*****
“Range one thousand meters and closing,” Captain Stanton’s voice was tight. “It’s dark. Not fog-- the edge approaching is too straight, moving too methodically.”
Ariana could see the same thing underwater-- a straight line on the sonar coming steadily toward Deeplab: the edge of the Bermuda Triangle gate.
“Five hundred meters.”
“Recommend we shut down all systems now,” Ariana said.
“We’re going to drift,” Stanton repeated his protest to that plan of action. “If Deepflight can’t use its equipment, it won’t be able to find us.”
“There’ll be nothing to find if we don’t shut down,” Ariana said.
“I back her plan,” Foreman’s voice was filled with static, the gate already affecting satellite communications with the Glomar.
“Three hundred meters,” Stanton said. “I’m going to keep this line open to Deeplab. It’s a passive system.”
“All right,” Ariana said, “but let’s shut down. Now!”
“Roger that,” Stanton said. “Shutting down.”
Ariana began turning off the habitat’s systems for the second time, this time with a little more care. She left the emergency battery-powered lights on and the link to the surface.
Soon she was sitting in a dim red glow. “One hundred meters,” Stanton’s voice broke the silence.
“Fifty. I don’t like this at all,” Stanton said. “I can sense something. This is not good.”
Ariana could feel the same thing-- an overwhelming sense of dread, like a heavy wool blanket draped over her body and mind. She had the feeling of being trapped, exacerbated by being inside the small sphere of Deeplab’s communication center.
“Can’t see more than twenty meters,” Stanton said. “I can’t see the top of the derrick. We’ve got no communications with the outside world any more. You’re going to get some oscillation as we’ve shut down the dampener. The sea’s mild though-- almost dead. So that’s--” there was a crackle of static, then in the background, Ariana could hear a scream of sheer terror. Then several more as the first one was abruptly cut off.
“It’s coming from the pool,” Stanton said. He barked out orders to other men on the bridge, then came back on the intercom. “We can’t see a damn thing.”
A new scream, one that Ariana knew couldn’t have come from a human mouth echoed out of the intercom.
“Sweet Jesus,” Stanton was leaving the mike open. “What the hell is that? It’s in the air, port side. I can’t see it, but that’s where the noise is coming from.”
The scream came again.
“It’s closer.” There were more human yells of fear and pain in the background. “I’m getting reports from the pool. Something’s coming out of the water. Giant squid. Something like that. But--” there was a statacco noise, then the inhuman scream.
“Oh, God. I can see it. Hovering in the air. White face. Red eyes. Long hair. Robes. It’s some kind of demon. Just watching.”
There was a burst of an automatic weapon firing.
“I can see one now. It’s climbing out of the pool, just forward of the derrick. God, it’s awful. Red body. A dozen arms at least. It’s big. Sixty feet long. There’s another. Another. There’re dozens of them. They’re coming over the side of the ship.
“And that thing. It’s just watching. It’s--” the sound of glass shattering blanked out whatever Stanton was saying. “They’re here! They’re here!”
The intercom went dead.
Ariana sat perfectly still, as if by moving she could bring down whatever had taken over the Glomar three miles above head. Only her eyes moved, shifting around to the walls that surrounded her, that suddenly didn’t feel very thick or secure at all.
THE PAST
Chapter 26
999 AD
Eleven men were gone. Some of the warriors whom Ragnarok had known since they were boys playing at war with wooden swords. He felt Hrolf’s eyes upon him as he made his mental roll call. The old warrior was slumped against the tiller, as Askell the Healer sowed up a jagged cut on the side of his face where one of the tentacle mouths had slashed home. Ragnarok coiled the rope that had connected to the ship and put it back in place at the base of the mast.
Tam Nok was in the bow, mesmerized by the temple that dominated the view in that direction. Ragnarok found the temple impressive but not enough to distract him from the state of his crew and ship. Half the remaining men were wounded, and Ragnarok could sense the shock brought on by the dual assault from the Valkyries and kraken, followed by transit through the black circle to their present strange location.
“The sun is wrong,” Bjarni had his hands on the tiller even though they weren’t moving. He had not moved through it all, standing fast at his duty place.
Ragnarok squinted at the sky. He realized what the helmsman meant-- the sun was higher in the sky than he had ever seen, even at the summer solstice.
“We are far south,” Bjarni said. “I have never been this far south.”
“Where are we?” Ragnarok asked Tam Nok.
The Khmer priestess was startled, broken out of her semi-trance. “This is-- this is here. The place we have been searching for.”
“Where is the weapon?” Ragnarok demanded.
Tam Nok nodded toward shore. “We must land.”
“The weapon,” Ragnarok repeated.
Tam Nok held up the staff with one hand, the amulet around her neck with the other. “These-- and the map-- they are the pieces of the weapon.” She pointed with the staff toward the top of the pyramid. “They go there.” The staff moved, pointing now to the north. “See? The Shadow comes closer.”
Ragnarok looked in the direction she pointed. A black smudge was on the horizon. He was certain it had not been there before.
“Rowers! To the shore!”
THE PRESENT
Chapter 27
1999 AD
The wood was finely crafted, the dragon’s head in the prow so expertly carved, Dane felt as if the eyes were watching him as he climbed into the longship. Sin Fen came up behind him. Shields still hung in place at some of the oar stations.
Dane knelt and touched the seat nearest him. There was a deep red stain in the worn wood. “Blood.” He could feel something about the ship. He had to search his memory, then he realized it was the strange sensation in the pit of his stomach he’d had thirty years ago, riding in Huey helicopter, across the Vietnamese border into Laos or Cambodia on one of the classified missions he’d conducted for MACV-SOG. Surrounded by the members of his team, trusting in their abilities, trusting in his own abilities, while at the same time having the fear of pending battle always lurking.
Dane closed his eyes, allowing the feeling to sweep through him. For a moment he was on the ship as it approached a beach, Viking warriors straining at the oars as bowmen fired volleys at defenders on the shore. There were screams and yelling, a tall warrior stood next to Dane, a massive ax in his hand, his eyes alive with rage. He was shouting something at Dane, the words in a strange language Dane had never heard before but he felt there was some sense to it, something that--
“What are you seeing?” Sin Fen’s words jolted Dane out of his vision.
“Nothing.” He looked down the boat the mast. Something glittered in the artificial light. Dane walked down to it, stepping over the rowers seats. A dagger had been thrust through the center of a metal plate, about a foot square. Dangling over the dagger was an amulet in the form of a black circle on a silver chain. There were marks etched onto the metal plate and marks on the amulets surface. Dane had to use both hands to pull the dagger out.
He handed the amulet and piece of metal to Sin Fen. “You’re the expert. What does it say?”
“It’s Norse. It says to take the amulet and the ship and go to the center of the water.”
“That’s it?”
“It’s the same hand that wrote on the side of the Scorpion’s sail,” Sin Fen said.
Dan
e thought of the warrior he had seen in his vision. “Let’s go.”
“How do we get the ship off the beach?” Sin Fen asked.
Dane grabbed a length of rope that was coiled underneath the mast. “DeAngelo can pull us out into the water.”
*****
Foreman looked through the stack of satellite imagery forwarded to him by Conners at the NSA. Iceland no longer existed. There were some peaks still above water, particularly the active volcanoes, but the majority of the island had disappeared into the cold North Atlantic.
Less than ten thousand people had escaped by ship or plane. It was a disaster unprecedented in the modern world since the end of World War II. And it was only the beginning.
The next series of photos showed the Bermuda Triangle gate. It had overtaken the Glomar and was less than fifty miles from Puerto Rico which was still trying to recover from the tsunami.
Looking up from the imagery, Foreman could see the status board at the front of the warroom. The Seawolf and other forces moving back as the gate grew larger. The mood inside the room was somber, as everyone was waiting for the other twenty-two missiles carried by the Wyoming to come out of the gate. Given what had happened to Iceland, there was no doubt that it would be the end of civilization if those missiles hit their targets. The best guess was that the entire Mid-Atlantic ridge would collapse, giving birth to tsunamis that would devastate the east coast of the United State and Europe.
Foreman had been in contact with both Nagoya in Japan and Kolkov in Russia and both of them were convinced some of the other missing nuclear weapons would come out of the other gates, raising havoc in other parts of the world. Computer simulations indicated Japan would go the way of Iceland along with the Hawaiian Islands, the Philippines and Micronesia. Splits along the Red Sea and Persian Gulf would lead to the end of the Middle East. The gate near Chernobyl would complete the devastation started years ago at that location.
His-- and the worlds-- only hope lay in Dane and Sin Fen. But at this point, even if they discovered the Shield, would they be able to use it?
*****
Deepflight pulled the Viking ship off the black beach with surprisingly little trouble, the solid, one-piece keel helping greatly in the process. From his perch atop the forward sphere, Dane relayed steering commands to DeAngelo who was lying on his stomach below, hands on the steering levers.
Sin Fen was next to Dane, seated on the edge of the hatch, her almond eyes following the longship as it was towed behind them. Dane turned to her as they slowly made their way toward the center of the large body of water.
“Tell me what you’ve been keeping secret from Foreman all these years.”
Sin Fen shifted her gaze from the Viking ship to Dane. “Secret?”
“You know too much while claiming you know nothing,” Dane said. “If we’re the same, why do you know so much more than I do?”
“I have been with Foreman for many years and--”
Dane cut her off. “I think Foreman is working for you more than you are working for him.” They were close to the center of the water.
Sin Fen laughed. “I should have known better than to try to fool you. I can block you from my thoughts, but there is more to a person than simply what they think.
“I’ve been wrong,” Sin Fen. “When I told you in Cambodia about the brain and the hemispheres-- yes, that is the basis for the telepathic ability, but reading that information on the Atlantean ship I realized I was putting the cart before the horse as you American say.”
Dane could feel the edges of Sin Fen’s emotions and he picked up excitement and fear, twisted together around a core of enlightenment. “What have you learned?”
“The fact that I can learn,” Sin Fen laughed, a manic edge to it. “Don’t you understand, Dane? I pontificated in Cambodia to you about what made us different from the animals and now I really know.
“It’s our consciousness. Our ability to understand the how, more than the what. The what is genetic instinct-- it’s what all animals have. But we can figure out how things work. We’re getting back to it, to the beginning, to the way the Atlanteans were. That is why the world has changed so much in the last several hundred years. More how!”
Dane had little idea what she was talking about. They were a quarter mile from the center of the chamber.
“Remember I said that ancient Egypt didn’t change, didn’t develop over the course of thousands of years? Why? Because the Atlanteans founded it, but humans lived in it. They couldn’t develop, couldn’t change. They could live there, but they didn’t understand the how behind much of what they had been given. It was only very slowly, over time, that humans began to try to understand the world around them, to change it.”
Sin Fen grabbed Dane’s arm. “Tell Foreman about this-- he has to know. This is important. There’s a scientist-- I can’t remember his name right now-- who has been doing research on this. On the development of consciousness in humans. If we can use what we know now about the Atlanteans we can fight this Shadow.”
Deepflight shook. Dane saw that the water was beginning to move, a whirlpool forming in the center of the chamber. “Why don’t you tell him?”
“You’ll find out very soon,” Sin Fen said. “You’ll see more than I could possibly explain if things work out the way I hope they do.”
A black circle had appeared in the center of the whirlpool. The Viking ship pulled past them and was being drawn in.
DeAngelo’s head popped out of the hatch. He saw the black circle, the whirlpool and the rope tying them to the Viking ship. “Should we cut free or am I disturbing you two?”
“That’s where we want to go,” Sin Fen said.
“Leave the rope,” Dane ordered.
The longship was sucked into the black circle, disappearing in a flash. The rope extended out, pulling Deepflight in. Dane gripped the railing around the top of the sphere. The black circle drew closer, then they were in.
Dane felt disoriented, then blinked. The light was now coming from the sun, the air clean and fresh, with the tang of saltiness from the open ocean filling his nostrils. Deepflight was bobbing in a gentle swell, open ocean all around-- except to the north and west where a dark cloud lay on the water. The longship was still tied to them, twenty meters away.
“What now?” Dane asked Sin Fen.
“We’re in the right place,” she said. She poked her head into the hatch. “DeAngelo, can you give me a sonar reading of the bottom?”
“Give me a sec,” the pilot replied.
Sin Fen dropped into the sphere, followed by Dane, which made for a tight fit inside the small enclosure.
“There,” DeAngelo pointed at one of the screens. “That’s strange,” he added.
“A hill?” Dane could see what the pilot was referring to-- from a relatively level bottom, something was jutting up from the bottom, the trace clearly outlined on the screen.
“With very straight sides,” DeAngelo said. “That’s not a natural formation.”
“How deep?” Sin Fen asked.
“The bottom is real shallow-- under a thousand feet,” DeAngelo checked another screen. “Hell, it’s under seven hundred feet right here and the top of that thing is only a hundred and eighty feet below us.”
“That’s it,” Sin Fen said. “We need to go there. It’s a pyramid built by the Atlanteans-- their outpost for the shield. Can you rig me a breathing tube?” she asked DeAngelo.
“For what?”
“I need to be on the outside,” Sin Fen said.
“Why?” Dane asked. “We can get the shield using the submersible’s arms.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Sin Fen said. “The entire pyramid is part of the shield. Consciousness, Dane--” she placed her hands on the side of his head. “The mind can be a powerful weapon when focused correctly.”
Dane felt a surge of emotion from Sin Fen’s mind, an avalanche that he couldn’t sort out. “I don’t understand.”
“We don’t have
time to discuss this,” she said. “You’ll figure it out later.” She let go of him and turned to DeAngelo. “Can you do it?”
DeAngelo nodded.
“Rig it, then take me down to the top of the pyramid.”
THE PAST
Chapter 28
999 AD
Ragnarok saw the darkness clearly now. It was over the ocean, approaching the wall that surrounded the moat. Tam Nok stood next to him, at the very top of the pyramid, also watching the Shadow.
“It is time,” she said.
“I see no weapon,” Ragnarok said. There was only a large slab with the contour of a person etched into its surface.
Tam Nok ignored him, pulling her pack off. She pulled out a long piece of cloth, which she draped around her neck over her shoulders. It was dark red, with faint black writing on it.
She knelt down and bowed her head. Ragnarok felt foolish towering over her, ax in hand. He stepped back, glanced at the horizon. The darkness was growing closer.
The survivors of his ship were loosely gathered around the top of the pyramid, awed by their surroundings, still stunned by recent events. Hrolf walked up to Ragnarok and spoke to him in a low, hushed voice.
“It is the same as we saw off the coast of Iceland,” he nodded toward the fog.
Ragnarok nodded.
“We will never go home,” Hrolf continued.
“We will defeat the darkness,” Ragnarok said.
Hrolf’s old face cracked into a weary smile. “My friend, I have sailed with you on many a journey. This was the strangest and the last.”
“My mother--” Ragnarok began, but the old warrior placed a hand on his shoulder.
“She is where she is. She let you go. Let her go.”
A muscle on the side of Ragnarok’s face quivered, but he realized the truth in the old man’s words.
Tam Nok suddenly stood. “Let us finish it.” She handed the staff to Ragnarok. “Here is what you must do.”
Atlantis: Bermuda Triangle Page 25
