Atlantis: Gate Page 14

  Turning his head, Leonidas saw the rising sun, highlighting Thetis’s left breast. Leonidas leaned over, kissing it lightly.

  Thetis’s eyes opened and she smiled, her face relaxed. In less than a second the calm look was gone.

  “No,” Leonidas placed his fingers on her lips. “Let us have now like we had last night.” He rolled over, placing his body on top of hers.

  Later, the sun was clear of the horizon and the King held his wife tight in both his arms. He felt the pressure of duty. He could hear distant yells and knew his troops were marshalling.

  “Thetis.”

  His wife buried her head into his scarred chest. “Yes?”

  “I know I have not been there for you as I should have been.”

  “You were there as you should have been as King.”

  “But not as a husband who loves you. For that I am sorry.”

  **************

  The Persian army moved past the smoldering ruins of the city. Pandora walked alongside the Imperial litter, which was carried by a dozen burly slaves. Immortals surrounded the King, a moving wall of humanity.

  “I understand you went into the city,” Xerxes’ voice carried through the curtains enclosing the litter.

  “I told you I was, my lord,” Pandora answered.

  “I also have been told you carried a child out of the city.”

  Pandora remained quiet.

  “My orders were that all should die. You heard them.”

  “Yes, my Lord.”

  “Yes, you carried a child out, or yes you heard my orders?”

  “Both, my Lord.”

  “Disobeying my orders is punishable by death.”

  Pandora noted that two Immortals had edged closer to her, their hands on the pommels of their swords.

  “Who was the child?” Xerxes asked. “I do not see you moved by pity, so there must be another reason for your actions.”

  “No one who need concern you, my Lord.”

  The curtain twitched open and Pandora could see Xerxes now. He had a goblet in one hand and was reclined on a pile of pillows. The slaves were specially chosen and trained as the litter moved smoothly despite the unevenness of the road.

  “I decide what is my concern.”

  “Yes, Lord. The grandson of the child I saved could be very important in his time, long after you and I are gone.”

  “A prophecy?”

  “Yes, Lord.”

  “Interesting.” Xerxes drank deeply, then stuck the goblet out of the litter. A slave grabbed it, quickly refilled it while keeping pace and handed it back to the King in one smooth motion. “I do not trust you.”

  “I know, my Lord.”

  “This important grandson,” Xerxes said. “Will what he does depend on what we do now?”

  “Yes, my Lord.”

  “You did this in case I fail?”

  Pandora hesitated, then told the truth. “Yes, Lord.”

  “Fail in what, particularly?” Xerxes was holding out the cup for more wine. Pandora wondered if the wine or the smell of burning corpses accounted for his benign mood this morning.

  “Defeating the Greeks.”

  “I doubt that is your goal. I doubt also that you will tell me what you are really doing unless I let my master at arms loose on you. And that is something you might not recover from. If you violate another of my decrees, I will have your head decorate the front of my litter.” The curtain closed.

  ***************

  Leonidas’s heart felt as heavy as his shield. The six lochoi were lined up in battle formation in front of the Helenian, the squires and battle train already on the road before dawn and out of the city. Cyra had been gone when he and Thetis arrived home, a neighbor woman watching Briseis. The woman said the strange priestess had told her that she had gone off to consult with the gods and that she would meet the King on the march.

  Wives and daughters were in the shade of the temple. The boys of the agoge were gathered in their own ranks to watch their fathers march off. A low sound, almost inaudible at first, came from the women. It grew in strength until the words of the hymn to the battle god could clearly be heard by all. The ranks stood still, their spear points aligned neatly.

  When the hymn died out and silence covered the field, Leonidas turned to the western road. Without issuing a command, he strode forth. The first rank of the first lochoi turned in step and followed. Row after row of Spartans trod onto the dirt road and headed to the west, casting long shadows before them. When Leonidas reached a rise in the road where he knew he would disappear from view after crossing, he paused and stepped to the side. His eyes were on the men, noting their deportment. It was only after the last rank had filed past and he was covered in dust did he turn and look back at his city. Stepping out from the shadow of the temple he saw Thetis. He raised his shield. She raised Amphion in her arms.

  Tears coursed down the King’s face cutting into the dust caked on it as he turned to the west and followed his army. It was a while before he sped up the pace to catch up with the column.

  CHAPTER 11 PRESENT

  Dane was slammed back in the seat as the SR-71 accelerated down the runway and leapt into the air. The nose of the jet was pointed almost vertical as they gained altitude. Dane pulled out an e-Book that he had borrowed from one of the crewmembers on the FLIP. He’d downloaded all of Frost’s books of poetry into it. He accessed the first book and clicked through to the preface, which had a brief summary of Frost’s life.

  As the SR-71 leveled off at 60,000 feet, Dane quickly read the bio to get a feeling for the man he had seen in his vision. Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874 and was named after General Robert E. Lee. His father was the editor of the San Francisco Daily Evening Post. Dane paused as he read the next entry in the bio: when he was nine, Frost told his mother he heard voices when he was alone and that he shared her gift for ‘second hearing and sight’. So history agreed with the vision he’d had to a certain extent, Dane thought.

  His first poem was published in 1894 and he was desperately in love with a woman named Elinor White. Frost took the first two bound copies of his collection of poems and went to her, begging her to marry him. She declined and he burned his copy of the collection and returned home dejected. He then decided to leave Massachusetts and travel to the Dismal Swamp on the Virginia-North Carolina border. Dane found that strange—why was the poet drawn to that location?

  After some time in the swamp, Frost finally returned home and White agreed to marry him. But from that point, it appeared from what Dane was reading, that the poet’s life entered an even darker phase. He had a son who died of cholera and then his mother was diagnosed with cancer and died later the same year. Several years later he had a daughter who died three days after her birth. Throughout these tragedies Frost made his living teaching, but he also continued to write poetry.

  His sister was sent to a mental institution for the rest of her life—Dane wondered if she too heard the voices and couldn’t handle it. In 1938 Frost’s wife died and he suffered an emotional collapse. What Dane found interesting was that almost all of Frost’s children suffered various ailments, with several deaths and at least one suicide and numerous commitments to mental hospitals.

  Dane was surprised to see that Frost visited the White House in 1958 and met with President Eisenhower. He wondered what that meeting was about. Dane’s eyes widened slightly as he read about Frost in 1959 predicting Kennedy’s election in 1960. And then in 1962 Frost did indeed travel to Russia. He was sick during the trip, but Khrushchev went to where the poet was laid up and visited him and the two talked for ninety minutes.

  Upon arriving back in the United States, Frost caused a minor furor when he said that Khrushchev had told him that Americans were too liberal to fight. And, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, admitted that Khrushchev had not said that. The poet died three months later.

  Dane paused as he got to the end of the short biography. It validated several things from his vision and he
was certain he had never read or heard these things about Robert Frost before, so it wasn’t coming from some old memory.

  He began reading the poems, searching. He paused as he read the last lines on one stanza from “Storm Fear,” where Frost doubted humans had the heart to save themselves.

  Dane felt the connection of his own fear to those lines; he also wondered if it was a reference to the Ones Before who seemed to be very chancy with their aid. He hit the forward button and stopped at the next poem, In Equal Sacrifice,’ which appeared to be about Robert of Bruce, and the sacrifices he made, but seemed relevant to recent events Dane had experienced.

  Dane scanned down, searching for the words that rang of the voice to him, skipping several stanzas until he got near the bottom where Frost wrote about giving all to the hopeless fight.

  The lines echoed in Dane’s mind. Was that his task? To give all to the hopeless fight? And if so, why?

  The next poems were from North of Boston, and immediately he noticed a reference to seeing a figure in darkness with a face “as plain as white plate.” Had frost seen a Valkyrie? It was a very unusual way, even for a poet, to describe a face, but a perfect way to describe a Valkyrie.

  Dane clicked on and came to Frost’s most famous poem about two roads diverging in the woods. But he read it now with a different sense of what the poet might have been saying, sensing something deeper under the words. He remembered the feeling he’d had about his vision, that he had seen something that had really happened. What if what he saw was another road, one that hadn’t been taken in Dane’s own life, but maybe it had been taken in some other way? Dane felt as if he were very close to understanding something fundamental about the gates and the Shadow.

  The next poem was the one Frost had recited to Kennedy. “Fire and Ice.” Dane continued on. The title of a poem caught his eye: “The Trial by Existence.” Dane found he was nodding, the rhythm of the words almost a mantra in his mind. When he had started reading the poems he had wished that Frost had simply said what the voices told him, but Dan was realizing that perhaps Frost had had visions just like he did and been forced to use the written word, the only means he had, to try to get those visions out of his head. Reading the lines, Dane knew he was picking up more than he was consciously realizing.

  One poem even focused on quartz, which Dan found strange. Quartz? Dane saw the crystal skulls in his mind and remembered watching Sin Fen’s head transform into one. He could feel his body pressed against the shoulder harness as the SR-71 banked and began descending. Quickly, he punched the button, turning the page. A long poem, THE GENERATIONS OF MEN, lit up the screen. Dane began scanning it, searching it for lines that triggered a reaction and he found them. It mentioned oracles, voices, visions.

  Dane could see the aircraft carrier directly ahead. The Sr-71 vibrated as the pilot decelerated, slowing the supersonic craft to just above its stall speed. At the end of the poem it mentioned meeting elsewhere.

  Dane looked up as the nose of the SR-71 lifted up as the pilot tried to eke every square inch of drag out of the delta shaped wings. With a heavy thump the plane hit the deck of the carrier, it raced down the deck and then was snagged by red nylon webbing stretched across its path. Dane was just about to tuck the e-book away in his pack when he noted a footnote the editor of the last collection had made, listing a quote Frost made during an interview:

  “One thing I care about, and wish young people could care about, is taking poetry as the first form of understanding. If poetry isn’t understanding all, the whole world, then it isn’t worth anything. Young poets forget that poetry must include the mind as well as the emotions. Too many poets delude themselves by thinking the mind is dangerous and must be left out. Well, the mind is dangerous and must be left in.”

  ***************

  The calculations were rudimentary. The two Russians on board Mir simply had to figure in their altitude above the target, terminal velocity once the MIRV rockets entered the atmosphere, cross-checked by the rotation of the Earth and the speed of the space station.

  They programmed the data into the computer and waited while the result was tabulated. It didn’t take long; about four seconds. A small flashing X appeared on the projected flight path of the space station and a digital countdown, currently at three minutes, thirty seconds also lit up. The senior cosmonaut sat in the command seat, his finger over the launch button. The fact that what he was about to do was an act of war with Peru concerned him little. What had happened at Chernobyl was also an act of war and on a scale that it threatened the capital of his country. What was happening at Nazca was a threat to the entire world, Peru included.

  “Two minutes,” his fellow cosmonaut unnecessarily announced.

  ***************

  The death zone around Chernobyl was a tear-drop shape over ninety miles long by forty at its widest. Although it might be reasonably assumed that the Shadow had caused all the damage it possibly could be destroying Towers 1, 2 and 3, the leadership in Moscow was not focused on reason.

  A single rocket lifted off from a silo just outside of Moscow and quickly accelerated to supersonic speed as it arced up into the sky toward the southeast. When it reached its apex, the engine flamed out and the rocket followed the laws of physics as it headed back toward Earth, directly toward Tower 4 at Chernobyl.

  Nestled in the nosecone was a single nuclear warhead, specially adapted to detonate when an eight foot prod that extended from the tip hit the ground and ignited a manual detonator which would then initiate the conventional explosives that were the first step of exploding the bomb.

  ***************

  The lead cosmonaut hushed his companion who had begun counting down from ten. Even though it was cool inside Mir—the heating elements had been operating below par for quite a while—a small bead of sweat made its way down his forehead. It was exactly between his eyes when the number went to zero and his hand slammed down on the release button.

  The rocket ignited and exited the launch tube, nose pointing straight down toward Earth. It gathered speed from both the engine and gravity.

  ***************

  The strikes had been coordinated so that the missiles would hit their targets simultaneously. The timing was close, but not perfect. The Chernobyl missile touched down, probe first, into Tower Four, about two seconds before the Mir missile hit Nazca.

  The aim of the Chernobyl missile was perfect, though, as it struck the black triangle exactly and disappeared.

  ***************

  The Mir missile had been launched with a time delay detonator set to go off at an altitude of four thousand feet above the Nazca Plain. The scientists in Moscow had determined this to be the best height for maximum effect, although they had reluctantly admitted they weren’t exactly sure what the composition of the target was, other than walls of fire.

  The warhead exploded.

  And as fast as the blast, radiation, and light expanded from the bomb, the lines of fire on the Nazca Plain leapt up and devoured it all. Within the two seconds all signs of the blast gone from the surface.

  ***************

  Amelia Earhart staggered as the ground hiccupped. She turned to Taki with a questioning look.

  The samurai simply shrugged and pointed. Earhart noted the golden glow ahead. While blue seemed to be friendly, she knew that gold was a sign of the Shadow. Because the Valkyries floated above the black sand, following them had been difficult. It had been a process of occasionally spotting them ahead, then waiting as they moved away, then hurrying in the direction they had gone. Taki had cautioned her that they might run into an ambush, but Earhart felt that the Valkyries were more concerned with getting their captives back than worrying about someone following them. Besides, she had a good idea where they were heading.

  The wall appeared ahead and the glow was coming from the base of it. Once more, Earhart edged her way up a dune, Taki at her side. Just before the top she halted and peered over. A large open cavern had been cut into the
wall. Her mouth went dry as she saw what was inside the cavern. Hundreds of upright metal tables, on which humans were strapped down. She could see that the skin on the ones closest to the outside had been removed and replaced with a clear covering. Muscles, internal organs, all glistened underneath the wrapping. Some of the people were missing limbs. Most had the top of their skulls removed and numerous needles poking up with small glowing bulbs on the top.

  She ducked her head as a white figure floated along the lines toward the opening of the cavern. A Valkyrie. Collecting herself, Earhart lifted up once more and looked. The Valkyrie had stopped in front of one of the bodies. It was one of the five that had just been recovered, the skin still intact, clothes piled at the base of the table.

  The Valkyrie raised its right arm, claws extended. With precise moves the creature sliced into the man’s chest. Two seconds later it pulled back the arm, a heart dripping blood cradled carefully in the claws. It floated back the way it had come, the gory trophy in hand.

  Taki tapped her on the arm, pointing. There were the new abductees in the Valkyrie lab. A half dozen men whose skin and bodies were still intact and wearing khaki uniforms.

  “Come,” Earhart said.

  Taki was at her side as she headed down the slope, the other warriors spreading out instinctively in a wedge formation. Earhart went straight to the newcomers and with her sword cut one free as the samurai did the same with the others. She grunted as she slipped the unconscious man over her shoulders in a fireman’s carry and headed back the way she’d come.

  THE PRESENT

  “Slow down,” Dane said into his SATPhone. “Start over.” He was looking into the clear blue water of the Caribbean. He was on board a launch from the carrier, cutting through the sea. Dane knew that not far below was the top of the pyramid on which Sin Fen had given her life.

  Ahana’s voice was still rushed as she repeated herself: “The Russians fired nuclear weapons at both Nazca and Chernobyl. The Nazca one detonated but all effects were absorbed into the walls of fire. The Chernobyl one simply disappeared.”