Assault on Atlantis a-5 Page 8

  “The bottom line?” Dane asked.

  “Annihilation of the human race within eighteen months. Most of Europe and Russia will be unlivable much quicker than that-within the month due to radiation. Some pockets might live longer if they go underground and use stored food and hydroponics, but they’ll need energy and water. And once the oxygen cycle is broken because of the ozone depletion-” Foreman didn’t finish.

  “Options?” Dane knew the answer, but he felt the need to ask anyway.

  “None that we’ve come up with.” Foreman waited. When Dane had come out of the Devil’s Sea portal the previous day after shutting down the portal draining the core of the planet, he had said he knew of a possible way to stop the growing disaster.

  Dane went to the small porthole and looked out. The dark line delineating the Devil’s Sea Gate was a few miles to the west. “Tell me about the Nautilus,” he said. “What?” Foreman was momentarily confused by the sudden shift.

  “I had another vision,” Dane explained. “I saw Robert Frost again. Except this time he was onboard the Nautilus at the North Pole. The rest of the world was dead and they were the last survivors. If I remember rightly, the Nautilus went to the North Pole around 1960?”

  “1958.” Foreman had worked at the CIA from the end of World War n until the present and knew much of the hidden history of the past five decades.

  “Did you ever use the Nautilus to investigate the gates?” Dane asked. He knew Foreman had used both the submarine Thresher and a U-2 spy plane in 1968 to investigate the gates, both of which had been lost. Dane’s first encounter with a ate had occurred in Cambodia that year when his Special Forces team had been ordered into that country by Foreman to try to recover the U-2’s black box.

  The fact that Foreman had not bothered to brief the team about the gate he suspected there or any other aspect of the mission had been Dane’s first exposure to the CIA man’s duplicity. As the two had been forced to work together recently, Dane had reluctantly accepted that much of what Foreman had done in the past had been because of the disbelief he had received in his quest to uncover what was behind the strange gates. However, Dane had also learned that old habits were hard to break.

  Foreman’s pause of a few seconds told Dane the answer even before the CIA man spoke. “The Nautilus was commissioned in 1954. It was the first nuclear powered submarine. What most people don’t understand about the significance of that is that the nuclear power plant allowed it to stay submerged for weeks, even months. Before the Nautilus, submarines had to surface every day to recharge their batteries.”

  “And?’ Dane wanted Foreman to get to the point.

  “You know I spent many years researching the gates. Tracking down legends. Like the Bermuda Triangle.” Foreman nodded toward the porthole. “The Devil’s Sea. Others.”

  Dane jumped ahead. “And one near the North Pole?”

  Foreman sat down. “You ever read Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth?”

  Dane nodded. “As a kid.”

  “Do you remember it?”

  “Not really.”

  “The opening chapter is most interesting. It’s about deciphering a runic message.” Foreman looked at Dane. “Runes. The language of the ancients.”

  Dane remembered the runic writing on the sail of the Scorpion written by a Viking warrior more than a thousand years ago, a Viking warrior who had become one of the many across time and worlds to help in this battle against the Shadow.

  Foreman closed his eyes and recited from memory. “In sneffels, Yoculis craterem kem delibat umbra Scartaris Julia intra calendas descende audas viator, et terrestre centrum attinges. Kod feci, Arne Saknussemm.”

  “Which means?” Dane asked.

  ‘It’s not classic Latin,” Foreman said. “A perverted form. But basically: Descend into the crater of Yocul of Sneffels, which the shade of Scartaris caresses, before the calends of July. Audacious traveler. And you will reach the center of the Earth. I did it. Signed, Arne Saknussemm.”

  “And?” Dane prompted. Usually Foreman was direct and to the point, but whenever he wandered into theory he became more tentative and explanatory. Dane thought something about what Foreman had just recited was vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t pin it down.

  “Over the past sixty years,” Foreman said, “I’ve gone many places, listened to many strange stories and followed every possible lead I could find, no matter how outrageous. I learned early on to look into legends. Also, to search for those with the sight. I think Jules Verne had it. Much like you feel Frost heard the voices of the gods. After all, he considered himself a poet also.”

  “How is that?” Dane asked.

  “Verne considered himself a poet in the old sense-that of a maker. He once said that poets weren’t just dreamers, they were also prophets but a prophet who tried to stay grounded in facts as much as possible. If you check his books, other than the fictional assumptions underpinning them, they are factual to an amazing degree.

  ‘’Think about it. Verne wrote Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea long before anyone had drawn up a plan for a submarine. He wrote about cars and airships before they were invented.”

  A prophet. Dane knew if he had been born in another time and another place, he, too, might have been considered one. He’d always been able to sense things, to see things others couldn’t. Some called it a sixth sense. During his tour of duty in Vietnam so many years earlier, he’d always taken point and his team had never been ambushed. That is until they went into the Angkor Gate under Foreman’s order to recover the U-2’s black box. There he had run into creatures not from this Earth and powers he could not comprehend and still didn’t, more than thirty years later.

  Foreman got to his feet, agitated. “It all fits. I knew that for Ii long time. I just couldn’t, still don’t. totally understand it. Journey to the Center of the Earth. Think about it. Even the Buddhists had an inner kingdom. Agartha. A worldwide web of underground passages.”

  Dane remained quiet, realizing Foreman was feeling guilty that he hadn’t understood the threat from the Shadow early enough to prevent all that had happened.

  “Caves.” Foreman stared at Dane, as if he knew what Dane was thinking. “Our early ancestors lived in caves. Nowadays we all look to the sky, to the stars for the unknown. But the interior of the Earth itself-” Foreman pointed down-“has always been as much an unknown.”

  Dane glanced at Ahana, who was listening raptly. Even as the Flip continued its rotation. She had been the one who had briefed them on the interior of the planet so they could understand-and defeat-the Shadow’s recent attempt to tap the power from the core of the planet. Dane had been shocked to learn how little science knew of the Earth on which they all walked, but upon reflection had realized that it wasn’t so strange. Although ships with men onboard had actually traveled into space, even to the moon-as Verne had predicated, he suddenly realized-the farthest man had penetrated into the planet was only about eight miles, hardly a scratch on the surface of the planet.

  “Plato wrote about Atlantis,” Foreman continued. “Which we now know existed and was destroyed by the Shadow. But he also wrote of ‘tunnels. Both broad and narrow in the interior of the Earth.”

  “The best way an ancient could explain the portals inside the gates,” Dane said.

  Foreman nodded. “Yes. As good as ally. And I studied all the ancient myths and legends regarding routes through the planet and an interior world-which would be the best explanation an ancient could come up with if they had happened to survive going through a portal.

  “Edmond Halley, who the comet is named after, was one of the first who tried to converge the myth of an interior planet with science. He was fascinated with magnetism and discovered that magnetic north was not always in the same place.”

  Dane reached out and grabbed one of the chairs, sliding into it. The Flip was almost completely horizontal. The floor having rotated more than eighty degrees. It was a strange experience, standing leve
l while the walls rotated but the floor remained level.

  “Halley had no way to explain this,” Foreman continued. “He also found that variation-the lateral deflection that could be determined according to longitude-was slowly changing over time. For lack of a better explanation. Halley posited that there had to be more than one magnetic field causing these conflicting readings. And to produce more than one magnetic field, he suggested that the Earth had an inner twin. That the surface we walk on is just a shell, with another entire planet inside with its own axis and magnetic poles. This, combined with this inner world having its own rotation slightly off from our own world, could account for the data he had.

  “When he found readings that couldn’t be accounted for by one inner world, he suggested there were several, one inside the other, like those Russian dolls where several are nestled inside each other.

  “Then there. Was an American in the early 1800s.” Foreman continued, “who jumped on this concept. A man named Bouyer. He claimed that not only was there an interior world, but that he could get to it by traveling north into the Arctic and entering through a hole at the pole-he claimed there was an opening at each pole. To give you an idea of how seriously this was taken, President John Quincy Adams gave him support and even planned to mount an expedition to find this opening. However, when Andrew Jackson replaced him as president, the idea was squashed. But in 1836, Congress actually allocated three hundred thousand dollars for an expedition to the South Pole.

  “The four-year Wilkes expedition didn’t find an opening, but then again it couldn’t penetrate the shoreline of Antarctica. In the same manner that later water-borne expeditions to try to fix the North Pole were stymied by ice. A surface vesse1 simply could not get there.”

  “So you figured the first nuclear submarine would be the best way to check it out?” Dane interjected.

  Foreman waved a hand, indicating that Dane had jumped too far ahead in his story. “Verne wasn’t the only one who wrote about a journey into the Earth. Edgar Allan Poe wrote The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket about a ship getting sucked into a hole at the North Pole. He was crying out Bouyer’s name on his death bed.”

  Poe. Dane found he was nodding. If Frost heard the voice of the gods, he had no doubt people like Poe and Verne heard them. Too. It seemed as if artists were the ones most open to visions, people whom society saw as being somewhat mad to start with, outside of the bell curve. Dane had never been, and,till wasn’t sure, that being outside the majority of society was a good thing or not.

  “Which brings me back to Verne,” Foreman continued. “He wrote Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1864. After reading the runes, the characters in his story head to Iceland, where they find a chimney deep inside an extinct volcano, which they follow deep into the Earth. There they discover a sea inside the planet.”

  Dane glanced at Ahana. She had been inside the gate with him to the Space Between, a place that consisted of an inner sea surrounded by a ring of black sand leading up to a wall that curved in overhead. And Iceland, which the Shadow had destroyed not long ago, using nuclear missiles from an American submarine to split the tectonic plates on which the island had rested.

  Foreman caught the look. “Yes. An inner sea. Just like what you’ve seen where all the portals seem to channel through. Maybe his fiction wasn’t so fictional. In his story, his characters sail on the inner sea and are attacked by monsters-again, sound familiar?”

  Dane nodded. The things his team had encountered inside the Angkor Gate — monsters were the best way to describe them. “Here there be monsters” —the phrase had always haunted him, every time he looked at an ancient map that indicated unknown, unexplored areas.

  The Flip was vertical, the muonic probe two hundred meters below them. Dane felt a sense of urgency, but he kept it at bay-once one entered a gate, time didn’t seem to be an Issue. Not only did the gates move one from world to parallel world, but also along the time line, as had been proved recently when the Thresher, thought to be lost in 1968, returned to the present world. Of course, it had detonated inside the Naval base in Connecticut, destroying other submarines, another assault by the Shadow upon the world.

  “After Verne, there was a man named Edward Lytton, who wrote a book called The Coming Race about the inhabitants of the inner world. His were less benevolent than Verne’s. They used a source of power called vril, something so powerful that it could destroy the Earth. And their goal was to conquer the world above them.”

  Foreman must have sensed he was moving too slowly to the question that Dane had started this with. But he still didn’t move ahead to the Nautilus and his involvement with it. “In April 1942, a Nazi scientist, an expert on radiation, led a team to the Baltic island of Rugen. They aimed a powerful camera loaded with infrared film into the sky at a forty-five degree angle. The goal was to take a picture of the British Fleet across the hollow interior of a concave Earth. That’s how seriously Hitler took the concept. I’ve found classified SOE and OSS documents about what they found in Berlin after the war, and there were reports of Nazi expeditions to both poles, most by submarine, searching for the entrance to the inner world.”

  Dane noted that while still listening, Ahana was typing commands into her control console. Foreman seemed oblivious to his surroundings.

  “All this activity, all these writings and reports, all the scientific interest-it couldn’t have come from nothing. There was something up there in the Arctic. I figured it had to be a gate. One that only a few had ever come close to, given the remoteness of the location.”

  “But the North Pole’s been explored,” Dane said. “If there was a gate there, don’t you think it would have been reported? If my history is correct, didn’t Admiral Peary get there early last century?”

  “Apri11909,” Foreman said. “Although there is some argument whether he actually made it to the exact pole or not. And Byrd overflew it in 1926, although, again some say he might have missed.”

  “And many others have been there since,” Dane said.

  “Yes,” Foreman agreed. ‘’Many have been to the North Pole, but how many have been under it?”

  “Thus the Nautilus,” Dane said.

  “Thus the Nautilus,” Foreman said. He sighed. “All right. listen.”

  Dane felt a surge of anger. He knew Foreman was about to let them in on something important that he’d withheld. The CIA man’s penchant for secrecy was ingrained deeply, after decades of having to fight an enemy no one really believed existed.

  “In 1946, Frost came to Washington. He had already won several Pulitzers and was quite popular, so when he began rambling about ‘visions’ be bad, people got concerned. Not about the visions, but about him. However, I heard about it and went to see him. I’d just begun working with a unit called X-2, part of the Strategic Service Unit, what used to be the Office of Strategic Services. SSU was the bridge between the OSS and the CIA after World War II when demobilization was wiping out a lot of organizations. With everything so jumbled and a lot of people opting out of service, even a young guy like me could hold a pretty important slot then.”

  Dane could sense Foreman’s discomfort. The logical man had had to accept that which couldn’t be made sense of.

  “Frost said he’d seen visions pretty much all his life. At that time I was just beginning to collect reports like this and investigating the history of oracles and seers in connection with the gates, so I listened.

  ‘’He said he’d had several visions of large spherical craft — very big-” Foreman saw both Dane and Ahana nodding—“yes, as we know, Shadow craft. Frost said he saw one of them above a large, ice-covered land, which to me meant either the North Pole or Antarctica. I’d found a couple reports in the OSS war files of similar things, and I also had access to captured Nazi records, showing Hitler’s obsession with both poles and that he had sent several U-boats to Antarctica during the war. There was even speculation that some senior Nazi officials had escaped there after the war.
Also, I’d uncovered several reports of UFOs, although we didn’t call them that then. There were the foo fighters reported by bomber pilots flying mission in both theaters and also quite a few reports from the Argentine military who flew closest to Antarctica.

  “So-“ Foreman drew out the word, and Dane knew what was coming next-“I managed to funnel enough data to the Department of Defense to convince them that we needed to go: o Antarctica to check this out. They were focused on the Nazi d exploration angle-I didn’t say anything to them about large flying spheres.

  “The Navy dubbed the project Operation High Jump. More than four thousand men. A dozen ships, including a carrier, the USS Philippine Sea. All under the command of Admiral Byrd.”

  “Did Byrd know your real suspicions?” Dane asked.

  Foreman laughed. “’Know’? He spent the winter of 1934 alone in a hut on the ice in Antarctica. He almost died, and when he was rescued he told a lot of crazy stories that people put down to his trying experiences. But he told me in 1946 bat he saw one of the spheres fly overhead. He described it quite well.”

  “And what did High Jump find?” Dane asked.

  “I went with them. It was the first time anyone had ever made a real attempt to map Antarctica. We did the most extensive mapping ever and barely covered two percent of the land mass. Two days before we were to return, one of the napping craft disappeared after some strange radio messages.”

  “It got grabbed by a sphere,” Dane said.

  Foreman nodded. “My guess.”

  “And?”

  “And it had a nuke onboard with a timer set to go off at a certain time-after they should have been back at the carrier. The crew didn’t even know it was onboard — it was in a crate marked ‘Generator.’ I was the only one who could turn it off.”

  “Jesus,” Dane muttered He’d known Foreman was ruthless. After all, the man had sent him on what had turned out to be pretty much a one-way mission into Cambodia. But to put a nuclear weapon onboard an aircraft? “No sign of the plane or the nuke going off?”