Assault on Atlantis Page 8

  The two men stared at each other as another bolt of lightning struck directly between them. Both horses reared and lied to run, forcing them to dismount. Bouyer could feel the hair on the back of his neck standing straight out. The heat from the skull was coming through the satchel’s leather.

  Another bolt struck in the same place, and Bouyer lost his grip on the skull. It fell to the ground in front of him, now glowing bright blue. He blinked as a black circle appeared between him and Crazy Horse. It was small, less than a foot in diameter.

  Was now the time? Bouyer wondered.

  He could see Crazy Horse beyond the black hole. The young Indian was gesturing, stopping other warriors from approaching and killing Bouyer but keeping his eyes on the circle.

  The hole grew larger, extending down to the ground.

  A hand appeared, the skin blistered and burnt, holding a metal tube. The arm followed, then half a person. His other arm Was stretched back the way he was coming from, as if someone or something were trying to hold on to him.

  Bouyer stepped forward to take the metal tube, but a hock of electricity knocked him back a few feet.

  The man collapsed through the hole and the circle napped out of existence. The man turned blind eyes toward Bouyer, hands raised in supplication. Crazy Horse and Bouyer both moved forward. The hands fell to the ground.

  Bouyer knelt, feeling the man’s neck for a pulse. Nothing. He looked up at Crazy Horse standing over him. “Brother,” he said in Lakota.

  A grimace crossed Crazy Horse’s face. “You are not my brother.”

  Bouyer ignored the correction as he examined the body. The man wore strange clothes. Even though they were scorched, Bouyer could tell they were made of some kind of tiny material he had never seen before. There was fur around the coat’s hood. It must have been cold like this, where the man had come from, Bouyer realized.

  Reaching inside the coat, Bouyer found a metal chain with two small metal plates. He pulled them out. There was writing on them, in English. Bouyer frowned as he read the few words:

  Ensign Graeheme

  U.S. Navy

  USS Nautilus

  It made no sense to Bouyer. What would a Navy man be doing out here on the High Plains, as far from ocean as one could get? And where he had gotten the clothes made of such strange material? And how had he been burned? There was something clutched in the man’s hand. Bouyer pulled back the burnt fingers to reveal a slim metal tube, which he removed.

  Bouyer didn’t have time to look at the tube as Crazy Horse stepped up to him, coming to within dew feet. Bouyer slowly stood to face the Sioux warrior.

  “It is as Earhart predicted,” Bouyer said. He waved his and to indicate the scene of the massacre below. There were no survivors among Fetterman’s troops, and scalps were being taken while bodies were mutilated. “A desperate battle opened a gate.”

  “But it was not time,” Crazy Horse noted. He spit as he nodded his head toward the site of the massacre behind him. “They were weak and cowards.”

  Bouyer nodded. “As she said, we will meet again, brother. Another battle, much greater than this, with many brave fighters on both sides.”

  “And then you will die,” Crazy Horse said.

  Bouyer gave a wistful smile. “We are guided by a greater spirit than our own. And we are more brother than we are not.”

  “Next time we meet, only one of us will walk away,” Crazy Horse said.

  Or the greater good,” Bouyer said.

  The anger left Crazy Horse’s face for the first time. “Whose greater good? My mother said the same thing.”

  “Our mother.” Bouyer said.

  “I should kill you now,” Crazy Horse said. “Perhaps that will change the prophecy.”

  Bouyer noted that Crazy Horse made no move to attack, even as he said the words. “It is our fate to meet again.”

  He looked at the scorched tube. There was a mark near one end. Bouyer twisted it and the tube came apart into two pieces. A piece of paper was inside. Bouyer pulled it out and unrolled it. It appeared to be a page tom from a book, but Bouyer had never seen such smooth paper or fine typesetting.

  “What does it say?” Crazy Horse asked, his curiosity overcoming his hatred.

  “It is a list of names.” Bouyer nodded to himself as he read down the two columns.

  ‘’Whose names?”

  In response, Bouyer tore the paper in two, separating the Columns. “1 believe it is those who must be there for our next meeting.” He handed one piece to Crazy Horse.

  Crazy Horse glanced at the paper in his hand. “I cannot read the white man’s writing.”

  Bouyer looked at the warriors below, reveling in their victory. “Some are here. Some are from tribes far away.” He took the list back and read it out loud. “From your tribe, the Oglala: yourself, Big Man, Black Twin and He Dog. From the Brule Sioux: Crow Dog. From the Blackfeet: Kill Eagle. The Sans Arc: Fast Bear and High Elk. The Hunkpapa Sioux: Sitting Bull, Gall, Black Moon.” Bouyer continued reading even though Crazy Horse was shaking his head. “From the Cheyenne: Brave Bear, Crazy Head, Two Moons.”

  “Those tribes will never gather under one leader,” Crazy Horse argued.

  Bouyer folded the list and put it in his pocket. “You have time to prepare. It will most likely be years before we meet again where mother foretold. At the Little Big Horn,”

  “And your list?” Crazy Horse asked.

  “A man I’ve never heard of. A soldier named Custer and several of his brothers, along with some other officers and men.”

  “Why these people?” Crazy Horse demanded.

  “Warriors. Brave warriors in one place. As Earhart foretold.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  EARTH LINE IV: 1958

  “God-damnit,” Captain Anderson cursed. The mitten on his 19ht hand was still smoking from his vain attempt to hold Ensign Graeheme out of the gate.

  Frost had the crystal skull cradled in his hands. There was a blue glow in the center of it, and his hands were warm. He pressed the skull against his chest, feeling the warmth penetrate the layers of clothing.

  Anderson turned to Frost. ‘’Where the hell did he go?”

  ‘’To deliver the message. As I told you.” Frost reluctantly put the skull back in the box. He glanced toward the southern horizon. The glow was brighter. “Dawn” was only a few days away.

  “Using a person’s life to deliver a message?”

  “It’s war,” Frost said.

  “War against who?” Anderson demanded ‘’What the hell ‘as that?”

  Frost was latching the top of the box, apparently unconcerned about the loss of the ensign or the captain’s anger. “I don’t understand myself, but the thing that destroyed the sky, le big sphere, that’s the enemy.”

  Anderson didn’t give up so easily. “You didn’t tell me this thing would take him. Did you see his skin? It was burning him alive.”

  Frost stood with difficulty, hefting the box. “My dear sir, we’re all dead. At· least he went quickly and served a purpose. Let us all hope for the same fate.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  PRESENT

  The hatch to the control center opened and Foreman entered, twisting as he came in to meet the angled floor. The CIA agent vas the man who had involved Dane in this war so many years ago during the Vietnam War.

  Two years was optimistic,” Dane said, turning away from updating himself on the current world situation.

  “I know,” Foreman replied. He had a hatchet face and thick white hair. The recent weeks had been hard on him as he Shadow had launched several all out assaults against the planet. There were deep pockets under each eye and Dane could swear whatever dark color had been left in his hair was completely gone now.

  Foreman had a long association with the gates. In 1945, Foreman’s brother had disappeared into the Devil’s Sea off he coast of Japan while on a war mission off the Enterprise. Then, assigned to Fort Lauderdale Air Station, Foreman had watched Flight 19--whic
h he was supposed to have been a member of--disappear into the Bermuda Triangle. Since then he’d dedicated his life to discovering the secret of such places and in the process had learned something of the gates and the Shadow behind them.

  Foreman took the sheet of paper that Ahana held out to him. “The Shadow’s craft took enough ozone from the upper atmosphere to deplete the planet’s supply by over sixty percent. The entire southern hemisphere will be unshielded in less than two months. People will be unable to expose their skin to direct sunlight. But even if they survive the radiation, the loss of crops and livestock will result in starvation within a year.”

  “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 level while the walls rotated but the floor remained level.