Assault on Atlantis a-5 Page 9

  Foreman shook his head. ‘’That’s why I know it was taken. If the plane had crashed anywhere, we still would have picked up signs of the atomic blast by seismograph.”

  “So if the plane was taken by the sphere, the nuke went off after it was inside.”

  “Yes.”

  “That might shut a gate, or at least keep the Shadow from using it again.”

  “Right.”

  “But maybe in the time line I saw this didn’t happen,” Dane said. “And a sphere came through in the mid-1950s and took the ozone.”

  ‘’That’s possible. I had a lot of luck being able to accomplish what I did,” Foreman said. “If one or two things out of many had gone the other way, I would have failed and High Jump would never have been conducted.”

  “Which is most likely what happened in the time line I saw in my vision,” Dane said.

  “I would imagine,” Foreman said. “There are a lot of things that could have gone differently.”

  “And the Arctic?” Dane asked.

  “That brings me back to Frost once more. After High Jump, Frost went back to poetry for a while. Then, in 1954, he went back to Washington. By then he’d been honored by a resolution of Congress so he had even more status. He went to Eisenhower — one of his friends was a man named Sherman Adams who was Ike’s chief of staff. He told Ike he’d seen visions of strange craft near the North Pole — just like what he saw in Antarctica. Ike, of course, was not too thrilled, especially because we didn’t really know what happened to the missing plane and I wasn’t about to tell anyone what I’d done.

  ‘’1 was called in and took Frost off the White House’s hands. I listened to him, assured him we’d do something and sent him on his way.”

  “And what did you do?” Dane asked.

  “I knew the North Pole had been explored. I knew about Peary and Byrd and all the others who followed, but I also knew no one had been under the ice. When the Nautilus was commissioned, I saw my opportunity. It took me four years, and a lot of-” Foreman paused as he searche4 for the words, which Dane willingly supplied:

  “Deception and misdirection?”

  “Yes. The angle that worked was making the trip a big propaganda boon for Admiral Rickover and his nuclear boys.”

  “And did they find a gate?”

  “No. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t one there. There just wasn’t one there when they looked. I think there was a gate in the vicinity of the North Pole a long time ago, a gate that led to all the speculation and legends, as the other gates did in other places around the planet.”

  Dane considered this. “1 think my vision had to be another time line. One where I think what’s happening here and now, happened there and then. The ozone layer was completely gone. So maybe Frost is there in the Nautilus in a parallel world because a parallel you sent him there? Too late to stop what happened to his world, but not too late for something else.”

  Ahana spoke up. “What something else?”

  Dane tried to follow the twisted logic. “Frost said he was waiting for a gate. Maybe a gate we could use. After all, we’ve determined that the Shadow uses the gates, but they don’t have complete control over them. The Ones Before seem to influence things somehow, but the biggest thing is we don’t completely understand the physics involved.”

  Dane nodded toward the black wall on the horizon. “I’m going to have to go back in. I think we can repair the damage.”

  “That’s not much of a plan,” Foreman said.

  “It’s as good as any that’s worked before,” Dane replied. We have to reverse what the Shadow has done, and the only way I can think of doing it is by using its own technology.”

  “What do you mean?” Foreman asked.

  “I saw one of its spheres that had crashed in one of the time lines. I was taken inside. That must have happened for a reason. And the one that raped our atmosphere was dead in the Inner Sea after I cut the portal. Maybe it’s still there. If we could get control of that. we might able to come back here and restore the ozone and sweep up the radiation.”

  Foreman frowned. ‘’That’s pretty thin. Even if you could control the sphere, where would you get the ozone? And how would you sweep up the radiation in the air?”

  “We take ozone from another time line,” Dane said. “And-”

  Ahana interrupted. “So we do what the Shadow has done to us, to another time line?”

  “A dead time line,” Dane said. “I’m sure there’s one out there that still has ozone.”

  “How can you be sure?” Foreman pressed.

  “Because if I’m wrong,” Dane patiently said, “then there is no hope.”

  “How about the portals? How can-”

  Dane cut off Foreman. “I’m not going in here.”

  “Where then?”

  “Baikal.”

  “Still-” Foreman drew out the word-“how can you know you’re going through the right portals? To the places you need to go? You gave the portal map back to the priestess who brought it to you.”

  Dane heard the accusation in Foreman’s tone, but he chose not to respond. He had no idea who the woman was who had brought him the portal map and allowed him to shut the gate in his time line/world in order to save it. But he also knew his wasn’t the only time line being threatened.

  “And the radiation?” Foreman pressed when Dane didn’t respond.

  “We use whatever they used to take our ozone to take out the radiation.”

  Foreman wasn’t buying any of Dane’s answers. “And how can you fly one of their spheres?”

  Dane remembered being inside the sphere. ‘’That might be the biggest problem. We’ll need fuel.”

  “What kind of fuel?” Ahana asked.

  “People.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE PAST: 1868

  Mitch Bouyer screamed as the knife sliced down the inside of his right arm, severing muscle and tendon. The pain was blinding, and his body convulsed, straining against the leather straps binding him to the tree. He blinked sweat out of his eyes. In the glow from the surrounding fires he could see the black “U.S.” stamped on the leather wrapped around his chest and upper arms. Must be from a packhorse, he thought, trying to keep his mind from the warrior approaching him again.

  Beyond the warrior he could see a circular framework of rough-cut poles, connected with rawhide thongs, some of the thongs disappearing over his head to a center pole. Buffalo skulls leered at him from the top of some of the poles. Warriors squatted around the outer poles, staring impassively in. In the darkness beyond them, he could make out the figures of women and children moving about.

  A sun dance site, he realized.

  He blinked. There was a Lakota woman in the inner circle who was standing close around him. In a flicker of firelight he locked onto her eyes and felt a shock, as strong as if a blade had touched him once again-she had blue eyes, just like his! But she was translucent, as if she were not really there. And behind her, his half-brother, Crazy Horse, staring back at him with a strange look on his face. A white man, arms bound behind him, stood next to Crazy Horse, a white man with dirty blonde hair cut short and a thick mustache and scraggly beard. He wore a tom buckskin shirt with an epaulette on one shoulder, the other one apparently ripped off.

  Farther in the distance, Bouyer saw a scaffold mounted in the branches of a young tree. A body, a small body, was up there. Crazy Horse was shifting his gaze between the woman’s image in front of him and the funeral scaffold with the same strange look.

  His left arm exploded, ripping his attention from the man. How could cold steel cause such heat? Bouyer wondered with the dwindling sanity left to him. Agency steel. He would have laughed if he could have. Agency steel and cavalry leather.

  The warrior held up the knife, showing Bouyer the red blood dripping off the blade, his blood, then lowered it. Bouyer felt the tip touch just below his sternum. He sucked in his stomach, desperately trying to pull away from the blade, the rough wood of the pole
he was bound to scraping along his back.

  He screamed again as the point punctured skin with a ripping noise. He felt his stomach muscles part. The warrior held a handful of thick, knotted red rope under Bouyer’s face. It took Bouyer a second to realize those were his guts. The warrior yelped-and walked back toward the nearest fire, pulling Bouyer s intestines with him and dropping what he had into the fire.

  Mitch Bouyer woke to utter darkness and a feeling of being buried alive, his scream echoing back right at him. He blinked several times, but there wasn’t the slightest hint of light. After a lifetime on the frontier he had learned to trust his inner clock and he had no doubt it was after dawn, yet there was no sign of daylight.

  He could feel his breath hitting something just in front of his face. He tentatively reached up and felt the wool blanket he had placed over the trench he’d dug in the snow the previous evening. It was less than four inches from his face, although it had been two feet above when he’d put it in place. It also didn’t move, as if it were weighed down by snow.

  Bouyer remained still, trying to get his panicked breath Hiller control. He closed his eyes. He knew Crazy Horse was somewhere not far away. He’d always bad a sense for his half-brother’s presence. But it wasn’t his brother who he needed to go to now.

  Southeast. In his mind’s eye, Bouyer could see the vast stretch of plains in that direction. Across the Colorado Territory, Kansas, into the Indian Territory just north of Texas. A river winding through a snow-covered plain. A river that ran with blood. And the officer he had seen in the dream. Bouyer knew he was down there somewhere.

  Had the dream been something that would happen or something that could happen? That was the question Bouyer always had when he had a vision. As he got his breathing under control, Bouyer thought about what he had “seen” and decided it was something that could happen but shouldn’t. After all, his fate as foretold was to die nobly, not tied to the stake. Perhaps the vision was a warning letting him know that if he did not stay true to his fate, things would turn out worse.

  Also, there was the Army officer. He was important.

  Bouyer shoved his arms upward, the blanket and snow slowly giving way. He stood up. It had snowed during the night. And the ground was now covered with almost three feet of white powder.

  Bouyer gathered his gear, wrapped it in the blanket and pushed his way through the snow to the tree where his horse was tethered. He tied off the roll behind his saddle and swung up onto the horse. The skull, still retaining a slight blue glow, was wrapped in a leather satchel underneath the bed roll.

  He knew he needed to go to the southeast. But there was someplace he needed to stop by on the way. He nudged his horse’s head and began to move.

  * * *

  Crazy Horse knew something was wrong as soon as he entered the village. He had been gone for a month, chasing Crow warriors who had stolen some ponies. During that time the village had moved, something he’d been apprised of when he met a hunting party two days ago. The movement was normal, as ponies ate grass and a village could not stay in one place for long before the available grazing was gone.

  Although others in his party carried scalps, Crazy Horse, despite killing two Crow in battle, did not. His mother had told him never to partake of the custom, and. it was one of the few things she’d said that he took to heart.

  No one would meet his eyes. That was what told him there was bad news. He knew Black Robe, his wife, had the white man’s wasting sickness. She’d been coughing for more than five moons now and was not expected to last much longer. As he slid off his horse in front of his lodge, he was prepared for the bad news of his wife’s death.

  He threw back the flap to the lodge and paused, seeing his wife seated by the fire. Wrapped in several robes in a vain attempt to get warm. She, too, would not meet his eyes, and he felt a pain rip through his heart as he wildly looked about, not seeing his young baby girl anywhere.

  “Where is she?” he demanded.

  “At the last camp,” Black Robe whispered, before breaking out in a spate of coughing. “The quick draining death disease.”

  Crazy Horse sunk to his knees. His only child, dead of another of the white man’s fevers. He had not seen this. Why? Why was she taken?

  Black Robe finished coughing, wiping the thin stain of blood from her lips. “I am sorry.”

  Crazy Horse ignored her. She was not the woman he had wanted for a wife. His face bore the scar where a bullet had punched through his left jaw when he had been with Black Buffalo Woman, the one he had always desired. But Black Buffalo Woman belonged to another man, and Black Robe had born him the one thing he had cherish above all else — his daughter.

  Crazy Horse howled, the yell echoing across the village. He was cursed, of that he had no doubt. The woman he loved was with another man. The child he loved was dead. The wife he didn’t love. But lived with, was dying, and could not even look him a decent meal or bear another child.

  Crazy Horse staggered to his feet. He left the lodge. Many were gathered about, wondering what he would do. He was known as a strange man. one who had visions, who often rode off alone. Who took no scalps, yet was brave in battle. Who bad pursued another man’s wife beyond the bounds of Lakota law. Who had been shot in the face because of it yet had not wreaked revenge on the man who shot him.

  Crazy Horse ignored them all and jumped on his horse. He knew the previous location of the village. Almost seventy miles away. He didn’t bother to get water or food. He rode out of the village, pushing his horse mercilessly through the new snow.

  * * *

  Bouyer felt the urge pulling him to the southeast, but he resisted it He sat cross-legged in the glade near the small stream, whispering the Lakota prayers Bridger had taught him. He heard a horse coming upstream, breathing hard. But he didn’t turn his head.

  The rider stopped between him and the scaffold. Bouyer watched Crazy Horse run forward, even as his horse collapsed in the snow. The Lakota warrior climbed up the tree that held the end of the scaffold until he could look down at the small wrapped bundle tied to it. Gingerly, Crazy Horse laid down next to his daughter, holding her to his chest. Bouyer didn’t move the entire time.

  And as the sun arced across the sky and day turned into night, neither man changed positions.

  When dawn came, Bouyer stiffly got to his feet and gathered wood. He built a large fire and waited by it. It was late afternoon before Crazy Horse rose from the scaffold and climbed down. The warrior seemed drained to Bouyer, empty of any energy, even of the anger Bouyer bad always felt coming from his ‘’brother.’’ Crazy Horse walked up to the fire and stared into it.

  “I am sorry,” Bouyer finally said.

  “Why are you here?”

  “I felt your pain.” Bouyer paused. “And your anger.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “I can always feel your anger. Sometimes strong, like the full moon, sometimes weak, like a distant star in the sky. But it is always there. This is the first time I’ve felt your pain.”

  “My daughter is dead. My wife is dying. All because of your people.”

  “And my people will make your people pay in turn,” Bouyer said. “Where does it end?” He didn’t wait for an answer as he angrily turned toward Crazy Horse. “Your anger is selfish. All you care about is how you feel. Why is it always about you? It is your daughter who is dead. You should mourn her, not be angry. But your anger makes you feel better, so you give in to it.” Bouyer reached across and slammed Crazy Horse in the chest, surprising the warrior, who staggered back a few steps. “Until you let go of the hardness in there, you will not be a great leader, nor will you fulfill your destiny. I have seen what happens to me if I do not fulfill the destiny foretold. It is terrible. I would imagine your fate would be as terrible if you do not do what is foretold.”

  Crazy Horse stared at Bouyer for several seconds and then surprisingly sat down, with his back to the fire, facing the burial scaffold. “I have nothing left but my
people, and I am told they are doomed, too.” He glanced over his shoulder at Bouyer. “You are going somewhere?”

  “I have had a vision,” Bouyer acknowledged.

  Then go. Leave me to my mourning in peace.”

  THE WASHITA RIVER, INDIAN TERRITORY: 1868

  “General, what if we find more Indians than we can handle?”

  The object of the question spit into the snow. “All I’m afraid of is we won’t find half enough. By God, there aren’t enough Indians in the entire country to defeat the Seventh Cavalry.”

  Mitch Bouyer’s expression of disbelief was masked by the scarf wrapped around his face, leaving only his dark eyes visible. He stared hard at George Armstrong Custer, the commander of the newly formed Seventh Cavalry. One of Custer’s officers had asked the question. And Bouyer thought it a valid one.

  The cluster of officers, scouts and Bouyer were standing on the near side of a bluff overlooking the Washita River in the Indian Territory. It was night, but there was good visibility due to star and moonlight reflecting off the foot of newly fallen snow. They were here because a day ago one of the scouts bad discovered the trail of a war party running across the Canadian River and beading southeast toward the Washita. They were in the Indian Territory, south of Kansas and north of Texas. It was a bleak land. Scoured by wind, with few trees, usually only along the riverbeds, which were few and far between.

  Custer had pounced on the report and ordered his command in pursuit. A winter campaign was something new for the Army in the west, but it was a sign of the pressure being put on the War Department by outraged civilians throughout the western territories. Particularly Kansas. Which had been hard hit by Indian raids the past couple years. There was also l report that one of the tribes in the area had white captives — women and children-which added to the urgency.

  Bouyer had arrived just two days ago, after a week of hard riding from Colorado. On the second day he’d sensed Crazy Horse’s presence behind him like a trailing storm, never closing, but not falling very far behind, either. Where before the sense of his “brother’s” aura bad always been red, of anger, there was a blackness now about Crazy Horse that worried Bouyer.