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7889$8:;<$=>?=:>@1$ (link to Who Dares Wins Publishing) PART I: THE PAST THE DROUGHT AD 800 ANGKOR KOL KER It was well into the first month of the wet season but not a drop of rain had fallen. Concern in the first week had turned to fear by the fourth week. As the water level of the deep moat fell, so did the will of the occupants of the capitol city. Anxiety was spreading like a sickness from person to person and mother to babe. The city had taken the people over five hundred years to build. Within its watery protection lay all their wealth, memories and the graves of ten generations of their ancestors. It was the most advanced and beautiful city on the face of the planet. Thousands of miles to the west, Charlemagne was being crowned Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in the Eternal City, but this place deep in the jungles of Southeast Asia dwarfed even Rome in comparison. It was the center of kingdom extending south to abut the Srivijayan Empire of Sumatra and the Shailandra Empire of Java. To the northeast, the Tang Dynasty of China ruled, while to the west, in the Middle East, the tide of Islam was rising. The capitol city of Angkor Kol Ker, the heart of the Khmer empire, held architecture the likes of which Europe would not see for half a century. But within the empire lay a Shadow--a dark place which closed off all travel toward India and the world beyond. The ancestors of the Khmer people had traveled halfway around the globe to avoid the shadow and for many generations they had seemingly foiled the force that had destroyed their original homeland. That place had birthed the Ones Before; the ones who knew the secrets of the Shadow. Secrets that their descendants had forgotten or remembered only as myth. But two generations ago, myth and legend reappeared in the lives of the Khmer. The Shadow had appeared in the mountainous jungle to the northwest, sometimes coming close, sometimes almost disappearing, but always stopping at the water. Now the water was disappearing.
The Emperor and his advisers gazed toward the mist covered jungle beyond the evaporating moat knowing the Shadow had removed their choices as quickly as the sun took away the water. They spotted a fire from the guard tower on top of a northern mountain that poked above the mist. The fire burned for two nights, then went out and never came back. The Emperor knew it was time. The Ones Before had written thousands of years ago of abandoning their home. He knew the cost of quitting the city. The Ones Before had chosen a hard thing to save the people. The next morning, the Emperor issued the order to evacuate the city. Wagons were piled high, packs were placed on backs, and en masse, almost the entire population of the city crossed the lone causeway and trekked away to the south. Fifty strong men remained. Warriors, standing tall, spears, swords and bows in hand, they had chosen to represent all the people of the Khmer. The would face the Shadow, so the city would not die alone. They destroyed the causeway and waited on the northern edge of the city, staring across at the dark mist that approached. It grew ever closer despite their prayers that the clouds would come overhead and rain would fall, filling the moats. The men had been tested in battle numerous times. Against the Tang people to the northeast, and the people of the sea along the coast to the south, they had fought many battles and won most, expanding the kingdom of the Khmer. But the warriors of the Khmer had never invaded the jungle covered mountains to the northwest. They had never within living memory gone in that direction, nor had any intrepid traveler from the lands on the other side come through. The warriors were brave men but even the bravest's heart quavered each morning as the mist grew closer, and the water still lower. One morning they could see the stone bottom of the moat and only puddles were left, drying under the fierce sun. The moat was over four hundred meters wide and surrounded the entire rectangle of buildings and temples, stretching four miles north and south and eight miles east and west. Inside the moat, a high stone wall enclosed the city. Over 200,000 people had called Angkor Kol Ker home, and their absence reverberated through the city, a heavy weight on the souls of the last men. The tread of the warriorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; sandals on the stone walkways echoed against the walls of the temples. Gone were the happy cries of children playing, the chants of priests, the
yells of merchants in their stalls. And now even the jungle sounds were disappearing as every animal that could flee did so. In the center of the city was the central temple, Angkor Ker. The center Prang of the temple was over five hundred feet of vertical, massive stone, a hundred feet taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza. It had taken two generations to construct and its shadow lay long over the city as the sun rose in the east, merging with the Shadow that crept closer from the west. As the last puddle dried, tendrils of the thick mist crossed the moat. The warriors said their prayers loudly, so their voices would prove to the gathering Shadow that this was a city well loved. Angkor Kol Ker and the fifty men waited. They did not wait long.
FLIGHT 19 AD 1945 FORT LAUDERDALE AIR STATION
"Sir, I request stand-down from this afternoon's training flight." Captain Henderson looked up from the papers on his desk. The young man standing in front of him wore starched khakis, the insignia of a corporal in the Marine Corps sewn onto the short sleeves. On his chest were campaign ribbons dating to Guadalcanal. "You have a reason, Corporal Foreman?" Henderson asked. He didn't add that Lieutenant Presson, the leader of Training Flight 19 had just been in his office making the same request. Henderson had denied the officer's immediately, but Foreman was a different matter. "Sir, I've got enough service points to be mustered out in the next week or so." Foreman was a large man, broad shouldered. His dark hair was swept back in thick waves, flirting with regulations, but with the war just a few months over, some rules had waned in the euphoria of victory. "What does that have to do with the flight?" Henderson asked. Foreman paused and his stance broke slightly from the parade rest he had assumed after saluting. "Sir, I--" "Yes?" "Sir, I just don't feel good. I think I might be sick."
Henderson frowned. Foreman didn't look sick. In fact his tan skin radiated health. Henderson had heard this sort of thing before, but only before combat missions, not a training flight. He looked at the ribbons on Foreman's chest, noted the Navy Cross and bit back the hasty reply that had formed on his lips. "I need more than that," Henderson said, softening his tone. "Sir, I have a bad feeling about this flight." "A bad feeling?" "Yes, sir.” Henderson let the silence stretch out. Foreman finally went on. “I had a feeling like this before. In combat.” He stopped, as if no further words were required. Henderson leaned back in his seat, his fingers rolling his pencil end over end. "What happened then, corporal?" "I was on the Enterprise, sir. Back in February. We were scheduled to do an attack run off the coast of Japan. Destroy everything that was floating. I went on that mission." "And?" "My entire squadron was lost." "Lost?" "Yes, sir. They all disappeared." “Disappeared?” “Yes, sir.” "No survivors?" "Just my plane's crew, sir." "How did you get back?" "My plane had engine trouble. The pilot and I had to bail out early. We were picked up by a destroyer. The rest of the squadron never came back. Not a plane. Not a man." Henderson felt a chill tickle the bare skin below his own regulation haircut. Foreman’s flat voice, and the lack of detail, bothered the captain. “My brother was in my squadron,” Foreman continued. "He never came back. I felt bad before that flight, Captain. As bad as I feel right now.”
Henderson looked at the pencil in his hand. First, Lieutenant Presson with his feelings of unease and now this. Henderson's instinct was to give Foreman the same order he'd given the young aviator. But he looked at the ribbons one more time. Foreman had done his duty many times. Presson had never been under fire. Foreman was a gunner, so his presence would make no difference one way or the other. "All right, corporal, you can sit the flight out. But I want you to be in the tower and work the monitoring shift. Are you healthy enough to do that?" Foreman snapped to attention. There was no look of relief on his face, just the same stoic Marine Corps stare. "Yes, sir." "You're dismissed." Lieutenant Presson tapped his compass, then pressed the intercom switch. "Give me a bearing," he asked his radio operator, seated behind him. "This thing's going nuts, sir. Spinning in circles." "Damn," Presson muttered. He keyed his radio. "Any of you guys have a bearing?" The pilots of the four other TBM Avengers reported a similar problem with their compasses. Presson could sense the irritation and underlying fear in some of the voices. Flight 19 had been experiencing difficulties from take off and the other crews were in training with little flight experience. Presson looked out of his cockpit and saw only ocean. It was a clear day with unlimited visibility. They should have been back at the airfield by now. Two hours ago they had passed a small string of islands that he assumed had been the Florida Keys. He wasn't as sure of that assumption now. This was his first training mission out of Fort Lauderdale Air Station. He had been recently transferred from Texas, and, as he stared at his wildly spinning compass, he wished he had paid more attention to their flight route. He hadn't wanted this flight. He'd asked the Squadron Commander to replace him, but the request had been denied because Presson could give no good reason for his request. He hadn't voiced the real reason: to fly today would be a bad idea. Well, it had been a bad idea, Presson thought to himself. And now he was beginning to question his judgment. Believing they had flown over the Keys, he'd ordered the flight to turn northeast toward the Florida Peninsula. But for the last 90 minutes, they had seen nothing but empty ocean below them. Could he have been mistaken? Could they have flown over some other
islands and were they now well over the Atlantic, rather than the Gulf of Mexico like he had assumed? Where was Florida? They had barely more than two hours of fuel left. He had to make an immediate decision whether to turn back, but now he couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t depend on his compass for a westerly heading. He glanced at the setting sun over his shoulder and knew that west was roughly behind them, but a few degrees off either way, and if Florida was behind them, they could pass south of the Keys and really end up in the Gulf. But if his original assumption had been right, then Florida should be just over the horizon ahead. Presson bit the inside of his mouth, drawing blood but the pain was unnoticed as he struggled with the problem, knowing the wrong decision would put them all in the sea. Presson ordered his radio operator to try and make contact with someone, anyone, to get a fix on their position. As he waited, Presson checked his fuel gauge, the needle now on the negative downslope toward empty, the sound of the plane's engine droning loud in his ears. He could almost sense the high octane fuel getting sucked into the carburetors and being burned, the fuel tanks growing emptier by the second. "I've got someone," the radio operator finally reported. "Sounds like Fort Lauderdale. Coming in broken and distorted." "Can they fix us?" Presson demanded. "I'm asking them but I'm not sure they're receiving us clear, sir." Thirteen lives in addition to his own weighed on Presson's mind. It should have been 14, but Corporal Foreman had been excused from the flight. Presson wondered how the corporal had managed that. Presson tried to concentrate on the present. "Come on. Get me a fix!" he yelled into the intercom. "I'm trying, sir, but I'm not receiving anything now." Presson cursed. He once more looked out at the sea hoping to see something other than the endless water. And he did see something. A swirl of mist that had not been there seconds earlier. It was boiling out of the sky above the surface of the ocean several miles directly ahead, strangely bright in a sky that was turning dark with night. It was as if there was a glow deep within it. It was a yellowish white color with dark streaks running through, highlighted by the internal glow. It was several hundred yards across, billowing outward at a rapid rate.
At first Presson thought it might be a ship making smoke, but he had never seen such strange colored smoke produced by a ship before, nor had he ever seen smoke that was brighter than the surrounding sea. As the mist rapidly grew in size, Presson knew it was no ship. Whatever it was, it was directly across their flight path. His instinct was to turn and fly around it, but with their compasses out, he feared he would lose the heading they were on. Of course he wasn't sure if their heading was taking them closer to land and safety or further away. Those seconds Presson wasted on mental debate brought Flight 19 within a mile of the rapidly growing fog bank. It was now a wall in front of them, reaching their current flight altitude, growing at a rate that defied any man-made or natural phenomenon Presson had ever experienced. Presson stared hard. The fog was swirling around its center. Inside of the glow, he could now make out a pitch black circle, darker than anything he had ever seen. It was like the center of a whirlpool, the mist spinning around, getting sucked in. "Let's go over," Presson called out over his radio, but he got no response. He looked around. The other four planes were in formation. He pulled back on his yoke, gaining altitude, hoping they would follow his lead, but a glance to the front told him it was too late. He hit the edge of the mist, and then he was in. At Fort Lauderdale, Corporal Foreman had watched Flight 19 on the radar since it had taken off. After crossing some of the western islands of the Bahamas near Bimini, the flight had inexplicably turned to the northeast, heading toward open ocean. The planes had threaded a needle, passing to the south of Grand Bahama and north of Nassau with nothing but open ocean ahead, the only land within flight range being the Bahamas to the far northeast. At first, following the flight, Foreman had not considered that overly unusual. Perhaps Lieutenant Presson had wanted to give the other new pilots some more open ocean flying time. Flight leaders had a lot of latitude in how they trained the crews under their command. But as the flight had strayed farther from land, neither turning back or heading directly for Bahama, Foreman had finally reacted, trying to contact them by radio. Occasionally he had picked up worried calls from the pilots but he couldn't establish contact. Foreman had radioed the Flight's location to orient them but the planes had continued heading northeast, away from land, indicating the aircraft were not receiving him.
"Flight 19, this is Fort Lauderdale Air Station," Foreman said for the thirtieth time. "You are heading northeast. You must turn around now. Your location grid is--" Foreman stopped in mid-sentence as the radar image of the flight simply disappeared. Foreman blinked, staring at his screen. They were too high to have crashed. He watched his screen while he kept calling out on the radio. With his free hand he picked up the phone and called Captain Henderson's office. Within ten minutes Henderson and other officers were in the control tower, listening to silence play out the unknown fate of Flight 19. Foreman quickly brought them up to speed on what had transpired. "What's their last location?" Henderson asked. Foreman pointed at a point on the chart. "Here. Due east of the Bahamas." Henderson picked up a phone and ordered two planes into the air to search for the missing flight. Within minutes, Foreman could see the large blips representing the two Martin Mariner searchplanes. "What's their weather, corporal?" Henderson demanded. "Clear and fair, sir," Foreman reported. "No local thunderstorms?" "Clear, sir," Foreman repeated. The men gathered in the control tower lapsed into silence, each trying to imagine what could have happened to the five planes. By now they knew the planes were down, having run out of fuel. Each man also knew that even in a calm sea, surviving a ditched TBM was a dicey proposition at best. Less than thirty minutes into the rescue flight, the blip representing the northernmost Martin, the one closest to Flight 19's last position, abruptly disappeared off the screen. "Sir!" Foreman called out, but Henderson had been watching over his shoulder. "Get them on the radio!" Henderson ordered. Foreman tried, but like Flight 19, there was no reply, although the other search plane reported in. That was enough for Henderson. "Order the last plane back." "Yes, sir." Many hours later, after the mystified officers had left the control tower worried about inquest panels and careers, Foreman leaned over the chart and stared at it. He put a dot on the
last location he'd had for Flight 19. Then he put a dot where the Mariner had gone down. He drew a line between the two. Then he drew a line from each dot to Bermuda, where Flight 19's troubles had begun. He stared at the triangle he had drawn, raising his head to look toward the dark and ocean. After being rescued eight months ago he had tried to discover what had happened to his brother and squadron mates. He'd learned that the area of ocean his squadron had gone down in was known to local Japanese fisherman as the Devilâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Sea, an area of many strange disappearances. He'd even gone ashore after the surrender and traveled to one of the villages that faced that area. He'd learned from one old fisherman that they fished in the Devilâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Sea, but only when their village Shaman told them it was safe to do so. How the Shaman knew that, the fisherman could not say. Today, staring out at the sea, Foreman wondered if the village shaman just got a bad feeling. Foreman reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a photograph. It showed a family, two boys who were obviously twins and in their teens, standing in front of a large man who had a big, bushy beard, and a small woman with a bright smile, her head turned slightly, half-looking up at her husband. Foreman closed his eyes for several long minutes, then he opened them. Foreman pulled the chart off the table and folded it up. He stuffed it into the pocket of his shirt. He walked out of the control tower and down to the beach. He stared at the water, hearing the rhythm of the ocean, his eyes trying to penetrate over the horizon, into the triangle he feared. His head was cocked, as if he were listening, as if he could hear the voices of Flight 19 and something more, something deeper and darker and older, much older. There was danger out there, Foreman knew. More than the loss of Flight 19. He looked at the picture of his family once more, staring at his parents who had ignored the warnings of danger six years ago and had been swallowed in the inferno of Europe during the dark reign of Hitler. He was still standing there when the light of dawn began to touch that same horizon.
WATER AND JUNGLE 1968
On one side of the world a secret aircraft capable of several times the speed of sound was leveling off at very high altitude; on the other, a nuclear submarine, the pride of the fleet and equipped with the latest technology and weapons, was letting seawater into ballast tanks as it began its descent. They were linked electronically to a point in the Middle East. The listening station had been placed in the rugged mountains of northern Iran to monitor the southern belly of the Soviet Union, Today it had a different mission: coordinate the SR-71 Blackbird spyplane flying out of Okinawa and the USS Scorpion, a fast attack submarine that had been detached from normal operations in the Atlantic for this classified mission. The man in charge of this operation wore a specially wired headset. In his left ear he could hear the relayed reports from the Scorpion coming up a shielded line being unreeled out of a rigging on the rear deck of the submarine, to a transmitter buoy that bounced on the waves above the sub. In his right ear, he could hear the pilot of the SR71, call sign Blackbird, directly. He used his own name, Foreman, not concerned about concealing his identity with a code name because he had no other life than his work. In the Central Intelligence Agency he had become not a legend, but more an anachronism, whispered about not in awe but as if he didn't really exist. In front of him were three pieces of paper. One was a chart of the ocean northwest of Bermuda where the Scorpion was currently operating, one a map showing Southeast Asia, where the SR-71 was flying, the other a chart off the east coast of Japan. Three triangles, one highlighted in blue marker on the Atlantic chart, one in red on the Pacific chart, the last one highlighted in green on the map, were prominently outlined. The Bermuda Triangle Gate, as Foreman preferred to call it, covered an area from Bermuda, down to Key West and across through the Bahamas to San Juan, Puerto Rico. It had not had the name 'Bermuda Triangle' when Foreman had listened to Flight 19 disappear, but with the publicity over that incident the legend had grown and some reporter had come up with the moniker for lack of a better label. Foreman wasn't interested in legends; he was interested in facts. He called these places â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Gatesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; because they were doorways, of that he was convinced, but the perimeters were never stable, growing and shrinking at various rates. At times, they almost completely disappeared, at other times they reached a triangular shaped limit. While the center of
each was fixed geographically, the size was more determined by time, sometimes swinging open, sometimes apparently completely shut. The Angkor Gate’s legends were more distant and faint, lying off the beaten path of modern civilization and in the midst of a country known as the world's largest minefield; the result of decades of civil and international war. It had taken Foreman many years to even begin to hear rumors of the place and many years more to determine that indeed there was another place on the planet that warranted his attention. Of more significance to Foreman was that the Angkor Gate lay on land, not hidden in the ocean. He called it Angkor Gate because of the legends surrounding that area which mentioned an ancient city in the area, Angkor Kol Ker. As near as he had been able to determine, the Angkor Gate was in northwestern Cambodia, bounded on the north by the Dangkret Escarpment separating Cambodia from Thailand, and on the south by the floodplain of Lake Tonle Sap, the largest freshwater lake in Southwest Asia. The maximum apexes of the Angkor Gate that Foreman had so laboriously worked out over the years from various sources were all positioned so that the land inside held no roads, no cities and were roughly bounded by streams and rivers along all sides. At maximum it was considerably smaller than the largest opening of the Bermuda Triangle Gate, but held much more potential as far as Foreman was concerned not only because it was on land but also because it was more consistently “active”. The Devil’s Sea Gate was named thusly because it marked the boundaries of the Devil’s Sea. Since it encompassed water like the Bermuda Triangle, Foreman preferred to focus his attention on the Bermuda Triangle. There were also the reports he occasionally received of intense, covert Japanese interest in the Devil’s Sea Gate area. Somehow they were all connected and Foreman lived only to discover the true nature of what these Gates were, what was causing them and what was on the other side of the Gates. "Clearing one thousand feet depth," the commander of the Scorpion, Captain Bateman, reported. "Heading nine-zero degrees. Estimated crossing of line of departure in five mikes. Status all good." "Level at sixty thousand," the pilot of the SR-71 called in. "ETA five mikes." Foreman didn't say anything. He had personally briefed the pilot and the captain of the Scorpion the previous week. He had made it abundantly clear that timing and positioning had to
be exact. He looked at the large clock in the front of the listening room, watching the second hand make another circle. Then another. "Three minutes," Scorpion called. "All go." "Three minutes," Blackbird echoed in his other ear at the same time. "All clear." Foreman looked down. A penciled-in line on the chart represented the Scorpion’s course. He knew that three minutes out meant that the submarine was less than a half-mile from the current edge of the Bermuda Triangle Gate along the western line drawn from Bermuda to Puerto Rico. A line on the map of southeast Asia had the SR-71's flight route, and Foreman knew it was ninety miles from the green line, heading in from the south, currently passing over Lake Tonle Sap. He had waited years to do this, watching, until both Angkor and Bermuda Triangle were active to this extent at the same time. Another circle of the second hand. "Transmitting via HF," Scorpion reported, indicating that the special high frequency transmitter that had been attached to the sub's front deck the previous week was now active. "Ah, Foreman, this is Blackbird." Foreman sat straighter. He could sense a change in the normally laconic voice of the SR71 pilot. "I've got something ahead and below." Foreman spoke for the first time. "Clarify." "A yellow-white cloud. Maybe some kind of fog but it's growing fast." "Can you go above it?" Foreman asked. "Oh, yeah. No sweat. I've got plenty of clear sky. Entering Angkor Gate airspace now." "We're in," Captain Bateman reported. "Still transmitting. We're getting some electric anomalies in our systems, but nothing major. Sonar reports the ocean is clear out to limits." "How about HF?" Foreman asked, wanting to know if the SR-71 was picking up the signal from the submarine or vice versa. There was normally no way the HF signal could reach the SR-71 on the other side of the Earth. But the operative word in that sentence, as Foreman knew, was normally. There was nothing normal about either of the locations the two craft were closing on and the whole point of this exercise was to prove a link between the two Gates. “Ah, I have a positive on the high frequency. I’m picking up Scorpion’s HF signal.”
Foreman tapped a fist against the desktop in triumph. The two Gates were most definitely connected, and in a way that was not possible using known physics. He keyed the radio. “Captain Bateman, can you read the SR-71 HF transponder?” “Roger. I don’t know how we can, but we are. Loud and clear.” There was brief silence, then a startled yell from the pilot. "What the hell?" Foreman was leaning forward, his eyes closed. The feeling of triumph faded. "Blackbird," Foreman said. "What is going on?" "Uh, this fog. I'm over it now but it's growing fast. It doesn't look right. I'm getting some electronic problems." "Will you be clear before it reaches your altitude?" Foreman asked. "Uh, yeah." There was a long pause. "I think so." "What about HF from Scorpion?" Foreman prodded. "Still have HF. That's strange. Yeah, it's--hey!" There was a garble of static in Foreman's right ear. "Blackbird? Report!" "Shit. I've got major failures here," The pilot's voice sounded distracted. "Compass out. On-board computer is going nuts. I'm--shit! There's light coming out of the cloud. Lines of light. Jesus! What the hell is that? That was close. There’s something dark in the very center. Shit! I'm kicking it to--" the voice broke into unintelligible static. Then silence. Foreman pressed the transmit button. "Blackbird? Blackbird?" He didn't waste any more time, hitting his other transmit. "Scorpion, this is Foreman. Evacuate the area. Immediately." "Turning," Bateman acknowledged. "But we're getting a lot of electronic interference. Some system failures. Really strange." Foreman knew the sub would have to complete a wide turn to clear the Bermuda Triangle Gate. He also knew how long that would take. He checked the clock. "There's something weird coming in over sonar," Bateman suddenly announced. "Clarify!" Foreman ordered. "Sounds almost like someone's trying to contact us via sonar," the captain of the Scorpion reported. "Pinging us. We're copying. Oh no!" he suddenly exclaimed. "We've got problems in the reactor." Foreman could hear Bateman yelling orders, his hand still keeping the channel open but the mike away from his lips. Then Bateman came back. "We've got a major reactor failure.
Coolant lines down. We've also got something coming this way on sonar. Something big! It wasn't there before." Foreman leaned forward listening to the faint voices as the captain again addressed his men in the conning tower. "Jones, what the hell is it? You told me we were clear. That thing's going to be up our ass in a couple of seconds!" "I don't know, sir! It's huge, sir. I've never seen anything that big and moving." "Evasive action!" the captain yelled. "Sir, the reactor's off-line," another voice was shouting in the background. "We don't--" "Goddamnit," the captain cut the other man off. "Get us out of here, number one! Blow all tanks. Now!" The voice of the sonar man Jones, echoed tinnily in Foreman's ear. "Sir, it's right next to us. Good God! Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s huge. It's real--" There was a crackling sound and a few more faint unintelligible yells then the sound abruptly cut off in Foreman's left ear. Foreman leaned back in the seat. He reached into a pocket and pulled out some peanuts. He slowly cracked the shell on the first one and paused before throwing the contents into his mouth. He looked his hand. It was shaking. His stomach was shooting sharp pains. He threw the shell and peanut to the floor. He waited one hour as agreed. Not another sound had come through either side of his headset. Finally he took it off and walked over to the radio that connected him to a man who sat on the National Security Council. He had a link between the Bermuda Triangle and Angkor Gates, but it looked like a high price had been paid to gain that information.
THE TEAM SOUTHEAST ASIA, 1968
The jungle pressed up against the edges of the camp, a dark wall of shivering sounds and shadowy menace in the early evening light. Clear fields of fire had been cut for a hundred meters from the outer perimeter, but beyond that neither eye nor bullet could penetrate far.
"I'm so short I could play handball on the curb," the team leader told the other three men in the small hootch that served as their home. The team leader kissed his fingers, then tenderly touched the photo of a young woman that was tacked to the wall on the right side of the door. "See you soon, babe." With his other hand he pulled a CAR-15 off its peg and tucked it into his side as he strode out into the setting sun. A miniaturized version of the M-16, the metal parts of the automatic weapon had a sheen that spoke of numerous cleanings and hard use. "I imagine Linda knows how short you really are," the second man out of the hootch said in a rumbling, deep voice to the laughter of the other two men. "Don't be talking about my fiancee that way," the first man rejoined, but there was no threat in his voice. He paused, letting the rest of the team catch up. The team leader and oldest of the four, Sergeant First Class Ed Flaherty was twenty-eight, but a stranger would have thought them all older. The war had aged their faces and their hearts, etching lines that were the physical memories of the fear, fatigue and stress. The men wore tiger stripe fatigues with no patches or nametags. Each one had a different weapon, but they all had the same look in their eyes: the haunted look of men intimate with death and violence. This morning, Flaherty's face was creased with worry lines, befitting his position as team leader. He was tall and skinny with red hair cut tight against his skull and a green drive-on rag tied around his neck. Given the short hair, the large, flaming red mustache on his upper lip seemed incongruous. His hands were cradled around the CAR-15. Hooked by a snap link to his load bearing equipment was an M-79 grenade launcher. Flaherty liked keeping it loaded with a flechette round rather than the normal 40 mm high explosive round, in effect making the launcher a large shotgun. He had inherited it from his own team leader after his first tour of duty and he'd carried it ever since. He called the M-79 his ambush buster. On Flaherty's back was his rucksack, a battered green pack loaded with water, ammunition, mines and food. The pack had gone with him on sixteen cross-border operations since he'd joined this specialized outfit. It was as much a part of him as the weapon in his hands. The next senior man, Staff Sergeant James Thomas, had been on fourteen of those trips which allowed him to joke about Flaherty's fiancee with impunity. Thomas was the radioman and his ruck was larger than Flaherty's, holding the same essential supplies as well as the team radio and spare batteries. The ruck, large as it was, looked small when placed on Thomas's back. He was over six and a half feet tall and heavily muscled. His black skin was covered in sweat,
even here at four thousand feet with the cool evening air swirling in. It was a running joke on Recon Team Kansas that Thomas would sweat even at the north pole. In Thomas's hands his weapon, the M-203, combination M-16 rifle and 40 mm grenade launcher, looked like a toy. The third senior member of RT Kansas was Sergeant Eric Dane and both Flaherty and Thomas were damn glad to have him along. Dane was the team's weapon's man and carried an M-60 machine-gun, capable of spewing out over a thousand rounds of 7.62 mm ammunition per second. But it wasn't the firepower he carried that endeared Dane to his teammates' hearts; it was his ability to move stealthily on the ground in the point position and keep the rest of them from walking into ambushes. In three tours in Vietnam, Flaherty had never seen anyone as good. Already, Dane had walked them around four different ambushes, any one of which Flaherty knew would have been the end of RT Kansas. Dane was of average height and had thick black hair. He wore army-issue glasses, the thick plastic frames marring an otherwise handsome face. He was lean and well-muscled, able to handle the twenty-two pounds of machine-gun without trouble. Carrying the machine-gun, by conventional tactics, Dane wasn't supposed to be on point, but the firepower was outweighed by his uncanny ability. And Dane never complained, never felt it was someone else's turn to take the most dangerous place in the patrol. Since the second time 'over the fence' when he'd rotated into the position, he'd stayed there. One night when they were alone, Flaherty had talked to Dane about it, telling him they could continue rotating the dangerous position but Dane had said it was where he belonged and for that Flaherty was silently grateful. Dane was a quiet man who kept to himself, but the other two senior members of RT Kansas were as close to him as anyone had ever been. The fourth man, Specialist Four Tormey, was new. The others didn't even know his first name. He'd been assigned to the team two days ago and the intervening time had been spent on more important things than becoming asshole buddies, such as teaching Tormey their immediate action drills. Tormey also wasn't Special Forces and that was another line between him and the older men. Tormey was an indicator of things to come. Special Forces had lost too many men in the meatgrinder of Vietnam. The people factory at Fort Bragg was only turning out a limited number of trained replacements every year. 5th Group had begun picking up volunteers like Tormey from regular infantry units in-country to replace dead or rotating members.
Tormey had seen combat but he'd never been on a mission over the fence. Tormey carried an AK-47, a weapon he must have acquired somewhere in his previous unit. Flaherty didn't mind Tormey carrying it as itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s report might confuse the bad guys with their own AK-47s. Tormey was only twenty-one and his eyes were darting about, searching for behavioral clues. The three older men knew how he felt, getting ready to go on his first cross-border mission, but they didn't say anything about it because they still felt that same way, no matter how many missions they had under their belt. More missions meant they were better at what they did, not less afraid. The four men strode through knee high grass toward the landing zone where their chopper was due. They were halfway when Dane suddenly whistled and held up a fist. Flaherty and Thomas froze in place, and, after a slight hesitation, Tormey did the same. Dane reached over his shoulder and quietly pulled a machete out of the sheath on the right side of his backpack. He edged forward, past Flaherty and Thomas, his feet moving smoothly through the grass. The blade flashed in the setting sun as Dane swung it. Then he reached down and pulled up the four foot long body of a King Cobra snake. The head was cleanly severed. "Jesus," Thomas said, relaxing. "How the hell did you know it was there?" Dane just shrugged, wiping the blade on the grass, then sheathing it. "Just knew." That had been Dane's answer about sensing the ambushes. He grinned at Flaherty and offered him the snake. "Want to take it home to Linda? Make a nice belt." Flaherty took the body and flung it away. His stomach hurt. He'd have stepped on the thing if Dane hadn't stopped him. "I'm getting too old for this shit," he muttered. Dane cocked his head. "Chopper inbound." "Let's go," Flaherty ordered, even though he couldn't hear the helicopter. The terrain below was unlike any the men of RT Kansas had ever seen. It was much more rugged and emanated a sense of the primeval, of a land that didn't acknowledge time or man's preeminence in other parts of the globe. Jagged mountains thrust up from the thick green carpet of jungle, their peaks outlined against the setting sun. Rivers wound through the low ground, surrounded on either side by towering limestone cliffs or fertile riverbanks. There was little sign of mankind's intrusions below and one could well imagine the land having existed like this for millennium.
The chopper was heading northwest, and each of the four men in the cargo bay knew they had crossed the "fence," the border between Vietnam and Laos long ago. "Any idea where we're going?" Tormey yelled, straining to be heard above the sound of the blades overheard and the turbine engines just behind the firewall their backs were resting against. Flaherty kept his eyes oriented toward the ground, keeping track of their progress. Thomas appeared to be asleep, his head lolling on his large shoulders. Dane looked at Tormey and a half-smile creased his lips. "I don't know where we're going but I do know we're not in Kansas anymore." It was an inside joke. Every recon team operating out of CCN, Combat Control North, MACV-SOG, Military Assistance Command Vietnam, Studies and Observation Group, was named after a state. The team leader before Flaherty had been from Kansas, and had so christened the team. Since RT Kansas had not lost a man since that name was assigned, the name stuck, everyone considering it to be good luck. Soldiers were a strangely superstitious lot; the green rag around Flaherty's throat had gone on every mission with him and he considered it his good luck talisman. Lately, though, he and Thomas had been considering Dane their good luck charm. Flaherty glanced at Dane who returned his troubled look. Tormey had asked a good question. None of them had ever been on a mission like this. They'd simply been told to gear up and get on board the chopper. No target information, no mission briefing, nothing other than their commander bidding them farewell at the helipad at their base in Vietnam and instructing them to take orders from whoever met them at the other end. And where could the other end be now that they were over the border? And there were no "little people," the affectionate term the American Green Berets used for the Montagnard natives who made up the other half of RT Kansas, on board. Their commander had been no more able to explain why the orders from Saigon said Americans only, as he could explain anything else about this mission. Flaherty and the other men weren't happy about leaving half their team at the forward operating base. They'd never gone on a mission before without their indigenous personnel. The second indication of trouble had been the chopper as it came in to the landing zone at the CCN launch site. The aircraft wasn't army, that was for sure. Painted all black with no
markings, Flaherty knew that it was part of Air America, the CIA's private airline. The pilots hadn't said a word to their cargo, simply taking off and heading northwest. The pilots' long hair flowing out from under their wildly painted helmets and their large mustaches indicated they were CIA or perhaps part of the Ravens, a group of Air Force officers secretly loaned to the Agency for the air war in Laos. Dane leaned close to Flaherty. "Long Tiem," he yelled in Flaherty's ear. The team leader nodded in agreement at Dane's guess as to their immediate destination. He'd heard of the small town and airstrip in northern Laos where the Ravens were headquartered and the CIA was coordinating its secret war. RT Kansas had been in Laos before, but much closer to the border, checking out the Ho Chi Minh Trail and calling in air strikes. They'd never been this deep nor had any other CCN team to their knowledge. He wondered why the CIA would want an American Special Forces recon team. The Agency normally hired Nungs or other oriental mercenaries for any onthe-ground work this far in, putting one of their own paramilitary personnel in charge of the indigs. Change was in the air though, and maybe that was the reason for this strange mission. Flaherty and the other two senior men knew that the secret cross-border war into Cambodia was going to become above-board sooner or later. The word was that the NVA and VC sanctuaries in Cambodia were going to get hit, and hit hard by the US regular army and air force. Nixon was going to allow the military to cross the border and destroy the bases from which the NVA and Viet Cong had been launching their attacks all these years. This trip they assumed, might have something to do with that. "What's your feel?" Flaherty asked Dane. Next to them, Thomas's head moved ever so slightly, his ear closer to hear the answer, belying the impression that he was sleeping. "Not good." Dane shook his head. "Not good." A grimace crossed Thomas's face and Flaherty felt his stomach tighten. If Dane said it wasn't good, then it wasn't. The chopper cleared a large mountain and then swiftly descended. Flaherty could make out a landing strip next to a small town. There were numerous black painted OV-1, OV-2 and OV-10 spotter aircraft and various helicopters parked on the landing strip along with propeller driven fighter aircraft. Air America. Long Tiem as Dane had predicted.
The chopper touched down and a man on the steel grating waved for them to get off. The man wore tiger stripe pants, a black t-shirt and dark sunglasses. A pistol was strapped to his waist and a knife to his right calf. He had long, shiny blond hair and looked like he belonged on a college football field rather than in the middle of a secret war. "This way!" he yelled, then turned his back and headed off. RT Kansas shouldered their packs and followed him into a building with walls of plywood and a corrugated tin roof. "My name's Castle," the man said, sitting on a small field table while the team dropped its rucks and settled down into folding chairs. "I'll be leading this mission." "And I'm Foreman," a voice came from the shadows to the left front. An older man, somewhere in his late forties, stepped forward. The most distinguishing feature that caught everyone's attention was his hair. It was pure white and combed straight back in thick waves. His face was like a hatchet, with two steely eyes set on either side of the blade of his nose. "I'm in charge of this operation." Flaherty introduced the team but Foreman didn't seem to care what their names were. He turned to the maps mounted on the wall behind him. "Your mission is to accompany Mister Castle on a recovery mission to this location." A thin finger touched the map in northeast Cambodia, along the Mekong River. "You will take all orders from Mister Castle. Infiltration and exfiltration will be handled by air assets from this location. All communications will be to me." Flaherty and the other men were still staring at the map. "That's Cambodia, sir," Flaherty said. Foreman didn't answer. He reached into his pocket and pulled out several peanuts and began cracking the shells, throwing the contents in his mouth as soon as he had one open. He dropped the empty shells to the floor. Castle cleared his throat. "I have all call signs and frequencies. It will be a simple mission. Straight in to a landing zone, move a couple of klicks to our objective and do the recovery, then a few more klicks to a pick up zone." "What about air cover?" Flaherty asked. "None," Foreman said, cracking another shell. "As you've noticed," he said without a trace of sarcasm, "you are going into Cambodia. Although that theater of operations will be legalized before long, it isn't legal now." Foreman shrugged. "Closer to the border, yes, we could
bring in some fast-movers and claim they misread their maps, but you're going in somewhat deeper." "What are we supposed to be recovering?" Dane asked. Flaherty was surprised as Dane rarely spoke or asked questions during mission briefings. "An SR-71 spy plane went down over Cambodia last week," Foreman said. "Mister Castle's job is to go in and retrieve certain pieces of classified equipment from the wreckage. Castle's been fully briefed. You are simply to provide him security." "How did the plane go down?" Flaherty asked. "You don't have a need to know that," Foreman said. "What about the pilot and recon officer?" Thomas asked. "The crew is assumed to be dead," Foreman answered. "Did they make any radio contact prior to going down?" Flaherty wanted to know. Foreman's answer was abrupt. "No." “How did it go down?” “We don’t know,” Foreman said. “That’s why you’re going there. To get its black box.” "You say it went down last week. Why have we waited this long?" Flaherty asked. "Because that's the way it worked out," Foreman said. His dead stare indicated he wanted no further questions. "How accurate is the plot of the wreckage?" Flaherty asked. "It's accurate," Foreman said. "Who's the enemy?" Flaherty asked. "Do we fire up anyone we come across or do we run and hide? What are our rules of engagement?" Cambodia was a nightmare of warring parties with shifting alliances. There were the Khmer Rouge, the Royal Cambodian Army, and of course, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. "You won't make contact," Foreman said. Flaherty stared at the CIA officer in surprise. "That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard." The team leader stood. "These men are my responsibility and I'm not about to send them out on a half-assed operation like this." Foreman pointed at Flaherty. His voice was level and cold. "Sit down, sergeant. You will go wherever I want you to. Those are your orders and you will follow them. Clear?"
"Not clear," Flaherty said, forcing himself to calm down. "I report to CCN, MACV-SOG, not to the CIA." Foreman reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. He negligently threw it at Flaherty. "No, you report to me for this mission. It's been authorized at the highest levels." Flaherty unfolded the orders and read. Then he refolded it and started to put it in his pocket. Foreman snapped his fingers. "Give it back." "I'll keep this copy," Flaherty said. Foreman's hand slid down to the pistol on his right hip. Dane was up, his pistol pointing at the CIA man's forehead. "Whoa!" Flaherty yelled, more shocked by Dane's action than Foreman's. "Tell your man to back off," Foreman said, his voice under tight control. "Dane," Flaherty said, his tone indicating what he wanted. Dane reluctantly holstered his pistol. Foreman tapped Flaherty in the chest where he had put the copy of the orders. "You are mine for the duration of this mission. There will be no more questions. Your chopper leaves in ten minutes. Get to the landing zone." Castle had remained still throughout the confrontation. Now he pointed to the door. "Let's go." The CIA man picked up his own rucksack and threw it over his shoulder. Flaherty jerked his thumb and the team walked out. Flaherty felt the straps of his pack cut into his shoulders as he got close to Dane. "What's with you?" "This is screwed,â&#x20AC;? Dane said. "Foreman's lying about something and Castle is scared." "Hell, I'm scared," Flaherty said. "Castle's more scared than just going on a deep mission over the fence," Dane said. "Maybe he's a cherry," Flaherty said. Dane just shook his head. Flaherty knew Foreman was full of crap but the part about Castle being scared was news. Dane stopped and pointed. Two Nung mercenaries, powerful looking Chinese men armed to the teeth, were watching them from the edge of the landing zone, their hands moving in certain gestures toward the recon team.
"What's with them?" Flaherty asked. "Do you wonder why they had to get us when the CIA usually uses people like them?" Dane asked. "Yeah, I been thinking about it," Flaherty said. "But I figure now it's cause of the SR-71. Maybe they don't want anyone to know they lost one and they're keeping this American only. That's why we had to leave our little people behind." "I've never seen Nungs afraid of anything," Dane said, "but those guys are scared. Those symbols are to ward off evil spirits." "Oh, Christ," Flaherty muttered as they continued to the chopper. "Just what we need. Evil spirits." "And they're not even going with us," Dane noted. The refueled black Huey was waiting for them, its blades slowly turning. RT Kansas, along with Castle, got on board and the chopper immediately lifted, heading southwest. Flaherty looked at his map, noting the location that Foreman had indicated the plane had gone down. It was near the Mekong river, about a hundred klicks from where the river crossed from Laos into Cambodia. The map was mass of dark green and contour lines in the area. No sign of civilization. Flaherty glanced over at Dane. The younger man was tense, his hands holding his M-60 tightly. Flaherty didn't know how Dane knew what he did about Foreman and Castle and the Nungs, but he didn't doubt that it was the truth. Dane just knew things, like he had known about the cobra at the base camp. Flaherty knew little about Dane, only what had been in his thin personnel folder heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d had with him when heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d signed in to CCN six months ago. Dane never got any mail and he kept mostly to himself, not joining the others when they unwound by getting shit-faced at the CCN bar in their compound. But Flaherty had instinctively liked the younger man when heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d first met him and over the months that feeling had deepened into mutual respect. Flaherty shifted his gaze from Dane to the terrain below. They were flying high, over six thousand feet and the landscape below was bathed in bright moonlight. Flaherty oriented himself, but it was hard as fast as the chopper was flying. He had no doubt though, when they came over the Mekong. The wide river reflected the moon and he could see occasional rapids. They flew above the river for an hour, then the chopper suddenly banked and headed west.
Flaherty felt a hand on his arm. It was Castle. "No maps now," Castle said, his hand on the edge of Flaherty's map. "Where the hell are we going?" Flaherty demanded as the Mekong disappeared to the east. "The crash site you indicated is south." "Just do what you're told," Castle said. "We'll be in and out in twenty-four hours." Flaherty gave up the map. He had hoped to leave this behind when he went into Special Forces: following stupid orders that could get you killed for reasons you would never know. Flaherty now knew that Castle and the CIA were playing secret games. They didn't want the team to know exactly where the SR-71 had gone down. For all Flaherty knew they might be going into China, but that would require another right turn and a long flight north. They flew west for an hour. Flaherty had to shrug when Dane and Thomas wanted to know why they had left the Mekong so far behind. There was nothing he could do. They were under orders and they were on board a CIA bird. Finally, Castle turned to them, holding up a finger. "One minute out. Lock and load." Flaherty looked out. The land below was triple canopy jungle with mountains poking through here and there. There was no sign of humanity. No roads, no villages, nothing. He took a magazine of 5.56 mm ammunition out of his ammunition pouch and placed it in the well on the bottom of his CAR-15. He slapped it to make sure it was seated, then pulled the charging handle on the weapon to the rear and let it slam forward. Then he placed the weapon between his knees, muzzle pointing down. He also took a 40 mm flechette round and loaded his M-79. He watched as Dane carefully fed a 100 round belt of 7.62 mm into the M-60 machine-gun, making sure the first round was locked in place, then attaching the canvas bag holding the rest of the belt on the side of the gun, making sure it could freely feed, yet be covered. Flaherty had seen plenty of grunts carrying the belts of ammunition across their chests or over their shoulders; heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d also seen plenty of those guns jam up as the dirty rounds fed into the machine-gun. The other three members of RT Kansas all gave Flaherty a thumbs up. The chopper slowed and then descended rapidly. Flaherty glanced forward. The pilots seemed to be arguing about something, pointing at the instrument panel. Still they went down. A small clearing on the side of a ridge line loomed ahead and below. The chopper slowed further and the pilot maneuvered them in close, touching the right skid against the side of the hill while
the other one hung in the air. Castle gestured and Flaherty jumped off, the rest of the team and Castle following. The chopper was gone just as quickly, heading back east. Flaherty knelt behind his rucksack, weapon at the ready as the sound of the aircraft slowly faded. Finally, the noise of the jungle returned. Flaherty felt what he always felt on infiltration after the friendly noise of the chopper disappeared into the distance: abandoned in Indian Country. He took comfort from the presence of Dane and Thomas. Tormey he didn't feel much about either way. The man would have to earn his place. They were all clustered together on the steep hillside, under the cover of trees just off the clearing. Castle made a low whistle and the men gathered closer. "We go over this ridge, then down to a river on the other side. The crash site is just across it. Then we follow the river for four klicks north, recross, and move back east about six klicks to our pick up zone." Flaherty pulled out his compass and looked at the glowing needle. His eyes widened. The needle was spinning. "Your compasses won't work," Castle said, noticing what the team leader was doing. "Why not?" Flaherty asked. "Let's get out of here," Dane said in a low voice. "This is real bad." Flaherty reached out and grabbed the collar of Castle's t-shirt. "What's going on?" "You were told," Castle said. "We're here to recover pieces of the SR-71." He peeled Flaherty's hands off his shirt. "How do you know the compasses won't work?" Flaherty asked, trying to get back under control. Castle shrugged, but he didn't quite pull off his attempt at nonchalance. "That's what the pilots were saying as we came in. Their instruments were going nuts. Maybe there's a large ore deposit nearby. I don't know." "Call a Prairie Fire," Dane said. He hadn't even heard what Castle said. Dane was looking about, his expression extremely worried. Flaherty rubbed his hand along the green rag tied around his neck as he considered Daneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s words. Prairie Fire was the code for an emergency exfiltration to CCN headquarters. The CIA bird might have brought them here, but Flaherty's ace in the hole was that CCN took care of
its own. He knew if he called in a Prairie Fire, a CCN chopper would be inbound, weather permitting. Or should be inbound. They might be so far over the fence now that CCN couldn't give authorization to fly. Hell, Flaherty cursed to himself; he didn't even know exactly where they were. Flaherty looked at the circle of faces. Dane's fear was evident. Thomas was Thomas, his face inscrutable, but Dane's words were having an effect as the large black man was nodding in agreement to Dane's suggestion. Tormey also looked scared, but this was his first time across the fence. The issue for Flaherty was Dane. The man was solid. They'd been in firefights together and the weapons sergeant had always done his share and more. Flaherty tapped Thomas on the arm. "Get up on the radio and call in a Prairie Fire. I want exfiltration ASAP. We can guide them in using radio direction off our set." Castle was shocked. "You can't do that. We have to recover the black box off that SR71." Flaherty ignored him. "Let's get a perimeter here. Dane, there. Tormey, you cover downslope." Castle leveled his CAR-15. "We have to go over into the valley and get to the plane." Dane was looking at the ridge line as if he could see the valley on the other side. "You go over there and you'll never come back." "What the hell is he talking about?" Castle demanded. "I don't know, but I trust him," Flaherty said. He was trying to ignore the CAR15, but Castle looked ready to lose his cool. "You're just security and pack mules to bring back the equipment," Castle said. "We've got imagery of the area. There's no sign of VC or NVA." "Put the weapon down," Flaherty said. Dane had his M-60 trained roughly in the direction of the CIA man's stomach. Castle reluctantly lowered the muzzle. "Foreman will have your asses," he said. "He can have our asses," Flaherty said. Hell, he was going home in less than a week and trading in his uniform for civilian clothes. He didn't need this shit. What was Foreman going to do? Give him a dishonorable discharge? Thomas had the team's radio out. He talked quietly into the handset for a little while, then he worked on the radio, turning dials and maneuvering the antenna.
"Damn," Thomas finally said, throwing down the handset. "I can't get diddly on FM." "Interference?" Flaherty asked. "Nothing I've ever seen. Like we're on the dark side of the moon. I can't even pick up Armed Forces radio and they blanket this part of the world from Vietnam to Thailand." "Is the radio busted?" Flaherty asked. "It's working," Thomas said with conviction. "Something's interfering, but I couldn't tell you what." "FM Radios don't work here either," Castle said. "The chopper pilots told you that too?" Flaherty asked. "Yes." "Any other piece of information you could dribble over to us?" Flaherty demanded. Castle pointed to the west. "Our exfil bird is laid on for the PZ," Castle said. "We have to go into the valley to get there anyway. I suggest we get moving if we're going to make it on time. Since radios don't work, there's no other way out of here unless you want to walk through five hundred kilometers of unfriendly territory." Flaherty cursed. He had no options. "Let's move. Everyone stay alert. Dane, take point." RT Kansas moved upslope, weapons at the ready. Once they were clear of the small opening, they were under the triple canopy of the rain forest. It was pitch black with even the faint light of the moon blocked out. Dane picked his way with care, moving uphill by feel. The other men followed, keeping their eyes on the small glowing dot on the back of the man in front's field hat. Flaherty checked the glowing face of his watch. At least dawn wasn't far off. Then he shook the timepiece. For all he knew, it wasn't working either. They made slow progress up the ridge. It took two hours before they reached the crest and the eastern sky was just beginning to lighten as they broke out of the jungle onto the rocky knife edge that overlooked the river valley. In that time, Flaherty confirmed that his watch had stopped working. Flaherty looked down. He couldn't see the river, it was too dark. On the far side the land sloped up but less steeply. As near as he could tell in the moonlight, there was a broken plateau stretching as far as they could determine on the western side of the river. Dane tapped Flaherty
on the shoulder, pointing to the right, where the ridge went even higher. There was something large and blocky there. "Ruins," Dane said. "Take ten," Flaherty said and the team slid down to their stomachs, rucks in front, weapons pointing out. It was getting light fast. Flaherty could see that Castle was doing something with his ruck, his hands hidden from sight. "Never seen anything like that," Dane whispered, still looking at the ruin. Large stone blocks were built up into a three story structure, with apertures for guards along the top. The tower overlooked the valley. It was about thirty feet high and each side was almost forty feet long. The jungle had encroached on the stone, creepers climbing the side, but it was still an imposing structure. "Let's check it out," Castle said. Flaherty looked at him. "This part of the mission? Checking ruins?" "It gives a good view of the valley," Castle said. He got to his feet and headed toward the stones, a hundred meters away. Flaherty signaled for Thomas and Tormey to remain in place. Taking Dane with him, he followed Castle. The closer they got to the structure, the more impressive it was. The stone blocks were each about six feet high and wide. The stone was cut very smoothly. The joints were so well done that Flaherty doubted he could slide a knife edge between them. Flaherty thought of the staggering weight each stone represented and the effort required to get them to this place. There was an entrance on the side, and Castle disappeared. Flaherty followed. Dane paused, then slowly entered. The inside was small with stone stairs wrapping around the outside wall, leading up to what had once been a wood roof but was now open. The three men took the stairs until they were at the top landing where a small, four foot wide stone ledge was built inside the outer wall, making a parapet for watchers to stand on. They view was unobstructed for many miles in all directions. Nothing but jungle and mountains as far as the eye could see. Early morning fog was rolling down the valley below, covering the river and its banks. Castle had his rucksack out and was looking inside. "What are you doing?" Flaherty asked. "Repacking my load," Castle said.
Flaherty figured the CIA man had some sort of transponder locator in the ruck that told him where the SR-71 was. Why Castle wouldn't check it openly was beyond Flaherty. Dane was staring down into the valley and at the land beyond, hidden in the early morning mist. Then he stepped back and looked at the ruins they were standing on. "This is old," he said to Flaherty, his hand resting on the parapet. "Very, very old." "What do you think it is? A guard outpost?" Flaherty asked. He'd never seen anything like it in Vietnam or in Laos. He'd heard there were massive ruins in Cambodia, and if this lone building was any indication, that rumor was true. Dane nodded. "A guard post. But the question is, what did it guard against?" He pointed to a large cairn in the southwest corner of the top. "Looks like that was for a signal fire. Maybe this was an early warning post against invaders." He lowered his voice, so Castle couldn't hear. "We shouldn't go down there, Ed." "VC?" Flaherty asked. "NVA?" He could see no sign of life, but maybe Dane did. Dane shook his head. "I don't think it's either. Just something bad, real bad." He pointed at the walls of the ruin. There were very old, faded drawings of warriors on them. The figures had spears and bows in their hands. Several were mounted on elephants. There were elongated circles in the air about them, perhaps representing the sun or moon, Flaherty guessed, except there were more than one. There were also lines drawn through every picture, some of the lines intersecting with the warriors. There were also some sort of symbols scattered about the pictures, writing, although Flaherty had never seen anything like it before. On each corner of the rampart, there was a stone sculpture of a seven headed snake, a figure Flaherty had seen at other sites in southeast Asia. He knew it had something to do with the religion in the area. The carvings bothered Flaherty and he involuntarily jerked his shoulders and stepped back. "Weird stuff," Flaherty muttered. "They all died," Dane said. "Who did?" Flaherty asked. Dane spread his hands. "The warriors who manned this post. And those they guarded. All dead. They were great once. The greatest of their time." "Yo, Dane," Flaherty slapped his teammate on the back. "Come back to me, man." Dane shivered. "I'm here, Ed." He tried to smile. "I don't want to be, but I'm here."
Between Castle and his mysterious rucksack, the compass and radio not working, and Dane's warnings, Flaherty was anxious to get moving to the pickup zone. "We'll get out OK," Flaherty said to Dane, but he could tell the words were finding no purchase. Castle had finished doing whatever it was he was up to, but continued to stare toward the jungle. "Let's go," Flaherty said to Castle. The CIA man sealed his pack and threw it back on his shoulder. "Can't we just move along the high ground?" Flaherty asked. "We can see everything from up here." "We have to go down to the river," Castle said. "The crash site is on the other side. Down there." It was lighter now, but fog still blanketed the ground below, hiding whatever was down there. It looked like the fog was lifting on this side of the river but it was just as thick on the other side. “That’s strange,” Flaherty commented. He didn’t like the look of the fog. It was yellowish-gray with streaks of something darker in it. He’d never seen anything like it in all his years in the field. He turned back to Castle. "My man here," Flaherty said, pointing at Dane, "thinks we're going to get blown away if we go down there. So far he's four for four on calling ambushes. I suggest you listen to him." "There's no VC down there," Castle said. "I don't know what's down there," Flaherty said, "but if Dane says there's something bad, then something bad is there." A shadow came over Castle's face. As if he were resigned, Flaherty thought with surprise. "We have to go," Castle simply said. "The quicker we get this over with, the better. This isn't negotiable. It's too late for all that. We all signed on, we do what we're paid to. There’s no other way." The three of them stood on the ancient stone rampart, each lost in their own thoughts, each realizing the truth of Castle’s words. They had all taken different roads to get here, but they were here together, cogs in a machine that was not overly concerned with the quality or length of their lives. "Let's get going then," Flaherty said, accepting that words had no real meaning here.
They rejoined the other two men and began the descent, Dane in the lead. As they left the craggy rocks behind, they again went under the blanket of green. It was dim now, despite the sun. Flaherty was used to that. No light penetrated the triple canopy unblocked. Halfway down the ridge toward the river, tendrils of fog began snaking their way through the trees until visibility was down to less than forty feet. They pressed on. It was like walking in place, the trees and other fauna the same, the ground sloping down, the fog crowding around. Then they could hear water running, getting closer, until Dane, walking point, saw the ground drop off in front of him. Dane halted, looking out onto the river. It was shallow and fast moving. The swirling fog occasionally parted to show the far side, a dark green line of jungle forty meters away but his vision couldn't penetrate beyond that. The fog was much thicker across there, a smear of grayish white overlaid on top of the green vegetation. But even the trees looked strange, sickly almost. It was chilly and the sweat on the men's skin met the damp air, producing goose-bumps and shivers. Castle moved past Dane and slithered down the bank until he was knee deep in the water. He pulled a jar out of his ruck and filled it with the water, resealing the lid and putting it back in his pack. "We have to cross," Castle said, looking up at the four men who were kneeling on the bank, the muzzles of their weapons pointing in the direction Castle wanted to go. "What are you doing?" Flaherty demanded. The water sample bothered him. "I'm not authorized to tell you that," Castle said. "No, you're only authorized to get us killed," Flaherty muttered. He gestured. "Thomas and Tormey, cross with Castle. Dane and I will provide far security, then you cover us." Thomas climbed down without a word or a look back. Tormey looked at Flaherty, then across the river and back at his team leader before he followed. Flaherty thought he had never felt the responsibility of command as sharply as the moment Tormeyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s face shifted to utter resignation. Dane extended the bipod legs of the M-60 and lay down on the bank behind a log. He flipped up the butt plate and put his shoulder under it. Flaherty joined him. The other three men were moving in a triangle, Castle in the lead, Thomas on the left and Tormey on the right, ten meters between each man.
"Call them back," Dane suddenly said as the men reached the halfway point. "What?" "Call them back. It's an ambush!" Dane's voice was low but insistent. Flaherty whistled and Thomas stopped, ten meters from the bank. He looked back and Flaherty gestured, indicating for him to return. Thomas hissed, catching Tormey's attention. The new man halted. Castle looked over his shoulder, irritated, then continued, reaching the far bank. Thomas was backing up now, retracing his steps, his M-203 swinging in arcs, aimed over Castle's head. Tormey was frozen, uncertain what to do. Flaherty gritted his teeth, waiting for the explosion of firing to come out of the tree cover of the far bank and the bodies to be riddled. Castle climbed up, but nothing happened as the CIA man disappeared. He seemed to just fade from view and be swallowed up by the fog and jungle. Flaherty blinked, but Castle was gone. If there was going to be an ambush it would have been sprung while the men were in the kill zone of the river. "No ambush," Flaherty said. "There's something over there," Dane insisted. Castle suddenly reappeared on the far bank in a brief opening in the fog, angrily gesturing for them to follow. Flaherty stood and indicated for Thomas to hold. "We have to cover Castle," Flaherty put his hand on Danes arm. "Plus he's the only one who knows where the pickup zone is." Dane reluctantly stood and followed his team leader down the bank and into the river. They hurried through the water, linking up with Thomas and Tormey. As they clambered up the bank, Dane suddenly grabbed Flaherty's arm. "Listen!" he insisted. Flaherty paused and strained his ears as Thomas and Tormey got to the top of the bank. "I don't hear anything." "The voice," Dane said. "What voice?" Flaherty cocked his head but heard nothing. "A warning," Dane whispered, as if he didn't want to be heard. "I've been hearing it for a while, but it's clear now. I can hear the words. We have to get out of here."
Flaherty looked ahead. Castle was nowhere to be seen. Flaherty heard nothing, the silence in the midst of the jungle as disconcerting as Dane saying he heard a voice. "Let's get Castle," Flaherty ordered, not wanting to let the CIA man further out of sight. They climbed up. All four paused as they reached the top. Dane staggered and went to his knees, vomiting his meager breakfast. It felt as if his stomach had been turned inside out. His brain was pounding, spikes of pain crisscrossing in every direction. And still the voice was there, inside his head, telling him to turn around, to go back. Flaherty shivered. The fog was different here. Colder and there was a smell in the air that he'd never experienced before. The air seemed to crawl across his skin and he couldn't seem to get an adequate breathful. "You all right?" he asked Dane. Dane shook his head. "You feel it?" he asked. Flaherty slowly nodded. "Yeah, I feel it. What is it?" "I don't know," Dane said, "but I've never felt anything like it before. This place is different from anywhere Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve ever been. And there is a voice, Ed. I can hear it. It's warning me not to go forward." Flaherty looked around. Even the jungle itself was strange. The trees and flora weren't quite right, although he couldn't put his finger on the exact differences. Dane struggled to his feet. "Can you move?â&#x20AC;? Flaherty asked. â&#x20AC;&#x153;Let's get Castle and get the hell out of here." Dane nodded, but didn't say anything. The team went into the jungle about fifty meters, the eerie quietness making each member of RT Kansas jumpy. Flaherty shivered, not so much from the cold but the feeling of the fog against his skin. It felt clammy, and he could swear he felt the molecules of moisture ripple against his skin like oil. Then there was a sound, one that pierced through each man like an ice pick. A long, shivering scream of agony from directly ahead. The four men paused, weapons pointing in the direction of the scream. Something was crashing through the undergrowth coming toward them, hidden by the vegetation and fog. Fingers twitched on triggers and then suddenly Castle was there, staggering toward them, his left hand clamped onto his right shoulder, blood pouring between his fingers. He fell to his knees ten feet from them. He reached out, bloody hand toward
the team. Four inches below his shoulder, his right arm was gone, blood pulsing out of the artery with each beat of his heart. Then something came out of the fog behind him, freezing every member of RT Kansas in his tracks. It was a green, elliptical sphere about three feet long by two in diameter. It was moving two feet above the ground, with no apparent support. There were two, strange dark bands crisscrossing it's surface, diagonally from front to rear. The bands seemed to pulse but the men couldn't make sense of it until it reached Castle. The front tip, where the bands met, edged down toward the CIA man, who scrambled away. The tip touched Castle's left arm, held up in front of his face, and the arm exploded in a burst of muscle, blood and bone. For lack of any better comprehension, the men could now see the bands were like rows of black, sharp teeth moving at high speed on a belt. From the widest part of the elongated sphere, the thing suddenly expanded a thin sheet of green like a sail and the object slid forward, catching the remnants of Castle's left arm in the sail. Then the green folded back down, taking the flesh and blood with it. RT Kansas finally reacted. Dane's M-60 machine-gun spewed out a line of rounds right above Castle's body into the sphere, which promptly floated back into the fog. Dane raised the muzzle and cut a swath through the undergrowth into the unseen distance. Tormey spewed an entire magazine of his AK-47 on automatic. Thomas fired off a magazine, quickly switched it out, then fired three rounds of 40 mm high explosive in three slightly different directions to their front as quickly as he could reload. Flaherty contributed his own thirty rounds of 5.56 mm from his CAR-15. Silence reigned as their weapons fell silent. There was the stench of cordite in the air and smoke from the weapons mingled with the fog. Remarkably, Castle was still alive, crawling across the jungle floor toward the team, using his legs to push himself, leaving a thick trail of blood behind. "What in Godâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s name was that?" Thomas demanded, his eyes darting about, searching the jungle. "Let's get him," Flaherty ordered. He and Dane ran forward and grabbed the CIA man by the straps of his ruck and dragged him back to where Thomas and Tormey waited. Flaherty ripped open the aid kit. Castle was in shock. Flaherty had seen many wounded men in his tours of duty and he knew the signs. Castle's face was pale from loss of blood and he didn't have much time. Even if they had a medevac flight on standby there was no way the man would make it.
Flaherty leaned forward, putting his face just inches from Castle's. "What was that?" Castle ever so slightly shook his head. "Angkor Kol Ker," he whispered, his eyes unfocused, the life in the them fading. “The Angkor Gate.” "What?" Flaherty looked up at Dane. "What the hell did he say?" When he turned back to Castle, he was dead. "Angkor Kol Ker,” Dane repeated. “That's what the voice said," Dane stared at the dead man in surprise. "Let's move to--" Flaherty began, but then he paused. There was a noise, something moving in the jungle. "What is that?" Thomas hissed as the noise grew louder. It was closer now and whatever it was, it was big, bigger than the thing that had gotten Castle. From the sound, it was knocking trees out of the way as it moved, the sound of timber snapping like gunshots was followed by the crash of the trees to the ground. And now there were more sounds, many objects moving unseen in the fog and jungle. Noise was all around them, but not the natural noise of the jungle; strange noises, some of them sounding almost mechanical. All the while somewhere to their left front was that incredibly large thing moving. "We'll be sitting ducks in the river," Flaherty said, glancing over his shoulder. "We'll be dead if we stay here," Dane said. "We have to get out of this fog. Now! Safety from these things is across the river. I know it." Tormey screamed and the three men turned right. The newcomer's body was off the ground, quickly moving up into the first level of canopy. His body was surrounded by a golden glow that emanated from a foot wide beam extending into the fog. Even as they brought their weapons to bear, Tormey's body was drawn back into the fog and disappeared. "Oh fuck!" Thomas said. Then he staggered back, a look of surprise on his face as some unseen force hit him in the chest. The big man dropped his weapon, his hands to his chest, blood flowing through them. There was a neat circular hole about the size of a dime cut through the uniform into his chest.
"What's wrong?" Flaherty asked, stepping toward the radioman, then freezing as a halfdozen unbelievably long red ropes flickered out of the fog and wrapped around Thomas, dragging him toward their invisible source. Dane fired, the M-60 rolling on his hip, the tracers disappearing in the direction of whatever was controlling the ropes. The firing jerked Flaherty out of his shock. He moved forward toward Thomas when movement to his left caught his eye. Something on four legs was bounding toward him. The image seared into his consciousness: a large serpent head with a mouth opened wide, three rows of glistening teeth, a body like that of a lion, long legs with clawed feet and at the end a tail with a scorpion's stinger. Flaherty fired his CAR-15, the rounds slamming into the chest of the creature, slowing it, stopping it, knocking it down, black fluid flowing out of the wounds. He emptied his magazine even though the creature had stopped moving. A beam of gold light came out of the jungle to the right of where the red ropes were dragging Thomas and hit Flaherty on his shoulder. He felt instant pain and could smell his own skin burning. He rolled forward and to his right, putting a tree between himself and the beam. The tree trunk glowed bright gold for a second, then exploded, scattering splinters across the jungle floor, peppering Flahertyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s side. Flaherty rolled onto his other side and looked around. Thomas was still screaming, feet kicking in the ground. Thomas had his knife in his hand and was hacking at one of the ropes that held him. The muzzle of Dane's M-60 was glowing red when the weapon suddenly seized up and jammed. He threw it down and drew his pistol and fired, emptying the clip. Flaherty started again for Thomas, who had now dropped his knife and had both large hands wrapped around a tree. Flaherty tossed his CAR-15 to Dane and ran forward, unhooking the M-79 from his LBE. Something scarlet-hued dropped down from above and Flaherty dodged it as it curled forward, reaching for him. It missed. He came to the tree, stepped to the side and fired the M-79 down the line of ropes. The flechette round spewed its deadly load, but the round seemed to have no effect. Flaherty drew a 40 mm high explosive round out of his ammo pouch and slammed it into the breach. "Don't let it get me," Thomas pleaded
Dane was there now, firing short sustained bursts into the ropes with Flaherty's CAR-15. Flaherty fired the HE round into the fog and heard the dull thump of an explosion, muffled as if it were under sandbags. Then the fog suddenly changed, coalescing, becoming darker, forms coming out of nothingness. Several spheres like the one that had gotten Castle floated in the darkness, rows of black teeth whirling around their forms. Flaherty and Dane went from trying to help Thomas to self-preservation, stepping back, dodging the wildly shifting and probing objects. Thomas's hands were ripped from the tree, leaving a layer of skin and blood. Then he was gone into the fog, his scream echoing through the jungle. The scream was cut off in mid-yell as if a dungeon door had slammed shut. A flash of blue light came out of the mist and hit Flaherty in the chest. It expanded around his body until he was encased in a glowing, second skin. He looked at Dane who seemed to be immune for the moment from the attacking forms. "Run!" Flaherty yelled, his voice muted. "Run, Dane." Dane rolled left, under one of the figures, and came up to his knees. He fired the rest of the magazine in the CAR-15 along the line of the light, until it was empty. Then he drew his knife. "No!" Flaherty screamed as he was lifted into the air. "Save yourself!" Then the team leader was being pulled rapidly through the air, toward the source of the blue light beam. The last Dane saw of Flaherty was his face open and contorted, yelling for Dane to run, the words already distant and muted. There was a flash of bright, blue light around Flaherty and then he was gone in the mist. A beam of gold light slashed out of the fog and touched Dane on his right arm, slashing up his forearm, leaving charred flesh in its wake, and causing him to drop the knife. Another beam of blue light came, wrapped around the knife, lifted it, then dropped it, continuing its search. The voice was louder now, more insistent, screaming inside of Dane's head, telling him to leave, to get away. Dane turned and ran for the river.
7889$>!8<$=>?=:>@1$7;CDE%=$>C@=:F?;$ (link to Who Dares Wins Publishing) PRELUDE THE DISTANT PAST 10,000 BC Like a thousand mile long crimson snake winding its way across the middle of the ocean floor, a line of magna boiled up from the inner Earth, met the cool water and, in that fiery intersection, built a ridge higher and higher. In a contradictory way, the mid-Atlantic Ridge grew because the tectonic plates that intersected beneath it were pulling away from each other. Like blood from a wound in the very planet, molten rock boiled forth the wider the planet-long split between the North/South American plates and the Eurasian/African plates grew. This process had been going on for millions of years, since Pangea had split into the separate continents. In the center of the Atlantic, about 20 degrees north latitude, the split was even more pronounced because there was an intersection of four plates pulling away from each other, both east/west and north/south. This widening process-- no more than a couple of inches a year, but multiplied over millennia-- had pushed so much magna through that the hardening lava had actually risen above the surface of the water, producing a cross-shaped string of islands, which over more time, rose high enough to connect to each other and produce a land mass almost worthy of being a continent itself. But it was a continent built over a crack in the Earthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s crust with no firm attachment to the planet other than the line of magna that still boiled through many miles under the surface. This made it very different from the other six continents which were anchored on top of one hundred kilometers of cold rock that made up the tectonic plates. Between the extremely fertile volcanic soil that covered the land mass, and the bountiful ocean that surrounded it, the pieces were in place for species that could reap the food supplied by both sources to develop quickly. On that central Atlantic land mass, the first civilization of
mankind arose. From packs of hunter-gatherers and fishers, to villages to cities, generations of humans slowly gained dominance over their land. But after civilization was well established a strange darkness appeared in the ocean to the west, devouring any ships that sailed into it. Other gatesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; opened around the planet bringing their own patches of darkness, but the main thrust was through the gate in the western Atlantic. It soon became clear that there was something in the darkness, a Shadow that sought to expand and conquer. A war was fought that the ancient ones of mankind didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t understand against an enemy no one survived seeing. The enemy came in the darkness, through the sky, from the water and under the Earth. And others came out of the gates to help the ancient ones defend themselves against the Shadow. These others called themselves the Ones Before. They gave the people weapons to fight the Shadow with. The ancient ones of mankind fought a war that spread around the globe until the very existence of life was threatened. And in the climactic battle the ancient ones and the Ones Before stopped the Shadow but the price was high. The continent in the middle of the Atlantic was destroyed in a cataclysm of fire and earthquake. The resulting tsunamis from that destruction touched every shore on the planet with such devastation that the legend of the Great Flood was written of both in the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Old Testament of the Jewish people on the other side of the world. The survivors of the ancient ones, a handful of ships, scattered to the four winds and planted the seeds for future civilizations to arise thousands years later. But the Shadow that came out of the gates was stopped. For the time being.
THE PRESENT
Chapter 1 THE WORLD APPROACHING THE SECOND MILLENNIUM 1999 AD The missile broke surface undetected in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle gate. It was a Trident II, a three-stage, solid-propellant, inertial guided ballistic missile with a range of more than 4,600 statute miles developed by Lockheed Martin for the United States Navy. Trident II was a more sophisticated version of the Trident I, upgraded mostly in terms of having a significantly greater payload capability. Forty-four feet long at launch, it was six point nine feet in diameter, weighed one hundred and thirty thousand pounds at launch and cost the taxpayer over forty million dollars each; which didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t add in the price of the nuclear warheads in the nosecone. As it punched into the air, an aerospike telescoped out of the front of the missile, reducing frontal drag by fifty percent. The first stage, made of a very strong, very light material called graphite epoxy, released and fell back into the ocean. The navigational system of the missile was designed to link with global positioning satellites to confirm location and direction, but this Trident didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t do that. Its course had been determined before launch. Six thousand feet up, the Trident came out of the gate into clear air, just as the second stage fell and the third stage motor kicked in. It was already traveling in excess of twenty thousand feet per second. The third stage burned for forty seconds and then released. The missile still had to reach its apogee and start coming down, but it was already four hundred miles from its launch point. The first detection of the missile was made by a satellite linked to the US Space Command deep under Cheyenne Mountain outside of Colorado Springs, but it was already far too late as the information was processed and forwarded to the War Room at the Pentagon.
Just after kicking over and beginning its descent, the nosecone of the Trident exploded open and the eight nuclear warheads encased inside separated in their own MK5 reentry vehicles, in a linear spread pattern. The warheads splashed down into the Atlantic along a three hundred mile long line. With no detonation. The warheads drifted down into the relatively shallow water of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge until they touched bottom. Then they exploded. *****
“The last time we met, you were pointing a gun at me,” Foreman said. Dane stared at the old man on the other side of the conference table noting the changes the years had etched. Foreman had aged well, except that his once-thick snow-white hair was thinner than Dane remembered. Foreman’s face was narrow, hatchet-like, with clear eyes. His body was slim, the suit he wore well-tailored. If anything, the old man looked too thin, almost sickly. “You were lying to me then,” Dane said, reaching down to his left and rubbing Chelsea’s ear. The golden retriever cocked her head and pressed against his hand. Dane was of average height and had thick black hair, with a sprinkling of gray along the sides. He wore glasses with a thin metal frame, his face angular and attractive. Just over fifty years old, he was as lean as he had been in his twenties when he had last met Foreman at a CIA forward staging base in Laos prior to going on a cross-border mission where Dane’s entire team had disappeared. “Withholding information,” Foreman clarified. “Lying is too strong a word to be used for the situation.” They were seated in a conference room inside CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. Sin Fen sat next to Foreman. She was an exotic-looking Eurasian woman, whose past Dane knew little about except somehow she had gotten hooked up with the CIA man and his obsession with
the gates. That she had some sort of strange mental abilities, Dane was certain, just as he knew he had some. But the extent of her’s was almost as unclear to him as his own. Foreman would be leaving shortly for a high level meeting in Washington with the president and the National Security Council to discuss what had just occurred in the Angkor gate in Cambodia and the other gates. The invasion of Earth from the other side’ through the gates at Angkor Kol Ker, the Bermuda Triangle, the Devil’s Sea off the coast of Japan and other locations around the world had been stopped by Dane with the destruction of the main propagating beam of radiation and electromagnetic interference in Cambodia. Beyond that, they knew little more than they had before the bizarre invasion started. Who the invaders were-- other than the term the Shadow-- why they were invading, where they were coming from; what they wanted; there were many questions that had not been answered yet. The shocking reappearance of the submarine Scorpion-- listed as lost in US Navy logs in 1968-- was being kept under wraps, but Dane knew it could not last much longer. They could not explain the fact that not a man in the crew seemed to have aged a day in over thirty years. Nor could the crew explain it. As far as they were concerned, just minutes had passed between the time they last radioed Foreman in 1968 that the reactor was going off-line as they entered the Bermuda Triangle to the moment Dane appeared on the ship two days ago, transported somehow from the middle of the Angkor gate to the submarine. “Why do you still need me?” Dane asked. “Because that mission you began thirty years ago never ended,” Foreman said. “Because you stopped the invasion through the Angkor gate.” “For the moment,” Sin Fen added. Dane glanced at Sin Fen. Her mind was a black wall to him. Then back at Foreman. There, he could tell more, but not as much as he would have liked. He knew the old man was telling the truth, but he also sensed there was so much Foreman didn’t know or was holding back. Based on his experiences with the CIA operative, Dane knew it was likely a combination of both. “I put everything in my report,” Dane said. “Also,” Foreman continued as if he had not heard, “we lost the Wyoming, inside the Bermuda Triangle gate.” “Other submarines have been lost in the gates,” Dane said.
Foreman steepled his fingers. “Not one with twenty-four Trident II ICBMs on board. With each missile carrying eight Mk 4 nuclear warheads rated at a hundred kilotons each. That’s 192 nuclear warheads. And our friends on the other side, whoever or whatever they are-- the Shadow as your man Flaherty called them-- seem to have a penchant for radioactive things. We defeated their weapons in this first assault, but we might not do so good against our weapons that they’ve captured.” “Great,” Dane said. “We get the Scorpion back; the Shadow gets the Wyoming and its nukes.” “We have you,” Foreman said. “You have some sort of power, some sort of attachment to these gates. You made it in the Angkor gate and out again. Two times. That’s once more than anyone else has ever done.” Dane simply stared at Foreman without comment. He felt as if he were in a whirlpool, being sucked against his will into a dark and dangerous center. And to be honest, he wasn’t sure how hard he should swim against the power drawing him in, or if he was even capable of resisting. Foreman slid several photos across the table. “The top one is the Angkor Kol Ker gate. Then the Bermuda Triangle and other gates around the world.” Dane looked at the first photo. It was a satellite image of Cambodia. There was a solid black triangle in the center, about six miles long on each side. It was located in the north-central part of the country, in deep, nearly impenetrable jungle. “Each gate is now shaped the same and stable at that size,” Foreman said. “That solid black is something new and we don’t know what it means. It’s never been reported as long as we have recorded history. No form of imaging can penetrate it. Ground surveillance from those visually watching the gates say the fog has coalesced into solid black. Sensors sent on remotely piloted vehicles, whether going via ground, air or sea, simply disappear into the black and cease transmitting. And they never come back out, even if they are programmed to return. “The Russians-- and this is classified as is everything else we discuss-- sent a team into one of the gates on their territory near Tunguska two days ago. The team hasn’t come back and is presumed dead. The Japanese are still missing one of their destroyers that went into the Devil’s Sea gate.
“I’m afraid that although we stopped the propagation it went on long enough to allow this thing, to gain a solid foothold on our planet at each of the gate sites. That’s something that never happened before.” “That we know of,” Sin Fen added. “It means they’re waiting,” Dane said. “They?” Foreman asked. “The Shadow.” “For what?” Foreman asked. “To attack again,” Dane said. “They’ve got their beachhead. Maybe that’s all this last series of events was about.” He turned to Sin Fen. “Do you agree?” She nodded. “That is the sense I have.” Foreman tapped a finger on the top of the conference table. “I’ve been thinking about that. The again’ part,” Foreman clarified. “As Sin Fen noted, there is much about the past we don’t know. That abandoned city you found in the center of the Angkor gate-- Angkor Kol Ker-it must have been attacked a long time ago. And we have a long history of ships and planes disappearing into the Bermuda Triangle and Devil’s Sea-- no one knows how long these gates have been active, but a lot of evidence points back to at least as long at ten thousand years ago, when Atlantis was destroyed.” “You really believe that?” Dane asked. “About Atlantis? Don’t you now?” Foreman threw back. “After all you’ve seen and heard?” Dane reluctantly nodded. He remembered Flaherty telling him the same thing-- that the Shadow and the Ones Before’ were waging a war and it spilled over onto Earth every so often. That during one of those battles Atlantis had been wiped off the face of the Earth. There were also the markings on the side of the watchtower that Beasley, the Cambodian expert who had traveled with Dane into the gate, had deciphered. They indicated that the people who founded Angkor Kol Ker had traveled from somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean in order to escape the Shadow. “It looks likely,” Dane agreed. “The key,” Foreman continued, “is that we have to assume that this has happened before. The gates opening. The Shadow trying to come into our world and take it over. And it’s always
been defeated. Even though Atlantis was destroyed so utterly it is just a legend, the rest of the planet survived. And it appears that there were survivors from Atlantis-- the people who started civilization at Angkor Kol Ker, in Egypt, China, Central America and other places.” “So?” Dane said. “We stopped it this time but we didn’t defeat it. What we stopped was just the first assault and another one is coming.” “You sound as if a new attack has already started,” Dane said. Foreman nodded. “It has.” He pulled more imagery out of the top secret file. It showed a Mercator projection map of the entire world. Dane studied it-- there were lines drawn through all the oceans. “What am I looking at?” Dane asked. “Lines of activity propagated by the gates in bursts,” Foreman said. “Radioactive?” Dane asked. “No,” Foreman said. “Low level electro-magnetic spectrum activity, barely enough to register. We think the Shadow is doing its own kind of imagery.” “Looking for what?” Sin Fen leaned across the table and placed a long thin finger on the map, tracing the lines. “The Mid-Atlantic Ridge.” The finger jumped North America. “The Pacific Rim along our west coast all the way around to the coast of Japan and down to Australia. The Mediterranean, bifurcating through both the Red Sea and Persian Gulf. The Antarctic Plate all the way around the bottom of the world. The Himalayas where the Eurasian Plate meets the Indian Plate. Those are just the major lines. As you can see there are several smaller ones, here in the Caribbean, the Philippines. The Shadow is checking all the lines where tectonic plates meet,” Sin Fen concluded. “And this, I assume, is a bad thing,” Dane said. “We have to believe it is,” Foreman ignored the sarcasm. “We have no idea what’s going on inside those gates or what is on the other side or what they are up to. “We need to look to our history and try to discover how our predecessors dealt with this,” Foreman continued. “We believe people in the past faced the same problem we’re facing and they succeeded in stopping the Shadow.”
“The people at Angkor Kol Ker didn’t succeed very well,” Dane noted. “Nor did the people of Atlantis.” “But the Earth wasn’t overrun or destroyed,” Foreman noted. “The Shadow tried to make it’s big push out of Kol Ker this time, but maybe the last time this happened, they tried their main effort somewhere else and it was defeated. Or there is a pattern to their assault and we’ve only met the first wave.” “But do you have any idea where this happened? Or who fought this battle?” Thorpe asked. “The Scorpion didn’t come back by accident,” Foreman said. “There’s something or someone on the other side of the gate that’s trying to help us. The Ones Before. The same force that sent your teammate Flaherty to you at Angkor Kol Ker. It sent the Scorpion back to us with a message.” This was news to Dane. “What message?” Foreman pulled a photo out of the file folder and pushed it across to Dane. It was an image of the sail of the Scorpion, the tower that held the periscopes and small bridge used when the sub was on the surface. Foreman slid a second picture, a close-up of the side of the sail. Something was etched in the metal, strange lines that Dane didn’t recognize. He had gotten off the submarine in the dark, cross-loading directly to a navy helicopter to be flown here. The etching must have been discovered the following morning. Below those lines was a drawing that Dane looked at for a while before he recognized that it was a map. “What is this?” “On top-- runic writing,” Foreman said. “It took us a little while before Sin Fen saw it and was able to recognize the language and decode it. On the bottom, a map. It also took some time to determine exactly what the map was of, because the scale and details are not exactly correct-- or what I should say is-- correct today.” Dane found the writing interesting and almost familiar. In between two horizontal lines, were a series of vertical and curved slashes. “What language is this?” he asked Sin Fen. “Norse,” she answered. “The language of the Vikings.” After all the strange things he had experienced in the past month, Dane didn’t even ask how Viking Runes ended up scratched into the metal on the side of a nuclear submarine that had disappeared for over thirty years. “What does it say?”
“This is the literal translation,” Sin Fen handed Dane a piece of paper: HERE FIND THE SHIELD TO DEFEAT THE VALKYRIES AND THOSE WHO FOLLOW THE DARK ONES I HAVE DONE MY DUTY IT STOPS THE FORGE OF VULCAN REVENGE ME “Vulcan’s forge?” Dane asked. “The power of the gods breaking through the crust of the earth,” Sin Fen said. “The Shadow might have used the instability of the Earth’s surface along the juncture of the tectonic plates to destroy Atlantis.” “Who wrote this? Who has done his duty?” Dane asked. “Your guess is as good as mine, but the important point is the Shield stops the power of the Shadow.” “There’s not much more information about this Shield,” Dane noted, “as the writer.” “The Valkyries,” Sin Fen said, “are part of Norse mythology. They were the handmaidens of the gods and were reported to devour the flesh of the dead on the battlefield.” “Monsters of legend,” Dane said out loud. Sin Fen nodded. “You ran into the seven-headed Naga of Khmer legend in the Angkor gate. And other strange creatures. It appears there is more truth to the Valkyries than simply legend.” Dane looked at the sheet. “‘And those who follow the dark ones’? Does that mean those who follow the Valkyries? Or humans who worship them?” “That’s not clear,” Sin Fen said. “There are only sixteen characters in the runic alphabet. And it was not used very extensively so there isn’t a great body of work to draw upon to even be sure the translation is correct.” “Great,” Dane said. “According to legend,” Sin Fen added, “the runic alphabet was given to the Vikings by the god Odin. The word run means mystery, so even the Vikings might not have been too sure
about their own written language. Modern scholars aren’t certain where or how it originated, but they have noted some similarities between Vikings runes and the runes used by other ancient cultures.” Dane put two and two together. “So the runic language might have come from Atlantis?” “That is possible,” Sin Fen said. “Of course, by the time of the Vikings, the original writing was probably greatly corrupted and simplified. The height of the Viking expansion was about 11,000 years after the great dispersion from Atlantis. That’s a long time for a language to survive, even in a bastardized form.” “Where is the here’ the message refers to?” Dane asked. “That’s the other strange thing,” Foreman said. “Someone went to a great deal of trouble to etch that map into the metal. God knows how long it took but it appears to have been done by hand with an edged tool.” “Where was the crew of the Scorpion while this was being done to their ship?” Dane asked. Foreman shrugged. “Where was the crew of the Scorpion for the past thirty-one years? To them no time passed between going into the Bermuda Triangle and coming out.” “Maybe they weren’t on board the ship,” Dane wondered out loud. “I don’t think we’ll ever know exactly what happened,” Foreman said. “What is important right now is what they came back with-- this map.” “Are you sure that’s all they came back with?” Dane asked. “The ship’s in quarantine at the Groton sub pens, being gone through with a fine-tooth comb to try to figure out what happened to it,” Foreman said. He tapped the photo, bringing attention back to the map. “It isn’t exact, at least according to what we know now, but it’s rather remarkable if it’s the work of someone who only could write in runes which means the message is probably over a thousand years old, but the ship is only thirty.” To Dane’s eyes there was something wrong about the map, though. The proportions were off and he couldn’t get oriented on the continents. Foreman reached into the file and pulled out another sheet of paper. “This is called Piri Reis’s map. It dates back to the sixteenth century. Compare the two.” Dane slid the paper next to the photograph. “They’re almost identical.”
“Yes,” Sin Fen said. “Which raises another problem. The Piri Reis map was drawn at Constantinople in 1513 by an Admiral in the Turkish Navy. It emphasizes the west coast of Africa, the east coast of South America ending in the Caribbean and the northern coast of Antarctica. Which is intriguing given that Antarctica wasn’t discovered until 1818. Not only that, but the Piri Reis map and the map drawn on the Scorpion both show an Antarctica without ice covering it. The last time that Antarctica wasn’t covered by ice, as near scientists can tell is at the latest, four thousand BC and mostly likely much earlier than that.” Dane leaned back in his seat and looked down at Chelsea. She pushed her head against his thigh, her golden eyes regarding him calmly in return. He envied the dog her ignorance and the innocence that stemmed from that. “How can that be?” he asked Sin Fen. “Piri Reis, in his notes, readily admits that he didn’t survey the map himself, but rather copied it from other maps. It appears that the ancient seafarers had a much more extensive knowledge of the world than we have ever suspected. At least some of them did. Much of that knowledge was lost when the great library at Alexandria was burned and sacked. “What is also strange,” Sin Fen continued, “is that the map shows the use of longitudinal coordinates, something that wasn’t invented-- at least we thought wasn’t invented-- until the 18th century.” “Why Antarctica?” Dane asked. “Why would a map be centered around that continent?” “Perhaps because that is where Atlantis was,” Sin Fen said. Before Dane could say another word she continued. “Albert Einstein had a theory about this-- I know, you’ve never heard of it, but trust me, it is true. He believed that Antarctica was ice-free about 12,000 years ago because it wasn’t centered on the south pole as it is now. Rather it was further north in the center of the Atlantic.” “You’re joking, right?” Dane asked. “How the hell did it move to its present location?” “I’m not saying this is fact,” Sin Fen said. “But who am I to argue with a theory of Albert Einstein’s? He called the process by which it moved earth-crust-displacement’ and scientists we have consulted say there is something to his concept. It also ties in with the theory of plate tectonics-- which is accepted by scientists as fact today-- which ties together with the Shadow scanning the lines of tectonic faults. “If Atlantis was originally located in the Atlantic, it was over the juncture of four major tectonic plates. That meant it wasn’t solidly anchored to the planet beneath it. It would have
taken a tremendous amount of energy, but it is possible that the land was ripped free, maybe even completely submerged, before drifting-- and drifting is a rather weak word for what happened as we’re not talking about drifting on water, but rather on the magna of the planet below-- to its current location at the south pole. “Antarctica, the land itself, is now actually below sea level. Most of it is covered by a layer of ice several miles thick. It’s only recently that we’ve mapped what the land underneath the ice looked like and it looks a hell of a lot like what’s shown in this map.” “Is this Shield in Antarctica?” Dane asked. “No,” Foreman said. “Note the rune marking on the map right here. It is the Viking symbol for weapon.” He reached across the table and tapped the photograph. “We correlated that with the Piri Map and with current maps. That spot is right on the edge of the Bermuda Triangle gate. Just north of the western tip of Puerto Rico.” “Then what is the connection between that site and Atlantis?” Dane asked. “We don’t know that yet,” Foreman said. “Although it’s possible this site was between Atlantis and the Bermuda Triangle gate which would be the logical location for a shield.” “This site is in the water?” Dane asked. “It appears so,” Sin Fen said. “And?” Dane said. “We think that spot is very important,” Foreman said. “It is along the line where the Caribbean tectonic plate intersects with the North American plate and close to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge which is formed by the North American Plate meeting the Eurasian and African Plates.” “Have you checked it out?” Dane asked. “We’ve done satellite imagery of it,” Foreman said. “Just ocean on the surface. Nothing there. What we’re looking for must be below the surface. I’m having some other special checks run that might tell us something more, but there’s nothing like having someone put a set of eyeballs on it.” “I ran a reconnaissance for you once before,” Dane said, “and everyone who went with me died or disappeared.” “We have a better idea what we’re dealing with now,” Foreman said. “Do we?” Dane retorted.
There was the buzz of a cellular phone. Foreman pulled one out of his pocket and flipped it opened. “Foreman.” Dane studied the map wondering who would have taken the time and the energy to scratch it into the metal on the submarine. After a terse acknowledgment, Foreman flipped the phone shut. “I have to go to the War Room immediately.” Foreman stood, abruptly ending the meeting. “Sin Fen will accompany you.” Chelsea had gotten to her feet, her head pressed against Dane’s side. Dane ran a hand through her golden hair. “Accompany me where?” Foreman was gathering up his files, stuffing them in the briefcase. “To the indicated spot, of course. To find this Shield.” “But--” Dane began, but Foreman cut him off with a wave of the cell phone. “That was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Tilson. A Trident II missile, obviously from the Wyoming, was fired out of the Bermuda Triangle gate twenty minute ago. The warheads impacted in the center of the Atlantic Ocean along the North Atlantic Ridge-where the tectonic plates meet. All eight warheads detonated. We’re still assessing what effect they had.” “Is the Shadow attacking?” Dane asked. Foreman shook his head. “We think it was a test.” He headed for the door. “Remember, they have twenty-three more Tridents with one hundred and eighty four nukes left to carry out an all out assault.”
7889$>IC;;<$=>?=:>@1$%;J@?K1$1;=$ (link to Who Dares Wins Publishing) !
CHAPTER ONE
THE DISTANT PAST 1628 B.C. The pale blue Mediterranean sky was cut by a thick finger of smoke drifting skyward from the tall volcano in the center of the island. It was just one of the portents of doom for those who called Thera their home. Closer to the sea, on the western horizon, a low Shadow covered the blue water, a dark wall a mile high and over ten miles wide. Yesterday, a ship had been sent out to investigate the strange cloud. It sailed into the black and never returned. Scouts had been sent up the volcano to look into the caldera to judge conditions and had been overcome with toxic gases, their bodies still visible on the lip of the high mountain. The priestess who stood on the shoreline, staring at her daughter playing in the warm surf, had told the warriors what the cloud was and what would happen with the volcano, but being men and fighters, they had sent the ship and scouts anyway. A priestess’s word had lost much power over the years. There were dozens of priestesses on Thera who maintained the pyramid in the center of the capital city of Akrotiri, but Pri Lo was the Defender, the dark red trimming on her white robe and the crystal amulet she wore around her neck signifying that unique position. She knew her time was coming. Her people had lived in peace here for many generations, the previous Defenders never being called upon to play their role. Why her time coincided with the appearance of the Shadow, she didn’t know, but she didn’t feel sorry for herself. She had been raised for the moment that would come soon. All she felt was focused on the sever-year-old girl in the water. Her daughter, Pri Kala, would be the Defender of her generation if she grew to adulthood.
A rumbled that she could feel through the sand under her feet caused Pri Lo’s gaze to shift from the sea to the large volcano. It had begun emitting fumes two days ago, just before the Shadow appeared to the west. The reason why her ancestors escaping Atlantis had chosen this dangerous island for their new home had been lost over the millennia since the destruction of their mid-Atlantic island, but Pri Lo’s gaze to shift from the sea to the large volcano. It had begun emitting fumes two days ago, just before the Shadow appeared to the west. The reason why her ancestors escaping Atlantis had chosen this dangerous island for their new home had been lost over the millennia since the destruction of their mid-Atlantic island, but Pri-Lo accepted that there must have been a valid reason. They were centrally located among the burgeoning civilizations of the Mediterranean. Greece was to the northwest, Persia to the northeast, Crete to the south, and Egypt farther to the southeast. They were a sea away from where their home had been. Still, the Shadow had found them. It took the dark force over eight thousand years, but the tale of terror that had been handed down through the lineage of priestesses was now a reality. Another rumble caused her to shift her bare feet nervously in the sand. She turned back to the ocean, staring at the headland that guarded the south edge of the sheltered cove. The boat was late. Pri Lo should be at the pyramid, ready to fulfill her destiny, but there was something she needed to do first. She didn’t want to, but she looked farther out to sea. The Shadow was closer; there was no doubt of that. It was creeping across the water, approaching the island. The blackness was absolute, drawing in the bright sunlight and extinguishing it. If it reached the land, Pri Lo knew that the tales, which were more horrible than the worst nightmares, would come true. Time was short. The other priestesses would be scouring Akrotiri, searching for her to take her place. Still Pri Lo waited. For she knew the Shadow could be stopped, but the volcano was another issue, one that she could not defend against. It was how Atlantis had been destroyed, and there were many who didn’t want to remember when the Earth itself raged. Her daughter, a slight wisp with blue eyes, fair skin, and red hair cut short, had a shell in her hands and was staring at it intently, as if reading something in the swirls on the surface. “Kala,” she called out as the prow of a sailing ship finally appeared around the headland, entering the cove.
“I do not want to leave you. “ Shell in hand, the young girl walked out of the water to her mother. Pri Lo had known she could not keep her thoughts from her daughter. The connection was too close. “You must go on this ship. It is your duty, just as I must do mine.” Kala understood duty. Pri Lo had taught her the absolute of that. The ship was closing on the shore, a man in the prow waving for them to wade out to it. There was a loud explosion inland. Pri Lo spun about in time to see the left side of the volcano crumble inward. “Here.” Pri Lo took the Defender crystal off her neck and slipped it over Kala’s head. “This is yours now.” Her daughter met her gaze and Pri Lo saw wisdom beyond her age in those young eyes. There was no point in pretending, in telling Kala they would meet again. What Pri Lo thought, her daughter knew. What she felt, her daughter sensed. They hugged briefly, intensely; then Pri Lo took Kala’s hand and led her into the water. They waded out until Pri Lo had to hold her daughter’s head above the water. She passed her to the captain along with a small purse filled with gold coins. He was from Knossos, to the south, and she had arranged this the previous night in a tavern near the wharves of Akrotiri. She knew he was trustworthy when she had met him and picked up the aura about him. “You should come, too,” the captain said as he lifted Pri Lo into the boat. The purse disappeared somewhere inside his shirt. “I will stay,” Pri Lo said. The captain wasted no more time, yelling orders to his crew. They strained at the oars, pulling the ship out to sea. Pri Lo stood in the water, feeling the slight sweet lap at her neck. Kala was next to the railing, staring back. There was not time to watch the ship until it cleared the headland. I love you. Pri Lo projected toward the ship. She felt the emotion from her daughter come back, a wave of sadness and love. Then she turned and headed inland. When she reached the stairs that were carved into the rock wall of the cove, she sprinted up them. At the top, she paused to look over her shoulder. The ship’s sails were set, and it was racing to the south. It would make it before the Shadow arrived.
She felt the pull of duty, but still she hesitated. Near the bow of the ship she noted several gray forms leaping out of the water and splashing back in. A brief feeling of peace passed through her, and she knew Pri Kala would be safe. Pri Lo stumbled as the ground spasmed beneath her, cracks forming in the rock. She could see the white towers of Akrotiri a quarter mile ahead and, above them, the top of the pyramid where the priestesses waited for her. She ran, the calluses on the bottom of her bare feet striking the closely set rocks of the path. The gates were open, the guards staring at the volcano. Several cried out to her as she passed. Now they believe, she thought as she sprinted along the main thoroughfare of the city; over ten meters wide, it led to the base of the huge pyramid, the first thing their ancestors had worked on when they arrived from Atlantis thousands of years previously. Three hundred feet high, made of stone blocks, it had a level top about twenty feet wide. A broad set of stairs ran up the face of the pyramid, and Pri Lo took them two at a time. A dozen priestesses waited, along with two warriors, one of whom held a staff, one end of which was a spearhead and the other end a seven-headed snake. Other than the people, there was a large slab with the contour of a person etched into its surface. “Where have you been?” Pri Tak, the head of the order, was an old woman, her face pale with fear. “I sent warriors looking for you.” Pri Lo ignored her. She took a dark red cloth from one of the other women, draping it over her shoulders. There was writing on it, symbols from long ago. Pri Lo looked to the sea. The Shadow was less than a mile from shore and closing. Pri Lo climbed onto the slab and settled into the stone, her body fitting perfectly into the depression. “I am ready,” she announced. “There are prayers and--” Pri Tak began, but Pri Lo cut her off. “There is no time for that. And there is no time for you to leave.” She laughed. “Don’t you see what’s coming? You could not run far enough, anyway. Best to have it over with here.” She turned her head to the warrior, a man named Kra Tek, a brave fighter, who had been entrusted with the spear. He was also Kala’s father. She gave the slightest of nods and saw relief briefly race across his face. She knew she had chosen wisely in picking him—it was obvious in Kala. “Do it.”
He slid the spearhead into a slit next to the slab. His scarred hand rested on the snakeheads. Without hesitation, he turned it. The pyramid began to vibrate. A blue glow suffused the slab and Pri Lo’s body. The priestesses were chanting prayers. The glow centered on Pri Lo’s head, the skin rippling as if the bone of the skull was alive. The skin began peeling off, the eyes turning into two blue glowing orbs. The bone appeared, bleached white, changing, metamorphosing from the inside out. The white became clear, crystallized, suffused with the blue glow. Her mouth was wide open, but no scream issued forth, even though she was still alive, the channel for the power that was rising through the structure. A bolt of blue shot out of Pri Lo’s head toward the approaching black wall. When it touched the darkness, there was an explosion. Again and again, blue lightning seared off the top of the pyramid toward the Shadow, until the black wall stopped moving forward, halting less than a hundred yards from shore. The consistency of the darkness began to change, swirls of blue mixing with the black. Then the pyramid stopped vibrating, the blue bolts ceased firing, and all was still for a moment. The priestesses and warriors, who had fallen to the stone and covered their heads during the assault, slowly lifted their heads. The Shadow was fading, breaking apart, rays of sunlight piercing it. They stood, watching the Shadow disappear, jubilation filling their hearts. Except for Kra Tek, who was staring down a Pri Lo’s remains. The body was gone, leaving just a pure crystal skull lying on the slab. He reached for the skull. Then the volcano blew. The explosion took off the top third of the mountain, sending hundreds of thousands of tons of ash, gas, dirt, and rocks into the air. Toxic gas rode the shock wave downslope, killing every living thing it washed over. Kra Tek cradled the crystal skull in his arms, turning his broad back to the coming death. The gas killed him instantly, then the blast of heat that followed scorched the flesh from his bones, but his hands still gripped Pri Lo’s skull as his body slammed into the slab. Several miles to the south, Pri Kala had watched the Shadow dispersed by the blue bolts. She had sensed her mother’s power projected from the island, then felt it fade to nothing other
than the faint essence of her father’s sorrow. But there was an aura of comfort from the dolphins swimming about the prow of the ship, seemingly guiding it out to sea and away from the island. Then the large volcano in the center of the island exploded. Every member of the crew paused as the sound of the blast reached them. They could see the spreading cloud of ash. Rocks, trees, and other debris splashed into the water all around. “Row, you fools!” the captain yelled as he pushed the tiller, putting the stern of the ship square on toward the island. The tidal wave from the blast was over fifty feet high, bearing down on them at eighty miles an hour. “Hold on!” the captain cried out. He held on to the tiller with one hand and with the other grabbed Pri Kala. Tears were running down her smooth cheeks, but she gripped his hand. The wave hit, and the ship rode it, the stern going up almost straight, several men sliding over-board, everything that wasn’t tied down smashing forward. Then the ship leveled on the top of the wave before slipping down the less steep backslope and settling in the water. Pri Kala looked back. Less than a third of the island was still above water. The Earth had not known such violence since the destruction of Atlantis over eight thousand years previously. People as far as a thousand miles away would hear the sound the volcano had made and the ash and dirt would circle the globe and drop the world temperature a couple of degrees for years. Once more, the Shadow had been stopped, but the price had been high. Pri Kala’s small hand reached up and felt the Defender crystal. She knew the Shadow would come again, and she knew her duty.
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PROLOGUE THE PRESENT “Some say the world will end in fire; some say in ice.” The voice was deep, resonant with power, echoing off the walls of the Oval Office. “From what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate to know that for destruction, ice is also great and would suffice.” The act of speaking wore out the old man and his head slumped back on the chair’s high back. President Kennedy was behind his desk across from the old man. The hallway outside the closed door was full of advisers and Secret Service agents, everyone on edge given the current crisis with Cuba, but there was only the two of them in the room. The old man’s voice lost some of its power as he continued. “The words. The words are the key.” Kennedy leaned forward. “Did Kruschchev really say we were too liberal to fight, Mister Frost?” Robert Frost’s deep blue eyes turned toward the President. “You’re not listening. No one listens.” Kennedy frowned. “What are you talking about?” “Kruschchev isn’t important,” Frost said. “One of our U-2 spy planes was shot down over Cuba yesterday,” Kennedy said. “He’s very important. You met the Premier two months ago. I need a feel for him. He sent a letter yesterday agreeing to pull out the missiles if we agreed not to invade Cuba. Then his people in Cuba shoot down a U-2. Can I trust him? That’s the key.” “Kruschchev isn’t important,” Frost repeated. “I hear voices. I always have. Since I was a child. Some of the words I’ve written aren’t exactly mine. They come through me.” He blinked, his gaze regaining some focus. “No, Kruschchev didn’t say that.” Kennedy leaned back in his chair, relaxing slightly. “Why did you say it then?”
“It got your attention. I’m here, aren’t I?” “And why did you want to see me?” “The voices of the gods,” Frost murmured. His voice firmed. “I’ve been told things. Some that have happened, some yet to happen.” “You predicted my election in ’59,” Kennedy acknowledged. “No one else gave me a chance that early.” He checked his watch. “Why did you want to see me?” “There is a man. In the CIA.” Kennedy half-turned in the seat away from Frost. Ever since the Bay of Pigs, those three letters had brought such a reaction. “His name is Foreman. He works alone. Studying gates.” “’Gates’?” “We’re not alone,” Frost said. “In the universe. There are gates on our planet. To other places. He studies them.” Kennedy half-stood, ready to end the meeting, but Frost’s next words froze him. “I die soon. So do you. Within a year. Maybe sooner if you don’t listen.” Kennedy sank back into the seat. “How do you know?” “The voices tell me.” “Whose voices?” “The voices of the gods that I hear inside.” Before Kennedy could respond, Frost waved a frail hand. “Not god, as in the traditional version. But something, some beings, some presence, beyond our world. Just like the Shadow. The force that seeks to destroy our world.” “Wait.” Kennedy turned slightly toward the right side of the office. “Bobbie, come in here.” A hidden door in the middle of the wood paneling swung open and the President’s brother entered. “What do you have on this Foreman?” the President asked. “He’s being held at Langley. He tried to transmit a message to the Russians over the CIA emergency landline to Moscow six hours ago.” “About?” Robert Kennedy shrugged. “I don’t know.” “He listens in on your conversations?” Frost asked, indicating the hidden door.
The President nodded. “Of course.” “Foreman needs to send that message,” Frost said. “It is probably already too late.” “Why?” “To save the world.” The President frowned. “Mr. Frost. You’ve had five minutes of my time. You’re not making any sense and I’m afraid there are pressing matters I must attend to.” Frost looked confused, as if he were trying to remember something, but it was eluding him. Bobbie Kennedy went over to the old man and put his hand on the frail shoulder. “Please come with me, Mister Frost.” “But . . . there’s something; something I should say.” “Please come with me.” Before Frost was even out of the office, the President was on the phone to the Pentagon, getting the latest update on the situation in Cuba. Frost was still protesting there was something he needed to remember, to say, as the door shut behind him. *************** The Russian freighter cut through the Atlantic, north of the Bahamas, bow pointed toward the south and Cuba. The American blockade was somewhere ahead and the ship’s crew was uncertain what reception they would receive, even though their new orders from Moscow were to help in the removal of the missiles. The unusual fog appeared off the starboard bow, a small patch at first, but it grew at an alarming rate, spreading over the ocean. The freighter’s captain ordered a course adjustment to the southeast to avoid the rapidly approaching swirl of gray and yellow, but the ship was too slow. The first tendrils of the mist swept over the decks, followed shortly the screams of the terrified and dying. Five minutes later, when the fog pulled back and faded, there was no sign of the freighter. ***************
The disappearance was noted both in Washington and Moscow. The first missile lifted out of a silo outside of Moscow heading toward NATO forces in Europe five minutes later. The order to launch against the United States was transmitted to the sites in Cuba two minutes and twelve seconds later. *************** The car carrying Robert Frost was pulling out the gates of the White House when the sirens began their wail. The old man leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes. In his mind’s eye, he ‘saw’ Miami, the mushroom cloud rising over what had once been a city. “Stop here,” he told the confused driver. He pushed open the door and got out. He stood on the sidewalk outside the White House feeling the fear of the people around him running for the shelters. Beyond that, though, he felt another connection, one that had touched on him all his life. He realized what he had failed to say. He looked south, across the Mall at the Jefferson Memorial. That was it, he realized, just as the first intercontinental ballistic missile from Cuba screamed down over the city. The first bomb detonated over the Lincoln Memorial, less than a mile from where Frost stood. The blast came toward the poet, a racing wall of blazing death. “Fire this time,” Frost said a split second before the wave hit him. *************** Dane jerked upright in accompaniment to Chelsea’s whine. His first action was to put a comforting hand on the Golden Retriever’s head, fingers automatically scratching her forehead. He felt cold even though a warm Pacific breeze came through the open porthole in the cabin. He became aware that his skin was wet. He was puzzled for a moment, and then realized it was sweat. He got out of the bunk, and pulled on a black t-shirt with a Special Forces crest on the chest to complement the faded green jungle fatigue pants he wore. Barefoot, he silently padded out of the cabin, Chelsea right behind him. He went to the railing at the edge of the deck and
halted. Chelsea sat next to him, waiting, then slid down to lay her belly against the cool metal, her nose just over the edge, nostrils flared, smelling the ocean. He was on the deck of the FLIP, a unique research vessel over two hundred meters long. Just behind him was the control section, and in front was the bulbous bow, which contained the muonic probe that had allowed Dane and the others to enter the gate and go through the portal inside. When in operation, tanks near the bow were flooded and the long ship went from horizontal to vertical, the probe going down while the decks in the control section pivoted to keep everything level. Muons, formerly called mu-mesons, were sub-atomic particles with a negative charge and an incredibly short mean lifetime; or at least muons that were generated by nature were like that. The muons that the gates generated were a different matter, lasting far longer than traditional physics said they should. Dane knew it had taken decades of research to discover the muon emission that occurred whenever the Shadow acted. He also knew that Professor Nagoya and his assistant Ahana, had learned to manipulate muons enough to allow his entry into the Devil’s Sea gate the previous day and that the two scientists were now in the control room, studying the data he had gathered and trying to make sense of it. He was also aware that Foreman, the CIA agent who had been studying the gates for decades was in contact with Washington, trying to decide what the next move would be in this strange war mankind was raging with the Shadow, the malevolent, unknown power behind the gates. “What’s wrong?” The voice startled Dane. He hadn’t sensed Foreman’s presence, which was unusual. “I had a strange—“ Dane paused as he realized he had been about to say dream, but knew better— “vision.” “Of?” Foreman asked. The old man was a silhouette in the dark, his sharp nose the most prominent feature, the starlight glinting off his silver hair. Dan quickly related what he had ‘seen’, from the meeting of Frost and Kennedy in the Oval Office through the detonation of the atomic bomb over Washington. When he was done, Foreman made no immediate comment. “It was sent to me,” Dane finally said. “It was a dream,” Foreman differed. Dane shook his head. “It was too detailed.”
“But it didn’t happen that way,” Foreman said. “So part of it is true?” Dane wasn’t surprised. Foreman nodded, remembering events almost forty years ago. “We picked up the Bermuda Triangle gate opening from a reconnaissance plane flying the blockade. I called Professor Kolkov in Moscow immediately on the CIA landline. He got hold of the Russian military and they managed to change the freighter’s course. It avoided the gate. That was the last day of the crisis. That freighter picked up the first of the missiles from Cuba that night and removed them.” Dane ran a callused hand over the metal railing, listening to the gentle lap of the sea against the ship. “I felt what Frost did. That’s not a normal dream. And I saw the freighter get caught in the Bermuda Triangle gate.” “Why would you get a vision of something that didn’t happen?” Foreman asked. Dane had been thinking about that while he stood at the railing. “We’re missing something important about these Gates and the true nature of the Shadow. Something very important. I was given that vision for a reason.” “Get some sleep,” Foreman said. “We’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.” He nodded toward the pitch-black wall two miles to the west, the Devil’s Sea gate that Dane had escaped out of the previous day. The CIA agent wandered off into the dark. For the first time Dane wondered why Foreman had been out in the middle of the night also. Then, unbidden, the thought struck him that maybe what he had seen had happened. How that could be, he had no idea, but he couldn’t shake the feeling.
480 BC. GREECE The King, one of the few kings who still ruled in Greece against the rising wave of democracy, was alone, a most strange occurrence for someone of his rank. Leonidas was also far from his kingdom. Sparta was one hundred and fifty kilometers due south of his current location. He rode along a rocky trail that wound its way through the steep hills that constituted the
northern shore of the Gulf of Corinth. He saw a temple on a mound to the right and knew he was close to his goal. It was dedicated to Apollo who was worshipped here at Delphi. He pulled back on the reins, eyes darting about in the shadow cast by the two cheek guards of his bronze helmet. His right hand went to the pommel of his sword, resting there, fingers lightly curled over it. There was no one about, which was most strange. Usually the area was crowded with supplicants trying to see the Oracle. Still, he felt a strong sense of threat, as if an enemy force lay in ambush. Decades of warring—and living to learn the lessons-- had taught him to trust these feelings. Then he noted the fog, a thick, unnatural mist, creeping up from the low ground to the south, out of the Gulf. He spurred the horse forward, passing the necropolis that held the temple and the place where the Oracle held formal meetings with supplicants. The sacred grove was ahead, but he edged the horse toward the Corycian Cave. The fog was rising faster, covering all the land below and coming closer. Leonidas halted as a torch appeared in the mouth of the cave. An old woman, wrapped in a long white cloak held the flame. “Quickly,” she called out. “Enemies come.” Leonidas rode up to her and dismounted, drawing his xiphos—sword-- as his feet touched the ground. He pulled his heavy shield off the saddle and hefted it with his off-hand. “You must attack the eyes,” the Oracle said. “It is the only place they are vulnerable to your weapon.” “Whose eyes?” With her free hand, the Oracle pointed toward the mist. “There.” Leonidas turned. A white figure floated in front edge of the fog, less than forty feet away and approaching rapidly. At first the King thought it was a ghost or a demon of the gods, as it was completely covered in white and its feet were six inches above the ground. It moved as if carried by the fog. But when it raised its arms, hands extended, and he saw the foot long blades on the end of each finger, he knew this thing was real. He went on guard, sword point toward the creature, shield covering the other half of his body and waited. He felt a moment’s shock as he saw that its face was featureless white, with only two red eyes, bulging like an insect’s.
It swiped at him and he ducked the blow, blocking the second swipe from the other hand with his sword. Then he struck, a lifetime of military training making the movement lightning quick. The tip of the xiphos entered the creature’s left eye, smashing through the crystal. The arm propelling the metal blade was well-muscled and covered with scars that rippled as the sword plunged deeper into the smooth white face. Leonidas twisted the sword, the metal scraping along the rim of the socket, giving to the harder white material. He jerked back, pulling his sword out as a terrible scream rent the night. The creature struck at him once more, the blow so powerful that it dented his shield and knocked it from his left hand. He jabbed with the sword once more, point hitting the open socket and the creature screeched, pulling back. The creature floated backward into the thickening mist. The Oracle was behind Leonidas’s right shoulder. “Wait,” she whispered as the creature disappeared. “There’s something else out there.” Leonidas checked his blade. The edge was ruined where it had caught on the creature’s armor. The shield lay five feet away and slightly behind him and he dared not turn his back on the fog to retrieve it. “What was that?” he asked as he peered into the mist. “A Valkyrie,” the Oracle said. “An emissary of the Shadow.” She pointed once more. “There.” Something bounded through the fog, an animal. But like none the King had ever seen. It had the head of a serpent, body of a lion, and the tail of a scorpion. Leonidas barely had time to register that image before he was on the defensive, slashing at the darting head, and ducking to avoid the simultaneous jab by the barbed tail. The snakehead struck again, getting past the sword and slamming into Leonidas’s chest, the strike blunted by the armor, venom spurting onto the metal. Before the head could pull back, Leonidas parted it from the body with one mighty downward stroke. Breathing hard, he stood over the strange body, looking at the fog, waiting for the next opponent. But the mist was dissipating, pulling back, revealing the stars and quarter moon above. “It is over,” the Oracle said. Leonidas was aware that he was gasping and abruptly slowed his lungs to not appear tired or afraid in front of the old woman. There was a strange hissing noise and glanced down to note
that the creature’s venom was eating through the metal on his chest. Cursing, he quickly ripped off his breastplate and threw it down to the ground. “What was this?” With the tip of his sword he prodded the body of the creature he had just killed. “A demon creature from the other side,” the Oracle said. “Other side of what?” “Come into my cave and warm yourself by my fire,” the Oracle turned and disappeared into the cave, the torch reflecting off stonewalls. Leonidas checked his armor first. There was a four-inch long, by half-inch wide hole in the breastplate, where the venom had eaten through. He touched the edge of the hole with the tip of his sword but nothing happened. Carefully he put the armor back on, and then he followed the woman inside. The Oracle sat in a stone throne opposite a glowing blue stone set in the floor. Leonidas frowned, and as he watched, the glow disappeared. Another strange thing in an evening of the bizarre, he thought. The Oracle thrust the torch into a pile of kindling and started a small fire. “Sit,” she instructed, pointing to a flat black stone opposite her. Leonidas hesitated, not wanting to be lower than her. Reluctantly he settled down on the rock. “You sent for me,” he said. “You are a King.” The old woman’s voice held an edge that Leonidas didn’t like. “I am,” he replied. He was uncomfortable sitting stiffly in front of the old woman. The journey to Delphi had been hard, not because of physical difficulties, but because of the constant reports brought to him by scouts about the invading Persian forces. King Xerxes of Persia was leading his massive army forward out of Asia. He was near the Hellesponte—the waterway dividing Asia and Europe-- and would be on Greek soil soon. The fools in Athens were too concerned with the Carneia, an annual festival and the preparations for the Olympic games, which were to be held soon. Or so they claimed, Leonidas thought. Cowardice took on many faces and many excuses. Athens and Sparta had been at each other’s throats for generations and he knew there was much debate among the leaders of Athens about which posed the greater threat: the Persians invading or allying with Sparta. It was one of the many failings he saw with democracy; the inability to take decisive action when time was short. “You are a Spartan.”
Leonidas knew that the rest of Greece viewed his home city as something of an enigma. The difference came not because Sparta still had a king, but because of the focus in Spartan society on the military. In essence, the entire city-state was designed to support its army. Because of that, Sparta was the most powerful city-state in Pelonnese, the southwestern part of Greece, connected to the rest of Greece by only a narrow isthmus. The city was located on the northern end of the central Laconian Plain on the Eurotas River and commanded the only land routes in Laconia. Even the Spartan heritage was somewhat different than the rest of Greece. They were descended from the Dorians who had invaded that locale around 1,000 BC. That was the reality; the legend the Spartans preferred was that their city was founded by Lacedaemon, a son of Zeus. The society had three classes—the Spartiates, who were the only ones allowed to vote; the Perioikoi, or free men, who did not have the vote but were graciously allowed to fight and die for the state; and then the helots, who while technically not slaves, were only slighter better off than if they had been. The old woman continued. “You are a warrior. There are times when warriors are needed and this is one of them.” “You summoned me, old woman.” “You had a vision,” she corrected. “You summoned me,” he repeated, unwilling to discuss the vivid dream he’d had had a week ago, directing him to Delphi and to travel alone. Even though he was not a strong believer in dreams and visions, the dream had been so strong, he’d known he had to follow the path it indicated. He had never been here before, but he had seen the woman before him in the dream so he knew now it was a true vision. Of course, he had not seen the Valkyrie or strange creature in the dream, which might have been helpful. Such was the ways of the gods—to show one hand, while keeping the other hidden. The Delphic Oracle sighed. “Who are you loyal to?” There was no hesitation in the answer. “Sparta.” “And Greece?” Leonidas shrugged. “If the threat to Greece is a threat to Sparta, yes.” “You have called up your troops in response to the Persian threat,” the Oracle noted. “Yet Athens hasn’t and they would fall to King Xerxes’ forces before Sparta.”
“Why am I here?” Leonidas pressed. “I too have seen a vision I could not ignore.” The Spartan waited. “You will fight the Persians,” the Oracle said. “And you will gain much honor and fame. And you will die.” Leonidas’s scarred and tanned face was smooth, no reaction apparent. “But there is something you must do before you die,” the Oracle added. “Besides kill Persians?” “There is something you must take from the Gates of Fire.” “Thermopylae?” Leonidas frowned. “Yes. It is where you will fight the Persians. You must get there first. And you must recover something and send it back to me safely.” “What is this thing?” Leonidas was already picturing the tight pass in his mind, realizing it was an excellent location to set up the defense against Xerxes’ overwhelming numbers. However, defending there would leave northern Greece—the city-states of Thessalia-- open to the ravages of the Persians, which had strong implications for various alliances. Still, if-“Listen to me,” the Oracle snapped, as if knowing his mind was already drawn to the battle and tactics. He blinked, not used to be talked to in such a brusque manner. “What you must save is a circle,” she made a vague gesture with her hands in front of her. “A sphere,” she amplified. “Of?” “I don’t know.” “You’re the Oracle of Delphi. How can you not know? And if you don’t know, why should I do this?” “It is important. Not just Greece, but the entire world lies in the balance.” “What is this important sphere?” “It is kind of map.” “Of?” he asked once more. “I don’t know. But someone else will.” “Who?”
The Oracle’s eyes lost their focus as she looked inward. “Someone who is not yet alive, but is alive. One who is of this world, but not of this world. Another warrior, like you, but not like you.” “Riddles.” Leonidas pulled off his helmet, revealing chiseled features and a lined face. White hair spilled out, tied in a ponytail that touched the back of his neck. “No, the commands of the gods. Will you do it?” “You promise me glory and honor and death in battle.” He smiled, highlighting a scar on his left cheek. “What Spartan could refuse such an offer? I will do it.”
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THE DISTANT PAST 10,000 B.C. A thousand men manned the fortress walls waiting to die bravely as the High Defender of Atlantis had ordered and foretold. They were the elite of the Atlantean army, handpicked for this last mission and the survivors of a decade-long war against an enemy none who had faced had ever returned to describe. They were armed with spear, sword and bow and knew their weapons would be useless against the coming darkness. Still, they stood tall on the ramparts and looked out to the sea from which their doom would come. The fortress was set on the smallest of thirteen volcanic islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Although the smallest, this island, centrally located, was the most important, as it was the seat of power for the Empire of Atlantis. The fortress wall surrounded a magnificent city, consisting of more than forty square miles of homes, temples, government buildings, and businesses constructed from a fine white marble, which gleamed in the late afternoon sun. In the very center of the city, a huge pyramid had been hurriedly built. It was more than three hundred feet high with a level top twenty feet wide. Contrasting with the rest of the city, it was built of black stone. On the top of the pyramid stood Pri Tor, the High Defender. She was a tall woman, with short red hair and pale skin. She wore a white robe with red trim and a crystal amulet around her neck as a sign of her special position. Her eyes were icy blue, and they were currently scanning to all points of the compass from the center of Atlantis. In every direction, darkness covered the ocean, a black wall over a mile high of an undeterminable depth: the Shadowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s domain. The circle of black was slowly closing in on the center island of Atlantis, the capital city of the kingdom that had once ruled the other twelve islands in the center of the Atlantic Ocean and colonies on both sides of the ocean. As far as she knew, the twelve were uninhabited now, overrun by the encroaching darkness of the Shadow.
Many had escaped, warned by the Defenders of the coming doom, spreading out across the ocean before the darkness finished encircling, the twelve tribes of Atlantis seeking haven, carrying with them the legend of Atlantis and the knowledge that had been given in visions to the Defenders by the Ones Before. It was only four days ago that the blackness had appeared, completely encircling the thirteen-island empire. In that time the darkness had constricted, overrunning the other islands coming ever closer. Some warriors had stayed on each of the islands, unwilling to give up their homes so easily. The Defenders had felt their deaths as the Shadow closed in. Their defiance had not slowed the inevitable in the slightest. A little less than ten years ago, the Shadow had first appeared in the form of a triangularshaped mist upon the sea far to the southeast. A ship sent to investigate had never come back out, as had no ship since then. The mist had turned to darkness over the course of two years. Then the colony on an island near the darkness had been overrun; every person had been swallowed by it. In the following years, several other colonies, on the both sides of the ocean, had been absorbed by darkness that appeared nearby. Then a select few among the Atlanteans, mostly woman, began receiving visions and hearing voices from some unseen entity calling itself the Ones Before telling them the nature of the force behind the darknessâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the Shadowâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and telling and showing them ways to combat the threat. At first, they were ignored as the warriors tried to use traditional means to fight the Shadow, but when all these attempts became abject failures, the people were forced to turn to these oracles. Thus the Defenders were formed. The darkness to the south-west was destroyed by a pyramid such as and the sacrifice of a Defender and several warriors exactly as the Ones Before instructed. For a couple of years there was peace and no sign of the Shadowâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;until the previous week. Desperate visions warned of the coming threat and now it was here. The visions they were given and the voice that whispered inside their heads told the Defenders there was only one desperate way to stop the Shadow this time. Pri Tor shifted her gaze to those gathered on the broad stairs of the pyramid, twelve priestesses like here, the Chief Defender from each island, especially chosen for this. There was a young girl, also with red hair and blue eyes, in front of them on the top step. Two warriors, the taller of which held a staff, one end of which was a razor-sharp spearhead and the other a seven-
headed snake—the Naga. Behind her was large a large slab with the contour of a human etched into its stone surface. Pri Tor signaled and her daughter came to her. The High Defender knelt so she was the same height as the young girl. “You must be brave.” Her daughter, Pri Ker, could only nod. Pri Ker was the first of one born to a Defender and a warrior who had some of the sight and hearing, brought into light nine years ago. She was the future. Pri Tor removed the amulet from her neck and placed it over her daughter’s head. “You must carry the knowledge of the High Defender.” She glanced over her daughter’s shoulder at the Shadow. “It will come back, and you and those who follow you will be the ones to fight it.” Pri Ker finally spoke. “Will we ever completely defeat it?” Pri Tor frowned. “I have not been shown that nor heard of it. I only know what must be done now. It is time for you to go. I do not know where your travels will take you.” She reached inside her robe and removed a slim metal tube, capped at both ends. It was covered with fine runes etched into the metal. “Take this also. It might help others some day. And perhaps someone can read the strange writing that we could not.” Pri Ker swallowed, holding back tears, knowing such a sign of weakness would be insulting to tall the chosen ones gathered around. She took the tube, reached up and hugged her mother, then turned and made her way down the stairs where several warriors waited to take her to the strange ship moored at the dock. Pri Tor rose to her feet. “It is time.” The dozen priestesses bowed their heads in prayer for several moments. “Go,” Pri Tor ordered, and the priestesses made their way down the stairs, then scattered to the twelve positions on the walls that Pri Tor had chosen as a result of the vision she had been given. Meanwhile, Pri Tor took a dark red cloth from her pocket and draped it over her shoulders. It had runic writing on it, a gift from the Ones Before, one of the few substantial things received via a gate, the name given by the Ones Before for the darkness. As near as Pri Tor could tell both the Shadow and the Ones Before used the gates, although no human had ever entered one and come back to tell of it, and no representative of either side had ever come out of the darkness of a gate into light.
Pri Tor walked to the slab and climbed onto it, standing tall, where she could see all of the capital of Atlantis spread out around her. She saw the chosen thousand on the walls. Would they be enough? she wondered briefly, and then dismissed the doubt. It was one of many decisions she’d had to make in the past week as the inevitable drew near. They had to be enough. The plan she’d “heard” from the Ones Before had indicated a thousand should be sufficient and she had to trust in it. Her eyes were drawn to a long, slim ship tied at the nearest dock. It was a hundred meters long by five wide. The hull was of black metal, open to the sky with no docking. A single thin mast of the same black metal poked into the sky, almost twenty meters high. In the rear was a raised platform on which rested a black box two meters cubed. There were rows of seats inside, manned by sailors. In the prow of the ship was a golden sphere about a meter in diameter. The surface of the sphere writhed and moved, each strand pulsing as if alive. The ship was a gift from the Ones Before. It had come out of the darkness with no one on board two days ago and been brought to shore by Atlantean sailors from a nearby warship. The warship had been waiting in the correct spot; because Pri Tor had had a vision, telling her what was going to happen. She had also had a vision as to what was to be done with the ship and that which was onboard it. The metal tube had been on the ship, and she knew it needed to stay with it. Pri Tor saw her daughter on the dock, then cross the gangplank onto the ship. The ship immediately began moving, although there was no apparent propulsion system. As it cleared the harbor, the ship paused. As she had been instructed by her mother. Pri Ker placed her hands on the golden sphere. A black hole opened in front of the ship, and the prow entered the gate. I love you. Pri Tor used her mind to send the message to the ship, and she “felt” the message returned by her daughter, Pri Tor saw several dolphin fins appear near the prow of the ship and she felt some relief that their brethren of the sea were escorting it as it disappeared into the gate. As soon as the stern of the ship was through, the gate snapped out of existence. Where her daughter was now, Pri Tor had no clue. The vision had only shown her this far. But she had to trust that the Ones Before would take care of her daughter. Pri Tor raised her gaze beyond. The Shadow was closer. Pri Tor looked at the fortress walls. The thousand warriors were ready. At the twelve designated points along the walls her priestesses stood.
Pri Tor felt a tremble come up out of the ground. The earth itself was unsteady, a result of the Shadow’s power. Several islands to the south, where colonies had taken root, had disappeared over the past several years due to disturbances in the earth. She signaled and the two warriors came up the stairs and joined her. “Be ready,” Pri Tor ordered. One of the warriors put the spearhead into a slit next to the slab. His steady hand rested on the snakeheads. Then Pri Tor lay down, her body fitting into the outline. She felt more tremors. High above, all she could see was blue sky. A single seagull flew overhead. She felt a tremendous wave of sadness knowing this was her last day. There would be no more beautiful dawns and wondrous sunsets. No more playing in the warm surf with her daughter. The simple joys and the pains of life were all to be ended, and she didn’t understand why. Why was the Shadow doing this? She didn’t even know who or what the Shadow was or who or what the Ones Before who had aided them were. The only contact with either had been through the gates. Among the Defenders, there had been much discussion, both about why they had been chosen and who had done the choosing. Were the Ones Before gods? Was the Shadow a demon force? Were humans’ just pawns in a battle between heaven and hell? “How close?” she called out. “Just about to touch the walls,” the warrior informed her. She could feel the sheer evil of the darkness that approached. Of that, there was no doubt. Theological questioning and reasoning aside, there was the reality of the threat that had proven itself again and again over the past decade. “At the walls,” the warrior announced. He was the father of Pri Ker, a brave man, and one who heard the whispers of the Ones Before, not anywhere near as loudly as a Defender, but enough to let Pri Tor know he had something of the sight and make her decide to mate with him. She briefly wondered how powerful their daughter’s sight and voice would be. Pri Tor could hear the screams of the warriors as the darkness slid over them and they encountered what was inside. She closed her eyes. She “felt” the wave of bravery mixed he closed her eyes. She “felt” the wave of bravery mixed the despair from the warriors. It was a bolt of high-power energy into the right side of her brain. With great effort, Pri Tor lifted her head and looked toward e walls. Darkness had encompassed the southwest part of it ‘St, but she could see the two priestesses who had been
overrun as deep blue silhouettes in the blackness, a beacon of positive power. Their skulls were absorbing the same thing her mind was feeling, the raw power of the warriors’ emotion, and e energy was pouring through them to the pyramid. A third and fourth Defender fell into the darkness. Bolts of blue flickered from the four now covered out to the others arranged around the wall, but mostly to the pyramid. Pri Tor felt the power in her head building, almost unbearable. ‘Now,” she ordered. The warrior turned his spear. The pyramid began to vibrate. A blue glow suffused the .lab and Pri Tor’s body. Energy from the outlying Defenders came toward her, adding to the power. Her mouth opened in a silent scream. The skin on her face began rippling as if there were something alive beneath it. Then her flesh began peeling way as her eyes turned into two blue glowing orbs. The darkness was closer now on all sides. Seven of the twelve Defenders were covered, sucking in power from the doomed warriors’ minds. Pri Tor had a moment of clarity when she realized what was happening-the absolute desperation of the warriors, combined with their bravery in the face of it, was tapping something primeval and very powerful, and the nearby Defenders were able to channel it to her. Still the Shadow closed in. Deep inside Pri Tor, she felt the darkness slide over the top of the pyramid and her body. She was still alive, her head the focal point of the twelve skulls-the skulls of twelve priestesses, the twelve Defenders, who had already given their all in the battle against the Shadow. Her body felt faint and far away. She distantly heard the warrior shout something and then scream in agony. More power flowed in. All the Defenders were active now. Bolts of blue shot out of Pri Tor’s head into the encompassing darkness. Again and again, blue lightning seared off the top of the pyramid into the darkness. The consistency of the darkness began to change. Swirls of blue mixing with the black. The blue and black spun about the top of the pyramid. Pri Tor’s head was now a clear crystal, suffused with blue. The power from the twelve Defenders still poured into the pyramid, their heads also crystallized now, still channeling the raw emotion from the dying warriors. So the earth did.
The explosion centered on the pyramid, on a scale not seen. Nee meteors battered the planet long before life existed. A tidal wave more than a mile high spread outward from the center of the Atlantic, so powerful it circled the entire globe core slowly subsiding. As far as Atlantis itself, the thirteen islands were gone so completely there was no indication there had even been land in the center of the mighty ocean, no ruins for later civilizations to find.
CHAPTER ONE 1844 Bone-cold wind blew down from the white covered peaks of the Rocky Mountains. Sweeping across the High Plains. Nestled in the valley that held the Greasy Grass River, known as the Little Big Horn to the whites, were two-dozen lodges of the Lakota Sioux. They were somewhat protected from the wind by the surrounding bluffs. But small wind devils still swirled about the lodges. It was the time of the Moon-of-Frost-in-the-Lodge, January, and only dire necessity would cause one to be outside before the sun rose. The woman known as Nahimana, wife of the medicine man Crazy Horse, pulled the frozen rawhide flap to her lodge entrance aside and peered out into the dark. Not just the cold. But also, the foreboding darkness caused her to pause before exiting, as she knew she must. She glanced once over her shoulder at her sleeping husband, and then silently left the tent, one hand cradled underneath her swollen belly, the other bolding a small leather pouch with an eagle feather tied to the binding. She had a small buffalo robe draped over one shoulder but wore only a simple one-piece dress made of deer hide. Her teeth were already chattering, the wind cutting through e thin garment and swirling up her bare legs. She wove her way through the lodges toward the cottonwoods next to the river. Tethered ponies watched her, gathered tightly together for protection from the cold. Even the logs the village used for warning were quiet, recognizing her cent, content to watch from their snowy havens underneath bushes. Nahimana passed the edge of the village and made her way into the cottonwoods. There was barely enough starlight and moonlight for her to avoid bumping into a tree. She stopped abruptly as the ground suddenly dropped off, telling her she had reached the bank of the Greasy Grass. With great difficulty, she slid down the steep four-foot riverbank to a small shoal consisting of pebbles and sand. Ice framed both sides of the flowing water for about two feet, leaving a free-flowing center channel. The river was not deep, a few feet at best in the center.
Looking up, Nahimana saw the uncountable stars overhead, twinkling in the clear night sky in the space between the bare branches from the trees on each bank that framed her view. She felt very small and alone. All her visions seemed foolish now. How could she—and the child inside of her who now wanted to come out-matter in light of such vastness? Why should she and her child be chosen, as she knew they had been? And chosen for what fate? Her child-the thought made her pause. It was tradition for a woman to leave the village to give birth, but not one scrupulously followed, especially when the weather was so dangerous. However, she had another reason to give birth away from the eyes of others. Although she had not slept with another man beside her husband, she was worried about what had grown inside her. Slightly more than eight moons ago, in the Moon of Shedding Ponies, she had awoken in great pain while Crazy Horse was off on a bunt. The dogs were barking loudly as if a bear had wandered into the camp. It was just few weeks past the night; she knew she had conceived with her husband. Her hair had crackled as if a summer storm were passing overhead. But such storms were still a few months off. Her abdomen was wracked with pain, and she’d feared she’d lost the child. But examining herself, she’d found a small, fresh cut on her stomach. While warriors scoured the camp, she’d covered the wound with a poultice. She knew in the way she had always known such things, that something had been done to her. What, she had no clue, but she feared for her child. The next night she’d had a dream. She “saw” her son leading their people to a great victory over the white skins, their soldiers falling into camp and her son killing many. But for some reason she couldn’t pin down, she’d felt no elation at the vision. Since that night, she’d had the same dream many times, of soldiers falling into camp and her son defeating them, but she shared it with no one. Because in concert with that vision, she had another. One of a dark-haired man with blue eyes who was with the white skin soldiers. This man disturbed her greatly, because she knew he was connected to her and also knew his fate. But still he charged into battle. She also had dreams of skulls. Not the white bleached skulls of the dead when left on their funeral platforms, but skulls that were solid yet clear in a way she did not understand. The man with blue eyes carried several in a bag tied off on his pony. Sometimes her son did, and sometimes he didn’t. The skulls were very powerful, but their purpose eluded her. The latest bout of recurring pain pushed aside such musings and returned her attention to the task at hand. She knelt, putting the pouch down to her right. She grimaced as another
contraction rippled through her body. Despite the chill in the air, sweat ran down her forehead and along the chiseled lines f her face. It was so cold that small ice beads formed underneath her chin before the sweat could drop off. Nahimana used her fist to punch a hole in the nearby thin ice. She cupped a handful of water and splashed it over her face, trying to distract herself from the pain in her womb. She began to hum to herself the tune her mother had taught her to focus her mind elsewhere and hold the pain at arm’s distance. She opened the pouch and pulled out a small flint knife that bad been her mother’s and her mother’s mother before her, through the long maternal line of the family. She pulled her garment up to her waist, spread her feet apart and waited, pressing her back against the bank for support, feeling the .train in her thighs. This was her first child. And although she had witnessed a few births and had consulted other women, the experience was novel to her. He child came surprisingly easily. She used the flint knife to cut the umbilical, then reached forward to wash him with the river water when pain once more spiked through her abdomen, causing her to collapse back against the riverbank. the baby on the buffalo hide stared up at her with wide, The baby on the buffalo hide stared up at her with wide, against the cold riverbank. Another child? She had not seen this. Or felt it. A shiver passed through her, some cold, mostly fear. She remembered the cut that had healed slowly. The pain that night eight moons ago. The warriors coming back saying not only had found no tracks of beast or man. But she knew dogs did not ark like that for nothing. She’d had a visitor. She cried out as the pain came again and lingered for several moments before subsiding. The second baby would not be born. She reached down and flipped the edge of the buffalo robe over the silent child to protect him from the cold. She strained with effort, trying to force the second child Out of her body. But to no avail. After almost a half-hour. The line was growing intolerable and blood soaked the pebbles and sand below her. She tried once more, and then collapsed sideways onto the pebbles, staring directly into the eyes of her first-born. She could feel the wet between her legs and. reaching down, drew back a hand covered with dark red blood.
She would die here. The thought angered her. She had always had the sight, and she had never foreseen this. She had visions of her son—, it was a son who stared back at her, and they had extended from his early childhood to his great victory. How could she die here and now? She had not had visions of another child. A brother or sister to her first-born had never appeared in her dreams. Then again, what had happened eight months earlier-whatever it was had never appeared, either. She heard a low rumble, like thunder but muted, even though it sounded nearby. A strange feeling passed over her skin. One she had experienced before during the night of the strange visitor who left no tracks. She tried to right herself. To let gravity help. But she couldn’t get to her feet or even her knees. If she died, would they find her son? Would he fulfill the destiny she saw for him? Or would he die here on the shoals of the Greasy Grass, frozen? With a painful hiss, she reached up with a blood-soaked hand, grabbing a root that extended out of the bank. She tried to pull herself up and was almost back in the crouching position when the root gave way, sending her tumbling onto the smooth pebbles of the shoal. Through her pain, she was vaguely aware of the sound of someone or something coming closer through the underbrush on the far side of the river. She looked in the direction, and fear washed over her, blanketing the pain for a few moments. There she saw a figure with smooth white skin unlike any she had ever seen before, floating six inches above the water, moving without any apparent motion. The eyes scared her more than the strange mode of movement-they glowed slightly, and were red and bulging. This was no human, of that she was certain. It had to have come from the world beyond where the Great Spirit dwelled. The figure floated to a halt just in front of Nahimana. She noted that it had a pack looped over one shoulder. The young Sioux reached down to grab her first child as she noticed starlight glinting off of blades on the end of each of the creature’s fingers. It was a demon creature, coming to kill her and her son. She gasped in pain but gathered up the buffalo robe and held her firstborn tight against her chest. Nahimana blinked as the front half of the figure split from the back half, swinging open, revealing a woman inside, as if tie hard white exterior were a garment of some kind. A paleskinned woman, like those she had seen at the white-man’s fort to the east, with curly, short
brown hair and dressed in a one-piece garment from neck to booted feet, stepped out. She took the pack from the shoulder of the white skin suit. “I am here to help,” the woman said. her accent very strange and the Lakota words pronounced with difficulty. Nahimana closed her eyes and sank to the pebbles. A hand on each shoulder helped her up, back to her crouching position against the bank. There was a strange odor in the air, one she had smelled only once before, in her lodge on the night of the pain during the Moon of the Shedding Ponies. She knew now that this woman had visited her that night. Why? And ‘why was she here now? What had the woman done to her? Nahimana cried out in pain as another contraction futilely passed through her body. The hands left her shoulders and went between her legs. She felt the invasion as they penetrated into her, but she welcomed the relief as the small hands righted the breached baby. In a moment, the second child was free of her body. Nahimana tried to reach for the dropped flint, but the movement was too much and she slid down into a seated position. Her benefactor picked up the ceremonial knife and cut the umbilical. Then she passed the newborn to Nahimana, who opened her robe and held both babies close to her bosom. Another boy. A great blessing, Nahimana thought. “Thank you,” Nahimana whispered. There was no immediate response. Nahimana peered in the darkness, able to see more as the first hints of dawn were appearing above the bluffs to the east. The person was indeed a woman, Nahimana realized, which didn’t surprise her, as no man would have known how to help her. The woman’s face was lined beyond her apparent age. Two sons. Nahimana had not seen this. All her visions had been of one. This thought troubled her and muted her happiness over the dual birth and her rescue from certain death. She looked closely at the second-born and was shocked to see icy blue eyes reflecting the first of the morning sun’s rays. And the skin was paler than the first-born’s. like the woman’s. This could not be. They bad both come from her womb and been born of her husband’s seed. Or had they? What had happened that night? Nahimana realized she had seen the second son in her visions. He was the one who rode with the white skins guiding them into the great battle against her first-born. He was the one who carried the strange skulls.
The woman knelt in front of Nahimana. The woman pointed at the first-born, then at Nahimana, nodding. Then she pointed at the blue-eyed child. Then back at herself. Nahimana frowned, trying to understand. The message was clear as the Woman reached out and took hold of the second-born, trying to pull him from the cocoon of Nahimana’s robe. Nahimana tried to fight. And the woman paused and then stopped. She placed both hands on the side of Nahimana’s head, pressing in. Nahimana gasped as a sharp pain passed through her skull. Then everything went black for a moment. “A great destiny awaits your son,” the woman’s voice was surer with the language as if drawing it straight from Nahimana’s mind in some way, “as you have seen before in your visions.” “And the other?” Nahimana asked. “He, too, has a destiny, and he is yours by virtue of the past nine months,” the woman said. “But he is also mine.” “How can this be?” “They are connected,” the woman said. “By your womb and by your blood and by the time they have spent together. They will share that connection for the rest of their lives. And they will bring about that which is needed when they come together later. They will be together again at the end but against each other, to bring about that which I cannot show you, nor would you understand. The fate of the world and all those who walk upon it rest upon their final meeting.” The woman removed her hands from Nahimana’s head and reached for the child once more. Nahimana wouldn’t let go. The woman paused and looked deep into Nahimana’s eyes. “You know the truth. There is nothing but doom for your children. For your tribe. For your people.” “No.’’ “It is the truth. The people with skin like mine come from the east. They are like a mighty river that cannot be stopped.” “So why are you here?” “Out of doom comes great power.” “What do you mean?”
The woman tapped the side of her head. “Our minds are very powerful, more so than we realize.” The woman reached into the pack and pulled out a crystal skull like the one Nahimana had seen in her visions. It was beautiful, enticing. Despite her fear and pain, Nahimana reached out with her free hand. The woman let her touch it. The surface was perfectly smooth. It gave off warmth, although there was no flame. Starlight glinted through the crystal and sparkled. There seemed to be a slight blue glow inside the skull, but Nahimana couldn’t see the source. ‘’There is something greater than your tribe, your children, your people. Greater than my people.” “There is nothing greater than my people for me.” ‘’There is the Great Spirit’s domain, which goes beyond the borders of your people’s land, of my people’s land, even beyond what you know of the river of time and of this world.” Nahimana frowned. “What are you talking about?” The woman spread her arms wide. “The world. The future for all children. The battles, past and future, where so many b.ave already died to try to save the world.” “I don’t understand.” “I don’t understand it completely, either” the woman said. “There is an evil force. The Shadow. It seeks to destroy our planet. Power is needed to fight it.” She held the crystal skull once more. “This will be his--” she indicated the blue-eyed boy. “With it he will turn defeat into power for victory.” The woman put the skull back in the pack and tapped the side of her own head once more. “There is great power in the mind. You know that, but you don’t know how powerful it can be under the right circumstances. These two--” she indicated the two babies -“will bring about the right circumstances.” “And my people? You say they are doomed?” This gave the woman pause. “I am sorry. I am not responsible for what will happen to your people. It is inevitable here and now. But in their sacrifice, and the sacrifice of others, many, many people will be saved. It is like the fall when much must die before there is rebirth in the spring. A winter comes for many which your son must help prevent.” Nahimana knew the words were true. It was the curse of the “sight,” to know the truth when it was spoken, even if it was a terrible one. She had seen the blue-eyed one grown, and she had seen the skull. And she had seen her son leading the people into battle.
The woman rested a hand on Nahimana’s shoulder. ”Your son will gain a great victory, one that will be talked about for many generations.” “But in the end his people lose.” The woman said nothing. “Where are you from?” Nahimana finally asked. The woman looked past Nahimana, her eyes becoming unfocused. ‘The Space Between.” “‘Between’?” “The world I came from and this world. The time I came from and your time.” It made little sense to Nahimana. She looked at the two children snuggled against her chest. It was the blue eyes more than the words that made the decision for Nahimana. She knew Crazy Horse would see those eyes and wonder what magic was afoot. He might even proclaim the child to be possessed by a demon. Nahimana opened the buffalo robe and nodded at the woman. The woman stood with the children in her arms. Nahimana raised a blood-soaked hand as the woman turned back to the strange suit that still floated in the air. “I am Nahimana, the mystic one, hearer of voices and receiver of visions. This one--” she indicated the child she still held--“will take his father’s name, Crazy Horse.” The woman nodded. “That is the name he should have.” “What is your name? And what will you call the child you take?” “The child’s name I cannot tell you, as he who I bring him to will give him that,” the woman said. “My name would mean nothing to you.” “It is a sign of trust to exchange names.” The woman gave a sad smile. “My name is Amelia. Amelia Earhart. I, too, hear the voices and see the visions. They are what brought me here.” “You were with me before.” Nahimana didn’t phrase it as it question. “Yes.” “Will you take the child to this space between?” “No. I take him to the white skin people to be raised.” Earhart paused. ‘They will meet again here.” She waved her hand about, taking in the Little Big Horn River and the surrounding bluffs. “It will be a great battle. A terrible victory and a terrible defeat. But it will help those in another place and time.”
â&#x20AC;&#x153;Nahimana wanted to ask more, to understand, but the woman was already moving away toward the suit. Earhart wrapped the child in the pack; head exposed, and hung the pack over the suitâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shoulder. Then she stepped into the suit as if consumed by it. The two halves closed. Nahimana watched as the figure floated back over the steam and up the far bank slope. In a minute, it was gone from view. There was a sound of muted thunder once more, and Nahimana felt her skin crawl with the strange sensation for a few moments, then return to normal. Nahimana looked down at the child in her arms and shivered once more. Not so much from the bitter cold, but from the bitter truth. It was terrible indeed to know fate.
7889$1@O<$7=>>?;$38C$=>?=:>@1$ (link to Who Dares Wins Publishing) !
CHAPTER ONE EARTH TIMELINE VIII Gettysburg, PA, 19 November 1863 “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The tall man with the dark beard and lined face paused and looked out over the crowd that listened to his speech. Soldiers, politicians, locals. And the dead. Acres and acres of dead in the cemetery he had come to dedicate. He felt the presence of the dead more than he did the living. He also sensed another presence. One he had known all his adult life. He was in southern Pennsylvania, in a small town that few had heard of before the great battle of the previous summer that had taken place in and around this place called Gettysburg. It was just past mid-November and the trees were bare of their leaves, making the terrain much different from what it must have looked like in July when the great armies clashed here. Lincoln continued. “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.” Almost fifty thousand men had been killed or wounded or were missing from the three days of battle. It was a number that had staggered a nation that had seen large numbers of casualties reported before. Many of the Union and Confederate dead still lay in their shallow battlefield graves and if one penetrated far enough into the surrounding woods, they would find those who had not even been buried, the bodies picked clean by scavengers, leaving skulls and bones to trip up the unwary. There was an air about the place. It was more than hallowed ground. It was as if the battle still resonated in the very soil. Lincoln had walked most of the battlefield the previous day
upon arrival. Visiting places that were already becoming legend: Little and Big Round Tops; the Peach Orchard; Culp’s Hill; Seminary Ridge; and, most important, Cemetery Ridge and the long open field leading up to it. Mary had refused to come with him to the last place, and he had become ill shortly after walking along place, and he had become ill shortly after walking along the stone wall on top of the ridge, peering out to the west the stone wall on top of the ridge, peering out to the west great battle. “But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate--we cannot. Consecrate-- we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” A slight breeze blew across the gathered crowd, and Lincoln felt a chill on his skin. He had made so many decisions in the past few years and so many people had died as a result of those decisions. And he knew there were more decisions to come. There was to be a final reckoning for which this was but a prelude. So he had been told. “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us-that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain-that this nation. Under God. Shall have a new birth vain-that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” Abraham Lincoln glanced down at the notes he had made on the way to Gettysburg from Washington and which he had honed the previous night in the local house at which he had stayed. There was another paragraph, one he had scribbled on the carriage ride from that house to this spot. One that he had spent many restless nights tossing and turning over, debating whether he even dare write it, never mind utter it. Mary, dear Mary, had told him not to. Had told him that the Truth was best left unsaid. That the apparent sacrifices that had been made were enough for people to know. That knowing more would be dangerous. There was no applause as Lincoln stopped talking. The speaker before him, Edward Everett, has spoken for over two hours, eulogizing those who had died in the Battle of Gettysburg this past summer. Lincoln had just spoken only two hundred and seventy-two words in less than
two minutes. There were many in the crowd who hadn’t yet realized he’d begun speaking, never mind stopped. It didn’t matter. The dead had heard. President Lincoln looked out over the audience. At the right edge of the crowd he saw his wife’s familiar face. He turned away, and then looked back and she was still there, peering at him intently, the face hidden beneath a black, broad-brimmed hat. The head bobbed slightly, as if indicating approval, and Lincoln shivered once more for several moments, despite the Indian summer warmness of the day. There were prices to be paid beyond that taken in battle. He took the envelope on which he had written the last paragraph, folded it in half and slid it inside a pocket on the inside of his long coat. “God help us,” Lincoln whispered to himself as he left the speaking podium. “God help all the worlds. We have done our part.” He made his way through the crowd shaking hands, edging his way closer to his wife. When he reached her, he looked into her dark eyes. She held his gaze. “Mary,” Lincoln said. Lincoln leaned his tall form toward her, like an old oak blown by a strong wind until his head was next to hers. “Did it work? Was it worth all the death?” “I don’t know yet. 1 am still waiting for the Voice to tell me.” N months,” Lincoln argued, a refrain that had been going between them ever since the great battle. “Time in this war doesn’t work like that.” Lincoln knew his wife wasn’t referring to the War between the States. It had taken him a long time to accept that there was something at stake larger than even the Union. Mary Todd Lincoln put a hand on his ann. “I promise, I will let you know. As soon as I hear it.”
CHAPTER TWO EARTH TIMELINE Little Bighorn, 26 June 1876 Custer Colonel George Armstrong Custer stared at the blood on his hands in disbelief. There was no pain. He just felt very, very tired. He was aware that someone was walking next to his horse, holding him in the saddle. He looked down and saw his nephew Autie Reed guiding him. There were troopers all about, most mounted, some on foot, all heading up the draw toward higher ground. That was good, Custer thought. Higher ground was always best. He could hear firing and screams, but they seemed far away. Where was the village? Were the Indians running? He saw his brother Tom Custer off to his right and slightly ahead. He tried to callout but no words would come. They rode out of the draw and a knoll was ahead. Tom was deploying troopers in a defensive line, facing downslope. Defensive? Custer thought. That was wrong. They should be attacking. Always attacking. Autie was helping Custer off his horse. Custer tried to stand but his legs were so weak, he sank to the ground. He was surprised when Autie pulled a pistol and shot his horse--his favorite steed. Why did he do that? Custer wondered as the horse collapsed next to him. Autie helped Custer to a seated position, with his back against the dead animal. He drew Custerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s pistol and placed it in his hand. Custer could barely hold on to it. He tried to ask Autie what was going on, why were they on the defensive, but no words would come and his nephew turned his attention outward, pistol at the ready. There was blood on Autieâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s face. How had that happened?
Then Custer saw beyond the perimeter. Hundreds of Indians coming forward, up the draw like wolves to a downed buffalo calf. They were firing rifles and bows. A trooper trying to escape was swarmed by the wave of hostiles, disappearing. This couldn’t be, Custer thought. It just simply couldn’t be happening. Not to his regiment. Not to the Seventh. Bouyer Mitch Bouyer and Lieutenant Weir, with D Company behind them, reached a high point where they could see to the north. “Oh my God,” Weir whispered. A small knot of soldiers were holding a perimeter about a mile away on a hill. And all around were Indians. At least a thousand, Bouyer estimated. And the Indians weren’t charging, but holding back, pouring lead and arrow at the soldiers. “We can’t … “ Weir didn’t finish the obvious. Bouyer understood, but he also knew he didn’t have the luxury of choice. He had three skulls. He’d had to pad the satchels with his blanket to keep them from burning his horse. They’d been growing hotter with each passing minute mirroring the intensity of the battle. Bouyer kicked his spurs into his horse’s side and headed forward. Weir wheeled his horse and pointed back the way they had come. His troop needed no urging. D Company raced back to the bluff that held the survivors of Reno’s command. Crazy Horse Crazy Horse rode around to the left, two hundred of his mounted warriors following, putting the firing to his right. He knew the terrain and knew where the battle was taking place. He also knew that the other tribes would attack head on. This was the great battle that his mother had foretold. He and his warriors galloped along a draw, out of sight. Crazy Horse could sense the anxiety among his men, their desire to ride straight toward the shooting and join in the battle. But they followed his lead. Gall
Gall strode back and forth along the front edge of the Indian line, holding them back from charging directly into the white men’s guns. It was difficult, but his size and stature brought grudging obedience. They lay down in the waist high grass, along the edge of the coulees that flanked the hill on which the white men had set up their perimeter. Gall had warriors with rifles move forward so they could see. He directed those with bows back; out of direct sight, and had them fire up into the air, their arrows arching .over and down into the whites. Gall had his hatchet in one hand, the satchel from the Sun Dance in the other. Inside of it was a crystal skull. Custer Autie placed something in Custer’s lap. A leather satchel. With something hot inside. That woke Custer from his blood-drained stupor. He blinked, looking about. Arrows were coming down, almost as heavily as a summer squall. Some men had pulled saddles over their backs as they lay prone, firing. The ground was littered with arrow shafts like stalks of prairie grass. Custer saw that the damned Springfield rifles were jamming as cartridges expanded in the heat of the chamber. One trooper, fifteen yards in front of the main line of the perimeter was on his knees, knife in hand trying to extract a round. Several braves saw this and charged forward. The man grabbed the barrel of his Springfield and jumped to his feet, swinging it like a madman. He knocked two of the braves to the ground before he was overwhelmed by the others. Custer tried to lift his hand holding the revolver but he couldn’t do it. Where was Tom? And Autie? And Boston? And Calhoun? His family1 Someone came rushing up on the left and Custer twisted his neck. Tom. Bleeding from a wound in his chest. “George--” Whatever he’d been about to say was cut off as an arrow punched in one side of his neck and out the other with a gush of blood. Tom’s hands grabbed for the shaft as arterial blood spurted for several seconds. A bullet cut short that attempt, hitting Tom Custer in the side of his head, splattering his brother with his brains. Custer could only stare in horror. Bouyer
A soldier came galloping madly toward Bouyer, leaning as far forward on his horse as possible. It took Bouyer a second to realize why the man was in this uncomfortable and unusual position--he was trying to minimize his back as a target for the dozen braves on ponies chasing him. Bouyer pulled back on the reins, halting. As the man raced past a bullet caught him in the shoulder, tumbling him from the horse. The man scrambled to his feet, looking about wildly. He saw Bouyer and raised his hands in supplication. Bouyer forced himself to be still as the braves raced up, two jumping off their ponies. One of them smashed the back of the soldier’s skull in with a stone-headed club. The other braves circled Bouyer, weapons held menacingly. Bouyer pulled one of the crystal skulls out of its wrapping. It glowed bright blue and was so hot, he could feel it sear his flesh, but he held it high. The warriors pulled back, even the two who had been ! in the process of scalping the soldier. Then they were startled as a second glowing skull held high appeared over a rise to the west. And the hand holding it belonged to Sitting Bull. “Powerful magic!” Sitting Bull cried out in Lakota. “Yes,” Bouyer agreed. Sitting Bull turned to the left. Just over the next rise lay the battlefield. They could hear the firing falling off from the crescendo it had been. Bouyer knew the end was close. “We go?” Sitting Bull inclined his head toward the rise. Bouyer nodded and put the stirrups to his horse. Skulls in hand the two rode toward the rise. Custer An arrow slammed into Custer’s left thigh, piercing through flesh and muscle into the ground beneath. He didn’t feel any pain. He didn’t feel the burning heat from the satchel Autie had placed in his lap. All he felt was in his mind, disbelief and shock about what was going on all around him. Gall
Gall saw Sitting Bull and the strange half-breed from the Sun Dance appear to the south, both holding up glowing skulls. He signaled, indicating for the warriors not to attack the halfbreed. Then he reached into his satchel and grabbed hold of the hot skull. He almost laughed at the pain. The Sun Dance had prepared him for this. He held the glowing skull aloft and moved forward. Buffalo Calf Woman Buffalo Calf Woman slammed an awl into a dead soldier’s left ear. Pulled it out, and then jammed it into the right, piercing the eardrum. He should not hear in the afterworld. Because he had not heard clearly in this world. Not heard the Great Spirit warning the whites to leave the People in peace. She looked up and saw mighty Gall striding forward, glowing blue object in his hand. She opened the satchel she’d taken from the blue-coat. She blinked at the bright blue glow, and then reached in. She grabbed bold with both hands and held it aloft. Then she headed in the direction Gall was going. Walks Alone The boy who had shot Custer as he tried to cross Little Bighorn, Walks Alone, saw Gall and Buffalo Calf Woman. Where was Crazy Horse? He wondered, as he pulled out the skull the great warrior had given him. He stood up, ignoring the warnings from the braves around to stay down. There were still soldiers alive on the bill, firing. None would hit him, Walks Alone knew. He headed up the hill. Two Moons Two Moons notched an arrow and fired it high into the sky. firing a second before the first impacted. He paused as he noted the people moving forward with the skulls. He put down his bow and opened the satchel he’d taken from Bloody Knife. He removed the skull, gasping as it burned his flesh, and moved forward. Crazy Horse
Crazy Horse turned to the south. Toward the firing. His warriors spread out on either side. He could hold them back no longer. Their vengeance against those who had invaded their land, killed their families, brought disease and death, was unstoppable now. Crazy Horse reached into the satchel tied to his pony and pulled out the talisman given by his “brother.” He kicked his pony in the side and raced forward. Sitting Bull Sitting Bull halted, fifty yards short of the last stand being mounted by the whites. He could see the Son of the Morning Star, still alive but wounded in several places, leaning back against the saddle of a dead horse. Bouyer saw Custer also. He stopped next to Sitting Bull as Buffalo Calf Woman and Walks Alone joined them. The skulls seemed to sense each other’s presence, their glow becoming brighter, unbearable to gaze on directly. And then Crazy Horse and three hundred warriors crested the hill behind the last stand and swept down. The Space Between Worlds and Times The dolphin Rachel leapt out of the dark water and landed with a splash directly in front of Eric Dane and Amelia Earhart. The Space Between was the name Earhart had given to this strange place--a transit point for the portals between parallel Earth timelines and time itself, consisting of a circle of black land surrounding the Inner Sea which they were on, enclosed inside what appeared to be a massive semicircular cavern. “Let’s go,” Dane said. He didn’t wait for a reply as he moved forward in the Valkyrie suit, floating ten feet above ! the water, following Rachel’s dorsal fin. The dolphin paused, arched her back so she could see that they were following, and then continued ahead. They were both ensconced in the hard, white suits that they’d stolen from the Shadow’s emissaries. Dane saw their destination. A narrow portal column, streaked with red, flickering to solid black, then gray with red, then black, still filled with the red lines. “That’s not a locked-in portal,” Earhart said. Dane didn’t respond. He moved forward, hit the portal and disappeared.
Earhart followed. Little Big Horn “Angels,” Custer whispered. “Come to rescue” me.” He dropped the pistol he couldn’t fire and reached up with ! both hands toward the white figures that had just appeared in front of him. All around the dying colonel were the dying remnants of half of the Seventh Cavalry. *********** Dane saw the massacre all around as a wave of several hundred warriors washed over the vestiges of Custer’s command. But all veered away from the strange vision of ! he and Amelia Earhart in the Valkyrie suits and Custer nearby with a glowing skull in his lap. Dane slowly turned and saw a handful of people approaching, glowing blue skulls held in their hands. He raised his white arms wide, welcoming them, spreading ! out the metal net he had taken from the sphere. The screams of the last dying soldiers echoed in his ears. He didn’t want to believe he’d become jaded to death; he wanted to believe that this battle had been inevitable anyway and he was here to cull something good out of a futile massacre. Sitting Bull walked up and dropped the glowing skull into the net. Then Buffalo Calf Woman. Walks Alone. Crazy Horse. Gall. Two Moons. And then Mitch Bouyer with two skulls. Eight. “Eric.” Dane had almost forgotten Earhart was with him. He turned. George Armstrong Custer was looking at him. His face Was pale, his body wounded in several places. “The ninth,” Earhart said. Custer was the only one of ! his command left alive. And on his lap was the ninth skull. Dane felt Custer’s shock and confusion. ‘’Take it,” he ordered Earhart.
With a clawed hand she reached down and lifted the skull from Custer’s lap. Dane wanted to say something to those around, but he knew the portal might not last. He turned to it, hit the blackness and disappeared. Behind him Amelia Earhart hesitated. Her thoughts and feelings were jumbled. She saw her lines in Bouyer’s face. Her son, but not her son. Standing on a hillside littered with bodies. He was half of one people, half of the other. What would happen to him, she wondered? He didn’t even know who she was. The portal flickered and she entered it. *********** Dane Went directly to the sphere’s power room carrying the skulls. Earhart took her place in the control room, entering the command Pod. There was no need for them to talk, to discuss what came next. Staying in the Valkyrie snit, Dane removed the nine glowing skulls and placed them in the alcoves that were on the same level as the portal map. When he was done, he went to the center and exited the suit; The power flowing in from the skulls was intense, much stronger than What he had just experienced from the crew of the doomed submarine Nautilus from another Earth timeline who had given their lives to get him this far. He let his hands flow among the portal strands, letting his own timeline attract them with its draw. His hands wrapped around a strand that felt familiar in a way he couldn’t explain. Then he realized he’d touched this one before, when he’d cut off the portal the Shadow had been using to drain power from his world, this sphere had come through. “I’ve got power,” Earhart said. “I see the portal. It’s big enough. You’re sure it’s the one back to your timeline?” “I’m not sure of anything,” Dane said. “But, yes, this is the one.” The sphere bit the portal, rocked, bounced and then Dane almost fell off the pedestal as the craft canted hard right. “Whoa!” Earhart called out. “I’ve got it.” The floor leveled. “Deploying panels and releasing the ozone.”
********** On board the FLIP, Foreman, Dane’s CIA boss, was one of the first to get the reports of the massive sphere reappearing. A dozen military and research aircraft from various countries were within range of the craft and they immediately vectored in. ********** “What are we going to do about the radiation?” Dane asked. “We’re heading north now,” Earhart reported. “You just keep the power coming. I’ll take care of it. We’ve discharged all the ozone we picked up. And keep that gate open.” ********** At McMurdo Station in Antarctica the surviving scientists couldn’t believe the data their instruments were recording. It wasn’t just a reprieve for them; it was a reversal of the damage to the ozone layer that had been done for decades previously. The Shadow’s attempt to destroy this Earth timeline by completely stripping the atmosphere of ozone had failed. ********** Moscow was a ghost town, millions having fled the inevitable wave of radiation from Chernobyl being born by the winds. The front edge had passed through the suburbs and now threatened the city itself. A handful of dedicated soldiers stayed at their stations, manning the nuclear launch control center, the air defense monitoring station, and other key facilities, which had NBC protection capability. They would stay there as long as they could remain buttoned up and survive. The air defense monitoring station was the first to pick up the image of the sphere as it approached from the south. The size of the image was so overwhelming the general in charge had no idea what to do. **********
Earhart brought the sphere and its miles of deployed panels down to a level where they wouldn’t hit the highest object. “How’s the power?” Dane looked at the nine skulls. Five had already gone blank, while four still glowed. “We’re under fifty percent.” “Damn.” Earhart knew the controls of this ship. It was Something she hadn’t wanted to discuss with Dane because she didn’t know how she knew. Whether the Ones Before had planted the knowledge in her somehow or, more darkly, she had piloted this craft sometime in the past and didn’t remember, she had no idea. She pushed a button to her extreme left. The panels crackled with energy, drawing the radiation in the air toward them. the sphere and panels swept through the sky above Russia in long, fast S-turns, cleaning the air of death, heading toward Chernobyl, which the Shadow had completely destroyed after draining all the reactor cores of their power. “We’re getting hot inside the cargo bay,” Earhart informed Dane. “We don’t have much power left,” Dane replied. “How much longer?” “I think we got it,” Earhart said, checking the displays. “Most of it at least. I’m heading back toward the portal and bringing in the panels so we can go faster.” As the sphere accelerated, the panels began folding on themselves. Eight of the skulls had been drained of the energy put into them at such cost. Only one still glowed. Dane was staring at it as if he could keep the power flowing from it with simply his will. Perhaps he could, he suddenly realized. He was one of the chosen. He realized he had the power if he was willing to make the sacrifice. He had asked others to make sacrifices. “Eric.” He lifted one hand out of the portal map and extended it toward the line of blue power that flowed from the skull to the map. “Damn it, Dane. We’re almost there. What are you doing?” He put his hand into the flow. His head snapped back as if he’d been shot in the forehead. He was only kept from falling by his one hand still gripping the portal end of his Earth timeline. The sphere hit the portal with a jar that knocked Dane to the other side, pulling his hand out of the power flow. Unconscious, he let go of the portal map and collapsed to the floor.
“We made it,” Earhart’s voice echoed inside the Valkyrie suit. “Dane? Eric, are you there?” Little Bighorn Sitting Bull There was firing to the south, where Reno and Benteen’s troops were dug in on top of a knoll. They didn’t have access to water and Sitting Bull knew it would only be a matter of a couple of days before they became dehydrated and desperate. They were not his immediate concern. He looked over the battlefield strewn with the dead blue-coats and crowded with his people. All had gathered round, staring up at him. The two ghosts had just disappeared into the black with the glowing skulls. Such a thing none here had ever seen, and all knew they had witnessed powerful medicine. For the first time in his life, Sitting Bull was at a loss for words. He could see Crazy Horse and the strange half-breed who had brought the skulls whispering together. “My people-” Sitting Bull began, but he still could not summon the words that had always flowed so easily. Thus he gave way when Crazy Horse surprisingly came forward. The one who never spoke in front of groups. Who let his actions speak. Crazy Horse stood next to Sitting Bull looking around at the thousand faces looking back. Warriors, squaws, children. Many covered in white man’s blood. He too heard the shooting to the south where warriors kept the other blue-coats trapped. This was a great victory indeed, but-yes. Even Crazy Horse could finally accept the but--they had destroyed only half of the Seventh Cavalry. And there was another column of blue-coats coming from the north with even more men than Custer had. And there were more, an ocean of soldiers to the east ready to sweep west. For the first time in his life, Crazy Horse saw the truth, the reality. “What happened today,” Crazy Horse said, his powerful voice easily carrying over the crowd, “the magic you have witnessed, must never be spoken of. Even among us. And you would be Wise not to speak of this battle at all to the whites. For they will come thirsting for vengeance for the Son of the Morning Star and the others who lie here.” He swallowed, looked at his “brother” who met his gaze steadily, then continued. “We must leave. Separate and go our own ways. And make peace with the whites when they offer it.”
There were no cries of dissent. The magic all had witnessed had been too powerful, too full of portent. “If we continue to fight,” Crazy Horse continued, “we will all die. We will become as extinct as the great buffalo. We used to see the plains covered with them as far as the eye could reach. They would pass by our encampments for days on end. Now we must search long and hard for a small group. If we continue to fight we too will come to an end.” He waved toward the west. “Go. Separate. Hide from the whites. And when they offer peace, take it. It is not a good thing. It is not what I or you would want. But it is what will happen.” Crazy Horse walked down. Past the horse against which Custer lay dead, up to his “brother.” “Go in peace. Talk to the white chiefs. Tell them it is over.” The Space Between Earhart floated into the power chamber which was lit only ?~ a dim gold glow from the portal map. She saw Dane lying at the base of the portal pedestal. “Eric?” Dane slowly opened his eyes. “Are you all right?” Dane nodded, grimacing with pain. “We must take the fight to the Shadow.” “How do we do that?” “First, we find the Ones Before.” Before Earhart could ask the same question, Dane continued. “I sensed something in the portal. I think I can get us to them.” “And then?” “We find out the truth about this war and who the Shadow is. And we end the war and the Shadow.”
>I;$C8Q9$ (link to Who Dares Wins Publishing)
Prologue THE CHAMBER CONTAINED ENOUGH ENERGY TO DESTROY the planet five times over. More than two kilometers in diameter, one kilometer from floor to ceiling, and three times that depth under the planet's surface, it echoed with the crackle of directed power beams, all focused on a black sphere dancing in the center, just above the metal floor. The sphere was fifty meters in diameter and did not appear to be made of any solid substance, but rather contracted and expanded in a rhythmic pattern. Halfway up the far wall, a half-kilometer from the sphere, a recessed window slid open, revealing a control room lined with consoles. Three figures dressed in long black flowing robes stood. Wires flowed from the back of the hoods to the glowing screen in front of them on which the thoughts each wished to express were displayed in a manner all could understand. "It is time for run four-five, " the figure on the left communicated. "Proceed," the one in the center ordered. The power beams shifted across the color spectrum as the levels were increased. The sphere slowly began to change its own shade, the pitch-black gradually changing to gray then fading away until an image appeared, incongruous among the technology and power of the cave: an aircraft hangar, the edges abruptly cut off where they met the edge of the power of the sphere. Inside the hangar, an old man in a military style uniform waited patiently. "What is the location?" The figure in the center asked. "Coordinates two-three-five-eight dash four-eight-three-four. A town called Leesburg, in the state of Virginia, in the country called United States." "Local date, time group?" "Nineteen ninety-one. The twenty-second day of the sixth month. Two forty-seven local time. " "Continue tracking." A MILITARY TRUCK SUDDENLY APPEARED IN THE SPHERE, bumper first, the
entire vehicle filling out as it entered the power frame. A man jumped off the truck, wearing unmarked black fatigues and carrying a weapon. He greeted the general with a handshake. "It's good to be back, sir." The general slapped him on the shoulder. "Good to have you back, Captain Hawkins. I've got the transcript of your in-flight debriefing and the President is very satisfied with the results of your mission." The man nodded wearily and watched as his three men threw their rucksacks onto the floor of the hangar and secured their weapons with the unit armorer. "I'd like to give the men some time off, sir." The general nodded. "Take a week and then give me a call. I'll put Richman's team on standby alert." "Thanks, sir." "Damn good job, man." With a slap on the back the general was gone, walking out of the range the sphere could see. The captain gave his men the good news and the figures dispersed one by one until only he was left standing there. He finally moved out himself, heading toward the hangar door that glimmered in the light of the sphere. THE FIGURE ON THE RIGHT GAVE THE FACTS. "Hawkins, Robert D. An officer in the military. Commander of a special-operations team. Program seven-one-three-two. Probability seven-six. Terminal impact projected six-three. " "He's the object. Track him, " the figure in the center ordered. Around the hub of the chamber, the machinery hastened to follow the command in an intricately organized dance of power and technology. THE SPHERE FLICKERED SLIGHTLY, THE IMAGE GOING OUT OF focus, then Hawkins reappeared in the parking lot outside the hangar, walking toward a pickup truck, a young woman leaning against the front bumper. A smile blossomed across her face as she spotted Hawkins and she ran to him, throwing herself into his arms. "I'm so glad you're back!" Hawkins held the woman in his arms for almost thirty seconds. Finally, he stepped back and looked at her. "I missed you, Mary."
"Well, you're back and you don't have to miss me for a while," she replied, sliding her arm through his and pulling him toward the pickup. "Let's go home. I've got something special planned for you." "TIME LINE?" THE CENTER FIGURE INQUIRED. "Three minutes, thirteen seconds, " the figure on the right answered. "Keep us on line. " WITH HAWKINS AT, THE WHEEL THE PICKUP TRUCK ROLLED OUT of the parking lot. "KEEP TRACKING!" The power being fed to the sphere surged as the automated machinery struggled to maintain pace with the truck. The vehicle appeared to be stationary, caught in the center of the sphere, the two-lane road sliding beneath its wheels, the countryside suddenly appearing at one end of the sphere and flickering by to disappear at the other end. THE ENTIRE CHAMBER SHUDDERED, EVER SO SLIGHTLY. THE center figure's hood twitched upward toward the metal-reinforced ceiling. "Report?" There was a slight pause and then the figure on the left spoke. "A strike on the fourth perimeter. Magnitude three point three. Security is holding at level eight. Risk factor up to onethree. We are secure. " Attention returned to the sphere. Every few seconds the image would fade and then regain its sharpness as the technicians struggled to keep track of the vehicle. "Time line?" "One minute, ten seconds." "Maintain. " THE PICKUP TRUCK TURNED ONTO A TWO-LANE HIGHWAY, Mary Hawkins leaned across the front seat and nuzzled up to her husband's right side. White teeth flashed as she nipped his earlobe.
"Hey, that's not fair." Hawkins laughed. "THIRTY SECONDS, " HAWKINS LET GO OF THE STICK SHIFT AND WRAPPED HIS right arm around his wife, pulling her tight against his body. "TEN SECONDS," THE PICKUP TRUCK WAS ROUNDING A curve in the sphere, the road appearing to the watchers as it did to the man behind the wheel. HAWKINS REACTED, SLAMMING HIS FOOT ON THE BRAKE and twisting the steering wheel with his left hand. The right front end of the pickup truck smashed into the rear of the stalled tractor-trailer rig with an explosion of glass and metal. Hawkins was thrown forward against the seat belt and just as abruptly slammed back against the seat in recoil. Mary Hawkins was ripped out of the desperate grip of her husband's right hand and her head thrust into the windshield, forming a flower of cracked glass as her chest crumbled against the unyielding plastic of the dashboard. "Call an ambulance!" Hawkins screamed as he slowly pulled Mary back and laid her down on the seat. She was unconscious, her breathing coming in labored gasps. Hawkins gently slipped his hand around her head and cringed as he felt the blood slowly flowing out. He carefully pressed his hand up against the wound and held her head still. THE TABLEAU APPEARED FROZEN IN THE SPHERE. THE FIGURE in the center finally spoke. "End four-five. Proceed with four-six. " The image of Hawkins holding his wife in his arms faded as the sphere turned black and the power shifted.
INITIATION Vredefort Dome, South Africa 17 DECEMBER 1995,0315 LOCAL 17 DECEMBER 1995, 01 15 ZULU WITH EACH MILE TRAVERSED TOMMY MEDUBA FELT THE death force, rise up in him. Lona leaned over and crooned his name and whispered of warriors and revenge as the sweat slowly dripped down his body, splashing unseen onto the floor of the truck. Blood pounded in his temples, the sound of the truck's engine faint in his ears. Lona had searched him out and found him in the gutter yesterday, covered with dirt, sweat, and blood. His brother was dead and there was no family left to him, so he'd bought eight cartons of Bantu beer and tried to obliterate reality. Lona and Nabaktu had offered him another way-a warrior's way that would strike back at the killers of his brother. The drugs she'd given him had done something to his body. He'd never felt like this before. He could barely feel the bumps as the truck negotiated the din road leading to the back entrance to the mine, but he could acutely feel Lona's hand on his arm. He wanted to avoid her dark eyes staring intently at him and not hear the words she mouthed. He ran his eyes around the enclosed interior, taking in the large crate squatting in the center, but again his eyes flickered back up to hers and his ears listened as if he had no control. "Soon you will be the greatest warrior. Your name will be spoken of across the land with the deepest respect. You are a man-not an animal. You must die a man's death, not lie in the street like a dog. You must avenge your brother." A small part of Tommy's brain wanted to think, but it would require too much energy. The truck came to a halt with a squeal of brakes. The tarp covering the tailgate was thrown back and a large figure dressed in traditional robes appeared, silhouetted against the night sky. "It is time to go." Lona leaned over and placed something in front of Tommy's face. He snorted reflexively and felt the power kick in. Tommy looked from Lona to Nabaktu. Their eyes were locked on him, willing for him to move. He stood and stepped out of the truck.
Security was oriented inward at the entrance and that was logical. The powers-that-be were concerned with what could be taken out of the mine, not with what could be taken in. The long line of dust-covered workers emerging like moles from their twelve-hour shift below the surface was subjected to strip searches by guards with cold hands and blank eyes. At random, a few men were having their bodily cavities invaded by gloved fingers, probing and searching. Behind the initial row of security, personnel looking for the gold were other guards watching the searchers. And above the second rank were video cameras, overseeing the watchers. And all that redundancy was logical, too, as this toothless opening less than eighty miles southwest of Johannesburg led to great coiled intestines of gold and uranium-laced rock. Tommy had been working here for eight years, six days a week, in twelve-hour shiftslong enough that any other existence before the mine was forgotten. He smothered his hatred and tried to avoid looking at the guards as he went past. That most of them were black also didn't matter. Some of these same guards had beaten his brother to death two days ago after finding a piece of rock in his pant cuff. No matter that it could have gotten there by accident. No matter that it contained no gold. The rule was that nothing came out that hadn't come in. When done they'd thrown his brother's body into the putrid shaft of an abandoned mine where all the other bodies had been dumped over the years. That the guards who had beaten his brother to death were Xhosa did matter very much to Tommy--they were the favorite of the ANC and the change in power had brought little change to the mines-and the Sothos, of which Tommy was a member, migrant workers from Lesotho, still suffered at the hands of the overseers. Night or day mattered naught in the black holes of the mines. The caged electric lights strung along the rock roof cast a dingy glow on the dark, perspiring bodies below as the line of arrivals trudged forward. Their shift started at three, but they weren't paid for the time spent getting there-only the toil of their hands started the clock. Tommy Meduba was pouring sweat also as he drove the small electric cart at a walking pace down the right side of the double set of rails. He was on the ground level leading to the massive elevator that would carry the cart and forty workers down into the depths. Tommy was sweating not so much from the thick air and scorching heat, though: Large beads of perspiration beaded his skin, forming rivers that gravity dragged down his body, because this was to be his last night alive and he hadn't assimilated that concept.
No guard spared him or his cart more than a glance as he rumbled onto the wrought-iron floor of the elevator. With a slight start, and then a steady stuttering, the platform descended. Dank rock walls on four sides guided them straight down. For twenty-four minutes, at a steady pace of more than four hundred and seventy feet per minute, they went down. They had to switch elevators twice and use horizontal tunnels that pushed them more to the southwest. More than two and a quarter miles into the earth. Straight to the heart of the richest vein of gold and uranium in the world: the Red Streak, a treasure trove that angles under the mystifying geological feature known as Vredefort Dome, so many kilometers directly above. Never before had a mine been dug so deep and so directly under the Dome itself. But the upper regions had been plundered for more than a hundred years, forcing the engineers to probe and invade the earth farther down into the dark nether regions in search of their mineral gods. The Red Streak had been touched less than three years previously and had already produced two thousand tons of gold bullion and a classified amount of uranium. Gold and uranium were the fuel that ran the South African economy, and Tommy was the cutting edge of a plan bent on stopping that engine and gaining the notice of the ruling ANC. He glanced over his shoulder with deadened eyes at the bulky metal container perched on the small flatbed. The casing was stenciled with English, Bantu, and Afrikaaner words indicating: DRILLING EQUIPMENT. It was so easy that even Tommy's drug-infused brain felt a certain euphoria at having gotten in. Nabaktu had said it would be easy. Dear, sweet Lona had whispered it in his ear as she took his body and mind. And they had been right. As the platform came to a final halt, Tommy fought the hysterical urge to laugh at the dulled men on either side of him as he slipped the cart's stick shift into drive and slowly rolled off the platform. A rock foyer beckoned with three dark openings less than twenty meters away. Wealth that would make most Third World nations weep with envy slithered back out of those holes and up the cables to the surface every day. Tommy stopped the cart as the other workers disappeared into the various tunnels. He walked around to the rear of the vehicle and flipped open a panel. Nabaktu had made it as simple as possible, but still Tommy hesitated. A worm of fear pierced the core of his being as his hand hovered over the red button. Through the drugs and the scent of sex a part of his mind rebelled.
TWELVE MILES AWAY, ON THE SLOPE LEADING TO THE EDGE of the Witwatersrand Basin, Kamil Nabaktu swiveled his pitch-black irises from the fluorescent dial of a cheap Mickey Mouse wristwatch to Lona. "He's down by now." The two were crouched in a thicket of scraggly, stunted trees that had never known enough water, just as Nabaktu's people had never known enough freedom since April 1652, when the first white men had set foot to stay on the southern end of the Dark Continent. They had hoped it would change in April and May of 1994, when the whites had amazingly given up power, but from their perspective, huddled in the shacks among the other tribal minorities, little had changed. In reality, the fact that the face now in charge in Pretoria was black made it all so much more galling. "He is a weak man," Lona said. "You should have let me take it." "No women in the mines," Nabaktu replied patiently. They'd had the argument hundreds of times. He checked his watch again. At the very least he hoped Tommy had gone down. If not, things were going to get very ugly, very soon. Twenty men had died sneaking gold out to pay for the bomb-Tommy's brother one of them. It had taken them a year to accumulate enough. This was the end result of that blood. "Thirty seconds." TOMMY LOOKED BACK TO THE ELEVATOR, HIS MIND SCURRYING through various options. He took his hand away from the red button and breathed a sigh of desperate relief. He shook his head, trying to clear the fog demons that were scampering about, dulling his brain. His eyeballs felt as if they were going to pop out of his head as he considered his position. He knew he was dead regardless. He couldn't go up. The guards would want to know why he wasn't on his shift. He couldn't go into one of the tunnels and take his normal place, because sooner or later someone would wonder what was on board the abandoned vehicle, and when they looked, there would be hell to pay. A soft click caught his attention and Tommy glanced down. His eyes widened even more as he watched the red button slide down of its own accord into the metal plate. Tommy never saw the plastic reach the bottom as he became a small patch of molecules vaporized by the nuclear blast that flashed into the rock around, which in turn dissolved and flowed.
THE EARTH BURPED, NABAKTU LOOKED AT LONA AND THEN out into the dark night again. He'd expected more Still, it was more than two miles down. "Let's go." He grabbed Lona's arm and they sprinted back the way they had come so many hours earlier. To the truck where the two waiting men threw questions at them. Could that small earthquake have been it? That's all? Where was the cloud? Nabaktu ordered them silent and they sped away down toward Soweto Township to hide among the hundreds of thousands huddled there in the cheap shacks. AND BELOW THE DOME, TWO MILES DOWN, THE ROCKS took hours to cool and congeal; microscopic bits of foreign matter that had once been men joining the minerals and stone. Deep Space Communication Center, Site 14 Vicinity Alice Springs, Australia 1 7 DECEMBER 1995, 1330 LOCAL 1 7 DECEMBER 1995, 0400 ZULU THE SUN BAKES THE SANDY SURFACE AROUND Alice Springs, the intense heat causing the light to wave] and bend. The only humans native to the Australian Outback-the Aborigines-did so through hundred! of generations of adaptation to their harsh environment. Life for them was finding water and food. Australia is the oldest, flattest, and driest continent, equal in size to the continental United States. The Aborigines are estimated to have been there for more than thirty thousand years. For all those years they were completely isolated from the rest of the world. The ancient Egyptian empires, Rome, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Industrial Age-all came and went and the Aborigines remained the same until the coming of the white man. When the first Aborigines arrived in Australia, the center of the continent was fertile, containing lush jungles and swamps. The present Red Center was born approximately ten to twenty thousand years earlier when the world's climate changed and the land dried up. As many plant and animal species died and were blown away by the harsh weather and terrain, the Aborigines adapted and survived.
The white man was an extreme latecomer to Australia when Captain Cook landed at Botany Bay in 1770. It took another hundred years before the first white men managed to cross the Red Center, going from Adelaide in the south to Darwin in the north. In the process of accomplishing this, many white men lost their lives, wandering through the deserts in desperate search of water and relief from the brutal sun. The overland telegraph line was built in the late nineteenth century from Darwin to Adelaide, and midway across the continent the town of Alice Springs was born to serve as a telegraph station on that line. A thousand miles from the seacoast and five hundred miles from the nearest town, Alice Springs is perhaps the most isolated town in the world. Because of that isolation, in the late 1950s, the United States, in cooperation with the Australian government, established Deep Space Communication Center (DSCC 14) sixty miles outside Alice Springs. The lack of interference from other radio emitters common in the civilized world made it an ideal spot to place the large receivers. This afternoon in 1995 eight large dishes pointing in various attitudes were spaced evenly across the sand, the sun reflecting off the metal struts and webs of steel that reached up to the sky. Thick loops of cable ran from the base of each to a junction box set in the lee of a large, modem three-story building. In that building all the incoming data that the dishes picked up were fed into a bank of computer screens, one for each dish. Inside the air-conditioned comfort of the DSCC control building, Major Mark Spurlock, U.S. Air Force, watched his monitors with the bored gaze of one who'd been here much too long. Spurlock's primary task was receiving classified data from the network of spy satellites that the U.S. had blanketing the planet as they passed overhead, encoding and passing on the data to the National Security Agency at For1 Meade, Maryland, on the other side of the world. The job had been exciting the first two months he'd been here--handling top-secret data and working with the codes--but the novelty had quickly been scrubbed away by the heat and stark living conditions. Spurlock was from a small town in Oklahoma, but even that place was lively compared to Alice Springs. He'd started his "short-timers" calendar last month, checking the day off each evening as he got off shift Booze-readily available at the commissary-was the common cure at the base for the loneliness and isolation, but Spurlock had avoided that trap. He focused on his job, practicing his skill at encoding and decoding, trying to break some of the
simpler codes used in the computer. He could often be found late at night, scrunched in front of his terminal, his fingers tentatively tapping out solutions. He was in the process of realigning one of the dishes to pickup an INTELSAT that was just coming Into range over the western horizon when his computer screen went crazy. A jumbled mass of letters and numbers filled the entire display. His attempts to clear were fruitless. He scooted his seat over to an empty console nearby and booted that computer up. Everything worked fine until he accessed Dish 4, the one he had been realigning. "What's the matter?" Colonel Seymour, the station commander appeared over his shoulder. "Trouble?" Spurlock worked the keyboard. "I don't know, sir. Could be the main drive. I get the same garbage on both screens when I access dish four." Seymour checked the clock. "INTELSAT 3A is going to transmit in two minutes." An abnormality--Spurlock was ready to see Seymour's head start spinning in circles. The Air Force didn't assign people to DSCC because they were highly adaptable to a rapidly changing environment. They were assigned because they could do routine and do it well. As he watched, the figures on the screen began shifting in a hypnotic fashion, the numbers and the letters realigning, drifting from one place to another. He'd never seen anything like it. "What the hell is going on?" Seymour demanded. "I don't know, sir." "Get that damn thing back on line. I'm going to have to file a report if we miss the burst from 3A." Spurlock frowned as he watched the screen. "I don't think it's the computer, sir." He checked the status board. "Dish two's free for a half hour. I'm going to use it on 3A." He gave the proper commands and dish two powered up and turned, lowering toward the western horizon to catch the satellite. "Shit," Spurlock muttered as the screen dissolved into the same shifting pattern. "Something's transmitting on very high power to the west. It's overpowering everything else." "Air or ground transmitter?" Spurlock played with the controls, moving the dish ever so slightly. "I think it's on the ground and stationary. I go a few degrees up and we lose it. Southwest of here." He checked the
status board. "Are there any military operations going on out in the Gibson Desert? Maybe somebody failed to file their freqs with Control and they don't know they're screwing up our receiving." Seymour shook his head. "As far as I know we've got nothing out there, and the Aussies haven't told us anything. " "Well, sir, there's a very high-power transmitter out there and until we get it off the air, we're not going to pick up anything in a twelve-degree arc from the horizon." Seymour ran a hand through his thinning gray hair. "I'll get a helicopter up. If it's that strong they ought to pick it up pretty quickly and get it shut down. Contact Goddard and inform them of the situation." Seymour left the room. Spurlock cleared the computer and accessed the direct satellite modem link to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. >GSFC, THIS IS DSCC 14. WE' VE GOT COMPLETE SYSTEMS OUERLOAD HERE FROM A TRRNSMISSION AT 223 DEGREES AND AN ARC OF PLUS 12 FROM ZERO ON THAT AZIMUTH. WE'RE LOSING OUR DATA AND REQUEST THE OTHER STATIONS PICK UP THE DOWN LINK. There was a long pause-much too long. Spurlock grew worried and repeated his message. The reply was not what he had expected. <DSCC 14, THIS IS GSFC, WHAT ARE YOU PEOPLE DOING? Before he could react, a new message from Maryland appeared. <DSCC 14, THIS IS GSFL REPEAT. WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WE'VE GOT REPORTS
FROM
ALL
STATIONS
OF
HIGH-FREQUENCY
ORIGINATING FROM AN UP LINK FROM YOUR AREA. Spurlock reflexively checked his screens.
TRANSMISSIONS
>THIS IS DSCC 14. WE ARE NOT TARNSMITTING. REPEAT. WE ARE NOT TRANSMITTING. ALL OUR RECEIVERS ARE ALSO OVERWHELMED BY THIS WHEN THEY ALIGN IN THE INDICATED DIRECTION. < WHO IS SENDING, THEN? WE'VE GOT IT COMING DOWN OFF METEOR BURSTS ALL OVER THE PLANET AIMED RT SPECIFIC LOCATIONS. ARE YOU GUYS PLAYING A GAME? > NEGATIVE, GSFC. WE ARE NOT, REPEAT, NOT TRANSMITTI NG. Spurlock paused and rechecked the other screens and the dish alignments. He tapped the keyboard. >WE'RE RECEIVING FROM THE GROUND, NOT THE SKY. A new message from Goddard Space Center. <DSCC 14, THIS IS THE 6SFC COMMANDER. I DON'T KNOW WHAT KIND OF GAME YOU PEOPLE ARE PLAYING, BUT WE'RE GETTING IT ALL ON TAPE AND WE'RE GOING TO FIND OUT WHAT IS HAPPENING. Spurlock typed in another rebuttal with sweaty fingers. >THIS IS DSCC 14. WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS. IT IS HITTING US TOO. I WILL FORWARD OUR TAPES AND COMPUTER PICKUPS FOR YOUR VERIFICRTION. The person on the other end seemed slightly mollified but more confused. <ROGER THAT, DSCC 14. WE'LL CHECK IT OUT. THAT TRANSMISSION IS GOING ALL OVER THE PLACE IN TIGHTLY CONTROLLED BEAMS. WE'VE GOT
MULTI PLE DOWN LINKS AND INTELSAT SAYS THE UP LINK IS IN YOUR LOCATION OR CLOSE TO IT. IF YOU AREN'T SENDING, THEN WHO IS? Spurlock turned and looked out of the large plate-glass windows at the eight dishes and then beyond that to the beginnings of the Simpson Desert that stretched westward for almost a thousand miles. As if drawn by a string his eyes looked upward at the pollution-free air. Something out there in the desert was sending a message, but what? What had the capability to overwhelm their receivers here at DSCC 14 on the ground and at the same time bounce radio waves off the belt of meteors out in space and back to Earth? Spurlock knew that meteor burst was a capability that only the military used-it was the same as bouncing a message off a satellite except the military anticipated few satellites to be up there in case of an all-out conflict. Therefore in the late seventies they'd begun using the belt of meteors farther out in space for the bounce points. As far as Spurlock knew the Australians did not have the capability to do multiple messages with such power. Spurlock slowly typed in his answer. >GSFC, WE HAVE NO IDEA WHO OR WHAT I S TRANSMITTING. WE HAVE A HELICOPTER INVESTIGATING. WILL REPORT AS SOON AS WE FIND ANYTHING OUT. Spurlock leaned back in his seat and stared at the screen. Whatever was transmitting this was powerful and very quick. No human hand could be sending those data without the aid of a computer. The figures danced in front of him, continuously changing. There was something about parts of the message that seemed tantalizingly familiar. Spurlock went to work. He copied a portion and slowed it down, reading the figures, trying to make some sense. He attempted a few simple transfiguration codes. None worked. Some of it looked almost like mathematical equations, but none that he'd ever seen. Another part had what appeared to be a rhythm. That last word stuck in Spurlock's mind and he tried something different. He fed a portion of the data into a different program on his computer. Turning the volume up he ran the program.
He almost dropped his coffee cup when classical music, played at an extremely rapid beat, piped out of his computer. Why was someone sending out classical music in digital form on a frequency reserved for space communication? The music suddenly changed into a country-western beat played at breakneck speed. Then rock. Then back to classical. Then it turned to unintelligible garbage. . Suddenly a mechanical voice spoke. It was speaking so quickly, he could understand none of what it was saying. Spurlock reran the tape, this time slowing it down so it was intelligible. The machine-generated voice rasped out of the computer. "Dos vadanya. An yong haseo. Ma-asalama. Hello. . . ." Spurlock listened amazed as numerous languages, most of which he couldn't even identify, whispered greetings. It struck him suddenly. He spun around and raced over to the bookcase on the far wall, his eyes flashing along the shelves until he found what he was looking for: the master data binder on Voyager 2. He ran his finger down the index and turned to the appropriate page. There was no doubt about it-he was hearing the record that had been placed on Voyager 2 being played back in digital form at high speed. But why was it coming from land to the west? He had no more time to puzzle over the problem as an extremely perturbed Colonel Seymour burst in the door and stormed over to the radio in the room. Spurlock started to explain what he had found, but Seymour cut him off. "Listen to this crazy sonofabitch!" the colonel exclaimed as he turned the set on. He picked up the mike and keyed it. "Rover Two, this is DSCC fourteen. Repeat your message, please. Over." "DSCC, this is Rover Two. I say again. I have located the source of the interfering transmission. It is two hundred miles from your location directly along the azimuth you gave us. We are hovering directly above. Over." Spurlock frowned. "Why haven't they shut it down?" Seymour hissed at him to be quiet. "Tell me again where the source is located. Over." "Ayers Rock. Over." Spurlock frowned. Ayers Rock was the most spectacular of the three great tors of Central Australia, rising out of the desert floor as if some giant had accidentally dropped it there. Spurlock had visited it on a tour after he'd first arrived on station.
"You must mean someone on Ayers Rock. Over." Seymour shook his head at the idiocy of the helicopter pilot as he released the send button. "Negative. I mean Ayers Rock. I've got my skids less than ten feet above the top of this damn thing and that signal is coming out of solid rock directly below me. The needle is off the gauge on my receiver. I don't know what is going on, but something side the rock itself is sending you a message. Over." !
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