Assault on Atlantis

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Amelia Earhart knelt at the edge of the Inner Sea and waited. Taki stood behind her. Naga staff in hand, eyes scanning the shore in both directions. Valkyries rarely ventured anywhere but between their cave and the portals, but one never knew.

Taki didn’t ask why they had come here. As a samurai in training in fourteenth-century Japan, he had quickly learned one never questioned orders. He had been onboard a ship off tile coast of Japan when they were caught in a terrible storm. They were adrift, out of sight of land for more than a week before a strange mist appeared, enveloping their ship. That was the last Taki remembered of the world he had known.

When he awoke he was on this same shore and that is all he and the other samurai from the ship had known since. There were several, people who spoke strange languages already here, and Earhart had arrived not long afterward. Her ability to speak Japanese and organize the group had earned her the loyalty of the samurai and Taki in particular. His last master in Japan had been a woman, the widow of his lord, and he felt serving Earhart was as close as he could come to performing his sworn duty while trapped here.

Duty was all Taki could focus on as he did not understand this place, the strange creatures in white called Valkyries, or the black columns Earhart called portals. Duty and fealty he understood; they were traits that superseded place and time for him.

Taki’s attention was drawn to the inner sea as he heard a splash. A dolphin swam up near the shore, right in front of Earhart. She waded out. Placed her hand on the dolphin’s forehead, and closed her eyes. The two remained still for several moments before Earhart removed her hand and walked back to Taki. With a thrust of its powerful tail, the dolphin headed back out into the Inner Sea.

“We must prepare for visitors,” Earhart said.

“Friendly or enemy?”

“Friendly.”

“How?”

“Come with me.”

The land was dying. Birds were the first to succumb to the invisible wave of death carried by the air. Their carcasses littered the landscape. The next to die were the animals, both domestic and wild. Cattle sickened and expired in their pens, while wildlife, somehow knowing the threat, tried desperately to run ahead of the radioactive cloud, but exhaustion eventually slowed them and the inexorable cloud caught them.

The edge of the radioactive discharge from Chernobyl had now spread more than two hundred miles from the nuclear power plant. Kiev, not far to the south, was a ghost town, the inhabitants fleeing ahead of the invisible death. Minsk, to the north, was in a panic as residents’ overwhelmed limited transportation in their dash to evacuate. Four hundred fifty miles to the northeast. Scientists monitored wind patterns as the government tried to figure out what to do. They could keep evacuating those in the path of the radiation, but how far could they keep running? Where would the people go? How would they survive? And what of the reports of the ozone depletion in the southern hemisphere? Were they just delaying the inevitable? Trading one kind of radiation death for another?

The first humans to experience the inevitable fate of the rest of the world were the handful of scientists working at McMurdo Station on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. They had been studying the hole in the ozone layer for years, ever since the smallest hole had opened in 1972 over Antarctica, and they had revisited every summer.

A dozen scientists swathed in heavy clothes and wearing protective goggles stared up at the bright sun. To them there was no apparent change. Their instruments told a different story. The readings indicated no plant would survive the sunlight long and skin exposed to it would develop cancerous growths in a relatively short period of time.

Cargo planes were standing by to evacuate the base, but those assigned there had already taken a vote based on the reality of the situation. The decision to stay was unanimous.

Dane rubbed Chelsea’s head and then scratched behind her ears. He could see the helicopter from the USS Washington approaching. The super-carrier was to the east, just over the horizon, helping keep guard on the Devil’s Sea gate.

“Take care of her,” Dane said to Foreman.

The CIA man nodded. “I will.”

Dane glanced at the dark wall of the gate nearby. “I’d stay clear of it.”

“You think your plan will work?”

“It’s not my plan,” Dane said. “I only have an idea of what I’m supposed to do. There are others who have to do their part.

The helicopter was overhead, lowering a sling.

Dane was shaking his head as he watched it come down.

“What’s wrong?” Foreman asked.

“This isn’t the way to fight a war,” Dane said. “Always on the defensive, always reacting. It’s what we did in Vietnam. It doesn’t work.”

“When you’re ass-deep in alligators-”

“Hard to remember your original purpose was to drain the swamp,” Dane completed the saying for Foreman. “After we kill this alligator-if we kill this alligator-we need to take the war to the Shadow.”

“How?” Foreman asked as the sling reached them.

Dane slipped it over his head and shoulders then tightened the strap. “I’ll work on it”

The winch started, and Dane’s feet left the deck.