Atlantis: Bermuda Triangle

Chapter 11

Dane had always let Chelsea find the bodies on their search and rescue missions. When she went after human scent, it usually didn’t matter whether they were dead or alive- in fact, Dane knew Chelsea could usually smell a dead body more clearly than a live one, depending on the length of time since death. Dane, on the other hand, could only sense the thoughts coming from the live ones and nothing from the dead, so whenever they went into a search situation, he concentrated on trying to save the living while his Golden Retriever located the bodies and Dane marked them for recovery.

But Chelsea was over three miles above his head. And Dane had ordered DeAngelo back into Deepflight, to await the results of his reconnaissance. As he climbed up the ladder in the central corridor of Deeplab, the feeling in his gut reminded Dane of all his cross-border missions into Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War when he had been a member of the classified SOG (Studies & Observation Group) unit. Already a decorated Green Beret, Dane had been drafted into SOG and then his team had been picked by Foreman to run a mission deep into Cambodia to search for a downed SR-71 spy plane.

Foreman had neglected to tell Dane’s team-- Reconnaissance Team Kansas (RT Kansas)- that the SR-71 had disappeared while flying over the Angkor Kol Ker gate. In fact, Foreman told Dane and his teammates nothing. And within minutes of crossing a stream and entering the Angkor gate every other man in the patrol was dead or disappeared.

Dane knew Deeplab IV wasn’t inside a gate. He would have been able to feel that. But something had happened here. He’d felt it while they were descending and he felt it now, a faint image, floating at the edge of his consciousness, like trying to remember a bad dream after a restless night.

Something had been here. And from the lingering sensations, it was something that had come out of the gate.

Dane climbed through an opening in a metal grate, then paused at the top hatches. There were three, evenly spaced around the cylinder. Green, red and blue, level 3. Red 3 was the command sphere. Blue 3 was communications. Green 3 was the escape pod. Dane checked the status board for Green 3. It indicated that the pod was gone.

Dane cleared the safety on the door for Blue 3. Once he had a blinking green light, he began manually turning the handle. It was cold in the central corridor, despite the glow of two electrical heaters, both at the bottom. After thirty seconds, the handle clicked and stopped moving. The light turned to a steady green. Dane pulled the hatch out on pneumatic arms. He pulled himself through the three foot wide opening into the communications sphere.

It was empty. Dane looked at the rows of blinking lights and dials. The overhead light began flashing, and if that wasn’t enough, a metallic voice announced that the sphere was unsecured and the hatch needed to be shut.

Dane ignored both the light and voice. He went over to a console and picked up the phone that linked the habitat with the surface.

“Is someone there?” the voice on the other sounded anxious. “What’s going on?”

Dane stared at the phone in his hand for a second, then put it back in place without saying anything. He went back out, shutting the hatch behind. He opened the door to Red 3, the command and control console.

He sat down in the commander’s seat and swung the laptop computer mounted on an arm in front of him. It was on, a screensaver showing sharks and sting rays swimming across the screen. Someone with a sense of humor must have put that in, Dane thought as he hit the enter key.

The screensaver disappeared and he was presented with an index showing the various parts of the master computer. Dane ran his finger across the touchpad until the arrow was centered over HISTORY. He double-clicked.

He was presented with a new set of choices. Dane choose LOG for his first investigation. Lieutenant Sautran’s voice echoed out of a speaker. It began with his initial confirmation of all system’s positive and everything running in the norm as Deeplab was lowered into the water from the Glomar.

Dane began fast-forwarding, searching for a point at which things got out of the norm. He found it just after Sautran reported Deeplab arriving at its current depth.

“We have a contact,” Sautran reported. “Directly below.”

There was a burst of static, then Sautran’s voice came back.

“It’s ascending. Eight thousand feet below and rising rapidly. Very big. About the size of the Scorpion bogey. We’re trying to make contact by pinging with sonar.”

There were a few moments of silence.

“No reply,” Sautran’s voice was calm. Dane could only imagine what was going through the naval lieutenant’s mind as something huge came up toward them from the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean. “Lou, is it mechanical or living?”

Sautran must have left the Log recorder on as he talked to one of his two crewmembers. Dane checked opened another window on the laptop screen. It showed the status of the members of the crew at the same time of the recording of the Log.

Sautran’s symbol was in the same sphere Dane was currently in. Lou Wilkins, the crew’s imaging specialist was in Green 1, was shown to be on the lowest level, where the main imaging units all terminated. Bob Freeman’s, the habitat specialist, was in Red 2, the habitat’s life systems sphere.

“Uh-” Wilkins’ voice was in the background, coming over the intercom. “Hard to tell, L-T. It’s moving straight up. All I’ve got is radar and sonar. But there’s nothing on the planet that big and alive. Hell, there’s nothing been built that big either. I’m trying-” there was a burst of static.

“Lou?” Sautran’s voice now had an edge to it.

“Five thousand feet and rising,” Wilkins reported. “Geez, this thing is ascending fast. We don’t have anything that can come up that quickly under control. Even the Japanese don’t have anything that-” static again.

Sautran was no longer talking to the Log, leaving the recorder running as he dealt with this unexpected situation.

“Freeman, get out of there. Get to the pod. Everyone to the pod. ASAP!”

Dane nodded. Sautran was doing the right thing.

“Lou, give me something. What is this thing?”

“Two thousand feet below and still closing,” Wilkins reported. “I’m turning on the IR searchlights and imagers. See if we can’t get a look-see at-- Geez!” Wilkins voice went up several octaves. “Everything’s going nuts here.”

“Same here, Lou,” Sautran’s voice was tight. “I’m reading major systems failures everywhere. Life support is-” static for several seconds. “-failure-” static “-diverting-”

The recorder went dead, catching Dane by surprise, his ears straining to try to hear through the static. Dane waited, letting it play out for another minute but there was nothing.

He checked the window that showed crew member status. All signs had also blipped out. Total system failure across the board. Dane looked about the command sphere. He wasn’t an expert, but everything seemed to be working fine now. He checked current crew member status. Nothing. They were all gone. Or their crew indicator sensors were gone. But Dane knew, without having to check the other six remaining spheres he hadn’t been in, that there was nobody on board but him. At least they’d managed to escape in the pod. Dane assumed that the Glomar would recover the sphere once it reached the surface.

He got out of the chair and left the command sphere to climb down and let Sin Fen and Ariana inside.

The National Security Agency was established in 1952 by President Truman as part of the Department of Defense. It’s mission was to focus on communications and cryptological intelligence, a field known as SIGINT, or signal’s intelligence.

While the majority of what the NSA did was highly classified, it was widely accepted that the organization was the largest employer of mathematicians in the world.

One of those mathematicians who had been with the organization for over two decades was Patricia Conners. She’d worked various jobs in the organization from code-making to code-breaking. She’d moved over to remote imagery five years ago and was considered one of the top people in the Agency not only in interpreting data down-loaded from the various spy systems the United States military employed, but in the actual operation of those systems.

Conners was in her mid-50s, a short, gray-haired lady, whose benign appearance belied a razor-sharp mind. She had been become involved in the gates when running imagery from spy satellites at Foreman’s request.

Her office was two floors beneath the main NSA building at Fort Meade. She did all her work through the large computer that took up most of the desk top. On the left side of the computer she had a large framed picture of her grandchildren gathered together at the last family reunion, all six of them, two via her daughter and four from two sons. On the right side of the computer was a pewter model of the Starship Enterprise, the one from the original TV series. Stuck on the side of her monitor were various bumper stickers from the science fiction conventions she religiously traveled to every year, ranging from one indicating the bearer was a graduate of Star Fleet Academy to another warning that the driver braked for alien landings.

In the past week, it seemed like science fiction had become science fact as the assault came through the gates and was only narrowly stopped at the last minute. But now there were triangular shaped gates at locations around the world that resisted every type of imaging that had been tried.

Conners knew about the Super-Kamiokande and right now that seemed to be the primary way they could detect activity around the gates. She had a direct link to the Can and also to Foreman in the War Room. Her job was to maintain a watch with the regular imaging devices on the off chance something changed and they could see in, or, more likely, if something was detected coming out of the gates.

As part of that, she was linked to the Navy’s SOSUS array, keeping an eye on underwater activity around those gates located in the water. SOSUS had picked up the disturbance coming out of the Milwaukee Depth, but the system wasn’t fast enough to allow them to alert the Glomar- besides, Conners knew the Glomar’s own radar and sonar couldn’t have missed picking up something that big.

Conners was running through the programs, making sure they were all running properly when something in the SOSUS data caused her to pause.

She stared at the screen for almost ten seconds before realizing what she was seeing. “Goddamn,” she muttered as she picked up the phone that linked her to Foreman.

Thirty miles to the northwest of Dane’s position, the Seawolf was finally in its designated patrol area on the edge of the Bermuda Triangle gate.

Captain McCallum had the submarine surface so he could maintain a satellite link with the War Room. He climbed the ladder to the top of the sail along with the watch crew. Training his binoculars to the east, he could see the solid black wall that marked the edge of the gate.

Two decks down and to the rear of where McCallum was, Captain Bateman took several CD-Rom discs out of a large bank and stuffed them in his shirt pocket.

He stood up and left the wardroom and headed forward, passing through the command and control room. He noted that the hatch to the sail was open but continued on to the helm.

Three men were seated facing a bank of instruments and displays. A chief petty officer was in a higher chair directly behind them. Bateman watched them for a few seconds, then continued forward in the ship until he came to the combat systems electronic space. Two men were overwatching banks of computer that ran every system in the ship.

Bateman shut the pressure hatch behind himself, the only way out of the room and began turning the handle.

One of the ratings in the room cleared his throat. “Sir, that door is to remain open unless-”

Bateman pulled the pistol out of his belt, turned and fired, cutting off the rest of the sentence and blowing the man’s brains all over the gray painted side of a computer hard drive. The other sailor stared in disbelief, which changed to shock as Bateman fired again, hitting him in the stomach. The man dropped to his knees. Bateman fired again, a shot directly to the heart, killing him.

Bateman clamped down the lock on the handle, insuring that he would be left alone.

Then he turned to the computers, pulling the CD-Roms out of his pocket. He inserted the first one in a laptop and brought up the information he wanted. He used a screwdriver to pull the cover off one of the pieces of hardware and went to work.