Atlantis: Bermuda Triangle

Chapter 23

Captain McCallum stared at the bodies, noting the gunshot wounds that had killed all three. “Get them out of here,” he ordered.

Sea water dripped out of computer hardware cases and there was still an inch on the floor of the computer systems room.

“I don’t assume we could get any of this on-line,” McCallum asked Commander Barrington.

“No, sir. It will all have to be replaced. I think the assumption was that if this chamber ever filled with water, the sub was sunk anyway.”

“Damn near was,” McCallum said. Seawolf was still on station, in the narrowing band of sea between the Bermuda Triangle gate and the Milwaukee Depth. Normally submariners liked having deep water below them, but the Puerto Rican Trench was a little too deep for McCallum’s peace of mind after their near sinking at the hands of Bateman.

He watched as two sailors wrapped Captain Bateman’s body in a sheet and strapped it to a stretched. “I wonder if he was trying to warn us,” Bateman said.

“Warn us?” Barrington repeated.

“Remember when he first came on board? He told us to be ready to fight without our sophisticated instruments.” McCallum waved his hand around, taking in the now worthless hunks of top-of-the-line computer gear. “We’ve lost pretty much every piece of gear in the ship when the computers went down. But there’s one thing we haven’t lost,” the captain of the Seawolf continued. “We still have the best damn crew in the navy. It’s time we break out the stopwatches and hand-held calculators. I want us to be ready to fight if anything comes out of that gate. Got that XO?”

“Yes, sir.”

While the navy’s most sophisticated weapons system was being forced to go back to the tools that submariners in World War II used to fight, one of the US Air Force’s most advanced airplanes was almost directly overhead, flying a tight racetrack.

The Boeing 767 Airborne Warning and Control System was a more advanced version of the venerable E-3 AWACS that had flown hundreds of thousands of surveillance missions for NATO during the Cold War. The most distinctive feature of the plane was the thirty foot wide radome bolted onto the top of the fuselage. Inside was the Northrop Grumman AN/APY-2 radar which rotated six times every minute. Able to read targets over 200 miles in any direction, the AWACS was able to paint a picture of the entire Bermuda Triangle gate.

Inside the AWACS the crew watched their screens, alert for anything coming out of the gate, while at the same time coordinating the military forces that were converging on the perimeter.

Scores of fighters and bombers flew air cover around the gate. The aircraft carrier George Washington was on station and had the unique distinction of being the first naval vessel to field an army anti-missile unit on its large deck. Several Patriot missile batteries along with their radar system were chained down on the large expanse of deck, their warning system tied in to the AWACS.

It was ingenious and also a sign of desperation. The Patriot was one of the biggest failures of the Gulf War while being labeled one of the greatest successes. While American commanders were crowing about 33 launches equaling 33 SCUD kills, the Israelis sent a high ranking diplomat to Washington to claim that at best, the Patriot had a twenty percent success rate. The reality, the Israelis claimed, was that in modifying their SCUD missiles to extend their range, the Iraqis had simply welded in new section of missile to hold the extra fuel. The result was that the vast majority of SCUDs broke up in flight due to poor structural integrity- many of these break-ups were erroneously claimed by optimistic American commanders as successful Patriot intercepts.

Not only was the Patriot suspect, it had originally been designed as an anti-aircraft system, not an anti-missile system. Even with extensive modifications over the years, even the manufacturer only claimed it was an anti-missile system working against tactical systems, such as the SCUD.

The Trident was no SCUD and the crews of the Patriot batteries and the crew of the AWACS knew that. The Patriot had a max speed of slightly over MACH 3, or about 2,200 miles an hour. The Trident at max speed was moving at over 16,000 miles an hour- a classic tortoise and hare situation.

The hope was that if the Wyoming launched a second missile that two fortuitous things could happen. One was that the launch would be close to the Washington. Second was that the launch would be caught early enough for the Patriots to be fired and catch the Trident while it was still accelerating upward.

It was a plan that fell back on the age-old military theory of throw everything possible’ at the enemy. Not only were the Patriot batteries on board the Washington, but the guns and ship to air missiles of every warship around the gate were oriented inward. Every plane was ready to turn over the gate and engage targets. There was no one among all the military personnel deployed in this operation old enough to have been there, but it was very much the same approach the American navy had used in the latter days in World War II against Japanese kamikaze attacks.

On the other side of the world, Professor Nagoya was caught between loyalties. Foreman wanted the Can oriented full-time toward the Bermuda Triangle gate. Japanese government officials- those in the know at least- were well aware of the Trident launch that had come out of the Atlantic, and they were also aware of the fact that other submarines, two of which carried nuclear missiles or torpedoes, had been lost in their own Devil’s Sea gate.

They were more concerned with the Pacific Rim, than the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. There were many places where a well-placed nuclear explosion would trigger massive earthquakes with subsequent volcanoes and deadly tsunamis, a threat which Japan was particularly vulnerable to. These officials wanted the Can, which after all was built on Japanese soil with a large dose of Japanese money, to exclusively monitor the Devil’s Sea.

Nagoya understood both parties’ concerns but he also thought both concerns were mis-directed. The importance of the Can was not to be an early warning system against a threat they could do little about, but rather to study the gates, to try to unlock the secret of what they were and possibly what was on the other side.

Still, Nagoya had spent enough years working for the government that he knew it best to placate the powers that be. He had the Can switching between the two as quickly as possible, forwarding data to his own military’s headquarters and the Pentagon War Room.

Meanwhile, he focused on studying the mound of data they had accumulated in the last twenty-four hours.

At least until the Can picked up a spike of muonic activity on the north edge of the Bermuda Triangle gate.

“We’ve got activity!” Colonel Croner, the supervising officer in the AWACS announced over the intercom. “Coordinates, four-seven-three-six-eight-one. Lock in all weapons’ systems, prepare Patriots for launch on confirmation of Trident.”

Croner only hoped one missile came out, What everyone was keeping their fingers crossed against was a multiple launch, with the Wyoming clearing all twenty-three remaining missiles in less than two minutes.

“We have a target coming out of the gate,” a radar operator announced. “Vertical at grid. Signature- a Trident!”

“All systems engage,” Croner ordered. “Keep your eyes open for a second launch.”

The Trident ICBM was already shedding its first stage rocket as four Patriot missiles roared off the deck of the USS Washington twenty miles to the north on an interception vector.

At the highest altitude they were capable of maintaining, navy and air force jets were vectored in over the Bermuda Triangle gate toward the path of the upcoming missile.

It was already too late for any of the surface ships to engage with either their guns or their anti-aircraft missiles and those crews could only watch helplessly the battle on the screens in their operations center.

One F-18 Hornet fighter pilot spotted the bright flame from the second stage of the Trident. He turned toward it firing his air to air missiles on straight trajectory as his radar couldn’t lock on the fast-moving target and then pressing his thumb down on the trigger of the 20mm Gatlin gun, hoping that by some miracle something would hit the Trident.

It roared past him a half-mile away so fast he never saw the missile itself, just the flame and smoke from the burning rocket fuel. Then his warning lights went on as one of the Patriots locked onto his aircraft as the most convenient target.

He barely had time to scream a curse as the Patriot hit and the jet blossomed into a fireball..

The other three Patriots were already being outpaced by the Trident and, after expending their fuel, began to come back down to earth.

Unimpeded, the Trident’s second stage fell off and the third ignited.

In the War Room, Foreman watched the explosion of anger and curses from the military men that surrounded him. Once more they’d thrown the best defense they had against the Shadow and failed- this time though, the frustration was doubled by the fact the Shadow’s weapon was one of their own.

They’d known there was almost no chance of stopping an ICBM once it was launched and that knowledge had just been confirmed.

Foreman was linked to the AWACS and he had one major concern. “Colonel Croner, do we have multiple launches?”

“We show no second launch yet, sir. We’re past due for a second missile if they’re firing in salvo.”

Foreman relaxed slightly. This wasn’t the end.

He looked up at the master screen at the front of the War Room. The Trident was now being tracked by Space Command as it moved north-north-east across the Atlantic.

“Projected impact?” he asked of no one in particular.

“Spread pattern, along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge,” an air force officer answered. “This time, much further north, at max-range, four thousand nautical miles.” The officer used a laser pointer. “In the vicinity of Iceland. We won’t know exact touchdown points until the warheads actually land.”

Iceland is a geological anomaly, almost unique on the face of the Earth. It was one of the few remaining land masses still above sea level, produced by the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It is a very young island, in terms of geographic age, still in the throes of change.

The landscape was so twisted by the forces of nature that ravaged it, that it had been chosen by NASA to send the crew of Apollo in 1968 to train on, as it was the one place on earth they felt most closely resembled the lunar surface.

In 1973 the island of Heimaey off the southern coast had to be evacuated after a large eruption by the volcano Helgafell. Earthquakes are common and the island is dotted with hot springs. The center of the island is a high plateau surrounded by mountains leading down to the coast where most human habitation was clustered, between the rocky slopes and the sea. A tenth of the island’s mass was covered by glaciers, the largest being Vatrnajokull, which alone encompassed over three thousand two hundred square miles.

The island had no armed forces, the only military present being that of the Americans serving at the airbase at Keflavik. Thus the only ones who had a warning of the incoming Trident missile were those from the country that had built the missile.

There was nothing for anyone to do except pray these warheads also struck the ocean, as the first missile’s had.

That hope disappeared in the flash of the first MK5 nuclear warhead detonating on the southern shoreline where the Pjorsa River reached the ocean. Ten seconds later, thirty miles to the north-north-east the second warhead impacted. In slightly over a minute, all eight warheads, each one many times the power of the one that was dropped on Hiroshima, impacted and detonated in a line bisecting Iceland, directly along the center of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.

Only five thousand people died in those initial explosions, due to the sparse population in the interior and on the two spots on the coast directly affected.

In Reykjavik, the earth shook and the sky to the east glowed red. Electro-magnetic pulse washed over the city, shutting down almost everything ran by electricity. One hundred thousand of the quarter million people who inhabited Iceland lived in the capital city and most rushed out to the streets, fearing an earthquake, then noting the glow in the sky.

The nukes had hit every thirty miles, close enough that the force of their blasts reached each other. In essence, the bombs split Iceland in half, letting lose the pent up energy of the unquiet earth below.

Magna flowed into the cracked earth, pushing upward toward the surface. One of the bombs had been aimed directly into the crater of a long-dormant volcano. The nuclear explosion took off the top five hundred meters of the mountain. Within minutes, a secondary explosion blew the rest of the top of the mountain off as gasses powered their way up.

In Deeplab, Ariana Michelet was getting live satellite imagery forwarded to her from Foreman through the Glomar Explorer. The center of Iceland glowed red in the thermal imaging and already one volcano was spewing a large cloud of deadly gas into the sky, the trade winds pushing it safely to the north and east for the moment.

“What do you make of it?” Foreman asked.

Ariana knew the CIA man had access to hundreds of experts through the War Room but she sensed he wanted the truth, up front and as quickly as possible. She knew what she was seeing- ever since the previous Trident firing, she had been thinking about possible scenarios and this fit.

“Iceland is going to be gone,” she said.

“Gone?”

“It’s already split,” Ariana said. “Right over the rift between the tectonic plates that it sits on. There’s going to be two dozen volcanoes active within twenty-four hours. While they fill the air with deadly ash, the land mass will begin to collapse in on itself, filling the void where the magna isn’t coming up. Some of the island may remain above water, but I wouldn’t want to be anywhere on it.”

“How long?”

“Thirty-six hours.”

“There’s a quarter million people living there,” Foreman said.

“There won’t be in a day and a half.”