Devil's Sea

CHAPTER FOUR

The Ring of Fire encircles the Pacific Ocean, stretching over nineteen thousand miles. It is delineated by the volcanoes and fault lines that are the surface evidence of the split in the crust of the planet deep below. From New Zealand to New Guinea, the Philippines, Japan, arching around to the Aleutians, down the west coast of North America to South America.

The Ring is formed by tectonic plates, a theory that was relatively new in scientific circles, first postulated in the mid-1960s. The surface of the Earth, the lithosphere, is divided into nine major plates and a dozen smaller ones. The lithosphere floats on top of the mantle below. Generally, each plate delineated a continent; all, that is, except for the Pacific, which encompasses several plates. The boundaries between plates produce one of three types of effects. Where two plates were going away from each other, they produced ridges where material came up through the split. When one plate slid under another, a subduction zone occurred. Where two plates moved in opposite parallel directions was a transform fault, a prime example being the San Andreas Fault along the west coast of the United States.

Along the Ring of Fire, all these things had been happening for millennia. It was called the Ring of Fire because volcanoes circled almost the entire Pacific Rim, where plates met and magma boiled up between them. The forces involved in the Ring were staggering in concept, but they played out over eons, rarely noted by man except when an earthquake such as the one that leveled San Francisco in 1906 occurred or a volcano such as Mount St. Helens in Oregon erupted. And those were isolated events, just a fraction of the length of the ring and its potential power.

The Shadow had shown a mastery of manipulating these forces by firing a salvo of nuclear weapons from a captured American submarine at Iceland, hitting along the tectonic line down the middle of the island and literally splitting it in half. It had barely been stopped from continuing the destruction along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which would have devastated the east coast of North America and Europe.

Now, out of the Devil’s Sea gate, off the coast of Japan new lines of imagining probing were reaching, noting the composition of the Ring of Fire, the position of volcanoes and their status, fault lines, and critical junctures.

The Shadow was readying a second assault on the planet.

The probing by the Shadow was not occurring unnoticed. Three miles below the planet’s surface, in northern Japan, a group of scientists led by Professor Nagoya was gathered around monitors, coordinating the data they were getting from the superkamiokande underneath their feet. They were near the top of the natural cavern, their computers, desks, and chairs set on a steel grate that covered a highly polished stainless steel tank sixty meters wide by sixty deep and filled with water. The walls of the tank were lined with twenty thousand photomultiplier tubes — PMTs. The tubes were very sensitive light sensors that could pick up a single photon as it traveled through the tank’s water.

The superkamiokande was a ring-imaging water Cerenkov detector. Cerenkov light was produced when an electrically charged particle traveled through water. The reason the superkamiokande was so far underground was in order to allow the miles of earth and rock above it to block out the photons emitted by man’s devices on the surface of the planet.

While Professor Nagoya and his coworkers knew little about the gates and the Shadow, they did know that activity by the Shadow produced muon emissions, which the superkamiokande could trace. Nagoya didn’t know yet why the gates produced muons or why the muons emitted did not decay as rapidly as physics said they should.

“The Shadow is checking the fault lines,” Ahana, Nagoya’s senior assistant, noted. She was a young woman with the sharpest mind Nagoya had ever interacted with. “Also volcanoes. Just like it did with the Mid-Atlantic Ridge,” she added, referring to what had happened just before the destruction of Iceland.

Nagoya had been studying the gates for years. Only recently, with the assistance of the superkamiokande, was he beginning to understand them. He tapped the screen displaying the lines of probes. “We have assumed that the Shadow is doing this imagining through the Earth,” he said, “but what if it isn’t going through the Earth by traveling on a different dimension or using wormholes.”

Ahana frowned “What do you mean?”

Most of what we know about physics is traditionally based on the dual foundations of general relativity and quantum mechanics. But, as you know, both cannot be right as they are interpreted by their traditional followers; they cannot coexist as formulated. Some say there is a split: that general relativity is what makes things work on a large scale and quantum mechanics on a small scale but such a concept is ludicrous. Where would such a split occur? Is there a magic point in the size of objects at which the laws of physics change?”

“What about superstring theory?” Ahana asked. “The two theories can coexist in that.”

“True,” Nagoya agreed. The fact that Ahana was up to date on all the latest theories was another asset she brought to the program. “And string theory requires we rethink our concepts of time, space, and matter. It claimed that there are many more dimensions to our universe than what we see.”

Ahana held up her hand. “But so far, only at a very small level with Calabi-Yau spaces.”

“Which no one has seen and which have only been postulated with mathematical formulas,” Nagoya said, “Still, if we stop looking at the Earth as simply a three-dimensional object but accept that there might be much to it that we don’t see or understand yet, we might be able to understand there gates better.” He tapped the screen once more. “The muon emissions that come out of the gates last longer than our physics say they should. But are they really any different? Or is it our perception that is different?”

“Relativity.” Ahana saw what he was getting at. “The muons may well be behaving the same as those in a lab, it is just that we are seeing them act differently. That means that time is variable inside the gates and on the other side, as you noted.”

“That would explain the submarine Scorpion reappearing after thirty years and the crew not appearing a day older,” Nagoya said. “I think they were caught in a wormhole between gates. I think the gates are connected in an inner space where time is very much a variable.”

“I remember when Foreman tried high-frequency radio communications through the Angkor gate to the Bermuda Triangle gate back in the early seventies. He was able to make contact when the laws of physics said he shouldn’t have been able to. The HF had to travel through the gates as the waves could not have traveled around the planet. If we could get an idea of the constitution of the world beyond the gates, probe from one gate to another, it would give us valuable data.”

“We could send a muon emitter into a gate and see what happens,” Ahana suggested.

“An emitter and a receiver,” Nagoya said. “We have to see how the patterns intersect. Could you rig something like that?”

Ahana nodded. “Yes.”

“We would have to use the Devil’s Sea gate and the Chernobyl one.”

“But-” Ahana began.

“Yes?”

“The Chernobyl gate is hot. Anyone trying to go in there would receive a fatal dose.”

“All the gates are dangerous,” Nagoya noted. “Sacrifices have to be made in the name of progress.”

Ahana’s normally calm disposition gave way to an expression of shock, but if Nagoya noticed it, he said nothing.

Eric Dane stood on the platform that ringed the top of the derrick in the center of the ship, looking out past the Glomar Explorer below him to the open sea. There was a slight breeze, and the water was calm. The sun was coming up in the east, a glowing orange ball on the horizon foretelling good weather for the day.

The massive ship was idle in the middle of an empty sea. The huge derrick took up the entire center of the ship, towering over it. The Glomar had been built by Howard Hughes in 1973 ostensibly to mine the ocean floor for minerals. In reality, as Dane had learned, the ship was built for the CIA to try to recover the remains of a Russian submarine that sank in deep water under the code name Project Jennifer. The classified reason for this recovery was to get the cipher codes the sub used. Even that, though, was a cover story, Dane now knew.

The Russian submarine the Glomar went after had gone through the Devil’s Sea gate and disappeared for a week. What was on the other side of these gates was something Dane and others were still uncertain about, but there was no doubt there were very unfriendly forces over there in the form of the Shadow. To the consternation of those participating in Project Jennifer, they discovered that some of the nuclear weapons on board the Russian submarine were missing and, even more perplexing, they found bodies on board that were not Russian sailors. One was a Japanese man in his mid thirties, yet he had dental work that dated him to the beginning of the twentieth century. They also discovered that the Russians had sunk their own submarine when it reappeared.

Dane heard someone coming up the metal stairs, but he didn’t turn. He had sensed Ariana’s approach long before he heard her arrival. A new crew had been flown in by the Navy the previous day and pulled up Deeplab and the docked Deepflight. There was no sign of the original crew of the Glomar except for numerous blood trails, mainly centered around the well pool. More casualties to add to a list that was approaching a half million, Dane thought.

Iceland was now only a dozen or so active volcanoes poking above the surface of the North Atlantic. Puerto Rico was still trying to clean up the damage from the tsunami started by action coming out of the Bermuda Triangle gate that had slammed into its northern shore. The sub pens at Groton, Connecticut, were radioactive, and a large evacuation had taken place for miles around after the detonation of the nuclear power plant of the Scorpion. The attack submarine Seawolf was gone, with no trace of the wreckage, although the Navy was still looking for both it and the remains of the ballistic missile submarine Wyoming.

“Foreman wants us back in Washington,” Ariana Michelet said. “He says Nagoya has some interesting hypotheses about the nature of the gates he wants us to look at.” Ariana was a striking woman, the daughter of one of the richest men in the world. Dane had rescued her out of the Angkor gate after her research plane was brought down by the Shadow inside the gate.

“Can he keep them closed forever?” Dane asked.

“I don’t know. From what Foreman said — and he was being very guarded — Nagoya has an idea how the gates work.”

Dane didn’t turn. “Where are all the people?”

“What people?”

“From the ships and planes we saw in the graveyard? From Deeplab? From this ship?”

“On the other side,” Ariana said.

“And what does that mean?” Dane asked.

“We’ll have to go to Washington to see what Nagoya and Foreman have come up with,” Ariana said.

Dane shook his head. “The answer isn’t in Washington, and this isn’t over. All we did was repeat history. We stopped the gates, but they’ll expand again. Next time, I think we need to open the gates and take the war to the other side.”

Ariana placed a hand on Dane’s shoulder. Her father could be considered a modern-day Howard Hughes, one of the richest men in the world and the current owner of the Glomar. His covert relationship with Foreman, the CIA man who had been tracking the gates ever since losing his brother in one during World War II and watching Flight 19 disappear in the Bermuda Triangle gate in 1945, was an example of the devious way Foremen had had to operate for decades before the recent blatant attacks out of the gates had garnered the world’s attention.”

They stayed like that for a minute before she turned to go. “I’ll meet you at the helipad with Chelsea.”

Dane heard her go down the stairs. He stared out over the ocean, but what he was really seeing was a tall Viking warrior standing in the prow of his longship, a large ax in his hand. He remembered the message the Viking had etched into the side of the Scorpion.

“You will be revenged,” Dane whispered before following Ariana.