Atlantis (2 page)

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’d passed a small string of islands which he assumed were 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 two hours of fuel left. He had to make an immediate decision whether to turn back, but now he couldn’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 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, and 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 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 search planes.

“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 Devil’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 man that they fished in the Devil’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 a 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. The man 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 ‘Gates’ 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 expanding, sometimes apparently completely shut.