Atlantis (3 page)

The Angkor Gate’s legends were more distant and faint, lying off the beaten path of modern civilization and in the midst of a country known as the world's largest minefield; the result of decades of civil and international war. It had taken Foreman many years to even begin to hear rumors of the place and many years more to determine that indeed there was another place on the planet that warranted his attention. Of more significance to Foreman was that the Angkor Gate lay on land, not hidden in the ocean. He called it Angkor Gate because of the legends surrounding that area which mentioned an ancient city in the area, Angkor Kol Ker.

As near as he had been able to determine, the Angkor Gate was in northwestern Cambodia, bounded on the north by the Dangkret Escarpment separating Cambodia from Thailand, and on the south by the floodplain of Lake Tonle Sap, the largest freshwater lake in Southwest Asia. The maximum apexes of the Angkor Gate that Foreman had so laboriously worked out over the years from various sources were all positioned so that the land inside held no roads, no cities and was roughly bounded by streams and rivers along all sides. At maximum it was considerably smaller than the largest opening of the Bermuda Triangle Gate, but held much more potential as far as Foreman was concerned not only because it was on land but also because it was more consistently ‘active’.

The Devil’s Sea Gate was named thusly because it marked the boundaries of the Devil’s Sea. Since it encompassed water like the Bermuda Triangle, Foreman preferred to focus his attention on the Bermuda Triangle. There were also the reports he occasionally received of intense, covert Japanese interest in the Devil’s Sea Gate area. Somehow all the gates were connected and Foreman lived only to discover the true nature of what these Gates were, what was causing them and what was on the other side of the Gates.

“Clearing one thousand feet depth,” the commander of the
Scorpion
, Captain Bateman, reported. “Heading nine-zero degrees. Estimated crossing of line of departure in five mikes. Status all good.”

“Level at sixty thousand,” the pilot of the SR-71 called in. “ETA five mikes.”

Foreman didn't say anything. He had personally briefed the pilot and the captain of the
Scorpion
the previous week. He had made it abundantly clear that timing and positioning had to be exact. He looked at the large clock in the front of the listening room, watching the second hand make another circle. Then another.

“Three minutes,”
Scorpion
called. “All go.”

“Three minutes,” Blackbird echoed in his other ear at the same time. “All clear.”

Foreman looked down. A penciled-in line on the chart represented the
Scorpion’s
course. He knew that three minutes out meant that the submarine was less than a half-mile from the current edge of the Bermuda Triangle Gate along the western line drawn from Bermuda to Puerto Rico. A line on the map of southeast Asia had the SR-71's flight route, and Foreman knew it was ninety miles from the green line, heading in from the south, currently passing over Lake Tonle Sap. He had waited years to do this, watching, until both Angkor and Bermuda Triangle were active to this extent at the same time.

Another circle of the second hand. “Transmitting via HF,”
Scorpion
reported, indicating that the special high frequency transmitter that had been attached to the sub's front deck the previous week was now active.

“Ah, Foreman, this is Blackbird.”

Foreman sat straighter. He could sense a change in the normally laconic voice of the SR-71 pilot.

“I've got something ahead and below.”

Foreman spoke for the first time. “Clarify.”

“A yellow-white cloud. Maybe some kind of fog but it's growing fast.”

“Can you go above it?” Foreman asked.

“Oh, yeah. No sweat. I've got plenty of clear sky. Entering Angkor Gate airspace now.”

“We're in,” Captain Bateman reported. “Still transmitting. We're getting some electric anomalies in our systems, but nothing major. Sonar reports the ocean is clear out to limits.”

“How about HF?” Foreman asked, wanting to know if the SR-71 was picking up the signal from the submarine or vice versa. There was normally no way the HF signal could reach the SR-71 on the other side of the Earth. But the operative word in that sentence, as Foreman knew, was normally. There was nothing normal about either of the locations the two craft were closing on and the whole point of this exercise was to prove a link between the two Gates.

“Ah, I have a positive on the high frequency. I’m picking up
Scorpion’s
HF signal.”

Foreman tapped a fist against the desktop in triumph. The two Gates were definitely connected, and in a way that was not possible using known physics.

He keyed the radio. “Captain Bateman, can you read the SR-71 HF transponder?”

“Roger. I don’t know how we can, but we are. Loud and clear.”

There was brief silence, then a startled yell from the pilot. “What the hell?”

Foreman was leaning forward, his eyes closed. The feeling of triumph faded.

“Blackbird,” Foreman said. “What is going on?”

“Uh, this fog. I'm over it now but it's growing fast. It doesn't look right. I'm getting some electronic problems.”

“Will you be clear before it reaches your altitude?” Foreman asked.

“Uh, yeah.” There was a long pause. “I think so.”

“What about HF from
Scorpion
?” Foreman prodded.

“Still have HF. That's strange. Yeah, it's--hey!”

There was a garble of static in Foreman's right ear. “Blackbird? Report!”

“Shit. I've got major failures here,” The pilot's voice sounded distracted. “Compass out. On-board computer is going nuts. I'm--shit! There's light coming out of the cloud. Lines of light. Geez! What the hell is that? That was close. There’s something dark in the very center. Shit! I'm kicking it to--” the voice broke into unintelligible static. Then silence.

Foreman pressed the transmit button. “Blackbird? Blackbird?” He didn't waste any more time, hitting his other transmit. “
Scorpion,
this is Foreman. Evacuate the area. Immediately.”

“Turning,” Bateman acknowledged. “But we're getting a lot of electronic interference. Some system failures. Really strange.”

Foreman knew the sub would have to complete a wide turn to clear the Bermuda Triangle Gate. He also knew how long that would take. He checked the clock.

“There's something weird coming in over sonar,” Bateman suddenly announced.

“Clarify!” Foreman ordered.

“Sounds almost like someone's trying to contact us via sonar,” the captain of the
Scorpion
reported. “Pinging us. We're copying. Oh no!” he suddenly exclaimed. “We've got problems in the reactor.”

Foreman could hear Bateman yelling orders, his hand still keeping the channel open but the mike away from his lips. Then Bateman came back. “We've got a major reactor failure. Coolant lines down. We've also got something coming this way on sonar. Something big! It wasn't there before.”

Foreman leaned forward listening to the faint voices as the captain again addressed his men in the conning tower. “Jones, what the hell is it? You told me we were clear. That thing's going to be up our ass in a couple of seconds!”

“I don't know, sir! It's huge, sir. I've never seen anything that big and moving.”

“Evasive action!” the captain yelled.

“Sir, the reactor's off-line,” another voice was shouting in the background. “We don't--”

“Goddamnit,” the captain cut the other man off. “Get us out of here, number one! Blow all tanks. Now!”

The voice of the sonar man Jones, echoed tinnily in Foreman's ear. “Sir, it's right next to us. Good God! It’s huge. It's real--”

There was a crackling sound and a few more faint unintelligible yells then the sound abruptly cut off in Foreman's left ear.

Foreman leaned back in the seat. He reached into a pocket and pulled out some peanuts. He slowly cracked the shell on the first one and paused before throwing the contents into his mouth. He looked his hand. It was shaking. His stomach was shooting sharp pains. He threw the shell and peanut to the floor.

He waited one hour as agreed. Not another sound had come through either side of his headset. Finally he took it off and walked over to the radio that connected him to a man who sat on the National Security Council. He had a link between the Bermuda Triangle and Angkor Gates, but it looked like a high price had been paid to gain that information.

THE TEAM

SOUTHEAST ASIA, 1968

The jungle pressed up against the edges of the camp, a dark wall of shivering sounds and shadowy menace in the early evening light. Clear fields of fire had been cut for a hundred meters from the outer perimeter, but beyond that neither eye nor bullet could penetrate far.

“I'm so short I could play handball on the curb,” the team leader told the other three men in the small hootch that served as their home. The team leader kissed his fingers, then tenderly touched the photo of a young woman that was tacked to the wall on the right side of the door. “See you soon, babe.” With his other hand he pulled a CAR-15 off its peg and tucked it to his side as he strode out into the setting sun. A miniaturized version of the M-16, the metal parts of the automatic weapon had a sheen that spoke of numerous cleanings and hard use.

“I imagine Linda knows how short you really are,” the second man out of the hootch said in a rumbling, deep voice to the laughter of the other two men.

“Don't be talking about my fiancée that way,” the first man rejoined, but there was no threat in his voice. He paused, letting the rest of the team catch up. The team leader and oldest of the four, Sergeant First Class Ed Flaherty was twenty-eight, but a stranger would have thought them all older. The war had aged their faces and their hearts, etching lines that were the physical reminders of the fear, fatigue and stress. The men wore tiger stripe fatigues with no patches or nametags. Each one had a different weapon, but they all had the same look in their eyes: the haunted look of men intimate with death and violence.

This morning, Flaherty's face was creased with worry lines, befitting his position as team leader. He was tall and skinny with red hair cut tight against his skull and a green drive-on rag tied around his neck. Given the short hair, the large, flaming red mustache on his upper lip seemed incongruous. His hands were cradled around the CAR-15. Hooked by a snap link to his load bearing equipment was an M-79 grenade launcher. Flaherty liked keeping it loaded with a flechette round rather than the normal 40 mm high explosive round, in effect making the launcher a large shotgun. He had inherited it from his own team leader after his first tour of duty and he'd carried it ever since. He called the M-79 his ambush buster.

On Flaherty's back was his rucksack, a battered green pack loaded with water, ammunition, mines and food. The pack had gone with him on sixteen cross-border operations since he'd joined this specialized outfit. It was as much a part of him as the weapon in his hands.

The next senior man, Staff Sergeant James Thomas, had been on fourteen of those trips, which allowed him to joke about Flaherty's fiancée with impunity. Thomas was the radioman and his ruck was larger than Flaherty's, holding the same essential supplies as well as the team radio and spare batteries. The ruck, large as it was, looked small when placed on Thomas's back. He was over six and a half feet tall and heavily muscled. His black skin was covered in sweat, even here at four thousand feet with the cool evening air swirling in. It was a running joke on Recon Team Kansas that Thomas would sweat even at the North Pole. In Thomas's hands his weapon, the M-203, combination M-16 rifle and 40 mm grenade launcher, looked like a toy.

The third senior member of RT Kansas was Sergeant Eric Dane and both Flaherty and Thomas were damn glad to have him along. Dane was the team's weapon's man and carried an M-60 machine-gun, capable of spewing out over a thousand rounds of 7.62 mm ammunition per second. But it wasn't the firepower he carried that endeared Dane to his teammates' hearts; it was his ability to move stealthily on the ground in the point position and keep the rest of them from walking into ambushes. In three tours in Vietnam, Flaherty had never seen anyone as good. Already, Dane had walked them around four different ambushes, any one of which Flaherty knew would have been the end of RT Kansas.

Dane was of average height and had thick black hair. He wore army-issue glasses, the thick plastic frames marring an otherwise handsome face. He was lean and well-muscled, able to handle the twenty-two pounds of machine-gun without trouble.

Carrying the machine-gun, by conventional tactics, Dane wasn't supposed to be on point, but the firepower was outweighed by his uncanny ability. And Dane never complained, never felt it was someone else's turn to take the most dangerous place in the patrol. Since the second time 'over the fence' when he'd rotated into the position, he'd stayed there. One night when they were alone, Flaherty had talked to Dane about it, telling him they could continue rotating the dangerous position but Dane had said it was where he belonged and for that Flaherty was silently grateful. Dane was a quiet man who kept to himself, but the other two senior members of RT Kansas were as close to him as anyone had ever been.

The fourth man, Specialist Four Tormey, was new. The others didn't even know his first name. He'd been assigned to the team two days ago and the intervening time had been spent on more important things than becoming asshole buddies, such as teaching Tormey their immediate action drills. Tormey also wasn't Special Forces and that was another line between him and the older men. Tormey was an indicator of things to come. Special Forces had lost too many men in the meatgrinder of Vietnam. The people factory at Fort Bragg was only turning out a limited number of trained replacements every year. 5th Group had begun picking up volunteers like Tormey from regular infantry units in-country to replace dead or rotating members.