Dane nodded. The things his team had encountered inside the Angkor Gate — monsters were the best way to describe them. “Here there be monsters” —the phrase had always haunted him, every time he looked at an ancient map that indicated unknown, unexplored areas.
The Flip was vertical, the muonic probe two hundred meters below them. Dane felt a sense of urgency, but he kept it at bay-once one entered a gate, time didn’t seem to be an Issue. Not only did the gates move one from world to parallel world, but also along the time line, as had been proved recently when the Thresher, thought to be lost in 1968, returned to the present world. Of course, it had detonated inside the Naval base in Connecticut, destroying other submarines, another assault by the Shadow upon the world.
“After Verne, there was a man named Edward Lytton, who wrote a book called The Coming Race about the inhabitants of the inner world. His were less benevolent than Verne’s. They used a source of power called vril, something so powerful that it could destroy the Earth. And their goal was to conquer the world above them.”
Foreman must have sensed he was moving too slowly to the question that Dane had started this with. But he still didn’t move ahead to the Nautilus and his involvement with it. “In April 1942, a Nazi scientist, an expert on radiation, led a team to the Baltic island of Rugen. They aimed a powerful camera loaded with infrared film into the sky at a forty-five degree angle. The goal was to take a picture of the British Fleet across the hollow interior of a concave Earth. That’s how seriously Hitler took the concept. I’ve found classified SOE and OSS documents about what they found in Berlin after the war, and there were reports of Nazi expeditions to both poles, most by submarine, searching for the entrance to the inner world.”
Dane noted that while still listening, Ahana was typing commands into her control console. Foreman seemed oblivious to his surroundings.
“All this activity, all these writings and reports, all the scientific interest-it couldn’t have come from nothing. There was something up there in the Arctic. I figured it had to be a gate. One that only a few had ever come close to, given the remoteness of the location.”
“But the North Pole’s been explored,” Dane said. “If there was a gate there, don’t you think it would have been reported? If my history is correct, didn’t Admiral Peary get there early last century?”
“Apri11909,” Foreman said. “Although there is some argument whether he actually made it to the exact pole or not. And Byrd overflew it in 1926, although, again some say he might have missed.”
“And many others have been there since,” Dane said.
“Yes,” Foreman agreed. ‘’Many have been to the North Pole, but how many have been under it?”
“Thus the Nautilus,” Dane said.
“Thus the Nautilus,” Foreman said. He sighed. “All right. listen.”
Dane felt a surge of anger. He knew Foreman was about to let them in on something important that he’d withheld. The CIA man’s penchant for secrecy was ingrained deeply, after decades of having to fight an enemy no one really believed existed.
“In 1946, Frost came to Washington. He had already won several Pulitzers and was quite popular, so when he began rambling about ‘visions’ be bad, people got concerned. Not about the visions, but about him. However, I heard about it and went to see him. I’d just begun working with a unit called X-2, part of the Strategic Service Unit, what used to be the Office of Strategic Services. SSU was the bridge between the OSS and the CIA after World War II when demobilization was wiping out a lot of organizations. With everything so jumbled and a lot of people opting out of service, even a young guy like me could hold a pretty important slot then.”
Dane could sense Foreman’s discomfort. The logical man had had to accept that which couldn’t be made sense of.
“Frost said he’d seen visions pretty much all his life. At that time I was just beginning to collect reports like this and investigating the history of oracles and seers in connection with the gates, so I listened.
‘’He said he’d had several visions of large spherical craft — very big-” Foreman saw both Dane and Ahana nodding—“yes, as we know, Shadow craft. Frost said he saw one of them above a large, ice-covered land, which to me meant either the North Pole or Antarctica. I’d found a couple reports in the OSS war files of similar things, and I also had access to captured Nazi records, showing Hitler’s obsession with both poles and that he had sent several U-boats to Antarctica during the war. There was even speculation that some senior Nazi officials had escaped there after the war. Also, I’d uncovered several reports of UFOs, although we didn’t call them that then. There were the foo fighters reported by bomber pilots flying mission in both theaters and also quite a few reports from the Argentine military who flew closest to Antarctica.
“So-“ Foreman drew out the word, and Dane knew what was coming next-“I managed to funnel enough data to the Department of Defense to convince them that we needed to go: o Antarctica to check this out. They were focused on the Nazi d exploration angle-I didn’t say anything to them about large flying spheres.
“The Navy dubbed the project Operation High Jump. More than four thousand men. A dozen ships, including a carrier, the USS Philippine Sea. All under the command of Admiral Byrd.”
“Did Byrd know your real suspicions?” Dane asked.
Foreman laughed. “’Know’? He spent the winter of 1934 alone in a hut on the ice in Antarctica. He almost died, and when he was rescued he told a lot of crazy stories that people put down to his trying experiences. But he told me in 1946 bat he saw one of the spheres fly overhead. He described it quite well.”
“And what did High Jump find?” Dane asked.
“I went with them. It was the first time anyone had ever made a real attempt to map Antarctica. We did the most extensive mapping ever and barely covered two percent of the land mass. Two days before we were to return, one of the napping craft disappeared after some strange radio messages.”
“It got grabbed by a sphere,” Dane said.
Foreman nodded. “My guess.”
“And?”
“And it had a nuke onboard with a timer set to go off at a certain time-after they should have been back at the carrier. The crew didn’t even know it was onboard — it was in a crate marked ‘Generator.’ I was the only one who could turn it off.”
“Jesus,” Dane muttered He’d known Foreman was ruthless. After all, the man had sent him on what had turned out to be pretty much a one-way mission into Cambodia. But to put a nuclear weapon onboard an aircraft? “No sign of the plane or the nuke going off?”
Foreman shook his head. ‘’That’s why I know it was taken. If the plane had crashed anywhere, we still would have picked up signs of the atomic blast by seismograph.”
“So if the plane was taken by the sphere, the nuke went off after it was inside.”
“Yes.”
“That might shut a gate, or at least keep the Shadow from using it again.”
“Right.”
“But maybe in the time line I saw this didn’t happen,” Dane said. “And a sphere came through in the mid-1950s and took the ozone.”
‘’That’s possible. I had a lot of luck being able to accomplish what I did,” Foreman said. “If one or two things out of many had gone the other way, I would have failed and High Jump would never have been conducted.”
“Which is most likely what happened in the time line I saw in my vision,” Dane said.
“I would imagine,” Foreman said. “There are a lot of things that could have gone differently.”