“And the Arctic?” Dane asked.
“That brings me back to Frost once more. After High Jump, Frost went back to poetry for a while. Then, in 1954, he went back to Washington. By then he’d been honored by a resolution of Congress so he had even more status. He went to Eisenhower — one of his friends was a man named Sherman Adams who was Ike’s chief of staff. He told Ike he’d seen visions of strange craft near the North Pole — just like what he saw in Antarctica. Ike, of course, was not too thrilled, especially because we didn’t really know what happened to the missing plane and I wasn’t about to tell anyone what I’d done.
‘’1 was called in and took Frost off the White House’s hands. I listened to him, assured him we’d do something and sent him on his way.”
“And what did you do?” Dane asked.
“I knew the North Pole had been explored. I knew about Peary and Byrd and all the others who followed, but I also knew no one had been under the ice. When the Nautilus was commissioned, I saw my opportunity. It took me four years, and a lot of-” Foreman paused as he searche4 for the words, which Dane willingly supplied:
“Deception and misdirection?”
“Yes. The angle that worked was making the trip a big propaganda boon for Admiral Rickover and his nuclear boys.”
“And did they find a gate?”
“No. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t one there. There just wasn’t one there when they looked. I think there was a gate in the vicinity of the North Pole a long time ago, a gate that led to all the speculation and legends, as the other gates did in other places around the planet.”
Dane considered this. “1 think my vision had to be another time line. One where I think what’s happening here and now, happened there and then. The ozone layer was completely gone. So maybe Frost is there in the Nautilus in a parallel world because a parallel you sent him there? Too late to stop what happened to his world, but not too late for something else.”
Ahana spoke up. “What something else?”
Dane tried to follow the twisted logic. “Frost said he was waiting for a gate. Maybe a gate we could use. After all, we’ve determined that the Shadow uses the gates, but they don’t have complete control over them. The Ones Before seem to influence things somehow, but the biggest thing is we don’t completely understand the physics involved.”
Dane nodded toward the black wall on the horizon. “I’m going to have to go back in. I think we can repair the damage.”
“That’s not much of a plan,” Foreman said.
“It’s as good as any that’s worked before,” Dane replied. We have to reverse what the Shadow has done, and the only way I can think of doing it is by using its own technology.”
“What do you mean?” Foreman asked.
“I saw one of its spheres that had crashed in one of the time lines. I was taken inside. That must have happened for a reason. And the one that raped our atmosphere was dead in the Inner Sea after I cut the portal. Maybe it’s still there. If we could get control of that. we might able to come back here and restore the ozone and sweep up the radiation.”
Foreman frowned. ‘’That’s pretty thin. Even if you could control the sphere, where would you get the ozone? And how would you sweep up the radiation in the air?”
“We take ozone from another time line,” Dane said. “And-”
Ahana interrupted. “So we do what the Shadow has done to us, to another time line?”
“A dead time line,” Dane said. “I’m sure there’s one out there that still has ozone.”
“How can you be sure?” Foreman pressed.
“Because if I’m wrong,” Dane patiently said, “then there is no hope.”
“How about the portals? How can-”
Dane cut off Foreman. “I’m not going in here.”
“Where then?”
“Baikal.”
“Still-” Foreman drew out the word-“how can you know you’re going through the right portals? To the places you need to go? You gave the portal map back to the priestess who brought it to you.”
Dane heard the accusation in Foreman’s tone, but he chose not to respond. He had no idea who the woman was who had brought him the portal map and allowed him to shut the gate in his time line/world in order to save it. But he also knew his wasn’t the only time line being threatened.
“And the radiation?” Foreman pressed when Dane didn’t respond.
“We use whatever they used to take our ozone to take out the radiation.”
Foreman wasn’t buying any of Dane’s answers. “And how can you fly one of their spheres?”
Dane remembered being inside the sphere. ‘’That might be the biggest problem. We’ll need fuel.”
“What kind of fuel?” Ahana asked.
“People.”
CHAPTER TEN
Mitch Bouyer screamed as the knife sliced down the inside of his right arm, severing muscle and tendon. The pain was blinding, and his body convulsed, straining against the leather straps binding him to the tree. He blinked sweat out of his eyes. In the glow from the surrounding fires he could see the black “U.S.” stamped on the leather wrapped around his chest and upper arms. Must be from a packhorse, he thought, trying to keep his mind from the warrior approaching him again.
Beyond the warrior he could see a circular framework of rough-cut poles, connected with rawhide thongs, some of the thongs disappearing over his head to a center pole. Buffalo skulls leered at him from the top of some of the poles. Warriors squatted around the outer poles, staring impassively in. In the darkness beyond them, he could make out the figures of women and children moving about.
A sun dance site, he realized.
He blinked. There was a Lakota woman in the inner circle who was standing close around him. In a flicker of firelight he locked onto her eyes and felt a shock, as strong as if a blade had touched him once again-she had blue eyes, just like his! But she was translucent, as if she were not really there. And behind her, his half-brother, Crazy Horse, staring back at him with a strange look on his face. A white man, arms bound behind him, stood next to Crazy Horse, a white man with dirty blonde hair cut short and a thick mustache and scraggly beard. He wore a tom buckskin shirt with an epaulette on one shoulder, the other one apparently ripped off.
Farther in the distance, Bouyer saw a scaffold mounted in the branches of a young tree. A body, a small body, was up there. Crazy Horse was shifting his gaze between the woman’s image in front of him and the funeral scaffold with the same strange look.
His left arm exploded, ripping his attention from the man. How could cold steel cause such heat? Bouyer wondered with the dwindling sanity left to him. Agency steel. He would have laughed if he could have. Agency steel and cavalry leather.
The warrior held up the knife, showing Bouyer the red blood dripping off the blade, his blood, then lowered it. Bouyer felt the tip touch just below his sternum. He sucked in his stomach, desperately trying to pull away from the blade, the rough wood of the pole he was bound to scraping along his back.
He screamed again as the point punctured skin with a ripping noise. He felt his stomach muscles part. The warrior held a handful of thick, knotted red rope under Bouyer’s face. It took Bouyer a second to realize those were his guts. The warrior yelped-and walked back toward the nearest fire, pulling Bouyer s intestines with him and dropping what he had into the fire.
Mitch Bouyer woke to utter darkness and a feeling of being buried alive, his scream echoing back right at him. He blinked several times, but there wasn’t the slightest hint of light. After a lifetime on the frontier he had learned to trust his inner clock and he had no doubt it was after dawn, yet there was no sign of daylight.