Robert Doherty
Atlantis: Bermuda Triangle
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bob Mayer is the best-selling author of 40 books. He is a West Point graduate, served in the Infantry and Special Forces (Green Berets): leading an Infantry platoon and then Battalion and then Brigade level Reconnaissance platoons; commanding an A-Team and as a Special Forces battalion operations officer; commanded a training company, and was an instructor at the JFK Special Warfare Center & School at Fort Bragg. He also served in Special Operations Western Command on a variety of classified assignments. He has been studying, practicing and teaching change, team building, leadership and communication for over thirty years.
PRELUDE
Like a thousand mile long crimson snake winding its way across the middle of the ocean floor, a line of magna boiled up from the inner Earth, met the cool water and, in that fiery intersection, built a ridge higher and higher.
In a contradictory way, the mid-Atlantic Ridge grew because the tectonic plates that intersected beneath it were pulling away from each other. Like blood from a wound in the very planet, molten rock boiled forth the wider the planet-long split between the North/South American plates and the Eurasian/African plates grew. This process had been going on for millions of years, since Pangea had split into the separate continents.
In the center of the Atlantic, about 20 degrees north latitude, the split was even more pronounced because there was an intersection of four plates pulling away from each other, both east/west and north/south. This widening process- no more than a couple of inches a year, but multiplied over millennia- had pushed so much magna through that the hardening lava had actually risen above the surface of the water, producing a cross-shaped string of islands, which over more time, rose high enough to connect to each other and produce a land mass almost worthy of being a continent itself.
But it was a continent built over a crack in the Earth’s crust with no firm attachment to the planet other than the line of magna that still boiled through many miles under the surface. This made it very different from the other six continents which were anchored on top of one hundred kilometers of cold rock that made up the tectonic plates.
Between the extremely fertile volcanic soil that covered the land mass, and the bountiful ocean that surrounded it, the pieces were in place for species that could reap the food supplied by both sources to develop quickly. On that central Atlantic land mass, the first civilization of mankind arose. From packs of hunter-gatherers and fishers, to villages to cities, generations of humans slowly gained dominance over their land.
But after civilization was well established a strange darkness appeared in the ocean to the west, devouring any ships that sailed into it.
Other gates’ opened around the planet bringing their own patches of darkness, but the main thrust was through the gate in the western Atlantic. It soon became clear that there was something in the darkness, a Shadow that sought to expand and conquer.
A war was fought that the ancient ones of mankind didn’t understand against an enemy no one survived seeing. The enemy came in the darkness, through the sky, from the water and under the Earth.
And others came out of the gates to help the ancient ones defend themselves against the Shadow. These others called themselves the Ones Before. They gave the people weapons to fight the Shadow with.
The ancient ones of mankind fought a war that spread around the globe until the very existence of life was threatened. And in the climactic battle the ancient ones and the Ones Before stopped the Shadow but the price was high.
The continent in the middle of the Atlantic was destroyed in a cataclysm of fire and earthquake. The resulting tsunamis from that destruction touched every shore on the planet with such devastation that the legend of the Great Flood was written of both in the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Old Testament of the Jewish people on the other side of the world.
The survivors of the ancient ones, a handful of ships, scattered to the four winds and planted the seeds for future civilizations to arise thousands years later.
But the Shadow that came out of the gates was stopped.
For the time being.
Chapter 1
The missile broke surface undetected in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle gate. It was a Trident II, a three-stage, solid-propellant, inertial guided ballistic missile with a range of more than 4,600 statute miles developed by Lockheed Martin for the United States Navy. Trident II was a more sophisticated version of the Trident I, upgraded mostly in terms of having a significantly greater payload capability. Forty-four feet long at launch, it was six point nine feet in diameter, weighed one hundred and thirty thousand pounds at launch and cost the taxpayer over forty million dollars each; which didn’t add in the price of the nuclear warheads in the nosecone.
As it punched into the air, an aerospike telescoped out of the front of the missile, reducing frontal drag by fifty percent. The first stage, made of a very strong, very light material called graphite epoxy, released and fell back into the ocean.
The navigational system of the missile was designed to link with global positioning satellites to confirm location and direction, but this Trident didn’t do that. Its course had been determined before launch.
Six thousand feet up, the Trident came out of the gate into clear air, just as the second stage fell and the third stage motor kicked in. It was already traveling in excess of twenty thousand feet per second.
The third stage burned for forty seconds and then released. The missile still had to reach its apogee and start coming down, but it was already four hundred miles from its launch point.
The first detection of the missile was made by a satellite linked to the US Space Command deep under Cheyenne Mountain outside of Colorado Springs, but it was already far too late as the information was processed and forwarded to the War Room at the Pentagon.
Just after kicking over and beginning its descent, the nosecone of the Trident exploded open and the eight nuclear warheads encased inside separated in their own MK5 reentry vehicles, in a linear spread pattern.
The warheads splashed down into the Atlantic along a three hundred mile long line.
With no detonation.
The warheads drifted down into the relatively shallow water of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge until they touched bottom.
Then they exploded.
“The last time we met, you were pointing a gun at me,” Foreman said.
Dane stared at the old man on the other side of the conference table noting the changes the years had etched. Foreman had aged well, except that his once-thick snow-white hair was thinner than Dane remembered. Foreman’s face was narrow, hatchet-like, with clear eyes. His body was slim, the suit he wore well-tailored. If anything, the old man looked too thin, almost sickly.
“You were lying to me then,” Dane said, reaching down to his left and rubbing Chelsea’s ear. The golden retriever cocked her head and pressed against his hand.
Dane was of average height and had thick black hair, with a sprinkling of gray along the sides. He wore glasses with a thin metal frame, his face angular and attractive. Just over fifty years old, he was as lean as he had been in his twenties when he had last met Foreman at a CIA forward staging base in Laos prior to going on a cross-border mission where Dane’s entire team had disappeared.