Another French archeologist, examining Mayan ruins and translating some of what he found, added to the story of Mu. It had been a civilization that ended when two brothers fought for the right to marry the Queen. When the continent was destroyed, the Queen fled to Egypt where, with the new name of Isis, she built the Sphinx and began civilization in that part of the world.
These Frenchmen placed Mu not in the Pacific, but rather in either the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean, and Nagoya believed they might have stumbled across records of Atlantis under a different name and from a western Atlantic perspective rather than eastern.
Looking around at the sophisticated scientific equipment that surrounded him, Nagoya knew there was a tendency for scientists to be very conservative and overly reliant on equipment rather than the power of their own minds. Nagoya firmly believed the human mind to be the most intricate device on the face of the planet, but the one which the least was known about.
The person Nagoya was most fascinated with was a man who was neither scientist or philosopher, but the son of a Kentucky farmer named Edgar Cayce. Born in 1877 and dying in 1945, Cayce left behind a legacy of 'visions’, many of which regarded Atlantis.
Like Plato, Cayce placed Atlantis in the Atlantic. But Cayce provided much more information, gathered while he was in a trance state, about the legendary island kingdom. He claimed that people lived on the island for thousands of years and it experienced three major catastrophes, only the last of which was the ultimate devastation that wiped it off the face of the Earth. Also, Cayce said the Atlanteans were highly evolved, using electricity and flying aircraft. He also spoke of a strange element he called 'firestone’ that generated energy. First mentioned by Cayce in 1933, Nagoya found that early writing very intriguing in that the description given by Cayce of firestone was very similar to how one would describe radioactive materials- and this a decade before the first public recognition of atomic energy.
Nagoya believed there were nuggets of truth in every legend and now that there was no doubting the reality of the gates, he also had to wonder how much truth there was to Cayce’s visions and predictions. Cayce had also said that the first Atlanteans were spiritual beings, lacking physical form. And it was after they began achieving physical form that the troubles began. Nagoya wasn’t sure how much to make of Cayce’s visions but he kept an open mind, more so since the assault out of the gates.
Nagoya had no doubt that Earth had been threatened by the gates in the past as it was being threatened now. And he also believed that although Atlantis was destroyed, that was only a defeat in a battle in which the war had yet to be decided. Somehow, the invasion through the gates had been stopped years ago. And however that had been done, it was necessary to find those same means to stop it once again, even more so now that the Trident had been fired in the Atlantic and the nuclear weapons exploded along the fault line.
Nagoya took hope from the fact that someone on the other side of the gates was obviously on mankind’s side. The fact that Foreman’s man Dane had been contacted by his former team-mate Flaherty both before he entered the Angkor gate and after he was at the ruins of Angkor Kol Ker were positive signs. The return of the Scorpion with the map etched into its metal was also positive.
Somehow, that site marked on that map, which coincided with the location of the deepest spot in the Atlantic, the Milwaukee Depth, was important. And that was the data he was waiting for from Ahana. As soon as he’d been alerted by Foreman about the map on the Scorpion, he’d had the computers that recorded data from the Can focus on that spot almost on the other side of the world, recording the muons that came out of it.
“We’ve centered and plotted the muon emission pattern,” Ahana spun her seat about. “Very strange, sir.”
“How so?” Nagoya asked.
Ahana stood, indicating for Nagoya to take her place. “This-” she said, pointing at the screen- “is the muon level reading. Note that the Bermuda Triangle gate is steady as we’ve always noted. This is the level we’ve been scanning around the world to map the gates. We never noticed anything different until you directed us to do a more thorough search of that specific area. I fine-tuned the sensors to record any muon activity down to one-tenth of the current gate reading.”
Her finger touched the monitor screen. “Note this very thin trace going from the Bermuda gate south? It ends exactly here, the same spot noted on the side of the Scorpion.”
“So they are indeed connected,” Nagoya said.
“Yes, sir. We not only have a longitudinal and latitudinal reading, but because we are reading this through the mass of the Earth, we were able to get a depth reading. That spot is at the very bottom of the ocean. And at that location it spreads and encompasses an area on the ocean floor over eight miles in circumference and a half mile in height that has low levels of muonic activity.”
“What do you think it is?”
“It’s not a gate,” Ahana said. “It’s on 'our’ side, in our world, but it has some qualities like a gate.”
Nagoya knew his assistant did not want to make a foolish guess but one thing he had learned over the years was that no guess could be too wild when dealing with anything associated with the gates. “A theory?” he prompted.
Ahana bit her lip, then spoke. “I think it is some sort of statis field surrounding an open space.”
“Holding what?”
“I don’t know.”
The submarine cut the water smoothly, the special rubberized absorbing material attached to the outer hull leaving minimum disturbance in the ocean it passed through. The specially designed propellers gave off little signature making it the quietest submarine in the ocean. At full speed, this vessel was quieter than any other submarine built simply sitting still in the ocean.
At one thousand feet, the sub had at least another fifteen hundred feet of ocean to spare below it before the modular hull would experience any pressure problems. Speed was perhaps the most important aspect of the ship’s design as its nuclear power plant allowed it to cruise at thirty-five knots, almost forty miles an hour.
The Seawolf was the US Navy’s most modern and most expensive submarine. Designed from first deckplate to the top of the sail as an attack submarine, the Seawolf had one priority mission- kill other submarines. At over two billion dollars cost, it incorporated every advance in underwater warfare ever developed. Not only could it kill other subs with its Mark-48 torpedoes, it was also armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles, enabling it to target 75 % of the earth’s land surface. 353 feet long, the Seawolf was actually not much longer than the first US Navy sub given that name during World War II. However, its forty foot beam was almost twice the diameter of those earlier vessels.
The rear two-thirds of the submarine were taken up with the nuclear power plant, engine room and environmental control systems. The crew of 14 officers and 120 enlisted men worked and lived in the forward third. Not as cramped as earlier submarines, the Seawolf still required a special type of man willing to work in tight quarters and live under the surface of the water for extended periods of time.
An example of the lack of space was the fact that the commander of this ship, Captain McCallum had to hold meetings with his officers in the wardroom where they also ate their meals. There was barely room for the twelve officers- two remaining on watch in the operations and engine room- to fit.
Since their abrupt departure from their home base in Groton, Connecticut, earlier in the day, the entire crew had been wondering what was up. The sub was sailing due south at flank speed. There was also the factor of a strange man being brought on board and kept isolated in the captain’s stateroom since sailing.