“Withholding information,” Foreman clarified. “Lying is too strong a word to be used for the situation.”
They were seated in a conference room inside CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. Sin Fen sat next to Foreman. She was an exotic-looking Eurasian woman, whose past Dane knew little about except somehow she had gotten hooked up with the CIA man and his obsession with the gates. That she had some sort of strange mental abilities, Dane was certain, just as he knew he had some. But the extent of her’s was almost as unclear to him as his own.
Foreman would be leaving shortly for a high level meeting in Washington with the president and the National Security Council to discuss what had just occurred in the Angkor gate in Cambodia and the other gates. The invasion of Earth from the other side’ through the gates at Angkor Kol Ker, the Bermuda Triangle, the Devil’s Sea off the coast of Japan and other locations around the world had been stopped by Dane with the destruction of the main propagating beam of radiation and electromagnetic interference in Cambodia. Beyond that, they knew little more than they had before the bizarre invasion started. Who the invaders were- other than the term the Shadow- why they were invading, where they were coming from; what they wanted; there were many questions that had not been answered yet.
The shocking reappearance of the submarine Scorpion- listed as lost in US Navy logs in 1968- was being kept under wraps, but Dane knew it could not last much longer. They could not explain the fact that not a man in the crew seemed to have aged a day in over thirty years. Nor could the crew explain it. As far as they were concerned, just minutes had passed between the time they last radioed Foreman in 1968 that the reactor was going off-line as they entered the Bermuda Triangle to the moment Dane appeared on the ship two days ago, transported somehow from the middle of the Angkor gate to the submarine.
“Why do you still need me?” Dane asked.
“Because that mission you began thirty years ago never ended,” Foreman said. “Because you stopped the invasion through the Angkor gate.”
“For the moment,” Sin Fen added.
Dane glanced at Sin Fen. Her mind was a black wall to him. Then back at Foreman. There, he could tell more, but not as much as he would have liked. He knew the old man was telling the truth, but he also sensed there was so much Foreman didn’t know or was holding back. Based on his experiences with the CIA operative, Dane knew it was likely a combination of both.
“I put everything in my report,” Dane said.
“Also,” Foreman continued as if he had not heard, “we lost the Wyoming, inside the Bermuda Triangle gate.”
“Other submarines have been lost in the gates,” Dane said.
Foreman steepled his fingers. “Not one with twenty-four Trident II ICBMs on board. With each missile carrying eight Mk 4 nuclear warheads rated at a hundred kilotons each. That’s 192 nuclear warheads. And our friends on the other side, whoever or whatever they are- the Shadow as your man Flaherty called them- seem to have a penchant for radioactive things. We defeated their weapons in this first assault, but we might not do so good against our weapons that they’ve captured.”
“Great,” Dane said. “We get the Scorpion back; the Shadow gets the Wyoming and its nukes.”
“We have you,” Foreman said. “You have some sort of power, some sort of attachment to these gates. You made it in the Angkor gate and out again. Two times. That’s once more than anyone else has ever done.”
Dane simply stared at Foreman without comment. He felt as if he were in a whirlpool, being sucked against his will into a dark and dangerous center. And to be honest, he wasn’t sure how hard he should swim against the power drawing him in, or if he was even capable of resisting.
Foreman slid several photos across the table. “The top one is the Angkor Kol Ker gate. Then the Bermuda Triangle and other gates around the world.”
Dane looked at the first photo. It was a satellite image of Cambodia. There was a solid black triangle in the center, about six miles long on each side. It was located in the north-central part of the country, in deep, nearly impenetrable jungle.
“Each gate is now shaped the same and stable at that size,” Foreman said. “That solid black is something new and we don’t know what it means. It’s never been reported as long as we have recorded history. No form of imaging can penetrate it. Ground surveillance from those visually watching the gates say the fog has coalesced into solid black. Sensors sent on remotely piloted vehicles, whether going via ground, air or sea, simply disappear into the black and cease transmitting. And they never come back out, even if they are programmed to return.
“The Russians- and this is classified as is everything else we discuss- sent a team into one of the gates on their territory near Tunguska two days ago. The team hasn’t come back and is presumed dead. The Japanese are still missing one of their destroyers that went into the Devil’s Sea gate.
“I’m afraid that although we stopped the propagation it went on long enough to allow this thing, to gain a solid foothold on our planet at each of the gate sites. That’s something that never happened before.”
“That we know of,” Sin Fen added.
“It means they’re waiting,” Dane said.
“They?” Foreman asked.
“The Shadow.”
“For what?” Foreman asked.
“To attack again,” Dane said. “They’ve got their beachhead. Maybe that’s all this last series of events was about.” He turned to Sin Fen. “Do you agree?”
She nodded. “That is the sense I have.”
Foreman tapped a finger on the top of the conference table. “I’ve been thinking about that. The again’ part,” Foreman clarified. “As Sin Fen noted, there is much about the past we don’t know. That abandoned city you found in the center of the Angkor gate- Angkor Kol Ker- it must have been attacked a long time ago. And we have a long history of ships and planes disappearing into the Bermuda Triangle and Devil’s Sea- no one knows how long these gates have been active, but a lot of evidence points back to at least as long at ten thousand years ago, when Atlantis was destroyed.”
“You really believe that?” Dane asked.
“About Atlantis? Don’t you now?” Foreman threw back. “After all you’ve seen and heard?”
Dane reluctantly nodded. He remembered Flaherty telling him the same thing- that the Shadow and the Ones Before’ were waging a war and it spilled over onto Earth every so often. That during one of those battles Atlantis had been wiped off the face of the Earth. There were also the markings on the side of the watchtower that Beasley, the Cambodian expert who had traveled with Dane into the gate, had deciphered. They indicated that the people who founded Angkor Kol Ker had traveled from somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean in order to escape the Shadow.
“It looks likely,” Dane agreed.
“The key,” Foreman continued, “is that we have to assume that this has happened before. The gates opening. The Shadow trying to come into our world and take it over. And it’s always been defeated. Even though Atlantis was destroyed so utterly it is just a legend, the rest of the planet survived. And it appears that there were survivors from Atlantis- the people who started civilization at Angkor Kol Ker, in Egypt, China, Central America and other places.”
“So?” Dane said.
“We stopped it this time but we didn’t defeat it. What we stopped was just the first assault and another one is coming.”
“You sound as if a new attack has already started,” Dane said.
Foreman nodded. “It has.” He pulled more imagery out of the top secret file. It showed a Mercator projection map of the entire world. Dane studied it- there were lines drawn through all the oceans.
“What am I looking at?” Dane asked.