It was long and looked more like a plane with two bulging bubbles, one at the front and one in the middle, than a submarine. Several Glomar crewmembers ran out and insured the submersible touched down gently on the deck, then unhooked it. The helicopter moved away while they hooked Deepflight’s harness rig to the ship’s rear crane. It was lifted once more, and swung around the side of the ship. Dane and the others waited as the helicopter came back and settled down on the helipad. A man got off and the chopper lifted and was gone.
Ariana led the way to greet the new arrival, a young-looking man in a bright red jumpsuit. He was tall and well-built, with thick black hair. Besides the jump suit, he wore a New York Yankees baseball cap, bill back, on his head.
“Jimmy DeAngelo at your service,” he stuck his hand out to Dane, and then each woman as they introduced themselves to him.
All the while his eyes kept shifting to the submarine teetering in the air, following it until it disappeared into the well. “How soon are we going down?”
Dane glanced at Ariana who shrugged. “As soon as you’re ready to take us.”
DeAngelo nodded. “I’d say in forty-five minutes. I did all my checks prior to coming here, but I want to make sure all the handling hasn’t damaged anything.”
Three hundred and fifty feet below the lowest level of the Pentagon proper was the Joint Chiefs of Staff's National Military Command Center, commonly called the War Room by those who worked there. It had been placed inside a large cavern carved out of solid bedrock. The complex could only be entered via one secure elevator and was mounted on massive springs on the cavern floor. There was enough food and supplies in the War Room for an emergency crew to operate for a year. Besides the lines that went straight up to the Pentagon's own communications system, a narrow tunnel holding back-up cables had been laboriously dug at the same depth to the alternate National Command Post at Blue Mountain in West Virginia.
When it had been built in the early sixties, the War Room had been designed to survive a nuclear first strike. The advances in both targeting and warhead technology over the past three decades had made that design obsolete. There was no doubt in the minds of anyone who worked in the War Room that they were high on the list of Russian and Chinese nuclear targeting and that they would be vaporized atoms shortly after any nuclear exchange. Because of that, it had been turned into the operations center for the Pentagon.
The main room of the War Room was semi-circular. On the front, flat wall, there was a large imagery display board, over thirty feet wide by twenty high. Any projection or scene that could be piped into the War Room could be displayed on this board, from a video of a new weapons system, to a map of the world showing the current status of US forces, to a real-time downlink from an orbiting spy satellite.
The floor of the room was sloping from the rear to the front so that each row of computer and communication consoles could be overseen from the row behind. At the very back of the room, along the curved wall, a three foot high railing separated the command and control section where the Joint Chiefs and other high ranking officers had their desks. A conference table was off to the right side of that. Supply, kitchen and sleeping area were off the rear of the room, in a separate cavern. The War Room had had its first taste of action during the Gulf War when it had operated full-time, coordinating the multi-national forces in the Gulf.
Since the gates had activated, the War Room had been the central clearing point for all information regarding them. Foreman found that ironic given that for over fifty years he had been the voice that cried in the wilderness against the danger he saw posed by the gates. Of course, he had not known they were gates, or what the danger was for many of those years.
Foreman had been forced to use guile, deception and even blackmail at times to keep his small section in the covert ops section of the CIA alive. In the beginning it had not been so hard as he was one of the founding members in 1947. But as the years went on and the old guard retired or died, it had become more of a struggle.
Claiming that Earth was being invaded by a strange force through gates he could not explain had caused many doors to be shut in Foreman’s face and he had learned to use deception more often than the truth, especially given he didn’t know exactly what the truth was. As one of the founding members of the CIA Foreman was an expert in the covert world, able to manipulate government agencies and millions of dollars of black budget money to support his activities over the years.
The activation of the gates and the nuclear attack out of the Bermuda Triangle gate had been a double-edged event for Foreman. The threat had been real and disaster narrowly averted by Dane destroying the propagating Prang in Angkor Kol Ker. On the more positive side, Foreman was finally being taken seriously.
As he sat at one end of the War Room conference table, Foreman realized being taken seriously had its drawbacks. He was now part of the 'system’ and as such there were a lot of people asking a lot of questions and the information flow had increased very dramatically to the point where he wasn’t sure he was getting what he needed. And while he was expert at manipulating and operating in the gray covert world, Foreman knew he was not as adept at dealing with the massive bureaucracy of official Washington when it was brought to bear on a problem.
At the present moment, he was listening to the various services argue about the best way to stop a Trident if another was fired out of the Bermuda Triangle gate.
Half-listening to the military men argue, Foreman checked the computer display that was inset into the table in front of him. All seemed to be progressing well at the Glomar. Deeplab had passed through 10,000 feet.
On the other side of the world Professor Nagoya had been underground for over twenty-four hours. It simply consumed too much time to go back to the surface and all the work he needed to do could be done at the Super-Kamiokande control center. Ahana and the rest of the crew also remained there. Several bunks were attached to the wall in the outside corridor and each person snatched sleep when they absolutely couldn’t keep going any longer.
Several things were going on at once and since there was only one Can, each series of experiments and surveillance data gathering had to be perfectly planned so that when time was allocated, the task could be accomplished in the most efficient manner so that the next task could begin as quickly as possible.
Besides monitoring the Bermuda Triangle gate every fifth task, the scientists under Nagoya’s leadership were checking the other gates, trying to determine their exact configuration and whether they also had traces of muon activity extended outward in any form. Besides that, there was the basic research of trying to figure out what exactly the fact that the gates and gate-affected places outside of them gave off muon activity meant.
Nagoya believed that if he could figure out how the gates worked, he could figure out how to shut them.
The simple fact, which irritated Nagoya to no end, was that even though the gates emitted muons, the Can shouldn’t be able to pick them up. A muon had a life span of only 2.2 microns when measured in a reference frame that was at rest with respect to them. Even given that the Can wasn’t in rest- moving at the speed of Earth’s rotation- the life span of the muon wouldn’t be much longer even in relative terms. They should be able to travel only about 600 meters before decaying into something else.
Yet, here, thousands of miles away, the Can was able to trace out muon images from the Bermuda Triangle gate and other gates as they were scanned. Scientists Nagoya consulted with were struggling with issues like this that didn’t neatly fit into hard physics. Quantum and wave physics had begun to explain some of this strange data, and Nagoya felt the key to understanding the gates, the essence of them, was to understand the physics surrounding them.