Lailoken paused. “Another journey?” He shook his head. “I have been on many but I am too old now. My mission is done. This is your responsibility. The stone chose you just as it chose me a long time ago. I am done.”
“The staff?” Ragnarok prompted.
“Ah yes. The staff.” Lailoken smiled. “I am forgetful in my old age.” He held the staff out and Ragnarok took it. The old man stretched both arms over his head slowly, then back to his side. “It is nice to be free.” He laughed, then turned to Tam Nok. “Remember the shortest distance between two points is not always a straight line. In fact,” he laughed once more, a manic edge to it, “the shortest distance is sometimes not a distance at all. There are shortcuts if you know what to look for. Trust the voice. I wish you well on your trip.” He strode off into the darkness.
“I must go also,” Penarddun said. “I have done what you asked. My people can’t know what has happened here. They would not understand. I don’t understand. In all my years praying here I have never seen such a thing.”
“Thank you,” Tam Nok said.
“I don’t know if I’ve done a good thing,” Penarddun said. “The king’s men will be back here. And those demon witches. You should leave too.” Without another word the Druid pulled her hood up over her head and slipped off into the night.
Tam Nok pulled the straps on her pack tight. “Back to the ship. I will show you where to go once we get there.” She held out her hand and Ragnarok reluctantly gave her the staff.
Chapter 17
The sub pens in Groton are capable of holding the largest underwater craft the US Navy deployed, the Ohio class ballistic missile submarine which is almost two football fields long. There were four main pens, not only long enough to hold the biggest sub, but wide enough to put five side-by-side. Just north of Groton, technically called the New London sub base, the pens were on the Thames River in eastern Connecticut.
In pen number 2, nestled between an Ohio Class and a Los Angeles Class attack submarine, the Scorpion was easily dwarfed. Security around the pen was heavy. The crew was quartered in barracks hewn out of the rock right next to the pen holding their ship as the powers-that-be in Washington tried to figure out how to explain their sudden reappearance after being proclaimed dead 31 years ago and the even more perplexing fact that not a man in the crew had aged more than a day in all those years.
While the crewmembers underwent intensive debriefings- which so far failed to yield any more information about what had happened to the ship in the Bermuda Triangle- teams of technicians were going through the ship, searching for any physical clues to solving the mystery.
They had already gone through the entire ship, excluding the nuclear reactor, and now they were preparing to go into that last off-limits area. Donning protective garb, a team of four nuclear specialists opened the thick door blocking the plant control compartment from the reactor itself.
Clad in their bright yellow suits, they walked through the tunnel separating the livable part of the ship from the deadly rear. And they finally found something out of the ordinary. Sitting on the floor of the main reactor chamber was a silver cylinder, three feet high, by two in diameter. Three beams of golden light came out of the cylinder and penetrated into the containment wall where the core resided.
The investigators were still staring at this in puzzlement when a beam of gold from the cylinder raked across their bodies, then continued to the rear of the ship and locked into the reactor’s core.
A split second later, the Scorpion’s reactor went critical.
The Scorpion, the subs tied up inside the pen, and the entire crew of the Scorpion along with the other navy personnel inside, were vaporized in the nuclear explosion.
Designed to withstand a close hit by a nuclear weapon, the top of the sub pen buckled, broke and collapsed, but managed to contain most of the explosion. The walls between pen 2 and 1 and 3 shattered, causing massive damage to the submarines in those other two pens.
Foreman was the calm in the center of a storm. Alarms were screeching, phones were ringing and orders shouted- the noise only partially absorbed by the sound panels on the sides and roof of the War Room.
The generals and admirals were reacting to the twin disasters in Puerto Rico and Groton, moving ships and planes and men to help minimize the after-effects and help the survivors.
To Foreman both those events were already in the past. And both were threats of things to come in the future. The tsunami just a taste of what might be coming out of the gates shortly. The nuclear explosion in Groton was more of a mystery to him.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Tilson strode up to Foreman and slammed a fist down on the top of the conference table. “We just lost as many sailors as we did at Pearl Harbor! I’m recommending to the President that we nuke the Bermuda gate.”
Foreman could see a vein bulging in Tilson’s forehead. “Sir that may be exactly what the Shadow wants us to do. We don’t have enough data yet-”
“Yet?” Tilson leaned forward. “You’ve been studying these goddamn things for fifty years and you don’t have enough data yet? Do you have more now? Do you?”
“I don’t think a nuke would do any good,” Foreman said. “The gates have strong electro-magnetic and radioactive properties. We believe the laws of physics inside the gates are different than ours.”
“Then get me something I can use to fight this,” Tilson said. “Because if you can’t, I’m going to go to the president and recommend we shut these goddamn things with the strongest weapon we have available and that’s a goddamn nuke-tipped cruise missile right smack into the center of these things.”
Tilson stalked off to rejoin the branch chiefs in the forward part of the War Room. Foreman leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes for a second, running recent events through his mind.
In all the excitement, the information he had been given by Conners about SOSUS had been shuffled to the bottom of his crisis reaction. Most of what was going on in the War Room was out of his hands now. He knew the most important thing was to be able to figure out not the what, but the why of recent events. He punched the direct line to the NSA.
The other end was answered immediately. “Conners.”
“Any changes?” he asked.
“Other than the tsunami and the nuke blast in Groton? We’re tracking fallout from the sub pen from our eyes in the sky. So far it doesn’t look too bad and the current winds are seaward which is lucky. The eastern tip of Long Island will get a little hot but we think the dosage won’t be fatal.
“We’ve down-linked to the relief agencies in Puerto Rico, giving them the latest sit-rep. It looks pretty bad there.
“As you can see from the data we’ve forwarded you, the Bermuda Triangle gate is now further south. Closer to the Milwaukee Depth. The other gates are beginning to show some activity, particularly those in the water.”
“What about the SOSUS infiltration?” Foreman asked.
“No change.”
“Can we shut SOSUS down?”
“Maybe that’s what the Shadow wants,” Conners said. “Maybe there’s a plan and they want you to react. We shut SOSUS down, we’re effectively going to be blind underwater.”
“We’ll still have the Can,” Foreman said.
“True, but what if they send the Wyoming back at us?”
“Christ,” Foreman muttered. Conners had been right before. “The Seawolf can cover the Bermuda Triangle gate if we shut SOSUS down.”
“Then I’d check to make sure everything’s OK with the Seawolf,” Conners said.
Foreman punched in a number on his SATPhone, accessing FLTSATCOM, the Navy’s communication system. After a brief burst of static, Captain McCallum’s voice answered the other end.