“The Christians pray to their one god for everything.”
Ragnarok snorted. “That makes no sense.”
Tam Nok spoke up. “Why is this monk interested in the Shadow then?”
“Because he believes it is something else,” Loddin said.
“What?” the Khmer priestess demanded.
“He doesn’t know. That is why he wants to learn more.”
“Why?” Tam Nok asked. “If he does not believe in the demons and the gods?”
Loddin ran a hand through his dirty hair. “I asked him that. He said it was important we learn what this Shadow really is. If we think it is the work of Gods then we might not fight it. We might think it beyond our powers. But if we learn it is something else, then we will fight.”
“Vikings fight the gods,” Ragnarok said.
“Yes, we do,” Loddin acknowledged, “but most others don’t.” He shrugged. “Really, I think this Brendan is just very curious.”
“He is traveling there?” Tam Nok asked.
“Yes.”
“When?” Tam Nok asked.
“I passed him two weeks ago. He was heading north-” Loddin pointed at the map. “Going to the same place you want to go.”
“How many people did he have with him?” Ragnarok asked.
“A crew of four. His boat is smaller than mine.”
“Is there a tunnel there?” Tam Nok asked.
“There is something,” Loddin answered. “If you pass through the fire and ice. You will see a fog bank that does not move. You will feel the evil inside.”
“But you’ve gone inside,” Tam Nok said.
“You are a strange woman,” Loddin said. “My supplies are loaded.” He stuck his hand out. Ragnarok took it, but didn’t let go of the other man’s forearm.
“What is in the fog?”
“Monsters. The monsters old women tell of late at night to scare children.” His arm was still in Ragnarok’s grip, but he looked to Tam Nok. “I do not know if there is a tunnel in there. I barely got out with my life. I wish you better luck.”
Chapter 23
Captain McCallum stared at the bodies, noting the gunshot wounds that had killed all three. “Get them out of here,” he ordered.
Sea water dripped out of computer hardware cases and there was still an inch on the floor of the computer systems room.
“I don’t assume we could get any of this on-line,” McCallum asked Commander Barrington.
“No, sir. It will all have to be replaced. I think the assumption was that if this chamber ever filled with water, the sub was sunk anyway.”
“Damn near was,” McCallum said. Seawolf was still on station, in the narrowing band of sea between the Bermuda Triangle gate and the Milwaukee Depth. Normally submariners liked having deep water below them, but the Puerto Rican Trench was a little too deep for McCallum’s peace of mind after their near sinking at the hands of Bateman.
He watched as two sailors wrapped Captain Bateman’s body in a sheet and strapped it to a stretched. “I wonder if he was trying to warn us,” Bateman said.
“Warn us?” Barrington repeated.
“Remember when he first came on board? He told us to be ready to fight without our sophisticated instruments.” McCallum waved his hand around, taking in the now worthless hunks of top-of-the-line computer gear. “We’ve lost pretty much every piece of gear in the ship when the computers went down. But there’s one thing we haven’t lost,” the captain of the Seawolf continued. “We still have the best damn crew in the navy. It’s time we break out the stopwatches and hand-held calculators. I want us to be ready to fight if anything comes out of that gate. Got that XO?”
“Yes, sir.”
While the navy’s most sophisticated weapons system was being forced to go back to the tools that submariners in World War II used to fight, one of the US Air Force’s most advanced airplanes was almost directly overhead, flying a tight racetrack.
The Boeing 767 Airborne Warning and Control System was a more advanced version of the venerable E-3 AWACS that had flown hundreds of thousands of surveillance missions for NATO during the Cold War. The most distinctive feature of the plane was the thirty foot wide radome bolted onto the top of the fuselage. Inside was the Northrop Grumman AN/APY-2 radar which rotated six times every minute. Able to read targets over 200 miles in any direction, the AWACS was able to paint a picture of the entire Bermuda Triangle gate.
Inside the AWACS the crew watched their screens, alert for anything coming out of the gate, while at the same time coordinating the military forces that were converging on the perimeter.
Scores of fighters and bombers flew air cover around the gate. The aircraft carrier George Washington was on station and had the unique distinction of being the first naval vessel to field an army anti-missile unit on its large deck. Several Patriot missile batteries along with their radar system were chained down on the large expanse of deck, their warning system tied in to the AWACS.
It was ingenious and also a sign of desperation. The Patriot was one of the biggest failures of the Gulf War while being labeled one of the greatest successes. While American commanders were crowing about 33 launches equaling 33 SCUD kills, the Israelis sent a high ranking diplomat to Washington to claim that at best, the Patriot had a twenty percent success rate. The reality, the Israelis claimed, was that in modifying their SCUD missiles to extend their range, the Iraqis had simply welded in new section of missile to hold the extra fuel. The result was that the vast majority of SCUDs broke up in flight due to poor structural integrity- many of these break-ups were erroneously claimed by optimistic American commanders as successful Patriot intercepts.
Not only was the Patriot suspect, it had originally been designed as an anti-aircraft system, not an anti-missile system. Even with extensive modifications over the years, even the manufacturer only claimed it was an anti-missile system working against tactical systems, such as the SCUD.
The Trident was no SCUD and the crews of the Patriot batteries and the crew of the AWACS knew that. The Patriot had a max speed of slightly over MACH 3, or about 2,200 miles an hour. The Trident at max speed was moving at over 16,000 miles an hour- a classic tortoise and hare situation.
The hope was that if the Wyoming launched a second missile that two fortuitous things could happen. One was that the launch would be close to the Washington. Second was that the launch would be caught early enough for the Patriots to be fired and catch the Trident while it was still accelerating upward.
It was a plan that fell back on the age-old military theory of throw everything possible’ at the enemy. Not only were the Patriot batteries on board the Washington, but the guns and ship to air missiles of every warship around the gate were oriented inward. Every plane was ready to turn over the gate and engage targets. There was no one among all the military personnel deployed in this operation old enough to have been there, but it was very much the same approach the American navy had used in the latter days in World War II against Japanese kamikaze attacks.
On the other side of the world, Professor Nagoya was caught between loyalties. Foreman wanted the Can oriented full-time toward the Bermuda Triangle gate. Japanese government officials- those in the know at least- were well aware of the Trident launch that had come out of the Atlantic, and they were also aware of the fact that other submarines, two of which carried nuclear missiles or torpedoes, had been lost in their own Devil’s Sea gate.
They were more concerned with the Pacific Rim, than the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. There were many places where a well-placed nuclear explosion would trigger massive earthquakes with subsequent volcanoes and deadly tsunamis, a threat which Japan was particularly vulnerable to. These officials wanted the Can, which after all was built on Japanese soil with a large dose of Japanese money, to exclusively monitor the Devil’s Sea.