But either he didn’t hear her, or he ignored her words. She could see that the glow was getting stronger because it was coming closer. She’d never seen the like before, but her heart pounded in anticipation. After all these years waiting for something to happen!
Then she saw it, coming up the main channel line. Like a line of fire ten feet high from the earth itself. She turned to Davon, to warn him, but he saw the danger and began to move, but he was too slow, the fire too fast. It caught his right leg as he tried to jump free.
Davon screamed as he stared at the stump where his leg had cleanly been severed at mid-thigh. He collapsed to the ground, blood pulsing out.
Reizer was frozen, not by Davon’s wound, but by the sight of every line and wedge on the plain ablaze.
In Japan, three miles below the surface of the planet, in an abandoned mine, was a much larger version of the muonic transceiver mounted on the FLIP. The super-kamiokande was a 50,000-ton ring-imaging water Cerenkov detector. The tank holding the detector was forty meters in diameter by forty meters high. It was filled with purified water and the walls were lined with over thirteen thousand photo multiplier tubes that were sensitive lights detectors.
It worked under the principle that any charged particle traveling through water produced Cerenkov light, which was light generated by a particle moving faster than the speed of light in water, which was slower than the speed of light in a vacuum. The particle of light produced a shock wave, similar to the sound wave set off by a supersonic aircraft. The wave hit the tubes and formed a ring, which when analyzed, could tell the type of wave, the strength, and to a certain extent the location.
The super-kamiokande had been Professor Nagoya’s brain-child, funded by both the Japanese and American governments ostensibly to do pure research in physics, but in reality to try to find a way to track the actions of the gates. The public had been told it was located this far underground to prevent interference from human sources on the surface, but while that was true, it was also oriented into the planet.
The control center for the S-K was linked to Ahana on board the FLIP via real-time satellite feed. Thus those in Japan only had about half-a-second to consider the data that exploded across their screens before Professor Nagoya saw it aboard the FLIP.
“What is it?” Foreman was hovering over Professor Nagoya’s shoulder, trying to make sense of the information being forwarded from the super-kamiokande.
Nagoya turned to Ahana. “Put it on the main screen.”
The young woman quickly typed the command into her keyboard. The western hemisphere appeared in outline form. And along the meeting lines of tectonic plates, which they had all grown so familiar with in the past year, were lines of extreme muonic activity, flowing, moving toward a spot in South America as if a vortex had opened on the surface of the planet and was drawing all into it.
“What does it mean?” Foreman asked.
Ahana answered. “The Shadow is drawing power from all the tectonic lines. There must be a gate in South America that it’s being funneled into.” She tapped the screen where there was a crimson red dot. “There.”
“I’ll get us satellite imagery of that spot,” Foreman said. He pulled out his SATPhone to dial the National Reconnaissance Office when he paused. “How much power is being drawn?”
“Off the scale.”
“And?”
Nagoya knew what Foreman meant. “At this rate, the tectonic plates will become unstable soon.”
Foreman seemed to have aged a decade in just a few seconds. “How much time do we have?”
“We’ll have to run the numbers.”
“Do it.”
The top edge of the sun creased above the horizon, sending horizontal rays just above the blue Pacific cutting toward Dane. He looked to the west from the deck of the FLIP, at the black wall that delineated the edge of the Devil’s Sea gate. It absorbed the rays of the sun as if eating them. He felt a chill ripple across his skin, the smell of death and destruction in his nostrils, although whether the odor was real or a figment of his sensitive brain, he couldn’t really tell. He knew that smell was the strongest of the five senses and any time he was near a gate the odor was sickening.
He could sense something was happening in the control center, but he had no desire to go in there and find out. He knew bad news would be brought to him soon enough. And regardless of what it was, he would be going back into the Devils Sea gate at least once more.
His first foray into a gate, had been done out of ignorance at the command of Foreman. Dane had been a member of MACV-SOG (Military Assistance Command Vietnam- Studies and Observation Group) a rather innocent sounding name for teams of elite Special Forces soldiers and their indigenous counterparts that conducted clandestine missions into Cambodia, Laos, North Vietnam and even into China during the Vietnam War.
Foreman had sent Dane’s team — Recon Team Kansas- on a mission far into Cambodia to recover the black box of a downed U-2 spy plane. What Dane hadn’t known was the U-2 was part of an experiment Foreman had run to check if there was a connection between the Angkor gate and the Bermuda Triangle gate on the other side of the world where he sent the submarine Scorpion. The two had managed to make communication with each other before the Scorpion disappeared and the U-2 went down. They had proved there was a connection that defied conventional physics, but at a high cost.
In the end, Dane was the only member of his team who made it back. Several members of the team had been killed outright, and his team leader Flaherty had disappeared. Dane had gone into other gates since, including a return into the Angkor gate thirty years later where he briefly met Flaherty once more, the man appearing not to have aged at all since his disappearance and telling Dane of the battle between the Shadow and the Ones Before, the latter indirectly helping mankind against the darkness. Dane shivered as he felt the lurking presence of death and terror close by.
He looked down at the water as a dorsal fin cut the water forty feet away. Dane stripped off his shirt, kicked off his shoes and dove into the warm water. He swam forward, the Pacific water cleansing him of the oppressiveness given off by the gate.
He felt warm skin against his and rolled as Rachel swam by. The dolphin rose halfway out of the water, and then flipped over, splashing Dane’s face. He reached out and rested his right hand on the lower front edge of the dorsal fin. He felt a wave of emotion and thoughts flow over him from the dolphin. There was so much, he couldn’t make sense of anything. He focused on the vision he had had the previous night, and ‘sent’ that to Rachel in return.
He felt it come back to him like an echo, which confused him. Kennedy, Frost, Cuba, the freighter, Washington destroyed, jumbled and confused as if it had been taped by a faulty machine and was being played back.
Dane let go of the images and focused on the feel of Rachel’s skin, her warmth, and the water sliding over his body. Rachel pushed him up, above the surface and he took a deep breath, then she dived, pulling him down with her. Dane remembered Rachel’s handler, Dr. Marsten saying a dolphin could dive to six hundred meters and stay down for over fifteen minutes, but he felt no panic, no worry as they descended. He swallowed, equalizing pressure on his ears as they went down, then relaxed as Rachel leveled off at about fifty feet.
Dane began to feel faint as the oxygen in his lungs was absorbed. Still there was no feeling of panic. He realized he’d almost welcome the oblivion of death. It was all he had known. From his time in Special Forces in Vietnam, through battling the Shadow in the past year. The list of those who had gone before into darkness was long. His recon team in Cambodia in the Angkor Gate; Sin Fen in the Bermuda Triangle Gate; the Viking warrior he’d met inside the ‘wall’ between Earth and the Shadow’s world, along with the Romans and Amelia Earhart; Ariana Michelet killed while trying to stop the detonation of Mount Erebus in Antarctica and the destruction of the Pacific Rim by the Shadow. All gone. And the Shadow only halted once more, paused, not defeated. And the riddle of what was on the other side of the gates, beyond the wall, in the unknown place where the Shadow came from, still as great. They’d only discovered that the portals led to a strange space — inside the wall- a staging area between Earth and the Shadow’s world, where some humans who had disappeared into the gates, such as Amelia Earhart, eked out a timeless existence. There were also two graveyards deep under the Atlantic and Pacific at each ocean’s deepest trench.