“Hold on,” Foreman said as he flipped open a new circuit.
“Talk,” he ordered.
A voice echoed out of the speaker and Foreman recognized the pitch as the distinct one coming from a submerged submarine transmitting on ULF, ultra-lowfrequency through water.
“This is Captain Rogers from the Wyoming. We have a situation here.”
Rogers ignored Commander Sills’ look at his last radio transmission. A ‘situation’ was understating current events. Alarms were sounding and the crew was racing to battle stations.
“I’ll hook you into our ops center,” Rogers said. “I’m a little busy to give you a blow by blow right now.” Rogers reached down and flipped a switch.
“Come hard right at flank speed,” Rogers ordered his helmsman.
“Aye-aye, sir. Hard right at flank.”
Rogers looked at Sills. “Sit-rep?”
Rogers was watching a gauge. “External radiation climbing.”
Rogers glanced down at the radiation badge clipped to his shirt front. “Power, chief!” he yelled a the petty officer in charge of driving the sub.
“We’re at max speed, sir.”
“Status?” he asked Sills.
“External radiation still climbing, sir. Way beyond safety limits.”
“Damn!” Rogers looked back at Sills. The executive officer was shaking his head. “It’s through red, sir.”
Rogers closed his eyes. He reached down and peeled back the tape on his badge. The line underneath was red. Everyone in the control room was staring at him. Rogers picked up the mike connecting him to Foreman. “We’re red. From stem to stern. One hundred percent casualties. We just aren’t dead yet, but we will be.”
Foreman listened to Rogers’ report. There was nothing he could say. He was startled when a voice came out of the speaker; he had forgotten he’d kept to the NSA open.
“That’s going to happen on land soon,” Conners said.
“I know.” Foreman glanced at some of the messages his operators had picked up. “The Japanese lost a scout plane ten minutes ago. Totally gone. God knows what’s happening to the Russians. They’ve lost all communication with their monitoring element near Chernobyl.”
“It’s the beginning of the end, isn’t it?” Conners said.
Chelsea could hear the helicopters near the place she had left. She paused and sniffed. There was much that was new to her in this strange place, many strange scents, sights and sounds.
Despite her bulk, she could move quietly when needed. Snout low to the ground, she slipped through the jungle, approaching the noise and the scents of the humans and the place she had last seen the nice lady, searching for the scent she remembered.
There were three paths among the four massive statues that barred the way. Ariana stared at the trio of tunnels through the stone.
“Which one?” Ingram asked.
“I don’t like this,” Carpenter muttered.
The statues on either flank merged with the stone walls of the draw. The arms of the statues touched, so that the openings were eighteen feet high by four wide, underneath the large hands. The opening disappeared into darkness. Each was draped with foliage, further restricting the view.
“I say the center one,” Ingram said.
“I don’t know,” Ariana said. She felt very uneasy. She could see the eyes in the statues, almost sixty feet above her head, bright red painted stone, barely visible through the swirling mist.
All three turned as the sound of a tree trunk breaking, split the air. Ariana recognized the slithering noise that followed. And it was coming closer.
“Oh, shit,” Ingram exclaimed. He turned and ran for the center tunnel. Ariana and Carpenter followed as the sound grew louder and more trees gave way.
Ingram was into the tunnel when he suddenly stumbled in front of them, down to his knees. He gave a short yell, looking over his shoulder. That was when the ceiling came down. The stone block completely filled the passageway and obliterated Ingram; the only indication of his death, the red blood seeping out from under the finely cut stone.
Ariana and Carpenter stepped back as the blood came toward their feet. Ariana shook herself out of her shock and grabbed Carpenter’s arm. “Let’s go.”
They ran back to the front of the statues. The sound was much closer, somewhere close by in the mist. “Left or right?” Ariana asked Carpenter.
“What makes you think either of them will work?” Carpenter asked.
“We go through or we wait for that,” Ariana pointed in the direction of the slithering noise. They could now hear the hissing.
“Left,” Carpenter said. “People tend to go right when lost in the woods so if there’s a choice, it should be left.”
Ariana wasn’t quite sure of the reasoning but there was no time. Together they ran around the base of the statue and into the opening. They paused, looked at each other, and then together ran forward through the tunnel.
“Sweet Lord!” Beasley exclaimed.
They were standing on the edge of the high ridge that extended left and right as far as they could see into the fog. The ground in front sloped down and, in that direction, there was no mist for the first time since they’d entered the Angkor Gate. Two kilometers straight ahead, burning bright, a golden beam rose from the apex of a steep mountain about five hundred meters above their heads and into the heavens where the sky was dark and swirling. But they could see that the “mountain” was manmade, a massive, steep pyramid of intricately carved stone, now covered with a thick layer of vegetation. And at the base of the mountain were the remains of a walled city, the stone crumbling under the weight of the years and jungle that had overgrown it. Outside of the walls, a wide moat stretched from there to the base of the ridge that they were on. It was hard to tell if there was water in the moat, as it had been reclaimed by the jungle.
“What is that?” Freed asked.
“Angkor Kol Ker,” Dane said.
“This is the greatest discovery-” Beasley began, but Freed cut him off.
“No, I meant that golden beam, you idiot.”
“I believe that is what is destroying our world,” Dane said, feeling the images that Sin Fen had given him of the Gates. He started down the slope.
Ariana slumped to the ground, momentarily exhausted not so much from the run through the tunnel, but from the sudden drop-off in adrenaline now that they had made it through without being crushed. She had sprinted the entire way, her shoulders hunched, anticipating the stone above their heads to come sliding down, but nothing had happened.
“Look at that,” Carpenter whispered next to her.
Ariana looked up. She saw the golden beam coming out of the pyramid and the ancient city around it. Ariana struggled to her feet, shaking off the exhaustion. “Let’s go.”
“There’s nothing we can do for those men?” The President’s voice had lost its earlier edge. It had been Foreman’s experience that reality had a way of doing that. He leaned back in his seat, listening to those in the White House Situation Room discuss the latest development with the Wyoming.
“We not only can’t save those men,” General Tilson, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said, “but we can’t even recover the submarine itself. It’s so hot that any boarding crew would also receive a fatal dosage of radiation.”
“How long do they have?” The President asked.
“About four hours before they start getting sick,” General Tilson said. “Every man on board will be dead inside of twenty-four hours.”
“What are you going to do about it?”