ATLANTIS

by Greg Donegan

  “Flight 19, this is Fort Lauderdale Air Station,” Foreman said for the thirtieth time. “You are heading northeast. You must turn around now. Your location grid is--”

  Foreman stopped in mid-sentence as the radar image of the flight simply disappeared. Foreman blinked, staring at his screen. They were too high to have crashed. He watched his screen while he kept calling out on the radio. With his free hand he picked up the phone and called Captain Henderson's office.

  Within ten minutes Henderson and other officers were in the control tower, listening to silence play out the unknown fate of Flight 19. Foreman quickly brought them up to speed on what had transpired.

  “What's their last location?” Henderson asked.

  Foreman pointed at a point on the chart. “Here. Due east of the Bahamas.”

  Henderson picked up a phone and ordered two planes into the air to search for the missing flight. Within minutes, Foreman could see the large blips representing the two Martin Mariner search planes.

  “What's their weather, corporal?” Henderson demanded.

  “Clear and fair, sir,” Foreman reported.

  “No local thunderstorms?”

  “Clear, sir,” Foreman repeated. The men gathered in the control tower lapsed into silence, each trying to imagine what could have happened to the five planes. By now they knew the planes were down, having run out of fuel. Each man also knew that even in a calm sea, surviving a ditched TBM was a dicey proposition at best.

  Less than thirty minutes into the rescue flight, the blip representing the northernmost Martin, the one closest to Flight 19's last position, abruptly disappeared off the screen.

  “Sir!” Foreman called out, but Henderson had been watching over his shoulder.

  “Get them on the radio!” Henderson ordered.

  Foreman tried, but like Flight 19, there was no reply, although the other search plane reported in.

  That was enough for Henderson. “Order the last plane back.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Many hours later, after the mystified officers had left the control tower worried about inquest panels and careers, Foreman leaned over the chart and stared at it. He put a dot on the last location he'd had for Flight 19. Then he put a dot where the Mariner had gone down. He drew a line between the two. Then he drew a line from each dot to Bermuda, where Flight 19's troubles had begun. He stared at the triangle he had drawn, raising his head to look toward the dark and ocean.

  After being rescued eight months ago he had tried to discover what had happened to his brother and squadron mates. He'd learned that the area of ocean his squadron had gone down in was known to local Japanese fisherman as the Devil’s Sea, an area of many strange disappearances. He'd even gone ashore after the surrender and traveled to one of the villages that faced that area. He'd learned from one old man that they fished in the Devil’s Sea, but only when their village Shaman told them it was safe to do so. How the Shaman knew that, the fisherman could not say. Today, staring out at the sea, Foreman wondered if the village shaman just got a bad feeling.

  Foreman reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a photograph. It showed a family, two boys who were obviously twins and in their teens, standing in front of a large man who had a big, bushy beard, and a small woman with a bright smile, her head turned slightly, half-looking up at her husband. Foreman closed his eyes for several long minutes, then he opened them.

  Foreman pulled the chart off the table and folded it up. He stuffed it into the pocket of his shirt. He walked out of the control tower and down to the beach. He stared at the water, hearing the rhythm of the ocean, his eyes trying to penetrate over the horizon, into the triangle he feared. His head was cocked, as if he were listening, as if he could hear the voices of Flight 19 and something more, something deeper and darker and older, much older.

  There was danger out there, Foreman knew. More than the loss of Flight 19. He looked at the picture of his family once more, staring at his parents who had ignored the warnings of danger six years ago and had been swallowed in the inferno of Europe during the dark reign of Hitler.

  He was still standing there when the light of dawn began to touch that same horizon.

  WATER AND JUNGLE

  1968

  On one side of the world a secret aircraft capable of several times the speed of sound was leveling off at a very high altitude; on the other, a nuclear submarine, the pride of the fleet and equipped with the latest technology and weapons, was letting seawater into ballast tanks as it began its descent. They were linked electronically to a point in the Middle East.

  The listening station had been placed in the rugged mountains of northern Iran to monitor the southern belly of the Soviet Union, Today it had a different mission: coordinate the SR-71 Blackbird spyplane flying out of Okinawa and the USS Scorpion, a fast attack submarine that had been detached from normal operations in the Atlantic for this classified mission.

  The man in charge of this operation wore a specially wired headset. In his left ear he could hear the relayed reports from the Scorpion coming up a shielded line being unreeled out of a rigging on the rear deck of the submarine, to a transmitter buoy that bounced on the waves above the sub. In his right ear, he could hear the pilot of the SR71, call sign Blackbird, directly. The man used his own name, Foreman, not concerned about concealing his identity with a code name because he had no other life than his work. In the Central Intelligence Agency he had become not a legend, but more an anachronism, whispered about not in awe but as if he didn't really exist.

  In front of him were three pieces of paper. One was a chart of the ocean northwest of Bermuda where the Scorpion was currently operating, one a map showing Southeast Asia, where the SR-71 was flying, the other a chart off the east coast of Japan. Three triangles, one highlighted in blue marker on the Atlantic chart, one in red on the Pacific chart, the last one highlighted in green on the map, were prominently outlined.

  The Bermuda Triangle Gate, as Foreman preferred to call it, covered an area from Bermuda, down to Key West and across through the Bahamas to San Juan, Puerto Rico. It had not had the name 'Bermuda Triangle' when Foreman had listened to Flight 19 disappear, but with the publicity over that incident the legend had grown and some reporter had come up with the moniker for lack of a better label. Foreman wasn't interested in legends; he was interested in facts.

  He called these places ‘Gates’ because they were doorways, of that he was convinced, but the perimeters were never stable, growing and shrinking at various rates. At times, they almost completely disappeared, at other times they reached a triangular shaped limit. While the center of each was fixed geographically, the size was more determined by time, sometimes expanding, sometimes apparently completely shut.

  The Angkor Gate’s legends were more distant and faint, lying off the beaten path of modern civilization and in the midst of a country known as the world's largest minefield; the result of decades of civil and international war. It had taken Foreman many years to even begin to hear rumors of the place and many years more to determine that indeed there was another place on the planet that warranted his attention. Of more significance to Foreman was that the Angkor Gate lay on land, not hidden in the ocean. He called it Angkor Gate because of the legends surrounding that area which mentioned an ancient city in the area, Angkor Kol Ker.

  As near as he had been able to determine, the Angkor Gate was in northwestern Cambodia, bounded on the north by the Dangkret Escarpment separating Cambodia from Thailand, and on the south by the floodplain of Lake Tonle Sap, the largest freshwater lake in Southwest Asia. The maximum apexes of the Angkor Gate that Foreman had so laboriously worked out over the years from various sources were all positioned so that the land inside held no roads, no cities and was roughly bounded by streams and rivers along all sides. At maximum it was considerably smaller than the largest opening of the Bermuda Triangle Gate, but held much more potential as far as Foreman was concerned not only because it was on land but also because it was
more consistently ‘active’.

  The Devil’s Sea Gate was named thusly because it marked the boundaries of the Devil’s Sea. Since it encompassed water like the Bermuda Triangle, Foreman preferred to focus his attention on the Bermuda Triangle. There were also the reports he occasionally received of intense, covert Japanese interest in the Devil’s Sea Gate area. Somehow all the gates were connected and Foreman lived only to discover the true nature of what these Gates were, what was causing them and what was on the other side of the Gates.

  “Clearing one thousand feet depth,” the commander of the Scorpion, Captain Bateman, reported. “Heading nine-zero degrees. Estimated crossing of line of departure in five mikes. Status all good.”

  “Level at sixty thousand,” the pilot of the SR-71 called in. “ETA five mikes.”

  Foreman didn't say anything. He had personally briefed the pilot and the captain of the Scorpion the previous week. He had made it abundantly clear that timing and positioning had to be exact. He looked at the large clock in the front of the listening room, watching the second hand make another circle. Then another.

  “Three minutes,” Scorpion called. “All go.”

  “Three minutes,” Blackbird echoed in his other ear at the same time. “All clear.”

  Foreman looked down. A penciled-in line on the chart represented the Scorpion’s course. He knew that three minutes out meant that the submarine was less than a half-mile from the current edge of the Bermuda Triangle Gate along the western line drawn from Bermuda to Puerto Rico. A line on the map of southeast Asia had the SR-71's flight route, and Foreman knew it was ninety miles from the green line, heading in from the south, currently passing over Lake Tonle Sap. He had waited years to do this, watching, until both Angkor and Bermuda Triangle were active to this extent at the same time.

  Another circle of the second hand. “Transmitting via HF,” Scorpion reported, indicating that the special high frequency transmitter that had been attached to the sub's front deck the previous week was now active.

  “Ah, Foreman, this is Blackbird.”

  Foreman sat straighter. He could sense a change in the normally laconic voice of the SR-71 pilot.

  “I've got something ahead and below.”

  Foreman spoke for the first time. “Clarify.”

  “A yellow-white cloud. Maybe some kind of fog but it's growing fast.”

  “Can you go above it?” Foreman asked.

  “Oh, yeah. No sweat. I've got plenty of clear sky. Entering Angkor Gate airspace now.”

  “We're in,” Captain Bateman reported. “Still transmitting. We're getting some electric anomalies in our systems, but nothing major. Sonar reports the ocean is clear out to limits.”

  “How about HF?” Foreman asked, wanting to know if the SR-71 was picking up the signal from the submarine or vice versa. There was normally no way the HF signal could reach the SR-71 on the other side of the Earth. But the operative word in that sentence, as Foreman knew, was normally. There was nothing normal about either of the locations the two craft were closing on and the whole point of this exercise was to prove a link between the two Gates.

  “Ah, I have a positive on the high frequency. I’m picking up Scorpion’s HF signal.”

  Foreman tapped a fist against the desktop in triumph. The two Gates were definitely connected, and in a way that was not possible using known physics.

  He keyed the radio. “Captain Bateman, can you read the SR-71 HF transponder?”

  “Roger. I don’t know how we can, but we are. Loud and clear.”

  There was brief silence, then a startled yell from the pilot. “What the hell?”

  Foreman was leaning forward, his eyes closed. The feeling of triumph faded.

  “Blackbird,” Foreman said. “What is going on?”

  “Uh, this fog. I'm over it now but it's growing fast. It doesn't look right. I'm getting some electronic problems.”

  “Will you be clear before it reaches your altitude?” Foreman asked.

  “Uh, yeah.” There was a long pause. “I think so.”

  “What about HF from Scorpion?” Foreman prodded.

  “Still have HF. That's strange. Yeah, it's--hey!”

  There was a garble of static in Foreman's right ear. “Blackbird? Report!”

  “Shit. I've got major failures here,” The pilot's voice sounded distracted. “Compass out. On-board computer is going nuts. I'm--shit! There's light coming out of the cloud. Lines of light. Geez! What the hell is that? That was close. There’s something dark in the very center. Shit! I'm kicking it to--” the voice broke into unintelligible static. Then silence.

  Foreman pressed the transmit button. “Blackbird? Blackbird?” He didn't waste any more time, hitting his other transmit. “Scorpion, this is Foreman. Evacuate the area. Immediately.”

  “Turning,” Bateman acknowledged. “But we're getting a lot of electronic interference. Some system failures. Really strange.”

  Foreman knew the sub would have to complete a wide turn to clear the Bermuda Triangle Gate. He also knew how long that would take. He checked the clock.

  “There's something weird coming in over sonar,” Bateman suddenly announced.

  “Clarify!” Foreman ordered.

  “Sounds almost like someone's trying to contact us via sonar,” the captain of the Scorpion reported. “Pinging us. We're copying. Oh no!” he suddenly exclaimed. “We've got problems in the reactor.”

  Foreman could hear Bateman yelling orders, his hand still keeping the channel open but the mike away from his lips. Then Bateman came back. “We've got a major reactor failure. Coolant lines down. We've also got something coming this way on sonar. Something big! It wasn't there before.”

  Foreman leaned forward listening to the faint voices as the captain again addressed his men in the conning tower. “Jones, what the hell is it? You told me we were clear. That thing's going to be up our ass in a couple of seconds!”

  “I don't know, sir! It's huge, sir. I've never seen anything that big and moving.”

  “Evasive action!” the captain yelled.

  “Sir, the reactor's off-line,” another voice was shouting in the background. “We don't--”

  “Goddamnit,” the captain cut the other man off. “Get us out of here, number one! Blow all tanks. Now!”

  The voice of the sonar man Jones, echoed tinnily in Foreman's ear. “Sir, it's right next to us. Good God! It’s huge. It's real--”

  There was a crackling sound and a few more faint unintelligible yells then the sound abruptly cut off in Foreman's left ear.

  Foreman leaned back in the seat. He reached into a pocket and pulled out some peanuts. He slowly cracked the shell on the first one and paused before throwing the contents into his mouth. He looked his hand. It was shaking. His stomach was shooting sharp pains. He threw the shell and peanut to the floor.

  He waited one hour as agreed. Not another sound had come through either side of his headset. Finally he took it off and walked over to the radio that connected him to a man who sat on the National Security Council. He had a link between the Bermuda Triangle and Angkor Gates, but it looked like a high price had been paid to gain that information.

  THE TEAM

  SOUTHEAST ASIA, 1968

  The jungle pressed up against the edges of the camp, a dark wall of shivering sounds and shadowy menace in the early evening light. Clear fields of fire had been cut for a hundred meters from the outer perimeter, but beyond that neither eye nor bullet could penetrate far.

  “I'm so short I could play handball on the curb,” the team leader told the other three men in the small hootch that served as their home. The team leader kissed his fingers, then tenderly touched the photo of a young woman that was tacked to the wall on the right side of the door. “See you soon, babe.” With his other hand he pulled a CAR-15 off its peg and tucked it to his side as he strode out into the setting sun. A miniaturized version of the M-16, the metal parts of the automatic weapon had a sheen that spoke of numerous cleanings
and hard use.

  “I imagine Linda knows how short you really are,” the second man out of the hootch said in a rumbling, deep voice to the laughter of the other two men.

  “Don't be talking about my fiancée that way,” the first man rejoined, but there was no threat in his voice. He paused, letting the rest of the team catch up. The team leader and oldest of the four, Sergeant First Class Ed Flaherty was twenty-eight, but a stranger would have thought them all older. The war had aged their faces and their hearts, etching lines that were the physical reminders of the fear, fatigue and stress. The men wore tiger stripe fatigues with no patches or nametags. Each one had a different weapon, but they all had the same look in their eyes: the haunted look of men intimate with death and violence.

  This morning, Flaherty's face was creased with worry lines, befitting his position as team leader. He was tall and skinny with red hair cut tight against his skull and a green drive-on rag tied around his neck. Given the short hair, the large, flaming red mustache on his upper lip seemed incongruous. His hands were cradled around the CAR-15. Hooked by a snap link to his load bearing equipment was an M-79 grenade launcher. Flaherty liked keeping it loaded with a flechette round rather than the normal 40 mm high explosive round, in effect making the launcher a large shotgun. He had inherited it from his own team leader after his first tour of duty and he'd carried it ever since. He called the M-79 his ambush buster.

  On Flaherty's back was his rucksack, a battered green pack loaded with water, ammunition, mines and food. The pack had gone with him on sixteen cross-border operations since he'd joined this specialized outfit. It was as much a part of him as the weapon in his hands.

  The next senior man, Staff Sergeant James Thomas, had been on fourteen of those trips, which allowed him to joke about Flaherty's fiancée with impunity. Thomas was the radioman and his ruck was larger than Flaherty's, holding the same essential supplies as well as the team radio and spare batteries. The ruck, large as it was, looked small when placed on Thomas's back. He was over six and a half feet tall and heavily muscled. His black skin was covered in sweat, even here at four thousand feet with the cool evening air swirling in. It was a running joke on Recon Team Kansas that Thomas would sweat even at the North Pole. In Thomas's hands his weapon, the M-203, combination M-16 rifle and 40 mm grenade launcher, looked like a toy.