by Sean Ellis
The image changed again to show an open area divided into several workstations where a gun battle seemed to be underway. Uniformed guards were exchanging fire with the barely visible assault force while civilians scrambled for cover. One by one, the defenders were taken out.
“Some form of lightweight body armor,” Pentecost was saying, “possibly utilizing magnetic-reactive liquid, and this.”
As if on cue, one of the static-shrouded images suddenly erupted in a blinding flash.
“As near as we can tell, the attacking force was equipped with a kind of bio-metric fail-safe device. We can only assume that a round penetrated this man’s armor, killing or incapacitating him. When that happened, an incendiary device was activated which literally vaporized every last trace, ensuring that there would be no physical evidence to lead us back to the source. We found three such burn sites.
“The surviving members of the assault force, which we estimate to be about twenty men, secured the objective—designated NLAL 770—and exfiltrated by unknown means—”
“Unknown?” scoffed Petty Officer Second Class Delaney Booker. Fit and tough as nails, Booker looked the part of a SEAL, but his future with the Team was in doubt, owing to his contempt for military discipline. Every unit had at least one guy like Booker—it was a statistical certainty—but while such behavior might be ignored or excused in a training environment, it could easily prove fatal in the field. Yet if Pentecost had been perturbed by the lapse of discipline, he gave no indication.
“Once their objective was secure, the men fought their way back outside and vanished. At precisely that moment, the satellite-imaging network at the National Reconnaissance Office was hacked. We have no visual record of their egress and eyewitness accounts are inconsistent. In short, they vanished without a trace.”
“Obviously not,” persisted Booker, “or else you wouldn’t be sending us to Libya.”
“Del!” This reproof came from the platoon chief, Warren Ball, but the admiral waved him off.
“You’re correct. Besides a lot of 5.45-millimeter brass, generic stuff, our intruders left one important piece of physical evidence.” Pentecost clicked through a few more PowerPoint slides to a photograph of blood smears, starkly contrasted against the white epoxy floor. “Before his self-destruct was activated, one of the intruders received a non-fatal wound that left a blood trail and more importantly, a DNA signature. He’s one of our own, or at least he was until six months ago.”
The next slide showed a tough looking, middle-aged Caucasian man with a shaved head. In one corner, the seal of the Department of the Navy revealed it to be a military ID photo.
“Gunnery Sergeant Riley Mathis, USMC Force Recon One. Six months ago, he got his retirement letter and promptly took his skills to the private sector; a security consultancy firm called Lightning Force. It took some work to discover exactly who was signing his paychecks; his employer covered the trail very well. However, as they used to say, “Loose lips sink ships,” and Gunny Mathis bragged about how lucrative those paychecks were when trying to recruit a fellow marine.
“The trail leads to the Atlas Trust.” The slide of Mathis blinked out, replaced by a corporate logo, a stylized depiction of the mythic Greek figure bearing the world on his shoulders. “A multi-national corporation founded by Marquand Atlas, who died under mysterious circumstances about eight months ago. And when I say ‘mysterious’ I mean that he might not be as dead as we thought. The Atlas Trust has the money and resources to develop the equipment prototypes used in the assault on the National Labs.”
“Atlas must have facilities all over the planet,” offered Collier. “Why Libya?”
“Once we identified Mathis, it wasn’t too hard to isolate other men associated with Lightning Force. Possibly believing that their camouflage was perfect, the men made no effort to hide their subsequent movement. Several of our suspects were on the manifest of an Atlas corporate flight bound for the Atlas research facility situated on the Libyan coast, about three hundred miles from Tripoli.”
The screen showed a satellite map of Libya. A red dot straddled the curving line that separated the blue of the Gulf of Sirte and the endless sand seas of the Libyan Desert.
Sitting in his jump seat, hours later, Collier was still trying to wrap his head around the idea that the Unites States was on the brink of war with Libya. In his earliest memories, Libya had always flirted with enemy status by harboring terrorists and occasionally even engaging U.S. fighter planes in combat. For the better part of a decade Libya’s bellicose and erratic leader, Muammar Qadafi, had successfully distanced his nation from the brand of extremism promoted by terror organization like Al Qaeda. But, in typically mercurial fashion Qadafi had welcomed as a hero the Libyan-born terrorist convicted of blowing up Pan-Am flight 103, virtually uprooting overnight the seeds of goodwill that had begun to sprout. Then, in 2011, a civil war—part of the Arab Spring movement that swept across the Middle East and North Africa—overthrew Qadafi’s long standing government and plunged the nation into a level of chaos that was still unresolved.
The Atlas campus predated the collapse of the Libyan government and evidently, it had been business as usual for Atlas, despite the ongoing violence. Even amid a state of war, foreign investments remained a source of income for whatever government was in power. It was unlikely that the government in Tripoli had any connection whatsoever to the raid on the National Laboratory, but that didn’t mean they would simply look the other way when U.S. bombs blasted the multi-million dollar facility to atoms, along with any unlucky and completely innocent Libyan employees. Whether they would simply look the other way, or use the act of aggression to launch a new campaign of anti-American sentiment that might conceivably lead to an all-out Arab-American war was something for the politicians to worry about. Collier had more immediate concerns.
Still pondering the subject of the briefing, Collier stood and headed forward to relieve himself one last time before the jump. Not surprisingly, there was a line.
The entire platoon was nervous about this op. Although they trained every day for missions like this, constantly adjusting for different scenarios, they would be going into the Atlas compound with nothing but exterior satellite imagery and guesswork. If the video footage from Los Alamos and scant DNA evidence were to be believed, they would be going up against men with training comparable to their own, who were armed and outfitted with the very best equipment in existence, not to mention a home court advantage.
He tried to avoid making eye contact with the men for fear that his anxiety might demoralize them further, but Ball and one of the platoon officers cornered him.
“We’ve got this, Ric,” stated Lieutenant Jersey Robinson a young ring-knocker who had never been deployed to combat.
Collier was more assured by Ball’s terse nod, but then a brusque voice from behind them snarled, “What I don’t get is why no one will talk about the real reason for all this.”
The platoon chief’s determined grimace turned into a sneer as he whirled on Booker, the troublemaker. “We’re doing it because we’ve been ordered to, sailor.”
Booker wasn’t cowed. “Do you know what that thing we’re going after really is? NLAL 770? It’s not some new piece of technology or a weapon of mass destruction; it’s from Atlantis. It’s called the Trinity.”
Collier kept a neutral expression, but behind his mask of ambivalence he began to seethe. He kicked himself for not recognizing the artifact during the briefing.
Several months earlier, a young woman—Collier couldn’t remember her name now, only that she was a knock-out—had walked out of the Darien Gap claiming to have discovered physical evidence of the existence of Atlantis. Subsequent exploration had recovered artifacts from a civilization older than anything ever found in the Americas. Despite skepticism from mainstream archaeologists, the idea that the ruins were some kind of refuge city, where survivors of Atlantis’ destruction had made their last stand, caught on with the public and the relics pu
t on display at a New York museum.
Collier still remembered the sense of shock that had followed a violent attack linked to some kind of neo-Nazi group. A gang of thugs had crashed the gala opening of the exhibition, but, as was the way of the world, other bad news soon came along to push that event out of the headlines. The exhibit had eventually reopened, along with its centerpiece, a diadem of silver metal with a white crystal said to have been worn by the last king of Atlantis. For some reason Collier could not fathom, it had earned the nickname “the Trinity.” As far as he knew, it was still on display in New York. Which meant NLAL 770 was either a second artifact exactly like the first, or the one on display in New York was a reproduction.
Either way, Booker was absolutely right. They were about to risk their lives, and risk starting a war, to recover a trinket.
Ball moved quickly to quash any hint of dissension in the ranks. “I don’t give a damn if we’re going after Qadafi’s Barbie doll collection, you’re a goddamn Navy SEAL; you volunteered for this. So shut up and get your game face on.”
“That’s not it at all, Chief.” A weird smile crossed Booker’s lips. “Don’t you see? Look what Atlas was willing to risk in order to steal this thing, and what we’re about to do to either get it back or make sure he can’t ever use it. This thing is more important than we can imagine.”
“Important? How so?”
Booker shrugged. “I have no idea, but the possibilities scare the hell out me. There are stories about Atlantis; stories about technologies more advanced than our own. Stories about….” He trailed off, perhaps realizing how preposterous further speculation would sound, and yet knowing deep down that his wildest imaginings probably fell short of the truth about the strange artifact. “I’ve got a feeling if we don’t get this thing back or destroy it, it’s going to be a very bad time on planet Earth.”
There was no more discussion about their objective, and hardly any talk about the mission itself. The SEALs went through the quiet ritual of checking and rechecking their gear; making sure that grenades and spare magazines were secure but easily accessible; their weapons functional and lightly lubricated; their internal and external comms synced and encrypted; the oxygen masks they would wear during the High-Altitude/High-Opening (HAHO) parachute jump operational. They wore cold-weather jumpsuits over USMC digital desert camouflage uniforms without any patches, flags or nametapes. Each man donned a ballistic combat helmet with a PVS-7 monocular night-vision device secured with easily removable nylon web straps, which distributed the not-inconsiderable weight of the device more evenly than the standard issue mounting plate. They chose to carry Colt M-4 carbines with armor-piercing ammunition, rather than their preferred suppressed H&K MP5s. The latter were virtually silent and much easier to handle when clearing buildings, but probably wouldn’t do much more than tickle an enemy wearing magnetic-reactive liquid body armor. For their own part, they wore state of the art Dragon Skin scale body armor, the best body armor available, purchased off the books by the Team, because Pentagon bean counters refused to admit that it was a superior product. Altogether, armor, weapons and equipment weighed close to eighty pounds—there was a reason that the SEALs placed an extraordinary value on physical fitness.
Their best intelligence, which was admittedly poor, placed the objective in one of three large research buildings at the center of the compound. Satellites had followed the convoy of vehicles that met the Atlas corporate jet at the nearby airstrip directly to that building, but the eyes in the sky could not tell them where in the five-story structure the objective would be located. That would require a room-by-room search.
Second squad, under Robinson’s command, would strike first, hitting the compound’s electrical plant and shutting down main power. First squad, led by Collier himself, would hit the ground—or rather, if all went as planned, the roof of the target building—moments later and begin their sweep. Unlike the assault team that had hit Los Alamos, they would not have to rely on their own devices to get out. They would have to find a secure LZ for a pair of Seahawk helicopters, which were probably just now taking off from the deck of the USS Ramage, parked somewhere out in the Med.
Collier would still have preferred another forty-eight hours to rehearse, get more intel and maybe even put some observers on the ground near the Atlas campus, but all in all it was a decent plan. Nevertheless, the butterflies raging in his stomach right now were unlike anything he’d ever felt preparing for a mission, and Booker’s pronouncements, as crazy as they were, only deepened his sense of dread.
They really could not afford to fail.
When the signal finally came, the men donned their chutes and oxygen masks, and trundled to the rear of the jet. There was a whoosh as the bay depressurized and the rear cargo door dropped to reveal the inky blackness of the Mediterranean night. Second squad immediately began moving forward, heaving themselves out into the thin air. When the last man was out, Collier, at the front of first squad, took his turn and leapt into the frigid sky.
2.
For Marquand Atlas, the abrupt blackout was merely an annoyance. Even had he known that U.S. Navy SEALs were presently invading his North African compound, he would have reckoned it of secondary concern to the revelation he had just made.
He had been awake for nearly thirty hours now, running tests and analyzing results, and the pace and intensity of his work had only increased with the arrival of the Trinity relic. Now that he had the Atlantean device in his possession, the final piece of the puzzle had fallen into place, exposing completely the lie that was his entire existence. When he had viewed the two computer-enhanced images from the STEM electron microscope side-by-side, he had flown into a rage and retreated to his private office to examine the data more closely. His mood had not changed appreciably.
The images were virtually identical, showing what looked like the landscape of an alien planet or perhaps something sprung from the imagination of M.C. Escher—a repetitive pattern of silvery rings, each sporting tiny points of gleaming white. The colors were a mere approximation of what the microscope had imaged; electron microscopes did not literally see the objective because the level of magnification was well beyond the wavelength of visible light. Instead, it returned a grayscale image, which the computer then translated into approximate colors. Colors did not concern Atlas, but the shapes were enormously important.
In the months since his resurrection, the broken pieces of his memory had returned, much the same way that his body had completely reconstituted itself. His memories were back in vivid detail; he remembered his uprising against Atl’an and the other members of the triumvirate, an event that had occurred more than three thousand years before the earliest recorded human history, as perfectly as he remembered meeting Mira Raiden in a Las Vegas casino. Yet, the intervening millennia were a bit hazy.
His earliest memories of the modern era were of emerging from a cavern in the Atlas mountain range of North Africa, only a short distance from his present location. He had staggered out into the desert and eventually found his way to Tripoli where he learned that a new civilization had emerged that was almost the equal of the one he had been instrumental in destroying, and that this new civilization was also on the brink of self-immolation. A powerful man had seized on a corruption of ancient knowledge—which Atlas would learn had become the stuff of myth, legend and religion—and was on the verge of conquering half the known world. It took him several more months to make his way to “civilization,” where he would learn that the year was 1944 AD, according to the way time was now reckoned, and Atlantis and everything he remembered had vanished into the mists of time.
He had made a furtive search for the Trinity, hoping to find the relic and use it to establish the global empire that Atl’an had denied him, but the divided pieces of the talisman were, like the cities where they had once been kept, completely gone. He sensed that they had only recently been removed, but the trail was cold. Still, he possessed unparalleled knowledge, and it did not take
long for him to carve out a place of great wealth and power among the primitives, even as he surreptitiously kept one ear to the ground, certain that one day the Trinity would resurface. Nearly seventy years later, literally fat and happy, and unnaturally young, his diligence paid off. His agents succeeded in locating Mira Raiden, a young woman who did not realize just how unique her psychic attributes were in the human species. With her help, he located Atl’an’s final resting place and for just a moment, regained control of the Trinity—a piece of it at least—only to lose it once more.
During the months since his recovery from what would otherwise have been a fatal bullet wound, he had puzzled over the fact that his first death seemed to have lasted thousands of years, while his most recent period of recovery had begun almost right away. It was but one of the mysteries he hoped would be resolved with the recovery of the Trinity, or rather two-thirds of it, and indeed, now that it was at last in his possession, he had all the answers.
The two electron microscope images were virtually the same. One was a surface scan of the Trinity itself, revealing that it was composed of what modern technology would call nanobots, incredibly small machines, capable of manipulating matter at the molecular level, and each nanobot was a perfect replica of the Trinity in its original, joined configuration.
Even at the pinnacle of their knowledge, the ancients would not have been able to fathom such a thing. Perhaps because the power to reshape their world had been given freely to them, they had never made a concerted effort to understand its mysteries. The simple truth was that the Trinity was not a thing of magic, but of science—a science so advanced as to be indistinguishable from sorcery. All of its manifestations were accomplished either directly by the action of those tiny nanobots or by their ability to generate a broad spectrum of radiation ranging from lethally intense light to the electrical impulses found in the human brain and body. In this respect at least, Atlas realized, the modern world was much more advanced than the ancient civilization of his own origin—they had learned the power of doubt.