The main room of the War Room was semi-circular. On the front, flat wall, there was a large imagery display board, over thirty feet wide by twenty high. Any projection or scene that could be piped into the War Room could be displayed on this board, from a video of a new weapons system, to a map of the world showing the current status of US forces, to a real-time downlink from an orbiting spy satellite.
The floor of the room was sloping from the rear to the front so that each row of computer and communication consoles could be overseen from the row behind. At the very back of the room, along the curved wall, a three foot high railing separated the command and control section where the Joint Chiefs and other high ranking officers had their desks. A conference table was off to the right side of that. Supply, kitchen and sleeping area were off the rear of the room, in a separate cavern. The War Room had had its first taste of action during the Gulf War when it had operated full-time, coordinating the multi-national forces in the Gulf.
Since the gates had activated, the War Room had been the central clearing point for all information regarding them. Foreman found that ironic given that for over fifty years he had been the voice that cried in the wilderness against the danger he saw posed by the gates. Of course, he had not known they were gates, or what the danger was for many of those years.
Foreman had been forced to use guile, deception and even blackmail at times to keep his small section in the covert ops section of the CIA alive. In the beginning it had not been so hard as he was one of the founding members in 1947. But as the years went on and the old guard retired or died, it had become more of a struggle.
Claiming that Earth was being invaded by a strange force through gates he could not explain had caused many doors to be shut in Foreman’s face and he had learned to use deception more often than the truth, especially given he didn’t know exactly what the truth was. As one of the founding members of the CIA Foreman was an expert in the covert world, able to manipulate government agencies and millions of dollars of black budget money to support his activities over the years.
The activation of the gates and the nuclear attack out of the Bermuda Triangle gate had been a double-edged event for Foreman. The threat had been real and disaster narrowly averted by Dane destroying the propagating Prang in Angkor Kol Ker. On the more positive side, Foreman was finally being taken seriously.
As he sat at one end of the War Room conference table, Foreman realized being taken seriously had its drawbacks. He was now part of the 'system’ and as such there were a lot of people asking a lot of questions and the information flow had increased very dramatically to the point where he wasn’t sure he was getting what he needed. And while he was expert at manipulating and operating in the gray covert world, Foreman knew he was not as adept at dealing with the massive bureaucracy of official Washington when it was brought to bear on a problem.
At the present moment, he was listening to the various services argue about the best way to stop a Trident if another was fired out of the Bermuda Triangle gate.
Half-listening to the military men argue, Foreman checked the computer display that was inset into the table in front of him. All seemed to be progressing well at the Glomar. Deeplab had passed through 10,000 feet.
* * *
On the other side of the world Professor Nagoya had been underground for over twenty-four hours. It simply consumed too much time to go back to the surface and all the work he needed to do could be done at the Super-Kamiokande control center. Ahana and the rest of the crew also remained there. Several bunks were attached to the wall in the outside corridor and each person snatched sleep when they absolutely couldn’t keep going any longer.
Several things were going on at once and since there was only one Can, each series of experiments and surveillance data gathering had to be perfectly planned so that when time was allocated, the task could be accomplished in the most efficient manner so that the next task could begin as quickly as possible.
Besides monitoring the Bermuda Triangle gate every fifth task, the scientists under Nagoya’s leadership were checking the other gates, trying to determine their exact configuration and whether they also had traces of muon activity extended outward in any form. Besides that, there was the basic research of trying to figure out what exactly the fact that the gates and gate-affected places outside of them gave off muon activity meant.
Nagoya believed that if he could figure out how the gates worked, he could figure out how to shut them.
The simple fact, which irritated Nagoya to no end, was that even though the gates emitted muons, the Can shouldn’t be able to pick them up. A muon had a life span of only 2.2 microns when measured in a reference frame that was at rest with respect to them. Even given that the Can wasn’t in rest- moving at the speed of Earth’s rotation- the life span of the muon wouldn’t be much longer even in relative terms. They should be able to travel only about 600 meters before decaying into something else.
Yet, here, thousands of miles away, the Can was able to trace out muon images from the Bermuda Triangle gate and other gates as they were scanned. Scientists Nagoya consulted with were struggling with issues like this that didn’t neatly fit into hard physics. Quantum and wave physics had begun to explain some of this strange data, and Nagoya felt the key to understanding the gates, the essence of them, was to understand the physics surrounding them.
Nagoya was studying the data they’d accumulated in just the past few days, comparing it to the little they knew about muons. He’d been one of the members of a team that in 1976 at the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva that had tried to determine why even muons that were caused by the sun’s rays hitting the atmosphere traveled further than their life span indicated they should. Muons were injected into a large ring, reaching speeds of.999 the speed of light. At the time the muons themselves could not be detected, but the electrons produced when the muons decayed could be and thus the distance and rate of travel of the muons prior to the decay could be deduced.
The first thing they discovered was that moving muons had a lifespan almost thirty times longer than stationery muons. The reason for that lay in time dilation according to the theory of relativity. Simply stated, time dilation meant that from a stationery observation point, a moving clock ran more slowly than an identical stationary clock.
That old data, combined with the new data Nagoya was now looking at, suggested several things to him. First he assumed that the gate-emitted muons were not a cause, but a by-product of some other action at the sub-atomic level. Second, whatever that action was, it was continuous as all the gates they were now checking showed muon emission.
The problem Nagoya faced was analyzing real data as opposed to data generated under the controlled condition of a laboratory- on top of the rather large problem of possibly dealing with a totally new world of physics from the other side’. He had to work his data while taking into account the Earth’s rotation, mass of the Earth between the Can and the target site, distances; the list went on and on to the point where Nagoya almost despaired of coming up with anything coherent.
Because of his strong background in research, Nagoya had slanted the use of the Can to gathering data than surveillance of the gates. Because of that, despite the fact that Foreman was launching a mission near the site, the Can oriented on the Bermuda Triangle gate only once every six tasks, meaning there could be over two hours between ‘peeks’.
The Can had just finished a peek at the Bermuda gate, noting nothing out of the ordinary. It moved on to a peek at the Russian gate under Lake Baikal to gather data. It would not reorient on the Bermuda Triangle area for two hours, six minutes and thirty-four seconds.
* * *
The rays of the sun are no longer visible to the unaided human eye deeper than 1,600 feet below the surface of any ocean. Even in the clean, blue water north of Puerto Rico, this law of the sea and evolution held true. Just over one quarter of a mile below the surface of the ocean, darkness ruled.
Hu
mans, of course, have always found ways around the laws nature tries to impose on them.
During World War II, submarines went no deeper than 400 feet, well within the range of the sun’s rays, in what oceanographers called the sunlit zone, extending to 600 feet. Next was the twilight zone which went from 600 to 3000 feet. Then came the midnight zone, where darkness ruled.
Technology had come a long way since the diesel fueled submarines of the Second World War in allowing man to penetrate the ocean depths. Modern military submarines now could go down to 3,000 feet and remain submerged for months at a time. Exploration submersibles had been used to photograph the wreckage of the Titanic in over 12,500 feet of water. The Japanese had sent a remotely piloted vehicle to the very bottom of the Earth’s surface, the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean, at a depth of 10,911 meters or over 33,000 feet down. Deepflight was the cutting edge of the next generation of vehicles designed to explore the depths of the world’s oceans.
Dane was in the front sphere with DeAngelo while Sin Fen and Ariana had crawled into the rear one. There were no seats, but rather an inclined, padded frame on which Dane and the pilot lay stomach-down. Tethers went around their bodies, giving them some freedom but preventing them from hitting the walls around the couches.
The curved wall directly in front of their faces was a series of flat TV screens that showed the view outside. Other flat monitors gave instrument readings so DeAngelo could pilot the craft. Right now they were still on the surface of the ocean next to the Glomar.
Besides numerous gauges and displays surrounding his position, DeAngelo had two levers in front of him with a short bar between them. He turned to Dane.
“It’s really very easy. Each lever controls the propeller on that side. Pull back and that blade goes faster, pull back and slower. There’s a point right about here-” he pulled back both levers- “where the blade stops, then as you go further back it reverses direction, so if you want to pull a hard right turn, you max forward speed on your left, and max reverse on your right.
“You have to be careful though,” DeAngelo added. “Deepflight’s center of mass is determined by the computer. It’s checking right now and we’ll make trim as soon as we’re released. This thing turns on a dime. It doesn’t take much to flip her. Which is why you really need to make sure you tether in or drive very carefully.
“Then this center bar is ascent or descent. It controls the horizontal plane between the two propellers. Push forward and you go down. Pull back and you go up.”
“And what if we lose all power?” Dane asked.
DeAngelo pointed to his right to a red cover, about two inches square. He lifted it up. A keyhole was underneath. “Put the key in, turn it, and we drop enough weight that we will go up.”
“Who has the key?” Dane asked.
“It’s around my neck on a chain.”
“Can we talk to Ariana and Sin Fen in the rear sphere?”
DeAngelo flipped a switch. A view of the inside of the second sphere, Ariana and Sin Fen on their stomachs, looking up, appeared. Dane noted that there was a small camera above the screen that showed them, so he imagined they had the same view in reverse. DeAngelo handed Dane a headset and put one on himself.
“How are you ladies doing?” DeAngelo asked.
Ariana looked at them. “We’re fine.”
DeAngelo checked one of his displays. “We’re in the water, but still slaved to the ship. The divers will release us in a minute or so. I’ll get us trimmed, and then we’ll start heading down.
“Deepflight is the most advanced submersible in the word,” DeAngelo said as he checked instruments and threw switches. “It’s more like flying an underwater plane than the traditional concept of a submersible. We also have redundancy on every major system, so it’s extremely safe.”
Dane felt the absence of Chelsea very keenly. DeAngelo’s confidence did little to allay Dane’s concerns about the upcoming mission. The thought of being cooped up in a confined space- whether in the submersible or the habitat- he found less than appealing. After returning from Vietnam and before being found once more by Foreman, Dane had spent over twenty years working in search and rescue. He had an uncanny ability to sense out people who were trapped, whether it be inside of destroyed buildings or someone lost in the woods. The former had always been his least favorite missions while the latter what he lived for.
He’d been in many confined areas while crawling through the ruins of buildings, but always with Chelsea. She was supposed to be the search & rescue dog and find the bodies, but in reality it had been Dane’s uncanny mental sense that allowed him to find those still alive. He’d relied on Chelsea for emotional support to get him through those difficult rescues.
He tried to block out his growing anxiety by studying the information packet on Deeplab IV Lieutenant Sautran had given them before departing for the depths.
The habitat was configured in three pressure resistant modules connected by a center, vertical corridor. Each module was actually three pressure resistant spheres set inside the outer protective cylinder wall, so there were a total of nine spheres, each independent of the others as far as pressure integrity goes. The only way into each sphere was through a hatch oriented toward the main corridor. The bottom of the main corridor had a hatch in it, allowing access to the ocean and submersibles.
Total living space was about 4,000 square feet. which when Dane divided by 9, didn’t make him feel any better. And square was the wrong term to use as there seemed to be an obsession for round shapes in all the designs from habitat to submersible. Dane understood that was the best shape to handle the enormous pressures they would encounter but understanding didn’t necessarily entail happiness.
A new voice came through the headset- Captain Stanton. “Deeplab is in place at seventeen thousand feet. They report everything is working fine. You’re cleared to descend and link up.”
“Roger that,” DeAngelo said.
“Godspeed and good luck,” Stanton said. The cable link- their only means of communication, went dead as the divers on the outside disconnected it.
There was sudden movement.
“All right, we’re free,” DeAngelo hands were wrapped around the two levers. “What you’re feeling is the swell. That will be gone in a minute.” He let go of the right lever and pushed the center bar up. Dane felt out of balance, as if his head were lower than the rest of his body.
“We’re going down,” DeAngelo said. “I want to get clear of surface effect, then I’ll trim us out.”
A minute passed and the bobbing motion was gone. “OK,” DeAngelo said. “I’m getting us balanced.” He continued speaking as he worked. “The ship has several small ballast tanks placed around the hull. I’m shifting air to give us neutral buoyancy and also to balance us exactly, fore and aft.” He held a hand over the mike. “I could have done it by computer, but I’ve learned never to ask a lady their weight- it’s easier to do it manually.”
Dane glanced up at the screen showing the rear sphere. Sin Fen and Ariana were trying to get as comfortable as possible.
“Done,” DeAngelo said. “We’re heading down.” He pressed forward on the center bar, then pulled back on both levers, the right one further back than the left. “We’re going down in a half-mile left turn spiral.”
“How long until we’re there?” Dane asked. The only sound since they slipped under the surface of the water had been the hum of the engines and DeAngelo’s running commentary. At least there was none of the creaking and cracking noises Dane associated with going deep underwater, a legacy of too many World War II submarine movies.
“We’re going down at four hundred feet a minute,” DeAngelo said. “To get to seventeen thousand feet will take about forty-five minutes.”
“Have you been in the lab before?” Dane asked.
DeAngelo shook his head. “I didn’t even know something like Deeplab IV existed before Foreman lined all this up. The military must have kept it
deep in the black.” He smiled. “No pun intended.”
“None taken,” Dane said. He studied the outside camera view relayed on the screens in front. The blue water quickly became dark green, then began fading to black.
“Lights on,” DeAngelo flipped a switch and a halo of light surrounded the sub. To Dane it felt as if they were suspended in a black void, with no sense of movement, totally cut off from the rest of the world.
“The pipe is off to our left,” DeAngelo said. “I’m going to spiral down around it, but keep it at a safe distance.”
* * *
On the surface above Deepflight, Captain Stanton was settled into his command chair, a large, deep leather seat bolted to the deck directly behind the helmsman station. There was the traditional wheel at the station, but more importantly, an extremely accurate ground positioning receiver currently getting input from five GPS satellites. Next to the GPR was a series of controls for the thrusters that kept the Glomar in position. They were run by computer, insuring that the large ship stayed within half a foot of the same spot on the surface of the ocean.
With the automated positioning system and the automated dampening system on the pipe there was little for those on board the Glomar to do other than wait. It was a situation Stanton was used to. He reached into the pocket on the side of his chair and pulled out a paperback. He had just opened it to the first page when his radar man broke the silence.
“Sir, I have a contact!”
Stanton put the book down. “Where?”
“Directly below. Depth twenty-seven thousand feet.”
Stanton stood and walked over to the radar console. “That can’t be.”
“It just appeared on-screen, sir.”
“What is it?”
“It doesn’t fit any known profile, sir. It’s big!”
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