Tam Nok raised her hands and called out a greeting as they approached the white-robed circle. There was no reply but the circle stood aside to let them pass. As did the ring of blue. The chanting still continued from both circles and Ragnarok was now certain that the strange noise was coming from the other tall object, to his right.
The figure robed in red who had watched their arrival broke from the group next to the trunk and came toward them. The rest of the group kept its attention on whatever it had been doing.
Tam Nok again spoke in the strange tongue. Ragnarok felt out of place. His ax was heavy, pulling his left arm down. The chanting was running through his mind, urging him to join in. He shook his head, dirty hair twisting in the wind, and growled. The tree seemed to be alive, the bark gnarled and twisted from hundreds, thousands of years of life, the branches drooping overhead, covering them. Drawing him in to the Earth, to be one with the soil.
“Your friend is restless,” a woman’s voice came out of the red hood, speaking in Norse.
“There is not much time,” Tam Nok said.
The other woman pulled her hood back, revealing pale skin and fiery red hair. “I am Penarddun.”
“I am Tam Nok, and this is Ragnarok.”
Penarddun smiled. “A mighty warrior of the north seas. You travel in formidable company.”
Ragnarok shifted his feet, trying to stay focused on the two women. He was not sure if she was referring to him or Tam Nok. The chanting was getting even louder. And that eerie noise was still floating on the air.
“I need-” Tam Nok began, but the other woman held up her hand.
“I know what you are looking for.”
“Is it here?”
“No.”
The chanting abruptly stopped. The black robed figure- a man as near as Ragnarok could tell- yelled out something in the strange tongue and then headed toward the other tall object, the others falling in behind him.
Penarddun extended a hand toward the tree. “We worship the mighty oak, symbol of the Earth Mother.” The slender hand continued toward the other tall object. “And there we sacrifice to the Ones Before. Come.” She followed the last in line and Ragnarok reluctantly followed. For some strange reason he had no desire to see the cause of the terrible noise.
As he drew nearer- and the torches illuminated more of it as the robed ones gathered round- he began to make out the form. It was a huge figure made of wood and wicker, over sixty feet high, formed in the image of a man. Two legs rose to a thick body. Two arms hung at the side and the very top a head, made of bent wooden staves.
Ragnarok’s hand tightened on the handle of his ax. Inside the wooden confines of the structure were people. Crammed in, some standing on others, arms poking between the beams, their supplicating voices the horrible sound he had been hearing. The writhing forms captured inside made for a bizarre spectacle, as if the wooden creature were alive, its skin crawling with some malignant disease trying to get out.
“What is this?” Ragnarok hissed at Tam Nok, but she hushed him.
“It is their way,” she whispered.
“Those captured inside are murderers, thieves, betrayers,” Penarddun said as if she had overheard. They halted about fifty feet away as the same circles that had surrounded the oak reformed around the wicker man. The voices of those inside rose even higher, begging for release, for mercy.
“The gods listen best if the message is coated in blood,” Penarddun said.
Ragnarok was surprised at such words coming out of such a slight and beautiful woman. He had seen many horrible things done in combat, but this was something he had never experienced.
“And the message is very important,” Penarddun continued. She turned to Tam Nok. “Is it not?”
“I don’t-” Tam Nok began, but Penarddun cut her off.
“The Shadow is coming once more. And we need the Ones Before to help us stop the Shadow.” Her voice lowered so that only Tam Nok and Ragnarok could hear. “My fellow Druids believe this is the best way to get the help of the Ones Before. But you and I know there is another way. They do not hear the true voices of the Gods, but we do.”
The man robed in black took a torch from one of those in blue. He walked toward the base of the wicker man. The priest thrust the torch into one of the legs of the statue. One of the prisoners kicked it back out.
The priest turned and raised his arms, yelling something. The circle of druids closed on the wicker man and flung their torches at it. In seconds flame caught hold at a dozen places.
The screams of those trapped inside rose to a fever pitch. Ragnarok watched as limbs smashed against the wood in desperate attempts to escape, bones breaking almost unnoticed in the grip of the searing flames.
Ragnarok looked to his right. Penarddun’s face was lit by the fire, appearing almost translucent. Tam Nok had also pulled her hood back and her dark eyes were watching the gruesome spectacle with no expression.
“Is this getting us any closer to our destination?” Ragnarok asked.
Both women turned to him in surprise.
“You said you knew what we were here for,” Ragnarok said to Penarddun. “If it is not here, where is it?”
Penarddun turned from the fire. “Do you know what the it is you are searching for?”
“You said you knew why I was here,” Tam Nok said.
“I know why you are here,” Penarddun agreed. “I know you need something I am to give you. I know where it is, but I don’t know what it is. It is the nature of our position to only be given pieces of knowledge.”
Ragnarok shifted his feet impatiently. “Where?”
Penarddun pointed to the north. “That way. Not far.”
A man had broken through the wood, high up on the wicker man. He fell to the ground, his hair on fire. The body slammed in the earth and the man feebly tried to rise. One of the druids ran forward with a dagger and slit the man’s throat, blood splattering the dirt. The wails and screams were decreasing as those inside succumbed to the flames. Ragnarok was glad the wind was at their back and that the odor of burned flesh was being blown away from them.
Penarddun finally turned from the dying flames. “Come.” She walked to the black robed man and spoke to him in the strange tongue. He looked Tam Nok and Ragnarok over, then replied. They seemed to be arguing about something.
“What now?” Ragnarok asked Tam Nok.
“He doesn’t want her to lead us to wherever it is we must go. It is apparently a very holy site. He is scared,” she added. “The Druids have many enemies.”
“Not as many as they had before,” Ragnarok noted, nodding his head toward the remains of the wicker man.
“The Romans tried destroying them for centuries, hunting them down like animals,” Tam Nok said. “And now that the Romans are no longer here, it is those of the new religion, the Christians, who seek to destroy the old ways and replace it with their new beliefs. The king in London has been converted and is being urged to destroy the druids.”
“How do you know all this?” Ragnarok asked.
“I have listened while on my journeys,” Tam Nok said. “Something I recommend to all who travel.”
Before Ragnarok could reply to that, Tam Nok stepped forward, next to the two High Druids. She spoke to them in their tongue, then pulled out the bamboo section. She unstopped the end and showed them the map and writing she had shown Ragnarok on his ship.
The black-robed priest still seemed opposed. Tam Nok rolled the parchments up and put them back in her tube. She pulled something out of the neckline of her cloak, an amulet attached to a thin metal chain around her neck. It glittered in the reflected light of the dying fire of the wicker man. A blue glow suffused Tam Nok’s hand and seemed to spread out over those close to her.
Penarddun and the priest dropped to their knees, bowing their heads toward Tam Nok. The other druids, seeing their leaders, did the same until they were surrounded by supplicating figures.
Tam Nok spoke quickly in their tongue and
Penarddun stood. “Let us go,” she said. They walked out of the circle of still kneeling Druids toward the north.
Ragnarok started to ask Tam Nok what the amulet was, but she hushed him. He fell in step as the passed between two burial barrows. A slight breeze had started to blow and Ragnarok caught the scent of burned flesh. He bowed his head and breath only through his mouth.
Chapter 11
THE PRESENT
1999 AD
Dane had always let Chelsea find the bodies on their search and rescue missions. When she went after human scent, it usually didn’t matter whether they were dead or alive- in fact, Dane knew Chelsea could usually smell a dead body more clearly than a live one, depending on the length of time since death. Dane, on the other hand, could only sense the thoughts coming from the live ones and nothing from the dead, so whenever they went into a search situation, he concentrated on trying to save the living while his Golden Retriever located the bodies and Dane marked them for recovery.
But Chelsea was over three miles above his head. And Dane had ordered DeAngelo back into Deepflight, to await the results of his reconnaissance. As he climbed up the ladder in the central corridor of Deeplab, the feeling in his gut reminded Dane of all his cross-border missions into Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War when he had been a member of the classified SOG (Studies & Observation Group) unit. Already a decorated Green Beret, Dane had been drafted into SOG and then his team had been picked by Foreman to run a mission deep into Cambodia to search for a downed SR-71 spy plane.
Foreman had neglected to tell Dane’s team-- Reconnaissance Team Kansas (RT Kansas)- that the SR-71 had disappeared while flying over the Angkor Kol Ker gate. In fact, Foreman told Dane and his teammates nothing. And within minutes of crossing a stream and entering the Angkor gate every other man in the patrol was dead or disappeared.
Dane knew Deeplab IV wasn’t inside a gate. He would have been able to feel that. But something had happened here. He’d felt it while they were descending and he felt it now, a faint image, floating at the edge of his consciousness, like trying to remember a bad dream after a restless night.
Something had been here. And from the lingering sensations, it was something that had come out of the gate.
Dane climbed through an opening in a metal grate, then paused at the top hatches. There were three, evenly spaced around the cylinder. Green, red and blue, level 3. Red 3 was the command sphere. Blue 3 was communications. Green 3 was the escape pod. Dane checked the status board for Green 3. It indicated that the pod was gone.
* * *
Dane cleared the safety on the door for Blue 3. Once he had a blinking green light, he began manually turning the handle. It was cold in the central corridor, despite the glow of two electrical heaters, both at the bottom. After thirty seconds, the handle clicked and stopped moving. The light turned to a steady green. Dane pulled the hatch out on pneumatic arms. He pulled himself through the three foot wide opening into the communications sphere.
It was empty. Dane looked at the rows of blinking lights and dials. The overhead light began flashing, and if that wasn’t enough, a metallic voice announced that the sphere was unsecured and the hatch needed to be shut.
Dane ignored both the light and voice. He went over to a console and picked up the phone that linked the habitat with the surface.
“Is someone there?” the voice on the other sounded anxious. “What’s going on?”
Dane stared at the phone in his hand for a second, then put it back in place without saying anything. He went back out, shutting the hatch behind. He opened the door to Red 3, the command and control console.
He sat down in the commander’s seat and swung the laptop computer mounted on an arm in front of him. It was on, a screensaver showing sharks and sting rays swimming across the screen. Someone with a sense of humor must have put that in, Dane thought as he hit the enter key.
The screensaver disappeared and he was presented with an index showing the various parts of the master computer. Dane ran his finger across the touchpad until the arrow was centered over HISTORY. He double-clicked.
He was presented with a new set of choices. Dane choose LOG for his first investigation. Lieutenant Sautran’s voice echoed out of a speaker. It began with his initial confirmation of all system’s positive and everything running in the norm as Deeplab was lowered into the water from the Glomar.
Dane began fast-forwarding, searching for a point at which things got out of the norm. He found it just after Sautran reported Deeplab arriving at its current depth.
“We have a contact,” Sautran reported. “Directly below.”
There was a burst of static, then Sautran’s voice came back.
“It’s ascending. Eight thousand feet below and rising rapidly. Very big. About the size of the Scorpion bogey. We’re trying to make contact by pinging with sonar.”
There were a few moments of silence.
“No reply,” Sautran’s voice was calm. Dane could only imagine what was going through the naval lieutenant’s mind as something huge came up toward them from the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean. “Lou, is it mechanical or living?”
Sautran must have left the Log recorder on as he talked to one of his two crewmembers. Dane checked opened another window on the laptop screen. It showed the status of the members of the crew at the same time of the recording of the Log.
Sautran’s symbol was in the same sphere Dane was currently in. Lou Wilkins, the crew’s imaging specialist was in Green 1, was shown to be on the lowest level, where the main imaging units all terminated. Bob Freeman’s, the habitat specialist, was in Red 2, the habitat’s life systems sphere.
“Uh-” Wilkins’ voice was in the background, coming over the intercom. “Hard to tell, L-T. It’s moving straight up. All I’ve got is radar and sonar. But there’s nothing on the planet that big and alive. Hell, there’s nothing been built that big either. I’m trying-” there was a burst of static.
“Lou?” Sautran’s voice now had an edge to it.
“Five thousand feet and rising,” Wilkins reported. “Geez, this thing is ascending fast. We don’t have anything that can come up that quickly under control. Even the Japanese don’t have anything that-” static again.
Sautran was no longer talking to the Log, leaving the recorder running as he dealt with this unexpected situation.
“Freeman, get out of there. Get to the pod. Everyone to the pod. ASAP!”
Dane nodded. Sautran was doing the right thing.
“Lou, give me something. What is this thing?”
“Two thousand feet below and still closing,” Wilkins reported. “I’m turning on the IR searchlights and imagers. See if we can’t get a look-see at-- Geez!” Wilkins voice went up several octaves. “Everything’s going nuts here.”
“Same here, Lou,” Sautran’s voice was tight. “I’m reading major systems failures everywhere. Life support is-” static for several seconds. “-failure-” static “-diverting-”
The recorder went dead, catching Dane by surprise, his ears straining to try to hear through the static. Dane waited, letting it play out for another minute but there was nothing.
He checked the window that showed crew member status. All signs had also blipped out. Total system failure across the board. Dane looked about the command sphere. He wasn’t an expert, but everything seemed to be working fine now. He checked current crew member status. Nothing. They were all gone. Or their crew indicator sensors were gone. But Dane knew, without having to check the other six remaining spheres he hadn’t been in, that there was nobody on board but him. At least they’d managed to escape in the pod. Dane assumed that the Glomar would recover the sphere once it reached the surface.
He got out of the chair and left the command sphere to climb down and let Sin Fen and Ariana inside.
* * *
The National Security Agency was established in 1952 by President Truman as part of the Department of Defense. It’s mission was to focus on communications
and cryptological intelligence, a field known as SIGINT, or signal’s intelligence.
While the majority of what the NSA did was highly classified, it was widely accepted that the organization was the largest employer of mathematicians in the world.
One of those mathematicians who had been with the organization for over two decades was Patricia Conners. She’d worked various jobs in the organization from code-making to code-breaking. She’d moved over to remote imagery five years ago and was considered one of the top people in the Agency not only in interpreting data down-loaded from the various spy systems the United States military employed, but in the actual operation of those systems.
Conners was in her mid-50s, a short, gray-haired lady, whose benign appearance belied a razor-sharp mind. She had been become involved in the gates when running imagery from spy satellites at Foreman’s request.
Her office was two floors beneath the main NSA building at Fort Meade. She did all her work through the large computer that took up most of the desk top. On the left side of the computer she had a large framed picture of her grandchildren gathered together at the last family reunion, all six of them, two via her daughter and four from two sons. On the right side of the computer was a pewter model of the Starship Enterprise, the one from the original TV series. Stuck on the side of her monitor were various bumper stickers from the science fiction conventions she religiously traveled to every year, ranging from one indicating the bearer was a graduate of Star Fleet Academy to another warning that the driver braked for alien landings.
In the past week, it seemed like science fiction had become science fact as the assault came through the gates and was only narrowly stopped at the last minute. But now there were triangular shaped gates at locations around the world that resisted every type of imaging that had been tried.
Conners knew about the Super-Kamiokande and right now that seemed to be the primary way they could detect activity around the gates. She had a direct link to the Can and also to Foreman in the War Room. Her job was to maintain a watch with the regular imaging devices on the off chance something changed and they could see in, or, more likely, if something was detected coming out of the gates.
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