by Sean Ellis
Hopefully, the helicopter was exactly what it appeared to be. Hopefully, his four day long ordeal was at an end.
Hope was a seductive luxury that he could not afford, a siren song enticing him to make reckless decisions.
He would wait. A few minutes of paranoid discretion might mean the difference between escape and spending the rest of his days in a Chinese prison.
The helicopter looked like a Mil Mi-17, but that wasn’t much help. Everyone in the region used them. Nepal’s regional alliances meant that aircraft from China might be allowed safe passage over the border. It was unlikely, of course. The two days he had spent skulking about the back alleys of Lhasa had convinced him that he was not being hunted; no doubt the Chinese believed him dead in the ruins of Potala Palace, if they even knew about him at all. But, with tensions running as high as they were, he couldn’t take the chance that someone might have spotted him near the border and reported his presence to the Chinese government. He knew he was in Nepal, at least a good twenty miles past the border, still much too close to let his guard down.
The aircraft circled again and then began to descend, settling onto a flat spot that was almost precisely where Booker had been instructed to make the rendezvous. Another good sign, but he did not move.
Getting out of Lhasa had not been very difficult, even with the increased military presence. The PLA troops were on a war footing, but they seemed quite content to let the locals flee the beleaguered city, and Booker had managed to stow away in the luggage compartment of a bus bound for Kathmandu. On the eve of the second night, he had slipped away and continued on foot, trekking through the entire night. He had used the stars to guide him. The GPS in his mobile phone would have been more precise, but it would also have depleted the battery, leaving him without the means to make contact with the pick-up element.
The overland journey had been an ordeal to rival “Hell Week,” the four-day capstone event of Basic Underwater Demolition/SEALs training that every SEAL had to survive in order to earn the golden trident badge of a US Navy SEAL.
No, he thought, it had actually been worse than BUD/S. Despite the physical stress of Hell Week, he had never been alone. Even when some of his swim buddies had fallen out and rung the bell to voluntarily remove themselves from the program, the simple fact that there were still others driving on had kept him going. He had made his escape from Tibet accompanied only by the ghost of Mira Raiden.
He had tried to compartmentalize that loss. People died, shit happened. How many good friends had he lost in Libya? Men he’d known and fought alongside for years. He didn’t allow himself to think about them. Grief was as destructive as hope when your ass was out in the wind. Try as he might, he couldn’t get Mira Raiden out of his head. He had failed her. He had let her die. Yet, it was not guilt that haunted him. Mira had been special. He had recognized that about her from the moment he’d first laid eyes on her.
He tried to tell himself that his feelings were just a schoolboy infatuation with a beautiful girl, but that was a lie. There were a lot of beautiful women in the world, but none of them would be able to replace her. Mira had been meant for something more, something important.
He hugged his arms around his chest. The constant cold and fatigue were making him maudlin. Mira was gone and he still had a mission to accomplish.
The helicopter bobbed in mid-air just a few feet above the ground as the pilot struggled to find the sweet spot where the collective pitch of the rotor blades would provide just the right amount of lift to allow for a gentle set down. He evidently failed. The Mil bounced hard on the ground twice before finally settling.
Booker stayed where he was, barely able to see the bird now from where he was huddled, even though now he was pretty sure that this was indeed his ride out. He took out his phone and powered it up. After a few seconds, the display flashed with a “missed call” notification. He waited, staring at it for almost a full minute, and was not disappointed when the device began to vibrate, signaling another call. He hit the receive button. “Booker, here…uh, I mean….” He was drawing a blank. He had been instructed to use a designation code. What was it? Something from one of those old black-and-white comedy films. Some kids with a dog and…, “Spanky. This is Spanky.”
There was a long pause. Just transmission lag, he told himself. Then a friendly voice said, “Roger, Spanky. Alfalfa here with the wagon. Where are you hiding?”
He sagged in relief and uncoiled from his huddle. As he hobbled like an old man toward the waiting helicopter, he saw a door open and a figure wearing a battle dress uniform with the distinctive pixilated woodland camouflage pattern used only by the US military. Booker didn’t recognize the face, but the sat phone in the man’s hand was all the proof he needed. He ducked under the still-spinning rotor blades and sank wearily into an empty seat.
His empty stomach lurched as the helicopter leapt skyward with the same abruptness as its landing, but after a few seconds, the sense of being in motion relented.
“You look like shit, buddy,” observed the man with the code-name Alfalfa. He had to shout to be heard over the twin turbine engines, and when Booker opened his eyes to look, he saw Alfalfa reaching out to him with both hands. In his right, he held a head-set that would tie Booker into the internal comms as well as to any radio traffic that came their way. In his left was a Thermos.
“Coffee,” he said, still shouting. “Just the way you SEAL boys like it. Lots of cream and sugar.”
Booker didn’t have the energy to laugh politely, much less respond in kind. Instead, he took both items, donning the headset first. The foam earpieces immediately brought the noise level down to an almost pleasing rumble.
Alfalfa’s voice sounded in his ears, this time at a more conversational tone. “You hungry? I’m afraid all I’ve got is MREs.” He held up a spread of beige pouches containing Meals, Ready to Eat, or as they were more popularly known, ‘Meals, Rejected by Everyone.’ “Okay, I’ve got Mediterranean Chicken, Beef Stew, Chili with Beans—”
“Beef stew,” Booker replied quickly. He was too hungry to be picky, but of the choices he’d been given, stew was something he could eat without heating. He tore into the meal with relish, devouring the stew and mopping up the last traces with something that was identified as “wheat snack bread” but had the taste and consistency of a beer coaster. The MRE included a packet of peanut butter and strawberry jelly, both of which he squeezed directly into his mouth.
The repast quieted the beast growling in his belly, but left him feeling even more fatigued. As he took a pull of coffee from the Thermos—black and unsweet, as it turned out—he turned his attention back to his rescuer. Alfalfa had regarded him with a bemused expression during the feeding frenzy, but now his countenance became more serious. “You should probably know that things are pretty well FUBAR, right now,” he said.
FUBAR. Booker’s fatigued brain struggled to recall the meaning of the familiar acronym. Fucked up beyond…something. “Why is that?”
“It’s this thing with China. We’re at DEFCON Two.”
Booker nearly choked on his coffee. Defense Condition Two meant that U.S. military forces were standing by for all-out war. In the more than fifty years since the adoption of the alert system, the United States had only gone to DEFCON Two once, during the Cuban missile crisis. In the years since, America had deployed its forces in numerous engagements, not always successfully, but none of those wars had resulted in a toe-to-toe conflict with a superpower. To make matters worse, the modern American military had spent the last decade learning how to fight asymmetrical warfare—battling small groups of insurgents who used small arms and roadside IEDs. War with China would mean a military engagement with the world’s largest army; a modern army equipped with tanks, jet aircraft, and long range missiles, almost certainly escalating into nuclear exchange.
Booker couldn’t believe that things had gotten so bad, so quickly, and wondered if perhaps his illicit intrusion into Tibet was somehow responsible
for the crisis.
“Anyway,” Alfalfa continued, “things are pretty tense. But I’ve got orders to make sure you get wherever it is you need to go. So…where do you need to go?”
Booker studied the other man for a moment. His work uniform had no markings, not even a branch of service tape. That meant he was either an operator—probably a SEAL like Booker—or a spook. “You got a name? I feel stupid calling you Alfalfa.”
“You could call me Al,” the other man replied with a laugh. “But the name’s Edwards. Jeff Edwards.”
“Should I be calling you ‘sir,’ Jeff?”
“Let’s just leave it at Jeff.”
“That’s how I like it. Okay, Jeff. I don’t know how much you know about what I’m doing….”
“I know enough. And I know that some very important people want you to succeed. Whatever you need, you get.”
“Okay. The first thing I’m going to need is a ship that can get me to the South Pacific.”
“Carrier Strike Group Five is currently in the South China Sea, and CSG Nine is on its way from San Diego. I’m sure we can arrange something.”
“I might also need some deep sea recovery assets.”
Edwards nodded. “Anything else?”
Booker closed his eyes and let his thoughts drift through his implanted memories of Lemuria, of the several weeks long journey south from the mainland, of the night sky above the forgotten island continent. “Yeah,” he said, not opening his eyes. “I’m going to need that astronomer guy. The one with the TV show.”
Edwards’ easy going manner seemed to stall. “Are you shitting me?”
“Nope. I need someone who can tell me what the skies looked like ten thousand years ago. If I can have that, I’ll tell you exactly where we need to go.”
44.
Somewhere in the South Pacific
Atlas, Mira decided, was like the scorpion from the fable. Treachery was in his nature, even when it worked to his own disadvantage. After her capture, when she had been under guard in a room at Gongar Airbase, she berated herself for having failed to recognize that simple truth.
What was the old saying? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Lesson learned.
Everything Atlas had said rang true. The Trinity was a weapon designed primarily to destroy people like herself. That meant it was as much a scorpion as Atlas was. Its fundamental nature opposed her existence. And if what Atlas had told her was true, then everything he did was an extension of that dark purpose. Did that include his stated desire to prevent it from being made whole again?
This question occupied her thoughts over the course of the days that followed. She was interrogated and threatened by a procession of military and government personnel, yet it had all seemed rather perfunctory, as if the men involved didn’t quite know how to step outside their designated roles. She surmised, early on, that the intent was merely to break down her resistance; fortunately, it seemed that her captors were unaware of her previous—or was it current?—career as an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. If they had known that, known that she was well versed in the techniques they were using, to say nothing of being a spy, her treatment probably would have been a good deal rougher.
The reason for the charade became apparent when at last she was visited by Xu Yongyue. Deputy Minister Xu, Atlas had called him, which indicated a prominent role in the Chinese government. That, however, was not the most interesting thing about him. When he entered her holding cell, Mira immediately sensed his wariness. Despite an outwardly confident manner, he was plainly discomfited by her presence, and after just a few seconds of observing him, she realized why.
Xu was like her.
Not a precognitive, or at least, she didn’t think that was his primary talent, but he had an ability. It radiated off him like a pheromone stink, the instinctive response of an animal meeting another of its kind, unsure of what to do next.
Mira felt as though Xu was looking right through her. She was an open book to him.
There was more to her distrust than merely the realization that they were both heirs to the power of the Ascendant Ones. Xu was almost certainly responsible for the attempt on her life in Germany, to say nothing of the destruction of Potala Palace, which had also destroyed Shambala and killed Booker.
Yet, it was clear from the questions he asked that Xu’s motives were very different from Atlas’. The Trinity was a weapon, currently being used against China by the Unites States; a psychological weapon that would arouse religious sentiment worldwide, a development that would almost certainly sweep the secular Chinese government from power. The destruction of Shambala had been a desperate move to prevent the full restoration of the Trinity, but Mira sensed that what Xu really wanted was control of the third segment, and he believed that Mira and Atlas could lead him to it.
A new arms race had begun, a race to possess the Trinity.
By evening of that same day, she found herself aboard a PLA transport plane, accompanied by Atlas and Xu, along with the woman in dark sunglasses that she had seen earlier. The woman kept herself apart from the rest of them, but even from a distance, Mira could tell that she too possessed an ability, perhaps one more powerful than her own.
Atlas had supplied the general coordinates that would get them close to Lemuria, but his information was nearly as obsolete as Mira’s implanted memories. She had not previously given much thought to the second of the three ancient cities, the so-called lost continent of the Pacific, which she had glimpsed during her vision of the ancient world. Like Atlantis, it was an island city, and had been destroyed and mostly inundated during Atlas’ battle to capture the Trinity.
When the three chosen ones, brothers of a single birth, had received the Trinity segments—circlets worn like crowns—they had each led a group of outcasts. These ordinary humans, rejected by the Ascendant Ones because the gene for psychic abilities was a recessive trait in their DNA, were able to survive and prosper by uniting into tribes under the leadership of the three. However, as their numbers grew, it became necessary for the groups to separate and migrate. Atl’an had taken his cohort west, and Le’Mu had gone in the opposite direction, striking out across the ocean to settle his tribe in a place beyond the reach of the Ascendant Ones.
They had sailed south, across the Pacific Ocean until arriving at a vast island that rose out of the sea; a wild place, unknown to the Ascendant Ones who preferred to migrate on foot. The city they built there, which had subsequently been destroyed in the global upheaval that resulted from Atlas’ campaign, had almost completely vanished from the mythscape of human memory, unlike Atlantis, or even the mystical Shambala. Located too far from the burgeoning civilizations that would arise following the cataclysm, it was not immortalized in oral histories or sacred texts. In fact, the existence of a lost continent had been suggested, not by priests or mystics, but by scientists of the nineteenth century who were trying to account for the existence of similar animal species on continents separated by vast oceans.
Later, spiritualists like Helena Blavatsky popularized the lost continent by claiming to have read about it in secret histories discovered in Tibet. Although Blavatsky’s claims were largely discredited, and the scientific theories were superseded by a better understanding of the movement of tectonic plates, Lemuria remained a subject of interest for metaphysicists. Yet despite the belief in its existence, few could agree on the location of the forgotten land. Some placed it in the Indian Ocean, associating it with Madagascar—not surprising since the island off the coast of East Africa was inhabited by ring-tailed lemurs—while others favored the open ocean between Australia and the Americas.
Mira knew there was a reason that Lemuria had floated back to the surface of humanity’s collective consciousness. She also knew something that none of those who had made finding the city their life-long mission did: she knew that Lemuria had actually existed.
Yet, as with Shambala, her memories were woefully outdated. She re
membered Lemuria as it had been, not as it now was. Furthermore, her recollections of the journey to the island lacked the kind of meaningful context that could help her narrow down its location. Atlas however had actually been to Lemuria.
“So where is it?” she asked Atlas when they were airborne.
“I don’t know exactly.”
“You’ve been there. Don’t you remember?”
Atlas glanced at Xu who was listening to their exchange with an intent expression, saying nothing, and for the first time, it occurred to Mira that Atlas might not have told the Chinese man everything about his past. “A lot has changed since I was in the area,” he said, choosing his words carefully.
“You said you could get me there,” she pressed.
“I can get us close. Once we’re at the approximate location, I believe that your special ability will guide us the rest of the way, just as it once guided you to Atl’an’s tomb.”
“Well, where is it approximately?” Mira asked.
Another glance at Xu. Mira realized that he had not yet revealed that information to the Chinese government minister. The information was Atlas’ hole card, and he evidently feared, perhaps not unreasonably, that if he gave the information up too soon, Xu would have no further use for him. Finally, he leaned forward. “Our destination lies south of New Zealand, on a section of ocean floor known today as the Campbell Plateau.”
“How close to New Zealand?” Xu asked, his eyes flashing dangerously. “Is it in international waters?”
“I don’t know for sure. As I said, it’s been a while.”
“We will not be welcome in New Zealand’s territorial waters,” Xu explained, “and we cannot risk angering their government by bringing one of our vessels too close.”