by Bob Mayer
One of Getty’s legs was gone from the knee down, blood pulsing out. But she took the sign of the blood flowing as a positive; it meant he was still alive. She tucked her pistol in her belt and then grabbed his arms. She turned her back to him, his arms tight over her shoulders, and dragged him.
A string of bullets whizzed by her head. “Sorry,” Miles yelled as he fired another burst that narrowly missed her, giving her covering fire at whoever was behind her.
She shoved Getty into the passenger seat, then sat on top of him, pulling the door shut. Miles slid into his seat, and they were on their way. Bullets thumped on the back window as he pulled away.
As Miles raced through the streets of Moscow, darting through narrow alleys, Ariana pulled her belt off. She slid it under the stump of Getty’s right leg, then pulled it as tight as she could. Then she stuck the muzzle of the Browning under the belt and twisted, tightening down the makeshift tourniquet.
“Where are you going?” she finally asked Miles, satisfied that at least there was no more blood coming out of the stump.
“The airfield.”
She shook her head. “We need to get him to a hospital.”
“The Mafia would have him in a heartbeat if we did that,” Miles said. “We’re coming with you.”
*****
Dane flexed his knees, allowing his body to roll with the slight swell that the Grayback bobbed in. There was one Crab in each of the two hangers, and the one on the right was being prepped for the upcoming mission.
The Crab looked like a cross between a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and a miniature submarine. It had a tubular body ten meters long by three in diameter with a turret on the top center that mounted the thirty-millimeter chain gun and the TOW and torpedo launchers. At the rear were dual propellers and horizontal and vertical dive fins, while along the lower half on either side were treads, both powered by the same powerful engine, the changeover made by shifting the power train to either tread or propeller. Entry was by means of doors on either side near the rear, just in front of the power plant, that were hinged on the bottom and swung down to become ramps.
“Impressive, isn’t it?” Colonel Loomis asked.
“Impressive was the B-52 bomber stuck vertically in the ground that was in the Angkor gate,” Dane said. “Impressive is destroying Iceland. Impressive is sending a tsunami to wipe out a hundred miles of the coast of Puerto Rico as a by-product of doing something else. It’s also destroying Atlantis so completely we thought it was simply a literary device used by Plato.”
“What’s your problem?” Loomis asked. “Ever since you’ve come here, you’ve been gloom and doom.”
“I should be dancing with joy?” Dane asked. He faced the officer. “I’ve been in a gate before. I watched my team get decimated. This” – he slapped the side of the Crab, producing a dull thunk—“is not going to defeat the Shadow. It’s a ride, that’s all. We have no clue what we’re going to find over there,” Dane nodded toward the dark wall on the northern horizon. “Not in the gate and especially not once we go through the portal, if we can go through the portal.”
“I know all that,” Loomis said. “But we’re taking the fight to the Shadow for the first time instead of reacting. I think you’d be a little more positive.”
“What makes you think this is the first time man has taken the fight into a gate against the Shadow?” Dane asked.
“What do you mean?” Loomis was confused.
“Nothing.” Dane said.
“We go in thirty minutes,’ Loomis snapped.
“Fine.” He noted Dr. Martsen near the bow of the Grayback, looking down into the water. He walked away, not saying anything else to Loomis, and headed forward. As he got close, he could see Rachel’s dorsal fin cutting through the water and then the dolphin’s head as Martsen tossed a small fish to her.
“Hello,” he said as he walked up. “I’m Eric Dane.”
Martsen was short and slender, with dark hair cut tight against her skull. There were deep lines around her eyes. “So this is your idea?”
“Who told you that?” Dane was taken aback at the anger in her voice.
“I was told you were the expert on that…” she pointed at the gate.
“As much as anyone is an expert,” Dane said.
“So it was your idea to go in there and ask for Rachel to accompany you,” she said.
“I didn’t ask for her,” Dane said. He could pick up the anger from Martsen and realized it mirrored the anger he had just shown toward Loomis. He glanced at the dark wall of the gate and realized being this close was affecting everyone.
The muscles on the side of Martsen’s mouth were working as she tried to control her temper. “Who did then?”
“I don’t know,” Dane lied. “I’m not even sure why the two of you are here, but I think Rachel has an important role to play.’
“Why do you think that?”
Dane told her about what had happened on the beach in Japan. As he spoke, he could sense her relaxing slightly.
“You can read minds?” she asked when he was done.
“I can sense things.”
She nodded. “Sometimes I feel like Rachel is communicating with me.”
“I know Chelsea does with me,” Dane said. He looked down at the water. “To be honest, I don’t know much about dolphins. Aren’t they supposed to be intelligent and able to talk among themselves?”
“Rachel’s a Tursiops truncates,” Martsen said. “What most people call a bottle-nosed dolphin.”
“She’s big,” Dane noted as Rachel surfaced, then dove.
“Three meters,” Martsen said proudly. “I’ve been with her for eight years.”
“Always with the Navy?” Dane asked.
“It’s the only way to get funded,” Martsen replied defensively. “And our work has been related to submarine rescue and mine mapping. Nothing offensive.”
“How long can she stay under?” Dane asked. He was watching where Rachel had gone under, and she still hadn’t come up yet. Martsen saw him looking.
“She can stay under for fifteen minutes,” she said. “And go down six hundred meters.”
“Isn’t she an air-breather?’ Dane felt ignorant, but he had rarely been to the ocean.
“A mammal, just like you and me. Air-breathing, warm-blooded.”
“How can she dive so deep and stay under so long then?”
“Her lungs are more efficient than ours. She can exchange a much higher percentage of the contents of her lungs than we can.”
“And she’s intelligent,” Dane said.
“More intelligent than humans in some ways,” Martsen said. “They don’t have wars and kill each other.”
“I hear that,” Dane said. “One has to wonder exactly what we mean when we talk about intelligence.”
“A lot of people confuse dolphins with porpoises, but porpoises have a rounded head with no beak, and their dorsal fins are smaller. And dolphins are smarter,” she added.
Rachel surfaced. There was a puff of spray from her blowhole, then she began circling lazily.
“She shuts the blowhole when she dives and has to clear it when she surfaces,” Martsen explained.
Dane’s attention was caught by the FLIP, a quarter mile away and closer to the gate, as the bulbous bow slowly went underwater and the stern lifted. Slowly, the forward end of the ship disappeared below the waves, taking the muon generator down. In less than five minutes, the majority of the ship was underwater, the stern bobbing in the slight swell.
Martsen signed. “I know why the Navy wants her for this mission. Colonel Loomis said that they were going in blind, no electromagnetic emissions. So they’re going to use Rachel as their sonar.”
“What do you mean?” Dane asked.
“Rachel uses sonar, what we call echolocation, to navigate and find prey. She sends out a series of clicks that she makes with the blowhole and emits through her forehead. Then she picks up the bounce-back with her jaw. Her brain can t
hen analyze the information and form a sort of picture of her surroundings using these sound images. There are some researchers who speculate the dolphins can even use their emitter to send high-frequency bursts that stun their prey.”
“Can you communicate with her?” Dane asked.
Martsen tapped a device on her belt. “This holds recordings of sounds that I’ve determined the meaning of. Many researchers say now that dolphins don’t communicate with each other or have a language, but my experience has been that Rachel clearly understands these noises.”
She pushed a button, and a high-pitched whistle came out of the box. Rachel stopped her circling and came over, staring up at them.
Dane could sense the intelligence in Rachel’s eyes, and he had the strange feeling that she was getting a reading on him also.
“That was Rachel’s name,” Martsen said. “Every dolphin has its own name, a specific sound that identifies it. A lot of dolphin language, such as it is, we can’t hear because the frequency’s too high. Rachel can hear up to one hundred fifty kilohertz, far beyond what we can. To give you an idea how far up that is, a bat can only hear up to one-twenty. So there’s a whole spectrum that most researchers ignored for many years.”
“So, how intelligent is she?” Dane remembered the pod of dolphins that had looked at him off the coast of Japan. He had no doubt that they were watching him and evaluating.
Martsen shrugged. “I don’t know. Her world is so different from ours that it’s hard to make an accurate comparison. Just because they haven’t built cities doesn’t mean they aren’t as smart as us. Dolphins live in harmony with their environment, unlike humans. Sometimes I wonder when they made the shift from living on land to water.
“What do you mean?”
“I told you that they’re mammals. They developed on land, and then some time in the course of their evolution they went into the ocean.”
“That’s strange,” Dane said. “Why would they do that?”
‘Maybe to get away from us,” Martsen said.
“Why?”
“Because we’re their worst enemies. It’s amazing that Rachel even works with us.”
“How are we their worst enemies?”
“We kill them, Mr. Dane. By the millions. Commercial fishers set out thousands of kilometers of drift nets that catch everything in their path, including dolphins. It’s estimated over five million have been killed in the last ten years here in the Pacific alone. The Russians have practically wiped out the dolphin population of the Black Sea.”
“That’s present day,” Dane said. “That doesn’t explain millions of years ago.”
Martsen shrugged. “There’s more that we don’t’ know about dolphins than we do know. Sometimes I wish I could escape into the ocean.”
“You don’t like people much, do you?”
“I like people,” Martsen said defensively. “There are some doctors who used dolphins in therapy for cancer patients. I’ve gone with Rachel on some of those missions.”
“What?” Dane’s attention was back on Rachel, the eye closest peering up at him as she swam past.
“There are doctors who think that the dolphin’s echo-sounding ability can affect the brain.”
Now Martsen had his complete attention. “How?”
“No one’s quite sure. Some think the energy of the sound dolphins transmit can actually change cellular metabolism. There have been several documented cases of people with severe brain cancer going into remission after dolphin therapy.
“What do you think?” Dane asked.
“I think there’s a lot more to Rachel than she lets me know,” Martsen said. “Sometimes I think she’s the one trying to train me.”
Dane laughed. “When I take Chelsea for a walk back home following her with a pooper-scooper, I often think that if aliens were watching, they would think Chelsea the master and me her pet.”
Dane could hear Colonel Loomis calling for him, but he didn’t turn. If dolphins could affect the brain… Loomis called again, and a klaxon sounded, followed by a loudspeaker ordering all personnel to clear the deck in preparation for diving.
“I have to go,” Dane said.
Martsen nodded. “Take care of Rachel.” She took the box off her belt. She pointed at a small LED screen. “You can scroll through and see what vocabulary I’ve got in there.”
“And what about understanding her?” Dane asked.
“ I don’t think you’ll have a problem with that.”
Dane turned. Loomis was standing on the left-side ramp of the Crab, waving at him. “You better get below,” he told Martsen.
“Good luck,” she said to Dane.
“This way,” Loomis pointed at the Crab in the right hangar.
Dane noticed that a long, torpedo-like object had been added on the front deck. “What’s that?”
“Nagoya’s plug.”
*****
The Learjet’s medical kit wasn’t designed for dealing with the type of trauma that Getty had suffered. The tourniquet had stopped the bleeding, but the man was still unconscious, slumped in one of the plush seats as the plane rolled toward takeoff position.
Miles was looking out the portholes. “I’m surprised the airfield hasn’t been shut down yet.”
“The Mafia is that powerful?” Ariana asked as she went through the meager contents of the kit.
“Capitalism at its worst,” Miles said. He finally relaxed and sat down as the plane rocketed down the runway and was airborne.
The best Ariana could do was give Getty an injection of antibiotics and morphine. She ordered the pilot to head for Berlin and to have an ambulance waiting for them.
“And after Berlin?” Miles asked.
That was a good question, Ariana realized. She now had eight skulls, but she had no clue where others might be, although she had people in her father’s employ making inquiries.
“I don’t know,” she finally said.
“The skull was that important?” Miles asked.
She could tell by the tone of his voice that he thought she was on some rich person’s lark, something he had probably seen often enough in his business. “It’s connected to the gates.”
“You said that earlier. How?”
“We don’t know exactly.”
“Important enough for my friend to lose his leg?”
“Probably not to him,” Ariana said.
“The Mafia thought you were more important than the skull.”
Miles didn’t’ say anything, and Ariana went over to the fax machine. A small pile of paper was on the tray, and she grabbed it and brought it back to her seat.
A report from Nagoya on his latest theories on the gates and what he was proposing to do with the Crab was the first thing that caught her attention. She quickly read it through, not completely understanding the physics but grasping the concept. She had never really considered that the tectonic activity might be more than just a destructive activity but instead, a by-product of the Shadow’s desire for energy. Humans had only stumbled on the theory of plate tectonics in the last thirty years, and much still wasn’t understood about the forces involved.
“We’re going to New York after Berlin,” she told Miles.
“What’s in New York?” Miles asked.
“There’s something I want to see.” She picked up the SATPhone to make the necessary arrangements for what she wanted.
*****
It had been christened Anak Krakatoa—Child of Krakatoa—in 1925 when its cone first peeked above the water. In 1950, a minor eruption raised the height to sixty meters above sea level. The next fifty years saw an additional thirty meters added.
The Shadow’s probing undid that in less than a minute. The main lava tube underneath Anak Krakatoa was a hundred meters wide and fed by the pressure of the molten mantel below. For years it had been blocked by the weight of a quarter mile of cooled rock above it in the caldera.
The probing changed that, hitting a crack in the plug, widening
it. As if sensing the weakness, the lava wormed its way into the opening, expanding it. And then the plug blew.
The explosion was heard by those who lived on the south end of Sumatra and the north tip of Java. They knew what it was immediately and hurried for high ground, just beating the tsunami that struck their shores minutes later.
*****
“How much time before the entire rim goes?” Foreman asked Nagoya as the information about Anak Krakatoa’s eruption was relayed from various seismic stations to the control room in the FLIP.
“Hard to tell,” Nagoya answered. “Remember that the Shadow used nuclear weapons to induce what happened in Iceland. Now it’s using the power it’s tapped from Chernobyl. The only thing I can do is try to match the power levels.”
“And?” Foreman pressed impatiently.
“And I think we have twelve hours, with a twenty percent margin of error either way.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE PAST
79 A.D.
The Pontus Euxinus stretched ahead of the galley as far as the eye could see. Since leaving the Hellesponte, Captain Fabatus had kept the shore in sight off the port side, creeping around the sea. Falco had always found sailors a curious contradiction. They claimed to love the water, yet they feared to stray out of sight of land. It had taken a direct order from General Cassius for Fabatus to take the plunge and take a north-northeast course across the Pontus Euxinus for three straight days, out of sight of land. As soon as he had spotted land directly ahead, Fabatus, and everyone else on board, had breathed a huge sigh of relief. Then he resumed his shore-hugging navigation to the east.
Standing in the bow, Falco could see the ship cutting through the water. He sensed Kaia coming up behind him, but his attention was below, on the gray forms leaping and splashing next to them.
“Good morning, priestess.”
“Good morning, soldier.” Kaia glanced over the thin railing. “We seem to be making good time.”
“After what happened in the Hellesponte, everyone, including the slaves, are most anxious to get us off the ship,” Falco said.