Atlantis: Bermuda Triangle

Chapter 5

Night or day no longer mattered as soon as the elevator began going down. The electric lights on the top of the cage reflected off the dark walls, showing the layers of rock going by as the elevator descended. Professor Nagoya had made the trip many times and it held little interest for him. He’d already called ahead with the coordinates to be checked and he knew his team would be hard at work.

He’d taken the bullet train north from Tokyo, traversing the two hundred kilometers in less than an hour. A helicopter had been waiting in the parking area of the station he got off at and whisked him here.

Rock walls on four sides guided Nagoya straight down. The Kamioka Mozumi mine was the deepest in Japan. Its lowest level was over three miles below the surface of the Earth. At a steady rate of four hundred feet per minute, the cage descended. Nagoya had to switch cages three times, and cross three horizontal tunnels to get to the deepest shaft that led to his destination.

These last three vertical miles took him almost as long as the hundred and twenty horizontal miles from Tokyo. At long last the final cage thumped to a halt. Nagoya impatiently pulled aside the gate. A young woman was waiting for him, Ahana, his assistant. She bowed as she greeted him.

“What have you found?”

“We are still coordinating with the Americans,” Ahana said, “but the results are looking positive. There is something at the coordinates we were given by Mister Foreman.”

Nagoya felt his pulse quicken. After all these years, every little discovery about the gates and those on the other side was like a drink of water to a man in the desert. They knew so little. Given that he had managed to get his government to invest over a hundred million dollars in this project it was good that it was finally paying results. Of course the project has ostensibly been done for other research reasons; indeed it was used for various research projects by numerous organizations and it paid dividends that way, but Nagoya had been the one who had accomplished what many had said couldn’t be done.

They walked down a corridor carved out of solid rock, over eight feet wide and ten high. After two hundred yards, the tunnel opened into a large natural cavern that had been discovered during drilling years ago, before the mine was tapped out. The cavern, over eighty meters deep and eighty wide had been exactly what Nagoya had been searching for.

The tunnel came out near the very top of the cavern. A steel grating extended out over the open space, with several work stations where the crew that manned the site worked. Underneath, a highly polished stainless steel tank, sixty meters wide by sixty deep had been painstakingly built, section by section. Along the walls of the tank over 20,000 photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) had been attached. PMTs were extremely sensitive light sensors that could detect a single photon as it traveled through water and reacted with it. They were all linked together with the output displayed on the computers in the work station.

The tank was filled with very pure water. The surface was dark black and mesmerizing. Nagoya often found himself simply sitting and staring at that totally smooth surface, lost in thought.

“What do you have?” he asked once more as Ahana took her place at the main console.

“The computer is still processing the data, sir,” Ahana typed in some commands. “Another few minutes please.”

Nagoya put his hands behind his back, trying to appear calm. The entire complex went by the name of Super-Kamiokande. In technical terms it was a ring-imaging water Cerenkov detector. Foreman, Nagoya’s counterpart in the United States, called it the ‘Can’, a rather simplistic term in Nagoya’s opinion for a device that was the only one of its kind.

Cerenkov light was produced when an electrically charged particle traveled through water. The reason the Can had to be so far underground was to allow the miles of earth and rock above it to block out the photons emitted by man’s devices on the surface of the planet. Thus researchers could study the much stronger cosmic rays given off by the sun which could pass through the rock in an almost 'pure’ environment much like astronomers put their telescopes on the highest mountains.

The other reason- and one that only Nagoya knew of- that it was deep underground was to look in the other direction; into the Earth. Since charged particles should not be emitted by the Earth itself, no other researchers even considered that a possible use. It looked for a particular charged particle that Foreman had stumbled across as being significant to the gates and the effect they produced.

For that reason, Nagoya did not mind the name the American CIA man had given the Super-Kamiokande, which had been developed as a joint US-Japan research project. Both Nagoya and Foreman tweaked their governments into doing something even the governments didn’t really understand the need for at the time.

Nagoya knew that Foreman over the decades after World War II had focused on various locations where strange things seemed to happen: the Bermuda Triangle was only the most prominent to the public. There was also the Devil’s Sea off the coast of Japan, the area that had first drawn Nagoya’s interest. There were many more spots on the face of the Earth that propagated strange electro-magnetic and radioactive properties.

The Russians, interestingly enough, had been the foremost investigators of these areas, looking beyond the spots inside their own borders. At a secret meeting brokered by Foreman shortly after the Berlin Wall fell, Nagoya had finally been able to meet his Russian counterpart, Kolkov, and learn much history and theory.

The Russians had lost a submarine not only in the Devil’s Sea, but two inside the Bermuda Triangle gate during the Cuban missile crisis. Additionally, the Soviets had sent ground recon elements into the Angkor gate area in Cambodia in 1956 and 1978, losing both groups without a single survivor. Only Kolkov knew how many people the Russians lost over the years into the gates inside their territory, three of which Nagoya knew certainly existed- Tunguska, in the waters of Lake Baikal, and near the Chernobyl reactor.

Indeed, survivors from the gate were few and far between, Foreman having two of them working for him in the man named Dane and the woman Sin Fen. Nagoya had never met Dane but he often wondered about the woman, whom he had met several times. She made him feel very nervous, as if her dark eyes could see into him, into parts he himself wasn’t aware of.

Nagoya also knew that the Russians were greatly interested in the gates for some very specific reasons. First, there was the natural tendency for paranoia on the part of every Russian. Numerous invasions over the years and betrayals had engendered a certain mindset in that country. Second, the Soviet Government had supported Kolkov with tremendous amounts of resources once it was determined that a gate opening in the vicinity of Chernobyl had caused the disaster at that nuclear power plant. There was also considerable speculation that the massive explosion in 1908 at Tunguska had somehow been associated with the gates.

Like Foreman and the CIA, Kolkov had worked in the dark hallways of the KGB for decades searching for answers when no one was even sure what the questions were.

Nagoya, with less resources but more technical expertise at his beck and call, had focused on scientific answers to the gate anomalies. The Japanese over the centuries had lost ships and more recently planes in the Devil’s gate and there were many legends about the area.

Nagoya wanted to step forward and look over Ahana’s shoulder to see how the data was progressing but he knew to do so would cause her some loss of respect among her peers, so he forced himself to continue waiting, standing over the tank, looking down at totally smooth black surface.

The Super-Kamiokande- the Can- had been developed because Foreman had discovered something rather strange about the gates. Using research money that poured down from the United States government to various university for projects, some of which even the American public considered quite arcane and bizarre, Foreman had had the Bermuda Triangle gate checked with just about every type of scanner science had ever invented in the desperate hope of uncovering any information that might yield data on what exactly the gates were and what was on the other side. Up until a year ago the gates had been simply a black hole to all imaging and sensing devices, recording nothing.

But last year one of those research projects discovered that the gates discharged muons which was strange information indeed. As a physicist, Nagoya knew the history of the muon.

In the 1930s, physicists had been very confident that the building blocks of matter were the proton, electron and neutron. There were three other basic particles that scientists were aware of but knew little about- the photon, neutrino and positron.

But there was a problem with the physics of the time- scientists also knew that the protons in the proximity of the nucleus, holding equal charges, should strongly repel each other, yet they remained there. Nagoya was very proud that it was a Japanese scientist, Hideki Yukawa, who came up with the answer and was awarded the Nobel Prize for his brilliance.

To explain why the protons were held in place, he proposed a new force in the nucleus formed by a new particle, which he called the meson. He also determined that the ratio of the force of this new particle was inversely proportional to its mass which made the meson 200 times more massive than the electron.

Other scientists around the world searched for mesons, mostly by studying cosmic radiation from the sun, the strongest electro-magnetic field they could find, infinitely more powerful than anything man could produce. The researchers discovered that it wasn’t quite as Yukawa had predicted- there was more than just a meson, there were two particles under that heading. One held the strong charge with little mass- now named the pion- and the other held a lot of mass with little charge- now called the muon. Both the pion and muon were very unstable and decayed rapidly when separated. The muon decayed into an electron, a neutrino and an anti-neutrino.

These discoveries were the beginning of particle physics which opened the doorway to quantum mechanics as well as a new perspective on special relativity and Einstein’s energy-mass relation.

The fact that the gates emitted muons which did not decay as rapidly as established equations for physics predicted they would was troubling to Nagoya and the other scientists who were investigating the gates. Fundamentally it meant that the physical rules on the other side of the gates were different than that on the Earth side- or, and this was even more troubling- it meant that whoever or whatever was on the other side was manipulating particles at the very basic level in order to make the gates work. Nagoya thought it was likely both. He also felt that the gates were tears in the very fabric of the Earth’s physical nature and, deliberately done by some force at another place, probably another dimension.

It was a staggering concept and one that Nagoya was determined to resolve. He had to admit that the Russians had suspected as much before anyone else, seeing a link between the gates. In the 1960's, three Russian scientists had published an article in the journal of the Soviet Academy of Sciences titled: Is The Earth A Large Crystal?

It was not taken seriously by scientists in the west, being lumped with articles in the same journal on psychic power and other matters 'real’ scientists considered the work of the lunatic fringe. Only in the last several years were the ‘real’ scientists beginning to realize the error of their ways and opening their minds to possibilities they had never considered before. And that awakening was not due to acceptance of the Russian theories, but rather new discoveries in physics that demolished old accepted beliefs.

The three Russian scientists who wrote the article had backgrounds in history, electronics and engineering and they threw aside their differences and preconceived notions to explore the world around them. They started with an earlier, widely debunked theory that a matrix of cosmic energy was built into the planet at the time of its formation and that the effects of this matrix were occasionally evident in modern times in areas that were now known as gates.

The Russians scientists divided the world into twelve pentagonal slabs. On top of those slabs they delineated twenty equilateral triangles. Using this overlay, they postulated that these triangles had a great influence on the world in many ways: fault lines for earthquakes lay along them; magnetic anomalies were often recorded; and ancient civilizations tended to be clustered along the lines.

They called junctions of these triangles Vile Vortices. It just so happened that these Vile Vortices were in many of the same places as the gates that Foreman was investigating. Thus, while the rest of the scientific community ignored the Russian paper, Foreman was very interested and passed it along to Nagoya in the mid-1960s.

The Russians had even postulated a mathematical harmony to the crystalline structure that formed these Vortices to explain the rhythmic nature of the disturbances associated with them.

Nagoya, upon receiving the paper from Foreman and being a scientist, had had two reactions. One was that the Russians were onto something by connecting the Vortices. The other was that the crystalline theory was grasping for an explanation that current science couldn’t give. Nagoya knew that the lithosphere, the outer surface of the planet, which is where these Vortices were located, had been moving for millions of years. He even knew of Einstein’s theory of crustal displacement which was not commonly accepted. Regardless, he knew that any crystal formation would be so disfigured by this movement as to make the fixed nature of the patterns the Russians postulated impossible over any period of time. Also, Nagoya knew there was no evidence of the planet having any sort of massive crystalline structure.

But during the recent expansion of the gates, there had been no doubt they were connected as they linked along the lines delineated by the Russians with electro-magnetic and radioactive propagation and were only stopped at the last minute by Dane from completely covering the planet.

The recent information from Foreman about the lines of propagation from the gates that flowed along the intersection of the world’s tectonic plates gave more validity to the Russian theory. The movement of the plates, continental drift in laymen’s terms, was the most powerful force on the surface of the planet. It could bring forth devastating earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, create the tallest mountain range on the surface in the Himalayas, and crack open the deepest depths of the oceans in the Marianas Trench.

Nagoya also believed tectonic plate intersection had been used to destroy a continent and civilization. His first contribution to gate theory was a historical one, based on his fascination for ancient cultures and civilizations. During his undergraduate years he had had dual majors in history and physics, only deciding to go into the latter when he accepted that it was the more factual of the two, able to be proved, whereas history, the more he studied of it, presented itself as fact, but was often wrong.

Nagoya had always been fascinated by the legend of Atlantis. First mentioned by Plato in the Timaeus and Critias, two of his dialogues, historians had widely felt it was just a device used in the oratories and not based on an actual place. Nagoya had found that assumption rather naive. Connecting that legend with archeological finds that were often suppressed and alternative theories of the development of civilization, Nagoya believed that a highly advanced human civilization had once existed in a place known as Atlantis and the gates had opened- as they had just a week ago- destroying it to the point where it was now only a legend.

Besides Plato’s mention, Nagoya believed in the existence of Atlantis for other reasons. The discovery of large stone blocks, closely fitted together in about fifty feet of water of the coast of the island of Bimini in the Bahamas had excited him. He felt that it might be actual, physical evidence of the existence of Atlantis or more likely, given the location, an outpost of Atlantis.

Another area he found fascinating- and one that the writing on the Scorpion had resurrected- was the similarities in early writing among ancient cultures. The Viking runic alphabet was not that much different from writings he had studied in South America, Mexico, Africa, even on Easter Island.

Nagoya believed these similarities were because they stemmed from a common ancient writing system that predated the oldest recorded language that was generally accepted by historians. That interest had led him to the diffusionest theory of the development of civilization.

The historically accepted concept of the development of civilization was the isolationist one. Isolationists believed that the ancient civilizations all developed independent of each other. The cities of South and Central America, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, China, Egypt- all crossed a threshold into civilization at about the same time- the third or fourth century before the birth of Christ. When looking at the vast timeline of the existence of the planet, and even mankind, that was a rather remarkable coincidence.

Nagoya knew of course that there were explanations for that coincidence the largest one being natural evolution. The many common discoveries in the archeological finds of these civilizations- such as the similarities in written language- were explained by isolationists as due to man's genetic commonness. Nagoya called that the great minds think alike’ theory and he didn’t buy off on it one bit. An isolationist would say that there were ancient pyramids in South America, in Egypt, in Indo-China, even in North America- some made of stone, some of earth, some of mud, but remarkably similar given the distances between those sites and the traditionalists insistence that those sites had had no contact with each other- all that was because each society as it developed had a natural tendency to do the same thing.

Nagoya was much more a fan of the diffusionest theory of civilization. He believed that those widely separated civilizations developed at roughly the same time in roughly the same way because those civilizations were founded by people from a single earlier civilization- survivors from the destruction of Atlantis.

Isolationists over the years had scoffed at the diffusionest theory on two counts. One was the very existence of Atlantis. The second was the issue of how survivors could have gotten from Atlantis to such remote locations around the world. In response, Nagoya pointed to the fact that modern scholars, sailing on reconstructed vessels, had crossed both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Whether it was a balsa-wood raft of Polynesian design named Kon Tiki or the longship of the Vikings, the ocean had been crossable in ancient times.

There were archeological facts to support the theory that the ancients had indeed crossed those oceans. Artifacts found in places where they had not originated. There was an entire group of people devoted to the field of what was known as forbidden archeology’. Investigating things found in places where conventional archeology said they shouldn’t be.

Nagoya, as a scientist, had not been overly surprised to learn that there were many discoveries made by archeologists that were suppressed. He knew that scientists tended to bury evidence that contradicted their own theories. There were locked rooms in almost every museum around the world where artifacts that could not be logically explained were hidden away from the public’s eyes.

Nagoya believed that if one accepted that there was an Atlantis- a civilization 7,000 years before the accepted rise of civilization- many of those hidden objects could be explained.

Even the destruction of Atlantis around 10,000 BC was recorded in almost every culture around the world. There were many records of a great flood at about that time. Not only in the Bible but in such tomes as the Tibetan Book of the Dead which described a large land mass sinking into the sea at that time. The Mayans called Atlantis Mu. The northern Europeans- Thule. And a large land mass sinking into the ocean would produce tsunamis- waves- hundreds if not thousands of feet high that would race around the world’s oceans inundating low-lying coastal planes with such devastation that it could easily be interpreted as a world-wide flood.

There was no doubt in Nagoya’s mind that Atlantis had existed and there was also no doubt that the world was now facing the same threat that had destroyed it. He thought it was important to study as much as was known about that ancient culture and how it was destroyed.

While many modern scholars and scientists scoffed at ancient writings as more fiction than fact, Nagoya took the opposite view. He’d read translations of the early documents, such as Solon’s dialogue which first mentioned Atlantis, placing it in the Atlantic. The description of the destruction of Atlantis fit in with what would happen if tectonic plates were manipulated to unleash their terrible force, resulting in earthquakes, volcanoes, giant waves and ultimately disappearance under the waves. The Greeks even said that where Atlantis had been, parts of the ocean were blocked by mud and underwater plants.

“Another five minutes and we will have the complete read-out,” Ahana interrupted Nagoya’s thoughts.

He acknowledged the information with a nod. Nagoya- and Foreman- believed the latter part about the impassable sea might refer to the Sargasso Sea which was north of the Puerto Rican Trench and in which they now knew close to where the Bermuda Triangle gate opened.

Beyond Atlantis, Nagoya had read extensively about any theory regarding earlier civilizations. The Vikings had had a land they called Thule, a land of fire and ice where creatures and gods lived, separated from the real world by a deep chasm. Another interesting legend was that of Mu, a lost continent of the Pacific Ocean. Some claimed that Mu predated even Atlantis. A French scholar in 1864, translating one of the few surviving texts of the vanished Mayan civilization of Central America uncovered references to a place called Mu- which the text described as an ancient landmass with a bustling civilization that sunk into the sea after catastrophic volcanic explosion.

Another French archeologist, examining Mayan ruins and translating some of what he found, added to the story of Mu. It had been a civilization that ended when two brothers fought for the right to marry the Queen. When the continent was destroyed, the Queen fled to Egypt where, with the new name of Isis, she built the Sphinx and began civilization in that part of the world.

These Frenchmen placed Mu not in the Pacific, but rather in either the Gulf of Mexico or the Caribbean, and Nagoya believed they might have stumbled across records of Atlantis under a different name and from a western Atlantic perspective rather than eastern.

Looking around at the sophisticated scientific equipment that surrounded him, Nagoya knew there was a tendency for scientists to be very conservative and overly reliant on equipment rather than the power of their own minds. Nagoya firmly believed the human mind to be the most intricate device on the face of the planet, but the one which the least was known about.

The person Nagoya was most fascinated with was a man who was neither scientist or philosopher, but the son of a Kentucky farmer named Edgar Cayce. Born in 1877 and dying in 1945, Cayce left behind a legacy of 'visions’, many of which regarded Atlantis.

Like Plato, Cayce placed Atlantis in the Atlantic. But Cayce provided much more information, gathered while he was in a trance state, about the legendary island kingdom. He claimed that people lived on the island for thousands of years and it experienced three major catastrophes, only the last of which was the ultimate devastation that wiped it off the face of the Earth. Also, Cayce said the Atlanteans were highly evolved, using electricity and flying aircraft. He also spoke of a strange element he called 'firestone’ that generated energy. First mentioned by Cayce in 1933, Nagoya found that early writing very intriguing in that the description given by Cayce of firestone was very similar to how one would describe radioactive materials- and this a decade before the first public recognition of atomic energy.

Nagoya believed there were nuggets of truth in every legend and now that there was no doubting the reality of the gates, he also had to wonder how much truth there was to Cayce’s visions and predictions. Cayce had also said that the first Atlanteans were spiritual beings, lacking physical form. And it was after they began achieving physical form that the troubles began. Nagoya wasn’t sure how much to make of Cayce’s visions but he kept an open mind, more so since the assault out of the gates.

Nagoya had no doubt that Earth had been threatened by the gates in the past as it was being threatened now. And he also believed that although Atlantis was destroyed, that was only a defeat in a battle in which the war had yet to be decided. Somehow, the invasion through the gates had been stopped years ago. And however that had been done, it was necessary to find those same means to stop it once again, even more so now that the Trident had been fired in the Atlantic and the nuclear weapons exploded along the fault line.

Nagoya took hope from the fact that someone on the other side of the gates was obviously on mankind’s side. The fact that Foreman’s man Dane had been contacted by his former team-mate Flaherty both before he entered the Angkor gate and after he was at the ruins of Angkor Kol Ker were positive signs. The return of the Scorpion with the map etched into its metal was also positive.

Somehow, that site marked on that map, which coincided with the location of the deepest spot in the Atlantic, the Milwaukee Depth, was important. And that was the data he was waiting for from Ahana. As soon as he’d been alerted by Foreman about the map on the Scorpion, he’d had the computers that recorded data from the Can focus on that spot almost on the other side of the world, recording the muons that came out of it.

“We’ve centered and plotted the muon emission pattern,” Ahana spun her seat about. “Very strange, sir.”

“How so?” Nagoya asked.

Ahana stood, indicating for Nagoya to take her place. “This-” she said, pointing at the screen- “is the muon level reading. Note that the Bermuda Triangle gate is steady as we’ve always noted. This is the level we’ve been scanning around the world to map the gates. We never noticed anything different until you directed us to do a more thorough search of that specific area. I fine-tuned the sensors to record any muon activity down to one-tenth of the current gate reading.”

Her finger touched the monitor screen. “Note this very thin trace going from the Bermuda gate south? It ends exactly here, the same spot noted on the side of the Scorpion.”

“So they are indeed connected,” Nagoya said.

“Yes, sir. We not only have a longitudinal and latitudinal reading, but because we are reading this through the mass of the Earth, we were able to get a depth reading. That spot is at the very bottom of the ocean. And at that location it spreads and encompasses an area on the ocean floor over eight miles in circumference and a half mile in height that has low levels of muonic activity.”

“What do you think it is?”

“It’s not a gate,” Ahana said. “It’s on 'our’ side, in our world, but it has some qualities like a gate.”

Nagoya knew his assistant did not want to make a foolish guess but one thing he had learned over the years was that no guess could be too wild when dealing with anything associated with the gates. “A theory?” he prompted.

Ahana bit her lip, then spoke. “I think it is some sort of statis field surrounding an open space.”

“Holding what?”

“I don’t know.”

The submarine cut the water smoothly, the special rubberized absorbing material attached to the outer hull leaving minimum disturbance in the ocean it passed through. The specially designed propellers gave off little signature making it the quietest submarine in the ocean. At full speed, this vessel was quieter than any other submarine built simply sitting still in the ocean.

At one thousand feet, the sub had at least another fifteen hundred feet of ocean to spare below it before the modular hull would experience any pressure problems. Speed was perhaps the most important aspect of the ship’s design as its nuclear power plant allowed it to cruise at thirty-five knots, almost forty miles an hour.

The Seawolf was the US Navy’s most modern and most expensive submarine. Designed from first deckplate to the top of the sail as an attack submarine, the Seawolf had one priority mission- kill other submarines. At over two billion dollars cost, it incorporated every advance in underwater warfare ever developed. Not only could it kill other subs with its Mark-48 torpedoes, it was also armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles, enabling it to target 75 % of the earth’s land surface. 353 feet long, the Seawolf was actually not much longer than the first US Navy sub given that name during World War II. However, its forty foot beam was almost twice the diameter of those earlier vessels.

The rear two-thirds of the submarine were taken up with the nuclear power plant, engine room and environmental control systems. The crew of 14 officers and 120 enlisted men worked and lived in the forward third. Not as cramped as earlier submarines, the Seawolf still required a special type of man willing to work in tight quarters and live under the surface of the water for extended periods of time.

An example of the lack of space was the fact that the commander of this ship, Captain McCallum had to hold meetings with his officers in the wardroom where they also ate their meals. There was barely room for the twelve officers- two remaining on watch in the operations and engine room- to fit.

Since their abrupt departure from their home base in Groton, Connecticut, earlier in the day, the entire crew had been wondering what was up. The sub was sailing due south at flank speed. There was also the factor of a strange man being brought on board and kept isolated in the captain’s stateroom since sailing.

“At ease,” McCallum called out as he squeezed into the officers’ wardroom. The captain sat at the end of table, placing a file folder with a Top Secret cover in front of him.

“Gentlemen, we’re currently operating under direct orders from the National Command Authority. You can read into that the President himself has authorized this mission. Our mission is to proceed with all speed to designated grid coordinates north of Puerto Rico and remain on-station until further orders. Our task is to destroy the USS Wyoming, which is currently missing, if it reappears with hostile intentions, before it can launch any of its ballistic missiles.”

“Sir-” his executive officer, Commander Barrington began to protest but McCallum cut him off.

“Before disappearing, the Wyoming’s crew received a fatal dose of radiation. If it reappears, you can be assured that it would not be manned by our fellow sailors.”

McCallum could see the shock on his officers’ faces. He knew it was best to hammer home the situation and let them sort it out afterwards.

“Gentlemen, there is a strong possibility that the Wyoming might reappear with people other than the crew on board. In the 70’s a Russian submarine that disappeared into the Devil’s Sea gate reappeared a week later. The Russians sunk it. When our people tried to recover the wreckage they pulled up a section that had bodies of men who were not part of the crew on board. The nuclear warheads had been worked on and some are still missing as far as we know. No one knows how these non-crew members got on the ship, but the fact is they were there.

“And, as you all know, a Trident- which had to have come from the Wyoming- was fired out of the Bermuda Triangle gate yesterday and nuclear warheads were detonated in the Atlantic Ocean. That leaves twenty-three Tridents unaccounted for.

“And something else tells us subs can come back out of this gate, sometimes long after they’ve disappeared.”

McCallum reached to his side and opened the door. Another officer wearing the same rank stepped in- the only difference was that this officer’s uniform was outdated, not worn since the Navy upgraded in 1975.

“Gentlemen, this is Captain Bateman of the USS Scorpion.”

Given that the Scorpion had disappeared in 1968 the appearance of the ship’s captain- and his relatively youthful appearance belying thirty years- the officers of the Seawolf forgot even military formality for a few seconds, before belatedly springing to their feet, as required when the captain of a ship entered the room.

“At ease, gentlemen,” Bateman said.

As the officers retook their seats, Captain McCallum opened the file folder and pulled out some pictures. He passed them around the table. “This is the Scorpion. It is currently being held under cover in the pens at Groton. As you can see, it appears as it did on the day it disappeared over thirty years ago.” McCallum pointed to his right. “As you can also see, so does Captain Bateman. Gentlemen, he doesn’t know why any of this happened or even how, but because he is sitting here in front of you, we have to accept it has happened. Captain Bateman is here to assist in whatever way he can as we patrol near the anomaly known as the Bermuda Triangle gate.

“We know little about this area- which you can see on the satellite imagery defined by the black triangle. Captain Bateman’s ship was part of an experiment in 1968 to learn more about it. While a SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance plane entered a similar area over Cambodia called the Angkor gate, the Scorpion entered the Bermuda Triangle gate to attempt to make radio communications with the Blackbird. This would prove that there was a link between the two sites. I’ll let Captain Bateman tell you what happened.”

Bateman was a short, balding man, his face pale. His eyes held a distance to them and as he spoke he kept them on the table, not making contact with anyone. His left hand had a tremor to it and he gripped the edge of his chair to keep it still.

“We entered the area. We didn’t have much information about what we were doing, other than crossing into a certain area and attempting to make communications via a surface buoy. We were on a heading of nine-zero degrees at a depth of two hundred feet. Our location was about sixty miles north of the northwest end of Puerto Rico.

“We began transmitting on high frequency radio. We made contact with the Blackbird, even though it was over Cambodia- which was not possibly unless the signal was traveling through the anomaly we were in directly to the anomaly the aircraft was in.

“The Blackbird began reporting system’s trouble,” Bateman’s voice was almost a monotone. “We were ordered to abort. I told the helm to come hard about. Then we got pinged.”

“Sonar?” McCallum asked.

“It was like someone was using sonar on us, but the tone was slightly different. I didn’t have much time to dwell on that because we then had a problem in the reactor. Instruments indicated a coolant line failure. I ordered the reactor off-line.

“Then we picked up something very big coming in our direction on radar. Very big.” Bateman looked up from the table for the first time. “I’d never seen anything other than a land mass that large on the radar screen except this object was moving. I ordered us to emergency surface.”

Bateman fell silent.

“And then?” McCallum prompted.

“And then nothing,” Bateman said. “I blacked out. Everyone on the crew did. When we came to, we were cruising at two hundred feet in the same general area we had been in before. Except it was over thirty years later, the reactor was fine, and we had people on board who had come through what you call the Angkor gate. That’s all I know.”

“Our concern is to stop anything coming out of the gate,” McCallum said. “There are no plans to go into it. We are to stand off at a safe distance and be ready to engage targets.”

“What if the large contact my ship picked up comes out?” Bateman asked.

“We will engage and destroy it,” McCallum said.

“I think you need to be prepared for system failures,” Bateman said. “I didn’t have time to even think about combat when we were attacked. This boat is very nice and you have very sophisticated devices, but I recommend you come up with a plan to fight if you lose all your sensors and targeting equipment.”

“Our master computer has a back-up,” McCallum said to Bateman. “It’s also shielded to survive the electro-magnetic pulse generated by a nuclear explosion.”

The captain turned to his officer. “You have your orders,” McCallum said, ending the meeting. The officers filed out of the stateroom.

McCallum went to his stateroom. Built into the wall, next to his small desk, was a safe. It held the key that allowed the captain of the Seawolf to launch nuclear weapons. It also held sealed orders McCallum had been handed by a CIA man just prior to sailing.

McCallum opened the safe and retrieved the envelope holding the orders. He cut through the seal and slid the piece of paper out. He read through twice then ran the paper through his shredder. He picked up the phone on his desk and ordered the officer in charge of navigation to make a slight change to their course and destination.