Ancients

18

It had taken far longer to get men and equipment through the small access tunnel, or Ratzville, as the men were calling it, than they had originally thought. A full fifty minutes had been wasted as they struggled through the filthy tunnel. When they finally made it out, the lead SEAL unit reported that the sewer shaft was clear for at least two miles.

"Ryan!" Jack called over his shoulder.

"Yes, sir?"

"The marines having any luck with the radios yet?"

"Negative. We can't even get the local Atlantis AM station," he joked, but stopped smiling when the marines around him looked on with sour faces. "No, nothing, Colonel."

Jack looked at his watch. Almost a full hour and a half since Morning Thunder had kicked off.

"Jack, are you feeling that?" Sarah asked. "The Coalition has started the Wave."

Collins didn't say anything; he knew that she was right. He was feeling it in his inner ear, just as Sarah had said he would.

"Look, when this thing starts, you watch your ass. I don't want a dead girl--" Jack caught himself. "Just watch your butt, Lieutenant," he said quickly and then walked off.

"What does the colonel have to say?" Mendenhall asked, walking up to Sarah.

"Nothing important, I guess."

Tomlinson was sitting in the now well-lit Empirium Chamber. The engineers had shored up what they could and roped off the worst areas. He had watched the men working without comment until his eyes had settled on something jutting from a large slab of marble. He had been looking at it for well over thirty minutes, mesmerized by the sight of the skeletal arm and hand. There was a mold-covered bronze knife clutched in the blackened fingers, the bones still curled around the hilt. He was content just to look and wonder who the person had been.

"Sir, we are ready. Power is at one hundred percent and we have full continuity in the power lines to the Black Sea and Lake Shiolin."

Tomlinson, without looking up from the hand and knife, smiled. "You forgot the Long Island Sound, Professor; is that line also active?"

"Yes, sir. The amplification modules are placed one mile from the Davidson fault line and thirty-three miles from the continental plate."

"Very good. That should create quite a headache in the financial district, wouldn't you say?"

"It should, yes," Engvall answered as he turned and slowly walked away.

Tomlinson looked up, but all he saw was the professor's backside as he moved into the shadows of the Empirium Chamber. Then he lowered his head and stared at the arm and hand again. He tilted his head and seemed to be somewhere else.

The Atlantean Wave equipment with the five massive fifty-thousand-watt generators had been placed inside a natural bowl surrounded by solid rock. The hole, it was surmised, must have been a manmade lake fifteen thousand years before. A 180-foot statue of Poseidon had once sat in the middle of the lake, rising a 100 feet into the air. Poseidon, the Greek god of the seas, now lay in a crumpled heap around the sides of the dry lake with only his island pedestal still in the center.

Technicians were working at a hundred monitoring stations inside the bowl and another twenty sat at stations on the hundred-foot tower. They all knew that the power they were about to unleash could not be calculated in normal terms because of the added power of the Key; with its intricate tone grooves and strange properties, such power usage was unknown.

After studying the Key's grooves, Engvall knew that the decibel level they had used before paled in comparison to what the Ancients had accomplished. They had duplicated only 3 percent of what the Atlantean Key had in its etched surface. The power of the diamond was awesome. They had placed the blue diamond in its cradle for only a moment in the initial test; when they had all felt the strength of the device as it started emitting a tone that they could not hear. So far, thirty men and women had reported to the makeshift field hospital where some of the troops from above were being treated, which upset Tomlinson no end, due to the fact he had wanted the cowards, as he called them, kept separate from the scientists, lest they cause doubts about their security.

The way in which the tones would be taken from the magical diamond was far different from the stylus method used in ancient times. Engvall had come up with an ingenious design that would flood the rotating diamond inside its chamber with plasma, which would ensure that there were no impurities on the surface of the grooves. Then the chamber would be flooded with ozone and electrified. The tones would then commence, carried electrically from the diamond chamber through the connecting lines and onto their long journeys to their target cities.

Each section of the diamond had been broken down into smaller sections by the Ancients. Each one was designed for a specific stratum of different tectonic plates; in other words, they had a section of tone grooves for the granite and sandstone base for Long Island Sound and the same for the paneurasian plate, comprised of compacted granite, slate, marble, and sandstone. Depending on the density of these materials, the Ancients had calculated the specific tone-groove-decibel level for that attack area. An electronic cable, the type that was found on every PC in the world only larger by a 100 percent, was running from the diamond's cradle to their coordinated continental cable.

Engvall now knew that the blue diamond was the only substance on earth that would hold up to the tones themselves without cracking. Amazing, he thought as he watched the chamber from a distance. This was why the grand experiment at Krakatoa had failed so spectacularly, when a large crystal was used instead of the blue diamond.

As Engvall watched from his perch high above the emptied lake where he and his special assistants would monitor the Wave as it radiated outward, he felt just as Tomlinson had said he would feel--like one of the gods of old with the power of the earth at his fingertips.

However, as he looked out at his creation, the thought of the destruction of Atlantis, Krakatoa, and the innocent deaths in China, Russia, and Iraq registered in his mind that he wasn't a god at all, just a man following another man. As he watched Tomlinson slowly leave the Empirium Chamber far below, he could not help but think that the man he was following was slowly becoming unbalanced, as were the many men who had come before him who had dreams of subjugating the world.

The president was taking many different routes in trying to explain to the Russians and Chinese what the plan was for rooting out the Coalition, members who had burrowed deep into the ground. Because of a solid argument from Niles, the president had not included the information regarding the discovery of Atlantis. So far, what they had come to terms with was the fact that the 650,000 inhabitants of Crete would have to be evacuated immediately. NATO and Russian warships and every passenger liner and ferry in the Mediterranean were being utilized to this end.

The situation in Korea had stabilized to the point where the Second Infantry Division with reinforced armor of the Fourth ID had reoccupied the border, and the North Korean army had recalled the surviving elements of the three-pronged attack into the South, though most of them wouldn't be coming home.

American airpower, without the added element of China to cope with, had manhandled and mauled North Korean airpower and artillery units so badly that his generals had persuaded Kim that they had no friends left at this point, and the only thing to do was end this thing. The Chinese still had not sent official word through diplomatic channels that they fully bought the American explanation, but they would assist in stabilizing the region until things could be made clear.

A tone sounded and a small light went on in the corner of the laptop Niles had placed on the table before him. Virginia's image from Nellis flashed on the screen.

"Niles, Pete Golding is on the line. I'm going to conference his monitor in with yours."

The screen was split so that Niles could see both Virginia and Pete from the Event Group Center at Nellis Air Force Base.

"Niles, we have a very bad situation," Pete stated flatly with no emotion in his voice. He was crumpled-looking, with part of his white shirt collar pointing up.

Niles closed his eyes. "What have you got, Pete?"

"We have deciphered some of the scrolls that Jack recovered. Niles, it's not the power of the blue diamond that is flawed, it's the great chart--the map the Ancients created that depicts the fault lines and tectonic plates. We've advanced in most areas since the Atlanteans' time. They were amazing to be sure, but one area they failed at was that these plates are conjoined, they are connected, some just below the crust, some as deep as the mantle. It took us a while to figure this out because the Atlantis language is some parts hieroglyph and what we call Linear B and--"

"Pete, for God's sake, what in the hell are you saying here? Forget the damn linguistics lesson!" Niles said irritably.

"Niles, if they use the Wave with the added power of that diamond and its tone design, it will set off a chain reaction that could bring this planet to its knees. We could lose entire continents, crack them wide open, flip whole continental shelves, crack the world down to its core. Whatever you consider hell to be, this damn device could make it happen!"

"Jesus," Niles said.

"We now know that the Atlanteans, for whatever reason, tried this once, fifteen thousand years ago, and look what happened: the entire world was changed."

"Get me Europa's model and your figures."

"What are you thinking, Niles?" Virginia asked.

"What am I thinking, Virginia? I'm thinking the president may have no other choice than to bow to world pressure and smash Crete and everything under it, including Jack, Carl, and those young marines."

The heat inside the sewage system was getting unbearable, but Jack could not afford to call for a halt to the march. The hundred marines had managed to make the best time possible under the circumstances. Giant walls of ancient magma had cracked and poured through in a thousand different areas. In many areas it looked as if the tunnel itself had been lifted up and dropped, to become a twisted and jumbled mess. All the while, they could feel the Wave building somewhere through the dense rock strata of the underground maze.

Sarah caught up with Jack and took long strides to keep up with him.

"Jack, it seems we're too deep," she said breathlessly.

"What? What do you mean?"

"I've been keeping track of our progress. We may be as far as a mile too deep. Have you noticed that the symptoms of the audio tones have lessened? Look around; men are making better time because they aren't feeling the effects in their inner ear. No nausea."

Jack stopped and raised his radio.

"Backdoor One to Two Actual," he called on the radio.

"This is Two, go ahead," Everett answered from somewhere up ahead.

"Two, our lieutenant here says she believes we've gone too deep."

"She may be right. We're starting to get magma vents here and the heat's up by thirty-five degrees in the last quarter mile."

Collins lowered the radio and watched as several of the marines walked doggedly past him.

"Wait a second, One. The SEALs are saying we have a large cavern ahead.... Jesus, Jack, you have to see this!"

Collins clipped the radio to his belt and then trotted forward after ordering the marines to take five minutes' rest. Sarah, Ryan, and Mendenhall followed Jack.

They climbed over a sloping mound of solid lava and finally spied Everett, who was talking with the SEAL lieutenant. They were standing in a natural alcove overlooking their new discovery. Twenty phosphorus flares glowed brightly from below and afforded a shadowy view of hell, highlighted by terrible orange and yellows of Satan's waters.

"Oh, my God!" Sarah said as she leaned over, placed her hands on her knees, and looked out over the vast chamber below.

The flowing river of lava was just that--a large ribbon, twenty feet wide, that stretched the entire length of the ancient excavation. The manmade structures inside were torn and broken; pillars of immense size had tumbled to the stone flooring. Littered among these ruins were hundreds and hundreds of skeletal remains that had melted into the stone to become one with floor they lay upon.

Collins looked around the upper reaches of the chamber and saw giant beams of scaffolding. There was a rail system capable of holding thousands upon thousands of tons. In addition, lying on its side at the bottom was what that system had once held--a gigantic wheel. The spikes arrayed around this object were as big a mystery as the wheel itself. It lay half buried in the debris that had shaken loose from the cavern's ceiling.

"What in the hell went on here?" Everett asked as he spied the arms and other skeletal parts protruding from the lava that had flowed over them.

Sarah was looking at the arrangement at the top of the giant cave. The ancient copper wires hung limp and grime-covered, and the copper plating attached to them was green with mold and corruption.

"This is the Wave chamber, a giant power-generating system. Jesus, Jack, this place was responsible for the death of Atlantis," she said as she straightened. "This diagram was in one of the engineering scrolls you recovered and the plate-map hologram, we just didn't know what it was. The whole of Atlantis must have come down on this place, and the weight of the island must have pushed this place miles under the sea."

Jack was watching the SEALs as they reached the bottom of the cavern, then he turned to Sarah. "Did the diagrams show any way out of here?"

"I don't know. We were in such a rush, Jack, I'm sorry. But listen, if this is truly the Wave chamber, Atlantis has to be on top. We have to find a way up; there has to be a connection."

"Well, we're not going to find it just standing here. Will, bring the troops in."

As Collins started down the sloping trail to the bottom, Sarah and the others became aware of the death that surrounded them in this ghastly place. Thousands of people had been killed in this tunnel while trying to escape the final decisions of their gods. The marines tried to step carefully, but many bones, petrified, snapped beneath their boots.

As Jack gained the floor of the chamber, he saw a particular set of bones that made him stop to examine them. The bronze armor was like others he had seen above, mostly melted into the stone. The skeleton was larger than most he had seen, and remnants of blue cloth could be seen cloaked around its shoulders. The helmeted head was still intact and lay staring up at him. The blue horsehair plume was as viable as it had been the day this man had fallen. It was covered in grime, but it was enough to tell Jack that this was a fellow soldier from a time ten thousand years before Moses.

As he gathered his thoughts and stepped over the remains, his boot came down on a smaller skeleton. There was no way to know that he had just given the final insult to the very necromancer who had invented the Wave, the great Lord Pythos, whose broken and twisted arm was still in the grasp of the last of the Titans.

As they followed Collins in a straight line, Sarah doubled over in pain at the same moment as half of the marine force did the same, some vomiting, others dropping their gear and grabbing for their temples in agony. Even Collins had to lean against a stone wall hard enough to send his helmet rolling.

"Jack, the Wave is building fast! They're going to attack!" Sarah yelled as she finally gave up and vomited.

Tomlinson watched the technicians as they monitored their boards. High up in the control platform, he, Caretaker, and several other Coalition members, including Dame Lilith, were amazed at the power being created by the generators, which seemed to have doubled in strength as soon as the blue diamond was connected. The time it had taken to recut the blank ends of hardened diamond to fit the new cradle designed by Professor Engvall had delayed the attack by more than an hour.

Tomlinson's eyes went from the generating station to that of the Atlantis defense. Five hundred crack troops were spread out in positions from which it would take a week for any attacking force to remove them, and at a cost that would be devastating. They were spread in the lava dome below the crystal structure that had protected the capital. Ruins of the great city were now teaming with machine-gun emplacements and mortar pits.

"We're ready," Engvall said as he removed his headphones.

Tomlinson saw the titanium enclosure where the diamond was spinning at twice the speed of sound; the air passing over it would be the only stylus needed to create the ancient tones. The amplification lines led outward from Atlantis to the amplification domes sitting off the coasts of the target cities. He smiled, knowing that New York would be the first to feel the Wave as the Coalition vied to end the old world quickly.

"Dame Lilith, since you are the one lamenting the drastic changes that have come about in your life, please do us the honor of beginning the new life we have chosen. Start the Wave, please."

Lilith really did not care to touch anything on the platform. Her nerves at this last moment had tuned to jelly and her blood ran cold. Still, as she looked into the eyes of Tomlinson, she knew that she would do as he'd asked. Even Caretaker was standing by, as if he were one of the many stone statues lying in ruins in the city below them.

"Why ... yes, of course," she replied.

Engvall rose from his chair and gestured for Lilith to sit, momentarily relieved that the responsibility for destroying so much of the planet would not be his. He replaced his headphones and adjusted the mike to his lips.

"Stations one and two, one hundred percent power on generators. The first tone will be a pulse to acclimate the tone amplifiers to their new computer settings."

Engvall turned to Tomlinson and slowly nodded.

"Dame Lilith, if you would raise the protective cover and push the ignition button, please."

"This one?" she asked as she saw a red flashing light underneath a clear glass cover.

"Yes."

Lilith lifted the cover and closed her eyes, then with two fingers she pushed down on the flashing button.

Immediately, everyone inside the city closed their eyes as the soundless tones started their long run for the Long Island Sound.

The first ripple of the Wave triggered Thor's Hammer.

Five thousand miles away, the Hammer fell, and Manhattan started to crumble.

The amplification domes had been laid down the year before by a local chartered workboat whose captain thought he was laying lobster-monitoring stations. That same year there had been a massive kill-off of the lobster beds, blamed on the toxicity of the Sound; little did anyone realize it was from the tuning forks inside the domes, which would sometimes chime in their deadly and soundless vibration that killed the lobsters on the bottom.

As the tones passed through the power lines to the amplifiers, every living aquatic creature shook and became still, and then died, for six miles around. The invisible Wave of Thor's Hammer slammed into the muddy bottom and reached out for the Davidson fault line and the distant continental plate.

At 4:00 PM on this Saturday, many of the workers who normally filed through the massive canyons of midtown Manhattan were at home. However, those who were out to catch the warmth of the sun saw the strangest sight they had ever before witnessed. Every bird in the city as one launched itself into the air, as if a magical switch had been thrown. People covered their heads and turned away from the billions of flapping wings. In Central Park, numerous New Yorkers were hurt as panicked pigeons sprang into the sky. Dogs across the city started barking and tried to break free of their owners. Several slammed through plate-glass windows in an instinctive effort to escape.

The first reaction to Thor's Hammer started in the East River as a barely perceptible wave struck the Brooklyn Bridge. Cars traveled across, never realizing that the bridge had sunk more than half an inch into the mud. That first ripple traveled into the lower reaches of the subway access tunnel far below the mass-transit line. As one shocked electrician looked on, a surface fracture in the old cement at first widened and then cracked through to the river itself. Within minutes, panicked calls were being made topside for assistance.

In Central Park, couples lying on the grass felt it through their backsides. The ground rippled like a wave, not so much as to actually lift a person from the ground, but more of a tickling sensation that people in California would have recognized instantly.

The first of the high-impact tones left the amplification domes and slammed hard into the seabed. The invisible Wave this second time slammed into the Davidson fault line and sent a tremendous jolt through the crust of the earth until it met the plate upon which the eastern United States sat.

Then the Hammer really went to work. As the Wave bounced back like a sonar ping, it hit once more the already damaged fault. The walls of the fault started to crumble only miles from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. As one of the world's longest cable-expansion structures, its pilings were sunk deep into the bedrock of the harbor. At the time of its construction, no one could possibly have seen or known of the minute cracking that had been sent through the rock strata. These small fissures and cracks were the first to let go, and the flowing water did the rest. Passengers on the upper and lower decks in the direct center of the great span felt it first--the sensation of sliding, though they knew that they were not. Then the first real jolt hit the bridge and the movement was perceptible to all. Cars involuntarily change lanes, causing many accidents and pileups up and down the entire span.

Suddenly, eight hundred feet beneath the lowest pilings, the bedrock gave way. As the eastern side of the bridge began to collapse into the mud, sinking forty feet, cars were smashed into the broken roadway on the on-ramp and others slammed into them. The giant cables held firm, keeping the entire east side from collapsing. Later, engineers would say that the collapsing bedrock actually saved the bridge from total collapse because the loose east end gave the bridge enough give to sustain itself against the onslaught of the earthquake.

The same could not be said as the ground shook in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Manhattan. Older buildings first started losing their facades, then glass started breaking throughout the city. As displacement waves hit the air, the people on the streets became disoriented, and most could not keep their feet. The Empire State Building received the first real jolt of an earthquake in its long history, but the old girl stood firm.

Then the third swing of Thor's Hammer hit, only this time it traveled east, toward the suburbs of Nassau and Suffolk counties. Long Island was under attack.

For fifty miles up and down the Long Island coastline, older houses started to collapse. The seas were rising into the streets; the surf table was up by 50 percent of normal. The streets of the coastal towns were flooding, hampering police and fire-department responses.

The five boroughs of New York, along with Long Island, started to crumble and burn.

Niles listened to the reports that were coming in from New York. Then they heard that the Wave had started in both China and Russia. The two countries were now saying that Crete had to be destroyed no matter the cost.

With the evacuation of the civilian population still far from complete, they were all in a tight spot. Which population was worth more than any other? they wondered.

"Give Colonel Collins time, Mr. President; he doesn't know how to quit!" Niles said, gritting his teeth.

The president just looked at his friend without saying anything. Then he nodded in affirmation that he would give Collins this one chance.

However, as Niles felt the relief hit him, the first tremble was felt through the flooring of the Oval Office.