Atlantis: Gate (12 page)

“Most open-minded of you, Lord.”

Leonidas gritted his teeth and they rode for another mile.

“Do you have family?” Cyra asked.

“I have a son,” Leonidas said proudly.

“His name?”

“Amphion.”

“And your wife?”

Leonidas smiled. “Thetis”

“Just one child?”

“We have a daughter also.”

“I am not surprised you only mentioned your son. Spartans do not think much of girls, do they?”

“They are necessary,” Leonidas allowed.

“Your mother was a girl once. Aren’t you fortunate she was valued?”

“Women—” Leonidas began.

“Yes?”

“They are good for some things. To keep the home. To bring forth the children. And, yes, to be priestesses and oracle, although we do not have such things in Sparta.”

“Do you think Spartan women think like that?”

“Of course.”

“You may be a very smart commander of men, my Lord,” Cyra said, “but you know nothing of a woman’s heart or mind.”

Leonidas pulled back on his reins and came to a halt. “What are you talking about?”

Cyra also stopped. She pulled a dagger out from somewhere in the folds of her robes. She held it against the wrist of the other hand. “If I am cut, do I bleed the same as you?”

Leonidas’s forehead wrinkled. “Yes.”

She leapt off her horse, throwing her long cloak to the side. She was dressed in leather pants and sleeveless jerkin. She spread her legs shoulder width apart, left forward. The point of the dagger was toward the King.

“What are you doing?” Leonidas leaned back in the saddle, amused.

“Fight me.”

“I would not fight a woman.”

“You are old,” Cyra said. “An old man who has to hold on to his stirrup to get off his horse or his leg will not hold him.”

The smile was gone from Leonidas’s face.

Cyra slapped her chest. “I wear no armor. I don’t even have that pig-sticker you carry at your waist, your xiphos that is so feared. All I have is this leather and a puny dagger. And—” she drew the word out. “You are a Spartan. The king of the Spartans. The most feared warriors in the world. I am just a priestess.”

Leonidas shook his head. “I will not be provoked.”

“I’m not trying to provoke you,” Cyra said. “I am trying to teach you something. You have trained almost all your life. Do you think you know everything? That you cannot learn something new? You will soon be in the battle of your life. Perhaps I could teach you a thing or two that might help.”

Leonidas slowly got off the horse, his hands clear of the stirrups. He turned toward Cyra. “What can you teach me, priestess?”

“I can only show. What is learnt depends on the student.”

Leonidas cocked his head. “My first teacher in the agoge told me that. Kyros. He was a fine warrior. He started me on the path of phobologia.”

“So you should not fear me,” Cyra said. She moved forward and slashed. Leonidas jumped back, her blade missing by a few inches, his hand instinctively drawing his xiphos. He was moving forward, a jab with the point, followed immediately by the second strike he had been drilled in, an upper thrust toward her solar plexus.

But she wasn’t there, spinning gracefully out of the way. She clamped down on his sword arm, pinning it against her side. Leonidas was surprised at the unexpected move and pulling back when he felt steel against his throat, between chest armor and helmet. His eyes rotated down. Her knife was against his skin.

Very, very slowly, Cyra pulled the knife and released his sword arm. She sheathed the blade and picked up her cloak. She threw it over her shoulders. Leonidas had not moved, standing as if carved in stone. Cyra mounted her horse and rode off, leaving the king standing alone.

***************

The weather on either side of the pass was fine, but storm clouds hovered unnaturally on Mount Oeta, extending down to the Gates of Fire. Lightning split the air and peels of thunder echoed out over the Aegean.

The sphere of black appeared, hovering a foot above the ground. A lightning bolt hit it and the darkness absorbed the strike, sucking in the power, conquering the force of nature in a blink.

Several seconds later a man staggered out of the sphere, his skin red and blistered, whatever he had been wearing seared away. His head turned back and forth, as if he were searching, but his eyes had been burned and were blind. In his right hand he held a curved sword, the metal bright and un-marked by whatever had destroyed his body.

He yelled, the sound un-intelligible and swung the blade as if he were surrounded by enemies. His movements showed training and skill despite his agony. His feet moved as he backed up. He jabbed with the sword, slashed and backed up further.

Then his rear foot went over the edge of the cliff. He tried to regain his balance to no avail. He fell over, tumbling down toward the sea-ravaged rocks below. All without a cry issuing his lips.

The body slammed into a rock, rolled down into the surf and disappeared.

In the Gates of Fire the black sphere coalesced on itself until it was dot and then disappeared.

CHAPTER 7 THE PRESENT

Reizer had never been so tired. She’d rationed her water bottle, but it was empty now. She knew dawn wasn’t far off but it was hard to tell as her eyes were numbed from the fierce red glow of the fire-walls that surrounded her. She was so tired that she worried she would make a wrong turn. As near as she could figure, she was half way out of the plain, but it had been a circuitous journey, going along lines, circling around flaming figures. Twice she had chosen wrong and ended up at a dead end, her way barred by high walls of fire. She’d noted that the wall was higher along the straight lines and wedges, lower on the figure lines.

She passed around the end of the tail of the monkey and saw a straight line of fire in front of her. She felt despair, realizing that although she had walked almost the entire night, she had moved just slightly over a mile from where she had started. She estimated she had walked over seven times that.

She turned about in a circle, confirming her location, knowing she didn’t have the energy to continue on after another mistake. Her eyes widened as she realized where she was. Near the base of the main line, where it met the wedge. And the flame was different here, darker in color, a scarlet red. Higher. Three times as high. And there was a blackness in the center of the flame in the wedge. A dark, black circle that ate the light and drew in the nearby flame, consuming it.

Reizer staggered as her eyes were mesmerized, trapped by the darkness. She felt as if her soul were being ripped out of her body. She had no idea what was in that darkness but she feared as she had feared nothing before, not even when she’d been in Berlin when the Russians overran it. She had always thought that had been hell on Earth, but looking at the black sphere she sensed an evil inside of it that transcended even that nightmare.

She took another step backward, unknowingly closer to the wall of fire behind her. Then another. Her subconscious could feel the heat, but her aware mind could only be repelled by the sheer evil of that dark hole.

She stopped. Then took a step forward. And another. Being drawn against her will toward the darkness.

**************

“There,” Dane pointed at the small glowing dot on the thermal imager of the Combat Talon, almost lost among the overwhelming glow of the fiery images.

“What?” The targeting officer was mesmerized by the numerous patterns displayed on a scale never before seen.

“There she is,” Dane said.

“Who?”

“We need to save her.”

“Who?” the targeting officer repeated. The dot had disappeared and Dane wondered for a moment if he’d really seen it.

Dane had flown from the Devil’s Sea to Hawaii in the back seat of a Navy F-16. Then he’d been transferred to one of the few remaining SR-71 Blackbirds and crammed in behind the pilot on a supersonic flight to Lima. He’d been met there by the Combat Talon, which had been sent from anti-drug missions in Colombia to meet him there on landing.

The MC-130 Talon was based on the airframe of the venerable Hercules C-130 cargo plane. It had four engines and a wide, stubby body like the C-130, but had been extensively upgraded. Four Allison T56-A-15 turboprop engines powered the plane with each producing almost five thousand horsepower of thrust. The true key to the plane was the sophisticated electronics, which allowed it to fly in all weather at low level. The pilots could use terrain following and terrain avoidance radar, allowing to fly ‘on the deck’ at high speeds, avoiding both obstacles and enemy radar.

The plane also had a contraption called the Fulton Recovery System. Two steel whiskers extended out from the bottom of the nose of the plane. Their purpose was to snatch a steel cable attached to a balloon on one end and a person on the ground on the other. The cable was snagged, then reeled in, recovering the person from the ground.

Right now, the Talon was at five thousand and had just gone ‘feet-dry’ over the coast of Peru. As Dane had crossed the Pacific eastward, he’d felt both pulled and repulsed. He knew there was evil ahead, but also sensed inside the evil a person in need. It reminded him of all the search and rescue missions he and Chelsea had been on. When disaster, usually the result of human stupidity, occurred, he and Chelsea had been called in to find those who had survived.

Dane clicked the transmit button on the headset he wore. “Do another fly-over of Nazca. Thermal imaging. I’m sure there’s somebody down there.”

He made his way to the cockpit, climbing up the few steps and looking over the shoulder of the navigator at his display. They’d all seen the satellite imagery of the burning lines so it was no surprise as the imaging screen showed them once more, bright red lines and shapes covering the plain five thousand feet below.

“Hard to find a person’s image among all that,” the navigator said. He fine-tuned the display as he spoke. “Funny thing is those flame lines are very hot, but they’re not giving off much side-way heat. Almost as if they’re being contained. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Dane still felt strongly that there was a survivor below, even though he had no idea what the lines of fire displayed represented.

“Any image at body temp?” he asked.

“I’m going to fade out the temperature range for the lines,” the navigator said.

Dane clutched the handrail and the plane banked. The pilots were now settling into a racetrack, circling the Nazca Plain.

The lines slowly disappeared and all that was left was one tiny orange dot. “There’s your person.”

Dane took another step up into the cockpit to get the attention of the pilot in command. “Here’s the plan.”

**************

Reizer focused the small percentage of her brain she still had conscious control of into stopping her slow movement forward. For a moment, her body came to a halt. But then like an alcoholic who’d been dry for days and was offered a drink, her left foot shuffled forward toward the darkness.

There was a strange noise above her, one she couldn’t immediately place, then she realized it was a plane.

But then her right foot moved forward.

**************

Dane stood, pressing a hand against the headset. “Open the back ramp.”

“You’re crazy!” was the response from the loadmaster.

Dane tugged on both leg straps, making sure the parachute was tight to his body as he headed toward the rear of the plane. “Open the Goddamn ramp.”

Dane threw the headset to the floor and waited. He was rewarded with a swirl of air coming into the cargo bay as a crack opened up between the back ramp and the top of the rear as it began to recess into the tail section.

The crew chief was maneuvering a bundle in a torpedo shaped plastic case onto the ramp, attached to a steel cable with a static line. Dane attached his own static line just behind the bundles. The ramp locked down level. The night sky, strange looking with the red glow from below, beckoned. They were low, just below five hundred feet, to insure better accuracy. Dane didn’t have a reserve because if the main didn’t open there wouldn’t be time to deploy a second.

Dane didn’t want to jump. He’d done hundreds of parachute jumps in the Special Forces. That wasn’t the issue. The danger and evil below was what repelled him.

But he could feel the old woman, lost, drawn into the darkness.

The light turned green and he followed the bundle off the ramp. His feet met air and he free-fell for three seconds, then the static line deployed the chute, jerking him abruptly. He caught a glimpse of the bundle’s chute ahead and below, then saw he was headed toward one of the lines of fire. His hands grappled with the toggles on the front risers, trying to turn. The chute gave way reluctantly.

Three seconds after the chute opened, Dane was less than fifty feet up, descending rapidly, less than thirty horizontal feet from a twenty foot high wall of fire. He pulled both toggles, dumping air.

His feet touched down less than ten feet from the flame, the leading edge of the parachute hitting it, being incinerated in the process. Dane stumbled forward, the chute caught in a breeze, tugging him forward toward oblivion. His hands scrambled at the quick releases located on the front of his shoulders. He flipped open the metal plate, fingers searching for the small metal loops he had to pull to release the chute from the body harness.

He stuttered another step toward the fire, feeling the heat on his face. One finger caught the loop and pulled. The other was still searching as he took another forced step forward. The chute was half incinerated as it collapsed into the fire and that was what saved Dane from the flame, the chute losing form and power as it was destroyed. He jerked backward with all his strength, falling onto his back, still feeling a pull on the one shoulder, until he popped the second quick release.

He lay on his back, breathing hard for several moments. The first thing he noticed was that there was no sound. The flames were eerily silent. He lifted his head slightly. The wall was if a blast furnace was caught between two panes of glass. The fire swirled, but he noted that it was overall moving from left to right, as if there was a destination for it.