Atlantis: Devil's Sea (2 page)

She turned her head to the warrior, a man named Kra Tek, a brave fighter, who had been entrusted with the spear. He was also Kala’s father. She gave the slightest of nods and saw relief briefly race across his face. She knew she had chosen wisely in picking him—it was obvious in Kala. “Do it.”

He slid the spearhead into a slit next to the slab. His scarred hand rested on the snakeheads. Without hesitation, he turned it.

The pyramid began to vibrate. A blue glow suffused the slab and Pri Lo’s body. The priestesses were chanting prayers. The glow centered on Pri Lo’s head, the skin rippling as if the bone of the skull was alive.

The skin began peeling off, the eyes turning into two blue glowing orbs. The bone appeared, bleached white, changing, metamorphosing from the inside out. The white became clear, crystallized, suffused with the blue glow. Her mouth was wide open, but no scream issued forth even though she was still alive, the channel for the power that was rising through the structure.

A bolt of blue shot out of Pri Lo’s head toward the approaching black wall. When it touched the darkness, there was an explosion.

Again and again, blue lightning seared off the top of the pyramid toward the Shadow, until the black wall stopped moving forward, halting less than a hundred yards from shore. The consistency of the darkness began to change, swirls of blue mixing with the black.

Then the pyramid stopped vibrating, the blue bolts ceased firing, and all was still for a moment. The priestesses and warriors, who had fallen to the stone and covered their heads during the assault, slowly lifted their heads. The Shadow was fading, breaking apart, rays of sunlight piercing it. They stood, watching the Shadow disappear, jubilation filling their hearts. Except for Kra Tek, who was staring down at Pri Lo’s remains. The body was gone, leaving just a pure crystal skull lying on the slab. He reached for the skull.

Then the volcano blew.

The explosion took off the top third of the mountain, sending hundreds of thousands of tons of ash, gas, dirt, and rocks into the air. Toxic gas rode the shock wave downslope, killing every living thing it washed over.

Kra Tek cradled the crystal skull in his arms, turning his broad back to the coming death. The gas killed him instantly, then the blast of heat that followed scorched the flesh from his bones, but his hands still gripped Pri Lo’s skull as his body slammed into the slab.

Several miles to the south, Pri Kala had watched the Shadow dispersed by the blue bolts. She had sensed her mother’s power projected from the island, then felt it fade to nothing other than the faint essence of her father’s sorrow. But there was an aura of comfort from the dolphins swimming about the prow of the ship, seemingly guiding it out to sea and away from the island.

Then the large volcano in the center of the island exploded. Every member of the crew paused as the sound of the blast reached them. They could see the spreading cloud of ash. Rocks, trees, and other debris splashed into the water all around.

“Row, you fools!” the captain yelled as he pushed the tiller, putting the stern of the ship square on toward the island. The tidal wave from the blast was over fifty feet high, bearing down on them at eighty miles an hour.

“Hold on!” the captain cried out. He held on to the tiller with one hand and with the other grabbed Pri Kala. Tears were running down her smooth cheeks, but she gripped his hand. The wave hit, and the ship rode it, the stern going up almost straight, several men sliding over-board, everything that wasn’t tied down smashing forward. Then the ship leveled on the top of the wave before slipping down the less steep backslope and settling in the water.

Pri Kala looked back. Less than a third of the island was still above water. The Earth had not known such violence since the destruction of Atlantis over eight thousand years previously. People as far as a thousand miles away would hear the sound the volcano had made and the ash and dirt would circle the globe and drop the world temperature a couple of degrees for years. Once more, the Shadow had been stopped, but the price had been high.

Pri Kala’s small hand reached up and felt the Defender crystal. She knew the Shadow would come again, and she knew her duty.

CHAPTER TWO

T
HE
N
EAR PAST

2 July 1937 A.D.

“KHAQQ calling
Itasca
. We must be on you but cannot see you. Gas is running low. Over.”

Amelia Earhart knew the sunrise she was watching might well be her last as she let go of the Transmit button and there was no reply to her latest attempt to contact the Coast Guard cutter Itasca. The very top of the sun was rising, as if directly out of the Pacific Ocean, which stretched in all directions as far as she could see from the cockpit. She was flying at twelve thousand feet, so the range of vision was quite far. But no sign of Howland Island or the
Itasca,
which was supposed to be on station just offshore the unpopulated island. It was waiting for her arrival to refuel the plane.

She and her navigator, Fred Noonan, had already flown twenty-two thousand miles in the past several months in her quest to be the first woman to fly around the world. But this section was the most dangerous: the longest they would be over water. They’d taken off from Lae, New Guinea, the previous day at noon, and she knew she only had about two more hours worth of fuel in the Lockheed Electra’s gas tanks. She had had the plane specifically modified for the flight, adding fuel tanks and radio-directionn- finding equipment.

Noonan had been working the direction-finding equipment all through the night, trying to keep them oriented, but reception was intermittent. The
Itasca
was supposed to be transmitting nonstop, giving them a target to fix on, but there had been long periods where she could pick up nothing.

“Give me a fix, Fred.” Earhart glanced at her compass. She was on a course slightly north of due east, but Howland was so small that the slightest deviation would cause them to miss it, thus the reliance on the
Itasca’s
transmissions. If they didn’t make the island, they would run out of gas and go down in the ocean. There was no other land within range for them to divert to.

“I’m getting a lot of static,” Noonan reported.

Earhart reached down and grabbed some smelling salts, taking a deep whiff, her eyes tearing. She didn’t drink coffee, and she had learned that she needed the salts on such a long flight. She’d been at the controls for eighteen hours, and tired didn’t even begin to describe how she felt. She’d recently had dysentery and had still not completely regained her strength. She had made the decision, during one of the long legs of the trip, that this would be her last flight of adventure. From now on, she would only fly for pleasure.

She was a striking woman: tall, with short brown hair. Many in the media had called her Lady Lindbergh, and there was some resemblance between the first woman to fly across the Atlantic and the first man. Of course, Earhart’s first trip across the Atlantic had basically been as luggage, a passenger as two men piloted the plane, but that didn’t stop the sensation the flight caused in 1928. Ever since, she had been pushing the envelope, to a large degree because of the scorn of the few who pointed out that she hadn’t piloted on that first flight, and partly because her husband, George Putnam, the famous publisher, encouraged her, keeping her in the limelight. Throughout the flight, she had filed dispatches from her journal.

She did fly the Atlantic solo in 1932, only the second person after Lindbergh to do so, and that was just one of the many long-distance-record flights she accomplished. This was to be her crowning achievement, another first in a long list of firsts. Noonan had been chosen to accompany her because he had served as a navigator on the Pan American Pacific Clipper so he was familiar with the region where they expected the most difficulty.

She had planned on starting from Hawaii and going west, but on takeoff from Luke Field, the tip of one wing of the fuel-laden plane clipped the runway, and the Electra was badly damaged. It was shipped back to the States, and Earhart decided to reverse the direction of the flight and the start point. On 1 June, they took off from Miami, Florida, and flew to Puerto Rico on the first stage. They’d flown along the northern edge of South America to Africa at the narrowest part of the South Atlantic, then across Africa, along the southern tip of Arabia, and across India. That latter stage was another first for Earhart; no one had ever flown nonstop from the Red Sea to India before. They’d then hopped down toward Australia from Karachi to Calcutta, then to Rangoon, Bangkok, Singapore, and Bandoeng. There bad weather delayed them, and she came down with dysentery. Also during that time, Noonan had made repairs on the long-distance receivers and transmitters, which had been giving them trouble all through the long flight. On 27 June, they’d flown from Bandoeng to Darwin, where more repairs on the direction finder were completed, and their parachutes were shipped back to the States. Given that the rest of the trip would be over the Pacific, the parachutes were no longer needed.

They’d reached Lae, New Guinea, on 29 June, over two-thirds of the trip done and seven thousand miles to go. But the last legs were all over the Pacific, the most dangerous part of the journey. At Lae, she had cabled her last article to the
Herald Tribune
and her last journal entry to George.

“I need a fix,” Amelia said. “We’re getting close, and we’re not going to have fuel to turn around if we miss it on the first pass.”

“I know that.” Noonan’s voice was tight. They were both exhausted. “I don’t know why I can’t pick up the ship. The equipment is working correctly,” he added defensively.

There was a smudge on the ocean ahead. Earhart’s heart leapt as she though it must be smoke from the
Itasca.
She grabbed the transmitter and keyed it. “K-H-A-Q-Q calling
Itasca
. I see smoke. Are you making smoke? Over.”

There was no answer.

Noonan had a set of binoculars, and he put them to his eyes. “I don’t think that’s a ship’s smoke.”

“An island?” Earhart asked.

“It’s like fog.”

“It can’t be fog,” Earhart said. “It’s too small.”

“It’s getting bigger,” Noonan said.

Even without the glasses, Earhart could see that it was growing larger. There was a yellowish tinge to the fog, and it was billowing upward and out ward at an unnatural rate.

“I’m getting something,” Noonan said. He had his hands over his headset, listening intently.

Amelia’s gaze shifted between the compass and the growing cloud on the horizon as she waited.

“I don’t know what it is,” Noonan finally said. “A lot of static, then what sounds like Morse Code, but I can’t--” he fell silent once more as he focused on listening, his eyes closed. “It’s clearer now.” Noonan opened his eyes and picked up a pencil and began to record the letters in the flight log, speaking them out loud, as he heard the dashes and dots.

“T-U-R-N-O-F-F-R-A-D-I-O-O-R-D-I-E.”

“What?” Earhart was so tired her brain couldn’t make immediate sense of the letters.

“Turn off radio or die,” Noonan succinctly informed her.

“We can’t. We won’t be able to navigate.”

“Hell, we haven’t’ been navigating for hours, “ Noonan noted.

“Who’s sending?” Earhart was confused. If it wasn’t the
Itasca,
who was out here in the middle of nowhere?”

“I have no idea.”

The fog was now less than five miles ahead and was huge, blocking their path now at twelve thousand feet and continuing to climb. In all her flights, she had never seen anything like it. She had a feeling they shouldn’t fly into it, but if she changed course, she would burn fuel and get off their track to Howland Island. A startling thought crossed her mind: Had she already flown past Howland Island and the
Itasca?
She pushed that negative thinking aside. She knew exactly how fast they had been going and how long they had been in the air. But, she argued with herself, there was the possibility of a strong headwind or tailwind, multiplied by the nineteen hours they’d been in the air, skewing her math.

“I think we should shut the radio off,” Noonan suggested, drawing her back to the immediate problem. “I don’t like the looks of that.”

“Find out who’s sending,” Earhart ordered.

Noonan had a knee key on his thigh, and he tapped out a quick query in Morse, trying to get the identity of the sender of the message.

A golden beam slashed out of the fog directly for the Electra. Earhart reacted, pushing forward and dropping the nose of the plane. The gold beam missed them by less than ten feet.

“Stop transmitting!” she yelled as she pulled the plane out of the dive and banked hard left. The fog was now less than two miles away, a wall stretching as far as she could see north and south and reaching up at least fifteen thousand feet.

“What was that?” Noonan was flipping switches, cutting power to their transmitter and receivers.

Earhart noted the fuel gauges. Not much left, and she had no idea where they were. Glancing out the window, she noted that even though she was flying a parallel course, the fog was closer, which meant it was still expanding.

“I’m going to ditch,” she announced.

Noonan said nothing, knowing there really weren’t any other options. They had an inflatable raft on board, and it was best to go down while they still had engine power so she could have some control of the landing.

Earhart turned away from the strange fog and began descending. Fortunately, the water was relatively calm, the swell no more than half a foot. When they were ten feet above the waves, she began throttling back, slowing the plane to just above stall speed.

The Electra hit, bounced hit once more, and again bounced into the air. Then they were down, both slammed forward against their seat belts as the water slowed the plane. Earhart cut power to the engines, and an eerie silence reigned, strange after so many hours in the air, the sound of the engines their constant companion. Her first thought was that silence was the sound of failure: she had fallen short of her goal. She shook that thought out of her head and knew she had to focus on the immediate problem, which was getting out of the plane. She unbuckled, knowing they had some time before the plane went down, as the empty fuel tanks would keep it afloat for a little while. Earhart got up and began gathering essential equipment.