Oracle (35 page)

It was exactly the way she remembered it.

David Wood
is the author of the popular action-adventure series,
The Dane Maddock Adventures
, as well as several stand-alone works and two series for young adults. Under his David Debord pen name he is the author of the
Absent Gods
fantasy series. When not writing, he co-hosts the Authorcast podcast. David and his family live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Visit him online at www.davidwoodweb.com.

Sean Ellis
is the author of several thriller and adventure novels. He is a veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom, and has a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Resources Policy from Oregon State University. Sean is also a member of the International Thriller Writers organization. He currently resides in Arizona, where he divides his time between writing, adventure sports, and trying to figure out how to save the world. Visit him at www.seanellisthrillers.com.

The Dane Maddock Adventures

Dourado

Cibola

Quest

Icefall

Buccaneer

Atlantis

Dane and Bones Origins

Freedom (with Sean Sweeney)

Hell Ship (with Sean Ellis)

Splashdown (with Rick Chesler)

Dead Ice (with Steven Savile)

Liberty (with Edward G. Talbot)

Electra (with Rick Chesler-forthcoming)

The Jade Ihara Adventures

Oracle (with Sean Ellis)

Changeling (with Sean Ellis-forthcoming)

Stand-Alone Works

Arena of Souls- A Brock Stone Adventure

Into the Woods (with David S. Wood)

Callsign: Queen (with Jeremy Robinson)

Dark Rite (with Alan Baxter)

The Zombie-Driven Life

The Dunn Kelly Mysteries

You Suck

Bite Me (forthcoming)

Writing as David Debord

The Silver Serpent

Keeper of the Mists

The Gates of Iron (forthcoming)

The Impostor Prince (with Ryan A. Span- forthcoming)

The Nick Kismet Thrillers

The Shroud of Heaven

Into the Black

Fortune Favors

The Devil You Know (novella
)

The Adventures of Dodge Dalton

In the Shadow of Falcon
’s Wings

At the Outpost of Fate

On the High Road to Oblivion

Chess Team/Jack Sigler Thrillers

(
with Jeremy Robinson)

Callsign: King

Underworld

Blackout

Prime

Savage

The Jade Ihara Adventures

Oracle (with David Wood)

Changeling (with David Wood-forthcoming)

Other Works

Dark Trinity - Ascendant

Magic Mirror

WarGod (with Steven Savile)

Hell Ship (with David Wood)

Enjoy this preview of

By David Wood and Rick Chesler

Prologue

July 2, 1937, 8:49 A.M., South Pacific Ocean

What was real
and what was a trick of the light? From an altitude of 1,000 feet, the shadows of cumulus clouds on the ocean appeared the same as the low-lying island Amelia Earhart was looking for. Her plane was about to crash. Nothing she could do would change that.  She needed somewhere to land and somewhere to land fast.

Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, were on the most difficult leg of their journey after having flown two-thirds of the way around the planet in their Lockheed Electra airplane. Earlier that day they had departed Lae, New Guinea en route to tiny Howland Isla
nd, where they were to make a fuel stop before traveling on to Honolulu. From there, San Francisco represented the completion of their goal—a circumnavigation of the globe at the equator, piloted by a woman, an almost unimaginable accomplishment.

Things had not gone as planned since Lae, however, and now Earhart was forced to make a choice: she thought that dark patch below and to the right was part of an island
—probably not Howland or even nearby Baker, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. It offered what looked like enough flat ground on which to try a crash-landing, but if she was wrong she wouldn’t be able to regain altitude to try somewhere else.

She smiled to herself in spite of the situation, recalling good times spent with her pilot mentors.
“Any landing you can walk away from.” She could hear them laughing across all the miles and all the years. This once humble farm girl, born in America’s heartland in 1897, six years before the pivotal Wright brothers’ first flight, had come farther than she had ever dreamed, both literally and figuratively.

Now, as the waves of the Pacific rushed up to greet her, it all came down to this. She squinted through her goggles at the outline below
—
there!
A white line indicating breaking waves on a reef. It was real land and not just a cloud shadow. She would at least have a chance. But there was yet another problem.

She needed desperately to communicate with Noonan, who sat ten feet behind her in the cargo area to accommodate his navigation equipment, rather than in the co-pilot
’s seat. The combined noise of air rushing into the plane and its twin Pratt & Whitney turboprop engines made normal conversation impossible. To overcome this, they had devised a crude clothesline system where they clipped a paper with a written message to a clothespin and slid it back and forth on a pulley. In this way, they could communicate during the long hours in the air. Right now, though, there was no time for that. But with her engines out, there wasn’t as much noise as usual and by shouting she could make herself heard. She craned her neck to face backwards and yelled, “Secure the payload, Fred! Secure it now!”

She could just make out his reply.
“Okay!”

Earhart quickly glanced to her right and frowned, then focused her full attention on the little island below. Much of it was forested and offered no hope of a real landing. On the far side of
the island, she picked out a pathetically small strip of sand or crushed coral, and she nosed her plummeting craft toward that.

She was not sure she would be able to reach it.

Chapter 1

San Diego, California, October 12, 2000

“Remember, only one
member of your dive team needs to avoid detection for that team to be declared the winners of this exercise!” The U.S. Navy underwater warfare trainer spoke forcefully, almost shouting, as he addressed the two Navy SEALs who stood next to him, as well as a dozen others who sat on the dock nearby.

For Navy SEAL Dane Maddock, the statement offered little consolation. He and the SEAL he had been paired with, Uriah
“Bones” Bonebrake, were the last to attempt the exercise, which so far none of their peers had been able to complete. Dane stood on a floating dock at the entrance to a military harbor, surveying his surroundings. He squinted against the bright morning sunlight at their goal: a destroyer ship docked in the harbor about the length of a football field away, a large red flag draped over one side indicating its training target status. The SEALs were supposed to act as enemy combatants infiltrating the harbor, by SCUBA diving through it and sticking a mine on the warship’s hull. Dane felt the pouch on his weight belt that contained the mine to make sure it was fastened securely. Bones also gave his equipment a last-second inspection. Their task would be hard enough without any gear failures.

“
Divers
ready
.”

Their warfare trainer spoke through a megaphone now, alerting those in the vicinity about what was taking place. Dane looked over to his left and sized up their foes
—the two opponents whose job it would be to stop the SEALs from placing a mine on the ship. They were superior swimmers—much better than Dane and Bones, and they always seemed to have annoyingly cocky grins on their faces. This was a test for them, too.

“
Mark 7 team,
ready
.”

T
wo bottlenose dolphins circled in their enclosure, an underwater pen with a sliding door which their handler, a marine mammal specialist, now lifted and held open. The United States Navy Marine Mammal Program had been in quiet, low-key operation since the early 1960s, with significant deployments during the Viet Nam War and other conflicts. The long-classified program trained dolphins and sea lions to perform useful underwater tasks such as mine detection, the recovery of underwater objects and, as would be demonstrated in this exercise, the protection of harbors from attacks by scuba divers.

Bones glared at one of the animals as if he could intimidate it. He knew it outweighed him, out-swam him,
had additional senses he did not possess, and, depending on whom one asked, was possibly even smarter than him. Unlike the trainers at public dolphin facilities like Sea World who constantly cooed in soothing tones to their charges while wearing brightly colored outfits, this trainer conveyed instructions to his dolphins almost exclusively by hand signals, wore military uniform, and never seemed to offer fish as treats. The dolphins were well-cared for and knew they would be fed well at the end of the day. A word of praise was reward enough.

Dane, who had been staring at the destroyer, lost in tactical thought, snapped out of it. He flexed his knees in
the wetsuit he wore to ward against the chilly water. The suits limited mobility somewhat, but it was important not only to retain body heat in a medium that transferred heat away from the body twenty-five times faster than air, but also to shield their bodies from accidental blows the dolphins might deliver. They could easily kill a man with blunt force, but were trained to tag the divers by placing a magnetic disc, typically by sticking it to a scuba tank, that would deploy a buoy marker when activated. When these yellow markers floated to the surface, Navy officers would then make a decision about how to intercept the potential threat.

“
Mark 7 team, set,
go
.”

The dolphin handler blew two short blasts from his whistle and the pair of cetaceans burst from their pen into the open water of the harbor entrance. They would be given three minutes to swim to the other end of the harbor, to the destroyer, before the dive team hit the water. Dane and Bones watched the sleek animals recede into the harbor until they were no longer visible.

“And to think I used to like that show Flipper when I was a kid.” Bones head. Of American Indian descent, his six-foot-six frame and muscular build intimidated many a human warrior, but would matter little to the dolphins.

Dane frowned at his friend and colleague with eyes the shade of a stormy sea. He often found Bones
irritating. It wasn’t that long ago that the two had butted heads in BUDS school while training to be SEALs, but gradually they had gotten to know each other through the course of various missions and adventures. Now they had what Dane considered a good working relationship, although he wished Bones would shut his mouth sometimes.

“
Divers,
set
.”

Dane leaned over to Bones.
“Let’s stick together.” The other teams had operated on the principle that splitting up underwater offered greater odds of success. But to Dane, it also meant each diver was more exposed, more on their own. It hadn’t worked so far. Bones just had time to nod before their warfare trainer spoke once more into his megaphone. 

“
Go!”

Dane and Bones slipped into the water of the harbor with barely a ripple at the same time as the marine mammal trainer gave a sustained blast of his whistle.

The clarity of the water was poor in the harbor; they could see perhaps ten feet in front of them and knew that it would only get worse the deeper into the harbor they went. The dolphins, meanwhile, depended less on sight and more on their echolocation sense—a kind of natural SONAR that allowed them to “see” objects by pinging them with sound waves generated from their melons. Dane knew they would have no trouble picking out two human forms.

They reached the muddy bottom at a depth of about twenty feet. Like their fellow SEALs who had already tried and failed, the thinking was that if you were near the bottom at least the dolphins couldn
’t profile you from below. Dane took a bearing from a compass he wore on his wrist and pointed toward the destroyer. They would swim straight toward it. Sneaking along the edges of the harbor, while it might seem like it was shielding, also took more time, thus giving the dolphins more time to detect and tag them. Bones nodded and the two warriors swam at a rapid pace toward their target.

There was little to see except for the flat muddy bottom. Clouds of silt puffed into the water when their fin strokes got too close. Dane glanced at his dive watch. They
’d been swimming hard for two minutes. It wouldn’t be long before the marine mammal sentries began sizing them up and closing in. They would swoop in and plant the magnetic buoy on their tanks, as they had been trained. If intimidating physical gestures or movements worked, the other teams would have had success by now.

Dane pulled on one of Bones
’ fin tips to gain his attention. The big Indian whirled around. Dane  held up the index finger of each hand and then drew them together, indicating that he and Bones should stick close together. Bones looked around, head on a swivel. When he saw nothing he held his hands up in a
what’s up
gesture. Dane wrote with a pencil on the underwater slate he had clipped to his dive vest.

STAND TANK TO TANK AND WALK IN ON BOTTOM

Dane watched as Bones’ eyes narrowed in confusion. The large warrior was a fast, powerful swimmer. He felt like they were making progress to their goal and now Dane wanted to stop and do something weird? At the same time, he’d been in the field with Maddock enough times to know that he wouldn’t propose a tactic he hadn’t already thought through.

Bones shrugged, took a last look around and settled into an upright position, fins flat on the bottom. Dane did the same and backed up to him so that their air tanks each contacted the other
’s back, severely limiting the amount of exposed metal. Dane checked his compass, tapped Bones’ arm and pointed toward the destroyer.

They proceeded to move across the bottom in a strange kind of crab-walk, their progress slow and plodding. They slowly rotated as they
moved, kicking up the mud as they went along, further limiting their visibility. After a couple of minutes of progress, Dane caught a streak of movement in his peripheral vision. He could no longer see anything there, but he knew it had to be a dolphin, shooting by, making a surveillance pass. He felt a tap on his arm and looked back to see Bones pointing off to their right. He, too, had seen something.

They kept walking across the bottom of the harbor. Dane glanced at his watch, tracking exercise elapsed time. At least one of the previous teams had been tagged out by now. Two more forms shot past them
—closer this time—one on each side of them moving in opposite directions. They were closing in.

Still, they kept moving, Dane keeping a close eye on the compass. The going was slow and they didn
’t need to go anywhere but straight to the target. Had they been swimming, they could have reached the ship by now. But at the same time, more time had ticked by, and Dane knew that by now some of their SEALs on the dock would be surprised that they hadn’t seen a yellow marker pop up yet.

Then he felt Bones slip and the big man fell in slow motion toward the bottom, rolling over on one side. Instantly one of the grey marauders homed in, the magnetic buoy tag clenched in its formidable peg-like teeth. Dane kicked at its snout as it closed in, the dolphin easily avoiding his finned foot with an effortless swerve of its head. He heard a shrill series of staccato clicks and whistles and could
only speculate it was a fighter’s trash talk.

Or perhaps tactical coordination?

Almost too late, Dane turned while Bones got to his feet in time to see the other dolphin swimming toward them at ramming speed. Dane spun, eliciting a grunt from Bones as he slammed his tank into his ribcage. But the dolphin missed, its muscular side careening off Dane’s wetsuit as it rocketed past. Dane now realized full well what they were up against. There was no way a mid-water swimmer would get past these aquatic sentries, no matter how skilled. His tactic was paying off.