Atlantis: Gate Read Online Free PDF Page B

Cuba, the freighter, Washington destroyed, jumbled and confused as if it had been taped by a faulty machine and was being played back.
    Dane let go of the images and focused on the feel of Rachel’s skin, her warmth, and the water sliding over his body. Rachel pushed him up, above the surface and he took a deep breath, then she dived, pulling him down with her. Dane remembered Rachel’s handler, Dr. Marsten saying a dolphin could dive to six hundred meters and stay down for over fifteen minutes, but he felt no panic, no worry as they descended. He swallowed, equalizing pressure on his ears as they went down, then relaxed as Rachel leveled off at about fifty feet.
    Dane began to feel faint as the oxygen in his lungs was absorbed. Still there was no feeling of panic. He realized he’d almost welcome the oblivion of death. It was all he had known. From his time in Special Forces in Vietnam, through battling the Shadow in the past year. The list of those who had gone before into darkness was long. His recon team in Cambodia in the Angkor Gate; Sin Fen in the Bermuda Triangle Gate; the Viking warrior he’d met inside the ‘wall’ between Earth and the Shadow’s world, along with the Romans and Amelia Earhart; Ariana Michelet killed while trying to stop the detonation of Mount Erebus in Antarctica and the destruction of the Pacific Rim by the Shadow. All gone. And the Shadow only halted once more, paused, not defeated. And the riddle of what was on the other side of the gates, beyond the wall, in the unknown place where the Shadow came from, still as great. They’d only discovered that the portals led to a strange space—inside the wall-- a staging area between Earth and the Shadow’s world, where some humans who had disappeared into the gates, such as Amelia Earhart, eked out a timeless existence. There were also two graveyards deep under the Atlantic and Pacific at each ocean’s deepest trench.
    Starved for oxygen, stars flickered in his eyes as the blood vessels constricted. His mind was fluttering between conscious and subconscious. Then he ‘saw’ an object, a sphere, glittering as if made of gold and other precious metals, the surface uneven, covered with twisted cords that seemed to be moving and pulsing with power. The image was too faint for him to make out more detail. A man in armor was stepping up to the sphere, a staff in his hand. Dane recognized the weapon—a Naga staff. Sharp blade on one end, the only thing that could cut the white skin of a Valkyrie—and seven headed snake figure on the other. The man lifted the Naga staff above the sphere, prepared to bring it down. Dane felt a terrible sense of dread and he tried to call out through the vision, but he knew it was another place, another time and there was nothing he could do. But floating on the edge of his consciousness was an awareness that he knew what he was seeing, that he had heard or read of it, but he couldn’t pin down exactly when or where.
    Then he saw Ariana Michelet. She was standing on a white surface, ice covered with drifting snow, and she was looking right at Dane. She was yelling something but he could hear nothing, only see her mouth moving, trying to get a message to him. She moved her arms in a gesture, but Dane couldn’t figure out what it was. Then behind her the ice began buckling, cracking, a tidal wave of hard white death. Dane reached forward, letting go of Rachel, trying to get to Ariana but she faded as his brain slipped further into darkness.
    Then Rachel turned her nose up and put her wide forehead under his back, pushing him upward. Dane broke the surface and gulped in a deep breath, letting go of Rachel and rolling onto his back, hacking and coughing to get water out of his lungs. The blue sky was cloudless, unmarked. Dane floated, rising and falling with the slight swell, regaining his breath and consciousness.
    He’d ‘drowned’ before. It had been a part of the training at the Special Forces scuba school at