The metal connected with a hollow clang, as if it had hit fellow metal, and the creature abruptly rose straight up, then the free hand, claws extended, sliced down and neatly separated Thorlak’s shield arm from his body at the elbow. The Valkyrie disappeared back into the fog, Thorlak hanging below, his screams fading.
“Ragnarok!” Hrolf yelled.
The Viking leader turned his attention back to the boat. The longship was heading straight toward rocks. Ragnarok threw his shoulder back into the tiller, every muscle straining to bring the boat about. Warriors in front of him were grabbing bows, spears, and shields, their frightened eyes scouring the fog, tensed for a reappearance of the demon.
Slowly the dragon head on the high prow swung to the right. They cleared the southern promontory with less than twenty feet to spare, the howls of the Valkyries fading as they sailed into the open sea.
Chapter 5
Night or day no longer mattered as soon as the elevator began going down. The electric lights on the top of the cage reflected off the dark walls, showing the layers of rock going by as the elevator descended. Professor Nagoya had made the trip many times and it held little interest for him. He’d already called ahead with the coordinates to be checked and he knew his team would be hard at work.
He’d taken the bullet train north from Tokyo, traversing the two hundred kilometers in less than an hour. A helicopter had been waiting in the parking area of the station he got off at and whisked him here.
Rock walls on four sides guided Nagoya straight down. The Kamioka Mozumi mine was the deepest in Japan. Its lowest level was over three miles below the surface of the Earth. At a steady rate of four hundred feet per minute, the cage descended. Nagoya had to switch cages three times, and cross three horizontal tunnels to get to the deepest shaft that led to his destination.
These last three vertical miles took him almost as long as the hundred and twenty horizontal miles from Tokyo. At long last the final cage thumped to a halt. Nagoya impatiently pulled aside the gate. A young woman was waiting for him, Ahana, his assistant. She bowed as she greeted him.
“What have you found?”
“We are still coordinating with the Americans,” Ahana said, “but the results are looking positive. There is something at the coordinates we were given by Mister Foreman.”
Nagoya felt his pulse quicken. After all these years, every little discovery about the gates and those on the other side was like a drink of water to a man in the desert. They knew so little. Given that he had managed to get his government to invest over a hundred million dollars in this project it was good that it was finally paying results. Of course the project has ostensibly been done for other research reasons; indeed it was used for various research projects by numerous organizations and it paid dividends that way, but Nagoya had been the one who had accomplished what many had said couldn’t be done.
They walked down a corridor carved out of solid rock, over eight feet wide and ten high. After two hundred yards, the tunnel opened into a large natural cavern that had been discovered during drilling years ago, before the mine was tapped out. The cavern, over eighty meters deep and eighty wide had been exactly what Nagoya had been searching for.
The tunnel came out near the very top of the cavern. A steel grating extended out over the open space, with several work stations where the crew that manned the site worked. Underneath, a highly polished stainless steel tank, sixty meters wide by sixty deep had been painstakingly built, section by section. Along the walls of the tank over 20,000 photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) had been attached. PMTs were extremely sensitive light sensors that could detect a single photon as it traveled through water and reacted with it. They were all linked together with the output displayed on the computers in the work station.
The tank was filled with very pure water. The surface was dark black and mesmerizing. Nagoya often found himself simply sitting and staring at that totally smooth surface, lost in thought.
“What do you have?” he asked once more as Ahana took her place at the main console.
“The computer is still processing the data, sir,” Ahana typed in some commands. “Another few minutes please.”
Nagoya put his hands behind his back, trying to appear calm. The entire complex went by the name of Super-Kamiokande. In technical terms it was a ring-imaging water Cerenkov detector. Foreman, Nagoya’s counterpart in the United States, called it the ‘Can’, a rather simplistic term in Nagoya’s opinion for a device that was the only one of its kind.
Cerenkov light was produced when an electrically charged particle traveled through water. The reason the Can had to be so far underground was to allow the miles of earth and rock above it to block out the photons emitted by man’s devices on the surface of the planet. Thus researchers could study the much stronger cosmic rays given off by the sun which could pass through the rock in an almost 'pure’ environment much like astronomers put their telescopes on the highest mountains.
The other reason- and one that only Nagoya knew of- that it was deep underground was to look in the other direction; into the Earth. Since charged particles should not be emitted by the Earth itself, no other researchers even considered that a possible use. It looked for a particular charged particle that Foreman had stumbled across as being significant to the gates and the effect they produced.
For that reason, Nagoya did not mind the name the American CIA man had given the Super-Kamiokande, which had been developed as a joint US-Japan research project. Both Nagoya and Foreman tweaked their governments into doing something even the governments didn’t really understand the need for at the time.
Nagoya knew that Foreman over the decades after World War II had focused on various locations where strange things seemed to happen: the Bermuda Triangle was only the most prominent to the public. There was also the Devil’s Sea off the coast of Japan, the area that had first drawn Nagoya’s interest. There were many more spots on the face of the Earth that propagated strange electro-magnetic and radioactive properties.
The Russians, interestingly enough, had been the foremost investigators of these areas, looking beyond the spots inside their own borders. At a secret meeting brokered by Foreman shortly after the Berlin Wall fell, Nagoya had finally been able to meet his Russian counterpart, Kolkov, and learn much history and theory.
The Russians had lost a submarine not only in the Devil’s Sea, but two inside the Bermuda Triangle gate during the Cuban missile crisis. Additionally, the Soviets had sent ground recon elements into the Angkor gate area in Cambodia in 1956 and 1978, losing both groups without a single survivor. Only Kolkov knew how many people the Russians lost over the years into the gates inside their territory, three of which Nagoya knew certainly existed- Tunguska, in the waters of Lake Baikal, and near the Chernobyl reactor.
Indeed, survivors from the gate were few and far between, Foreman having two of them working for him in the man named Dane and the woman Sin Fen. Nagoya had never met Dane but he often wondered about the woman, whom he had met several times. She made him feel very nervous, as if her dark eyes could see into him, into parts he himself wasn’t aware of.