Just thirty feet away in her cabin, Doctor Martsen was unaware of Ahana’s dire pronouncement and calculations for the end of the known world.
Doctor Renee Martsen had worked with dolphins for over twenty years, ever since her time as a grad student at the University of Hawaii. She found in them the acceptance she had never realized among humans. The fact that her research into dolphin linguistics for the past fifteen years had been funded by the US Navy she viewed as a necessary evil.
She sat in her cabin playing the recording that had been forwarded from the Connecticut over and over. Foreman had given it to her with the vague instruction of ‘make something of this’ and then hurried back to his control center and his muonic monitors. Since arriving at the Devil’s Sea, Martsen had noted how there was much more focus on machines than mammals.
Martsen had loaded the sound into her laptop, then played it. She had no doubt that they were dolphin voices, but there were other noises in the backdrop. She had sophisticated software loaded into her hard drive as her primary focus of research was trying to decipher how dolphins communicated. There were many who said there was no logic or sense to the sounds that dolphins made, but Martsen was convinced otherwise.
Her primary argument had been simple — she could send, and receive, messages to and from Rachel, a bottle-nosed dolphin she had been working with for over seven years. However, recent events had caused her some doubt. Dane had claimed to have a telepathic connection with Rachel, which meant that perhaps the sounds did indeed mean nothing and Rachel was simply picking up and sending messages in a form that couldn’t be recorded, but could be felt.
The computer beeped, the latest program having finished running. It had separated the different tracks, which took quite a while since she had determined there were over sixty different sound emitters on the tape. She hit the enter key and the first one began playing— definitely a dolphin.
She shifted that track to her ‘translator’, no longer certain that her miniscule dolphin vocabulary was actually that. She moved on to the second track and continued the process until she hit the ninth track. At first she had no idea what the noise was, then her blood froze as she realized what she was listening to.
A human throat producing a scream of unimaginable agony.
She was so shocked by the scream that she simply sat there for several minutes. Then she regrouped and checked the computer. The first dolphin track had played through. The result was disappointing. Just a few potential words among hundreds.
Then it occurred to her — whether she was right or wrong about there being a dolphin language, there was no doubt that Rachel could communicate. She grabbed the recording and her translator. She left her cabin, heading for the deck.
She climbed down a ladder to the small docking bay on the side of the FLIP and dropped the waterproof mike and speaker into the water. She hit the button on her controller to send the message that summoned Rachel. In less than thirty seconds she saw the dolphin’s dorsal fin cutting through the water, heading toward the ship.
“Good girl,” Martsen whispered as Rachel’s bottlenose poked above the surface of the water, the dark eyes regarding her.
Martsen hit the start button and the dolphin tracks began playing. Within seconds, Rachel began to show agitation, her powerful tail propelling her up, out of the water. She arched back, slamming into the surface, showering Martsen with water.
Martsen had to pull the headphones off as Rachel shot a powerful series of clicks from her blowhole, radiated through her forehead into the water. Martsen’s fingers shook as she accessed the database and a series of words scrolled across the screen:
END-- THIS-- WORLD-- NOW-ONLY-- CHANCE-CHANGE-- PATH-- POWER-GET--MAP
Then Rachel dove out of sight.
Foreman finally tore his gaze from the picture of the Nazca Plain. “What do you suggest?”
Dane felt as if he were playing a game of chess, but much of the board was blocked off from his sight. He could only see a move or two ahead at best and he had no idea what reaction would come from those moves. He also knew that — despite what Foreman believed — that there were other pieces on the board on his side and that he just hadn’t met them yet. “I think at the very least we need to recover Sin Fen’s skull and the Naga staff and get the skulls that Ariana collected.”
Foreman seemed relieved to be able to order something within his capabilities. “All right. I can arrange that.” He pulled out his phone, then paused. “There’s something I should have given you.”
Dane waited, but Foreman didn’t continue. Dane sensed confusion and embarrassment from the CIA man, something that he had never picked up from him before.
“Sin Fen,” Foreman finally said.
There was sorrow coming off Foreman, a thin layer covering a deep pool of a lifetime of pain.
“Yes?” Dane asked quietly.
“She left you something. A tape.” Foreman opened a drawer and pulled out a bulky, sealed manila envelope and handed it to Dane. He ripped it open and a videocassette fell out into his hands.
“You didn’t watch it?” Dane asked.
A flash of anger crossed Foreman’s face. “I know what you think of me. Yes, I thought about it. I’ve been thinking about it ever since we lost her and I found it in her gear. It’s been there—” he slapped the desk hard, drawing unwanted attention from others in the control room—“all this time.”
“Why didn’t you give it to me before?” Dane asked. “It could hold important information.”
“Sin Fen wouldn’t have held back information that could have helped us,” Foreman said.
“Than why not—” Dane paused as he realized why the old man hadn’t handed it over— jealousy, something Foreman would never admit to. Sin Fen had been like a daughter to him and she had left a tape for Dane, a newcomer in her life, rather than Foreman who had rescued her from the streets of Phnom Penh.
Dane nodded. “It took you a while to come clean.”
Foreman’s reply was interrupted by Doctor Martsen’s excited entry into the control center. She bounded over to the table and slapped down a single piece of paper with eleven words written on it in front of Dane. “That’s the translation of part of the dolphin message that the Connecticut picked up.”
Dane read it, then passed it to Foreman. “We know we have to stop the power drain, but what is this map?” he asked.
Ahana came over and read over the CIA man’s shoulder.
“I don’t know,” Marsten said. “There’s more to the tape, but that’s the first thing Rachel translated.”
“Nazca’s the key,” Dane said. “Maybe those designs on the plain are a map of something. We need to get this person,” he tapped the small dot.
“That person,” Ahana said, “is probably Doctor Leni Reizer. A German woman who is considered the expert on the Nazca Plain. I did an Internet search and her name was constantly mentioned. And she lives right next to it.”
“I need to go there,” Dane said.
Foreman nodded. “All right. I’ll arrange transportation.”
He turned on his SATPhone. Dane handed the translation back to Marsten. “You get any more done, please forward it to me.”
“I’ll do that.”
Dane left the control room and went to his bunkroom. Chelsea was waiting inside. Her tail thumped against the wall as she greeted him.
“Hey, big girl,” Dane leaned over and scratched behind her ears. He felt the comfort that the Golden Retriever always projected but the tape was heavy in his hands.
A small TV with a built-in VCR was bolted above the desk. Dane slid the video into the machine and pushed play.
The screen went blue, then Sin Fen’s exotic Eurasian face appeared. Dane took a step back, remembering the last time he had seen her, her head changing into crystal, focusing the power of the pyramid in the Bermuda Triangle and shutting the gate there.