Foreman didn’t wait for an answer. “Over fifty years I’ve tried to convince them. No one wanted to listen to me. No one wanted to know the truth. But they know now, don’t they?”
“What truth?” Dane asked. “We know where those planes and ships are now, but we still have no clue why they’re here.”
Foreman pointed at the eviscerated Russian submarine. “For our technology, our power.”
“The power maybe,” Dane allowed, “but I doubt they need our technology. Did it ever occur to you that maybe they want the people, too? The craft are here, but where are the people?”
The submersible came to a halt, forestalling any answer by Foreman as he carefully lowered himself overboard and swam the short distance until he could touch bottom. Dane followed.
Foreman went directly to his brother’s plane, clambering up on the wing. The cockpit glass was pulled back, and Foreman leaned inside. Dane climbed up on the other side.
“Just like the day he got in it,” Foreman said. “It hasn’t aged a bit.”
There was a photo tucked next to one of the instrument panels. Two young men in flight suits standing on a beach smiling. Foreman noted Dane looking at it.
“Our last shore leave together in Hawaii.”
It was hard for Dane to connect the smiling young man in it with the hard old man on the other side of the plane. Even in the midst of World War II, Foreman had looked happier than he did now.
“Do you think your brother could still be alive?” Dane asked.
Foreman took the picture, sliding it into a plastic bag and putting it in his pocket. “When I saw the movie Close Encounters — have you seen it?”
Dane nodded, and Foreman continued.
“And all those people got of the mother ship at Devil’s Tower, all I could think about was my brother and all the others. I was a member of Flight Nineteen, the only one who didn’t go on that last fight into the Bermuda Triangle.”
“You have a knack for staying out of trouble,” Dane noted.
“Sometimes I wish I had been with my brother at the end.”
For one of the few times in their history, Dane believed him.
Foreman climbed off the wing onto the strange black beach. He looked about. “See anything interesting?”
Dane joined Foreman and scanned the beach. “Besides the Enola Gay?” He pointed. “How about the Indianapolis?”
The cruiser was resting on its side about a half mile away, a gaping hole where a Japanese torpedo had punched a fatal hole in the ship that had delivered the first atomic bomb to Tinian.
“That means the Shadow scavenges the bottom,” Foreman noted, seeing the damage.”
“There’s the Reveille,” Dane had just spotted the research ship between a World War II-era Japanese aircraft carrier and a battered steamer. He started walking in that direction, Foreman next to him.
As expected, there was no sign of life on the ship when they got to it. They climbed up a gangway onto the ship and went to the bridge. The video camera that the captain had held was lying on the floor of the wing. Dane picked it up. “Should we see if he continued recording after we lost contact?”
In response, Foreman took the camera from his hands and popped the tape out. He went into the bridge, to the rear where the captain’s cabin was. A small TV with a built-in VCR was bolted to the bookcase. Foreman slid the tape in and rewound it. The he hit Play. Dane sat on the captain’s bunk while Foreman sat in the chair, remote in hand. The screen came alive, showing the sea. Foreman hit fast-forward, and they saw the scene where the black sphere came up.
The opening irises shut, and they could hear the yells of alarm from the crew members. Then there was complete darkness as the top shut.
A voice — the captain’s, Dane recognized — came out of the TV‘s small speaker. “I can hear water being pumped. The air is strange. We have no power, not even emergency backup.”
A tiny shaft of light appeared.
“A flashlight. The camera is still working. So batteries work but no other power.”
There was a loud metal-on-metal noise.
“We’re grounded. Like a dry dock. Something’s happening. A golden glow on the starboard side.”
They could see the glow he was referring to on the screen now.
“Just like Ariana reported in the Angkor gate,” Dane said.
“There’s something coming out of the gold,” the captain reported. “Several objects.”
They could see about a dozen white dots silhouetted against the gold glow and growing larger.
“What the hell are those?” Foreman muttered.
The captain was yelling orders, and then he dropped the camera, and all they could see was gray metal. They heard shots and screams, and then the picture went dead. Foreman rewound it and then paused at the last useful frame, the dozen white objects against the gold glow.
“I think we might have had our first view of those who live in the Shadow,” Dane said, tapping the TV screen.
Instead of heading back to Heathrow, Ariana had ordered the helicopter pilot to head northwest toward Oxford. She’d called the number for Davon that she’d been given and arranged to meet him at a site he described to the north of the town.
As the chopper banked toward the field he had designated, Ariana could see a set of headlights cutting across the grass from the stationary car. The chopper touched down, and she instructed the pilot to shut down and wait for her. She felt a bit conspicuous as she walked across the field to the car, wondering why Davon hadn’t bothered to get out to greet her. As she reached the road, the passenger door swung open on the BMW.
“Get in,” a voice called out.
Ariana hesitated, then slid in the seat. Before she had the door shut, the car was moving. In the dim glow from the instrument panel she could barely make out the driver’s profile. A large hook nose dominated a hatchet face.
“Are you Davon?” She asked.
“Who the hell else you think would be waiting for you?” he replied.
“Where are we going?”
“Away from there,” he nodded his head over his shoulder at the field. He took a turn in the road a little to fast and over corrected with a jerk of the wheel and the squeal of the tires.
“Listen,” Ariana said, “I just—”
“Are you with the government?” he cut her off.
“Which government?”
“Well, you’re an American by your accent,” he said. “So let’s try that one first.”
“No, I don’t work for the U.S. government.”
“Any government?” he pressed.
“I don’t work for any government,” she assured him.
“And I’m supposed to believe you just ‘cause you say so, right, missy?”
“What the hell are you afraid of?” Ariana demanded. She was thrown against the door as he took another turn at high speed. “And would you slow this thing down?”
“They’ve tried to get me before,” he said.
“First,” Ariana spoke slowly and deliberately, “are you Davon?”
“Yes.
“Ok. Who is the they you’re afraid of?”
“You know. They. Them. The people with the power. The people afraid of the truth.”
“What truth?”
Davon gave a manic smile. “Well, if I told you that, that would mean they’d be after you, too, wouldn’t it?”
Ariana was beginning to believe she had hooked up with a paranoid crackpot. She grabbed the dash as he turned off the hard road onto a thin dirt tract between two rows of thick hedges.
“Where are we going?”
“You wanted to know about the stones. About the leys of power, right?”
“The what?”