'The Coalition has survived through worse many times. They will attack and then disappear, only to resurface with new identities and the same hidden wealth, and they will still win by offering financial assistance to the countries that are devastated. They have been planning this thing since the end of World War Two.'
The president stood among the gathered men and women of the Security Council, who were still smiling from ear to ear. Then he looked at the threat board; down at the bottom sat the small island of Crete.
'Niles, I've heard about his prowess in the field, but tell me again how good your Colonel Collins really is.'
18
It had taken far longer to get men and equipment through the small access tunnel, or Ratzville, as the men were calling it, than they had originally thought. A full fifty minutes had been wasted as they struggled through the filthy tunnel. When they finally made it out, the lead SEAL unit reported that the sewer shaft was clear for at least two miles.
'Ryan!' Jack called over his shoulder.
'Yes, sir?'
'The marines having any luck with the radios yet?'
'Negative. We can't even get the local Atlantis AM station,' he joked, but stopped smiling when the marines around him looked on with sour faces. 'No, nothing, Colonel.'
Jack looked at his watch. Almost a full hour and a half since Morning Thunder had kicked off.
'Jack, are you feeling that?' Sarah asked. 'The Coalition has started the Wave.'
Collins didn't say anything; he knew that she was right. He was feeling it in his inner ear, just as Sarah had said he would.
'Look, when this thing starts, you watch your ass. I don't want a dead girl--' Jack caught himself. 'Just watch your butt, Lieutenant,' he said quickly and then walked off.
'What does the colonel have to say?' Mendenhall asked, walking up to Sarah.
'Nothing important, I guess.'
Tomlinson was sitting in the now well-lit Empirium Chamber. The engineers had shored up what they could and roped off the worst areas. He had watched the men working without comment until his eyes had settled on something jutting from a large slab of marble. He had been looking at it for well over thirty minutes, mesmerized by the sight of the skeletal arm and hand. There was a mold-covered bronze knife clutched in the blackened fingers, the bones still curled around the hilt. He was content just to look and wonder who the person had been.
'Sir, we are ready. Power is at one hundred percent and we have full continuity in the power lines to the Black Sea and Lake Shiolin.'
Tomlinson, without looking up from the hand and knife, smiled. 'You forgot the Long Island Sound, Professor; is that line also active?'
'Yes, sir. The amplification modules are placed one mile from the Davidson fault line and thirty-three miles from the continental plate.'
'Very good. That should create quite a headache in the financial district, wouldn't you say?'
'It should, yes,' Engvall answered as he turned and slowly walked away.
Tomlinson looked up, but all he saw was the professor's backside as he moved into the shadows of the Empirium Chamber. Then he lowered his head and stared at the arm and hand again. He tilted his head and seemed to be somewhere else.
The Atlantean Wave equipment with the five massive fifty-thousand-watt generators had been placed inside a natural bowl surrounded by solid rock. The hole, it was surmised, must have been a manmade lake fifteen thousand years before. A 180-foot statue of Poseidon had once sat in the middle of the lake, rising a 100 feet into the air. Poseidon, the Greek god of the seas, now lay in a crumpled heap around the sides of the dry lake with only his island pedestal still in the center.
Technicians were working at a hundred monitoring stations inside the bowl and another twenty sat at stations on the hundred-foot tower. They all knew that the power they were about to unleash could not be calculated in normal terms because of the added power of the Key; with its intricate tone grooves and strange properties, such power usage was unknown.
After studying the Key's grooves, Engvall knew that the decibel level they had used before paled in comparison to what the Ancients had accomplished. They had duplicated only 3 percent of what the Atlantean Key had in its etched surface. The power of the diamond was awesome. They had placed the blue diamond in its cradle for only a moment in the initial test; when they had all felt the strength of the device as it started emitting a tone that they could not hear. So far, thirty men and women had reported to the makeshift field hospital where some of the troops from above were being treated, which upset Tomlinson no end, due to the fact he had wanted the cowards, as he called them, kept separate from the scientists, lest they cause doubts about their security.
The way in which the tones would be taken from the magical diamond was far different from the stylus method used in ancient times. Engvall had come up with an ingenious design that would flood the rotating diamond inside its chamber with plasma, which would ensure that there were no impurities on the surface of the grooves. Then the chamber would be flooded with ozone and electrified. The tones would then commence, carried electrically from the diamond chamber through the connecting lines and onto their long journeys to their target cities.
Each section of the diamond had been broken down into smaller sections by the Ancients. Each one was designed for a specific stratum of different tectonic plates; in other words, they had a section of tone grooves for the granite and sandstone base for Long Island Sound and the same for the paneurasian plate, comprised of compacted granite, slate, marble, and sandstone. Depending on the density of these materials, the Ancients had calculated the specific tone-groove-decibel level for that attack area. An electronic cable, the type that was found on every PC in the world only larger by a 100 percent, was running from the diamond's cradle to their coordinated continental cable.
Engvall now knew that the blue diamond was the only substance on earth that would hold up to the tones themselves without cracking.
As Engvall watched from his perch high above the emptied lake where he and his special assistants would monitor the Wave as it radiated outward, he felt just as Tomlinson had said he would feel--like one of the gods of old with the power of the earth at his fingertips.
However, as he looked out at his creation, the thought of the destruction of Atlantis, Krakatoa, and the innocent deaths in China, Russia, and Iraq registered in his mind that he wasn't a god at all, just a man following another man. As he watched Tomlinson slowly leave the Empirium Chamber far below, he could not help but think that the man he was following was slowly becoming unbalanced, as were the many men who had come before him who had dreams of subjugating the world.
The president was taking many different routes in trying to explain to the Russians and Chinese what the plan was for rooting out the Coalition, members who had burrowed deep into the ground. Because of a solid argument from Niles, the president had not included the information regarding the discovery of Atlantis. So far, what they had come to terms with was the fact that the 650,000 inhabitants of Crete would have to be evacuated immediately. NATO and Russian warships and every passenger liner and ferry in the Mediterranean were being utilized to this end.
The situation in Korea had stabilized to the point where the Second Infantry Division with reinforced armor of the Fourth ID had reoccupied the border, and the North Korean army had recalled the surviving elements of the three-pronged attack into the South, though most of them wouldn't be coming home.
American airpower, without the added element of China to cope with, had manhandled and mauled North
