Descendant- A Mira Raiden Adventure: Dark Trinity, #2

By Sean Ellis

Death is not the end…The mission is simple. The Trinity—a mysterious device found in the tomb of a forgotten Atlantean king—has been stolen, and it’s up to Captain Eric Collier and his elite team of Navy SEALs to recover the artifact, or destroy it.But the first rule of battle is that nothing ever goes as planned.
Restored to life by the Trinity itself, Collier is given a new mission: Unite the world’s faithful to hear the revealed will of the Wise Father, the timeless entity who brought humanity out of the Stone Age with the power of the Trinity.

There’s just one problem. The Trinity is damaged, and if it isn’t fixed, the world will descend into chaos. The only person who can repair the Trinity is Mira Raiden, the precognitive CIA officer responsible for nearly destroying the Trinity in the first place.
Pursued by ruthless enemy agents and racing against the Doomsday Clock, Mira must find the forgotten cities of the ancients and restore the Trinity. If she succeeds, it may cost her the power to sense the future. If she fails, it could mean the end of human civilization.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adrenaline Press
• Release date: Nov 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781502234025

Book preview

PART ONE: WHISPER

1.

Above the Mediterranean Sea—four months later

Captain Eric Collier was not a happy man.

He should have been happy; as the commanding officer of Naval Special Warfare Group 2, he had long ago resigned himself to the idea that he would do most of his work from behind a desk, so any opportunity to lead his men from the front was a welcome change. But, as he looked at the faces of his shooters—sixteen men who would willingly, even eagerly, follow him through the gates of Hell—he knew with a terrible certainty that some of them, perhaps all of them, would not be coming back.

That was not a pessimistic assessment.

I won’t bullshit you, Rear Admiral Pentecost had told them at the briefing, only twelve hours earlier. The odds of operational success are extremely low.

That the man in charge of Naval Special Warfare Command was personally conducting the pre-op meeting was an indication of just how serious the mission was, and that played no small part in Collier’s decision to personally lead SEAL Team Eight’s second platoon on the operation.

That, and one last chance for a little glory. It was tough for SEAL operators to make flag rank; leading men into combat—leading from the front—was something that would distinguish him from the good ol’ boy network of ship drivers who were lined up ahead of him, waiting for their stars. Still, that didn’t mean he was eager to rush headlong into danger.

Respectfully, sir, those odds would improve astronomically if you gave us forty-eight hours to rehearse and gather more intel.

Pentecost made little effort to hide his chagrin. "We don’t have forty-eight hours, son. This has to happen now or never.

Whether you succeed or fail— Collier knew that the admiral had chosen those contrasting outcomes carefully as an implicit dare, —approximately fourteen hours from now a B2 bomber will obliterate the target facility in what will probably be interpreted as an act of war. It’s that serious.

The admiral gestured to the projected image of a generic looking industrial campus, situated in an equally austere desert environment. Pentecost must have sensed the unasked question, for he continued, The reason that we are putting you men in harm’s way is this.

The image on the wall changed to what appeared to be a file photograph of a silvery metal circlet with a two hexagonal crystals situated at diametrically opposed points along its orbit.

This is your objective, men. We want it back and that’s why we’re sending you, but if we can’t get it, we’ll destroy it at any cost. Every minute is critical. Every minute that this object is in the possession of our enemy.... Pentecost trailed off, perhaps unable to articulate just how dire such an eventuality would be. Here’s what we know.

The image changed again, this time to reveal what looked like a security camera video feed. The grainy footage showed a non-descript corridor and for a few seconds it appeared that nothing was happening. It took Collier a moment to realize that what he first thought to be ghost images—digital static—were in fact human forms moving down the hall. As if to verify this conclusion, the secure door at the far end was abruptly framed in a puff of smoke as it burst outward.

Three days ago the National Laboratories in Los Alamos, New Mexico were penetrated by a team of intruders utilizing very advanced equipment and weapons. And when I say advanced, I mean that they were using equipment that is still on the drawing board at DARPA. Adaptive camouflage that is virtually invisible to video surveillance, and according to eyewitness accounts, damn difficult to see up close and in person….

The image changed again to show an open area divided into several workstations where a gun battle seemed to be underway. Uniformed guards were exchanging fire with the barely visible assault force while civilians scrambled for cover. One by one, the defenders were taken out.

Some form of lightweight body armor, Pentecost was saying, possibly utilizing magnetic-reactive liquid, and this.

As if on cue, one of the static-shrouded images suddenly erupted in a blinding flash.

"As near as we can tell, the attacking force was equipped with a kind of bio-metric fail-safe device. We can only assume that a round penetrated this man’s armor, killing or incapacitating him. When that happened, an incendiary device was activated which literally vaporized every last trace, ensuring that there would be no physical evidence to lead us back to the source. We found three such burn sites.

The surviving members of the assault force, which we estimate to be about twenty men, secured the objective—designated NLAL 770—and exfiltrated by unknown means—

Unknown? scoffed Petty Officer Second Class Delaney Booker. Fit and tough as nails, Booker looked the part of a SEAL, but his future with the Team was in doubt, owing to his contempt for military discipline. Every unit had at least one guy like Booker—it was a statistical certainty—but while such behavior might be ignored or excused in a training environment, it could easily prove fatal in the field. Yet if Pentecost had been perturbed by the lapse of discipline, he gave no indication.

Once their objective was secure, the men fought their way back outside and vanished. At precisely that moment, the satellite-imaging network at the National Reconnaissance Office was hacked. We have no visual record of their egress and eyewitness accounts are inconsistent. In short, they vanished without a trace.

Obviously not, persisted Booker, or else you wouldn’t be sending us to Libya.

Del! This reproof came from the platoon chief, Warren Ball, but the admiral waved him off.

You’re correct. Besides a lot of 5.45-millimeter brass, generic stuff, our intruders left one important piece of physical evidence. Pentecost clicked through a few more PowerPoint slides to a photograph of blood smears, starkly contrasted against the white epoxy floor. Before his self-destruct was activated, one of the intruders received a non-fatal wound that left a blood trail and more importantly, a DNA signature. He’s one of our own, or at least he was until six months ago.

The next slide showed a tough looking, middle-aged Caucasian man with a shaved head. In one corner, the seal of the Department of the Navy revealed it to be a military ID photo.

Gunnery Sergeant Riley Mathis, USMC Force Recon One. Six months ago, he got his retirement letter and promptly took his skills to the private sector; a security consultancy firm called Lightning Force. It took some work to discover exactly who was signing his paychecks; his employer covered the trail very well. However, as they used to say, Loose lips sink ships," and Gunny Mathis bragged about how lucrative those paychecks were when trying to recruit a fellow marine.

The trail leads to the Atlas Trust. The slide of Mathis blinked out, replaced by a corporate logo, a stylized depiction of the mythic Greek figure bearing the world on his shoulders. A multi-national corporation founded by Marquand Atlas, who died under mysterious circumstances about eight months ago. And when I say ‘mysterious’ I mean that he might not be as dead as we thought. The Atlas Trust has the money and resources to develop the equipment prototypes used in the assault on the National Labs.

Atlas must have facilities all over the planet, offered Collier. Why Libya?

Once we identified Mathis, it wasn’t too hard to isolate other men associated with Lightning Force. Possibly believing that their camouflage was perfect, the men made no effort to hide their subsequent movement. Several of our suspects were on the manifest of an Atlas corporate flight bound for the Atlas research facility situated on the Libyan coast, about three hundred miles from Tripoli.

The screen showed a satellite map of Libya. A red dot straddled the curving line that separated the blue of the Gulf of Sirte and the endless sand seas of the Libyan Desert.

Sitting in his jump seat, hours later, Collier was still trying to wrap his head around the idea that the Unites States was on the brink of war with Libya. In his earliest memories, Libya had always flirted with enemy status by harboring terrorists and occasionally even engaging U.S. fighter planes in combat. For the better part of a decade Libya’s bellicose and erratic leader, Muammar Qadafi, had successfully distanced his nation from the brand of extremism promoted by terror organization like Al Qaeda. But, in typically mercurial fashion Qadafi had welcomed as a hero the Libyan-born terrorist convicted of blowing up Pan-Am flight 103, virtually uprooting overnight the seeds of goodwill that had begun to sprout. Then, in 2011, a civil war—part of the Arab Spring movement that swept across the Middle East and North Africa—overthrew Qadafi’s long standing government and plunged the nation into a level of chaos that was still unresolved.

The Atlas campus predated the collapse of the Libyan government and evidently, it had been business as usual for Atlas, despite the ongoing violence. Even amid a state of war, foreign investments remained a source of income for whatever government was in power. It was unlikely that the government in Tripoli had any connection whatsoever to the raid on the National Laboratory, but that didn’t mean they would simply look the other way when U.S. bombs blasted the multi-million dollar facility to atoms, along with any unlucky and completely innocent Libyan employees. Whether they would simply look the other way, or use the act of aggression to launch a new campaign of anti-American sentiment that might conceivably lead to an all-out Arab-American war was something for the politicians to worry about. Collier had more immediate concerns.

Still pondering the subject of the briefing, Collier stood and headed forward to relieve himself one last time before the jump. Not surprisingly, there was a line.

The entire platoon was nervous about this op. Although they trained every day for missions like this, constantly adjusting for different scenarios, they would be going into the Atlas compound with nothing but exterior satellite imagery and guesswork. If the video footage from Los Alamos and scant DNA evidence were to be believed, they would be going up against men with training comparable to their own, who were armed and outfitted with the very best equipment in existence, not to mention a home court advantage.

He tried to avoid making eye contact with the men for fear that his anxiety might demoralize them further, but Ball and one of the platoon officers cornered him.

We’ve got this, Ric, stated Lieutenant Jersey Robinson a young ring-knocker who had never been deployed to combat.

Collier was more assured by Ball’s terse nod, but then a brusque voice from behind them snarled, What I don’t get is why no one will talk about the real reason for all this.

The platoon chief’s determined grimace turned into a sneer as he whirled on Booker, the troublemaker. We’re doing it because we’ve been ordered to, sailor.

Booker wasn’t cowed. Do you know what that thing we’re going after really is? NLAL 770? It’s not some new piece of technology or a weapon of mass destruction; it’s from Atlantis. It’s called the Trinity.

Collier kept a neutral expression, but behind his mask of ambivalence he began to seethe. He kicked himself for not recognizing the artifact during the briefing.

Several months earlier, a young woman—Collier couldn’t remember her name now, only that she was a knock-out—had walked out of the Darien Gap claiming to have discovered physical evidence of the existence of Atlantis. Subsequent exploration had recovered artifacts from a civilization older than anything ever found in the Americas. Despite skepticism from mainstream archaeologists, the idea that the ruins were some kind of refuge city, where survivors of Atlantis’ destruction had made their last stand, caught on with the public and the relics put on display at a New York museum.

Collier still remembered the sense of shock that had followed a violent attack linked to some kind of neo-Nazi group. A gang of thugs had crashed the gala opening of the exhibition, but, as was the way of the world, other bad news soon came along to push that event out of the headlines. The exhibit had eventually reopened, along with its centerpiece, a diadem of silver metal with a white crystal said to have been worn by the last king of Atlantis. For some reason Collier could not fathom, it had earned the nickname the Trinity. As far as he knew, it was still on display in New York. Which meant NLAL 770 was either a second artifact exactly like the first, or the one on display in New York was a reproduction.

Either way, Booker was absolutely right. They were about to risk their lives, and risk starting a war, to recover a trinket.

Ball moved quickly to quash any hint of dissension in the ranks. I don’t give a damn if we’re going after Qadafi’s Barbie doll collection, you’re a goddamn Navy SEAL; you volunteered for this. So shut up and get your game face on.

That’s not it at all, Chief. A weird smile crossed Booker’s lips. Don’t you see? Look what Atlas was willing to risk in order to steal this thing, and what we’re about to do to either get it back or make sure he can’t ever use it. This thing is more important than we can imagine.

Important? How so?

Booker shrugged. I have no idea, but the possibilities scare the hell out me. There are stories about Atlantis; stories about technologies more advanced than our own. Stories about…. He trailed off, perhaps realizing how preposterous further speculation would sound, and yet knowing deep down that his wildest imaginings probably fell short of the truth about the strange artifact. I’ve got a feeling if we don’t get this thing back or destroy it, it’s going to be a very bad time on planet Earth.

There was no more discussion about their objective, and hardly any talk about the mission itself. The SEALs went through the quiet ritual of checking and rechecking their gear; making sure that grenades and spare magazines were secure but easily accessible; their weapons functional and lightly lubricated; their internal and external comms synced and encrypted; the oxygen masks they would wear during the High-Altitude/High-Opening (HAHO) parachute jump operational. They wore cold-weather jumpsuits over USMC digital desert camouflage uniforms without any patches, flags or nametapes. Each man donned a ballistic combat helmet with a PVS-7 monocular night-vision device secured with easily removable nylon web straps, which distributed the not-inconsiderable weight of the device more evenly than the standard issue mounting plate. They chose to carry Colt M-4 carbines with armor-piercing ammunition, rather than their preferred suppressed H&K MP5s. The latter were virtually silent and much easier to handle when clearing buildings, but probably wouldn’t do much more than tickle an enemy wearing magnetic-reactive liquid body armor. For their own part, they wore state of the art Dragon Skin scale body armor, the best body armor available, purchased off the books by the Team, because Pentagon bean counters refused to admit that it was a superior product. Altogether, armor, weapons and equipment weighed close to eighty pounds—there was a reason that the SEALs placed an extraordinary value on physical fitness.

Their best intelligence, which was admittedly poor, placed the objective in one of three large research buildings at the center of the compound. Satellites had followed the convoy of vehicles that met the Atlas corporate jet at the nearby airstrip directly to that building, but the eyes in the sky could not tell them where in the five-story structure the objective would be located. That would require a room-by-room search.

Second squad, under Robinson’s command, would strike first, hitting the compound’s electrical plant and shutting down main power. First squad, led by Collier himself, would hit the ground—or rather, if all went as planned, the roof of the target building—moments later and begin their sweep. Unlike the assault team that had hit Los Alamos, they would not have to rely on their own devices to get out. They would have to find a secure LZ for a pair of Seahawk helicopters, which were probably just now taking off from the deck of the USS Ramage, parked somewhere out in the Med.

Collier would still have preferred another forty-eight hours to rehearse, get more intel and maybe even put some observers on the ground near the Atlas campus, but all in all it was a decent plan. Nevertheless, the butterflies raging in his stomach right now were unlike anything he’d ever felt preparing for a mission, and Booker’s pronouncements, as crazy as they were, only deepened his sense of dread.

They really could not afford to fail.

When the signal finally came, the men donned their chutes and oxygen masks, and trundled to the rear of the jet. There was a whoosh as the bay depressurized and the rear cargo door dropped to reveal the inky blackness of the Mediterranean night. Second squad immediately began moving forward, heaving themselves out into the thin air. When the last man was out, Collier, at the front of first squad, took his turn and leapt into the frigid sky.

2.

For Marquand Atlas, the abrupt blackout was merely an annoyance. Even had he known that U.S. Navy SEALs were presently invading his North African compound, he would have reckoned it of secondary concern to the revelation he had just made.

He had been awake for nearly thirty hours now, running tests and analyzing results, and the pace and intensity of his work had only increased with the arrival of the Trinity relic. Now that he had the Atlantean device in his possession, the final piece of the puzzle had fallen into place, exposing completely the lie that was his entire existence. When he had viewed the two computer-enhanced images from the STEM electron microscope side-by-side, he had flown into a rage and retreated to his private office to examine the data more closely. His mood had not changed appreciably.

The images were virtually identical, showing what looked like the landscape of an alien planet or perhaps something sprung from the imagination of M.C. Escher—a repetitive pattern of silvery rings, each sporting tiny points of gleaming white. The colors were a mere approximation of what the microscope had imaged; electron microscopes did not literally see the objective because the level of magnification was well beyond the wavelength of visible light. Instead, it returned a grayscale image, which the computer then translated into approximate colors. Colors did not concern Atlas, but the shapes were enormously important.

In the months since his resurrection, the broken pieces of his memory had returned, much the same way that his body had completely reconstituted itself. His memories were back in vivid detail; he remembered his uprising against Atl’an and the other members of the triumvirate, an event that had occurred more than three thousand years before the earliest recorded human history, as perfectly as he remembered meeting Mira Raiden in a Las Vegas casino. Yet, the intervening millennia were a bit hazy.

His earliest memories of the modern era were of emerging from a cavern in the Atlas mountain range of North Africa, only a short distance from his present location. He had staggered out into the desert and eventually found his way to Tripoli where he learned that a new civilization had emerged that was almost the equal of the one he had been instrumental in destroying, and that this new civilization was also on the brink of self-immolation. A powerful man had seized on a corruption of ancient knowledge—which Atlas would learn had become the stuff of myth, legend and religion—and was on the verge of conquering half the known world. It took him several more months to make his way to civilization, where he would learn that the year was 1944 AD, according to the way time was now reckoned, and Atlantis and everything he remembered had vanished into the mists of time.

He had made a furtive search for the Trinity, hoping to find the relic and use it to establish the global empire that Atl’an had denied him, but the divided pieces of the talisman were, like the cities where they had once been kept, completely gone. He sensed that they had only recently been removed, but the trail was cold. Still, he possessed unparalleled knowledge, and it did not take long for him to carve out a place of great wealth and power among the primitives, even as he surreptitiously kept one ear to the ground, certain that one day the Trinity would resurface. Nearly seventy years later, literally fat and happy, and unnaturally young, his diligence paid off. His agents succeeded in locating Mira Raiden, a young woman who did not realize just how unique her psychic attributes were in the human species. With her help, he located Atl’an’s final resting place and for just a moment, regained control of the Trinity—a piece of it at least—only to lose it once more.

During the months since his recovery from what would otherwise have been a fatal bullet wound, he had puzzled over the fact that his first death seemed to have lasted thousands of years, while his most recent period of recovery had begun almost right away. It was but one of the mysteries he hoped would be resolved with the recovery of the Trinity, or rather two-thirds of it, and indeed, now that it was at last in his possession, he had all the answers.

The two electron microscope images were virtually the same. One was a surface scan of the Trinity itself, revealing that it was composed of what modern technology would call nanobots, incredibly small machines, capable of manipulating matter at the molecular level, and each nanobot was a perfect replica of the Trinity in its original, joined configuration.

Even at the pinnacle of their knowledge, the ancients would not have been able to fathom such a thing. Perhaps because the power to reshape their world had been given freely to them, they had never made a concerted effort to understand its mysteries. The simple truth was that the Trinity was not a thing of magic, but of science—a science so advanced as to be indistinguishable from sorcery. All of its manifestations were accomplished either directly by the action of those tiny nanobots or by their ability to generate a broad spectrum of radiation ranging from lethally intense light to the electrical impulses found in the human brain and body. In this respect at least, Atlas realized, the modern world was much more advanced than the ancient civilization of his own origin—they had learned the power of doubt.

He now sought the answer to a question the ancients had never thought to ask: Why? Why had the figure known as the Wise Father given them the Trinity? It was unquestionably the product of an advanced civilization, a civilization of which even the ancients had no knowledge. Why would a representative of such a culture put this powerful tool in the hands of primitives who were incapable of comprehending how it worked and what it could do?

These were the questions that Marquand Atlas was wrestling with in his private office when the lights abruptly went out. Out of habit, he groped for the intercom on his desk, but the power outage had cut off that source of communication. The emergency battery-powered lights came on almost immediately, prompting him to leave his desk and venture into the foyer where his assistant Wallace Vaught was trying to raise the head of security on a Motorola radio.

What’s going on?

I’m not certain, Mr. Atlas. It appears that power to the entire compound has been cut.

I didn’t think that was possible.

Vaught shook his head. It shouldn’t be. Beck thinks this might be an incursion.

Incursion? Atlas frowned in thought, even as he realized the truth of what the other man was saying. That’s exactly what it is, Wallace. It’s time for us to go.

Vaught blinked at him, but did not question the order. Instead, he keyed the microphone. Beck, Mr. Atlas has given the order to evacuate. Secure the artifact and meet us—

No, barked Atlas. Leave it. We’ll destroy it along with everything else. Make sure he sends someone to deal with Miss Raiden. Nothing fancy; just kill her. Leave no trace.

A question hovered on Vaught’s lips, but once more he kept his opinions to himself as he relayed the order. Set the charges and meet us at the plane.

Atlas nodded, but was far from satisfied. Destroying the Trinity would not be nearly as easy as it sounded, and there was no reason to believe that doing so would make a bit of difference.

The Trinity was a tool, true, but for what purpose had it been forged? You didn’t give children matches or chainsaws to play with unless you secretly wanted them to hurt themselves. Whatever the Wise Father’s purpose in giving the Trinity to the ancients had been, it would doubtless take more to thwart than merely its physical destruction.

Yet, these revelations themselves were not as worrisome to him as the matter of the hole in his memory, not the long gap between the fall of Atlantis and his rebirth in the 1940s, but rather the missing years of his early life. He had no memory of his parents, childhood friends or why, exactly, he had aspired to conquer the ancient world. He had knowledge of that world’s origins, but none regarding his own.

This was especially troubling to Atlas because of the fact that the STEM scan of the Trinity had been virtually identical to the second scan, which was a sample of his own blood.

3.

Mira awoke with a start, convinced that something was about to happen. She was no stranger to such sensations. All her life she had possessed uncanny intuition—some had called it psychic precognition—and while her special ability, which was as innate as her other five senses, almost never provided a detailed image of what was about to happen, she did not for a second distrust it. That the feeling should be so intense, after months of imprisonment in which the only intuitive episodes she experienced were precursory to the relentless assaults by her tormentors, made her all the more alert.

Her cell was dark, but there was enough ambient light through the small window for her make out every corner of the tiny room. She swept aside her threadbare blanket and sprang for the door, pressing her ear to the solid, smooth metal. The corridor beyond was as still as a crypt, but she stayed there at the door, certain that whatever she had sensed was imminent.

The lights in the corridor abruptly winked out. At that same instant, something inside the electronic door latch mechanism clicked. Instinctively, Mira grasped the door handle and pulled, even as the emergency lights outside her cell flashed on. A bolt sprang out of the lock body, but missed the strike by a fraction of second. Between the loss of main power and the activation of back-up systems there had not been time enough to blink, but she had been ready, primed by a premonition of salvation, and now she was free. How long that state of affairs would last, she could not say, but for the first time in weeks, perhaps even months, she was the master of her own destiny and she did not intend to let this opportunity slip away. Sensing no immediate danger, she pulled the door open and embraced her freedom.

She had no idea where she was. Though she had glimpsed this corridor several times, it was always on the edge of a drug-induced fugue. Atlas’ interrogators always made sure to dope her up before entering the room in order to move her to the medical bay for questioning. Initially, they introduced sedatives into her food, but she had sensed their presence immediately. From that point forward, they had simply filled the room with anaesthetizing gas—just enough to render her quiescent before coming in and securing her to a stretcher with leather restraints.

In her previous life, working for the Agency, Mira had been thoroughly trained in resisting the crudest forms of coercion. She discovered early on that her intuition gave her an additional advantage against her captors, but Marquand Atlas was far too sophisticated to attempt simply browbeating her into submission. He had used a whole pharmacy worth of drugs on her, and she could not say with certainty what she had revealed or in what ways she might have aided him. She did remember enough however to glean the purpose of the ongoing interrogation: Atlas was after the Trinity—or rather the two pieces of it that she had managed to save from the doomed subterranean realm known in legend as Agartha. She had left the relic with her traveling companion, a New York City detective who had, in a moment of romantic gallantry, decided to tag along with her in search of the secret technology of an ancient civilization, and from that moment forward, she had no certain knowledge of its fate. Atlas either believed otherwise, or had found a way to tap into her psychic abilities while she was in a drug-induced hypnotic trance. Either way, her interrogations, at least those few that she actually remembered, always focused on the whereabouts of the Trinity. It was the only thing her nemesis seemed to care about.

It had been several days, at least by her best ability to reckon the passage of time, since gas fumes had filled her cell. She didn’t have to be psychic to realize that Atlas had succeeded in capturing his prize. However, she was psychic—after a fashion—and knew for a certainty that not only did Atlas now possess the Trinity, but it was located in the same building where she was being held captive.

She had a pretty good idea how the billionaire had survived what should have been a lethal bullet in the brain. Among its other