The Sphinx by Robert Doherty

Author:Robert Doherty [Doherty, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Area 51 (Nev.), High Tech, Action & Adventure, Political, General, Science Fiction, Ark of the Covenant, Fiction, Espionage
ISBN: 9780440234944
Publisher: Dell
Published: 2000-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

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meters of ship out of water and on the beach. Below the waterline, over 150 meters of the ship had been crushed, gouging out a twenty-meter-deep trench in the rock below leading up to the shore. The forward edge of the flight deck had crumpled from the destruction of the ship below.

With the last screech of tearing metal bouncing off the rim of Rano Kau, silence once again came to the island.

"Jesus!" The Springfield's sonarman ripped off his headset and threw it down on the console. "The carrier's hitting the island!" Standing behind him, Captain Forster could hear the terrible sound of the Washington hitting Easter Island, relayed by the one thousand hydrophones arrayed in the sonar sphere in the front end of his submarine, echoing out the phones.

The sound grew louder to the point where every member of the crew could plainly hear it reverberating through the hull. Then silence. The Springfield rested on the bottom, four hundred meters below the surface and just outside the shield. Two foo fighters hung in the water nearby, little golden orbs, three feet across, with the power to destroy the heavily armed submarine.

Even as he tried to imagine what could have happened to the Washington, Forster was looking at the displays on the screens in front of him. Able to use only their passive systems, he was working half blind. They had followed the sound of the carrier heading toward the island and now could pick up the other ships in the task force moving about.

"What's that?" Forster pointed at one screen. It "painted" a map of the seafloor around them, leading up to the slightly curved line that indicated the shield sur-

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rounding Easter Island less than a mile away. There was now a small anomaly along a curved line, showing how the sound had partially reflected off the alien shield.

"I don't know, sir," the sonarman answered. "It wasn't there before, but the shield went off for about thirty seconds as the carrier went through, then back on."

"Overlay the bottom chart," Forster added.

The computer screen cleared for a second, then the image was superimposed on a hydrographic chart of the sea bottom. A line between Forster's eyes narrowed as he located the anomaly. It was where a very narrow and steep cut bisected the ocean bottom, where the Washington had dug a channel out of the rock. The shield had not snapped back into place there because the gap had not existed before. "I do believe we might have found a hole in the shield around the island."

AREA 51

D-31 Hours, 40 Minutes

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