Heirthall, though barely conscious, heard the fear in his first officer's voice. His face was now ashen gray, the blood long since absent from skin and veins. He managed to raise his head but his vision was cloudy at best.

"The children--Captain, the barbarian has your wife and children on deck!"

Heirthall came fully awake and fell to his knees as he let go of the wheel. He tried to stand and was thankful when Meriwether once again lifted him to his feet. He left him, ran to the wheel, and tried to turn the giant ship. The rudder was nonresponsive as it was dragging in the thick mud of the bottom. He used all of his considerable strength to turn her, but the resistance was just too great. The mines Stanton had ordered placed against Leviathan's hull, coupled with the weight of her ballast, were dragging the stern into the mud.

"She's not responding, Captain," Meriwether cried out.

Heirthall leaned heavily against the thick crystal of the viewing window. His eyes blank and his body dying, he still needed no binoculars to see his family lined up on the riverboat's stern.

"Elizabeth," he cried out weakly as his body slumped and blood seeped heavily from his mouth.

"Captain!" Meriwether cried out as Heirthall collapsed.

"What has thy vengeance wrought?" Heirthall said, the words coming out as a whisper.

Stanton ran to the railing and jumped over the side. His large body hit the cold water unnoticed by the riverboat's crew and complement of marines. The French news correspondent stood his ground as the great submarine rushed toward him. He suddenly tried to run and reach the woman and her children, but he slipped on the wet deck and went down hard just as the Mary Lincolnstarted a turn. The momentum of the large riverboat rolled the young Jules Verne into the river. Once the cold water closed over him, the Frenchman heard the scream of Leviathan's three propellers as they pushed the huge mass of iron boat through the water. He kicked as hard as he could to fight his way toward the rocky shoreline of the Penobscot, crying as he did at the ruthless fate awaiting the woman and her children.

Leviathan'striple prow sliced the waters of the Penobscot cleanly, and her tower rose majestically over the doomed riverboat. It seemed as if Heirthall had aimed the killing apparatus directly at his wife and children, cleanly slicing into the Mary Lincoln'sstern. The tower of Leviathanfollowed the killing cut of the arched keel breaker. If any were alive inside the strange craft to see, they would have beheld a bizarre sight, as the first mate was covering his captain with his own body.

Leviathanwas traveling in excess of fifty-eight knots when she made contact with the wood, iron, and brass riverboat. She sliced through her from stern to bow in less than three full seconds, with the impact only slowing her by six knots.

The Mary Lincolnsimply folded over in two separate sections and sank as if she had never been, while Leviathancontinued into the broad mouth of the Penobscot and the deeper waters of the ocean beyond.

Meriwether assisted Heirthall to his ship's wheel. The great submarine was dying. Water cascaded into the tower from the cracks in the nearly indestructible crystal of the viewing ports. He could hear the men below fight the flooding caused when her steel rivets popped upon impact with the steel and iron of the riverboat's power plant.

"I have killed that which I loved most, I--"

"It was not you, Captain, 'twas warmongers; it was the likes of Stanton. They are responsible for this."

Heirthall reached up and grabbed the wheel. She turned easily now that her rudder was clear of the river bottom. She had made it back to the sea--made it back to her home.

"Take her ... to the continental ... shelf, Mr. Meriwether; she'll die in deep waters," he ordered as his chin sank lower until it rested against the wheel's stanchion.

The lights flickered and then went out as Leviathandove deep for the last time in her short life. As the red battery-driven emergency lights came on, Octavian Heirthall died.

As the crushing depths started to take a lover's hold on Leviathan, Meriwether and the crew were under no grand illusions about their fate.

Meriwether closed his eyes as the thick, meticulously machined crystal window cracked, the crack streaking across the surface like an invisible hand. Then the first inward bulge of the crushing effect popped loudly outside in the companionway.

"Down to the sea with heavy heart, we follow our captain. We are going home."

PART ONE

DOWN TO THE SEA

IN SHIPS

The ship hangs hovering on the verge of death, / Hell

yawns, rocks rise, and breakers roar beneath!

-- William Falconer, "The Shipwreck"

1

EVENT GROUP COMPLEX,

NELLIS AIR FORCE BASE, NEVADA

PRESENT DAY

The Event Group Center was as quiet as anyone stationed there had ever heard it. For the men and women of Department 5656, a dark and secret entity of the National Archives, the day was darker than even their mission for the United States government. They were saying good-bye to forty-six of their own people. One man in particular--Colonel Jack Collins, United States Army.

The assembled military, scientific, research, academic, and philosophical staffs were seated in the overcrowded main cafeteria of the complex, because the small chapel deep on level eight would have been too small for this massive turnout.

As the Dire Straits' haunting tune "Brothers in Arms" played, the mood was somber. Director Niles Compton had made the decision, and the new head of security agreed, that no eulogy for those lost would be given; the memorial would be a silent tribute to men and women lost in the Atlantis operation six weeks before.

The Event Group was the most secret section of the federal government outside of the National Security Agency. Their task was to uncover historical truths from the past, changes in the fabric of history that led to world-altering events. This helped identify them or their parallel in today's world, and advise the president of the consequences, good or bad, so he could make the decision whether to act or not act on a fluid situation that resembled an event from the past.

The agency was a ghostly rumor to almost everyone in government service. President of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt built the permanent Event Group Complex in 1943 under the strictest of secrecy. It served as a research and storage facility that protected the greatest secrets of the world's past. The concept was a child of Abraham Lincoln, thought of in the waning days of the Civil War, and finally brought into being as an official agency by Woodrow Wilson. The group's chartered mission was to uncover the civilization altering events that could change the course of history.

The Atlantis incident was the reason they were gathered today, to pay their respects to those lost. The scrolls of that once-mythical civilization, which described a weapon of immense power that could shatter cities by the manipulation of the earth's plate tectonics, were discovered thousands of years later by an unscrupulous society that attempted a financial takeover of the world. This group was responsible for the deaths of millions, including the men and women remembered today.