He pointed a claw at the generator. “Load another warhead. We have some other business to take care of before we proceed with your master’s list.”
Chapter Twenty-six
Lieutenant Jackson and Dr. Hammond were alone in the control chamber— other than the bodies in the isolation tubes. Hammond was having Sybyl run through various projections about a possible connection to the lost psyches— if they still existed on the virtual plane. So far they had come up with nothing. She was also continuing the search for Raisor.
Jackson was monitoring communications between Sybyl and Sergeant Major Dalton while keeping an eye on the small television set to the side of the master control panel. CNN was broadcasting the first reports of the nuclear explosion outside of Moscow. Confusion seemed to be the common denominator in all the reports, with the source of the bomb being the most speculated-upon aspect.
“That’s strange,” Dr. Hammond suddenly said.
“What is?” Jackson asked.
“I’m picking up something through Sybyl. Something on the virtual— ” She paused, staring at her readouts.
A loud screech ripped through the room, echoing off the walls, the sound piling on top of itself. Red warning lights flashed, pulsing, adding to the confusion. Jackson looked up in shock as in the center of the room, above the isolation tanks, a small black sphere appeared, the surface pulsating, glistening, straining to expand.
Hammond’s panicked voice punched through the noise.
“The psychic wall has been breached. I’m reverting all power to interior containment.”
“Oh my God!” Jackson whispered as she checked the infrared scanner. It showed a nuclear bomb hanging in the center of the room in the virtual plane. She looked up. A square inch of the top tip of the bomb appeared in the real plane. Then another inch.
Chapter Twenty-seven
“Sybyl’s holding it, but I don’t know how long she can keep it contained.” Lieutenant Jackson’s voice was on the edge of hysteria, but her training and discipline were holding. Dalton had heard radio calls like this before— from an A-Camp being overrun in Vietnam; from the trapped Delta Force soldiers in Mogadishu; from pilots shot down in the Gulf War calling for rescue as Iraqis closed in.
“But Sybyl is holding, right?”
“If she wasn’t, we wouldn’t be talking. The bomb must be on some sort of timer that is on hold until it clears into real space.”
“Can you clear out of there?” Dalton asked.
Jackson gave a wild laugh. “To go out we’d have to shut down the psychic wall. If Sybyl turns off the wall, we’d be destroyed instantly. We’re caught between two walls. The bomb is inside the outer wall, but Sybyl used the backup containment program to stop it before it came into the real plane inside. The psychic wall and the containment program work off the same system. Turn one off you turn the other off.”
Dalton looked at Major Orrick “How long?” he mouthed.
Orrick flicked his ten fingers at Dalton. Ten minutes.
“How long can the wall hold?” Dalton asked.
“Dr. Hammond is putting every bit of power she can into the computer. But we have no idea. Every time Sybyl ups the containment, it seems like the other side ups too. Jesus, Sergeant Major, the damn nuke is just hanging there above our heads, slowly coming into reality. It’s about a fifth in now. It comes all the way in, we’re done for. I don’t want to put any extra pressure on you or anything, Sergeant Major, but could you hurry the hell up!”
* * *
Feteror had put the bomb into Bright Gate without much trouble. The outer virtual wall had been relatively easy to pierce. But that damn computer had reacted with startling speed. The bomb had been caught in a virtual containment field.
He’d left the bomb there, operating off the program from the phased-displacement generator. It was going into the real world, much slower than Feteror would have liked, but it would get there eventually.
* * *
“Two minutes out,” Colonel Searl announced over the intercom. “Slowing to recon speed.”
“Extending surveillance pod,” Major Orrick said. He looked up at Dalton. “We have to slow down or else we’d rip the surveillance pod right off. We’re down to about two thousand miles an hour right now.” He leaned forward and placed his eyes into a set of eyepieces that had cycled up from the console. “We’ll get a good shot across the spectrum. Someone’s farting down there, we’ll pick it up.”
Dalton waited. He looked down, noted that his left foot was tapping impatiently against the wall of the recon room and forced it to stop.
“Missile launch.” Orrick mentioned it as if he were saying the sun had come up in the morning.
“We’re tracking red,” Colonel Searl acknowledged.
Orrick hit a button. “Pod in. Clear to boogie.” He smiled at Dalton as they were both slammed back in the seat. “We’re faster than any missile made.”
“Tracking green,” Searl announced. “We’re all clear. Entering approach to destination airfield.” He laughed. “Damn Russkies are gonna be surprised to see this baby land.”
Dalton clicked on the SATCOM link. “Jackson?”
There was no reply.
‘Jackson, I don’t want to take anything from what you’re doing, but if you can answer me, let me know.”
“I can talk,” Jackson said.
“How’s the wall holding?” Dalton asked.
“It’s a losing battle. The bomb is sliding from virtual to real at the rate of three percent per minute. At this rate, it will completely be in the real plane in twenty-two more minutes.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
“Sergeant Major.” Colonel Mishenka snapped a salute, which Dalton automatically returned.
“Colonel Mishenka.”
Mishenka unrolled a blueprint and put it on the hood of the four-by-four he’d driven out to the SR-75’s taxi point. “This is Special Department Number Eight’s Far-Field Experimental Unit.” His finger touched several points. “Surface-to-air missiles that fire automatically if the airspace is encroached upon.”
“We already had one of those fired at us as we came in.” Dalton put the imagery the SR-75 had taken next to the blueprint. He checked his watch: twenty minutes.
Mishenka looked over the photos, then back at his blueprint. “Automatic guns cover the entire perimeter using heat sensors. Anything registering over a certain size is fired on. I understand many a deer has lost its life there. The perimeter is also mined; the mines are pressure activated. The only map of the minefield is kept in the facility, so we are going to have to breach it.
“Everything is controlled by the master computer inside SD8. And General Rurik even if we could get through to him, can’t turn it off as long as Feteror— Chyort— is out of his cage.”
“So we have to get in.”
Mishenka pointed across the runway. Two heavy cargo planes waited. They were surrounded by a large number of men in camouflage fatigues preparing weapons and gear. “The Twenty-third Spetsnatz company is ready. We’re only a couple of minutes from SD8 by air.” He waved and several officers came over and gathered around the hood. Dalton noted in them the same hard, competent look he had seen in Special Operations soldiers the world over.
“How do we get in?” Dalton asked.
Mishenka frowned. “There is a bigger problem than the automatic defenses.”
“What is that?” Every nerve of Dalton’s body was screaming for them to load the planes and get going, but he knew a couple of minutes spent planning was more important than rushing in with guns blazing.
“Just before I left Moscow, I was fully briefed on SD8’s base. Two things struck me— one good, one not so good. The not so good thing is that there is a wall— a psychic wall— completely surrounding the facility. I saw a videotape of a prisoner who was forced to walk into the wall.” Mishenka tapped a finger against his skull. “His brain was destroyed.”
Dalton nodded. “Bright Gate, where I came f
rom, has a similar wall around it.”
“Do you know of a way to get through it?”
“I will check with my base once we’re airborne. What was the good thing?”
“General Rurik did not trust Feteror. Because of that, the general wears a wristband that monitors his own heartbeat. If his heartbeat ceases for ten seconds, the wristband shuts down the central computer, Zivon, which shuts down Feteror, trapping him inside the cyborg machine that keeps him alive.”
“So we get to General Rurik— ” Dalton began.
“And stop his heartbeat— which means kill him— we stop Feteror,” Mishenka finished.
* * *
Lieutenant Jackson remained in the chamber where the bomb hung over the isolation tanks. It had materialized over 40 percent. As she watched, another small piece flickered into reality.
“Dr. Hammond?” Dalton’s voice cut through the air.
“Yes?” Hammond answered.
“How do I get through a psychic wall?”
Hammond gave a bitter laugh. “You don’t. Not if you want to keep your brain from becoming mush.”
“I’ve got to get through the wall here or we can’t stop this thing.”
Jackson watched the bomb produce another square, but listened as Hammond thought out loud to Dalton. “The wall is an electromagnetic projection on the psychic plane. Think of it as a field of deadly electricity. You touch it, you’re zapped.”
Jackson could hear the sound of turboprop engines in the background coming from Dalton’s end.
“How do I get through it, Doctor?” Dalton’s voice was insistent. “Wear rubber-soled shoes? Wrap tinfoil around my head? Think! There’s got to be a way.”
“There’s so much we don’t know!” Hammond protested. “We aren’t even really sure if our wall works or not!”
“Well, the Russian one does, that’s for damn sure,” Dalton said.
‘Jesus Christ!” Jackson exploded, pushing Hammond aside and typing into the keyboard. The answer was back in a second.
“Sybyl says there aren’t any options,” Jackson relayed.
“Not good enough,” Dalton’s voice echoed out of the speaker. “There’s got to be a way.”
“Here.” Hammond regained the keyboard and typed. She stared at the results. “I’ve had Sybyl run a multitude of possibilities and probabilities. Your best chance of success is that you might be able to short it out for a very brief period of time.”
“How do I do that?” Dalton asked.
Hammond closed her eyes and thought for a few seconds. “You would have to put a conductor in the field. It would draw power for an instant before the field snapped back to normal operating parameters. For the short period while the field focused on that conductor, most likely less than a second, you might be able to get through close by.”
“What would be a conductor?”
“There is only one conductor that works for a psychic field,” Hammond said. “The human brain.”
* * *
Oma’s cell phone rang for the third time in five minutes. Reluctantly she opened it.
“Yes?”
“I said every warhead had to be accounted for,” the NATO representative hissed at her.
“Every warhead is accounted for,” Oma said. “You know for certain where one is— or was— and I can tell you where the other nineteen are.”
“Don’t be a fool. Detonating one doesn’t count.”
“It took out GRU headquarters, you should be grateful.”
“Grateful? Grateful? Every country that has nuclear weapons is in DEFCON Four alert status. There’s a lot of itchy fingers out there and you’ve put them over the button.”
“Do you want the location of the rest of the warheads or not?” Oma pressed. “The one that just went off proves we have the warheads and we have the means and the will to use them.”
“Give me the location.”
“If I give it to you, you must promise that you will not pursue me.”
The man laughed. “Fine. We won’t. But I’m sure your countrymen will be after you until the day you die.”
“Perhaps,” Oma said. “Here are the coordinates of the remaining weapons and the phased-displacement generator.”
“What will happen to the bomb here if Sergeant Major Dalton does succeed?” Jackson asked Hammond.
“I do not know,” Hammond answered.
“Best guess,” Jackson pressed.
“It will explode right where it is, some of it into the real plane at approximately the percentage it is in your world when it detonates.”
Jackson looked at the half of a bomb that hung in the air. “So we’re dead no matter who wins.”
There was no reply from Hammond, nor had she expected one.
Jackson nodded to herself. “All right then. There’s only one thing to do.” She tapped Dr. Hammond on the shoulder. “Get my isolation tank ready. I’m going over.”
“What are you going to do?” Hammond asked.
Jackson pointed at the bomb. “The only thing I can do. Defuse that thing.”
* * *
Colonel Mishenka leaned close to Dalton in order to be able to hear inside the noisy cargo bay of the AN-24 transport. Dalton relayed Hammond’s course of action.
“Short-circuit the field with a brain?” Mishenka asked.
Dalton nodded.
Mishenka laughed. “That is great. Simply great. You Americans have such a great sense of humor.”
“It’s not— ” Dalton began, but he paused as Mishenka put a hand on his arm.
“I know it is not a joke, but it is the Russian way to laugh when things are the worst. It is how we have survived much misery. Besides, before we worry about the psychic wall, first we have to get to it. We will deal with the psychic wall if we live long enough to get there.”
“What is your plan?” Dalton shouted. The Spetsnatz men were rigging parachutes on each other as the plane banked.
Mishenka pointed at the map. “We will parachute in the only place we can— here in this open field. Then work our way up the hill and then in. Not much of a plan, but it is the best I can do with such little notice.”
He stood and grabbed a parachute off the web cargo seat and held it out to Dalton. The sergeant major took it and slipped it over his shoulders. There were AK-74 folding-stock automatic weapons, and Mishenka indicated for him to take one, along with ammunition, grenades, a demolitions pack, and other weaponry.
Dalton checked his watch. Sixteen minutes.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Feteror formed himself in the real plane inside the hangar. He looked about. Leksi and his men waited by the generator with eighteen plastic cases holding nuclear weapons lined up. Vasilev was at the computer console. Barsk was gone.
That last fact started to truly register on Feteror. Why would Oma’s grandson have left? He knew the answer as soon as he considered it: She was double-crossing him. He laughed, the sound startling everyone in the hangar. She was double-crossing everyone.
But it did not matter. His revenge had begun. He only needed to complete it.
He was adapting, changing. The link back to Zivon was as strong as ever, and the computer was helping deal with this unusual situation with regard to the phased-displacement generator and the bombs. What else could he accomplish? Feteror wondered. Might he be able to actually direct more bombs while the one still was out there, not detonated? He saw no reason why not.
“Load the generator,” Feteror ordered.
* * *
The back ramp of the Antonov AN-24 was down, the wind swirling in the back, adding to the roar of the engines.
“One minute!” Colonel Mishenka yelled to Dalton and the Spetsnatz men lined up behind him. The Colonel knelt down, grabbing the hydraulic arm that lowered the ramp on his side.
Dalton went to the other side and assumed a similar position. He looked forward, blinking in the 130-knot wind that blew in his face.
The peak that held SD8 base
was directly ahead. As he watched, there was a flash and a line of smoke streaked up into the sky.
“Missile launch!” one of the crewmen yelled. The man was seated on the center edge of the back ramp, a monkey harness around his body hooked to a floor bolt keeping him attached to the plane. He pointed a flare gun out the back and fired in the direction of the oncoming missile.
He continued firing as quickly as he could reload. It wasn’t high-tech, but it worked. At least for the first two missiles launched at the lead plane as the infrared seekers in their nose went after the hot flares.
“Stand by!” Mishenka yelled.
Dalton stood and shuffled closer to the edge of the platform.
“Go!” Mishenka stepped off on his side, Dalton on his.
Dalton tucked into a tight body position as his static line was pulled out. The chute snapped open. Dalton looked up, checking to make sure his canopy had deployed properly, and he saw a SAM-8 explode in the right engine of the second AN-24 cargo plane as the first jumpers exited.
The cargo plane’s right wing sheered off and the plane canted over. Dalton watched as desperate parachutists tried scrambling out of the open rear. A couple made it before the plane impacted with the ground, producing a large fireball.
Dalton turned his attention to his situation, forcing his feet and knees together, bending his knees slightly— as he’d been taught almost thirty years ago at Fort Benning by screaming Blackhats— and he prepared for his own impact with the ground.
His feet hit; he rolled and came to his feet. The wind was taking his chute upslope, so he cut lose the shoulder connects. The chute, minus his weight, took off. Forty meters away a machine gun chattered, stitching holes in the nylon.
There was a terrible scream. Dalton looked up. One of the last men out of his plane had hit the top of the psychic wall. He was still descending, but the man had both hands wrapped around his head. Even at this distance, Dalton could the blood gushing out of the man’s ears, nose, and mouth.
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