The scream ended just as the man hit the ground like a sack of potatoes. An automatic machine gun fired twenty rounds into the corpse. The man lay there, his parachute anchored by his body and flapping in the breeze.
Dalton watched as two Spetsnatz commandos slapped down a tripod, slid a tube onto the top, loaded a missile, and fired, all in less than ten seconds. The missile streaked right into the source of the firing that had shot up Dalton’s parachute. The small mound hiding the machine gun exploded.
Colonel Mishenka was yelling orders, but the men were well trained and needed little direction. Other Russian soldiers were opening their bundles, pulling equipment out.
Three men ran forward to the minefield warning signs and opened up a large satchel. They pointed a thick plastic tube upslope. There was a flash, then a thick line flew out of the end of the tube, soaring high through the air until it landed, a hundred meters away. One of the men pulled a fuse ignitor on the close end of the line, then all three dove for cover.
The cord of explosive detonated, blowing a five-foot-wide path through the minefield. The three men dashed into the path, made it ten meters, then were cut down by another automatic machine gun.
A rocket destroyed that bunker.
And the bloody process continued as Colonel Mishenka’s Spetsnatz worked their way up the hill, closer and closer to the shimmering psychic wall.
Dalton ran forward and threw a grenade at a bunker housing a machine gun that had just killed a soldier. He knelt and checked his watch. Nine minutes.
* * *
Zivon alerted Feteror to the attack, even as the computer battled the attackers with the automatic defense system. Leksi’s men were loading the third warhead into the generator.
“How soon will you be ready?” Feteror demanded of Vasilev.
The professor looked up at the demon. “You still have the second bomb in stasis in the virtual field. That’s affecting the computer. Slowing it down.”
Feteror frowned, dark ridges coming together on his demon face. “Can you fire the next one?”
Vasilev didn’t look up from his keyboard. “I am trying to get the program to accept the new mission.”
“How long?” Feteror demanded.
Vasilev ignored him. Feteror stepped forward.
The professor looked up. “We can fire the third now.”
* * *
Jackson felt the liquid pouring into her lungs, but her focus was elsewhere. She had Sybyl access everything in the database on Russian nuclear weapons. She contacted Hammond through the computer.
“Anything from Sergeant Major Dalton?”
“He is on the ground. They are assaulting SD8’s base, Chyort’s home.”
“Any other nuclear explosions?”
“Not yet.”
“How long can you keep the bomb from coming through completely?”
“I estimate 8.4 minutes.”
“Come on, Dr. Hammond!” Jackson yelled. “Get me over there!”
* * *
Dalton fired on full automatic, right into the open end of a machine-gun bunker, his bullets smashing into the weapon. He rolled twice to his right, pausing at the edge of the path blasted by the line charge.
He was less than twenty feet from the psychic wall. He could not only see it shimmering now, but he could feel something. A thrumming on the edge of his consciousness. A feeling that made him want to turn and get away as fast as possible.
He looked over his shoulder. Over three quarters of the Spetsnatz were dead, but the survivors were still moving forward, wiping out the last of the automatic weapons.
Colonel Mishenka ran forward and threw himself into the dirt next to Dalton. He peered ahead at the wall, then glanced at Dalton.
A Spetsnatz soldier ran past them.
Mishenka yelled for him to stop, but too late as the man hit the psychic wall. His body spasmed, arms flying back. They could hear his spine snapping in a row of sharp cracks.
The man tumbled to the ground, his head canted at an unnatural angle, blood flowing from every visible orifice.
* * *
General Rurik pounded his fist in frustration against the console. “What is going on?”
“I cannot access the surface,” the technician said.
Rurik looked up at the red flashing light. He had missed the last contact with Moscow because Feteror was still out.
He had violated procedure for the first time in his career. He had no clue what was going on. But they knew something was happening above them. The dull sound of explosions echoed through the stone walls.
Someone was attacking them. But who?
There was only one answer— it had to be Feteror and help he had recruited. No one else would dare go up against the psychic wall. No one else could be this far into Russia and assaulting this most secret of bases.
“Captain,” Rurik said, turning to the chief of security. “Have your men ready to stop an assault.”
“But, sir— ” The man hesitated, then continued. “They cannot get in.”
“Oh, they will get in. Feteror is helping them! Now move!”
* * *
“The generator is in phase,” Vasilev announced. “The program is working slowly, but it is working.”
“Fire this one,” Feteror ordered, “and load the next one.”
Leksi stepped forward. “You are doing as Oma ordered now!”
Feteror looked at the huge naval commando. He smiled, revealing his rows of sharp teeth. Without a word he sliced forward with his right claw.
Leksi surprised him with his speed. The commando rolled forward, pulling up his submachine gun as he did.
Feteror jumped through the virtual plane to right behind Leksi, even as the man pulled the trigger. Feteror swung down with both hands. Leksi again surprised him by bringing back the submachine gun and blocking the right claw, but the left ripped into Leksi’s back.
Feteror relished the familiar sound of tearing flesh. He lifted Leksi as the commando tried to bend the gun back, to fire at his attacker. Feteror solved that problem by slicing off Leksi’s right arm.
He tossed the dying commando against the wall and stood over him. “I will destroy Oma’s targets but I do not need you to tell me to do it.”
“The bomb is in phase,” Vasilev reported.
Feteror turned to the cowering mercenaries. “Load the next bomb as soon as the generator is clear.”
He jumped into the virtual plane and connected with the bomb. He directed it west toward America.
“Time for your plan to get through the wall, if you have one,” Dalton said.
Mishenka spit and rubbed a hand covered in blood across his face. “I have one. You need a short?” He tapped the side of his head. “I’ve got one right here.”
Dalton wasn’t sure he had heard right.
Mishenka stood and walked toward the shimmer that indicated the boundary of the psychic wall. “I suggest you stay close to me,” he called over his shoulder.
“I can’t let you do that,” Dalton said.
Mishenka was standing right in front of the wall. Dalton came up next to him. He could feel the pain now, the fear, pulsing through his brain.
Mishenka laughed. He ripped open a packet on his combat vest and pulled out a small red pill. He held it up to Dalton. “My antiradiation pill. Perhaps it works, eh?”
Dalton knew the Russians issued the red pill as a placebo and that anyone with the slightest common sense knew that.
Mishenka tossed it away. “I am a dead man anyway. Let my death be worth something.” He looked at Dalton. “Are you ready?”
Dalton met the other man’s eyes. “I’m ready.”
Mishenka pulled his belt off and handed one end to Dalton. “I go, you follow.”
Dalton found he could not speak, so he simply nodded.
“Now!” Mishenka yelled.
He stepped forward into the wall, pulling on the belt. Dalton was pulled through behind him.
The Russi
an jerked straight up, his mouth open, a cry issuing forth that chilled Dalton’s heart.
Dalton hit the wall. He staggered, feeling a spike of pain rip into the base of his skull. His skin crackled, felt as if it were on fire. He kept moving his legs, going forward. He fell onto the ground, the pain receding.
Dalton rolled and looked back. There was a glow around Mishenka’s head. The Russian was looking straight at him. The mouth twisted from the open scream into a fleeting semblance of a smile, then a river of blood spilled over the lips and Mishenka fell to the ground dead.
Dalton looked down at his hand. He was still holding the belt. The other end was in the Russian’s dead hand. Dalton let go of the belt and stood. He headed toward the base.
* * *
Feteror’s head snapped to the left. He was halfway toward Washington, but something halted him at the jump point.
He opened to the flow of data from Zivon. Someone was through the psychic wall!
Feteror jumped for home, the bomb going with him.
Chapter Thirty
Lieutenant Jackson floated next to the bomb. It was the inverse of what she had witnessed from the floor of the experimental chamber. Here, on the virtual plane, a small square disappeared every few seconds. There was less than a third of the bomb remaining in the virtual plane.
“Dr. Hammond?”
“Yes?”
“I need the specifications for this type of nuclear weapon.”
“I have specs for our version of it.”
“Stay with me.”
“I will.”
Jackson let go of her avatar and became pure psyche. She flowed into the bomb.
* * *
Dalton threw the backpack Mishenka had given him to the ground in front of the large steel door that blocked his way into the underground complex. He pulled out the long black tube. He worked fast, his watch telling him that less than four minutes were left.
He peeled the tape off the end of the tube and pressed it against the center of the left steel door. He swung down the two thin metal legs to the ground, centering the tube horizontally against the door. He pulled the firing tab, ran twenty feet away, and dove for cover behind a berm.
The tube fired, the shaped charge producing intense heat that burned a three-foot-diameter hole through the door in an instant.
Dalton ran forward. He slammed against the door, next to the hole, the edges still simmering. He pulled a flash-bang grenade off his vest and threw it in. Counted to three. The grenade went off. Dalton dove through the hole, rolling forward onto the concrete floor inside, coming up to his knees with his AK-74 at the ready.
He fired at the two stunned guards, knocking them backwards. Then he was on his feet, running along the corridor that sloped downward.
* * *
Feteror came into being above SD8-FFEU. He could see the bodies littering the ground below. He recognized the uniforms of the dead. Spetsnatz. It had come full circle.
He clearly saw the psychic wall. There was only one way he could get in, through the window allowed him. And once he was inside he would be trapped inside Zivon.
He roared, a demonic dragon circling on leathery wings, his lair below being invaded. Impotent to stop— Feteror paused. He had the bomb. It had to end now.
Mishenka had told Dalton that the guard force inside SD8’s base was minimal— they counted on the automatic defenses and the psychic wall.
So far Dalton had encountered six guards. He edged between two large stacks of supplies. The door from the supply room to the brain center lay ahead. He paused and looked at his watch. Less than two minutes.
Throwing caution to the wind, Dalton sprinted forward and was slammed back as a bullet ripped through his left shoulder.
* * *
Jackson was in the center of a jumble of wires in the core of the bomb. She had gone into machinery and computers before, but only for data, for information. Never to do anything real to the machine. She didn’t even know if she could do anything.
“How much time?” she asked Hammond.
“A minute and twenty seconds.”
“What do I do?”
There was a short pause. “According to Sybyl, you must stop the detonator. The conventional explosion that initiates the nuclear reaction.”
“Where is it?”
Hammond had Sybyl project the vision to Jackson.
* * *
Feteror took the bomb with him through the window into the underground complex.
Inside the hangar, the next bomb was loaded inside the generator.
Vasilev looked around. Some of the men were tending to Leksi, leaning the dying man against the wall. Chyort was nowhere to be seen, nor did Vasilev sense his presence.
“Fire the next target!” Leksi spit the words out along with a dribble of blood down his chin. “Damn you, do as you’re told.”
Vasilev smiled. He knew without Feteror, the bomb would not go anywhere. “Yes, sir.”
He hit a button on the console. “Atonement,” he whispered.
The hangar disappeared in an instant, destroying the immediate area and the approaching Russian forces that had been alerted by NATO intelligence using the information Oma had called in for her four hundred million.
* * *
Dalton looked at his watch. Under a minute. He could hear the man who had shot him moving on the other side of the pallet.
Dalton stood, blood streaming from his shoulder. He yelled in Vietnamese at the top of his lungs and came around the pallet firing. The man was still turning toward him when Dalton’s first bullets hit, splattering him against the wall.
The bolt slammed home. Dalton tossed the gun aside and ran into the corridor, pulling a pistol out of its holster. He kicked open the door at the end and staggered into the brain center.
A Russian general holding a pistol in his hand stood in front of Dalton, soldiers flanking him, their weapons also at the ready.
Feteror looked down from his virtual perch. He saw the American Green Beret and General Rurik pointing their guns at each other. He knew the bomb he had would explode in ten seconds after he released it into the real world. There was nothing they could do to stop it.
“Why?”
Feteror spun about, startled. Opa was shaking his head. “Why must you destroy?” Opa said. The old man’s right arm stretched out toward Feteror, who jumped back, startled. But the arm went right past him, into the virtual window.
Feteror turned to follow it. The arm kept growing until it reached the half-materialized bomb. It flowed into the bomb. The red digital readout blacked out.
“What have you done!” Feteror screamed.
* * *
“Do not move!” General Rurik ordered Dalton. The two guards flanked the general, their weapons pointed at Dalton.
The sergeant major could feel the flow of blood down his side from his wound. His head pounded from the aftereffects of the psychic wall. He could see that the barrel of the pistol he was holding was shaking. He knew there was no way he could get all three before they gunned him down.
“Jimmy,” a woman’s voice whispered in his ear. “You know what you have to do.”
Dalton let go of the gun.
Feteror saw the American drop the gun.
“What have you done?” he demanded of Opa. “They have won!”
“No,” Opa said. “I do not think so.”
* * *
“Who are you?” General Rurik demanded.
Dalton focused on the Russian general, pushing away all distractions. He used the power of over fifteen hundred days and nights of captivity, the skills he had learned during six months of Trojan Warrior and the past two days at Bright Gate, what Sybyl had shown him of the virtual world and the line between it and the real. He put the white dot right between the Russian’s eyes and then he probed with his mind.
Rurik grabbed his temples, a surprised look on his face. He staggered, tried to say something, then went down to his knees. He wavered there
for a couple of seconds, still trying to mouth words that wouldn’t come through the pain in his head. Then he keeled over and smashed into the hard floor, face first.
* * *
Feteror saw General Rurik hit the floor, the body slack. He’d seen the psychic force go from the head of the American into the general’s— a golden burst of light on the virtual plane. The light on the general’s wristband changed to red. “We’ll be trapped in here forever!” Feteror grabbed Opa by the shoulders and shook him.
Opa shook his head, the gray beard wagging back and forth. “It is best.”
Feteror screamed into nothingness as his power drained from him, leaving him floating in inky darkness.
The nuclear warhead hanging over the center of Bright Gate snapped completely into reality.
“Oh God!” Hammond yelled as it dropped to the floor of the control room with a thud. It lay there.
“Bring me back,” Lieutenant Jackson’s voice echoed out of the speakers.
Epilogue
“Are they alive?” Barnes asked.
“Their bodies are,” Jackson answered. “Their psyches— their selves…” Her voice trailed off
Sergeant Barnes was in a wheelchair next to her, looking at the tubes holding the rest of the second Psychic Warrior team. “You don’t think we’re going to find them, do you?”
Jackson shrugged. “I don’t know. We’re getting different readings off of Raisor. Sybyl doesn’t know what to make of it. We think he’s definitely out there somewhere, but we haven’t been able to make contact.”
Barnes had a gold ring that he was rubbing between two fingers. “What do you— ” He paused as the door to the outside corridor swung open.
Sergeant Major Dalton slowly walked in, his arm in a sling, his face drawn and tight from exhaustion. He’d returned to Denver via Aurora as soon as the surviving Spetsnatz had secured the SD8 base. Then he’d been flown to Bright Gate by a Blackhawk
“Sergeant Major!” Barnes and Jackson said it at the same time.
“You have something of mine.” He held out a hand.
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