He felt power course into him, the black giving way to gray. He was moving, being jumped back to Bright Gate by Sybyl automatically, retracing the route he had taken to Fort Campbell.
And then he was back in the tank, the program bringing him back from the virtual world into his body.
“Marie?” Dalton queried into the gray, but there was no response.
16
The shuttle was mated with the external tanks and boosters, nose pointing toward the roof of the vehicle assembly building. The entire system rested on a crawler transporter forty meters long by thirty wide. Propelled by eight sets of huge tracked propulsion units, the entire thing began moving, starting the trip to the launch pad. At a speed of less than one mile an hour, it would take four hours to reach the launch pad overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
Inside the cargo bay, the SC-MILSTAR satellite was secured.
It wasn’t long into the Cold War before the United States realized that housing its command and control facilities in surface buildings, easily susceptible to attack, was not a good idea. Once the decision was made to build a “hardened” facility, politics and practicality chose Cheyenne Mountain, overlooking Colorado Springs, which already had a large military presence in the form of Fort Carson, the Air Force Academy, and Peterson Air Force Base.
Work was begun on the one-hundred-million-year-old mountain in May 1961. A four-and-a-half-acre grid was hollowed out deep inside the mountain. Then over thirteen hundred metal springs were placed on the floor. Each spring was four feet long and twenty inches in diameter and could withstand a pressure of sixty-five thousand pounds. The theory was that the springs would allow the facility to withstand the shock wave of a thermonuclear blast on the surface of the mountain. On top of the springs, fifteen steel, windowless buildings were built to house NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, a joint U.S.-Canadian facility.
There were only two tunnels into the underground base, allowing security to be very tight. The main entrance tunnel was over a third of a mile long and ended at a set of massive steel and concrete blast doors. Over eleven hundred people worked in the center, and it had operated 365 days a year, round the clock, since inception.
The facility had opened for business on the sixth of February, 1964. Through the sixties and seventies, the major mission of the center was to provide missile warning, primarily through the Defense Early Warning line established across Canada and Alaska. In 1979 the Air Force established the Space Defense Operations Center there to counter the perceived growing threat by the Soviet Union toward satellites. In the 1980s the Air Force Space Command was established, and it absorbed all the subordinate units working in Cheyenne Mountain.
In 1981, Space Command supported the first shuttle launch, as it has done ever since. It was also tasked to coordinate the deployment of the MILSTAR constellation. In preparation for the coming deployment of the last satellite in that system, a group of Space Command men and women deep inside Cheyenne Mountain were running through a practice exercise insuring that once the SC-MILSTAR was put in orbit by Columbia , they would be ready to begin worldwide operations.
“Don’t ever do that to me again!” Dalton was inside Kirtley’s personal space, causing the agent to take an involuntary step backward.
“Don’t worry,” Kirtley said. “It won’t ever happen again, because you’re never going over again.”
Dalton didn’t back off. “Were you embarrassed because we killed most of the hostages and stole the others? Because you screwed up?”
“It was time to come back.” Kirtley slipped out from between Dalton and the wall and walked to the control console, stepping up on the higher platform, looking down on the sergeant major.
“You should have jumped right into the room where the hostages were held,” Dalton said.
“That’s not proper technique,” Kirtley argued.
“ ‘Proper technique’?” Dalton pointed at the isolation tubes where the rest of the team were being removed. “There’s no book on this. There is no proper technique. You have to use the advantages Psychic Warrior gives you to the max. Why clear a building in the normal way, when you’re not normal? I guarantee you that those cartel guards will put a bullet in the hostages’ heads the second they realize something’s wrong.”
“I’ll take your advice under consideration,” Kirtley said. He turned to Hammond. “We’ll be ready to go in three hours.” He left the control room.
Dalton went over to Jackson ’s tube, waiting as she was lifted out and her TACPAD helmet removed.
“Son of a bitch,” she said, then spit some fluid out of her mouth. “That jerk cut us off. Goddamn,” she cursed once more as Dalton draped a thick towel over her shoulders.
“I’ve already talked to him, for whatever good it did,” Dalton said.
Jackson shivered. “Geez-if that’s what those people in the other room are experiencing since they were cut off-” She shook her head. “That was bad, real bad.”
“We’ve got to do all we can to help them,” Dalton said.
“Before Kirtley turns off their iso-tubes.” Jackson nodded. “Hell, yeah. Sign me up.” “I’ve got a call to make,” Dalton said. “Get Barnes when he comes out and meet me in our bunkroom.”
“Do you have contact with the satellite?” Cesar asked.
Souris ’s eyes were closed, the leads from Aura covering her head. “Yes.”
“Is it working?”
“I wouldn’t have contact with it if it wasn’t,” Souris said. “Everything is developing exactly according to plan. Exactly.”
“The coordinates are programmed?”
“Yes.”
Cesar nodded. He didn’t like waiting. He left the operations center and went upstairs to the atrium, his favorite place. All the other Ring members except Naldo had gone back to Colombia, satisfied that their money was being well spent and that their future in Cesar’s hands looked bright. Or to plot to overthrow him, perhaps, but Cesar thought that unlikely given the display he had presented and Alarico’s fate.
Naldo was seated in a chair by the pool, a tall glass by his side.
“Old friend,” Cesar said as he sat next to him, a bodyguard quickly bringing his own drink.
Naldo laughed. “Old enemy is more like it. We were at each other’s throats many more years than we have spent sitting by the side of a pool drinking together.”
Cesar raised his glass in toast. “To old enemies then.”
Naldo acknowledged the toast. “Things are different now. It’s a new world. I miss the old days, though, when things were simpler.”
“They were never simple,” Cesar said. “Just different. The deals and double-deals and triple-deals you and my father used to do to each other-there was nothing simple about those.”
“True. But it was between us. Two men. This-” Naldo fell silent.
“Go ahead.”
“This doesn’t feel right, Cesar. Even you, you’re different. Why do we need to fight the Americans?”
“Because we finally can,” Cesar said. “Don’t tell me you are not angry that the Americans tried to kidnap, or even kill, your son.”
“Angry? Yes. Stupid? No.”
A vein popped up on Cesar’s forehead, blood throbbing. “You saw what we can do with Aura. And we will be more powerful after tonight.”
Naldo leaned forward so that listening ears beyond the immediate vicinity could not hear. “I have to admit, yes, I was very impressed with the demonstrations of this Aura. But I have had time to think about it since. And I have to tell you that I do not understand what you are doing. You act as if this Aura is the final answer. The Americans have other weapons. They have not hesitated to even invade a country when it was in their interests. Noriega learned that and now he rots in an American prison.”