On a hillside a half mile away, Farruco could see the strange forms appear on the roof of the building. Just as Cesar had told him would happen. He flipped open his SATPhone. “They’re here.”
Cesar put his hand on Souris ’s shoulder. “Now!”
She pressed the Enter key.
From the antenna on top of Saba ’s volcano, a tight-wave beam darted up into the sky toward Aura IV. It hit the retransmit panels, triggering a surge of power from the main battery, and was redirected down to Earth.
Kirtley’s avatar staggered, the screams of his team members’ dying psyches hitting him like a wave of pain.
The last thing Sergeant Lambier saw was the two forms getting wiped away, like pencil images under a powerful and extremely fast eraser. Then his brain exploded in agony, blood poured from his eyes, mouth, ears, and nose, and he collapsed to the floor dead.
“They just disappeared,” Farruco reported.
Cesar slapped Souris on the back. “It worked!” “Of course it worked,” Souris said.
“Go in and see what happened to the prisoners,” Cesar ordered Farruco.
“Did you track it?” Kirtley demanded. “Did you track the transmitter? Is it close by?”
Boreas was staring at the data HAARP had picked up. It made no sense.
“Where is it?” Kirtley’s voice had risen to a panicked pitch. “They wiped out my team, goddamn it! I’ve got the choppers on hold at the final line. Give me a location.”
“You knew that was going to happen,” Boreas said calmly, still trying to figure out what the information he was looking at meant, as it wasn’t like the previous Aura transmissions they’d intercepted. “Stand by.”
In the air next to Mount of the Holy Cross, Roby was watching his radar screens, and he didn’t like what they were telling him. Four helicopters were coming in from the north. He tried contacting them on the guard frequency, but there was no reply. “This ain’t good,” he muttered.
“I’ve lost them!” Hammond said as she came running into the loading bay.
“What?” Dalton spun around, his attention diverted from the sky outside. He could hear the inbound Blackhawks but he hadn’t seen them yet.
“The team. They’re gone. Except for Kirtley. The rest of them flat-lined. All at once. No mental activity at all.”
“Damn it,” Dalton muttered.
With a blast of cold air, the first Blackhawk came to a hover, the side door opening. The crew chief shoved out the cargo netting and Jackson and Barnes began spreading it out on the grate.
He ran over to Jackson, grabbing her shoulder to get her attention. “Get this first load out, then get on board the second chopper.”
“Where are you going?”
“ Hammond ’s lost the team. Something happened to them.”
“There’s nothing you can do,” Jackson said.
“Kirtley isn’t gone-he must be in a different place. I’m going to have Hammond extract him and find out what the hell is going on. The pilots know where to take you if it comes to that.”
He could see that Jackson was going to protest further, but they were both interrupted by the crew chief throwing an expended aluminum flare tube at them. It clattered on the grate and Dalton picked it up. He pulled the top off and took out the note crammed inside.
Four helicopters inbound. Not responding to hails. You have six minutes.
He shoved the note into Jackson ’s hand. “Get them loaded and get out of here.”
“What about you?”
“We’ll get out,” Dalton said. He reached over and pulled the emergency radio off her flight vest. “Come back for us.” Then he turned and ran to Hammond, leading her back into the complex.
“It came from a satellite,” McFairn’s voice echoed out of the speaker.
Boreas slapped his palm on the desktop. That fit the data but was unexpected.
“My people tracked the downlink,” McFairn continued, “but we didn’t catch the uplink.”
“Do you have a lock on the satellite?” Boreas asked.
“Space command is tracking it. I’ve got an F-15 out of Eglin Air Force Base scrambling. It’s armed with ALMV.”
“A what?”
“ALMV stands for air-launched miniature vehicle. It’s an ASAT-antisatellite-missile.”
“We need the uplink,” Boreas said.
“First things first,” McFairn said. “We take out the satellite before someone else gets killed.”
Boreas leaned back in his seat. Souris was one step ahead of them again. What the hell were she and the Ring doing? He spoke into his headset, directly to Kirtley. “Order the helicopters in.”
“Where’s the transmitter?” Kirtley demanded.
“In space. Order the helicopters in and clean up the mess at the villa.”
Farruco kicked one of the American bodies with the tip of his boot. The amount of blood surprised him. How had Cesar done this? And who were the strange beings who had just appeared on the roof, then disappeared?
He cocked his head at the sound of helicopters approaching. Barking orders, he ran upstairs. Reaching the main level, he flipped open the cell phone as the first American helicopter came racing in over the treetops.
“Can you do another burst?” Cesar asked Souris.
“I’m checking on the status of the satellite’s power right now,” she replied. Reading the screen, she nodded. “I think we can get one more.”
“Stand by,” Cesar told her. He spoke into the phone, ordering Farruco to pull his men back.
Afterburners kicked in as the F-15 roared into the sky, nose pointed almost vertical. Slung beneath the left wing was a long rocket. The F-15 passed through the sound barrier less than two minutes after wheels-up and continued to accelerate.
“Pull Kirtley back using Sybyl,” Dalton ordered Hammond.
“What about the rest of the team?”
“You’ve got no contact with them?”
“No.”
“Then there’s nothing you can do. Leave them alone. I want to know what’s going on. These inbound choppers are probably Kirtley’s people.”
The first load of commandos off-loaded on the roof, blowing holes in the ceiling, working their way down.
Farruco and his men were beating a hasty retreat across the back lawn, firing as they went. An Apache gun-ship raced by, thirty-millimeter cannon spitting bullets, killing half of Farruco’s gunslingers before they reached the relative safety of the jungle.
Two more lifts of commandos off-loaded on the roof. Thirty men were in or on the villa.
From his vantage point, Kirtley could see the action, but he made no move. The plan had been for him to redirect the commandos to capture the Aura transmitter, which Boreas had expected to be located nearby. Given that it was in space, he was at a loss what to do.
He started in surprise as he sensed a shift in his link to Sybyl. Against his will, he was being drawn back. The villa disappeared and he was in total blackness.
The first Blackhawk carefully gained altitude, lifting the cargo net full of isolation tubes off the grate. Jackson and Barnes had managed to put six in that net. The second bird dropped its net and they quickly spread it out. The unknown helicopters were three minutes out.
Valika turned on the Aura generator. Despite her warning, the men inside the helicopter bay were startled when Raisor’s image appeared, floating half in and half out of the left side door, just in front of Valika.
“We’re three minutes out,” Valika informed him.
“I know.”
The F-15 was shuddering as it passed through fifty thousand feet altitude. The pilot was linked to Space Command in Colorado Springs, which had a lock on the target satellite and was relaying the data to his targeting computer. In turn, the computer was automatically downloading updates to the ALMV every second.