“Director,” Carlson stood and indicated for her to sit in the chair directly in front of his massive desk.
“General, good to see you again.”
Carlson wasted no time in pleasantries. He threw the faxed photograph in front of McFairn. A dead man in unmarked jungle fatigues, splayed out on a neatly maintained lawn, a bullet hole in the left side of his chest. “That’s Captain Scott. The team leader.”
“I know,” McFairn acknowledged.
“What do you have on the Special Forces team?” Carlson demanded.
She put Dalton ’s report on his desk and waited as he leafed through it.
“How did you get such detailed information?” he asked when done.
“Bright Gate.”
“I thought the Psychic Warrior team was inoperative.”
A fancy term for lost, McFairn thought. “We still have some operators and I’m currently reconstituting another team.”
“How did the Task Force Six team get compromised? You don’t have that in the report.”
“We think there’s a possibility the Ring is using remote viewers and they spotted the team.”
“Oh Christ.” Carlson slammed the report down on the desk. “You people and your weird psychic crap.”
“You know Bright Gate works and you know it works well, given what happened in Russia not long ago,” McFairn pointed out.
“If your people went down there, why didn’t they free our men? They might have saved Scott’s life.”
“They could only do a recon. There was no way they could have gotten the men out without all of them getting killed.”
Carlson grumbled something.
McFairn leaned forward. “I have an idea how we can kill two birds with one stone.”
“What do you mean?”
“Rescue the captured soldiers and destroy the Ring’s RV capability.”
“I’m listening.”
As McFairn laid out her plan to use the Psychic Warriors to spearhead a rescue mission, Raisor listened in, floating in the virtual plane in Carlson’s office. The Pentagon wasn’t psychically shielded, which Raisor found interesting, but not surprising. It was simply too large and had too many people coming and going to be shielded. He also knew there was the fact that the conventional military distrusted something as radical as Psychic Warrior.
He had followed McFairn’s limousine from Fort Meade to the Pentagon, seething with the inability to do anything, but now he saw an opportunity to strike back.
When she was done presenting her plan, Raisor made his first jump south, heading back toward Saba.
Captain Mikhal Lonsky had been in command of the research ship Kosmonaut Yuri Gagarin for almost ten years, and he had watched their operating budget shrink with each new appropriation out of Moscow. Named after the first man to go into space, the ship had maintained communications with Mir as long as that station had been operational. With the space station’s demise the previous year, this year’s appropriation had been appallingly low. The crew was at forty percent, the rest laid off by the new capitalistic Russian society to save money, which was spent first on necessary repairs.
The most recent mission given the ship was to monitor launches from the European Space Consortium’s base at Kouro, in French Guiana. It was a boring job, but one the new KGB, called the SRU, wanted done, more for industrial espionage purposes than military necessity.
When all four radar dishes were oriented forward as they were now, the Gagarin lost two knots in speed due to wind resistance, but that was of little importance to Lonsky as they were stationary, thrusters fore and aft holding them in place against the wind and current.
Lonsky turned as his senior communications and computer officer, Tanya Zenata, entered the bridge. There was supposed to be separate officers for each specialty, but the combining of the jobs was another cost-cutting measure forced on Lonsky.
“Sir, we have a radio communiqué from Moscow.”
Lonsky took the paper and read it. His eyebrows arched as the import struck home. Lonsky started laughing, causing the scant bridge crew to turn and look at him. He couldn’t help it. He fell backwards into his command chair, still laughing, tears now flowing down his cheeks. “We’ve been sold,” he finally managed to get out.
Boreas paced back and forth in his office, staring out the large bullet-proof window at the field of antennas that was his province. When HAARP was off, the entire facility was guarded by an electromagnetic wall, impenetrable to remote viewers, Psychic Warriors, or any living thing. Numerous local animals had died when they crossed the buried cables that transmitted the field. A brain, whether in the real world or a virtual essence, could not cross the electromagnetic barrier that was on a frequency inimical to the mind’s own electromagnetic operation.
Beyond the field, the Wrangell Mountains loomed over the site. Boreas often looked to them. Not to enjoy the beauty of their white peaks against the blue sky, but because of the threat he felt lurked there.
The phone rang, cutting through his dark mood. It was McFairn, confirming the plan they had come up with the previous night.
After hanging up with her, Boreas made a call on his secure satellite phone to Kirtley, giving the necessary order. Then he made a final call. The other end was answered immediately.
“Yes?” The voice was deep, one used to authority, the overseas connection perfect despite the scrambling and encryption. The equipment was cutting edge, not penetrable even by the NSA.
“We are taking action against the Ring.”
“Good. Nexus has been dealt with in the United States.”
“Are you sure you got all of them?”
There was the shortest of pauses. “We’re not certain.
But we’ve taken care of the important ones. They have no immediate access to the President, and by the time any survivors make contact and are verified, it will be much too late.”
“What about Souris and the Ring?”
“Try to track down their Aura transmitter using your new Psychic Warrior team. Then destroy it and the Ring. What is the status of HAARP?”
“CS-MILSTAR goes up soon. We’ll be on-line worldwide in less than two days. We still have to get the unlock codes for the MIL STAR satellites, but I anticipate being able to do that without too much trouble. And then it will finally be over. After all these years.”
“Don’t underestimate them.”
Boreas looked at the mountains. “I won’t.”
“We’re going operational in eight hours.” Kirtley had satellite imagery of Colombia spread over the conference table, his team gathered round. Dalton, Jackson, and Barnes stood in the background.
“You’ve only been ‘over’ once,” Dalton pointed out. “I don’t think you’re ready to be operational.”
“It’s not debatable, Sergeant Major.” Kirtley slapped the tabletop. “We’re leading the effort to rescue your fellow green beanies. I would expect even you to be happy about that.”
“The team got ambushed,” Dalton said. “What makes you think the team going in to save them isn’t going to be ambushed also?”
“Because we’ll be going in first, clearing the way,” Kirtley said. “The conventional team that follows us is coming just to recover the hostages.”
Dalton rubbed his forehead, trying to keep the growing headache at bay.
“And we will have one practice session this afternoon before the actual mission,” Kirtley added. “A live fire run-through at the urban combat range at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.”
“What do you want us to do?” Dalton asked, indicating Jackson and Barnes along with himself.
“We’re done with you. You’ll be released to go back to your units once my team is operational.”