“That would make sense,” Valika agreed.
“I could use some more specifics on what actually we are looking for and what is to be recovered.”
“Get us in first,” Valika said. “Then you’ll be shown what is to be taken.” She paused at the door. “There’s something in the airplane-a computer-that you need to off-load and place inside the helicopter I am to ride in. There are also several cases of high-power lithium batteries. Those are to be placed near the computer.”
She waited while Gregory’s men hauled out the small Aura transmitter and the batteries. Then she got in the truck and they drove to the hangar.
“They’re here,” Jackson ’s voice, modified through Sybyl, sounded inside of Dalton ’s head. Or actually, he realized, his avatar’s head. He still wasn’t comfortable operating on the virtual plane. She relayed what she was seeing, through the computer, to both Barnes and Dalton.
Kirtley’s team appeared, popping into existence, almost simultaneously. Four men on the roof of the main building, one in each cardinal direction. Targets began popping up and the avatars fired, small balls of power exploding the wooden silhouettes.
Dalton moved down the sewer tunnel he was in, forcing himself to not “jump” but move totally in the real plane. He shoved open a manhole cover and fired as he came out, hitting one of the team in the back with a low-power shot. Dr. Hammond froze the avatar.
“You’re dead,” Dalton said as he ducked back down into the tunnel. He raced back toward the building, keeping track of Kirtley’s forces via Jackson. The four men that had appeared on the roof were working their way down through the building, a classic clearing technique. Dalton had expected Kirtley’s men to jump from the roof to the hostage room in one move.
Dalton popped his head up in the hostage room, Barnes’s avatar not even turning. “Hey, Sergeant Major,” Barnes said.
“I’m taking a couple of the hostages,” Dalton said.
Barnes nodded. “They’re too slow.”
Dalton grabbed two of the dummies and ducked back down in the tunnel. He “saw”-via Barnes-the first avatars appear in the basement.
Barnes fired, spinning, hitting the remaining dummies, even as Kirtley’s men shot at him. Barnes hit all of the “hostages” before being shut down by Dr. Hammond. Dalton lost his “eye” in the room.
Dalton made it across the street and up into the next building. Through Jackson he could “see” that Kirtley had called in his other three men from their guard positions. And then all went black.
No form, no input. Nothing. Just self.
Dalton knew immediately that Kirtley had had Hammond shut him down. He felt a moment’s panic, but then used the techniques he had used in the Trojan Warrior program to regain control of his psyche. He was completely isolated on the virtual plane, unable to move, unable to even sense the grayness of the plane itself.
Panic overwhelmed him, his mind screaming without a voice. The memories of the prison cell in Vietnam came rushing back, led by the feeling of helplessness.
“Jimmy.”
He didn’t hear at first, so lost was he in his primal fears.
“Jimmy.”
Like a lifeline in a vast, dark ocean, the voice got through. Dalton seized on it, focusing.
“Jimmy. It’s me” “Marie” “Be careful, Jimmy. There are others here.” “Who?”
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.