One aspect that had seemed very strange at the time was the training spent hooked to a machine that gave them feedback on their alpha brain waves. They’d learned to increase those waves, which the trainers said resulted in decreases in anxiety and apprehension and allowed them to master stressful and life-threatening situations, something Dalton thought he had gone a long way toward achieving in Vietnam.
All the men who had gone through Trojan Warrior— named after the figure on the crest of the 10th Special Forces Group when it was first formed in 1958— had changed, mostly for the better.
But then the training had ended, the instructors were gone, and everyone seemed to lose interest in the entire program. Life went back to the normal cycle of training and deployment Special Forces was used to.
Dalton looked around the interior of the Blackhawk, mentally cataloguing the other seven members of the team. It was a thing he found strange about the military, the sort of lottery that resulted in one man’s getting chosen to go on a mission while another didn’t get picked. One man died on the luck of the draw while another lived. It was something he had struggled with over the years, having too much imagination to simply accept as others did that it was just fate.
Captain Anderson was, of course, the highest-ranking man and the team leader. But Dalton had worked with Anderson and he knew that the younger man would defer a lot of responsibility and decision making to him due to his experience. It was the traditional Special Forces way of doing business.
Master Sergeant Trilly had not questioned Dalton’s position or attempted to take charge of the team during the load-out. Dalton’s major concern was whether the man would pull his own weight, never mind take responsibility. Trilly had been the weakest link during the Trojan Warrior training.
Seated next to Trilly was Sergeant Barnes, the medic. Barnes was a tall, well-built man with dark hair, in his mid-thirties. His slate gray eyes were his most distinguishing feature. Of all those that had gone through the Trojan Warrior training, Barnes had been the one most deeply affected.
Staff Sergeant Stith, an engineer/demo man, was a quiet black man who, Dalton knew, had plans to get out and go back to college to get a degree in architecture with his GI Bill money. Sergeant Monroe, a hulking presence in the helicopter, over six and a half feet tall with a completely shaved skull, was known for his imaginative work with weapons.
The last two members were an intelligence sergeant and an executive officer. Sergeant First Class Egan was a quiet man who wore wire-rimmed glasses. Dalton knew Egan’s passion was reading military history, and he felt the man was a strong asset to any team. Warrant Officer Novelli, a large, slow-moving man, was the second-weakest man on the team, in Dalton’s opinion. Dalton felt Novelli had somehow slipped through the cracks over the years. As with Trilly, Dalton simply hoped Novelli would hold his own.
The chopper turned and Dalton looked out. He spotted the distinctive white cross of snow on the Mount of the Holy Cross to the north. From that, he knew they were somewhere in the White River National Forest, south of Vail, north of Aspen, and west of Leadville, in the heart of the Rocky Mountains.
“Check it out.” Barnes nudged him, pointing forward.
Straight ahead, a large door, camouflaged to look like part of the mountainside, was sliding up, a level metal grating coming out at the bottom. A dark hole appeared on the side of the mountain.
“Some high-speed stuff, Sergeant Major,” Barnes said. “Who the hell are these people?”
Dalton knew that Anderson and Trilly had not had a chance to fully brief the team, but Special Forces men were used to missions with vague parameters.
The blades flared and the chopper settled onto the metal grating. Dalton grabbed the door handle and slid it to the rear. He felt the chill blast of air as he stepped out.
“Gentlemen, welcome to Bright Gate.” Raisor waved the team off the helicopter. Dr. Hammond was next to him, holding her coat against the chopper blast.
It had taken them two hours to reach this location deep in the spine of the Rocky Mountains. The helipad was extended out of the side of a massive, thirteen-thousand-foot peak. The entire platform shuddered, then began retracting into the hangar cut into the side of the mountain, taking the helicopter and its passengers with it. As they cleared the side of the mountain, the door slid down, cutting them off from the outside world.
“This way.” Raisor gestured toward a large door on the side of the hangar furthest into the mountain. He and Hammond led the way, the team following, carrying their gear in large green rucksacks. Raisor paused before the door, a large circular steel structure, over eighteen feet in diameter. It was strangely formed, with rings of concentric strips of black metal spaced evenly out from the center on the polished steel. Dalton noticed that strips of the same black metal were attached to the rock wall that extended left and right the length of the hangar, disappearing into holes drilled into the rock where the hangar ended.
Dalton looked closely. There was something strange about the door, in fact the whole wall the door was set in; a shimmering effect that was barely noticeable.
Raisor punched a code into the panel on the right side. Dalton blinked. The shimmering seemed to have stopped. The door rolled sideways into a recessed port. A corridor lit with dim red lights beckoned. Raisor made a sweeping gesture with his hand and the team trooped through. The door rolled shut behind them and Raisor again punched a code into the inside panel. Dalton swore that the shimmering came back, this time on the inside of the door. And the inside was also covered with the black metal circles, branching off into holes drilled on this side into the rock.
Dalton followed the rest of the team down the corridor. They walked through a door, then down a hallway cut out of the stone. Hammond opened a door and showed them a large room with gray painted walls and several bunk beds.
“I’m sorry the arrangements aren’t the greatest,” Hammond said, sounding not sorry at all as the team members threw their rucks down. “I’d like to get started right away,” she added.
They followed Raisor and the doctor down another corridor deeper into the mountain. The corridor opened into a large chamber. They all stopped, taking in the view. There were two rows of ten of the large cylinders that had been on the slide. Two had people in them, floating in the green liquid, a man and a woman, like full-grown fetuses in suspended animation. Each wore a slick black one-piece suit over their torso.
The team silently walked up and stared at the two bodies.
“Don’t touch the glass,” Hammond warned. “The fluid inside is supercooled and your hand would freeze to the glass.”
Dalton looked closely and now he saw a thin haze in the air surrounding the glass as the ambient room temperature met the much lower temperature.
“Supercooled?” Anderson asked.
“It’s necessary to slow the body’s processes down to allow the brain to function at a higher level.”
“How do they breathe?” Master Sergeant Trilly asked.
“Actually, they’re not breathing as you know it,” Hammond said, a statement which caused a ripple of concern among the team.
Hammond pointed. “You see the center tube going into the helmet?” Next she pointed to a bulky machine on the outside. Clear lines coiled around the outside of a pump moving so slowly, the action was almost imperceptible. The liquid in the lines was a dark blue.
“A mouthpiece is attached to that lung machine. It doesn’t send oxygen in the gaseous form as you are used to, but rather a cooled, special liquid-oxygen mixture directly to their lungs. The machine actually does the work for the lungs, because we can’t count on the autonomic nervous system to function properly.”