“What happened to them?”
“No one knows. I don’t know exactly, but I have an idea. I told Hammond but she thinks it’s bull. I believe she thinks that because what I told her scared her.”
“What about Raisor?”
“I think Raisor believes me. He’s weird.”
“What’s your theory?”
“There are bodies in the isolation tanks, but there are no people in there, if you know what I mean. Heck, Sergeant Major, I went looking for them. I went out on the virtual plane to see if I could find them.” She paused, her eyes withdrawing.
“And?” Dalton prompted.
“And I think I found the team. What was left of them. Their psyches. Worn out as if they’d died of starvation. They were all dead there.”
“Wait a second.” Dalton held up his hand. “You’re talking about a thing that’s not real in a place that doesn’t exist.”
“Oh, you know it exists,” Jackson said. “Or you will once Sybyl passes you over. It’s as real as this room.”
“If this avatar is a construct, how can remains of the psyche exist? Wouldn’t it just disappear?”
“I don’t know,” Jackson said. “I’m just telling you what I found. I don’t pretend to understand this stuff like Hammond does.”
“But… how could their avatars have ‘starved,’ as you put it?”
“Loss of power from Sybyl. They got cut off.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Like I said, whenever Psychic Warrior was operating, we were locked down.”
Dalton considered what she had just told him. What mission had the first team been on? Or had they been lost in training and that explained Raisor’s reaction to what had happened to Stith?
“There’s something else I think you should know,” Jackson said.
“What?”
“There’s something, or someone, else over there,” Jackson said.
“Who?”
“Chyort,” the lieutenant whispered.
“What?”
“The devil. I translated it using Sybyl. Chyort is the Russian word for ‘devil’ The CIA picked up reports about such a thing several times but they dismissed it. I don’t.”
Dalton bit back his reaction. He could tell the lieutenant wasn’t making this up. That she believed what she was saying.
“Not the devil like most people think of him,” Jackson said, then she paused, as if hearing her own words. “Well, maybe I’m wrong there. Maybe it is the devil like most people think of him. But whatever you might think, I’m telling you there is someone else in the virtual world.”
“Any idea who?” Dalton asked.
“Most likely the Russians,” Jackson said. “We know they’ve been working with remote viewing longer than we have. And I heard rumors when I first got to Grill Flame from some of the old hands that the Russians had gone way beyond what we had been doing. That they had taken psychic warfare very seriously a long time ago and have been putting a lot of resources into it.
“Also, we get blocked when we try to see into certain places in Russia. It seems pretty logical to me that if the Russians know enough to block us psychically, then they know enough to RV. You can’t have an antidote without a poison.”
“So this devil is a Russian avatar?”
“I think so. I met him earlier today. When I went on the recon to check out the nuke warheads shipment. He was there. In the same room at the railhead. I couldn’t see him and I don’t think he saw me, but he was there. I felt him. And I know he felt me.”
“Does Raisor know this?”
“I told him. He didn’t seem that interested. The CIA reports are unsubstantiated according to him. And he chooses to disbelieve reports we give him that he doesn’t want to hear.”
“But this means the Russians probably know about the planned attack,” Dalton said.
“There’s a high probability of that,” Jackson said. “I’ve read numerous unclassified reports of the strong Russian interest in remote viewing and psychic phenomena. In fact— ” She paused, but Dalton indicated for her to continue. “In fact, there’s some evidence that the Russians were trying to tap into psychic weapons a long time ago. In 1958 there was a tremendous explosion of undetermined origins just north of Chelyabinsk in the central Soviet Union that devastated a large amount of countryside. The CIA formally reported it as a nuclear mishap, but there was quite a bit of speculation that it was caused when some sort of psychic weapon misfired.
“There’s a scientist, a Dr. Vasilev, at the Moscow Institute of Physiological Psychology, who has written several papers that, if you read between the lines, indicate strong Russian experimentation in psychic weapons. I think this
Chyort, this devil, may be the latest generation of such a weapon.”
The lieutenant shivered and Dalton put an arm on her shoulder. He could feel the shaking, something he had felt before from soldiers who had been pushed too far and couldn’t handle it anymore. Combat stress.
Jackson leaned her head into his arm, her voice no longer that of the woman, but the girl who had been scared. “I don’t know what this thing is. I met the devil today and now he knows me. And he’ll get me next time I go over there.”
“Listen to me,” Dalton said in a low voice. “Listen to me. I know you’re afraid and it’s okay to be afraid. Because you got something to be afraid of and you just had something real bad happen.
“When I was a POW in Vietnam, they brought in a pilot late one afternoon. They carried him down the corridor past my cell, and I could see that he was in bad shape. He still had his flight suit on but it was all torn up and he was bleeding. He must have come down near a village. In a way, he was lucky to be alive, because once the villagers got hold of one of those who brought death out of the sky— as they called pilots— they usually hacked him to pieces before he could even get out of his parachute harness. But the NVA must have gotten to him in time. They liked pilots because they could get some good intelligence off them and they had publicity value.”
Dalton heard Jackson sniffle. He kept speaking.
“They put him in the cell next to me. I heard him crying that night. Hell, I remember crying my first night after I came to.”
Jackson looked up at the sergeant major in surprise.
Dalton smiled. “Anyone who wasn’t scared or didn’t feel afraid in such a situation would have to be nuts. I’ve met a few guys who weren’t afraid in combat, who actually enjoyed it— they were sociopaths. And those guys scared the piss out of me.
“Anyway, I reached through the bars and called to him. I got him to put his hand out and I held it. All night long. Because the thing we’re afraid of more than anything else is being alone.”
Jackson pulled back slightly and Dalton took his arm off her shoulders. “This devil doesn’t scare you as much as the thought of facing him alone. But that isn’t going to happen. Next time you meet this Chyort, this devil, you won’t be alone. We’ll be there with you.”
Jackson stood up.
“Okay?” Dalton asked.
Jackson nodded, her eyes red.
“Get some rest,” Dalton said. “I’d take one of Hammond’s shots if I was you.”
Dalton watched her walk away. Jackson reminded him in a way of Marie. He tried to pinpoint what the semblance was, then realized there was nothing in particular except that Jackson had needed him.
He sat in the dark of the bunk room, his mind not on the upcoming mission, but on the past. The first time he had been under fire. The day that had torn him away from Marie for five long years.
“He must keep this bandage on for three days.”
Specialist Fourth Class Jimmy Dalton listened as the interpreter relayed his instructions to the mother. Dalton spoke Vietnamese, not fluently, but well enough so that he could have given the information himself, but he had learned that it went over better coming from the interpreter. It was scary enough for these people to come with their medical problems to the large foreigners and allow themselves to be exposed to treatments they could not understand. The concept of one of the foreigners speaking their language was something that took a while for most to assimilate