“All right,” Dalton said. “Captain Anderson, designate targets for your men.”
“Roger that,” Anderson answered.
Dalton did the same, able to use the views forwarded from Lieutenant Jackson and the two other RVers to give each of his men specific targets. As he did this, a part of Dalton started feeling more confident. He’d been on many military operations in his time in the Army, but this one, while undoubtedly the strangest, also was presenting him with advantages he hadn’t even dreamed of. Being able to see the target like this and then being able to mentally communicate with each of his men, letting them know his plan by seeing it, instead of just telling them what he wanted, was something every military commander would give anything for.
“Are we ready?”
He received an affirmative from each man.
“Sybyl, give us the visual checkpoints,” Dalton ordered.
It was a technique the RVers had perfected. Sybyl could access the NSA’s satellite imagery database and pick easily identifiable spots on the earth’s surface between their present location and the target. They could then project themselves through virtual space from checkpoint to checkpoint by imaging the picture.
“Let’s do it.”
The Special Forces men’s avatars lost their weapons as their arms shifted into wings. They entered the virtual plane and headed south.
Dalton found himself alone once more, moving through the virtual sky with his virtual wings. He hit the first checkpoint and spotted two other of his men passing through. He kept going, until he was at the last checkpoint, less than a kilometer from the target. At that point, he pulled in power from Sybyl and materialized on a hillside, the bulk of the mountain between him and the target. He watched as the other men showed up within a couple of minutes of each other.
“Hell of a way to infiltrate a target area,” Captain Anderson noted as he gained his feet and took a few tentative steps, refamiliarizing himself with operating in the real world with his avatar.
“Any change in the target?” Dalton asked Jackson.
“Negative, ” Jackson responded. “Here’s the current image.”
Dalton checked it. “All right,” he said to the men of his fireteam, Trilly, Egan, and Barnes. “We will go back into the virtual plane from here and I want us to come out into the real world right here— ” He picked a spot on the image. It was about a hundred meters from the railcar, in the midst of numerous red silhouettes indicating the attacking force.
“When you come out, come out blasting,” Dalton said. “Ready, Captain Anderson?”
“Ready.”
“Let’s go.”
Dalton released his hold on the real world and dematerialized. He focused on the image of the spot he had picked. And then he was there. He materialized, the power tube flowing out of his right arm as he flickered into existence in the real world.
He fired at the closest red silhouette.
On a hill to the south a wide-angle video camera had been set up on orders from the CIA to send an image back to Bright Gate. The range area was supposed to be completely evacuated, but two officers from Fort Hood had stayed in the observation post, curious to see what the results of all the strange, high-level orders they had received would be. They had expected to see parachutes come out of the sky, perhaps carrying members of a Ranger battalion practicing a train takedown.
They were stunned when strange men appeared out of nothingness, firing with what looked like tubes in place of forearms and hands. Silhouettes splintered as small fireballs hit them.
Through his binoculars, one of the officers watched as a derelict tank was hit by a larger fireball that smashed through the front armor and exploded inside.
“Who the hell are these guys?” the officer asked his partner.
“What the hell are they?” the other officer asked in return as he focused in on one of the forms, seeing that the face was a featureless white mask.
It was going very well. Of course, Dalton reflected as he moved and fired, the silhouettes weren’t shooting back. That was perhaps the biggest concern he had. Despite Dr. Hammond’s assurances, he wasn’t absolutely confident that the avatars could sustain much damage or that they could be reconstituted as easily as she imagined. There was the issue of what had happened to Stith lurking in the back of his mind.
He did a forward roll behind a berm and fired, slicing a red silhouette in half. “Anderson?” he asked through Sybyl.
“We ’ve wiped the ORP out. No problem!” Anderson’s voice was excited, like a kid who had just won a big ball game.
Dalton didn’t blame him. It was intoxicating, being able to move and fire, to communicate instantly, to come in and out of reality. As he thought that, Dalton looked at a tank hulk fifty meters away. He faded out of the real, sped through the virtual, and popped into existence inside the tank. He “killed” all the crew, then “jumped” again to another position.
Without being asked, Sybyl was updating him on the position of the other members of the team, pushing the data through his consciousness without interfering with what he was doing. He could see that Anderson’s team was moving slowly in his direction, clearing out the terrain between them.
That was when the drones came in overhead. Three of them, flying in triangular formation, they were firing off flares to simulate weapons. Each was programmed with their flight route and had a wingspan of twenty feet. They were flying at two hundred miles an hour, low out of the setting sun.
Even as Dalton noted this unexpected development, he was getting the exact positions, directions, and speeds of the drones from Lieutenant Jackson. He swung up his tube and fired, as did Barnes. The drones were blasted out of the sky less than two seconds after they had been spotted.
“Behind you!” One of the RVers warned him.
Dalton spun, tube at the ready, but even before his avatar completed the turn, the RVer had shown him what was happening. A group of the blue silhouette targets had dropped their covering and were now red.
That lasted for less than a second as all six Special Forces men fired into the new targets.
Dalton paused. There were no more targets. The other members of his fireteam “jumped” to his position. Then Anderson’s team was there. He could see Raisor’s avatar floating to the north, watching, and he knew where the surprises had come from.
“Let’s go home,” Dalton ordered.
On the hillside, the two officers lowered their binoculars after watching the ten men’s arms shift into wings before they simply blinked out of existence.
“That couldn’t have been real,” one of the men whispered.
“Those targets are all destroyed,” the other noted. “That’s real.”
The first officer headed for the door of the bunker. “We weren’t supposed to be here. As far as I’m concerned, we didn’t see anything. We didn’t hear anything. We don’t know anything.”
“We wasted them!” Egan, the intelligence sergeant, was ecstatic as he toweled off the embryonic fluid.
Dalton didn’t say anything, letting the adrenaline flow run its course. The trial run had gone far better than he’d expected. He’d had to reevaluate his outlook on the upcoming mission and accept that Raisor was mostly right— they would have a tremendous advantage and they were the best force for this mission. Not only were they a potent fighting force once they arrived on target, but the ability to infiltrate and exfiltrate a foreign country through the virtual field was unparalleled in its possibilities. Dalton saw Raisor and Hammond by the master control console watching.