“Missile launch.” Orrick mentioned it as if he were saying the sun had come up in the morning.
“We’re tracking red,” Colonel Searl acknowledged.
Orrick hit a button. “Pod in. Clear to boogie.” He smiled at Dalton as they were both slammed back in the seat. “We’re faster than any missile made.”
“Tracking green,” Searl announced. “We’re all clear. Entering approach to destination airfield.” He laughed. “Damn Russkies are gonna be surprised to see this baby land.”
Dalton clicked on the SATCOM link. “Jackson?”
There was no reply.
‘Jackson, I don’t want to take anything from what you’re doing, but if you can answer me, let me know.”
“I can talk,” Jackson said.
“How’s the wall holding?” Dalton asked.
“It’s a losing battle. The bomb is sliding from virtual to real at the rate of three percent per minute. At this rate, it will completely be in the real plane in twenty-two more minutes.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
“Sergeant Major.” Colonel Mishenka snapped a salute, which Dalton automatically returned.
“Colonel Mishenka.”
Mishenka unrolled a blueprint and put it on the hood of the four-by-four he’d driven out to the SR-75’s taxi point. “This is Special Department Number Eight’s Far-Field Experimental Unit.” His finger touched several points. “Surface-to-air missiles that fire automatically if the airspace is encroached upon.”
“We already had one of those fired at us as we came in.” Dalton put the imagery the SR-75 had taken next to the blueprint. He checked his watch: twenty minutes.
Mishenka looked over the photos, then back at his blueprint. “Automatic guns cover the entire perimeter using heat sensors. Anything registering over a certain size is fired on. I understand many a deer has lost its life there. The perimeter is also mined; the mines are pressure activated. The only map of the minefield is kept in the facility, so we are going to have to breach it.
“Everything is controlled by the master computer inside SD8. And General Rurik even if we could get through to him, can’t turn it off as long as Feteror— Chyort— is out of his cage.”
“So we have to get in.”
Mishenka pointed across the runway. Two heavy cargo planes waited. They were surrounded by a large number of men in camouflage fatigues preparing weapons and gear. “The Twenty-third Spetsnatz company is ready. We’re only a couple of minutes from SD8 by air.” He waved and several officers came over and gathered around the hood. Dalton noted in them the same hard, competent look he had seen in Special Operations soldiers the world over.
“How do we get in?” Dalton asked.
Mishenka frowned. “There is a bigger problem than the automatic defenses.”
“What is that?” Every nerve of Dalton’s body was screaming for them to load the planes and get going, but he knew a couple of minutes spent planning was more important than rushing in with guns blazing.
“Just before I left Moscow, I was fully briefed on SD8’s base. Two things struck me— one good, one not so good. The not so good thing is that there is a wall— a psychic wall— completely surrounding the facility. I saw a videotape of a prisoner who was forced to walk into the wall.” Mishenka tapped a finger against his skull. “His brain was destroyed.”
Dalton nodded. “Bright Gate, where I came from, has a similar wall around it.”
“Do you know of a way to get through it?”
“I will check with my base once we’re airborne. What was the good thing?”
“General Rurik did not trust Feteror. Because of that, the general wears a wristband that monitors his own heartbeat. If his heartbeat ceases for ten seconds, the wristband shuts down the central computer, Zivon, which shuts down Feteror, trapping him inside the cyborg machine that keeps him alive.”
“So we get to General Rurik— ” Dalton began.
“And stop his heartbeat— which means kill him— we stop Feteror,” Mishenka finished.
Lieutenant Jackson remained in the chamber where the bomb hung over the isolation tanks. It had materialized over 40 percent. As she watched, another small piece flickered into reality.
“Dr. Hammond?” Dalton’s voice cut through the air.
“Yes?” Hammond answered.
“How do I get through a psychic wall?”
Hammond gave a bitter laugh. “You don’t. Not if you want to keep your brain from becoming mush.”
“I’ve got to get through the wall here or we can’t stop this thing.”
Jackson watched the bomb produce another square, but listened as Hammond thought out loud to Dalton. “The wall is an electromagnetic projection on the psychic plane. Think of it as a field of deadly electricity. You touch it, you’re zapped.”
Jackson could hear the sound of turboprop engines in the background coming from Dalton’s end.
“How do I get through it, Doctor?” Dalton’s voice was insistent. “Wear rubber-soled shoes? Wrap tinfoil around my head? Think! There’s got to be a way.”
“There’s so much we don’t know!” Hammond protested. “We aren’t even really sure if our wall works or not!”
“Well, the Russian one does, that’s for damn sure,” Dalton said.
‘Jesus Christ!” Jackson exploded, pushing Hammond aside and typing into the keyboard. The answer was back in a second.
“Sybyl says there aren’t any options,” Jackson relayed.
“Not good enough,” Dalton’s voice echoed out of the speaker. “There’s got to be a way.”
“Here.” Hammond regained the keyboard and typed. She stared at the results. “I’ve had Sybyl run a multitude of possibilities and probabilities. Your best chance of success is that you might be able to short it out for a very brief period of time.”
“How do I do that?” Dalton asked.
Hammond closed her eyes and thought for a few seconds. “You would have to put a conductor in the field. It would draw power for an instant before the field snapped back to normal operating parameters. For the short period while the field focused on that conductor, most likely less than a second, you might be able to get through close by.”
“What would be a conductor?”
“There is only one conductor that works for a psychic field,” Hammond said. “The human brain.”
Oma’s cell phone rang for the third time in five minutes. Reluctantly she opened it.
“Yes?”
“I said every warhead had to be accounted for,” the NATO representative hissed at her.
“Every warhead is accounted for,” Oma said. “You know for certain where one is— or was— and I can tell you where the other nineteen are.”
“Don’t be a fool. Detonating one doesn’t count.”
“It took out GRU headquarters, you should be grateful.”
“Grateful? Grateful? Every country that has nuclear weapons is in DEFCON Four alert status. There’s a lot of itchy fingers out there and you’ve put them over the button.”
“Do you want the location of the rest of the warheads or not?” Oma pressed. “The one that just went off proves we have the warheads and we have the means and the will to use them.”
“Give me the location.”
“If I give it to you, you must promise that you will not pursue me.”
The man laughed. “Fine. We won’t. But I’m sure your countrymen will be after you until the day you die.”
“Perhaps,” Oma said. “Here are the coordinates of the remaining weapons and the phased-displacement generator.”
“What will happen to the bomb here if Sergeant Major Dalton does succeed?” Jackson asked Hammond.
“I do not know,” Hammond answered.
“Best guess,” Jackson pressed.
“It will explode right where it is, some of it into the real plane at approximately the percentage it is in your world when it detonates.”