He peeled the tape off the end of the tube and pressed it against the center of the left steel door. He swung down the two thin metal legs to the ground, centering the tube horizontally against the door. He pulled the firing tab, ran twenty feet away, and dove for cover behind a berm.
The tube fired, the shaped charge producing intense heat that burned a three-foot-diameter hole through the door in an instant.
Dalton ran forward. He slammed against the door, next to the hole, the edges still simmering. He pulled a flash-bang grenade off his vest and threw it in. Counted to three. The grenade went off. Dalton dove through the hole, rolling forward onto the concrete floor inside, coming up to his knees with his AK-74 at the ready.
He fired at the two stunned guards, knocking them backwards. Then he was on his feet, running along the corridor that sloped downward.
Feteror came into being above SD8-FFEU. He could see the bodies littering the ground below. He recognized the uniforms of the dead. Spetsnatz. It had come full circle.
He clearly saw the psychic wall. There was only one way he could get in, through the window allowed him. And once he was inside he would be trapped inside Zivon.
He roared, a demonic dragon circling on leathery wings, his lair below being invaded. Impotent to stop— Feteror paused. He had the bomb. It had to end now.
Mishenka had told Dalton that the guard force inside SD8’s base was minimal— they counted on the automatic defenses and the psychic wall.
So far Dalton had encountered six guards. He edged between two large stacks of supplies. The door from the supply room to the brain center lay ahead. He paused and looked at his watch. Less than two minutes.
Throwing caution to the wind, Dalton sprinted forward and was slammed back as a bullet ripped through his left shoulder.
Jackson was in the center of a jumble of wires in the core of the bomb. She had gone into machinery and computers before, but only for data, for information. Never to do anything real to the machine. She didn’t even know if she could do anything.
“How much time?” she asked Hammond.
“A minute and twenty seconds.”
“What do I do?”
There was a short pause. “According to Sybyl, you must stop the detonator. The conventional explosion that initiates the nuclear reaction.”
“Where is it?”
Hammond had Sybyl project the vision to Jackson.
Feteror took the bomb with him through the window into the underground complex.
Inside the hangar, the next bomb was loaded inside the generator.
Vasilev looked around. Some of the men were tending to Leksi, leaning the dying man against the wall. Chyort was nowhere to be seen, nor did Vasilev sense his presence.
“Fire the next target!” Leksi spit the words out along with a dribble of blood down his chin. “Damn you, do as you’re told.”
Vasilev smiled. He knew without Feteror, the bomb would not go anywhere. “Yes, sir.”
He hit a button on the console. “Atonement,” he whispered.
The hangar disappeared in an instant, destroying the immediate area and the approaching Russian forces that had been alerted by NATO intelligence using the information Oma had called in for her four hundred million.
Dalton looked at his watch. Under a minute. He could hear the man who had shot him moving on the other side of the pallet.
Dalton stood, blood streaming from his shoulder. He yelled in Vietnamese at the top of his lungs and came around the pallet firing. The man was still turning toward him when Dalton’s first bullets hit, splattering him against the wall.
The bolt slammed home. Dalton tossed the gun aside and ran into the corridor, pulling a pistol out of its holster. He kicked open the door at the end and staggered into the brain center.
A Russian general holding a pistol in his hand stood in front of Dalton, soldiers flanking him, their weapons also at the ready.
Feteror looked down from his virtual perch. He saw the American Green Beret and General Rurik pointing their guns at each other. He knew the bomb he had would explode in ten seconds after he released it into the real world. There was nothing they could do to stop it.
“Why?”
Feteror spun about, startled. Opa was shaking his head. “Why must you destroy?” Opa said. The old man’s right arm stretched out toward Feteror, who jumped back, startled. But the arm went right past him, into the virtual window.
Feteror turned to follow it. The arm kept growing until it reached the half-materialized bomb. It flowed into the bomb. The red digital readout blacked out.
“What have you done!” Feteror screamed.
“Do not move!” General Rurik ordered Dalton. The two guards flanked the general, their weapons pointed at Dalton.
The sergeant major could feel the flow of blood down his side from his wound. His head pounded from the aftereffects of the psychic wall. He could see that the barrel of the pistol he was holding was shaking. He knew there was no way he could get all three before they gunned him down.
“Jimmy,” a woman’s voice whispered in his ear. “You know what you have to do.”
Dalton let go of the gun.
Feteror saw the American drop the gun.
“What have you done?” he demanded of Opa. “They have won!”
“No,” Opa said. “I do not think so.”
“Who are you?” General Rurik demanded.
Dalton focused on the Russian general, pushing away all distractions. He used the power of over fifteen hundred days and nights of captivity, the skills he had learned during six months of Trojan Warrior and the past two days at Bright Gate, what Sybyl had shown him of the virtual world and the line between it and the real. He put the white dot right between the Russian’s eyes and then he probed with his mind.
Rurik grabbed his temples, a surprised look on his face. He staggered, tried to say something, then went down to his knees. He wavered there for a couple of seconds, still trying to mouth words that wouldn’t come through the pain in his head. Then he keeled over and smashed into the hard floor, face first.
Feteror saw General Rurik hit the floor, the body slack. He’d seen the psychic force go from the head of the American into the general’s— a golden burst of light on the virtual plane. The light on the general’s wristband changed to red. “We’ll be trapped in here forever!” Feteror grabbed Opa by the shoulders and shook him.
Opa shook his head, the gray beard wagging back and forth. “It is best.”
Feteror screamed into nothingness as his power drained from him, leaving him floating in inky darkness.
The nuclear warhead hanging over the center of Bright Gate snapped completely into reality.
“Oh God!” Hammond yelled as it dropped to the floor of the control room with a thud. It lay there.
“Bring me back,” Lieutenant Jackson’s voice echoed out of the speakers.
Epilogue
“Are they alive?” Barnes asked.
“Their bodies are,” Jackson answered. “Their psyches— their selves…” Her voice trailed off
Sergeant Barnes was in a wheelchair next to her, looking at the tubes holding the rest of the second Psychic Warrior team. “You don’t think we’re going to find them, do you?”
Jackson shrugged. “I don’t know. We’re getting different readings off of Raisor. Sybyl doesn’t know what to make of it. We think he’s definitely out there somewhere, but we haven’t been able to make contact.”