The hand twitched and tremored, hovering above the switch.
Then it stopped in surprise. Souris ’s psyche saw something on the virtual plane, a burning essence racing her way. Full of rage and anger, a red-hot form against the gray.
She flipped the switch and the field-and form-disappeared and she was back in the Rover.
Raisor would have screamed if he had a body to produce the sound, as the cone of light was snuffed out and he was back in the featureless psychic plane.
He paused. But it was not so featureless now. He could sense more than before, picking up the faintest outlines of the real world as if through very darkly colored crystal. He was somewhere south of the United States. Over jungle.
He had gained some strength through the effort of moving on his own. He remembered Dr. Hammond at Bright Gate and her explanations of the importance of the avatars that her master computer, Sybyl, generated to allow him and the others to move on the psychic plane. She had said they were useful but not essential to existence on the plane.
Another pause. He was remembering more. There was more of him here than he had thought. He had some power.
And the cone of light. How he knew, he could not articulate even to himself, but he knew the light promised more power, a haven in the virtual world. He would find it again.
7
A metal field was growing in the middle of a brutal Alaskan winter, braving the harsh winds coming off of the Wrangell Mountains. Eighty acres of metal sprouted from a surface of loose gravel and blowing snow-last year it had been only sixty acres. Over 540 towers, each exactly seventy-two feet high, were spaced eighty feet apart in a rectangular grid pattern. Each tower was crowned with two pairs of crossed dipole antennas. Lower down, fifteen feet above the gravel, an elevated screen of mesh went from tower to tower, forming a reflector and allowing room for maintenance workers and trucks to travel underneath. There were eighty transmitter stations also hidden under the screen, each one linked to a master control room ten miles away on a foothill of the Wrangells, where it could safely overlook the transmission field. In the highly classified books that listed expenditures in the American government’s Black Budget, the facility was known simply by the acronym HAARP-High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program.
Snow-covered peaks reached up to gray clouds all around. HAARP was in the center of United States ’ largest national park, bigger than New Hampshire and Vermont combined. Nine of the sixteen tallest mountains in the United States were in the park. Four of those mountains were over sixteen thousand feet, higher than any peak in the continental United States.
The park comprised over thirteen million acres, with another million acres of private land inside its boundaries, yet less than one hundred people lived in the area. They were a tight-lipped group of prospectors and hunters, rugged individualists who valued their privacy and who knew better than to inquire into or stray too close to the strange fenced compound hidden in the midst of their domain.
Inside the two-story concrete building that controlled HAARP, on the top floor, a cluster of scientists and military personnel were gathered around monitors, each doing their assigned duty. Overseeing all of them, in a small room at the back of the control center, a man in civilian clothes sat behind a desk, looking through a one-way mirror at the workers. He was a distinguished looking man with thick white hair combed straight back atop a patrician visage. His eyes were the most striking feature, deep, icy blue with flecks in them, that some who had peered into had sworn were silver. He watched as his chief scientist-Dr. Woods-grabbed a piece of paper as soon as it was clear of a laser printer and came into the office.
“What do you have?”
While HAARP was primarily designed to be a transmitter, it could also receive on the same frequencies. Picking up activity on the virtual plane was a passive action, and they had been trying to perfect their ability to pinpoint such activity for over a year now. The problem was that while they could get a direction, determining the distance to such activity was more difficult, as it was not clear what the transmission’s power level was. Boreas’s initial recommendation had been to build a second HAARP site so they could get two directions, and where the lines crossed would be the location they sought.
However, as with everything associated with the virtual plane, the scientists informed him that it wasn’t that simple. They were like drunks wandering in a forest, trying to map it by bouncing into trees. Another, more immediate problem was that building another HAARP site would bring them more attention than they wanted.
The door opened and the lead programmer walked in with a computer printout.
“Did you find it?” Boreas asked.
In response, Woods put the paper on the desk. “We have a track line for the new transmission.”
Boreas ran his finger along the dark line. It crossed the location in Colombia where the ambush had been set. More importantly, it didn’t cross the transmission track they’d had for the attack on the Coast Guard cutter. Which meant that there were two transmitters. Or, Boreas realized, Souris had developed a portable one. Or both. Looking out his window at the field of antennas and considering that the Ring might have designed a portable version of what he saw made him accept that the option of using Psychic Warriors to investigate was much more desirable than it had been. They were too close now to have a group of drug dealers screw things up.
He was still pondering the problem when the door to the room opened and two men, one dressed in civilian clothes, the other in the green uniform of the United States Army, walked in. Three stars adorned the officer’s shoulders, and rows of medals were stretched across the left side of his chest. His face was well tanned, a curious anomaly here in the great white north. The civilian was a middle-aged, well-built black man with a shaved head. He wore a pair of dark slacks and a collarless black shirt buttoned all the way to the neck. A pair of thin metal glasses framed his eyes.
Boreas dismissed Dr. Woods and greeted the newcomers. “General Eichen, Agent Kirtley, welcome to HAARP.”
Eichen took Boreas’s hand. “Hell of a trip to get here, but I enjoyed it. Great country you have. I imagine the hunting is spectacular.”
Kirtley shook hands without comment.
“Depends on what you are hunting.” Boreas turned to a small cabinet. “Can I get you gentlemen a drink?”
“Hell, yes,” Eichen said. “Scotch if you have it.”
Kirtley declined. “No, thank you.”
Boreas poured the general’s drink, then his own. He sat down behind the desk and slid the glass across the pitted surface.
Eichen glanced at the window. “Busy as heck in there.”
“Yes, they are.”
“I’ve read the documents you sent the expenditure oversight committee,” Eichen said.
Boreas steepled his fingers and considered the general. An investigator arriving now couldn’t be coincidence, not with the project as close to completion as it was.
Eichen looked out the window. “HAARP. The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program. Fancy name. Two billion dollars in research and development money over the last two years. And reading between the lines, nothing really accomplished.”
“Reading between what lines?” Boreas didn’t wait for an answer. “We’ve gathered valuable research information and-”
“The ultimate goal of HAARP isn’t research, is it?” Eichen cut him off. “You briefed the congressional oversight committee that this entire complex was designed to allow full-time strategic communications and data link with submerged ballistic missile submarines.” The general paused to take a sip of his drink. “You and I know that was bullshit, correct?”