“Level one,” Dr. Woods called out.

Boreas was peering through a large pair of binoculars mounted on a tripod. He could see in the bottom of the view that the general was getting out of the Humvee and into the chopper. He indicated for Kirtley to take a spare pair of glasses.

“Level two.” The red glow was now over a hundred meters in diameter, reaching up the same distance into the sky.

The helicopter lifted, banking to the east.

“Level three.” There was excitement in Woods’s voice.

“Increase,” Boreas ordered.

“Level three point five.”

The red glow now covered the entire antenna field and was racing after the helicopter, the crew and passengers of which were unaware of what was happening behind them.

“Level four.”

Boreas adjusted the focus. He could see into the cockpit as the field reached the aircraft. Both pilots jerked upright in their seats and the chopper skewed about as if on a string. There was blood flowing over the pilot’s face, pouring out of his ears.

The pilot slammed forward onto the instrument panel, twitched for a few seconds, then was still. The chopper nosed over and smashed into the ground, exploding in a ball of fire.

“Decrease power,” Boreas ordered.

The red field diminished to nothing until the power was completely off.

Boreas turned to Kirtley. “Now come to my office and I’ll brief you on what I want from you at Bright Gate.”

8

McFairn had four pieces of paper on her desk. One was the intelligence summary from Boreas regarding the activity on the virtual plane HAARP had picked up. The second was an action brief from Southern Command, detailing the disappearance of a Special Forces team assigned to Task Force Six in Colombia. The third was an interception and subsequent decryption of satellite communications between a ground element in Colombia and an unknown location.

She noted the brief introduction to the intercept, which gave information about the way the message had been encrypted-a top-notch program, but not good enough to beat the acres of computers hidden underneath NSA headquarters. The NSA was the largest employer of mathematicians in the world, almost all of them focused on making and breaking codes.

She’d read many such reports in her years, and the dryness of spoken words typed on a page had always struck her as a weak substitute for the real thing, so a DVD disk with the intercept decrypted was attached to the report as per her standing order. Before she read the report, McFairn stuck the DVD in the player built into the face of her desk and thumbed the remote.

There was a hiss of static, then a woman’s voice. “They’re surrendering.” Glancing at the report, McFairn noted that her voice analysts had deduced the accent to be Russian, specifically from the Moscow area.

The second voice startled her. Feminine, but with an echo to it. “Three of them are dead, one is wounded. There are six others. I think Valika is going to kill the surviving Americans even though they are surrendering”

McFairn hit the Pause button. The report indicated that the speech experts had no fix on the owner of the second voice. The writer of the report summarized that the voice might have been distorted by the transmitting equipment at the source. McFairn thought differently-she couldn’t tell herself why, but the edge in the voice went beyond what a machine could do. Besides, they had the machines downstairs to reverse distortion, and they obviously hadn’t been able to.

The next voice was male. “We want them alive.”

The report indicated: male, Colombian, educated. No surprise there, McFairn thought-the Ring. They even had the same voice on other intercepts: Cesar-the leader of the organization. “I said we want them alive,” the man repeated. “Put the gun down, Valika, and send the men in”

Natasha Valika-McFairn’s intelligence officers had a file on the ex-GRU agent. She’d go through that later.

“I don’t like being spied on, Señor Cesar. Where is the witch?”

The strange voice again: “Where I can see you.”

“It worked, Professor. We don’t need you any more, Souris. Turn off the Aura generator.”

McFairn sat up straight. That confirmed what they had already been almost positive of. It was indeed Professor Souris who was behind Aura.

“This is just the beginning. The world will be ours.”

Checking the report, McFairn noted that the voice analyst could not match the voice off this intercept with their file copies of Souris ’s voice. The two weren’t even close. What had happened to Souris? Why had she become a turncoat?

McFairn had read the scientist’s FBI file. There was nothing there to indicate treason. Dual Ph.D.s from MIT. The highest clearance possible granted, which meant an extensive background check that she had passed without the slightest blemish. Over a decade of work on various projects before going to the HERTF group when it was founded. From there she went to work at Bright Gate and then to HAARP. And then one day she just didn’t show up for work and was gone.

McFairn tapped the end of a pen against her lips. Souris and Professor Jenkins had been the keys to getting HAARP/Bright Gate going. Now Souris was working for the Ring and Jenkins was dead. She wished that Boreas would tell her whom he was fighting.

The other essential piece of information from the report was the fact that the location of Valika and Souris had been pinpointed in Colombia via a KH-14 spy satellite tracking their uplink. Almost exactly where the Special Forces team had been waiting in ambush. That meant that Souris had developed a portable Aura transmitter since the SF team had picked the ambush site. Cesar’s uplink had been tracked back to a commercial transmitter in Puerto Rico, which meant he was most likely using a ground line from a distant source to the uplink.

The fourth item on her desk was a copy of an accident report filed to the aviation center at Fort Rucker concerning the crash of a Blackhawk helicopter in Alaska. Four fatalities-two pilots, a crew chief, and General Eichen. Cause of crash was initially being called pilot error pending further investigation. McFairn knew such investigations could take months. And then, they would most likely support the initial conclusion, since the effect of HAARP would not be taken into account because the investigators would have no idea how it worked.

More blood spilled. She took out her Sun Tzu and read for a little while, before going back to her work.

Sweat poured down Dalton ’s face. His left arm jerked, then lifted up to cover his eyes as his legs kicked the blanket off the bed. He moaned, protesting in his sleep against whatever demon was invading his unconscious mind.

Jackson put a hand on his shoulder and shook gently. “Sergeant Major.”

Dalton bolted upright, hand snaking for the automatic pistol under the pillow. Jackson ’s hand was on top of his, having seen this once before. “Easy, Jimmy, easy.”

Dalton ’s hand stopped, his eyes focusing. He swung his feet over to the side and planted them on the floor, connecting with reality. “What’s up?”

“The new boss is here. Kirtley. And he has a half dozen people with him. A new team.”

“Military?” Dalton asked as he retrieved the pistol and stuck it in the small of his back, under his fatigue shirt.

“I don’t think. Civilian clothes.”

“CIA?”

“Maybe,” she said. “One of the alphabet soup organizations, for sure.”

Dalton scratched his head. “Then why does he want us around?”

“I suppose he’ll tell us. After all, we’re the old hands-the only experienced people left who have operated as Psychic Warriors.”