“You don’t know what you’ll be missing,” Kraskov said as she headed for the door.

“I don’t even want to consider thinking about that,” Valika threw over her shoulder as she left.

The first Blackhawk landed, blowing snow into Dalton ’s face. The side door slid open and the crew chief jumped out. Dalton waved at him to help. With Barnes’s and Jackson’s assistance they manhandled Sybyl III’s mainframe to the helicopter and inside. It filled most of the cargo bay.

That helicopter lifted and the second one came in. As Jackson, Barnes, and the new crew chief loaded the other gear needed for Sybyl III to work, Dalton got in the cargo bay and leaned between the seats. He shook Roby’s hand.

“Thanks for making it, Chief

“Long time no see, Sergeant Major. We needed some blade time for training anyway. Where do you want me to take this stuff?”

Dalton handed him a map. He tapped a location. “Right there.”

Roby squinted, making out the markings. Then he looked up, eyes widening. “Oh, man.”

“There will be someone there waiting to off-load this gear.”

“All right.”

Raisor’s essence was drained of power as Aura II was turned off. He was once more a formless being on the psychic plane. He headed toward the United States.

Cesar picked up the phone and dialed the direct number for his villa in Colombia where the Special Forces team was being held. His instructions to his man in charge there were brief and to the point. It was time to get things moving and the Americans weren’t playing along as he would like.

Once the picture came out, he put it back in the top slot and dialed a new number.

McFairn stared at the photo that had just been faxed to her office. She almost jumped as her secure phone rang.

“McFairn.”

“General Carlson here. I just got a faxed picture from Colombia.”

“I also just received it,” McFairn told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“My office. Now. Bring everything you have on these sons-a-bitches.”

Dalton watched the lights of the second Blackhawk disappear into the night sky and listened as the sound of the blades faded until there was silence. He stood on the landing grate, looking out over the starlit mountains.

“Marie?” he whispered.

A cool breeze blew by and he thought of the poem.

He reached out, above his head, ignoring the pain in his shoulder, spreading his fingers wide, the breeze touching his skin. “I feel you.”

14

Deputy Director McFairn rarely traveled away from her office for meetings. It was a sign of power in Washington to have people come to her, but in the case of General Carlson, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, she had to make an exception.

The sun was barely tingeing the eastern sky with light as her limousine pulled into the Pentagon lot. She was quickly escorted to Carlson’s office, her briefcase tucked tightly under her arm.

“Director,” Carlson stood and indicated for her to sit in the chair directly in front of his massive desk.

“General, good to see you again.”

Carlson wasted no time in pleasantries. He threw the faxed photograph in front of McFairn. A dead man in unmarked jungle fatigues, splayed out on a neatly maintained lawn, a bullet hole in the left side of his chest. “That’s Captain Scott. The team leader.”

“I know,” McFairn acknowledged.

“What do you have on the Special Forces team?” Carlson demanded.

She put Dalton ’s report on his desk and waited as he leafed through it.

“How did you get such detailed information?” he asked when done.

“Bright Gate.”

“I thought the Psychic Warrior team was inoperative.”

A fancy term for lost, McFairn thought. “We still have some operators and I’m currently reconstituting another team.”

“How did the Task Force Six team get compromised? You don’t have that in the report.”

“We think there’s a possibility the Ring is using remote viewers and they spotted the team.”

“Oh Christ.” Carlson slammed the report down on the desk. “You people and your weird psychic crap.”

“You know Bright Gate works and you know it works well, given what happened in Russia not long ago,” McFairn pointed out.

“If your people went down there, why didn’t they free our men? They might have saved Scott’s life.”

“They could only do a recon. There was no way they could have gotten the men out without all of them getting killed.”

Carlson grumbled something.

McFairn leaned forward. “I have an idea how we can kill two birds with one stone.”

“What do you mean?”

“Rescue the captured soldiers and destroy the Ring’s RV capability.”

“I’m listening.”

As McFairn laid out her plan to use the Psychic Warriors to spearhead a rescue mission, Raisor listened in, floating in the virtual plane in Carlson’s office. The Pentagon wasn’t psychically shielded, which Raisor found interesting, but not surprising. It was simply too large and had too many people coming and going to be shielded. He also knew there was the fact that the conventional military distrusted something as radical as Psychic Warrior.

He had followed McFairn’s limousine from Fort Meade to the Pentagon, seething with the inability to do anything, but now he saw an opportunity to strike back.

When she was done presenting her plan, Raisor made his first jump south, heading back toward Saba.

Captain Mikhal Lonsky had been in command of the research ship Kosmonaut Yuri Gagarin for almost ten years, and he had watched their operating budget shrink with each new appropriation out of Moscow. Named after the first man to go into space, the ship had maintained communications with Mir as long as that station had been operational. With the space station’s demise the previous year, this year’s appropriation had been appallingly low. The crew was at forty percent, the rest laid off by the new capitalistic Russian society to save money, which was spent first on necessary repairs.

The most recent mission given the ship was to monitor launches from the European Space Consortium’s base at Kouro, in French Guiana. It was a boring job, but one the new KGB, called the SRU, wanted done, more for industrial espionage purposes than military necessity.

When all four radar dishes were oriented forward as they were now, the Gagarin lost two knots in speed due to wind resistance, but that was of little importance to Lonsky as they were stationary, thrusters fore and aft holding them in place against the wind and current.

Lonsky turned as his senior communications and computer officer, Tanya Zenata, entered the bridge. There was supposed to be separate officers for each specialty, but the combining of the jobs was another cost-cutting measure forced on Lonsky.

“Sir, we have a radio communiqué from Moscow.”

Lonsky took the paper and read it. His eyebrows arched as the import struck home. Lonsky started laughing, causing the scant bridge crew to turn and look at him. He couldn’t help it. He fell backwards into his command chair, still laughing, tears now flowing down his cheeks. “We’ve been sold,” he finally managed to get out.

Boreas paced back and forth in his office, staring out the large bullet-proof window at the field of antennas that was his province. When HAARP was off, the entire facility was guarded by an electromagnetic wall, impenetrable to remote viewers, Psychic Warriors, or any living thing. Numerous local animals had died when they crossed the buried cables that transmitted the field. A brain, whether in the real world or a virtual essence, could not cross the electromagnetic barrier that was on a frequency inimical to the mind’s own electromagnetic operation.