“What kind of help?” Mentor asked.

“We have access to both normal MILSTAR communications channels and GPS, right?” Dalton pressed.

Mentor was thoughtful. “Yes.”

Dalton grabbed a chair and indicated for Jackson to pull one close. “I have a plan if we can find the right pieces to play.”

Souris transferred from the helicopter to Cesar’s Lear at Colorado Springs. As the plane accelerated down the runway, she contacted the Gagarin via SATPhone.

“Yes?” Cesar answered on the first ring.

“I have the code.”

“Give it to me.”

Souris rattled off the letters and numbers.

“I’ve got it,” Cesar acknowledged.

“I will be there in six hours,” Souris said.

“It will be over by then,” Cesar said.

“I know.” A smile crossed Souris ’s face. “I know.” She had her laptop on her knees and was typing in what she had learned about the Psychic Warrior program. Aura no longer interested her, nor did Cesar. She cut the connection.

McFairn stood in front of the large stainless steel vault door. Her pulse was racing and she forced herself to slow her breathing before she fainted from hyperventilation. A part of her was almost grateful that she couldn’t send the code to Boreas. But that part was overwhelmed by the knowledge that the code had been stolen; regardless of how much she agreed with Boreas, she knew that she would rather be on his side than whoever his enemy was.

Dalton felt the embryonic fluid around his feet, then legs as he climbed into his isolation tube. The process was as brutal as all the previous ones, but his focus was on the upcoming mission. They had found the right piece for Jackson to use in Alaska, but hadn’t been able to find him anything near the Gagarin. He was going in on his own and hoping he could come up with something once he was on the ship. At least it wasn’t virtually shielded.

“Focus on the white dot,” Hammond ’s voice echoed inside his head.

24

The cargo bay doors of the shuttle swung open to space. Sitting in the lower level of the flight deck, facing the cargo hold, Eagle Six had his hands on the controls for the Remote Manipulator System (RMS), a fifty-foot-long articulating arm. The tip of the RMS was attached to CS-MILSTAR. Earlier, while the doors were still closed, he had gone in and removed the locking bolts on the satellite, freeing it.

Boreas checked the computer program for the tenth time in the past hour. It was all set. Millennia of battling would be over in a minute. If he had the unlock code for CS-MILSTAR. He pressed Redial on his SATPhone once more.

He cursed as the phone rang and rang without an answer.

The dishes on the Yuri Gagarin shifted in orientation, aiming toward the nearest MILSTAR satellite. In the communications center, Cesar was with Valika, the crew under strict orders to leave them alone.

“We will destroy HAARP first,” Cesar said. “Then, I think, maybe the Pentagon.”

Valika frowned. “Señor Cesar, I do not see why-”

Cesar smiled. “Valika. Call me Hector.”

“Why are you doing this, Hector?”

“Because it is-” A confused look came across Cesar’s face. “Because.” The confusion disappeared and anger replaced it. “Goddamn it, can’t anyone do what I tell them to, just because I tell them?” “I’m sorry, sir,” Valika said.

“We have the power!” Cesar said. “Don’t you see that?” “But it makes no sense for you to do this.” “You are like Naldo,” Cesar said. “A coward.” Valika stiffened. After all she had done for Cesar, he was treating her like the Soviet Union had done to its faithful soldiers, turning its back on them. She got up and left the communications center, slamming the hatch behind her, leaving Cesar staring at the program on the computer screen that Souris had set up.

In the small cabin she had been allocated, Valika looked around. Her weapons cases were laid out on the bed, along with the small bag containing her few personal items. She tried to calm down, but her chest hurt and she felt as if she might be ill.

She realized this was the sum of her life. The original of the photo that Souris had used in the simulation, of her parents, was in her bag. Valika sat down next to the case holding her sniper rifle and took the picture in her hands.

Jackson saw the field of antennas. And she could feel the psychic wall like a dog would feel an electronic fence. She hung in the virtual plane, waiting, close by. While she was there, she cast about, searching for others, but there was nothing, just the cold wind over the icy mountains.

“ Mentor ?” she relayed through Sybyl. “Are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“Have you pinpointed my help?”

“Yes,” Mentor replied. As he relayed the information she needed, Jackson was already moving.

The two B-2 bombers were “hot,” meaning they had live ordnance on board. They’d been in the air for eleven hours, having taken off from their home base at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri and flying a complex route, designed to test the crews’ abilities en route to their “target.”

Each plane was loaded with a conventional Block 30 weapons package: forty MK-82 five-hundred-pound bombs and thirty-six CBU-87 combined-effects munitions, each weighing a thousand pounds. Almost forty thousand pounds of ordnance was packed inside each aircraft, more than ten B-17 Flying Fortresses could carry. The bombs were loaded inside the fuselage on cylindrical racks, which allowed them to be dropped at a high rate of speed.

The two bombers were flying north at high altitude, having gone “feet dry” over the southern coast of Alaska. Their designated target was an Air Force bombing range in the middle of the state.

They were using GATS/GAM to conduct their mission: Global Positioning System Aided Targeting System/GPS Aided Munitions. In normal speak, that meant the two-man crews were basically surrendering control of targeting and even flight path to the computer, which had the location of the objective programmed in and which was updating the flight path every one thousandth of a second using Ground Positioning Satellites that fixed the aircraft’s position within two meters. The computer would not only get them to the target, it would release the bombs in a predetermined order to cause maximum destructive effect.

It was cutting-edge technology and something the crews of the planes didn’t particularly care for, as they were little more than observers.

Jackson found the two B-2s by following the GPS downlink. She flew above them on the virtual plane, admiring their sleek lines. While only 69 feet long, each aircraft was over twice that wide, at 172 feet. The smooth black surfaces were designed to make the aircraft virtually invisible to radar, and also served to make them almost invisible as they flew through the dark night sky.

Jackson slid into the first bomber. She found the master computer and entered it, flowing along the electronic paths inside.

Eagle Six’s hand barely twitched on the controls, but the RMS magnified the effort and the CS-MILSTAR satellite lifted off the floor of the cargo bay.

“The mainframe is still booting,” General Mitchell told McFairn. “But we have found access to an outside line. It’s an old one. Landline. As far as we can tell, it’s a regular phone line that someone forgot about.”

“Where?”

Mitchell led her out of the building they were in, into another that held stacks of crates. In the rear an old rotary dial phone hung on the wall. “One of my men checked it. It has a dial tone.”