by Bob Mayer
Leksi unfolded a map. "This island holds the target."
One of the men laughed. "October Revolution Island. Perfect."
Leksi pointed at the map. "The GRU has an observation post here, on this mountain, overlooking our target."
"I thought you said this place has been abandoned for thirty-five years," a mercenary noted.
"It has been."
"And the GRU is still watching it?"
"Our target holds something very important," Leksi said.
"What can be that important?"
Leksi looked up from the map and stared at the man. Then he continued the briefing. Barsk listened, but he wasn't jumping with the team. He was to stay on board the aircraft with the pilot and wait until Leksi gave the all-clear signal. Then they would land on the old runway that had serviced the abandoned base.
"Let's rig," Leksi ordered at the conclusion. He looked at his watch. "We're fifteen minutes out."
The plane was a military AN-12 Cub, surplus that Oma had bought off some Air Force personnel eager to make money. Barsk considered it interesting that in the blink of an eye the former Soviet Union had embraced capitalism fiercely; the problem was that there were none of the established checks and balances that Western societies had developed.
In the front half of the cargo bay, a large backhoe was chained down along with other excavating equipment. A pallet full of explosives was tied down just in front of the backhoe. Knowing that he was riding in a plane with a load of C-4 and detonating devices didn't do much for Barsk's emotional health.
The plane banked and Barsk eyed the pallet warily.
Leksi thrust a mask at Barsk. "Put it on."
Barsk slipped it over his head. He felt the cool oxygen flow.
The mercenaries were hooked into small tanks on their chests, bulky parachutes on their backs. Weapons were tied off on their left shoulder. Leksi had a headset on, listening to the pilot. He pushed his mask aside to yell.
"Depressurizing!"
With a shudder, the back of the plane began opening. The bottom half lowered, making a platform, while the top slid up into the large space under the tail.
The twenty men followed Leksi as he walked onto the platform. Barsk shivered from the freezing air swirling in. He edged closer to the heat duct over his head. Leksi moved a large bundle to the edge of the ramp.
A green light flashed. Leksi pushed the bundle, and the men tumbled off the ramp, following it.
*****
Fifteen thousand feet below, First Lieutenant Gregor Potsk was concerned about wood. With winter coming, heat was the first priority, and resupply had gotten so strained that they were lucky to get enough food, never mind kerosene for the heater built into the concrete-and-log bunker set high on the side of the mountain. Two years ago they'd converted to wood, but the problem was they had already cut down all trees within two miles. More wood meant going further.
Potsk shrugged his greatcoat on and picked up an AK-74 and a large band saw. He waited. Two of his detail of eight men stood.
"Let’s go," Potsk said, opening the heavy door. He knew he could order his men to do this, but the situation here was strained at best. He believed in leading by example.
They'd been here for eight months, having been flown in as soon as the weather had cleared the previous spring. They had four months left on their tour of duty, and morale was plummeting with the pending onset of winter. Especially since there seemed to be no purpose to this tasking-watching an abandoned airstrip and the blocked entrance to a long out-of-use underground bunker. Ice crackled underfoot as Potsk traversed the hillside, heading for a valley where the closest trees were left.
"Sir!" one of the men said, tapping him on the arm and then pointing upwards.
Out of the low-hanging gray clouds a parachutist appeared, then another. Soon there were twenty chutes in sight as the first one touched down about two hundred meters away, tumbling down the hillside until the man got his feet under him and cut away the chute.
"Sir?" The soldiers with Potsk were waiting on his orders.
Potsk looked from the closest jumper to the bunker, now over a quarter mile away. He knew they would never beat the paratroopers there. And he had no idea who these men were. Perhaps Spetsnatz running some sort of training exercise. But then he should have been notified. Of course, he immediately thought, things were so disorganized in the military that whoever was jumping might not have known the island was occupied. In fact, Potsk thought as he started walking toward the jumpers, these men shouldn't know about this place at all, because it was highly classified.
"Hello!" Potsk called out
The man stared at him. He was wearing a black jumpsuit with no markings or insignia.
"This is a classified area. There is to be no trespassing. Who is your commander?" Potsk demanded.
"I am." The voice came from the right and Potsk spun around.
Potsk stepped back. The man towered above him, and Potsk noted that there was a scar running down the side of his face. "I said-"
The man brought up a submachine gun and fired a burst blowing back one of the soldiers with Potsk. He swung the smoking muzzle toward Potsk. "Drop your weapons."
Potsk swallowed, dropping his AK-74, the other soldier doing the same. Behind the large man, some of the paratroopers were setting up a tripod and opening a case.
"Who are you?"
"Are all the rest of your men in the bunker?" Leksi demanded.
Potsk glanced toward the bunker, then back at Leksi.
“Tell me the truth." Leksi shifted the aim of his gun and fired. The round caught the other soldier in the leg, spinning him down to the ground. The man moaned in pain, looking up at Potsk.
"They are all in the bunker," Potsk said. He knew the shots would have alerted his men.
"Don't lie to me." Leksi fired again, this time right between the soldier's eyes. Potsk was stunned at the sight of the brains splattered onto the icy ground. The muzzle of Leksi's submachine gun turned in his direction. "Are they all in the bunker?"
"Yes."
Leksi signaled. The paratroopers had placed a missile on top of the tripod. With a flash the missile was off. One man watched through a sight, leading the wire-guided missile. It smashed into the front of the bunker, the armor- piercing nose punching through, the charge going off inside, making puree of the inhabitants.
"You pig!" Potsk yelled.
Leksi fired, almost negligently with one hand, the bullet taking off the top of Potsk's head.
Leksi grabbed his commo man. "Bring the plane in. We don't have much time."
Chapter Ten
"I don't give a damn what this guy says." Colonel Metter's voice was harsh, even with the dampener of the secure phone line. "I'm running this up the flagpole before we lose anyone else."
"Raisor said that we have to keep quiet about Sergeant Stith's death until he gives us the release," Dalton said. He was standing in a room off the experimental chamber, talking to his commander on a direct satellite link phone. "I don't think running it up the flagpole is going to do any good," he added.
"How are the rest of the men?" Metter asked.
Looking around the door, Dalton could see into the chamber. "They just pulled the first two after me out. Both are okay. The rest seem to be doing all right."
"You know they're going to tell me to forget about it." Metter was calming down, thinking about the reality of the situation.
Dalton knew what his commander meant. No matter what the colonel said, the Pentagon was going forward with this. "It's the nature of the job, sir."
"But I'm still going on record against this. From what you're telling me, they haven't got a good handle on what they're trying to do."
"No, sir, I don't think they have." Dalton hadn't told Metter about the nukes, and he knew he couldn't. "But they do have a high-priority mission that all this is aimed for. And it's got a short fuse."
"Is the mission worth losing men over?"
Dalton t
hought briefly of all the various missions he had been on where men had died. Few had been worth it. “Yes, sir, it is."
There was a long silence. Dalton could hear the slight crackling in the earpiece, indicating the MILSTARS satellite the call was going through was frequency hopping, making sure the transmission couldn't be intercepted. Dalton could see Raisor walking toward him across the experimental chamber. "Got to go, sir."
"Good luck."
The phone went dead.
"I assume you didn't reveal any information you weren't supposed to," Raisor said.
Dalton glanced around. No one was close. He stepped close to the CIA man, invading his personal space. "Listen to me very carefully, because we are not having this conversation again. I know you're holding information back from us. I highly recommend you stop doing that. Because what we don't know could get us killed."
Raisor started to say something but Dalton got even closer. "I was doing special operations while you were still in diapers. Don't treat me or these men like we're just pieces of the machine to be used. We're not. And we won't accept being treated that way."
Raisor met his eyes. "What are you going to do? Complain to your colonel?"
Dalton didn't say anything. He remained perfectly still, looking deep into the other man's eyes, until finally Raisor nodded. "I understand where you're coming from." He shifted the subject abruptly. "We've got new information that changes things. You want to be informed, follow me."
Dalton trailed the man across the experimental chamber. Captain Anderson was pulling on his fatigue shirt, his face drawn. Dalton gestured for the captain while Raisor called out for Dr. Hammond to join them.
The four entered the conference room. Raisor and Hammond sat behind the front desk while Dalton and Anderson took other seats.
"The nuclear weapons convoy has been moved up five days," Raisor said.
Silence greeted that statement.
"We're going to have to be operational in forty-seven hours," Raisor continued.
Dalton waited on Hammond, as it was clear this was the first she had heard of this also.
She finally spoke. "That will be hard."
"We have no option," Raisor said.
"There are plenty of options," Dalton countered.
"No, there aren't." Raisor leaned back in his seat, putting more distance between the two. "This is not open for discussion. We’re going in forty-seven hours. The only issue is how do we prepare."
“We?" Dalton repeated.
"I'm going with you, of course," Raisor said. He turned to Captain Anderson. "You’re the ranking man here, not the sergeant major. You’re under orders to comply with any and all instructions I give you."
"What the sergeant major is saying makes sense," Anderson said. "I don't think we can do this in two days. We've already lost a man."
"It's not up to you," Raisor said. "Plus the person who knows if you can or can't do it in two days is Dr. Hammond, not you or the sergeant major. And if you can't follow orders, I'll relieve you and find someone who can."
Dalton remained silent, as did Captain Anderson. They knew that by doing so, they were assenting to the mission, but there really wasn't much choice now. They'd pushed it as far as they could short of disobeying orders and getting court-martialed.
"We can do it," Hammond interjected. "But we have to really accelerate the schedule. I'd like to get moving on developing avatars immediately."
"Good," Raisor said. "I’ll get as much intelligence as possible regarding our target." He threw a satellite photo down on the desk. "Right now all we have is that the state of Kazakhstan is transferring twenty nuclear warheads via rail to Russia in accordance with the latest arms agreement signed between the two countries.
"The warheads will be on a train traveling from Semipalatinsk to Novosibirsk." His finger traced a black line. "Along this rail line. Our analysts believe that the attack will occur just after the handover occurs on the Russian side of the border."
"Why then?" Captain Anderson asked. "Why not on the Kazakhstan side?"
"Because we believe it is the Russian Mafia who will be conducting the raid. They have more power on the Russian side. They might even have infiltrated the soldiers who will be guarding the warheads."
"What kind of security will the Russians have?" Anderson asked.
"One understrength company of infantry," Raisor said. "About fifty men. The train itself will be armored."
"That's a pretty tough nut to crack," Anderson noted. "How do you figure the Mafia will be able to take it down?"
"We don't know," Raisor said. "But you do need to understand that the Mafia in Russia is unlike anything you've heard about here in the States. They’re very powerful and well armed. There is a tremendous amount of firepower available on the black market in that part of the world. We've had reports of the Mafia having tanks and attack helicopters. Along with the trained personnel to use them. I have no doubt that if the Mafia wants to take down that train, they will do it."
"What about the codes that arm the warheads-the PAL codes?" Dalton asked. "Even if the Mafia gets the warheads, I'm sure even the Russian army isn't stupid enough to ship the PAL codes on the same train."
"And the Russian Mafia isn't stupid enough to attack this target if it didn't feel confident it could get the arming codes somehow," Raisor said.
That was the first thing Raisor had said that made sense to Dalton. "How do we stop them?"
Raisor turned to Hammond. "That's your area of expertise."
Hammond nodded. "What we're going to do is design combat forms for each of your men using Sybyl. These forms, which we call avatars, will be what you use when you come out of the virtual plane into the real."
"What exactly is an avatar?" Captain Anderson asked.
"An avatar," Hammond said, "is a representation of a person in virtual reality. Gamers use it when they participate in a virtual reality session. For our purposes, we use the term for the cyber-self that goes into the virtual world. We also use the term for the form that comes out of the virtual world at the far point. Let me show you what I mean."
She stood up and walked to a TV on a cart in the corner of the room and wheeled it to the front. She took a DVD from the rack on the bottom and slid it in the player.
"This is a tape of the avatar used during our test run."
The screen showed an empty room, the floor covered with various objects. For a minute nothing happened, then there was a shimmer in the air, about four feet above the center of the room.
Raisor spoke up. "The RVer who conducted this operation was in an isolation tank here at Bright Gate. This room, the far point, was in the basement of CIA headquarters at Langley."
Hammond tapped the screen. "Our man has now found the room and is beginning to gain coherence. The avatar used here was very basic. A program that copies a mechanical arm. Two joints, you could say an elbow and wrist, and five digits. The arm is about ten feet long, which makes each finger eight inches long."
Dalton could now make out the vague outline of the arm Hammond had described, but he could still see straight through it. Then, from the high end, the arm began to solidify in small squares, each one about four inches on each side, the colors ranging from red to orange, each one slightly different.
"We added the color in order to be able to see the avatar," Hammond said.
"Can it remain invisible?" Dalton asked.
"Not quite invisible, as you saw when it first started to appear," Hammond said. "You can remain invisible if you stay in the virtual world, but once you enter the real world, there will be some disturbance of the light spectrum. The light goes through, but it is affected. There’s also a disturbance of the electromagnetic field, but that can only be noticed with special imagers."
"So if you wanted, you could keep our avatars relatively invisible?" Dalton pressed.
"I have a tape of the avatar operating when we don't add color," Hammond said. "You’ll be able to see what it looks like."
<
br /> The arm was now solid, floating in air. The long fingers, actually looking more like a series of rectangles, began moving.
"Our man is testing the avatar now," Hammond said.
The arm bent at the elbow, then at the wrist. The fingers continued to move.
The hand reached down and picked up a block of wood about four inches square. It moved through the air and deposited the block on the other side of the room. Hammond hit the fast-forward and the arm raced through a series of maneuvers.
"What was the heaviest weight the arm moved?" Dalton asked.
"Four hundred pounds," Hammond answered. "That was the heaviest we tested it for. Really there’s no limit to what it can do as long as the power coming from Sybyl is sufficient to support the proposed action."
"What's the limit of the power, then, that you can send from Sybyl?" Dalton asked.
"We're not exactly sure," Hammond said, "but based on our data, we have set up some basic parameters. The limit on avatar size will be about eight hundred parts per projected unit."
"Parts?" Anderson asked.
"It's a power unit that flows into size for Sybyl. To put it in terms you can understand, eight hundred parts would equal a hundred seventy-pound human being."
"Not exactly Godzilla," Dalton noted.
"It's the best we can do right now," Hammond said. "Eventually we might be able to produce Godzilla-like avatars, but there seem to be some limits on what can be sent through the virtual plane and then reassembled in a coherent form at the target."
"And power?" Dalton asked.
Hammond frowned. "That’s a problem. Using Sybyl, we can only send a set limit. That one arm could lift four hundred pounds, but if we'd put another similar arm into the room, also powered by Sybyl, each one could only lift two hundred pounds."
"So the more men we send over," Dalton summarized, "the less power they’ll have?"
"Yes," Hammond said. "I've got our computer people working round the clock to increase the flow, but there seem to be some mathematical limits to the virtual physics that we don't quite understand."
"There seems to be a hell of a lot that you don't understand about all of this," Dalton said.