Project Aura Page 8

  Her lips moved, whispering into the boom mike in front of her lips, as she reported what she was ‘seeing’. "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."

  On the ridge, Valika centered the reticules of the scope on the man's head, her finger resting lightly on the steel trigger. She was aware of her breathing, her heartbeat. Even the pulse of blood through the vessels in her body could affect the shot. She knew there was a round in the chamber, eight more in the box magazine. The weight of the heavy barrel rested on a bipod, the stock tight in her shoulder.

  "We want them alive," a man's voice crackled in her ear.

  So much power in the two-pound pull of a sliver of metal. Valika's tongue unconsciously licked her thin lips.

  "I said we want them alive," the man repeated. "Put the gun down, Valika, and send the men in."

  Valika removed her eye from the scope. "I don't like being spied on, Senor Cesar," she radioed. "Where is the witch?"

  A new voice, very low, feminine, echoed in her earpiece. "Where I can see you."

  "It worked, Professor," Valika granted. She barked out commands to the mercenaries' lieutenants, ordering them to take the Americans prisoner. "We don't need you any more, Souris. Turn off the Aura generator."

  "This is just the beginning," Souris said. "The world will be ours."

  The radio clicked off. Valika stood and looked about, knowing there was no way she could tell if Souris's spirit was still watching her. A chill ran down her back.

  Reluctantly Professor Souris's left hand reached toward the switch for the Aura generator. She did not want to return to her Earth-bound body. Her spirit was soaring free above the trees, swooping and gliding, unrestricted by gravity, by the foibles of the flesh. To turn off the generator was like asking an alcoholic to smash the bottle at the golden moment of drunkenness when all felt just right; telling a marathoner to stop just as the body reached the runner's high of perfect rhythm and the feet were gliding effortlessly over the road and it felt like one wasn't even breathing.

  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.

  Chapter Seven

  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. Overseeing 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. 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.

  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. 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.

  "Did you find it?" Boreas asked as Woods entered the office.

  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 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 was out there 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 once more 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."

  Eiche
n took Boreas's hand "Hell of a trip to get here. 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 links with submerged ballistic missile submarines." The general paused to take a sip of his drink. "You and I know that was bullshit, correct?"

  "A good cover story, don't you think?" Boreas said.

  Eichen downed the rest of the scotch and slapped the glass back on the desk. "What is it really?"

  "It's a weapon, of course," Boreas said.

  "A weapon from radio antennas?" the general was skeptical.

  Kirtley had yet to say a word, his dark eyes going back and forth between Eichen and Boreas like those of a spectator at a tennis match.

  "A weapon beyond anything you could imagine," Boreas said. "With it the United States can control the world."

  Eichen snorted. "A bold statement. I've been in uniform since I was seventeen and a plebe at the Academy. I've fought in the Gulf, Afghanistan and half a dozen other shitholes our President decided to send us. I heard my colleagues in the Air Force say the Stealth fighter and bomber would totally change warfare, but they didn't. They said smart bombs would do the job, but they didn't either, contrary to what CNN and the Discovery channel tout on their specials.

  "There's always a new weapon that will change everything, but in the end it's always the poor grunt with a rifle in his hand who has to take the ground from the enemy, who determines the outcome of war. That's the ultimate weapon. Always has been, always will be."

  "This weapon is different than those you mentioned. It targets here--" Boreas tapped the side of his head. "What is a soldier without a mind?"

  "A good soldier, according to some," the general replied sarcastically. "One who will follow orders without question. I don't agree with that, of course. How exactly are you going to affect minds with a bunch of antennas?"

  Boreas glanced out the window. A dark part of him appreciated the irony of the questions the general was asking. Plus, this was information he needed to brief Kirtley on, so it wasn't a waste of time. "A radio sends a wave through the air, the distance determined by the power and line of sight for frequency modulated waves: FM. Certain waves, such as high-frequency or amplitude modulated, AM, can bounce off the atmosphere and even go beyond line of sight, again limited only by power of the transmitter."

  "I have worked with radios," Eichen said patiently.

  "This transmitter is on a different frequency than those," Boreas said. "We have determined that there is a frequency that affects the human mind."

  "Affects it how?" Eichen asked.

  "Do you know how your mind functions?" Boreas didn't expect an answer or wait for one. "Most people haven't a clue. Do you know what a thought is? Is a thought real? It is real inside your head, isn't it? But is it real outside of your head?"

  Boreas was frustrated after years of trying to explain the work to idiots who only believed in things they could see and touch. The Priory didn't need the money from the Black Budget for this. It needed the access to the land to place HAARP on, the satellites that were also to be part of the system, and the scientists the United States could provide.

  The Priory had always used existing political structures for its own end. In days of old, when a Prior could stand behind a king and whisper in his ear, it had been easier. It was more difficult now, but even in a democracy there were ways to manipulate power. Out of the paranoia of the Cold War and the legacy of the Black Budget, the Priory had found an avenue to operate within the shadows of the U.S. and Russian governments for decades.

  Boreas rapped his knuckles on the edge of his chair. "To you, this is reality. But you will also agree that the voice you hear over your radio is real too. But you can't see it, can you? What does a radio wave consist of?

  "There are levels to reality. And the mind operates on one of those levels, which we call the psychic plane, or the virtual one. 'Virtual' means something exists in essence or effect but not in actual form."

  The general, as others Boreas had briefed, focused on one word. "Psychic? You mean like those people who advertise those 1-800 psychic hot lines? Or that fellow who claims he can bend a spoon just by looking at it?"

  "All 'psychic' means is something that pertains to the mind." Boreas held his anger in check. "Why do scientists constantly ignore the power of the thing they use the most? The core of our being, that which makes us different from the animals? And why do you military men ignore the vulnerabilities of the mind? Control the mind, you control the man. Destroy the mind, you destroy the man. Target the mind with a weapon, and every man is vulnerable, no matter if he is in an armored tank or flying at Mach 2 in a plane.

  "What we are doing at HAARP is taking warfare to the virtual level. This weapon; the waves that will be broadcast from these antennas will work as such. Once we fine-tune the proper wavelengths for the psychic or virtual plane, there are numerous directions in which we can pursue research. There's so much we don't understand about the virtual plane, the physics of it For example, what is distance in the virtual plane? If I can visualize in my mind a place a thousand miles from here, have I traveled that far in the virtual plane?"

  Eichen didn't seem satisfied. "Wasn't there something on the Russian end like this that caused the recent snafu in Moscow? The nuclear weapon going off?"

  "Something like it" Boreas acknowledged. There were only a couple of people in the hierarchy of government who knew of the existence of both Bright Gate and HAARP. In the Black Budget world, everything was compartmentalized so that the left hand rarely knew what the right was doing. Or did the general know about Bright Gate also? If Eichen had been recruited by the other side, he might know much more than he was letting on. Or if he was Nexus, he might know about both.

  "What exactly is a radio wave?" Kirtley asked, breaking his silence. The question surprised Boreas. Everyone he had briefed had either been too embarrassed to ask such a simple question or assumed they knew the answer, which was wrong in the vast majority of cases.

  "A radio wave is the electromagnetic modulation of particles we call photons,” he replied. “Photons have zero mass but we know they exist because of their effect. The study of them is part of what some call the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. Photons are all around you, but you can't see or feel them. At least not consciously.

  "When you’re in a big city, do you know how many radio frequencies are going through you? Hundreds, if not thousands. And all of them you don't notice, but every so often, while driving your car, do you ever have a certain tune in your mind, and then you turn on the radio and that song is playing? How do you account for that? It's because parts of your mind, mostly in the subconscious, are attuned to the virtual plane. Some minds ar
e better at that than others and can even project some power into the virtual plane, but all humans are capable of receiving."

  Boreas had been forced to give this spiel several times to those who controlled the purse strings in the Black Budget; the 160 billion dollars the Pentagon spent on classified projects each year.

  The general was once more looking at the antenna field. "How far can you transmit?"

  "Currently, line of sight," Boreas said.

  "Why so many antennas?"

  "To affect the mind requires much focus and much power," Boreas said. "It would be difficult to explain the exact physics to you."

  He didn't add that the scientists were like children walking in a dark room, reaching out with hands and feeling things in it, trying to figure out what they were. And they were scavengers, trying to work with what they'd been given by the Priory who nuderstood the virtual world much better.

  "We transmit two sets of signals, both in the high-frequency range. One between two point eight and seven megahertz and the other between seven and ten megahertz, both at very short wavelength. We pulse these rays at increasing levels of power. At the correct power and rate of pulse, it will produce a virtual field around the towers."

  "How does this affect the mind?" the general asked. "Make someone think of show tunes?"

  "At a certain frequency it is disharmonic to the natural virtual plane of the mind."

  "And what will that do?"

  "It will kill all within range."

  There was a moment of silence before Eichen spoke again. "So what do you plan on doing? Set up a massive field of antennas within line of sight of your target? And what, the enemy is just going to sit there and let you do that? Do you have any idea of the pace of modern warfare?"