Project Aura (8 page)

The ambush was laid out perfectly. L-shaped, with the heavy M-60 machine gun along the short leg, aimed down the dirt road where it curved to the right. The long leg was comprised of eight men with automatic weapons, each with aiming stakes carefully stuck in the jungle floor to delineate their fields of fire in the darkness. Across from them, on the far side of the road, antipersonnel mines lined the ditch where any survivors of the initial firing would most likely seek cover. Four large antitank mines had been carefully buried in the road, their remote detonator in the hands of the captain in charge of the team

They'd flown in by chopper from the aircraft carrier
Roosevelt
the previous evening and set the kill zone up that night. According to the intelligence the CIA representative had given them, their target was due through just before dawn, which was less than an hour away.

They were members of the 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne) on loan to a shadowy organization under the umbrella of the CIA with the unassuming code name of Task Force Six. TF-6 had been formed in the mid-nineties to take the drug war from the streets of America to the sources, whether in South America or in the Far East. Twelve missions had been conducted over the intervening years, ranging from raids on labs to assassinations of key cartel or Triad members. All had been complete successes without the loss of a single man or the source of the action being compromised.

"Lucky thirteen," Master Sergeant Garrison muttered.

"’Tomorrow let us do and die’," Captain Scott replied in the same low voice, eyes peering through night vision goggles, noting the distant glow that indicated headlights coming their way.

Garrison nodded, seeing the same thing and recognizing the quote. It was their routine just before action. "'Cry Havoc! and let slip the dogs of war’." He keyed the FM radio. "Target ETA four minutes. Give me a check by the numbers."

Each man reported in, their voices subdued and tinny in the small earpiece.

Garrison checked the action on his M-4 one more time. "'You can go where you please, you can skid up the trees, but you don't get away from the guns'."

Scott took his attention away from the coming lights. "That's a good one. Twain?"

"Kipling. Read it last week It was in..." He paused.

"What?" Scott was alert also, both men sensing something, even though the car was still two miles away.

Garrison rolled onto his back and looked up at the branches above, the night vision goggles revealing the scene in shades of green, even the night sky where it peaked through. There was a very dim red sphere high up, above the trees, about eighty meters to the south. Garrison had never seen the like. He knew the goggles would show a cigarette burning as a bright red glow, almost a searchlight, so whatever was there was extremely low level. Then it was gone, blinking out.

There it was! Fifty meters from where it had been. "What the hell?" Garrison muttered. The level in the goggles was so low, he wondered if it was a malfunction.

"The car's stopped," Scott reported.

Garrison twisted his head awkwardly. The glow from the headligh was stationary, a half mile short of the kill zone. "Something's wrong. We need to pull back. Now." He looked up. The unidentified glow was gone.

"Maybe someone had to take a leak," Scott reasoned. "Let's give it another minute."

The glow hadn't reappeared but Garrison's apprehension was increasing with every passing second. Their orders were to take no chances, which was rather ludicrous given they were preparing for a combat operation, always a chancy thing in Garrison's military experience. They wore sterile fatigues, no identification or dog tags, but it wouldn't take a genius to figure out where they were from.

"I strongly recommend we pull back now, sir."

The use of the official military courtesy startled Scott and gave him an idea how serious the team sergeant was. He keyed the radio. "All elements, pull back to the extraction rally point."

The team was well trained; not a single word of protest or question was heard over the net as each man began to slide back from his carefully prepared position.

"Multiple intruders coming in from the north," a voice reported. That was Boyd, their demo man, who had rear security.

"Got some from the east side of road, about a platoon," Pinello, the furthest deployed man informed them.

With a sinking feeling, Garrison looked west, behind their position. He could see a dozen figures moving through the jungle, approaching cautiously. "At least a squad-sized element to the west," he reported.

They were surrounded on three sides. The only way out was through the kill zone they had so carefully prepared, across the open road, through the mined ditch and into the jungle beyond.

"By teams, withdraw to the south," Captain Scott ordered. "On my command, team one move with demo in the lead. Boyd, deactivate the road mines and point us through the ditch setup."

Garrison grabbed the captain's arm. "It's too obvious."

"Any other way we're sure to be running and gunning," Scott responded. "They can't know for sure we're here."

"Then why do they have us surrounded?" Garrison asked, but there was no more time for discussion.

"Team one, move," Scott ordered.

Five shadowy figures slipped across the road, Boyd leading the way, the only one who knew the escape route through the minefield he’d sown; a mistake, Garrison was realizing much too late. That information should have been disseminated; it was a basic rule he'd had beaten into him in Ranger School over ten years ago.

A line of tracers seared down the road, intersecting with Boyd and sending his body tumbling, confirming the mistake. The sound of the machine gun ripped through the jungle stillness a millisecond later. The other four men dropped to the dirt and returned fire.

"Boyd," Garrison hissed. "Boyd!"

There was no answer. Machine-gun fire lit up the darkness with a line of green tracers that passed over the road and barely a foot above Garrison's head. Sergeant Buhler, manning the M-60, sent a long burst of red tracers in the opposite direction.

An amplified woman's voice echoed out of the night. "American soldiers. You are surrounded. Surrender and we will let you live."

The first tinge of dawn was lighting up the sky to the east. Garrison knew there was no way they could break out and make it to the extraction pickup zone without more losses.

"’War to the knife’," he whispered to Captain Scott, quoting Palafox's response to a French general's request to surrender at Saragossa in 1808. This was a situation they had discussed, and the team consensus had been to never surrender. To go down fighting.

"I'm calling this in," Scott had the handset for the SATCOM radio in his hand.

Garrison couldn't tell which direction the voice was coming from as it spoke once more. He could pick up a slight accent, although he couldn't place it in the distortion.

"American soldiers. There are nine of you still alive. Your dead bodies have the same leverage as your live ones. The only ones who will care about the difference are yourselves and your families. It is your choice how this ends for you."

"How do they know our strength?" Garrison wondered aloud.

"I'm not getting anything on the SAT link," Scott said, dropping the handset in disgust. "Just static."

"We've been set up." Garrison pulled extra magazines out of his web vest and stacked them ready for use.

"Why? Who?" Scott was bewildered as another burst from the machine gun caused them to duck their heads. The angle of fire had changed, meaning the gun had moved. The four men in the road were no longer in defilade, as rounds struck one of them, ripping into his leg.

"Granger's hit!" the senior medic, Lambier, yelled from the road.

Before the machine gun could fire again, Lambier grabbed Granger and rolled toward the far ditch, preferring the chance of the mines against the certainty of the gun. They landed with a splash in two inches of water, and both men tensed, waiting for the explosion, but nothing happened. The last man trapped on the road, Staff Sergeant Baldwin, low-crawled after them. He dove headfirst into the ditch, landing on top of one of the claymore trip wires.

The semicircular mine exploded, ripping Baldwin's body in half, throwing the torso back onto the road. Amazingly he was still alive, his hands scratching into the dirt, trying to pull himself to safety. He made it about five feet, leaving a trail of blood and intestines behind, before he died.

Garrison hit Scott on the arm, shaking his team leader out of the shock of seeing Baldwin's dying efforts.

"Captain!"

"No more," Scott said. "This isn't worth it" He began to stand, hands upraised.

Garrison jumped up and grabbed his team leader around the shoulders. "Get down!"

They were Garrison's last words, as a fifty-caliber round entered just below his left eye, under the night vision goggles. The massive bullet over half an inch in diameter and designed in the early 1900s to be used against tanks, carried such weight and velocity that Garrison's head exploded, spraying Scott with his team sergeant's blood, bone, and brain matter.

*****

On top of the ridge, over three quarters of a mile away, Natasha Valika lay perfectly still, the recoil of the fifty-caliber Barrett M-82A1 rifle going from the shoulder pad through her body. The warm blast reflected back from the muzzle break passed over her cheeks like a lover's caress.

"They're surrendering," she said into the boom mike in front of her lips as she saw the man next to the soldier she had just shot waving his arms wildly. The words were relayed to her mercenaries surrounding the Special Forces team and to a retransmitter in a Land Rover nearby that uplinked to a satellite and forwarded the transmission to a dish on an island in the middle of the Caribbean.

The SATCOM retransmitter took up only a small part of the cargo bay of the Rover. The rest was filled with two rows of high-power lithium batteries on the floor, on top of which sat a series of power converters which were linked by cable to the mast on the roof much like that on news vans, but in addition to the normal satellite dish, there was a dipole antenna and dish at the very top, extended sixty feet into the sky but angled toward the ground in the direction of the Special Forces team.

A second Land Rover was right behind the first, connected to it with several power cables. The shocks were strained to the utmost, as the truck's entire cargo bay was dedicated to batteries. Stenciled on the side of the vehicles in small letters was Aura III.

The passenger seat in the front Rover faced backwards. In it was a woman, Dr. Souris, surrounded by numerous consoles and gauges governing the equipment, the human link between Valika and her employer, eight hundred miles away. Souris was reclined back in the seat, her eyes open but unfocused, seeing nothing of her immediate surroundings. Her head was shaved and various leads, each ending in a pad a quarter inch in diameter, were stuck to her scalp at locations marked by red tattoos.

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.