Robert Doherty
Psychic Warrior
To my sisters, Ellen & Jean Mayer, with love.
Acknowledgments:
With thanks to my editor Mike Shohl, my agent Richard Curtis, and last, but not least, my fellow Green Berets, the original Trojan Warriors of 2d Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group (Airborne).
De Oppresso Liber!
Prologue
The wind swept the desolate land of the Severnaya Zemlya chain of islands with no mercy for the sparse vegetation that struggled to grow among the rocks. The few plants only showed their face for a month at the height of summer. The rest of the year, the island was covered with a freezing layer of driven snow and blistered ice. The only exception was the airfield on the eastern side of the one island in the chain that held human life. The island was labeled on maps as October Revolution Island, but none of those sheets indicated that there was any habitation here, ten degrees above the Arctic Circle. The existence of the airfield and the base it served was one of the most highly kept secrets in the Soviet Union.
The men stationed on October Revolution Island, part of a unit known only by the typically bland Soviet code name Special Department Number Eight, would not have called their situation habitable; more on the order of barely survivable. The security forces were billeted in poorly constructed concrete buildings that lined the edge of the metal-grating airstrip. But it was far underground that the true essence of the work done in this forsaken spot was conducted.
Eight hundred feet down, accessible via only one large freight elevator, lay the core of Special Department Number Eight, known in inner circles simply as SD8. It was run by the GRU, the Soviet military’s version of the KGB. And to keep the work done there secret from the KGB, as well as the NATO countries’ spy services, was one of the reasons that this remote spot had been chosen.
The SD8 complex had been dug out by Nazi soldiers still being held prisoner by the Soviet Union in the mid-1950s. These men had been captured during the last years of the Second World War, and those in power had never seen any point in even reporting their existence, never mind repatriating them. The prisoners were useful in certain ways, such as working on this project. Upon completion of the task, the German soldiers had been summarily executed and dumped into the freezing waters of the Arctic, each of the twelve hundred bodies weighted down with a heavy iron chain.
Those Russians who worked in the complex had the highest clearances granted in the Soviet Union. Today was to be the test of whether all the time and expense they had put into the project over the last several years would bear fruit. There had already been one major disaster, and today’s trial was to be either the beginning or the end for this particular project.
Professor Leonid Vasilev was the head of the theoretical arm of the SD8 scientific team, and as such was the second-highest-ranking scientist present on the island. But he was still number two and he often did not agree with his superior, Professor Arkady Sarovan, who had been in charge of SD8 from the day it was founded, during the dark and bitter years of the Great Patriotic War, the Soviet name for the Second World War. It was Sarovan’s job to take theory and create action, and today he planned on taking that first step, over Vasilev’s objections.
“It is not ready,” Vasilev argued for the third time that morning. He was a tall, slender man, with thin, straight blond hair and a face badly scarred by acne. In a briefcase, he carried the master program for the project on several reels of tape.
“It is indeed ready,” Sarovan said with forced patience. He was short and stocky, and the body hair poking out over the collar of his white coat made him look like a bear wrapped in human clothes. The sloping forehead belied the brilliant mind encased behind it. “It must be ready, because we have no more time. Those in power require a statement to be made, and this is the means they have chosen to make it. The timing is not subject to scientific realities, but political ones.”
The two were riding the elevator down to the SD8 control room, and Vasilev knew this was their last chance to talk privately.
“But there is great danger. Not only if we fail, but also if we succeed.”
Sarovan shrugged. “True, but if we succeed, that is for the politicians to sort out. The order for this has come from the very highest level. The very highest,” he repeated with emphasis, to let the other man know that Khrushchev himself was involved.
“What will they do if it works?”
“Our leaders? Or the Americans?” Sarovan shrugged. “Either way, that is not our concern.”
“No, no.” The quaver in Vasilev’s voice testified to the fear he felt. “Not our government or the Americans. What concerns me is what they might do if we succeed.”
Sarovan’s bushy eyebrows contracted. He knew exactly whom his colleague was referring to, and he had experienced many a sleepless night considering the problem. “It is like nuclear weapons, my friend. They are very dangerous, but as long as we keep them under positive control, they cannot harm us.”
Vasilev expelled a snort of disgust. “Nuclear weapons don’t think for themselves.”
“We have positive control over the way they think,” Sarovan said flatly.
“But we don’t understand what we’re dealing with! We don’t really understand how they do what they do.”
“We know enough to use them.”
Vasilev shook his head. “No, we don’t. We’re meddling with unknown forces. Things beyond our knowledge.”
The argument was over as the large elevator doors rumbled open. On the other side were a dozen senior GRU officers, present to oversee the test. As Sarovan walked forward, his large paw extended to greet them, Vasilev quietly walked over to the main console. He pulled the tapes out and slid them onto their spools on the large computers.
The control center was carved out of solid rock, and no matter how high the heat was turned, there was always a damp chill in the air. It was a semicircular room, over seventy feet long by twenty in depth. The front was walled in with thick blast glass overlooking the test chamber. The test chamber was also hollowed out of the rock and was two hundred feet in diameter, with a ceiling over fifty feet high. The far wall of the chamber was filled with banks of capacitors, all designed to handle the large amount of power brought in from a small nuclear reactor on the surface. On the floor in the center of the chamber lay the result of twenty years of hard work by the scientists of SD8.
There were four objects shaped like coffins, eight feet long by four in width and height, evenly spaced around a huge vertical metal tube. Their lids were open, revealing a contoured space where it was obvious a man was to lie. Numerous wires and tubes came out of the sides and top of each, running to machines that completely encircled the four. In the exact center was the shining metal tube, eight feet in diameter by thirty feet in height. The tube rested securely on a cradle, and several monitoring wires ran from the top, looping over to the control center. The bottom of the tube pointed into the floor, where a vent shaft extended over a half mile into a volcanic crack deep under the island.
The tube was hollow, with two-and-a-half-foot-thick walls. There were two openings in it. The one at the bottom led into the vent shaft; the other, near the top, was a three-foot-wide section of wall that had been unscrewed. Around the outside of the tube were numerous black wires, linked to a thin network of silver strands crisscrossing in strange patterns.
Vasilev knew all the expertise and guesswork that had gone into building the tube. Even getting it down here had been a task, requiring the removal of the freight elevator for several days as the tube was lowered down and then maneuvered into position with great difficulty. It had been built to exact specifications under a cloak of secrecy at the largest tank factory in the Soviet Union.