"I did get an assignment, I think. When I filled out my last dream sheet I was sort of . well, daydreaming. Appropriate, 33.

huh? Anyway, I put down that I was interested in the High 'Technology Advanced Weapons Center-- "HAWC! You got an assignment to Dreamland? I don't be- lieve it! Do they actually give assignments there?"

"I didn't think they did, either. Like I said, it was a long shot. And I don't have any assignment yet. But I did get a letter back from the deputy commander, a Brigadier General Ormack. He sounded interested. It was sort of a don't-call-me- I'll-call-you letter, but at least I got an answer back."

"I don't believe it," Murphy said. "Dreamland. You real- ize that all of the world's hottest jets and weapons in the past thirty years went through there? Those guys fly planes and test weapons out there that are years ahead of anything that exists in the real world. And you're going to be assigned there-"

"I said I don't have an assignment, Murph. So keep this under your hat, okay? Besides, how do you know so much about Dreamland?"

"I don't know much of anything, except that anybody who even accidentally overflies Dreamland gets sent to our version of the old Gulag Archipelago. Every now and then you hear about an ex-Los Angeles Center air-traffic controller telling stories about Mach-six fighters or planes that fly vertically to fifty thousand feet over Dreamland. It's got to be the assign- ment of a lifetime."

"Well, like I said, keep all this under your hat," James said.

. Now take off. I want to polish my briefing before we do our dry runs this afternoon."

After Murphy left, James got up from his seat, went to the door, locked it, put a chair in front of it. He returned to the small pile of red-covered books and manuals on the desk the front of the conference room and selected one marked: "COMBAT CREW EMERGENCY WAR ORDER COMMUNICATIONS.

PROCEDURES-TOP SECRET/NOFORN/SIOP/WIVNS." It was the master document used by all the American strategic combat forces all over the world-aircraft, submarines, intercontinen- tal missile sites, and command posts-outlining every one of their communication sources and methods, procedures, fre- quencies, timing and locations of the nation's domestic and overseas communications facilities. The hieroglyphics after the title warned that the document was top secret, not releasable to foreign nationals, pail of the Single Integrated Operations 34 DALE BROVIN.

Plan-the master plan on how the United States and its allies would conduct "the next world war." This particular volume was dated I October 1994, some two months from now, be- cause it belonged to the new SIOP revision scheduled to take place at that time. The procedures in that manual would be used by all strategic forces for the next twelve months after- ward.

It made it convenient for him and the KGB, Ken thought, to have to do these once-a-year briefings for the wing corn- mander. The annual Mission Certification briefings were re- quired by law. The wing commander of each SAC base with nuclear missions had to certify to the Commander-in-Chief of SAC, and he in turn to the President of the United States, that each crewman knew precisely what his duties were in case the SIOP was "implernented--a euphemism for the so-called un- thinkable, the declaration of World War Three. Normally the certification briefings were given once, when a crewman be- came mission-ready. But the SIOP was revised each year, re- flecting new rules, new tactics, and so every year each crewman had to dig out the changed books, study them, then brief the wing commander on the revised mission. The top-secret books were trotted out for the certification, studied for a week, then locked away, usually never to be seen again except for base- wide exercises or inspections. The opportunities were rare to have such free access to these manuals, and Ken had to work fast.

He opened the manual to section four, "ELF, LF, HF and SATCOM SIOP Frequencies and Broadcast Schedules," and ped the pages open with a couple of books. This section prop detailed all of the frequencies used by aircraft and submarines to broadcast and receive coded messages from SAC and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, along with what time of the day these broadcasts would be made. Anyone knowing these frequencies and times could jam or disrupt them, specific broadcasts could be intercepted and decoded. The crew charts had stickers that had only one frequency, but this book had all the frequencies for the nuclear strike force of the United States.

James unzipped a leg pocket of his flight suit and took out what looked like a thick-barreled marking pen. Moving his chair so his body would cast no shadows across the pages, he twisted and pulled the cap, held the device a couple of feet 35.

r the pages, and pressed the pocket clip to activate the shut- ove ter.

Murphy was close, James thought as he worked. He would have liked to get assigned to F- I 5s or F- 16s, or the new F- 1 17 Stealth fighter unit, but he went where Moscow told him to go, and that was where he could learn as much as possible about the new B-I's nuclear-strike mission. Drearnland was the most secret base in the country. B-I Excalibur bombers were fine, but he would give anything to get his hands on the United States newest fighters.

Two minutes later Kenneth James had finished photograph- ing the entire chapter and its accompanying appendices with the tiny microdisk camera. He wrapped the device in a hand- kerchief to help protect it, then zipped it safely away in his leg pocket, out of sight so no one would be tempted to ask to borrow his "Pen."

Satisfied, he packed up his charts and books and turned them back to the vault custodian. He would put the camera in his car outside the alert facility to prevent discovery during one of the commander's frequent no-notice locker searches on the alert pad, then deliver it to the prearranged drop point for his KGB contact from St. Louis after he got off seven-day alert.

Dreamland, Nevada Monday, 3 December 1994, 0730 PDT (1020 EDT) stiff, uncomfortable Ken James was strapped securely into a chest bound by heavy leather steel chair, wrists, ankles and straps. His head was immobilized by a strong steel beam. The room where he lay on the rack was dimly lit, buzzing with the sound of power transformers and smelling of the ozone created by electronic relays and microcircuits. Two men in Air Force blue fatigues rechecked his bonds, making sure they were extra tight; one of them adjusted a tiny spotlight directly onto James'

right eyeball, smiling as James tried to squint against the glare.

The sergeant knew there was nothing James could do to him.

James had been sweating in the steel chair for nearly an hour, the two technicians hovering over him, before another man entered the room. Tall and lanky, he looked considerably older than his mid-thirties, thanks to a bald head and a few 36 .

stray shocks of gray hair that seemed to be haphazardly stuck onto his skull. He spoke briefly with the techs, then walked over to the rack and inspected the fitting and bonds. He stuck his face close to James, smiled and said, "Now, Captain James, I'll ask you once more-where were you on the afternoon of August eleventh?"

In fact, Ken James was photographing top-secret documents in a vault at McConnell Air Force Base in Kansas. He rolled his eyes in exasperation. "Very funny, Dr. Carmichael. Now can we get on with this?"

"Couldn't help it, Ken," Alan Carmichael, the white-coated researcher, said. "Seeing you trussed up gives this place the look of some futuristic interrogation chamber."

Which was precisely what Maraklov was thinking himself.

He was wearing a heavy suit made of thick metallic fabric. The suit had several thick cables and conduits sewed into it that ran all through his arms, legs, feet, hands and neck. A raised metal spine ran along his backbone from head to tail, so thick that a channel had been cut into the chair to accommodate it. There was a bit of cool circulating air flowing through tubules in the suit, but it did little to relieve the oppressive heat and stuffi- ness.

"Have you been practicing your deep breathing exercises9 Carmichael asked.

"Don't have a choice. I either breathe deep in this getup or I suffocate. Are you ever going to tell me exactly what I'm supposed to be doing?"

"Try to relax and I'll tell." Carmichael adjusted the volume of a small speaker next to a nearby oscilloscope-like device; I I.

the speaker began to chirp in a seemingly random pattern. Car- I michael motioned to one of twenty-five lines on the oscillo- scope. "Your twenty-five cps beta readouts are still firing.

Relax, Ken. Don't try to force it or it won't come."

"14%at won't come?" Carmichael said nothing. Ken began to take deeper breaths, trying to ignore the sweat trickling down his back and the cramp in his right calf. After a few moments, the chirping subsided. Progress?

"Very good," Carmichael said. "Beta is down . . . your Hertz waves are increasing. Good. Occipital alpha is increas- ing. Good. Keep it up. " He turned and with the help of one 37.

of the techs lifted a huge device off a carrying cart that he had brought in with him.

"What the hell is that?" James asked as the huge object was lifted overhead. It was hexagonal, and two wide visors in the front and cables leading to various parts of the suit and to controls and boxes nearby.

"Your new flight helmet," Carmichael said. "The final component of the suit you're wearing. The project is progress- ing so well, we've decided to proceed with a full-scale test."

"Test of what . . . ?"

"Wait." Carmichael slid the heavy helmet over Ken's head.

"Watch the ears, damn it."

"Watch your beta-you're pinging again." The helmet was set into place and fastened to a heavy clavicle locking ring on the metallic suit. The braces holding Ken's head in place took some of the helmet's weight, but his shoulders were aching after only a few moments.

A microphone clicked on, and through a set of headphones in the helmet came: "How do you hear me, Ken?"

"I think you broke my left ear off."

"You'll live. Try to relax and I'll explain." Carmichael's voice dropped into the familiar deep, even monotone that he had used weeks earlier during several days of screening: in fact, Carmichael was hypnotizing him, not with a shiny watch on a chain, but with his voice only. James' susceptibility to hypnotic suggestion had made him an especially good candi- date for this secret project.

"As you know, we've been working here at Dreamland with several projects. We call them all together 'supercockpit'- designing an aircraft workspace that allows the pilot to perform better in a high-speed, high-density combat environment. You and several other pilots were working with Cbeetah, the F-15 advanced technology fighter demonstrator; that's the state of the art, and her systems will be incorporated in the Air Force's new fighter in the next few years. Cheetah makes extensive use of multi-function computer screens, voice-recognition and artificial intelligence, as well as high-maneuverability technol- ogy . . . Well, we've been working on the next generation of fighters after Cheetah, things like forward-swept wing technol- ogy, hyper-start engines, super-conducting radar. But the most fascinating aspect of the new generation of fighters will 38 DAIZ BROWN.

be ANTARES-that's an acronym for Advanced Neural Trans- fer and Response. "

"Neural transfer? Sounds like Buck Rogers thought-control stuff." Comic books were SOP at Connecticut Academy.

A slight pause, then Carmichael said: "It is."

Inwardly Maraklov was tingling with excitement-Can-nichael's electroencephalograph must be pinging off the dials, he thought.

They were actually working on thought-controlled aircraft . . . ?

"Relax, relax," Carmichael said. "It might sound like sci- ence fiction but we demonstrated the rudimentary ANTARES technology as early as the late nineteen eighties."

"But is it possible . . . ?"

"Well, we don't know that yet. I'm hoping, I'm betting, we'll find out pretty soon . . . "

"But how can you control by thought?"

"The idea is simple, the mechanism is complex." He waited a few moments while the subject hurriedly fought to control his racing heartbeat.

"That's better," he said in his most soothing, uninflected voice. "Here we go. Remember back to your physiology. The human nervous system is composed of nerve cells, neurons.

The neurons carry information back and forth from receptor nerves in the peripheral nervous system-nerves in the body in general-to the central nervous system, brain and spinal cord.

The information carried through the nervous system is a series of chemical and electrical discharges between neurons. If one neuron is stimulated enough so that-its ionic balance is changed, it releases a chemical into the synapse, the gap between neu- rons, and that chemical stimulates another neuron."

"Like electricity flowing through a wire?"

"Well, some discharges are purely electrical, like when neu- rons physically touch, but mostly the connection is chemical.

Anyway, this electrochemical and ionic activity can be de- tected and read by electroencephalographs, which you've be- come very familiar with the past weeks. " He would have nodded if he could. -EEGs in the past could only measure electrical activity-they couldn't analyze, decode that activity.

It was like the Plains Indians putting their ears up to a telegraph pole, which they used to call the spirit trees, by the way. They could hear the telegraph clicks and tell that something was hap- 39.

pening, but they couldn't decipher the clicks or tell which di- rection the clicks were coming from, and of course, they didn't know how it was being done, just as we are ignorant about so many things in the nervous system. Sure, lots of clicks usually meant the army was coming, but that was about all. Ditto for us twentieth-century wizards."

Carmichael paused to ad ust his oscilloscope. "Well, a few years ago we built an EEG i that could read the spirit tree. You could lift a finger or hand and this EEG could tell a researcher that you lifted a finger. And the opposite was true, too-when you generated a thought command to lift your hand, that im- pulse could be detected and read-in effect, we could read your mind.

"Of course, the military got their mitts on the system right away. The new-style EEG, nicknamed Spirit Tree-hey, I'm famous-was the ultimate lie detector. But there was much more potential in Spirit Tree than use as a glorified polygraph.

We already knew the general path of nerves and which areas of the brain corresponded to certain thoughts or activities-that all came about during Nazi Germany's infamous lab experi- ments on human guinea pigs, when they would surgically re- move parts of a prisoner's brain and see what the victim could no longer do. The new idea was, if we could now read the information flowing through the system, was there a way we could interject outside or foreign stimuli into the nervous sys- tem? Instead of receptors in, say, the fingers generating the initial sensory impulse, could we send information from a com- puter into the system and read how the brain reacted to it? And could the opposite be true-could we think about, say, moving a finger, and have a computer read that nervous instruction and execute the command electronically?"

The more James heard, the more excited he became, though now it was an intellectual response and his signs stayed re- laxed. A computer issuing instructions to a human via his own nervous system . . . a computer reading the human nervous system ... For a while he thought his time might better be spent making drawings or photographs of the F-15 Advanced Tacti- cal Fighter named Cheetah. But now . . . well, the Academy hadn't imagined anything like this when they sent him to America. Of course nobody could have . . .

"Got all that?" Carmichael asked.

40 .

"I think so ... You're going to try to read my mind with this ... whatever it is "In a sense, yes.

"But how strong are those electrochemical discharges across the synapse? Don't you have to clip some electrodes onto my skull?

"In the past that's how EEGs were done. Every human body has a basic electrical potential, an electrical aura, so to speak, and that potential is affected by the central nervous system.

Simple electrodes could read the tiny impulses generated by the brain and nervous system. But those electrodes couldn't measure anything except the change in electrical potential .

"Like the telegraph clicks . . . "

"Exactly. But now we have two new technologies that have improved our ability to read those electrical impulses- very high-speed integrated circuits and NRTS, near-room- temperature superconductors.

"Your helmet and that large device on your spine are huge superconducting antennae. They're so powerful they not only can measure your nervous activity, they can read it, analyze it and map its direction as the impulses move around your pe- ripheral nervous system. And as they do, the computer issues instructions to the other large device you're wearing-that metallic flight suit. Actually, the suit is an integrated circuit that records the route each and every nervous impulse takes and studies it. After repetitions of the route the artificial- intelligence computer actually learns the route and proper timing and intervals between a certain set of impulses from certain areas of the central nervous system."

This project did sound remarkable, but it also appeared to involve a long period of passive training. Maraklov preferred action. Could he sustain the process . . . ? "You're going to map out every muscle twitch, every movement, every breath I take . . . ?"

if "To the contrary," Carmichael said. "We'd be overloaded we tried to record every muscle twitch, just as your question implies-so the idea is, we don't want you to twitch any mus- cles. We don't want mere muscular activity to show up. We don't need it-once we map out your peripheral nervous activ- ity, we'll know what impulses are necessary to move things like muscles.

41.

"So we need you totally re axed, imp, deeper than re- laxed-we need you as detached as you can be from your phys- ical body. We practiced biofeedback techniques before to get you to what we call, for lack of a better term, alpha state-it simply means the propagation of alpha brain waves and the suppression of beta waves, the latter activity indicating con- scious brain activity. But alpha state has many levels-nine known ones, to be exact. You've reached perhaps the'second or third level, where you can totally relax both smooth and ridged muscle and even exert control over certain autonomous functions such as heart rate, respiration and blood pressure.

That's fine-but we need more."

Carmichael's voice became even deeper, even more steady.

There was no hint of tension, no emotional cues, no inflec- tion. Somehow he had even managed to cut out most of the background noise in the laboratory-or was that part of the hypnotic state the subject knew he was slipping into?

"There's a level of activity called theta-alpha," the voice continued, so melodic and penetrating that it seemed to bypass his eardrums and enter directly into his brain . . . "Theta-alpha.

It's a stage where the central nervous system in effect cuts out the peripheral nervous system. In higher life forms it's a de- fense mechanism, a way to protect the central nervous system from sensory overload.

"Without any peripheral functions to control, the brain ex- pands its powers. Areas of the brain that normally go unused are suddenly put into service to control autonomous functions.

The average person uses only thirty percent of his available brain capacity, but under theta-alpha the other seventy percent is suddenly put on line. That new seventy percent has the mem- ory and computational power of all the computers in this build- ing, packed into a ten-pound package that needs no power, no cooling air, no bench or field maintenance. And, like a corn- puter built by humans, it's programmable and erasable, with its own built-in operating system."

James was finding it progressively harder to concentrate.

When he tried to speak he couldn't make his jaw work. It felt as if he was asleep, but in that weird half-in, half-out state of sleep where you could hear and feel everything around you but were still deeply resting. His body felt very warrn, but not sweaty or cocooned any more. The oxygen being fed into the 42 .

face mask was cool and soothing as it streamed into his lungs.

It was as if his body were somewhere else, as if he was de- tached ...

Suddenly, he felt his whole body burst into flame. Every pore, every cell, every molecule of his body spit red-hot lava.

He jerked out of his semi-sleep state and screamed.

"Easy, Ken, easy," Carmichael said. Pure oxygen flooded his face mask. The visors on his helmet opened, and Carmi- chael and a medical technician peered inside to check his bulg- ing eyes.

"What . . . what was that?"

"It worked," Carmichael said. He nodded to the med tech, and they both disappeared out of view. Ken tried to move his head but found it still securely fastened in place.

"Get me out of here-"

"No, Ken, relax," Carmichael was saying. The room noise seemed louder than-ever. Ken rolled his eyes, trying to blot out the hammering in his head. "Everything's fine. Relax, re- lax . . . "

"I felt like . . . like I was-"

"Shocked. Electrocuted," Carmichael finished for him.