The Eldridge Roster

by Stephen Ames Berry

  Jim’s .45 was safely locked in his bedroom table. Idiot, he thought. “Swim for it!” he snapped at Angie. The Potomac was deadly here above the cataracts, but her only chance lay in the water.

  “Sorry! Can’t swim!” she said, stepping out from behind Jim as he faced their attackers.

  Crouching, scared more for her than for himself, he waited, heart pounding in his ears, adrenaline surging. He didn't know what Angie was doing until she fired—a 9mm Beretta, he learned afterwards—shooting carefully, firing two-handed, like they’d taught her in Officer Candidate School.

  Their attackers never had a chance. Ferret Face took a round between the eyes, a second through the heart, falling like a stone to lie still on the grass, looking surprised. His partner didn’t hesitate, betting his life that he’d cover the few remaining steps to Angie before she could aim and fire. He lost as she blew him away, two rounds to the chest that sent him reeling back against a tree. Pry bar dropping from his hand, he slid down the trunk, sitting to stare sightlessly at the empty sky.

  Lowering her pistol, Angie took a fresh clip from her pocket and reloaded. “‘Swim for it,’” she mimicked, slipping the gun back into her jacket pocket. “Where’s your gun, secret agent man?”

  “Home,” he managed, looking at the corpses, then up and down the path. Not a soul in sight. “My God, you just...”

  “Killed them,” she said. “They didn’t come to chat. They were too close. And besides, everyone knows that a woman with a gun’s only bluffing. It’s okay, Jimbo,” she added reassuringly. “Just means there’re two fewer scum walking the earth.”

  “I wasn’t complaining.”

  “Let’s go call the cops,” she said.

  “No cops,” said Jim, scanning the paths and the woods again. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Why? We’re the ones who were attacked. I’ve got a permit for the pistol.”

  Jim laughed—a loud, rolling laugh that rang above the roar of the rapids. “Angie! In some ways, you’re just so naive,” he said, trying to hug her.

  “No, I’m not,” she said, slipping away from him. “What’s your point?”

  “Wouldn’t be a big problem for whoever’s after the Eldridge roster to have the cops hold us on some charge until our disappearance could be arranged. I’ve done that myself—push the right buttons and they’re very cooperative. What we’ve got to do now is determine a plan of action and move on it. Quickly. We’ve been dallying too long.”

  “Dallying? Is that what we’ve been doing?”

  “Milano! Are you with me on this?”

  “Yes,” she said, after a beat.

  “Let’s get out of here before someone comes along,” he said, heading toward the path.

  “No rush,” she said.

  Something in her voice made him turn.

  The bodies were gone, the ground clean of blood, undisturbed.

  Jim stared, stammering, not trusting his eyes. “Where... What...”

  Angie stood there, pale and frightened, beseeching and terribly vulnerable. “The widgies,” she said in a small voice. “Told you I was a freak.”

  Chapter 10

  He hadn’t meant to tell her that he loved her—so banal a word, so overused, so subject to later revision. Yet his heart had betrayed him and it had come rolling off his tongue as he stood there, crushing her to him, her body wracked by sobs as she let it all pour out, for the first time trusting another human being. And, he thought later, how could he not have said it, as it was so true?

  Walking slowly back through the woods, Jim all but forgot the attack and the attackers as Angie spoke almost non-stop, telling him how growing up Different had been. A lonely girl who’d never dared make friends, whose life was plagued by incidents of things disappeared, things moved, of school bullies suddenly gone meek and quiet—of a life lived not quite on the run, moving every few years. After a while the innuendos and the half-truths always forced Angie and her mother on to the next place. Her mother was a surgical nurse and could make a good living just about anywhere. Puberty had been especially hard, with two boys—fine, upstanding boys from the best homes who’d tried to rape her—ending up in the hospital. The widgies had quieted down by college, thankfully. Over time they’d diminished in frequency but increased in magnitude.

  “Usually it only happens when I’m upset,” she said as they drove home in the jeep, Jim staying in the slow lane of the Beltway. “Sometimes, though, it just sneaks up on me, like when I want something to happen and don’t even know it.”

  “Such as?” he asked, turning at their exit.

  “Such as that tree falling down during the thunderstorm. I just thought I’d like to stay with you a little longer, that I didn’t really want to go home but I didn’t have a good reason not to. I thought, why can’t that tree just fall down and block the street for the night?”

  “Didn’t cause the storm, did you?” asked Jim uneasily.

  “No, silly, I’m not the weathergirl,” she laughed. After a moment she added, “You okay with this?”

  “I’m okay with it,” he said. “Just go easy on the trees. The azalea you can rip up.”

  “I like the azalea.”

  “Great.”

  “So, can you guess now why someone wants the Eldridge roster?” she said.

  “They want to round up folks like you and see what makes you tick.”

  “I couldn’t tell you anything before without telling you everything,” she said apologetically.

  “Understood.”

  Reaching the house, Jim unlocked his front door as Angie took the day’s mail from the box. Stepping into the front hall and the floor so recently graced by Erik’s recumbent form, Angie handed Jim a stack of bills, junk mail and a small packet.

  “So, Jimbo,” she said as he shuffled automatically through the mail, “now what? We’ve ruled out the authorities—any authorities, civil, military, ecclesiastical. And we’re now into this up to our asses.”

  “Just our asses?” he said absently. “Now that’s strange,” he said, holding the flat cardboard mailer.

  “It’s just your music club,” said Angie.

  “I don’t belong to a music club. Never could get those little postcards back in time—always ended up with several thousand default selections lying around, unopened. Mostly opera.” He made opera sound like tofu.

  Tearing open the mailer, Jim removed a CD case and examined the label. “Gotta love it. Pavarotti: Favorites from Puccini.”

  Angie picked up the CD mailer, opening the envelope pasted to the front. “Famous Record Club of Arkansas? Come on! But your name is on the invoice.” Her eyes grew wide. “Invoice number DE173!”

  He popped opened the box. The DVD had a yellow sticky note in George’s unmistakable hand: Play on PC.

  A few minutes later they were upstairs watching George Campbell, comfortably seated in a red leather armchair, smoking a cigar and drinking an amber liquid from a Napoleon brandy balloon.

  “Jimbo,” he said raising his glass. “Aren’t these things great? No, not the booze, lad, the camera stuff you can’t see. There’s a computer shop in Georgetown that delivers—they send polite young men to your home to get you going, for a little something extra—after they cheerfully run your credit card, of course. Is Angie with you, perchance? Well, I certainly hope so—do you both a world of good. There’s a first class woman under all that ‘I’m a big bitch’ stuff. Don’t know what she sees in that Saunders. Yeah, actually I think I do. Not the best way to get what you want, Angie—it cheapens you.” He paused for another sip.

  “Did he just call me a cheap first class woman?” she whispered, furious.

  “Bitchy first class cheap woman,” said Jim.

  “Anyway, if you’re seeing this, guys, I’m dead. Always thought I’d enjoy saying that, you know, savor the melodrama?” he chuckled. “But I’m having second thoughts.” Taking yet another sip, he set the cognac down and returned to his cigar. “No matter. Tomorrow, I�
�m querying SLIF and extracting some information about the crew of the destroyer used in the first ship invisibility experiment – the Philadelphia Experiment of 1943.” He went on to briefly relate much of what they already knew about ship invisibility projects and the Eldridge. “Other people, evil people—if you don’t believe in tangible evil, you soon will—want this information, have wanted it for a very long time, and will do anything to get it. I intend to give you a copy of that crew roster tomorrow, Jimbo, without explanation, in the very likely event that something does happen to me. If certain people find out you’ll be in deep trouble – nothing new for you.”

  “Screw you, George,” said Jim.

  “If I’m gone,” continued George’s ghost, “a friend will mail this to you. So let’s get on with the purpose of my postmortem visit—Project Telemachus. Telemachus is an outgrowth of the ship invisibility experiments, of which the Philadelphia Experiment was but one. Two other ships were subjected to the same phenomenon—one German, one Japanese. Telemachus is a long-term U.S. effort to advance and exploit the original experiments. It has two principal components. The first—the most obvious—is to replicate the experiment in a controlled manner and determine its underlying physics. I don’t know anything about that part of Telemachus—it’s the blackest of black projects.

  “The second aspect of Telemachus is to exploit the latent, longitudinal genetic affects exhibited by the survivors’ children. These tend to manifest themselves in a variety of paranormal abilities.”

  Jim glanced at Angie. She sat beside him, her attention given totally to George.

  George took a deep pull on his cigar. A blue wreath of smoke briefly fogged his image. Jim could almost smell it and almost smelling it was struck by a very sudden and profound sense of loss.

  “I know the bastard who’s running this,” continued George. “His name’s Terrence Whitsun. He’s retired Navy—our navy, sad to say. He directs Telemachus for DOD and the CIA through a front company in McLean, GDR Corporation. Nothing new, those CIA fronts, are they, Jim? I first met Whitsun in Occupied Germany—he was a Commander then, with a cover job on the High Commissioner’s staff, but his real mission was to cut deals with detained or captured Germans. Some of these were Nazi scum who should have danced on the end of a rope. One of them was a man named von Kemnitz—Martin Amadeus von Kemnitz. You may remember the name?” George paused, sipping his brandy.

  “Christ,” said Jim.

  “Who’s von Kemnitz?” said Angie.

  “Mere child you are,” said Jim. “Listen and learn.”

  “Okay, Jimbo—details,” continued George, setting down his brandy. “After the war the crew rosters of the two foreign ships used for invisibility experiments were obtained by the U.S., as was that of Eldridge from the second Navy experiment. They used Eldridge twice, with two different crews, a few months apart.

  “Of the three hundred and forty-eight men of the four crews who went through hell on those vessels, one hundred and thirty-one of them were known to have survived the experience and the rest of the war—more or less. However, though the number of men who crewed the first experiment was known, there was no extant crew roster for Eldridge from that first experiment—both times she was officially in Newark, awaiting arrival of her precommissioning crew. The sailors assigned to her were for both attempts were pickup crews, mostly from the Philadelphia Navy Yard. They were told they’d be part of a new hull degaussing experiment, something to do with avoiding magnetic mines—got a little more than they bargained for. Without the roster from the first experiment, the only way to find out who was aboard that day was to collect and process millions of personnel records. Recovering those fifty-three names cost $8,918,112 per name. And people complain about what the military pays for toilet seats.

  “So, three ships’ rosters out of four gave up one hundred and thirty-one survivors. Of those, ninety-two fathered children—one hundred and eighteen children, to be exact. Of these one hundred and eighteen kids, Telemachus was able to snare over the years ninety-five, of whom fifteen were lost due to ‘initial excesses in experimentation,’ is how they phrased it.” He poured himself another brandy from an elegant crystal decanter, carefully replacing the stopper and setting the decanter out of sight.

  “Napoleon VSOP,” said Jim. “It’s all he ever drank. Said it was proof against osteoporosis.”

  “Bullshit,” muttered Angie.

  “Observable results were obtained from sixty-two of the surviving eighty program participants,” George continued. “Then the project was placed under the direction of the aforementioned von Kemnitz, now reborn as one Dr. Richard Schmidla. Like his colleague, Dr. Josef Mengele, Schmidla—might as well call him that—von Kemnitz’s death certificate was signed over fifty years ago—Schmidla was a graduate of the SS Physicians Institute. He was a very different sort of fish than Mengele and the rest—aristocratic, educated, with degrees from Heidelberg and Bern. He came from an ancient Brandenburg banking family that’d lost just about everything during the Weimar. His father committed suicide. During the First War, Schmidla was a highly-decorated infantry officer. Finishing his medical training in the 20’s, he joined the Freikorp, a group of reactionary ex-army officers. He was a charter member of the Nazi Party. Hitler, Rosenberg, Rohm, Himmler, Goebbels, Goering—he knew them all, though he was never chums with any of them. His blood runs blue—he’s a Hohenzollern, descended from the margraves of Brandenburg.

  “In 1933, Schmidla was commissioned a lieutenant colonel in the new SS Medical Corps and helped coordinated Germany’s euthanizing of the mentally and physically handicapped. He was later attached to SS General Ohlendorf’s Action Group A on the Eastern Front—one of the infamous Einsatzgruppen. Surviving Stalingrad, he became Medical Director of the Nordhausen concentration camp, where he was given carte blanche by Himmler to experiment on death camp inmates and Russian POWs. Schmidla’s areas of research, on which he wrote numerous papers, were eugenics and the paranormal. Reichsführer Himmler was a devoted reader.

  “At Nordhausen, Schmidla tried to produce paranormal events through torture, but by 1942 he’d developed an increasingly sophisticated pharmacopoeia of mind-altering drugs that worked far better than his original medieval methods. For a time he was very interested in twins. In fact, he and Mengele used to compete for identical twins throughout Nazi Occupied Europe. Why, for years after the war, Jimbo, there were side-busting anecdotes, told in certain South American bars, about the lengths those two zanies went to snatching kids from each another.” He raised his glass. “Ha Ha.

  “Then, because of his training in medicine, his undoubted loyalty to the ideals of National Socialism and probably also because of the von in his name, Schmidla in 1943 was called in to advise the Kreigsmarine during their first and only attempt at ship invisibility—an attempt which suffered the same fate as the Eldridge and the Kikuzuki, an Imperial Japanese Navy vessel. Surviving the fate of many on board the destroyer von Blücher, Schmidla remained on detached duty, ministering to his fellow Blücher survivors until war’s end. As cover, he’d been transferred on paper to Field Marshal Paulus's personal staff in Russia, then listed as missing in action. Given that the German 6th Army were almost all MIA, it worked well. Whitsun easily slipped Schmidla out of Germany.

  “Only through dumb luck did we ever learn Schmidla was still alive—a former Nordhausen inmate saw him in ‘48, in Paris, tripping the light fantastic at a tea dance at the Ritz. This ex-inmate, by the way, was bussing tables, Schmidla was wearing a tux.

  “By the time the Sûreté got moving, Schmidla was long gone. We found out much later that he was even then working for Terry Whitsun. In 1947, Dr. Schmidla had moved to New England and become director of what was to be the second aspect of Telemachus.

  “Arriving here, experienced, nay, brilliant! kidnapper that he was, Pied Piper Schmidla gathered the children of the survivors of those ships to his deadly bosom—from Europe, America, Asia—didn’t matter how old you were when he found
you—any age qualified. These foundlings were placed in a refurbished Federal quarantine facility on an island in Boston Harbor. There they were subjected to experimentation, as were their descendants. These were baby boomers, mostly born between 1947 and 1960.

  “The range of their abilities were catalogued and attempts made, with some success, to control and duplicate the results. Those early ‘experimental excesses’ killed many of the Potentials, as they’re called. Richard and his lads came to regret this loss when they found that the third-generation offspring often possessed paranormal abilities far greater than those of their forbearers. Yet, despite this, Schmidla continued his ruthless and deadly experiments. Terror to induce teleportation and telekinesis. Mind-altering drugs to enhance precognition. Forced eugenics to produce selective traits—later refined into the use of surrogate mothers who had no knowledge of the child’s origins.

  “The goal?” George stopped for a refill. “Note, this is only my third. You know, this stuff’s sovereign against osteoporosis? Not that I’m really concerned anymore.”

  “That glass holds half a liter, you old lush,” said Angie softly.

  “Where was I? Yes, the goal. Don’t know what the goal is. Or, if we’re lucky, was. There are no more Potentials—they’ve killed them all off! Amazingly, just as The Good Doctor had almost perfected his techniques, too. The operation was a success, but the patient died.” George laughed too loudly. “Schmidla and Whitsun aren’t finished—oh, no. They saw this coming and got the CIA to fund SLIF. Incredible, isn’t it? A half a billion bucks to get a short list of names?” He shook his head. "Whitsun argues that Schmidla's so honed his techniques that given the Eldridge descendants, success is assured. If given those Eldridge folks, they’ve told their government patrons that they will then quickly show them something,” he cast his eyes toward the ceiling “‘. . . of such power and promise that it will change our entire conception of humankind and of our destiny.’” George looked back at them. “I hope that scares the hell out of you. It does me. Whitsun and Schmidla—two very formidable, evil men united to achieve that to which they’ve dedicated much of their lives. It will be monstrous.