The Lovecraft Squad: Dreaming

by Stephen Jones

  “Jesus,” she said. “And it’s here?”

  “We have to assume that, yes.”

  “So now he’s test-firing it? Calibrating it, maybe?”

  “That’s what it feels like. There’s nothing to connect our victims to each other, let alone to NATO. They just loved the snow here.”

  “Could that explain the lack of footprints? These guys got blasted from one spot to another?”

  Claude seesawed his hand: maybe, maybe not. “There’s an argument that energy weapons might cause displacements in time and space. The Philadelphia Experiment? Somebody lost control there in a big way. A casualty ending up sixty meters away from his last tracks might be the same thing on a smaller scale.”

  Okay, then. Fresh eyes and intuitive insights, that’s what they wanted from her? Or claimed they did? Fine. What do I notice here?

  She gave the valley the same sweeping look-over that Claude had. For the most part, Innsbruck was not a city of tall buildings, the occasional castle and bell tower aside. From nearly anywhere below, it would’ve been a straight, unobstructed shot to up here.

  Only there hadn’t been any witnesses. If Portner had fired his weapon four or more times, why hadn’t anybody seen it happen? He was either doing it from very close to the mountain, or . . .

  “Is there any reason to conclude it had to come from below?” Luna turned her back on the city and pointed up-slope. “Could it have come from above?”

  There were structures and settlements on the mountain too in a few places. She’d seen them from the air on the flight in, as the plane circled its descent.

  Claude followed her finger. “The irregularities of the mountainside would create a lot more obstructions. But there could be a spot common to all four, so there’s no reason to rule it out.” Then Claude kicked at the snow. “Doesn’t quite square with the Dutch guy, though. His tracks show he was running uphill. He had to be running from something.”

  “Maybe you’re too long out of Quantico already.” Luna poked him with her elbow. And yeah, that felt good, even through two parkas. “I distinctly remember one of the investigation instructors telling us that if everything lines up perfectly, there’s a good chance you’re looking at it all wrong.”

  Claude got a worried look. “We’re presuming a fixed installation. Or something that would be cumbersome to move, maybe mounted on the back of a truck. But it’s not impossible that Portner has worked up something portable already. If he’s done that, all bets are off.”

  “Possible, but how likely? If he’s tromping around up here, we’d be talking about a backpack unit, like a flamethrower. That’s highly advanced. I mean, at first glance it looks like he’s had twenty years to develop the thing, but he really hasn’t. Some of that time would’ve been survival. He would’ve had to start over from scratch. Not just his post-war life, but everything. Logistics, materials, funding, making sure it’s all set up through channels where his contacts aren’t going to sell him out . . . which means whoever he found is expecting to get more out of him than they invest in him.”

  “Because nobody develops a freeze-ray solely out of the badness of their hearts,” Claude said. “Hellooo, Olde Fellowes . . .”

  She turned her back to the peaks and once more began looking below. “Energy weapon, you called it. How much energy are we talking about on the front end, just to get something like that to fire?”

  “Considerable is the consensus.”

  She found her attention lingering on a structure to the east, at the bottom of the hillside, like a giant playground sliding board—a ski jump. Further beyond, a landing strip, ringed by spectator stands.

  “What about down there?” she said. “Are you an Olympics fan?”

  “Not really. When I was a boy, I never forgave them after I learned they stripped Jim Thorpe of his medals.”

  “I’m talking about the Winter Olympics. Different games.” Luna pointed at the ski jump, then farther out, at the arenas and athletes’ quarters. “See all that? The Olympic Village, it’s called. It was just built for the games here two years ago. I’m pretty sure training and competition still go on around here, but there has to be a lot of unused space now, sitting idle.”

  Claude picked right up on her thinking. “And if the Olde Fellowes managed to corrupt the right official or administrator, they could make Portner’s use of it look legitimate on paper, as long as he was careful when he sneaked in the hardware.”

  A rapid dusk was coming on now that the sun had ducked behind the peaks. Shadows began to stretch across the valley floor, while the blue of the sky turned deeper, richer. The air was already feeling colder. Time to get moving again.

  “Considering what this complex was for, global stage and all,” Luna said, “that whole area down there probably has the newest, most reliable power grid in Innsbruck. If we’re right about this, that could be his number-one need.”

  Claude had a dossier on Dr. Portner in their room, and after a dinner of Tafelspitz and dumplings, Luna set up shop at the table by the window.

  The longer she spent with it, the more it seemed as if the war that had formed such an indelible backdrop for their childhoods had never truly ended. Twenty-one years after Hiroshima and the fall of Berlin, they’d sent the soldiers home, shuffled the teams, and continued the fighting in less obvious ways.

  Japan was a friend now, and the USSR an enemy. Italy was for hedonists. And Germany? Well. Germany was . . . complicated.

  The Nuremberg Trials had made for a good show, but behind the scenes, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had been willing to forgive any atrocity as long as the U.S. got enough in return. And with Operation Paperclip, they had—an importation of 1,600 German rocket scientists who got to pick up where they left off and continue their research for the victors. A sweet deal if you could get it.

  It stood to reason that not all of them could, or would even want to, not if Uncle Sam was signing the checks.

  Was that the kind of man Dr. Gerhardt Portner was? He’d been a member of the Nazi Party, and rose to the rank of lieutenant. During his time at a research facility in the Polish countryside, he was reported to have delighted in telling batches of new prisoners, brought in as expendable slave labor for the Wehrmacht’s projects, “You arrived through the gates behind you, and you will leave through the chimneys you see in front of you.”

  His mission for the Reich, it was said, was more esoteric than rocketry. He was fascinated by the cold. He yearned to harness the cold. Much as the sun’s rays could be focused to a point that might incinerate what it touched, Dr. Portner wanted to concentrate cold’s killing power. Freezing to death was effective, but slow. Any process that could kill so well was worth speeding up.

  The only records of his research were fragmentary, bits and pieces recovered from the ruins left after the Polish facility had been abandoned because of Allied bombing near the end of the war, and pieced together later. Dr. Portner and his fellow researchers—such a benign word for such systematic inhumanity—had presumably fled with what they could and recreated the rest.

  His freeze-ray had been dubbed Project Thule, a name almost certainly derived from the strains of occultism that had woven through Nazism’s higher echelons. A cold and remote land to the north, Thule might only have been an ancient name for Norway. Mythologized, though, it had become antiquity’s cradle of the Aryan race, peopled by a lineage of giant übermenschen, whose magic had plugged them into the cosmos and brought them knowledge of what lay beyond the stars.

  Learning about Portner’s freeze-ray was like learning about atomic bombs. You could hear about kilotons and fallout zones, and it remained academic. To appreciate the true horror of what had been created at Los Alamos, you had to look to the people it had been used on. Say, the short-lived survivors the Japanese had called “alligator people” . . . burned black as cracked leather, faceless, eyeless, a wheezing red hole for a mouth, but no voice, crawling along the ground.

  Different weapon, same principle. In a
place like Dr. Portner’s facility, slaves didn’t always know what they were working on . . . but the survivors nonetheless had stories to tell, testimony to give to whoever would listen. They may not have known weapons systems, but they knew carnage. They knew the expendability of their lives.

  Good god. Portner had tested his prototypes on them.

  She could only imagine the fear in his test subjects, peeled off from the workforce for any number of reasons that might have doomed them. Too old, too slow, too sick, too injured. They would be led to a spot along a concrete wall. Stand here. Or chained to a stake in the ground outside. Sometimes they were allowed to run, because a moving target was the ultimate test for any weapon. . . . and if the test failed and the prisoner kept running, there were always rifles, already proven, at the ready.

  “At first the boy looked like he’d been burned. His skin turned red, but soon it swelled up and was covered in blisters full of pus. You could see anybody’s ribs but his. They kept him in the infirmary where they had me cleaning, and he lived like that for another four days.”

  “Her whole leg was black, the skin was dead, falling off, all the way to the bone eventually.”

  “It didn’t kill him but Chaim didn’t seem to understand what just happened to him, poor soul. One of the soldiers took a mallet and hit his arm near the shoulder. It shattered. Like ice, it shattered. A chunk of ice, only made of skin and bone and muscle.”

  As early as 1944, Dr. Portner had succeeded in creating something that could do hideous damage, but how reliable it had been was unknown. There was at least one serious accident, resulting in the deaths of soldiers and prisoners alike. The conclusion of the analysts who’d gone over the surviving data was that his freeze-ray’s biggest limitation was its range. Which he had no doubt since improved.

  Luna had to push back from the table for a moment. She took a lingering look across at the Nordkette. Even now, somebody on this side, along the southern chain, might be lying in the snow, inches from death.

  She turned to Claude. “The bodies here don’t fit the damage described in the war records. These . . .” She slapped her hand flat onto the papers. “They’re ghastly. It’s the kind of trauma you’d expect from a weapon of war. The bodies here, what was done to them was . . . almost delicate. Not even instantaneously fatal.”

  “That’s not gone unnoticed,” Claude said. “It could be a variation in the ray itself, and that’s what he’s testing now. He got the horrible death part dialed in early, now he’s working on dialing it back. There’s this new show on TV called Star Trek. You being at Quantico and all, this may be the first you’ve heard of it.”

  She had to laugh. “Yeah. Not a lot of leisure time this past year.”

  He unholstered his “HPL Special” pistol and held it up. “For them, this would be crude. Their standard sidearm is this thing called a phaser. You can set it to kill, or just to stun. Maybe this is the same principle.”

  “For what possible reason would you want a freeze-ray that only incapacitates?”

  “Next time we’re sharing scotch-and-sodas with one of the Olde Fellowes, I’m sure he’ll be glad to tell you all about it.”

  She dug back into the papers, ready for more atrocities, but by now it was mainly down to a spotty compilation of sightings.

  Portner was one of the many who had simply disappeared during the chaotic end of the war. It wasn’t a matter of him putting down a rifle and going back home to civilian life. He was too high profile for that, with a documented history of war crimes. He was a man who had retained his ambitions.

  But the U.S. hadn’t gotten him, and neither had the Soviets. Gerhardt Portner remained unaccounted for. The last known photo of him, shot during the war years, showed a mature man in his thirties, with hair swept back from a prominent widow’s peak. A pale scar, rumored to be from some lab mishap, skidded from one side of his nose to the far edge of his cheekbone. It looked less like the result of a cut than something that had been seared. He was not indistinctive, and the survivors of death camps and labor facilities had a long memory for the faces of their captors.

  Over the years, he’d been spotted in a few locations across Europe. In Oslo, in Krakow, in Helsinki, men and women who would carry the memory of him to their graves had lifted their arms and pointed, but justice had never caught up with him. He was vapor, like frozen breath on a winter day.

  Any pattern to the sightings had emerged only within the past couple of years, with the most recent sightings of him having come from here in Austria. Vienna once, Salzburg twice, and, most recently, Innsbruck.

  “Twenty years on the run,” Luna said once she’d closed the folder. “He’s got to be awfully cagey. And dangerous. He’s not even an old man yet. He hasn’t stayed free all this time by not being dangerous. And he can’t be doing this on his own. He’s got help.”

  “You sound worried now.”

  “Just the two of us, for a crew like that?”

  “Never fear,” Claude said. “You and I aren’t doing the heavy lifting. We’re here as spotters, and to sort out whatever connection there is with the Olde Fellowes.”

  Her gut clenched. “They can’t be planning on letting him go. A man like that.”

  “No.” Claude pointed at the dossier. “I wanted you to go over that first. So you’d be clear on who this man is and what he’s done. I thought that might make it easier to accept where this is headed. You’ll sleep better if you have no qualms.”

  “Nazi hunters?”

  Claude nodded. “Inter-agency cooperation, it happens all the time. In three other rooms here, there’s a combined total of six Mossad agents. Israeli intelligence. They’ve been doing this kind of thing awhile. These six? Four years ago they were part of a campaign called Operation Damocles. It targeted German scientists who’d gone to work for the Egyptian government. Sometimes it was limited to intimidation. Sometimes . . . more. So they get Portner. We get everything else, whatever there is to recover.”

  He seemed so matter-of-fact about it. She tried to connect his cool pragmatism here to the boy she knew, years ago.

  “They’re here to do what we can’t, Luna. We’re not authorized for it, and even if we were, we’re not trained for it. Not this. They are.”

  She couldn’t do it. Couldn’t find a middle that would connect the ends.

  “We’re not assassins,” he said. “We’re not kidnappers.”

  No. They weren’t. Not yet.

  And she wondered who they might have been had they grown up in some town other than Mitford, where they could’ve come of age with their blinders left intact. Someplace where they could have maintained their illusions that the world, even at its most violent, made an underlying sense, and that the cosmos was ordered, and that everything they did was virtuous, because so were they.

  They made the hike—three of them now—as dawn lifted misty and gray, with flurries of snow swirling through the valley. It seemed more than bad luck. It seemed a bad omen, the elements working against them after yesterday’s crystalline skies. They needed visibility and had none.

  Only the Israeli team leader didn’t seem bothered. His name was Daniel Yahav, and under his winter gear he moved as if the hard, lean look of his face went all the way down to the soles of his feet. He was, though, nothing if not buoyant. He didn’t explain, and Luna didn’t have to ask: he’d surely seen things go wrong much worse than this.

  Stakeout—the term had always conjured images of a couple guys stuck in a car all night, sick of bad food, sick of breathing each other’s stink, and finally sick of each other. This was an upgrade—a shelter not far from the top of the ski jump . . . enclosed, safe, and once they got the kerosene stove going, warm. The deputy commander of the Gendarmerie that Claude had already liaised with had put in a discreet call to arrange it. They would have it to themselves for as long as they wished.

  Now all they needed was a view of the valley below.

  “Cheer up,” Yahav told them. “Nobody’s dead, i
t has to clear up sometime, and for now we have this . . .”

  From his pack he pulled out a pan and a container of coffee ground to a powder. Within minutes he’d boiled up a thick, muddy brew, Turkish-style, as black as oil with just enough foam to tell the difference. When he poured it into three mugs, no strainer, Claude balked.

  “You should know, to refuse a cup is the ultimate in rudeness,” Yahav said, then gave her a wink when Claude took his first sip and grimaced.

  Her own reaction? She’d never had coffee any hotter or stronger, and figured by noon, it might leave her spoiled for anything less.

  Yahav got on his radio to check with each of his men, who’d taken up positions around the Olympic Village, to watch without being seen. Every now and again, he would squint out the windows as if it merely took a bit of extra concentration for him to pierce the veil of snow and know exactly where each man was down there. A few minutes of that, then there was nothing more for them to say, and the radio went silent.

  All Yahav really wanted was to get a visual on what the Village looked like from up here. From above was the only vantage point he hadn’t already familiarized himself with.

  “When does he fire that thing? Have you picked up a pattern to it yet?” Yahav asked. “Particular days? Intervals? Anything?”

  “Afternoons, we think,” Claude said.

  “Why is that?”

  “The last time anybody else saw the victims,” Luna said. “Wives, friends, staff wherever they were staying. Before they were reported overdue, they were all last seen either late in the morning or in the early afternoon. None of them seemed to have been a morning person. They all preferred going out later in the day.”

  “Any reasons given for that?”

  “One of them was a cross-country skier,” Claude said. “His wife told the police he liked it better when the trails thinned out and most people had gone in for the day.”