Talon of Scorpio

by G T Almasi

  “What?”

  “Yeah, they’re—we’re—shut down.”

  “Why?”

  “The ExOps computer system tried to crash every jackframe in the federal government.”

  W-a-a-i-t a minute. “When?”

  Brando puffs out his cheeks. “September tenth.”

  Heat rises in my neck. “The day we were in Bastogne.”

  “Yeah. I think the denial-of-service attack we saw inserted malware that went after everyone in the fed.”

  Jesus.

  I say, “How long has Fredericks been planning this?”

  “Years, maybe.” Patrick shakes his head. “He could have traps like that all over the world.”

  Double Jesus. This mess will take forever to clean up.

  “Let’s scram,” I say. “I’ve had it with Dachau.”

  Dos and Patrick disconnect from their jackframes and we make our exit. The only sounds are our footsteps and a dull roar that gets louder when we climb aboveground. Fire is consuming the entire camp. The surviving Staatszeiger men are so busy fighting the flames we simply stroll out of the camp. Fire trucks zoom past us, toward the conflagration.

  Krysta asks me, “So, where should we go next?”

  Uhh…

  I clear my throat. “Ha-hm.”

  “How the fuck should I know” does not exactly ooze leadership qualities.

  I clear my throat again, this time with a German accent. “Ha-hm!”

  When in doubt, answer a question with a different question.

  I turn to my brain-squad. “Darwin, Doska, did you guys pull anything else off the jackframes?”

  “We sure did! One of the databases had over four hundred thousand entries about—”

  I stop them with The Hand. “Just gimme the big picture.”

  The two IOs confer briefly, then Patrick begins his condensed recital.

  “Markus Wolf has gathered a combined-arms force of forty thousand soldiers, a hundred pieces of artillery, plus an armored regiment. He plans to take them north to capture Berlin.

  “Then there are the Nazis and the Red Army Faction. Both can be counted on to serve as lunacy multipliers. All of these people are in Munich, not to mention Fredericks and probably Talon. I have no doubt she’ll try to rescue her boss.”

  “Anything else?” I ask.

  Doska says, “A series of encrypted reports came in just before we disconnected. The message headers indicate they’re about the Faction, but we need time to open them so we can read the rest.”

  I rub my temples and squint my eyes shut. My mind imagines an existential vacuum cleaner sucking everybody who’s anybody toward Europe’s impending Göttdammerpalooza. I replace my pained grimace with a stony mask of what I hope looks like imperturbability.

  “Munich it is,” I say.

  —FEDNET 293.529.646.001, 10 Sep 1981 10:24 A.M. EDT—

  Bobby,

  XIC is seizing ExOps. Says one of your teams in Europe has gone crazy. Get your ass to Bush’s office, ASAP.

  —Ted

  —FEDNET 999.999.255.023, 10 Sep 1981 10:25 A.M. EDT—

  Ted,

  What the fuck are you talking about?

  —Bobby

  —DARE: SECURITY, ExOps Breached—

  10 SEP 1981, 11:00 A.M. EDT

  From: Office of the Executive Intelligence Chairman

  To: Robert F. Kennedy, Director, ExOps

  Director Kennedy,

  ExOps has sustained a virulent and comprehensive security breach, apparently caused by her own agents. You will suspend all ExOps missions, impound CORE and DARE for review by the Security Council, and report to my office immediately.

  —George H. W. Bush, XIC

  26

  TWO HOURS LATER, SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 7:03 P.M. CEST

  OUTSIDE MUNICH, GREATER GERMANY

  I pilot the Meat Locker south. Krys rides next to me while our Info Operators stretch out in back. They’re bushed. Brando and Dos have to do all this running around without the government-issue narcocopia Krysta and I enjoy on a near-constant basis.

  We pass a charming old village. The tightly packed houses look like livestock huddled together for warmth. Church spires elevate the skyline, and people mosey about in the relaxed manner of Germany’s southern country. Uniquely, the little town bears absolutely no blemishes from warfare. The highway here is also pleasantly crater-free, in contrast with much of the autobahn.

  We leave the suburban huddles of single-family houses behind and pass into a neighborhood of apartment buildings. We’re almost in Munich.

  An occasional fighter plane streaks by overhead. Scouting, we figure. The air force’s presence is noticeably thinner near the big cities. This is thanks to the Reich’s powerful air-defense systems.

  Every urban center is ringed with huge weapons platforms known as Flak Towers. These stations, along with the rest of the Luftwaffe’s assets, were delivered to Markus Wolf by the very recently departed Reinhard Heydrich. General Ape-Man’s replacement, Klaus von Stauffenberg, has reclaimed most of the country’s aircraft and their crews.

  The anti-aircraft installations, however, were beyond his recovery. Ironically, this was because the Luftwaffe air-defense men refused to fire on their comrades. Wolf took them all prisoner and restaffed the Flak Towers with his own guys. Those heat sigs we saw in Dachau’s slave sheds may have been the Luftwaffe ack-ack crews from around Munich.

  My ruminations are interrupted by a terrible smell flooding my nose.

  “Ugh, God!” I roll my window down.

  “Oh,” Krysta says. “Sorry.”

  “That was you?”

  “No, no.” He tilts his head toward the backseat to indicate his partner, then reacts to my sullen glower with a shrug.

  I ask, “Does he do that a lot?”

  “Only when he’s really bushed.”

  “So, every night?”

  “Kinda, yeah. I just wave a pillow at him.” Krys turns to look at his flatulent partner. “If that doesn’t work I dump a spoonful of Tabasco sauce in his mouth.”

  I try not to wake the boys with my laughing. The car has aired out, so I roll my window up. Krysta and I lapse back to our quiet cruising.

  Our primary objective hasn’t changed—find Fredericks. Pro-o-o-bably kill him. However, this mission has been profoundly bamboozled by all the lunatics cutting in on the dance floor. We can outpace these dopes as long as we know where to aim ourselves, which is why the labs and safe houses have been playing such an important role in our travels; they’re our sole source of reliable information.

  Like other Carbon installations we’ve visited, the jackframes at Dachau’s Slave Camp and Mad Scientist Emporium have a direct link to the Reich’s comm-nets. Brando and Dos hoovered a massive trove of intel, and for the first time in almost a week our operational awareness is up to date.

  Our Info Operators are the biggest advantage we have over Talon. Sure, the bitch can access Carbon’s comm-net, but we Interceptors have nowhere near the data-processing capacity of Info Operators.

  Because of this, we know something T-Bitch almost certainly does not.

  Everyone’s unfavorite anarchists have gone from pretty damn crazy to absolutely fucking bonkers. Last night the Faction paid a visit to Munich’s Gestapo HQ, where—instead of dropping off the secret weapon they stole in Antwerp—the Red Army Fools abducted our target, Director Jakob Fredericks, killing a bunch of Gestapo men in the process.

  Brando and Doska were babbling this news so quickly I had to shake my partner’s arm to ask a question.

  “Wait a minute,” I squawked. “Did you just say the Faction double-crossed the secret police?”

  “Yeah!”

  I sputtered, “What
the…why would…”

  My confused expression elicited the following wisdom from Patrick: “I’m not sure rational analysis really applies to these people.”

  Unsurprisingly, Gestapo goons are ripping Munich’s underworld apart looking for the Faction. The last twelve hours of the Gestapo’s comm-traffic mentions nothing else. Wolf’s brute squads are clocking mountains of overtime.

  After we caught up on current events, Doska and Brando recounted some of the history they’d found about Dachau’s maxi-creepo Carbon facility.

  The lab’s original mission was not to clone whole people, but to produce transplantable human organs. The founding scientist, Dr. Sigmund Rascher, was a dyed-in-the-wool Nazi sociopath who got his start in the Human Cancer Testing Station in Dachau. There he injected prisoners with various plant extracts to observe the often lethal side effects.

  Next came altitude testing. Rascher stuck his victims in an airtight chamber and rapidly depressurized it to simulate a pilot ejecting from an aircraft. Then Dr. Maniac would boost the air pressure to study the effect of a “pilot’s” rapid descent.

  These experiments continued despite the Nazi Party’s fall in 1942. The party’s collapse would have ended Rascher’s research if his Schutzstaffel superiors hadn’t agreed to become the supposedly more enlightened Staatszeiger. Dr. Rascher changed the pins on his epaulets and kept screwing with people. His next brain dump was to freeze a few dozen Jewish workers in ice water. That’s what those green tubs were for. God knows what’s happened in them since.

  Rascher’s personal conduct was far below that of the rest of his Carbon colleagues, but his output was prodigious. While Rascher burned through test subjects by exposing them to mustard gas, rat poison, white phosphorous, and malaria, his team cranked out fresh, clean internal organs for the elite of Greater Germany unfortunate enough to need a new body part.

  The biggest advance came when Rascher’s crew cloned a functioning, transplantable human eyeball. These significant contributions to Carbon granted Rascher the liberty to attempt even zanier experiments on live human subjects. He tried transplanting just about everything—limbs, genitalia, lengths of nerve tissue, even brains.

  Hardly any of his demented ideas resulted in useful data. Just cruelly mangled corpses, all of whom were chucked in the ovens and sent up in smoke.

  Dr. Rascher’s fall from grace began with a series of gruesome experiments on children. His magnum dopus was to stitch a pair of twins together to see if he could conjoin them. This pointless moral lapse earned him the nickname “Doctor Frankenstein,” and his outraged colleagues demanded his removal.

  What happened next for Dr. Rascher-Frankenstein is known only in brief. He and his equally asinine wife, Karoline, caught the next plane to Buenos Aires. There, it’s rumored they founded The Mews Of Teutonic Ratfucks with other Nazi scumbags like Mengele, Sievers, and Hippke.

  I chew the inside of my cheek and try not to scratch the wound under my cap. I look out at the rain, which has rinsed the Mud Locker back to being the Meat Locker. The bad weather means we’ve had fewer worries about lead-spewing warplanes, but Krys still scans the sky for jet-powered marauders.

  Finally, Munich comes into view. So does a roadblock.

  “Darwin,” I comm.

  He inhales deeply, yawns, and comms, “What’s up?”

  “Checkpoint. Let’s switch seats.”

  Patrick awkwardly tumbles into the front seat between me and Krys. I use the steering wheel as a pull-up bar to hoist my butt off the leather. My partner slides under me. Our feet switch places. I ease myself off his lap, then into the backseat.

  Brando pokes at the buttons on his armrest until all four windows are down. Krysta and I draw our weapons and hide them out of sight below the door sills. One of the guards, a tired-looking SZ pinhead, waves us forward before signaling us to stop at the gate.

  Patrick still has a bandage around his head. Guards tend to latch on to this sort of thing, and sure enough, this ding-dong orders us out of the car.

  I cautiously dose some Madrenaline, grab a double helping of grenades from my belt, and comm, “Darwin, you ready?”

  Brando says to the guard, “Guten Tag, was ist das Problem?” and simultaneously comms to me, “Tell me when, Scarlet.”

  My fingers blur over the saucer-shaped grenades. A pile of pins falls to the floor between my feet. I scoop the entire pile of boomies out the window.

  “Now! Go, Darwin!”

  The Meat Locker’s sudden acceleration squishes me into the upholstery as the car’s front bumper smacks the lowered wooden barrier out of the way. Shouted German follows us away from the checkpoint. The four of us hunch down in our seats.

  A staccato string of blasts tears the gathered guards to ribbons and swallows them in gusting smoke. Patrick keeps the gas pedal down. We disappear into the city center.

  Hello-o-o, Munich!

  —DARE: SCORPIO—

  20 SEP 1981

  CONFUSED SIGINT FROM MUNICH

  From: Potsdam, GG

  To: ExOps HQ, Washington, D.C.

  Sir,

  Signals traffic from Gestapo spiked suddenly last night and has remained extremely high for almost twelve hours. The messages are confused, sometimes truncated, and originate from Munich, not Berlin. Another notable detail is how the comms are not being transmitted across the Reich’s normal government frequencies and channels. They’re sent and received exclusively on Carbon’s freestanding comm-net. That network was never expected to carry this much traffic, which explains the fragmented messages.

  It seems the Gestapo is facing a localized crisis, as the message sources and recipients are all in Munich. None of the signals have said anything about sealing the city, so we can assume that whatever the secret police are dealing with is expected to remain in the area.

  Yours,

  —Grey, L12-INF

  ADDENDUM

  I just harvested the following message from Markus Wolf:

  “Find our guest or I’ll use your skull as a soccer ball!”

  Considering the mission, I think I know who “our guest” may be. Please advise if I can assist in any way.

  27

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 8:55 A.M. CEST

  MUNICH, GREATER GERMANY

  Bright stabs me in the eye. I groan and roll away from the horrible sunshine.

  Brando’s voice says, “Hey.”

  I lie still, pretending to have fallen back asleep. The near side of the bed sags. Patrick’s warm breath caresses my chin. I purse my lips and give him a peck without moving my head.

  “Hah! You are awake.”

  “No,” I mumble. “I’m sleep-kissing.”

  “Mm-hmm,” he says. “Want coffee?”

  “Bluh-huh.”

  “Was that a yes?”

  “Glahh.”

  “What’s that?” He hops off the bed. “You want more beer instead?”

  “God, no!”

  I open my eyes. The room’s walls are pale blue, the ceiling is white, and the carpet is dark indigo. Outside looms the funereal tower of Munich’s New Town Hall. I roll out of bed, pad to the window, and look at Munich’s famous central plaza, Marienplatz. Busy little Germans bustle here and there. A choral group stands in the shadow of Town Hall and serenades everyone with a jazz standard. You’d never know there’s a war going on.

  This is because Munich hasn’t been contested. Instead of the gaggles of pissant paramilitary groups swarming everywhere else, this part of Germany is home to only two regional forces. One is the resurgent Nazi Party, which has been co-opted by Markus Wolf as an urban security force. The other is the small but virulent Red Army Faction. Neither of these groups has chosen to bomb where they eat, so the city is still in good shape, including this uniquely constructed safe house
. From outside the building is a yellow-and-white six-story hotel. The cheerful color is at odds with the architecture’s severity. It looks like the box a hotel comes in.

  Inside, the structure has been craftily divided into two zones, each inaccessible to the other. The main section exits onto Marienplatz and feels like it’s the whole building. The second zone, where we are, fills this corner of the building’s plan with six stacked safe rooms. The entrance is in the U-Bahn station, twenty feet below street level, through a grimy, gray door so nondescript it doesn’t even bother to say VERBOTEN.

  Patrick walks a steaming mug to me. I take the coffee, hold it to my mouth, and blow across the top of the cup to cool it off. I rewind my Day Loop and review last night’s activities:

  After blowing up the checkpoint, Brando barreled us into Munich. We found an all-night garage off Odeonsplatz and skidded the Meat Locker into a parking spot. A quick ride on the subway brought us here, to the Marienplatz safe house.

  Doska checked us in and asked the House if he knew where we could find a Gestapo communication center. Our host led Dos to the window and pointed at the plaza’s centerpiece, the New Town Hall.

  I barely had time to dump my clothes all over the floor before we went back out again. Doska led us to a very low door in the Town Hall, and before you could say, “Heil Scheisskopf,” we’d broken into the lightly staffed Gestapo facility. It was a cakewalk. In fact, we didn’t kill a single person, which made the mission truly unique. The IOs swagged a heap o’ data and we returned to the safe house, stopping only to shoplift a case of beer.

  I cracked open a round of brewskis for everyone and launched a drinking contest where we’d slurp every time someone on the TV said a word with five syllables or more. German has hundreds of these linguistic beasts, so this was some Serious Drinking. Except it turns out my teamies are total fucking lightweights and I wound up guzzling most of the beer myself. When the case was empty, I kicked Krys and Dos down to their room and threw Brando on the bed. Sometime later I fell asleep. That was only two hours ago.