Dark Tales From the Secret War

by John Houlihan

  “We’ll hang ‘em in the Louvre after the war’s over, if that makes you happy, but we can talk about that later. Right now, we need to discuss your new orders, which means I get to introduce you to Major Schiller.”

  The second man stepped forward, and the little shock of worry Rifkin had felt previously amped itself tenfold. Schiller was hawk-faced and pale, with a nose sharp enough to cut cheese on, and unsettlingly blue eyes. He wore a uniform that Rifkin didn’t recognize, cap tucked under his arm, and his hair was an almost translucent white. He extended a hand, and, after a second’s hesitation, Rifkin took it.

  “Major Schiller, allow me to present Captain Henry Rifkin of the 603rd Camouflage Engineers, D Company. His men are very good at what they do despite the man leading them, and what they do is exactly what you’re going to need. Captain, this is Major Heinrich Schiller, and you’re going to be taking orders from him for the near future.”

  Schiller clasped Rifkin’s hand with cool pressure. “A pleasure to meet you, Captain. Your company’s work has won my admiration.”

  “Thank you, Major.” With some difficulty, he broke the handshake. “Schiller — is that a German name?”

  “Swiss.”

  Rifkin frowned. “I thought you guys were sitting this one out.”

  Schiller smiled thinly. “There are some evils, in the face of which one cannot remain neutral.” He opened his mouth as if to say more, and Harasty stepped in.

  “Plenty of time for that sort of thing later. Right now, we need to talk nitty-gritty.” He walked over to the jeep and pulled out a briefcase.

  “If you please, Colonel,” Schiller said, and took the case from him. He opened it up and pulled out a series of sketches, while Harasty turned and motioned Rifkin over.

  “The good news is that the bulk of their forces pulled away from the river crossing at Wesel before the Brits started their boys forward. Thanks, I might add, in large part to what you and your people did here; looks like they moved two tank divisions upstream to deal with your plywood panzers over there, which let us take the bridges last night.”

  Rifkin smiled. Waging war with paintbrush and saw was not something that every GI understood. His men actually getting credit for what they’d done was rare and encouraging.

  Schiller spread the sketches on the hood of the vehicle as Harasty kept talking. “The other good news is that you’ve got some fans at HQ, people who understand the value of what you do. They’ve got a special assignment for D Company, working under Major Schiller here. Top secret, top priority, whatever resources you need. You’re also going to get a little help; part of the 3302nd SSSC will be working with you.”

  Rifkin nodded. “Sounds good, sir. What are we going to be doing?”

  Harasty glanced over at the cadaverous figure by the jeep. “That’s for Major Schiller to tell you. This one’s strictly need to know, and in about two minutes, you’ll know more than I do. Major?”

  Schiller nodded, very slightly. “Thank you, Colonel. Captain, if you’d step over here for a moment?”

  Harasty backed away as Rifkin closed in, glancing at the sheets of paper on the hood of the jeep. What he saw on the paper didn’t look like tanks. It didn’t look like anything he’d ever seen.

  “What the…“

  The major held up a thin hand. “Please. Allow me to explain. Your company, it is not constituted of what one would consider ‘traditional’ soldiers, correct?”

  “No. We’ve got artists, carpenters, set designers — not a lot of dogfaces, no. But if the war gets to the point where we’re doing the shooting, we’re in trouble.”

  “We are in a great deal of trouble already, Captain,” said Schiller, his tone so matter of fact that Rifkin shivered. “Which is why I am here, and why I need your men. You build decoys, yes? Replicas designed to fool reconnaissance and intelligence. Fake tanks to make scouts think your American armour is in position ten miles away from where it should be. In short, fakeries and frauds.”

  “That’s a cheap way of putting it, Major. What we do saves lives, it helps win fights, it —“

  Schiller waved him off. “You misunderstand. What I said, I meant with the greatest respect for your craft and skill. To fool the greatest war machine Europe has seen since the days of Genghis Khan with painted wood and balloons, now that, that is art. And that is why I am here for you and your men. Because I need you to build this.” A bony finger jabbed down at the pages on the hood. “Exactly this, and quickly.”

  The American leaned in to take a closer look. What he saw looked more like a set design than anything else, a series of shapes and forms that screamed “Grand Guignol” more than “armoured division”. If he’d gotten something similar back in New York while putting together the set dressing for an opera — something from Wagner, maybe, before Hitler had put Wagner out of style — it would have made sense, though he would have pushed back against a few of the details as too dark, too disturbing. But to see something like this in-field, it made no sense. The arches in the background belonged on a stage or in a tomb, not in the forests of the Rhineland. And the writing on them seemed somehow obscene. He felt his head starting to spin and closed his eyes, willing away the images.

  “Can your men build that, Captain Rifkin?” Schiller’s voice cut through the murk in his brain.“

  “My boys can build anything,” he replied, willing himself to stand tall, to ignore the nausea seeping into his gut. “Why the hell do you want them to build that?”

  Schiller stepped in and bundled up the papers. He handed them to Rifkin, who took them in nerveless hands. “That is exactly why, Captain. Colonel?”

  A plainly relieved Harasty lumped himself back into the jeep. “Let’s get out of here, Major.” He turned to Rifkin. “Captain, we’ll be sending transport for your people at 1800 hours. Don’t worry about the tanks; someone will be along to deflate them and put ‘em in crates. Just get your men and their tools ready, and prep a list of everything you’re going to need to do that. Major?”

  Schiller climbed into the jeep as well, as the driver gunned the engine. “Captain. I look forward to working with you.” And then the vehicle roared off, leaving Rifkin standing in the makeshift road with a fistful of papers and a knot in his gut.

  “Do you, you spooky bastard? Do you really?” He stared after the departing jeep for a long minute, then turned and started the trudge back to camp.

  * * *

  The new campsite was further from the river, which was good, and on the far side of a hill from the location where Schiller wanted the thing, whatever it was, set up and ready to go. The move had been accomplished with a minimum of fuss or questions. Instead, the questions started after they’d settled in, and Rifkin had started explaining what they were doing.

  “This doesn’t look anything like what we’ve been doing over here Captain.” The speaker was a lanky sergeant named Kelly whom the 603rd had plucked out of the New York gallery scene. Before the war, he’d been an up-and-coming painter; now his main focus was teaching the other men how to imitate camouflage patterns more precisely. “You ask me, that’s a stage set. Aerial recon sees that, they’re going to pee themselves laughing.”

  “Doesn’t make any sense to be doing it out here, either,” chimed in another one of the men, a short, wiry fabricator named Gleeson. “Why not build it someplace closer to the materials instead of hauling them all the way out here?”

  “Because your painting belongs in the woods where no one can see it,” came a response from the back of the tent.

  “Screw you,” replied Gleeson, and chaos erupted as the various men weighed in with their opinions of the project, why they were doing it, the quality of each other’s work, and anything else they could think of.

  Rifkin let them go at it for a couple of minutes — good for them to blow off steam, he thought — then stood up and shouted for quiet. Within a few seconds, the tent had quieted down except for a few final grumbles from Gleeson, and most of the men were looking a
t him.

  “Look,” he said. “I know this one’s nothing like anything we’ve done since we’ve gotten here. I know it’s a helluva strange thing to be putting together on the battlefield, and I know it’s pretty creepy, too. But none of that matters. We all spent years wanting to know when we’d be getting over here and telling each other we’d do anything to be in the field instead of twiddling our thumbs back in training. Well, now we’re in the field, and this is what they’re asking us to do. I don’t know why, but why isn’t my job, and it isn’t yours either. Our job — yours and mine — is to make this thing they’re asking us to make, and to make it right. Everything else is details. You got a problem with that, you come see me after. Right now, I need you to start getting ready, ‘cause the supplies will be here in a couple of hours and we need to be ready to hit the ground running. Dismissed!”

  The men rose as several, breaking into small knots of discussion or argument and drifting out of the tent. Kelly remained behind as they went, waiting until he and Rifkin were alone before strolling over to the sketches of the work Rifkin had set up on easels.

  “So what do you really think, Cap’n?” he asked, staring at each sketch in turn.

  “Deadline’s tight. You think we can pull this off?”

  Rifkin ambled over to join him. “We put 700 inflatable tanks in the field in under a month from concept to deployment. We can do this in our sleep.”

  Kelly pursed his lips before responding. “All right then, let me ask the real question: should we be doing this?”

  “It’s orders,” Rifkin said.

  “Yeah, it’s orders, but should be we following those orders? There’s something about what they’re asking that doesn’t quite sit right. Something in this,” and he tapped one of the sketches with his finger, “is trouble.”

  “Trouble,” said Rifkin, “is doing set building for a George S. Kaufman play and screwing it up. This Schiller guy and what he’s asking for? A piece of cake.”

  “I hope you’re right,” said Kelly, and left Rifkin in the tent alone.

  * * *

  It was Kelly who made the first complaint, or at least the first one brought to Rifkin’s attention. “Captain,” he said. “We’ve got a problem.”

  “Do tell,” said Rifkin, as Kelly stepped down from the scaffolding where he’d been working. Progress on the site had been steady, though not as fast as Schiller wanted, and the main elements of the proposed architecture had risen steadily from the forest floor. Brawny engineers had brought in actual boulders for the borders of the central circle once the wooden ones Rifkin’s people were making had been deemed insufficiently authentic, and a gigantic web of netting stretched across the roof of the dell where the entire operation was set up, to hide it from prying aerial eyes.

  “It’s this writing, captain. I can’t work on it for more than a half an hour at a time, tops, before I get dizzy. And if I’m working up there —” he leaned back and pointed at the top of the scaffold, which loomed 30 feet into the air — “I’m sure to go ass over teakettle sooner rather than later.”

  Rifkin frowned. “How many other men are working on the inscriptions?”

  “Three. They’re all complaining of the same thing, but…” his voice trailed off.

  “But what?”

  “None of them wanted to complain. Didn’t want to look soft, didn’t want to mess up the schedule. So it was up to me.”

  “Huh.” Rifkin thought for a minute, arms crossed. “Schiller’s already breathing down my neck about getting this done in time.”

  Kelly shrugged. “The way I see it, I fall off this thing and break my arm, it’s gonna put a way bigger wrench in the works than if I bitch to you about it.”

  “Alright. Here’s what we’re going to do.” He spat into the dirt, pissed off and impotent to do anything about it. “From now, anyone working on that crap does it in fifteen minute shifts. I don’t care what you’re working on, I don’t care if you’re in the middle of something, fifteen minutes on and you swap out with a man on the ground. You understand what I’m saying?”

  Kelly nodded. “Sure, Captain, but are you sure? I mean, Schiller might —”

  “You let me handle Major Schiller, you understand? You paint. Now go tell the boys.”

  “Roger that.” Kelly loped off, shouting. Rifkin turned the other way and walked toward the edge of the clearing. It was unseasonably hot, and the sun punched down even through the protective netting. Half the men were working shirtless, sweat pouring off them as they laboured to make Schiller’s vision real. Schiller’s vision, that was getting in his mens’ heads and making them dizzy and afraid.

  He crossed the edge of the clearing, passing under the canopy of trees and into the cool of the woods. They’d cleared out the bowl first thing, of course, chopping down everything and pulling out the stumps, but now he noticed that the trees on the edge of the site were looking sickly. A ring of yellow leaves had drifted down, and here and there the contagion had spread deeper into what had been a healthy-looking forest. He wondered if it were a coincidence.

  Somehow, he didn’t think so.

  * * *

  Two nights later, Schiller came to talk to him.

  It was well after midnight when the major arrived. Apart from the guards on the perimeter — widely spaced and not terribly alert, as the nearest hostile units were well on the other side of the river and going backwards every day, the entire unit was asleep.

  “Was wondering when you were going to show up,” Rifkin said. “Cigarette?”

  “I do not indulge,” said Schiller, as he stepped out from the shadows between two of the trucks the 3302nd boys were using to haul their massive speakers into position. “And neither should you. They blacken the lungs and invite disease. Fire is meant to be breathed out, not in.”

  “Whatever the hell that means.” The captain stood, unravelling himself from the chair at the base of one of the plywood monoliths. “What can I do for you, Major?”

  “You can do your job. This,” he waved at the ongoing construction, “is not progressing fast enough. We have a deadline, Captain, one we dare not miss. And now you, you are slowing the work.”

  “It’ll get done when it gets done, Major. My men are working as fast as they can. They —”

  “They are working in fifteen minute shifts!”

  Rifkin blinked. “How the hell did you know that?”

  “It does not matter how I know it. Nothing matters except you and your men following my orders and creating this work exactly as I have described.” He jabbed Rifkin’s chest. “If that means they get dizzy, they get dizzy. If that means they fall, they fall and you find men to replace them. But you will not stop, and you will not slow the work down, and you will not question me again. Do you understand?”

  Slowly, Rifkin looked down at the finger planted in his sternum. “Are you going to remove that, or am I?”

  “You’re not listening, Captain.” Schiller tilted his hand back, waggling the offending finger in Rifkin’s face. “You are important. You are not essential. None of your men are. They are merely convenient for the task at hand.”

  “You son of a bitch, I ought to —”

  “Shh!” Schiller suddenly whirled, faster than should have been possible. “Listen”.

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “That’s because you are talking! Shut up!” And with that, Schiller plunged into the woods. Rifkin tried to follow him and found his legs impossibly heavy, his arms locked by his sides. He tried to reach for his pistol, but the movements simply would not come. He tried to call out — for help or for Schiller, he wasn’t sure — but his jaw stayed resolutely locked in place, his rasping breath the only noise he could hear.

  And then there was shouting in German, and the sound of pistols firing in the woods so very close. Then more shouting, and running feet on dead leaves, and then one last, final shot.

  Two minutes later, Schiller came trotting back out of the woods, a Luger P08 in
his hand and a slim grin on his face. “Apologies for the interruption, Captain, but it was best I take care of that before we continued our discussion.”

  Which is when the forces holding Rifkin in place suddenly evaporated, and he tumbled forward onto the ground at Schiller’s feet. “You…what the hell?”

  “That was for your safety. You are not equipped to deal with the servants of the Black Sun, and as I said, while you are not essential, it would be inconvenient to lose you.”

  “The Black who?”

  “The men holding the leashes on the dogs of the Sonderkommando H. Searchers after Wunderwaffe for the Führer, and worse.”

  Rifkin climbed to his feet, a hundred questions on his lips, but Schiller hushed him. “Double your guards. Finish the work. Ask no questions, and you will hear no answers that will haunt your dreams. Now, go to bed. If the Black Sun is aware of our little project, you’ll need to work faster.” He stared at one of the fake monoliths, a brooding monstrosity on the near side of the clearing. “And fix that one. There’s a bullet hole in it now, and that simply will not do.”

  Satisfied, he turned and walked away. Rifkin stared after him until he vanished into the woods once again, the shadows swallowing him up with swift hunger.

  “What the hell just happened?” Kelly came out from behind one of the plywood structures, scratching his head. “I half-thought he was going to bite your neck.”

  “That might come later. How much did you hear?”

  “Enough.”

  “You don’t repeat a word of it, you hear? And you don’t go anywhere alone anymore. Nobody does. Whatever the hell this Black Sun thing is he’s talking about, I don’t want to lose anyone to it.”

  Kelly pursed his lips. “Seems sensible. What’re you going to do?”

  “Look for the bodies, though I don’t think I’ll find any. Keep things going. And pull every string I’ve got to find out more about what the hell we’re doing here.”