In the Still of the Night--The Supernaturals II Read online

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  For my family—Life Begins Anew

  PROLOGUE

  OUR TOWN, USA

  Like a rubber ball I’ll come bouncing back to you …

  —Bobby Vee, “Rubber Ball,” Billboard #89 Top Hits of 1961

  GEORGETOWN, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  The gathering consisted of the elite of governmental society. Some would say the real power brokers of that elite. That power being the wives of senators and House members.

  For the guest of honor, there were whispered innuendos about her own motives in attending, but not one of the women present this night would be caught commenting on it. The guest in question used the occasions to conduct business without the prying eyes of the media or the security elements that constantly surrounded her.

  The blond woman eased past her security team with a raised hand as she approached the hostess. She would leave them behind for her clandestine meeting. The lead security man nodded as she passed, and the agent spoke softly into the hidden microphone.

  She smiled as she was greeted by the hostess. “You have a visitor. I have shown him into the study.”

  “Thank you,” the woman said and then was shown in. The double sliding doors were closed as the man stood from a chair at a small table.

  “I was expecting you forty-five minutes ago, Mr. Webber,” she said as she turned and faced the smaller man.

  “It took more time than expected to get the request from Mr. Avery to myself. Then it took more classified digging than I had originally thought it would take.”

  “Do you have the information?” she asked impatiently.

  “Yes. And if I get caught, it will be no less a charge than treason. This is beyond classified. If the assistant director ever got wind—”

  She held up a hand. “From what Mr. Avery has told me, you’re good at your job. So, instead of assisting my husband, you’ll be assisting me.”

  The man sat down in the Queen Anne chair and then placed his briefcase on the table. He opened it and produced a thick file. Her brows raised when she saw the TOP SECRET stamp printed onto its front. Then the embossed departmental seal for the Central Intelligence Agency. Then he placed another, even thicker file on top of the first. This one had emblazoned in bright red lettering the seal of the United States Army. Then a third file was placed on the first two. This was from the Department of the Air Force.

  “All three confirm what you suspected. Your father-in-law was involved to the top of his head and was the main participant in all three after-action reports from 1945, by the army, the U.S. Army Air Corps, and the old OSS, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency. How your husband would be involved, there is no mention, considering at the time the boy was only three months old and living at home with his terminally ill mother.”

  “Have you and Mr. Avery come to any conclusions about the town? Is there any financial connection to Moreno by either my husband or his father to the corporation—a paper trail, perhaps?”

  “If the town is connected in any way to your future holdings, it’s buried so deep in the company’s financial infrastructure that you’ll find out in ten, maybe fifteen years of reading the fine print on thousands of deeds of ownership documents on what you own or do not own. I, as well as Mr. Avery, suspect that the corporation has no direct ties with Moreno.”

  “Okay, what did you find?”

  “I would rather place my findings in a written report to you, which I have already completed. I don’t relish the opportunity to revisit that damnable military operation.”

  “Perhaps that’s a good place to start. My husband has dreams and nightmares about something that he never actually witnessed, but is so traumatized by it that it invades his sleep. So, start with the operation, and tell me why he’s haunted by something committed when he was but three months old.”

  Webber swallowed and then pulled out that written report. “Operation Necromancer, conceived by Dr. Jürgen Fromm, from dates 1941 through 1945. Captured by special operation in Yugoslavia on June 13, ’45.”

  “Read my father-in-law’s entry on that last day once more,” she said, wanting to hear the gruesome details again. Webber swallowed and took a sip of water. He picked up his report and found the day in question.

  “June 13, 1945, 0240 hours,” Webber read. “Low-altitude jump was completed with the only casualty being Sergeant Leach, who sprained his ankle severely in the landing. Proceeded to the bunker complex fifteen miles outside of Belgrade with the assistance of the Slavic underground forces in the area. Attempted to contact by radio for verification of initial radio communiqué received two weeks ago in London by Major Dietz. Radio contact with German SS security unit was established with Major Dietz—”

  * * *

  The night was overcast when the gray-uniformed man stepped from the deepest shadows of the demolished structure that had been hit by no less than four Royal Air Force bombing missions over the area in the last year of hostilities. The Americans stood in a group with weapons raised. The members of the Yugoslavian underground stood aloof of the group. They had done what the Allies had asked of them and guided the soldiers to the underground complex. The Yugoslavian resistance melted into the shadows. The SS officer faced the men in front of him and in the waning moonlight started to raise his right arm in the air until he saw the American colonel raise his left brow. He lowered the hand.

  “I take it you are Major Dietz?” the tall American colonel asked.

  The German clicked his heels together in answer. He then reached for his sidearm. This brought an immediate response from the men attached to the Office of Strategic Services. Five Thompson submachine guns were raised. The major held his left hand up as his right withdrew the Luger semiautomatic from its holster. He offered it to the colonel, who took it and tossed it back to Captain Frank Perry, who caught it in turn and ejected the clip and then discharged the chambered round.

  “My men will be taken into your custody, and our deal will be intact?”

  “They will receive the treatment my superiors promised,” the colonel lied. He knew that every SS officer and enlisted man would face warrants for war crimes. “Just as long as you were truthful about this little camp you have here.”

  The German major bowed his head and then gestured for the team of commandos to follow him. “All of my men, except for Fromm’s guard detail, have been disarmed. I do not wish them shot,” he said as he stepped into a battered and crumbling doorway.

  “Goddamn Kraut speaks better English than I do,” Sergeant Leach said as he limped but followed the team onto a lift that had survived the bombings.

  “When I produce Fromm and supply his journals and notes to you, I have your word as an officer that my men will—”

  “Major, let’s not get into whose word is good while we stand in the middle of a city that is
lying in ruins because of you. This is not a negotiation. If what we find is useful to us, you will be treated accordingly.”

  The lift continued deep into the earth.

  The major raised the gate when the lift came to a stop. He stepped out, and the commandos immediately saw the twenty SS personnel standing at attention. Their weapons were placed on the floor in front of them.

  “Sergeant Leach, sit these men down and disable those weapons,” Captain Perry said as he followed the German major and his commanding officer, U.S. Army colonel Robert Hadley. The farther they traveled, the more oppressive the air became.

  The major came to a large steel doorway and he stopped. He knocked three times and the doors opened. The Americans were greeted with the muzzle of a German Grease gun. The automatic weapon’s barrel was lowered by Major Dietz, and the SS sergeant holding the weapon saw his and then backed away, offering Captain Perry his weapon as he did so. The other two SS guards did the same. When the guards stepped away they saw a small man with graying hair and white coat sitting in a rolling chair. He was handcuffed to the chair’s arms. His glasses were askew. He spoke rapid German at the major, the goatee-style beard moving rapidly up and down as he sprayed spittle in his anger. Colonel Hadley looked at Captain Perry, who knew German from his college days.

  “Our friend here is quite angry at his perceived betrayal,” Perry translated.

  “I speak English very well, Captain … Perry, is it?” the small man in the chair said. “Whatever this fool has promised you, it will do you no good. The information you will seek is in my head and mine alone. Even if this traitorous pig gives you my journals, I am the only one who can interpret them.”

  “Okay, you’ve demonstrated your ability to speak English; now shut the hell up,” Hadley said as he stepped past the chair and examined the large enclosure in the middle of the hidden laboratory. “Is this it?” The colonel moved to the front of the giant vaultlike structure and looked closer. He saw lines of rubber and metal running in and out of the steel like snakes emerging from holes in the ground. He saw viewing ports that had slide shutters on them, and then he saw the most outstanding feature was on the top of the vault—two large steel tanks that fed the lines running into the container.

  “This looks like the pressure chamber we saw in the States, all right,” Captain Perry said as he too examined the vault. “Except for those tanks up there, almost identical.”

  “And you have all the high-altitude experimental data, Major?”

  “Well-documented data, Colonel. It’s all there.”

  “High-altitude data—is that the goods you are selling the Americans, Major?” The small scientist laughed from his chair a few feet away. Dr. Jürgen Fromm used his feet to turn in his wheeled chair.

  “Explain, Doctor,” Hadley said.

  “I would not have contacted your organization, Colonel, if I did not have more to trade than high-altitude experiment results that the Allies have not previously discovered. That alone would not have saved the lives of me and my men.”

  “You are not qualified to explain what happened. No matter what you study or even reverse engineer, you Americans will never grasp what I have discovered,” Fromm said confidently from his chair.

  The German officer turned away and then angrily stepped toward the vault and up on a small platform that lined it for viewing purposes.

  “Captain, behind you you’ll find a small switch on control panel B. It says viewing port, chamber one. Throw that switch, please.”

  Perry looked at Colonel Hadley, who nodded that he should do as asked. He did. There was the sound of an electric motor, and then the viewing port in front of the major and colonel began to slide into the side of the thick steel. The major reached out and turned on the light inside.

  “What in God’s name is this?” Hadley said as he turned angrily to face the seated scientist.

  “That is high-altitude experiment 1193-A, oxygen deprivation at fifty-six thousand meters, the result of well over a thousand attempts to understand oxygen deprivation and its effect on pilots at altitude,” Fromm said with a satisfied grin that froze Perry’s blood as he too stepped onto the viewing platform. He turned back when he saw what that was inside. He looked at Fromm with murder in his eyes.

  Arranged in a circle where each had died a horrid death were the sludge-like remains of many people. They could see that some were men and others women. From what they could see of their expressions, they had succumbed to a death that sent them to the afterlife screaming in agony.

  “What in the hell did you do to these people, you son of a bitch?” Captain Perry said as he turned away from the horrid scene and faced the grinning doctor in his chair.

  “By happenstance—sheer luck, really—the men and women you see in that section of the vault were from the same small village near the town of Sarajevo. We were lucky to have entire families involved that proved crucial to our inevitable result. It was a godsend for our accidental discovery.”

  Major Dietz turned and walked to the control panel and hit another switch. Fifteen feet away, toward the back of the vault, another viewing port opened. The two Americans moved farther down. Perry did not want to see any more, but Hadley looked far more intrigued as he viewed the room through the reinforced glass.

  “Not that I would not like to see all of you killed for the fools you are, may I suggest you flood the vault sprinkler systems with M-12, Major.”

  Dietz looked at Fromm and then turned the opening valve on the mixing chambers on the top of the vault. The automated safety system kicked in with a hiss of flooding chemical rushing into the steel and rubber lines.

  “Oh,” was all Captain Perry could get out of his constricting throat as the lights came up.

  They were all layered in a pile in front of the wall that separated the two different sections of the vault, which they now saw was two rooms. The wall had windows almost exactly like the viewing ports on the outside so each could view the occupants of the opposite side. Hadley turned silently and looked at Fromm before turning back.

  “As I mentioned, the last high-altitude test conducted for, and sponsored by, the German Luftwaffe, did not have the result we initially intended.”

  “Fucking children?” Captain Perry said, sorely tempted to open fire on any German he now saw. He would start with those available, Dr. Fromm and Major Dietz.

  “Yes, children. The children of the subjects you have just observed inside section A. Purely an accidental discovery because we were running low on slave labor, so we used the children to fill the role of adult subjects. It was just a lucky circumstance, as I said, that we had nothing but families left. That was the turning point on the initial discovery.”

  “What result?” Hadley asked, staring at the moldering bodies in their small pile of humanity. None of them could have been any older than sixteen years of age. “All I see here is cold, calculated murder, the same things we are finding all through the eastern countries. Just more mass murder.”

  “Yes, mass murder, but for a cause, Colonel, a cause. You will receive your high-altitude results from my files; you may even learn something new from them. But the discovery you are about to see is the real miracle here. What I have proven in this cesspool of a bunker is the very secret that all of mankind has wondered and dreamed about throughout human existence. The power of the mind and what it is capable of.”

  Hadley and Perry stood before the madman in silence.

  “Now you will see who holds the real bargaining position here. It’s not this fool with his Death’s Head cap on; it is I, a mere doctor of cardio and vascular theory. Now lower the chambers lights and watch the magic.”

  Hadley nodded to Dietz. The lights, not only in the bunker but the vault itself, turned low.

  “Examine chamber A, please, gentlemen,” Fromm said.

  They both looked inside. Nothing had changed; the bodies of the parents were still arrayed in a semicircle against the wall of the vault.

  “And
now the children in chamber B, please,” Fromm said, watching the men move down to the next section and look inside as the metal lines above them hissed with pressure.

  “If we did not have containment security, this experience would surely be your last, Colonel Hadley. It was too late for sixteen of my colleagues and twenty security men before we found the chemical makeup to contain them, weaken them.”

  Once they saw inside, both Americans knew their lives had changed forever. Hadley’s eyes widened, and then Captain Perry felt his heart race to dangerous proportions.

  “God Almighty, look at them all,” Hadley said.

  “This is not God’s design, Colonel, it is mine.” Fromm laughed.

  The view inside had affected Hadley for no other reason than he saw a way for him and his small team to benefit from, and in turn take something more than just honor out of this war. His mind began racing.

  “Now shall you deal with the author of this amazing discovery, or do you wish to deal with the fool Dietz? Because without my knowledge, the experiment can never be duplicated.”

  With his eyes locked on the activity inside the steel vault, Hadley flinched when something came at him at the viewing port. He heard the hiss above his head and a fine mist of something heavy and silver in color fell from a small shower-like head in the ceiling of the enclosure. He finally tore his eyes away and faced Captain Perry.

  “Free the doctor, Captain.”

  * * *

  The CIA researcher placed the file report on the top of the pile of three folders, and then he looked at the back of the woman at the window as she finally turned and smiled.

  “Thank you. And this has been verified as actually having taken place?”

  “By no less than three agencies that do not falsify reports, ma’am.”

  “Did you get the photos that I requested?” she asked.

  “Mr. Avery has them. I also have an item that was found in a very old safe-deposit box account of your husband’s that even you knew nothing about.” He reached into his coat pocket and brought out a small wooden box and placed it on the table.