Doppelganger (32 page)

After the tingling energy of the pattern signature capture, Paul heard Kelly’s voice in the intercom wishing him well. The power revved up, with the Arch suddenly coming alive with the scintillating energy that accompanied time displacement. He stared at the broad yellow line on the cold concrete floor. Stay on this side, and you remain a movement in the here and now. Take one step across that line, and you become a movement somewhere else.

The great anaconda of causality lay coiled at your feet, and through the Arch, you could walk along that serpent’s back, traversing the scales of ages past, and move to another time. The moment he took that first step, however, the only thing in the here and now that remembered him were the memories of the other team members, and that pattern signature stored safely in the massive data banks of the Arch facility computers.

As always, Paul closed his eyes to lessen the shock and disorientation of the shift, and he whispered a silent prayer that Kelly had all his numbers in order. They had experienced any number of mishaps in their many missions, and things were already critical enough without any further problems arising from their own equipment failures, or operator errors.

He reached up, straightened his naval officer’s cap, and then took a deep breath. Maeve had it so right, he thought. Here we go again. Then he took that one forward step, closing his eyes, and felt the cold chill of infinity closing in around him.

It was happening…

Part X

Loose Ends

“If you lack the humility to go back and tie up the loose ends in your past, then be prepared to forever be haunted by ghosts, all of whom will come into your present and your future— staining everything and everyone with their leftover emotional and mental garbage.”

- C. JoyBell C.

Chapter 28

Hornsrandir
was a wild place that night. Situated on the northernmost cape of Iceland on the Denmark Strait in the Westfjord region, it was cold and cheerless, even in the summer when the light seldom faded. The winds were fierce on the exposed cape, moaning with sounds that seemed unearthly at times, like demons lamenting their fate in some unseen hell. Few people lived in the region, where only a scattering of old farm houses and hunting cottages dotted the landscape. It was a green desolate preserve, pristine in its simplicity, with emerald swards that swept up at near 45 degree angles to the edge of a jagged coastline that suddenly dropped off in sheer cliffs to the rocky shore and cold sea below.

There two men stood a bleak and lonesome watch, where even the stubborn sun, high in the sky, could not chase away the eerie green fire of the auroras that night. Fedorov had come up with the idea that they could set up a generator and
Oko
panel radar team in a small cottage, the Ice Watch, as they called it, to keep an eye on the Denmark Strait. A pair of radar technicians from the ship, and one local guide named Oleg held forth in the cottage, and Oleg was coming up to the place on the thin stony trail after a long day’s hike from the nearest settlement. He carried a small backpack with gifts for the men in the cottage, tea, fresh cheese and bread, and some good hard sausage, with two bottles of wine.

Bad out tonight, he said to himself, one hand tight on the strap to the rifle slung over his right shoulder. It wasn’t for protection from the Germans, and certainly no other Icelander would ever pose a threat to him, but these wild lands were said to be haunted by… other things. There was always a chance that he might find a hungry polar bear that had come up from the coast, or an occasional Arctic wolf on the prowl. Yet those were things he could deal with well enough. He would see a bear very easily in the open terrain, and so he felt reasonably secure… Until the ice fog came.

It rolled in from the coast like frosty smoke, the breath of Odin, hoary white. Soon his visibility dropped to just a very few yards, and he stopped, suddenly feeling a deep, bone chilling cold. High above, the impenetrable fog seemed to glow with milky green trails, and he knew it must be the auroras still dancing in the late summer skies. Some said the Huldufolk would creep out from their hidden rocks and glens to dance beneath the lights. The ancient reclusive elves, according to legend, might be celebrating a marriage, or the birth of a new child. Oleg was not a superstitious man, but he believed the tales, for he had seen too many strange and unaccountable footprints in these wild lands, and things he could never explain. Even in modern times, a survey of the population found that over half the people on the island believed in the Huldufolk, and he was one of them.

Oleg stopped, his eyes tight as he watched the green light color the hoarfrost all around him. He tightened his coat and pulled up his collar against the cold, and then the sound came, the dolorous moaning that was part wind, part wolf, and everything that spoke of death and foreboding. Fear struck him, and he slipped to one knee, huddling down near the ground as if to hide from some unseen demon in the mist. The sound became a roaring rumble, and he felt the earth quiver beneath his feet. Then all was still and silent, and the pale green lights slowly dissipated.

Soon a cold wind began to stir the ice fog around him, and curling eddies of frosty air swirled about the jagged edges of nearby rocks, which loomed like the dark stony shoulders of trolls as the landscape slowly cleared. Then the wind subsided, the deep cold abating, and there came only the mournful call of some wild thing on the distant bleak shore.

Shaken by the experience, now he wanted more than ever to reach the safety and warmth of the cottage, and the company of the two men there, manning their lonesome watch. He hastened along, skirting around the large boulder that lay on the broken ground beneath the stony rise that led up to the cottage. The sight of the thatched roof, and the thin stream of wood smoke from the chimney, gave him heart, and he hurried on. Soon he came tramping up to the outer porch, taking a deep breath, much relieved as he knocked firmly on the door.

He called out a greeting in Russian, one the men had taught him in their long hours at the post, but no one answered. Casting a wan look over his shoulder, he looked for any sign of recent activity out of doors. Then he tried the handle, finding the door unlocked, and nudged it open. The hinges creaked as he eased inside, thinking he might find the men dozing by the fire, or lost beneath those strange headsets they used when minding their equipment, yet, to his great surprise, there was no one there.

Why would they be out with the weather so unpredictable like this? Perhaps that sudden fog had fouled their radar set, and they went up to the cape to check on it. So this is what Oleg decided to do, yet his discomfiture only increased as he went back out and looked up the sloping rise to the high point where they had set up their devices. Nothing was there… He looked this way and that, thinking the men may have moved the equipment somewhere else. Could they have been recalled to their ship, he wondered? Did that strange whirlybird come just now, devouring them and taking them up into those fluorescent green skies? Was that what he had heard moaning through the ice fog, the deep growl of the engines on that flying contraption?

He took a long look around, shaking his head, and then going back down the rise to the cottage. Once inside he shifted off his pack, and set his rifle down by a chair. Then he saw something on the bare wooden table that seemed odd, a pot of freshly brewed tea, the steam still curling from the spout of the iron kettle. One cup was half full on the table, the second broken and spilled on the wooden floor.

He could picture the men in his mind… at least he thought he could. Suddenly it seemed very difficult to summon up the memory of their faces, though he had spent many hours with them there in the past. Frowning, he scratched his head, looking about, and finding absolutely no sign of the men, not their equipment or books, no boots and coats, nor any possession—only those two cups of tea, one half empty, the other broken. He walked up to the wooden table, pulling off his gloves and feeling something was very wrong here. One hand touched the side of the iron kettle, finding it still very warm, as though taken from the fire just minutes ago.

And yet, with each minute that now passed, his mind seemed to be enfolded with the same deep ice fog that he had encountered earlier on the trail. Why had he found it so necessary to walk all day and come up here to the hunter’s lodge? He knew damn well that pickings were very lean in the summer. He might find an occasional fox or minx, enough for a good pelt or two, but little more. And who had taken the liberty just now to make themselves at home in his cottage?

They must have seen me on the trail, he thought, and when that fog bank rolled through on the wind, they took the opportunity to slip away. Then again, it might have been the reclusive Huldufolk, curious about his isolated haunt, and creeping about in the fog to see what they might find. That he had come there that day, bearing gifts for two strange Russian men, never entered his mind. It fled like the thin, insubstantial tendrils of a dream, the images fading, recollection losing its grip, memories lost. Never again would he think about them, sitting there before those strange humming boxes and winking lights in the night, their eyes watching the odd sweep of a phosphorescent clock face as the green hand swept in endless circles. He knew nothing of the two Russians, nor anything more of the fact they had ever been there.

He was simply Oleg, out that morning to visit his hunting lodge, and curious as to who might have been in his private little domain, helping themselves to his tea.

* * *

First
Able Seaman Thomas Winn was back at his station, staring oddly at the new equipment in the radio room he would monitor from time to time. It had been brought in by the Russians, quietly installed and fed power from the ship’s electrical system, and he had been taught how to use it, bemused at first by the many new dials and switches. Yet Winn was an old radio man, with many years of experience, and he soon learned that this one worked much like the other equipment he was so familiar with, once he got used to the dials and switches.

There had been very little traffic on the device of late. The fleet had moved south to the Azores, where a gathering of several new and unfamiliar looking ships had been secreted away in a broad bay. Crewmen pointed and whispered about them, wondering what they were, but in time, the men got on with their business and let them be.

From time to time,
Invincible
had sortied out with a pack of destroyers, watching the waters east towards the bay of Biscay for any sign of enemy activity. HMS
Glorious
was on station there to look for the Germans, but they never came.

Old
Hindenburg
and the rest took a little spanking and went running off to France, he thought. Yet we lost a good ship in
Rodney
, and word is we damn near lost
Glorious
as well. But we made them pay, or so it’s been said. Jerry had a carrier out here too, and it never made it to France. The Russians put the fire to that one, and sent it down, or so I’ve been told.

Funny thing that they slipped off like that, right in the thick of things, and haven’t been seen or heard from since. The Admiral has been down here nigh on every other day, and always with the same bloody questions—any news of the Russians? Any messages on the secure comm link channel? He seemed good and worried about that ship, and so maybe we lost more than
Rodney
that day. Maybe the Russian ship went down as well, ran afoul of a U-boat and took a torpedo that ripped open her sides and sent her down so fast that no one could even get off an S.O.S…

Yes, I’ve seen it before when I was with the convoys out of Halifax. Damn U-boats would come prowling like sharks, nipping at the flanks of the convoy, and then a ship might just light up with fire and smoke, all on a moment, and be gone the next.

Yet we had no sign of that with the Russians. Watchman Jimmy Corkle has a few tall tales to tell about how it went missing—just like that, one minute there, and the next minute gone. But Jimmy Corkle has told more than his fair share of tall tales from the mainmast, and could not always be taken seriously. Still, the silence on that radio set was deepening with time.

Then it happened.

He was sitting there that day, minding his signals traffic on the British set, where plans were being made for some visit by that other odd ship, the
Argos Fire
. It had been riding at anchor out in that secluded bay with the rest of those new ships, the funny fleet as the men called them now. A message came in on the Russian radio set, and he quickly typed it up for the Admiral, glad he would have something to hand him when he came down today with his questions. Then it happened, that strange glitch, the green fire, the tingling in the air all about the room.

He saw what looked like static fireflies around him, and particularly near that new equipment set he had learned to monitor. Thinking the damn thing might be shorting out, he reached for it to turn off the power, and then felt a sharp pain, as if his hand had been bitten by something, or burned on a hot teapot. He yanked it back, cupping it in his other hand, his eyes still wide with surprise and shock as the light danced around the radio set, green fire enveloping it, but held at bay by a shimmering sheen of scintillating blue.

Then there came a sudden chill, and a moaning sound, like the braying of the Hound of the Baskervilles. He felt a sensation of dread, a clammy fear settling over him, as if something was coming for him, to this very place, with an anguished hunger that wanted everything here dead and gone.

“God save me,” he breathed, leaning back away from the infernal Russian machine. Amazingly, he saw the device shudder, alight with that strange green and blue fire, and then the moaning trailed off, long and distended. The cold abated, and things settled down.