Operation Wolfe Cub: A Chilling Historical Thriller (THE TIME TO TELL Book 1) (41 page)

Chantain then buried her nose into it. “
Hmmm
…this is as good as my science-fiction crap. Maybe I should read this tonight before bed.” She flipped the page. “Listen to this…it says, ‘The four sides of a cross, or the cardinal points, often give meaning to the representation of the world into four classical elements: Earth, Water, Air, and Fire—”

Eddie put his cake and coffee aside. “Oh, come on, Chantain. I was just looking at some pictures, really.”

Chantain marked the spot with her finger, glaring. “I want to continue if you don’t mind…it says ‘Some ancient cultures of Japan, China, India, and Greece and their philosophers have added an additional element, which is sometimes not visible on the cross’s four points. The works of Aristotle, Plato, Hinduism, Buddhism, and others have added such an element, which is called various other names and has different meanings ranging from aether, quintessence, stars, void, and even the Universe. Some of the concepts defined in the additional element, range from corruptible, heavenly, or things not of our—natural lives.’”

Suddenly Eddie became interested. “Wow, it says all that?”

“Hush up. I’m reading…it says, ‘It is not known exactly when the first cross was made, but predominant theories indicate just after the time of the circle…older circle symbols were made during the Stone Age. These were diagonal crosses or Xs, technically termed as a—saltire.’”

“
Hmmm
, let me take a look at that.”

Chantain handed his book over. “Doesn’t sound much like your typical war stuff to me.”

Eddie turned the pages back and forth. “Sure it is…let me show you…
ah ha
, yes, here we go…look, there are all kinds of military iron crosses here…says so right here. Oh, look here.
Here’s the Egyptian Cross, the Greek Cross, Saint Andrew’s Cross, Celtic Cross, Swastika…Christian Crosses are military too…they’re all war…yup, all about war and pages of them… Doll’s mark isn’t there anywhere. Go on, look.”

Chantain snatched the book back. “Okay then, I will…
hmmm
, hope you don’t mind if I read more…
hmmm
… the Coptic Crosses of different ages in Egypt.
Hmmm
, the Sunwheel Cross used throughout Native American culture. The High Cross of Ireland…
hmmm
…the Canterbury Cross dating back to 850 AD. The Crucifix Cross? Oh, look…the Crucifix Cross is all about Jesus. Is that about war? Look here, the Lorraine Cross of Joan of Arc. Jerusalem Cross.”

As she kept reading and looking, her eyes and mouth suddenly opened wide. “Oh my God, look at this.”

“What did you find now?
Sheesh
.”

“Here are crosses with daggers and upside-down swords… crosses with shields…
hmmm
, I never would’ve thought these church crosses would—oh, this is interesting.”

Eddie looked like he threw in the towel. “No, just keep looking until you’re satisfied. There’s stars too…here look in
this
book. Five and six-sided ones, even.”

As she kept looking, she somehow slowly swayed herself out of suspicion. At some point, she became satisfied. Without further hesitation, she closed up the last of his books, leaving them on the desk. Strangely enough, she even covered them back up with Eddie’s newspaper. “Okay.”

Eddie coyly picked up his cake and began to eat again, just as Chantain blurted, “I know you’re hiding something… okay, I admit…I’d like to believe that terrible tattoo of Doll’s is just something simple like—”

“Look…it’s probably what I said, honey, some family symbol. What else
can
it be?”

Chantain pointed to one of the books. “That book there, they even covered one of those crosses with a
skull
and-and
cross bones
.”

Eddie took another bite of cake, speaking with his mouth full, “Well, I
did
say I was looking at ugly war stuff, didn’t I?”

“Oh, I know. I just wish I knew if he meant something bad.”

To appease her mind, Eddie cordially opened up one of the books and turned to the page of another cross called the Saint Peter’s Cross, which he pointed to with his fork. “This’ll help you out…look here…if Doll’s mark was evil, it would be an inverted Christian cross, like this one. Now
that’s
evil, my darling…don’t worry about it.”

Chantain gasped, “Why, why that’s the-the Jesus Christ cross—except upside down. I didn’t see that one…you mean all you got to do is turn it upside down? That’s stupid. The one on my necklace turns upside down all the time.”

“I know honey, that’s what I’m saying. It turns upside down on your neck because you move around…they’re called accidents.”

Almost instantly, she let down her guard. “Well, how do you like the cake?”

Eddie almost missed his mouth with his next bite. “Oh, the cake? It’s good. Real good…don’t throw any away. I want it all.”

Just then, a song came on the radio that Eddie liked, so he yelled, “Hey, Doll, turn it up a little, will you?”

Chantain shook her head. “He’s not that good.”

“Oh, wanna bet? You’re out of the house a lot. You miss what that cute little kid is really about.”

As Doll turned the radio’s volume up a little bit more, Chantain swiftly headed out of the office while talking over her shoulder, “You just taught him that—like you taught him how to turn it on. You can’t fool me.”

Eddie carefully watched her leave before letting out a huge sigh of relief. Quickly, he picked up the book Chantain was reading and thumbed over to that particular section, whispering, “It looks like a star…it’s a cross…a saltire cross.”

He continued, “
Hmmm
, a rolling star with four legs, it has to be.”

As he anxiously flipped the pages back and forth time and again. Soon enough, he muttered, “Why isn’t it here? Got to be somewhere…where the hell is it?”

Among the many pages of diagrams, photos, and colored drawings he looked over, including several varieties of four-sided crosses, he read carefully into another portion of the text. “The family of equilateral crosses with arms bent at right or left facing angles…some were saltire.”

He muttered, “
Hmmm
…interesting.” He then picked up the pencil tracing to look at it again, before nodding. Indeed, Doll’s symbol had right-facing star tips, like it was in motion. They were tilted in the fashion of an “X” as well.

He softly read aloud, “These types of crosses are—some of the oldest archaeological human symbols ever found. They date—what?”

Eddie looked up blindly at the wall, softly repeating the text, “Ninety-five hundred years BC…the Neolithic Period? What in the hell is that?”

With a whole new rush of fervor, he quickly thumbed to equilateral crosses and saltires to see if Doll’s symbol could be stuffed somewhere in the corners of those pages, but it wasn’t.

The photographs revealed more pictures and descriptions, which tantalized him. Some artifacts were pictured there too: the Indus Valley Civilization, Iran in the first millennium BC, India, Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, the Samurai Hasekura Tsunengaga, Ancient Greek, Bronze Age, Baltic, Celtic, Finnish, Slavic, Sami, and even ancient Germanic. He looked closely at all of the pictures with their symbols, and there they all were staring back at him.

He whispered, “
Hmmm
, nothing stands out…nothing like Doll’s.” After staring at them a minute or two longer, he rubbed his eyes. “Wasting time maybe.”

Inexplicably, Eddie soon lost what little bit of enthusiasm he had struggled to keep. After that, he simply closed the books up without further interest.

As he got up from the desk, he yawned and stretched. His pencil tracing caught his eye in the middle of his stretch, so he stopped to look at it one last time before wadding it up and throwing it in the trash basket with a lucky toss. Closure to Doll’s mysterious, emblematic folly came to an end all too quickly it seemed.

Shortly thereafter, nothing seemed to amuse him, except for perhaps the song he liked on the radio in the background. Even it had ended too soon when the radio went on the blink. He lazily gazed up at the ceiling, doing nothing in particular, just as the radio started again with a special broadcast.

“This is not a test…I repeat…this is not a test. JDVL radio is interrupting this program with a special emergency announcement from the President of the United States of America. Please stand by.”

Chantain rushed over to peek through the door. “Come out, Eddie. Truman’s going to talk on the radio it sounds like. I wonder what it’s about.”

Eddie walked out, shrugging away his pent-up aggravations. He stepped back into the living room to be greeted by mild nuisances. Doll’s spinning top contributed its share of noise, while Major barked at the movement of it, spinning on the floor.

Eddie pointed to the radio. “Do you know what Truman said when he first ran for office? It’s the only thing I agree with him on.”

Chantain sat down to get ready for the emergency announcement, which hadn’t yet come on. “No. Why would I remember what he said? I hardly remember what
you
say half the time.”

He went on, “The damn goofball said that his choice early in life was either to become a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician
³⁰
…then he said there was hardly any difference between the two…can you believe that? That’s what he said.”

Chantain quickly lit a cigarette. “Oh, come on, Eddie. He wouldn’t say that. Why are you so down on everybody?”

“He did too say that. That’s no lie…the dirty rotten Democrat. That’s the only good thing he ever said.”

“Now, Eddie. You voted for Roosevelt, didn’t you? He was Democrat. You liked him.”

“That doesn’t mean a thing. Truman’s a
scoundrel
. That’s all I got to say.”

After pacing in a circle, he finally sat down next to the radio, with Doll and Major at his side. This didn’t stop Doll and Major from making more racket. Eddie had enough, so he took the dog outside to the porch and then hobbled back in to sit down again. Chantain assisted by placing Doll on her lap just as the emergency broadcast hit the airwaves nationwide:

“—now for our President of the United States...Harry S. Truman
³¹
.
”

“Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than twenty thousand tons of TNT. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British ‘Grand Slam,’ which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare
.

“The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many-fold. And the end is not yet. With this bomb, we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction
to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. In their present form, these bombs are now in production and even more powerful forms are in development—”

Chantain became disinterested right away. Immediately, she put Doll back down on the floor then clacked her heels back to the kitchen. “Oh, thank God we’re bombing them… for a minute, I thought
we
were the ones getting bombed.”

Eddie lifted his cane onto the seat of his chair. “Wait. Where you goin’? This is big. Some bomb with twenty thousand tons of TNT, did you hear? That’s revolutionary technology.”

Chantain was in the kitchen by then, clanging dishes. “I don’t care. As long as we’re not getting bombed, that’s all I want to hear.”

President Truman continued,

“—It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”

Eddie yelled toward the kitchen, “They call it an atomic bomb…it harnesses the powers of the universe, he said!”

Chantain yelled back, “Did they get rid of all the Japs, or just some of them?”

Eddie glanced over to the noisy kitchen, shaking his head as if he didn’t even want to answer that question. He muttered, “Christ sakes…can’t believe her sometimes, Doll.”

President Truman went on:

“Before 1939, it was the accepted belief of scientists that it was theoretically possible to release atomic energy. But no one knew any practical method of doing it. By 1942, however, we knew that the Germans were working feverishly to find a way to add atomic energy
to the other engines of war with which they hoped to enslave the world, but they failed. We may be grateful to Providence that the Germans got the V-1s and V-2s late and in limited quantities and even more grateful that they did not get the atomic bomb at all
.

“The battle of the laboratories held fateful risks for us, as well as the battles of the air, land, and sea, and we have now won the battle of the laboratories, as we have won the other battles
.

“Beginning in 1940, before Pearl Harbor, scientific knowledge useful in war was pooled between the United States and Great Britain, and many priceless helps to our victories have come from that arrangement. Under that general policy, the research on the atomic bomb was begun. With American and British scientists working together, we entered the race of discovery against the Germans
.

“The United States had available the large number of scientists of distinction in the many needed areas of knowledge. It had the tremendous industrial and financial resources necessary for the project, and they could be devoted to it without undue impairment of other vital war work. In the United States the laboratory work and the production plants, on which a substantial start had already been made, would be out of reach of enemy bombing, while at that time Britain was exposed to constant air attack and was still threatened with the possibility of invasion. For these reasons, Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt agreed that it was wise to carry on the project here
.

“We now have two great plants and many lesser works devoted to the production of atomic power. Employment during peak construction numbered one hundred twenty-five thousand, and over sixty thousand individuals are even now engaged in operating the plants. Many have worked there for two and a half years. Few know what they have been producing. They see great quantities of material going in, and they see nothing coming out of these plants, for the physical size of the explosive charge is exceedingly small. We have spent two billion dollars on the greatest scientific gamble in history—and won.”