SecondWorld (34 page)

Adler had done it. Before he could thank her, Vesely shouted, “Safe to come out now?”

“
Ja,
” Adler said.

Vesely slid into view from behind one of the cylinders. He looked down and then stopped. He crouched, scrunched his nose, and then said, “Survivor. Come see this.”

“What is it?” Adler asked.

“Come and see!” Vesely said. “Is labeled with man’s name. Rolf Bergmann.”

Miller stood next to Vesely and looked at the name etched into the base of the strange device. Several gauges and valves lined the base next to the name. Three metal tubes on the far side exited the base and stretched out toward an identical device.

Miller guessed there were at least one hundred of the things. But what really bothered him was that beyond cylinders left behind were several hundred more empty bases. Had they never been filled or were these things part of what had been transported out?

He couldn’t imagine what they were, but they looked like futuristic giant-sized vertical coffins. He knocked his fist against it twice. It rang hollow.

“Here,” Vesely said. “Is handle.” He took hold of a handle on the side and pulled. It stuck for a moment, held closed by a small amount of suction, and then opened. Cool air seeped out, steaming as it rolled around them. The inside of the device was cushioned with red rubber. Several tubes dangled from the side. But it was otherwise empty.

The shape of the cushioning—perfectly fitted for a six-foot-tall man—held Miller’s interest. “I think these held people,” he said.

“Cryogenics,” Vesely said.

“That’s not possible,” Adler said. She moved a hand to play with her hair, but her blond locks had been cut. She squeezed a fist instead.

Vesely turned to Adler. “The Nazis did many experiments on humans. Jews and Russians at Auschwitz were stripped naked. Placed in freezing water with temperature probe in rectum. Is documented. Test subjects were kept in water until death, or near death. Then, they would attempt to resuscitate the victims. Heat lamps. Internal irrigation—scalding water in throat, stomach, and intestines. And bath in near boiling water. To my knowledge, all victims died. But it seems process was perfected.”

“Mein Gott,”
Adler said. She walked along the line of cryogenic tombs, reading the names to herself. “There are so many. But where are the others?”

“That’s what we need to find out,” Miller said. He turned toward the command center and saw Brodeur sitting at a computer, its screen glowing brightly. He’d apparently recovered from the attack, booted the system back up, and got back on task. His fingers clacked over the keyboard.

“Where were you?” Miller asked.

Brodeur glanced up for just a moment and gave an awkward smile. “Got lost. By the time I came back the army of killer gizmos was on the loose. When they shut down, I got to work.”

Miller headed toward him. “Why did you scream?”

Brodeur’s smile turned sheepish. “I tripped.”

Before Miller could tease the man, Brodeur finished his flurry of keystrokes. “To quote
Spaceballs,
I ain’t found shit. Can’t make heads nor tails of this operating system, never mind that everything is in German.”

Miller looked at the screen. Like the mobile computer, Miller couldn’t make sense of what he was seeing either. It looked something closer to the Windows operating system, but the learning curve would be steep with everything written in German. But Adler seemed to know her way around a computer.

Vesely entered the command area and whistled. They were surrounded by computers, servers, and bundles of cables that descended from the grid of metal beams above them. As his eyes followed the cables up, Vesely went white and fell back. He landed in one of the floor-bolted swiveling chairs and would have spilled out if Miller hadn’t caught him.

“You okay, Cowboy?” Miller asked.

“No. I am not.” Vesely looked beyond Miller’s face, toward the ceiling. “Am terrified.”

Miller looked up and saw what had Vesely so frightened.

The Bell.

It hung from the stone ceiling, fifty feet above their heads.

“Is that what I think it is?” Miller asked.

“I do not think it is prototype, but it resembles Bell, yes. I do not think this is meant for flight, though.”

“Why?”

Vesely looked at Miller like he was crazy. “Because is mounted to ceiling.”

Adler joined them, looking up, looking nearly as pale as Vesely. Then she saw the computer screen. “Have you found anything?”

“Everything is in German,” Brodeur said.

“Let me,” Adler said, motioning Brodeur out of the seat. She looked the screen over for a moment and said, “Linux, same as the other. Should not have any trouble accessing anything that is not encrypted.” She looked back at Brodeur. “You are lucky starting the system did not restart the robots.”

“Actually, I think it did,” Miller said, pointing out the red lights gleaming like a horde of angry, midget Cyclopes. “It just didn’t restart the last command.”

“Well, good. Knock yourself out,” Brodeur said. “I’m going to do some recon and make sure there aren’t any stragglers.”

“Cowboy,” Miller said. “Go with him.”

Vesely didn’t look happy about the order. Neither did Brodeur. The two men had rubbed each other the wrong way from the beginning. But he didn’t like the idea of any of them being alone. After the two men left, Miller watched over Adler’s shoulder as she worked her way through the system.

A series of folder icons appeared on the screen. She translated them. “Assembly. Stasis. Facilities. Schedule.”

“Facilities,” Miller said.

Adler opened the folder. The first name on the alphabetical list was “Auschwitz.”

The number of sites was mind-blowing. Adler opened one at random and found several more subfolders, everything from schematics to construction reports to photos. They scanned it all, quickly realizing they were looking at the plans for an underground bunker and the evidence that it had been completed.

“Go back to the list,” Miller said. If these bunkers had been built to survive the coming storm, and he believed they were, then one of them might hold the key to stopping it. He scanned the list.

Several names sounded familiar. Some sounded foreign. One of the names had caught his attention. “Dulce.”

“Have you been there?” Adler asked.

“It’s a base so secret it’s kind of a modern myth. I served with a guy who claimed he served at Dulce. Said they had—shit—he said they had UFOs. Was real proud of it. Come to think of it, he was a racist prick, too. It’s our best bet so far.”

“What about Area Fifty-one? Aren’t they supposed to have UFOs?”

“They’ve got stealth bombers, which will probably turn out to be Nazi technology, but I don’t see Groom Lake on the list.”

“I think I can print this if you want.”

“Don’t need to.” He reached into his pocket and took out a thumb drive he’d requested along with the rest of the equipment. Nothing worked better for high-speed, mobile data transfers. “Thought it might come in handy. But don’t just copy the Dulce folder. Copy it all.”

He handed it to her and she plugged the small device in the computer’s front side USB port. She went back to the display of the four folders, selected them all, and started the transfer. Ten gigabytes of information in ten minutes. Not bad. If they found nothing else, Miller would take the information back to the
George Washington
and have a team of people sift through it. He suspected Dulce was important and didn’t want to stay in the Nazi stronghold any longer than he had to.

“You think that’s what we came for?” she asked.

“We’ll find out when we—” A horrible thought occurred to him. “Can you open the personnel file while that’s transferring?”

She did. Three new folders appeared.

Current.

Deceased.

Stasis.

Miller’s stomach churned. “Open the stasis folder.”

Adler’s shoulders shrunk in. She’d figured out what had him concerned. “You don’t really think?”

“Just open it.”

Inside the folder was a single file. She opened it.

A long list of names, in no discernible order, opened on the left side of the screen. As she scrolled through the names using the arrow keys, a photo and profile for each person opened on the right side of the screen. Images and text flashed past.

“Stop!” Miller said. He moved her hand away from the keyboard and hit the Up key three times. A face he’d hoped to never see again appeared on the screen.
It’s true,
he thought.
Vesely is right.

He scanned the man’s profile. Ulbrecht Busch. Born in 1921. Member of the Schutzstaffel—Germany’s elite SS. He served in World War II under a man named—

“Mazuw,” Adler said. She’d seen the name, too.

Miller nodded. “I’m willing to bet most of the men in this database served under him, perhaps were handpicked by him.”

“You recognized him?”

“I killed him,” Miller said. “In Miami.”

He scrolled through the names again. Images of grim men flashed on the screen, but his eyes were on the names. The first name he recognized sent a chill through his body.

Hans Kammler—the man who’d overseen the building of extermination camps and many of the Reich’s more exotic weapons, including the Bell.

A second name caught his attention as it quickly scrolled past and made his knees nearly give out.

Before he could think about the discovery’s ramifications or point it out to Adler, she said, “Stop!” and brushed his hand away. “The names on the left, highlighted in red. I think they’re the men who have been revived already.”

Miller scanned the list, looking for the name. It was colored mustard yellow.

That was good.

Above it, near the top of the screen, Kammler’s name appeared in red.

Not so good.

Toward the end of the list, most of the names were in red. “Look,” she said. “Rolf Bergmann.”

The name from the cryogenic chamber. It seemed Adler’s assumption was correct. She scanned through the red names slowly. A face appeared that they both recognized.

“The asshole from Huber’s,” Miller said. “Who wanted to marry you.”

Not wanting to look at his face any longer, Adler tapped the Down arrow and immediately felt far more violated by what she saw than when the large Nazi manhandled her at Huber’s cabin.

Miller let out a drawn-out, whispered “Fuuuck.”

While he and Adler once again both recognized the face, the name—Lance Eichmann—didn’t make sense. They knew him by a different name.

“I don’t look bad for ninety years old,” Brodeur said from behind them. The Southern accent was gone, replaced by a thick German zing. He punctuated the statement by chambering the first round of his assault rifle. The message was clear: if they moved, they were dead.

Miller turned around slowly, fire burning him from the inside out.

Roger Brodeur was Lance Eichmann.

A Nazi.

46

“You didn’t bypass the outer door,” Miller said. “You knew the code.”

Brodeur grinned and shrugged. “I may have exaggerated my skills.”

Miller fought back visions of tearing Brodeur’s head from his body. Losing his cool now would be a mistake and would likely result in him and Adler lying in a pool of their own blood. Of course, that seemed the most likely scenario, anyway, but no need to rush things. He really only had one hope left. The Cowboy. “Where is Vesely? Did you kill him?”

“The clown is alive. Wandering the hallways in search of little green men. Bringing him was a mistake, Miller. The man’s not a soldier. Doesn’t follow orders. Of course, if he’d listened to you and followed me, he would be dead. Darwin was wrong, sometimes the stupidest of us survives.” Brodeur grinned like a demon. “Though not for much longer.”

“Is that what you’re doing now?” Miller asked. “Following orders?”

“Right now, I’m improvising.” Brodeur adjusted his aim from Miller to Adler and then back to Miller. “I was tasked with following you and reporting everything you discovered.”

“To monitor what the president knew,” Miller guessed.

He nodded. “I’ve become quite good at intelligence gathering.”

“How is this possible?” Adler asked. “You’re an FBI agent.”

Miller realized Adler could easily put the pieces together herself. She was stalling for time as the data transfer progress bar scrolled across the bottom of the computer screen behind them. But then what? Did she think he had a plan? Because aside from being Superman or the Flash, there was no way he could cover the distance between himself and Brodeur without being cut down.

“I was brought back in 2000. My first year included painful physical therapy. But I regained my former strength, and then surpassed it. For a year I studied modern American culture—learning about all of the silly ways you waste your lives. I perfected my Southern accent and then, in the wake of nine-eleven, when the military and law enforcement agencies began recruiting for the War on Terror, I was inserted into the United States with a complete history—passport, driver’s license, medical history, diplomas, everything I needed to join the FBI. I have enjoyed rapid promotion since.” He smiled. “I will be an Obergruppenführer in the SecondWorld.”