The Coldest War Read online

  Dinner was a bowl of white rice with tomato and, as a treat to himself, the rest of a bockwurst he’d been saving in the icebox. It lifted his spirits, reminded him of home. In the earliest years of his exile, when London still carried fresh scars from the Blitz, German food couldn’t be found for any price. That was changing, but slowly.

  After dinner, he sorted through the odds and ends he’d brought home. He’d been gone for two days, and assaulted by the little bastards who infested this place when he returned, but it was worth it. The Royal Air Force had decommissioned an outpost down near Newchurch, one of the original Chain Home stations dating from the war. It was one of the last to be replaced with a more modern and sophisticated radar post that could peer deeper into Socialist Europe. Such posts would provide a futile first warning if a wave of Ilyushin bombers and their MiG escorts started heading for Britain.

  The decommissioned radar station had meant a wealth of electronic equipment practically free for the taking, pence on the pound. The sensitive equipment had been carted away long before any civilians set foot on the premises. But Reinhardt didn’t care about any of that—it would have been the high-frequency circuitry, microwave generators, and other esoteric things. What Reinhardt sought was also esoteric, but wouldn’t be found in a newspaper advertisement.

  He’d snatched up condensers, valves, inductors, relays, and more. An excellent haul, even better than the estate sale of the deceased ham radio enthusiast. He’d even found a few gauges, which would serve him well when he re-created the Reichsbehörde battery-circuit design.

  When. Not if.

  Reverse engineering the damn thing was a painful process. He had learned, through trial and error, how to induce hallucinations, indigestion, convulsions.…

  He mused to himself, bitterly, that he had collected nearly enough equipment to build his own radar outpost. How ironic. Radar was touted as one of the great technological innovations of the last war, but Reinhardt himself was the greatest of all. Yet in all the years since the war had ended, he had failed to recapture the Götterelektron.

  Then again, Herr Doktor von Westarp had enjoyed the resources of the Third Reich at his disposal. The IG Farben conglomerate had assigned teams of chemists, metallurgists, and engineers to the devices that had fueled Reinhardt’s feats of superhuman willpower.

  But Reinhardt did not have IG Farben at his disposal. It didn’t even exist any longer.

  They had always called them “batteries,” but that was misleading. They held a charge, yes, but Reinhardt had deduced over the years that they also contained specialized circuitry tailored to deliver the Götterelektron in precisely the correct manner.

  The accumulated detritus of his quest had transformed his flat into a cave. Most of it he had purchased or scavenged, but some came from the work he did repairing televisions and radios. It was demeaning work, but even gods had to eat. Sometimes he lied, claiming the device was beyond repair, and then kept the parts.

  Reinhardt stored his journals in a hollow behind the gurgling radiator. When he had first come to England, he’d had no training in electronics, nor in the scientific method, for that matter. He’d been raised by one of the greatest minds of the century, but he’d never bothered to pay any attention to how Doctor von Westarp worked. And for that, he cursed himself frequently.

  The journals contained hundreds of circuit diagrams accompanied by lengthy annotations describing Reinhardt’s experiences with each. But none of those circuits had elicited anything like the tingle of the Götterelektron. Reinhardt retrieved the latest journal, opened it to a new page, then settled down at his workbench (a discarded wooden door laid across two sawhorses).

  Hours passed.

  It was some time after midnight when Reinhardt, bleary-eyed and exhausted, abandoned his efforts for the evening. He brushed his teeth. Then he brushed them a second time, and his tongue, too, trying vainly to scrub the odd taste from his mouth.

  A metallic tang.

  Reinhardt had all but forgotten it: the copper taste, that harmless but annoying side effect of godhood.

  He tossed his toothbrush in the sink and rushed back to the bench, where the evening’s final experiment still stood. He worked backwards through everything he had done, searching for the combination that had coated his tongue with the taste of metal. Beads of sweat ran down his forehead, stung his eyes with salt as he trembled with the exertion of calling up his Willenskräfte. Nothing happened.

  But then—

  —a blue corona engulfed his outstretched hand, just for an instant—

  —and died.

  Strive as he might, he couldn’t call it back. But it had happened. He had felt the Götterelektron coursing into his mind, fueling his willpower. He tasted copper, and smelled smoke.

  Smoke?

  Reinhardt thought at first he had inadvertently started his flat on fire owing to rustiness and a lack of finesse. But no. A faulty condenser had shorted out. Reinhardt realized that as it had died, its electrical characteristics had changed in some random, unpredictable way. Changed in a way that had, just for a moment, returned his power to him.

  Children called him Junkman. But he had been a god, once.

  And would be again.

  one

  1 May 1963

  Arzamas-16, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, USSR

  Gretel laid a fingertip on Klaus’s arm.

  “Wait,” she whispered.

  Several seconds passed while she consulted some private time line that existed only in her head. He recognized the look on her face: she was remembering the future, peering a few seconds ahead.

  Then she said, “Now, brother.”

  Klaus pulled the merest trickle of current from his stolen battery, just enough of the Götterelektron to dematerialize his hand. It was a gamble, one Gretel had assured him would work. But he’d practiced for weeks.

  His hand ghosted through ferro-concrete. He wrapped his fingers around one of the bolts that sealed the vault. Klaus concentrated, focusing his Willenskräfte like a scalpel, and pulled a finger’s width of steel through the wall. Gretel caught the slug before it clattered to the floor and gave them away.

  They repeated the process twice. Klaus severed all three bolts, and the alarm circuit, in fifteen seconds. But the damage to the door was strictly internal; a passing guard would see nothing but pristine, unblemished steel.

  It would have been easier for Klaus to walk straight through the wall with his sister in tow. But that would have tripped sensors and triggered their captors’ fail-safes before he was halfway through. The entire facility, this secret city the locals called Sarov, bristled with antennae and circuitry attuned to the telltale whisper of the Götterelektron. Unauthorized expression of the Willenskräfte instantly triggered the electromagnetic equivalent of a shaped charge. The British had developed a crude precursor to this technology back during the war; they’d called their devices “pixies,” and they had a range of a few hundred meters. The Soviet fail-safes could knock out a battery at six kilometers. Klaus knew the specs because he’d helped them test the system. He’d had no choice.

  Gretel never worried about the fail-safes. Klaus stood on the cusp of fifty (according to his best estimate; he and his sister had been war orphans) and yet he still didn’t know how or when Gretel called upon the Götterelektron to see the future. He suspected she relied upon batteries far less than she let their captors believe, and not when they thought she was using them. It had been that way back home in Germany, too.

  They eased the vault door closed after slipping inside. Klaus groped for the light switch. Sickly yellow light cascaded from the naked bulb overhead, chasing shadows past rows of cabinets and shelves. A musty smell permeated the vault; their footsteps kicked up swirls of dust. The Soviets still referred to this place, almost reverently, as ALPHA. But they came here rarely these days.

  The cabinets contained papers the Soviets had obtained during their lightning-fast occupation of the old REGP, the Reichsbehörde fü
r die Erweiterung Germanischen Potenzials; the shelves held physical artifacts from Doctor von Westarp’s farm, where the Reichsbehörde had lived and died.

  Gretel and Klaus sought the batteries their captors had confiscated at the end of the war. He had managed, after months of preparation, to sneak a single battery past the Soviets’ stringent inventory controls. But if his sister had foreseen things correctly (of which, of course, he had no doubt), they would need every millivolt they could muster on their long trek to the Paris Wall.

  The rechargeable lithium-ion packs had been cutting-edge technology, decades ahead of their time in 1939. But they were blocky, bulky things, and hopelessly outdated compared to the sleek modules the Soviets had developed. Gretel’s prescience aside, it was difficult to believe the Reichsbehörde batteries had retained any charge after twenty-two years. Klaus wiped away the layer of dust and grime coating the gauges. The batteries were degraded but still serviceable. If the gauges could be trusted.

  Although Klaus had suffered tremendous misgivings about Doctor von Westarp’s research, and had lost his unswerving faith in the Götterelektrongruppe long before the Communists’ master stroke, he now felt a frisson of relief and pride. German engineering. A reminder of those golden days when the world had been so much simpler, their shared destiny so much grander. Even degraded, these old batteries represented a wealth of power and opportunity. More than Klaus had known in decades.

  They also found a few of the old double harnesses. Klaus and Gretel stripped to the waist. It was awkward, but they both managed to don two harnesses, one in front and one in back. When they had finished, they both carried four batteries beneath their clothes. It was very uncomfortable.

  “Let’s go,” he said, taking her hand.

  But Gretel said, “Wait. We need something else, too.” She led him down one aisle and up another, to a shelf holding a pair of jars filled with sepia-colored solution. Beside them lay an empty rucksack.

  “What are those for?”

  The corner of Gretel’s mouth quirked up in a private little smile. “Don’t worry. I’ve packed for you, too.”

  Something in the way she said it dislodged a forgotten moment from the recesses of Klaus’s memory. It was the day of their capture, minutes before. He’d been away, and had rushed back to the farm to retrieve Gretel before the Communists overran the facility. He’d taken her hand, preparing to pull her through the wall, desperate to get back to the truck and drive ahead of the advancing Red Army:

  “Wait,” she said. She pointed at the rucksack. “We’ll need that.”

  The sack clattered like ceramic or glass when he lifted it. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ve packed for you, too.”

  Klaus took one of the jars. A pallid, shriveled mass floated in the murk. The jar had a wide opening, and the lid had been sealed and resealed with wax. The yellowed label listed a set of dates and other annotations printed in Cyrillic, in a variety of hands and a variety of inks. The jar had last been studied six years ago. It was dusty.

  He blew away some of the dust, then lifted the jar to the light, trying to peer inside. The contents settled against the glass like a dead fish.

  Klaus frowned. “Is this … is this Heike’s brain?”

  “Part of it.”

  Heike. The invisible woman. Another of Doctor von Westarp’s children, one of that small handful to survive the procedures and learn how to embrace the Willenskräfte. They had grown up together, lived together, trained together back at the Reichsbehörde. Until poor, fragile Heike had spent a long afternoon in private conversation with Gretel, and killed herself the next day.

  The doctor didn’t mourn his dead daughter. He dissected her. It was, after all, a perfect opportunity to study the physiological effects of channeling the Götterelektron. Since Heike had done that via the electrodes in her skull—like Klaus, Gretel, Reinhardt, and the others—the doctor had paid particular attention to her brain.

  Gretel took the jar from his hands. She crumpled the label and tossed it aside, then picked at the wax with her fingernails. It flaked away in long clumps. Klaus caught a strong whiff of formaldehyde when she cracked the seal.

  “Why…” Klaus trailed off. He tried again. “How will Heike’s brain help us to escape?”

  “It won’t,” said Gretel, as though explaining something obvious. She dumped out the contents. Formaldehyde and brain matter splattered on the floor. And then she added: “But we need a jar.”

  “What? I don’t—”

  Comprehension dawned, and something icy slithered down Klaus’s spine. It became an oily nausea when it reached his gut. He put a hand over his mouth and swallowed. Oh my God.

  Back during the war he had seen Gretel do strange things. Inexplicable things. Terrible things. Perhaps none more so than what she had done to Heike. Now he understood the why of it, but that only made things worse: Heike’s suicide was a tiny cog in a vast machine. Gretel had prepared their escape long before they were captured. She had caused an innocent woman to kill herself, just to ensure one perfectly normal jar would be there twenty years later, exactly when and where they needed it. The sheer callousness rivaled anything ever done at the Reichsbehörde or Arzamas. But the scope of Gretel’s machinations … It was a wonder Klaus’s blood didn’t crystallize in his veins.

  Gretel was weaving cause and effect across decades. The farm had fallen because Gretel wanted it to happen. Why? It had gnawed at him since before their arrival at Arzamas. He’d asked, of course, but Gretel never answered his questions. Just smiled as she weaved her plans.

  And here he was. A ghost along for the ride.

  Klaus sighed. He feared this insight into his sister, but he hated Arzamas more. “What now?”

  “Now you go to the bathroom.”

  Gott. This is getting worse and worse. “In the jar?”

  Gretel frowned. Her braids—long raven-black locks streaked with gray—danced past her shoulders as she shook her head. She’d always worn her hair long, except in the early days here, when the Soviets had shaved their heads.

  “No. You go,” she said, pushing him toward the vault door, “to the bathroom.” Another nudge toward the door, and this time she put the glassware in his hand. It was slippery. “Clean this. Leave it on the sink.”

  He started to talk, to ensure he understood what she said, but she interrupted him. “Go. And don’t linger.”

  Klaus ran the water as quietly as possible, so that he could listen for footsteps in the corridor. He half suspected that part of Gretel’s escape plan involved him getting caught outside the dormitory after curfew. The jar made his hands stink, and a layer of gunk had accumulated around the rim. He scrubbed it away as best he could with a towel. Working quickly, he managed to get the jar looking like it was mostly clean. And then, because the incriminating towel stank of formaldehyde (like his hands), he hid it behind one of the toilets. He balanced the jar on the narrow ledge of the sink, where a water-stained wall joined rust-stained ceramic.

  When he returned to the vault, Gretel was slipping something into her blouse. “All done, brother? Time to go.” She led him into the corridor.

  Before it became a secret city, Arzamas-16 had been known as Sarov: a dozen churches built around the Sarova monastery, home of St. Seraphim. Everything was closed by order of the state when Sarov became a research facility. It grew quickly.

  But inside and out, the architecture here was unlike most Soviet towns of comparable size: most of Arzamas-16 had been built by POW labor from Axis troops captured during the Red Army’s sweep across Europe in the final months of the war. Arzamas-16 had a distinctly European, distinctly German, feel. It could have been a Thuringian village. The early days had been profoundly disorienting, when Klaus had watched the buildings going up and felt he was witnessing the destruction of the Reichsbehörde in reverse.

  Arzamas-16 was a large and heavily guarded facility, ringed with walls, fences, and aggressive perimeter defenses. Including the fail-safes. This building
, number three, sat near the center of town. Klaus suppressed the urge to keep looking over his shoulder while his sister led him toward the guard station.

  Gretel pulled him to a stop at the base of a stairwell. They backed up a few stairs, until they perched in the shadows around the corner from the guard desk.

  Klaus whispered, “The patrols—”

  “There won’t be any tonight.” Gretel put a finger to her lips.

  As Klaus’s breathing slowed, he started to make out sounds from around the corner. He recognized the sound of liquid sloshing inside glass. It reminded him of poor Heike, and her ignominious end. Nothing happened for several minutes.

  Then footsteps echoed up the corridor. Klaus braced for a fight he hoped to avoid. At best, he’d get a few seconds of complete insubstantiality before tripping the fail-safes, barely enough time for him and Gretel to escape through the wall.

  A voice said, “What the hell are you doing?”

  Another answered, “Drink with me, Sacha.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “I am not drunk. I am celebrating! It is, as I say this to you, not twenty minutes after midnight. Do you know what that makes today?”

  The sound of glass on metal, like a bottle pulled across a desk. “Where did you get this?” That was Sacha’s voice again. Klaus didn’t know the guards by name, but he might have recognized their faces.

  “It makes today,” continued the first guard, “International Workers’ Day. And so I am celebrating my hardworking brothers and sisters. To them!” A moment later, the sound of smacked lips.

  “You’re disgraceful, Kostya. Have you done the rounds, or must I do your job for you?”

  Gretel patted Klaus on the knee when he tensed. Trust me, she mouthed.

  “Disgraceful? I am a patriot, I’ll have you know.”

  “You would drink jet fuel, if you could find it. What is that?”