EXOSKELETON II: Tympanum

by Shane Stadler

  Photos and schematics of the various Antarctic bases were organized according to their respective operations – but most were from Operation Tabarin. Some of the bases had been shockingly small – in some cases, just a single building and fewer than ten people. He thought those who’d occupied them must’ve been miserable dealing with the extreme conditions.

  He inspected the images of the ships and equipment involved in the operations. Pictures of German and American submarines, British vessels, and various aircraft were grouped according to the dates the photos had been taken. Three photos of the Schwabenland were pinned in a vertical column, each showing the vessel from different perspectives. The British report described it as an 8000-ton floating airbase. It had two tall masts, which were actually antennae, and a catapult to launch its two seaplanes, Boreas and Passat. A claw-like crane was mounted on the rear deck to pluck the planes out of the water after returning from a flight. The Schwabenland had belonged to the German airline, Lufthansa, whose crews flew and maintained the planes.

  He kept staring at the Schwabenland pictures. He walked closer to the board and examined each more closely. There was something …

  The door beeped, far to his right.

  Sylvia stepped in and inserted her wet umbrella into a clay pot next to the door. She nodded to Daniel, walked into her office area, and put her lunch in a small refrigerator. A few second later, she walked to his side of 713. An empty coffee cup dangled from her hand.

  “May I?” she asked, and nodded in the direction of his coffee pot.

  She looked disheveled, as if she’d been up all night. Her damp hair was the color of dark copper. “Certainly,” he said as he walked to the back of his office, retrieved the pot, and filled her cup. “You look tired.”

  “Just what a girl wants to hear,” she said and shook her head. “Couldn’t sleep. My brain was in overdrive all night. When I finally managed to fade out, I dreamt of this stuff. I feel like we’re behind.”

  “We are,” he said and walked out of his office and towards the furniture arrangement in the center of the huge room. Sylvia followed.

  He sat in Horace’s chair, and she on the couch directly across from him.

  “I think we have many pieces of the puzzle,” he explained, “but something big is still missing.”

  “If this is so important, why aren’t all of the other Omnis working on it? Why aren’t they pooling together all of our resources?”

  “Who’s says they aren’t?” Daniel replied.

  “Why are you and I working together?” she asked.

  Daniel shrugged. “Our projects have commonalities: Nazis, South America – the route to Antarctica was not direct from Germany or England,” he said. “It was a long trek through South America and some island hopping.”

  She nodded. “The Nazi network I’d been researching spanned Argentina and included Deception Island.”

  “As a part of Operation Tabarin, the Brits put an outpost on Deception Island to spy on the Germans,” he explained. “But why would the post-War network set up anything there? What interest could former Nazis have in getting to Antarctica? They’d be better off hiding in South America. Warmer, too.”

  “There were rumors about ex-Nazis and Antarctica,” she explained. “One of my tasks was to find their origins and debunk them.”

  “What kind of rumors?”

  “That the Nazis were regrouping. Hitler was still alive and building the Fourth Reich in a secret base in Antarctica,” she said. “The best one was that they had come across extraterrestrial technology and were about to mount a new attack. There were even stories of strange aircraft sightings in newspapers.”

  Daniel fell into deep thought for a few seconds. “How else can we account for the beacon being there for centuries, and being beyond their technology – maybe beyond our current technology?”

  Sylvia raised an eyebrow. “Are you suggesting it had an extraterrestrial origin?”

  He huffed and shook his head. “I’m saying we can’t take anything off the table. For now we have to keep all possibilities open, no matter how absurd they may be.”

  She nodded.

  He continued, “We can’t even identify the material the damned thing’s composed of – can’t even scratch it. And we certainly don’t know its purpose.” His legs muscles twitched like taught rubber bands and he had to stand. “I need to get back to work.”

  Sylvia went back to her office and Daniel went to the corkboard to reexamine the photos. His attention was again drawn to a large snapshot of the Schwabenland. One of the water planes, the Passat, was perched on the catapult. Its two propellers – push and pull – were blurred, so it must have been getting ready to launch. He stared at it for a few minutes and then moved on.

  His focus turned to the German U-boats that the Brits had tracked as part of Operation Tabarin. One was of U-530, taken in July of 1945 at the Argentine naval base at Mar del Plata. He wondered how the men on those vessels coped with the cramped conditions; they’d been but a malfunction or depth charge away from a horrible death.

  The adjacent picture was of U-530’s young, smiling captain, Otto Wermuth. There were some strange facts regarding U-530. First, it had arrived with no torpedoes. Second, it had a skeleton crew – somewhere around twenty men – where its full contingent was 54. Third, the vessel’s documents were destroyed before landing in Argentina. Finally, there were large barrels of cigarettes on board; a strange detail that had drawn speculation that they’d been intended for delivery at a base of some sort.

  As he’d done at least 100 times in the past week, he examined the pictures of Otto Wermuth. Some had been taken after his arrival at Mar del Plata, and others snapped before his final mission. It was easy to tell the difference: he didn’t smile in the later pictures.

  He unpinned and took down two pictures of Wermuth to have a closer look. Both had been taken in the captain’s quarters of U-530. He focused on a leather file binder in one of the photos. It lay open on a desk and contained file folders stamped with standard Nazi emblems. He could see swastikas on everything, and SS symbols were stamped on a few, but there was one he couldn’t quite make out.

  He went into his office and returned with a magnifying glass. The image was a little fuzzy, but clear enough. The hair on his neck bristled and the magnifying glass shook in his hand. The symbol was of a large bird of prey carrying an emblem that resembled a hash symbol with tails coming off from every other edge. It was like a swastika drawn with a tic-tac-toe board at its center rather than a cross.

  He knew exactly what it was.

  2

  Friday, 15 May (8:54 p.m. EST – South Beach, Florida)

  This is more like it, Lenny thought, as he parked the rental car in a gravel parking lot in front of the restaurant. South Beach, or SoBe, as the locals called it, was exactly the type of place he wanted to live out the rest of his life. The heat made his aging and damaged body feel comfortable. He’d experienced too many cold winters in Chicago and Detroit, not to mention the long spans of time he’d spent in Eastern Europe.

  Ivan Poliakov, M.D., Ph.D., was smarter than most of the others who had been involved in the Compressed Punishment program. The others hadn’t run far enough away, or run at all. Poliakov at least made it to a place better than Detroit, but he didn’t change his name. It was okay. It made Lenny’s job easy.

  He got out of the car and took a deep breath of evening ocean air marinated with the scents of seafood and spices. He donned a Florida Marlins baseball cap he’d purchased at his hotel the day before, and adjusted his loose-fitting khakis. He slipped on a light leather jacket over his open-collared white shirt. He’d fit in perfectly with the rest of the upper-class clientele.

  The doctor was celebrating his fifth wedding anniversary, which was earlier that week. Poliakov had been low on the target priority list, but he’d been moved to the top when Jonathan McDougal started looking for him. Lenny had known of McDougal long before the catastrophic breakdown of
the Red Wraith project. The do-gooder lawyer was the one who had shot him. Lenny longed for the day when he’d find McDougal on his target list. Now the law professor’s DNA Foundation was tracking down everyone involved in program. He was certain McDougal intended to not only round up the run-of-the-mill employees, like Poliakov, but to use them to get the people at the top.

  Lenny knew he wasn’t safe either, having blood on his hands, even though it was unlikely they’d get any solid evidence. Even the man who had ordered the hits, Heinrich Bergman, was dead. He wondered why McDougal wasn’t a priority target: they could end the problem with one hit.

  Poliakov was one of a team of three doctors who knew enough to put many people away. The other two had been killed in the explosion that had exposed the Red Box. Eliminating Poliakov would allow many high-level Red Wraith personnel to sleep more easily – and that included the former CIA Director.

  Lenny walked into the Blue Dolphin Bistro, a restaurant-bar that was crowded on Friday nights because of their seafood and margarita specials. He asked a young woman at the host station how long the wait was for a table for two. There wasn’t a second person, of course, but to dine alone in such a place would draw attention. Besides, he had no intention of being seated; he just needed an excuse to move about the place.

  As he weaved his way through the crowd, he spotted Poliakov’s wife, Jillian. She was a stunning woman, tall with dark hair and green eyes. She wore a green sundress and a thin, white sweater. According to the file, she was in her early thirties, eight years younger than her husband.

  A bearded man, about four inches taller than Jillian, walked onto the scene holding two glasses of red wine. He handed one to her.

  Lenny took a seat at the bar, his back to Poliakov, and ordered a beer. He watched the doctor and his wife in a mirror mounted behind the racks of alcohol and below a TV showing a baseball game. He glanced back and forth from the TV to the mirror as he sipped.

  Poliakov’s red beard was nearly as full as his own, and much thicker than it was the first time they’d met. Although Lenny had been beardless during their first encounter, he wondered whether the doctor would recognize him. He doubted it: when they’d met, Poliakov had just accidentally injected himself with some horrific chemical and was writhing in pain. How a person could accidentally inject his own thigh with a syringe of fluid, he’d never understand.

  Even though Poliakov wouldn’t recognize him, Lenny had to be careful. Most places had cameras. After being shot and captured, his identity had been well-cataloged – pictures, fingerprints, and DNA. He couldn’t leave any evidence behind – and that included the beer bottle in his hand.

  It was fitting that Poliakov would die by injection. The man had spent a good part of his so-called professional life administering various drugs and chemicals into the bloodstreams of hapless patients. How many people had the man treated? he wondered. How many of those had died?

  Lenny was no hypocrite. He, too, was a killer. But the man had it coming, as did the others. The woman he’d terminated in Detroit was no better. Nor was the young woman in the hospital in Chicago. She was a psychopath whose goal was to become the dentist of the damned – a torture artist of the worst sort. None of these people belonged in the world, and Lenny was doing a service to society.

  That was the thing about operating in the civilian world: he was almost always given justifications for his hits. In the professional world, there were only orders. In that case, he thought of himself as an instrument, and all guilt could be transferred from him to the entity that had deployed him. He was innocent.

  Dr. Poliakov stood from the table and excused himself.

  Lenny watched in the mirror as the man passed behind him towards the restrooms. He pulled his hat low on his forehead, gulped the last of his beer, and slid the bottle into his jacket pocket. It was time.

  3

  Friday, 15 May (9:20 p.m. CST – Baton Rouge)

  Will pulled the SUV out of the apartment complex onto Corporate Boulevard. Why did Agent Jennings want to meet at such a late hour?

  He turned left on College Drive and worked his way through a half dozen traffic lights. He made a right onto Perkins and, after a half mile, turned right again into a large complex of stores and restaurants. He spotted a bar called the Bullfrog and parked about as far away as possible, in front of a Thai restaurant. He got out of the car and was confronted by the sweet tang of Thai spices.

  Voices and music grew louder as he approached the bar’s entrance, and the volume increased sharply as the door opened. Two young women, laughing as they walked out, saw him and held the door. He nodded and smiled, and went inside into a dark foyer.

  The bar was loud, but milder than he’d anticipated. It wasn’t smoky – Baton Rouge had a no-smoking policy for such places – and clean. A few wall-mounted screens were showing baseball games.

  He spotted Jennings in a booth in the far corner to his right. There was a woman with him, but he couldn’t see her face.

  Jennings noticed him as he approached, and waved him over. “This is Natalie Tate,” he said. “She’s on our project.”

  Natalie looked up and nodded to him. Will returned the gesture. She looked like an FBI agent: conservative dress, dark-rimmed glasses, physically fit – possibly underweight – and a serious expression.

  “You’re wondering why we called you out,” Jennings said and slid over to give Will room to sit.

  Will nodded and sat.

  “Our friends are back in town, and four of them are here,” Natalie explained. “Can you identify them?”

  Will scanned the room and immediately spotted the men at the bar. The bumps on their foreheads gave them away. It was clear that at least one of them had had cosmetic surgery, but it wasn’t a good fix. One of the others tried to hide them with his hair, and the remaining two made no effort to conceal them. They were all Compressed Punishment victims.

  “How’d you find them?” Will asked.

  “Border control warned us,” Natalie replied. “These guys showed up in El Paso a week ago, and we put a GPS tracker on one of their vehicles.”

  “That tracker,” Jennings broke in, “is no longer active, but we’ve located their residence.”

  “Why not just round them up now?” Will asked.

  “Nothing to go on,” Natalie said. “What do we charge them with – being ugly?”

  Will admitted they weren’t exactly physically appealing human beings, and then wondered if he fit into that same category. “A little risky – bringing me here.”

  “Why?” Natalie asked.

  “Can’t you see them on my forehead?” Will replied. He’d had an excellent cosmetic surgeon, but remnants of the bumps were still visible in the right light.

  He watched Natalie’s dark eyes scan his head and focus first right, then left.

  “You were an inmate?” she whispered, eyes wide.

  Will looked to Jennings.

  Jennings shrugged and looked to Natalie. “Now you know.”

  “If those guys see me, my cover will be blown,” Will said.

  “Do they look familiar?” Jennings asked.

  “No,” Will responded. “I’ve only met one other inmate – just before I was inserted into the program. He’s not one of them.”

  Will caught the eye of Natalie. Her eyes shifted back and forth from his eyes to his forehead.

  “What did they do to you in there?” she asked, seemingly both intrigued and horrified.

  “Bad stuff,” Jennings cut in. “I’ll fill you in later. For now, we need to concentrate on what these guys are planning.”

  “Not sure how I can help with that,” Will said. “Why did you call me here?”

  “Just hoped you’d ID one of those guys,” Jennings explained.

  “And then what?” Will asked.

  Jennings shook his head.

  “You want to know what they’re up to,” Will said. “It’s more than a coincidence that Syncorp is in Baton Rouge.”

&
nbsp; “The scope of our investigation has broadened,” Jennings said and then nodded to Natalie.

  “If we could get you into Syncorp,” she said, “could you identify equipment used in the Compressed Punishment program?”

  “To what end?” Will asked.

  “Syncorp has been sold,” Jennings replied. “The company has had numerous government projects – many of them were so-called black projects. We need to know which ones are still active after the takeover – especially anything connected to Red Wraith.”

  “Red Wraith?” Natalie asked, confused.

  “Forgive me,” Jennings said to Will. “I haven’t brought her up to speed.” He turned to Natalie. “It’s the black project that’s responsible for the CP program.”

  “You think they’re still producing CP equipment?” Will asked.

  “Not sure. They’re not delivering anything inside the US,” Jennings explained. “But a shipment of medical equipment arrived in China just three weeks ago.”

  Will’s heart thumped so hard he felt it in his eyes. “And you think they sent CP equipment to China – Exoskeletons?”

  Jennings shrugged.

  If all it took was for Will to identify equipment in the facility, he was ready to go immediately. “Will there be arrests?”

  “Likely,” Jennings replied.

  “When do we start?” Will asked, hardly containing his eagerness.

  “There are some complications,” Natalie said, and motioned with her eyes towards the CP inmates at the bar. “We think those guys are going to pull something. They’ll ruin our investigation.”

  Will didn’t mind if the CP guys acted first. He wanted to see the place burn.

  “Contact me when you have a plan.” Will said and stood. He left the bar.

  He checked his phone as he weaved through parked cars towards his SUV. It was time to give Denise and Jonathan an update.