The Claus Effect

by David Nickle

  They’d taken him to the lead truck, a retired troop carrier that had recently been converted to a post-Soviet approximation of what a mobile home should look like. The air in the combination living/sleeping/eating area was thick with the smell of boiled cabbages and engine oil, and lines of grey, drying laundry crisscrossed the space within like Scud contrails. The front of the truck was stacked with crates stamped as “MACHINE PARTS” in Cyrillic.

  The woman called Olga was seated on the lowest of these stacks, unfastening the face covering on her parka as her three henchmen led Mr. Beland inside. Olga pulled off the rest of her hood, letting fall a cascade of luxuriant brown hair.

  “You must be freezing,” she said in passable English.

  Mr. Beland could have replied in Russian, but he didn’t see any point in tipping that particular hand. Not yet…

  “I’ve been colder,” he replied honestly, scanning the room for potential weapons.

  “Not recently, you haven’t,” said Olga. “The cabin temperature in your Stealth bomber won’t go below sixty-five fahrenheit. It’s one of the things that makes that plane so easy to track.”

  Mr. Beland’s eyes narrowed, and Olga allowed herself a smug little grin.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. American Spy,” she continued. “There’s no one left to call in a retaliatory strike. The secret of your tactical blunder is safe with us.”

  “Don’t talk to me about tactical blunders,” said Mr. Beland under his breath.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Mr. Beland cleared his throat and said, more loudly: “I’m not the one whose country’s leadership drove the second-mightiest empire on the planet to ruin in the space of a few months. And I have to say—I resent your implication that I’m a spy, American or otherwise.”

  “Are you a tourist, then?” She switched back to Russian and said to her henchmen: “His tour bus took a wrong turn at Leningrad.”

  “Perhaps he lost his traveller’s cheques,” opined the small henchman with the AKM.

  “Were they American Express?” wondered another henchman. All four in the room had begun to snigger.

  They were sniggering at him.

  “Where are you taking me?” he demanded, too late realizing he’d instinctively slipped into Russian.

  At that, the sniggering turned into all-out laughter. Olga recovered first, switching back into English as she spoke:

  “What the hell was that?”

  “I said,” repeated Mr. Beland in English, struggling to keep his voice level, “where are you taking me?”

  “Ah. In Russian, it sounded like something else.” Olga climbed off her crates, picking up the Tokarev that in a moment she would use to pummel Mr. Beland into oblivion. “Someplace warm. Don’t sweat it. First, though, we’re going to stop by the wreckage of your jet, see what we can find. And don’t worry,” she added, seeing the expression shift on Mr. Beland’s face. “We’re not KGB, and we’re not the army.”

  Mr. Beland said nothing for a moment. He’d allowed himself to get angry—to tip his hand with his idiomatic Russian. He took a deep breath, tried to calm himself before he spoke again. But it was no good. They were laughing at him!

  “Then just what the hell are you?” said Beland finally, through gritted teeth.

  Olga smiled. “Cossacks, Mr. American tourist. A lot has changed, maybe, since you were here last.”

  Cossacks. Now it was Mr. Beland’s turn to laugh out loud. “Cossacks!” he managed between guffaws. “Where—is—your—horse?”

  “Right here,” Olga had said, and lifted her Tokarev high enough to tick against the ceiling. It actually whistled as it descended on Mr. Beland’s skull.

  In the back of the truck with the bruise swelling nicely on the side of his head, Mr. Beland counted two Cossacks in the cab up front. From the look of things ahead, they’d crossed the base’s perimeter while Mr. Beland had been unconscious.

  Cossacks…Who’d have guessed?

  “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” muttered Mr. Beland to himself.

  After his pistol-whipping, the Cossacks hadn’t bothered to tie him up, but they’d taken all of his weapons and left nothing that could serve as such in the back of the truck. Mr. Beland was still considering how best to make his escape when he heard a blaring of horns and the truck ground to a halt. One of the Cossacks leaned out of his view, and Mr. Beland heard the sound of the door opening and closing. The driver stayed where he was and lit a cigarette, waiting.

  It was time.

  Mr. Beland made his way to the back of the truck. The door was on rollers, and wasn’t locked, either. These Cossacks weren’t any brighter than the communists who preceded them. Mr. Beland lifted the door a foot, lay on his back and peered out. Seeing nothing behind but an empty jeep, he pushed the door up another foot and rolled out onto the road.

  They were well into the compound, all right. In fact, the convoy had stopped within spitting distance of Stealth wreckage. The frozen ground had been torn up by the aircraft’s impact, which had sliced across the road in a deep gouge that made the route impassable. Most of the Cossacks were following that gouge to where the bulk of the aircraft’s superstructure lay twisted and burning in a shallow moon crater the size of a baseball diamond.

  Making sure to keep the immobilized convoy between himself and the wreckage, Mr. Beland made his way forward, to Olga’s truck. He needed a gun, and if those crates contained what he suspected…

  “Well, Mr. American Spy. Feeling better already?”

  Mr. Beland stopped and turned. Olga stood leaning on an armoured personnel carrier, her AKM cradled in the crook of her elbow. Her face was covered by her parka, but Mr. Beland couldn’t shake the sense that she was smiling at him.

  “You caught me off-guard,” he muttered.

  Olga shrugged. “You pissed me off, you got what was coming to you. Look, Mr. American. Nobody cares if you stay or go, okay? This isn’t the Cold War anymore. But dressed like that, you’re going to freeze your balls off.”

  “I’ve been colder.”

  Olga rolled her eyes. “So you’re happy to stay outside on the coldest night of the year. What are you doing here, Mr. American, now that the ‘second-mightiest empire on the planet’ has crumbled into dust?”

  For the first time in hours, Mr. Beland allowed himself a thin little grin.

  “I’m looking for Santa Claus,” he replied, and leapt forward.

  Olga didn’t raise the AKM to shoot, but even if she had it wouldn’t have gone off before Mr. Beland had wrestled it from her grip. By the time the two of them tumbled to the icy ground, Mr. Beland had the AKM in both hands, and was able to hold it just out of Olga’s reach.

  Olga spun on the ground and lashed out with a dancer’s kick aimed at Mr. Beland’s stomach, but Mr. Beland rolled out of its way and onto his knees. Olga’s snow gear might have kept her warm in the sub-arctic winter, but it didn’t do much for her mobility.

  “You idiot!” she snarled, and caught him behind the knees with a second kick, nearly sending him to the ground again. “We don’t have to do this!”

  Mr. Beland didn’t answer. He climbed to his feet, and without a second thought brought the rifle butt down against the side of Olga’s head. Despite the padding of her parka, the blow did its work, and the long-haired Cossack collapsed unconscious.

  Mr. Beland stayed only long enough to pull Olga’s Tokarev from its side holster and check the ammunition in both guns. He’d been lucky; everyone had been at the Stealth wreckage, and no one seemed to have witnessed the exchange.

  Mr. Beland didn’t look back at the convoy as he started once more on his trek toward the mountain.

  Just Like Old Times

  Purpose informed Krampus’ every movement. He had not felt this way in decades. As he slid around a tight corner deep in the depths of the castle’s baroque ventilation system, he was reminded of earlier days, when it had been a tree-trunk at his back as he stealthily approached Claus’ hidin
g place. There had been that time in Norway, with ice cracking off the glacial tops of the fjords, when he had clung to the underside of a dock built by Vikings, and peered up through a crack as Claus loaded his sleigh with linen dolls steeped in Plague. Oh, that had been a battle neither of them would forget. And really not since then had the adrenalin flowed thus through the thin soup of his blood. It was a giddy feeling, an improper, indecorous feeling, one he would never admit to having. But it felt good, after these many years of grey servitude to the State. He pinched his mouth shut primly, satisfied with his lot and eager to face his ancient enemy one final time.

  He paused at the juncture of two air shafts, uncertain which to take. This was a bad thing; he should know all these ways by heart, and at one time he had, along with every other duct, nook, cranny and back-corridor of the Soviet military system. It seemed not even he had been immune to the creeping malaise that had brought the empire down. It was unbecoming of him to forget things, and he resolved to restudy all the plans of these complexes in full detail again as soon as this mission was complete.

  But for now, which way to go?

  Elfish voices drifted from the left-hand channel. Perhaps that was the way. Krampus folded himself around the thirty-degree angle and drew himself rapidly along, leaving behind only tiny Y-shaped scratch marks in the dust.

  The air became colder the farther he went. Krampus began to suspect he had gone the wrong way, and indeed when he finally came to a grate, he could see through the tiny cross-hatches of wire that he had left the castle. This was some intake duct jutting out of the bald stone at the base of the structure.

  The voices continued from nearby, whining in Pole-ish.

  “Jyst like yld times, ay Starthrottle?”

  “Hmmph. Why’s the yld bastard keep losin’ it, eh?”

  A minute scuffing sound followed.

  Curious, Krampus exited through the screen. He slipped behind a boulder and watched. Five elfs were picking their way down the mountainside, poking the snow with sticks and shining their flashlights around.

  “Couldna rolled this far,” muttered the leader.

  Krampus didn’t know what they were doing, but concluded it was unimportant. He had made a wrong turn, that was the important thing. Moving back into the duct, he set about righting his error.

  Dreaming. Dreaming and nostalgia were the cause of his misdirection, unchecked sentiment, and as Krampus retraced his steps he resolved to expunge himself of the weakness. By the time he was back at the original juncture, his eight teeth were set with determination, his breath palpating with the cold deliberateness of purpose for which he had been born. There was no Soviet empire, no past, no future, only the implacable reality of his single, eternal goal: a caning. An overdue caning for the Claus.

  Krampus skittered through the ductwork fast and low, like a cockroach towards a sugar bin. The air grew warmer as he proceeded inward. He passed his first juncture without a thought and then effortlessly navigated seven more.

  The next grating he reached was in the duct’s floor, and through it shone a dappling of yellow light. Krampus stopped before it, mindful that the muted glow of his own eyes might give away his position, and held his lungs still as he listened for movement below. The only sounds he could hear were the wheezing rattle of the air-circulator, and when he was satisfied that no one was below, he inched overtop the grate, and peered through.

  The room below had formerly been an office—and judging from the distance that Krampus had crawled, he guessed it to be reserved for the KGB liaison officer. With a grimace, Krampus slid his head between the bars of the grille and had his supposition confirmed: one wall was covered in television screens, while the ubiquitous dentist’s chair sat against the opposite wall, covered in dust and old GQ magazines, its leather straps dangling to the floor.

  Evidently the Claus had seen even less use for the protocol of maintaining an office here than a post-Soviet army commander would have. All that was left of the mahogany desk that was standard issue for KGB were four imprints of the legs in the thick pile carpet and a leather chair that had been turned on its side, with a note in Cyrillic explaining that one of the wheels was broken.

  Krampus smiled: the room was a perfect place to start.

  Crinking his shoulder, Krampus reached his right arm through and began undoing the screws that held the grate in place. In less than a minute, he was able to jump to the floor and shrug the grate off, like an old suit jacket that no longer fit.

  Krampus approached the television screens, and in an instant found the hidden switches that activated them. For a moment, they only showed the snowstorm of dead channels, but as more power came online, one by one they began to reveal to Krampus the extent of the Claus’ organization.

  The first screen showed a flickering black-and-white image of the main hangar, as seen from a vantage point that Krampus guessed was perhaps fifty feet up. As the camera scanned back and forth, Krampus saw what the girl Emily had been talking about: ICBMs, stacked like firewood, ringed the hangar, with paths breaking off between them like tracks from a roundabout. In the centre of the hangar squatted the Claus’ sleigh. Squinting, Krampus could count perhaps a dozen tiny forms—the degenerate elfs, no doubt—moving with welder’s helmets and cutting tools among the huge rockets. Every so often, the glow of an arc-welder being applied to casing-metal would flare, leaving an annoying afterimage on the time-worn pixels of the monitor.

  The Kinder would find the missiles missing from their place of storage, he thought. He hoped they would prudently hide until he had disposed of the Claus.

  Preparations for the Claus’ deadly flight were farther along than he had imagined. It was imperative that he find his ancient enemy immediately, for cranes were even now trundling along the ceiling of the hangar, preparing to load the warheads.

  He punched the square glowing buttons on the console, bringing up rolling vistas of other corridors and rooms in the complex. One showed some sort of cafeteria with round tables and withered potted plants in the corners. Giant portraits of Claus adorned each wall; his one-eyed squint would seem to follow you about the room, Krampus figured. Several elfs perched on the oversized chairs around one table, using rubber bands to flick paper-clips at one another. From his camera perspective, Krampus could see a large dust-covered microphone clumsily taped to the light fixture above their heads. He did not activate it.

  Another camera showed an exterior view. A small mob of Russian comrades in dark greatcoats laboured under the headlights of their trucks, digging Stealth technology out of the rather large pit some incompetent American pilot had made for them. Old instincts died hard, he mused. What on earth were they going to do with the stuff once they dug it up? Nobody in Moscow would care. Maybe they intended to sell it as souvenirs.

  An odd pantomime was playing itself out in the foreground of the picture. The castle was built on the lip of a steep hill; the old drawbridge of the castle had been built to jut at an angle from the side of the castle across the slope to the top of the hill. There, just visible in the lower right corner of the screen, several sentry elfs stood puffing on cigarettes, which appeared cigar-sized in their soot-blackened mitts. They were watching the Russians with interest or apathy—it was hard to tell.

  But, sneaking along the crest of the hill in an apparent attempt to get behind them, Krampus spotted a rather tattered-looking man. He was dressed in a flight suit and carried a Soviet rifle. Who could this be? Krampus blinked slowly, his curiosity piqued.

  Because of his fascination he did not hear the door creak ever-so-faintly as it opened behind him.

  The stealthy man slipped, starting a minor landslide down the hill. He tumbled on his back and slid down ten feet. The sentries hopped up and began waving flashlights in his direction. Quickly he rolled over and aimed his rifle. Its muzzle flashed and one of the flashlights exploded. The elf who’d been holding it pulled his toque down over his ears and ran in a tight circle, his mouth wide open. The others stared at hi
m for a second, then dove into the snow and began moving forward on their elbows. The man did the same, and for a few seconds they appeared in the blurry monitor like nothing so much as some nature show about walruses as they jockeyed for position.

  The man, however, had set off another avalanche and fell back with it, his gun going off straight into the air. The elfs took that as their cue to stand and run in the other direction, but since they were on the lip of the hill themselves now, they only started more snow sliding.

  Down they went, a jumble of arms, legs and toques, in a widening, deepening fan of white, while ahead of them the dark figure of the man, arms akimbo, rifle held above his head, tried to stay ahead of the wave of snow.

  Fascinating. But where was Claus? Krampus wondered. He tried several more of the complex’s hidden cameras, finding nothing. Most weren’t even working. One gave him a most disturbing view of the old swimming pool of the complex. Krampus was grateful that the light had been so dim, and the camera old enough that he could not make out the details of the thing—or things—which had overgrown the chamber. Nervous and a bit sick, he cycled through the cameras back to the hangar view.

  And there he was.

  Krampus leaned forward, eagerly drinking in the sight. Claus appeared much as he always had—save for something wrong with one of his eyes. Just now he was flailing his arms and shouting silently at a small pack of cowering elfs which he had trapped in a corner. Small flecks of saliva surrounded his head like a demented halo. Behind him, long taut metal cables lowered a conical MIRV into the mouth of a mottled, much-patched and now-bulging sack.

  “Claus,” Krampus hissed, his tiny chest palpating rapidly with the excitement of his find. Krampus’ grin grew so long and thin that his lips nearly met at the back of his neck. “Like a naughty child, you return to the very scene of your misdeeds. Ha!”