Jonathan Maberry - SNAFU - An Anthology of Military Horror

“When was this?”

“1925.”

“What did it do then?”

“It looked at me.” He shuddered and seeing it scared me. “For the first time I felt like an insect. It was studying me. It was trying to decide whether to let me live or not.”

“Clearly you survived.”

“I’ll never know why.”

“Do you know where they come from? Who they’re affiliated with?”

He shook his head furiously and got up. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” He grabbed his caviar and stalked away.

Jakes made a move to grab him, but I held the big man back. No sense in aggravating the Russian any more than he already was. There was no telling when I’d need him again.

“What next?” Harvey asked.

“You and Brahm get to a phone and call Nancy and tell him what the Russian said.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Taking Jakes to Lawrence Livermore Labs. I need to look at some files.”

Harvey eyed Jakes. I knew what he was thinking. He’d be better suited to help me than the hulking corporal, but he had good sense enough not to say it. I had my reasons. If I wanted him to know I’d tell him.

We crossed the Bay Bridge, skirted Oakland, and hit 580 going east when we hit Castro Valley. My thoughts were circling the idea of the inhuman creature described by the Russian. I didn’t doubt his veracity one bit. But that he didn’t want to discuss it further worried me. What wasn’t he telling us? What else did he know about these satoris? Could they be as terrible as he described?

When they recruited me and read me on to the supernatural defense program, I was dumbfounded. I often still find myself wondering how we came to exist. It seemed extraordinary that the human race didn’t die off during the last three thousand years, especially considering the forces aligned against it.

And not only were there supernatural threats, but threats humanity invented themselves.

Even now we had almost six hundred thousand young men and women fighting in the Republic of Vietnam. I’d seen the brutal television reports of the Battle of Hamburger Hill back in May and couldn’t help remember Chosin and the Dantean sea of frozen bodies we’d created all because one group desired the land of another.

Not all wars are for physical gain. Some are waged to cultivate fear. Barely two weeks ago a man calling himself the Zodiac Killer shot two people up in Blue Rock Springs, then called the police from what turned out to be a phone booth. Still on the loose, not a day goes by now without the media watering the bitter seed this monster planted.

Then there are wars for the hearts and minds of the people, like the Cold War we were raging against the Soviet Union. I often wondered if they saw themselves as the good guys. Harvey laughs at the idea and says that only good guys have that sort of sentimentality. After all, how could they compare bread lines, starvation, iron-fisted authoritarianism, and gulags, against the open freedom of the Western World? To think that they knew themselves to be bad guys reminded me of the cartoon character Snidely Whiplash. And if the USSR was this caricature, then we had to be Dudley Do-Right. That would make Nell… what? The prize? The hearts and minds of the people?

I shook my head and climbed out of the deep rabbit hole my wandering mind had taken me. It was simply a cartoon about a Canadian Mountie and his cohorts. It was not a metaphor, even if it looked like it could be.

We pulled past a gate guard, who, after consulting our badges and a list of names on a clipboard, let us through. Although it was near seven in the evening, the parking lot was still nearly full. Jakes and I found a parking spot and headed to the nearest glass building. Before we could get there, Rachel Nakamura met us, running lightly in high heels.

“That’s not the right building.” She smiled apologetically and gestured for us to follow her. “Come this way. I’ve arranged for you to look at his office.”

I glanced at the building we almost entered, but relented and followed her. Jakes fell in behind us.

“What’s in the other building?”

“Projects. Research. All very hush hush.” Then she hurriedly added, “Nothing that Doctor Adams was working on, I assure you.”

My curiosity wanted to confirm this, or at least see what was hidden behind the glass and steel doors, but it was merely that… curiosity. I needed to focus on the mystery at hand and determine why an satori had been involved in the murder of Doctor Adams.

She took us to a well-appointed office on the second floor of the main building. The window looked out on the parking lot. The desk was almost clear of papers. The only things on the walls were the decedent’s diplomas and a San Francisco Giants calendar. This looked nothing at all like the desk of a working scientist. Jakes thought the same way.

“Where’s all of the stuff?”

Rachel blinked. “Stuff?”

“Yeah, all the scientific stuff. Papers, books, folders, files… you know? Stuff.”

She stared at the ground in that aggravating Japanese way that Nancy used when he didn’t want to meet my eyes. “We had to remove a few items. Proprietary information.”

“And if I said I wanted to see them?”

“I don’t know who took them or where they went. But if you want to submit the paperwork, I’ll see that it gets processed.”

I tried not to glare at her — not that she could see me even if I did with her gaze fixed to a spot between my feet. “How long does it take for such a request to be processed?”

“I can’t be sure.”

“Has anyone ever been granted access?” Jakes rumbled.

“Not since my tenure.”

I couldn’t help but sigh. I pulled out the chair and sat at the desk, trying to occupy the space as the deceased might. I let my hands touch the surface, then pulled open one of the drawers. Empty. I could usually figure out something about a person by how they kept their desks organized. But there was nothing here of Doctor Adams. This was a simulacrum, an empty interpretation of his workspace.

I pushed the chair back and stood. “This is a waste of time.”

“Maybe not.” Jakes had removed the calendar from the wall. He’d flipped the month back to June. “Where did Doctor Adams travel to on June 26th?”

She glanced at the calendar, surprise sneaking past her usually composed face. “I… I don’t—”

“Let’s cut the bullshit, Ms. Nakamura. I know you’ve been told to keep us in the dark, but a man was murdered. Not just murdered, mind you, but interrogated in such a way he most assuredly told whoever asked the questions everything they needed to know. This is a Cold War, and American secrets have been taken.” I snapped my mouth shut. It was bad form to act this way towards this woman. She was merely doing her job. I was about to apologize when she spoke.

“He was at an international engineering conference in Japan.”

“Was that the last conference he attended?” I asked.

She nodded.

Jakes asked, “Who went with him? I already know he didn’t go alone.”

She glanced at me, then returned her gaze to the floor. “Doctor Crocket.”

“Can we speak with him?”

“He… he hasn’t been in this week.”

“Did he call in? Is he sick?”

She shook her head and shrugged her shoulders.

Jakes’s eyes almost rolled out of his head. “Jesus. Don’t you think he might be in trouble?”

She stepped back. “You don’t think…”

“Give us his address. I’ll send the police over right away.”

The house at 737 Bay Street was a white midcentury shotgun two-story with a garage in front. Of note was its location in the Russian Hill Neighborhood of San Francisco. Canvassing the neighbors showed that they were predominately of Russian and Hungarian descent. Any one of them could have been a Russian informant; even unwilling. Many still had families back in the motherland whose lives could be leveraged for deeds done on American soil. I’d seen it often enough.