Jeremy Robinson - SecondWorld

“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.

“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?”