Robert Williams - Ice Fortress

“XO, take us in,” Jameson commanded before anyone had a chance to object.

Yet again the dull overhead lights dimmed further as the experimental chamber placed an impossible strain on the lab’s power grid. Bulbs exploded, fuse panels showered sparks and the tang of ozone filled the air as the circuits became increasingly over loaded.

“Dr… Kammler,” the former professor stammered as he watched the dials and gauges dance behind their glass binnacles, “a power surge could destroy the device.” And take us all with it, he failed to add. Maybe he should have remained silent, like the obedient prisoner that he was.

The familiar blue light glowed brighter than before, the extra Xerum 525 and additional power seemingly producing results.

The rail thin prisoner huddled in the corner of the chamber soiled himself as he began to illuminate with the same eerie radiance that blazed from the machine itself.

Kammler stood in front of the thick glass window, his hands clasped behind his back. He sensed something was different with this test. Somehow the piercing sound and the diffuse blue glow felt more stable. More controlled.

The General had taken an unprecedented risk in deceiving the Fuhrer. The financial backing had only been made available in such generous sums because of the promise to create a propulsion system that would win the war for the German military. A propulsion system so advanced that it defied the laws of physics as they were understood.

What Kammler had not told the Fuhrer, especially with his mental health deteriorating at an alarming rate, was how his new propulsion system worked. Better to let Hitler think it was a nuclear device rather than find out what it really was — a device that used what the Fuhrer called ‘Jew Physics’. Such a revelation would not have saved him from the firing squad, no matter how well the device worked.

“Dr. Kammler?” the prisoner at the control panel prompted again, disrupting Kammler’s reverie.

“Wait.” General Kammler’s tone was commanding and threatening at once.

The prisoner in the chamber shimmered like an apparition.

Then he was gone.

His chains. His uniform. Vanished.

“Shut it down!” Kammler shouted at the technician.

Immediately the two counter rotating hemispheres of the device slowed, the high pitched sound quieted and the glow faded.

The shimmer returned and the vanished prisoner began to take shape once again. Only this time, he was different. The grubby, emaciated prisoner was… smiling.

And he was on the wrong side of the room.

Hans Kammler threw open the door to the chamber as soon as the bell shaped machine stopped spinning.

“Where did you go?” The prisoner at the controls heard him shout with uncharacteristic emotion.

When the prisoner, still in his chains with a sneering smile on his lips, refused to answer, Kammler grabbed him by the front of his filthy, threadbare uniform and shook him violently. The former professor had never seen the pristine and meticulous general touch anything or anyone so repulsive.

“Where did you go?” he screamed again, spittle flying from his lips as he continued to shake the silent, smiling man like a rag doll.

Through his parched, smiling lips the man whispered so softly that the general was forced to ignore the foul fecal odor that rose form the man in order to bring his ear closer to the man’s mouth.

The prisoner whispered again, his smile growing more arrogant as he spoke.

Unable to hear what the man had whispered to Kammler, the professor could only surmise that it was not anything positive. The color drained from the general’s face as he stood and walked back into the laboratory, his face painted with a blank expression.

“General?” he asked as the Dr. Kammler entered the room, walking behind him.

“I did it,” the general said in total disbelief.

The scientist in him was elated that the experiment was successful, but he also knew what that success meant for the Third Reich and the barbarity that would be unleashed on his people, in turn. He opened his mouth to offer a word of congratulation to Hans Kammler on his scientific breakthrough, after all, collaborating with the Nazis was the only thing keeping his wife and six year old daughter alive. But the words never reached his lips.

The General had sliced the professor’s throat, severing his larynx and carotid artery in one swift stroke of a surgical scalpel. So fast and so clean that he was dead before he realized what had happened.

The general dropped the scalpel on the floor where it was slowly engulfed in a growing pool of blood. He turned on his heel and strode from the laboratory with renewed vigor in his step and only one irritating concern.

He would have to find someone new to clean up the mess in the lab.

Assistant Director Henry Preston was accustomed to being seated at the head of the table and having his underlings report to him. Not this morning, though. It was 21:30 and he was bleary eyed from lack of sleep and seated half way down the table. He wondered what he was doing there at all.

His director, George Turner sat at the head of the table and looked like he’d just walked in off the golf course. His tanned face made him look younger, but Henry knew he’d turned 62 a few months ago. Casual pants, Ralph Lauren polo shirt and tasseled loafers were apparently acceptable meeting attire at the Director level. His silver hair was slicked back and still damp, somehow he’d had time for a shower before the crisis meeting. The room was heavy with notes of citrus and vanilla from his aftershave.

Preston barely had time to grab his jacket and tie before slamming his office door on an inbox full of unread emails and a bunch of phone messages he’d never likely have time to return. Things had gone crazy since the Pine Gap incident and he was putting out one fire after another. He looked at his reflection in the glass wall surrounding the boardroom table and saw that, in his haste he was wearing the same rumpled shirt he wore yesterday. He felt like a fish out of water in the director’s private meeting room.

Director Thomas Burgess of the Defense Intelligence Agency sat opposite Henry and despite the lack of uniform, his bearing was military through and through, even the creases in his chambray sport shirt were ironed to perfection. Preston guessed that at any other time of the working day he’d be in uniform with campaign ribbons on display across his broad chest. In his late fifties with a face lined with the stress of his position, Director Burgess was a no-nonsense man with a brusque way about him.

“Are you the one who woke me at 3am the other night?” Burgess grilled Henry without bothering with pleasantries or introduction.

Henry looked to his boss for explanation after all he was the one who instructed Henry to call the DIA director.

“Sorry, Tom, that was my call,” admitted George.

“I was on holiday, with my wife, damnit. She’s not going to let me forget this, you know. I promised her I’d actually stay the distance this time and not get called back to the office. This had better be important.” Burgess sat ramrod straight in his chair, hands splayed in front of him on the table.

“When I took this job three years ago,” George Turner explained, “I was read in on a few sensitive files and one of them had quite specific instructions with regard to calling you and you alone under certain circumstances,” Turner explained.