He moved too slowly and besides, I came at him from behind; he didn’t have a chance, and I cut his throat with a knife and caught him in my arms as he fell, dropping him gently to the ground.
Red mixed with white and I had a flash of memory, the red swastika tattoo and the wings on each side, promising death.
The research facility was a fortress carved in the ice. Icy turrets and frozen walkways and, behind the walls, the sense of an invisible presence. The beams of powerful searchlights criss-crossed the ice just beyond.
I had come on it almost by accident as if it had sprung, magic-castle-like, out of the ice where, a moment before, nothing had been. There were no fences, no battlements; they wouldn’t have been necessary. There was only the castle, solid ice and impregnable to sight, squatting like a malevolent angel sculpted in snow and shadows; what lay behind its walls I could only guess at.
The place had an eerie silence about it, an absence of sound that didn’t seem natural even in the midst of this quietude of ice. Consulting my wristwatch--I thought it might have stopped at some point during my rush across the ice, but no, the entire journey had taken me less than half the time I had thought it would.
I worried that my speed, too, wasn’t entirely natural.
I circled the facility from a safe distance, trying to assess its security.
Watchtowers, four, one on each corner; searchlights; what looked like identical sets of machine-gun arrays below each tower. Soldiers, indistinct shapes, moving in the dark. There were no obvious openings, but I could see, at the bottom of one tower, slight humps in the ice that suggested hidden guard outposts.
As I circled, the pattern repeated; what entry there was into the castle was likely underground.
I needed to somehow reach those guard posts without being detected, and then, somehow, force my way inside, find Eldershott, abort whatever operation it was the Germans were running there, in the middle of the Siberian desert of ice. There were too many somehows in the equation, too many random elements I couldn’t control, and I knew I would simply have to risk it, rely on the organism to keep me alive, to keep me going until I could finish the mission, and hope it would be enough.
It was cold, the ice penetrating through my suit with its dead, cold bony fingers, and I knew I would have to move fast, that staying out here for too long was in itself a death.
And so I did: I moved fast, crawling on the ice towards the castle’s walls. My suit blended in with the colour of the snow, as I crawled towards the edifice. I hugged snow and crawled and tried not to think of the pain.
It was only a short distance, really, but when you’re on your belly it’s different, crawling and knowing those searchlights could find you in a careless second, and that you wouldn’t even know it when they did. The sniper’s bullets would make sure of that.
I didn’t dare stop; I had to keep going until I reached the relative safety of the walls. When I approached close enough for me to hear voices, what I heard wasn’t good--the guards spoke German, not Russian--and that most likely meant the Russians had lost control of their own facility. I wondered if they knew it. I wondered if the remains of the Russian guards were buried somewhere in the snow, white bones resting in a sea of white ice. I wondered who was running the facility now, and for what purpose. I wondered what I was doing there, but then let that one go.
The first of them didn’t even notice when I cut his throat, he just died, quietly and politely and without making a fuss, but the second turned, gun at the ready and about to shout and raise the alarm, and I threw the knife at him, the blade still wet with his partner’s blood, and the knife missed his heart but got the hand holding the gun and he dropped it, and before he could shout for help, I was there with a swivel kick to the head, and a follow up as he fell. I’d been aiming for the throat and, in a moment, he didn’t have enough of a windpipe left to breathe with.
The entrance to their post was hidden in the ice; it was a round hole, wide enough, with an iron ladder leading down. I pulled their bodies, one by one, and lay them against the wall and tried to cover them with snow; just enough to make it difficult to detect if you weren’t specifically looking for them. Then I climbed down the ladder.
The atmosphere grew warmer as I went down, a hidden air-conditioning unit humming in the background, and when I reached the floor, I took off my gloves and my hat and pocketed the goggles.
It was quiet down there, a featureless corridor of ice leading away towards the facility, and not a person in sight. I guessed they didn’t figure on the need for much security past that point, but it still had me worried. They didn’t need the kind of security they had, not out here, not even for a nuclear facility, but they still had it.
I came to a three-way intersection and chose the middle path, continuing straight ahead, trying to feel for any gradual changes in the level of the corridor, but it wasn’t sloping or climbing. It was a level passageway, and there were no doors or windows, and no guards. I began to worry that this, too, was some kind of a trap, a maze of corridors leading nowhere, but then the level of the floor did change and I began moving downwards, deeper into the earth and, as I did, my perception began to change, and I could feel the strangeness I had felt before. It was slowly working its way into my mind.
In my double vision, the corridors assumed an eerie, ghostly second layer; hazy lines wavered almost beyond sight, resembling the anatomical representation of amputated angels’ wings. My heart was beating faster, pushing the blood around the body as if trying to pump it away, and I tried to calm it but it was no use; it was as if I were being administered adrenaline externally and it was now making its presence felt.
I descended gradually, and as I did the lights became brighter and the corridor expanded, and then it stopped at a small, white door that said, simply, LABORBEREICH, Laboratory Area, and I opened it, and then the screaming started.