The Coldest War (2 page)

The cold English rain sizzled and steamed on Viktor Sokolov as he began the long walk back to his car.

24 April 1963
East Ham, London, England

Children called him Junkman. But he had been a god once.

They called him Junkman because of his tatty clothing, his shabby auto, his scruffy beard. But most of all, they called him Junkman because of his cart, piled high with odds and ends, broken radios and other electronic bric-a-brac. He hoarded junk. And that was the definition of a Junkman.

He never spoke. Not that any of the children had ever heard, not even the oldest ones. He couldn't, they said. His throat had been cut by Hitler himself, or Mussolini, or Stalin, or de Gaulle, they said. This they knew with great certainty, the kind of certainty that can be found only on the playground, sworn upon with crossed hearts and spit and the threat of dire retribution. But common wisdom held that if Junkman could speak, it would be with a French accent, like many of the refugees who had crossed the Channel to escape the Red Army in the closing days of the war.

They were wrong. His English was excellent. Flawless, without a hint of accent. He had been proud of this, once.

He spent most of his time secluded in his tiny flat. None of the children knew what he did in there, though one boy had found the courage—on a solemn dare—to follow him all the way across the council estate to his building and his floor. He caught a glimpse of Junkman's home as the man slipped inside with his clattering cart. The flat was filled, said the intrepid scout, with junk. Piles and piles of it, some almost reaching to the ceiling.

Sometimes their parents paid Junkman to repair their radios and televisions. He was good at it. Their appliances would disappear into his lightless den for a day or three, and emerge working not quite good as new. Repairing things was how he paid for food and his tatty clothing and his dingy flat.

Sometimes Junkman ventured out with a newspaper tucked under his arm. Sometimes he'd be gone all day, returning in the evening—or sometimes even the next day—the boot of his auto filled with more scrap. When this happened, the children followed him down the long service road from the car park as he wheeled his new prizes back to his flat. The
skreep-skreep-skreep
of his cart called to them like the Pied Piper's flute.

“Junk man!” they jeered. “Garbage man!” they called. “Junk man, garbage man, rubbish bin man!”

For the most part, they threw only taunts and jeers at him. But the children remembered the winter a few years earlier, an especially cold season when snow had lasted on the ground for weeks at a time. (But not nearly so cold as the hellish winter that had broken the Nazis, said their parents.) That winter somebody had taken the idea of punctuating their insults with snowballs. And so, on this particular day, they armed themselves with clods of earth made muddy by intermittent spring rains.

Junkman struggled to direct his cart across the slippery pavement. And still he never spoke, not even when the mud splattered against his cart and knocked down a spool of wire. This emboldened the children. They aimed for Junkman, whooping with glee as they unleashed mud and scorn.

Until one boy hit Junkman square in the forehead. It knocked him down, shook off his trilby hat and tousled his wig. A
wig
! Peals of laughter.

Junkman scrambled to regain his hat. He ran his fingers over his head and his ridiculous hairpiece, again and again, delicately, as though worried his skull had been cracked. And then, after apparently reassuring himself that his head was still attached, he stomped over to the boy who'd made that throw.

The children fell silent. They'd never taken a close look at Junkman before. They had never seen his eyes: the palest blue, colder than icicles. Junkman had always kept them downcast.

Junkman lifted the boy by the collar of his coat, lifted him clear off the ground. First, he shook the boy, and that was frightening enough. Junkman was sure to kill them all, they thought. But then he pulled the boy close and whispered in his ear. Nobody heard what he said, but the boy lost the flush on his cheeks, and trembled when Junkman set him down again.

Nobody followed Junkman back to his flat that day. The others crowded around the crying boy. He was, after all, the only child in the entire council estate ever to hear Junkman's voice. “What did he say?” they demanded. “What did he tell you?”

“‘You'll burn,'” he sobbed. “He said, ‘You'll all burn.'”

But worse than what Junkman said was how he said it.

*   *   *

He called himself Richard, a self-taught electrician from Woking. But he had been Reinhardt, the Aryan salamander, once.

He lived in a vast, soulless council estate. One of countless housing projects that had sprung up throughout London in the years after the war, when much of the city still lay flattened by the Luftwaffe.

Reinhardt wiped the mud from his face as best he could, though it was wet and sloppy. It stung his eyes. He manhandled his cart into the lift, one eye clenched shut and the other barely slitted open. He breathed a sigh of relief when he made it to his flat and bolted the door behind him.

He tossed his coat on a crate of electrical valves, stepped on a cockroach before kicking his galoshes into a corner behind the soldering equipment, flung his hat across the room to where it landed on the flat's only empty chair, and then carefully peeled off his sodden hairpiece. He never ventured outside without one, and after living secretly for so many years, the thought of leaving his wires exposed to the world gave him a frisson of anxiety. As did the possibility those miserable whelps outside had caused damage.

The wires had frayed over the years. The cloth insulation wasn't suited to decades in the field. But of course, that had never been the intent; if things had gone the way they were meant to, Reinhardt and the others would have had ample access to replacements and upgrades. He inspected the wires daily, wrapping them with new electrical tape as needed. But he would never be able to fix damage to the sockets where the wires entered his skull. It was hard enough to
see
the sockets, sifting through his hair while holding a mirror in the bathroom. If the children had damaged those, Reinhardt's dream of recovering his godhood would be permanently extinguished.

To think he might have endured so many humiliations, countless degradations, only to have his goal rendered unreachable by a single child … Another unwelcome reminder of how far he had fallen. Of how vulnerable he had become. How
mundane
. But the wires and sockets were undamaged.

Reinhardt breathed a deeper sigh of relief; it ended with a shudder and a sob. He struggled to compose himself, to draw upon an emotional Willenskräfte, while secretly glad Doctor von Westarp wasn't there to observe his weakness.

There had been a time when he could have—
would
have—torched the little monsters outside with a single thought. Back when he had been the pinnacle of German science and technology, something more than a man. Terrible miracles had been his specialty.

Dinner was a bowl of white rice with tomato and, as a treat to himself, the rest of a bockwurst he'd been saving in the icebox. It lifted his spirits, reminded him of home. In the earliest years of his exile, when London still carried fresh scars from the Blitz, German food couldn't be found for any price. That was changing, but slowly.

After dinner, he sorted through the odds and ends he'd brought home. He'd been gone for two days, and assaulted by the little bastards who infested this place when he returned, but it was worth it. The Royal Air Force had decommissioned an outpost down near Newchurch, one of the original Chain Home stations dating from the war. It was one of the last to be replaced with a more modern and sophisticated radar post that could peer deeper into Socialist Europe. Such posts would provide a futile first warning if a wave of Ilyushin bombers and their MiG escorts started heading for Britain.

The decommissioned radar station had meant a wealth of electronic equipment practically free for the taking, pence on the pound. The sensitive equipment had been carted away long before any civilians set foot on the premises. But Reinhardt didn't care about any of that—it would have been the high-frequency circuitry, microwave generators, and other esoteric things. What Reinhardt sought was also esoteric, but wouldn't be found in a newspaper advertisement.

He'd snatched up condensers, valves, inductors, relays, and more. An excellent haul, even better than the estate sale of the deceased ham radio enthusiast. He'd even found a few gauges, which would serve him well when he re-created the Reichsbehörde battery-circuit design.

When. Not if.

Reverse engineering the damn thing was a painful process. He had learned, through trial and error, how to induce hallucinations, indigestion, convulsions.…

He mused to himself, bitterly, that he had collected nearly enough equipment to build his own radar outpost. How ironic. Radar was touted as one of the great technological innovations of the last war, but Reinhardt himself was the greatest of all. Yet in all the years since the war had ended, he had failed to recapture the Götterelektron.

Then again, Herr Doktor von Westarp had enjoyed the resources of the Third Reich at his disposal. The IG Farben conglomerate had assigned teams of chemists, metallurgists, and engineers to the devices that had fueled Reinhardt's feats of superhuman willpower.

But Reinhardt did not have IG Farben at his disposal. It didn't even exist any longer.

They had always called them “batteries,” but that was misleading. They held a charge, yes, but Reinhardt had deduced over the years that they also contained specialized circuitry tailored to deliver the Götterelektron in precisely the correct manner.

The accumulated detritus of his quest had transformed his flat into a cave. Most of it he had purchased or scavenged, but some came from the work he did repairing televisions and radios. It was demeaning work, but even gods had to eat. Sometimes he lied, claiming the device was beyond repair, and then kept the parts.

Reinhardt stored his journals in a hollow behind the gurgling radiator. When he had first come to England, he'd had no training in electronics, nor in the scientific method, for that matter. He'd been raised by one of the greatest minds of the century, but he'd never bothered to pay any attention to how Doctor von Westarp worked. And for that, he cursed himself frequently.

The journals contained hundreds of circuit diagrams accompanied by lengthy annotations describing Reinhardt's experiences with each. But none of those circuits had elicited anything like the tingle of the Götterelektron. Reinhardt retrieved the latest journal, opened it to a new page, then settled down at his workbench (a discarded wooden door laid across two sawhorses).

Hours passed.

It was some time after midnight when Reinhardt, bleary-eyed and exhausted, abandoned his efforts for the evening. He brushed his teeth. Then he brushed them a second time, and his tongue, too, trying vainly to scrub the odd taste from his mouth.

A metallic tang.

Reinhardt had all but forgotten it: the copper taste, that harmless but annoying side effect of godhood.

He tossed his toothbrush in the sink and rushed back to the bench, where the evening's final experiment still stood. He worked backwards through everything he had done, searching for the combination that had coated his tongue with the taste of metal. Beads of sweat ran down his forehead, stung his eyes with salt as he trembled with the exertion of calling up his Willenskräfte. Nothing happened.

But then—

—a blue corona engulfed his outstretched hand, just for an instant—

—and died.

Strive as he might, he couldn't call it back. But it had
happened
. He had
felt
the Götterelektron coursing into his mind, fueling his willpower. He tasted copper, and smelled smoke.

Smoke?

Reinhardt thought at first he had inadvertently started his flat on fire owing to rustiness and a lack of finesse. But no. A faulty condenser had shorted out. Reinhardt realized that as it had died, its electrical characteristics had changed in some random, unpredictable way. Changed in a way that had, just for a moment, returned his power to him.

Children called him Junkman. But he had been a god, once.

And would be again.

 

one

1 May 1963
Arzamas-16, Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, USSR

Gretel laid a fingertip on Klaus's arm.

“Wait,” she whispered.

Several seconds passed while she consulted some private time line that existed only in her head. He recognized the look on her face: she was remembering the future, peering a few seconds ahead.

Then she said, “Now, brother.”

Klaus pulled the merest trickle of current from his stolen battery, just enough of the Götterelektron to dematerialize his hand. It was a gamble, one Gretel had assured him would work. But he'd practiced for weeks.

His hand ghosted through ferro-concrete. He wrapped his fingers around one of the bolts that sealed the vault. Klaus concentrated, focusing his Willenskräfte like a scalpel, and pulled a finger's width of steel through the wall. Gretel caught the slug before it clattered to the floor and gave them away.

They repeated the process twice. Klaus severed all three bolts, and the alarm circuit, in fifteen seconds. But the damage to the door was strictly internal; a passing guard would see nothing but pristine, unblemished steel.

It would have been easier for Klaus to walk straight through the wall with his sister in tow. But that would have tripped sensors and triggered their captors' fail-safes before he was halfway through. The entire facility, this secret city the locals called Sarov, bristled with antennae and circuitry attuned to the telltale whisper of the Götterelektron. Unauthorized expression of the Willenskräfte instantly triggered the electromagnetic equivalent of a shaped charge. The British had developed a crude precursor to this technology back during the war; they'd called their devices “pixies,” and they had a range of a few hundred meters. The Soviet fail-safes could knock out a battery at six kilometers. Klaus knew the specs because he'd helped them test the system. He'd had no choice.