“So what was this place then, Cap?” Wiggins asked as he handed Banks a mug of coffee.
“Some kind of scientific research station I was told,” Banks replied. “Our lads and the Norwegians had a joint operation sometime in the late ‘40s, early ‘50s.”
“Researching what?”
“I didn’t ask,” he replied.
Wiggins grinned.
“Smart move, Cap. So why are we here?”
“To see if they left anything incriminating behind and to blow the place to buggery.”
“Oh, I do like a big bang.”
“That’s not what I’ve heard,” Hynd said at the corporal’s back.
“You shouldn’t believe everything your wife tells you, Sarge,”
- 2 -
Banks only allowed them ten minutes respite then he had the squad gear up ready for moving out. Each man wore stout boots, a white heavy-duty hooded jacket, and white, fleece-lined waterproof trousers over their standard gear. They all had polarizing snow goggles and each had a handgun holstered at their hip. He eschewed any heavier weaponry for now — there didn’t appear to be any immediate danger and he didn’t intend to be more than fifty yards from the kit bags at any time; everything they had to see appeared to be in the line of huts around the jetty.
“This is a reccy and clean-up mission,” he said. “I’m not expecting any action this time out but the sarge and Wiggo especially know that this squad has a bad habit of stepping in unexpected shite so keep your eyes peeled and shout if you see — or even smell — anything hinky, anything out of place. If you find any records or any kind of documentation, fetch it to me. Wiggo, you and Davies are with me, we’ll take the other four huts on this side of the jetty. Sarge, you and Wilkins go to the other side. Meet back here in twenty. If there are no problems, then we rig the place to blow, Wiggo gets his big bang, and we get the flock out of here.”
He opened the door into sleet that threatened to turn to snow and a wind that had ramped up to little short of a gale. He turned back for one last command.
“Nobody wanders off alone, everybody watches out for the man next to him. You know the drill,” he said and pushed his way into the wind heading for the next building. Wiggins and Davies followed. When he reached the next hut door, he turned to look back. The sarge and Wilkins were on the other side of the jetty, mere blurred figures in a shaken snow dome.
The door opened when he turned the handle and he led the other two inside. There was no lighting and the gathering gloom outside made the interior even darker but he saw clearly enough that this hut had once been a dormitory of sorts. Four bunk beds lined the walls and the bedding was neatly folded up at the base of each bed, frozen solid in place. There were eight tall metal lockers but apart from frozen nightclothes, there was nothing else of note inside them. A small cold stove heater and two dry oil lamps were the only other items in the room. Banks had a last look around to make sure he hadn’t missed anything then headed out into the storm again to the next hut in the row along the shore.
This one was as empty and cold as the first. It had been a rec room rigged up as a makeshift mess with a cooking stove, a small bar area stocked with whisky and vodka in a pair of optics on the wall, and a table tennis table in the middle of the room. But this room too looked like it had survived untouched since the day the base was abandoned, the only indication of the passage of time being the layer of frost that covered everything.
Wiggins nodded towards the bar area.
“Anybody fancy a dram? It’s my shout.”
Banks laughed.
“I’ll tell you what, Wiggo, find me something interesting to take back to the colonel and we’ll all have one before we go.”
He hadn’t expected the corporal to actually find anything and their third hut proved to be a double-doored storeroom for a dinghy, its rubber long since perished, its outboard motor little more than rusted metal. But as if the thought of booze had worked some magic, the last hut in the row, with the best view overlooking the fjord, had them hitting the jackpot. It had obviously been an administrator’s office containing a heavy mahogany desk, a leather chair that might have been very comfortable at one time, and three tall metal filing cabinets.
The cabinets proved to be full of little more than gray mush, having suffered an influx of ice that had subsequently melted, rotting down the paperwork in the process but the treasure proved to be something that had survived snug and dry in one of the desk drawers. And as chance would have it, it was Wiggins who found it.
“Looks like we’ll be having that dram after all, Cap,” the corporal said with a smile and handed Banks a stout leather-bound book. It opened with a crisp rasp of frost but the interior was dry and the print clear; it was a handwritten journal in a neat, readable hand, started in 1949 and with the last entry in January 1951. His gaze fell on a page near the end.
Jan 11th 1951
The bars are holding for now but his strength is growing daily. He cannot, will not, be controlled and I have had to post more guards, for even under the heaviest sedatives we have at hand he continually tests the limits of his imprisonment. The top brass in London have been informed of the success of the experiment but for my own part I worry. If this is a success, I do not wish to see failure.
It did not tell him anything apart from the fact that it appeared that the commander of this base had a premonition of sorts of disaster to come. He closed the journal and stowed it away inside his jacket for later perusal.
What the hell happened here?
Wiggins stopped expectantly at the door of the rec room and Banks knew he was hoping that the promise of a dram would be made good but before Banks could give the okay, Sergeant Hynd came through in the headset radio.
“Best get over this way, Cap,” Hynd said. “There’s some things you need to see. Last hut at the far edge of the harbor.”
The weather had turned even worse, with thick squalls of wind-whipped snow almost blinding them. The snow goggles only helped in as much as it protected their eyes. They had to navigate by staying close to the walls of each hut as they passed it and it took five minutes of hard pushing against the wind before they reached the last of the huts on the shoreline. Hynd and Wilkins stood just inside the doorway but they weren’t getting much protection from the elements for the whole back wall of the hut had collapsed.
Hynd spoke first.
“The other huts are empty — some kind of laboratories but all smashed up now. This is what you need to see though.”
The sergeant stood aside to let Banks into the hut.
The room had at one time been the most sturdy of any of the huts in the group, not prefabricated like the others but being built mainly in red brick with double thickness walls. It had one simple purpose, reminding Banks of the old Westerns he’d watched as a lad and the town jail, a square box with an inner wall of iron bars enclosing a basic cell. Whatever had been imprisoned here, it had not been contained.
Something had torn the place apart and Banks didn’t think it had been the weather, for the iron bars that lay strewn on the ice were bent and mangled and the back wall looked to have been pushed outward rather than blown inward.
“There’s more,” Hynd said, almost shouting now to be heard above the wind. The sergeant led Banks over to the tumbled back wall and pointed at the ground. At first, Banks was unsure what he was meant to be looking at then details began to become clear amid the rubble. The remains of at least two men lay amid the bricks, remains being the appropriate word for the limbs looked to have been roughly removed from the bodies and the torsos had been brutally torn open, rib cages splayed wide like skeletal wings. It had obviously happened many years since for there was little meat left on the bones, little clothing left but tattered rags, and what blood had been spilled was frozen solid in a black, ink-like stain on the icy ground.