7. BAD MOON RISING
THE EMERGENCY GATHERS PACE OVER THE NEXT three hours.
When I glance out the front door I see a fire-control truck-a big lorry with a control room mounted on its load bed-squatting in the middle of the street outside the hotel, blue lights strobing against the darkness; a couple of pumps are drawn up on either side, and a gaggle of police vans are parked round the corner. Cops are busy buzzing around, evacuating everyone on the block from hotel and dwelling alike. The cover story is that there's a gas leak. The pump engines are real enough, but the control vehicle has nothing to do with the fire brigade: Angleton had it shipped into Holland before Mo and I arrived, just in case. It belongs to OCCULUS-Occult Control Coordination Unit Liaison, Unconventional Situations-the NATO occult equivalent of a NEST, or Nuclear Emergency Search Team. But while NEST operatives are really only trained to look for terrorist nukes, OCCULUS has to be ready for Armageddon in a variety of guises. I only just found out about OCCULUS and I really don't know whether or not I want to punch Angleton or just be grateful for his foresight.
There's rack after rack of specialised communication equipment in the back of the truck, and a scarier bunch of paramilitaries than I've ever seen outside of a movie. They're poking around the hotel right now-sending in robots with cameras, installing sensors on the way up the staircase-laying the groundwork for whatever comes next.
Alan leads me into the bar, where Angleton is waiting. Angleton has dark hollows under his eyes; his tie is loose and his collar unbuttoned. He's scribbling notes on a yellow pad in between snapping instructions on a mobile phone that's just about glued to his ear. "Sit down," he gestures as he listens to someone at the other end.
"We ought to pull back to the amber zone," Alan says. "There's structural damage."
"Later." Angleton waves him off and goes back to talking on the phone. "No, there's no need to go to Rung Four yet, but I want the backup wagon on twenty-four by seven alert, and we'll need Plumbers crawling over everything. And Baggers, but especially Plumbers. Tell Bridget to fuck off." He glances at me. "Grab a drink from the bar and get ready to tell me everything." Back to the phone: "I'll expect hourly updates." He puts the phone down and turns to me. "Now. Tell me exactly what happened."
"I don't know what happened," I say. "I went to bed. Next thing, I hear screams and wake up-" I clench my fists to stop my hands shaking.
"Fast forward. What did you find in her room?" Angleton leans forward intently.
"How did you know… hell. I got up there, heard whistling like wind. So I tried to break the door down. Then the concierge showed up, unlocked the door, and nearly got sucked in; I grabbed her and sent her back down. There's a gate in there, class four at least-it's about two-plus metres in diameter, runs straight through the wall, and it's stable. Furniture was thrown around as if there was a fight, but there's a big wind blowing. On the other side of the gate there's no atmosphere to speak of."
"No atmosphere." Angleton nods and makes a note as two firemen-I think they're firemen-enter the bar and begin setting up something that looks like a rack of industrial scaffolding in the middle of the room. "The source of the wind?"
"I think so. It was bloody cold, which suggests expansion into vacuum." I shiver and glance up; above our heads the whistle of wind through rubble continues unabated. "She wasn't there," I add. "I think they took her."
Angleton's lips quirk. "That is not an unreasonable deduction." His expression hardens. "Describe the other side of the gate."
"Twilight, a shallow valley. I couldn't see the ground very clearly; it sloped down to a distant lake, or something that looked like one. The stars were very clear, not twinkling at all, and I could see they weren't familiar. There was a huge galaxy covering, uh, about a third of the sky."
Alan sticks a glass between my fingers: I take an experimental swallow. Orange juice spiked with something stronger. I continue: "No air on the other side. Alien starscape. But there are stars, and at least one planet; that means it's pretty damn close to us, it's not one of those universes where the ratio of the strong nuclear force to the electromagnetic force prevents fusion." I shiver. "Whoever they are, they've got her and they've got an open mass-transfer gate. What do we do now?"
Alan silently leaves the room. Angleton looks at me oddly. "That's a very good question. Do you have any ideas to contribute?" he asks.
I swallow. "I have one idea. It's the Ahnenerbe, isn't it? That's the connection. The Middle Eastern guy, the one with the luminous eyes that she described-it's a possession. Something left over from the war, an Ahnenerbe revenant of some kind, possessing the leader of a Mukhabarat strike cell in California. And now they've snatched Mo."
He closes his eyes. "Your email this afternoon. You are sure she positively identified the scan you sent me from California? You'd bet your life on it?"
"Pretty sure." I nod. "Was it-"
"We found the same pattern in Rotterdam." He sighs and opens his eyes again. "The very same; my compliments on your search criteria. Was there something similar in her room?"
"I honestly can't say; it was dark, I was trying not to be dragged in by the wind, and the gate had instantiated in the middle of it. I don't think so, but if you can get a photograph from up there I can confirm-"
"In progress."
Alan comes back in; he's wearing a bright orange overall and carrying a bulky box, some kind of sensor gear. "You'll have to move now," he tells Angleton. "The top floor's in danger of collapsing. Hole up in the van and stay out of the way; we need to sweep the block for werewolves."
"Were-"
I must look surprised because Alan barks a brief laugh at me. "Leftovers from the authors of this incursion, old boy, not hairy-palmed wolf-men with a silver allergy. Come on, shift yourself."
"Shift-" I find myself on my feet, Angleton holding my elbow in a vicelike grip.
"Come now, Mr. Howard. This is no time to lose your self-control." He steers me out into the street (barefoot, the tarmac under my toes makes me wince) and then up the steps into the OCCULUS command vehicle. A guard waves us in, insect-eyed in respirator. "A spare overall for Mr. Howard here," Angleton calls, and a minute later I'm loaded down with enough survival gear to equip a small polar expedition, from the y-fronts out.
"You're going to send people in to try and close the gate," I predict in the general direction of the back of Angleton's head as he dials a phone number. "I want to go with them."
"Don't be silly, boy. What do you think you can achieve?"
"I can try to rescue her," I say.
There's a burst of static from farther up the compartment and one of the men in black (black turtleneck, black fatigues, black face-paint, and MP-10 slung over his chair) turns and calls out: "Message for the captain!" Alan mutters a curse and squeezes past me. I begin pulling on a sock. There are one-way windows along one side of the cabin and outside in the road I see some kind of large truck squeezing past us.
"I'm serious," I tell Angleton. "I know what's going on here, or most of it. Or I can guess. Werewolves, he said. Holdovers from the Reich, huh? And the Mukhabarat connection. That gate doesn't go into the dark anthropic zone; it stops short, somewhere where humans can exist. Really evil humans, whoever survived from the Ahnenerbe-SS after the war was lost." I begin to wriggle into the bottom half of my survival suit shell. "I've been studying Sheet 45075 from Birkenau, you know. If it's the same one they used over there, I can shut it down safely-without a massive discharge when it arcs to ground."