It all seemed so very pedestrian. Frank expected a bunch of Madison Avenue types to come in, sit down, and start talking about the latest ad for Coca-Cola. But the room was full of military brass — Frank was one of the few there below the rank of colonel — and split into two very distinct groups. The first was American and South Korean, along with a smattering of Australian and British officials. The other was Chinese and North Korean. Aside from one or two brave souls who met in the middle to exchange pleasantries, the two clusters kept to themselves.
“I’ve never been to an armistice negotiation before,” Mrs. Stevens said.
Frank looked over at her and smiled. She was visibly uncomfortable in the uniform, constantly adjusting her collar and pulling on her skirt, and she looked wide-eyed and worried the entire time. Of course, she was probably more worried about making a fool of herself than anything else; Frank knew she had multiple contingency plans in place should things take a turn.
“Major.”
Frank turned and saw General Harrison; he saluted sharply, as did Mrs. Stevens — they’d spent an hour practicing last night. “General, sir.”
“I assume you took a look at the perimeter already?”
“Yes, sir. All’s well so far.”
Harrison squinted a little at Frank. “I told Wallace this yesterday, and I’ll tell you today. Whatever you got going, you make sure it doesn’t affect this — what in God’s name?”
The general’s gaze wandered over Frank’s shoulder to the entrance the North Korean representatives used. Lavrentiy Beria had just walked in.
“Rose?” Frank said.
She looked just as stunned as he felt. “Well, that narrows the contingencies down quite a bit,” she said, reaching for the little notebook she kept handy to take notes and make plans.
“Major,” the general said, “is that who I think it is? And were you expecting him?”
“Yes, it is, sir. And… well, this isn’t what we expected, no.” An ambush, sure. Some kind of sabotage. A diversion at the front. But walking right into the Panmunjom armistice talks? Not really.
“Sir, if you’ll excuse me? Major Stevens, please feel free to answer the general’s questions to the extent you can,” Frank said before heading over toward the middle ground of the room. Mrs. Stevens would know just how much to tell the general. And Frank wanted a word.
Beria spotted him and walked over — they met at the far end of the table. “Major Lodge.”
“First Deputy — wait. I’m sorry. Mister Beria,” Frank said.
The Russian Variant squinted slightly before smiling. “Ah, yes, well. Temporary, I assure you.”
“Man with a plan,” Frank said. “What brings you to North Korea?”
“The same as you, Major. An end to this war.”
“Somehow, I don’t think we’re on the same page when it comes to how to do that.”
“Likely not. You remember Miss Dubinsky?”
Frank had been so focused on Beria that he hadn’t seen Maggie behind and to the right. “Hard to forget. Heya, pal.”
“Heya, Frank. Hats off to the team. Bang-up job in Moscow.”
Frank couldn’t help but smile. “And elsewhere.”
Her eyebrows went up at that. “Oh, really? East Berlin?”
“Good beer there.”
Shooting Frank a look, Beria walked off, leaving Frank face-to-face with Maggie. “We didn’t know you were involved with that,” she said.
Join them.
The dead man’s voice slipped through Frank’s mental defenses, and a deluge followed.
Join them. It makes sense. He’s got something going. He’s outthought you. Only way. Join them.
Frank closed his eyes a moment and shunted the voices back into the lockbox in his mind. When he opened them, Maggie was looking at him oddly.
“What was that?” she asked.
“Unwanted opinions. You’re looking swell.”
Maggie smiled. “The uniform’s not flattering.”
“Better than you think. Like Rita Hayworth on a USO tour.”
“I was going for Garbo.”
“Really?” Frank said. “You don’t have the hair for it.”
Maggie rolled her eyes. “But I got the chops. Left jacket pocket. See you later.”
With that Maggie walked off and the crowd was asked to take their seats. Frank checked his pocket and, finding nothing, went to his assigned seat — front row, good sightlines, and right next to Mrs. Stevens.
“Well?” she said as Frank sat down.
“Garbo.”
“Really?”
“Yep.”
“Anything else?”
Frank looked over to Beria, who had taken a front-row seat behind the North Korean negotiators. “Left jacket pocket.”
The electrical hum coursing through the room was so loud, Detlev Bronk had to shout to be heard, and a few people on the team had managed to scrounge up earmuffs to protect their hearing. But after nonstop work for the past sixteen hours — starting before they even got the go-ahead from Washington — they were ready.
They were going to try to shut down the vortex.
The damn thing had been going absolutely crazy throughout the day, sending out pulse after pulse of low-level radiation, as if something inside it knew what they were up to. Likewise, the callbacks were increasing as well. Something was answering. More and more, Bronk felt that Schreiber was onto something big. Not bad for an insane Nazi.
The first order of business was to get the vortex into a smaller space — but the magnetic field generators that contained the phenomenon were massive, and not easily put on rollers. So Bronk had built a room around the vortex inside the hangar — a slapdash box about ten feet all around, the walls coated with layers of metal and mesh, all designed to keep radio signals from penetrating inside.
Then the jamming equipment had been brought in. They couldn’t shut out the entire electromagnetic spectrum, so they’d decided to drown it out instead, concentrating on the wavelengths that the phenomenon seemed to prefer, but ideally sending along a massive influx of waves across the entire spectrum. That meant everything from microwave emitters to bright lights to no fewer than three dozen radios and four televisions, all tuned to different stations.
Bronk walked over to the jury-rigged control panel outside the box. Dozens of cables flowed out of it and down to the floor, and then into the box itself. The radiation detectors they’d used to ferret out the wavelength information were now tuned to the entire EM spectrum, as much as was possible, to see if any recognizable signals could escape.
With a last look around at his engineers, all of whom responded with nods, Bronk began flipping switches. Inside the box, the equipment came to life — and the noise was absolutely deafening.
Let’s hope this works.
Cal woke up and felt, surprisingly… better.
Sure, his head hurt like hell from where Illyanov hit him, but a lot of his aches and pains were muted somehow, as if someone turned down the volume dial on his aging body’s radio. And there were voices around him, speaking quietly, one at a time, in a couple different languages, it seemed. With all that, Cal figured he was still alive, which was a good start.
But then he opened his eyes and wondered if he’d gone blind.
“Rick?” Cal said. His words echoed slightly. “Rick, where you at?”
The sound of footsteps echoed, and Cal felt the thump of each step under him. He turned to see Rick Yamato holding a lit cigarette lighter. “I’m right here, Pops. Welcome back.”