Operation Antarctica

- 4 -

At least McCally had managed to get the stove going in the hut, although it was cramped inside with all eight of them in a space that looked to be made for no more than two or three men. Hughes, Patel, and Wilkes sat tight together on the bottom bunk, Wiggins was stretched out on the one above them, Parker and McCally were by the stove, with a kettle on and a pot boiling up some of the thin soup that passed as their rations. They all looked up as Banks entered.

“At ease, lads,” he said. “The brass needs some thinking time. Four hours till next check-in, so smoke them if you’ve got them.”

“So what do they think it is, Cap?” Wiggins asked. “Some black ops bullshit cobbled up during the war to try and make us shit ourselves?”

“Aye,” Parker said. “I’ve seen that film. Nazi UFO in a tube station in London, wasn’t it? Fucking ace that was.”

“This is no black ops,” Hynd said, and the room fell quiet. “We all saw the bodies, and the rust on the walls, and the age of the paperwork. It’s all too good; in fact, it’s fucking perfect. It’s exactly what it looks like. No more, no less.”

“But, Sarge,” Wiggins said. “Fucking NAZI UFOs? That’s just sad-sack internet conspiracy theory bollocks.”

“Not anymore it isn’t,” Hynd said. “You saw it. We all saw it.”

McCally came over from the stove and put a pot of soup on the table and some bowls and cutlery. The room was already warming up, so much so that Parker and McCally had taken off their outer jackets.

“Get it inside you, lads. We found enough wood to keep the stove running for a while, so at least we won’t freeze our nuts off for the next four hours.”

“Turn it down a tad,” Banks said. “And eke out the wood as much as you can. We might be here a bit longer than four hours, if my gut’s right.”

Banks and Hynd let the squad get to the soup first. Hynd had been as good as his word and been among the paperwork in the canvas kit bags they’d brought out of the base.

“This all looks legit, Cap,” the sergeant said. “But it’s as weird as fuck.”

“In what way?”

“Well, there’s orbital mechanics and flight plans and the like, everything you’d expect if they really were trying to attempt to get that fucker off the ground. But there are all sorts of other bits of shite along with the technical stuff. Take those gold markings on the floor under the saucer, for example. If I’m reading this right, it’s a fucking pentagram.”

“What, black magic, demonology, all that old bollocks?”

“Exactly. I’d heard the Nazis were mad for that kind of crap, but I never expected to find evidence all the way down here.”

“So what next? The fucking Lost Ark?”

Hynd shrugged.

“At this stage, Cap, very little would surprise me.”

Banks wasn’t really listening to his sergeant. His mind was back in the hangar, his foot on the gold circle, feeling the tingling vibration run through his body. His gut instinct was shouting loud at him now, but he pushed it down.

“Maybe Wiggins was right,” he said. “Maybe this is all some kind of black ops psychological shite.”

“Aye, maybe,” Hynd said. “But what if it isn’t?”

Banks clapped Hynd on the shoulder.

“Then we’ll just have to kick auld Nick in the nuts and fuck off for a pint,” he said. “Like we always do.”

His attempt at humor seemed to placate the sergeant, but Banks’ own mood was sour. After finishing the soup, Hughes, Patel, and Wilkes sat, tight together on the bottom bunk, and all three quickly went to sleep, accompanied by the snoring of Wiggins above them. Banks envied them the rest, but he couldn’t get his mind to settle. Parker, McCally, and Hynd got a card game going, but Banks was still thinking of the two names in the journal he’d found, still wondering as to their relevance to the current situation. He stepped over nearer the stove and sat leaning on the counter that served as chopping board and food preparation area. He got the old leather journal from his backpack, opened it up, and continued reading from where he’d left off.

Soon he had left the Antarctic behind, flying back to London, over a hundred years before.

I was expecting a parcel of books that Saturday morning, and when the knock came to the door in Cheyne Walk, I almost ran to answer, eagerly anticipating an afternoon of studious endeavor in my library among the pages of some new friends for my shelves. Instead, I found a tall, heavily built lad on my doorstep.

At first glance, I might have taken him for a policeman or a bruiser, for he had something of the manner of both, but his tone was polite, even cultured, as he handed me an envelope.

“I was told to pass this to you personally, sir,” he said. “It is for your eyes only.”

The envelope was plain, but of expensive paper, and the handwritten note was done most elegantly in the blackest of black inks with not the slightest smudge on it. The wording of the note itself was equally as terse as the deliverer’s message.

“I have sent my driver for you. Come immediately. It is of national importance.”

I suspected the name even before I read it. It was appended, simply, ‘Churchill.’ I knew the man well enough from our previous encounters to know he would not be an easy chap to refuse.

I took enough time to fetch an overcoat, a hat, and my pipe and tobacco. The burly young chap stood, stock-still, filling my doorway the whole time, and only moved aside to let me exit. Then I was, if not exactly bundled, enthusiastically encouraged into a waiting carriage and within seconds, we were off and away, heading east at some speed along the Embankment.

I had the interior of the rather well-appointed carriage to myself, the bearer of the telegram having stepped up to sit with the driver. Once we passed Westminster, and didn’t stop at Parliament, but continued to head even farther east, I realized it might be a longer trip than I had anticipated.

To pass the time, I read the note again, but it told me nothing new beyond the fact that Churchill was a man who expected to be obeyed. I hadn’t heard from him since our last encounter, but I remembered reading of his appointment as First Lord of the Admiralty in The Thunderer a month or so back. I wondered if this summons might had something to do with that, but I had insufficient facts to hand for such conjecture, and settled for lighting a pipe, trying to enjoy the journey, and not letting my curiosity turn to frayed nerves and a bad temper.

The carriage kept going along the north side of the river, past St. Paul’s and London Bridge, past the Tower, and headed into the warren of old quays and warehouses of the docks. I was starting to regret not having partaken of a larger breakfast.

I was still wondering quite how far I might have to travel when the carriage finally came to a halt at an old boat shed that, once upon a time, must have been one of the largest on the docks. There were a score or more of the young, strapping, silent type of chaps around. Some of them had made some kind of attempt at disguising themselves in old, frayed and worn clothing in an effort to pass themselves off as dockhands. But they weren’t fooling me. This was Churchill’s work all right, and these were his lads. I guessed they were military, or rather, given Churchill’s post, Navy chaps to a man, and they were hard men, trained to kill by the look of them. I decided I had better be on my toes and keep my nose clean as I stepped down from the carriage onto the quay.

Churchill was there to meet me. He had grown more stout and portly since our last meeting, and his belly strained rather too tightly against his waistcoat. Compared to his lads around us, he looked out of place on the dock, his walking cane, heavy silver fob chain, tall hat and tails being much too grand, and more suited to the rarified atmosphere of the House.

Given the abrupt nature of my summoning, I half-expected him to be brusque and off-hand. But he was all ‘hale fellow, well met’ and made a show of telling his lads that I was an expert, consultant I believe is the word he used, and that I was to be given access to the whole site; nothing was to be kept from me. I still had no idea what was kept in the big shed at this point, but at least I knew now that I had been brought for a reason, for Churchill took my arm and suddenly became quite conspiratorial.

“It’s those bally Huns. They’re at it again,” he said as he led me toward the large boat shed and to a small door to the rear of the main building. “They’re readying for war, I can feel it in my water. And it’s my job now to do what I can to stop them mastering the seas. It’s our best defense, always has been. But it’s also our weakest point, for there are far too many miles of coastline all the way up the North Sea that are undefended and vulnerable to a sneak attack. We must show that we are prepared for any eventuality. Britannia must rule the waves again, and we must take charge of the oceans now, before it’s too late. Don’t you agree?”

It had sounded more in the nature of a speech than conversation, so I thought it best to be circumspect and muttered my agreement, to which he clapped me on the shoulder. It appeared we were to be friends, for a while at least.

We came to a halt outside the small door and he turned to me again.

“Now, Carnacki, my good man, I must ask for your complete discretion on this matter. What you are about to see is the best-kept secret in the country at the moment, and we must ensure it remains that way. Apart from my chaps on guard here, there’s only ten people know of it. And you are the tenth. The PM knows, but not the cabinet, and not even the King has been told. I know you are a man of your word, so I can trust you to keep this under your hat.”

I nodded in reply, but didn’t get time to get a word in edgeways as he continued.

“And there are to be no Friday night stories told around the fire over a smoke and a brandy; not with this one. It’s too bally sensitive to be bandied about, even between close friends and confidantes. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” I replied, although I was feeling increasingly unsure as to what I was letting myself in for. Churchill nodded to the guard beside the door, who opened it to allow us into the cathedral that was the boat shed and reveal Churchill’s big secret.

Of all the things I had considered, of all the things I had expected to see, I think a German U-Boat might well have been near the bottom of the list.

And yet there it was, like a great russet-colored whale beached up on timbers that held it off the floor and ran along its whole length. The bulk of it almost filled the old shed from the huge riverside doors to the rear where we stood. I could only look at it in awe, and wonder how it had got here, to the East London docks. Churchill answered my question before I asked it.

“We think she’s a prototype for a new class they’re developing over there; there’s been rumors of such a thing for a year or so now, and it looks like they were right. We caught this one snooping around in the North Sea, up in Doggerland at the shallowest point. Well, we didn’t actually catch her. The engineers who’ve been over her bow to stern tell me that she had some kind of system failure and gave up the ghost all on her own. She was floating on the surface when we got to her, and not a man of the crew left alive inside either. The poor blighters all died of suffocation, or so the doctors assure me.”

He paused, and laughed as if he had made a joke.

“Gave up the ghost. That’s rather apt, I must remember that one.”

He didn’t look inclined to explain that point, so I let it lie and went on to the matter that most concerned me.

“So you have a German submarine. That’s probably good for you and the Admiralty,” I replied. “But I fail to see why you need my particular brand of expertise, or where I am being asked to apply it.”

Churchill laughed again, a booming thing that echoed high in the rafters of the shed.

“That is why you would never make a politician or indeed an Admiral, Carnacki. You have failed to see our tactical advantage here, even when it’s right in front of your nose.”

“I’m still not with you,” I replied.

Churchill waved at the length of the submarine in reply.

“It felt like a godsend, when it turned up like that, almost on our doorstep,” he said. “A free, no strings attached, chance to examine our largest adversary’s latest vessel. But when I looked at it, I started to wonder. It was a simple question at first, but the implications of it kept making me come back to it again and again.

“What if we gave them it back? What if we gave them it back with something on board that would make them think twice about ever sending something our way again?”

I was starting to see some daylight, and I was wishing that I didn’t.

“You want me to mock up some kind of propaganda scene inside the submarine, is that what this is about? I am to make it look like something from beyond killed the crew and that it has been taken over by a spectral presence? Parlor tricks and scare tactics, in other words.”

“You’ve nearly got it, old man,” Churchill said, and suddenly he looked completely serious. “But I do not, under any circumstances, want a mere mock-up. There must be no ‘parlor tricks’ that can be easily exposed as such. I need the real thing. I want this U-boat infested with a particularly vicious spook. I want it sent back to them, and I want to put the fear of God into the bally Hun so that they will never trouble us again.”

It took a few seconds for all of that to sink in. I did not know whether to be simply confused, or completely appalled. In the end, I pleaded unfit for the task at hand.

“You’ve seen my methods first-hand, Churchill,” I said. “You know my defenses are just that; they are only defensive. I wouldn’t know to go about calling up a spook, never mind ensuring you got a nasty, vicious one.”

He didn’t reply at first; he looked me straight in the eye for the longest time before speaking in a measured voice.

“Come, now. That is not strictly true, is it, Carnacki?” he said finally. “I know for a fact you have a wide variety of books on the shelves in your library dealing with such matters. There must be something in those tomes that is of practical use?”

I did not go into how he might know what I had in my private library. Just as he had seen my methods first-hand, so I had seen his. He had a ruthless streak in him I found hard to like, and a blatant disregard for any piddling matters such as legality and morality if they did not suit his purposes. He did, however, have the strongest sense of duty to King and Country of any chap I have ever met, and I could not help but be impressed with the zeal with which he approached the task.

But that in itself was not enough to get a job done that I considered to be, frankly, impossible. I tried to tell him so in words he might understand.

“Those are merely books,” I said. “It is only research and history. Practically, there is little there of use. Necromancy and demon summoning are only primitive methods of trying to understand the mysteries of the Outer Realms, and I have never encountered a single report that suggests any such attempts were ever successful. Let it go, Churchill. There is no foolproof way of summoning a thing from the Great Beyond, never mind getting one to do your bidding”

“I am not asking for it to be foolproof,” Churchill said. “I am only asking for it to be done. Your country needs you, man. Will you refuse it in its hour of need?”

He did not know me well enough to realize that appeals to base patriotism wouldn’t wash with me. My country was of little consequence compared to the immensity of the Beyond. But, still, it is my country, and Mr. Churchill is a most persuasive gentleman.

I also had a feeling that if I did refuse him, I might not be making a return journey home from this boat shed. I have seen the shark beneath his smile, and his ruthlessness would not allow his secret to be out and abroad and not under his control. I would have to brazen it out with a brass neck until I could get a clearer idea of how I would need to play it to satisfy his demands.

“What manner of spook do you require?” I asked calmly, as if I knew what I was about.

He laughed at that, and hid the shark away. He did not fool me though; I knew it still swam in the depths, waiting to surface when required.

“I knew you were a man of sense,” he said. “Come, let’s seal our deal over a drink and a smoke and we can discuss it further.”

He led me to a small office that was more like a foreman’s hut at the back of the shed beyond the submarine propellers. The space was crammed with carpentry tools, blueprints, cameras, and ledgers. And I was not in the least bit surprised to see my box of defenses on the floor amid the clutter, and two tall piles of my books on the table in a space that had obviously been cleared for them. It appeared that Churchill didn’t only know the contents of my library; he had the run of the whole bally house.

At least he hadn’t needed to have his chaps rifle my liquor cabinet or smokes drawer. He had a tall travelling valise at his side, one of those expensive leather and brass jobs I’ve had an eye on for myself. He opened it to expose, not books or clothes, but a well-stocked range of liquor in tall decanters, some expensive crystal glasses, and a long wooden cigar box.

He winked at me as he saw my astonishment.

“Perks of the job, old boy,” he replied. “One must travel in style, if one must travel at all.”

He poured me some rather fine single malt I hadn’t had before from Orkney, and passed me a Cuban cigar that was thicker than my thumb and twice as long, before clicking his glass against mine.

“To business,” he said after swallowing most of his scotch in a single gulp. I merely sipped at mine. I had a feeling I had a lot of work ahead of me, a feeling that was amplified considerably as he outlined his requirements.

“It has to be strange enough to spook the Huns,” he said, “yet not so bloody weird that it’ll frighten my men. I’m going to have to have some crew aboard when we take this thing out of here. They’ll be needed to get it back into waters where it can be found.”

“And what about the original German crewmen? How will their absence be explained?”

“Absence?” Churchill said, and again I saw the ruthless shark under the mask. “Oh, they won’t be absent. We have them on ice in a shed not a hundred yards from here. When we’re ready, we’ll get them back on board and send them off with their boat.”

I was less and less keen on this whole business by the second, but I was in too far now to back out.

“I will need to spend some time with my books,” I said. “This is not something I can undertake lightly.”

Churchill nodded. He poured another large measure of his scotch and topped up mine, although I had as yet scarcely touched it.

“I thought you might say that,” he said. “Let me know if you need anything. The chaps outside are at our beck and call at all hours.”

He went and sat in the chair across the table opposite me and was immediately lost in his thoughts, a fug of cigar smoke surrounding him like fake ectoplasm at a séance.

It was time for me to get to work.

I sipped at the scotch and smoked the cigar as I checked to see what Churchill had thought were the books I might require for the task at hand. Not for the first time, he surprised me with his perspicacity and breadth of knowledge. He had indeed thought of everything, from the Key of Solomon to De Vermis Mysteriis, from several medieval grimoires to my working copy of the Sigsand mss. Of course, as I have said, I considered the bulk of this material to be of historical curiosity value only. I had read them all before, but never with an eye to considering them as in any way practical.

I took the time it took me to smoke the cigar to clear my mind of my own preconceptions, and then set about looking for something I thought might have a chance of working, given my talent and expertise, and a large amount of good luck. I had a feeling that I was going to need it.

I ploughed through spell after spell, annoyed at myself for agreeing to a course that took me so far from my natural instincts to defend against the very things I was going to attempt to raise. Much of the kind of ritual spellbinding I was perusing is, of course, superstitious mumbo-jumbo; dead men’s hands, blood from a pregnant mare, the skull of a dog killed at a crossroads; all stuff and nonsense. And besides, procuring any such items in time for Churchill’s purposes was going to prove problematic, to say the least. I aimed for something that might be simple, but effective, which proved to be another problem; the old coves responsible for writing these things didn’t really go in for doing anything the easy way.

But finally I settled on something I found in ‘The Mysteries of the Worm,’ a binding spell for summoning a hellish entity that could cloud men’s minds and make them go mad at the sight of it. It sounded like the kind of thing that Churchill might be after, and even if it didn’t work, I had the passage right there in the book to point at, to show him that I’d at least tried.

I was, however, not quite stupid enough to walk directly into a dark place and start chanting a centuries-old demon summoning ritual. I would need some protection. I got up to check that nothing in my box of defenses had been damaged in its journey here.

Churchill looked up as I opened the box.

“Another snifter?” he said, and raised his empty glass.

“No,” I replied. ‘But I shall definitely need one when I return. I think I’ve found what you asked for.”

“And will it work?”

“We shall know one way or another in a couple of hours.”

It was mid-afternoon and already starting to get rather dim inside the big boat shed as I carried my box of defenses up the makeshift gangway that led to the flat, main deck of the submarine. My footsteps clanged on metal and echoed, hollow, like funeral bells, all around me. The chill I immediately felt in my spine did not bode well for my state of mind to deal with what was coming next.

I considered setting up on that open, flat surface, but Churchill would want this job done properly. I would have to descend into the bowels of the beast so to speak. That was easier said than done, for there were no obvious exterior hatches. To get inside, I had to manhandle the bally box up the railed steps of the turret, and back down the other side once I got inside. As a result, I was dashed hot and bothered before I even started to investigate the interior of the vessel.

I had enough light coming in from above me to open my box and get out the small oil lantern I carry within it. I lit it up and started to look for somewhere I could set up my circles.

It was immediately obvious that I was going to have some difficulty. Conditions were cramped inside the submarine, to say the least, and there appeared to be no single spot of floor large enough to contain my defenses. The air inside the vessel felt heavy and slightly warm; it stank, of burnt oil and stale breath. To my left was a tall and wide bank of meters and dials I could make no sense of whatsoever, and to my right long lines of piping and wiring stretched off in both directions down the dark corridors. There was no sound save any that I was making, and even the tiniest movement, the merest scrape of sole on deck, was amplified in whispering echoes that ran up and down the length of the boat.

My lamp did not penetrate far into the darkness, and I was suddenly all too aware of Churchill’s tale of the thirty dead crewmen who had met their end, locked in this metal box under who knows how many feet of cold water. That made my mind up for me. I could possibly have spent more time searching for a better, wider, spot, but now that I was here, I wanted to get things done as quickly as possible and get back to the bottle of scotch and some living company.

As I have said, I was in a tight spot. So I improvised. I stood in the main control area, which was slightly toward the bow under the turret, and set up a pair of small circles in chalk that were as wide as I could make them in the space I had available. Then I transcribed the pentagram, noticing that there was now only just, by a matter of inches, enough space for me to stand with my feet together inside the defenses. That, obviously, meant that my valves for the pentacle were much closer together than I would have liked, with only the span of a hand separating them, but I managed to quickly get them aligned in the peaks and troughs of the pentagram, and switched on the battery pack.

The resultant hum echoed and thrummed through the whole bally vessel, and a wave of cold rushed through the corridors, a cold, damp, breeze as if a heavy fog had descended. My heart thudded faster, and my knees went to jelly before I remembered that I had stood in worse bally spots than this, facing real danger, not imagined spooks. I berated myself for letting the dark and Churchill’s story get to me.

I stepped into the defenses, lit a pipe, and composed myself.

It was time to begin.

I will not reproduce the spell that I used here. Even inadvertent reading of these old incantations is thought by practitioners to cause unforeseen and unwanted effects, so it is probably for the best not to tempt fate. Besides, I did not get the opportunity to finish even the first stanza of the chant.

A great wall of darkness rushed at me out of the aft corridor, and all of the valves of the pentacle flared at once, so bright I was forced to close my eyes against the sudden brilliance. I heard the valves whine, and felt again the wave of cold and damp wash over and around me. I tasted salt spray at my lips.

When I opened my eyes again, I thought the brightness had temporarily caused a problem with my sight, for although I stood inside the shining pentacle, and color washed over and around me, there was nothing but black velvet dark beyond the boundaries of my circles.

I felt the weight of the darkness press against the pentacle, as if something solid were testing itself against the defenses. Cold seeped up from the deck, gripping at my ankles and calves as if I stood in a deep puddle of freezing water, and my teeth started to chatter until I clamped them down on the stem of my pipe.

The valves pulsed and whined and the green one in particular was under a deal of strain. The darkness got darker, the cold got colder, and I felt something in my mind, a searching, questing thought, as if the dark was looking for a way inside. I knew I had to resist. I could not succumb, for if I did I would never leave this vessel alive.

I started to recite an old Gaelic protection prayer that had proved efficacious for me in the past, mumbling through my clenched teeth, focussing all my attention on the words.

The darkness continued to press, hard, against all of my defenses. I struggled for breath, felt coldness pour down my throat, salty again, like the sea, and the dark swelled and closed in even tighter.

I summoned up all the strength I had in me and continued the Gaelic right through to its end. I called out the last words.

Dhumna Ort!

The blue valve blazed at my last shout, and all at once the blackness washed away, so suddenly it might never have been there at all. I stood there as the pentacle valves dimmed to a normal level and blood started to pump faster in my veins, warming parts that had been in danger of being frozen.

I had no need to call up one of Churchill’s favored spooks.

There appeared to be one on board already.