Operation Norway

- 10 -

They waited on the path for five minutes, both to ensure the beast wouldn’t return and to give the others below time to find shelter and make it safe. Wiggins even relaxed enough to have a cigarette but Banks couldn’t bring himself to drop his guard; the memory of being tossed aside like a discarded coffee cup was still large in his mind — it would be a while yet before he got over the wound to his dignity.

But after a while, with the wind showing no sign of getting any less — or any warmer — he called time on their vigil.

“Let’s go, Wiggo. With any luck, the sarge will have a brew on.”

They descended quickly to the shore and neither of them gave a look to the ruined hut and the strewn body parts, now almost obscured again in snow. The lights were on in the hut where they’d spent the night before and they found Davies working on Wilkins and Hynd getting a fire going in the grate. There was already a pot of water boiling up on the camp stove.

Banks’ first thought wasn’t for heat but for the wounded man. He went quickly to Davies’ side, initially dismayed to see that Wilkins was unconscious. Davies put him right.

“I put him out, Cap,” the private said. “We found enough sedatives in yon lab next door to keep him pain-free all the way home; I think that’s for the best.” He showed Banks several tall jars filled with a milky fluid. “An opiate of some kind. Which one I’m not sure, but it’s strong stuff.”

“Talking of strong stuff,” Wiggins said as he got some coffee going on the stove. “What was that all about out there, Cap? If I’d known it was going to obey me, I’d have told it to fuck off. Why did it stop?”

Banks didn’t have an answer for that. He put a hand in his pocket and took out the sat phone. His fingers touched the old journal that was still sitting inside his jacket.

“I don’t know, Wiggo. But maybe the answer’s in this book. In the meantime,” he said, tossing the phone to the corporal, “see if you can get this bugger of a thing working, will you? Yon supply boat skipper’s expecting a call in the morning. I’d hate to disappoint him.”

Hynd had got the fire going and had now set up guard by the door. He banged on the wall beside the doorway.

“This is the strongest of the huts, Cap,” the sergeant said. “But seeing as how our boy survived a shitload of C4 and a cave falling on his head, I don’t ken what good it’s going to do us.”

Banks removed the lump of tissue from his pocket and showed it to Hynd.

“It bleeds. As Wiggo said, that’s a start. We might have bought ourselves some time.”

“Time for what?”

“Coffee and a fag for one thing,” Banks replied and took the journal from out of his pocket. “And a look for some answers in here for another.”

Wiggins dispensed coffee and smokes and slowly they all felt some warmth creep back into their bones. Wilkins was still out for the count but they put him down close to the fire, ensuring he’d stay warm. Wiggins set to fiddling — dismantling — the sat phone and Banks took the chance of a quiet moment to do a rapid search of the journal for more clues.

The bulk of the part he hadn’t already read was more of the writer’s misgivings as to the nature of their experiment and details of the scientists’ increasing frustration at not being able to control the thing they’d made. The very last entry was a longer one. Banks lit himself another smoke and started reading.

Jan 15th 1951

We buried Johnson today, a naval funeral out in the fjord — there was precious little left of him to do the right thing with after McCallum had finished eating. Jensen had the temerity to try to condone the act of brutal barbarism.

“It’s in his nature,” the scientist said, as if McCallum’s nature is not now merely that which we have endowed him with. Jensen tried to fob me off with some old drivel about racial memory being embedded in the specimens we took from the cave up in the high valley. He says that the process has created a chemical soup in what passes for McCallum’s brain these days and that drives only his most base instincts, but I will have none of it. I know exactly what it is we have wrought here between these cold cliffs.

We have created a monster and I for one will have to live with that for as long as God gives me breath. If this is the future of warfare, I am glad I will be too old — or too dead — to have any further part of it.

I wish now that I had listened to Johnson when he came to me all those months ago to ask for McCallum’s termination.

“It would be for the best if we used all the sedative we have at our disposal in one fell swoop,” he said.

“On what grounds?” I had asked.

“For mercy’s sake,” had been the simple reply.

And at that, Johnson took me that very hour to the brick and iron cage to see what we had made together. Even then, more than six long months ago, Private McCallum was a painful thing to look upon, being gray and riddled with pink fissures that wept blood and fluid with every movement. He had become a thing not fully rock yet not entirely man, a thing that moaned and wailed most piteously day and night when not sedated.

I had to naysay Johnson and I refused to countenance any slowdown of the work at that time. Back then, in the height of summer and with glowing testimonials from Jensen to pass on to my superiors in London and Edinburgh, I still thought the experiment, if not entirely moral, was yet a minor success. Yes, Jensen was having difficulties controlling the thing — I can no longer think of it as a man worthy of the name — it continued to resist all form of discipline, whether it be in pain or in removal of food for long periods. It refused to comply with even the simplest commands and its very intransigence threatened to negate any goodwill the results so far had brought us from the people who pay the bills — and my salary.

The orders that came through in the late autumn suggested that the matter was dragging out too long and that our budget might not be forthcoming for the following year if more encouraging results could not be achieved. I knew exactly what they meant by ‘encouraging’—they required the final product of what we did here to be obedient to a fault, with no questions, no complaints. They wanted an attack dog they could send into battle with no qualms, one that would put the fear of God into the enemy. They did not expect it to have put the fear of God into those of us tasked with creating it.

Jensen, for his part, took the new orders to heart and began a stricter regime of discipline, treating his patient more like a prisoner with no rights, no privileges. When discipline, drugs, beatings, and electric shocks failed to inspire obedience, Jensen turned to his last resort.

From October to the start of the new year, he starved it. Johnson came to me several times over that period, once again pleading for mercy for the man.

“That’s no man,” Jensen had said when I passed Johnson’s qualms on. “Not anymore.”

“If not man, then what?” I asked.

“He is what we made him, a product of the materials from the cave samples; he is one with his building blocks — he is a mountain troll and he is the very last of his kind. He is a legend.”

In passing, I would like to state here for the record that I doubt whether Jensen is fully sane. The pressure of work, the long hours, and a constant proximity to the beast has unhinged him in some fundamental fashion that is hard to pin down but perfectly obvious to anyone who knows the man. My recommendation is that once we are done, he be placed on administrative leave and in no way should be allowed access to any of the materials we have gathered here.

As for his statement of McCallum being ‘the last of his kind’; I knew, of course, that if our experiment were eventually proved to be a success, then the poor creature in our cell would not be the last of anything, merely the first of a new army. And having seen far too much of one war already, I was not keen to see another, particularly one fought with beasts such as this.

But, mindful of my salary, my position, God help me, my reputation, I’m afraid I let it drag on far too long. My main reason, the only thing I have to plead with, is that Jensen finally got some results, although it did not come from the starvation or any other deprivation.

It is the simplest things that you neglect to consider.

Jensen was with his ‘patient’ administrating a sedative when the thing woke unexpectedly and threatened to crush the scientist’s windpipe with a single hand. Sergeant Wicks was in the room standing guard at the time and his training and instincts led him to call out an order.

“Private McCallum, put that man down. That’s an order.”

And to everyone’s great surprise, the thing took pause and stood still, as if confused. That gave Jensen time to administer his sedative.

He came to me that very afternoon.

“We should have seen it before. He still has a soldier’s training, a soldier’s loyalties. All we have to do to make him comply is play to that.”

Johnson obviously felt that it was all too little too late — or maybe he just did not wish to see any further torture. Whatever the case, he entered the cell alone late at night, having bribed the guard with scotch and cigarettes for passage. His purpose is unclear but if asked to speculate, I’d say he was intent on administering the excess dosage of sedative he mentioned to me in the summer. He may even have made an attempt but it seems he got too close to the reaching arms of the “troll.” The first we all knew of it in the camp was the high screams that echoed around the fjord but Johnson was long gone before anyone could come to his aid.

The starving had obviously brought on a great hunger. I saw the results of that red feast; it is a sight that will be with me for as long as I live.

And that is it for me. I have had enough and despite Jensen’s long and loud protestations, I have given the order.

This experiment is over.

The thing dies tonight.

That was it; there were no more pages to read. Banks could only surmise that some calamity befell the attempt to bring the experiment to an end, the result of which was the tumbled walls and bent iron of the cell and the dead men at the foot of the cliff.

But the main thing he took from the reading was the reason the thing on the cliff path had stopped its attack at Wiggins’ shout.

It’s a soldier. Somewhere down there, somewhere deep, it’s one of us.