SNAFU: An Anthology of Military Horror

Cold War Gothic Weston Ochse

We called for the Box Man a little after midnight, once the police released the crime scene. It took him an hour to get here. We kept him in an out-of-the-way warehouse with some of our other less savory tools. I’d often forget we even had him at our disposal, then once I’d see him again, I’d wonder how in the hell someone could forget something like that.

Harvey brought it into the home on a leash attached to a metal box completely covering the Box Man’s head. Rusted, riveted, and made of old iron, the weight of it made the Box Man move like a hunchback, favoring one side over the other as he tried to keep the incredible weight upright yet still manage locomotion. A fine mesh screen covered the mouth and eye areas. The only other opening was a circular door on the very top of the box from where he was fed and from where he began his divinations.

I stood over the place where the body had been. There were still bloody marks where the assailant had bludgeoned the victim.

Harvey stood beside me and stared at the blood. “Who was it?”

“Doctor Charles Adams. Nuclear scientist from Lawrence Livermore Labs. When the police ran his name, they saw it was flagged and called us.”

“Do we know what he was working on?”

I shook my head and turned to Harvey. He was younger than me by ten years and an up and coming officer. His blue eyes still held the excited patriotism mine had once held. With his blonde hair and youthful appearance, he’d fitted right into the Haight-Ashbury scene in 1967, helping to uncover several attempts to kidnap and possess several young scientists either working on or destined to work on military projects. He was a good kid. I hoped I wasn’t going to get him killed. I seemed to have a habit of doing that.

“I put in a call. They’re sending over a liaison. We have a meeting at eight A.M.”

Harvey glanced around the room. “Did you find any I can use?”

I pointed to a corner high above the bedroom door where a flat tangled web could be seen.

“Common house spider.” He handed the leash to me and looked around for something to stand on. “Wish it was a black widow. They don’t miss a thing.” He shoved a chest-high bureau beneath the web, knocking over several books and a bottle of cologne, which thankfully didn’t break.

“But then you’d have to deal with all the drama,” I added. The Box Man had shuffled away from the sound of the bureau skidding across the wooden floor. I jerked on the leash and it returned to its position at my side, hunched over with its hands close to its chest. “Better off with the house spider. It’s straight forward and no nonsense.”

“Just so. If you’ve gotta do something, you might as well do it in style.” He climbed up on the bureau and pulled a glass Gerber baby food jar out of his pocket, removed the top, and scooped the spider from the web.

I turned to the Box Man, trying to make eye contact through the wire mesh. “Listen, you do it right, I’ll reward you with rats.”

It giggled and stuttered. “Ra-ats. Ba-ats. Ca-ats. Momma says yum yum.”

Although it had once been a middle-aged man, it now had the high-pitched voice of a little girl. No matter how many times I heard it I got chills. “No cats and no bats, Boxie. Just rats.”

Harvey came up and held out the glass jar where a startled spider now sat, legs arched, prepared to defend itself. “Ready?”

“Why not?” I twisted open the screw that kept the door shut on the top of the box. The door opened, revealing the scarred top of the Box Man’s head. Whisps of oily brownish-gray hair shot up in lonely clumps around massive scarring. “Spider’s coming, Boxie.”

“Mamma says yum yum.” It made slurping sounds.

I couldn’t help but wrinkle my nose.

Harvey dumped the spider onto the Box Man’s head, then I closed the door, making sure to tighten the screw.

I released the leash and stood back.

“It tickles. Tee hee.” Then the Box Man jerked. “It bites. Bad spidle. Bad bad spidle.” It began to gyrate, jerking its head left, then right. “Spidle wants to play.”

It twisted fully around, almost crashing into me. I was barely able to step aside. Instead, it crashed to the floor where it slammed the metal box several times on the ground.

A gleeful laugh was followed by slurping sounds.

I glanced at Harvey as he glanced at me. He shrugged. I did as well. Sometimes this worked and sometimes it didn’t.

I gestured at Harvey.

He bent over and put his hands on his knees. “Can you hear me?”

The Box Man twitched on the floor, minute jerks of its legs and arms.

“We need to speak with you.”

The Box Man stilled.

“You’ve been killed. We need your help finding the—”

The Box Man sat straight up. “Brown and brown and brown and brown,” it said in a deep voice.

I felt elation at the connection, but knew this was only the beginning. How much did the fragment remember, and could it communicate, were the big questions now.

Harvey glanced at me grinning. “What’s brown?”

“All brown.”

“Brown and brown and brown and brown?”

“Yesss. Brown and brown and brown and brown.”

I wrote it down on my pad and nodded for Harvey to move on.

“Tell us what happened.”

It was silent for a moment, then it said, “Broken eyes.”

I wrote that and circled it twice. I should have known.

“Tell me about broken eyes.”

“Broken eyes made me dream. Man with bat hit me hit me hit me hit me hit me hit me hit me-”

Harvey smacked the side of the metal box with the flat of his hand, stopping the fragment’s loop.

“Doctor Adams, concentrate.”

“Kwaj… X-ray flux… Kwaj… X-ray flux… Kwaj…”

Harvey was about to hit the side of the box once more when it let out a blood curdling scream, which resolved into sobbing.

“Prison. Plop plop fizz fizz oh what a relief… I’m dying… can’t breathe… my face is… broken… Plop… plop… fizzzzzz…”

Then the Box Man fell onto its side and was silent.

Harvey stared somberly at the creature curled up on the ground. “Those last minutes must have been terrible.”

“He was bludgeoned. We’re just lucky we have what we have.”

“Make anything of it?” he asked.

“Garbled ghost talk. We’ll give it to Nancy and see what he can come up with.”

Harvey grinned. “You know he hates it when you call him Nancy Drew.”

I matched his grin with one of my own. “I know. That’s why I do it.” I nodded to the Box Man. “Take it home and feed it. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Our offices were on the third floor of the old Transamerica Corporation offices, in a triangular building on the corner of Columbus and Montgomery. I had a corner office whose window was filled with the construction of what promised to be a two-hundred and sixty meter pyramid. As unpopular as it was to the local populace, who feared a repetition of the giant forest of skyscrapers in New York City, the Transamerica Pyramid was important to the defense of America. In addition to protecting against Soviet agents stealing American technology, Special Unit 77 was also charged with the protection and facilitation of the pyramid’s construction. I’d once thought this gig was going to be a snoozer. Little had I known when I arrived that I’d be so busy my wife would find a better life with our milk man.

My telephone buzzed. I depressed the blinking square button and waited.

“Your eight o’clock is here.”

I went to my door and opened it. I had seven men on the floor, and ten desks. The empty desks were for the three I’d sent to work the construction site. I hardly saw them, but had reports on my desk each morning. The others were filled with my agents, including Harvey Goldsmith and Chiaki Chiba, our resident genius whom I referred to as Nancy Drew.

My appointment stood at the reception desk speaking with our receptionist, Doris Morgan. The matronly woman was our own special Cerebus. She had the sole ability to tell if someone meant someone else harm. She was perfect for the job, not to mention she could type. I bee-lined to the desk and stuck my hand out to the young Japanese woman waiting for me.

“David Madsen, chief of Special Unit 77.”

She shook it firmly. “Rachel Nakamura from Lawrence Livermore.” She narrowed her eyes as she glanced around. “I was under the impression that this was a military unit.”

“It is. We are. We just don’t promote it.” I turned to Doris. “Any news?”

She had a friend who worked at Houston space control. Ever since Apollo 11 lifted off two days ago, all eyes were on the sky.

“Nothing new. They’re due to touchdown in two days. Fingers crossed.” She held up crossed fingers.

I did the same, then gestured for Ms. Nakamura to follow me. On the way back to my office, I also pointed at Harvey and Nancy Drew, who both stood and hastened to join me. “If we were to come to work in uniform, we’d have the dregs of Haight and Ashbury on our doorstep with signs and singing flower child songs.”

Harvey frowned. “Careful, now. You’re talking about my people.”

I made it to my desk and gestured for everyone to sit. Since there were only two chairs, Nancy stood in the back, a notepad against his chest. He had close-clipped black hair and the drawn face of someone who looked as if they never slept. He wore a cardigan over a button down shirt and khaki pants, and looked more like a teacher than the stone cold killer he really was.

Ever since his undercover stint, Harvey had gone to wearing bright colored clothing. His bright yellow button down was tucked into jeans. He wore docksiders on his feet.

I wore my usual blue Oxford shirt tucked into khaki pants and Johnston & Murphy shoes. I also wore a safari jacket because I liked its myriad pockets.

As Rachel sat, it was clear she that she was still bothered by our uniformly non-military appearance. I grabbed a framed picture from the corner of my desk and handed it to her. “This is me and General MacArthur.”

She took the picture and stared at it. “Gaijin Shogun. When was this taken?”

“Inchon. 1950. I was a buck lieutenant then and was showing him some destroyed North Korean T-34 tanks. There was sniper fire all around but he was cool as could be. I’d jump every time a round would go off. At least I did until he said, you know they’re aiming at me, right? If they can’t hit me, what makes you think they’ll hit you, lieutenant? I learned more from my interaction with him than I did in the next ten years.”

She regarded me with a smile. I could tell she had a Caucasian father. “Do you bring out this business card often?”

“Only when someone comes in here with expectations we can’t match.” I held out my hand and she gave me back the picture. I placed it back in its place of honor. “I’m Colonel David Madsen, but everyone calls me Madsen. That’s First Lieutenant Harvey Goldberg beside you, and behind you is Gunnery Sergeant Chiaki Chiba, but you can call him Nancy Drew.”

Harvey gave her a youthful grin.

Nancy Drew gave me a withering look, then bowed and said, “Ohayou Gozaimasu, Nakamurasan.”

She stood and returned his greeting. They spoke for a few moments in Japanese, then she sat down and returned her attention to me. “I think I understand now.”

I glanced at Nancy Drew, but he kept his eyes pinned to the floor. “Let’s talk about Doctor Adams.”

“I’m afraid there’s not much to talk about. His work was highly classified, as you understand.”

I gave her my patented do-you-take-me-for-a-fool look. “I can assure you that we have the appropriate clearances.”

“Even so, I’m not at liberty to discuss what he was working on.”

“My mission is to determine who killed him and why, Ms. Nakamura. Without knowing what he was working on, it’s going to be terribly difficult for me to complete my mission. For all I know, Doctor Adams is the first of many scientists being targeted.”

She paused as if she were considering, then shook her head. “I’m sorry. I just can’t.”

I turned to Harvey. “What do we have so far?”

He grinned as he turned to face her. “X-ray flux,” he said, and her face paled immediately. “The LIM-49, or the Spartan, is a three-stage, solid-fuel, surface-to-air missile with a W71 nuclear warhead capable of delivering lethality to thirty miles. It delivers an X-ray flux to incoming enemy missiles, frying their electronics, causing the target missile to lose target lock and fall from the sky. You tested one last month at Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific.”

Her jaw had dropped to the point where she had to force it closed. She turned to me. “How could you— did he have papers?”

“If he had papers with him, they are no longer there. My guess is his killer has them.”

“But you already know.” She closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. “You must tell me how you know.”

I nodded to Harvey.

“We discovered long ago that ghosts are drawn to webs, much like dreams are drawn to dream catchers. Once in the web, the spiders eat the ghosts. We have a Box Man who eats spiders. He told us.”

She stared uncomprehendingly, then stood. “If you’re going to treat me like this, then—”

Nancy Drew rattled off a series of Japanese words that stopped her in her tracks. They spoke for a moment, then she returned to her seat.

“What’d you say?”

“I told her that everything Harvey said was true and I staked it on the honor of my family.”

“Is that all you said?”

“I also said that you are at times an indelicate asshole and love to get rises out of people.”

I stared at him for a long moment, then nodded. “All true.” Then I turned to Rachel Nakamura. “Shall we be a little more forthcoming now?”

Harvey, Jakes, Brahm, and I entered Corona Heights Park from Roosevelt Way. We needed to consult with the Russian, and since he was forbidden to leave the park, we had to come to him.

He was handed over to me by my predecessor. Neither of us knew his real name and he wouldn’t divulge the reason he was banished to this piece of land, but rumor had it that he was a Russian immigrant who’d come out in 1849 with the Gold Rush and had gone sideways with a nature spirit. Regardless of the reason, he had a fondness for vodka and Black Sea caviar, which I could get relatively cheap in the Russian neighborhoods of San Francisco.

Rachel Nakamura had become amazingly forthcoming once she realized what kind of military unit we were. Doctor Adams had indeed been part of the Spartan Missile project. He was in fact the America’s leading authority on X-ray Flux. His death set back the program by years. She had little more to provide, but had brought up a point we’d all missed.

“Why did they use a bat?” she’d asked.

I thought about it and couldn’t come up with a suitable answer. But Nancy Drew did.

“Maybe they were trying to hide something they’d done.”

I’d contacted the morgue, but there was nothing they could discern. Whoever had beaten him had done an excellent job at crushing every bone in his face. Whatever had been done to him would remain a mystery, unless the Russian was able to provide some illuminating information.

Jakes and Brahm took left. Harvey and I took right. Corona Heights Park wasn’t immense, but it did have unobstructed panoramic views of the city. In the end, we found the Russian at the pinnacle, staring out at the ocean.

As I approached he said, “It’s like placing a meal of wild boar just outside your reach. You can smell it. You can see it. But you can never have it. What did you bring for me, Madsen?”

His skin was the color of the terracotta red chert bedrock he sat upon, and pulled tight across high Siberian cheekbones. He could have been anywhere between sixty and a million years old. He wore a flowered shirt and had a Mexican blanket wrapped around him like a sarong.

I brought forth the vodka and the caviar and placed them at his feet. He never took them from me, which made it feel as if I was making an offering at the feet of some strange Russian demigod. Still, I went through the motions, only because he was so attuned to the supernatural energy of San Francisco.

He sighed. “You always know what to bring me.”

“It’s easy when you never change your habits.”

He shrugged. “Why change them when I know what I want.” He opened the vodka and took a deep slug. When he came back up for air, he gasped. After a moment he held out the bottle. “This tastes like Russia. It tastes like home. Here. Join me.”

I took it and seared my throat with the white liquor. I fought to keep a smile on my face as I handed it back to him.

But he didn’t miss much. He laughed. “I can tell you are not Russian. Even children learn to drink vodka at an early age.” He softened the V to give it a W sound. He took another slug, then capped the bottle and cradled it in his arms like a baby. “What is it you want, Madsen?”

“We’re looking for some activity. Your people have done something to our people.”

“Don’t call them my people. I’m a proud Tzarist. Whatever these communal gavnoyeds believe in has nothing to do with me.”

I grinned. “Good, then you’ll have no qualms about telling me about their activities.”

He eyed me for a moment. “Nice try. You know I must remain neutral and can’t take sides. One day I want to leave this place. To take a side means to make an enemy of the other.” He shook his head. “But then again, you knew that.”

Jakes made shushing noise with his hand. The big Arkansas corporal turned and glowered at two girls and a young man. They carried a blanket, a picnic basket and a bota bag, so their intentions were clear. But right now we didn’t want anyone intruding on our mission. They stopped like deer when they saw him, their eyes wide. He took a step forward and they scampered back down the hill. If they wanted to picnic on the pinnacle, they’d have to wait until we left.

“Not so nice.” The Russian stared after them. “They come up here often and invite me to join them. Peanut butter and jelly and red wine.”

“You’re just going to have to struggle with caviar and vodka.” I squatted down and took a seat beside him. “Maybe you can help me another way using your encyclopedic knowledge. Here’s what happened.” I described the wounds to the face and postulated what possibly could have been done to the victim that needed to be covered up. When I mentioned the broken eyes he actually twitched. “What is it?”

“I’ve been feeling something alien for the last week. Feels greasy… unclean.”

“I’ve heard the term broken eye before over the years, but never made a connection. What does it mean to you?”

He closed his eyes. “Have you heard of the satori?”

I shook my head. Nancy Drew might know, but I had no clue.

“How to describe them… think of an apelike man. They can’t speak, except to relay what the victim is thinking. They communicate through thought, only…”

“Only what?”

“They have to touch you.”

“Do they touch your face?”

He nodded. “I saw one.” He turned and pointed to a spot thirty feet away. “There. It grabbed a man by the head. When it was done, the man’s eyes were blanks. Everything inside him was gone like it was sucked free.”

“When was this?”

“1925.”

“What did it do then?”

“It looked at me.” He shuddered and seeing it scared me. “For the first time I felt like an insect. It was studying me. It was trying to decide whether to let me live or not.”

“Clearly you survived.”

“I’ll never know why.”

“Do you know where they come from? Who they’re affiliated with?”

He shook his head furiously and got up. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” He grabbed his caviar and stalked away.

Jakes made a move to grab him, but I held the big man back. No sense in aggravating the Russian any more than he already was. There was no telling when I’d need him again.

“What next?” Harvey asked.

“You and Brahm get to a phone and call Nancy and tell him what the Russian said.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Taking Jakes to Lawrence Livermore Labs. I need to look at some files.”

Harvey eyed Jakes. I knew what he was thinking. He’d be better suited to help me than the hulking corporal, but he had good sense enough not to say it. I had my reasons. If I wanted him to know I’d tell him.

We crossed the Bay Bridge, skirted Oakland, and hit 580 going east when we hit Castro Valley. My thoughts were circling the idea of the inhuman creature described by the Russian. I didn’t doubt his veracity one bit. But that he didn’t want to discuss it further worried me. What wasn’t he telling us? What else did he know about these satoris? Could they be as terrible as he described?

When they recruited me and read me on to the supernatural defense program, I was dumbfounded. I often still find myself wondering how we came to exist. It seemed extraordinary that the human race didn’t die off during the last three thousand years, especially considering the forces aligned against it.

And not only were there supernatural threats, but threats humanity invented themselves.

Even now we had almost six hundred thousand young men and women fighting in the Republic of Vietnam. I’d seen the brutal television reports of the Battle of Hamburger Hill back in May and couldn’t help remember Chosin and the Dantean sea of frozen bodies we’d created all because one group desired the land of another.

Not all wars are for physical gain. Some are waged to cultivate fear. Barely two weeks ago a man calling himself the Zodiac Killer shot two people up in Blue Rock Springs, then called the police from what turned out to be a phone booth. Still on the loose, not a day goes by now without the media watering the bitter seed this monster planted.

Then there are wars for the hearts and minds of the people, like the Cold War we were raging against the Soviet Union. I often wondered if they saw themselves as the good guys. Harvey laughs at the idea and says that only good guys have that sort of sentimentality. After all, how could they compare bread lines, starvation, iron-fisted authoritarianism, and gulags, against the open freedom of the Western World? To think that they knew themselves to be bad guys reminded me of the cartoon character Snidely Whiplash. And if the USSR was this caricature, then we had to be Dudley Do-Right. That would make Nell… what? The prize? The hearts and minds of the people?

I shook my head and climbed out of the deep rabbit hole my wandering mind had taken me. It was simply a cartoon about a Canadian Mountie and his cohorts. It was not a metaphor, even if it looked like it could be.

We pulled past a gate guard, who, after consulting our badges and a list of names on a clipboard, let us through. Although it was near seven in the evening, the parking lot was still nearly full. Jakes and I found a parking spot and headed to the nearest glass building. Before we could get there, Rachel Nakamura met us, running lightly in high heels.

“That’s not the right building.” She smiled apologetically and gestured for us to follow her. “Come this way. I’ve arranged for you to look at his office.”

I glanced at the building we almost entered, but relented and followed her. Jakes fell in behind us.

“What’s in the other building?”

“Projects. Research. All very hush hush.” Then she hurriedly added, “Nothing that Doctor Adams was working on, I assure you.”

My curiosity wanted to confirm this, or at least see what was hidden behind the glass and steel doors, but it was merely that… curiosity. I needed to focus on the mystery at hand and determine why an satori had been involved in the murder of Doctor Adams.

She took us to a well-appointed office on the second floor of the main building. The window looked out on the parking lot. The desk was almost clear of papers. The only things on the walls were the decedent’s diplomas and a San Francisco Giants calendar. This looked nothing at all like the desk of a working scientist. Jakes thought the same way.

“Where’s all of the stuff?”

Rachel blinked. “Stuff?”

“Yeah, all the scientific stuff. Papers, books, folders, files… you know? Stuff.”

She stared at the ground in that aggravating Japanese way that Nancy used when he didn’t want to meet my eyes. “We had to remove a few items. Proprietary information.”

“And if I said I wanted to see them?”

“I don’t know who took them or where they went. But if you want to submit the paperwork, I’ll see that it gets processed.”

I tried not to glare at her — not that she could see me even if I did with her gaze fixed to a spot between my feet. “How long does it take for such a request to be processed?”

“I can’t be sure.”

“Has anyone ever been granted access?” Jakes rumbled.

“Not since my tenure.”

I couldn’t help but sigh. I pulled out the chair and sat at the desk, trying to occupy the space as the deceased might. I let my hands touch the surface, then pulled open one of the drawers. Empty. I could usually figure out something about a person by how they kept their desks organized. But there was nothing here of Doctor Adams. This was a simulacrum, an empty interpretation of his workspace.

I pushed the chair back and stood. “This is a waste of time.”

“Maybe not.” Jakes had removed the calendar from the wall. He’d flipped the month back to June. “Where did Doctor Adams travel to on June 26th?”

She glanced at the calendar, surprise sneaking past her usually composed face. “I… I don’t—”

“Let’s cut the bullshit, Ms. Nakamura. I know you’ve been told to keep us in the dark, but a man was murdered. Not just murdered, mind you, but interrogated in such a way he most assuredly told whoever asked the questions everything they needed to know. This is a Cold War, and American secrets have been taken.” I snapped my mouth shut. It was bad form to act this way towards this woman. She was merely doing her job. I was about to apologize when she spoke.

“He was at an international engineering conference in Japan.”

“Was that the last conference he attended?” I asked.

She nodded.

Jakes asked, “Who went with him? I already know he didn’t go alone.”

She glanced at me, then returned her gaze to the floor. “Doctor Crocket.”

“Can we speak with him?”

“He… he hasn’t been in this week.”

“Did he call in? Is he sick?”

She shook her head and shrugged her shoulders.

Jakes’s eyes almost rolled out of his head. “Jesus. Don’t you think he might be in trouble?”

She stepped back. “You don’t think…”

“Give us his address. I’ll send the police over right away.”

The house at 737 Bay Street was a white midcentury shotgun two-story with a garage in front. Of note was its location in the Russian Hill Neighborhood of San Francisco. Canvassing the neighbors showed that they were predominately of Russian and Hungarian descent. Any one of them could have been a Russian informant; even unwilling. Many still had families back in the motherland whose lives could be leveraged for deeds done on American soil. I’d seen it often enough.

Nancy and Harvey already had the Box Man there, although it might have been a wasted effort. We had no body, only a giant congealed pool of blood. Jakes and Harvey poured through the missing man’s things.

“Have we checked the hospitals?”

“And the morgue. Marshall and Evans are doing that now, especially concentrating on John Does.” Harvey glanced into a corner of the room and smiled. “There we go. I suppose we can at least try and see.”

Harvey found a chair, but even that wouldn’t get him to the high ceilings. He grabbed two handfuls of shirts out of a dresser drawer and made a pile of them on the chair. Stepping on them, they afforded him the extra four inches he needed to swoop the glass jar over the spider. He got down, poured the spider into the box, then closed the lid.

The Box Man began to twitch and shake, jerking his head inside the metal box to chew the little eight-legged morsel.

“Spidle. Spidle. Momma says yumyum.”

The metal rang with dull thuds as he battered his head against the inside of it. Finally he fell to the floor and used it to bang the metal box against it. Then he stilled, the only sound now one of languorous slurping.

Harvey squatted before the Box Man. “Okay, Boxie. What have you got?”

The sounds of slurping were his only reply.

Harvey struck the box with the palm of his right hand. “Come on. Talk to me, Boxie.”

“Ni sher shay? Weishemme?”

Jakes approached the Box Man. “What’s that?”

“Chinese.” Harvey frowned and glanced at me. “What do you think, is it a floater?”

“Unless Doctor Crocket is Chinese, I’d say so.” I looked around the room, but didn’t see any spiders. I went to the headboard and jerked it from the wall.

“Get the jar.”

I made room for Harvey who cursed when he saw the web. “Damn. Recluse. This is going to be fun.” He moved the jar to several locations before he finally captured it and took it over to Box Man.

“This one’s going to hurt, Boxie. It’s a recluse.”

The Box Man reacted immediately and scooted himself across the floor. He slammed the top of his box cage against the wall and held it there so Harvey couldn’t open it. “No no cloosy! Puhleese no cloosy!”

Harvey gestured to Jakes. “Give me a hand.”

“Is it another floater?”

“What? No. Floaters are just extraneous ghosts. This one could be old, young. Hell, it could have been the ghost of a coolie from a hundred years ago.” He held up the glass jar to show a tiny brown spider. “This is a brown recluse. It’s one of the only spiders who will stalk a human rather than run for it.”

The Box Man let out a long ragged scream. “No cloosy!”

Jakes wrinkled his nose as the Box Man let go with a bladderful of urine that soaked his pants and began to drip on the floor. “Why is he so afraid of it?”

“You ever been bit by a brown recluse?”

Jakes shook his head. “Not that I’d know.”

“Oh, you’d know if one bit you. Not only do they sting, but then its venom paralyzes the skin around the injection point, then the skin turns necrotic and falls away.”

“When you say falls away you mean…”

“Falls the fuck away. Like off your body and onto the floor so you have a mini pool of you to step in.”

United States Infantry Sergeant John Jakes gave the spider in the jar a look I’d never seen him give before. If I wasn’t mistaken, it was fear. Funny how a man like him could be fearless in the face of a well-armed enemy but a ten millimeter creature could cause him to worry.

The Box Man began to scream, the sound of his terror punctuated by the occasional no cloosy! Then finally he was still.

“Come on, Boxie. Talk to us.”

A bass monotone came metronomiocally from the box. “It was driving in the rain and it saw its waiting on the porch and it let its in because its had a gun but then the it with a broken eye began to move towards it and it screamed and it screamed and it said everything it ever knew and then they cut it up and rolled it into a blanket and took it away.”

I exchanged glances with Harvey. It didn’t take a brain scientist to figure this one out.

“Do you have names, Boxie? Do you know names, Mr. Crocket?”

“It was driving in the rain and it saw its waiting on the porch and it let its in because its had a gun but then the it with a broken eye began to move towards it and it screamed and it screamed…”

“Clean, rinse, repeat.” Harvey shook his head. “Standard recluse run-on.”

Jakes stood beside him. “Is that all there is?”

“Recluse have a way about them. They don’t even use any personal pronouns. They refer to everything as an it. When it says its it really means them.”

I stepped over and kicked the box. “We need more, Crocket.”

“… it went to a party where it had many naked its who served drinks to it but it wouldn’t talk even when it got drunk because it is a loyal it and it went to a party where it had many naked its who served drinks to…”

They tried for several more minutes, but other than the two stream of consciousness memories, there seemed to be nothing else.

I sighed heavily. We barely knew more than we knew this morning. Maybe with it all together we could make some sense of it. “What do we know, Nancy?”

“Adams and Crocket are scientists who are working on a top secret government missile project for Lawrence Livermore Labs. They recently traveled to Japan for a conference. Within weeks of their return, each dies at the hands of a creature with a broken eye, one we believe to be an satori. Additionally, Crocket recently attended a party where drinks were served by naked women.”

Jakes laughed hollowly. “This is San Francisco. I can’t toss a dead Chinaman without hitting a place where drinks can be served naked.”

I gave Jakes a look meant to convey that his words weren’t appropriate but he wasn’t paying attention. “He’s right,” I said finally. “Can we trace Crocket’s steps in the last two weeks?”

Nancy nodded. “We can do that, but we might not have to.”

I gave him a look of surprise. “What did you find?”

He produced a card and I took it. On one side it had a stylized calligraphy-painted Japanese butterfly. On the other was Japanese lettering.

“What is it?”

“An invitation to a party corresponding to when they were in Japan. This particular invitation is from Countess Mizuki.”

My heart stilled. “Haven’t heard that name in an age.”

Nancy nodded. “We thought she was dead.”

“That was Colonel Hermann’s operation ten years ago. Why would he lie?”

“Maybe he didn’t lie.”

“Remember what the purpose of the mission was?”

I scratched my head. “Wasn’t there something about a geisha house-vampire hive?”

“Exactly.”

“I think I need to contact Colonel Hermann. Harvey, take Jakes with you tomorrow and see if any other coworkers have interacted with Countess Mizuki. Nancy, I want a dossier on her, and make sure to include her pattern of movement.”

“What are you going to do?” Harvey asked.

“Talk to the Russian again.”

I didn’t like the way we’d left it. His disclosure of the satoris had certainly freaked him out, leaving him acting more like one of the hippies tripping on Haight than a hundred and fifty year old Russian. The fact that he’d been so scared actually scared me. I couldn’t remember a time when the Russian had been scared. And why should he be? He’d been cursed to live forever.

The introduction of Countess Mizuki into the mix gave it a definitive Russian connection. I didn’t know a lot about her — after all she was supposed to have been ancient history — but I did know she was the daughter of an exiled Russian count and his Japanese geisha wife. Although her father and his father before him had been firmly Tsarists, she’d been linked to several Soviet operations, providing them instrumental support through her geisha vampires.

The Russian had to know something to help.

I parked at the base of the hill and began picking my way up the path we’d taken earlier in the day. The lights of the Castro Neighborhood blinked below. A cool wind brought the first hints of water-soaked fog. I shivered, pulling my jacket collar closer around my neck.

I heard a shout.

Then a scream.

I jerked my M1911 .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol free of its leather shoulder holster and broke into a run. I tripped several times once I veered off the path, but managed to stay upright.

Another scream. I was close enough to hear the sounds of scuffling and be drawn to it. Two men were fighting each other, while another, dressed in a long fog jacket, looked on.

“Hey! Stop where you are.” I held the gun in the air for them to clearly see.

The man in the long jacket turned towards me. For a moment, I thought it was a woman, long tresses hanging from its head. But then I saw it for what it really was. The tresses were over its face, too.

A satori!

I slowed just as a shot rang out.

One of the figures slumped to the ground.

The air crackled and sizzled. I felt the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck rise. A slice of blinding white lit the night. Both figures disappeared into it before a great zipping noise, then silence.

I stared for a stunned moment, before I ran to the downed man. It was the Russian. Shot between the eyes. I guess he wasn’t eternal. I suppose he could be killed.

I spun, trying to ascertain if I was truly alone. A breeze swirled the approaching fog. A horn came from somewhere out in the bay. At my feet lay a spilled can of caviar and half a bottle of vodka. Three cigarettes lay in an area a little ways off, one still smoldering. The filters were constructed of gold foil, telling me immediately of their origin — Sobrainie Black Russians made in Ukraine.

I regarded the Russian. I could try and find a spider, perhaps take it with me to the Box Man, but looking at the old face, a face older than any other in the city, much less the state of California, turned me against the idea. I felt it was time to give him some rest. God knows he earned it.

I was early into the office, receiving reports from my other agents. A Chinese-American worker had been caught trying to place a statue of a dragon inside a wall of the twentieth floor of the TransAmerica Pyramid. We couldn’t be sure what it was, but on the off chance it might be something harmful, we sent it to the Skunk Works for evaluation. I also sent a telegram to D.C. detailing the death of the Russian and the positive identification of an satori at the scene. I mentioned the light and their disappearance. I hoped they could explain it.

Doris informed me that Apollo 11 was out of contact with Earth and was now on the back side of their lunar orbit. This marked the first time an astronaut had ever been completely out of contact and Houston was all pins and needles.

Jakes and Harvey had left earlier for a meeting with the deceased’s co-workers at Lawrence Livermore. Nancy was hard at work, pulling files and adding to the dossier of the countess whom we’d thought dead. Luckily, Colonel Dieter Hermann had retired in the Bay Area, and was due at our offices within the hour. If anyone could shed light on the countess and her activities, he was the one who could do it.

I was working on fitness reports when Hermann stormed into the office. Doris stood to greet him, but he ignored her, glanced around the main room until he saw me sitting at my desk, then marched in my direction. About seventy and bald, he was still fit and hale. He had the face of a bulldog and the glare of my ex-wife. He wore yellow pants and a white golf shirt.

As he entered my office, I stood. I was prepared to welcome him, but never got the opportunity.

“What the hell is it with you people?”

You people?

He placed his hands behind his back and leaned forward, inspecting the wall behind me and my military memorabilia from previous units.

I stood for several moments, feeling more and more ill at ease in my own office. It was as if I were back at West Point as a plebe and being inspected by a senior cadet. I smiled, but it was lost on him as he continued to rack and stack my place on the military pyramid. Regardless of the fact he was a colonel and I’m a lieutenant colonel, there was a significant event which separated him from me — his retirement. Whatever power he’d wielded before, whatever ability to make people feel small and insignificant he’d used before, it had no bearing on the current situation.

Then why is he making you so nervous? my inner voice asked.

Shut the hell up, I told it.

He finally stood straight and appraised me, his gaze raking my civilian clothes; his nose twitched, signifying his distaste.

“Welcome to Special Unit 77, Colonel Hermann.”

He sighed and sat in one of my chairs. “I’m retired. I keep telling you I’m retired.”

“Me?”

“The War Office. The Pentagon. You know. And they keep calling me.”

I was beginning to feel awkward being the only one standing, so I sat. “They must have a good reason.”

“Where’s your uniform, by the way.” He made a hand gesture. “And what’s up with the long hair.”

First of all, my hair wasn’t long. And secondly, I was getting a little fed up. I waited a moment for my inner voice to pipe up, but it remained silent… which meant consent. It clearly agreed with me. “We have relaxed grooming standards here. No reason to announce that this is a military organization.”

“In my day we would have been proud of that fact.”

“Well, sir, it’s not your day.” And Hannibal has since crossed the Alps.

His eyes widened, then narrowed. “Clearly. Is that you with that upstart MacArthur?”

I nodded. “It is. I take it you don’t approve of him.”

“General Officers should be commanding men, not looking for photo ops and greasing the hands of politicians.”

I shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I was too busy trying to stay alive.”

“Korea, right?”

I nodded.

“Nothing like World War Two. Now that was a real war.”

My mind’s eye returned to the frozen arms and legs of too many dead marines scattered across the Chosin Reservoir. “No, sir. Nothing like it.” Enough of the dick-measuring chit chat. “We need to discuss your operation against Countess Mizuki.”

He frowned. “That’s what I was told. Why bring up that old op? It’s done and done.”

“Your reports indicated that she perished in a fire. We have reports that she is still alive. I’m trying to examine those two facts and see which is real?”

“Are you challenging my integrity?”

“I’m questioning whether or not her death was verified or assumed.”

He paused and gave me a hard stare. I’m sure had I been a second lieutenant I would have found a sword and committed seppuku. “As I recall, there was a fire. No one could have survived.”

“Did you find her body after the fire was put out?”

He shook his head. “The fire was so hot it consumed everything.”

“Everything?”

He nodded.

“So you can’t actually verify that she was dead.”

“Listen. I shot her, she fell back and knocked over an oil lamp. That was it. The silk screened walls and cedar rooms went up faster than one could believe.”

“Where’d you shoot her?”

His eyes searched mine, but I kept my stare hard and dispassionate. “The chest. Yes, the chest.”

Nancy had come up behind him and stood with a file to his chest. I nodded to him.

“Do we have further evidence?” I asked.

Hermann spun in his seat and looked askance at my Japanese-American officer.

Nancy ignored him and pulled a black and white photo from the file. “We have this photo.”

Before I could look at it, Hermann snatched it away. “Where was this taken?”

“Japan… before your operation.”

Hermann laughed hollowly and handed the picture to me. “You call this evidence? Evidence of what?”

“When was this taken, Gunnery Sergeant Chiba?”

“February 12, 1917.”

Hermann’s eyes widened. “But that’s not possible. She looks the same as she did when… is this some sort of trick?”

“No trick. Did it ever occur to you that Countess Mizuki might be a vampire?”

He sat back and stared. “It had occurred to us, but she was killed by fire. Everyone knows that fire kills vampires.”

I could see the seed of his failure growing in the egotistical mulch of his mind. “But you found no body.” I shook my head and made tsking sounds. I stood and held out my hand. “Thank you for coming in Mr. Hermann. Your service, as always, is appreciated.”

He stood warily. My use of mister went unnoticed.

“What are you going to do?”

“Clean up your mess.”

“My mess?”

Nancy let the final shoe drop, surprising both of us.

“Customs reports that a woman matching her description landed at San Francisco International Airport three weeks ago. She took transit on TWA Flight 23 from Tokyo with an entourage of thirteen women.”

“Yes, your mess. Thanks to your shoddy work we now have a vampire hive to deal with. This, on top of all the other problems we are currently tracking, is going to be a problem. Now if you’ll move along and go back to playing your game with the little white ball, we’ll continue our mission to save America from the fate others would wish her.”

He stared at me, unable to move.

I sat down. Nancy handed me the file and stood next to me as I reviewed the documents. I paid particular attention to the customs form. After a minute or two, Hermann turned and tottered out of the office.

We’d found her location with the help of some of the flatfoots. Count on street cops to know their own territories, and an older police sergeant had already noted the disappearance of homeless in his area as well as the opening of a new oriental massage parlor. He didn’t piece them together. Why should he have? But for Nancy and Brahm, it was clear as day. Soon after, I had Marshall and Evans conducting surveillance on the place.

Jakes returned early afternoon. Harvey wasn’t with him. Jakes said Harvey was following down a lead. When asked which one, Jakes explained how they’d discovered one other scientist who’d attended the party at Countess Mizuki’s. He was now under protective custody in a safe house in Marin County. He didn’t have much to add at this point, but verified the existence of Countess Mizuki, as well as her entourage of beautiful women.

What concerned me was what had also concerned Harvey: why hadn’t Rachel Nakamura told us about this third scientist? Surely she’d known about the three of them traveling together. It was as if she was intentionally trying to keep us from getting to the bottom of this. I was eager to hear what Harvey came up with.

I didn’t have long to wait. At three that afternoon, he called in.

“Where have you been?”

“Gilmore.”

“What took you to the Garlic Capital of the World?”

“Ms. Nakamura. Her security clearance paperwork indicated she went to Gilmore High School.”

“Did she?”

“Yes. I even saw her in a copy of the senior year book, as well as a cheerleading photo.”

“So it was a dead end.”

“Not at all. Her clearance paperwork listed her as attending Lyman Gilmore Middle School. Turns out she did. All of the records indicate that she was here, then at Green Grass Elementary before that.”

“Doesn’t sound like you found anything?”

“I wouldn’t have. The paper trail was covered nicely. But whoever put it there couldn’t have counted on me encountering Ms. Magill who rules the front office of the middle school like a queen.”

“I’m listening.”

“Turns out she remembers when young Rachel Nakamura showed up and where she came from.”

“You’re drawing this out for the drama, aren’t you?”

Harvey laughed. “Caught me. Turns out the girl never even went to the elementary school. She arrived at the middle school during the seventh grade year.”

“Why’d she lie?”

“No one would have questioned the paperwork. Who would have actually taken the time to verify it? All the security clearance requires is that she fill in her high school and any colleges she attended. But thanks to Ms. Magill’s excellent memory, we now know that she immigrated to America from the Kuril Islands.”

The Kuril Islands were a string of Islands near Russia that were claimed by both countries. Some belong to Japan and the rest belong to Russia. All of them are heavily Russian influenced. I’d noted when we met that she appeared to be only half-Japanese and half Caucasian. I’d assumed it was American, but could just as easily have been Russian. “What does her paperwork say regarding her citizenship?”

“Says she was born in Los Angeles Memorial Hospital.”

“Did you check?”

“There are records there confirming that.”

I paused. We either go with the memory of an old woman or believe all the physical evidence before us. “What do you want to do?”

“Roll her up.”

I thought about it for a moment, but ultimately agreed. “Okay, but get Jakes to help you.”

I spent the rest of the afternoon working with Nancy, running down information about known Russian entities and any relationship they might have with the Kuril Islands. We had boxes and boxes of files and went through each file as fast as we could. It was an eye-straining, back-breaking two hours, but we eventually discovered that a shoemaker living in Pacific Heights had been flagged in 1957 for sending mail by way of Japan to Ekarma Island. The lead came when a Russian drop ship house was busted in Hokkaido in 1957 by Air Force OSI. The mail was read, recorded and translated, then sent on. I held copies of birthday letters the shoemaker sent his wife as well as young daughter. They were simple, filled with love and longing and nurturing a growing through line of regret as the girl grew from the age of three to fifteen. The OSI Detachment tracked the letters for hidden messages. Each letter had a cryptologic analysis attached to it. All read negative. It didn’t mean there weren’t hidden messages, just that none could be found.

“What would make a man leave his wife and child for twelve years? He clearly loves them.”

Nancy put a pencil behind his ear. “An assignment?”

“Have to be. How old is Rachel Nakamura?” Ms. Magill was turning out to be the most important lead we’ve had.

“Twenty Five. If she’s been here twelve years that would put her in seventh grade when she came to America.”

“He’s her controller. What’s his name?” I picked up the file and read it. “Mr. Vitoli Ryabkin. He was sent as her contact and her control. We have to get a man on him now.” Shit was about to get serious. I looked around the room. I saw several of my agents, but I also saw Jakes. “I thought you were with Harvey.”

He shook his head. “Why would I do that?”

“I told him to call you.”

He shrugged. “Never called.”

Son-of-a-bitch. I hated it when my men went off alone, which was why I enforced partnering.

A phone rang. We have phones ringing all the time, but this time it rang in dead later-afternoon silence. I turned to Doris who was answering it. I felt a pit open in my stomach. I knew what it was before Doris turned to me, before I read it on her face, before she started to cry and mouthed the words it’s Harvey… he’s dead.

My men have died in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. They’d been shot, gutted, blown apart, run over, pungi staked, and on one occasion been laid low by the flu. But never have any of my men died on American soil. After all, we’re not supposed to be fighting a war here. We’re the home of the free and the land of the brave. We haven’t had a war on our own soil since we were stupid enough to fight ourselves in the Civil War. At least that’s what Mr. and Ms. Middle America think as they eat Salisbury steak and watch Walter Cronkite on the nightly news dispensing facts and reports that go well with dinner. They didn’t want to know the truth. They wouldn’t understand. Even if they did, they’d be terrified. To think that anyone — their next door neighbor, the girl at the grocery, the guy who picks up their dry cleaning, the kid who mows their lawn, the scout leader, their bowling partners — could be anything more than human would rock their fucking world. Then to try and understand that these creatures have aligned themselves against America and are working for the great Soviet Union would freak them the hell out.

After all, we’re America and this is American soil and no one can touch us here.

Tell that to Harvey.

Tell that to my man lying amidst the trash and empty booze bottles in an alley in the Castro.

Tell that to my man with no fucking head.

They call this a Cold War. I’ve never understood what that meant. Wars don’t rely on temperatures. They don’t rely on metaphors. Wars rely on one person hating the other enough to step over that line of civility which all of us were taught never to cross way back in the days when we had to work together or be eaten by all the savage animals on the planet.

This isn’t a Cold War.

This isn’t a Hot War.

This is just a war and Harvey Isiah Goldsmith is just its latest fucking victim.

Both ends of the alley had been closed by SFPD. They had several officers scouring the alley for evidence. All of my agents except for Jakes, who’d gone for the Box Man, were helping as well, some going door-to-door, some assisting the officers, and the rest searching for Rachel Nakamura. Although there wasn’t any direct evidence linking her with the murder, the coincidence was impossible to ignore. Plus, my gut said that it was her and my gut is hardly ever wrong.

Nancy came up to me and waited silently.

I shot a glance in his direction and nodded.

“No sign of his… head.” He said it in such a way I could tell he was taking it personally. “No evidence at all. Or if there is, it’s mixed up with everything else.”

I knelt beside Harvey. His head hadn’t been cut off, but ripped off. What could have that sort of strength? I examined the neck near the jagged edges. Then I saw it. I waved Nancy over.

“What do you see here?”

“Looks like a needle went in there.”

Placing my hand on it, I offered an alternative. “Could it have been a fang?”

His eyes widened slightly. “Possibly. But then the wound’s twin would have been on the other side of the tear.”

“There are vampires who are strong enough to do this.”

Nancy stood. “Not the young ones, but the older ones can.”

“Old as in Countess Mizuki?”

“Yeah.” Nancy smiled grimly. “Old like that.”

“What do we know about Japanese vampires?”

“There are no vampires endemic to Japanese mythology. We have demons and ghosts, but no strictly vampires. Malaysia has the Penanggalan. It’s the result of a woman who obtained beauty through black magic, or a deal with a demon, who then is cursed to feed on blood to sustain it, typically from pregnant or ovulating women. They’re easily identified because their heads leave their bodies.”

“Jesus. Do the heads fly?”

Nancy shrugged. “I’ve never seen one.”

“What about others?”

“The Balinese have the Leyek. Indonesians have the Kuntilanak, the Pontianak, and the Matianak. All are variations of the flying head female vampire. Then there’s the Aswang and the Mananangall from the Philippines which are vampire succubi with wings.”

Jakes stepped out of a van, went to the back, and pulled out the Box Man. The police let them in, staring fearfully at the hunched figure with the metal box on its head. I’m sure they wondered what it was. They didn’t want to know.

Jakes had been crying. His nose was red, his eyes were still a little wet.

I held out a glass jar.

He took it and peered inside. “A Black Widow. How fitting.”

I knocked on the side of the box. “Get ready, Boxie. This one’s important.”

“Spidles and spidles. Idles and oodles. Marvey it’s Harvey.”

“That’s right, Boxie. We need to talk to Harvey.” I glanced at Jakes. “Did you tell him who it was?”

“He wanted to know where Harvey was.”

I nodded. Harvey had been the Keeper of the Box Man for more than a year now. I’m sure they’d formed a bond.

Jakes shook the spider free inside the box, then closed the door.

We stood back and waited.

A full minute passed but the Box Man hadn’t even moved. Not even a twitch.

“Come on Boxie,” I urged.

“Don’t wanna,” came the low whisper of a child’s voice. “Me want Harvey.”

“Me want Harvey, too, Boxie, but he’s gone. Someone killed him. We need you to help us discover who it was.”

“Marvey Harvey Spiddle Diddle Marvey Harvey.”

“That’s right, Boxie. Marvey Harvey.”

The Box Man’s shoulders shook gently as he began to sob. A low moan resonated from the metal box. Then suddenly he moved, throwing himself against an alley wall. He staggered, then spun, then threw himself against the wall once more. He rebounded, listed like a drunken sailor, then fell hard to the ground, beside Harvey’s body.

“Spiddle. Fucker. Spiddle. Fucker.”

His flailing hands fell upon Harvey. At first, he recoiled, but then he paused, jerked, twitched, shuddered, then smacked his lips together. He sighed as he laid back. His hand fell against one of Harvey’s and he gripped it.

“Harvey, speak to me. Is that you, Harvey?”

A low husky voice said, “Marvelous.”

“Who is that?” Jakes asked.

“It was a female black widow. They attach themselves somehow to the ghost. It’s going to be confusing because we’re going to have to figure out which is Harvey and which is the spider.”

“That’s just weird,” Jakes said.

I didn’t point out that the weirdness should have started when we fetched a man with a metal box on his head that we kept in a special warehouse, but I was more intent on the mission at hand.

“Harvey Isaiah Goldsmith, talk to me.”

“Minding my own business and harvesting my babies when this happened. Can you believe it? Can you believe the luck?”

That was the spider. Harvey had been right. They were so melodramatic. But I had to play along. “Such bad luck. What was your luck, Harvey?”

“I waited and waited and waited. So many morsels. So many and now it’s over.”

“Such a tragedy.”

“It’ll be sad not to see them born.”

“Maybe the ghost isn’t there,” Jakes whispered.

I was getting ready to believe it, when the Box Man jerked and another voice joined the spiders as they took turns telling their stories.

“Following, following, following, following, being followed, got to get to a place where I can — never see how beautiful my children would have been, each of them impeccable and — strong, so strong, but how can she be — my mother was beautiful like me she — hit me, too hard, too hard, broken inside, I try and run, but it — strikes me funny that thing should end with the beautiful flash of light then — a moment of impossible pain then I’m gone — and then darkness, where I waited, and wondered, then was trapped, so trapped, so trapped. Tragic.”

The voices stopped. After a moment, I stood. “Yep. Tragic.”

Jakes stared at me, his forehead wrinkled. “Did you get any of that? So jumbled.”

I’d gotten enough. I now know that he was being followed. He’d either picked it up during his meeting at Lawrence Livermore or in Gilroy. Whoever it had been, it was a woman, and she was impossibly strong. And the light? It could have been anything, but then again it could have been something as well.

I headed out the alley.

“Where are we going?” Jakes asked.

“To get a massage. Bring Boxie and put him in the Van. I need you there with me.”

I conferred with Evans and Marshall. They’d made a log of the comings and goings of the various people, mostly men. They’d also used one of our SX-69 Polaroid Land Cameras and had forty pictures. They would have had more, Evans had explained, but they’d run out of film.

Nancy picked four pictures out of the lineup. One belonged to Countess Mizuki. She’d left at 3:13 PM and returned at 7:32 PM. One seemed to match the passport photo of one Vitoli Ryabkin. He’d entered with another man. Although I didn’t recognize him, I noted in the picture he was smoking a gold-filtered black cigarette. They’d gone inside an hour ago and hadn’t left. The last was Rachel Nakamura. She seemed upset in the picture, the snap catching her as she looked fearfully over her shoulder. She was inside as well.

My guess is that once they discovered that Harvey had gone to Gilroy, they panicked. They’d been so successful hiding her presence. If it hadn’t been for her failing to tell us about the other scientists, we never would have discovered any of this. That all of my targets were now under the same roof gave me hope. Maybe there was a god and maybe he was on our side. I hoped so, but I wasn’t holding my breath.

Nancy brought a suitcase and opened it on the trunk of the car. Inside were various bullets, knives, swords, machetes, hatchets, and even a wood saw. All of them were made from silver. According to our records, it was the only thing that could consistently kill a vampire. It didn’t work all the time, but it was the best weapon we had. Sunlight only affected a small percentage of them. Garlic had absolutely no effect and mirrors were something from pure fiction.

I loaded my .45 with silver bullets, then grabbed two magazines. I took a machete, which I strapped to my belt. Then I grabbed two hand grenades. Made from silver, they’d also been emptied and filled with silver fragments.

“What about holy water and crosses?” Jakes asked, holding up a silver cavalry sword.

Nancy sniffed, as he loaded his .38 Police Special. “Never heard of it working.”

I was itching to get inside. “Everyone locked and loaded?”

“Seven men around back, led by Brahm. Five in front, including Evans, Marshall, Jakes, you and myself.”

“Do we have backup?”

“SFPD is waiting with SWAT two blocks away, but per SOP, have been asked to wait until called.”

“Doris standing by to make the call?”

Nancy nodded toward the house across the street and down the block. “The nice residents have agreed to let her watch. If things go south, she’ll call in the cavalry.”

I’d emptied out the office and even with all of my men, we probably didn’t have enough. A vampire hive was about the deadliest thing I’d ever encountered during my tenure with the unit. My arm still ached from where it had been broken in three places by a sweet young woman when I’d been the first one in the Berkley sorority house.

Twelve of us were arrayed against it. We had the best weapons modern technology could offer. But even with that, I knew it wasn’t enough. Some of us would die this night. It might even be me. I’d told the men that earlier. I’d always believed it was important to go into a mission with the belief that you would die. That way it relieved you from the fear of the unknown. The fear of death was a strong enemy and I slaughtered it at every opportunity.

I checked my watch and glanced at the sky. I wondered what Neil, Buzz, and Michael were doing now. Were they on the moon yet or had they overshot and were now careening through space. A moon landing would be a great win for America against the Soviet machine.

Like them, I had my own dangerous victory to achieve. Not only that, but I had a life I needed payment for… check that. Remembering the scientists, I had four lives that needed payment. I drew my machete and hefted it in my right hand. I held my pistol in my left.

I nodded.

Jakes went first, followed by me, Marshall, Evans with Nancy taking the rear. The home was a two story California craftsman. City blueprints showed four bedrooms upstairs and one downstairs. The door opened into a living room with a dining room to the right, and a kitchen in back. The place seemed too small for what was going on there, so we were prepared that the basement, for which we had no blueprints, might be extensive.

Jakes’s bull shoulders struck the door at a run. It burst open as he roared, splinters from where the metal lock tore free from the jamb shooting forward. He lurched into the room, then paused. The only person in the living room was a beautiful young Japanese girl who was completely naked. She sat perfectly still on a four-cushion sofa, a small smile on her face.

“Move.” I pushed him, but he wouldn’t budge.

“She’s… she’s…”

“A fucking vampire,” I said, shooting her three times in the chest with my .45.

That broke the spell. Jakes took a step inside, then shots rang out from the dining room. He spun towards them, but only managed to catch two more bullets in the chest.

I dove into the room, so the men behind me could get inside. As I landed, I turned and saw the unknown Russian standing in the shadows of the dining room, holding a smoking Walther PPK. I slid too far, a chair spoiling my sight line.

“In the dining room. Gun.”

Marshall heard me and entered firing.

I couldn’t see if he got the guy.

I started to stand, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I spun. The girl used my shoulder to pull herself upright. I pushed her away. She fell hard to the couch. He body slumped over, but her head remained where it was, trailing a length of spine like a tail. I raised my machete at the same time it began floating higher in the air.

I sliced at it, missing the first time, but catching it the second time.

The head screamed a high keening. The open mouth revealed a row of fangs which were more like a shark’s teeth than a vampire’s. My blade was caught in the skull but the thing wasn’t yet dead. I pumped two rounds straight into the face and felt delight as life left its eyes. I had to use my foot to press against the head so I could pry my blade free.

My other men breached the back door. I pointed to the ceiling and they headed upstairs. I immediately heard gunshots, punctuated by several screams.

I headed towards the dining room, but stopped when Nancy stepped out, blood on the samurai sword in his hands. I peeked into the room and saw the pants and shoes of a man, a pack of Sobrainies littering the ground. I shoved them in my pocket.

Both Evans and Marshall reported the floor clear.

Nancy was attending to Jakes, who’d taken two to the chest. He needed medical attention now. I directed Evans to take him outside where I knew Doris would see him and call an ambulance.

Now it was time to go down.

I went first, wiping the blood off my machete on a sofa cushion as I passed, then sheathing it. The door to the stairs was in the kitchen on the other side of the refrigerator.

“This isn’t going to be pretty.”

Nancy tried to push past me, but I held fast.

“I’ll lead. You follow.”

He grumbled, but wasn’t about to disobey an order.

The knob turned easily. I mime-counted to three, then flung open the door. Two heads hovered a foot from me. Marshall opened up with his .45s, catching both of the heads in the face. Bits of bone and skin blew out the backs of their heads which fell to the stairs and bumped down them like oddly-shaped bowling balls.

I stepped inside, checking the ceiling for any floating heads before I descended a few steps. The stairwell was walled, so whoever was downstairs couldn’t see me as I descended. What they could see, however, were the two destroyed vampire heads. I hoped they hadn’t been fond of those two.

I pulled free one of my hand grenades. If I threw it right, I could bank it off the wall on the landing, and send it left into the room. I pulled the pin, let the spoon fly free, then tossed it. My aim was sure. It hit the wall, and bounced out of sight. A second later a tremendous explosion rattled the rafters. Dust rained. Lights blinked off and on. Silence ensued.

I pulled a flashlight from my jacket and snapped it on. I skipped down the stairs, leading with my .45. Marshall and Nancy were tight behind me. When I got to the bottom, I peered around the corner and was pleased to see three dead bodies and a wounded man, lying in the middle of what had once been a parlor. Several hallways ran off of it, clearly a greater space than the home’s footprint should have allowed.

“Boss!” Marshall pointed to a retreating figure of a woman. He ran after.

I wanted to shout for him to stop, but I spied the satori the same time as Nancy. I took one step, then felt a terrible pain in the back of my neck. I spun into the face of Rachel Nakamura. No longer was she the demure public affairs liaison for Lawrence Livermore Labs. Her face had transformed into everything evil and terrible one would image in a demonic vampire. Blood dripped from her razor teeth. My blood.

I raised my pistol but she easily slapped it away. The weapon went flying into the flashing darkness leaving me with only my flashlight. I raised it to hit her, but felt my hand catch as another vampire gripped it. I had one free hand and could grab my machete from my waist, but then I wouldn’t be able to defend myself from Rachel.

I spared a glance at the terrible thing behind me just as Rachel lunged. My free hand caught her around the neck and there I was… fucked. Then I remembered a move I’d seen Nancy do once when he was trying to teach us Judo. I pulled against the hand that grasped my wrist and received a hard pull in return. Instead of fighting against it, I let it pull me and Rachel towards it. When my hip touched the other vampire’s body, I knew I had but one chance to use my leverage. My success depended entirely on the speed of Rachel and the element of surprise.

I let go of Rachel and dropped to a knee. She kept coming, but lunged where I had been, instead of at me. I shot my free arm between the legs of the vampire who was behind me, and tossed it into Rachel’s face. It had no choice but to let go of my wrist in order to defend itself from Rachel.

I rolled away and managed to pull free the machete without cutting myself. I immediately began hacking at the body nearest me. It turned out to be the other vampire. My blade sunk into an arm, then a leg, then its chest. It fell to the floor, but not before the head disengaged the body.

Fuck me to hell, but I’d never get used to seeing that.

Rachel screamed as she lunged at me, her teeth biting deeply into my right calf. I tried kicking her away with my other leg as I swung the machete in the air as if the head was a bloodsucking piñata. My foot finally caught her in the face.

I glanced up at the hovering head in time to see it jerk back as bullets slammed into it — one, two, three times.

Marshall had returned and fired once more into the head, sending it careening to the ground.

I took advantage of the moment, and lunged for Rachel. I used my weight and pushed her back and down. I held both of her arms. But where she’d been ugly and demonic before, now she was the same girl-next-door pretty Japanese girl I’d first met in my office.

I breathed heavily but managed to ask “Why?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Why help the Russians? We’re the good guys.”

She sneered. “Where do you get off calling yourselves good?”

I didn’t know how to answer that. How do you explain the obvious?

She hissed like a cat, then spoke tremulously. “Tell that to all of my people you put in camps. Tell that to my grandmother who froze to death in North Dakota in a winter so cold even the kerosene froze. She was third generation. Sansei. She was more American than most of them who locked her up. You Americans always think you’re so good, but that’s because your memories are so bad.”

“But that was a mistake. A reaction to Pearl Harbor.”

“Tell that to my Grandmother. Tell that to yourselves when you point at Russia and say that they have Gulags.”

While she’d been talking her head had been moving free of the body I had under control. It suddenly shot upwards. Marshall fired at it, but wasn’t able to hit it.

I stood, searching for my .45.

“Where’d it go?” he asked.

“More important, where’s Nancy?” I saw my pistol beneath a chair and snatched it. Now armed with machete and pistol, I headed down the hall where I’d seen the satori. “Follow me.”

I stumbled down the hall. Four doors opened on either side. We ignored them. We should have opened them, but Nancy was alone back here somewhere with a creature whose powers I couldn’t discern. The hall ended in a T. Marshall went right, I went left. I came to a door. I went to open it, but it was locked. I raised my foot and kicked it open. Light flooded the hallway. I’d entered an arcane library, which included many instruments of pain, including an iron maiden. The room also held Madame Mizuki and a short Russian I recognized as Vitoli Ryabkin. They stood in front of a Queen Anne sofa colored with violets and yellows, and swirls of black wood. The satori, standing behind the sofa, appraised me as if I were its pet insect. The grotesque hair of its face moved gently to a private wind. Its eyes, broken colors much like a cat’s-eye stone, held me cold for a moment. I now understood what the Russian had meant.

I raised my pistol at the old madame, the one who probably killed Harvey. “Stop!”

Madame Mizuki wore a long silk-embroidered robe with an ermine fox collar. Half-Russian and half-Japanese, she had the small mouth and cheek bones of the Japanese, but the angular face, eyes, and nose of a Russian. She wasn’t beautiful or ugly. I’d call her incongruous. Regardless, her look was so distinct it was hard not to stare.

She pointed a long red-lacquered nail at me. “No, you stop!”

“This is over. You’re captured. Tell me where my man is and I’ll go easy on you.”

She smiled the sort of smile that could give a man nightmares. “What man?”

Marshall ran up behind me. “Other room is clear.”

“Any sign of Nancy?”

“None.”

I took a step forward. My movement triggered everyone else.

Madame Mizuki grabbed the Russian and pushed him towards me.

The satori backed into the corner of the room, his movements swift and choppy, like he was in a silent film.

Ryabkin jammed his hand into his pocket and began to remove something.

I shot him in the chest and entered the room.

Marshall worked his way to the right.

I worked my way to the left and moved to the far side of the sofa. I saw a set of shoes and slid closer, following them to the pants, then the torso, then… Nancy. He’d been hidden by the sofa the entire time. His face was… oh my god the satori had done something to his face. Circular marks pocked his face, raised purple and pulsing. Nancy’s eyes were open but I wasn’t sure if he was alive.

I raised my pistol, my anger so deep my hand shook.

The satori made a gesture with his left hand and the air unzipped, revealing a line of light that went from floor to ceiling. He grabbed Madame Mizuki by the wrist, then seemed to pause as he inspected me just a little more.

I pulled the trigger. The shot went wide, splintering the wood near its head.

The satori pulled her into the white, then was gone.

“No!” I leaped to my feet. My hands fumbled with the last grenade. Pin and spoon went flying as I hurled it towards the light. It flew straight, disappearing a mere second before the line of light re-zipped and ate itself. Had I missed, I would have killed myself and Jakes.

I glanced at the latter and saw his wide terrified eyes.

I returned to my downed man and shook him. “Nancy. Nancy Drew are you okay?” I patted his face, but there was no reaction, he simply stared into space. I used his real name in desperation. “Chiaki. Chiaki Chiba. Come on, man. Wake up.” But there was nothing. It was as if I had his body, but his mind had been taken from him.

I saw Walter Cronkite cry tonight. Normally a dour deliverer of the world’s news, the white haired man I’d come to trust like my own father first cried, then laughed as the voice of Neil Armstrong beamed from the surface of the moon into a billion living rooms.

I cried myself. I cried for Harvey. I cried for Nancy. I even cried for Jakes. Nancy survived, but his mind is wiped. We tried to get to him, but it’s like he’s an empty vessel. Jakes is at least recoverable. We’ll have to see once he’s medically discharged.

And it was all for what?

Ideology?

Communism vs democracy?

Totalitarianism vs capitalism?

I’d once heard an Army colonel say “if it wasn’t for all the ISMs we wouldn’t have a job to do.”

Brahm brought in several more boxes and put them on the floor by my desk.

We were moving. Not knowing what the satori knew or what its intentions were or even if it survived the blast, we had to protect ourselves. We’d killed a lot of vampires yesterday and when Madame Mizuki finally found time to be pissed off, she would surely come.

We were lucky. They hadn’t known about us and couldn’t have anticipated us becoming involved in their espionage. The Gilroy connection broke the case wide open. So unanticipated. So random. But then again that’s how these cases were solved. Follow your gut, pound the pavement, and luck will find you.

Doris came in.

“Need some help, boss?”

“No. Go celebrate the landing with your friends.”

“Are you sure?”

She’d been planning a party for weeks. But then yesterday’s events happened and she almost cancelled them. I convinced her not to. It was important for someone to celebrate something amidst all of this death.

She thanked me and left.

Instead of packing another box, I opened one of my desk drawers and pulled free a bottle of twelve-year old scotch. I found a glass and poured myself two fingers.

I held my glass up and saluted in the general direction of the moon. Those men were probably the bravest of us all. By now they were on the minds of everyone with a television or radio. But make no mistake. The Cold War was alive and well, even on the moon. By now, with the famous words said and the cameras stopped, they should have placed the obsidian pyramids into the proper formation, their function to keep any other craft from any other country from landing on the lunar surface. Would they work? Only time would tell.

I downed my drink, and resumed packing, my thoughts once again earthbound… thoughts of Nancy and Harvey, two of the greatest men with whom I was fortunate to have served. Two men who’d died protecting their country from an ISM we could never acknowledge. There’d be no hero’s parade and no solemn funeral. In some office in the basement of the Pentagon, someone was taking a file from one filing cabinet and putting it in another. Although it was a simple act, it was a final act, and no less powerful than the killing of a man on the battlefield.

This is how Cold Wars were fought.

Let’s just hope that this is the way Cold Wars are won.