CHAPTER ONE:
SIERRA ALPHA TANGO PROJECT
Franklin D. Roosevelt was having a shitty day, and his head hurt like hell. This bunch of malarkey they had him listening to wasn’t helping one damn bit. He cocked his head like a dog hearing a high-pitched sound, trying to decipher what he was being told.
“Monsters?” Roosevelt asked. “Please tell me this a joke.”
Chief Wyatt looked across the room at the President’s chief adviser, Harry Hopkins, sitting with his legs crossed, looking distracted. Chief Wyatt had prepared a speech for this occasion so the whole thing wouldn’t sound so damned ludicrous. He could no longer remember a single word of it, however, so instead he just stuttered. “N-n-n-o, sir.”
Roosevelt grinned. “You got a speech impediment, boy?”
“No, sir.”
“Then what?”
“I guess I’m just nervous,” Chief Wyatt said, remembering what his mother had told him about how he shouldn’t be intimidated by the President. That line of crap sounded great when she’d said it, but it now seemed ridiculous. After all, Roosevelt was the most powerful man in the entire world. Who wouldn’t be a little shaken, sitting here in his presence? It didn’t matter one bit that he was confined to a wheelchair—he was still an intimidating figure.
Roosevelt seemed to relax a little. He shuffled some papers around on his desk and looked up. “Son, there’s no need to be intimidated. I may be the President, but I assure you I’m just a regular guy, just like you. I put my pants on one leg at a time. There’s no need to be nervous, Wyatt. Hell, you’re the chief of...” Roosevelt grinned a big shit-eating grin, looking through his papers. “Now what exactly is it you’re the chief of again, son?”
Chief Wyatt hated being mocked—even by the President. Neverth
eless, he started to respond, but Roosevelt answered his own question before he could. “The United States Secret Security Council.”
Chief Wyatt nodded. “Yeah.”
Roosevelt looked up, his expression a mixture of cynicism and disdain. “Remind me, son. What exactly does that mean, the Secret Security Council?”
“Excuse me, sir?”
“You heard me. What do you do over there at the Secret Security Council?”
Chief Wyatt mostly typed up reports and did a lot of pointless paperwork, but he wasn’t about to say that. Instead he said, “We’re like the FBI. We handle the things they can’t.”
“Such as?”
“Special matters.”
“For example?”
“We do what the FBI can’t,” Chief Wyatt said. “Why? Because they are accountable to the people, and we’re not.”
Roosevelt raised his eyebrows, his cigarette holder dangling from his lip.
“We at the Secret Security Council,” Chief Wyatt said, “are only accountable to you, sir. If it’s deemed necessary that someone needs to be, how shall I say...”
“Eliminated?” Roosevelt asked.
“Right, eliminated. Should that particular bit of nastiness need be
done, we would handle that.”
“I see. So, in theory, you guys make the FBI look like a bunch of damn pansies.”
“I guess so, yeah.”
“But as of now, Wyatt, what exactly is it you do?”
“Sir?”
Roosevelt chomped down on the cigarette holder. “When nobody needs killing, what is it you do—on a day-to-day basis?”
Chief Wyatt squirmed in his seat. He could feel his face getting red. “I do paperwork, sir.”
Roosevelt sat back and laughed heartily. “You do paperwork! Wonderful! You hear that, Harry? He’s a goddamned paper-pusher!”
Chief Wyatt felt like an idiot. He said nothing. He looked over at Harry Hopkins, who was cracking a big, toothy smile, on the verge of real laughter.
Roosevelt looked Chief Wyatt in the eyes. “Tell me more about this thing you boys wanna do.”
“We wanna put together an exploratory committee.”
“To what purpose again?”
“Well, sir, as I said before, we know that Hitler and his boys are experimenting with genetics, trying to create super-soldiers.”
Roosevelt nodded. “Go on.”
“They also experiment with witchcraft and the occult.”
“Yeah, they’re a bunc
h of damn weirdos over there.”
“They have archaeologists digging for religious artifacts that are said to aid armies.”
“We know that already. They’re a bunch of kooks. We’ve established that. So what?”
“The point is that they’re willing to examine any and all methods with which to achieve their goal, which is world domination. If any one of these things happens to actually work, well, God help us all, sir. It could mean the end of the world as we know it.”
Roosevelt was tired of this. “Get to the point, Wyatt. I don’t need a lesson on Hitler’s intentions.”
“All right,” Chief Wyatt said. “My point is that in order to defeat an enemy such as the Nazis—an enemy willing to dabble in anything whatsoever that might aid them to their end—then we must be equally prepared to experiment with even the most unlikely of methods with which to defeat them.”
“And you have an unlikely method in mind.”
Chief Wyatt smiled uneasily. “Yeah, you could say that.”
“Is this gonna involve the moon men we’ve got frozen?”
“No, sir. Not yet.”
Roosevelt chuckled. “Not yet, huh? Okay, what then?”
“Well, we wanna
put together this exploratory committee to determine whether or not there might be some sort of, er ... supernatural weapon with which we could defeat the Nazis.”
Roosevelt’s eyebrows raised again. “Supernatural?”
“Yes, sir.”
“As in ghosts and ghoulies and weirdos and whatnot?”
“Well, not exactly,” Chief Wyatt said. “At least, again, not as of yet.”
“You keep saying that.”
“What?”
“Not as of yet.”
Chief Wyatt felt his cheeks turning red again. “Sorry, sir.” He was doing his best, but it didn’t seem to be good enough for President Roosevelt. He felt like a damned fool sitting here talking about “supernatural weapons,” but then this was the job he’d signed on for, for better or worse.
“What then?” Roosevelt asked. “What kind of supernatural weapon we talking here?”
“Well, this project was the brainchild of Dr. Elliot Kandinski, a professor at Harvard.”
Roosevelt looked at Harry Hopkins, then back at Chief Wyatt. “What kind of professor?”
“I don’t understand.”
Roosevelt was growing impatient. It was obvious that Chief Wyatt had caught him on a bad day. “What subject does the man teach?”
“Uh, he studies world history, archeology, and ancient civilizations, sir. And he’s published a number of papers and books on
alternative warfare methods.”
“Did he write about this method—the supernatural method?”
Chief Wyatt shook his head. “No, sir, but he devised it.”
“Okay, tell me more.”
“Well,” Chief Wyatt said, “he would lead the exploratory committee, under my watch, of course.”
“Which means that you would be watching him under my watch.” Roosevelt grinned, clearly having a good time playing with him.
“Of course, sir. Under your watch.”
“Okay, go on.”
“Dr. Kandinski has a list of possible candidates for this new program.”
“Tell me about the program.”
“We call it the S.A.T. Program, or Sierra Alpha Tango.”
“S.A.T.? What the hell does that stand for? Let me guess... Supernatural ... er, um...”
“Supernatural Agents,” Harry Hopkins added. “Supernatural Agents of, uh...”
Chief Wyatt ended
the game. “Supernatural Army Training Program.”
Roosevelt chuckled hard at this. “Sorry,” he said, genuinely apologizing. “I couldn’t help it.” He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes, which were watering now. He laughed hard, his torso shaking as he did. He was clearly having a good old time with all this. But then he hadn’t seen or heard the things that Chief Wyatt had. If he had, Chief Wyatt was sure he wouldn’t be laughing.
“You do see,” Roosevelt said, “how completely preposterous this all sounds, don’t you, Wyatt?”
“No, sir. I don’t find it preposterous at all.”
“No?” Roosevelt asked.
“With all due respect, sir, no.”
Roosevelt’s grin grew wider. He looked at Harry Hopkins. “Harry, this boy’s got stones.”
Harry Hopkins agreed. “Big ones. I guess that’s why he’s the chief.”
Roosevelt chuckled again.
“Uh, thank you, sir,” Chief Wyatt managed.
Roosevelt stopped himself from laughing. “Okay, so go on, Wyatt.”
“Where was I?”
“You were telling us about the S.A.T. Program.” Roosevelt grinned and exchanged knowing glances with Harry Hopkins.
“Right. Under Dr. Kandinski’s guidance, we would recruit a number of special candidates for the program.”
“What kind of candidates are we talking here? Coloreds? Jews? Japs from the internment camps?”
“No, sir. As I said before, we want to use monsters.”
Roosevelt bolted forward in his chair, his mouth falling open and his
cigarette falling onto his lap. “Goddammit,” he muttered, reaching for the burning cigarette. Once he had the cigarette holder securely in hand, he looked up at Chief Wyatt. “Monsters?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, uh, what kind of monsters are we talking about here, Wyatt?”
“Real-life monster-monsters, sir.”
Roosevelt looked around incredulously. “I wasn’t aware that there were any real-life monsters.” He looked over at Harry Hopkins. “Did you know about this?”
Harry shook his head. “Hitler’s the only monster I know of.”
“I know how it sounds, but I assure you that monsters are very real,” Chief Wyatt said.
“Like the Loch Ness Monster? The chupacabra?”
“Not exactly, sir.”
“Well, then what?”
Chief Wyatt took a breath and tried to remain calm. “I don’t know much about them, sir. That’s the truth. Locating and identifying these creatures would be Dr. Kandinski’s area. I mean, I’ve read the dossiers, and I’ve seen the photographs. But that’s about it.”
“This is what they pay you to do over there at the Secret Security Council? Hell, I’d feel safer if you boys just went back to doing your damned paperwork.”
“Sir—”
“This is absurd,” Roosevelt said. “Completely ridiculous.”
“Sir—”
“And this is real, you say?”
“One-hundred percent.”
“Are you sure this isn’t some sort of joke? No one put you up to this?”
Chief Wyatt swallowed hard. “No, sir. No one put me up to this.”
“Well, where in the hell would you find these, uh, monsters?”
“I can only tell you what Dr. Kandinski has told me,” Chief Wyatt said. “Some of the monsters are simply creations of nature.”
“Such as?”
“Vampires.”
“Vampires? What the hell are you telling me, Wyatt?”
“Vampires are real, sir.”
“You expect me to believe that malarkey?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s the truth, sir.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve got security clearance.”
Roosevelt’s eyes got big. “Security clearance? I’m the goddamn President, boy. How come I don’t know about any of this
?”
“I guess they figured you had more important things on your plate than learning about vampires. Besides, there are some things it’s probably best that you know nothing of.”
“Like what?”
“Vampires, sir.”
“This is all nonsense.” Roosevelt looked at Harry. “What do you know about this?”
“Nothing,” Harry said, shaking his head in disbelief. “Not one damn thing.”
“Vampires?” Roosevelt asked.
Chief Wyatt answered dutifully. “Vampires, sir.”
Harry Hopkins spoke up this time. “They’re dead, but alive? And they, uh ... they suck blood from living creatures in order to survive? That’s all true?”
“As far as I know, sir,” Chief Wyatt answered. “Again, I’ve never seen them up close and personal myself.”
“How can you know they’re real then?” Harry asked.
“It’s all in the reports, sir.”
“Can we trust the reports?” Roosevelt asked.
“Reports never lie, sir.”
“Do the vampires turn into bats, like in the novel? Do they fly around?”
“No, sir. That’s just a myth. Well, the bats are a myth.”
“But vampires aren’t?”
“No, sir. Vampires
are real. And the flying, well, more like floating.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Roosevelt said. “This is remarkable news.”
Harry agreed. “You can say that again. I’m hearing what you’re saying, but I’m having one hell of a hard time believing it.”
“Next you’ll tell us the Bram Stoker novel is true,” Roosevelt said, retrieving a fresh cigarette.
“Uh,” Chief Wyatt managed.
Roosevelt stared at him. “What?”
“It is true, sir. Well, mostly anyway.”
“What’s true?”
“The novel Dracula.”
“In what way?”
“Count Dracula is real, sir.”
Roosevelt laughed heartily. He looked at Harry. “You sons of bitches are putting me on.” He looked back at Chief Wyatt. “Harry here put you up to this, didn’t he?” He looked at Harry again. “Harry, you crazy old so-and-so.”
“No, sir. Mr. Hopkins and I have never met before.”
“Well then, who did put you up to this?”
“No one, sir. It’s real.”
“You swear on your mother’s eternal soul?”
Chief Wyatt nodded. “May she burn in hell if I’m lying.”
“And you’re a Christian?”
“I’m Catholic.”
“And you love your mother?”
“Very much, sir.”
“Hmmm.” Roosevelt stopped laughing. He sat there for a moment in deep thought, stubbing the unlit cigarette into an ashtray on top of his desk. “I just ... I can’t believe it. This can’t be real. It just can’t.” He looked at Harry again. “What do you think?”
“I believe the boy,” Harry said. “God help me, I believe him.”
Roosevelt nodded somberly. “So do I. It’s just difficult to grasp.”
“I know, sir,” Chief Wyatt said. “It was all a bit much for me to take in, as well, sir.”
Harry nodded. “I could see how that would be the case. You lose any sleep after you learned about these...monsters?”
“No,” Chief Wyatt lied, thinking about the vampire nightmares he’d had every night since he’d first learned of their existence.
“Well, I’m damn sure gonna lose sleep,” Harry said. “That shit is scary.”
“What about the other monsters?” Roosevelt asked, now serious as a heart attack.
“As I said, sir, some of them are creatures of nature.”
“And the rest?”
“Some are man-made.”
“Like Frankenstein’s monster?”
Chief Wyatt nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“They’re like the F
rankenstein Monster?”
“Yes, sir.”
“But the Frankenstein Monster is obviously fictitious, right?”
“Um, no sir,” Chief Wyatt said. “He’s real, too.”
“How is that possible?”
“With all due respect, sir, how is any of it possible? I mean, once you resign yourself to part of the story, it becomes much easier to accept all of the story.”
Roosevelt nodded. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”
“Exactly, sir.”
“This is all just too much to take in.”
“Where is he?” Roosevelt asked.
“Frankenstein’s monster?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s in captivity, sir.”
“Here?”
“No,” Chief Wyatt said.
“Where then?”
“Well, that’s the sticky part.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Germans have him. The krauts have a doctor named Josef Mengele experimenting with him. It’s part of their super-soldier program. They’re trying to duplicate the, uh,
technology, for lack of a better word. They’re basically trying to create an entire army of Frankenstein monsters.”
“Is that possible?”
“Damned if I know, sir.”
“Well,” Roosevelt said, “I guess we need to get him as soon as possible, just in case. But how the hell do we get him from the Germans?”
Chief Wyatt grinned. “We’ve got a few ideas, sir. We’re thinking a special team could extract him ... err, it.”
“From behind enemy lines?”
“Yes, sir.”
“This must be one hell of a team you’re thinking about.”
“Yes, sir,” Chief Wyatt said. “We’re going to need General Armissen’s assistance in putting together the team. We figure we’ll need the team to extract and/or capture each of the, uh ... candidates.”
“General Armissen is a good man,” Roosevelt said. “It’s a shame...”
“A shame, sir?”
“What happened to General Armissen.”
“Come again?”
“I mean his being pulled out of Europe,” Roosevelt said. “But we had no choice once the media caught wind of his methods.”
Chief Wyatt didn’t understand. “I’m not familiar with his methods.”
Roosevelt smiled. “They’re what you might call—”
“Cruel,” Harry said, interrupting. “I would call them cruel.”
Roosevelt nodded. “Yeah, that’s a good word for it. Cruel.”
“Well,” Chief Wyatt said, “then he might be just the man for this job.”
Harry sat forward. “In what way?”
“It may require a bit of cruelty to lead a group of monsters into battle.”
“Right,” Roosevelt said. “Good thinking. Just don’t let the media catch wind of this.”
“With all due respect, sir, if the media catches wind of any of this, we’re gonna have more worries than just public relations.”
Roosevelt laughed. “You’re right, Wyatt. I’ll be damned, but I think I’m on board for this. It’s one hell of a story anyway. If these monsters, as you call them, can aid the fight overseas then I’m all for it. But how about the war in the Pacific?”
“We figured we’d start in Europe and go from there.”
“What do you need from me?”
“Just your approval, sir.”
“Fine,” Roosevelt said. “You have it. But before you go—”
Chief Wyatt perked up. “Yes?”
“Could you tell us more? This is all new to Harry and myself.”
Harry said, “It certainly is.”
“What do you want to know? I only know so much.”
“Is the chupaca
bra real?”
Chief Wyatt shrugged. “I have no idea, sir.”
“No files on him, I guess,” Harry said.
“No, sir.”
“How about the Loch Ness Monster?”
“Don’t know about him either.”
“That’s too bad. I’ve always been fascinated by that one. I mean, it seems fathomable that a dinosaur or two could have survived...in just the right conditions.”
“I’ve never given it much thought.”
“And just think what the Loch Ness Monster could do to a German U-boat.”
Chief Wyatt just nodded.
Roosevelt thought for a moment. ...
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
