Susan did not press Illyenov on his plans for the motor, sensing they were obscure and Russian. Perhaps difficult to explain to a woman unencumbered by the romance of noisy, dangerous things.
A kid from the Flaming Trench Committee needed Illyenov to look at something. Reluctantly, he excused himself.
Shrieve picked up one of the half-filled cups lying on the table. He held it to his nose. “Christ.” He turned away. His eyes watered.
“Don’t mess with that,” she said. “The Russians call it vlint. It’s a bootleg amphetamine they make with cough syrup, gasoline, red phosphorous, and sulfuric acid.”
Shrieve started to laugh. “Go on.” He saw the look on her face and set the cup down, carefully.
Susan’s buddies in the Red Army engineering detachment had marched into Berlin on a highway paved with vlint. They told her it gave them their crazy-ass reputation. She suspected the public relations value of certain Soviet crowd-control practices—nailing people to barn doors, for instance—could not be discounted. She kept these opinions to herself, of course. She did not wish them to think her rude.
A flash of light drew her eye up the valley wall. Someone was on the ridge. He was signaling down to his mates with a pocket mirror, tipped back and forth against the firelight. The light of the campfire caught movement all along the ridgeline. Susan counted a squad. So, Illyenov had not given up the high ground.
“They’re preparing for an attack,” Susan guessed.
“We’re thirty miles inside the Soviet sector,” Charley point out.
“The campfire, the airplane engine—it’s some kind of smoke generator. If they’re not using it to hide under, then what are they using it for?”
Malmagden made some disparaging remark about the native intelligence of your mid-Asian ethnics. Shrieve shuffled through the pile of junk between the tin cups.
Here was a ream of newsprint, and a charcoal stick. An artist might have just stepped away for a moment to check his subject from a better angle.
Shrieve flipped through the first couple of sheets. “What do you make of this?”
Each sheet showed the same thing, but from a different angle—a lump-backed thing, crudely drawn, with indications of tentacles. Something on the top might have been a human face, with eyes and wide, leering mouth. The mouth was filled side-to-side with horsy teeth that looked as large as C-Ration cans.
“Reminds me of some of the Armitage transcripts,” she said.
“Is Walter Foley still showing those pictures?”
“Flattened farmhouses and half-eaten cattle? Yeah.”
Shrieve laughed. “He loves that stuff.”
Susan remembered the Dunwich, Massachusetts, primaries—the Dunwich Horror, as her Watermark instructors referred to it. It had been dead over ten years by the time the war started. Her instructors spoke of it in an academic tone.
How did it get into this dimension? How did it acquire these distinctly human attributes? Some woman had become pregnant with it, apparently.
All of her male friends nodded at this speculation with mild interest, hmmm. They got more excited about the future of the forward pass in football. Susan could not shake the image of a woman alone in a cabin somewhere, waiting on some leprous extra-dimensional entity to arrive in a mellow mood.
Susan had nightmares the last eight weeks of her Watermark training.
She looked at Malmagden. “How about it?” she demanded. “You were up here. What about this?”
Malmagden glanced at the drawing pad and then looked at her with a raised eyebrow.
“Hybridizing experiments between humans and Old Ones. That sounds like right up your alley.”
Malmagden demurred. “I am just polizei,” he apologized. “I made no such decisions.”
Shrieve took it up as well. “Is this Das Unternehmen?” He shook the pad in Malmagden’s face. “Maybe you were up here, making deals with the Old Ones to turn the tide of the war?”
“Yeah, and just to cinch the deal, you threw in somebody’s daughter.” She shoved him maybe a little harder than she meant to. “What about it? You’re usually so chatty. What are you so quiet about suddenly?”
Malmagden had his eyes on the perimeter fence. He hadn’t even heard her. He looked back at her from some middle-distance.
“Forget that,” Malmagden paid little attention to the drawing pad. “That is not important.” He stared out east at the far side of the crater. He pulled at his lip. His eyes were bright with fear. “Something is not right,” he said. “Something is missing from here.”
Susan leaned toward Shrieve, wincing in disbelief. “What did he say?”