Terminal Freeze by Lincoln Child Read Free Book Online Page B

unsettling experiments. Following the occupation, the castle was burned to the ground, its secret basement laboratory ransacked. Logan had been tracking the alchemist’s accomplishments and the fate of his bizarre experiments. His best hope to learn more, he now knew, was here, among the moldering files of the Omega Archive.
    He proceeded briskly down the tall metal ranks, peering at the labels on the cabinets at random. He quickly determined they were chronological, further subdivided by armed services branch. It was the work of ten minutes to locate 1944; five more to bracket the files related to the Fifth Army; another sixty seconds to pinpoint dossiers related to the Italian theater of operations. He pulled the appropriate drawer to its maximum. There were perhaps three feet worth of manila-and khaki-colored files related to operations at Cassino. They were dusty and badly faded, but otherwise appeared to be barely touched. A quick flip through the titles located a thick file labeled “ Fort Diavilous -Tactical and Strategic.”
    He glanced over at Hunt, who was standing nearby, looking on like a disapproving chaperone. “Is there a reading table nearby I can use for my examination?”
    Hunt blinked, sniffed. “The commissary is down the hall past the electrical substation,” he said. “I’ll take you there.”
    Logan pulled out the file, prepared to close the drawer. Then he stopped. Removing the file had exposed another behind it, almost equally faded. Its title tab had been stamped with a single word: “Fear.”
    Instinctively, Logan reached for it, pulled it forward. It was very thin. Behind it lay another file, identical, stamped with the same word.
    Both copies of a classified file, stored in the same location?
Something was very wrong here.
    He shot a hooded glance toward Hunt. The man was walking down the aisle of hulking cabinets, his back to Logan. Looking back at the drawer, Logan cracked open the first of the two identical files, scanned the cover sheet.
     
    TOP SECRET
    United States Army

     
    REFERENCE
    B2837(a)
    Logan ’s instincts as a researcher into the abnormal were finely tuned, and now they were going off full blast. This was an opportunity, and he didn’t hesitate. As stealthily as possible, he snapped open his briefcase; slipped one of the two thin folders beneath other paperwork; closed the case again; placed the Castello Diavilous folder atop the black leather. And then, closing the file drawer and arranging his face into an expressionless mask, he turned and followed Hunt, the view facilitator, out of the echoing vault and down the concrete hallway.

7
    Within five days, Fear Base was transformed utterly. The three-acre apron of concrete between the base entrance and the perimeter fence had become a frantic anthill of activity. Helicopters and small transport planes arrived day and night, dropping off workers, supplies, food, fuel, and all manner of exotic equipment. The quiet, dimly lit hallways of the base’s central wing now seemed like city boulevards: full of chatter, the clacking of keyboards, and the whir of machinery. Power cables snaked everywhere, waiting treacherously to trip the unwary. The base’s powerhouse, until now operating at near-minimum capacity, had been ramped up to 50 percent, filling the arctic silence with its growl. Sergeant Gonzalez and his three army engineers had seemed first astounded, then annoyed by this sudden invasion that turned their once-somnolent base into a hive of demanding, high-maintenance urbanites. The small team was at work night and day, splicing broken wires, fixing leaks, opening heating ducts, and in general making several dozen rooms-largely unused for fifty years-habitable once again.
    Evan Marshall walked down the mountain valley, a cooler full of specimens on one shoulder. Halfway to the base, he stopped briefly to rest and survey the small city below, bathed in early-afternoon sunlight. Although the documentary team was naturally