Codename: Omega (feat. The Apiary Society) Read online

  What Others are Saying about Codename: Omega

  “Perfect for Ian Fleming and Matt Reilly fans.” – Reader review, Amazon

  “A terrific romp!” – Reader review, Amazon

  Codename: Omega

  Bernard Schaffer

  Published by Apiary Society Publications

  Copyright 2012 Bernard Schaffer

  Discover other titles by Bernard Schaffer at Amazon.com such as:

  Superbia

  Guns of Seneca 6

  Whitechapel: The Final Stand of Sherlock Holmes

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. No reference to any real person, living or dead, should be inferred.

  For Ian Fleming,

  On whatever sandy beach you now reside

  I hope the drinks are cold

  and the women are not.

  Table of Contents

  Episode One: Subject 129 (1918)

  Technical Sgt. James Scott is killed in combat, only to re-awaken later with strange abilities.

  Episode Two: Codename: Omega (1945)

  OSS secret super-weapon Sean Price is dispatched to Germany to destroy a Nazi weapons facility.

  Episode Three: Operation: Fuhrerdie! (1946-1947)

  Agent Omega goes back in time kill Adolph Hitler…as a child.

  Episode Four: Tabula Rasa (1947)

  Stripped of his powers, Sean Price is sent to Camp X to begin life anew as a British Commando.

  Episode Five: The Apiary Society (1958)

  British Intelligence Agent Sean Price goes up against the CIA’s infamous MKULTRA program to save a mysterious woman named Emily Watson.

  About the Author

  Episode 1

  SUBJECT 129

  1918

  Technical Sergeant James Scott planted his foot on an injured German soldier’s helmet to launch himself up the trench wall. Someone shouted, “Go, go, go! We’ve taken their front line!” Mortar bombardments sent clumps of dirt flying into his face as Scott scrambled up the traverse, when a German bullet punched through his right shoulder.

  Scott dropped to the dirt. He struggled to get back up and stay in the fight, peering through thick artillery smoke, trying to see how far he was from the next trench. I’ll find it if I just keep moving, he thought. A bullet bounced off the brim of his helmet, searing his face with chunks of hot metal. German rifles cracked and bullets slammed his torso, stinging like hot knives. Scott gurgled and dropped to the ground. He rolled over the lip of the next trench and slid down the dirt wall.

  Allied soldiers pouring over the ledge landed on top of him, crushing him with their boots in the unseen panic of the assault. Scott died underneath his fellow soldiers. He was twenty-three years old.

  ***

  Medical personnel evacuated the dead from the trenches at night. They placed James Scott’s bullet-ridden corpse in a covered Army transport and drove it to a secure staging area in Bellicourt. Scott’s body was laid on the floor beside dozens of others in long lines, and female nurses walked up and down the aisles of corpses, checking their dog tags.

  An Army Major walked behind them, jotting down each soldier’s rank, battalion, and cause of death. His charts went to a clerk in Washington DC, who checked another chart that listed which medal to send the soldier’s family on behalf of their sacrifice in America’s Great War.

  The Major came to the body of Technical Sergeant James Scott, making a quick notation and about to move on when something moved. The Major stopped cold. The dead man was sitting up.

  ***

  The dead man ran screaming through the facility, smashing into trays of medical supplies as guards and doctors raced after him. A guard ran in from outside and dove for Scott’s knees, but Scott shook him off like George Gipp driving through a defensive line to score a touchdown. Scott leapt onto the back of the same military transport that had brought his dead body to the base. He clung fast to the bumper while the guards beat him over the head and hands with clubs.

  They piled onto him until he finally collapsed. The guards stomped him with their boots but Scott roared and pressed up from the floor, lifting twenty men into the air. He grabbed the nearest guard and picked him up off the ground. The guard screamed as Scott hurled him across the facility, smashing him into a support beam with a sickening crunch.

  A doctor raced toward the crowd with a dripping morphine needle, screaming, “Hold him still!” He wrapped his hand around the collar of Scott’s bloody uniform and jabbed the needle forward at the bulging vein on the soldier’s neck, when the entire group of guards and doctors collapsed on top of one another.

  The doctor stood up, still clutching the collar of Scott’s uniform, but as he ripped it through the throng of people, it was empty. He started pushing everyone out of the way, trying to get to the bottom of the dog-pile. The man was gone. “Look around,” someone said. “He’s got to be here somewhere.”

  They searched under the trucks and among the dead bodies until a scream erupted from outside the building. A sheet-white nurse staggered through the door and said, “A naked man just ran past me into the woods. I don’t know where he came from. He didn’t come from anywhere. He just appeared out of thin air.”

  They found him shivering underneath a tree. The doctor injected him with the needle of morphine and put his lab coat over Scott’s shoulders. “Everything will be all right, soldier.”

  Scott clutched the lapels of the coat tight around his chest and said, “I don’t feel very good.” Blood spilled out of his nostrils and Scott’s eyes rolled up in his head before he dropped to the ground.

  “Is he dead?” one of the guards said. “Again, I mean?”

  The doctor bent over Scott and checked his pulse. He shook his head and barked, “Get this man back inside and call base command.”

  ***

  Half an hour later, a long trail of black cars arrived. The man who stepped out of the second car made everyone outside snap to attention. General “Blackjack” Pershing, Commander-in-Chief of the American Expeditionary Force, did not bother to return their salute. He hurried past them into the building and said, “Where is he?”

  The guards pointed at the office where James Scott was sitting, staring at the rows of dead bodies. The young soldier looked up at Pershing as he walked in and said, “Was I one of them?”

  The General took off his hat and sat down. “That is what they tell me, son,” he said. “Either someone seriously screwed up in that evaluation or you are a goddamned walking miracle.” He bent forward to look at the bullet hole in Scott’s chest and said, “Do you mind?”

  “No,” Scott said.

  Pershing touched the bullet hole and looked at it from the front and back, realizing his could see his fingers wiggle on the other side of the young soldier’s body. He inspected the raw wound across Scott’s right cheek and said, “How do you feel?”

  “Cold,” Scott said.

  Pershing stuck his head out of the door and said, “Get this man a blanket and some clothes!” He wiped his hand across his face with a handkerchief and said, “What can you tell me about this?”

  “Nothing,” Scott said. “I don’t remember anything.” He looked down at his dog tags and said, “Not even this name.”

  “Okay,” the General said. “I need to contact some people. Can you excuse me for a moment?”

  Scott looked out at the bodies again and said, “Take your time, sir.”

  ***

  They sailed him back to the United States aboard an experimental submarine. The sub docked in New Jersey and Scott was escorted off of the
sub by a group of men in black suits holding submachine guns. “Where am I going?” he asked repeatedly, but the men did not answer. They packed him in the back of an Army Jeep and drove him to a small farm outside of Atlantic City where a bi-plane sat idling in an unmarked field.

  He was packed into the back seat of the plane without a word. The pilot pulled back on the lever between his legs and they took off racing through the wheat grass and corn stalks. The pilot looked back and said, “Hold on!” just as the plane’s engines roared and they went soaring into the sky.

  He changed planes three times, each time it was the same. Men in suits who carried guns while escorting him onto the next plane without a word. From the sky, he watched the landscape below change from lush green fields and streams to what looked like long stretches of flat red rock.

  The heat became so intense that Scott took off his scarf and helmet. He shielded his eyes from the sun as the plane descended into the barren wasteland of a flat desert.

  The men waiting for him weren’t wearing suits. They were dressed in white lab coats and PH gas helmets, the kind made of loose rubbery full-face masks except for the wide circles around the eyes and a nozzle at the mouth. There was no plane waiting for him as Scott climbed down from the one that brought him there. He was only on the ground for a moment before the pilot gunned the engine and sped away.

  “What happens now?” Scott said.

  No one answered him. When they breathed, it sounded like hissing.

  They walked him toward a cave at the base of a mountain and Scott gasped in amazement when one of the rock walls slid apart to reveal an elevator shaft. He followed the men into the elevator and flinched when they slammed its iron gate shut.

  Scott’s ears popped as the elevator dropped so far and so fast that it felt like his feet were coming off of the ground. Every time he moved, one of the guards moved their fingers to the trigger of their gun. The impact of the elevator landing on solid rock jarred Scott from his knees to his jaw. The doors opened and the guards shoved him forward into the facility.

  The cavern was carved into the deep rocks beneath the earth’s surface, with walls formed of jagged limestone. Every inch of the interior was filled with scientific stations and medical equipment. The only light came from the blinking machines, reflecting blue and red off of the limestone, making Scott squint. They led him through the facility, taking him past a room with a chair that had heavy leather straps bolted to it, like something from an insane asylum. “What’s that for?” Scott said. They did not answer.

  They passed a thick steel door, the size and shape of a bank vault, built into a wall of stone that was reinforced with concrete. “What’s that for?” Scott said.

  The guards shoved him forward. One of them said, “Just take off your clothes and go into the shower. Everything will be explained to you after you are decontaminated.”

  Scott scrubbed the holes in his chest, looking down to watch soap bubbles form from inside the wounds. Water went into the hole in his right shoulder and spilled out of the other side. He was amazed at first, but soon, the sensation left him feeling too queasy to stand.

  His clothing was gone when he came out of the showers, replaced by light cotton shorts and a tee-shirt. His boots were gone. Now he had a cheap pair of slippers to wear, the kind prisoners were issued in a jail.

  The only person waiting for him when he left the shower was an unmasked military guard, who stood by the door. “Where’s your mask?” Scott said.

  “My pay grade’s not high enough to justify being protected from whatever kind of disgusting poison you got inside you, boy. Don’t touch me, don’t breath on me, and don’t make me break my nightstick across your head.”

  “Okay,” Scott said. He followed the guard to the bank vault door and stood back as the guard spun the lock and pulled it open to reveal a small room of concrete walls and floor with only a thin mattress laying on the floor. Scott stopped at the doorway and looked in.

  “Go on now,” the guard said.

  “I’m not a prisoner. Why are you treating me like this? I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Seen any decent people raising up from the dead lately, boy? Me neither. Get your ass inside.”

  ***

  They made him do tests designed to measure the limits of his strength. For short periods of time he could lift the rear end of a car into the air by just the back bumper, but after that he would be too weak to move.

  The men in the masks drew vials of his blood for testing. They measured him for radioactivity, electricity, and atomic energy but found nothing. What seemed to truly annoy the researchers was that Scott refused to recreate the act of teleportation. “I don’t know how I did it,” he insisted. “I can’t do what you want me to do.”

  Statements were read from eyewitnesses at Bellicourt. The event was broken down moment by moment until someone finally said, “It was the sight of the morphine needle. Perhaps he only vanishes when he is afraid.”

  The next morning, the guard tapped the outside of Scott’s door with his nightstick and said, “Time for your exercises, Subject 129.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  The guard flipped the meal slot’s lid and said, “That’s all you are anymore. A goddamn science project. Now get up.”

  Scott did not move from his cot. “I’m finished. You people aren’t telling me anything, and I need to figure out who I am. I must have family somewhere and I want to be taken to them.”

  The guard smiled, “Actually, I have a military jacket sitting on my desk right now. It arrived in the mail yesterday. There’s all sorts of good information in there for some dead man named James Scott. Would you be interested in seeing it?”

  “You’re lying,” Scott said.

  “You willing to risk that?”

  “Show me the file.”

  “Not unless you behave today. Got something special for you. If you want that file, you need to do as you’re told.”

  Scott sighed and got up. “Lead the way.”

  They walked down the hall toward the room with the lunatic chair from the asylum. “Have a seat. They asked me to tie you down. Relax, it’s no big deal. They just wanna see if you can escape again.”

  “I already told them I can’t.”

  The guard nodded politely as he pushed Scott into the chair and pulled a heavy strap across his chest. He buckled the rest across Scott’s waist, arms and legs. “They on good and tight? Can you move? Good. Bring in the machine.”

  Squeaking wheels came down the hall and Scott managed to lift his head enough to see a hooded researcher pushing an electrical generator into the room. It had a long wooden hand crank and multiple wires that connected to dozens of small suction cups, like a robotic octopus. “What the hell is that?” Scott said.

  “Hold still, partner,” the guard said. He stuck a suction cup on Scott’s arm and then kept sticking them until they covered Scott’s chest, neck and face. He yanked Scott’s underwear down to stick them between his thighs and onto his lower belly. He stuck them to bottom of Scott’s feet. Finally, the guard waved a wooden dowel over Scott’s face and said, “Bite this.”

  “Let me out!”

  “Bite it or you’ll chew your tongue off, stupid.”

  The hooded researcher cleared his throat and said, “You are required to pay attention to this next part, Subject 129. We are going to crank this generator and produce a significant electrical charge that will travel through these wires into your body via the suction cups. I am afraid that the pain will be quite severe. You may escape via teleportation at any time.”

  “I can’t!” Scott shouted. “I don’t know how to! Let me out of this thing!”

  “Yes you do, Subject 129,” the researcher shouted. “Stop wasting everyone’s time and do it. No? Fine. Crank the handle.”

  The guard grabbed the handle and started to turn it, making the generator whine until flashes of blue and white electrical current sparked inside the suction cup
s. Scott screamed until his teeth crushed the wooden bit and one of the connections blew off of his chest. Lights flickered inside the facility and the guard stopped turning the crank and wiped his brow as Scott clenched his eyes and whimpered and sobbed.

  The researcher leaned over Scott and said, “That was nothing. We are just getting started. Are you ready to teleport?”

  “I can’t—”

  “Crank the handle.”

  The guard spun the crank and waves of searing current flew through wires all over again.