The Coldest War Read Free

able to fix damage to the sockets where the wires entered his skull. It was hard enough to see the sockets, sifting through his hair while holding a mirror in the bathroom. If the children had damaged those, Reinhardt’s dream of recovering his godhood would be permanently extinguished.
    To think he might have endured so many humiliations, countless degradations, only to have his goal rendered unreachable by a single child … Another unwelcome reminder of how far he had fallen. Of how vulnerable he had become. How mundane . But the wires and sockets were undamaged.
    Reinhardt breathed a deeper sigh of relief; it ended with a shudder and a sob. He struggled to compose himself, to draw upon an emotional Willenskräfte, while secretly glad Doctor von Westarp wasn’t there to observe his weakness.
    There had been a time when he could have— would have—torched the little monsters outside with a single thought. Back when he had been the pinnacle of German science and technology, something more than a man. Terrible miracles had been his specialty.
    Dinner was a bowl of white rice with tomato and, as a treat to himself, the rest of a bockwurst he’d been saving in the icebox. It lifted his spirits, reminded him of home. In the earliest years of his exile, when London still carried fresh scars from the Blitz, German food couldn’t be found for any price. That was changing, but slowly.
    After dinner, he sorted through the odds and ends he’d brought home. He’d been gone for two days, and assaulted by the little bastards who infested this place when he returned, but it was worth it. The Royal Air Force had decommissioned an outpost down near Newchurch, one of the original Chain Home stations dating from the war. It was one of the last to be replaced with a more modern and sophisticated radar post that could peer deeper into Socialist Europe. Such posts would provide a futile first warning if a wave of Ilyushin bombers and their MiG escorts started heading for Britain.
    The decommissioned radar station had meant a wealth of electronic equipment practically free for the taking, pence on the pound. The sensitive equipment had been carted away long before any civilians set foot on the premises. But Reinhardt didn’t care about any of that—it would have been the high-frequency circuitry, microwave generators, and other esoteric things. What Reinhardt sought was also esoteric, but wouldn’t be found in a newspaper advertisement.
    He’d snatched up condensers, valves, inductors, relays, and more. An excellent haul, even better than the estate sale of the deceased ham radio enthusiast. He’d even found a few gauges, which would serve him well when he re-created the Reichsbehörde battery-circuit design.
    When. Not if.
    Reverse engineering the damn thing was a painful process. He had learned, through trial and error, how to induce hallucinations, indigestion, convulsions.…
    He mused to himself, bitterly, that he had collected nearly enough equipment to build his own radar outpost. How ironic. Radar was touted as one of the great technological innovations of the last war, but Reinhardt himself was the greatest of all. Yet in all the years since the war had ended, he had failed to recapture the Götterelektron.
    Then again, Herr Doktor von Westarp had enjoyed the resources of the Third Reich at his disposal. The IG Farben conglomerate had assigned teams of chemists, metallurgists, and engineers to the devices that had fueled Reinhardt’s feats of superhuman willpower.
    But Reinhardt did not have IG Farben at his disposal. It didn’t even exist any longer.
    They had always called them “batteries,” but that was misleading. They held a charge, yes, but Reinhardt had deduced over the years that they also contained specialized circuitry tailored to deliver the Götterelektron in precisely the correct manner.
    The accumulated detritus of his quest had transformed