The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: The Case of the Old Wizard's Woods, Part 1 of 3

The dust in Tallahassee and Houston might still be settling, but Mickey Malloy still has work to do. An attack at Zoo Base has left the Office reeling, and the scientists who create their strange weapons are stuck front and center in the spotlight. One such scientists thought he had left the world and the war behind, but they weren’t done with him yet. Mick would just as soon let even one person find peace, but that’ll have to wait…

This is Part 1 of The Case of the Old Wizard’s Woods. It directly follows The Heartland Heroes and features characters from The Case of an Old Dead Guy.

To learn more about Ned Garver and what went down at Zoo Base, keep an eye out for The Carpenter and the Curator, the first steamy entry in Vigilance: Love and War, coming soon.

Content warnings: Mild swearing, violence, death, gore, alcohol use, tobacco use.

SATURDAY MORNING, JULY 17, 1943
NORTH GATE, ZOO BASE
OAK RIDGE, TENNESSEE

“One man did all this?” Doctor Charlie Cypress wondered aloud. He shook his head. The crater Ned Garver had made during his flight stretched a quarter-mile north, starting from the first gate house. The silent blast had thrown aside tons of earth, both the inner and outer gate houses, the road, the fence, the wall, the mines, and the trench. It looked like a team of bulldozers had been working for a month despite one man with a briefcase doing it all in three-quarters of a second.

“One man and five years of my funding,” Researcher General Douglas Gonzales replied. He handed Cypress a steaming coffee mug and tried to tame his thick gray beard. He tried to keep it trimmed, but when stressed that was always the first task to escape him.

He was looking quite feral about then.

“It could have been worse,” Cypress tried to offer.

“I just spoke to two families,” Gonzales replied. “I had to try to explain to them how their loved ones, stationed in the U.S., mind you, were so grievously injured that have yet to locate their remains.”

“Third watch?”

“Yeah,” Gonzales confirmed.

“Lorenz and Steck,” Cypress said. The pair was hilarious and inseparable. She’d set them up, he’d knock them down. It felt cold to think of Punch at the time, the Australian Shepherd they had been assigned, but he’d actually worked with her more. She was gone, too. “Do you know how…”

“I do not,” Gonzales answered. After-action reports from Eberkopf indicated that the terahertz radiation weapons Garver had developed and that the Nazis had stolen could kill in about a dozen ways. He wasn’t sure how Lorenz and Steck had died and he didn’t want to guess. Once the site was cleared for radiation and explosives, the cadaver dogs would come in.

Cypress sipped his coffee and watched the recovery crews work. Gonzales had assured him that terahertz radiation didn’t leave any lasting effects, but it never hurt to be careful. The teams worked slowly, inch-by-inch, letting their metal detectors, Geiger counters, and bomb-sniffing rats lead the way.

“Didn’t you train most of those critters?” Gonzales asked after he’d drained half his mug.

“I helped,” Cypress said, smiling. He pointed at a fat white rat with two black spots. “That one right there, that’s Domino.”

The rats weren’t as fast as metal detectors, but Lord, they were thorough. And all for a nibble of cheese. It would take until Monday to definitively clear the whole site. As if that were Gonzales’ only problem.

The red band peeked over the mountains. He was starting to get used to seeing it.

Out in the Pacific, Field Commander Wong Fei-Song had submitted an urgent request for captured I-A bombs. Even if he had them, it would take a week to get them there safely. He’d already sent them Eun Hye. In a month it had snowballed from a second set of eyes to enough firepower to cause a second Vesuvius.

The latest he was hearing was that there was some kind of animal out there that he did not have time to wrap his head around at the moment. It sounded like a whole other conversation he’d need to have with Cypress, maybe over Tuesday’s coffee.

“This is insane,” Cypress said after a moment. The devastation fanned out before them.

“I could have listened to him,” Gonzales said.

“You’re not putting this on yourself,” Cypress pressed. “You knew Ned as well as I did. He doesn’t want to be a researcher, he wants to be a celebrity. He thinks that anything not propping him all the way up is an attack.”

“But he was right,” Gonzales objected.

“No, he wasn’t,” Cypress insisted. “He couldn’t have done this without someone else pushing him.”

“I should have seen that it had this… application.”

“There’s a thousand projects more promising than this, at a thousandth the cost, without Ned running them. Your goal is to save lives, right? As many and as fast as you can. You do that better than any of us could hope to.”

“I tried.”

“You did it. You do it. And Ned’s a prick, he makes it impossible to work with him, much less to elevate him.”

“That doesn’t mean he was wrong,” Gonzales pointed out.

“He was the worst kind of right. He is such a condescending jackass that no one else will so much as review his work, even if he’d’ve let them. What’s unfortunate is that the only people who are big enough assholes to make him seem reasonable are the God damn Nazis.”

On any other morning Gonzales would have chuckled at that.

“This though…” Cypress said. The crimson sun was washing everything out blood red, picking out the chunks of asphalt, the twisted iron rail, the crumpled fencing.

“Nobody should be able to do this,” Gonzales said as if he were reading Cypress’ thoughts.

“He’s not a runner, we’ll catch him soon enough.”

They watched in silence for a moment as the bomb rats and their handlers gave a mutilated Jeep a wide berth.

“One thing about Ned was that he never did anything without a plan,” Garver told him. “He needed five safety nets before he ever put his neck out. When he left, he was confident he could.”

“Who’s on his tail?”

“Klavin sent a few down from New York and one up from Florida. They’re already out following leads.”

“Florida, huh? Malloy?” Cypress asked. It had been a spell since he’d seen that old bastard.

“Mickey Malloy? He’s still kicking?” Gonzales asked. “I was sure he would have gotten his number called upstairs by now.”

He pointed heaven-ward.

“I’m not sure ‘up’ is where Malloy’s headed,” Cypress chuckled.

“Sounds like he’s up to the same old tricks.” Gonzales finished his coffee. He surveyed the scarred land once more. “You know the worst part about all of this?”

“What’s that?”

“It makes you realize how much destruction one man can cause,” he replied. “And even worse than that, Garver isn’t even one of the scary ones.”

“How’s that then?”

“Ned Garver is doing all this to be famous. That fact has got him limited. But there’s others out there that want to change the world. They got an idea of how things should work and they have the means to make that happen, regardless of what the rest of us want or think.”

He sighed and let the dregs of his coffee drip into the grass.

“I’m horrified to see what happens when one of the dangerous ones finds a bone to pick.”

SATURDAY AFTERNOON, AUGUST 29, 1943
TESLA RESIDENCE, WILD RIVER WILDERNESS
WHITE MOUNTAIN NATIONAL FOREST, MAINE

“I assure you, I have no need of assistance,” Nikola Tesla insisted as he folded up his long arms and legs like a mantis to hide behind a scrubby little bush.

“You have more than just yourself to worry about now, Nikola,” Regional Inspector Wailey Earp reminded him. The silver-haired cowboy was pressed up against a sturdy pine, peeking around the trunk every few seconds. His nickel-plated Colt 1911 pistol gleamed in his hand.

“I do not believe anyone so dense as a fifth columnist could have discovered my residence,” Tesla muttered. He looked over his shoulder, down a stream valley, past green and granite, to a small cabin. Chickens pecked the dirt and dogs lounged in the some of the last beams of the summer sun. A cheerful, plump woman was inside that cabin, baking a fresh loaf of pogaca.

“My source is genuine, we wouldn't have bothered you otherwise,” Mickey Malloy told him. He was belly-down in the dirt, taking cover behind a log and scanning the forest before him through merciless iron sights. The big man was from the city; everything about the woods annoyed him. He swatted at the no-see-ums swarming his face. This place were filthy with the things. One buzzed into his cauliflower ear. “How else would we have found you?”

“It was in my papers,” Telsa said.

“There's a lot in there,” Mickey muttered. Tesla had left the Office nearly one-hundred-forty-thousand pages of hand-written notes, but progress deciphering them had been slow. The inventor had written in a complex code that, once-broken, yielded a twisted mixture of Serbo-Croatian, English, French, Latin, mathematics, chemistry, physics, and several new branches of science that Oak Ridge was tentatively calling 'Teslavian deviations.'

“I always intended my location to be found, in time,” Tesla explained. “My codifying system was not designed to make my works inaccessible, but to delay those interested until that the world was ready for my discoveries.”

“Like your fountain of youth?” Mickey asked. His back was aching from the position he'd had to assume to hide behind the log. Tesla pushed his thick black hair back and smiled.

“It is written there, when it is ready to be found,” the scientist promised. It was hard to believe that the strapping woodsman was eighty-seven years old; he didn't look any over thirty-five. His gray hair and spectral pallor were gone, instead replaced by work-hardened muscles, a heavy coal-black beard, and the glimmer of happiness in his blue eyes. The new Tesla was eager to smile, though still quiet. His silence felt like a man holding in a laugh rather than an indignant egg-head bottling up a rant.

“The crick in my back is ready for it now,” Mick groaned. He'd been squatting in the dirt for close to an hour now. His arthritic knees were protesting. He discretely removed his flask from his jacket pocket and took a nip. The bourbon was warm and cheap, just like he liked it.

“Do you mind?”

Mickey looked to see Tesla's pale hand open. Earp gave him a look of disbelief.

“I've taken a liking to distilled spirits,” Tesla admitted. Earp's mouth was hanging wide open. Tesla had been a teetotaler for as long as he'd known him.

“Welcome to our side,” Mick said. He handed the flask over and Tesla took a healthy swig. He wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve, smacked his lips, and sighed.

“A... unique vintage, Mister Malloy,” he finally declared. Mick took his flask back and tucked it into his pocket.

“Country life suits you,” Earp was able to say. The man before him, the rejuvenated Tesla, was nothing like the scientist he'd worked with in the Office. Tesla had followed through on the promise he'd made that night in New York: his research had given him a second lease on life and he was running with it.

“The Abwehr tracked my building materials, then?” Tesla asked.

“You figured that out quicker than we did,” Earp confirmed.

“It was the dynamo coils,” Tesla concluded, speaking mostly to himself.

“If you had just bought a diesel generator, you would have probably been fine,” Mick told him.

“When one possesses the skills, is one not obligated to use them? Hydroelectric power, when so readily available, demands to be utilized.”

“Not too many folks out here who can build their own Hoover Dam across a babbling brook,” Earp replied. “Those specialty orders left a trail to the wholesaler in Newport, to the mechanic supply warehouse in Littleton, to the garage in Gorham, to your middleman in Jackson.”

“They found Damir?” Tesla asked, suddenly concerned.

“What that its name?” Mickey asked.

“I assume they terminated him,” Tesla said.

“Several days ago, after torture,” Earp said. His voice was even but sympathetic.

“Damir did not know anything, save where to purchase and deliver my supplies and how to eat crackers. Had he had a pain sensory system for torture to affect, he still possessed no relevant information to retrieve,” Tesla said.

“Whoever found him got that information out of him,” Mickey said. That was the softest way he could put it. The krauts had taken blades to Tesla's auto-sapien. When Mick and Earp had burst into its apartment a day before, they found the creation in pieces. Sheets of vat-grown skin had been peeled off loom-woven muscle, pressed calcium bones were snapped, and several of the auto-sapien's crafted organs were missing, including his heart and eyes. The krauts must have recognized another of Tesla's inventions after they'd opened it up. Technology for artificial organ replacement would be a major coup for the Reich.

“Why would he talk?” Mick asked. “If he couldn't feel pain or fear, I mean.”

“Completing his assigned task was all he understood. I told you, auto-sapiens are incapable of original thought or critical thinking. If the agents promised him that he'd be able to go back to work, he would tell them whatever they asked.”

“They got it out of him,” Mick said. “And they called in reinforcements. They're coming for you, Nik.”

“As you told me,” Tesla groaned. “But I can assure you, I will be fine.”

“You are lucky is what you are,” Earp told him. “Our clearance let us interview a sheriff who'd heard a story from a drunk whose brother is a poacher who'd been arrested by a game warden who'd stumbled on your set-up here.”

“Francis,” Tesla muttered.

“Luckily we were able to manufacture a traffic jam that slowed the insurgents' convoy so we could beat them here.”

“The Abwehr mobilized their largest operation ever on American soil to find you,” Mick explained. “Our backup is an hour out.”

Earp had arranged a convoy of Jeeps and deuce-and-a-halfs full of commandeered infantry to meet them here, but they'd been delayed getting out of Boston. Mick hadn't wanted to wait.

“That is not necessary,” Tesla insisted again.

“You know you're getting people killed, right?” Mick snapped.

“Easy,” Earp cautioned. He'd been worried about spooking the eccentric inventor, but Mick knew they didn't have time for pussy-footing around.

“We don't have time for pussy-footing around,” Mickey growled. His blunt words came easier now. His patience with the naive inventor was running as short as his flask. “When they get here and they are not immediately greeted with overwhelming force, shots will be fired. People will die.”

“Who are these men you say are coming for me?” Tesla asked.

“We don't just say. We know they are coming,” Mick declared.

“The Abwehr caught your scent a few weeks back and have been hunting you down since. Two weeks ago they thought they were close enough to activate six quisling sleeper cells,” Earp explained. “You are lucky we were able to track you down with enough time to save your can.”

“I appreciate - !” Tesla started, but Mickey belched to interrupt him.

“No you don't,” Mick grunted. It was a wet burp and he paused to wipe his mouth on the back of his sleeve. “A small army of the deadliest killers ever trained by the Axis are coming for you.”

“Wailey, Michael, with the enemies I have made, do you think I would dare leave my home and my wife vulnerable? Please, your men are unnecessary. You need not have even drawn your firearm.” Tesla let his hand rest on the lid of a small, dented tool box as he spoke.

“I'll hold onto it if it's all the same to you,” Earp grumbled. He twirled the heavy pistol on his finger, a gesture Mick had come to recognize as a calming technique.

“The boss finally let me check one of these out, don't dare think I'd miss the chance to put some ordnance on some traitors,” Mick said, hefting the M13 Randall rocket carbine he'd carried all the way from the road. The stubby, sturdy gun was all rolled steel and solid oak and could put enough inch-and-a-half rockets downrange to level a skyscraper. The fascists wouldn't know what hit them. Mick wished he'd had one of the things back in the Somme. He'd have scrapped a lot more kriegerpuppe shamblers with one of them.

“I assumed you have defenses in place,” Earp said. He scanned the forest around them but couldn't see anything out of the ordinary.

“My wife and home are of the utmost priority, Daniel,” Tesla replied. “I have revived a number of my more controversial creations in defense of my home.”

“The death ray?” Earp asked with a start.

“That is not what I named it,” Tesla objected. “It was a weapon of peace.”

“No such thing,” Mick snorted.

“My weapon, in reasonable hands...” Tesla started, only for Mick to interrupt again.

“No such hands, neither.”

The Croatian ignored him and continued:

“In reasonable hands, the teleforce weapon would be a deterrent capable of ending war before it could begin.”

“That assumes your enemies are reasonable, too,” Mick grunted. “I don't know how your gun works, but...”

“Teleforce is simply the projection of radically-ionized tungsten particles through organic matter. They move with the force of sixteen million volts and reduce all natural media to disrupted carbon. No army would stand against it.”

“It would help our fight,” Earp offered.

“Yeah, it would. Why haven't you sold it to us?” Mick asked. His voice was thick with sarcasm. Tesla hesitated before he answered.

“This weapon is quite...” he hesitated, “... final.”

“So's a lump of lead to the noodle,” Mick snorted. He took another slug of rye. “A gun's a gun's a gun. Nothing special about it.”

“This one is distinctive,” Tesla objected. “Were a general to see the consequences of its use, he would never commit his troops to face it nor would he ever order it used.”

“You must know different generals than I do. I've seen men sent against the worst things in the world,” Mick replied.

“Enough,” Earp snapped.

“Is it?” Mick recoiled. “I've seen men eaten and shot and blown to pieces and fall a thousand feet. I've seen a whole platoon bleed to death through their skin and more shredded by lightning. Is a better gun what we need?”

Mick wanted to clam up after that. He wished the traitors had shown up right in that moment. It would have been the perfect punctuation. Tesla could have proved him wrong by blasting a bloodthirsty horde of the Abwehr's insurgents, saving the day, ending the damn war, and their discussion with it.

“The teleforce weapon is specific and absolute,” Tesla continued. Red invaded his pale features and his voice grew deeper. “Its results are instant and painless.”

“No muss, no fuss,” Mick said under his breath. Earp punched him in the arm. The big man spoke up, rubbing his shoulder: “You ever use it on anyone?”

Tesla was taken aback. The red drained from his face.

“Of course not,” he stammered.

“Killing a man is much different than whatever fish and broccoli you test it on,” Mick replied. The bourbon was warm in his gut, and demanding company. He obliged it with another heavy slug from the warm flask.

“You killed a man, right Earp?” Mick asked his boss.

“I have,” the inspector said quietly.

“Would Nick's clean gun have made it better?”

“Easier,” Earp responded, reluctant.

“That's not better,” Mick said. “That's the other thing.”

Tesla was quiet. His empty hands twisted and flexed and wrapped together, over and over, dough-pale spiders fighting. His black beard twitched, full of unconsidered words. Nicola Tesla was beyond logic. He was an armorer, not a soldier. The teleforce was unwelcome in his newly-calloused hands, whatever it was.

“I have never killed a man,” Tesla finally told them. “I created teleforce so no other man must kill another ever again.”

“Threats and fear don't make peace,” Mickey told him.

“It could be a facsimile, for a time,” Tesla argued. “Tenuous peace is better than open war, even for a day.”

“Can't argue that,” Mick burped. His breath burned his nostrils in a familiar way. “What if these goons the Abwehr put on your tail think you're bluffing? You're going to have to flip the switch, and the carry the result.”

“I would carry the end of war,” Tesla said, but his voice had gone dry and raspy.

“Today won't be war. It'll be men, American men, albeit traitors, dead in your yard. And to a man, dead is dead, no matter what happens next,” Mick muttered.

“Enough,” Earp snapped again, this time with force. Mick clapped his trap shut and brooded for a long while. Squirrels chittered high the trees, dancing through dappled green sunlight. It was disgusting. He preferred cracked concrete and peeling paint any day.

“Why did you move out here?” Mick asked, eyeballing the puke-green moss oozing over the rocks around him. He never liked the woods: there was no telling what was out there.

“Every morning I wake up and see this forest, these mountains, they remind me of the Dinaric Alps, the most beautiful ecosystem I have ever experienced,” Tesla explained. “I wish to show them to my wife one day. Until then, these woods are the closest I have found in America. They are daily a reminder of my youth.”

“Which youth?” Mickey muttered, quiet enough that he thought only he could hear it. Earp glared at him.

A beeping interrupted Mickey's next thoughts. He snapped the barrel of his M13 back, tracking it through the woods for targets.

“I fear you were right about these men,” Tesla said. He flipped the latch on his tool box open and creaked the old hinges. It was stainless steel on the inside, a collection of buttons and dials and lights that would have looked more at home in a cockpit than a rusted metal box in the middle of the woods. He examined a blinking orange light within. He sighed, then pressed a button. The blinking and the beeping both ceased. He then pulled a trio of gleaming badges out of the box and held them up.

“Please affix these to your shirts,” he told them. Mick and Earp each took one. They were bulky steel rectangles festooned in circuits with a clip on the back. They were warm to the touch.

“Miniature Faraday effect projectors,” Tesla explained. He saw the look on Mick's face and realized that he'd have to elaborate. “They block electric fields, which is how the teleforce emitter identifies its targets.”

Tesla seemed to think that that was enough of an explanation and pinned the Faraday badge over his heart without further comment. Mick and Earp looked at each other, then followed suit.

“Thank you,” Tesla said. He pressed a green button in the box and a loud whistle emanated through the woods. Mick looked back at the little house. Each of the dogs' ears had perked up, and the chickens stopped clucking and stared at the house One by one, each animal turned and walked into the cottage's open door until only one little white dog remained outside.

“Peraje! Go inside!” Tesla shouted. The fluffy mutt growled in response. “Inside, now!”

The rebellious pup snarled and yipped.

“Peraje!” a woman's voice called from the cottage. The little dog yipped again, then scampered inside. The door shut behind him.

“He talks a lot for a little guy,” Mick observed.

“He has always had a large personality,” Tesla agreed. He deactivated the whistle, then positioned his thumb over a blue button. He paused before pressing it and said: “Do not take your badges off until this is resolved.”

“Understood,” Earp said. Mick simply nodded.

Tesla pressed the blue button and a low hum filled the air. Mickey's carbine seemed to come to life and wiggle in his hands. Earp's eyes went wide and he held his Colt 1911 at arm's length like it was struggling from his grasp.

“What the hell?” Mick said.

“It is an electromagnetic variance field,” Tesla told them. “It repels conductive metals.”

“Enemy bullets would be useless,” Earp surmised.

“As well as shrapnel and any other metal object,” Tesla added.

“As well as our guns,” Mick snapped.

“Your firearms will still operate, but the trajectory of your projectiles will be erratic at best,” Tesla explained. “I told you that you would not need your weapons, did I not?”

“You did do that,” Earp said. The look on his face said more than his reserved words ever could about how much he liked holstering his pistol. Mick wasn't as confident in the magician's tricks; he held onto his carbine for dear life. Tesla changed the subject.

“It was the HYDRA, yes?” Tesla asked, though he kept his eye on the tool box.

“What about it?” Mick growled.

“That alerted you to this plot,” Tesla replied.

“Of course it was,” Mick snapped. An invisible magnetic wave washed over him, pushing his M13 off the log he’d settled it on. Mick gritted his teeth and wrestled the rocket carbine back down.

“What he means to say is that your contraption has become indispensable. It pulls in more intel than we can decode right now,” Earp told him as he watched for blinking lights as well. “We had to expand our decryption school to try to keep up, but even when the new class graduates, it'll take months to catch up. This intercept was just a lucky break.”

“Was the eruption of Vesuvius not the last stand of Department Three?” Tesla asked. “Is this attack not among the last gasps of desperate remnants, clawing at crumbling effigies?”

“'Crumbling effigies?' We got a regular Walt Whitman over here. How do you know about Vesuvius?” Mick demanded.

“Any undergraduate geologist could tell you that the pyroclastic explosion that destroyed the mountain was not a natural occurrence for its current caldera structure. It would take a significant change in the crystalline structure of the mountain to permit such a blast, and only German Ionen-Aktivierung technology possesses such a capability. It was simple to deduce, really.”

“Yeah,” Mick replied. His flask was suddenly dry. “Real simple.”

“To answer your question, no, the war is not ending. Vesuvius was just a small piece of a big puzzle,” Earp explained.

“One that's getting bigger every day,” Mick added.

“The time, resources, and research lost in Vesuvius must have been...” Tesla started.

“A drop in the damn bucket,” Mick interrupted. “Big things are happening out in the world, Nick.”

“I gave one whole life to that world, this second one is mine to be selfish with,” Tesla replied. Color was rising in his cheeks.

“There are people in these woods itching to take every life you got to give,” Mickey said. Two green bulbs flared to life in Tesla's tool box, and a ringing alarm silenced the squirrels chittering above them.

“What do the lights mean?” Mick asked. Tesla flipped them off before answering.

“It is a proximity alarm, inspector,” he answered. “Our visitors should be emerging from the glen in the next few minutes.”

“Then what?” Mick asked.

“Then we determine whether they are innocent bird-watchers, inquisitive forest rangers, old associates, or someone else,” Tesla said.

“Good bird-watching around here?” Mick asked. His voice was dryer than his flask.

“Thirty-eight native species, seventy-two migrant,” Tesla answered. He did not pick up on Mickey's sarcasm at all; his attention was focused on the third green bulb. “Unfortunately, the magnetic field irritates the inner ear of birds. As a result, they avoid this area when it is active.”

“Real interesting,” Mick grunted. His M13 was trying to twist itself out of his hands again and the flask was slowly pushing its way out of his pocket. A sudden startling sensation made him yelp, drop the carbine, and grab for his trousers.

“What is it?” Earp asked, ready to start blazing away at some unseen attacker. Tesla smirked, knowningly.

“Nothing, nothing,” Mick muttered. The magnetic waves were tugging at his belt buckle, furiously trying to pants him. His M13 scraped against granite as those same fluctuating forces attempted to drag it away.

“It is impossible to predict how the field will affect certain objects,” Tesla told him. Mick grunted as a response, then looped his Randall's strap over a tree branch, letting it swing as Tesla's field pulled it in one direction then another. He could tell Tesla was right: his rockets would fly wild within inches of leaving the barrel. There was no use in weighing himself down with the heavy gun. His old stand-by would have to do.

Mickey hefted the chair leg in one hand. It was worn, battered, cracked, and lacquered, then reinforced and cracked anew. It had notches from straight razors and combat knives, ice picks and claw hammers, bullets, shattered glass, buck shot, and ninja blades. It was old but solid, ready to take even more punishment than it had left to dish out. He had been an official too long; a wool-suited G-man couldn't carry a blood-stained club everywhere, and it seemed like the only cases he was closing anymore were with paperwork and delegation rather than brute force.

When Mick was in the thick of it, swinging and breaking and bashing, the world seemed much simpler.

Earp scowled at the sight of the club, but Mick chuckled, imitating Earp’s raspy voice:

“‘Why do you bring that thing everywhere, Malloy?’ you said. 'That thing isn’t even fit to be kindling,' you said,” Mickey laughed. He thumped the log he was laying behind, knocking old bark off the worm-eaten wood. “Looks like this may be the only thing shooting straight all afternoon.”

“It will not come to that,” Tesla assured them.

“We'll see,” Mickey muttered. In his experience, it came to that more often than not. The hard oak in his hand calmed his nerves more than an invisible field and an egg-head's promises ever could.

A new tone, insistent and impossible to ignore, sounded out from Tesla's control box. The third bulb was glowing. The scientist clenched his jaw and pressed another button, silencing the alarm.

“They are within thirty meters,” he annmounced. Mick swallowed hard. Unknown dozens of enemies were advancing on his position through the woods ahead. He his body went numb and hyper-alert all at once.

He wasn't policing or brawling or investigating, he was fighting a war.

In Maine.

“I hope your gizmos work, Nikola,” Earp said.

Mick watched the furious vein bulging in his boss' temple. He hadn't seen Earp that tense since Klavin had dressed him down after Tallahassee.

“We do not even know if these men are hostile,” Tesla said. “In fact, they might not even be men. This alarm was once triggered by a bear.”

“Wouldn't want a bear in my house, either,” Mick grumbled.

“Can it,” Earp rumbled. He still held his Colt out, struggling to keep his sights aligned as the magnetic field pulled them every which way.

Twenty yards out, the underbrush rustled.

Mickey ground his crooked teeth together. He hated the trees, the dirt, those damn bushes and shrubs and worms and birds and moss and sunshine. He felt exposed and blinded all at once.

Anything could hide in green.

“Hello there!” Tesla called out. The idiot was on his feet. Earp snatched at his sleeve, but Tesla wrenched his arm away and shouted again: “Did you smell the pogaca baking?”

There was silence in the woods. Mick imagined he could smell the anxious sweat of dozens of traitors, each eager to prove his worth to the Axis through violent action.

“Nikola Tesla, you are needed by the President of the United States,” a voice boomed from the trees. It was a man without any discernible accent.

“I understand that Mister Tesla is dead,” the scientist replied. “I read it in the New York Post.”

“This is a long way to deliver that rag,” the man called back.

“The local post office is very accommodating,” Tesla replied. His lips smirked but the rest of his face was dead still.

The intruder shoved his way through the bushes, keeping himself cloaked in a tall oak's deep shadow. He was decked out in a complete US Army field uniform, a colonel's full bird on his collar. He looked every bit legitimate, from his trench boots to his steel pot helmet, save for his gun. The man was carrying an MP 40 submachine gun, a nine-millimeter stamped-steel monster native to Germany capable of shredding a target two hundred yards away with five hundred rounds a minute. It was the finest machine pistol the Reich had to offer

“We came a long way on Roosevelt's orders,” the uniformed man growled. At that, three dozen or more men emerged from the woods around him in a loose firing line. Each was armed to the teeth, most wielding Carcano rifles, others sporting Beretta 38A submachine guns, and every one carried a black Beretta automatic pistol; all Italian weapons.

“You see what I'm seeing?” Mickey whispered.

“You bet,” Earp replied. “Tridente Cremisi.”

“Italian traitors,” Mickey snarled through clenched teeth.

The Tridente were Italian-American militants, trained and armed by Mussolini's spies. They weren't the Silver Legion: they were men with a singular purpose. Whereas the Legion was an amalgam of disparate paranoid hate groups banded together under a convenient banner, the Tridente was focused. They sought a sovereign Italy and would strike at any who threatened her, even against the country they were actually born in. They had a strained alliance with the Legion and would only rarely work with the Abwehr.

Mick sighed. He had just the luck to show up to one of those rare occasions.

“Gentlemen, there is no one here interested in leaving with you,” Tesla said, his voice loud enough to wash out Mick and Earp's mutterings. “Please go home.”

“I can't do that,” the ‘colonel’ replied. “Like I said, the cripple gave us orders.”

“Cripple?” Earp snapped, bristling. F.D.R. had personally given Earp his Office commission. Three dozen Tridente guns popped to shoulders at his outburst, three dozen fingers wrapped around triggers.

“Who's that there with you?” the ‘colonel’ shouted, his MP 40's sights locked onto Tesla's chest.

“Some of your colleagues,” Tesla answered. He motioned for the officials to stand. With that their element of surprise was gone so they stood. “They neglected to mention the president's request.”

Mick squared his shoulders and glared across the divide at the uniformed man. He wasn't big, nor was jhe armored like some of the D3 krauts he'd heard about. The man lowered his machine pistol and studied the pair of officials for a long moment.

His beady eyes reflected pink in the low light.

“Identify yourselves,” he demanded. Mick spit into the dirt. Earp gritted his teeth before he spoke:

“I am Regional Inspector Earp of - !”

Gunfire cut him off. The intruder's pink eyes had widened at Earp's name and he fired his MP 40 from the hip in an instant.

His men followed his lead, and three dozen rifles and machine guns howled in unison.

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Copyright © 2025 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Tyrelle Smith.