The First Interbellum (1918-1939)

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Recall that Zadatharion had been drawn to Chicago by his own interest in the fact
that the operatives of the Unity were so interested in something in Chicago. He did
not know what it was that so interested his strange collective enemy, but the fact of
his enemy being so interested was itself interesting.

Zadatharion arrived in Chicago and began to investigate, as quietly as he could do
so, but as we have already seen, just the presence of such power as his was all too
noticeable to the sensitives working for the Unity, and indeed the Unity itself did
its best to keep track of the movements of Zadatharion. It was not extremely good
at this, any more than Zadatharion was able to discern the movements of the Unity,
but it did have its agents always on the watch for any sign of his presence.

Jurgensen and his master had made preparations against the possibility of Avatars
coming into the affair, and now those preparations were put into effect. Along with
his own men (and women), Jurgensen was aided by the presence of several of the
unimems, the ‘components’ of the Unity, present in Chicago and channeling in the
necessary psychic energy to veil the entire area in metaphysical ‘interference’. This
was a very low-level effect, but added to the natural constant telepathic ‘noise’ and
interference from the presence of millions of people in a relatively small area like
Chicago, it was enough to keep Zadatharion (and Aradel, who was also present)
from using their psychic and Flux abilities to discern the nature of the situation in a
short time. They were forced to rely on much more ‘conventional’ methods.[1]

At times, Zadatharion or Aradel would make an effort to overcome the interference,
which it seemed worth the attempt. Also, the two Avatars dealt harshly and very
briefly with three different assassination attempts by the forces working for their
enemies, these various uses of their power were detected by Howard Lake. He had
no experience to suggest that such intensities of power could exist, but even so his
machine was detecting and logging those signals relatively accurately.

In the meantime, the Seven Aces, tracking down ‘Alvin Stanel’ and his associates,
were working their way along a trail that led them first to the University of Chicago,
and then to the Chicago underworld. It was not as hard as one might have thought,
Jurgensen and his associates had been guarding their tracks to make themselves less
visible to the Rhaemyi and the Avatars and such like, they were less well hidden to
‘conventional’ eyes, if those eyes had first been alerted to the presence of the trail.
The Aces had resources of Federal information and money and connections that
could be, and were, used to work their way along the various associations that they
discovered radiated out from ‘Alvin Stanel’.

It was not that Jurgensen was incompetent. Normally, his lack of worry about the
ability of the conventional authorities to track his movements and activities would
have been completely justified. It was only the indirect knowledge of the more
esoteric world held by the Aces, and the unprecedented fact of the ‘detector’ that
Lake had developed, that permitted the Aces to penetrate the deception at all. This
was something that had never really happened to Jurgensen before, in decades of
activity as the chief agent of the Unity. This was why some of the trails that the
Aces now followed were not as well hidden as they otherwise would have been.

It was a far more serious oversight than Jurgensen could possibly have imagined.

The associations of Stanel turned out to include some members of the complex and
unsavory Chicago criminal scene. It rapidly became clear that ‘Professor Stanel’
knew people in the illegal alcohol business, and that a steady flow of money was
heading into various hidden accounts, ‘Stanel’ was actually a crime boss of sorts
himself, and profiting handsomely by these activities. It seemed very, very odd
that the same man would be involved in moving illegal booze across the border
with Canada and throughout much of the middle west, and also using a cover
identity as a specialist in history and old languages, and that his ‘cover’ would
be something as improbable as a British academic.

The Aces were able to learn much of this over the course of a few days, but even
so time was pressing. They knew that the State Department could not stall the
issue of the stolen gems for long. The United States had not yet even informed
the owners of the gems that the real gems were gone, but that could not last long.
It was in itself a serious violation of protocol, at the very least, and Conners was
quite sure that his chief in Washington was ‘feeling the heat’ already. [2]

One of the trails they were following led them to a group of smugglers who were
known by the Illinois authorities to be involved in moving whiskey across Lake
Michigan, and they determined that a boat known to be used by this group had
been seen near the Chicago lake shore on the evening the gems had been stolen.

MORE LATER.


[1] Recall that as a general thing, most Homosapients naturally generate a
steady, low-level pulse of Antipsionic activity, which can accumulate to a very
substantial intensity in high-population, low-volume areas like large megalopoli.
This makes psionic abilities somewhat harder to use in large cities even without any
further interference such as the Unity was now providing.

[2] In fact, he had no idea how much. McLaird was developing new ulcers
as the whole business unfolded.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

As the pieces came together, it looked fairly likely to Conners that the vessel in
question had been brought to the tunnel entrance and used to carry away the entire
stolen display case, with the gems still inside. The problem was that there were
an almost infinite number of places along the shore of Lake Michigan where such
a craft could put to shore and unload the stolen jewels. Lake Michigan was quite
large, and possessed of a long, intricate, and in some areas very empty coastline.

Given time, it might have been possible to track the chain of activity back through
the various gangsters, smugglers, and other shady sorts to find the actual owners
of the boat, and to track down their movements and perhaps find the vessel, but it
would require weeks or months that simply were not available. Fortunately, the
situation admitted of another possible solution.

Conners, as he considered that they were dealing with opponents who made use
of ‘supernatural’ abilities, realized that their possession of a machine able to
detect such could be a crucial advantage. As long as their opponents failed to
recognize that they did possess such a device, they would continue to use those
abilities, and that could reveal their location. It seemed to Conners that it was not
unlikely that their enemies would make use of such abilities at their base, or their
hideout, or whatever one wanted to call it, which might well be where the boat
had gone as well.

The problem, of course, was that even the custom-made version of the detector
mechanism was large, bulky, massive, and had a relatively short effective range.
It most certainly could not be used to search for ‘supernatural’ activities across the
length and breadth of Lake Michigan. It did not have even a small fraction of the
range performance necessary to attempt such a feat.

On the other hand, it seemed to Conners more likely than not that the boat would
have gone only a relatively short distance. If that was so, a search up and down
the shoreline might actually pay off, if they could somehow make the sensor
system portable. When tasked with this, Lake found a way, albeit a clumsy and
expensive and inconvenient way.

As one of the other Aces commented, “Anything is possible if you’re willing to
spend enough money on it.”

Though that statement was not entirely and always true, it certainly held more than
just a grain of truth. Fortunately for the Seven Aces, the pressure to recover the
stolen gems was sufficient that Robert McLaird was able to get authorization for
spending a great deal of money. Some of that cash now went to purchase a barge.

Well, not quite a barge, but something like one. It was a flatbed boat with heavy
diesel engines, able to carry the sensor apparatus and quite a few people on a run
up and down the shore of Lake Michigan, in the hopes of detecting something.
As soon as the custom detector was in place on the boat, a second similar craft
was procured and the ‘home made’ detector Howard Lake had constructed was
also put to use, to make it possible to search more shoreline in the same period.

This was a chancy activity, because there was no guarantee that it would actually
work. Still, Conners thought it was worth the try, and even as he and most of his
men continued their legwork in Chicago, the sensor-boats were sent out to scour
the shoreline for any trace of what a later time would call psionic activity.

As it happened, the gamble paid off.

Jurgensen was still making heavy use of psionic healing to accelerate his recovery
from the wounds he had taken during his escape from the hotel. He had moved
from the safehouse in Chicago to his temporary headquarters, in a small bay to the
north of Chicago on the western side of Lake Michigan. There, his psychically
capable associates continued to apply their power to accelerate his recovery. The
group remained blissfully unaware that their opponents had access to sensors
able to detect such things. Indeed, they remained mostly unaware of even the
existence of the Seven Aces as an organization.

Thus, when one of the sensor-boats approached the upcoast hideout, the machine
began to flash and sound its alarms, revealing the presence of psychic power in
use. The radio call flashed back to Chicago, and the Aces moved to investigate.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

It was here that one of the gifts possessed by Nathan Conners came into play. As
the leader of the Seven Aces, he had the abilities one would desire to find in a
commanding officer. He was a decent administrator, a competent strategist and a
very good tactician, he was alert and paid attention to details, and even at a young
age he was already a reasonably competent judge of people. Along with these
abilities, he was a good hand-to-hand combatant.

Along with these talents, however, Conners possessed something more, something
much less common and rather harder to define. It might be called an instinct, or
perhaps that would be the wrong word. In its essence, Conners had the ability to
subconsciously put subtle clues together, to assemble them and perceive patterns
that his conscious mind might not immediately recognize, but which could be very
telling once understood. In practice, the result was the Conners sometimes seemed
to guess very accurately, to perceive what was going on before he himself quite
understood how he had reached that understanding. [1]

As he received the reports that the searching boats had detected something, Conners
immediately concluded that speed was of the essence. He was not quite certain
why this was so, but he had learned to trust that ‘deep instinct’ when it sounded such
alarms, ever since his early teens when he first recognized that it was present. No
more than a few hours had passed by the time Conners had gathered what data he
could find about the region in question, and he and Brody and a few other men had
set out to follow up on the potential lead.

By this point, more reinforcements had arrived in Chicago, Conners had twenty men
available on site. This was still none too many, of course, but at this stage there were
not all that many Aces anyway, the organization was still new and relatively small.

Conners, Brody, and three other men headed north to investigate the discovery, and
they knew already from their search of the property records that the area was mostly
empty. Though it was not all that far from Chicago in terms of distance, it was not
heavily populated. The region in question was rocky, wooded, and much of it was
off the ‘beaten track’.

The sensor boat was able to narrow down the trace fairly easily, because the signal
was strong. Further, now that the detection apparatus was on a mobile platform, it
was relatively easy to ‘triangulate’ on that strong signal. The trace led them to a
small embayment on the west coast of Lake Michigan. A large house was found to
be located on that bay, with its own small dock able to serve two modest boats.

The house itself had been built by a rich industrialist around 1900, and since sold
to another wealthy man, who used it as a summer retreat. The man supposedly
lived most of his time in New York City, coming west to spend the hottest part of
the summer on the relatively cool shore of Lake Michigan.

This information had been easily obtained by a quick check of property records,
but the very act of finding it held dangers. Though the Aces had no idea of this,
Jurgensen had paid a clerk to pass him a warning if anyone showed a sign
of interest in that property. Jurgensen himself was the owner, the ‘New York
City financier’ persona was just one of his many useful legends, and he used the
house on the Lake as one of his safehouse/bases for his work when he was in the
United States. He had such useful places located near most of the major cities of
the United States, just in case they should prove useful. When his business had
taken him to Chicago in 1925, he had naturally made use of his waiting safehouse.

A telephone call from the clerk alerted Jurgensen that someone was interested in
the ownership of his safehouse. This news reached Jurgensen less than twenty
four hours after the Seven Aces had sent a man to pay a visit to the office. This
was the first indication Jurgensen received that the Aces were even involved, even
if he had no idea that the Aces existed, as an organization. He had fought them in
a previous incident, in Petrograd, but he had no idea who they were, and as yet he
had no idea that the same people were working against him in Chicago.

That might seem fair enough, of course. At this point, the Aces had no idea that
they were working against the same man they had encountered in Petrograd.

MORE LATER.


[1] Often he worked out the details, or brought them to consciousness, later
when he had leisure to consider the matter. This was not a psionic ability, it
was a gift of thought and analysis.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The reason it took almost a day for Jurgensen to learn of someone interested in his
property was that his paid clerk took several hours to learn of the fact, and when
the message arrived at his 'safehouse' Jurgensen was asleep, still recovering from
his wounds. When he awakened and was given the message, Jurgensen was quite
angry not to have been informed earlier. He demoted one of his subordinates for
this lack of judgement, and began thinking about who might be curious about his
safehouse and what he could or should do about the matter. [1]

His own suspicion was that the Rhaemyi and/or Zadatharion and Aradel and their
followers had a line of his safehouse. He was sure that they could have no more
than a suspicion, or else they would already have struck against him. In this, he
was wrong, but quite understandably wrong. This basic error on his part enabled
Conners and his men to have time to locate the safehouse, and to see the cabin
cruiser docked there and match the appearance of it to the descriptions they had of
it from witnesses in Chicago.

Guided by his subconscious instinct that time was crucial, Conners organized his
men for a fast action that was, among other things, technically illegal. They did
not, after all, have search warrants or any of the other paraphernalia of such
matters, nor were they acting with the approval of the legal authorities. Still, they
knew that the people they were seeking were unlikely to be filing any charges. It
was risky, but not so risky as it might have been in any time and under other
circumstances. Conners was concerned more by availability of forces than he was
by the technical legalities under which they would be operating. [2]

The strike came in the pre-dawn hours, as Conners led a force of thirty men, a
large percentage of the total force of the Seven Aces at the time, in what would
perhaps be considered a commando raid against the safehouse. What followed
was strange from the point of view of either the Aces or the Jurgensen forces.

Conners and his men had received some very limited training in how to deal with
what would someday be called ‘psionic’ enemies. This training had come from
the British organization SG-7, and though it was, as noted, very limited, it was
not useless. Jurgensen and his men were prepared and on the lookout for people
from the Rhaemyi, or servants of the Avatars, not so much concerned with the
‘conventional’ authorities and their minions. The combination of their training
and the misapprehensions of their targets enabled the Seven Aces to ‘get the
drop’ on them, which is why the Aces were not wiped out by the objectively
superior forces waiting for them in the safehouse.

The Aces were moderately outnumbered, but very heavily outgunned. Jurgensen
and his men had converted the old two-story structure from a small but very
comfortable mansion into a veritable fortress. There were caches of weaponry
and ammunition, and concealed fixed-mount weaponry on the more likely
approaches. What appeared to be a decorative cupola atop the structure served
as a viable watch tower, and it was constantly manned. Behind the apparently
conventional and decorate walls and supports were metal armor and other sorts
of precautionary additions, as well. Jurgensen was a cautious, suspicious man.

On the other hand, not all of the people working for Jurgensen at the safehouse
were experienced combatants. While many of them were former soldiers or
otherwise familiar with violent situations, many were specialists with limited
or no combat experience. Jurgensen had been running a complex operation in
Chicago and not one that he had expected to turn violent. Indeed, if it turned
violent it had almost by definition failed, for reasons we shall see.

Now it did turn violent, as the Seven Aces raided his safehouse, and in
the ensuring chaos several people were quickly killed on both sides. Conners
and his men managed to sneak up on the safehouse by coming in from the
Lake itself, coming ashore to the north and south and coming in over ridges,
rather than by any of the more convenient lines of access.

When the shooting started, the Aces proved that McLaird had worked well when
recruiting them and training them, they carried off the raid with precision,
discipline, and efficiency, even as things went crazy around them. Along with
armed and well-trained fighters, Jurgensen had psionically-capable men in his
safehouse, some of whom had the necessary powers and skills to be dangerous
in combat. Even a small amount of psychokinetic power can be deadly if used
with high levels of skill, as the Aces discovered in those strange pre-dawn hours.

MORE LATER.


[1] Though a sadist and many other unpleasant things, Jurgensen was not
a fool or a Hollywood villain, he did not kill or torment his subordinates because
of ordinary errors of judgement, he was a very capable leader and administrator
who only rarely allowed his personal inclinations to interfere with necessities.

[2] Conners and his men were not indifferent to legality, but circumstances
did matter to how they operated.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

At first the assault went almost spookily well for the Aces, which made Conners
nervous because no plan ever works as planned in combat. They managed to sneak
past the first line of sentries by a combination of an unexpected approach, skilled
personnel, and a certain amount of luck, and they quickly overwhelmed and they
dispatched the first tier of guards quickly and ruthlessly. Within a very short time,
however, the resistance intensified and the battle, for such it was, dissolved into a
chaos of individual encounters all over the property and the house itself.

So close together were the combatants, and so tight and confined were the various
parts of the battle zone, that for the most part the combatants used small arms,
and sometimes even knives or other melee weapons, because heavily weaponry had
far too high a chance of striking their own forces. Conners was more than a little
surprised by how heavily fortified their target turned out to be, a misjudgement on
his part that cost the lives of some of his men. On the other hand, it would be safe
to say that Jurgensen and his defenders were surprised by how well-trained and
well-disciplined the attackers proved to be as well.

Once past the outer defenses and into the main house, the Seven Aces discovered
a very peculiar place, a place with very many strange things contained inside.

Conners swallowed hard, as he nodded at Charlie Adams, on the
opposite side of the doorway, and he rolled the tear gas grenade
through the doorway. A modification of a device used by the
French in the Great War, the device flooded the room with a
choking haze of gas. The two men went through the doorway
as quickly as they could, since a man coming through an open
door was ideally positioned as a target. Indeed, shots rang out
as Adams and Conners came through the opening, but went wild,
the men too busy dealing with breathing to take proper aim.

Wearing gas gear, heavy and bulky but effective, Conners and
Adams fired more precisely, there were four men in the room
and two of them went down with bullets in their torsos, the other
too retreating as best they could to the next room. More men
came into the room behind the leaders of the Seven Aces, while
Conners cursed the differences between the plans they had
studied and the actual layout of the house.

This sort of combat was among the most hellishly dangerous that
existed. Room to room, corridor to corridor, blind doorways and
no real knowledge of the layout, against defenders who knew the
area and how to make use of it. The Aces had little choice but to
move quickly, and ruthlessly, because they knew that it they let
the enemy ‘catch his breath’ the result could be disaster. Though
the battle had only been raging for perhaps fifteen minutes, already
it felt as if they had been engaged for many hours.

Now, the room they had just secured greeted them with a strange
sight. The chamber was about ten yards on a side, and looked as
if it might originally have been some sort of large living room.

Now it was covered on all sides, as well as floor and ceiling, in a
layer of metal plate. No effort at concealing the nature of this
was evident, and even to a cursory examination, it was clear that
the chamber had been intended to keep something contained
within it, not to keep things out. The doors were designed to
be sealed from outside, with heavy sliding metal bars able to
reinforce them, again on the outside. The inner walls were as
smooth as glass, or nearly so, offering no purchase and no
protuberances or bolts or anything else that might represent
a weakness in the chamber.

“What the Hell was this place?” Conners heard Adams mutter
as they moved toward the opposite doors. “What were they
gonna use this for?!”

“Worry about that later, Charlie,” Conners ordered, “I hear
somebody coming up the far hall!”

Moments later, a short but intense firefight broke out as six
men fired through the far door, the exchange took lives on
both sides, but the Aces broke through and into the next room,
where they found a laboratory of some sort, filled with what
had been scientific equipment before the battle wrecked most
of it. Before they had time to even catch their breath, another
attack came at them from an adjacent corridor.

Conners raised his pistol to fire, only to discover that it would
not fire, because the safety lock had been engaged...somehow.
The other Aces discovered that they were similarly afflicted,
and two men died and two were wounded as they fell back to
the Metal Room, struggling to get their weapons operational.

“How the-”

“****, I didn’t put the safety on-!”

“Quiet!” Adams snapped in his ‘senior sergeant’ voice, though
he was technically a lieutenant now, or would have been if the
Aces had had any legal existence.

“Everybody reset your weapons, we’re being ‘witched’,” Conners
said. “Be ready to use your knives if you have to.”

By the time their overconfident pursuers entered the Metal Room
after them, the Aces had gotten their weapons working, and the
balance changed again, for the most part the Aces were better at
conventional combat than the men they were facing.


Even as Conners led Team One through the heart of the safehouse, Jurgensen was
struggling to organize his defense and figure out who it was that had discovered his
headquarters and attacked him. He had known that someone had been nosing
around the records with regard to his safehouse, but he had not really expected this
sort of sudden, military-style attack, nor had he expected it to come so quickly.

To make matters worse, from his point of view, he was still recovering from what
had been fairly significant wounds taken during his escape from the burning hotel.
Though psionic power could and had been used to accelerate his healing, he was
still suffering considerable discomfort and needing to rest and sleep more then he
usually did. When the attack had come, Jurgensen had been permitting himself a
brief sleep before heading into Chicago to address the issue of the people looking
into the ownership of his house. By the time he had been awakened and informed
of what was happening, the battle had already been raging for some minutes.

Normally his own psychic senses would have awakened him the moment the battle
started, or even possibly (not a sure thing, but often it worked) warned him of the
coming attack before it came. Now, though, so much of his psionic strength had
been in use accelerating his healing that his senses were somewhat numbed. The
presence of considerable amounts of pain medication in his system further reduced
his psionic sensitivities, making him unusually vulnerable while he was asleep.[1]

Thus Jurgensen had been caught uncharacteristically off-guard.

MORE LATER.

[1] Pain medication, in this case, being a mix of morphine and an exotic drug
he had discovered some decades before while travelling in Africa. The combination
was effective, but had its drawbacks.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Jurgensen was still cursing his own wounds even as he listened to the reports of
the commanders of his men, and tried to sort through what exactly was happening.
His mind was foggier than was the usual state, from the drugs and his own natural
exhaustion from his wounds, but he was able to discern that something very, very
strange was happening in this attack. Nothing about it fit the profiles of any of the
people who might normally have been expected to launch such a thing.

Such an attack was not the ‘style’ of either the Rhaeymi or the Avatars who were
so often in his way, if they launched one at all, they would have done so with such
overwhelming force that no battle would even occur. The Rhaemyi would not
have attacked with such a small group, and had Zadatharion and Aradel attacked,
they would have struck with such power that it was unlikely that house would even
still exist, after so many minutes of the attack.

The attackers, as far as Jurgensen and the defenders had been able to tell, had struck
in three groups, by surprise in the pre-dawn darkness. One group was fighting their
way right through the house itself, Jurgensen could easily hear the sounds of
the fighting elsewhere in the large house. Another group seemed to be trying to get
access to the boats moored on the small pier, and a third group had struck earlier in
support of the first two, and then seemed to have vanished. This last group was one
of the more nerve-wracking aspects of the situation, since Jurgensen and his men had
no idea where they were now or what they were doing.

The entire battle was only minutes old, but it was already clear to Jurgensen that no
matter how it came out, this was a disaster from his point of view. As he pondered
the situation, he concluded that he might be able to overcome the attackers, if he was
to throw everything he had available into the fight, but that outcome was in doubt.
He had an edge in numbers and weaponry, but several of his best fighters and most
capable combat leaders had already gone down in the first moments of the battle,
and for various reasons he could not call in reinforcements from the Unity just then.

The problem was that he was engaged in activities on his own part that he wanted
kept from the Unity. The Unity certainly knew that Jurgensen was active on work
in Chicago, but there were ‘extra’ aspects to the operation that Jurgensen had set
in motion on his own, and Jurgensen most certainly did not want that known to his
master. At the very least, he suspected, such knowledge would lead to a great deal
of loss of freedom, pain, and suffering on his part, and it might well mean a very
sudden end to his potentially still long life.

If the Unity sent in more forces to the safehouse, it might find any number of signs
of his own clandestine operations. Jurgensen dared not take the chance, he needed
to keep his local operation staffed entirely by his own picked men, and in addition,
there was no way the Unity could get any reinforcements to the site in time to make
any difference, anyway, even if Jurgensen dared call on such.

Furthermore, even if whoever was attacking was not associated with the Rhaemyi,
or the Avatars, or any of his other familiar foes, the attack could only draw more
attention than he wanted to the safehouse, and its secrets. No matter had he went
over the situation in his mind, Jurgensen kept coming to the same grim conclusion.

He quickly concluded that escape was more important the victory in the battle, even
if part of him raged at the setback and longed to capture and interrogate the people
responsible, there was no time, and he lacked the necessary resources just then. The
secrets in the safehouse needed to be kept, either possibly from his mysterious new
enemies and certainly from his familiar old enemies.

With a muffled, internalized curse of hate, Jurgensen reached his decision and acted.

“Dekter,” he ordered his ranking lieutenant on-site, in clipped,
calm German, “begin a fighting retreat. Let the enemy think they
are driving you back, if you can, but draw them further into the
house as you do. Minimize our own casualties, destroy anything
you can that they might be able to take with them, but focus on
drawing them in.”

“Sir,” Dekter replied in German, with a nod.

“Armin,” Jurgensen said, turning to one of his technical men, “I
want you to prepare the incendiaries for use, on my command.
We will draw as many of these bastards into our web as we can
and burn them alive.”

Armin saluted and hurried to obey, though his chief was still as
calm and self-possessed as usual, there was something in his
manner as he spoke of incinerating his enemies that sent shivers
down the spine of the engineer.

“Nels,” Jurgensen said in German to a Swede standing to one
side, “have the attackers captured the boats?”

“No, sir,” Nels said calmly, “my men are holding both vessels
and the pier as well.”

Jurgensen nodded in approval, Nels had always been the soul
of professional competence, ever since he had ‘hired’ him away
from the Swedish military after that organization discovered
that Nels had been engaging in certain...indiscretions.

“How long will that continue?”

“As long as no more men join the attack, we can hold them as
long as we need to,” Nels answered. “We are not constrained
by our surroundings there as we are here, and the attackers are
forced to attack on only a few lines.”

“Very well,” Jurgensen said. “Is the cabin cruiser fueled?”

“Fueled and ready,” Nels replied. “I issued the necessary orders
as soon as the attack began, to engines are warm and the vessel
can sail on your order, sir.”

“Very good, Nels,” Jurgensen said. “We will make our departure
aboard the cabin cruiser. Can we get from here to the boat safely?”

“With difficulty, sir,” Nels replied. “The second group of the
enemy is between the house and the boat. My men can cut us a
path, but it will be costly. These people are competent, whoever
they are, we should respect the threat they represent.”

Jurgensen nodded, and Nels left the room to prepare their exit.


Even as Jurgensen prepared his departure and his trap, a fight was still raging not
so far away, as a small but heavily armed team of Aces made yet another attempt
to gain control of the pier and the boats moored alongside.

MORE LATER.

[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The small embayment on which the safehouse rested was well-suited for the role,
protected on the north and south by ridges and open to the waters of Lake Michigan
only through a relatively narrow gap. It provided excellent shelter both from the
elements and indeed from visual observation to an observer out on the Lake. The
bay itself was about a quarter of a mile long, running mostly east-west, and some
one hundred to one hundred and fifty meters wide over most of its length.

At the western end of the bay was the house, the surrounding property and the pier.
The pier jutted out into the bay and on the north side was a cabin cruiser and on
the south side a small runabout. The house was roughly a quarter of a mile from
the shore, connected to the bay and the pier by a paved walkway. A small service
building was present on the shore, beside the back of the pier. Constructed in its
beginning as a playground for a wealthy recluse, this place was now being used
for a rather different purpose, and in the dark before the dawn on a summer morning
in 1925, it had become the sight of an ongoing battle.

The second team of the Aces, sent to secure the boats, were experiencing far less
in the way of casualties, but at the same time making less progress than the team
in the house itself. The defenders on the boats and in the boathouse had a clear
field of fire, and were not constrained in their choice of weapon by the same close
quarters considerations that applied in the house. They could use heavy guns,
rifles, automatic weapons, and more unusual devices, and they were sheltered by
the hidden armor in the boathouse and by distance, since the Aces were limited in
what sort of weaponry they could bring with them to such an assault.

Recognizing this, the second team under Commander Joneseon had fallen back from
their initial attack as soon as they realized what intense resistance was waiting, and
had surrounded the pier as best they could and were trying to find a way to advance
past the defending fire, while keeping the men on the boat and the pier from going
to the assistance of their fellows in the house.

There was not much in the way of ‘cover’ around the pier, it was mostly just a vast
lawn, immaculately maintained as part of the ‘cover’ for the safehouse. A broad,
open, level approach, the only visual cover a few pieces of statuary or decorative
bushes, it was a nightmare for a small and lightly armed attack force to cross while
it was covered by heavy enemy firepower. To make matters the worse, any attempt
to seize the boats would have to proceed toward and along the pier, since the waters
on either side were too wide to manage. This channeled any attack, no matter
which angle it might approach from, directly toward the same highly defended spot.

All things considered, it was a nasty situation that Commander Joneson faced.

“Sir,” one of the newer recruits reported, having crawled on his
stomach up the small hole where Joneson and Bill Miles waited,
“we’re hearing the sound of engines warming up on the bigger
boat and we’ve seen what look like people crouching inside the
runabout as well. They may be about to try and move them.”

“If they try it, they’ll hit our guys out on the Lake,” Miles said,
very quietly. “But it’s hard to watch all the directions they could
go with just the men we have out there.”

“I don’t believe it,” Joneson commented in a soft whisper. “If
they were going to do that, they’d have already done it. They’re
waiting for something, Devil knows what but something.

“How long until the Sun rises?” Joneson asked.

Miles looked at his pocket watch and said, “About thirty
minutes, but it’s going to be cloudy so it won’t be so
obvious as it might be.”

“Bad enough right now,” Joneson mused, looking out at
the nightmarishly open ground between them and their
target. “When the sun rises and there’s plenty of light,
it’s going to be a thousand times worse.”

Suddenly the sound of gunfire rose, but the sound was
coming not from the boats but from the east. Joneson
looked in that direction and saw the tell-tale flashes of
gunfire and the sound of yelling, and began to curse.

“Fall back!” he ordered, “we can’t let them trap us
between the boats and the house!”

In that moment, more gunfire suddenly sounded in
the quiet darkness, as the men in the boathouse made
a sortie against their enemies, trapping a section of
Team Two in precisely the trap he had feared.
Caught between the men advancing from the house
and the men in the boathouse, those Aces were all
but helpless. Several men fell in a few seconds as
the rest scattered as best they could, unable to stand
and able to retreat only with desperate difficulty.

Joneson let out a string of heartfelt curses as he saw his
men falling, and ordered a retreat while they could.

In the meantime, not so far away in the house, Team One was suddenly left in an
eerie quiet, over the course of a few minutes, the resistance had melted away,
leaving only the occasional pot shot or booby trap to deal with. They had made
a great deal of progress over the course of the last few minutes, but now, just as
they reached the innermost recesses of the house, the resistance had faded away.

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[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Jurgensen and his men were making their move, every minute was now precious.
As one might expect, the fortified house had quite an array of hidden entrances
and exits, some of them quite carefully disguised. Even as his men were slowly
falling back, drawing the attack forces into the depths of the house, Jurgensen led
his immediate lieutenants and chief psions and technical personnel out through a
hidden door, assembling in a concealed subbasement chamber. Over the course
of a few minutes, more and more of his surviving men joined them.

“Sir,” Dekter reported, “in his usual steady German, “everyone
is accounted for, the others are either dead or have been retrieved,
except for the squad now harrying the enemy.”

Jurgensen nodded and turned to Armin, his chief of technical
operations in the field, and asked, “Are the incendiaries ready?”

“Yes, sir,” Armin said in nervous German. He held up a simple
electrical control, with a dial and a knife-switch attached to it,
connected to a web of wiring on the far wall by cable. “Set the
dial for the number of minutes you want, up to fifteen, and the
switch starts the clock. Once it starts, it can not be stopped.”

“Excellent,” Jurgensen said, his voice calm but with a certain
gleam of anticipation in his eyes that made several of his men
nervous. “Dekter, inform your men that they have five minutes
to get out beginning now, we are going to shut the heavy doors.”

“Sir!”

The moments ticked by leadenly, the sound of gunfire from the
house fading away as the orders were obeyed. As the clock
struck five minutes, Jurgensen walked over to the wall, which
was covered in breaker boxes and other electrical gear, and he
pulled a heavy switch shut. A distant rumble of motors could
be heard rising through the house, even as another door opened
up on one wall, revealing a stair that led up and outside.

“Everyone out!” Jurgensen ordered, as he turned the dial to set
the clock for five minutes, and closed the switch.


Moments before, some few tens of yards away in space, but with several heavy
walls separating them from Jurgensen and his men, Conners and Team One had
been pondering the sudden cessation of resistance. It had been falling off for a
few minutes, but now it had simply stopped. Even the occasional pot-shots had
stopped, the only sound of combat was coming from a distance, in the direction
of the bay and the pier.

“I hear something,” Adams said suddenly, in the quiet. “Some
kind of machine, or something...”

The entire house was dark, all the lights had gone out moments
before. The Aces had immediately prepared for an assault, but
none had come. Indeed, nothing at all had happened. Seconds
passed, but it was as if the entire house was suddenly abandoned.

Indeed, there was a grinding noise to be heard, or almost rather
felt, a vibration in the walls and floor. Then Conners saw that
something was moving in the darkness, it was hard to be sure
just what even with his now dark-adjusted eyes. Still, it seemed
to be coming from the direction of the doors.

“Everybody out! NOW!” Conners suddenly heard himself give
the order, even as his conscious mind was still processing what
his subconscious had recognized. They made it through the
door into the main hall, but by the time they reached the next
set of doors, they were shut. Heavy plates of steel were now
locked into place across the doors. The vibration that they had
felt had been motors sliding heavy steel doors into place on all
the exterior doors and several of the internal doors as well.

“Oh, crap,” Conners muttered to himself in the darkness, as the
Aces realized the nature of the trap that had closed upon them.


There were, however, three teams of Aces on the ground that morning, along
with a handful of men on boats out on the Lake. The third team was the smallest
of the three. Their first task had been to find and cut the phone lines, power lines,
and other connections to the outside. This had been accomplished, and now the
handful of men in the third group were preparing to do what they could to assist the
first two teams.

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[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

Team Three was the smallest of the three groups, but they were relatively well-
rested and had as yet taken no casualties, not even any wounds. As they came
back to the main area around the house, they found their compatriots engaged
in a nasty ongoing firefight around the pier and the boats, and joined in. Their
timing was superb, they arrived in time to trap Jurgensen and his men between
Team Two and themselves, just as Jurgensen had caught the men in Team Two
between himself and the boathouse, just moments earlier.

Furthermore, Team Three came in from the north side, and managed to pick off
some of the men on the cabin cruiser, men who had exposed themselves to that
apparently safer side while lining up shots against the men in Team Two.

In the meantime, Conners and his men were working rather desperately to get
out of the trap inside the house.

“Move it!,” Charlie Adams ordered, as the two younger recruits
carefully placed the tubes against the metal ‘curtain’ that had fallen
across the door. “I want to be home in time for dinner!”

His voice was as strict as his words were casual. Conners was
grateful that he could count on Adams to take care of that, while
he set up the device that he hoped desperately would enable his
men and himself to get out of what he was sure was a deathtrap.

Conners had no idea of just what form that death would take, but
his deep instinct was screaming at him that it was coming, and
that it was coming soon. The way the metal panels had slid
into place, sealing the rooms off so perfectly, was sufficient to
convince him of that. Some situations just felt like death.

Normally the heavy metallic panels would have been more than
enough to trap the men in the house. Fortunately, the Seven
Aces were a very unusual group of men. One of the things
Conners and his men had considered in their ‘general planning’
was ways to get out of such situations, and they had taken some
precautions against just such a moment.

One such experimental precaution was a device designed to ‘burn’
through metal rapidly, using an acidic mixture. It was delicate,
and for the sake of safety and convenience it had to be carried in
a disassembled form. Since carrying the components of such a
device would have been highly inconvenient (to put it mildly!) in
combat situations, Howard Lake had designed them to be carried
as part of their uniforms.

Tubes of liquids, components of the acid mix, were built into the
belts and harnesses that the men used to carry their gear. Wiring
had been woven into belts and straps. All this equipment had to
be assembled, and Conners and his men had practiced at this, to
the point that they could assemble any of their various devices in
the dark, by ‘feel’, in just a few minutes.

Of course, those practice runs had not been in combat situations.
Now, though the room was dark other than the lights carried by
the men, and the situation was physically much like the places in
which they had performed their practice runs, the situations was
quite different, because the danger was immediate and real. This
made everything different, fear was in the air, adrenaline pumping
in the blood, and a sense of pressing time drove upon them. Now
they were racing, not against the stopwatch, but against Death.

“Damn it!” Conners cursed quietly, as he felt the wire in his hand
slip free of his fingers yet again. “Hold the light steady!”

“Sir!” the voice of one the most junior men said, his voice
almost steady as he did. He did manage to get the flickering
light to be a little steadier, as Conners fumbled for the wire.

It seemed to take an eternity, but in fact Conners was sure that it
was only a few seconds, as his fingers closed on the small wire
and brought it to the appropriate point on the mechanism. With
a sigh of relief, he saw the connection ‘take’ and he set the small
machine on the floor near the ‘join’ between the metal panel and
the slot into which it had locked itself.

Moments later, the scent of sweat and fear was joined by a sour,
chemical odor, as the device sprayed a stream of acidic liquid at
the metal, and the reaction began. The men backed away, the
fumes from the reaction were not entirely healthy, and nobody
wanted any of the acidic mix to touch their skin or eyes!

“Come on, come on...” Conners whispered, acutely conscious of
the passage of the seconds.

At approximately that time, Jurgensen and his lieutenants were discussing their
options for reaching the boats. Now that they were caught between two groups
of their enemies, they found themselves in a situation that had many precedents
in history, the ‘double encirclement’.

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[Johnny1A.2]

LATER.

The situation was unstable, Jurgensen had more men available to him than Team
Three could muster, more than enough to keep Team Two pinned down and still
prevent Team Three from pressing his forces between the groups. On the other
hand, for the moment the Aces had Jurgensen pinned down, and that enabled the
men in Team Two to focus on their still-elusive goal of capturing the cabin cruiser
and the runabout. This remained difficult, there was still no easy way to cross the
open space without being cut down by the men defending the boats and boathouse.

In the meantime, the seconds were still ticking away, as the members of Team One
were all too aware.

“Come on, come on,” Conners heard himself whispering, as the
scent of the ongoing reaction filled the air, burning their nostrils
and stinging their skin where the vapors touched them.

“Do you think it’ll work?” Charlie Adams asked him in a very
low whisper, too low to be heard by their men. “There’s not that
much acid in that thing!”

“It can’t burn through the door,” Conners whispered back, “but
if we’re lucky it’ll burn through the locking bars. I hope.”

“Would this be a good time to pray?” Adams asked dryly, still
in a whisper.

“Can’t hurt,” Conners whispered back. “Try crossing your fingers,
too.”

“Sir, yes sir!” Adams whispered.

Conners was actually going partly on a hunch, or as he preferred
to think of it, a ‘calculated risk’. He knew that acid was simply
not sufficient to cut its way straight through the metal plate, there
was too much metal and not enough acid.

When the metal plate had locked into place, however, Conners
was fairly sure that he had seen a bolt slide into place just prior
to the whole door sealing off. If that was true, Conners hoped
that the acid stream could break through the bolt, and then if the
bolt was the only one holding the plate in place, they might just
get out before...well, Conners was not sure. He was certain that
something bad was about to happen, but he did not know just
what that something would be.

He was sure that the details really did not matter, if they were
still in the room when it happened.

The endless seconds passed, each dropping leaden as if hours
long, and yet racing by faster than the racing hearts of the men.
They moved back as much as they could from the door, to
avoid the stinging vapors, but they dared not move too far for
fear to not being close enough to get out if the door opened.

Then, suddenly, so suddenly that the shock of it almost made
Conners lose his balance, the metal plate seemed to shift, as if
some vibration had gone through it.

“Stop the machine!” Conners ordered, but it was needless, since
the acid reservoir emptied itself moments later. Even as he was
issuing the order, two of the strongest men in the team, ready by
his previous instructions, grabbed at the door and pulled.

Conners bit his lips, holding his breath in a mixture of fear and
hope. If the door was held by additional bolts, they were out
of luck, and he knew it. Still, why would there be more? The
heavy metal rod would have been fully sufficient in most cases.

For a timeless, heart-hammering, stomach-churning moment,
Conners thought that their fortune had failed them, the men
strained to lift the door and it refused to move. Then, just as
he felt the nausea of seeing the failure, the door slid up by a
few inches, and he let out a breath of terrified relief.

“Rossi, Caruthers, get in there and help them lift it!” Adams
ordered in his ‘senior sergeant’ tone, and as four men worked
to lift the door it began to slide upward. As soon as it was
high enough, the members of Team One began to slide and
roll under it, after kicking open the wood-panel doors that
lay beyond the armor.

Meanwhile, Conners and Adams grabbed some pieces of heavy
furniture from the hall and positioned them to hold the armor in
place to let the men lifting the plate slide through. Last of all
went Conners and Adams, the metal plate slamming back into
position behind them as they rolled through!

They were on the front porch of the house now, and Conners
snapped, “Out and down, before somebody fires on us!”

In fact, there were no enemies in position to fire on them, but there was no way
for Conners and his men to know that just then. The members of Team One
headed away from the house as fast as they could while staying low, and just a
few moments later, the darkness of the pre-dawn night suddenly turned brighter
than the brightest day, in a blaze of red-white light coming from behind them.

MORE LATER.