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child?”
     
    “He may look young, but trust me, when Omega shows up, it’s the end.”   
     
    ***
     
    The image of dead British soldiers was frozen on the projection screen.  A dozen of them, their uniforms shot to shreds and blood-spattered, were splayed across the ground.  Donovan clicked the projector button to change the slide, now showing a poorly-dressed Russian family collapsed on top of one another along the side of a dark road.  The photography was stark and spared no detail, revealing the brain matter tangled in the woman’s babushka.  Her children’s dead, wide-open eyes. 
     
    “I have a dozen more of these,” Donovan said.  “All the same.  Random groups of people used as target practice.  All of them gunned down in the darkness from unknown locations.” 
     
    Donovan clicked the slide projector again to show the drawing of a fantastical-looking rifle.  A telescope and searchlight assembly mounted to the gun barrel, connected to several brick-sized batteries.  “You are looking at the prototype of an active infrared device called the ‘Vampir.’  MI-6 has confirmed the Nazis can now see us in the dark and pick us off at will from a distance.”
     
    Price grunted.  “How long before they begin mass-production?”
     
    “Hard to say.  Hitler is developing a whole host of experimental super weapons at his Hillersleben research facility.  Wunderwaffe , as he calls them.”
     
    The projector clicked, this time showing a short cartoon.  “This is the Oberth Sun Gun,” Donovan said, tapping the screen with his pointer at the orbiting space station as it rotated.  “Its reflective shields capture the sun’s rays and store the energy until it can be used to emit a laser beam.” 
     
    Fans extended from the space station as it collected rays from the sun, building in power until it fired an enormous burst at the earth and set it on fire.  “This thing is supposed to have enough power to make the ocean boil like a tea kettle and reduce whole cities to ashes.” 
     
    “Just a space laser, Colonel?” Price said drolly.  “Isn’t that aiming a little low when they could build a giant robot?  I say we thank God they’re wasting time trying to invent stuff they see in cartoons.”
     
    Donovan looked at Amelie Brevot.  “What do you think, Miss Brevot?”
     
    Amelie’s eyes turned downward.  “My brother is a good man, Colonel Donovan.” 
     
    Donovan nodded politely.  “Of course he is.  Unfortunately, Aleister Crowley is not.” 
     
    The next photo showed a balding, intense looking man dressed in wizard’s robes peering at them from the screen.  “What can one say about The Great Beast?   He’s been called a fraud, a sadist, an occultist, and the Antichrist.  Frankly, I don’t care what he is.  Two years ago Crowley befriended a French physicist named Louis Brevot whose ideas were routinely considered far-fetched.  Crowley was planning a new secret society that combined the occult with experimental science.  Who, you might ask, would take such a thing seriously?”
     
    The projector showed a grainy photograph of three men: A thin-looking scientist in horn-rimmed glasses, Aleister Crowley, and a tall arrogant looking SS- Obersturmbannfuhrer . 
     
    The Nazi’s black hat bore a silver death’s head and he smiled thinly beneath its brim.  Donovan slapped the screen with his pointer.  “Victor Kramer.  One of the rising stars in Hitler’s personal death squad.  The SS are the worst of the worst and Kramer means to outdo all competition by killing his way to the top.  He is detailed to Hillersleben, and it is his sonderkommandos that test all of the weapons invented there.  It was his people you ran into at Ivangorod.  It was Kramer who gave them the order to kill those civilians.” 
     
    Donovan let that sink in for a moment before he said, “The sonderkommandos were training German night hunters there on the Vampir, when they were