Having parachuted into central Germany, MI6s Enhanced Team are investigating the connection between the German facility hidden beneath Kohnstein and the mysterious chemical that gave them their abilities. The team consists of Mademoiselle Mimi Dubois, La Résistance fighter and mistress of skills; Miss Madeline Forsyth, SOE operative and a living shadow; Sven Hyse, Norwegian Resistance soldier and shapeshifter; and Doctor Jackal, timid physician with his less than timid friend Mister Hades.

Kohnstein Facility, Niedersachswerfen, Germany, October 1942

Sven surveys the airfield from his bird’s eye, literally, vantage point and makes a mental note of the major buildings. Based on the number, and size of the barracks he estimated that the airfield supports possibly two to three hundred personnel. It was easy for him to identify the airfield control tower, ammunition store, two fuel storage areas and the aircraft stationed in one corner of the airfield. The aircraft consisted of four fighters, but more interestingly two medium aircraft. A Heinkel He 111 and a more heavily armed Junkers Ju 88 which would be ideal for our plan A exit strategy.

Having checked out the two unmanaged entrances into the Mittelwerk complex, I slide along the top of the hillside to the first of the bombed entrances. As before, there is a tunnel large enough for a truck to easily drive through but this time there are no lights. That’s not an issue for me since I have ‘borrowed’ Madeline’s ability to see in the dark. I can see that the tunnel ends fifty yards in at a cave in, but I believe that there may well be enough room between the large debris for my shadowy form to slip through, so I head in.

The dark raven that is Sven Hyse sits atop one of the taller buildings and watches the activity of the airfield with a beady eye. He spots a two man patrol carrying out a circuit of the perimeter fence, they leave from the main cluster of buildings and head anticlockwise around the inside edge of the fence. Sven estimates that it will take them approximately an hour to complete a full circuit of the fenced boundary. He settles in to watch them for a little while.

In the collapsed tunnel it is slow going, even as a two dimensional shadow, but after roughly a hundred metres I come up against a third set of heavy duty blast doors. This time they are stencilled with the words MIttelwerk III, but more importantly next to this is stencilled a stylised wolf's head logo. The same wolf’s head logo that I saw painted on the barrels that were loaded on the fated train from London Euston. Believe it that I have found what we are looking for I start to test the edges of the blast doors to see if they are airtight.

Through his binoculars, Doctor Jackal watches a two man patrol continue their circuit around the perimeter fence. Madeline taps him on the shoulder and tells him that she is going to search the rear slope of the hill for air vents. The problem is, Kohnstein is over a mile wide and a couple of miles long, and the downward slope of it is densely wooded. Nevertheless, Madeline begins to work her way backwards from where she believe the tunnels beneath run.

Having watched the two man patrol for a short while Sven decides to check out the open tunnels, he flies past the tunnel mouths and can see that they are well lit and empty. He lands in the shadows outside of the tunnel mouths and transforms into a house cat, he then proceeds to stalk along the length of Mittelwerk II. When he gets to the blast doors he can tell that they are almost impenetrable, almost. He also spots some kind of mechanism on the wall next to the doors. Cat Sven stalks back out of the tunnel.

Having tested most of the door and finding it still airtight I am lucky enough to find a section on the right of the door that has buckled slightly under the force of the air strike and the tunnel collapse. I slip through. Beyond the doors I find myself in another collapsed tunnel, at this point I remember the words of Sven and pause to push out with my senses. I sense no enhanced within range and so I proceed along the tunnel worming my way through the rubble.

Thirty yards beyond the doors I finally exit the rubble and find myself in a narrower tunnel, about two and a half yards square. I position myself on the ceiling and continue to slide along the corridor, ignoring the passageway that splits off to the left, and heading for a last blast door at the end of the corridor. I pass a smaller door to my right and then my blood freezes in my veins as I hear a low growl rumbling in the chest of something to my left.

Sven lands next to Doctor Jackal and transforms back into himself just as Madeline returns from a fruitless search of the hillside. But while she has been searching she has been thinking, and she explains to Sven that if there are vents then they must be issuing hot air. And if that is the case then there must be some thermals coming from them that Sven, as a bird, should be able to detect. Sven agrees and transforms once more and launches himself into the air flying a zig zag pattern across the rear slope of the hillside. After twenty minutes, Sven manages to detect what he believes to be an area of rising air.

Sven lands and investigates the area discovering a low row of nine inch pipes, capped with a ten inch dome, making them look like two parallel rows of large mushrooms. Sven transforms into a rat and scurries up under one of the domes, all he can see is the pipe running straight down into the darkness. He transforms back into himself and heads off to find Madeline.

With panic building I look to my left. Sat in a niche, staring straight at me with it’s hackles up, is a large German shepherd dog with a very dark coat that appears to be encrusted with something. As my panic continues to rise I come to terms with the fact that I am a silent dark shadow sliding along the ceiling of a pitch black tunnel and yet this beast is still looking straight at me and growling. In the second that it takes me to realise this the beast starts to bark. It is a bark that is greeted by others barks from elsewhere in the complex. My panic finally gets the better of me and I run.

I race back towards the tunnel collapse with the beast running below me, jumping to try and reach me. I remember being very grateful that I had decided to slide along the ceiling of the tunnel. Another of the beasts scrambles out of the tunnel that I had ignored on my way in and joins it’s pack mate in trying to reach me. I make it into the rock pile just as the beasts are scrambling up. I stop ten yards in and calm myself down. Once I have my breathing under control I push out once more with my senses. I get four contacts. With my heart in my mouth I slide forwards once more so that I can see what is there.

Madeline and Sven arrive back at the mushroom pipes and Sven leans in and, muscles straining, pulls one of the caps off. Madeline rolls her shadow self into a tube and slides down the pipe, she head down approximately two hundred yards and finds herself at what’s appears to be a filter at the end of the pipe. She pushes her way through physically and finds herself in a larger filter, making her knife solid she cuts through this filter and finds herself looking down into a large tunnel filled with machines and chemical equipment. A handful of individuals in white coats and overalls are moving around the area checking dials and taking readings. She manages to read their lips and they are discussing pressure readings, having learnt all she can she retreats back towards Sven at the top of the pipe.

I slide to the edge of the rock fall and can see four German shepherds pacing at the base of the rock fall. I push out with my senses again and am greeted by four contacts in front of me. The beasts are all enhanced. The Germans have managed to enhance their guard dogs, they are a long way ahead of us in this race. Once more I push with my senses, this time focusing on the lead dog. I learn that it has an enhanced bite; three hundred and sixty degree vision; it can see in complete darkness; it doesn’t need to eat, drink, or sleep; and it is gifted with both defensive and ablative armour. I run!

By twenty three forty five hours we have all regrouped at Doctor Jackal’s position. As we are carrying out a debrief of what we have discovered so far Henry spots two trucks leaving the airfields main barracks. He watches as the trucks drive up towards the entrance to Mittelwerk I where they are loaded with what look like workers from the complex. The trucks then drive off heading back the same way that they arrived.

Leaving Doctor Jackal on watch Madeline, Sven and I head for the final tunnel together. We find that it is also blocked by a tunnel collapse, but that the chunks of rubble are larger and possibly navigable by a man. When we arrive at the blast doors we find it stencilled with Mittelwerk IV and a wolf’s head. The blast door of Mittelwerk IV has taken far more damage from the air strike and there is a large buckle at the top of the door, again large enough for a man to scramble through. Beyond the door we discover a guardpost, marked with a stencilled wolf’s head, that is clear of collapsed rubble and large enough for us to use as a base camp.

Beyond the guardpost the tunnel is once again blocked by a rockfall, sticking out of the rubble is the front of a German military truck. We attempt to navigate the rockfall using the truck and we discover in the rear of the vehicle high grade machinery, that seems to be designed to pulverise something. The machinery is badly damaged from the tunnel collapse, but it does mean that the guardpost is secure from the beasts beyond and so we decide that we can safely get Doctor Jackal to that point.

By zero thirty hours we are all crouched in the small guardpost behind the blast doors of Mittelwerk IV. Doctor Jackal moves to the front of the German truck and discovers the remains of the driver buried in the rockfall. He searches him and discovers that he is a German Soldat named Heinz Gruber, his uniform bears the wolf’s head logo and checking his pockets Henry discovers a German military identity card showing that he is part of a unit called the Wolfenkorps and a security pass giving him access to Mittelwerk IV.

While Henry is examining the corpse of Heinz Gruber, Madeline heads for Mittelwerk III in shadow form intending on acting as a distraction so that Sven and I can search the rest of the tunnels from this side. When she arrives she finds two of the beast still sat at the bottom of the rockfall, she slides her arm out and the beasts start to bark. Soon she has attracted all four of the hounds once more. From our location in the back of the truck in Mittelwerk IV Sven and I can hear the barking of the beasts in the distance. We run for the turn at the end of the tunnel, but half way down Sven calls to me saying that he can’t see in the absolute darkness and so he has to retreat back to Doctor Jackal’s position.

In Mittelwerk III, Madeline starts to drop the temperature behind the beasts. In a matter of seconds there is a band of cold that is one hundred and fifty degrees colder than the ambient temperature in the tunnel, the hounds scramble away from the cold and are effectively trapped up against the rockfall.

I turn the corner in Mittelwerk IV and can tell that it links up with the corridor running from Mittelwerk III, I am grateful that Madeline has the dogs focussed on her. There is a corridor running further into the hill and opposite that is a door labelled with a small sign saying ‘Logistik’, I slide under the door and find myself in a large empty room. Looking around I realise that it is not empty as such, but that it has rather been cleared out. There is an opening at the end of the door with another small sign reading ‘Logistik-Manager’. The room beyond has collapsed and is filled with rubble, I slide through the rubble in my shadow form and attempt to search the room.

In the middle of the room I find a corpse buried under the rubble. Clutched in his hand he has a document file and in his pockets I discover his identity card and security pass, I grab all of them and head back out into the outer office. The identity card identifies the corpse as Hauptmann Bruge of the Wolfenkorps, and his security pass gives him access to both Mittelwerk III and IV. I leave the empty outer office and head back to Doctor Jackal with the file clutched in my hand.

Madeline moves the area of extreme cold towards the trapped dogs. As it passes over them they howl out in pain and eventually leap clear of the area back down the corridor. They start to bark once again and Madeline once again drops the temperature, but this time the beasts back off along the corridor to avoid the cold. So Madeline changes tactics and slides as quickly as possible along the ceiling of the corridor with the beasts jumping over each other in an attempt to reach her. As she is rushing forwards she spots the door opposite the tunnel running further under the hill. She quickly slides under it just before the dogs reach her.

Like I did, Madeline finds herself stood in a room that has been cleared out, and again her mind comes up with a scheme. She opens the door and quickly slides across the ceiling making a noise. The dogs burst in and try to reach her, once all four are in Madeline uses her cold power to trap them at the back of the room and then rushes for the doorway and slams the door shut behind her. She feels the thump of heavy dog bodies slamming against the back of the door. With a smile on her face Madeline heads back towards us.

Doctor Jackal reads through the file that I recovered from the logistics office, it contains a report request dated July 1942. It is asking specifically for a comprehensive report on the possibilities for additional refinement and industrial processing of the product. It also requests a progress report on operations and is signed by Generalleutnant Heinrich Gertz, Wolfenkorps Zentralbefehl, Wewelsburg Schloss. Doctor Jackal looks up and says;

Looks like the Wolfenkorps Central Command are based in Wewelsburg Castle!