TimeRiders

by Alex Scarrow

  She gave up on the idea of doing a search on the name ‘Hitler’. Instead she clicked through the various article tabs along the timeline chart – scanning each article for the name.

  Five minutes later she shook her head.

  ‘No mention at all of Adolf. It’s like he never existed.’

  ‘But plenty of mentions of Der Führer… the leader,’ added Foster.

  Maddy ground her teeth with frustration. ‘So who exactly is Der Führer?’ She accessed the computer’s on-site database, a vast encyclopedia of correct history, and pulled up files on Hitler’s high command, his inner cabinet… the men most likely to succeed him. ‘Heinrich Himmler? Hermann Göring? Martin Bormann? Joseph Goebbels?’ She turned to Foster and Sal. ‘One of them maybe?’

  Foster splayed his hands. ‘It could be any of them.’

  Sal spoke quietly. ‘Or perhaps none of them?’

  1956, Washington DC

  Splinters of plaster erupted around Liam’s head.

  ‘Oh God help us!’ he yelped, ducking down behind a desk. ‘They’re in the entrance hall!’

  The air was thick with the percussive rattle of machine-gun fire, and the throaty burr of the invaders’ pulse rifles.

  Bob pointed down to the far end of the room. ‘Recommendation: go to the end and take cover.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I shall secure tactical advantage.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  Bob shoved him. ‘Please go now,’ he said calmly as bullets from the entrance hall sprayed in through the open door and noisily shredded the typewriter and telephone on the desk they were crouching behind.

  ‘What about me?’ asked the man in the suit.

  Liam half smiled. ‘Come with us for now, but we can’t take you back with us.’

  ‘Jeez… I’ll be happy staying alive just a little while longer.’

  ‘You must go now,’ insisted Bob.

  Liam pulled himself to his feet, poked his head round the desk and stole a glance through the open door into the entrance hall. He could see a couple of dozen black-suited men firing on the marines’ blockaded position. The staccato chatter of the marines’ guns was lessening against the incessant snatched purr of the pulse rifles.

  Liam realized the Germans had whittled down the defenders to one or two marines. The fight was all but over.

  We have to move now.

  He pulled himself out and sprinted down an aisle between two rows of desks, away from the open door and the one-sided battle. He came up against a wooden-panelled door at the far end.

  The man in the suit was right behind him.

  ‘Where does this door lead?’

  ‘A hallway. If we turn right there’s an exterior door that leads us out to the rose gardens.’

  Liam looked back the way they’d come. At the far end where they’d been hiding was the mustard-coloured mist. He could only just make out a dark blob that might have been Bob.

  ‘Your friend coming?’ asked the man.

  ‘I hope so.’

  The dark shape moved suddenly, lunging out from behind the desk, and then it was gone through the doorway and into the main hall. A moment later Liam heard a renewed and intense burst of gunfire: pulse rifles. He heard cries of alarm and panic, muffled voices barking hasty commands in German. He heard several loud screams that ended abruptly, the sound of a ferocious struggle, something toppling over and shattering.

  ‘What in the heck is happening back there?’

  It’s Bob happening.

  For the briefest moment, as he imagined what those powerful arms could do to mere flesh and bone, he almost felt sorry for them.

  A moment later, emerging through the mist, he saw something lunging like a charging bull down the aisle towards them. Bob emerged from the smoke, his face and chest spattered with blood, none of which appeared to be his own.

  ‘I have acquired a tactical advantage.’

  Hands slick with fresh blood, he held out a gas mask and a black rubber hood. ‘Suggestion: Liam O’Connor, you wear the mask and hood. You will appear to be one of them from distances greater than ten feet.’

  ‘What about me?’ asked the man.

  Bob regarded him dispassionately. ‘You are not a mission priority.’

  Liam took the hood, wet with blood. ‘You killed one of them?’

  ‘Incorrect. Seven enemy units were killed.’

  ‘With just your hands?’

  Bob looked sternly at both of them. ‘There is insufficient time for this conversation.’

  Liam noticed several ragged fleshy wounds across Bob’s hip and waist. ‘Jay-zus! Bob, you’ve been shot! More than once it looks like.’

  ‘The wounds will heal in no more than three days. The blood is already coagulating. This is not a priority.’

  The support unit then turned swiftly to the man.

  ‘Question: do you have detailed information on the floor plans of this structure?’

  The man looked at Liam. ‘Uh?’

  ‘I think he’s asking if you know of another way out.’

  ‘Oh… yeah, it’s just up ahead.’

  Bob nodded. ‘This is good.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Liam. ‘I think I’ve got a better idea how we might get back across the gardens to those trees.’

  ‘Please explain now,’ said Bob.

  CHAPTER 38

  1956, Washington DC

  Liam and the man in the suit stepped out through the door into the rose garden, their hands raised. The smokescreen was still relatively thick out here and through the wafting mist he could see squads of soldiers fanning out across the lawn, rounding up able-bodied prisoners and shooting those marines too wounded to get to their feet.

  Inside the building, sporadic gunfire could still be heard as the men in dark rubber hoods and suits moved from one room to another, finishing off the last few pockets of resistance.

  As they stepped through the decorative maze of bushes towards the main lawn, Liam looked up at the sky and saw that the giant saucer had moved along, slowly drifting across towards downtown Washington DC, spraying out occasional jets of black dots from the dark trapdoors in its underbelly; squads of men dropped swiftly down to the ground, no doubt with key objectives in mind, to hastily secure administrative buildings, critical utilities and intersections.

  Behind them Bob marched stiffly, a pulse rifle levelled at their backs, the bloodied hood and mask stretched over his thick skull.

  A soldier nearby, unhooded and unmasked, called out to them across the waist-high rose bushes.

  Bob replied in German.

  ‘What did he say?’ hissed Liam out of the side of his mouth.

  ‘I told the man you were being taken for questioning.’

  ‘That’s very good, Bob,’ whispered Liam almost proudly. ‘Very good thinking.’

  ‘I am programmed to mimic human traits such as lying and also duplicate –’

  ‘Shhh, save it for later, Bob,’ muttered Liam.

  They walked through the garden and diagonally across the White House’s north lawn towards the copse of trees they’d first arrived in. Liam stared wide-eyed at the corpses littering the ground. He had seen only a couple of German bodies, but was now staring at no less than a hundred dead marines. Clearly, while they’d been inside, many more American soldiers had bravely converged on the White House in a vain attempt to defend their president.

  The smokescreen had hidden a massacre out here before the building, those pulse rifles mowing them down as they charged pointlessly into the mist to save their commander-in-chief.

  He looked for the copse of cedar trees amid the clearing smoke and finally found it. His heart sank as he spotted a platoon of German soldiers resting in and around the small stand of cedars. They had removed their hoods and masks and chatted animatedly, many lighting up cigarettes.

  ‘Dammit! They’re covering our way home!’

  ‘Way home?’ The man looked askance at him. ‘It’s ju
st a bunch of trees!’

  ‘Our exit window will appear there,’ said Bob beneath his hood. He accessed his internal mission clock. ‘The window will open in precisely one hour and seventeen minutes and thirty-four seconds.’

  ‘What the flippin’ heck do we do?’ whimpered Liam under his breath.

  ‘I have no tactical suggestions at this moment.’

  ‘Great.’

  He looked around. A fresh autumnal breeze was blowing away the last wisps of the smokescreen and he could see that the few prisoners taken alive inside the building were being ushered towards the centre of the lawn where half a dozen Germans were standing in a circle watching the defeated, dispirited civilians and soldiers already slumped to the ground.

  He felt a cold stab of fear and desperation run down his spine.

  They’ll expect Bob to herd us over there. And once I’m dumped with the others I’m going to be stuck.

  As if overhearing his thoughts, a German officer, his black rubber jumpsuit rolled down and tied round his waist, revealing his grey Wehrmacht uniform, pointed to the prisoners and gave Bob an order.

  Bob nodded, replied and steered them towards the holding area.

  ‘I have been instructed to leave you there,’ the support unit uttered quietly. ‘What are my orders, Liam O’Connor?’

  ‘I really don’t know. What do you suggest?’

  ‘Suggestion: I can attempt an attack on the soldiers among the trees. But I estimate a point-five per cent chance of success in taking and holding the position until our extraction window arrives.’

  They were running out of time and options. The gathered prisoners sat in a cluster only a few dozen yards away, and no matter how slowly the three of them walked towards it, that’s where they were headed.

  ‘Suggestion: I leave you here and attempt a rescue when the percentage chance of success exceeds ten per cent.’

  Liam gritted his teeth.

  No, both he and Bob would be riddled with rapid-fire high-calibre rounds before he could get them both halfway across the lawn to the trees. Bob might well be able to survive several more shots on target, but Liam didn’t fancy he’d survive one… given the ragged wounds he’d seen the pulse carbines inflict.

  ‘There’s nothing we can do right now, Bob. It looks like we’re going to miss this window,’ he hissed out of the side of his mouth. ‘And I don’t fancy having my head blown off trying to make it. How long now?’

  ‘In one hour and fifteen minutes, precisely.’

  ‘But there’ll be another, right?’

  ‘Correct, an hour later. And twenty-four hours after that.’

  ‘So,’ said Liam, now just a few yards away from the seated prisoners and the nearest guards, ‘leave me here. If you see an opportunity to get me, take it. But, for Chrissakes, don’t get us both killed doing it.’

  ‘What percentage chance do you authorize me to take, Liam O’Connor?’

  ‘I dunno!’ he uttered under his breath. ‘Just take your best shot.’

  One of the German guards called out something and pointed at Liam and the man with him.

  ‘I am being told to leave you here,’ said Bob quietly. Liam thought he detected the slightest note of anxiety in the unit’s deep flat-toned voice.

  ‘Then do it. If they take us from here, then follow me… wait for a chance and get me out of this fix, all right?’

  ‘Mission priority: primary duty is to observe and report back.’

  ‘What? You are not leaving me here, Bob! Do you understand?’ Liam snarled under his breath. ‘That’s an order!’

  A guard stepped forward and roughly grabbed Liam by the shoulder.

  ‘Be quiet!’ he snapped in accented English. ‘Join the others!’

  Liam staggered forward and then slumped to his knees among the group of prisoners. He watched as Bob stood perfectly still, face still hidden by the mask and hood, and looked helplessly on.

  An officer called out to Bob from across the lawn to help with dragging and stacking the bodies for disposal.

  The unit turned hesitantly.

  Behind the glass plates of the gas mask, a complex computer loaded with AI that was still in the process of learning, still almost childlike, was desperately juggling mission priorities and variables, calculating a million different ways to proceed.

  Liam watched the lumbering figure move away.

  Oh blimey. What kind of a mess am I stuck in now?

  CHAPTER 39

  2001, New York

  ‘How long until the return window, Madelaine?’ asked Foster.

  Maddy looked up at a screen. ‘We’re counting down the last two minutes,’ she replied.

  ‘All right, then. We’ll find out what the boys have seen and work it out from there.’ He smiled thinly.

  The sudden erasure of history before 1956 made it almost impossible to identify exactly when and where things had begun to change – and to zero in on that. While the wiping out of historical records may well have been on the whim of some insane Nazi dictator, to appease his ego no doubt, it also had the additional effect of completely hiding the tracks of whomever had instigated this time shift. If that’s what some time traveller had intended, then he was being very, very clever. Leaving no trace, no tracks… nothing for them to identify the moment they’d arrived in the past.

  Very clever.

  Maddy interrupted Foster’s train of thought. ‘Uhh, Foster… a warning dialogue box has come up.’

  He looked at it.

  LOCATION POINT PHASE INTERRUPTION

  ABORT OR CONTINUE?

  ‘The computer’s picking up varying density packets in the pick-up window.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘The computer monitors the area inside the target window for the minute before we’re due to send back our operatives. If there’s a lot of unexpected movement through it, we can assume there are unwary people or perhaps an animal walking across it. If it’s persistent enough, the computer flags a warning.’

  ‘What do we do?’

  ‘Wait and see if it continues,’ he replied, pointing to a graphic display on the screen. ‘There’s a density packet spike. Someone or something walked through about ten seconds ago.’

  ‘We aren’t going to leave them?’ asked Sal, her voice brittle with worry.

  Foster shook his head. ‘That won’t happen,’ he reassured her. ‘If we need to abort this window, we’ll try again in an hour.’

  He looked at the display. There were no more density spikes.

  ‘It looks like a one-off,’ he said. ‘Could easily have been a bird flying through, or rubbish blown across. It happens quite often.’

  Sal managed a wan smile. ‘OK.’

  ‘Thirty seconds,’ said Maddy. ‘We aborting or continuing?’

  The display looked flat. Whatever had passed through didn’t look like it was coming back. In all likelihood it was Liam accidentally stepping in too early. The support unit had probably advised him to stand clear and now they were both waiting patiently to come home.

  ‘Continue,’ said Foster.

  Maddy clicked the mouse and the dialogue box winked off screen.

  ‘Ten seconds.’

  Sal turned towards the middle of the archway’s floor, ready to welcome them both back.

  ‘Keep well clear, Sal,’ said Foster, pointing at a faint circle of yellow chalk on the concrete, scuffed and in need of a refresh. It marked out the dimension of the return window. You really didn’t want to be standing there when it opened.

  ‘Five seconds.’

  The generator hummed, the lights momentarily flickered and dimmed. Foster looked at the graphic display, expecting to see the graph spike as Liam and Bob stepped in together. But it remained flat.

  Come on, boys… stop messing around.

  ‘And three… and two…’

  The graph suddenly spiked.

  The lights went out completely.

  As they flickered back on, he was about to turn round and give th
em both a telling-off for cutting it so fine when he heard Sal’s scream.

  A young man stood there, staring at them, eyes widened with fear and incomprehension – a young soldier, perhaps no more than a couple of years older than Liam, blond hair cropped short, his pale choir-boy cheeks smudged with dirt and flecks of dried blood. He wore a black rubber boiler suit, rolled down to his waist. Beneath it was a grey army tunic with oak leaves on the collar and an eagle emblem on the chest.

  His eyes darted from Sal, to Maddy, to Foster… and then to someone else’s dismembered leg and arm lying at his feet amid a scattering of dried leaves, twigs and a circular tuft of blood-spattered grass and soil.

  ‘Was –?… Was ist das?’ He looked down at the severed limbs on the ground, oozing blood on to the concrete floor. ‘Was geschieht? Wo bin ich?’

  His mouth fluttered in fear, his voice broken, shrill, like a child suddenly finding himself lost in a crowded mall.

  Maddy reacted first. She stood up and slowly approached him, hands raised. ‘It’s OK,’ she cooed softly. ‘Everything’s all right… We’re not going to hurt you.’

  The young man gathered his wits enough to unsling his gun and swivel the barrel down to point at her.

  ‘Halt, stehen bleiben! Wer sind Sie? Wo bin ich?’

  Maddy shook her head. ‘I don’t… I don’t do German, sorry,’ she said, offering him a friendly smile.

  ‘Keep him talking,’ said Foster quietly.

  Maddy pointed to herself. ‘My… name… is Maddy. And you?’

  The young German stared silently at her, his breath rasping in and out, fluttering with fear.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asked in her best motherly voice. ‘This,’ she said, pointing to Sal, ‘this is Sal.’

  ‘Hi,’ said Sal, smiling sweetly and slowly offering him a small hand to shake.

  He glanced from one girl to the other.

  ‘Ich… Ich bin Feldwebel Lohaans.’

  Maddy guessed she was hearing his rank and surname.

  ‘But what’s your first name? Hmm?’ she asked, taking another step forward.

  The young man racked his gun nervously. ‘Stehen bleiben!… Stay!’ he barked, licking his dry lips.