TimeRiders

by Alex Scarrow

  Maddy stopped dead and shook her head apologetically. ‘Sorry. I’ll stay right where I am. I won’t hurt you.’

  He nodded, seeming to understand that. He took another deep breath. ‘You… Amerikaner?’

  She smiled. ‘Yes.’

  ‘This…?’ he said, and shrugged, lacking the words in English to complete the question.

  ‘This place is in America. In New York, actually.’

  The man’s eyes widened. ‘This… New York?’

  She nodded.

  He snorted nervously. ‘Washington… zehn –’ he made a whooshing noise – ‘New York?’

  ‘That’s right,’ she replied. ‘Whoosh… and now you’re right here. Crazy, huh?’

  That seemed to be one of the three or four English words he knew. He nodded and managed a bemused grin. ‘Ja… craz-ee.’

  The generator suddenly hummed, the lights winked and a moment later the young soldier, the arm, leg and most of the tuft of grass and soil were gone.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I initiated an emergency dump,’ replied Foster. ‘He’s back where he came from. Although he’s…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter now,’ he replied. He looked at Maddy and Sal. ‘That… that was a German soldier who looked like he’d just been sucked out of a fight, right off the lawn of the White House, no less.’

  ‘An invasion?’

  He nodded. ‘Day one of recorded, or should I say approved, history, it would seem, begins the day that America was successfully conquered by the Germans. Just like we were saying.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ whispered Maddy, ‘then we dropped Liam and Bob right into the middle of a battle.’

  Sal’s face paled.

  ‘We can get them back, though, right?’

  ‘We’ll try again in an hour. But only if we don’t see any other odd density packets at the last moment. I don’t want to bring back another Nazi, or a part of one, if I can help it.’

  ‘But if we can’t bring him back? Is that it? Is he stuck there?’

  ‘There’s another scheduled for twenty-four hours later.’

  ‘And if he misses that too?’

  ‘Madelaine, he’s a resourceful lad. He has Bob with him. They’ll do just fine where they are. And, as I said, there is a way we can communicate with them. We can let them know a where-and-when for another extraction window.’ He turned to both the girls. ‘What’s of more importance to us right now is whether there are any more shifts due, whether the world has stabilized as it is, or whether it’ll get worse.’

  ‘Is there anything we can do?’

  ‘All we can do right now is try to work out where history was altered, see if we can narrow things down a bit. My guess is something must have happened during the Second World War, something that changed the balance.’

  Maddy nodded. ‘Yeah… maybe.’

  ‘So,’ continued Foster, ‘what we’ll do is work with what we have. We’ll have to explore the New York out there. Perhaps there’ll be clues as to what happened prior to the invasion of America. OK?’

  She nodded.

  ‘OK, Sal?’

  She looked at him, tears rolling down her pale cheeks. ‘Poor Liam,’ she whimpered. ‘I hope he’s all right.’

  Foster got up tiredly and walked over to her. He stooped down in front of her. ‘Don’t worry, Sal… He’ll be fine. With Bob right beside him, he’ll be just fine, I promise you.’

  ‘What now?’

  ‘We need more information. Sal, I want you to head out to Times Square again. Just find a seat somewhere and observe all you can. See if you can pick out any visual clues… anything at all that hints at events prior to 1956. And, Madelaine?’

  She nodded.

  ‘We need to trawl their historical database. If you can find a way to hack through their security measures, perhaps we can learn a bit more. And then we’ll get ready to activate the back-up rendezvous.’ He sucked in air through gritted teeth. ‘Hopefully, second time round it won’t be cluttered with German troops, eh?’

  CHAPTER 40

  1956, Washington DC

  Bob observed the hive of activity going on around him. His cold eyes locked on and studied the giant disc floating gracefully above the city and intermittently spewing out troops. He could hear the distant rattle of gunfire, the muffled thud of explosions.

  Somewhere in the city, small pockets of American soldiers were still holding out, unaware that the struggle was all over, that their leader, President Eisenhower, had gone down fighting, and even now his body was being carried out and laid across the steps in front of the building along with the rest of his cabinet and chiefs of staff.

  An officer standing nearby adjusting his tunic and Wehrmacht peaked cap, no longer encumbered with a drop suit, was hurriedly directing activity on the ground.

  ‘You!’ He pointed at Bob. ‘You can remove the mask. The air’s clear.’

  Bob silently removed the gas mask. His hair – only a fortnight’s worth of growth, still just coarse bristles – and his hard emotionless face made him look no different from the other storm-troopers around him.

  ‘When we’ve tidied up the mess out here, then you can take a rest,’ the officer said. ‘Now, get a move on, man.’

  Bob’s eyes narrowed as he made a millisecond calculation on whether he should continue to pretend being an enemy unit or sprint a dozen paces across the rutted grass and effortlessly rip this man’s arms from their sockets.

  [Attack: tactically incorrect at this moment]

  He turned away and reached down for the body of a marine, flinging the ragged remains over his shoulder and carrying it across to where a pile of corpses was slowly growing. As he did so, Bob’s inexperienced silicon mind worked on a bigger issue, more important than any immediate tactical assessments. He had a strategic command decision to make…

  Tactical Options:

  1. Rescue Operative Liam O’Connor

  2. Return to field office with gathered intelligence

  3. Prevent further contamination – self-terminate

  Bob’s AI routines worked more efficiently with smaller numbers of options on each branch of its decision tree – two or three was the ideal number. Any larger an array of choices slowed down the risk-assessment processing exponentially.

  He scanned the prisoners clustered together and identified Liam crouched miserably among them and looking back at him. If Bob had had a little more time to become more familiar with human facial expressions and muscle tics, he might have been able to recognize the mixture of fear, anger and betrayal written across the young man’s face.

  His eyes suddenly registered a growing commotion among the cedar trees; the place where the time window had been due to open. Soldiers were gathering round something on the ground – something unpleasant enough for one or two of them to double over and dry-heave.

  Whatever was going on it was becoming too busy to clear the area, too busy to consider it a viable extraction point, for now, at least. He decided the option that best satisfied the mission’s parameters was the first option: to rescue Liam.

  Option 2 left Liam stuck in the past where he might potentially be tortured and expose dangerously revealing details of the future.

  Option 3, to trigger his computer brain to fry itself, achieved absolutely nothing useful at this moment in time.

  He cocked his head.

  Option 1 had the highest mission-relevance rating. He closed his eyes for a moment.

  Option 1 Solution Assessment:

  1. AWAIT 2nd extraction window – 57.30 minutes’ time

  2. IF success of extracting Liam is greater than 25%, THEN proceed

  3. ELSE… Await 3rd extraction window in 24 hours

  Bob opened his eyes and tossed the corpse he’d been carrying on to the pile. The solution was an acceptable one, even though it amounted to little more than wait and see. He was not going to leave nor was he going to terminate himself; instead he was going to wait for
a better opportunity to rescue Liam to present itself.

  But, he realized, something else had been factored into the decision, something to which he couldn’t assign a recognizable label.

  For now he decided to give it the name indefinable factor.

  This indefinable factor wasn’t coming from his database or his AI code; it was coming from the small part of his brain that was organic, the tiny nub of wrinkled flesh in his skull linked by a myriad hair-thin wires to his on-board silicon wafer-cell computer. And all this indefinable factor could do was whisper a very illogical and impractical message into his logical computer, an awkward message that was beginning to cause a little confusion amid his carefully ordered AI code.

  Liam O’Connor is my friend.

  CHAPTER 41

  1956, command ship over Washington DC

  Oberleutnant Ralf Hoffman stepped on to the freight platform with two other men who were hefting a heavy body bag between them. They let it down gently and, like him, looked up in awe at the dark sky above them, at the giant grey underbelly of Der Führer’s command ship.

  Hoffman had been billeted aboard the ship with the men of his unit, the 23rd Fallschirmjäger Assault Corps. He was familiar with the inside of the air vessel – but, viewing it from outside, the truly immense size of the thing came home to him.

  The freight platform, a square alloy plinth large enough to fit one truck at a time, slowly began to winch upwards. Beneath them the grounds of the White House and proud boulevards of Washington DC gradually receded.

  Hoffman watched the waning light of the afternoon fade as dusk rapidly toned the smoke-smudged sky over the city. There were no street lights on, no lights on in any of the buildings. The city’s power stations had been taken out in the first wave of the assault. Only sporadic fires burning here and there illuminated Washington DC, along with the occasional stabbing flicker of gunfire in the streets.

  He took a deep breath.

  Nerves.

  He was on his way up to Das Mutterschiff… ‘the mother ship’, the nickname his men had for the giant airship. More specifically, he was on his way to the upper deck of the mother ship, where a long line of broad windows looked out on to the world below – Der Führer’s viewing deck.

  Hoffman had never been invited up there. Few men, other than the Führer’s high command and senior chiefs of staff, had. It was more than the great man’s command and control point – it was his campaign home. A very special place.

  The platform continued to winch them up with a dull motorized clacking from above. He looked up to see the trapdoor yawning open in the vessel’s belly.

  All of a sudden, floodlights kicked in and powerful columns of light speared down into the gathering twilight, panning across the city below. Hoffman winced and shaded his eyes. Gazing up just as the damned things had been switched on, he was surprised he hadn’t been blinded.

  Ralf… you may actually meet him. It’s a distinct possibility. Prepare yourself.

  The thought sent an unwelcome shudder of fear and excitement down his spine. He didn’t want to appear foolishly nervous in front of the Führer. He so wanted to impress the man, to appear calm and professional as an officer of the elite Fallschirmjäger should. The two men with him, on the other hand, were grinning like excited children on their way to meet Father Christmas.

  ‘You two,’ he snapped irritably, ‘you look like fools. Smarten yourselves up and stop gurning like a pair of monkeys.’

  The men obediently tidied their appearance and stowed their smiles away beneath solemn parade-ground faces.

  Hoffman looked down at the body bag. The order had come directly from the Führer’s senior field officer, Reichsmarschall Haas to Hoffman’s commanding officer. Der Führer had asked to inspect this curious body for himself… and to ask the men who’d seen what happened to explain directly to him what they’d witnessed.

  The clattering from above had grown much louder. He looked up, carefully shading his eyes, to see the yawning loading bay was now only twenty or thirty feet above them.

  The freight platform finally jerked to a halt inside the bay where Hoffman saw a couple of SS Leibstandarte guards standing to attention, dressed crisply in ceremonial black.

  For an unhappy moment he thought they were going to take possession of the body bag and send Hoffman and his two men back down. But, with a perfunctory nod from one of them, they beckoned Hoffman and the others to follow.

  A stairwell guarded by two more men took them to the upper deck. The battleship-grey walls that Hoffman and his men had grown used to on the way over – living like battery chickens on the lower decks as Das Mutterschiff sailed gracefully south from the conquered area around New York – now gave way to dark oak panels. The floor no longer metal grilles but a soft maroon carpet that whispered beneath his muddied combat boots.

  Ahead of them, double doors guarded by two more SS Leibstandarte standing to attention.

  ‘Oberleutnant Hoffman, to see the Führer,’ announced one of the guards who’d escorted them up from the bay.

  One of the two standing guard announced their arrival into an intercom. A moment later a young smartly dressed adjutant appeared from a side office.

  ‘Ah, good.’ He smiled. ‘I’ll see you in.’

  Hoffman felt his heart pounding in his chest as the young man pushed the double doors open. His first glimpse of the Führer’s grand chamber was almost too much for him to bear.

  Remember, professional, calm. Look good for the Führer.

  The adjutant spoke softly with someone before turning round to them.

  ‘Come on in.’ He smiled smartly and waved them forward.

  Hoffman stepped through the doors, his two men behind him lifting the body bag between them. His first impression was of one long wall of broad windows slowly curving around, like the stern of an eighteenth-century tall ship, and the brilliant glow of the floodlights outside pouring in, bathing the ornate decorated ceiling of the large room. Through the glass he could see an outline of the dark city and, above, the turbulent rolling thunderous clouds of the September sky, framed together like a large oil painting.

  Standing behind a generous conference table spread with maps of the east coast of America and dotted with flagged tokens representing the invading German forces, stood the Führer, every bit as tall, slim and charismatic as all the posters and billboards made him out to be.

  To one side, a few feet away, stood the Reichsmarschall: stern faced, fit and alert, as his reputation portrayed him. It was well known that Haas and the Führer went back a long way, more than a decade. It was said they’d first met while serving together during the Second World War. Before that time, of course, there was nothing known about them.

  Two very enigmatic men.

  The Führer smiled generously at Hoffman.

  ‘You led the attack?’

  ‘Yes, m-my Führer,’ Hoffman stammered awkwardly.

  He waved a dismissive hand and laughed. ‘Relax, Oberleutnant… I don’t bite. You led the assault on the White House?’

  ‘Yes, my Führer.’

  ‘Congratulations. A very well-done job.’

  Hoffman’s chest swelled with pride.

  ‘So… I believe you have brought something to show me?’ said Paul Kramer.

  CHAPTER 42

  1956, Washington DC

  ‘Where… w-where are we going?’ asked Liam.

  The rear of the army truck dropped down, presenting them with a ramp. The German soldiers ushered them up, waving their guns.

  ‘Re-education camp,’ said the suited man Liam and Bob had interrogated earlier in the White House.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I heard that’s what happened to all the people in New York when the Germans took it. That’s where everyone’s headed.’

  ‘Re-education camp?’

  ‘Prison camps, that’s what they really are… that’s where we’re headed,’ the man sighed. ‘If we’re lucky.’

  Liam turned
to look at him. ‘Uh… what if we’re unlucky?’

  ‘They’ll just take us somewhere quiet and shoot us.’

  Liam felt his mouth suddenly dry and his skin prickle. He looked across the heads of his fellow prisoners, searching once more for any sign of Bob. If the support unit was going to actually support him, he’d better get a move on and do something.

  In the gathering dusk it was getting harder to pick anything out. But he thought he could just about detect the distinct outline of a particularly tall and muscular German soldier, standing perfectly still a hundred yards away, looking intently back at him.

  Bob?

  ‘Oh Jay-zus… come on, Bob! Get me the hell out of here!’ he whimpered under his breath.

  The man in the suit looked at him curiously. ‘Hey, kid. You and that big friend of yours… you said some weird thing about the future back in the –’

  ‘Yes,’ Liam replied distractedly, ‘I don’t suppose it matters now where we said we came from.’ He craned his neck to catch sight of Bob one last time, but the lone figure, standing motionless, had disappeared.

  God help me.

  A soldier barked irritably at Liam to get a move on up the ramp and into the truck, grabbing his arm and pushing him roughly forward.

  ‘Do as they say,’ muttered the man beside Liam. ‘Be glad they didn’t just shoot us all right here on the lawn.’

  Liam stepped up and inside, finding a wooden bench in the darkness to sit down on. It was dark enough, he hoped, to ensure the man wouldn’t see the twin tracks of tears rolling down his dirt-smudged cheeks.

  Bob watched the last of the prisoners climb aboard and the truck’s engine rattle to life, billowing out a cloud of exhaust fumes.

  [Chance of success 0.5%]

  It made no practical sense to attempt a rescue of Liam O’Connor now. Even if his body could survive dozens of bullet wounds… Liam’s wouldn’t. He watched as the truck rolled away across the lawn, through a fence and bounced across a pavement and on to the hard tarmac of a broad avenue.

  The highest priority at this moment in time was for him to return to the future with what little intelligence they had managed to gather. The missed-window protocol meant the field office would try one last scheduled window amid the cedar trees in precisely twenty-two hours.