Time Patrol

by Bob Mayer

  “Really sorry to be in such a rush,” Orlando repeated, and she sensed he was. “Normally I do a test on a new recruit. Harvey, or the suicide bomber, or something like that, but Nada vouches for you and that’s good enough. You’ve had three months of training, which is barely enough to get you in the Army, never mind the Nightstalkers. But you’ve already worked with the team. And you’re still alive, so that’s a pretty good test that you’ve passed. Twice.”

  They reached the helicopter and Scout hopped aboard, placing the piggy bank on her lap. Orlando had a little more trouble getting on board, but the second he was inside, the chopper lifted.

  The import of what Orlando had said struck her suddenly. She had to shout to be heard above the blade and engine noise. “Does that mean I’m a Nightstalker now?”

  “Not up to me,” Orlando said.

  “Are we going to Area 51?”

  “Nope.”

  “Is this in regard to my text?”

  “No idea.”

  “My training?

  “No clue.”

  “Well, okay.” Scout saw Comanche standing calmly where she’d left him, peering up at the receding helicopter. The horse didn’t seem that upset, but then again, it was a horse. Then she shifted her gaze. Scout could already see the Knoxville Airport directly ahead. “Where are we going?”

  “New York City.”

  “Cool beans,” Scout said. “I’ve never been to the Big Apple.”

  An F-14 Tomcat was waiting for Roland at Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, engines throttled back, pilot at the ready.

  Roland got out of the truck, still dressed all in black, his face covered with camouflage paint, his field pack over one shoulder, his other hand holding the case for his sniper rifle. Neeley got out also and stood next to him. They waited awkwardly, side by side, neither certain what to say. Roland’s stomach rumbled since he still hadn’t gotten a chance to eat since the shooting.

  Roland settled on mission, which is what he always did when nervous. “That guy said some weird stuff.”

  “What weird stuff?” Neeley asked.

  Roland relayed Carl Coyne’s last words verbatim.

  “People say strange things facing death,” was all Neeley could say. They were both still rattled by the body disappearing. “Any idea what he meant by the Patrol?”

  “Nope.”

  “Ratnik is interesting,” Neeley said. “Russian, I think. We’ll have to check into it.”

  “Okay.” It was obvious Roland could care less what Coyne had said.

  “And Sin Fen,” Neeley said. “A name perhaps?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “That was a strange anomaly,” Neeley added about the disappearing body, for lack of anything else to say.

  “It was.”

  Of course, they were also rattled by the kiss.

  “Well . . .” Neeley cleared her throat. “You best be going. Be careful with that”—she nodded at the case of the sniper rifle. “Don’t hit anything important in the cockpit.”

  “Yeah.” Roland took a step toward the waiting jet, and then turned back to her. He stuck a big paw out. “It was an honor to serve with you.”

  Neeley shook his hand.

  Roland flushed red once more underneath the green and black camouflage. Then he turned abruptly for the fighter.

  As the jet roared down the runway and disappeared into the clouds overhead, Neeley’s cell phone began to ring.

  There was only one person who had that number: Hannah.

  SEE ALL THE POISINUS SNAKES 75CENTS

  The sign was punched full of bullet holes and rusting so badly it was difficult to read the letters. Eagle was driving the Humvee (Eagle always drove), Mac was in the passenger seat listening to Pitr give him an update (not much information other than to get to New York City ASAP), and Kirk was in the center turret manning the .50 caliber machine gun (because someone always manned the .50). Doc was in the backseat, still complaining about the lack of Ivar.

  No one was singing Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns and Money.”

  Eagle slammed on the brakes in irritation as two guards popped up out of hide holes, their laser sights sending red dots dancing on Eagle’s and Kirk’s foreheads. Eagle also knew a Hellfire missile had been targeted on the Humvee as soon as they got in range. Its firing mechanism was slaved to the guards’ triggers and also their body monitors: If they either fired their weapons and/or died, the Humvee would be blasted.

  Sometimes the intense security at the Ranch got on his nerves.

  One of the contractors came forward and flashed the retina scanner into Eagle’s eyes.

  “Are any of us who we really think we are?” Eagle asked the contractor, because Eagle always liked jangling their psyches.

  The guard ignored him, as they all learned to do. The guard waved them through, although Eagle picked up a glint in the man’s eyes that indicated he’d like nothing better than to pull his trigger, or even die, just to have that Hellfire let loose.

  Eagle accelerated toward the barn. Which is what it looked like. Old wood planking, sagging roof, paint faded away by desert storms. Certainly long abandoned, the casual observer would assume.

  He aimed for the doors that appeared to be drooping on rusting hinges. The doors were actually reinforced concrete that could take an RPG hit and shrug it off. Mac reached up and hit a button on the top of the windshield. The sophisticated garage door opener sent the correct signal (the wrong signal got the Hellfire up the ass of the approaching vehicle), and the two doors swung smoothly open, hydraulic arms handling the heavy loads.

  Eagle raced through the doors while they were still opening (the engineer who designed them hadn’t accounted for Eagle’s skill and speed) with barely an inch of clearance on either side. He slammed the brakes and twisted the wheel, bringing the Humvee to an abrupt halt right next to the Snake.

  The prototype aircraft was a couple of generations beyond the tilt-wing Osprey. The most prominent differences were jet engines instead of turboprops and angled black surfaces on the outside, indicating stealth technology. A refueling probe poked out the front underneath the cockpit where a powerful chain gun was housed in an interior well. The craft took up most of the space inside the Barn.

  The four men scrambled out of the Humvee. “Checklists, people,” Eagle said, the senior man taking charge. “Protocol saves lives.”

  He grabbed the acetated Nightstalker Protocol that was usually Nada’s province and an alcohol pen and began checking off each preflight task as it was accomplished.

  “The only information Pitr gave me,” Mac said, “is we might have to do some breaching.”

  “Load for that,” Eagle ordered.

  Mac, Doc, and Kirk began loading pre-packed gear to supplement the standard load already in the cargo bay of the Snake. A team box was tied down in the center holding everything from climbing ropes to arctic clothing to chemical/biological protection suits, parachutes, dry suits, spare radio batteries, two million in gold coins for barter, etc., etc.; someone with an extremely paranoid and inventive mind had packed it. Aka Nada.

  Eagle did his quick preflight pilot check, walking around the aircraft (even though he’d done one yesterday as part of his own Protocol), and then walked inside and climbed into the pilot’s seat. He hit power and the dual engines began to whine.

  “Kirk, cut me loose,” Eagle ordered over the team net.

  Kirk removed the power cord underneath the nose of the aircraft. Then he ran up the ramp and took a seat next to Doc on the ubiquitous red web cargo seats along the outside of the cargo bay that all military aircraft seemed to have.

  Doc had his laptop open and was trying to access data about the potential mission.

  There wasn’t any.

  “Mac, open her up.”

  Mac went to one of the numerous dirty glass cases set on tables along the edge of the Barn and reached into one that warned DANGER: EXTREMELY POISINUS. He hit the open button and then joined Kirk inside the
cargo bay. The ramp was closing as soon as he was clear.

  The sagging roof of the barn, which was anything but, split apart, powerful hydraulic arms opening up the heavy steel.

  The Snake lifted while the doors were still opening, and once more, Eagle cleared the portal with inches to spare.

  Eagle banked the hybrid aircraft hard and accelerated as the wings rotated from vertical to horizontal. Less than thirty feet above the ground, Eagle headed east. He pulled back on the controls and the Snake headed up at a steep angle. Eagle kicked in the afterburners.

  “Yo, Eagle,” Mac said over the net.

  “Yes?”

  “Got a round in the chamber?”

  Eagle’s jaw was tight, most of his mind focused on flying, while another part was still on the anomaly in the book he’d been reading and the bigger anomaly of no Ivar.

  “Actually,” Eagle said, “I do.”

  In the cargo bay of the Snake, this unexpected development caused the other three Nightstalkers to all share a concerned look. Eagle making sure his pistol was ready for action was almost as disturbing as the other anomalies they’d encountered so far.

  * * *

  It smelled bad. That was Ivar’s first conscious thought. The air was thicker than normal, with an oily quality. And he sort of recognized the smell, similar to the lab in North Carolina when the Rift had opened there, and the mirror Ivars had come through. He’d been so confused then he’d begun to lose track of which Ivar he really was, which actually didn’t make sense.

  Unless you’d been there.

  Ivar didn’t want to open his eyes because he knew by the smell it was likely he would not be seeing anything good. Like a child hiding under a blanket, there was a part of him that wanted to believe not seeing meant there was nothing out there.

  His last memory was of being in the Archives and Doc yelling at him to move the ladder. Then blackness, as abrupt as being put under before surgery.

  He hadn’t even had a chance to count back.

  The sense of touch wormed into his brain after smell. He was on his back. He twitched his hand and could feel a coarse, larger-than-sand material running through his fingers.

  A beach?

  A beach would be good, Ivar thought, so he knew he wasn’t on a real beach.

  With resignation and a sense of dread, Ivar opened his eyes. It was dim, not dark. But not light. And the light wasn’t coming from the sun, he knew that right away. It was diffuse, coming from all around. And there weren’t clouds up above. Just a gray, mixed with black, misty haze. And he knew, without being able to see it, that there was something solid above there, a roof. Very far up.

  Ivar moved only his eyes, shifting left, right, up, and down. Nothing but the haze. He sat up.

  He was on a beach. Sort of. There was water to his right. Dark, black water, perfectly smooth. Which made sense since the air was perfectly still. The water looked thicker than water should be.

  Perfect was the wrong adjective, Ivar thought as he got to his feet. There was nothing perfect about this place.

  The black water stretched as far as he could see into the haze, a distance that was hard to determine. Anywhere from a hundred yards to four hundred or more. He had nothing to scale a distance reference against. It was peculiarly uninviting.

  Blinking and focusing, Ivar could barely make out what appeared to be several black columns extending up out of the water and disappearing into the haze above. They didn’t appear to be solid. They were of varying diameters, their dark surfaces shimmering.

  Strange, Ivar thought.

  The “sand” was a black, coarse granular material. The “beach” stretched along the shore in a very gentle (another poor adjective he realized as soon as he thought it) curve in either direction.

  And it was littered with vessels. Some large rafts consisting of logs tied together with vines were about ten meters away. Each had a long rudder sweeping back, dug into the sand. Each also had a tattered sail, which drooped, windless, from a mast in the center.

  Just past the rafts was a freighter, an old one from as much as Ivar knew about freighters. He walked past the rafts to a point where he could see the name painted on the bow: Cyclops. That tingled something in Ivar’s memory, but he couldn’t grab onto it.

  But even as he pondered that, he saw what lay on the other side of the freighter: five Spanish galleons, stranded on the sand as if evenly parked by some massive hand. Scattered on the black sand around them were ransacked chests and supplies.

  “Hello!” Ivar called out, knowing as he did so there would be no answer. It was all so still and quiet. And if there were people here, Ivar wasn’t sure he wanted to meet them. He was drawn forward, curiosity overwhelming his confusion about this place.

  “Whoa,” Ivar whispered as he saw what was beyond the galleons. An old ship. Very old. Something he must have seen on the History Channel or some similar show. A single-masted ship with holes on the sides for a bank of oars. The ship was old in design, but the vessel looked relatively new, definitely not a thing for the museum.

  A replica, Ivar wondered, but he knew that wasn’t the case. It was the real thing.

  He climbed up a ladder attached to the side of the ship with wooden pegs. As he came up over the bulwark, he saw something on the other side of the ship that caused him to halt: five military propeller aircraft, lined up wingtip to wingtip.

  “Flight Nineteen,” Ivar whispered, remembering the opening of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and knowing it had something to do with a formation of planes that had disappeared with no trace.

  The five TBM Avengers were in mint condition, no sign of accident or foul play.

  “Okeydokey.” Ivar climbed down the ladder to the “sand.” He went over to the planes. There was no sign of the pilots, not that he expected to see any.

  He turned away from the water. Ivar took several deep breaths, then looked “landward.”

  In that direction, the land rose up to a dune about fifty yards away, which blocked any further view. Besides the black sand and the vessels, there was no vegetation, no rocks, nothing. Ivar took a step landward. The sand gave way slightly, but was firm enough to walk on. He moved toward the dune, to gain some altitude and try to get some sense of the terrain.

  Ivar crested the dune and wasn’t surprised to see similar dunes rippling away into the haze.

  “Great,” Ivar muttered. He wondered if this was another one of Orlando’s tests to see how he would react to this unique environment.

  Even Orlando couldn’t come up with something this complex and vast.

  “Aliens,” Ivar muttered to himself, which he knew wasn’t a good sign, but there was no one to notice. Maybe a big spaceship with a lot of lights flashing and organ sounds. People coming out of it. The pilots of the Avengers. Except he wasn’t on top of Devil’s Tower but deep inside some sort of place. “No spaceship,” Ivar said.

  Ivar made his way down this dune and up another, no idea what he was in search of, but with a feeling that moving was better than staying still. He had to have gotten here some way, so there had to be a way back.

  It was the way a scientist would think.

  Of course, the ships and planes had gotten here some way too: They’d disappeared off the face of the planet.

  And they were still here. In what looked like the exact same condition as when they’d disappeared.

  Ivar looked over his shoulder and saw his footprints. As he watched, the black “sand” slowly shifted back into place, making it look as if he had never walked by. Ivar shivered at the deeper implications of that.

  He crested another dune and paused. There was really no way to tell direction here, and if his footprints faded away, he wouldn’t be able to retrace his steps back to where he’d started.

  Belatedly, Ivar pulled out his phone. He wasn’t surprised to see no bars: He doubted any of the cell companies had made it this far, however far this was. Still he tried to make a call and got nothing. He shoved the phone
back in his pocket.

  Ivar puzzled over this predicament for a few moments. He was so lost in thought, he failed to realize he was being surrounded. When he tuned back in to his environment, he had to blink several times to make sure what he was seeing was real: Four men had materialized with no sound, as if sprouting from the ground itself. They were dressed in black lacquered armor and wore ornate helmets. What Ivar focused on, though, were the swords they held in their hands and the spears slung over their backs.

  He’d only seen their like in movies: samurai. Or maybe ronin. He wasn’t quite sure what the difference between the two was.

  One of them gestured, the intent unmistakable. The man took a few steps and disappeared from sight, and Ivar realized the undulating terrain explained their sudden appearance. If he’d been a student of military history, he’d have realized this geography was much the same as that at Little Big Horn, which allowed Custer to be taken so quickly by surprise.

  But he wasn’t. And he wouldn’t have liked the connection.

  Bowing to the inevitable, and respecting the sharpness of the blades, Ivar followed. The other three moved in around him without a sound. They walked along the draws, avoiding the crests. After a few minutes, Ivar noticed a change. There were pockets of brown soil here and there. Plants were struggling to grow. As they passed through the junction of two gullies, a small trickle of water cut a path.

  “Whoa!” Ivar paused as he saw a stone wall loom directly ahead, arcing up through the haze. One of the trailing warriors gave him a nudge and Ivar continued. They came around a bend in the gully and the pitted wall was two hundred meters in front of them, rising up overhead and disappearing into the haze. Etched into the wall were shallow caves.

  More importantly, there were people. Dozens of them. All dressed in a dizzying array of clothes and accouterments, ranging from the samurai/ronin, to medieval garb, to a Roman legionnaire, to more than Ivar could process at the moment.

  His attention focused on a woman who came striding toward him, wearing what he recognized as a flight suit. She had curly brown hair and there was something about her striking features that flickered a lightbulb in Ivar’s memory but didn’t turn it on.