Patton's Spaceship (The Timeline Wars, 1)

by John Barnes

  “It’s because luck can run out,” Jaffy whispered back at him. “That’s okay, man, we can understand that. Life is not always fair. Go in peace, and I hope it works out, but if it doesn’t—woe to the wicked, you madman.”

  Al grabbed him and kissed him passionately on the lips, which startled me a little, especially since I’d figured Al and Sandy were probably an item, but like they say, some of your best friends and not always the guys you’d expect …

  We moved up the edge of the beach—the grass came down there in irregular tufts and clumps so that there was lots of cover in shadows and hollows. It went faster than we might have thought.

  Sandy touched my arm and pointed, and a moment later Al gave a little hiss beside me. There was a man patrolling the beach with a machine gun; he didn’t look any more alert or better trained than the Good Neighbors, but he sure as hell was better armed.

  I felt in my pockets and found one of the pieces of rope I’d cut for the purpose, tying a little bowline loop on each end. I’d never actually garrotted anyone before, but what the heck, I was new to the timeline. Maybe I’d get to like it.

  I crawled forward, the cold sand pressing moisture up through my clothes so that between the sweat and the damp I was drenched when I finally reached the shoreward end of his patrolling. I crouched in a deep shadow and waited.

  He came back into the shadows for just a moment, and I sprang. The gun hit the ground as I did, but in the deep sand it wasn’t noisy, and praise god it didn’t go off. I had the line around his neck, braced my knee in his back, and yanked it tight enough to shut off his air before he knew what was going on. I kept the tension up as I used my shoulder to drive him into the sand on his face.

  I put one loop over the other, slid it down as my opponent struggled facedown in the sand under me, and then pulled the free end tight with all the force I had. It must have finally pinched a carotid, because after a flurry of scuffling around in the sand that seemed to go on forever, he finally lay still. I yanked hard to ratchet it that little extra bit tighter, and tied it off. If he was playing possum, he’d be pretty uncomfortable and have to move soon, and if not, he’d the soon. I’d made out the American Swastika insignia on his arm and was enjoying the thought of him dying slowly.

  As I rose and motioned them forward, I found Sandy was right at my ear. She whispered, “Al saw another one and went on ahead. Let’s move up to him.”

  When we got there, he’d done a neat little bit of knife work, but then I think he probably had had more practice than I had. Slashing the carotid like that drops blood pressure in the brain so fast that the victims are dead before they hit the ground—and Al had been quick enough about it to get practically nothing on his clothes.

  We crept on forward; there was a dark, vertical shadow on the sand ahead. We had to get close before we could see what it was.

  “Oh, fuck” Al whispered under his breath, about the time I saw, too.

  It was a woman, nude, smeared with dark streaks that could only be blood, tied upright to a post, facing the sea. It wouldn’t have fooled anyone under any circumstances—you could see she was either dead or unconscious, and the post stuck way up above her head. It was there to freak out whoever came ashore.

  “Bush league,” Sandy murmured.

  Al glanced sharply at her. “Explain?”

  “Everyone we’ve hit even up close is a Good Neighbor. This isn’t a professional operation. They got lucky, caught her, beat her until she told them where her pickup was. Now they’re doing this kind of petty bullshit. That’s all. If we can get ’em off the beach somehow, we’ll be right in the clear.”

  “Is it—” I whispered.

  “Oh, yeah, it’s Sheila. Jesus, those fuckers. Can we kill some more?” Sandy asked.

  “Just about for sure,” Al reassured her. “One good diversion would do it … if we just had somebody to kill one of them at a distance, we’d be in damn fine shape. They’ll all either run toward the noise or start firing in the dark.”

  “I could go get one,” Sandy suggested, “just to get things rolling.”

  Al shook his head. “We have to get to Sheila, see if she’s still alive. And if she is, we need time there. We’ll need a better diversion than that.”

  All of this was in whispers soft as breathing. I was gaining a little confidence—the patrols had not been set up in any way that would let them cover each other, so I thought Sandy was probably dead right. This was some overambitious local Good Neighbor captain—probably the same one Whiner and Sympathizer had been talking about—who had launched this operation on his own. “I just had an idea,” I breathed. “I’m going to try something—just take advantage of it if it works.”

  They nodded, once—I guess they trusted me, which was pretty flattering in the circumstances.

  I crept up the sandy beach to the brush line. The question I had asked myself was, if I had no brains or judgment, what would I think was the best place for my command post? I wasn’t sure what I would do when I found my hyperambitious captain, but I did know that if I wanted to make a lot of valuable chaos happen, doing something to him was probably the most efficient way to accomplish it.

  There was one likely spot, and as I climbed up the grassy side of the dune, I was gratified to find tire tracks. He’d even driven up here. Too perfect.

  He was there on the hood of his car—having a car at all, of course, meant he’d spent some years of assiduous sucking up to the authorities. Probably thought of it as being realistic and honestly pursuing his self-interest …

  He was sitting there cross-legged with his radio operator on the ground beside him, and as I listened I realized he was having a great time talking military-talk with the boys out in the field. He didn’t know yet that two of his pickets were dead, because he’d put them out so badly; he had a lot of men scattered all over the place grumbling and hating him, and probably a division of marines could have landed without his men picking it up. He was smoking, himself, so that as I got closer I saw the tiny dot of red going back and forth.

  The problem was there were two of them. If I could get them both, for sure, silently, I could have all kinds of fun …

  I crawled in closer, and now I could hear the two of them talking. The radioman, I realized, was young enough to be impressed with his captain.

  By now I was practically up behind the car from them, and could take a better look. The car was parked on an upslope, but I didn’t think releasing the emergency brake would make it roll back—it was in soft sand.

  I figured any burst of noise would bring people running in here, and it could well start them shooting each other, but that would mean regular cops out on the beach and make the contact that much harder.

  There was a walkie-talkie, sort of—the thing was huge, backpack-sized—just leaning up against the car. In fact there were two of them …

  An idea hit me, and the more I thought about it, the better I liked it. Very quietly I lifted the radio and crept on back. The captain was just explaining—way too loudly, “Well, you know, Jimmy, you do get a lot of time when all you can do is wait. That’s part of being in the organization; it’s the mark of real discipline …”

  Probably the captain became a Good Neighbor because the Boy Scouts thought he’d make a lousy Scoutmaster.

  It took very little time to get back to Al and Sandy. They saw what I had, and I wished it was bright enough for them to see me wink. “What kind of fun can we have with this?”

  Al beamed; I could see the glow of his teeth in the dark. “Allow me … you said the kid’s name was Jimmy?”

  “Yep.”

  “Then it’s Captain Alex Laban. A stuffed shirt and a first-order moron. Let’s get some radio traffic …”

  Holding the earphone so that all three of our heads could surround it, we heard three things; Jimmy requesting people to report what was happening at their stations, people reporting nothing, and Laban chewing them out for reporting nothing in incorrect form. “That’s C
ommand Post Command Post Nothing to report sir Over,” he was telling one.

  Al grinned, flipped the mike to talk, and said, “Jimmy, you tell us as soon as he tries to pat your butt.”

  There was an amazing spell of radio silence. Then Laban said, “Who was that! Acknowledge! Who was that?” It was really loud.

  Al flipped the knob around, and his grin got more deep and wicked. “Emergency, Channel 100 Emergency,” he said, crisply but softly into the mike. His voice was high and squeaky.

  A voice responded at once. “Situation?”

  “Good Neighbor captain exceeding authority. Beach north of Half Moon Bay. I have been ordered to do things contrary to my moral beliefs. My name is Jimmy, and he’s just left me alone, but he’s been bothering me all night—he said it was for field maneuvers, and I had to work the radio for him, but now he’s got me out here all alone and he’s—he’s—I can’t say. It’s too icky.” Then he rammed the mike against his neck and made a gargling noise, and rubbed it facedown in the sand.

  The voice on the other end started frantically trying to hail “Jimmy.” Al flipped the channel again and asked Jimmy a question that would have been pretty blunt in a leather bar. Jimmy didn’t answer. Then Al asked him if he couldn’t talk because of what he was doing for Captain Laban, and whether he really liked it. Jimmy’s voice now came through high and squeaky: “Captain Laban is going around to the posts right now to find out who’s doing it, and if you don’t stop it, I’m going to have him kill you.”

  “Has he ever—” what Al suggested seemed a bit implausible, but now Jimmy was really raving, screaming almost. I could hear him perfectly well without the radio.

  The regular cops had flipped over from the Emergency Channel and seemed to be convinced Jimmy was getting raped right there and then on the beach; they started trying to talk to him. Al did a deep voice and said, “Jimmy, this is the police. We just want you to know you are not to do any of that stuff with the captain. You are reserved for us, and you will do it with us.”

  That got Jimmy yelling that Al wasn’t the police and he wasn’t doing anything and Captain Laban was going to beat his ass in.

  Al sat back, smiling happily. “Except on Channel 100, these things are all very low power, so they won’t interfere with each other,” he whispered. “Only base stations like Jimmy’s have much oomph. So all they can hear is him raving. And I would bet any minute—”

  Sure enough, the captain might not have been any kind of military genius, but he’d figured out that the cops would be out to investigate real soon. Considering he had kept a possibly important witness all to himself and that there were some pretty wild accusations flying around, he behaved like you’d expect anyone of his type to do—he ordered people to go home and jumped into his car. We heard him drive away.

  “He didn’t even check to see whether his whole command heard it,” I said.

  Sandy shook her head. “The regular cops were all trained by the Nazis during Reconstruction. He knows that anyone with any sense will be taking off to hide right now. Good Neighbors are always doing this kind of thing—a lot of them are people who weren’t smart enough or brutal enough to make the regular cops. We can probably sneak up to Sheila now and see if she’s alive—but I’m afraid she isn’t.”

  She wasn’t. She was as cold as the night air, and her poor body was bruised, battered, and cut all over. I figured they had probably not so much systematically tortured her as they had just improvised, the way a group of sadistic children will sometimes keep coming up with things to do to a dog or a cat until it mercifully expires.

  She was tied to the post too tightly to unknot, but we cut her loose and at least laid her on the ground. There was no sign of her SHAKK or of anything else except her—along with her clothes they had taken everything.

  Al swore and pointed at her mouth. “Look what they did to her.”

  A lot of the blood on her had come out of there. I didn’t see what it was, and then Sandy said, “Oh, shit, shit, don’t let Greg see this, I think he had a crush on her.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “There’s this weird belief they have that some agents on our side have radios concealed in hollow teeth. They pulled out all her teeth, either looking for it or to destroy it.”

  I felt pretty sick, but I said, “Uh, but—you could have a radio in a hollow tooth—”

  Al made a face. “Please. I know your people are more advanced than mine, but even I know you can’t make a vacuum tube that small work.”

  It was my turn to be baffled and irritated. “Ever hear of transistors? I’m not defending them, but if they’ve gotten hold of a Special Agent before—”

  “What do you know about transistors?” a voice said, very softly, behind us. “Keep your hands away from your weapons,” it added.

  11

  “May I turn around?” I asked, my hands kept high above my head.

  “You may,” the voice said, and I did—very slowly.

  You know how sometimes a face of a public figure stays with you forever? You see him a few times, maybe you hear him speak, and—presto, with you forever.

  I’d heard this guy twice, both times because I was deliberately crossing a picket line to hear him. He was the great bête noir of a rather large faction at Yale when I was there, and even though he generally irritated hell out of me, and more so out of Marie, he was always much too interesting to ignore.

  That is, as much of him as you could get to hear before the whooping and shouting got too loud.

  He was a broad-shouldered man with bushy black eyebrows and a sharp nose and chin, bigger than he looked at first, and he stood a little awkwardly, like he might limp or stumble a bit when he walked. At the moment he had a very convincing Thompson submachine gun pointed at me.

  His Hungarian accent was not as thick as it had been when I’d heard him speak at Yale, he was twenty years younger, and even in the dim light reflecting off the sea I could tell he was heavily tanned.

  “Dr. Teller,” I said. “Are transistors unknown in this timeline?”

  “You realize,” he said very casually, “that your knowledge of transistors, plus your knowledge of timelines, means that either you are what I have been praying for, without knowing exactly what it was, for years—or else that I should shoot you and your companions right now.”

  “He’s legit,” Al said, and rattled off half a dozen passwords.

  Teller nodded. “Then we had best get moving. Was this poor woman—”

  “The contact you were supposed to have,” I said. “I’m sort of the best that was available as a substitute.”

  “Let us pray you’re good enough,” he said. “Are we ready to go, then?”

  “We can be,” Al said, “as soon as we pick up our three friends from back in town. They’ve nowhere else to go and, there’s a fair amount of incriminating stuff with them.”

  By that time a dozen soot-faced men in black turtlenecks, watch caps, and dungarees—the very image of the World War II commandos in the movies of my childhood—had emerged from the shadows.

  Teller spoke briefly into a handheld gadget that looked like a cellular phone, and we hurried up the beach, back toward Half Moon Bay. But we had gone no more than three hundred yards when we heard the rattle of gunfire. We picked up the pace, but long before we got near the town there was a huge explosion. Flames shot far up into the air.

  “Can we wait ten minutes?” Al asked, shuddering, as he stared at the flames. “God damn the god damn luck, Mark, Sandy, we could have taken them along with us.”

  Teller shook his head, and I could tell he didn’t like it any better than we did. “This beach will be swarming with cops of all kinds in minutes. We’ve got to get off it. There’s a good chance your friends died in that explosion, and if not, they will have to shift for themselves. At least they have been provided with a diversion.”

  Al nodded slowly and started to mutter something under his breath; we dog-trotted up the beach to where the
rubber rafts lay concealed, guarded by four more tough-looking commandos.

  There wasn’t any surf worth talking about, but a beach that is able to have surf tends to amp up any wave that hits it, and the paddling out to sea was about as difficult, physically, as anything I’d done. They handed us all paddles, and we put everything we had into it.

  There was no more gunfire behind us. Either the other three members of the cell were dead, as we hoped, or they were captured.

  Al was still muttering next to me; I glanced at him, feeling sorry for him, and he must have thought I was curious. “Kaddish,” he explained. “Haven’t said it in years, not since I found out my mother died in a camp near Toledo.”

  Though there were no shots, there was plenty of noise from the shore—sirens, motors, people yelling. We could see many headlights on the road over the mountains behind us, as we topped each wave, and a little later there were headlights on the coast road as well.

  Let all of ours be dead … please let them be lucky enough to be dead …

  I was about to ask just how far out we were going to have to paddle—my arms were getting sore from the unaccustomed labor—when we came into the calmer water away from the beach, and I caught a glimpse of something long and thin sticking up from that water. By now there were all sorts of electric lights glowing on the shoreline.

  Very swiftly, and making what seemed like a terrible lot of noise, the submarine broke the surface in front of us. I’d built some model ships as a kid, and I knew what a Salmon class sub looked like. In my time that thing would have been a museum piece, but here it was.

  Lines were thrown out and tied off, and they brought us in fast. I’m no sailor, but it seemed to me that I’d seldom seen men who knew their business so well. In less time than it takes to tell, our rubber boats were up against the steel sides of the sub, and we were scrambling onto the slippery deck and down through the hatches into the close, smelly space underneath. They towed us into a cramped corner, sort of out of the way, and then the commandos were piling in as quickly as they could. The last man down the ladder was in a faded navy shirt and a pair of black pajama trousers, with bare feet, and as the hatch slammed shut he hissed, “Think I heard a plane engine, Cap’n.”