TimeRiders

by Time Riders (epub)

  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.

  Until then Bob calculated his best course of action was to find somewhere to lie low and undetected. More importantly, his body had sustained several bullet wounds around his torso. No critical organs had been damaged and the blood had clotted, preventing further loss, but the wounds would need cleaning, disinfecting and dressing. His software
informed him that failure to do so soon would result in an eighty-three per cent chance of a spreading bacterial infection and eventual systemic failure of his organic body.

  He would die… just like a human.

  He walked away from the other soldiers, some of whom had begun to glance suspiciously at his unfamiliar face. He strode swiftly across the grounds of the White House, passing unnoticed amid the flurry of activity going on – appearing in the gathering dusk as if he was just another trooper given an important errand to perform with all haste.

  CHAPTER 43

  1956, command ship above Washington DC

  Kramer turned round to look out of his sweeping observation windows down at Washington, a dark, still city. He had expected far stiffer resistance around the capital. Washington DC had fallen in just two days. The major battle had taken place just north of the suburbs on the first day. The American tanks, the lightly armoured and cumbersome Sherman MkIIs, had been outmanoeuvred and out-gunned by their Blitz Raptor MkVIs from the very first moment; the Raptors’ agile hovercraft weapons platforms had made pitifully short work of them.

  Their hastily assembled and dug-out defences, running east to west above the city, had been so easily bypassed. The American battle line fell to pieces in the early hours of this morning, the second day of the battle for Washington. When Kramer’s highly trained Fallschirmjäger, equipped with gas-propellant landing packs and their recently upgraded pulse rifles, had dropped behind the Americans’ crumbling line, further panic and disorder had soon spread among them.

  Today had mostly been a mopping-up exercise.

  The Americans had managed to muster together a few defensive clusters. His intelligence corps informed him a brigade-strength force of American marines was holding a strong position around one of the southern suburbs of the city, and there were pockets here and there within Washington DC. But the Americans had not had enough time to set up anything more than a shambolic line of battle-weary troops around the White House itself.

  Kramer shook his head. President Eisenhower’s last stand had been pitiful and undignified. He’d hoped for a much more dramatic conclusion to the campaign. America had surrendered with a whimper instead of a bang.

  The complete surprise with which they’d caught the Americans had left them scrambling from the very beginning. It had taken little more than eight weeks from the first massed amphibious assault on the beaches of New England… to today.

  It was of course better for the civilians this way, better than a long drawn-out campaign stretching into the autumn and winter, with innocent people dying unnecessarily. He genuinely felt no ill will towards the people of America. In fact, his mother had been American – a woman born in Minneapolis – and he himself had once had an American passport. He smiled at the absurd complexity of things. His mother, Sally-Anne Gardiner, all-American girl, wasn’t due to be born for another forty-five years, wasn’t due to meet and marry his father, Boris Kramer, for another sixty-five. And yet here was her son, leader of the German nation, the European states… and now also the United States.

  Such is the absurdity of time travel, Paul… eh?

  Background details, of course, known only to the few men he trusted around him: Karl Haas and the three other men who’d come through the time machine and survived to this day. Storming Hitler’s Bavarian retreat had proven costly. Just the five of them left by the time Hitler ordered his men to stand down.

  The people of Germany adored Kramer, their Führer – the one who led them to victory, the leader who’d replaced that confused anti-Semitic old fool, Adolf Hitler. They believed him to be German, they cared not that there was no record of his childhood, no record of a mother or a father, no trace of his existence in this world… until the spring of 1941. All they cared was that he had emerged from nowhere, like a guardian angel falling from heaven, and led them to victory. He’d united Europe under one proud banner, not that idiotic symbol, the swastika, but a banner of his very own design, the uroboros – the serpent eating its own tale – a symbol of infinity.

  What comes around… goes around.

  Europe, and now America, had at last been united – the combined muscle he needed to eventually bring the rest of the world to heel.

  And it was going to be a much better world. A world where no one starved. A world whose population could be responsibly controlled to not exceed what this earth could feed. A world whose resources would be carefully used and not squandered by disgustingly rich and self-serving politicians. A world not poisoned by vehicle exhausts or coal fumes. A world not dying because mankind could not control its greed.

  But more importantly…

  It will be your world, Paul. All yours.

  The quiet voice of his ambition made him stir uneasily.

  You’ve conquered more than any leader in history.

  Kramer knew he should be feeling elated, proud of what he’d achieved so far. But he wasn’t. And the reason for that was lying on the floor in front of him, brought up by the oberleutnant and his two men: a hideously deformed thing that once might have been a young German soldier, but was now a twisted mix of two, maybe three, young men.

  It lay in front of him in an unzipped body bag. Kramer had seen something like this only once before, over a decade ago in the snowy woods of Obersalzberg. He remembered he’d nearly vomited then, just as he felt like doing now.

  Karl squatted down beside the body and inspected it closely. ‘This could be the result of an incendiary weapon. The intense heat could have fused these poor men together.’

  Kramer nodded, tight-lipped, stroking his chin. It could well be that… or the result of one of their pulse bombs, designed to pulverize soft tissue with its shock wave. His modern weapon designs had a habit of producing unpleasant-looking casualties like this.

  Or it might be something else?

  That voice again. He bid it be silent.

  ‘Yes, Karl… it’s a possibility.’

  CHAPTER 44

  1956, outside Washington DC

  Liam looked out of the back of the truck as it rumbled noisily along a road away from DC lined with German troops on patrol, civilian refugees herded at gunpoint and pitiful lines of beaten American soldiers in their khaki greens, many of them wounded.

  ‘I’m Wallace, by the way,’ said the man in the suit. ‘Daniel Wallace. I work in the White House press corps. Well,’ he sighed wearily, ‘at least I did.’

  Liam held out a limp hand. He wasn’t sure what ‘press corps’ did, but he guessed it was to do with newspapers. ‘Liam O’Connor, from Cork, Ireland.’

  Wallace nodded. ‘You’re a long way from home, son.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ he replied with a lacklustre smile.

  Wallace spoke quietly. ‘I’m still puzzled about you and your friend. You said you were…’ Wallace looked around at the other prisoners; many of them were either in shock, or had retired into themselves, shutting out this grim reality.

  ‘Look, why don’t we forget what I said?’ Liam replied. ‘It’s not like it matters now, does it? I’m right here in the same boat as everyone else.’

  ‘What about the man you were with?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘I… I swear I saw him take gunshot wounds that… that he shouldn’t have survived.’

  Liam said nothing and Wallace let it go for now, turning to listen to a couple of other prisoners in the back of the truck talking quietly, a silver-haired army colonel and a naval officer.

  ‘… were all strung out, shell-shocked. I can’t believe two months ago the big story was Eisenhower meeting Kramer on neutral ground to discuss peace – an end to the growing tension between us and them.’

  ‘And all the while,’ cu
t in the navy officer, ‘Kramer was putting the final preparations together for his invasion of America.’ The colonel ran a hand over his buzz-cut hair. ‘We never even saw it coming, Bill… We were just kidding ourselves that they wanted peace and would leave us alone.’

  Liam gazed out of the back of the truck, his mind a million miles away.

  My first trip… and it’s already over for me.

  The last few weeks of his life felt like a crazy dream. A little over three weeks ago, he’d been a junior steward on the Titanic, tending to rich, pampered passengers, looking forward to arriving in the land of opportunity, America. The plan had been to quit his job the moment the ship docked and begin a new life of adventure and discovery. He’d read so much about America and knew this was the place for him, the country in which he would make his fortune.

  Then a chunk of bloody ice at sea had changed everything.

  And with it came Foster… saving him from the sort of death he’d always had nightmares about – drowning. The old man had opened an incredible door for him. A stunning world of the future, a world of chrome and glass buildings, of neon lights and flashing screens of colour, of excitement, of movement, of technology that seemed out of this world. But also a world of the past, of any time he wished, for Foster assured him he would see so many wonderful things, wonderful moments, that in a way… no, definitely… he was the luckiest young man alive.

  Now here he was. Stuck. What he faced now along with everyone else in this truck was a frightening and uncertain future. They were going to be shot and, if not, then most probably put to work as prisoners of war.

  Some small voice inside tried to reassure him that at least he was alive instead of crushed and rotting fish-food at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. It did little to cheer him. He was stuck here. There was no way for him to return to that third and final extraction window. And, without any way at all to communicate with Foster, Maddy and Sal… that was it for him.