England Expects el-1

by Charles S. Jackson

  “I see we rated a welcoming party,” Thorne called from a few paces as they began to walk over. “Nice of you all to stop by.”

  “We thought we’d bring some ‘friends’ along to keep an eye on our guest, seeing as you insisted on coming back with him alone,” Eileen explained, her voice cold as she eyed the Republican volunteer with quite obvious distaste. Kelly returned her gaze with one that was equal parts self-confidence and lasciviousness as he overtly studied her up and down, probably the worst thing he could have done under the circumstances.

  With the sun above shining through light, patchy cloud that afternoon, the temperature was climbing to close to 14-15 degrees centigrade and was warm enough walk about without the need for bulky jackets. As a result, Eileen was wearing just combat fatigue pants and a snug-fitting ‘Howard Green’ army jumper that carried her commander’s rank on its shoulder boards, none of which did much to hide her fine figure. Kelly took instant note of her Scottish accent, but spent no more than a second or two noting her rank and the rest of the time staring at her body, something that didn’t go unnoticed by the female officer and did nothing to reduce her instant dislike of the man.

  “Rest assured y’ can calm yourself, missus!” Kelly began in what he intended to be a conciliatory and quite roguish Irish lilt. “A fine, young Celtic lass such as yerself has nothin’ to worry about from the likes o’ me!” Thorne winced visibly as he envisaged the reaction those remarks were likely to elicit, a sneer already forming on Donelson’s lips.

  “Nothing to worry about, ‘Jimmy’…?” She snarled back at him, patting the large revolver she wore at her own hip. “Well seein’ as I’m not an unarmed civilian ye can blow up from a safe distance, I do feel fairly safe… to be sure!” Her voice was laced with a level of venom that surprised Kelly completely and forced him to take a few mental steps backward. She’d done a fair impression of his accent in the last three words of her sentence, and it was fairly obvious the intent hadn’t been complimentary.

  “Max, if you’ve finished with this creature, they can take him somewhere and keep him safe and sound.” Her next words, directed at Thorne, were only slightly less angry, and although he was ostensibly the unit’s Commanding Officer, Max was also smart enough to know when discretion was the clearly the better part of valour.

  “Yes, we could probably all do with the rest.” He turned his gaze on Kelly and there was a friendly warning in the man’s eyes that the volunteer didn’t miss. “Toddle along with these gentlemen here and they’ll settle you in nice and comfy… I’ve some things to get on with this afternoon, but we can have a chat tomorrow some time.”

  “I’ll be lookin’ forward to it, Mister Thorne,” Kelly nodded, putting as bright and cheery a face on as he could manage after the embarrassing rebuttal from Donelson, unaccustomed as he was to having his usually-successful charm fall so flat when used upon the fairer sex. The pair of SAS troopers took position on either side of him at that point and lead him away toward the security office and its small group of cells.

  “I don’t like those bastards, Max… I’m sorry, but I don’t like them!” Eileen growled darkly, her angry eyes never leaving the Irishman’s back as he was taken away and the remaining three officers gathered together.

  “I think he got the message, Eileen,” Thorne grinned faintly. “He’s not a bad bloke for all that, and history bears that out. He was one of the IRA’s more vocal opponents to the unrestricted bombings and violence after the war, and he and his mates ended up doing a lot to lay the groundwork for the peace processes that Adams and Sinn Fein put in place with Britain and Ulster in 2001…”

  “More than that,” Alpert added, speaking for the first time as he momentarily rested a conciliatory and friendly hand on her shoulder, “from a purely pragmatic point of view, he may be our only effective chance of getting a connection into Ireland, so we need him! I don’t particularly like dealing with the IRA either, but we all have to focus on what we’re trying to do here.”

  “I know what we’re trying to do, Nick,” Eileen snapped back, calming but still annoyed. “I also know we need that bastard’s help. That doesn’t mean I have to like him into the bargain.” She decided to change the subject at that moment as another thought occurred to her. “Oh, and I’ve organised to see about getting Richard Kransky re-equipped with some decent hardware tomorrow as well, so it might be an idea to have an word or two to him about what’s going on here before then: wouldn’t exactly be fair to throw him into all this without a bit of forewarning.”

  “Yeah, I’m planning to do just that this afternoon,” Thorne agreed, a vaguely mischievous grin flickering across his face. “Nothing nasty or unpleasant about ‘Septics’ you have a problem with, is there…?” In Australian vernacular, ‘Septic’ or ‘Septic Tank’ were rhyming slang terms for ‘Yank’ — for an American.

  “Nothing particularly wrong with Americans, no,” Eileen conceded, forced finally to smile a little herself. “The man seemed nice enough, if a little flustered when I last spoke to him.”

  “And I wonder why that could be?” Thorne laughed openly for the first time, giving her a ‘once-over’ himself that was by no means completely innocent.

  “You can watch yerself too, Mister!” She shot back, giving him a light punch to the shoulder and reddening in mild embarrassment over such a remark in a grinning Alpert’s presence. She and Thorne had some ‘history’, albeit many years in the past, and he could get away with both a remark and a look like under circumstances where others wouldn’t: she knew the man well enough to know that the intent was entirely humorous.

  “Well try not to damage the man too much, will you…” Thorne passed a quick wink to Alpert that she failed to notice. “We don’t need a trail of broken hearts and beds left through the Twentieth Century as well as the Twenty-First!” With that he darted out of potential reach or a swung fist, knowing Donelson well enough to know damn well he’d completely crossed the line with that remark. Eileen went after him with an indignant squeal and a vengeance as Alpert rather uncharacteristically broke down into outright guffaws of laughter.

  The sight of a CO who could barely run properly for laughing, being chased by a howling dervish in the shape of Eileen Donelson, would’ve had more impact on those around the base originally from the future had it not already become an infrequently common sight for one reason or another before they’d left their own time. More accustomed to long distance running than sprints, Eileen wasn’t able to quite catch her CO as he darted across the open grassland between the billets and the flight line, and Thorne wasn’t stupid enough to slow down…

  Friday

  July 19, 1940

  Eileen’s statement regarding others of the officer group at Hindsight being too lazy to get up early enough to go for a run with her had been somewhat unfair: most of the group, in all honesty, were often up that early… although none of them were in the slightest bit interested in running as exercise, in the morning or at any other time. Thorne and Trumbull were indeed awake and dressed by 0700 that Saturday and preparing for the squadron leader’s first official flying lesson on the F-35E, although Thorne, having suffered another long and sleepless night of unsettling dreams, would in retrospect have preferred a later starting time.

  As they walked near a line of slit trenches and the roof of a concrete command bunker, heading from the officers’ billets toward the flight line across open grassland, they both caught sight of Commander Donelson doing warm-up stretches alone in the distance near the control tower’s base. Even at that distance, Trumbull could see that the light shirt and shorts she appeared to be wearing were far too brief for such a lady to be wearing in his opinion.

  “A little chilly for that kind of dress, wouldn’t you say?” He observed quietly, feeling the cold through the flight suit and lined jacket he wore as their breath streamed about them in clouds of condensation on that chilly morning.

  “Never bothers our valiant Commander Donelson, mate,” Thorne rep
lied, shaking his head in mock pity as if speaking sympathetically about a ‘simple’ but nevertheless well-loved relative. “Rain, hail or shine, you can guarantee that mad woman’ll be traipsing all over the bloody countryside like a marathon runner on drugs.”

  “She goes running on her own, then?”

  “You think anyone else is silly enough to go haring about the place after her at this time of the morning?” Thorne snorted derisively. “No thank you, pal: I like my sleep too much!”

  “Well, it appears someone is ‘silly’ enough,” Trumbull pointed out as they continued on, nodding off to the left where he’d spied another figure walking past the parked aircraft toward the commander through the foggy morning.

  “Who’s that?” Thorne muttered, squinting hard. “Kransky…?”

  “He’s dressed for exercise by the look of him: the commander must have made a positive impression on him!”

  “Jesus,” Thorne shook his head sadly. “The poor bastard…”

  “How’s that…?” Trumbull asked, curious over the man’s choice of words and tone.

  “Alec, I don’t mean this as an insult, but that woman can be a real cow when it comes to sucking blokes into doing things. She used to do it back in our time as well, and the silly pricks fell for it in droves…”

  “I don’t understand what you mean,” Trumbull admitted with a quizzical expression.

  “Look, Eileen’s an attractive woman and no mistake, and men — even in my time — tend to get bedazzled by attractive women and not look beyond their physical appearance. ‘Oh dear — pretty little thing wants me to partner her for a little run — mustn’t be too hard on her…’ They don’t see the strength and capability behind those good looks, and as a result they usually end up a bloody sight worse off!”

  “You think Eileen ‘tricked’ Major Kransky into running with her?”

  “Oh, if I know her, I’m bloody certain of it. There’s no malice in it,” Thorne was quick to add in explanation, afraid he might be giving the wrong impression of his friend. “She doesn’t like running on her own any more than anyone else likes doing stuff by themselves…” he shrugged “…but you tell me which you’d rather: going running with a cute, ‘defenceless’ woman who thinks she can jog a bit… or take on a fit, athletic female who regularly won awards at the naval academy for long-distance running and has an overload of Twenty-First Century ‘attitude’?”

  “Eileen was a long distance runner?” That fact caught Trumbull by surprise. Although he was already seeing a good deal of the commander’s great capabilities in many areas, the idea of a woman being an accomplished athlete and the physical equal of a man was still somehow a strange concept.

  “Not ‘was’ — is. In her spare time she was running the occasional marathon or ten kilometre race right up to the point we left for 1940: I don’t care how fit the bloke is in the field… unless Kransky’s been training for the Olympics, she’s going to kick his arse!”

  “Poor fellow,” Trumbull agreed after a long pause, a faint smirk crossing his features as they walked on. “Poor fellow indeed!”

  “Good mornin’, Richard,” Eileen called out cheerfully as the American approached, the man now feeling rather dubious about an idea that’d seemed far more appealing the day before. He wore a pair of loose-fitting combat fatigue pants and long-sleeved shirt, along with the only pair of shoes he possessed — his well-worn army boots — and he was feeling the cold of the morning more than he’d have liked. He was used to cold climates, but that didn’t mean he was altogether happy about being out in one any more than necessary.

  “Morning to you… Eileen…” he said with a little hesitation as he took a good look at what she was wearing for the first time. Her dress was, as Trumbull had suspected even from a distance, far more revealing than was normal for a woman of that period when engaging in sport or otherwise. The fluoro-green shorts she wore over a skin-tight black pair of thigh-length, Lycra pants were very brief and left not a great deal to the imagination, while the plain, white T-shirt above them clearly showed off a grey sports bra beneath.

  Being quite cold that morning, Kransky couldn’t help but notice that her erect nipples were showing quite clearly through the sports bra and T-shirt, and as he made a valiant attempt at not staring directly at her breasts, he discovered there was almost no part of her body he could look at that wasn’t showing either far too much bare skin or showing off undergarments far too readily. In the end he stared down at her feet, trying to ignore her toned and shapely legs and instead studied her unusual running shoes for a few moments. He wondered if ‘Nike’ was the surname of perhaps someone from whom she’d borrowed them, although it occurred to him that if that were the case, the person in question had to be very poorly sighted if they needed their own name emblazoned across the shoes in such large letters.

  “It’s quite all right, Richard,” Eileen laughed lightly, noticing his consternation and embarrassed inability to look directly at her. “I’m sure this is probably ‘more’ of me than you expected to see.” She carried out a final five set of toe-touches as she spoke which did nothing to help Kransky’s mental state at all, before rising to stand completely once more, legs slightly apart and hands expectantly on hips. “We’re going for a run, for goodness sake, not a formal dance!” The grin on her face was sympathetic and showed some understanding of the man’s ‘plight’.

  “I do know Max had a chat with you yesterday about what’s going on here at Hindsight,” she noted, changing the subject a little.

  “It was a lot to take, I have to admit,” Kransky nodded slowly, the remark bringing curiosity to his expression and taking his mind completely away from her body for a moment or two. “It took an awful lot of convincing.”

  “Well under those circumstances, perhaps you can understand that we do things a little different at the start of the 21st Century.” She held her arms out at her sides in indication of her own attire. “For a start, male or female, we tend to wear things for practicality rather than purely for modesty. Shall we…?” She added, making movements that suggested they get started on their run. “I was thinking we could head east along the perimeter fence and then down to South Walls and back.”

  “What would that be…?” Kransky began, drawing on what he’d learned of the island’s topography and working it out in his mind “…maybe six miles each way…?”

  “Perhaps a bit more than that, but not by much: thought we’d go easy for your first day.”

  “Nah, that’s okay, Eileen: just go as far as you want — don’t worry about me,” he countered, not outwardly displaying any of the smug confidence that suddenly resurfaced at the back of his mind. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Okay then, mister: let’s be off!” She stated simply as she turned and began to jog away toward the northern side of the runway and hangar buildings and the nearest set of gates beyond that led out through the two-metre-high fence surrounding the installation. He hesitated just a moment or two before taking off after her retreating form, thinking that despite his own ego, leaving his pack and equipment behind mightn’t have been a bad idea after all.

  Almost two and a half hours and more than twenty kilometres of solid, paced jogging later, Richard Kransky had given up all thoughts of ‘going easy’ on anyone and was concentrating on nothing more than keeping up. As they made their way back along the perimeter fence toward those same gates once more, Donelson was a good ten metres ahead and he no longer regarded the shapely figure running before him as anything more than an incentive to keep going, despite the constant protests of his back, feet and legs… and the rest of his body for that matter. The bright, fluoro-green shorts were all he could focus on, and he used them as a beacon to drag himself onward as his ego forced him to continue, determined to at least finish the run with her, even if it killed him.

  He didn’t turn his head as he passed a group of Australian SAS troopers, engaged in setting up equipment on the open ground beside the runway on the other side of
the fence to his left, but he could hear their laughter and less-than-sympathetic remarks regarding his worn-out appearance. He wasn’t entirely sure what a ‘Septic’ was, other than the obvious dictionary definition, but he was fairly certain it wasn’t complimentary. The few Australians he’d come across in his life had proved to be excellent fighters and hard workers, but they were a strange lot into the bargain and were possessed of a sharp and caustic sense of humour that perhaps reflected the harsh nature of the country they’d grown up in.

  Invariably behind Donelson for the entirety of the run, he’d spent the time thinking about many things, not the least of which was the incredible story Thorne had told him the day before regarding the origins of the Hindsight Interception unit. It’d been difficult to accept what Thorne had revealed to him initially, but the man had produced enough evidence — in light of the existence of those four jet aircraft particularly — to eventually convince him. He was looking forward to getting the chance to work his way through some of the files and information that Hindsight had brought with them: to learn more about the world that the unit had left and the way the one he lived in should be.

  In retrospect, he did wonder why Thorne had been so quick to trust him with the true nature of the Hindsight unit — it was something that was obviously of the highest security after all and should be — and he had the distinct feeling that perhaps Thorne somehow already knew him, or at least knew of him… something that wasn’t at all impossible considering they’d all come from the future. The man wouldn’t elaborate the few times Kransky had asked however, and it was a singularly bizarre and unnerving feeling for the tall American that someone might well know his fate. He’d later decided that Thorne was right not to volunteer any information… it was better perhaps than a man never know what the future had in store for him.