England Expects el-1

by Charles S. Jackson

  As the song played, Trumbull took his eyes away from the instrument in Thorne’s hands just long enough to pull out a nearby chair and take a seat, and neither man noticed as another three naval ratings and a sub-lieutenant working in nearby offices appeared in the open doorway and looked on, having been drawn there by the unusual music. Thorne knew nothing of what was happening beyond the guitar as he played, his eyes shut tight as he lost himself in the words and music of a song that had once held great significance in his life.

  As the lyrics ended and the last few bars played out, the impromptu audience outside the door gave a few appreciative claps and smiles before eventually returning to their workstations once more. Thorne gave his appreciation of their applause with a smile and a faint nod, but there wasn’t the same level of embarrassment he’d felt the first time Trumbull had walked in on him practising the Pink Floyd instrumental. Instead, he carried the air of someone humbly satisfied with his own performance and happy just to take pleasure in the fact that what he’d done had provided some minor enjoyment for others.

  “That was beautiful!” Trumbull declared softly, finding it difficult to remove the wide smile from his own face as he spoke. “Just wonderful…! What was that song called?”

  “Romeo and Juliet,” Thorne replied as he maintained his own faint grin. “Originally performed by a band named Dire Straits… it’s a song I used to like playing for my wife. Looking back over those photos there made me want to play it again.”

  “Photographs, eh?” Trumbull took note of the album on the table for the first time. “Mind if I take a look?” Thorne almost refused the request, but he remembered what Eileen had said the night before… remembered the good advice she’d given him.

  “What the hell,” Thorne shrugged. “Go right ahead.”

  He lifted the album and passed it to Trumbull as the man rose and moved across to take the chair beside his, the pilot receiving the item quite carefully. It was covered in a strange, synthetic material with a leathery feel, and as he opened it he was pleasantly surprised.

  “Colour photographs… I haven’t seen these before…!”

  “They’re personal photos… ones I haven’t looked at since we arrived here. Lucky really that I had left them in storage inside the Galaxy — they’d have been lost in the raid, otherwise. Anyway, I thought it was about time I refreshed some of my memories…”

  Trumbull turned through some of the pages, studying the photographs held there almost reverently and halting as he came across a much younger Thorne in a flight suit similar to the one they wore when flying the Lightning or Raptor. Thorne was standing beside a large fighter aircraft sporting a similar style of faded-grey insignia that all the aircraft at Hindsight displayed, although this one was of a leaping kangaroo enclosed within an RAF-style roundel.

  “That’s an F/A-18 Hornet… it was the fighter I flew during the Nineteen-Eighties.”

  “It’s big like the Raptor… was it fast?”

  “Yeah… pretty fast,” Thorne nodded, smiling as he remembered the joy he’d felt upon first qualifying to fly the jet. “Getting to the end of their life now though, after twenty-five-odd years of good service… the RAAF’s waiting to replace them with F-35s just like the one we have here… just waiting for their turn in the queue as production starts.” IT never occurred to Thorne, as he reminisced, that he was speaking in the present tense about events far away in a future that might never happen.

  The next photograph was of a strangely built house on a block of open, brown-grassed land with the towering skyscrapers of a huge city rising imposingly in the deep background. A middle-aged man and woman stood in the foreground beside a large, white automobile of a type and style Trumbull had never before seen.

  “My parents,” Thorne explained softly, the memories now not so fond. “They’re both dead… died years ago. That’s the house I grew up in as a kid.”

  “The city: it’s huge…!”

  “No, not really,” Thorne grinned with irony, thinking Trumbull’s concept of the word ‘huge’ wasn’t necessarily the same as his own. “That’s only Melbourne, mate: one of Australia’s state capitals. That photo was taken in 1975, just a few months before mum and I moved out to the country. The city covers a lot of area physically, but the actual density of population is pretty low in most Australian cities. Melbourne’s probably five times larger than London in terms of area, but even now — in 2010, I mean — there’s only about four million people living there.” Thorne grinned as he saw the surprise in the man’s face. “That’s not many for a big city: London has twice that many crammed into a space a fifth the size… not much different to what it has now.”

  “Only four million people,” Trumbull muttered softly. He’d never really thought about how many souls were crammed into London’s streets and boroughs, but he knew he’d always felt the city to be absolutely huge whenever he had cause to visit there. Yet the city Thorne had grown up in as a child, with just half the population, covered an area of land five times greater. He knew Australia was a country many times larger than England… or even the whole of Britain for that matter… but that statement alone really did bring home the differences of scale between his world and the one Max Thorne knew. He flipped to the next photo and gave a happy smile.

  “London!” He exclaimed in recognition… at least Trafalgar Square hadn’t changed all that much, although some of the buildings in the background seemed as strange and imposing as those in the previous photograph. A pretty young woman wearing a bright, summer dress and a playful expression on her face stood in the foreground by Nelson’s Column, her dark hair clasped behind her head and hanging down across one shoulder.

  “I would say that that picture was taken five years ago, but instead I’ll just say it was taken in the summer of 2005.” Trumbull noted a changed inflection in Thorne’s voice… something different and hesitant in the tone.

  “Your wife…?” He asked softly, and as he looked up he was more than a little surprised to see the man’s eyes were moist.

  “Yes,” Thorne said simply, taking up his coffee cup and staring down into it.

  “She’s very beautiful,” Trumbull complemented haltingly, a feeling of uncertainty creeping over him as he spoke. He knew there were many things about this man’s past that hadn’t been spoken of, and there were likely to be important reasons for that. He also suddenly realised that viewing these photographs might well have dragged his commanding officer into an emotional ‘minefield’. “It must have been difficult for you to leave her behind…”

  “Not really,” Thorne replied with some difficulty, his voice almost breaking with sudden emotion. “She died two years after that photo was taken.”

  “My God… I’m so sorry Old Man… forgive me!” Trumbull stomach lurched as if he’d just fallen into a deep pit… something his conscience would’ve preferred at that point.

  “How were you to know?” Thorne replied, trying to smile and mostly succeeding. “As I said, it was a long time ago… nearly three years now…” He took a gulp of the coffee. “We’d been expecting it for longer than that, of course…”

  “There’s no need to explain,” Trumbull began, fearing he’d insensitively opened a terrible old wound.

  “No… it’s okay… really. Maybe it’s better if I do talk about it. You see, life in the 21st Century isn’t quite as simple as it is now for a number of reasons: there are some enemies you can’t fight so easily as Hitler or the Luftwaffe. My wife contracted a disease not long after we were married in 2004. We had no idea at the time… some test failed, or wasn’t carried out properly, and we just didn’t know — not that it would’ve made any difference anyway. The disease was called AIDS — Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome — and it could lay dormant in your body for many years before you knew something was wrong. It was early 2007 when the first symptoms were detected and diagnosed, and from then on she went downhill quickly. This disease… well it destroys the body’s ability to fight infections. AI
DS wouldn’t kill a victim most of the time, but it stops them being able to fight all the things that do. A common cold got her in the end, and she fell into a coma just ten months after first diagnosis and died two weeks later.”

  “There… there were no treatments?” Trumbull stammered, deeply moved by this outpouring of Thorne’s soul. He couldn’t believe that infection or disease might still plague a future so great and advanced as to produce such things as the Raptor and the Lightning.

  “There was no cure… is no cure,” Thorne said with finality. “There was just nothing to be done…” There was a long pause, and the pilot watched the man’s actions as silence reignedThorne staring at a dead spot on the far wall and fighting a hard battle within his own mind.

  “I see that you loved her very much…”

  “Yes,” Thorne said finally, managing a weak smile. “Yes, I did.”

  “I hope you can forgive me for bringing that up…”

  “No problem,” the Australian shook his head. “I think it might actually be better for me to talk about this kind of shit every now and again…”…and he was surprised to discover he actually meant every word.

  “Well any time you want to talk about anything, you can always count on me to listen, my friend.” Trumbull smiled warmly, patting Thorne on the shoulder in a comradely manner.

  “I may hold you to that some time,” Thorne warned, grinning faintly and deciding that perhaps he did feel a little better after all.

  Davies, Kransky and Donelson, the only other Hindsight officers present on the base at that time, arrived fifteen minutes later. It was as they all took their seats that Thorne revealed the reason behind calling the impromptu meeting: the presence of Oberstleutnant Carl Ritter, the prisoner they’d fished out of the water following the raid of two days before. All three were equally surprised at the synchronous nature of Ritter’s capture, but only Thorne had formed an idea — wild and unlikely as it was — as to how they might make full use of that opportunity.

  “You wouldn’t believe that something as unlikely as this could happen.” Much like the rest of those present who were in the know, Donelson found the German pilot’s arrival a little difficult to accept as coincidence. “They send nothing for six weeks, then two air raids within days of each other and Ritter — of all people — is shot down in that second raid and lands right in our hands.”

  “I’d call that some serious dumb luck!” Davies observed with a grin. The Texan was seated beside Donelson, their chairs slightly to the left of where Thorne still sat. “Reuters’ll be going loco on the other side of The Channel right about now… two Flankers splashed on our first day, followed by their AWACS and tanker not long after, and now we finish up the ol’ ‘one-two’ with Ritter droppin’ in on us! I’ll lay money down some asshole at Fliegerkorps is getting his nuts roasted big time for sending his unit our way!”

  “There’s an alternative to consider,” Donelson observed slowly, pausing. “Reuters might’ve sent him in on purpose as a plant.”

  “I wouldn’t imagine there’d be too much chance of that,” Thorne interjected, dismissing the idea out of hand as he glanced up from the small, leather-bound diary that’d been confiscated from the prisoner in question. It’d been inside his flight suit as Ritter had gone into the water, and as such Thorne was now forced to turn the soaked pages with extreme care.

  “You’re certain of that, Max?” Donelson wasn’t insulted by his immediate rejection of the idea… she’d not considered it all that likely either, and had merely sought a little consensus.

  “I had considered it for a moment,” he admitted after a long pause, “but look at the facts as they…” he halted, rephrased the next sentence in his mind, then continued “…as they would have occurred back in Realtime: Ritter was commanding ZG26 just as he is now, and his unit’s performance in The Med and in Russia during ‘41 and ‘42 was good enough to earn him a promotion or two and a spot on the General Staff. He was a major-general by 1944, and a junior advisor with Hitler’s entourage. He was also one of the first against the wall with Von Stauffenberg after the failed bomb plot. He was one of the pricks that managed to get the guy and his bomb into the same room as Adolf in the first place! There were rumours that paperwork discovered after the purges placed him high in the leadership of the ‘new’ German government if they’d succeeded. Either of you really think he’d be working with the Nazis to such an extent he’d allow himself to get shot down, just so we could capture him?”

  “I wouldn’t like to try for ‘a little bit shot up’ in a hostile environment either just so I could bail out… I’ll tell you that straight!” Davies admitted with a lop-sided grin. “As I found out on Saturday myself, it’s far too easy to get your ass shot off completely!” He shrugged, then added thoughtfully: “Pity those bastards didn’t nail Hitler with that bomb plot. We could’ve ended the war a year earlier with someone sane in charge.” His grin broadened momentarily and became a little malicious. “Probably would’ve pissed the Ruskies off too!” Despite almost a twenty years of ‘peace’ between United States and the CIS following the end of the Cold War, some old prejudices still died hard within the US military.

  “Yeah… a negotiated peace wasn’t on Stalin’s agenda at all.” Thorne agreed with a thin smile. “I don’t know that ‘pissin’ off the Ruskies’ would’ve been a great idea at that point, though! Those guys lost twenty million against the Krauts — two million at Leningrad alone — and they weren’t about to forget that. Had the western alliance struck a peace pact with Germany, you might well have seen US and Soviet troops fighting for the Elbe rather that shaking hands across it… would’ve been real good for the world during the fifties and sixties if the Iron Curtain had started at the English Channel!”

  “Come on…!” Davies scoffed lightly. “The Russians weren’t that good!”

  “Yeah, well they weren’t that bad either… sheer weight of numbers alone could well have been enough. The Krauts threw everything they had at them and couldn’t even slow them down!” He shook his head in a dismissive gesture. “In any case, the whole thing was completely academic then, and its doubly so now! Lieutenant-Colonel Carl Ritter has dropped into our laps. Fine… ‘Good deal’, as they say in your country, Jack. We just need to work out what to do with the arsehole.”

  “Pardon my ignorance, people,” Kransky chimed in from his seat at a table on his own, toward the rear of the room, “but could someone please tell me who this Kraut son of a bitch is?” Although more coarsely voiced than words Trumbull would’ve chosen, the question echoed similar thoughts in his own mind.

  “Carl Werner Ritter: born 1905 and died (in Realtime) in August of 1944,” Thorne began, grinning apologetically for not previously filling the two new Hindsight members in. “On the face of it, a damn good pilot and commander, and career Luftwaffe all the way. Other than that, not much can be said about him…” he allowed the sentence to trail off until Kransky was on the verge of another question “…except… he has one single important and very significant thing about him that interests us: our sources back in Realtime believed he’s the biological father of one Kurt Reuters, ex-Bundeswehr and current Reichsmarschall of the Wehrmacht.” Thorne positively beamed at being the centre of the two men’s attention, and at the spectacle of it all as expressions of stunned disbelief flashed back at him in an instant. “That pretty much answer your questions…? Yes…? Excellent…! Ideas, anyone…? Bueller…? Bueller…?” Neither Trumbull nor Kransky were capable of asking anything more at that moment, something Thorne considered quite an achievement in itself, knowing the pair as he did.

  “Why not just hand him over to the proper authorities and let him take his chances like any other downed flier?” Davies was a capable man, but Thorne was sometimes exasperated by his ability to narrow his focus on some issues.

  “I think Max has other ideas for this feller’s potential,” Eileen Donelson observed softly, regarding the grin that spread across Thorne’s face with interes
t.

  “I reckon we can turn him,” Thorne spoke slowly, his gaze as steady as his tone was serious.

  “Are you nuts?” Davies was shaking his head now, mildly incredulous. “Have you forgotten who we’re talking about?”

  “Not at all… I just don’t see why that should make any difference…”

  “Of course it makes a fuckin’ difference! He’s Reuters’ father, Goddamnit! If you want to really turn him, you’ll probably have to give him the same spiel you handed Trumbull, here! You’ll have to tell him what we’re really about!”

  “Probably, but…”

  “What’re you going to tell him about Reuters?”

  “What the fuck do you think I’m gonna tell him about Reuters, y’ great pillock…?” Thorne shot back with mild derision. “Throw him some ‘Luke, I am your father!’ bullshit? Do I look like Darth Fuckin’ Vader to you?” Save for Trumbull and Kransky, who could never get the joke, everyone grinned at the remark, Davies included. They were all close and knew how Thorne operated, and that morning he was in a particularly good mood for a change. Jack Davies had a good idea of the reason for the good humour, having been woken up unexpectedly by the noises next door during the middle of the night, and he wasn’t going to take offence… although he still had to admit he was more than a little envious.

  “Jesus, Jack — I want to turn the bastard to our use, not turn him bloody mental!” Thorne continued. “I’m gonna tell him sweet bugger all about Reuters — absolutely bloody nothing. There’s no reason for him to know the truth, and he probably wouldn’t believe it anyway. All he has to know is the truth of what his country is going to do to Europe, should they be victorious. In Realtime, he backed the army once they realised Hitler was destroying them, and he gave his life for that belief… I’m certain he’s still that man of honour in this temporal environment. His diary sure as hell supports that in the few pages I’ve read so far… listen…”