Ironfall (Kirov Series Book 30)

by Schettler, John

  “So our men reached the year 1804,” said Elena. “Which means anyone with the knowledge of that passage could do the same, and that brings us round to the matter of the key we lost on Rodney . We think we know where it was, that very year, in 1804.”

  “Indeed… Now you can be the history professor, Miss Fairchild. Enlighten me.”

  “It was in the salvage operation at the wreck of the Mentor, a ship owned by one Lord Elgin, a man you must certainly be familiar with.”

  “Ah, yes, the Elgin Marbles. You say this key was found in the base of the Selene Horse, and that artifact was recovered with the rest of the Parthenon Marbles, by the Earl of Elgin.”

  “Correct. The Mentor was caught in a storm, sought refuge off the Greek Island of Kythera, and went down when her anchor could not hold. That was in September of 1802, and a salvage operation was immediately planned to recover the crated marbles. By September of 1803, they had recovered eleven of sixteen boxes. Five more were still on the seabed, and of those, two had not even been located. In April of 1804 they renewed the diving operations, and by June of that year they had finally located and recovered all sixteen boxes, and also recovered the Throne of Prytanis.”

  “You’ve done your research,” said Churchill. “But weren’t they subsequently moved to England?”

  “Not until February 16th, of 1805. They were loaded aboard the British vessel Lady Shaw Stewart, Royal Transport Number 99. So between that date, and the date of the final recovery, all the crates were simply kept right there on the beach at Kythera, covered with sand and brush, and kept under daily guard. So the Selene Horse is there—right there, in late 1804. If that passage in St. Michael’s cave holds true and delivers a traveler to that time, then we can go and find that key before it ever reached England.”

  At that, Churchill raised an eyebrow. “How would that be possible, because it clearly did reach England. How else would it have been loaded onto the Rodney with the rest of the marbles?”

  “An interesting point,” said Elena. “However, since 1804 predates the arrival of the Marbles in England, there is no reason why I would not find it there.”

  “Yes, but if you do so, then you never had reason to come here looking for it aboard the Rodney . Yes?”

  “Possibly,” said Elena. “It sounds like a little paradox, but we think we have the answer. The rift crosses the line to another meridian of time.”

  “I’m not sure I follow you.”

  “Well let me put it this way… In all the history I know, the Germans never occupied the Rock, nor did they ever reach Moscow. This is an altered meridian, and that rift is reaching one where no change has contaminated it. I could go there, retrieve that key, and why would Time object? I had no idea the key I was given, or the device I discovered at Delphi, would move my ship here. I had no knowledge of this other key, nor any thought of the Earl of Elgin in my mind at all when our displacement first occurred. So there is no paradox of intent being foiled by the fact I already possessed the key.”

  “I suppose that’s sound enough reasoning,” said Churchill. “But suppose you do send those gentlemen of yours through.”

  “You mean my Argonauts?”

  “Yes. Very handy fellows. Suppose you send them and they bring back this key. What then? What would you do with it?”

  “Another good question. All I know is that there are seven apertures on the device in my cabin aboard Argos Fire , and one is most likely reserved for that key. If we’re ever to solve this mystery, I’ll need to go and fetch it. Would you have any problem with that?”

  “If you’re asking for my consent, it is given. But Miss Fairchild, I was told that all these alterations you spoke of first originated in the year 1908. Now here we are talking about a little jaunt to 1804, over a hundred years earlier. Might I advise caution while you are there. I know your Argonauts are quite effective, but a bullet in the wrong place might have some alarming repercussions. You might shoot someone’s grandfather, if you fathom what I’m getting at.”

  “Understood,” said Elena. “We’ll be as cautious as we can, but the mission must succeed. The order will be that no one of that era is to be harmed, but we may have to make a show of force if stealth and guile won’t serve.”

  “Show it if you must,” said Churchill, “but be a little reticent to use it.”

  It was more than someone’s grandfather on the chopping block of time. Fairchild had taken hold of a rope that was leading her to a most dangerous place. It didn’t start off that way. In the beginning, it was just a little competition between two men with more time, money and accompanying ego, than common sense. It was the sort of thing that sent them to hire experts to go and fetch ashes for sport, and those of Mister Churchill himself had been collected at St. Martin’s Church in Bladon. The substance of his very being had been gathered up, compressed, and made into a trophy diamond to garner little more than bragging rights in a selfish contest between two very powerful and vain men. What the Prime Minister might think or say about that would be something to hear.

  The man behind that little caper was one we have met long ago, and perhaps forgotten, but he has been about his business all this time, a keyholder, and one that has remained hidden from the Watch, Elena Fairchild, and even avoided the scrutiny of a man like Director Kamenski.

  That man was, of course, one Sir Roger Ames, the Duke of Elvington, and his secret trip to Lindisfarne was undertaken, in part, to do exactly what Miss Fairchild was now about. The Duke knew more than he ever told, and was aware that other keys existed in this world that could open some very well hidden doors. His was but one of them, and it turned out to be a most useful key indeed, for it delivered him to a most fateful time and place, the eve of one of the great battles of modern times—Waterloo.

  Duke Elvington had something to do there, someone to kill, as he put it to his so-called footman, and it was all a part of the same game he had been playing with his rival, one Jean Michel Fortier a wealthy French industrialist like Ames. Fortier had no love for England, dubbing it the bully of the 18th and 19th centuries.

  “The world would have been so much better off,” he claimed, “if the British Empire had died at Waterloo instead of French Imperialism.” The man claimed he was directly related to the French Capetian King Philip IV, The Fair, also called the “Iron King,” for it was he who had completely annihilated the order of the Knights Templar in his time. Ames never knew whether that lineage held true, but it hardly mattered. The deprecating remarks Fortier would constantly make about England quickly set the two men in opposition, and history was to be the shuttlecock they would slam back and forth at one another.

  They had competed in everything since that moment, wheeling and dealing as they attempted to gain advantage over one another in their business ventures. They competed for the same real estate, sought investment control over the same companies, and when their economic sparring had run its course, they jousted for the favors of the same elegant and well placed women. The competition led to some very odd games. Fortier once also boasted that he would one day wear Churchill on his little finger. Ames had countered by saying he would secure the remains of Bonaparte himself, fashion them into a pendant that he would dangle around the neck of the woman Fortier was obsessed with at the time, and take her away. Then he had commissioned a resourceful man to secure Churchill’s ashes before Fortier could get to them, and he fashioned the diamond himself.

  And so went the game.

  Now, however, it was getting quite serious, for the key that the Duke had acquired gave him what he first believed to be an unassailable advantage—Lindisfarne. It opened the doorway to a hidden passage within that ancient coastal keep and monastery, and it led to a most remarkable place. He had explained it to his hired man, Mister Thomas, when the real truth of what had happened as they traversed that hidden tunnel became evident.

  “Few men or women will know what I will now tell you.” He began. “To put it simply, the world we have just come from
is in real jeopardy, not just with that war brewing up like a storm on our near horizon, but because it seems time itself has simply run itself down there. Things are starting to come apart and it’s about to get very strange, which is why it was necessary that we go somewhere else.”

  “I don’t understand, sir. How could we move in time?”

  “Of course you don’t. Let me see if I can explain it. You are given to thinking of time as something you always have, and always spend, like these shillings in my leather pouch here.” He cupped the pouch under his waistcoat and went on. “You think of your life as beginning at birth, when you are handed a nice big bag of coinage in time, and you spend two pence a day until you run out. You move through time every day. Yes? But you always move in the same direction, forward. The thought that you might ever take a step back, to unsay an ill made remark, or correct some other misjudgment often crosses every man’s mind, but it’s not something he can ever do—or so he believes. You’ve heard the poetry by Omar Khayyam: ‘The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.’ So it has seemed to be true for most of our lives. Yet I have found it to be in error, Mister Thomas. Other men have too—though they are very few in number.”

  “Others have done this—they have traveled back here?”

  “Not here. This is my keyhold, and I paid handsomely for it, believe me. But there are other places like Lindisfarne in the world, and they open hidden doors like the one you and I just went through. I only know of a very few, but they are there.”

  “You’re telling me these doorways and passages exist elsewhere?”

  “They do. There’s one in the Great Pyramid, and others in Greece and China. There may be more that I do not know of, and each one leads to a different place—or I should say, a different time . This one led us here to the eve of a great moment in history, and it was much coveted. I had to pay a great deal for the key, and there it is.” He touched the chain that held the key where it hung about his neck.

  It was not long until his arch rival Fortier became aware of that key’s existence, and of the fact that others existed as well. Not to be upstaged by Ames, Fortier committed all his efforts to finding and securing his own key, one that had been hidden in the history for ages, until it was inadvertently discovered by French troops in Egypt in the year 1799. It was his eventual acquisition of that key that finally evened the odds, for the game had begun to focus on a bet he had made with the Duke.

  “I’ll see England under Bonaparte’s foot, come hell or high water,” said Fortier. “And there will be nothing you can do about it.”

  Ames took that for wanton braggery, until a certain book was delivered to him one day, dating to the mid-1700’s. Fortier had vanished, undoubtedly off on some nefarious safari to get one up on the Duke. On that day, however, Sir Roger was shocked to open the book to a place that had been carefully marked, and there to see his great rival’s face staring at him with a wry smile, a man standing behind one Count Maurice de Saxe in a portrait. There, inscribed below, was the last will and testament of the Count, which read in part:

  ‘I likewise bequeath my great diamond named Prague, now in France, in the hands of Mr. Fortier, Notary, to my nephew, Count Frife. And I beg his most Christian majesty to grant him my regiment of light horse, and my habitation at Chambord…”

  That widened the eyes of Sir Roger Ames, for it was Fortier who had often boasted about his possession of the Prague Diamond, given to Count Maurice de Saxe, a Marshal of France, after his first great achievement in the capture of Prague. It was bestowed upon him by the people of the city itself as a gift for preventing his soldiers from looting, but it had come into the possession of Jean Michel Fortier, and now Ames finally realized how he had acquired the jewel. But how? How did Fortier get back to that place and time to worm his way into the graces of the Count, and become his “Notary?”

  Before he could learn that, both men became aware of the existence of yet another key, and each was now trying to find it. So the journey Ames was undertaking with his footman was more than an escape, and more than a mere safari for sport. It had a most sinister purpose. That was a move in the game made by Fortier that the Duke was now seeking to counter, and it would soon lead both men to settle their differences on the same fields of glory that settled the enmity between Britain and France…. In the early 1800’s.

  The fate of one of history’s most significant and colorful despots, Napoleon Bonaparte, was riding in the balance. For the game these two men were playing was a kind of tug of war on the history itself. It could only end with that history taking one of two pathways. The first led to the royal halls of London, where Bonaparte would sit in triumph over his most stubborn and tenacious enemy, the British Empire. The other path led to Elba, Waterloo, and eventually the far forsaken Island of St. Helena, the place where Britain buried its monsters, and the resting place of French Imperialism once and for all time.

  History knows well the path that was actually trodden. France fell to the combined might of her enemies, and not even Bonaparte could prevail with all his skill and prowess on the field of battle. But things change, and in ways many would never give a moment’s thought.

  Things change…. As Elena Fairchild knew all too well.

  Part XII

  The Mission

  “A goal without a plan is just a wish.”

  —Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Chapter 34

  The great ship eased around the headland of Cape Agustin, Mindanao, and into the deep sanctuary of Davao Gulf. Battleship Yamato was always an awesome spectacle on the sea, it sheer mass conveying power, and equal grace in the smooth lines of its clipper bow and hull. It was accompanied that day by a pair of heavy cruisers, one light carrier for air cover, and a flock of destroyers.

  The battleship was carrying the Admiral of the fleet, Isoroku Yamamoto, who had canceled his planned tour of bases in the Solomons at the urging of Captain Harada, and instead traveled by sea to this place for a most secret and fateful rendezvous. That was a decision that had saved the Admiral’s own life, for the Americans had gotten wind of his planned itinerary, and they were going to send long range fighters out to look for him, and end his life. So now Yamamoto was a Zombie, the walking dead, and living a life he had never been meant to experience. Soon it would be his turn to stare in awe, for his forward air reconnaissance soon reported ships ahead, a full task force, and with two carriers.

  That alone was surprising enough, for Yamamoto knew the locations and missions of every carrier in his fleet. They were the vital backbone of the navy, in spite of the power of his battleship, and he knew the fate of the Japanese Empire as it now existed rested on the integrity of those flight decks. And suddenly, unaccountably, here were two more!

  This Captain Harada had called and reported the loss of his destroyer, Takami , but he nonetheless urged me to come to this place, thought Yamamoto. He stepped out onto the broad weather deck off the bridge of Yamato , to raise his field glasses and see for himself. There they were, unmistakably carriers, and around them was a small group of what appeared to be light cruiser escorts.

  He was reminded of the old Zen proverb of a farmer’s only plow horse which ran off one day. The neighbor lamented the loss with him, for how would he ever sew and harvest his crop, but the farmer was steadfast. “Who knows what is good or bad,” he said quietly.

  The simple wisdom of that statement was proved a few days later, when the horse returned from a foray in the wild, but with two others it met along the way! Again the neighbor came to rejoice with the farmer, telling him that his great good fortune would now allow him to complete his work three times faster. But he received the same reply: “Who knows what is good or bad.”

  There is no end to that proverb. The farmer’s son breaks a leg trying to tame one of the new wild horses, but who knows what is good or bad, for the next day, when war came to the provinc
e, all the able bodied young men were rounded up—except that of the farmer…. And on and on it went.

  So, thought Yamamoto, what have I here? Two fresh horses come from some far off wild place, and all those other ships look very much like the one this Captain Harada brought to me last year. How very strange. He would soon learn all that had happened. The meeting would be held aboard Yamato , for Admiral Kita was every bit as eager to see that ship up close as Yamamoto was to visit those two new carriers.

  The experience the Admiral had with Harada and Fukada made all these impossible things easier for him to grasp. How this had happened would never be known, but he would accept the verdict of his own eyes. There, just beyond that headland and into the deep blue bay, was a harbor full of miracles. The ships were sitting at anchor and flying the flag of Japan, warriors from another time, returning to fight for the Empire.

  After introductions, Admiral Kita, with Captain Harada and Lieutenant Fukada, were sitting at the table in Yamamoto’s stateroom aboard Yamato. Kita had offered a deep bow when he first laid eyes on the legendary Admiral, for there was the living history of the fleet, the most significant officer to serve Japan since the great Admiral Togo. Then these strange men from another time told their story, while Yamamoto listened quietly, struggling to believe in spite of his own eyes.

  “The question now is how we should proceed,” said Admiral Kita. “My Captain Harada here has told me he pledged the service of his ship and crew to fight for Japan. They were here, impossibly here like I now find myself, and like them, we have no way of knowing if we will ever be able to return to our own time. So we put the same question to our own Captains and crew, and the answer was that we would stand and fight for Japan, in any time, any era of our nation’s history. So my little fleet is at your service, Admiral, and it is a most capable force.”