by Alex Scarrow
‘What the flippin’ heck do we do?’ whimpered Liam under his breath.
‘I have no tactical suggestions at this moment.’
‘Great.’
He looked around. A fresh autumnal breeze was blowing away the last wisps of the smokescreenand he could see that the few prisoners taken alive inside the building were being usheredtowards the centre of the lawn where half a dozen Germans were standing in a circle watchingthe defeated, dispirited civilians and soldiers already slumped to the ground.
He felt a cold stab of fear and desperation run down his spine.
They’ll expect Bob to herd us over there. And once I’mdumped with the others I’m going to be stuck.
As if overhearing his thoughts, a German officer, his black rubber jumpsuit rolled down andtied round his waist, revealing his grey Wehrmacht uniform, pointed to the prisoners and gaveBob an order.
Bob nodded, replied and steered them towards the holding area.
‘I have been instructed to leave you there,’ the support unit uttered quietly.‘What are my orders, Liam O’Connor?’
‘I really don’t know. What do you suggest?’
‘Suggestion: I can attempt an attack on the soldiers among the trees. But I estimate apoint-five per cent chance of success in taking and holding the position until our extractionwindow arrives.’
They were running out of time and options. The gathered prisoners sat in a cluster only a fewdozen yards away, and no matter how slowly the three of them walked towards it, that’swhere they were headed.
‘Suggestion: I leave you here and attempt a rescue when the percentage chance ofsuccess exceeds ten per cent.’
Liam gritted his teeth.
No, both he and Bob would be riddled with rapid-fire high-calibre rounds before he could getthem both halfway across the lawn to the trees. Bob might well be able tosurvive several more shots on target, but Liam didn’t fancy he’d surviveone… given the ragged wounds he’d seen the pulse carbines inflict.
‘There’s nothing we can do right now, Bob. It looks like we’re going tomiss this window,’ he hissed out of the side of his mouth. ‘And I don’tfancy having my head blown off trying to make it. How long now?’
‘In one hour and fifteen minutes, precisely.’
‘But there’ll be another, right?’
‘Correct, an hour later. And twenty-four hours after that.’
‘So,’ said Liam, now just a few yards away from the seated prisoners and thenearest guards, ‘leave me here. If you see an opportunity to get me, take it. But, forChrissakes, don’t get us both killed doing it.’
‘What percentage chance do you authorize me to take, Liam O’Connor?’
‘I dunno!’ he uttered under his breath. ‘Just take your bestshot.’
One of the German guards called out something and pointed at Liam and the man with him.
‘I am being told to leave you here,’ said Bob quietly. Liam thought he detectedthe slightest note of anxiety in the unit’s deep flat-toned voice.
‘Then do it. If they take us from here, then follow me… wait for a chance and getme out of this fix, all right?’
‘Mission priority: primary duty is to observe and report back.’
‘What? You are not leaving me here, Bob! Do youunderstand?’ Liam snarled under his breath. ‘That’s an order!’
A guard stepped forward and roughly grabbed Liam by the shoulder.
‘Be quiet!’ he snapped in accented English. ‘Join the others!’
Liam staggered forward and then slumped to his knees among the group ofprisoners. He watched as Bob stood perfectly still, face still hidden by the mask and hood,and looked helplessly on.
An officer called out to Bob from across the lawn to help with dragging and stacking thebodies for disposal.
The unit turned hesitantly.
Behind the glass plates of the gas mask, a complex computer loaded with AI that was still inthe process of learning, still almost childlike, was desperately juggling mission prioritiesand variables, calculating a million different ways to proceed.
Liam watched the lumbering figure move away.
Oh blimey. What kind of a mess am I stuck in now?
CHAPTER 39
2001, New York
‘How long until the return window, Madelaine?’ asked Foster.
Maddy looked up at a screen. ‘We’re counting down the last two minutes,’she replied.
‘All right, then. We’ll find out what the boys have seen and work it out fromthere.’ He smiled thinly.
The sudden erasure of history before 1956 made it almostimpossible to identify exactly when and where things had begun to change — and to zero in on that. While the wipingout of historical records may well have been on the whim of some insane Nazi dictator, toappease his ego no doubt, it also had the additional effect of completely hiding the tracks ofwhomever had instigated this time shift. If that’s what some time traveller hadintended, then he was being very, very clever. Leaving no trace, no tracks… nothing forthem to identify the moment they’d arrived in the past.
Very clever.
Maddy interrupted Foster’s train of thought. ‘Uhh, Foster… a warningdialogue box has come up.’
He looked at it.
LOCATION POINT PHASE INTERRUPTION
ABORT OR CONTINUE?
‘The computer’s picking up varying density packets inthe pick-up window.’
‘Meaning?’
‘The computer monitors the area inside the target window for the minute before we’re due to send back our operatives. If there’s alot of unexpected movement through it, we can assume there are unwary people or perhaps ananimal walking across it. If it’s persistent enough, the computer flags awarning.’
‘What do we do?’
‘Wait and see if it continues,’ he replied, pointing to a graphic display on thescreen. ‘There’s a density packet spike. Someone or something walked through aboutten seconds ago.’
‘We aren’t going to leave them?’ asked Sal, her voice brittle withworry.
Foster shook his head. ‘That won’t happen,’ he reassured her. ‘If weneed to abort this window, we’ll try again in an hour.’
He looked at the display. There were no more density spikes.
‘It looks like a one-off,’ he said. ‘Could easily have been a bird flyingthrough, or rubbish blown across. It happens quite often.’
Sal managed a wan smile. ‘OK.’
‘Thirty seconds,’ said Maddy. ‘We aborting or continuing?’
The display looked flat. Whatever had passed through didn’t look like it was comingback. In all likelihood it was Liam accidentally stepping in too early. The support unit hadprobably advised him to stand clear and now they were both waiting patiently to come home.
‘Continue,’ said Foster.
Maddy clicked the mouse and the dialogue box winked off screen.
‘Ten seconds.’
Sal turned towards the middle of the archway’s floor, ready to welcome them bothback.
‘Keep well clear, Sal,’ said Foster, pointing at a faint circleof yellow chalk on the concrete, scuffed and in need of a refresh. It marked out the dimensionof the return window. You really didn’t want to be standing there when it opened.
‘Five seconds.’
The generator hummed, the lights momentarily flickered and dimmed. Foster looked at thegraphic display, expecting to see the graph spike as Liam and Bob stepped in together. But itremained flat.
Come on, boys… stop messing around.
‘And three… and two…’
The graph suddenly spiked.
The lights went out completely.
As they flickered back on, he was about to turn round and give them both a telling-off forcutting it so fine when he heard Sal’s scream.
A young man stood there, staring at them, eyes widened with fear and incomprehension — a young soldier, perhaps no more than a couple of years older than Liam, blond hair croppedshort, his pale choir-boy cheeks smudged with
dirt and flecks of dried blood. He wore a blackrubber boiler suit, rolled down to his waist. Beneath it was a grey army tunic with oak leaveson the collar and an eagle emblem on the chest.
His eyes darted from Sal, to Maddy, to Foster… and then to someone else’sdismembered leg and arm lying at his feet amid a scattering of dried leaves, twigs and acircular tuft of blood-spattered grass and soil.
‘Was — ?… Was istdas?’ He looked down at the severed limbs on the ground, oozing blood on to theconcrete floor. ‘Was geschieht?Wo bin ich?’
His mouth fluttered in fear, his voice broken, shrill, like a child suddenly finding himselflost in a crowded mall.
Maddy reacted first. She stood up and slowly approached him, hands raised.‘It’s OK,’ she cooed softly. ‘Everything’s all right…We’re not going to hurt you.’
The young man gathered his wits enough to unsling his gun and swivel the barrel down to pointat her.
‘Halt, stehen bleiben!Wer sind Sie?Wo bin ich?’
Maddy shook her head. ‘I don’t… I don’t do German, sorry,’ shesaid, offering him a friendly smile.
‘Keep him talking,’ said Foster quietly.
Maddy pointed to herself. ‘My… name… is Maddy. And you?’
The young German stared silently at her, his breath rasping in and out, fluttering withfear.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked in her best motherly voice.‘This,’ she said, pointing to Sal, ‘this is Sal.’
‘Hi,’ said Sal, smiling sweetly and slowly offering him a small hand toshake.
He glanced from one girl to the other.
‘Ich… Ich bin Feldwebel Lohaans.’
Maddy guessed she was hearing his rank and surname.
‘But what’s your first name? Hmm?’ she asked,taking another step forward.
The young man racked his gun nervously. ‘Stehenbleiben!… Stay!’ he barked, licking his drylips.
Maddy stopped dead and shook her head apologetically. ‘Sorry. I’ll stay rightwhere I am. I won’t hurt you.’
He nodded, seeming to understand that. He took another deep breath. ‘You… Amerikaner?’
She smiled. ‘Yes.’
‘This…?’ he said, and shrugged, lacking the words in English to completethe question.
‘This place is in America. In New York, actually.’
The man’s eyes widened. ‘This… NewYork?’
She nodded.
He snorted nervously. ‘Washington… zehn-’ he made a whooshing noise — ‘NewYork?’
‘That’s right,’ she replied. ‘Whoosh… and now you’re right here. Crazy, huh?’
That seemed to be one of the three or four English words he knew. He nodded and managed abemused grin. ‘Ja… craz-ee.’
The generator suddenly hummed, the lights winked and a moment later the young soldier, thearm, leg and most of the tuft of grass and soil were gone.
‘What happened?’
‘I initiated an emergency dump,’ replied Foster. ‘He’s back where hecame from. Although he’s…’
‘What?’
‘It doesn’t matter now,’ he replied. He looked at Maddy and Sal.‘That… that was a German soldier who looked like he’d just been sucked outof a fight, right off the lawn of the White House, no less.’
‘An invasion?’
He nodded. ‘Day one of recorded, or should I say approved,history, it would seem, begins the day that America was successfully conquered by the Germans.Just like we were saying.’
‘Oh, no,’ whispered Maddy, ‘then we dropped Liam and Bob right into themiddle of a battle.’
Sal’s face paled.
‘We can get them back, though, right?’
‘We’ll try again in an hour. But only if we don’t see any other odd densitypackets at the last moment. I don’t want to bring back another Nazi, or a part of one,if I can help it.’
‘But if we can’t bring him back? Is that it? Is he stuck there?’
‘There’s another scheduled for twenty-four hours later.’
‘And if he misses that too?’
‘Madelaine, he’s a resourceful lad. He has Bob with him. They’ll do justfine where they are. And, as I said, there is a way we cancommunicate with them. We can let them know a where-and-when for another extractionwindow.’ He turned to both the girls. ‘What’s of more importance to us rightnow is whether there are any more shifts due, whether the world has stabilized as it is, orwhether it’ll get worse.’
‘Is there anything we can do?’
‘All we can do right now is try to work out where history was altered, see if we cannarrow things down a bit. My guess is something must have happened during the Second WorldWar, something that changed the balance.’
Maddy nodded. ‘Yeah… maybe.’
‘So,’ continued Foster, ‘what we’ll do is work with what we have.We’ll have to explore the New York out there. Perhaps there’ll be clues as to whathappened prior to the invasion of America. OK?’
She nodded.
‘OK, Sal?’
She looked at him, tears rolling down her pale cheeks. ‘Poor Liam,’ shewhimpered. ‘I hope he’s all right.’
Foster got up tiredly and walked over to her. He stooped down in front of her.‘Don’t worry, Sal… He’ll be fine. With Bob right beside him,he’ll be just fine, I promise you.’
‘What now?’
‘We need more information. Sal, I want you to head out to Times Square again. Just finda seat somewhere and observe all you can. See if you can pick out any visual clues…anything at all that hints at events prior to 1956. And, Madelaine?’
She nodded.
‘We need to trawl their historical database. If you can find a way tohack through their security measures, perhaps we can learn a bit more. And then we’llget ready to activate the back-up rendezvous.’ He sucked in air through gritted teeth.‘Hopefully, second time round it won’t be cluttered with German troops,eh?’
CHAPTER 40
1956, Washington DC
Bob observed the hive of activity going on around him. His cold eyes locked on andstudied the giant disc floating gracefully above the city and intermittently spewing outtroops. He could hear the distant rattle of gunfire, the muffled thud of explosions.
Somewhere in the city, small pockets of American soldiers were still holding out, unawarethat the struggle was all over, that their leader, President Eisenhower, had gone downfighting, and even now his body was being carried out and laid across the steps in front ofthe building along with the rest of his cabinet and chiefs of staff.
An officer standing nearby adjusting his tunic and Wehrmacht peaked cap, no longer encumberedwith a drop suit, was hurriedly directing activity on the ground.
‘You!’ He pointed at Bob. ‘You can remove the mask. The air’sclear.’
Bob silently removed the gas mask. His hair — only a fortnight’s worth of growth,still just coarse bristles — and his hard emotionless face made him look no differentfrom the other storm-troopers around him.
‘When we’ve tidied up the mess out here, then you can take a rest,’ theofficer said. ‘Now, get a move on, man.’
Bob’s eyes narrowed as he made a millisecond calculation on whether he should continueto pretend being an enemy unit or sprint a dozen paces across the ruttedgrass and effortlessly rip this man’s arms from their sockets.
[Attack: tactically incorrect at this moment]
He turned away and reached down for the body of a marine, flinging the ragged remains overhis shoulder and carrying it across to where a pile of corpses was slowly growing. As he didso, Bob’s inexperienced silicon mind worked on a bigger issue, more important than anyimmediate tactical assessments. He had a strategic command decision to make…
Tactical Options:
1. Rescue Operative Liam O’Connor
2. Return to field office with gatheredintelligence
3. Prevent further contamination — self-terminate
Bob’s AI routines worked more efficiently w
ith smaller numbers of options oneach branch of its decision tree — two or three was the ideal number. Any larger anarray of choices slowed down the risk-assessment processing exponentially.
He scanned the prisoners clustered together and identified Liam crouched miserably among themand looking back at him. If Bob had had a little more time to become more familiar with humanfacial expressions and muscle tics, he might have been able to recognize the mixture of fear,anger and betrayal written across the young man’s face.
His eyes suddenly registered a growing commotion among the cedar trees; the place where thetime window had been due to open. Soldiers were gathering round something on the ground — something unpleasant enough for one or two of themto double over and dry-heave.
Whatever was going on it was becoming too busy to clear the area, too busy to consider it aviable extraction point, for now, at least. He decided the option that bestsatisfied the mission’s parameters was the first option: to rescue Liam.
Option 2 left Liam stuck in the past where he might potentially be tortured and exposedangerously revealing details of the future.
Option 3, to trigger his computer brain to fry itself, achieved absolutely nothing useful atthis moment in time.
He cocked his head.
Option 1 had the highest mission-relevance rating. He closed his eyes for a moment.
Option 1 Solution Assessment:
1. AWAIT 2nd extraction window — 57.30 minutes’time
2. IF success of extracting Liam is greater than 25 %, THEN proceed
3. ELSE… Await 3rd extraction window in 24hours
Bob opened his eyes and tossed the corpse he’d been carrying on to the pile.The solution was an acceptable one, even though it amounted to little more than wait and see. He was not going to leave nor was he going to terminatehimself; instead he was going to wait for a better opportunity to rescue Liam to presentitself.
But, he realized, something else had been factored into the decision, something to which hecouldn’t assign a recognizable label.
For now he decided to give it the name indefinable factor.
This indefinable factor wasn’t coming from his database orhis AI code; it was coming from the small part of his brain that was organic, the tiny nub ofwrinkled flesh in his skull linked by a myriad hair-thin wires to his on-board siliconwafer-cell computer. And all this indefinable factor could do was whisper avery illogical and impractical message into his logical computer, an awkward message that wasbeginning to cause a little confusion amid his carefully ordered AI code.
