Time Riders tr-1

by Alex Scarrow

  Liam O’Connor is my friend.

  CHAPTER 41

  1956, command ship over Washington DC

  Oberleutnant Ralf Hoffman stepped on to the freight platform with two other men whowere hefting a heavy body bag between them. They let it down gently and, like him, looked upin awe at the dark sky above them, at the giant grey underbelly of DerFuhrer’s command ship.

  Hoffman had been billeted aboard the ship with the men of his unit, the 23rdFallschirmjager Assault Corps. He was familiar with the inside of the air vessel — but, viewing it from outside, the truly immense size of the thing came home to him.

  The freight platform, a square alloy plinth large enough to fit one truck at a time, slowlybegan to winch upwards. Beneath them the grounds of the White House and proud boulevards ofWashington DC gradually receded.

  Hoffman watched the waning light of the afternoon fade as dusk rapidly toned thesmoke-smudged sky over the city. There were no street lights on, no lights on in any of thebuildings. The city’s power stations had been taken out in the first wave of theassault. Only sporadic fires burning here and there illuminated Washington DC, along with theoccasional stabbing flicker of gunfire in the streets.

  He took a deep breath.

  Nerves.

  He was on his way up to Das Mutterschiff… ‘the mothership’, the nickname his men had for the giant airship. More specifically, he was on hisway to the upper deck of the mother ship, where a long line of broad windows looked out on tothe world below — Der Fuhrer’s viewing deck.

  Hoffman had never been invited up there. Few men, other than the Fuhrer’s highcommand and senior chiefs of staff, had. It was more than the great man’s command andcontrol point — it was his campaign home. A very special place.

  The platform continued to winch them up with a dull motorized clacking from above. He lookedup to see the trapdoor yawning open in the vessel’s belly.

  All of a sudden, floodlights kicked in and powerful columns of light speared down into thegathering twilight, panning across the city below. Hoffman winced and shaded his eyes. Gazingup just as the damned things had been switched on, he was surprised he hadn’t beenblinded.

  Ralf… you may actually meet him. It’s a distinctpossibility. Prepare yourself.

  The thought sent an unwelcome shudder of fear and excitement down his spine. He didn’twant to appear foolishly nervous in front of the Fuhrer. He so wanted to impress the man,to appear calm and professional as an officer of the elite Fallschirmjager should. Thetwo men with him, on the other hand, were grinning like excited children on their way to meetFather Christmas.

  ‘You two,’ he snapped irritably, ‘you look like fools. Smarten yourselvesup and stop gurning like a pair of monkeys.’

  The men obediently tidied their appearance and stowed their smiles away beneath solemnparade-ground faces.

  Hoffman looked down at the body bag. The order had come directly from theFuhrer’s senior field officer, Reichsmarschall Haas to Hoffman’s commandingofficer. Der Fuhrer had asked to inspect this curious bodyfor himself… and to ask the men who’d seen what happened to explain directly tohim what they’d witnessed.

  The clattering from above had grown much louder. He looked up, carefully shading his eyes, tosee 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 SSLeibstandarte 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 sendHoffman and his two men back down. But, with a perfunctory nod from one of them, they beckonedHoffman and the others to follow.

  A stairwell guarded by two more men took them to the upper deck. The battleship-grey wallsthat Hoffman and his men had grown used to on the way over — living like batterychickens on the lower decks as Das Mutterschiff sailed gracefullysouth from the conquered area around New York — now gave way to dark oak panels. Thefloor no longer metal grilles but a soft maroon carpet that whispered beneath his muddiedcombat boots.

  Ahead of them, double doors guarded by two more SS Leibstandarte standing to attention.

  ‘Oberleutnant Hoffman, to see the Fuhrer,’ announced one of the guardswho’d escorted them up from the bay.

  One of the two standing guard announced their arrival into an intercom. A moment later ayoung 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 Fuhrer’s grand chamber was almost toomuch for him to bear.

  Remember, professional, calm. Look good for the Fuhrer.

  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 thestern of an eighteenth-century tall ship, and the brilliant glow of the floodlights outsidepouring in, bathing the ornate decorated ceiling of the large room. Through the glass he couldsee an outline of the dark city and, above, the turbulent rolling thunderous clouds of theSeptember sky, framed together like a large oil painting.

  Standing behind a generous conference table spread with maps of the east coast of America anddotted with flagged tokens representing the invading German forces, stood the Fuhrer,every bit as tall, slim and charismatic as all the posters and billboards made him out tobe.

  To one side, a few feet away, stood the Reichsmarschall: stern faced, fit and alert, as hisreputation portrayed him. It was well known that Haas and the Fuhrer went back a longway, more than a decade. It was said they’d first met while serving together during theSecond World War. Before that time, of course, there was nothing known about them.

  Two very enigmatic men.

  The Fuhrer smiled generously at Hoffman.

  ‘You led the attack?’

  ‘Yes, m-my Fuhrer,’ 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 Fuhrer.’

  ‘Congratulations. A very well-done job.’

  Hoffman’s chest swelled with pride.

  ‘So… I believe you have brought something to show me?’ said PaulKramer.

  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 soldiersushered them up, waving their guns.

  ‘Re-education camp,’ said the suited man Liam and Bob had interrogated earlier inthe White House.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I heard that’s what happened to all the people in New York when the Germans tookit. That’s where everyone’s headed.’

  ‘Re-education camp?’

  ‘Prison camps, that’s what they really are… that’s where we’reheaded,’ 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 hisfellow prisoners, searching once more for any sign of Bob. If the support unit was going toactually support him, he’d better get a move on and dosomething.

  In the gathering dusk it was getting harder to pick anything out. But he thought he couldjust 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 underhis breath.

  The man in the suit looked at him curio
usly. ‘Hey, kid. You and that big friend ofyours… you said some weird thing about the future back in the — ’

  ‘Yes,’ Liam replied distractedly, ‘I don’t suppose it matters nowwhere we said we came from.’ He craned his neck to catchsight 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, grabbinghis arm and pushing him roughly forward.

  ‘Do as they say,’ muttered the man beside Liam. ‘Be glad they didn’tjust 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 wasdark enough, he hoped, to ensure the man wouldn’t see the twin tracks of tears rollingdown his dirt-smudged cheeks.

  Bob watched the last of the prisoners climb aboard and the truck’s enginerattle 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 bodycould survive dozens of bullet wounds… Liam’s wouldn’t. He watched as thetruck rolled away across the lawn, through a fence and bounced across a pavement and on to thehard tarmac of a broad avenue.

  The highest priority at this moment in time was for him to return to the future with whatlittle intelligence they had managed to gather. The missed-window protocolmeant the field office would try one last scheduled window amid the cedar trees in preciselytwenty-two hours.

  Until then Bob calculated his best course of action was to find somewhere to lie low andundetected. 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, butthe wounds would need cleaning, disinfecting and dressing. His software informed him thatfailure to do so soon would result in an eighty-three per cent chance of a spreading bacterialinfection 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 hisunfamiliar face. He strode swiftly across the grounds of the White House, passing unnoticedamid the flurry of activity going on — appearing in the gathering dusk as if he was justanother 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 atWashington, 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 thesuburbs on the first day. The American tanks, the lightly armoured and cumbersome ShermanMkIIs, had been outmanoeuvred and out-gunned by their Blitz Raptor MkVIs from the very firstmoment; the Raptors’ agile hovercraft weapons platforms had made pitifully short work ofthem.

  Their hastily assembled and dug-out defences, running east to west above the city, had beenso easily bypassed. The American battle line fell to pieces in the early hours of thismorning, the second day of the battle for Washington. When Kramer’s highly trainedFallschirmjager, equipped with gas-propellant landing packs and their recently upgradedpulse rifles, had dropped behind the Americans’ crumbling line, further panic anddisorder 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 corpsinformed him a brigade-strength force of American marines was holding a strong position aroundone of the southern suburbs of the city, and there were pockets here andthere within Washington DC. But the Americans had not had enough time to set up anything morethan a shambolic line of battle-weary troops around the White House itself.

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

  The complete surprise with which they’d caught the Americans had left them scramblingfrom the very beginning. It had taken little more than eight weeks from the first massedamphibious 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 campaignstretching into the autumn and winter, with innocent people dying unnecessarily. He genuinelyfelt 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. Hesmiled 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 marryhis father, Boris Kramer, for another sixty-five. And yet here was her son, leader of theGerman 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 andthe 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 thetime Hitler ordered his men to stand down.

  The people of Germany adored Kramer, their Fuhrer — the one who led them tovictory, 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 thisworld… 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 Europeunder one proud banner, not that idiotic symbol, the swastika, buta 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 toeventually 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 whosepopulation could be responsibly controlled to not exceed what this earth could feed. A worldwhose resources would be carefully used and not squandered by disgustingly rich andself-serving politicians. A world not poisoned by vehicle exhausts or coal fumes. A world notdying 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 hewasn’t. And the reason for that was lying on the floor in front of him, brought up bythe oberleutnant and his two men: a hideously deformed thing thatonce 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 oncebefore, over a decade ago in the snowy woods of Obersalzberg. He remembered he’d nearlyvomited then, just as he felt like doing now.

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

  Kramer nodded, tight-lipped, stroking his chin. It could well be that… or the result ofone of their pulse bombs, designed to pulverize soft tissue with its shock wave. His modernweapon 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 awayfrom DC lined with German troops on patrol, civilian refugees herded at gunpoint and pitifullines of beaten American soldi
ers 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 Idid.’

  Liam held out a limp hand. He wasn’t sure what ‘press corps’ did, but heguessed 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 youwere…’ Wallace looked around at the other prisoners; many of them were either inshock, or had retired into themselves, shutting out this grim reality.

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

  ‘What about the man you were with?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘I… I swear I saw him take gunshot wounds that… that he shouldn’thave survived.’

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

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

  ‘And all the while,’ cut in the navy officer, ‘Kramer was putting the finalpreparations together for his invasion of America.’ The colonel ran a hand over hisbuzz-cut hair. ‘We never even saw it coming, Bill… We were just kidding ourselvesthat they wanted peace and would leave us alone.’