by Alex Scarrow
CHAPTER 87
1941, woods outside Obersalzberg
Falling again. Falling through a dark void.
Liam had just enough time to wonder whether he was ever going to get used to thestomach-lurching sensation before he found himself waist-deep in a drift of powder snow.
‘Oh, great!’
Liam looked around at the snow-covered pine trees, glowing almost a luminescent blue by thelight of the quicksilver moon. Thick branches of fir needles were weighed down beneath a heavyshroud of fresh-fallen snow.
Beneath the thin material of his SS uniform, he shivered. ‘Jay-zus, it’s bloodyf-f-freezing,’ he hissed under his breath, sending a plume of condensation out beforehim. ‘Glad we’re not just wearing wet p-pants right now. Hang on, isn’t thatgoing to cause a contamination problem?’
‘Acceptable level of contamination at this point,’ replied Bob. ‘We willreturn with our clothes.’ He stopped mid-stride for a moment, consulting data in hishead. ‘Information: two hundred yards ahead is the road leading to the Eagle’sNest.’
‘Right.’
‘Recommendation: we attempt to acquire better weapons and appropriate clothing anddisguise.’
Liam nodded eagerly at the suggestion of appropriate clothing.
The support unit led the way, pushing through the wood’s undergrowth,dislodging hissing showers of shifting snow from the low branches above them. They walkedquietly through the hushed winter forest until finally Liam could make out a narrow road, snowshovelled to either side to keep it passable.
Bob squatted down, surveying the way ahead, and Liam joined him. The road, little more than adirt track, climbed the hill gently. Fifty yards up they could see a guard hut picked out inthe glow of a swivelling floodlight, sand bags either side, and a raisable barrier blockingthe way. A small smile crept across Liam’s quivering lips.
Nothing Bob can’t handle there.
‘If you can take out those guards,’ said Liam quietly, ‘we could wait rightthere for Kramer.’
Bob nodded. ‘Affirmative. That is a good plan. I shall — ’
He froze.
‘Bob? What is it?’
‘I have just detected emerging tachyon particles in the vicinity.’ His grey eyesswivelled on to Liam. ‘A time window has just been opened nearby.’
‘What? You sure it’s not traces of our own time window you’re pickingup?’
‘It is not us.’
Liam glanced at the trees around them. ‘Nearby?’
‘Very close. Within three hundred yards of our position.’
Foster’s guesswork must have been wrong. This guy, Kramer, hadn’t already beenback in 1941 for some time working at getting an audience with Hitler. He’d only justarrived.
‘I am detecting a significant number of decaying particles.’
‘And that means?’
‘One large displacement window or many smaller windows.’
Liam bit his lip with dawning realization. ‘It’s not just Kramer on his own, isit?’
It was then that they heard movement through the trees: faint at first, theswish of a snow-laden branch pushed aside, the soft clink and rattle of webbing and carriedequipment, the hushed whisper of several voices. All of it coming their way.
‘Recommendation: we should hide.’
Liam looked around in the darkness. The glow of moonlight made everything that wasn’tsnow-covered stand out in stark contrast. Unless they could quickly bury themselves, they weregoing to be spotted. He looked up at the tree they were squatting beneath.
‘Up there.’ He pointed. ‘In the tree.’
Bob nodded. Without a moment’s hesitation he grabbed Liam and effortlessly hefted himup on to the lowest branch. Silently, and with the grace of a gymnast on parallel bars, heswung up beside him, the branch creaking worryingly beneath his immense weight.
The noises grew subtly louder, closer, until Liam was able to see movement. Dark shapeswarily emerged from beneath the shadow of trees, stepping cautiously across the glowing snowbelow, then — almost unbelievably — coming to a halt beneath the very tree theywere hiding in.
They squatted down and surveyed the track heading up the hill just as Bob had been doing amoment earlier. Then he heard one of them talking softly.
‘This is it, Karl. This is it! Hitler’s winter retreat!’ An accent hevaguely recognized. He recalled the precise tones, the voice of recited speeches endlesslybroadcast over the prison-camp speakers.
Kramer?
A second voice. ‘Der Kehlsteinhaus. The Eagle’s Nest.It does not appear that heavily guarded.’ This one had a clipped, foreign-soundingaccent.
Liam strained to hear what the men said next, their voices quieter still.Then Kramer spoke more clearly: ‘A little further up the hillside, only a few hundredyards away, is an SS garrison housing four or five hundred of them. They will happily die todefend their leader. Your men will have to be very fast, Karl.’
His voice dropped again, then the second murmured a response.
Liam turned to look at Bob, perched perfectly still on the branch beside him like a night owlwatching the progress of some small rodent and poised ready to leap.
‘Switch to night sights, gentlemen,’ hissed the second man. In the darkness belowthem, Liam saw something glowing a soft ghostly green among the gathered men. Then severalmore. He realized they were goggles of some sort.
‘Mr Kramer, sir?’ whispered one of the men.
It is Kramer! Liam felt his heartsuddenly flutter.
‘What is it, Rudy?’
‘Will we actually get to meet Adolf Hitler tonight? Forreal?’ Another heavily accented voice.
‘Yes, Rudy, you will. Tonight, gentlemen — ’ Kramer raised his voice from awhisper to a soft murmur for them all to hear — ‘we are going to write a brand-newhistory together.’
Bob tapped Liam on the arm. They were too close to the men below to be able to talk. Insteadthe support unit gestured at them. An unmistakable gesture that told him…
I am ready.
Liam swallowed anxiously, feeling his gut churning once again with fear. Gritting his teeth,he nodded.
Do it.
CHAPTER 88
1941, woods outside Obersalzberg
Bob dropped silently down out of the tree on to the men below. Liam heard the heavythud of his solid body and the unmistakable crack of bones.
Then all hell broke loose.
Voices brittle with alarm and confusion. The dark swirling scrum of figures below illuminatedfor a freeze-frame second by the single muzzle-flash of a silenced weapon. Bob, a bloodiedknife in one hand mid-slash across the chest of one man, his other big hand crushing thethroat of another of them.
Several more strobing muzzle-flashes in the confusing darkness, accompanied by the muted puffof a silenced rifle. The fleeting light showed four tangled bodies on the ground already,blood pooling across the snow. Bob thrashing at another man with lethal speed and agility, andat least another dozen men around him recovering from the moment of surprise and cocking theirguns to fire.
I have to help him.
Liam pulled the pistol out of his holster and aimed it at one of the dark outlines — one of the men who looked nearest ready to fire — and pulled the trigger. The loud crackfrom his gun echoed through the trees, no doubt rousing the SS guards up the track.
One of the men below him grunted and went down, clutching his thigh.
My God, I actually hit something.
Having now given his position away, he realized he couldn’t sit perched up on thebranch any more. Grimacing and gritting his teeth, he dropped down to the ground into thethick of the fight. He landed heavily on the back of one of the dead men. Around him all hecould hear was the grunting, the laboured breath of a dozen or more men, shrill words barkedin German, accented English and one or two other languages.
‘There… shoot him!’
‘Shoot! Shoot!’
‘Out of the way, Schwartz!’
A mach
ine gun spewed a salvo of muzzle-suppressed taps and litthe scene with flickering light. Liam saw Bob take half a dozen shots in the chest, his blacktunic erupting with exit wounds and geysers of dark blood.
Not enough to stop him, though. In an instant he was upon the one who’d fired, hisblade a lethal flash of quicksilver death across the man’s throat.
Another short burst from someone else caught Bob from behind and once more his uniform tunicdanced, tattered, ripped and bloody.
Liam fired several rapid-fire rounds at the dark shape. It buckled and fell to the snow.
Bob leaped forward at another man, his hand twisting the blade into him, but he was slowingdown now. Still a deadly force, but no longer with the devastating whip-tail speed of a lethalpredator. Instead he had the lumbering energy of a cornered and exhausted mammoth, hisflesh-and-blood body weakened by too many wounds to recover from.
Another short, silenced burst of gunfire, sounding like a walking stick dragged across awooden picket fence. Bob staggered back heavily.
‘Schei?e!!Toten Sie ihn!’
Another rattle of suppressed fire.
Bob collapsed to his knees, wavered for a moment, before falling face forward into thesnow.
A torch snapped on to Liam. Caught in its glare, he instantly tossed the gun aside and raisedhis hands. ‘Don’t shoot! P-please!’
The torch panned across his face, blinding him. ‘On your knees!’
Liam dropped down into the snow.
‘Who the hell are you?’
‘I’m… my name’s Liam.’
‘Who sent you?’
There was no official name for the agency. None that Foster had been prepared to tell himanyway. ‘I’m… I’m an agent f-from the future.’
The torch beam dropped down, out of his face, and Liam could now see from the glow that onlyfour of them remained standing. The man holding the torch spoke again.
‘From the future? So soon?’ said Kramer. There was bitterness in his voice.Bitter and resentful that his bid to change history had already, after mere minutes, beenintercepted.
Liam knew for certain his life was now going to be measured in minutes… if not mereseconds.
‘But this is impossible. Waldstein’s was the onlymachine,’ snapped Kramer.
You have to keep him talking, Liam. Keep him talking.
‘No, Kramer. You’re wrong. The people I work for have machines. We’re hereto protect history.’
Kramer took a step towards him. ‘But why?’ He shook his head angrily. ‘Why?The world we’ve come from… it’s dying. We killed it with our pollution, weover-populated it, sucked it dry of resources, wiped out almost every other species.’ Hesquatted down in front of Liam. ‘Why would anyone want to preserve that kind of future?’
Liam looked up at him. He realized from the haunted expression on Kramer’s face thatperhaps he wasn’t driven by greed or an insatiable thirst for power, but perhaps bybetter intentions. ‘Why would anyone want to protect that?’ he asked again.
‘I… I’ve seen the future you made,’ uttered Liam, ‘with my owneyes. It… it’s a world of ashes and… and ruins.’
Kramer’s eyes narrowed. ‘What?’
‘You will end up doing something terrible. And it will destroy the world… leavingnothing. The future may be bad. But what you do makes it far worse.’
One of the other three men stepped forward and stood beside Kramer. ‘We came back hereto make a better world,’ he said adamantly. ‘Not todestroy it.’
It was the heavily accented man. The one called Karl.
Liam shook his head. ‘But somehow… somehow that’s exactly what you will endup doing. Something will go wrong. Something you do will lead to a…’
What was it Foster said?
‘… a… a nuclear war. And there’ll benothing left.’ Liam looked from one of them to the other. ‘God help me, I’veseen what’s left of humanity. Pitiful ghouls… living on each other’sflesh.’
Karl’s eyes widened. For a moment he looked lost, confused.
‘If there is a Hell, if there really is… then I’ve seen it,’ saidLiam. ‘And it will be your actions that createit.’
‘Paul?’ Karl turned to Kramer. ‘Paul? Could this be true?’
Kramer shook his head, his eyes searching for truth in Liam’s face.
In the distance, they heard a siren begin to wail. Liam’s unsilencedgunshots had clearly alerted the SS guards. The entire regiment would be roused and combingthe woods soon.
‘You say you have seen this yourself?’ askedKramer.
Liam nodded. ‘And I think I’d rather die here… than go back tothat.’
Clouds of vapour filled the space between them, caught like fleeting pale ghosts in the beamof torchlight.
‘Paul,’ said Karl, ‘this must be a lie.’
Kramer’s face was shrouded with conflicting thoughts, conflicting emotions. In thedistance they could hear the barking of dogs over the mournful wailing of the sirens. Voicesraised and growing closer.
Kramer shook his head. Something in the expression on his face, the glint of his hauntedeyes, told Liam that deep inside his troubled mind a decision was being made.
But what it was, he’d never know.
A burst of silenced gunfire ripped through the stillness. Kramer’s Arctic-camouflagejacket spat blood and then he flopped to the ground.
Karl and the other two men turned round to open fire on Bob. The support unit was splayed onhis back, holding one of their machine guns loosely in its left hand. Most of their unaimedshots sent divots of dry snow into the air. But all of Bob’s shots hit home, droppingeach of the three men with surgical precision.
‘Bob!’ gasped Liam, scrambling across the ground wet with blood, snow staineddark as night.
‘Bob… I thought you were dead.’
Up close he could see the support unit had taken too many chest and stomach wounds topossibly survive.
‘Information…’ He gurgled blood out of the side of his mouth.
‘No… shhhh, Bob,’ whispered Liam, cradling the supportunit’s head in his lap. His coarse dark hair, grown over the last six months and longenough to lose a fist in, was matted and wet from a head wound.
Bob’s grey eyes blinked and fluttered. He was doing some housekeeping on his hard drive- collating files, compressing data.
‘Bob?’
His eyes cleared and locked on Liam. ‘Mission priority one: must destroy theweapons… advanced weapons technology.’
‘Yes… yes, of course.’
‘Gather the weapons together… destroy them with a grenade,’ he said,pointing towards an equipment satchel lying on the snow nearby. ‘Grenades are in thatbag. Use one… set off the others.’
Liam nodded and realized there were warm tears running down his cheeks. Realized he wasshedding tears for a broken machine.
‘Bob… I — ’
‘You must be quiet and listen!’
He could hear voices now, dozens of them calling out to each other, and baying dogs eager tobe let off the leash. In the distance, torches flickered faintly through the woods.Floodlights up on the hill, where Hitler’s Berghof was located, sent beams into thesky.
The entire hillside seemed to be alive with activity.
‘Mission priority two: you must leave, Liam O’Connor. You must not be capturedalive. Hide, await the return window or back-up window. You must leave immediately.’
‘Just help me get you up! I’ll not leave you here to — ’
‘Negative. Self-termination must be activated.’
‘No! Don’t you do that, Bob! I mean it, don’t you do it!’
Bob gurgled more blood. ‘Mission priority three: support unit cannotfall into the hands of — ’
‘No! That’s crazy, we can get you out of here… if you’ll just get offyour backside, you big lump!’
‘Negative. You must leave now. You should leave now.’
‘Bob… will you shut your mouth for just a second?’
<
br /> ‘Leave now! Leave Now!’
‘Bob! Please… You don’t need to terminate! I’ll do it! I’ll doit!’
He looked around the bloodstained snow and saw what he was after.
CHAPTER 89
2001, New York
Still. Quiet… but for the rustling of a lifeless breeze across the barrenlandscape. Tall spires of rusted metal and crumbling concrete stand over the lost remnants ofa place once called Times Square.
The creak of a long-faded sign swinging from a lamp post. The squeak and bang of a windowshutter somewhere, caught and played with by the haunting wind.
A sickly yellow sun behind scudding brown irradiated clouds casts pallid beams down on toashes and dust. From the darkness inside gutted and scorched buildings, milky eyes look outhungrily for some other meagre supply of food… a rat, a dog — if any are left- perhaps another of its kind.
Not a dying world, but a dead world… just waiting for theselast pitiful skeletal survivors of mankind to realize the time has come for them to die.
But, gently at first, the breeze freshens.
That loose window shutter across the square bangs ever more heavily; small clouds of dustwhip along the ground. The wheel on a rusted and upended pram turns slowly with a click-click-click of bearings.
Then, faintly — blink and you’d miss it — the slightest shimmer. Like theripple across the hot tarmac of a motorway on a midsummer’s day, the flicker of hot airabove a bonfire.
A shimmer, flickering, undulating… changing.
The tallest dead spire overlooking Times Square now has windows, unbroken. As do the otherbuildings, one after the other. One can see clear roads and faint ghostly apparitions movingalong them. Clearer now… not ghostly but solid. Cars, buses, trams… people.
The sky has changed from an unhealthy poisoned brown to a wet-Tuesday grey and the persistentdrizzle of mean-spirited rain.
Tall crimson-coloured banners with the emblem of a snake eating its tail suddenly adorn everylamp post. Placards appear above shop entrances, featuring the face of a leader who promisesto unite the world under his rule. Soldiers in grey and black uniforms and tall leather bootspatrol soulless ordered streets full of soberly dressed civilians quietly, obediently, turningup for work.
