by Bob Mayer
The Colonel turned the Jeep off the hardtop onto a dirt road. A piece of plywood had a warning spray-painted on it in unsteady letters: No Trespass: We Will Shoot Your Ass. A skull and crossbones were painted next to it.
“It wouldn’t have been a real test if it weren’t a real grenade,” Orlando said.
“I should—”
“Oh, relax. It had altimeter arming built in. Wouldn’t have gone off above eight thousand feet. If none of those yahoos had done anything, it would have just rolled around, and we could have kicked it out or put the pin back in. But she did something. Damned impressive.”
“But why have it explode on the way down?”
“She didn’t, and doesn’t, know there was an altimeter arming device,” Orlando said. “She’s always going to believe it was live from the get-go.”
“What if one of the others had done that?” Eagle asked. “I was able to hook into her straitjacket with the lowering line. But if one of the other—“
“They didn’t,” Orlando said. He glanced over at Eagle. “I been doing this for a long time. I didn’t actually expect anyone to jump out with it. Jump on it. Try to throw it out. Run away. No one has ever grabbed it and jumped with it. What’s as interesting as Lara jumping, is you going after her.”
Eagle didn’t like the change in direction. “So she’s suicidal.”
“You said she tossed the grenade away after she left the plane,” Orlando pointed out.
“Yeah, but she didn’t have a chute.”
“If she were suicidal, she’d have held on to the grenade,” Orlando said.
Eagle shook his head. “But, again, she didn’t have a chute.”
“Maybe she knew you’d come after her?”
“How could she know that?” Eagle asked.
Orlando shrugged. “Good question.”
Eagle sighed, tired of going in circles with Orlando. “Any problems with the autopilot landing?”
“Nah,” Orlando said. “Machines can do stuff like that, but they can’t think. They don’t got the instincts a real pilot has.”
“Boris?”
“Pissed in his pants,” Orlando said. “Seriously, if that’s the best the Russkies got, I don’t know why we worry about them. He’s on a plane home. In the old days, they’d greet him with a bullet to the back of the head for getting sent back. Now, they’ll probably kiss him.”
“Princess?” Eagle asked.
“Had to shoot her,” Orlando said. “Not fatal, but she’s gonna need a knee replacement. She tried to cut me. Women. Can’t trust ‘em.”
“Ms. Jones was a woman.”
“She was Ms. Jones.”
“Moms is a woman.”
“She’s Moms.”
“Scout?” Eagle tried.
“I like her,” Orlando grudgingly admitted. “Something about the kid.”
Eagle knew he’d never dent Orlando’s misogyny. “Why’d you call her Lara?”
Orlando shrugged. “First thing that came to mind when I saw her.”
“Doctor Zhivago?”
“Who?”
“She’s not Russian,” Eagle said. “Sounds American. How’d she end up with the Russians?”
“How’d she end up in a straitjacket?” Orlando asked as a way of answering.
“Where are they taking her?”
“Your boss, Dane, wants to talk to her.”
Eagle had a good idea what that “discussion” entailed.
Orlando looked at him. “I don’t suppose you want to tell me what unit you guys are in now. Who Dane is.”
“Sorry,” Eagle said. They were approaching what appeared to be a derelict gas station.
“Don’t suppose you want to tell me what happened to Nada. You gotta remember, I knew who he was. Before.”
“Best not get into that, Colonel,” Eagle advised.
The brakes screeched as Orlando stopped them a hundred yards shy of the building. Two guards popped up from spider holes, weapons trained on the Jeep. A third man, coming out of his hole behind the Jeep, walked up and put a handheld in front of Orlando’s eyes. It beeped, and a green light flickered.
“Proceed, Colonel.”
“Ever wonder if, one day, they’re just going to let you pass, since they know you?” Eagle said, as Orlando threw the Jeep into gear.
“They do, I’ll have their ass.” Orlando pulled to the front of the crumbling station. “I’ll wait.”
Eagle got out, then went to the rusting soda machine and pushed the button for a grape soda. The soda machine slid to the side, and a stairway beckoned. Eagle went down the stairs, the entrance sliding shut behind him.
He entered a room that only someone on a government contract could design: depressing, gray steel-reinforced concrete walls, curving to a popcorn ceiling. Eagle knew there was twenty feet of steel-reinforced concrete above it.
The Den.
The evolution of the place’s name was part of the history of the team. It had been tabbed a “bunker” on the official specs, but that had sounded too last-days-of-Hitler. Someone during the Cold War days had suggested the Zoo, via The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. But when the Cold War faded, that had changed to Lions’ Den, then simply Den.
The generations of Nightstalkers who’d passed through had given it personality. Various knives, axes, guns, etc. were on the wall, mementoes of missions past. A vertical log, half chipped away from thrown knives, spears and axes, stood in one corner. Eagle smiled as he remembered everyone ducking whenever Doc took his turn throwing an axe.
A large table was in the center. Etched into it were the names of all the Nightstalkers who had made the ultimate sacrifice. The table had originally been in Area 51, in the room where the very first Nightstalkers, under a different name, were assembled to battle Rifts. It had been moved out here when the team moved, many years ago, away from all the scrutiny focused on Area 51 by alien conspiracy people.
Eagle ran his fingers over the names, all code names conferred onto each team member as they joined.
There were a lot of them.
He looked about, and his desire to strip the place in order to make the team room in the Possibility Palace wilted. The new team, whoever they were, whatever missions they were being tasked with, were the Nightstalkers.
Traditions always had to start somewhere.
Plus a name was missing. It was the first for the Time Patrol: Nada.
The Time Patrol needed their own traditions.
The Missions Phase V
Normandy France, 6 June 1944 A.D.
“DAWN ISN’T FAR OFF,” Brigit said as she led the way along a cow path.
They halted as a tremendous storm of heavy firing erupted to the west and north, dwarfing the artillery that had been pounding away.
“It must be five-forty-five,” Mac said. “The fleet bombardment. The battleships Nevada and Texas. The Nevada was sunk at Pearl Harbor. And the Arkansas.” He smiled as he thought of Arkansas, and Kirk chopping wood and taking care of his siblings. How he was alive because Nada was dead, and that was how fate worked sometimes. Moms had said something about fate and scales, and Mac imagined that life and death were balanced somehow in the larger frame of things.
Mac allowed the download free rein, because it kept him from thinking too much on other things. “The British battleships Ramillies and Warspite. Twelve cruisers. Thirty-seven destroyers. They’re firing up the beach, and will shift inland since the first troops land on Utah and Omaha Beaches at zero-six-thirty.”
“And we must destroy this bridge as part of all that,” Brigit said. She was walking along the path faster than what Mac considered safe, given the darkness, but it was obvious she knew it well.
“Yes.”
“Look.” Brigit halted, and Mac came up next to her. The rail line curved on a raised bed toward the trestle bridge. “You can destroy that?”
Mac took the load of explosives off his back and put it down. “Yes. It’s my expertise.”
“A str
ange thing to become an expert in.”
“I spent most of my time in”—He considered how to phrase it—“in my last war, defusing bombs.”
“That is a good thing. So, you were saving lives.”
Strange, he’d simply thought of it as defusing the IEDs, not saving lives, but he had saved a lot of lives. Mac began sorting out the demo, inserting fuses, and running det cord. He worked by feel. He didn’t really need to see what he was doing. He had the diagram of the bridge in the download, and knew exactly where the critical points were and what each would require.
“You will destroy the bridge, and then it will have to be rebuilt,” Brigit said. “War is so futile.”
“This was, is, a good war,” Mac said. It might have been the last one, he thought.
“Indeed?” Brigit looked at him, her eyes glinting in the pre-dawn. “How so?”
“The Germans have done terrible things.”
“Oh, yes. The camps. The camps everyone pretends don’t exist.”
Mac regretted saying that because now he knew what had happened to her husband and baby. “You can go back now,” he said. “You’ll be safe, and it will soon be over here. The Allies will pass by, and you can make your farm beautiful again. And you can have another Maurice, and he will wear flowers, and perhaps you will think of me now and again and maybe smile.”
“Yes. I will think of you and smile. Now, do what you have to do.”
Mac crawled out from the treeline, up onto the tracks. He jogged forward, his arms full of explosives, all wired together, and thought, Tripping now would be really bad. But even worse was seeing the German step up onto the rail line ahead of him, a Sturmgewehr 44 selective-fire rifle in his hands.
Mac stopped, and couldn’t help but think Roland would love to get his hands on that weapon, the grandfather of all modern automatic rifles. “Oberführer.”
“I was wagering with myself,” the German said, “who would come. Would it be Procles, with you as a prisoner, or just you?”
“Did you win your bet with yourself?” Mac asked, hoping that Brigit was heading back to the farm.
“It was fifty-fifty.”
“Why?” Mac asked.
“Why, what?” the oberführer was a tall, thin man. He wore a long gray coat, just like the other SS Officer. He didn’t have a cap on, and his blond hair was too long for a soldier.
“Why are you attacking us?”
“That question is too large for the two of us,” he said. “Like you, I am a soldier doing a mission.”
“Why did you kill the boy?”
“One life?” The oberführer was confused. “You care about one life in the midst of all this? And more so, in the middle of the even larger picture of why the two of us are here?”
Mac realized the shore bombardment had ceased. It was that moment just before the sun came up. There were tens of thousands of soldiers, American, Canadians, British, and Free French, heading toward the Normandy coastline in landing craft, a sad percentage of whom would be dead before nightfall.
Mac could hear vehicles approaching in the distance, the clatter of tracks from armored vehicles, the rumble of diesel engines from trucks.
“We are surrounded,” the oberführer said. “It will take them a while to get organized, but they will be here shortly. When they catch you, they will execute you as a spy. Even I cannot stop that. This is not the way I wanted this to happen. I wanted to speak with you.”
Mac really hoped, prayed to the God he didn’t believe in, that Brigit had left.
“But there is a way,” the oberführer said. A Gate appeared beside him, a dark, inviting portal away from all this. “Come with me. There is much we can learn from each other.”
“You shot a boy in the back of the head,” Mac said. “There’s nothing I can learn from you. I wondered at times about our missions. Our war. But now, I know it is right, too. It’s a just war.”
The oberführer sneered. “You’re a fool.”
Mac winced, not from the pains of his bad knee or the broken fingers or the scrapes from being pulled out of the well, but because he could see Brigit’s slight form creeping up onto the rail line behind the man pretending to be a German officer, but representing something so much worse. He saw the glint of first light on the knife in her hand as the top edge of the sun broke the horizon behind her.
The oberführer realized too late as the blade slid across his throat. Blood spurted forth in a geyser from his severed carotids. He staggered for the Gate, trying to escape, but Brigit shoved him in the other direction and he fell off the embankment, tumbling to the dirt. The Gate snapped out of existence.
Mac walked up to Brigit. “You didn’t leave.”
She nodded at the bridge. “Hurry. There is not much time.”
“Go back to your farm.”
The oberführer’s body crumbled into dust.
Mac ran to the bridge, ignoring his torn knee. He moved swiftly, placing the charges, then running the det cord.
When he was done, he took the roll of det cord and walked backward along the side of the embankment to his pack. Brigit sat next to it, but he’d expected no different.
He wired the cord into the detonator.
The vehicles were closing in. Brakes squealed. Commands were shouted in German.
“You should go now,” he said to Brigit.
“No.”
“You have to go.”
“No.”
“I thought you were going to think of me and smile.”
Brigit smiled. “I am thinking of you.”
Sjaelland Island, Denmark, 6 June 452 A.D.
Heorot emptied as darkness approached, except for the thanes of Hrothgar, Beowulf, and ignored in their dark corner, Jager and Roland.
Jager had refused to talk further of his world, his life, Grendels, or anything. He withdrew into a mode Roland was familiar with: pre-combat.
Roland watched as the thanes took their armor off and put swords and spears aside. After all, Heorot was now safe.
He was startled when Jager spoke after such a long silence. “This poem of that—” He indicated Beowulf. “Why is it important?”
“I’m told it is,” Roland said. “It is part of the start of”—the download confused him with possible answers, so he went back to the Met, to what they had seen—“art.”
“‘Art.’” Jager said the word. “I was told stories of it by the old ones. They used a word with it: beautiful.” He sighed. “I’d like to know what ‘beautiful’ is before my Hunt is over. What art is.” He shrugged. “But it does not matter. She comes. I sense her approach.”
They were both ready. Roland had ceded the Naga to Jager, given his greater experience fighting Grendels. He had the spear. If Mac had been there, he’d have commented that it was the ultimate sacrifice Roland could make: to give up his weapon.
“Does she have a name in the poem?”
Roland checked. “No. She is termed an Aglaeca, which means a ferocious fighter.”
“‘Aglaeca.” Jager nodded. “That works.”
The fire began to die down. More fell asleep. Roland wondered how much longer he had here. If he were pulled back before—
“If the poem is important,” Jager said, his eyes scanning the hall, “then we must follow the words as best we can and kill her in her lair. I do not like the field of Hunt in here. We let the Mother take whomever she takes. Follow her back to the lair. Kill her.”
Roland nodded. He felt the pressure of time, unsure what hour he had arrived the previous night. It had been late, given how quickly dawn came after the battle. He had some hours, but—
The front doors were thrown open, and Aglaeca was there, larger than Grendel, stooping to enter Heorot.
There were just two guards alert and awake, and they were dead within seconds. It went against Roland’s nature to hold back from a fight, but this wasn’t a fight. It was a slaughter as Aglaeca plowed her way toward the throne, slaying any thane who woke at her approach.<
br />
“She’s going after Beowulf,” Roland said. “We can’t—”
Jager was already moving. He shouted something in a language that Dane, and the download, didn’t recognize.
Twenty feet short of Beowulf, Aglaeca paused. Her entire body had to turn in order to see to the side, as she also had no neck. Larger, fifteen feet tall, covered in scales, her only noticeable difference from Grendel was a ridge of black scales on the top of her head, a foot high, and continuing down to her back.
Jager yelled again as Roland ran up next up to him, spear at the ready.
Aglaeca snatched the severed arm from the post to which it was hammered. She rumbled for the door, carrying the body like a doll in one hand, the arm in the other. The monster disappeared into the darkness as the inside of Heorot began to finally awaken, at least, those who hadn’t been killed.
“Why did it run?” Roland asked. “It could have killed Beowulf.”
“It knew the language I spoke to it,” Jager said. “It knows I’m a Jager.”
“But why not fight?”
“Her survival is her priority,” Jager said. “Even more than revenge. That was another way they were able to defeat us. They can sublimate their emotion to their purpose. Often, we humans can’t do that.”
Roland nodded.
“Time for me to finish it,” Jager said.
“I’ll help,” Roland said. He looked over. Beowulf was awake, but still drunk. He was trying to make sense of what had happened, but other than Roland and Jager, no one had witnessed the complete assault. It would be a while before any sort of coherent group could be put together to go in pursuit.
“Beowulf is alive,” Jager said. “When I finish it, he can take credit. That is your task. This is mine.”
“I’m coming with you,” Roland said. “You can use the Naga.”
Jager shrugged and sprinted for the door. Roland ran after him. They loped through the darkness, Jager slightly in the lead, bent forward at the waist, his eyes toward the ground. There was a full moon, and Aglaeca’s tracks were easy to follow. Roland could also swear he heard Jager sniffing every now and then, as if tracking a scent.
