One Helluva Bad Time- The Complete Bad Times Series

by Chuck Dixon

  15

  Warrior Princess

  It was a boy.

  After eighteen hours of labor, Caroline Tauber gave birth to an eight-pound, twenty-one-inch howler.

  “We’re not naming him Maximus,” she said just before the drugs took affect and whisked her away to Happy Mommy Land.

  Dwayne held the squealing red bundle in his arms and just stared.

  “What are you going to name it, sir?” a nurse asked him.

  “Damned if I know,” he said and allowed another nurse to gently pluck his son from his arms to place him in a plastic-walled bassinet and wheel him away. He then numbly followed an orderly back to the suite to await Caroline and his son after the post-op cleanup had been completed.

  The biggest flower arrangement he’d ever seen was there on a table. Next to it was a huge teddy bear in Ranger camouflage and sergeant’s stripes. He’d phoned Morris when they wheeled Caroline into the delivery room. Plenty of time for his bros to call the order in to a local florist.

  He sank down into a chair, physically and emotionally drained. He could swear that bear was laughing at him.

  “Hooah, Sergeant Teddy.”

  “I’m not wearing that,” Lee said.

  “I had it custom-made for this op,” Jimmy Smalls said.

  “Maybe you want to look like a Dollar Store Spartacus. I’ll stick with my Dragon armor,” Lee said.

  The team was on the main deck of the Raj unloading the crates Jimbo had brought back on the launch. The crates were drop-shipped to the port in Limassol care of Praxus Enterprises, the shell corporation the team used as an avatar for their dealing with the outside world. They even paid taxes. Sort of.

  “This is the same as Dragon,” Jimbo insisted. “Bob Tosches made these up for me at his shop.”

  “What did you tell him? He must think you’ve lost your damned mind.” Chaz laughed.

  “This looks like a fucking dress!” Lee said, holding up something that looked like a skirt fashioned from old-school pre-digital desert camouflage.

  “It’s a utili-kilt. Guys in construction wear them. The goddamn Scots highlanders wore kilts, and they were badasses,” Jimbo said. “Besides, they’ll help us blend.”

  “At a gay pride parade?” Lee said in disgust and threw the kilt down.

  “Buckles, my man? Where’s the Velcro?” Chaz said, holding up a layered torso armor with steel studs in rows.

  “It’s a lorica segmenta. Standard issue for the Roman army. It’s better than the shit we wore in Iraq. There’s shoulder protection, and straps that hang down to protect your balls.” Jimbo held up a set of the torso armor manufactured in black Kevlar. “It’s layered, so it breathes. This shit is awesome. You’ll see when you try it on.”

  “Buckles, bro?” Chaz said, jiggling a belt strap with a steel buckle jangling at the end of it.

  “We can’t be having Velcro and plastic fasteners back in The Then,” Jimbo said. He was losing patience.

  “I think they’re cute,” Bat said and held a set up against her as if she were at Neiman’s.

  Jimbo sagged.

  “You’ll look like Xena,” Lee snorted.

  “And that’s a bad thing?” Bat said.

  “I think he was talking to me,” Jimbo said.

  “I’m wearing my BDUs and Dragons,” Lee said and walked away forward to the bridge.

  “Oh, hell no,” Chaz said and pulled a helmet from within a box. Packing peanuts spilled to the deck.

  He held the helmet up. It was a recreation of a Roman galea in black ballistic cloth over a high-impact plastic dome. It was accented with brass bosses, and had cheek guards and a bill at the rear for protection to the back of the neck.

  “It’s optional, okay?” Jimbo snatched the helmet from Chaz’s hand. He didn’t mention that he’d ordered greaves to cover their shins as well.

  Bat laughed.

  “Fuck, yeah!” They all turned to see Boats standing in his cutoffs with the retro armor strapped on. With his wild red hair and beard, he would have looked at home in the German auxilla.

  “At my signal, unleash hell,” Boats intoned gravely. Now they all laughed.

  16

  Transit: the Med

  All personnel and gear aboard, the Ocean Raj weighed anchor and moved out into the Mediterranean. They’d take their time to bring the ship to its new anchorage roughly thirty miles off Haifa in waters almost two thousand meters deep. The team would use the transit time to shake down their equipment and make any last minute adjustments to the mission plan. Most strategies don’t survive long once the boots hit the ground. The team worked out countless contingencies and tried to anticipate as many surprises as they could imagine.

  The law of unintended consequences was squared and then cubed by traveling into the past. Where every op had its share of gotchas, the world of the ancient past was mostly unknown. They would be making landfall at a strip of beach south of what was today the port of Haifa. Back in 16 AD, it was Caesarea, the seat of imperial power in Judea. Their research informed them that they could lose themselves in the crowd of a bustling port city and also readily buy the horses they needed.

  Of course, their research could be bullshit. One variable and the whole op was turned ass up. The city could be in the grip of plague or famine. It could be suffering the aftereffects of an earthquake or fire. Maybe the legions were there clamping down after a week of riots. They could motor their rubber raft right through an imperial fleet.

  Doc Tauber worked at fine-tuning the Tube, but he still couldn’t guarantee what time of day they’d pop out—high noon or the middle of the night. They could drop into mirror seas or the middle of a hundred-year storm. There was just no way to know. It was impossible to be prepared for every eventuality, but they’d be ready enough to stay flexible when, not if, things went sideways.

  They had enough of the Carthaginian coins on board to live like kings in first-century Rome. They’d only take enough to buy mounts and incidentals. Lee Hammond took care of the currency they’d need for paying their way. A few days in a lemon-juice solution removed the centuries of patina from the coins so they’d look closer to the right vintage in the eyes of anyone they met back in The Then.

  Jimbo rolled a fifty-gallon drum off the lower rear deck of the Raj. Bat stood by with one of the Winchester 70s. The sea was as flat and calm as a tablecloth. The sun was low to port, making the sea glimmer in copper and deepest green. The ship was moving slow. The barrel rose and fell on the rolling, creamy wake.

  “Let it drift on out,” Jimbo said.

  “Okay,” Bat said and dropped her Ray-Bans onto her freckled nose to cut down the glare off the water. She stood rocking easy with the slight movement of the deck. Three weeks on board, and she had her sea legs back. But striking a moving target from a moving deck was still going to be a challenge.

  The barrel bobbed away until it was a good two hundred yards out. It was a crimson dot catching light as it dipped and rose in the gentle current.

  “Find your target,” Jimbo said. He had a pair of binoculars to his eyes.

  Bat rode the slight rise of the deck and sighted over the scope to locate the barrel. She lowered her eye to the scope cup. The drum seemed to leap within touching distance.

  “Got it,” she said.

  “All yours, then,” Jimbo said.

  She locked the reticules on the barrel and held that position as the deck fell beneath the soles of her sneakers. Holding her breath, Bat waited until the deck climbed up and the barrel was in view again. She let her breath out slowly and squeezed firm and steady on the trigger.

  Jimbo saw a geyser of foam six feet in front of the barrel.

  “That an honest miss?” he said.

  “If you mean, was I on it, I was,” she said.

  “You’re hitting short.”

  She lowered the rifle and twiddled a dial atop the scope then raised it again to find the barrel now drifting closer to three football fields distant. Breathe in, ride t
he roll, squeeze.

  Through the lenses, Jimbo saw a hole punched in the metal skin of the barrel. The force made the drum take a quarter spin.

  “Money,” he said with a grin.

  She jacked a fresh round and retrained the 30x and nailed the barrel again. Four more times she worked the bolt and brought the crosshairs down and drilled the steel drum clean each time. The barrel was five hundred yards aft on her last strike and sinking low in the water.

  “Nice,” Jimbo said. “How’d that feel?”

  “Like holding my first puppy.” She smiled.

  “What’s your best?”

  “In the rings from a thousand meters.”

  “On a range?” he asked.

  “A place called Qana. Took a Hezbollah sapper through the head,” she said and pulled the bolt from the rifle with an expert tug.

  “Headshots are a bitch.”

  “He didn’t give me much choice,” she said. “I’m going forward to clean the Winchester if that’s okay with you.”

  “Sure.” The Pima nodded. “Far as I’m concerned, that rifle’s yours from now on.”

  “Thanks.” She flashed a smile and walked to a ladder with the rifle under her arm.

  Damn, Jimbo thought, Lee better watch his ass around this girl. He wouldn’t want to do anything to piss off someone who could shoot like that.

  Bat found Chaz in the cabin they used for meetings and as a day room. He had buds in his ears from an iPod and listened to his tunes while running the blade of a combat knife, an eight-inch Bowie type with a brass tang, over the surface of a whetstone.

  “What’re you listening to?”

  “Right now? Gorillaz. Part of a mix,” he said.

  “They’re okay. You like Bonde do Rolê?”

  “Brazilian, right? Yeah. I have some of them on here.”

  “Death to your speakers. Death to your speakerssssss...” she growled in an exaggerated basso.

  Chaz laughed. Bat poured some coffee from a pot warming on a hot plate.

  “Hey, while I’m putting an edge on my blade, you need your knife sharpened?” He nodded to the bayonet in a web scabbard on the belt of her cutoffs.

  “Thanks, but I promised my dad I’d always do that.” She sat across the table from him, shaking a paper packet of Equal in her fingers. “A Kabar. Your dad a jarhead?”

  “First Marines. Semper fi, do or die. He carried it in Vietnam. He was at Hue City after Tet.”

  “So that’s where you get it,” Chaz said.

  “My mom’s tougher. Public school teacher in Cleveland. She’s been in more fights than me or Dad.” She took a sip.

  “So why this fight, girl? You coming along to be with Lee or for the action?”

  “A chance to see what you guys have seen? Like I could pass that up? Besides, you could use my help.”

  “A chance to visit your holy lands the way they used to be. Kind of a pilgrimage.”

  “Same for you, Chaz. I’m sensing this is more than just another op for you.”

  Chaz examined the razor edge of the blade in the light from the ceiling lamp.

  “My dad was a deacon. Church of Christ. I turned my back on all that,” he said, studying the silvery gleam off the polished metal. “Thought I had all the answers. Then I joined the army, got deployed, and had my world rocked. I saw shit I couldn’t handle; shit that drinking couldn’t make me unsee. You have to deal with that, right? Well, I went back to my father and begged for his help. I found peace there in The Word with his guidance. Cancer took him three years back.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Chaz,” Bat said.

  “It’s okay. He went easy. He was right with God. And knowing I was the same gave him his own peace. It was good between us in those last years. I’m thankful for that.” Chaz slid the oiled blade into a leather scabbard.

  “He must have been proud of you,” she said.

  “I just wish he could see what we’re about to see.” Chaz smiled easy. “The way I look at it, Jesus saved me, and now I’m returning the favor.”

  17

  Station Five

  The mist was growing to fill the well at the center of the chamber.

  The tension was high as the technicians waited for whatever would emerge from the veil of icy mist spreading from the black steel array. Any opening of the field was a cause for anxiety. There were so many imponderables, so many opportunities for disaster. They were, after all, playing with the building blocks of the universe here. What lay beyond the chilling fog, growing denser with each passing second, was no abstract mystery. It was real, and it was dangerous.

  That’s why armed and armored security waited at the base of the ramp with weapons trained and ready for whatever may exit from the field.

  To the more learned technicians, these precautions were childish. The true horror they might unleash by punching a hole into the fabric of time could not be subdued with bullets or bombs. It was the unimaginable power of existence itself that could suck them all into an endless void or cause them to vanish in an instantaneous torrent of light.

  Today the strain was from a more particular, more localized, source.

  Sir Neal Harnesh himself was visiting the Gallant Temporal Transference Field Generator at Station Five.

  The man in the flesh.

  The man who financed the experimentation and the construction of the facility and recruited the staff at the costs of billions of euros sat sipping oolong in an observation room set in the mezzanine above the well in which the generator sat. No one could recall Harnesh ever visiting before, let alone sitting down to watch the device in operation. He was accompanied by Augustus Martin whom they were familiar with.

  It was Martin who descended upon them when they “cocked it up,” as he phrased it in his parlance. Like the time they were all herded from the generator well by a gunman and locked out of the facility. When security had cut their way in they found two men dead on the rampway and a control console had been vandalized to the point where it had to be entirely replaced. That was when paramilitary security was brought in from Gallant Security Solutions LTD. From that day on the facility felt more like an armed camp than a scientific operation.

  The pressure was on from the plant managers that today’s field opening must be flawless.

  They worked through each step and felt the palpable frisson of static in the air, raising the hair on scalp and arms, as the initiating jolt from the shielded reactor in the sub-basement powered the carbon steel rings with megajoules of free magnetic power. The rings vibrated and hummed. A fresh gout of white vapor descended from the ramp. The security men at the bottom of the ramp stiffened. They thrust the butts of their rifles into their shoulders and held the sights unwavering into the cavity of the ring array.

  A single figure emerged from the chilled cloud. A man with white hair that was in severe contrast with his deep mocha complexion and silken robes of gold-trimmed indigo. The man wore the costume with authority and gestured impatiently for the guards to lower their weapons as he strode off the ramp. They parted to make a path for him. He stopped to glance up and sighted Sir Neal now standing at a window of the observation room. The robed man climbed the stairs to the mezzanine in a series of eager bounds to be shown into Harnesh’s presence.

  “Something to drink, Sumesh?” Sir Neal asked softly.

  “Anything with ice!” the newcomer proclaimed, and Gus Martin stepped to a rolling bar cart to prepare a cold drink.

  “I take it you have returned with news I will not like,” Sir Neal said.

  “What is that saying? ‘You can’t buy an Afghan, but you can rent one?’” Sumesh Khan accepted without comment a crystal tumbler filled with an amber liquid in ice.

  “I take it then that the Nazarene is not dead,” Sir Neale said.

  “He is not. Neither are any of them. He has been sold into slavery with all the captives. I have taken steps to make certain that the company he travels in remains together. It would not do to have him sold awa
y to persons unknown and taken to places unheard of.” Khan drained a long swallow from the tumbler.

  “I wanted to avoid the task of finding and identifying him,” Sir Neal said. “I wanted his death to be not a singular event but a statistic.”

  “They may still all be executed as you wish.” Khan gathered the hem of his robe and took a seat. “We have him. It’s only a matter of taking a more direct hand.”

  “Something I avoid when possible. I dislike actions that create interest in me. Though we deal in anomalies, I wish for them to remain unseen and unnoticed.”

  “Then I will return and see it done,” Khan said and held out the empty tumbler for Martin to take.

  “No,” Sir Neal said. “I have another task for you. Something closer to home. Closer to the present.”

  “I thought this operation in Judea was the priority,” Khan said.

  “It is. It is at the core of all I have planned. But you know this is a complicated game we play. Time is everything and nothing to us. You will return to Judea another day, and it will be as though you were only absent for a moment.”

  “As you wish, of course, Sir Neal. All I ask is to take a hot shower, and I am at your complete disposal,” Khan said, standing.

  “Take all the time you need,” Sir Neal said with a trace of a smile.

  Sumesh Khan departed with a swirl of his dark robes.

  “I don’t like him, sir. He’s dangerous,” Augustus Martin said when Khan was out of earshot on the other side of the heavily insulated door.

  “Said one predator of another,” Sir Neal said. “It is that precise attribute that makes yourself and Mr. Khan valuable to me.”

  18

  At Home

  “Stephen. I like it,” Dwayne said.

  “It was my father’s name.” Caroline was smiling, beaming really, where she reclined in the bed nursing their son. The sun that streamed into the room seemed to be shining just for them. Dwayne couldn’t remember being this happy or this at peace.