by Chuck Dixon
The sun was going down over the heights to the west. Dwayne determined that they were moving on a south/southwest course deeper into what would be Mexico. Whatever their ultimate destination, they were keeping him alive for now. He could wait for his moment to get that bracelet back. The sky was turning gray when Black Mask called a halt to the march. They stopped on a broad area of rock sheltered on three sides by steep slopes. A natural defensive position that hid them from sight but offered a clear view of the approaches from below. They camped without building a fire, and their conversations were hushed so as not to echo from the walls of the natural bowl of rock. They were in enemy territory now, behind the lines.
Dwayne accepted strips of cold camel meat and some kind of mush of dried corn and berries. As he ate with the others, he wondered what sort of threat would make these guys take the precautions of a cold camp. These people wore decorations that identified them as Aztecs or Toltecs or Mayans. If there were other parallels to the world, he knew then this area of northern Mexico was probably under the control of nomadic tribes like the Yaqui or Apache. If not them, maybe the turban-topped slavers he’d seen along the coast to the North. In any case, his captors set out sentries, each man and woman taking turns to listen and watch.
He thought they might leave him unbound for the night. They barely paid attention to him, growing used to his company over the course of the long day. Even Snaggletooth turned his back to him to eat. He was already working out his options of slipping the bracelet off Black Mask’s arm and winking the hell out of here. Give these little mothers a real story to tell when they got home. When the sky was full dark, Black Mask brought along three of his pals. They tied Dwayne’s wrists and ankles with leather thongs and left him that way to return to guzzling corn beer.
The girl—he’d taken to calling her “Heather” for some reason—brought him a bowl of the beer and he drank it dry. Her eyes held more curiosity than kindness. Most of her attention was for his clothing and his sneakers. He was wearing the pants from a mesh cloth outfit he’d taken from the mystery gunman that he’d “ridden” to this place and time. Seemed like a lifetime ago, though it was a little over a month that he’d spent in this place so far. He’d walked half the length of the Baja in that time. The only alteration he’d made to his clothes was to cut away the sleeves of the tunic.
That exposed his arms and the tattoos that covered them from above the wrists to his shoulders. A skull with crossed daggers. Paratroop wings. An ace of spades pierced with bullet holes. A snarling fox for his old Ranger company. And the newest, a black silhouette of a wooly mammoth just above his left wrist. The images inked on his skin fascinated Heather. He saw others stealing glances at the tats. Heather touched them tentatively. Her hand jerked away as though they might begin to move.
She touched the laces of his sneakers. They were in sad shape after weeks of hiking, even though most of that was on sand, and he often went barefoot to conserve wear. He’d tossed his only pair of socks long before. The day’s march across harder ground of flint and loose rock ripped them up even more. The soles were holding but coming loose from the uppers. He’d need to find a way to bind them before they went much farther. But to Heather, they were a marvel. Her fingers explored the seams and traced the logo embossed in the leather of the heel plate.
Heather and her people went barefoot, the bottoms of their feet as thick with callus as a boot sole. A week or more of this kind of marching and he’d be barefoot too. He wasn’t looking forward to it.
“They’re called shoes,” he said.
She looked up, startled. He made sure not to show teeth when he smiled. She blinked and returned her attention to his sneakers. He hoped her interest wouldn’t turn to theft. Her child-sized feet would be lost in his size fourteens. That didn’t mean she wouldn’t take them if only as a trophy. Even with a fresh layer of hardened skin from walking barefoot on the Baja beaches, his feet would be bloody tatters after only a few hours travel in this country if he was forced to hike shoeless. She moved away, taking the empty bowl with her, to join others huddled against the rock walls.
Dwayne lay back, looking up to the stars. Without the light pollution of the modern world, the stars showed bright and clear against a sky of velvet black. He recognized the constellations he could see. That brought him a degree of cold comfort. At least that was one familiar feature in this strange place.
He wondered about Caroline and his infant son. She would have no idea where he was or what had happened to him. He hoped and prayed that N’itha had reached them in time to get away. He hoped and prayed Caroline listened and ran as fast and as far as she could. The men hunting them were the same ones who had been pursuing them across the planet and the ages since the day Dwayne and his Ranger buddies helped Caroline and her brother steal the Tauber Tube from the man who’d financed it.
Sir Neal Harnesh wanted his time travel device back. He spared nothing, not cash or human lives, in his efforts to have it returned to him. And equal to his desire to have his device back was his need to see anyone connected with the theft dead. Being one of the world’s richest men wasn’t enough for this guy. He had a strategy cooking to take control of the fate of humanity, and for that to work, he required absolute secrecy. The last thing he needed was a gang of Army vets using his own gadget to turn his master plan to shit. And he literally had all the time in the world to hunt them down.
Dwayne was powerless to help Caroline. But he knew she was as tough and resourceful as they came. She’d stay a step ahead of Harnesh. The only trouble being that she didn’t have access to the Tauber Tube. She had only The Now to hide in. She was left with only the option of putting geographical distance between her and the goons who almost captured Dwayne back on the Baja. There was no escape into the past for her. Not an option. The Tube was currently still aboard the Ocean Raj, the cargo ship the guys leased to keep the device as mobile as possible. Dwayne had no clue where or when the Raj was. Hell, he didn’t know where or when he was.
He missed his wife and his son, Stephen, with a pain he could feel in his chest. They’d had so little time together. An anomaly separated them when he was trapped back in Roman Judea. He’d returned to The Now to find he had a son, and the boy was already six months old.
To get his mind back to the current mission, he thought about the technological level of this place. His captors were armed with matchlock firearms. They were probably taken in a raid or picked up after a skirmish. They had prepared cartridges of greased paper in bandoliers hanging from their camel saddles. They carried a firebox of embers to light the cloth fuses that ignite the powder charges. He doubted they had a supply of gunpowder or the knowledge to manufacture more. This was a borrowed technology.
The lateen-rigged ship he’d seen off the coast of California had ports for cannon. The men he saw were too far distant to see if they carried muskets. He could only assume they did and were probably the source of his captors’ weapons. The men in the boat, the slavers, might even have more advanced weaponry.
And who were the slavers? Arabs? Turks? The corpses he’d found on the beach a few weeks back were Asian Indians and clearly kept as slaves. Whatever the history of this time turned out to be, it was a significant divergence from the one he knew. There was no evidence of Spaniards here, no conquistadors, and no missions. In fact, he’d seen not one permanent structure of any kind since blipping into this parallel.
In fact, he had no way of telling when he was in relation to his own era. For all he knew, this was the same year here as the one he left. No reason to believe that this world was in the centuries past. Perhaps technological development had slowed here. This could be any year from the late 15th century onward. In any case, it wasn’t really relevant to him when this was. It was a gunpowder era world where slavery was still a thriving basis for the economy. And here he was a captive at the bottom of the chain, a slave.
It struck him that was the best he could hope for. To be a slave. With a cold realization,
he recalled that the Aztecs were known for ritual human sacrifice. But they wouldn’t walk him all this way, treat him with this much care, only to cut his heart out.
Would they?
6
The Messenger
“Why should I help you?” Jason Taan said.
“Because you’re stuck here just like us,” Lee Hammond said.
The billionaire smirked. “Perhaps I am spiteful enough to allow you to continue to share my misery.”
“You could be more comfortable. You could have free range of the ship instead of being locked in here,” Lee said. His gaze ranged over the eight-by-ten-foot, windowless cabin they’d kept Taan in since the night they left 21st century Shanghai for the prehistoric past.
Taan’s only answer was to hiss something in Mandarin at the other Chinese man standing stolid with his back to the cabin entry. Shan Li Ti was a former hired gun in the employ of Eastern Star Security Solutions, a subsidiary of Taan Enterprises wholly owned by the man now held prisoner in the belowdecks cabin. Shan had switched sides when he objected to the coldblooded murder of the men who escaped with him from the horrors of the Taiping Rebellion. He went so far as to kill one of his own comrades to save Lee Hammond’s life. Five other Eastern Star men, less cooperative types, were being held in a locked cargo container deeper in the bowels of the Raj.
Shan chose not to answer his former boss.
Lee snapped his fingers in Taan’s face to bring the man’s attention back to him.
“If it were up to me, I’d toss you overboard in a heartbeat. As it is, we’re in the middle of an existential survival situation here. If it comes down to sharing the last can of peaches with you or putting a bullet in your head, well, that’s no choice at all, is it?”
With a sullen expression, Taan looked away from the big American. He was not used to negotiating from a disadvantageous position. He searched his mind for bargaining room and could find none. They fed him and gave him water and even books to read. But he was confined to swelter day and night in a cell half the size of the largest closet in his smallest condo. Even the walls sweated in the wet, heavy, furnace heat of this hell.
“All we’re asking is for a little help, and we all go home. You have my word you’ll walk, Taan.”
“Your word.”
“I never lied to you. Not once.”
“You have hijacked me. You have kidnapped me.”
“Never promised I wouldn’t. And it was you who kidnapped us, remember? And stole our ship. And forced us on that crazy chase over half of China looking for a treasure map. We even found the damned thing for you.” The legendary original draft in Chinese of the memoirs of Genghis Khan with detailed directions to the treasure trove of the greatest of the Mongol khans.
“And in addition to my life, will you return to me the scrolls?”
“That’s negotiable.”
Taan repressed a smile. A bargaining chip. A thin one but it was something. Still, it rested on the goodwill of his captors. They held all the cards in this game.
“What must I do?” Taan asked with a sigh. “That’s better,” Lee said.
The letter turned out to be a project in itself. Jason Taan composed it with help from Morris Tauber. It took most of the afternoon and into the evening to put together. A version in English and another, supervised by Shan, in Chinese script.
The heart of it was directions from Jason Taan to several of his corporate officers to have the recent steel construction off Changxingxiang Island disassembled and transshipped to a Chinese port facility on the west coast of Panama. There, the massive steel cage was to be reassembled at a location fourteen miles offshore in the Pacific, precisely as it was before.
“Once we know the superstructure is in place, we can make plans to dock the Raj inside and return to the present,” Mo said.
“How will you locate the cage so far in the future? I am assuming that global positioning does not work here,” Taan said.
“You’re right. But we’ll know the location. Its coordinates are included in the instructions, remember? We’ll work it out,” Mo said.
“When do I leave to deliver my letter?” Taan asked.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Lee said.
“What if my associates do not believe the letter is from me?”
“You’d just better hope you were persuasive enough,” Lee said.
“Then have whoever goes take this with him.” Taan wetted a pinkie finger and pulled from it a ring of dark gold; a blood red oval-cut ruby grasped in a dragon’s claw at its center. A delicate piece of work.
Lee took the ring and dropped it in the plastic pack that included the letter from Taan and instructions from Doc Tauber.
“I’m thinking,” Mo said, “Maybe a letter isn’t enough.”
Jason Taan asked, “Is it necessary to read this again?”
“That’s the whole point, Taan. It sounds like you’re reading it,” Lee said.
“I am reading it,” Taan said. He waved the paper in his hand with growing impatience.
“Okay. Okay. But you don’t want them thinking you’re being forced against your will,” Jimbo said. He stood behind a video camera set up on a tripod.
“This is against my will and my better judgment,” Taan said. He stood from his chair, slamming the sheet of paper down on the chart table.
“You want to go home? Then read it like you mean it,” Lee said. He picked the sheet up and tossed it back at Taan.
“From the top,” Lee said, his eye on the camera’s monitor screen.
Taan took the paper and heaved a sigh before sitting down once more, squarely in the view of the camera. He spoke in Mandarin Chinese. Shan stood by, following along with his own copy of the paper to make certain his former employer did not vary from the script.
“My name is Jason Taan, and I have urgent instructions that must be followed to the last, most minute detail…”
They left the choice of messengers up to Shan. He knew Taan’s bodyguards best. The man he picked was named Jinhai, and Jinhai was not pleased with the prospect of being put alone and unarmed in a raft and shoved into the monster-haunted waters surrounding the Ocean Raj. He had not seen the creatures that roamed the sea and land here, but he had heard them. The Conex container that had served as a cell for Jinhai and the other four Eastern Star mercenaries was deep in the hold against a bulkhead. Sounds of muted rumblings and the scraping of long, scaled bodies came to them through the hull night and day.
Mo explained to the terrified man, through Shan, that he would not be going into the ocean of the Cretaceous but returning to a more familiar era through a rip in time. That did nothing to calm Jinhai. Like a man condemned to death, he took a seat in a Zodiac. He was given a waterproof packet containing his boss’ personal letter, DVD testimonial, pinkie ring, and detailed instructions from Morris Tauber on how to proceed if Taan Enterprises ever wanted to see their beloved founder alive. Also in the packet was a very special sender-receiver that would be used to provide further instructions on a special wave frequency that would reach out from the distant past.
Jinhai sat in the raft on the angled steel roller platform that ran into the opening of the Tauber Tube. The steel rings above him dripped with frost as a chill cloud of cold air covered every surface with a white rime. A frisson of static electricity crackled in the air. He turned back to look at the pair of Americans gripping rubber handholds set in the rigid surround of the Zodiac. They were awaiting orders from someone behind an ice-covered observation station set in the rear wall of the Tube chamber.
His grasp of English was limited to obscenities and lines he recalled from American action movies. But he realized that it was a cadence he was hearing from a speaker set in the ceiling. It was a countdown.
The Americans gave a shove to the raft, sending it rolling down the platform and into the dense cloud of icy air. Jinhai felt the cold grip him, bite hard into his joints. His face burned with it. Everything around him wobbled in a cascadi
ng vibration that had his teeth gnashing against one another. He tasted copper in his mouth.
And then...
The air was warm, and the wobble was replaced with the gentle rise and fall of mild chop. The white mist about him thinned to lace and then gone, parted by a balmy sea breeze. Jinhai sensed rather than saw this as he was on hands and knees vomiting up his breakfast. When he finally recovered, he remembered to be terrified and looked around in every direction, expecting to see the heads of monsters exploding from the foam.
What he saw was nothing at all.
Even the ship he was on a few moments before was nowhere to be seen.
From the position of the sun, he determined that it was early evening. To the west, he could see a jewel-like line of lights along the horizon. A shoreline. A city. He started the motor at the rear of the raft and steered the Zodiac toward the lights.
Jinhai was happy. He had not been eaten by a monster. He was off that terrible ship. He took comfort in the idea that he would sleep in his own bed that night, in his father’s apartment in a tower behind the International mall off West Nanking Road.
And that’s all that it was. An idea. Jinhai Ho would not see his own bed for many days and nights. That is until he had talked to what seemed like hundreds of executives from every level of the corporate structure within the Taan organization. From there, he was placed in the rough hands of the company’s security men, who treated him like a criminal complicit with the disappearance of Jason Taan.
Jinhai was surprised to learn that his boss had been missing for nearly a year. To Jinhai, only a week or so had passed while he was confined with the others on the horrible ship. The humble private guard found himself in the center of a mystery that had been debated to exhaustion in the media across the world. The vanishing act of one of the world’s richest men became a ripe subject for pundits and late-night comedians. Jason Taan’s whereabouts and the circumstances of his disappearance were grist for conversations for months following the night the Ocean Raj evaporated into the ether. Theories were bandied about, each one wilder than the next. Books were written. Even a movie was in production about the mysterious disappearance of one of China’s richest men.
