Time Patrol

by Bob Mayer

  “Do you speak English?” she asked.

  Ivar felt a surge of relief. “Yes!”

  The woman smiled. “American?”

  “Yes!”

  “Excellent.” The woman extended her hand. “Welcome to the Space Between. I’m Amelia Earhart.”

  Nine Hours

  The Nightstalkers came into New York City hard, and as fast as they could, from their dispersed positions. The word had come down from the top of the National Command Authority, aka the President, and the NYPD had already cleared out the Metropolitan Museum of Art and set up a perimeter around it, including a landing zone for helicopters directly behind the building in the one nearby open space that could take a chopper.

  Still, given the Nightstalkers’ original displacement, it took several precious hours. But the Keep, first on the scene from DC, had insisted that everyone gather first, which went against Nightstalker Protocol to hit a target quickly. But the Keep had her reasons, actually, reason, dictated by the papers she’d taken out of the safe in her office.

  Moms, the second on scene after the Keep, coming out of Kansas, waited impatiently on the south side of the Met. She’d met the Keep once before, during the incident at the White House the Christmas before last involving the Cherry Tree truth serum. As she’d been then, the Keep was anything but a font of information, telling Moms she only wanted to brief this once.

  But with the locals having containment (a terrorism threat was working as cover for the moment, one of the few things New Yorkers actually paid attention to), the focus was on figuring out exactly what the problem was. No one was quite sure. A steel door shuttered the corridor at the bottom of the old elevator. The guard inside the first door was overwhelmed by all the activity, and the only piece of information he could give was that some woman had gone inside and never come back out. Beyond that, it seemed his memory was Swiss cheese.

  NYPD SWAT was covering the top of the elevator for the moment, but the moment was stretching out too long in Moms’s opinion.

  Scout landed after a thrilling fighter jet ride from Knoxville to LaGuardia and a transfer to a military helicopter. She hopped off and looked around. Moms waved for her to come over to the large, modern van the NYPD had given up as the command post, parked on the southwest corner of the museum.

  “What’s going on?” Scout asked as they entered the CP. “Cool digs,” she added, noting the cluster of communication gear, weapons, briefing boards, and maps along the walls, and all the other high-speed gizmos required to run an operation in the City That Never Sleeps. “They got donuts in here somewhere?”

  “She on your team?” the Keep asked. “I don’t have her on your roster.”

  “We need her,” Moms said, not completely sure why Nada had called Scout in, but implicitly trusting her team sergeant’s wishes. “She’s been in training for a while now,” Moms fudged.

  The Keep shrugged. “All right. Your team, your call, your responsibility. But we need the rest of the team here ASAP.”

  “Nice to meet you too,” Scout muttered.

  Moms made a brief introduction. “Scout, the Keep. Keep, Scout.”

  “Charmed,” Scout said.

  The Keep picked up a phone and ignored her.

  “So what’s going on?” Scout repeated. “A rift? Fireflies? Zombies?”

  Moms stood next to Scout. “We’re not sure yet. As she noted, we’re waiting on the whole team.”

  “Okeydokey,” Scout said. “Who exactly is she?” she added with a nod at the Keep.

  “She works in the White House,” Moms said. “For the President. Although it might be the other way around.”

  “Ah,” Scout said, as if she understood something. But it sounded good.

  The Keep put down the phone and Moms took the opportunity. “We should move, even without the rest of my team. Containment is the priority.”

  “NYPD has containment.” The Keep looked at Moms. “We’re not just waiting on your team. There are others on this list who are en route and need to be here before we attempt to breach whatever is down there.” She held up a manila envelope. “Plus, besides NYPD, that steel door at the bottom has containment.”

  “Says who?” Moms asked.

  “According to the information I have,” the Keep said, “the facility is six hundred feet underground, surrounded by solid granite bedrock. The only way in or out is via that elevator and a tunnel at the bottom. That door blocks the tunnel in case of an emergency.”

  “As long as the door isn’t breached from the inside,” Moms said. “Whoever is in there, if someone is in there, might want to come out. Someone or something sounded the alarm.”

  To that, the Keep didn’t have an answer.

  “Who are we waiting on?” Moms asked.

  The Keep sighed. “I could pretend to know more than I know. I see it all the time in the White House. But that gets people killed and screws things up.” She shook the envelope. “This is how much more I know than you do and there’s not much in here. Containment is not the priority here at the moment. Proper reaction is. At least that’s what my instructions read.” The Keep glanced at her watch. “The clock is ticking and I like it even less than you. We’re down to nine hours.”

  “Until?” Scout asked.

  The Keep was expressionless. “Something bad happens.”

  “Right,” Scout said, as if she completely understood. “Bad.”

  Further conversation was interrupted by the Snake coming in, engines rotating to allow it to descend vertically. The vehicle settled down, the back ramp opened, and most of the rest of the team (minus Roland and Nada—and Ivar) exited, geared up for combat. Scout ran out of the trailer to them and hugged Eagle, then Doc, then Kirk, and finally Mac, not the meeting they were used to at a rally point. They all entered the command post and gathered round Moms, who gave them the same non-news she’d given Scout.

  “How much longer until the rest of your team gets here?” the Keep asked, and it was obvious she too was beginning to question the need for the entire team, and whoever else, to be present. She didn’t wait for an answer. “Can you have your demo man prepare to blow the steel door at the base of the elevator?” she added. She opened the folder and quickly transcribed some numbers. “Here’s the code to activate the elevator.”

  Moms gestured, handed the code over, and Mac and Kirk left the CP and ran into the Met with their gear to prep charges.

  Moms had her head canted, listening to the radio traffic from Pitr at the Ranch, catching up to the Keep’s first question. “Roland is coming in by chopper as we speak. He was already en route back east when the alert came. Ten minutes ETA.”

  Doc was almost bouncing on his toes. “Moms. Ivar is gone.”

  That got Moms’s attention. “What do you mean gone?”

  “We were in the Archives and he was pushing me on the ladder. And then I looked down and he was no longer there.”

  “AWOL?”

  Doc shook his head. “No. It appears he just disappeared. And his cell phone. When you call, it says the number never existed. It doesn’t make sense.”

  Moms sighed. “You have any idea what happened to him? I want—” She paused as more information came through her headset. “Roland reports there was an anomaly on the Sanction.”

  “Does he even know what an anomaly is?” Eagle asked.

  “He was with Neeley,” Moms said.

  “Ah,” Eagle said, the explanation of Roland’s sudden vocabulary expansion now clear. “What kind of anomaly?”

  “He didn’t say,” Moms reported. “We’ll get that when he gets here.”

  “A Sanction’s not important right now,” the Keep said.

  “What about one of our people missing?” Moms asked. “Something isn’t right.”

  “Something isn’t,” the Keep agreed. “But let’s deal with the immediate problem.” She held up a hand to forestall further conversation and pressed her other hand on her earpiece, listening. She checked a piece of paper in
the envelope. “Bring him through,” she finally said. She had a frown, a major indication of puzzlement, as she turned to the team. “I didn’t think Foreman really existed. More an urban legend in the black world. The Crazy Old Man.”

  “Who are you talking about?” Moms asked.

  The Keep pointed as an NYPD patrol car pulled up and an officer hopped out. He opened the back door and an old man gingerly exited. He put on a black porkpie hat and adjusted it, edging it down toward his thick glasses.

  “Oh, please,” Scout said. “Is this guy for real? Trying to Break Bad?”

  “I don’t think he has to try,” the Keep said.

  Foreman was leaning hard on a cane as he slowly made his way toward the large van. The Keep opened the door to the CP and Scout quickly reached out and offered him a hand.

  “Thank you, young lady,” Foreman said as he made his way up the steps into the command post. Once inside, he peered around through his thick glasses as he took off the hat. “Which one of you is the current iteration of the Keep?”

  “I am.”

  “Hmm,” Foreman said. “A bit young, aren’t you?”

  “Bit old, aren’t you,” Scout whispered to Moms, who hushed her.

  The Keep didn’t respond. Foreman sat down in one of the bucket seats. “What do you have from below?”

  “Nothing,” the Keep said. “There’s a steel door just outside the bottom level. We’re rigging charges to blow it right now.”

  “Yes,” Foreman said. “Be careful though. The doors are there as much to keep something in as keep something out.”

  “Keep what in?” Scout asked.

  Foreman grinned, not exactly from pleasure but from a foreboding sense of satisfaction. “Down there be Monsters. Perhaps,” he added.

  “What exactly was in there?” Moms asked.

  Foreman nodded. “If it’s still there, the Time Patrol.”

  “Cool,” Scout said.

  The Keep turned to Foreman. “When you say Time Patrol, what exactly are you talking about down there?”

  “The HUB,” Foreman said.

  “What’s the HUB?” Doc asked.

  “How they travel in time, of course,” Foreman said. “A form of a gate.”

  “And how—” Doc began, but Foreman held up a hand.

  “You’ll know more once we go in and the rest of your team arrives.” And with that he folded his arms over his chest.

  The Keep turned to Moms. “Where is your team sergeant, Nada?”

  “Nada is—” Moms paused, listening on her own earpiece—“parachuting in. Thirty seconds out.”

  Nada wasn’t exactly parachuting in. Not yet. He was in a pod, tucked tightly inside where the surveillance gear on the Blackswift spy plane was supposed to be. He was breathing oxygen from a small canister and couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there.

  The Blackswift was the latest version of spy plane, capable of Mach 3, and, most importantly, unmanned. It was a drone, but a very fast drone. Nada had been picked up from Disneyland by a military helicopter and flown to Edwards Air Force Base in the high desert where the Blackswift awaited. It was the fastest way to get him to NY, and they were going to try something experimental.

  Nada had still been in enough shock from his memory opening up that he’d acquiesced, not that they were going to give him any choice. They’d shoved him in the pod and assured him he’d be ejected 35,000 feet above New York City, a drogue chute would open and slow the pod to a survivable speed, the pod would split and then he could HALO parachute the rest of the way to the ground.

  Seriously.

  Sounded good in theory.

  Often theories are postulated by those who don’t have to end up being the test dummy. Nada had his own theory, not quite a Nada Yada yet, that it should be a rule that whoever came up with something should have to test it personally.

  The Blackswift looked like a flying dart, most of the space given over to the ramjet engines. The pod fit in underneath the nose, taking up space that would have been a cockpit in a regular plane. There was usually a surveillance pod in this place, not a people pod.

  The hour-and-a-half flight had given Nada time to get through his shock and realize this wasn’t the brightest idea, being a pod-test dummy. But it was a bit too late for that.

  Actually, he didn’t care much one way or the other. If he splatted in, so be it. Because now he could remember, and he kept going back to the Nightstalkers’ team leader, the one before Moms, pulling him aside during an op, and telling him the news. Actually, the longer the flight went on, the more the thought of splatting in appealed to him.

  A voice came over the small earpiece, interrupting his morbid thoughts. The “pilot,” who was still sitting back at Edwards at the controls of the drone, said, “Ten seconds until pod drop.”

  Nada took a breath and prepared as best he could for the unexpected.

  He wasn’t exactly dropped from the Blackswift. He was ejected. The pod tumbled crazily, and for the first time Nada was grateful for both how tightly he was jammed inside and the cold weather gear he was swaddled in. This went on for about five seconds, and then the pod abruptly jerked into one orientation and Nada assumed that was the drogue chute slowing it down. Twenty seconds later, the pod split apart with a flash of exploding bolts, and Nada was freefalling in the thin and freezing air at altitude.

  This, at least, was familiar. Nada spread his arms and legs and got stable. He also got oriented, looking downward. It was a clear day and he could see all of Manhattan, indeed most of New York City and the surrounding metropolitan area, below him. He checked his altimeter.

  Thirty-one thousand feet.

  It occurred to Nada that the airspace above the city was full of all sorts of aircraft, particularly civilian airliners given the three major airports that served the area, plus all the ones transiting at about this altitude along the northeastern corridor. He could see contrails all about the sky around him.

  What were the odds he’d hit a plane? Nada imagined Eagle could have given him those, but he immediately focused on directing his fall. Central Park was easy to pick out, the rectangle of green in the center of the island of Manhattan. So was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir. He knew the destination was to the south of that and on the east side.

  He’d had a chance to check the imagery of the target, so he directed himself toward that side of the park. As he passed below ten thousand feet at terminal velocity, Nada spotted the bulk of the Metropolitan Museum, the only large building inside the perimeter of the park.

  At five thousand feet, Nada pulled his ripcord and was rewarded with the opening shock. He grabbed the toggles and began steering toward the command post parked behind the museum. At four thousand feet he reversed his spiral down, because Protocol said to reverse direction.

  Nada was a big believer in following Protocol.

  As he passed through one thousand feet, something flickered to his left and he twisted his head, thinking perhaps it had been a flash of light off the tens of thousands of windows on the cliffs of stone and steel surrounding the oasis of green he was descending into.

  But there was nothing of note there.

  Nada reached up and flipped open the covers on his quick releases. He stuck his thumbs through the metal loops and began to apply pressure. Glancing down he saw police cars with lights flashing along with other emergency vehicles. Looked like a clusterfrak.

  Nada pulled his thumbs out of the loops.

  He focused on the ground just as a Black Hawk helicopter came racing up Fifth Avenue. Nada was above it and realized they didn’t see him. The irony almost made him laugh—deciding not to commit suicide and then getting sliced and diced by a chopper anyway.

  The chopper banked and headed toward a VS-17 panel staked down in the grass in the only open spot directly behind the museum. Nada did a quick check. There was a huge open area with a bunch of ballfields to the west, but he instinctively knew he didn’t have the altitude to make it.


  As the chopper landed, Nada jerked his toggles and flared, touching down in the road adjacent to the landing zone. The downblast from the helicopter’s blades caught his chute and it knocked him over, dragging him. Nada grabbed the cutaways and pulled them. The chute flew off down the road as Nada did the paratrooper’s moment of grace, lying perfectly still in contact with Mother Earth, thankful that all his pieces and parts were still attached.

  “Nice entrance,” Scout said, slightly out of breath from running over.

  Nada got to his knees and then stood. “You’re bigger.”

  “I’m older.”

  “That too,” Nada said. He was surprised at the strength of feelings that washed through him, and he repressed the desire to rush up to her and give her a hug. Fortunately for him, Scout had no such reservations. She wrapped her arms around him, longer than Zoey’s and thus fully embracing, even though Nada had on a combat vest loaded with the various tools of his deadly trade.

  “Good to see you, old man,” Scout said.

  “You too, young woman.”

  Scout stepped back and looked at him in a curious way. “You all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Nada lied, and as he did so, he knew she knew he was lying. And then he realized her curiosity was infused with concern.

  “Why aren’t you in college?” Nada asked.

  “I’m trying to decide what to do with my life,” Scout said. “Right now I’m thinking the Peace Corps.”

  Nada gave a wan smile. “Right. How was the training?”

  “Army training, sir,” Scout said in her best Bill Murray voice. “Come on.” She tugged at his hand, reminding him of an older Zoey, which reminded him of someone else, and he masked the pain of the fractured memory as best he could.

  “Let’s move, people!” Moms was standing in the doorway of the CP. Nada glanced over and saw Roland’s unmistakable bulk coming from the chopper. Nada followed Scout, and the Nightstalkers were finally assembled. Except, of course, for the disappeared Ivar. And Mac and Kirk, who were rigging charges.