A Time To Every Purpose

by Ian Andrew

  “What could be worse than your death Master?” Judas asked.

  “Oh Judas and Miriam, Heinrich, Leigh and Franci, hearken to me. If we succeed, there will be wars and nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom. And as for those that do have faith and believe in me they will stand before governors and kings and be beaten and will be put to death.”

  “Then please, let’s stop,” pleaded Judas.

  “No my dearest friend. I have dwelt long on this during the years since Capernaum. The Lord told me these distant voices were coming to us. This is what must be done. So it will be done. We will enter Jerusalem and I will challenge the elders, the scribes and Pharisees. I will challenge them and they will be forced to denounce me. Once they have done that it is likely no more will be attempted. Now it is decided. Leigh, Heinrich, when did they declare me as Messiah, in your time?”

  “It was on the Fast of the Firstborn,” Heinrich answered.

  “That would be this coming Friday. We should meet before then, if only to talk one last time. Judas, please tell them where they can meet us.”

  Judas wiped his face with the sleeves of his robe and looked hard at Yeshua. Then he bowed his head and said, “Forgive me Master. I will of course do as you ask.” After a brief pause he spoke again, “Heinrich, do you know the village of Bethany? It lays fifteen furlongs east of the city. Less than an hour’s walk along the road to Jericho, on a small rise to the north”

  “Wait for a moment,” Heinrich said and flicked through a couple of pages of maps. “Yes, I can see it.”

  “Near the eastern end is the last road that turns from the Jericho road into Bethany. Take it and go to the ninth house along on the northern side. You pass through an arched gateway. It is the home of a friend; we will be safe in there. Meet us, tomorrow at dusk, in the upper room of the house.”

  “Thank you Judas,” said Yeshua, “Leigh, Franci, Heinrich, we shall meet and talk again.”

  Heinrich turned to Leigh and she began to close the Projection down. There was silence in the room.

  Mary saw the four lift doors open almost simultaneously and a gaggle of firefighters began to stream down the rubber walkway. Mixed in with them were a couple of Wehrmacht soldiers and an older man that she safely assumed was the professor that Heinrich had described to her. At the same time the door that she had control of opened on its own accord. That confirmed one of Heinrich’s suppositions, that there would be a master override in the ground floor security post. It made sense; how else would they get back in following an evacuation? It also made no difference to what she was about to do.

  She watched them pass by the first camera and as they began to approach the midpoint of the pink-pastel painted corridor she stood to one side of the open door and flicked the S-98’s safety catch off. She waited until they were just coming into view round the gently sloping turn and fired a full magazine on automatic, upwards along the length of the ceiling. She still wondered why Heinrich was so concerned about not dropping a few firemen and an academic but he had set the rules. She couldn’t avoid the odd injury from a ricochet but she doubted she had even managed that. She flicked the ‘Close’ switch hoping that the door would close, which it did and rechecked the CCTV. Sure enough all of her visitors were scurrying back to the lifts quite unharmed. Except the old professor.

  He remained standing upright in the middle of the corridor. As she watched him he looked up into the camera. Like he was looking directly at her, or whoever he thought was watching. He had such a sad look on his face and shook his head slowly as he turned to walk away. Then he stopped. When he turned back his face showed a resolve and an anger that was beginning somewhere deep inside him. He mouthed very clearly, ‘Abschied Verrätern’, gave a formal salute to the camera and then slowly walked back to the lifts.

  Mary texted Heinrich a SitRep.

  Chapter 57

  Heinrich read Mary’s report and knew that time was beginning to run out. He watched as Francine and Leigh worked quickly to reset the Window’s controls but all the while he could see Leigh was wiping away tears.

  Through them she asked, “I don’t understand. How can they charge Him with any crime, let alone sedition?”

  “I’m not sure,” he replied, “but I suspect it’s because He’s been called the Messiah.”

  She stopped and frowned at him, “You need to explain this to me. Please Heinrich, just tell me.”

  “We know it as a word to describe Him. But in His time it just meant an anointed one who leads. The Jewish scribes used it when they spoke of Kings. If you want to push Him in front of a Roman trial then just call Him a King. They’ve dealt with so many rebellions in Judea another King is simply another threat. It’s like Franci said, the Reich and Rome share similarities. Imagine a leader in our world being held up as a new Royal King. Berlin would destroy him in a heartbeat.”

  Leigh wiped away more tears and turned back to the control console. Francine nodded that she was ready and Leigh went to initiate the Projection but stopped.

  “Heinrich? What do we do if Caiaphas doesn’t back down? What if it isn’t a bluff?”

  “I don’t know Leigh, really I don’t.”

  Leigh sighed a deep sigh and said quietly, “Please God forgive us.”

  Heinrich came and stood behind her, put his hand on to her shoulder and said “3rd April 30AD, coordinates are 31, 46, 11.66 north, 35, 15 and 50.05 east.

  She looked up at him, “What time do we go for?”

  He was conscious that he couldn’t spend too long finding the place and then idly waiting yet he needed light to be sure of hitting the mark. He compromised with himself as best he could, “Dusk in April is about 18:00 local, so 16:00 GMT but if we arrive when it’s too dark we’ll never find the place. Go in at 15:30 GMT.”

  The image opened above a wide track running horizontally across the landscape. As Leigh adjusted the Window a large village came into focus just metres to the north of the track. It occupied a hilltop and then fell away down the reverse slope as the village continued to the north-east. She moved the Projection until they had gone past the last houses before coming back slowly to the last road that went into the village.

  “I assume this dirt lane is the road?”

  Heinrich was following the image of the Projection on the copies of the Roman Surveyor’s maps. “Yes, definitely. You know these maps are remarkable. Especially considering the lack of technology they had available to them.”

  Francine and Leigh raised eyebrows at one another and suppressed a giggle at Heinrich’s enthusiasm for Roman mapmakers. Even without the maps she would have easily found the ninth house to the northern side. It sat wide and tall on the reverse slope of the hill and was built from a rich cream colour limestone that, on the upper floor levels, was quickly turning to a luscious golden caramel in the rays of the setting sun. Leigh reorientated the image and confirmed the arched gateway, through which they could see manicured gardens and a neat path that ran up to a solid looking front door. The door and all the windows seemed to have intricate carvings of geometric patterns framing them. Switching the image to look from ground level, Leigh held it in position to allow Francine to assess the likely elevation of the roof line some three storeys above. Using a rough guestimate they centred the Projection on what they hoped would be the top floor of the dwelling.

  After a small amount of adjusting Leigh settled the image into a long, low ceilinged room that appeared to run the length of the house. It was empty of people but the shafts of the dying sun came through a large window and picked out a pitcher and some rough-hewn cups sitting here and there on a long table that ran almost a third of the length of the room.

  “Shall we assume this is it?” she asked. Francine and Heinrich nodded their agreement.

  “And so we wait.”

  Chapter 58

  Mary was waiting too. She’d been busy since the professor had saluted and departed to the lifts. As soon as the door had been automatically opened fo
r the firefighting entourage Mary surmised that the security detail upstairs might have automatic control over a few other things. She had spent a few minutes putting the items she had scavenged earlier into place and a few more rehearsing her planned movements. Then she spent some time trying to estimate how long it would be before they came back.

  She figured on them having missed she was even in the building and so they would reckon on two scientists and a SS-Standartenführer. He alone would be enough for them to take the time to gather their strength. Working through a likely chain of events she estimated how long it would take the firefighters to get back above ground, tell whoever was commanding the detail what had happened, allow him to regroup his troops and try to put a plan into place. She assumed they would work off an immediate action drill to retake the below ground level and use as many of the security detail as were on shift. Heinrich had said it was an 8-man shift with a senior NCO and an Officer, so a standard 10-man squad would probably be coming out of the lifts. Having run her scenarios a couple of times she settled on a delay of eighteen minutes if they were dumb like Heinrich had suggested they would be.

  When he’d briefed her earlier, he’d said that if they were smart they’d call in reinforcements from the Wehrmacht barracks in Chelsea immediately. Those troops would come with grenades and rocket launchers. If they were really smart they’d call in SS-Kommando from Northwood, but they wouldn’t ever call the SS to take back a Wehrmacht guarded site. So it would be Chelsea Barracks. That would take, at the very least, twenty minutes to get from one side of London to the other. So he’d said if they came earlier than twenty minutes then it would be standard troops with small arms only and that would be dumb.

  “And so we wait,” she said to herself.

  A little bit of her was quite impressed at the ‘can-do’ attitude of the commander up there when the door clicked open again after only fourteen minutes. As soon as the door servo had driven it half way open it ceased and all the CCTV displays that monitored the rubber walkway went blank. Then all the lights went off. Mary put her plan into action.

  She leant around the door and fired a full magazine into the space but not up along the ceiling this time. She dropped the empty weapon, switched on two of the torches she had found and threw one of them into the walkway. She left the other where she had taped it to the security desk, pointing at the door. She ran back to the T-junction and switched on two more torches she had taped high up on either side of the opening. She turned on a portable 400-watt halogen, workshop spotlight she had found in one of the labs. It was covered with a piece of thick black fabric she had found in another lab and positioned to the right hand corner of the T as her attackers would look. She checked that a thick cord she had taped to the fabric was still in place and followed it across to the other side of the T-Junction. She dropped prone, nestled herself into the corner, checked the magazines placed around her and pressed her left shoulder into the stock of the prepositioned S-98. She was naturally right-handed but had thought, ‘Needs must’ as she swapped over and got comfortable. By the time she had regulated her breathing back to a steady rhythm she heard a burst of gunfire and the torch in the walkway extinguished.

  The next shots came from her as she sighted the first man through the doorway in the beam of the torch taped to the desk. She aimed at the night vision goggles he had on his head and double tapped the trigger. He fell backwards out of sight and left only a plume of red mist suspended in the torchlight.

  Two muzzles came around the side of the door and Mary managed to roll back behind the wall as they fired indiscriminately into the space between them and her. There was a short pause followed by three more bursts that were obviously aimed at the torches she had taped into position. She didn’t have to peek back out to know that all of them had been extinguished. She waited calmly in the pitch black knowing that at least two and maybe four of the detail would have night vision equipment. They would be coming into the corridor and making their way down the walls in tight pairings.

  She forced herself to wait another three seconds that felt like three hours, then pulled the cord attached to the fabric. The warmed up halogen pumped out a blinding 32000-lumens of light into the corridor. To a non-night vision wearing soldier it would have been dazzling. To one with goggles it was the equivalent of a whiteout. She rolled back into the opening and saw all of the first four soldiers had goggles on and were therefore effectively blinded. She sighted on the nearest two that were on her side of the corridor and dropped each man with a short, three-round burst. Before they could react to the noise she did the same to the two on her opposite side. The next two pairs of soldiers behind, who she was surprised to see also had night goggles, were using their ears and obviously decided their only hope was to fire everything they had as quickly as they could.

  Mary ducked back round the corner as bullets whipped and ricocheted around her. It didn’t take many seconds for a number of them to find the halogen and once more there was darkness. She had at best a few seconds before the advantage slipped away from her so she turned and ran as fast as she could back to the Oscar Lab. The entrance was seventy metres from the junction and she knew she probably wouldn’t make it before they came round the corner. She held the S-98 across her body, pointed it back under her left arm and fired randomly behind her. Even then, just as she reached the door of the lab a 7.92mm Mauser round from a Karabiner went clean through her left calf. It spun her halfway around and threw her sideways through the heavy-duty PVC doors like a ragdoll being tossed by a bored child.

  She switched her last two torches on and slid one up against the PVC doors. The heavy-duty plastic might stop the light being shot out so quickly and at least it would give her a little warning that her pursuers were coming. She looked down at her leg and saw the red stain spreading alarmingly quickly. Ripping the torn fragment of trouser into two good lengths of fabric she tied them in a makeshift tourniquet above the wound before grabbing up the last two loaded S-98s, the rest of the magazines and as much ammunition as she could shove into her jacket pockets. She decided it was time to bug out. Taking the final torch and now limping badly, she headed towards the door Heinrich had shown her. When she got there she doused the light and punched the speed dial.

  Chapter 59

  Heinrich answered immediately.

  “You need to come get me. I’m at the door.”

  “On my way.”

  He got up and ran out of the Thule Room ignoring Leigh and Francine’s startled looks. He bolted through to the HPL door and opened it. Mary practically fell into his arms with three S-98s and the holdall hung about her. He pulled her back inside the HPL, laid her on the ground then took one of the S-98s and shot out the card reader access port on the outside of the door. As he pulled the door closed he looked down at her. “Mary, you’re hit.”

  “No shit! There’s me thinking it was only a paper cut. Of course I’m fucking hit. You think I didn’t notice?”

  “Fair enough. How many and what do they have?”

  “Probably five left, small arms only. Like you said, they were dumb. How long do you reckon it takes them to breach that door?” she said looking over her shoulder.

  “Without having explosives of some form or other they don’t get through at all. With a few well placed charges then they’ll be through in seconds. That means they’ll need to call over to Chelsea, or the Woolwich Arsenals or the artillery companies up in the north of the city. Any of them are going to be at least twenty minutes in getting mobilised and over here.”

  “Unless they called them twenty minutes ago?”

  “If they’d done that they would have waited for them.”

  “You hope.”

  “Yeah, I hope. Okay come with me.” He helped her up and allowed her to use him as a support. He guided her back through the HPL and into the Thule Room.

  “What the fuck’s she doing here?”

  “Well hi to you too Leigh. No really, the pleasure’s all mine,” Mary managed to
say through clinched teeth.

  Heinrich helped her across to the nearest seat and Mary lowered herself in gingerly.

  Francine was already moving towards the portable first aid box on the wall spurred on by the quantity of blood that was flowing from Mary’s calf.

  Leigh stood stock still in the middle of the room and stared. “Heinrich I asked you a question?”

  “We needed someone to help us. Someone close by, able to use a weapon and capable of being trusted. There was no other choice.” He elevated Mary’s leg as Francine kneeled in front of her and ripped open the first aid container.

  “What about Konrad? You couldn’t have used him?” Leigh was angry and her tone of voice was severe.

  “No I couldn’t. We wouldn’t have been able to get him past the security detail. They all know him and they all know his access has been rescinded. No one up top knows Mary. Also, I doubt Konrad can use an assault rifle.”

  “So we’re using a murderer to help us now?”

  “To be perfectly honest Leigh, she was the one that came up with the idea that has us standing here.” Heinrich could feel his temper rising.

  Mary flinched and reared back in the seat as Francine used alcohol laden wipes to clean the wound area. “You’re lucky, it’s gone clean through,” Francine said and reached for some thick gauze pads.

  “And you didn’t think to tell me and Franci that you were going to get her out of her cell?”

  “No I didn’t. I wanted both of you to concentrate on getting the Projection up and running and I don’t see I had any other choice.”

  “What makes you think, in your right mind, that using her was going to be okay? All you did was put loaded weapons into the hands of a potential psychopath.”

  “Hey, hey, I’m sitting right fucking here!” Mary shouted. She squirmed a little more as Francine bound her wounded calf tightly but she didn’t give either Heinrich or Leigh a chance to interrupt before continuing, “I can hear this wonderful domestic you two seem to be having about my presence. I’ve just been fucking shot trying to buy you time for something I’m still not a hundred percent up to speed on and all you can do is call me a fucking psycho. Thanks. I really appreciate it. The first time I met you,” she looked directly at Leigh, “you fucking electrocuted me. Now all you can do is call me names. What is your fucking problem?”