Flashback sb-2

by Ian Hocking

  Flashback

  ( Saskia Brandt - 2 )

  Ian Hocking

  In 1947 a Santiago-bound plane crashes into the Andes minutes after confirming its landing time.

  In 2003 a passenger plane nosedives into the Bavarian National Forest during a routine flight.

  Although separated by more than 50 years, these tragedies are linked by seven letters:

  S, T, E, N, D, E, C.

  On board Flight DFU323 in 2003 is Saskia Brandt—a woman who holds the answers to the many puzzles of the two flights and who knows she must survive in order to prevent a catastrophic chain of events stretching well into the future.

  But Saskia is not the only one to know this. She is being followed and her life is in danger—inside and outside of the plane.

  Filled with twists and turns as it trips skilfully through time, Flashback is a gripping technothriller that reaches more than fifty years into our past—and one hundred years into our future—to solve the enigmas of the doomed Star Dust and Flight DFU323.

  But is it enough to solve the enigma that is Saskia Brandt?

  Ian Hocking

  FLASHBACK

  To those who kept the faith.

  ‘When, in 2023, I created the first machine that successfully sent matter through time, I was prepared for most of the things that happened to me and my colleagues. I was not prepared for the jealousy and the murder. Those things were not, as I had thought, things of the past. They were real—here and now.’

  Jennifer Proctor, interviewed for Newton, Einstein, Proctor: On The Shoulders of Giants (2092)

  ‘The greatest tragedy of time travel? Nothing can be changed, whatever you do. Trust me on this. What’s done is done.’

  David Proctor, father of Jennifer Proctor, in private correspondence dated August 2048

  Saskia Brandt illustrated by Pia Guerra

  Author’s Note

  The Saskia Brandt Series

  You are reading the second book of the Saskia Brandt series. It may be read as a standalone novel, but it will spoil aspects of the first book, Déjà Vu. If you intend to read Déjà Vu at all, I recommend reading it first.

  Characters and Events

  The second of the two aeroplanes described in this book—British South American Airways’ Star Dust—was real. It did indeed disappear in August, 1947, on a daytime trans-Andean flight between Buenos Aires and Santiago. The aircraft was well maintained; the crew was experienced and capable; weather conditions were good. Its last transmission was a single word that the radio operator keyed fast and clear, twice: ‘STENDEC’. I have cast my story with the actual people involved in that flight: BSAA staff, the crew of the Star Dust, and her passengers.

  DFU323 is entirely fictional.

  Prologue

  Autumn, 2003, near Regensburg, Germany

  This was the place where Tolsdorf had come to die. North was the Bavarian Forest, a dark froth always visible, even on gloomy days. East: the rich plain of the Danube. To the south were the great stone feet of the Alps, and to the west the uplands of Franconia. He had grown to love this area during his work as a ranger for the forest authorities, and when government cuts made the position redundant, he had chosen to stay forever. The idea that he would die here, alone, no longer scared him, because as the twentieth century ended with the loss of his job, something had changed within Tolsdorf. He had reached an amicable divorce with himself. His eyes were steel grey now, not blue, and his hair was white, not blond. When he spat, perched on his rock overlooking the Danube, he looked down at the phlegm and noted the black flecks with indifference. Something was coming for him, alright, and it would find him here.

  Tolsdorf kept a hut about half a kilometre away, down the eastern slope of a valley he called ‘the notch’. The roof and walls of the hut were prefabricated blocks camouflaged with wood drawn, as one might draw teeth, from the mouth of the forest. If a busybody came looking for the old ranger station, they would probably walk right past it. Nobody did come, though, apart from a charity volunteer from Regensburg called Frau Waellnitz who had heard the rumour of an old man in the woods. Tolsdorf tolerated her. He had even told her about the submerged concrete blocks that allowed a person to cross the river to the hut’s dooryard.

  Frau Waellnitz was his last connection to society and Tolsdorf knew it. His habits had drifted towards the eccentric. For instance, he slept fully clothed, and liked to take that sleep—when it came—within a secret compartment behind the mirror in the main room of the hut. This compartment was lined with wire mesh because he had come to know these last three winters that people were manipulating his thoughts through focused radio waves. It was for this reason that Tolsdorf kept a loaded, well-maintained pistol on the stand next to his bed. Sometimes, when he could not sleep, and the river hissed louder and louder, he would swing his legs over the edge of the bed and put the pistol to his temple.

  If Tolsdorf needed to keep something chilled, he put it in the river. Old batteries beneath the hut powered his lamps and his short-wave radio. To heat food, he had a blackened stove whose chimney continued some twenty metres into the dark colonnades behind the hut. As a boy, in the army, he had been shouted at by hard men. Told which berries to eat, and when. How to start a fire with a bow-drill. How to butcher out the edible parts of an animal. How to take his body to its extremes.

  This he had now done. Tolsdorf had reached his last extreme. He did not expect to live through another winter. He would not let Frau Waellnitz take him from his hut. The skin of his heart was tight. It still vibrated to his sprint between the police and the fireman as those well-remembered flames rose through his former home in Regensburg.

  ~

  He awoke in his cot, immediately sensing that something was wrong. Quite automatically, he scooped the pistol and trained it on the plywood reverse of the mirror door. He had a sense that something important was waiting at the limit of his awareness. He sat quite still for ten seconds, counting them off. His forehead was sweaty. He saw sunlight in the air holes near the ceiling. Was it morning? No, he decided, patting his full stomach. It was afternoon. He had come into his compartment to nap.

  He paused again as he heard a voice.

  ‘Help me.’

  It came from the door. Tolsdorf was so certain that a boy stood beyond his secret portal, betraying his sovereignty, that he almost pulled the trigger. He tried to get up. He grunted and swore. He pushed the nose of the pistol into his nightstand and, with the little table wobbling, achieved the last of his height. His knees squeaked.

  ‘Help me,’ said the voice.

  The impertinence of this repetition angered Tolsdorf. Surely, the voice belonged to a child on a dare. No doubt his friends had urged him on through the forest and pushed him across the threshold of the hut. Though could it be a woman’s voice? If so, was it a charity do-gooder? He nettled himself with thoughts of a stranger moving through the clutter around his stove, touching the remains of his lunch, pushing the hanging meats aside to find the secret compartment.

  Tolsdorf would show them. He looked at the pistol. Though it was not his preferred weapon—that accolade fell to his rifle, which lay across the door lintel in the main chamber of the hut—the pistol would have to do. Tolsdorf could shoot the stranger, parcel the body in newspaper, and send it down the river to the town. But this future was ghostly. Absurd. Tolsdorf didn’t think he had the balls to shoot anyone.

  He reached out with the hand of a weak, old man. He pushed the mirror-door open and stared into the gloom of the hut.

  ‘What do you want?’ he said. As ever, his throat felt dry when he spoke. He coughed. ‘Did you hear me? This is private property. What do you want?’

  There was nobody there. He noted the swinging, drying animals, smelled t
heir bloods, and saw his bread and cheese on the table. Nothing, as far as he could tell, had been disturbed. He stepped into the room proper. His boots creaked. There was nothing here but his disappointment at the dwindling of his anger, of its replacement with a sense of foolishness. At once, he saw him himself as the Regensburgers must see him: a silly man in a hut on a hill, dying.

  But the words came again. This time, from behind.

  ‘Help me.’

  Tolsdorf tried to spin but staggered clumsily, tasting once more the bitterness of idiocy. He had been out-flanked. As he turned, he told himself not to shoot, but the pistol’s trigger was lighter than the one on his rifle, and he loosed a round into the empty corner of the room, left of the mirror.

  In the silence and gun smell, he said, ‘Who said that?’

  Nothing.

  Tolsdorf waited.

  Then: ‘Help me.’

  He noticed something strange about the words. They were scratchy, ill-defined, like a recording in wax. The idea came to Tolsdorf with a shock of insight as startling as the gunshot. He did not know how the idea had formed. To be sure, it was incredible: The voice had to be coming from the mirror itself. He approached the glass and put the barrel of his pistol against it. When ‘Help me’ came again he heard a second, harsh component in the sound. The mirror was indeed vibrating against his pistol. Though he could not explain this phenomenon, the discovery was nevertheless sweet. It confirmed his intellect was not yet erased; he could question the world and it would answer.

  His questions now doubled and tripled. How could a voice come from the mirror? What would it take to do that? He had been a radio operator and a medic during his national service, and he had heard stories of mirrors and tooth fillings receiving radio transmissions. But this did not sound like a commercial radio station. It was a single voice and it was talking to him.

  Before his wonder at this visitation could transform into fear, he heard a dull roaring sound from outside the hut.

  Tolsdorf hurried to the door, opened it, and stepped onto his porch. What he saw and felt returned him to the morning his family died: the smell of paints, plastics and clothes on fire; the neighbours preventing his re-entry to the house; the certain conviction that his wife and his boys, the twins, were dying in each other’s arms in a wardrobe; and Tolsdorf, raging, shouting calls that remained unanswered.

  Here, on the far side of the valley, a mushroom-cap cloud was turning about a yellow core, hundreds of metres high and climbing. A speck of ash fell on Tolsdorf’s tongue. His wonder grew with every gust of crisp bark and blasting air. He looked at the back of his hands. They were bald. The heat reached his eyes, dried them, and he backed against the hut. He put his knuckles to his nose. The hair was gone: burned.

  ~

  He put the pistol on the table and pulled out the first-aid kit that he had never used. Then, feeling the charge of a life not yet spent, Tolsdorf took a blanket from his bed and left the hut. He was not responding to the mirror, he decided. He was investigating the explosion. He crossed the short dooryard and dunked the blanket in the river. Its sudden weight pulled him forward and he stumbled into the water. The cold found his feet through the eyelets of his boots. Old age was making him a clown. All the while, he felt the singeing of his eyebrows and the growing heat on his cheeks. Then he pulled the blanket about himself. It was cool—like night, his best and clearest time. He pulled down the peak of his cap and crossed the river in large strides that recalled the tall man he had once been.

  There was a deer path that coiled around the western shoulder of the hill. Tolsdorf set himself upon it. His legs were pained with cramp and his knees clicked, but he walked this path every morning to claim the vantage of the hill, and with the familiarity came ease. His breath quickened. In the shelter here, the heat slackened and his mind calmed. That much fuel, in so isolated a location, could only mean that a plane had crashed. A large one. Tolsdorf shook out his bandana and covered his nose and mouth. Ash and wood cinders were falling through the forest canopy. Larger pieces—he saw a sheet of paper with a letterhead, a deformed plastic cup—pattered on the trees like fat drops of summer rain. And the smell rolled over him: a bloody stink of incineration.

  He reached the top of the hill. Through streaming eyes, he saw that the forest had been wiped away. A foggy bowl of dirt remained. There was an ordinariness about the thin layer of debris. It might have been a steaming rubbish dump. Tolsdorf struggled to understand. How could this have been an aircraft? What could have happened to the mass of it? He could see part of one engine. On the far lip of the depression, almost one-hundred metres distant, was a tyre, still inflated. It was certainly an aircraft tyre. Nearer, he saw a paperback novel. He surprised himself by recognising the cream-and-blue cover. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Frau Waellnitz had wanted to read it to him months ago but Tolsdorf had dismissed the idea with a grunt, playing fully on her expectations of this backward woodsman. Then, as though the paperback unlocked his perception, he saw the scattered, broken pieces of people. His eyes faltered in the toxic air and the heat. He squeezed them shut and knelt fully, coughing.

  Not so old to be useless, Tolsdorf. Move.

  ‘On three,’ he growled. ‘Three.’

  He rose, settled the blanket around his shoulders, and walked into the debris. The surface was hot through his boots but the fires had shrunk to flickering islands. Now the ash fell upwards as well as down. He picked a route that took him from one ruined stump of tree to another, and he sometimes crouched, gasping, waiting for the next roll of smoke to pass, praying he would not collapse. His eyes felt ruined. He wanted to be sick but his retches produced only spit. He did not know what to do. There was no-one alive here. Beneath his boots were plastic cups, seat cushions, wiring, and things he would not name.

  He focused on the mechanics of the crash. What would it take for someone to survive this?

  It happens. Sometimes it happens.

  Ten metres away, beyond an upturned tree, was a long sheet of fuselage. It was sooty and mangled but its windows were intact. For someone to survive, Tolsdorf thought, they would need the protection of a strong structure. They would need a space. Tolsdorf hauled himself towards it. He stepped on one of the windows and scraped away the soot with his heel. It revealed something bright beneath the shed skin of the aircraft. Tolsdorf dropped his first-aid kit and blanket. The renewed heat assaulted his body but, with the last of the fires going out, he felt he could work. His head was clearer. He took wood-chopping gloves from the long pockets of his trousers—they had Kevlar pads, what he needed—and thought about the best way to lever up the fuselage. Then he crouched by the edge that looked thinnest, said, ‘On three,’ and felt his muscles gorge on the sorry old blood. The metal began to lift.

  Chapter One

  Berlin, some hours before

  Jem Shaw made a quarter turn so that the hood of the phone booth was close enough to hide her lips. The airport concourse buzzed behind her. She had taken the middle of five booths. She was anonymous. One woman among many. She swallowed and listened to the ringer of an English telephone. It was the first time she had heard the sound in six months of exile. Dialling the number was a betrayal of the person she had been the previous summer: angry, proud, and leaving the island forever. Stepping from the ruins of her family, dressed to kill. On a mission and Arctic cool.

  She passed a hand through her gas-flame blue hair and waited for her brother to answer. Never had she needed to talk to him more. She stamped her Cossack boots. At twenty-four, she felt too old for humble pie.

  ‘Ahoy-hoy,’ said Danny, and with those words, Jem was transported to Exeter and the crappy, 1980s BT phone that Danny now held. She could breathe the shoes-and-dogs smell of that hallway.

  ‘Danny, it’s me.’

  She could accept any extreme from him. Anger. Contrition. Humour. But mostly anger. One moment she felt ready for him, the next off-balance and unprepared. Her brother was her twin, she told herself. They had shared too
many pains. Each must know the other.

  ‘Where are you?’

  His question was toneless. She knew, then, that Danny had lost the anger he must have felt when she ran away. What was he thinking? Was he planning an intervention?

  ‘I’m in Germany.’

  ‘Where? Are you still with Wolfgang?’

  Jem scratched her eyebrow with a thumb, mulling over Saskia Brandt and feeling tired.

  ‘Not exactly. I’m going to Milan.’

  There was a blast in her ear. Danny had sighed across the receiver.

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I’ve met someone. I don’t mean Wolfgang.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘She’s called Saskia.’

  Another silence. Then he said, ‘Saskia,’ slowly, as though he were writing the name.

  ‘She wants me to go to Milan with her.’

  ‘Well, that sounds peachy.’

  Jem laughed. A chuckle came back from Danny.

  ‘Do we get to meet her?’ he asked.

  Jem looked at the departure board. She had left Saskia at the gate more than ten minutes ago, too long for her excuse of a toilet break to work any longer. Soon, Saskia would come looking for her.

  ‘Danny, I have to go.’ Jem spoke her next words with the knowledge that they might undo the good work of the conversation. ‘I shouldn’t have called.’

  ‘Then why did you?’

  ‘I’m…’

  ‘You’re what?’

  ‘…Worried.’ In a whisper, she continued, ‘There’s something strange about it.’

  ‘Jem, are you in trouble?’

  ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘I want you to stay in Berlin. I’m coming to get you. Stay right there.’