The Project

by Brian Falkner

  Luke didn’t have to speak German to know that the conductor was getting a good tongue-lashing.

  The Gestapo man passed their papers back and retreated with a curt nod and a click of his heels, pulling the door shut behind him.

  “What was that all about?” Luke asked softly when he was sure they were out of earshot.

  “A lowly conductor does not question Werewolves,” Tommy said.

  Their papers were powerful magic, it seemed, in this place and time.

  33. ATTACKED

  A rhythmical thump, thump, thump came from the rear of the train. It startled Luke, who had been dozing. His first thought was that something was wrong with the train, but they did not slow and, in fact, seemed to accelerate.

  He pressed his face to the window, trying to locate the source of the sound.

  He could see nothing, so he pushed the sliding window of the carriage open and leaned out and, despite the freezing blast of air, craned his neck around. Tommy did the same beside him.

  The train was on a slight curve, and Luke could see back to the rear carriages. Just in front of the rear engine was a low flatbed truck that had been covered with tarpaulins when they boarded. It was not covered now. The thin snouts of twin anti-aircraft guns were pounding away at something unseen in the sky.

  Luke scanned the sky, searching for the target. The sky was clear, with occasional patches of cloud, and in one of those patches he saw them. Three aircraft, flying so closely together it was as if their wingtips were joined with string.

  Flashes were coming from their wings. They were firing their guns. He idly wondered what they were firing at.

  “Get down!” he yelled with sudden realization.

  He dived to the floor, rolling underneath the wooden seat. Tommy was a fraction slower but made it just as the window shattered above them and the wooden paneling of the compartment exploded in a series of splintered holes.

  Tommy rolled underneath the seat opposite and flattened himself against the wall. The seats would be little protection, Luke realized, looking at the size of the shell holes in the opposite wall.

  There was an explosion from near the front of the train, and the entire carriage rocked.

  The sound of the aircraft roared over their heads, so close that it seemed they must have just about peeled the top off the train.

  The strafing run over, Luke climbed out from underneath the seat. All the glass in the window was gone, and it crunched on the floor beneath his boots. A wintery blast of air hit him in the face.

  He found the trio of planes again, far in front of the train, banking as they circled around for another run.

  The guns at the rear of the train fired incessantly, and a heavy machine gun had opened up somewhere else. Luke could see bright tracers weaving a lazy, curving string of pearls toward the fighters.

  A tracer wandered onto the fuselage of one of the planes, and it shuddered, smoke pouring out behind it, peeling off from the attack.

  “Got him!” Luke shouted, then stopped. Whoever these fighter planes were, British, American, or Russian, they were on his side. He was shouting in English, he suddenly realized, and hoped that no one had heard him over the noise of the train, the guns, and the aircraft engines.

  The other two planes continued straight in.

  “Here they come again!” Luke said in a frightened whisper, rolling back under the seat.

  The carriage shuddered again, but not so close this time, and there were screams, then silence from somewhere behind them.

  Luke stood up, a little wobbly on his feet, and searched the sky again, but he could not spot the planes.

  Each of the cannon-fire holes in the compartment was big enough to put his fist through, and he wondered how Mueller and his friends were getting on at the front of the train.

  Perhaps the aircraft could do the job for them.

  Luke couldn’t count on that, though.

  The train was slowing now, even as he spotted the planes, circling around for another attack.

  “What’s going on?” Tommy asked, peering out the window with him.

  Luke risked a look forward, leaning out of the shattered window. Ahead of them, in the side of a mountain, was the black mouth of a tunnel.

  “They’re going to stop the train in the tunnel,” he said to Tommy. “Wait for the fighters to leave.”

  Luke crawled back under the seat as the planes lined up for one final run. “This might be our chance,” he said.

  34. GOGGLES

  It was pitch-black inside the tunnel. The train was unlit, running under blackout conditions. Luke could not even see Tommy, who was on the floor on the other side of the compartment.

  “Pass me the goggles,” Luke said. “I’m going to see if I can steal the plans.”

  “Do you want me to come with you?” Tommy asked, pushing the night-vision goggles across the floor in the darkness. He didn’t sound very enthusiastic.

  “No,” Luke said. “One person will make less noise than two. You stay here. I’ll be back soon.”

  He said it with an air of confidence that he did not feel.

  Where would Mueller have the briefcase? On his lap? That would make it impossible.

  The black ink of the corridor turned to a bizarre green world of shapes and strange bright edges as he pulled the night-vision goggles down over his head and stepped out of the compartment.

  A sudden flash of light, impossibly bright, appeared at the end of the corridor, and he ducked back inside, shutting the door as a conductor, waving a flashlight, called out something in German.

  Remain calm, Luke guessed. Stay in your compartments. Something like that.

  As soon as the man had passed, Luke crept back into the corridor and headed toward the front of the train.

  Shattered glass crunched underfoot, and he did his best to avoid it.

  The damage from the cannon fire was everywhere, and he hoped that not too many people had been injured, or killed. The shell holes were mostly quite high in the walls of the corridor, and he felt that if, like them, they had sought shelter under the seats, they would have been safe.

  At the far end of the corridor were two doors. One to his right, for boarding the train, and one directly in front of him, which led to the next carriage. The door to the next carriage squeaked, but he was not concerned. As long as the conductor didn’t come back, there was no one to hear.

  He stepped out of the train onto the narrow metal platform that linked the two carriages, grateful that the train was not moving.

  It was bitterly cold outside, and he cursed the Hitler Youth uniform with its short pants. The platform was icy, and he almost slipped as he stepped across to the door of the next carriage just a few feet away. Through the glass window of the door, he could see that the area inside was empty, so he twisted the handle. The door opened quietly.

  He glanced up for a moment at the walls of the tunnel, but the goggles could make out only blackness. Even so, the walls seemed to press down on him, crushing and suffocating him, and he quickly moved into the next carriage.

  In the middle of the carriage, a man emerged from one of the compartments, perhaps to locate the source of the noise of the door opening and shutting.

  Luke froze, although it was obvious from the way the man fumbled around the walls that he was totally blind in this utter darkness. Luke could not see his face, but from the bulky build of the man, he felt sure this was Jumbo or Mumbo.

  Luke remained motionless, scarcely breathing, until the man realized that it was fruitless to move about in the dark and returned to his compartment.

  Luke advanced, walking on the balls of his feet, then rolling back onto his heels so there was no sound as his feet met the floor.

  He heard low voices as he neared the compartment, and wished that Tommy had come along after all, to translate. Perhaps they were discussing the noise he had made. Perhaps they were waiting for him to arrive so they could grab him.

  The door to the compartment
was still open, and he sidled up, keeping his back to the far wall of the corridor.

  Mueller was seated by the window, his briefcase by his foot, against the wall. Jumbo and Mumbo sat on the other seat.

  Their conversation finished, and there were no suspicious glances aimed at the corridor, so he hoped that whatever they had been discussing, it was not him.

  Luke could see them so clearly, if a little greenly through the goggles, that it was hard to imagine that they could not see him, standing just a foot or so away.

  His heart was pounding, and he willed it to ease, for his breathing to remain calm and quiet.

  He dropped to the floor and crawled on his hands and knees into the room, keeping as far as he could from the feet of Jumbo, who was closest to the door.

  As soon as he was inside the room, inside the lion’s den, he crawled underneath Mueller’s seat.

  They were not talking, but he could hear them breathing. He could hear every rustle as one of them moved on their seats.

  Surely, they could hear him, too. The rustling of his clothing as he crawled.

  Probably they could. But not being able to see him, nor suspecting he was there, they would assume that the sounds came from one of the others in the compartment.

  Luke crawled behind Mueller’s feet, hoping Mueller wouldn’t feel a sudden urge to shift them backward, under the seat.

  He reached out for the briefcase, and his hand closed on the buckle just as Mueller’s hand reached down from above, checking that the briefcase was still there, still safe.

  His hand landed on the briefcase a few inches from Luke’s, and Luke snatched his hand away.

  Satisfied, Mueller’s hand disappeared upward, out of Luke’s field of vision.

  Now was the time, Luke knew. His best chance to grab the plans before Mueller decided to check the briefcase again.

  It was not the same briefcase he had had in the hotel. That had been a modern type with metal spring catches. This was an old-fashioned satchel-type case.

  Luke reached out again, undid the buckle, and then carefully lifted up the top of the case. Mueller’s leg moved, and Luke froze for a second, but Mueller said and did nothing else.

  He felt around inside the briefcase. His hand closed on a folder, and he slowly drew it out and placed it on the floor in front of him, confirming that it was the plans. He folded it and slid it into an inner pocket in his coat.

  He reached back and slipped the strap of the briefcase back through the buckle, refastening it, then eased backward underneath the seat, toward the doorway.

  But there were footsteps in the corridor outside, and the compartment filled with light. The conductor and his flashlight!

  Luke was sure that Jumbo or Mumbo would see him crouched under the seat opposite them; they only had to glance down.

  The conductor said something briefly, and Mueller made some kind of acknowledgment; then the light disappeared.

  There was a high-pitched squeal from the hinges, then a click from the latch as the door to the corridor was shut.

  Luke looked around in panic.

  There was no way he could open that door without them hearing. He was trapped in the compartment.

  And when the train emerged from the tunnel, Jumbo and Mumbo would see him.

  He struggled to control his breathing.

  There’s a way out of this, he thought, although he couldn’t see one. There had to be a way.

  There was a sudden lurch, then another, and the train began to move.

  35. EASY AS

  Luke fought rising panic and tried to think clearly.

  There were only a few minutes left before the train built up speed and cleared the tunnel and no way for him to open the door without them hearing.

  But the door had to be opened by somebody.

  He shuffled quietly around underneath the seat so he was facing the door; then he reached out, raised his hand as high as he could, and knocked three times on the compartment door.

  “Hallo,” Mueller said. “Hallo. Wer ist es?”

  Luke waited a moment, then rapped on the door again.

  “Hallo?” Mueller queried, and when there was no response, he said, “Guck mal, wer da ist.”

  Jumbo, closest to the door, stood up, a pistol appearing in his hand. “Wer ist da?” he said loudly. He flung open the door, and it banged against the corridor wall outside.

  Mumbo rose and stood in front of Mueller, like a bodyguard.

  Jumbo groped blindly outside the doorway, but of course there was nobody there. He took a few steps into the corridor.

  The gap behind him was barely enough for Luke to squeeze through, but it was all he had. He rolled out from under the seat, stood, and slid around behind Jumbo.

  Jumbo turned around, inches from Luke’s face.

  Luke took a slow step backward, then almost fell forward into Jumbo as the train lurched again. He would have hit him, too, if Jumbo hadn’t taken a quick step backward at the same time to keep his own balance.

  Minutes, maybe seconds now, before they hit daylight.

  Luke eased back down the corridor away from Jumbo. He paused at the far door, not wanting to open it and create a noise while Jumbo was still standing in the corridor.

  Ahead, out of the window, he could see a faint light, the end of the tunnel approaching. The train was moving faster.

  Finally, Jumbo gave up and stepped back into the compartment. Luke slid the door open, and a moment later he was back in the other carriage.

  The conductor was in the middle of the carriage, moving away from him, and Luke scurried along behind him. He reached his own compartment just as the windows of the train filled with brilliant green light.

  Exhausted, he pulled the goggles off and handed them back to Tommy.

  “How’d it go?” Tommy asked.

  “Easy as, bro,” Luke said.

  36. DEVASTATION

  “Awesome, dude!” Tommy said, leafing through the plans in the folder. “What do we do with them?”

  “Destroy them,” Luke said.

  “Yes, but how?”

  Luke hadn’t thought about that.

  “We could burn them,” Tommy suggested.

  “You got a gadget for that, too?” Luke asked.

  “Nope,” Tommy said.

  Luke pulled his overcoat tightly around him. With the window gone, the central heating of the train could do little to cope with the freezing air that was rushing in from outside.

  The warmest place was on the floor, by the heating vents, and that was where they were both sitting, finishing off the extra sandwiches they had bought from the shop in Berchtesgaden.

  “Whatever we do, we should do it soon,” Tommy said. “In case Mueller finds out the plans are missing and they search the train.”

  “We could eat them,” said Luke.

  They both looked at the thick sheaf of papers enclosed in the folder and shook their heads in unison, taking another bite of their sandwiches instead.

  “We could dissolve them in acid,” Tommy said. “If we had some acid.”

  “Yeah, and we could put them in a rocket and send them to the moon,” Luke said. “If we had a moon rocket.”

  They batted back and forth various and increasingly silly ways to destroy the plans, but in the end all they did was rip them into small pieces, page by page, and release them out through the shattered window, the bits fluttering into the ice and the snow and the trees.

  They scattered the plans over miles and miles of countryside, then tore the cardboard folder into pieces and did the same for that, laughing like maniacs the whole time.

  They watched the outskirts of Munich slip by with a growing feeling of confidence and hope. Against the odds, their mission was accomplished. All they had to do now was return to Berchtesgaden. To go home.

  The low, outlying buildings became taller as the train approached the center of the city. They passed beautiful white-brick buildings with steep orange roofs and tall spires. But All
ied bombers had been through here, and as they continued on, the magnificent architecture gave way to fire-blackened ruins—houses collapsed in on themselves, buildings with entire front walls missing, allowing them to see into every rubble-strewn room.

  In one area, there was not a single building standing, just jagged spears of brick and the remnants of walls rising pitifully from mounds of debris around them. Whole suburbs had been ground into the dirt.

  The smell of the city poured into the carriage through the shattered window. The reek of lingering smoke, dust, and decay mingled with a strong odor of disinfectant.

  People were moving amid the destruction, digging in the rubble or hauling their possessions through the streets in handcarts or suitcases.

  What looked like a family—two parents and three children—sat on two ragged sofas in the middle of the street outside a bombed-out building. Their faces, hair, and clothes were covered with gray dust. They sat, unmoving, waiting for something, or perhaps nothing at all.

  A lush park, with playground equipment for kids, was untouched by the bombing but was now home to rows of roughly dug graves.

  “It’s like September eleventh, times a hundred,” Tommy whispered beside him.

  “Times a thousand,” Luke said.

  Luke’s desire to leave this place—this nightmarish world—increased with every mile. He wanted to get back to the comfort and peace of the twenty-first century. Nothing in his experience could possibly have prepared him for the horrors that these people were going through, and he knew that it was far worse in many other countries.

  He wanted desperately to go home.

  But even before the train pulled to a halt at the railway station, the Ostbahnhof, they could see that something was terribly wrong.

  37. A FACT

  Passengers waiting to board were being herded away from the train. Long rows of soldiers were running up the platform’s stairs. Gestapo officers in their black uniforms with the swastika on a bloodred armband were directing people into lines.