“I know that, Joachim,” the other man assured, an involuntary shudder coursing through his body as he also remembered the torture committed against him far more vividly. He also couldn’t resist adding silently in his own mind: …and without ‘that kind of treatment’, none of you would’ve gotten a fucking thing out of me in the first place! “How’s the family?” He asked aloud instead, hiding the darkness of his thoughts with all the expertise of one well-practised.
“Very well, thank you,” Müller smiled genuinely. Lena is five now and will be starting school next year…and we’re expecting our second now…Hanna’s twelve weeks along now and doing nicely.”
“My congratulations, Joachim… wonderful news…” Lowenstein made a great show of stifling a yawn and covering his mouth with one hand. “Please excuse me… it’s late and I’m well past my bed time. Forgive me if I come to the point now, but what’s the real reason you’ve come to see me at such a late hour?” There was no malice in the man’s tone, but there was also a suggestion he was done making pleasant small talk.
“We’ve been presented with an interesting theoretical question by the Nazi Party hierarchy,” Müller lied with conviction, having prepared his story in detail before the visit. “Hitler, Hess and the others are paranoid that if we could come back through time to assist them to victory, then there remains the possibility, no matter how remote, that our enemies may manage to do the same to counter us.” He took a short breath. “As a hypothetical question, I was hoping you’d perhaps be able to run through any scenarios you could possibly come up with in which such an unlikely event might threaten our position…” he shrugged “…apart from the obvious answer of bringing with them a plane load of nuclear weapons, of course…”
“Of course,” Lowenstein agreed dubiously, his eyes narrowing as he considered the premise. “It’s an interesting but not altogether unreasonable question.” He shrugged noncommittally. “Any force would have their job ahead of them unless they did come loaded with nukes, and the temporal distortion wave would leave them only twenty-four hours in which to cobble something together…”
“And the distortion wave is a constant?” Müller queried eagerly.
“As far as we were able to ascertain, it was: there was only limited time for testing available to us before New Eagles…‘acquired’ the research…” Lowenstein intentionally chose a less inflammatory phrase to describe his kidnapping and subsequent torture for his own reasons rather than any interest in protecting the other man’s feelings. The physicist thought silently for a few moments before wincing visibly and rubbing a hand roughly across his face as if in an attempt to refresh himself.
“Excuse me again, Joachim,” he offered in a softly apologetic tone, “I’ve been having difficulty sleeping the last few weeks, and it’s starting to take its toll: I’m not my best after midnight these days.”
“Of course, Samuel,” Müller nodded with understanding. “I’ll let you get some rest, of course.” He rose and moved to the doorway, halting for a moment and turning back as the other man spoke again.
“Come and see me tomorrow afternoon and we’ll talk some more on it, Old Man,” Lowenstein suggested. “Bring me a pen and some paper and we’ll make some notes for you to take back to your superiors.”
“Thank you again, Samuel,” Müller smiled, switching off the light once more. “Get yourself some rest.”
Lowenstein waited a full twenty minutes in the darkness after Müller left before daring to rise from the cot and move across to the loaded shelves of books. Lighting a small candle sitting in a brass holder atop the bookcase with a match taken from a pack beside it, he crouched down in the dim, flickering light and searched through the bottom shelf for one of the oldest books he possessed.
“Joachim, my old ‘friend’, if you were half the liar I’ve learned to be, you’d still be completely transparent!” He muttered softly to himself as he found the volume he was looking for and drew it from its niche, the plain, bound cover carrying little more than the title: Über die Spezielle und die Allgemeine Relativitätstheorie, Gemeinverständlich. Lowenstein, already possessed of a rudimentary ability in German prior to his kidnapping, had been forced into a steep learning curve with the language since, and he could both read and speak it quite fluently if he chose to, which was seldom.
The book he’d chosen was by Albert Einstein, and was a 1918 publication that in English translated as On the Special and General Theory of Relativity (A Popular Account) – 3rd Edition. He’d read the work several times, however in this case it was something else inside the book that he was seeking: something hidden ‘in plain sight’ between the pages within.
“‘Hypothetical question’…!” He declared with uncanny certainty as he found the item he was seeking and pulled it gently free. “What sort of fool do you take me for?” Standing once more, he placed to book on top of the shelves, close to the flickering candle, and opened the single, folded piece of flimsy paper he now held in his hand. He studied it with a dark intensity for a few moments before moving back to the bed and sitting down, his eyes never looking away.
“They’ve come! They’ve come!” He whispered with soft intensity. “I knew you’d never abandon me, Hal,” he muttered as he lay down in the cot once more, head turned toward the candle’s faint illumination and his features contorting into an almost maniacal smile. “All these years, and I knew you’d come for me one day: I’ve kept it all this time, knowing one day you’d need it.”
The ragged sheet of paper he’d unfolded was most of the front page of an issue of the Berliner Tageblatt newspaper, most of the text printed on it fading now after seven years clamped between the pages of Einstein’s work. The headlines and articles were of little consequence in any case; the only real significance lay in the fact that the newspaper it had been torn from had been given to Lowenstein by Joachim Müller on the afternoon of the day they’d returned from the 21st Century. It’d been handed over as an afterthought… a small kindness to their prisoner in providing something for him to read as the New Eagles’ ‘arrival’ carried on around them.
“Eight years! Eight years!” He whispered as he lay there, staring unfocussed at the ceiling beyond the paper he held. “Müller doesn’t understand, Hal... none of them understand!” He paused for a second as the wild, hysterical grin returned. “But I do, Hal… I do! Only one thing that can fix it all… only one action that can put it all right, and I’ve been waiting all this time… waiting for just this day!”
Samuel Lowenstein had somehow held onto his sanity for the entire length of his captivity. Throughout all the initial beatings and torture, and the years of solitary confinement to follow, he’s clung to his reading, and his regular talks with Müller and his guards, and somehow he’d managed to skirt around the boundaries of madness. Part of that very conscious process of maintaining control over his own thoughts and emotions had, ironically, been the unequivocal recognition that his own situation was completely and utterly hopeless.
He was a single prisoner – a man who technically had no identity in that era and simply didn’t exist – trapped in a time many years in the past and held captive by an ascendant Nazi Germany that was now no longer destined to lose the Second World War. There was no possibility of escape, for there was literally nowhere he could escape to, and there was also no way as a single individual he could have any chance of reversing the changes to history his captors had created through the terrible perversion they’d perpetrated on his own life’s work.
Yet somewhere, deep inside his subconscious there had also lived that small, ridiculous belief that there might still be a chance… that in the 24 hours left of Realtime after the New Eagles had departed the 21st Century, Hal Markowicz and the governments of the Earth had somehow managed to prepare a counter-attack. No one on the planet, either living in the 1940s or from their original era in 2010, understood the concepts behind temporal displacement research as completely as Samuel Michael Lowenstein: no one understood as
instinctively and completely as he that there was only one possible way the damage the New Eagles had wrought upon the history of the world itself might be reversed. No one except – perhaps – for his colleague and friend, Hal Markowicz.
It’d originally been an unconscious whim upon which Lowenstein had decided to keep the piece of newspaper clipping; he’d swear before God himself that there’d originally been no thought in his mind of rescue or escape at the end of that first day, when he’d folded the newspaper and kept it with him rather than simply throwing it away. Yet as the years wore on and he spent the greater majority of his time in solitude thinking about his own predicament, and that of the planet as a whole, he quickly came to realise that if there ever did exist the slightest possibility of returning history to its rightful course, then there was just one possible way that might be achieved.
“And I have it right here…” he stated with soft certainty, once again focussing his eyes on the piece of newspaper he held before him. The headlines and articles might’ve been smudged and worn away, but there was one piece of information that could still be clearly read. In the top, right corner of the page, directly beneath the last five letters of the Berliner Tageblatt masthead, the day and date was there for all to see: the exact date that the New Eagles had arrived in that era from the 21st Century.
For the first time in almost a decade, the cold, hopeless resignation had lifted from Samuel Lowenstein’s eyes, replaced by a sharpness and intensity that had been absent for many years. The reality behind Müller’s lies was obvious to him, and that meant that somewhere out there beyond the borders of Grossdeutschland, others from his world and his reality had arrived to do battle against the New Eagles and Nazi Germany. They’d need his help… would need the information he held in his hands… and for the first time in many years, the despair within his soul had been supplanted by hope and the possibility of rescue.
Sitting up, then rising to his feet once more, Lowenstein folded the newspaper clipping once more and returned it to its ‘hiding place’ within the pages of Einstein’s book. Carefully replacing that where it’d come from on the bottom shelf, he took out some blank sheets of paper and a ball-point pen he’d kept secreted in the same area above his books and carried them across to the small table, the flickering candle in his other hand.
In the dim candle light, he began to write notes on everything he’d seen and learned over the last seven years that he’d spent captive in 1930s Germany: every important piece of information he could think of pertaining to his captors and their activities that might possibly be of use to an allied force was committed to those pages in a hurried, almost illegible scrawl. He worked long into the early hours of the morning before exhaustion finally forced him to rest, seeking much-needed sleep as dawn finally broke over the French countryside with the chirping of birds as his restless lullaby.
He awoke late into the next morning with a sense of drive and determination he’d not felt in many years, his mind and body rejuvenated by the new and very real hope, no matter how slim, that there might possibly be a way to put an end to the New Eagles and their perversion of history. He made more notes… pages of them… and kept them well hidden inside and behind his collection of books, taking care to ensure neither Müller nor any of the guards saw him write a single word. The time to act was coming, and he’d need to be prepared… Samuel Lowenstein had no intention of allowing that opportunity to slip by unrealised.
Pas-de-Calais near Sangatte
Northern France
Thursday
July 4, 1940
Even by comparison to landing a flying boat, the Opel trucks provided an uncomfortable ride in Edward Whittaker’s admittedly biased opinion as they pulled into the armed compound. In the five days since being dragged out of the Channel by an enemy E-boat, he’d spent time in three different cells with three of the four main arms of the Wehrmacht: Kriegsmarine, Luftwaffe and SS in that order. All in all however, he couldn’t claim to have been treated particularly badly, all things considered. The guards had been generally terse, and as he didn’t speak German and almost none of them spoke any English, there were occasions when some pushing and shoving had been used to pass on instructions, but overall he’d so far been given little to complain about.
On the third day, he’d been thrown into the back of a large truck with a group of fellow British and French prisoners-of-war and delivered to a newly-constructed POW camp a few kilometres north of Boulogne-sur-Mer. The amenities were sparse and primitive, but the dormitories themselves were all new and the Luftwaffe guards seemed at worst to be neutral rather than outwardly hostile. They’d been ‘welcomed’ by the colonel in charge and had the camp rules read out to them: the camp was for officer POWs only, with all of the hundred or so already present therefore of commissioned rank. As a result, the regimen was a little more relaxed than Whittaker presumed it might’ve otherwise been for enlisted me.
Those facts made the arrival of the SS convoy early that Thursday morning even more unusual. They’d been roused unexpectedly and assembled in the pre-dawn darkness as a staff car and a dozen open-topped trucks were driven into the compound, a pair of half-track APCs loaded with troops travelling at the head and tail of the procession. Even more unusual was the fact that the trucks, APCs and the troops inside them were all Waffen-SS rather than Luftwaffe. They’d been ordered up onto the trucks, although Colonel Scammell, the ranking captured officer had protested strongly to the camp’s commandant the entire time. Those complaints had fallen on deaf ears however, and off they’d gone in the trucks in the cold darkness of that early morning.
It’d been a forty minute drive or so north along the coast from Boulogne-sur-Mer, and had the circumstances – and the comfort of the trip – been better, Whittaker might well have found the whole thing quite enjoyable. The Route de la Motte du Bourg carried them through village after village as it wound its way along the French coast, quite close to The Channel throughout the majority of the journey. The sun rose over the French countryside to the east during the drive, the golden light streaming down across the huge expanse of water and the indistinct English coastline beyond… a coastline Whittaker and most of the others in those trucks would much rather have viewed from a good deal closer.
The sun had well and truly risen by the time the convoy turned off the main road at the small village of Escalles and headed north-east toward La Haute Escalles on the Route de Peuplingues. Just a kilometre or two beyond the village, all could easily see a massive construction site being cut into the green countryside as it rose into low, flat hills between the township of Peuplingues and the coastal village of Sangatte, just a few kilometres north.
The compound they eventually arrived at was truly huge, with the twin, parallel chain-link fences topped with coils of barbed wire stretching out in either direction from the side road through which they entered. There were towers inside the fence by the main gate, and also further along at regular intervals, the muzzles of a pair of heavy machine guns clearly visible protruding from the upper platforms of each of the nearer ones, and there was no reason to imagine the rest would be any different. A pair of squat, concrete pillboxes also sat athwart the road outside the gates, the long muzzle of an anti-tank gun protruding from the darkened firing slot of each.
A single railway line approached from the east, passing close by the northern side of Peuplingues and running parallel with the road for a kilometre or so as both followed the site’s southern perimeter fence, the newly-constructed track running about three thousand metres east to join up at with an existing French railway line near Fréthun. By coincidence, the majority of the new line’s layout almost exactly mirrored the positioning of what fifty years later in Realtime would’ve become the entrance to the Channel Tunnel.
The road and rail links converged as they approached the site and entered side-by-side through the same wide, double gates. The convoy drove on through as those gates opened before them, the guards waving them through, and Whi
ttaker and the rest of the prisoners could see that there was already quite a bit of work going on.
Construction equipment was in operation all around, and Waffen-SS troops armed with assault rifles and submachine guns were everywhere also. Another thing that didn’t go unnoticed were the large number of anti-aircraft emplacements spread around the area: light 23mm guns in twin and quadruple mountings were numerous, with lesser numbers of medium 37mm and 50mm automatic cannon accompanying them.
Batteries of the ubiquitous Flak-36 88mm – equally adept at dealing with aircraft and armoured vehicles – were placed at strategic points around the compound perimeter, while heavier 105mm and 128mm high-altitude weapons were also visible in single gun emplacements here and there, also on the perimeter and usually set up close to clusters of the smaller guns.
The trucks finally came to a sudden stop near the end of the parallel railway track – a track that seemed far from complete. The earthworks and the bedding for further new track continued on much further, curving back around to the west and then to the north-east, the layout almost perpendicular to that coastline that was at that point probably no more than three kilometres away.
They were ordered off the trucks and lined up between the road and the railway line in two ragged rows of fifty men. Piles of digging equipment – picks, shovels and such – lay nearby in large, lidless wooden crates, and as SS guards piled out of the APCs they began to order the POWs to take up those tools in both German and broken English.
England Expects (Empires Lost) Page 31