Written in Time

by Jerry Ahern

  Jack tore the weapon free of the body and hit the Heckler & Koch’s bolt handle with his left hand as he found the fire-control lever.

  The bolt had been closed on a chambered round that flew past him; H-Ks were among the comparatively few submachine guns to fire from a closed bolt. But a fresh round chambered. Jack had fired an MP-5 submachine gun once before in his life; the weapon, like this one, had been fitted with a suppressor. But many of the characters in his novels used MP-5s, and Jack’s knowledge of the weapon was detailed.

  No time for the shoulder stock, Jack let himself sprawl onto his back in the coal bin, holding the weapon with both hands as he tripped the trigger. The man on the roof was standing, submachine gun to his shoulder. Jack, on the other hand, was using a technique often described as “spray and pray,” pumping the automatic weapon’s trigger as fast as he could, firing three-shot bursts, turreting the weapon’s muzzle in some hope of contact with his target.

  Bullets pelted into the coal around Jack, coal dust spraying his face and hands.

  Jack’s expropriated submachine gun was very suddenly empty. A spare magazine was jungle-clipped beside the spent one. Mechanically, he started to make the change, knowing he wouldn’t have the time before his adversary fired again and killed him.

  But Jack’s adversary, although he stood perfectly erect, weapon tucked to his shoulder, didn’t fire.

  Jack blinked.

  The third assassin’s body shuddered, collapsing into a heap, then falling away into the slipstream, swallowed by the darkness.

  Jack breathed.

  He seated the fresh spare magazine and got to his knees in the coal. He looked forward, toward the locomotive. A fourth member of the team, just as Jack had predicted, was clambering up from the locomotive cab, into the coal car.

  Jack started to fire, but hesitated lest he strike the engineer, a mountain of a man swinging a wrench in an arc toward the fourth killer’s head. Jack went flat in the coal, a single burst of gunfire, bullets whistling past his head.

  No more gunfire.

  Jack’s submachine gun was on-line with where the fourth man had been. But the man wasn’t there anymore.

  The locomotive engineer was fumbling dangerously with the fourth man’s submachine gun.

  “Hey, man! Don’t!” Jack shouted as loudly as he could.

  Then the submachine gun began to spit lead and Jack dove for what cover there was in the coal pile.

  CHAPTER

  NINETEEN

  The train was beginning to slow, which might be interpreted by the assassins’ pickup unit as a signal to come in closer. Jack jumped from the coal car into the cab. The fourth assassin lay sprawled half inside the locomotive and half hanging down over the coupling. The fireman was dead, executed in an identical fashion to the military personnel and male secretary in the support car.

  The engineer was bleeding profusely from his left thigh and seemed close to death, already unconscious. A closer inspection of the wound revealed that his left thigh was partially severed.

  “Shit,” Jack hissed through his chattering teeth. He was very cold, and the adrenaline rush was leaving him.

  Scanning the cab’s interior, he identified the lever-like throttle and began easing it forward. The train picked up speed again.

  Turning his attention to the engineer, Jack resumed his quick triage. In the light of his flashlight, the color of the blood looked awfully dark, meaning it was very likely arterial. Considering the enormity of the wound, regardless of the blood’s color, the engineer might be dead in seconds.

  Jack tore the bandanna from the engineer’s neck, and patched it against the most obvious bloody hole. The bandanna was instantly saturated. Jack stripped off his own vest, bundled it firmly and pressed it over the bandanna. The bleeding seemed to slow. He added the engineer’s cap to the compress. Jack released the lock on the clip that held the two submachine gun magazines in place, letting it clatter to the cab floor. Using the empty magazine and the remnants of the sling from the submachine gun, Jack started a tourniquet. The fourth assassin had a knife taped to his web gear, a Randall Model 1 by the looks of it. Jack cut the sling free of the submachine gun, tightened the tourniquet again. The engineer groaned in pain.

  If he let go of the tourniquet, Jack knew, the engineer would surely die. If he stayed with the engineer, they would all die when the pickup team arrived.

  There was a toolbox on the floor of the cab. Jack started to reach for it, hoping to use it as a wedge against the empty submachine gun magazine that controlled the tourniquet.

  Jack thought he heard his name called.

  He looked up. Teddy Roosevelt, suitcoat gone, white shirtsleeves smudged with coal dust, climbed down from the coal car.

  “Barbarians! To kill men like that! Barbarians!”

  “Yes, sir, except that’s an insult to barbarians.”

  “I’m glad you were able to give them their just desserts, Jack. What can I do, sir, to assist you and this injured man?”

  “Hold this tourniquet in place while I get Ellen and our stuff. We’ve got to lose the special car and the support car. There are explosives mounted on the roof of each of those cars. They can be radio detonated at any time. Probably soon.”

  “Radio—like this, this Italian fellow, Macaroni?” “Marconi, sir.”

  “Indeed. Marconi it is.”

  “Just like television, sir, but without pictures. His invention proved quite versatile and can, indeed, be used to remotely detonate certain types of explosives. Remember to hold on to the tourniquet while I get Ellen. You may need to find additional packing for the wound.”

  “These dead men seem to be members of some sort of military unit. They might be carrying field kits with bandages.”

  “Excellent idea, Mr. Roosevelt. I’ll have a look.” The nearest of the dead assassins, indeed, had an individual first-aid kit. Jack opened it, took out two field dressings and applied them over the packing. There was antiseptic, but in order to have it do any good, he’d have to reexpose the wound and hasten the blood loss. “I’ll see what else I can find that might help.”

  And Jack was moving, climbing up into the coal car as rapidly as he could, crossing to the car’s rear. He jumped, nearly twisting an ankle, but reached the platform at the front of the support car. Dodging the obstacle course of dead men and their weapons, Jack reached the rear of the car, crossed to the special and shouted, hoping Ellen would hear him and not shoot. “Ellen! It’s me, Jack. I’m coming in.”

  Jack put his hand on the door handle and twisted, opened the door and went inside. Ellen was crouched behind the overstuffed chair with a Colt revolver aimed at his chest.

  “Grab whatever you think Mr. Roosevelt would want out of here, and I’ll get our stuff. Hurry, kid. This car and the one in front are going to blow up any minute.” Somehow, Ellen had gotten into her dress, but he would have bet a million dollars she’d skipped the corset.

  The engineer was dying. She hated talk of time-travel and its anomalies, but maybe this man’s death was supposed to be, or maybe time was just healing itself. With his death, the only living man from 1900 in 1900 who knew of the reality of being able to travel in time was Teddy Roosevelt.

  After getting her, their bags and a hastily packed suitcase and briefcase for Teddy Roosevelt ferried across the coal car, Jack had gone back to the coal car, stripping the dead assassins of their weapons, ammunition and anything else useful. There was, of course, no identification.

  With a submachine gun slung tightly at his side, he’d climbed back across the coal car one last time, to slip the pin for the coupler connecting the train cars to the coal car.

  There was a sudden lurching of the engine and coal car, and Ellen Naile realized that both of the two trailing cars—the support car and the special—were no longer attached, the locomotive’s full force and speed unfettered.

  As Jack finally climbed down from the coal car, he looked at her in the lamplight and smiled, holding up both ha
nds.

  Despite the dying engineer, his head on her lap, Ellen almost laughed, restraining herself—but barely—only out of respect for the man’s life.

  The reason she almost laughed out loud was the recollection of a story concerning Jack’s paternal grandfather. Michael Naile, tippling when he shouldn’t have been, had lost a finger slipping coupling pins into place on railroad cars, the finger inserted where the pin should have been. Ever after that, “Mick” Naile’s lost finger was kept in a jar of formaldehyde on the mantle in his home. When Mick’s wife, Margaret, would move the jar in order to dust, he’d swear that he knew the exact time that she did so, that somehow he was able to feel that severed digit. Jack’s showing his hands after removing a coupling pin was his way of saying “Look, Ma! All ten fingers!”

  Jack crouched to the floor of the engine, where he had piled the booty taken from the dead assassins. Teddy Roosevelt was stoking the boiler and driving the train. “The people Lakewood hired for this must have brought their own individual weapons. We’ve got one Glock 17, one SIG 228 and one SIG 226 as sidearms. Probably work internationally, with all the handguns being 9mms. We’ll give Mr. Roosevelt the SIG 226 and one of the H-Ks; I’ll hold on to the SIG 228 and we’ll keep the Glock for emergencies.” He stuffed the smaller of the two SIG pistols—the 228—into his waistband, dropping four spare magazines for the pistol into his front pants pockets.

  “Time to give Mr. Roosevelt a crash course in use of the SIG and a suppressor-fitted submachine gun.” Jack stood up and glanced behind them. “Can’t see the two cars we uncoupled.” As he spoke, the air around Ellen seemed to pulse, and there was a roar so loud she could barely hear Jack exclaiming “Holy shit!”

  Ellen rested the locomotive engineer’s head on the carpetbag as she sprang to her feet so rapidly that her heel snagged in the hem of her dress. Jack caught her, and she was in his arms when she looked back along the tracks. “It’s not nuclear, is it, Jack?” Ellen heard the desperation in her own voice as the mushroom-shaped fireball lit the night almost as brightly as a premature sunrise would have.

  “No, kid. No. Just conventional. Probably semtex or an even more powerful kind of plastic explosive. But they sure used enough of it. Probably trashed the whole track under the train cars. We’ll need to find the first place we can where we can wire news of the wreck before the next train trashes itself with no track under it and wreckage in front of it.”

  Ellen turned her head and looked at Teddy Roosevelt. The explosive fireball was reflected in his glasses, his face red-tinged, as was Jack’s, where the coal dust had fallen away.

  Ellen wondered if Roosevelt thought that he was having a vision of Hell, and Hell was the future.

  As a little girl, if Ellen had ever pictured herself as a locomotive engineer, it was not under circumstances similar to those in which she found herself now. Her husband was showing Roosevelt all about how to use a submachine gun and an automatic pistol. It was half past five in the morning. The wind around the locomotive was very cold and numbed her. The feeble light positioned between the locomotive’s smokestack and cowcatcher—a headlight—provided so little illumination that the train was clearly outrunning it; by the time she might spot something on the rails ahead, there would be no time to stop the train before smashing into whatever that object was.

  Nor had she envisioned herself driving a locomotive after the real engineer had died in her arms fewer than five minutes earlier.

  And, to make matters just peachy, she saw a bright light to the south—a light slowly but steadily increasing in size. “Jack! We’ve either got a UFO coming toward us or it’s a helicopter. You hear me, Jack?”

  “I hear you,” Jack told her, suddenly beside her. “And, I almost hope it’s a UFO.”

  “What do the letters U-F-O stand for, Mrs. Naile?” Teddy Roosevelt inquired of her.

  Ellen looked at Jack, seeing his eyes in the lamplight. She couldn’t read them, but he said, “May as well tell him. The phenomenon was reported in various ways down through the centuries.”

  “Mysterious lights in the sky,” Ellen amplified, “flying objects which move in strange ways, aerial phenomena that are unidentified. They came/will come to be known as unidentified flying objects in about fifty years from now. Some people call them flying saucers.”

  “Is that light emanating from one of these flying saucers, then?”

  “No, sir,” Jack volunteered. “You’re doubtless familiar with the scientific musings of Da Vinci. Do you recall his design for an aircraft or flying machine with rotating wings above its approximate center?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do, Jack. Quite fanciful, but there was no power source by means of which it could be made to fly, even if such had been possible.”

  “You’ve identified the crux of the problem, Mr. Roosevelt,” Jack agreed. “Until two bicycle mechanics will achieve the first powered flight in a little over three years from now.”

  “Americans, these bicycle mechanics?”

  “Of course, sir,” Ellen informed Teddy Roosevelt.

  “Bully, Mrs. Naile! So, Jack, the power problem was solved—or will be—and the origin of that light—electrical, certainly—is from a flying machine similar to that posited by the great Leonardo.”

  “Yes, sir. When and where we come from,” Jack told him, “they are called helicopters. Sometimes they are heavily armed for warfare. This might be such a gunship, but probably isn’t. More likely there will be one, possibly two armed men aboard, along with the pilot.”

  “If we are attacked, as it appears may soon prove out, then I would assume the object in returning fire is to disable the flying craft in such a fashion that it is forced down.”

  “You’ve got the spirit of it, sir,” Jack agreed.

  Ellen suggested, “If time permits when they come into range, Jack can point out the chin bubble where the avionics might be disabled, and the tail rotor, which would force a controlled landing at the very least.” In the books Jack and she wrote, the good guys had shot down many an enemy helicopter in just such a way.

  As for their vehicle, one string of gunfire, if it stitched across the locomotive’s boiler, could cause the engine to lose steam pressure and gradually fail. Almost certainly, had Jack Naile known a great deal more about the operation of steam-powered locomotives, there were other dangers from such gunfire that might prove more abruptly catastrophic. There were times, he reflected, when ignorance was bliss.

  Theodore Roosevelt working side by side with him, Jack had taken toolboxes, coal shovels and every other suitable metal object that might slow down or stop a bullet, forming a low wall behind Ellen as she crouched before the controls of the locomotive.

  Roosevelt, sleeves rolled up past his elbows, eyeglasses freshly buffed with his handkerchief, an expression of enthusiastic determination set across his broad face, had the submachine gun’s stock extended, the butt to his shoulder. “Good stock length for me, Jack. Will there be much recoil impulse when I touch off a round?”

  “Barely noticeable, Mr. Roosevelt. And remember— very little noise, too. It’s got a sound suppressor. And, don’t forget to pump the trigger, sir, as I suggested. You don’t want to fire out the entire magazine.”

  “I await your command to fire.”

  Jack felt embarrassed—a seasoned man like Theodore Roosevelt following his lead. Up until four years ago, Jack’s only rip-snorting adventures were the ones he and Ellen made up for their books. Aside from a few animal pests he’d had to dispatch over the years, he’d never shot a living thing. Roosevelt was a seasoned man, had been all his life, choosing the adventurous path. Jack had merely fallen into circumstances beyond his control or imagining.

  He could explain all that to Teddy Roosevelt, explain about a time loop that was the cause of all of this, but instead he called back to Mr. Roosevelt across the engine cab from him, “I’ll tell you when, sir,” and left it at that.

  The helicopter was about two hundred yards off, its outline o
nly partially visible in the predawn darkness, the spotlight emanating from the chopper the best and most logical first target. Jack was beginning to wish that he’d brought over one or two of the .30-40 Krag-Jorgensen military rifles from the support car. Unless the chopper got in well under a hundred yards, the submachine guns and pistols would be close to useless.

  “I suggest shooting out their electric light, Jack!”

  “My thought exactly, sir. We have to let the machine get very close before we open fire. Even a hundred yards is well beyond any practical range for the weapons we have available to us, firing from a moving platform as we are at a moving target. We don’t want to just hit the helicopter, but to disable it. If they think we’re their people and injured, we might have a chance of the helicopter getting in close enough that we can destroy it.”

  It was a slim chance, at best, but their only one.

  The helicopter was about one hundred fifty yards off, coming in so slowly that a sprinter could have outdistanced it.

  One hundred yards.

  Jack tucked the butt of the H-K submachine gun tight to his shoulder. His mouth was dry. He licked his lips. He blinked his right eye as he continued to watch the chopper over his sights.

  “They’re getting pretty damned close, Jack!” Ellen cautioned.

  “I know. Keep down and pray.”

  “I think I see glass on the lower front of the flying machine. Is that the chin blossom?”

  “Bubble, sir. Chin bubble. You concentrate on the light, Mr. Roosevelt, and then pour as much lead as you can through that chin bubble. When I tell you to, please.”

  “Of course.”

  The air around them was freezing cold, the darkness— except where the helicopter’s light illumined—impenetrable. The distance was seventy-five yards, give or take, and Jack Naile was sorely tempted to open fire.

  Instead, he waited.

  Fifty yards.

  “Hold your fire, Mr. Roosevelt. Hold!”

  “Affirmative, Jack!”

  Twenty-five yards with the H-Ks would be easy, even considering that their firing platform—the racing locomotive—was moving at about sixty miles per hour and rocked slightly to one side or the other.