by Jerry Ahern
“It’s a dilemma, Dad. How about some words of wisdom?”
Alan heard bitter-sounding laughter from the other end of the line. His eyes swept the lobby for signs of anything strange. He wore both SIG pistols under his shirt, but they provided little comfort at the moment.
His father spoke. “If you want me to be the one who says it, then I will. We’re just going to have to—”
“No. Don’t say it, but I agree. I’m going to need some help out here quite rapidly. Kaminsky’s people have their secondary base out here.”
“Is it even safe for you to be near there, Alan?”
An older couple wearing T-shirts and ball caps that were a perfect match were wending their way across the blue-carpeted lobby toward the polished wooden front desk. A fluorescent fixture buzzed just a little. Nothing else was even that noteworthy. “No, I’m okay for a little while, here. I’ll wait, but get some people to me in a hurry.”
“They’re already en route, son.”
Alan nodded again, his stomach churning at the thought of his only recourse concerning Lakewood Industries. “About their facility in Chicago, Dad—there’s a lot of data there that really shouldn’t be.”
“I’m on top of that, son.”
There was only one solution and it was terrible, but Bethany had brought it down on her own head.
Just as the flashes of manmade lightning that signaled the time-transfers had been visible miles away from the mountains, so too were the fires burning at the site that had once been Lakewood’s base in what, to them, was the subjective past. It would be late in the afternoon where Alan was—1996. Part of the time-displacement anomaly included a difference of four hours, twenty-three minutes and some seconds. It was four and one-half hours later and early evening in 1900, dark enough that Jack Naile could easily spy the glow of the flames through his binoculars.
The small convoy—two Suburbans and an old Soviet tank—had stopped in order that Clarence could launch a weather balloon, assisted by Lieutenant Easley. Easley’s father, it was discovered, had been a reconnaissance balloonist during the Civil War and had imparted an interest in aeronautics to his son. Although Clarence manned the electronics package, Lieutenant Easley was clearly in charge of readying the balloon itself.
The purpose of the binoculars Jack Naile held was not for the observation of far-distant fires, but to keep track of the first balloon. He’d lost sight of it almost five minutes earlier.
As Jack aimed his binoculars toward the subtly darkening eastern horizon, he thought he spotted it. “Over that ridgeline, about five miles to the southeast! Do you see the ridgeline, Clarence?”
“Got it! I think. Yeah, I’ve got it.” There were a limited number of video cameras and a limited number of balloons. If they could be salvaged, it was definitely advantageous. If they could not be salvaged, at least if their location could be generally fixed, it would be possible for Mr. Roosevelt to have them recovered so they would not be randomly discovered. “The camera’s picking up what must be headlights far to the southwest.” The reason for waiting until near dusk before launching was the hope of spotting headlights being a better bet than spotting a dust trail. “What happens if they spot our headlights and send that helicopter back after us?”
“We might die,” Jack answered as cheerfully as he could.
The air was cool, rising along the rocky promontory near where they’d parked. The western horizon was a deep purple, the ball of sun—about the color of an egg yolk—enormous-seeming.
Clarence and Lieutenant Easley were packing up their ballooning and electronic monitoring gear, Ellen rounding up her passengers for the next leg of the journey . . .
Still in cowboy clothes and boots, Alan buttoned down the stretched black Lincoln’s right-side window as the limousine skidded slightly on the hard-packed sandy dirt and ground to a halt. Three helicopters were coming in, sunset-tinged and gleaming black Bell Long Rangers, unmarked, their registration numbers meticulously taped over. Alan didn’t wait for their arrival or for the bodyguard from the front seat to open the door for him. He stepped out of the Town Car and flexed his arms, his shoulders, tried loosening his neck muscles.
Red Raven Ranch was twenty miles away, a distance that a helicopter could cover in little more than a heartbeat. This land was the same as it had been ninety-six years ago, in the Old West. Only what transpired there was different. It was strange; it literally boggled the mind to contemplate that what was happening ninety-six years ago had already happened, but differently. Time, almost certainly, healed itself, as was often said in science fiction books and films; Jack and Ellen, dead by all logic, lived on in the past, and the past was happening simultaneously with the present. All pasts? All presents? Did everything just go on and on and on, repeating and rerepeating itself in alternate planes of time?
And what of the future? Alan wondered.
He’d read articles in which well-respected serious scientists had theorized that travel into the past might be theoretically—at least—possible. But that made such a vain assumption! Why was this moment in time the point farthest along in time? Had a scientist in 1900 posited that time-travel into the future was impossible because 1900 was as far as the future had yet gone, the events surrounding Jack and Ellen and himself and Teddy Roosevelt and the men from the Seventh Cavalry—not to mention Lakewood’s back-and-forth journeys—would have proven the idea totally false, a conceit of the most ludicrous proportions.
The same held true in 1996, Alan felt. 1997 and 1998 and only God knew how many other futures were already out there, unreachable now, but there.
“Mr. Naile?”
Alan turned around and glanced at his bodyguard; the man looked overheated, standing there in the desert twilight wearing his nattily tailored Chicago business suit. “Yes, Frank?” The man was adjusting an earpiece, one of two, the second dangling lazily over his left lapel.
“The choppers are ready, sir, and your presence aboard the nearest of the three”—Frank gestured in the direction of the helicopters—“is requested, sir. The penetration team is in position on the ground.”
Alan merely nodded his understanding and assent. Whatever the year, murder was murder, and that was what circumstances demanded of him. These murders would be for the good of all mankind, of course, but that reason was almost certainly one of the more common excuses offered for taking significant numbers of human lives.
As Alan walked toward the designated helicopter, he kept reminding himself that he was with the good guys.
David worked the squeeze bulb to evacuate the air in the transparent plastic line between the first jerrican and the Suburban’s fuel tank. Among the supplies his parents had packed for their anticipated—and realized—journey almost a century into the past were numerous odd things. He remembered asking his father, “Why are we taking plastic tubing and these squeeze bulbs? Are we going to start an aquarium?” When the family had been in its tropical-fish period, identical tubing and bulbs had been used to evacuate dirty tank water into buckets; these were carried off, their contents flushed down the toilet. Jack Naile had responded that what was used to siphon water could be used just as easily to siphon gasoline.
His father had some good ideas at times.
Anyway, it amused his passengers, the men of the Seventh Cavalry, to watch the pale reddish liquid moving magically through the transparent tube. The rechargeable flashlight by the light of which he was able to see what he was doing had elicited mutterings of pure amazement, the light so terribly bright. David felt like a veritable master of illusion.
Alan retracted the M-16’s bolt and let it fly forward. That he was violating countless laws was of little consequence. Dealing death from a helicopter would be the toughest rap, and he’d never beat it.
The western horizon was washed in brilliant shades of red, dissolving into orange and then into yellow-tinged pink, all edged in deeply purpling darkness. Already in the west, Alan could make out the sparkling pinpoint of Venus. The eastern horizon
was so dark a blue that it was nearly black.
The desert slipping away below the helicopter was gray, neither day nor night, but in between. The leader of the raid, Del Stringfellow, was Horizon’s chief of security for the southwest. His somewhat high-pitched voice was coming through Alan’s earphone. “We’ll be over the contact point in ninety seconds. Ground personnel—I kept to a minimum—are fully positioned. This should be quick.”
“Any chance they’ve got us on radar, Del?”
“No, sir—we’re too low. They could have us on visual by accident, but that’s doubtful. About sixty seconds, now.”
“You didn’t have to do this, Del; so, thanks. This wasn’t part of the job description.”
“In a funny way it is, though, Mr. Naile. Don’t sweat it.”
Alan didn’t answer verbally, only nodded.
Probably thirty seconds remained.
“Incoming! Surface to air!” It was the pilot’s voice, shouting, not panicked, but startled.
Del’s voice hit with machinegun rapidity in the next millisecond. “Evasive action. Get us outa here. Special One to Special Two and Three; we are under fire, presumably low-end Soviet-era SA-7 shoulder-mounted SAMs. Evasive action. Engage enemy at will. Prospector One and Two; commence Operation Visitor immediately. I say again, commence Operation Visitor immediately. Special One Out.”
The helicopter had been climbing, then diving. It leveled off and skimmed the ground, seeming inches over the dirt. Only twenty seconds or so had gone by. The contrail from one of the missiles flashed past the Bell’s nose, missing the chin bubble by less distance than Alan wanted to think about.
A searchlight flicked on from the helicopter’s nose. “They can see us by our running lights anyway, Mr. Naile.”
“Affirmative that, pilot.”
As the searchlight flashed across the sandy terrain, Alan spotted a half-dozen Lakewood personnel, discarded missile tubes only a yard or so behind them. Two of the men stopped in their headlong lunge and turned; one fired an M-16. Bullets spiderwebbed the chin bubble. The second had a missile tube to his shoulder, preparing to fire.
“Mr. Naile! Be careful, sir!”
It was Del Stringfellow’s voice in his ear, but Alan Naile was already dismounting the door, letting it fall away in the helicopter’s slipstream. Belted in, he leaned out of the chopper, the M-16 to his shoulder. Aiming at the man with the missile from the unsteady firing platform, he missed him and struck the rifleman beside him instead. The Lakewood man’s M-16 fired a long, full auto burst skyward, bullets ricocheting off the fuselage.
Flying over the man with the missile, there was a flash of yellow, the missile firing. The pilot shouted, “Hold on!”
The helicopter banked sharply to starboard and Alan nearly lost his rifle as he was half flung from the machine, only his safety harness keeping him from being dashed to the ground below. The missile tracked so close to the helicopter that Alan could feel heat from its vapor trail.
Gunfire and explosive flashes were everywhere in the gathering darkness below. Hands—Del Stringfellow’s— pulled at him and Alan was fully returned to the cabin. “Thanks! Let’s get that fucker!”
“Yes, sir! You heard Mr. Naile! Turn this crate around.”
“Wilco that, Del.”
The helicopter described a steep arc and swooped toward the ground. “He’s mine,” Alan declared, checking his safety belt and leaning out the starboard side of the fuselage. This time, his M-16’s strap was twisted round his left arm in the classic Hasty Sling. The Lakewood man threw his empty missile tube to the dirt and ran, firing an MP-5 submachine gun blindly upward and behind him.
Alan drew his weapon’s trigger back, and a long burst chewed into the ground behind the Lakewood man, then stitched up along the length of the man’s body as the helicopter overflew. The Lakewood man tumbled down dead in the mini-cyclone of sand that rose in the helicopter’s wake.
Alan looked ahead. Brilliant, ephemeral flashes of yellow-orange rose and fell in the darkness.
Stringfellow’s voice came through the headset again. “It’s estimated that resistance is over ninety percent neutralized. Enemy personnel encountered have been permanently neutralized. Estimating maybe a little over a dozen Lakewood personnel. One pocket of resistance remains near what appears to be the time-transfer control station, a capsule near it.” There was a pause, and Alan looked over at Stringfellow. Short, slight, blond, with a jaw like a rock, the security man’s ice-blue eyes flickered up from an aerial shot showing on the screen of a laptop. With his right thumb, Stringfellow made a downward sign three times. “The last of the Lakewood personnel have been permanently neutralized, Mr. Naile.”
“Let’s get down there,” Alan ordered, letting out a long breath that was almost a sigh.
The dry lake bed below them was an enormous valley, what had once been its shoreline—David had no idea how long ago, but the time would be best reckoned by a geologist—forming the rugged higher ground wherein they had concealed themselves. Through the predawn hours they’d waited. Beyond, to the east, the sun relentlessly climbed. It would be hot this day.
“The bad guys are over there,” David said, addressing the nine troopers with him. He had driven the Suburban through the night on the calculated guess that this was Kaminsky’s probable destination. The guess was correct. “Very bad guys,” he reiterated, jerking his thumb toward the center of the lake bed, where there was pitched an enormous tent. Sand-colored and large enough to shelter a small circus, the tent had been erected with additional canopies adjoined to it. Maybe folding chairs hadn’t yet been invented, or maybe a more elegant look was sought, but elaborate-seeming wooden dining-room-style chairs with cushioned seats and raised arm-rests were ranked under the canopies. Overstuffed chairs with exposed wooden trim and love-seat-sized sofas of the same construction formed a semicircle of grand proportions beneath the tent itself. At what was the exact center between the two main verticals around which the tent roof was erected were buffet tables. Several portable generators were providing power for electric chandeliers and a bank of bar-sized refrigerators and at least two refrigerated serving tables.
It was a credit to Anglo-American cooperation— strained occasionally during these times, David knew— that there seemed to be no representation for Great Britain. There was, of course, none for the United States. The French, the Germans, the Russians—they were the expected bidders and they were present. David could tell from the uniforms of the military personnel, his knowledge based on old movies his father had pretty much coerced him and his sister into watching. The Germans had the most businesslike and military-looking uniforms, and these were field gray. The French uniforms were certainly the most stylish and their headgear was the flat-topped, almost ball-cap-looking thing called a kepi. The Russians had extremely elaborate helmets, apparently not trusting to ordinary hats of any kind.
Many of the civilians—the diplomats—wore swallow-tailed coats and striped pants and tall, narrow-brimmed, shiny black silk hats. The other men—there was not a single woman visible—were evidently assistants, male secretaries and the like, attired in uncomfortable-looking suits and less formal hats, derby-or Homburg-style. Ranked socially lower still were coach drivers and footmen, exiled to nether regions beneath more spartan canopies and near where the luxurious carriages and less prestigious buckboards were parked.
“Missah Naile, suh? What’s them li’l blue houses out yonder?”
David glanced over at Corporal Gossman, the ranking soldier, and smiled. “What do you suppose they are for, Corporal?”
“Well, suh, sho’ look like the’ oughta be a qua’ter moon cut in them doors, if’n y’all takes mah drift.”
“I take your drift, Corporal.” David nodded. “Only these are portable. When they’re no longer needed somewhere, they’re carted off.”
“What’s they do with the, the—”
“The shit? It’s usually sucked up with a hose after chemicals have liquefied—”
David stopped, his attention focusing solely on the motor home parked some distance back from the tent. A solitary woman exited it. As she turned her face toward the east, David could see her clearly through his binoculars. It was Bethany Kaminsky. Alan’s powers of elucidation proved quite remarkable; she was as promised, even down to exuding an amazing and unmistakable deadliness.
Kaminsky’s blond hair, done in ringlets, was piled at the crown of her head. Her eyes—in this, Alan’s descriptive abilities failed utterly—were blue, yes, but such ineloquence could best be compared to labeling the world’s most exquisite diamond as a “pretty rock.” Blue, to be sure, but so much more than that. Even through the lenses of mere binoculars, the color was at once obvious and magnificent.
Women’s fashions of the day were designed to accentuate a slender waist, of course, and Kaminsky’s figure showed the classic and perfect hourglass. David smiled at himself as he realized that he was wondering what Kaminsky— evil bitch that she was, assuredly—looked like without all those pounds of clothes. “Oh, well,” he muttered under his breath. Her coachwork looked great—what he could see of it. Her motor probably ran a little hot and fast, he guessed; but, with an experienced man controlling the throttle . . . But, lamentably, there’d be no chance for a test drive.
“Pick four men you can trust to stay here with you and not spook if they see the aircraft or any of the weapons in use before we get back. We’re going to use that telegraphy kit; make sure we’ve got plenty of water.” His father thought that he never listened. He listened—sometimes. Jack related seeing one of his half-hour western A-list boyhood action heroes, Jock Mahoney, use canteen water and a piece of wire to short out and link up with a telegraph line. David found himself actually remembering hearing the story before when his father had recently suggested using the same technique. And his dad was actually rather impressed. “Pick your men, Corporal. I’m moving out in under two minutes.” But he’d be damned if he let anyone use the barrel of a six gun to tap out a message in Morse.