Written in Time

by Jerry Ahern

  Turning her head to glance behind her, just as quickly, she turned her face away. A rush of hot air engulfed her. The helicopter shattered against the sun-hardened surface of the lake bed, and a fireball flared from its fuel tank. She wasn’t on fire and she kept moving, thanking God for favors large and small.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SIX

  Jack was gaining on the fleeing bad guys and the bad girl who led them. David, although he told himself what they were doing was beyond insanity, would not have missed this experience with his father.

  Without knowing why, David found himself wondering if there were secret orders that the Naile family should all be killed. Then, would other soldiers kill the soldiers who had killed them, like some sort of Ancient Egyptian security precaution taken when the great tombs of the Valley of The Kings were sealed against a presumed eternity? He’d seen that old Boris Karloff movie about a mummy on the loose.

  And, riding like a madman, bullets periodically whizzing around him, the uneven ground enough to make his horse snap an ankle and pitch him to the rock-hard lake bed, dead, crippled or concussed, was it that one’s mind turned to unadulterated crap in the moment before death?

  The mysteries of life and death perhaps unfolded before him. “Fuck it,” he murmured, kicking his heels into his mount’s sides still harder and getting with the spirit of the thing, firing his Colt revolver uselessly and shouting, “Giddyup!”

  If his old friends could have seen him—David shuddered at the thought . . .

  Lieutenant Castle’s hands were at Lizzie’s waist, Private Hargrove’s left hand under her good foot, Castle saying, “On three, Hargrove! One. Two. Three!” Then Lizzie was up into the saddle, and the pain in her ankle—it wasn’t broken, she told herself—only felt unbearable for a split second, then began to subside.

  The battle raged on a mile or so ahead of them in the dry lake bed, and Lizzie wasn’t going to miss it. “Let’s go, Lieutenant!”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  He was cute, she thought.

  Clarence leaned heavily against the side of his tank; he’d miss the tank, actually. Easley asked him for the third time in the last few minutes, “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “I’ve never been shot before. Have you?”

  “No, Clarence, I haven’t.”

  “So I don’t know if I’m okay or not. But there isn’t a lot of blood. My wife’s a doctor from my time. Once we get me outa here, she’ll fix me up quick as anything.” Easley was either moving, swaying back and forth, or Clarence’s vision was starting to go. He felt a spasm of pain, clutched his side, fell forward into darkness.

  ***

  The Lakewood man reined in his horse, half fell from the saddle and tried holding on to the terrified animal’s reins as he swung his submachine gun forward on its sling.

  The guy had watched too many movies, Jack observed to himself, realizing the mere thought was the pot calling the kettle black. The MP-5’s butt stock wasn’t extended, and the weapon wasn’t even steadied at his hip. He just held it up, jerking the muzzle side to side and firing like somebody in a Middle Eastern terrorist group or something, his bullets stitching into the ground, making a lot of noise and frightening the horses—especially his own—but doing nothing to stop the men who pursued him. David’s horse reared; David held on, then spurred the animal into a lunge that took rider and mount perilously close to the Lakewood man.

  Jack reined in tight, his stolen black skidding on its haunches.

  Jack swung down out of the saddle, hauling the animal downward, tugging hard on the right rein to turn the horse’s head away from him as his left hand went to the horse’s near-side elbow and pushed. The animal laid itself down, belly toward the man with the submachine gun. Jack dropped behind the saddle, knowing he had a matter of seconds before the horse might bolt to its feet. Jack drew his revolver and fired one shot, hitting the Lakewood man in the throat. Jack fired again, the second shot striking the man in the forehead.

  Jack stood, stepping back as he tugged at the reins and let the horse rise to its feet. Jack stood on the reins in the next instant, quickly replacing the spent cartridges in his revolver, holstering and hammer-thonging, then catching up the black’s reins in his left hand. “Easy, girl. Nearly through here.”

  Jack led the less skittish animal quickly toward the dead man. He dropped into a crouch, holding the reins under his boot once again as he rapidly opened and removed the dead man’s pistol belt, then the strapped bag of spare magazines. There were three thirty-round sticks remaining. Jack examined the magazine in the weapon. Three or four rounds appeared to remain. There would be a round in the chamber.

  Jack inserted a full magazine up the well, slinging the submachine gun to his right side well behind his revolver, the magazine carrier already slung to his left. The pistol on the man’s belt was apparently the man’s own and a brand that Jack didn’t fully trust. He cleared the weapon, dismounted the slide, pulled the recoil system and dropped the springs into the magazine case. He flung the weapon’s slide and frame in opposite directions, dropping the dead man’s belt.

  Jack eased the cinch on the dead man’s mount, tethered the animal to some scrub just off what passed for the road. Swinging up into the saddle again, his own animal starting to shiver from its sweat—no time to rub the black down— Jack turned in toward the pursuit, but not taking the trail. What Jack intended to do in order to make up the lost time was dangerous in the extreme, something that could result in a broken leg for the black and a broken neck for himself. The shootout with the Lakewood man had been at a hairpin along the ridge road, the road turning back on itself into the next valley. A steep incline separated the two sections of road, cutting off, Jack calculated roughly, close to a mile and a half.

  Jack made the Sign of The Cross and murmured “God help us,” then started the German’s horse down on to the loose gravel and sand that formed the slope. Errol Flynn or his stuntman did it in the classic film Virginia City and Jock Mahoney, one of the greatest stuntmen who ever lived, did it in 1958’s The Last of The Fast Guns.

  Jack tried to concentrate on the ride. He no longer actually controlled his horse’s movements, nor did the black control its movements, either. What he and the animal beneath him were engaged in could best be described as a headlong downhill lunge. To stop would be suicidal for them both.

  A sudden dip—like a pothole from his own time— loomed ahead of them. In vain, Jack attempted to exert control via the reins. The animal didn’t respond. Jack realized that his lips were moving and he was saying the Lord’s Prayer. The German officer’s horse wouldn’t swerve right or left; Jack was certain that the black was going to fall and pitch him over its head. At the last microsecond, the black leapt up, jumping the depression, its hind legs half folding under it, Jack’s left hand going out to grasp the saddle’s smallish cantle. The black righted itself and dove onward and downward along the face of the slope.

  Jack dared to glance away from the terrain and look at the road below. The woman, the hired gun from this time and the German officer and two other men were almost directly below him. Following behind them, low over the neck of his sweat-gleaming mount, rode David.

  More than halfway down the rock-and scrub-strewn slope, Jack thought of the first of William Boyd’s classic western adventures when “Hoppy” was riding down a slope much like this and fired his revolver from the hip off the back of his still moving horse, shooting the revolver out of the hand of a bad guy maybe a hundred yards away. “Poetic license,” Jack Naile murmured to himself and the horse.

  Bethany Kaminsky judged that the second and smaller time base had to be over the next ridge. The animal she rode was beginning to falter and couldn’t go on much longer. Young David Naile was about two city blocks behind them, and his madman father, Jack, would be reaching the road in another moment or so.

  Bethany licked her dry lips. “Baron,” she shouted over the labored breathing of the animals and the thuddin
g of horses’ hooves. “We might need the extra horse. Shoot the kid on the paint horse!” She still wondered where the young punk had gotten the twentieth-century woman’s wristwatch he wore on his left wrist.

  The oddly shaped automatic pistol Von Staudenmaier held in his right hand flashed fire twice, and the local punk with the two pistols all of a sudden had a third eye just under his hatband at the bridge of his nose and an instant tracheotomy from the second shot.

  “Get that horse!” Bethany shouted to her men as the dead kid slumped out of the saddle. “Baron! Do you want to come with us to my time? I could use a man like you in my organization.”

  “I should travel through time!” he shouted back. “You are mad!”

  “What’ve you got to lose, Baron? And you’ve got me to gain!”

  As Bethany glanced toward him again, she caught his lips curling into a smile. “As you say, Fraulein, what is there to lose?! Yes? Ha-ha! Yes!”

  “I like you, Baron!” Turning her head toward the two remaining Lakewood men, Bethany ordered, “Stop the Nailes. Kill them! We’ll wait for you at the alternate time base. But be quick!”

  The two Lakewood men reined back on their mounts, Bethany, with Baron von Staudenmaier riding beside her, Maier leading the dead cowboy’s paint horse, headed toward the ridge.

  Of course, she had no intention of waiting for anyone.

  “I’ll be fine,” Lizzie gasped as Major Davis and Lieutenant Castle helped her down from the saddle.

  “This man needs medical attention, and fast, really fast!” Lizzie heard her mother shout. Lizzie began looking around to find her. Davis and Castle helped her to stabilize, to stand on one foot. Hopping a little bit to turn around, to see better, she at last spied her mother standing in the midst of a sea of dusty, uniformed shoulders. Ellen dropped to her knees in the dry lake bed near a blanket stretcher. Clarence lay on it, looking like he was dead. “Get a medic here! Now!” Lizzie watched in horror as her mother began to beat on Clarence’s broad chest.

  Jack marveled at his own folly; never again would he think it at all even remotely odd that someone might be so moved at journey’s end as to kneel and kiss the ground. As the German’s big black mare bounded on to the roadway, nearly abreast of David, Jack would have done so, time permitting. Time was accepting of less and less. The easy thing would have been to rein in, fall back and let the two Lakewood men—perhaps a quarter mile ahead—just wait there. Jack had ridden to catch David, to keep David from going at the bad guys alone. Kaminsky would not wait for her two hapless minions. Any enemy personnel not dying in combat would have to be executed. Jack, in this short period of years, had accumulated a lifetime’s worth of things he did not want to remember, knew he would never forget. Albeit that he and his family were, literally, saving the world from veering into an alternate historical path, one more bloody than the original destiny which lay within the years ahead, murder was still murder, however noble the reason.

  Kaminsky would literally—and figuratively, as well— seal her own fate.

  Jack reined back a little, letting his horse slow. David did the same.

  “When this is all behind us, son,” Jack began, looking at the fine and strong man who had once been a little baby in his arms, “let’s plan a family trip to New England. A few years down the road, here. I’d kind of like for you to meet your grandfather. He won’t be born until 1908, but still . . . ”

  “I’d like to meet your dad—Dad.” David laughed.

  Jack glanced up the road. The two Lakewood men had their submachine guns at the ready. Jack looked again at his son. He extended his right hand. David did the same.

  They held the handshake for a moment, exchanged a nod.

  Jack offed the safety of the submachine gun he’d liberated from the Lakewood man he’d killed. David had one, too, shifting it into a firing position.

  “Let’s be done with this, son.”

  “Agreed, Dad.”

  Jack and David—a calm having settled over them— urged their sweating mounts slowly ahead . . .

  Bethany dismounted from the paint horse she’d expropriated and glanced behind her. Looking silly running in his high riding boots and funny uniform pants, Von Staudenmaier was about a city block’s distance away. His horse had collapsed under him. In the distance, on the other side of the ridge, she could hear gunfire, and lots of it. She turned away from the road and toward the large shack about a quarter of a block off the road. “Better hurry, Baron,” she called over her shoulder. Raising her skirts, Bethany started toward the shack.

  The old-looking cabin had been built only weeks before, torn down from a location several miles distant, brought to this spot and reassembled, with an addition put on at the rear. This addition contained a compartmentalized cylinder about the size of a large bathroom, shaped like a loaf of bread. She had been rehearsed in the cylinder’s use dozens of times. Everything was automated, computerized. Push this button, that button, this other button. Enter the code—known only to her now that Morty was probably dead or about to be executed. The power would come on-line, and the machine would be activated.

  Bethany could hear the Baron’s heavy breathing. Still, he was in remarkably good shape.

  “There’ll be a lot of rebuilding to do, Baron, my organization and all.”

  They opened the cabin door. Inside was darkness. She’d forgotten a flashlight. “Baron? Got a match? We need some light.” He struck a match as they stepped through the doorway and out of the wind, the smell of sulfur unmistakable. “On the far wall. There’s a deer’s foot shaped like a clothes hook.”

  “I see it,” Von Staudenmaier volunteered, striking a second match as he dropped the first to the dirt floor.

  “Good, Baron. Give it three twists to the right—full twists—and jerk it downward.”

  “Is this some sort of—”

  “It opens a panel in the wall.”

  Her baron turned the repulsive looking clothes hook three times exactly, then pulled it downward. The right side of the rear wall slid a few inches inward, then left, disappearing beside the other half of the shack’s back wall. A light mounted above the chamber, powered by emergency batteries, came on. The baron dropped his match to the floor and stepped on it. “I am impressed, Fraulein, once again.”

  “You think you’re impressed now, wait until we get between the sheets, Baron.”

  There was a smooth metal surface beyond, forming the back wall of the building, seamless in appearance. A smallish panel—like a keypad for a miniaturized cellular telephone—was at eye level on the far left side of the metal wall. She heard gunfire from outside, perhaps the two men she’d left behind shooting it out with the Nailes.

  Bethany tapped out a series of digits on the panel. There was a hum, and a piece of the metal surface slid away. This exposed the combination lock to the outer chamber door. She twirled it, swung back the rest of the metal panel and turned the handle, then opened the vaultlike outer door of the bread-loaf-shaped metallic gray pod through which she would escape. At the touch of a button, the rest of the lights came on. “Close that door behind us, will you, Baron? Turn the handle.” She stepped over the threshold, the baron behind her. He began to turn the small, four-spoked wheel, the outer vault door locking bolts—twelve of them—sliding back into the frame. “We’re impregnable now, Baron.”

  “We are locked within an enormous bank vault. I do not understand how this benefits us tactically.”

  Bethany was already booting the computer for typing the entry code giving access through the inner vault doorway, readying the power for the surge that would carry her and everything within the time-transfer capsule to her own time.

  “What is this humming sound?”

  “Electricity, Baron. A special kind. It will carry us away from here. I’ll have a tech explain it to you when we get there.”

  “What is a tech, my dear?”

  “Tell you later, Baron.” And she leaned up on tip toes and kissed him hard on the mouth.
He was salty-tasting from sweat. She liked his flavor.

  The inner door opened. “Come with me,” she beckoned, passing over the threshold. He followed. She closed the door from an activation panel on the inside wall to her right. “Hold my hand and walk slowly, and we’ll be in my time when we reach the other side of the chamber.”

  He took her hand. Bethany began to walk as the chamber began to shimmer, looking at once of substance, yet shapeless. She felt the pressure of the baron’s hand closing around hers in the instant before she realized that her body was merging with something unrelenting and hard and the air was pushed out of her lungs and—blackness.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Father and son, Jack and David, prepared to mount up, their horses tired, sweat soaked, close to used up. The two Lakewood men who had been left behind had made a good, quick fight of it. Jack had gotten a terrible scare when David was hit. But it was only a flesh wound across his left tricep. Cleaned properly, it would amount to little more than an inconvenience.

  “The war’s still going on out on the lake bed, Dad.”

  “I suppose we should, shouldn’t we?”

  David swung up into the saddle. “Shit, that hurt!”

  “Pain makes a great reminder, doesn’t it, son?” Jack observed. He was securing the captured twentieth-century weapons to the mounts the two dead Lakewood men had ridden. Jack climbed up into the saddle, feeling his fifty years a lot more than he usually did. He lit a cigarette. Pretty soon, he’d be back to rolling his own again.

  “You ought to quit those things, Dad, before they kill you.”

  “When I smoke the last of these, I promise I’ll try. One last battle?”

  “Sure. Maybe they’ll be through by the time we get there, huh, Dad?”

  Exhaling smoke through his nostrils and mouth as he spoke, Jack smiled at his fine son. “I wouldn’t bet on that.”