Timelines

by Bob Blink

  Flight reservations were made using corporate accounts. Different companies were used for Mike than Naiya and myself. We would all travel to Montreal using the assumed identities. Our flight left at two this afternoon, which wouldn’t leave much time for shopping. There, Naiya and I would switch back to our own identities while Mike would continue on with his fake identity. Our flight would take us to London, leaving 12:30 tonight Montreal time. From London, we would catch another flight to Berlin after a two-hour layover. The London to Berlin would be with SAS rather than Air Canada. After checking into the hotel in Berlin, we would finally have a chance to get some real sleep before Jeff came to see us.

  Chapter 57

  Berlin, Germany

  Saturday, 14 October 2006

  I had totally lost track of date and time with all the flying and number of countries we had passed through in the past forty-some hours. Somehow, the alien communicator still worked here, half a world away from the cave entrance. I didn’t understand it, but it meant we could stay in contact with the complex. When we talked with Carol a short time ago, she informed us that ten days remained before the aliens were expected to arrive. Nothing had changed their course or tentative arrival date while we had been flying around the world. The utility ship had merged with the alien ship a bit early. Al indicated there had been a brief slow-down in the larger ship’s advance toward us, but it was short and difficult to measure on the graphic. How they managed to meet up with the incredible velocity delta was yet another mystery. Carol would be in touch via the communicator, but was planning a one-day trip uptime for something.

  While it seemed a shame to waste the opportunity to see a bit of Berlin, we weren’t really here as tourists despite what we had told the immigration officer when we entered the country the previous evening. We decided that we better just call down to room service for breakfast. We had been here since late the previous evening and I hoped we would be hearing from Jeff before too long. Mike was in the hotel as well, but we had made efforts to break any obvious ties between us. He had come in a separate cab almost thirty minutes after us, and had used yet another identity when he checked in. The man who had flown in from Canada no longer existed. Mike would join us in our room for breakfast and I planned to place a large enough order to feed us all, without making it clear I was ordering for three. Once I figured out which buttons to press to get connected to the right place, I placed the order and was told it would be thirty minutes, thank you. I hung up the phone and turned toward Naiya.

  “So far, so good,” I said.

  She sighed. “I now understand why Carol is so critical of travel in this era.”

  I hadn’t spent the extended time Naiya had with Carol uptime. My one trip years ago had been restricted to the tunnel and the nearby city where Carol lived. Naiya had traveled extensively on one of the earlier trips. “Much easier up then?” I asked.

  “We could have gone from Montreal to Berlin in under two hours,” she explained. “And it wouldn’t have been so bumpy.”

  I knew that Naiya was afraid of turbulence, although she wouldn’t admit it. I had explained turbulence was an entirely natural result of changing air density and pressure. Even so she wasn’t convinced in her heart that the airplane designers had taken it into consideration when they made their design choices.

  Mike arrived shortly after the waiter had departed leaving the breakfast. I had left the door slightly ajar so he could slip in unobserved at his own convenience. All this was probably unnecessary. I doubted even when they followed up on our trail that anyone would recall the three of us together. We all dug into the first real food in a very long time. Other than fast food and airline offerings, we hadn’t had the opportunity to stop and eat calmly. The last sit down meal was breakfast in Canada far too many hours ago. We were just finishing up when we heard a couple of knocks at the door.

  “Jeff,” I guessed, and pushed back from the small table. I made my way across the room and looked through the small eyepiece. I’m not sure what I would have done if it had been the police or some other equally undesirable caller, but as expected it turned out to be Jeff. I opened the door and stepped back so he could enter.

  He looked different. Older, and European. I’m not sure what had changed, but the effect was there. I suspect the hair had been touched up ever so slightly, and something about the clothes suggested he was German, not American. His posture was different as well. Again I couldn’t tell exactly how. He greeted us in German. He was full of surprises today. Then he grinned, and some of the differences seemed to melt away and he became more the Jeff we knew.

  “Sorry,” he chuckled. “I couldn’t help myself.”

  “How do you do that?” Naiya asked amazed.

  “One of the things they teach us,” he explained. “And I was assigned here for a couple of years so my German impersonation is better than anything else I can do.” He smiled again and added, “By the way, there is still nothing officially released to indicate they are looking for you. The current situation can’t last much longer. We don’t have insight to what they are doing internally. The responsibility for this project has been totally compartmentalized, and we have been excluded. I don’t think the president liked my boss’ views on the matter.”

  Jeff walked over to the table and grabbed a piece of toast. He nibbled while I brought him up to speed with what had happened to us since escaping from the residence. He was excited about the new communications device we had in our possession. I didn’t bother to mention how Al had managed to activate the device. I still didn’t feel comfortable with the key being so readily accessible. I wondered if I kept the key out of my conscious mind nobody else would think about it either. I smiled at his enthusiasm, and showed him the small device. I explained that we had five of them activated and that we would be able to coordinate between all of our facilities, regardless of the eras in which they existed. He shook his head in amazement.

  “Incredible technology,” he said. “It’s too bad we have to destroy it all.”

  “Roughly ten days,” Mike added, relaying the schedule we had received from Carol a bit earlier. “Can we do everything in that time?”

  “It’s all got to go smoothly,” Jeff admitted. “There is so much that can go wrong. Most important, we have to hope no one inside the military takes note of the resources we are diverting. Over here, it’s a good bet things will go unnoticed for a while. It will be even less likely once we get into the combat zones. It is an area my boss normally works and has almost unquestioned authority.”

  “It’s got to be discovered eventually,” I noted. “What happens to you and your boss when they figure out what has been done? It has to be career ending, or worse?”

  “We know that,” Jeff admitted. “This is too important. For a couple of us, we will be in violation of our legal authority and subject to prosecution. All the rest of the people involved are simply following orders. Orders from the same people they have worked for the past several years. They will not be in any way held at fault.”

  “What will you do?” Mike asked.

  “We have plans,” he said. “Several of us will have to disappear. We already have made plans to do that. Not to worry. We’ll be fine.”

  I could tell he didn’t want to explain just now. Whether it was a secret he wanted to hold indefinitely, or whether it was something he would share later I couldn’t tell. Maybe he felt it wasn’t his to share since it involved others who were putting their future on the line. I changed the subject to make it easier on him.

  “What’s our plan from here?”

  “As soon as you can get your stuff together and check out, I have my car downstairs. We will go to my place and I’ll prepare you for the next steps.”

  Mike returned to his room and made his own departure. Naiya used the speed checkout that has become common around the world. Simply punch a few buttons in response to questions on the room television, and you are done. No need to stand in public lines down in the lobby.
Make your choices and slip away. We took the plastic doors keys they had given us along when we left. There was far too much information recorded on the little magnetic strip to leave those things lying around.

  In the lower level parking garage, Mike was already in the car. Naiya and I piled into the back seat of the four year old white Mercedes that served as Jeff’s car. It was consistent with the clothes he was wearing, that of a reasonably successful businessman. I wondered how all of this had been put in place so quickly, but suspected all of this wasn’t ‘his’ but more likely part of the assets maintained and made available to members of his organization as needed. It explained in part why he had chosen Berlin. A large U.S. military base was here, and it would be one of the cities where his organization had signification presence. I doubted his apartment would be his either. However, it would be secure. He could tell us the next steps of this wild plan there.

  He didn’t disappoint me. Inside his ‘home’ he explained that we would be leaving via military transport for Israel in a few hours. We would be going to one of the ‘sites’ he explained. He couldn’t give us specifics of what and where these were, other than we would be landing not too far from Ben Gurion airport in a private area where the U.S. Government maintained a significant, but very unpublished military base, with full agreement and cooperation of the Israeli government. There we would brief the representatives of their military and government.

  I had no problem informing another government about what we had. It wasn’t a secret we needed to keep anymore. In fact, it was soon going to be our goal to make sure the story of the facility and the aliens became common knowledge. I wondered if they would help unlike my own government. Both Jeff and the General thought they would. We had nothing to lose by giving them the opportunity.

  He had a change of clothes for each of us. Also new identification. All of us would be officially military from this point on. Mike and I were majors, and Naiya was a lieutenant. All of us were in the same organization as Jeff, which would minimize interest and questions from any other military we might encounter while on the base. I noted Jeff has gotten a promotion. He was changing into a colonel’s uniform. I asked him about it.

  “Just for show,” he replied. “We wear what seems to be appropriate. A little extra rank seems in order for this meeting, so I get a temporary promotion. Even if the promotion were real it no longer matters. I will be out of the military completely however this turns out.”

  I wondered if that bothered him. It didn’t seem to, but he was better at concealing his feelings than I had realized. His boss was giving away his career to help us as well. I just hoped it wasn’t in vain.

  Once we were all dressed in the appropriate uniforms, none of which were new I noted, Jeff gave us a brief overview of where we would be heading and what to expect once we arrived at the military base here in Berlin. There shouldn’t be any issues or questions we would have to deal with as the flight we would be taking was an existing bi-weekly run, and today he had made certain that no one besides our group would be scheduled on the plane. That meant we would have the flight to ourselves, and could dispense with the fake identities once we took off. Where we were going they already knew we weren’t military.

  ---------------------

  We passed through base security without any difficulty. With our uniforms and clearance identification we hadn’t anticipated any problem. Our identification badges and supporting orders were as real as they could get. Issued by the same office that provided the identification for every American on the base, we had nothing to worry about. No one even asked to see a copy of the ‘orders’ Jeff had supplied each of us with. Since we had valid badges for the base, it would have been rare to be questioned, but Jeff had seen it happen.

  While we waited, Jeff made a call to the flight line and requested transportation for us. I was very surprised by the number of U.S. military personnel here. I had thought the U.S. military presence in Germany, and Europe in general for that matter, had significantly decreased the past few years. If it had, I wondered what this place had looked like a few years ago. Jeff returned and led us down a long hallway that opened at the far end onto one side of an immense paved area. Multiple buildings and airplane hangers were scattered around the periphery. Planes sat parked around the outside of the hangers. Some of the hangers were surrounded by fighters. Others had an assortment helicopters, while still others had transport planes of various types and sizes. All the planes in this area appeared to belong to the United States, although I could see Air Force, Navy, as well as Army markings on the sides of the various fuselages. The only planes I could identify by name were a couple of older F-4 phantoms. I suspected I would have recognized a B-52, but I didn’t see anything that large as we made our way across the busy tarmac. Vehicles scooted back and forth seemingly at random as we made our way across the open expanse. Only a couple of planes were in motion, slowly taxiing their way down the field heading toward the runways that were out of sight from here.

  The battered mini-bus dropped us off at one of the concrete block hangers a third of the way around the field. Jeff led us directly to an older looking plane sitting outside the open hanger door.

  “C-130,” Mike noted as we followed behind Jeff who continued up and into the waiting plane. As we entered the relative darkness of the plane, I could see that the pilot and crew were not yet present. Unconcerned, Jeff turned into the cargo area of the plane and showed us how things worked. The back third of the plane was filled with pallets strapped to the floor of the plane. The pallets were stacked with boxes that were in turn wrapped with red restraining nets. While the boxes were labeled in large black letters, everything was in terms of some military designator number, and gave no indication of the true contents. We might be flying with scrambled eggs for the base exchange, or it might be some form of class A explosive.

  Seating wasn’t going to be up to airline standards either. Three rows of eight seats were mounted on a steel pallet that attached to the deck of the airplane in the same manner as the cargo pallets further back. It was situated approximately ten feet back of the entryway. I could see the pallet could be easily removed to make room for more cargo. The seats were more like canvas supports than nicely padded and comfortable recliners found in the airlines. The seat belt even looked like something the pilot would use, with oddly shaped clamps and rotating buckles to hold us in.

  “It looked to me like this plane had Air Force markings?” I asked Jeff when I had the chance. I wasn’t too comfortable with any Air Force at the moment and had been surprised. I had expected we would be flying one of the Army vehicles. Probably something secret supplied by his boss.

  “They are the bus drivers,” he responded. “It’s actually the low key approach for now. The pilot only knows he has a certain number of authorized passengers. He doesn’t know or care who they are. People use the service all the time. It’s a boring assignment. When we come home afterwards, we will be using a different means. Then you will be using some of the less publicized assets.”

  I had to assume he knew what he was doing. This was so far out of my previous experience it was difficult to place in any meaningful perspective. In one sense I wondered why we were here at all. We wouldn’t be participating in the recovery. It might have been better for them to run the recovery and bring the weapons to us at some designated location. On the other hand, we needed to be where certain people couldn’t find us, and as Jeff had explained we needed to explain to some people about the complex and convince them of the seriousness of the alien threat. They wanted to see us, and judge for themselves what we were claiming.

  I could hear footsteps on the stairs outside. Jeff turned and made his way forward where he talked briefly with the two pilots that had only glanced in the back and settled into the cockpit. He handed them the authorization papers. They had either been briefly or really didn’t care who or how many were in back. The lead pilot simply handed the clipboard to the co-pilot who in turned noted the
weight and then set it in a slot off to one side. To them we were cargo.

  Jeff returned to the back and showed us where the facilities were and a bin where they stored food and water against our getting hungry along the way. The water was in liter sized plastic bottles, the same you can buy almost anywhere these days, and the food was MREs. How delightful! Fortunately we had just completed a large breakfast, so I doubted anyone would be partaking of the first class offerings this trip.

  A few minutes later it was time to strap in. Jeff took the empty seat next to Mike. Naiya and I were at the other end of the first row. When the engines started I could tell there wouldn’t be much talking on this trip. The roar coming through the side of the plane wasn’t muffled by any sound-proofing, and made it so one would have to yell to be heard. Jeff reached under his seat and pulled out a pair of ear protectors. I did the same, half expecting them to contain some form of intercom. Not on this luxury flight. I guess passengers weren’t expected to have too much important to say. At least the sound was muffled. I leaned back and took Naiya’s hand in mine. She had finished putting on her muffs as well.

  Time passed and not much happened. The plane roared and bounced and rattled its way to our destination. The only window was a small round porthole in the door we had entered when we boarded. I tried to sleep, but wasn’t able to even dose in the uncomfortable machine. A little more than eight hours later we landed at Site 57, wherever in hell that really was.

  Chapter 58

  Site 57, Israel

  Saturday, 14 October 2006

  2000 Hours

  We came to a stop after what seemed like several hours of maneuvering around the runways. I think we could have driven here from Germany and arrived about the same time. The flight itself was long, and the endless taxing at the end of the flight made it seem much longer. We were already burnt out from the days of flying before starting today’s trip. Finally the plane jerked to a halt and the engines wound down and stopped. The sudden silence was remarkable. The plane creaked and groaned as it settled in place, reacting both to the changing load distribution and the change in temperature on the ground as compared to what we had experienced at altitude. The pilots were still going through some kind of shutdown checklist and coordination with the tower when Jeff pushed open the door for us to exit. Jeff informed us that our few belongings would be collected for us, so we had no need to wait until the loadmaster arrived for the removal of the cargo.