Black Tuesday (Area 51: Time Patrol)

by Mayer, Bob

  The team spoke together. “Sergeant Major Edward Moreno.”

  Edith Frobish had seen this before, in New York when the team paid its respects to Kirk after he was killed by a Valkyrie. She bowed her head out of respect.

  “We, the Nightstalkers,” Moms continued, “have seen many things and been many places. We don’t know the limits of science and we don’t know the limits of the soul. If there is some life after this, or some existence on a plane we can’t even conceive of”—at that, Moms gave a glance toward Edith—“then we know Nada is there, in a good place. Because that is what he deserves for performing his duty without any acknowledgment and for making the ultimate sacrifice. If there is nothingness in death, then he is in his final peace and will not be troubled any more by the nightmares of this world having fought them to his death.”

  There was a moment of silence before Moms continued.

  “He is buried at Arlington, in a place of honor. He died on a mission for the Time Patrol. Changing an event in the past so the present would be a better place.”

  When she paused, Eagle spoke up. “He died so that Kirk could live. A different life, but a life where Kirk takes care of his family.”

  Moms continued. “He leaves behind a wife and daughter we never knew of. As Nada always insisted, we take care of our own. His family will not do without. They will be protected by the Nightstalkers to our death.”

  There was a silence, broken only by Scout sniffling and holding back her sobs. Finally, the youngest member of the team spoke through her grief. “All we can do is keep him in our hearts.”

  “In our hearts,” the rest of the team, and Edith, murmured.

  Then Moms did as she regularly did. She reminded them. “Why are we here? Because someone has to man the walls in the middle of the night. The walls between the innocents who go to sleep each night with only the troubles they see in their lives. Normal troubles. Who know little, if anything, of the dangers, the nightmares, surrounding our world. Who need people like us to stand watch over them. To protect them from”—Moms paused—“the Shadow. And the forces it sends against our timeline. Trying to obliterate us and everyone we know, and everyone we love, from existence.

  “We fight against things like the Valkyries and the kraken and whatever else is sent against us. We’ve defeated Fireflies and shut Rifts. We’ve stopped the folly of man destroying our own world with nuclear weapons.”

  And then she intoned the lines that the deceased Ms. Jones used to remind the team of every time they came back from a mission when they were battered and hurting and wondering if it was all worth it.

  “We are here,” Moms said, “because the best of intentions can go horribly awry and the worst of intentions can achieve exactly what it sets out to do. It is often the noblest scientific inquiry that can produce the end of us all. We are here because we are the last defense when the desire to do right turns into a wrong. We are here because mankind advances through trial and error. Because nothing man does is ever perfect. And we are ultimately here because there are things out there, beyond mankind’s current knowledge level, which man must be guarded against until we can understand those things, as we finally understood the Rifts and the Fireflies and our role in that. We must remember this.” Moms took a deep breath. “Can we all live with that?”

  Everyone, Edith included, nodded.

  “Impressive,” Dane said. He was in an open door on the other side of the room, entering unnoticed during the ceremony. “You have my condolences on the loss of your teammate. He died bravely and for good cause.”

  “I saw his grave,” Scout said, surprising everyone.

  “When?” Moms asked. “How did you make it—”

  “In a dream,” Scout said. “I saw it at Arlington. A young girl was there. Isabella. His daughter. She was grieving. It was in 2005.”

  An uneasy silence settled over the team room.

  Dane was the first to speak. “Sin Fen said you had a touch of the Sight.”

  “And what is that?” Scout asked.

  “To see things others can’t see,” Dane said. “To see back in time. Sometimes even get visions of what might be. To see possibilities and realities and memories you shouldn’t have.”

  “Where does it come from?” Scout asked.

  Dane shrugged. “We’re not sure.”

  “Bull,” Moms said. “You know more than you’re telling us.”

  “Let’s focus on the mission,” Dane said, once more raising the shield of mission first, information second. “We don’t have much time before launch.”

  Moms indicated the team members and their outfits. “Just because we’re dressed right doesn’t mean we’re going to fit in.”

  “True,” Dane acknowledged. He held up a device they had all seen before—the memory blocker Frasier had used to unlock Edith’s memories, and Nada’s. “This does more than block memories and restore them. It also downloads knowledge. Language, directly into your brain so that you can immediately understand and speak a particular tongue. All you’ll need to know about the place and time you will be going to. It can be a bit overwhelming, but remember, you should have an agent in place who will assist you. Each agent is from the time and place you’ll be going, so that gives you extra cover.”

  “Should we know each other’s missions?” Moms asked. “Doesn’t that violate security?”

  Dane shook his head. “Your missions run simultaneous to each other. And”—he paused, as if considering how to broach the subject—“the Shadow is already ahead of you. We know the date and the years because agents close to the years have reported the beginning of ripples. Your job is to stop those ripples.”

  “I don’t get it,” Mac said. “If the Shadow has already changed things, aren’t we too late?”

  Dane sighed. “There’s a lot we don’t understand. The best I can explain these ideas are in the way the scientists explained them to me, and I don’t think they know as much as they think they know.”

  “Ain’t that always the truth,” Roland said with a glance at Doc, a rather amazing cutting observation coming from Roland.

  “The day each of you are going to,” Dane said, “is like a bubble. A bubble in time. It doesn’t matter what happens during the actual day; what matters is the result at the end of the day. Is the result the same or is the result different? Right now, agents are picking up ripples of possibilities. But the bubble is still there.”

  “That’s why this is called the Possibility Palace,” Edith threw in, gaining her an eye roll from Scout.

  “Your job is to make the result the same as history recorded it,” Dane said.

  “We just show up?” Ivar asked. “Isn’t that going to be obvious?”

  “No,” Dane said. “It’s a bubble where all before and all after are question marks. You’ll arrive being part of what you come into. The only one who will know you’re ‘new’ will be the Time Patrol agent who should be there to meet you.”

  “‘Should’?” Scout said.

  “Should,” Dane said. “The vagaries of the variables.”

  “You sound like a politician,” Scout said.

  Dane stared hard at her. “I do the best I can.” His head dropped for a moment, as if accepting Scout’s take on things. “The problem is, we’re not sure exactly what the Shadow is doing to change the past. We’re pretty sure of the events for each of you. Well, almost all of you.”

  “Which are?” Moms asked.

  “That’s the briefing I’m going to give you now,” Dane said. “Before you go to get downloaded and infiltrated through time to your objective.”

  “Isn’t that backward?” Eagle asked. “Shouldn’t we be downloaded before you brief us? That way we have the knowledge base?”

  Dane shook his head. “And that way you start heading down the wormhole overwhelmed with information. Remember, information is not intelligence. We know where and when you’re going so that gives us the most likely key event the Shadow will try to manipulate, but I
want to emphasize that you must keep an open mind. If we cloud your brain beforehand, there’s a danger you’ll get tunnel vision. Also, you won’t know how to sort the information that’s going to be poured into your head into intelligence you can use.”

  That satisfied Eagle and the rest of the team.

  Dane walked to the blackboard. He wrote:

  1618 AD—ENGLAND

  He pointed at Mac. “As you already guessed, Elizabethan England. The 29th of October, 1618, is the date on which Sir Walter Raleigh was executed. You’ll get all the details on the execution and why it happened and his background during download. The most obvious thing the Shadow could do is prevent the execution. So it’s possible that isn’t its plan at all. It could be misdirection for a number of other things on that day, like an attempt on the life of King James the First, who succeeded Elizabeth. Also, that year was the start of the Thirty Years’ War, which ravaged Europe. It’s doubtful any single event occurring on that day could stop that war, but who knows?”

  “Helpful,” Mac said in a tone that indicated it wasn’t helpful at all.

  Dane gave a wry smile. “It’s why we recruited the Nightstalkers. The best of the best and all that.”

  “Blow smoke somewhere else,” Moms said.

  “It’s not smoke,” Dane said. “You’re Special Operations, and as Nightstalkers you’ve been involved in events far beyond that which ordinary people can even fathom as you yourself just said in your touching ceremony honoring your team sergeant. We trust your judgment. It’s why we recruited you.” From anyone else it would have seemed patronizing, but they could all sense Dane’s sincerity. He was a warrior like them, tested and forged in combat.

  No one had anything to say to that, so Dane wrote on the board:

  1972—ANDES MOUNTAINS

  “Moms, as you can tell by your outfit, this is yours. On the 13th of October in 1972, Uruguayan Flight 571, carrying forty-five passengers and crew, crashed in the Andes. Twelve died immediately in the crash and five the day after and another on the 21st. On the 29th, your day, an avalanche sweeps over the crash site, killing another eight.”

  “Alive!” Eagle said, emphasizing the word, and referring to the bestseller written about the event.

  “Indeed,” Dane said. “Two of the survivors eventually make an epic ten-day journey over the mountains to get rescue.”

  “You’re skipping over the anthropophagy,” Eagle said.

  “Huh?” Roland said.

  “Ditto,” Scout added, earning an appreciative glance from Roland.

  “Cannibalism,” Eagle explained. “They ended up having to eat their dead in order to survive.”

  “Oh,” Roland said, and it was obvious he was ponderously rolling the implications of that around in his brain.

  “I don’t get it,” Moms said. “Am I supposed to stop the avalanche? Actually, make sure it happens? Isn’t it an act of nature?”

  Dane shrugged. “Again, your call once you’re on the ground. We know the avalanche happened. Perhaps it’s the goal of the Shadow to stop the avalanche? Keep one of those who died alive? Or something completely different. Make sure none of them survived the avalanche?”

  “Great,” Moms said.

  Dane ignored that and wrote on the board once more:

  1929—NEW YORK CITY

  “Duh,” Ivar said. “That was the easy one.”

  Dane agreed. “Black Tuesday. The implications are huge. The world, not just the United States, plunged into the Great Depression that lasted until after World War Two.”

  “I doubt the Shadow could stop that from happening,” Eagle said.

  “Wait a second,” Ivar said. “What if it could? Would that be a bad thing?”

  Dane stared hard at Ivar. “When we recruited you, I gave you a choice. Whether you would go back and change something in the past if you could or whether you were willing to move forward. That was a personal choice. You have no choice now. Our timeline must be maintained no matter what you think or feel.

  “Additionally,” Dane continued, “our timeline exists and is functioning. Maybe not perfectly, but let me tell you something.” An edge had crept into his voice. “We’ve learned what happens when things don’t work. Worlds where humanity has been wiped out. We’ll take what we have right now over possibilities of making things ‘better.’ Because you have no idea what changing things will unleash. Say the Shadow stops the Great Depression? What then? Maybe there’s no World War Two. Or maybe there’s a delayed World War Two and both Germany and the United States develop nuclear weapons. But the Germans have the rocket capability to reach targets in America and the US can’t reach Germany?” Dane shook his head. “Maybe this and maybe that.” He pointed at Ivar. “The creed of the Time Patrol is to maintain our timeline at any cost. If you don’t like that, you can remake your personal choice and be gone from here.”

  Ivar put his hands up defensively. “Whoa. Listen, I was just throwing out an idea.”

  Dane took a deep breath, and then turned back to the board, ending that discussion. He wrote:

  1980—EGLIN AIR FORCE BASE

  “Not Ranger School,” Eagle said. “I did it once. Not again.”

  “I did it too,” Dane said. “A long time ago. And it kept me alive in Vietnam. You will be going to a Ranger patrol, but only because your objective is on the Eglin reservation: Operation Credible Sport.”

  The team turned to Eagle, expecting his vast trove of information would spill forth with what Dane was referring to, but for once he came up blank.

  Dane continued. “Earlier in 1980, on the 24th of April, an attempt was made to free the hostages in Tehran.”

  “Operation Eagle Claw,” Eagle said.

  “Yes,” Dane said. “It failed. Eight servicemen were killed.”

  Every member of the team who’d been in Special Operations before the Nightstalkers knew about Eagle Claw. It was the start of the Special Operations Command and many other changes in the military. It was part of their legacy.

  “Even though it failed,” Dane said, “the military did not give up. A task force was—” He paused as a door opened and one of the nondescript people in gray came in without a word and handed him a thin folder. Dane opened it, read, grimaced, wrote something, gave it back, and then the person was gone.

  “Bad news?” Moms asked.

  Dane ignored her. “A task force was formed to come up with another mission to rescue the hostages. Operation Credible Sport was to be that second rescue attempt.”

  “But there wasn’t a second one,” Eagle said.

  “Exactly,” Dane said. “Credible Sport failed during preparation. Because of the helicopter failures of Eagle Claw, Credible Sport involved retrofitting a C-130 transport plane with rocket engines to allow it to land and take off from the short field inside a soccer stadium across from where the hostages were being held. On the 29th of October, they were conducting the last test at Wagner Field on the Eglin Reservation. Up to that point, everything had worked perfectly. Every takeoff and landing on spot. It looked like the plan was a go.

  “As the plane was attempting to land on this last test, the braking rockets were fired too soon while the plane was still in the air and the vertical rockets didn’t fire. The plane slammed into the ground and the right wing broke off. The plane caught on fire. No one was killed, but the project was scrapped. There was no second rescue attempt and the hostages were released just after President Reagan was inaugurated later that year.”

  “So the Shadow is going to try to make that last test a success?” Eagle asked. “Have the rescue mission be a go?”

  “Again,” Dane said, “we don’t know. But it’s the most likely scenario. We’ve projected several possibilities: What if the second attempt succeeded and the hostages were rescued? What if the second attempt failed during the mission in a disaster that dwarfed Eagle Claw? The plan called for gunships to support the assault. There is the possibility hundreds, if not thousands, of Iranians might have bee
n killed in the attempt along with the hostages and the rescue forces.”

  “How did the braking rockets get fired too soon?” Eagle asked, focusing on the technical aspect and leaving the what-ifs to Ivar and Doc.

  “Two versions,” Dane said. “One is that the flight engineer manually fired them too soon. He denied that, of course. Lockheed engineers working on the project claim it was an electrical malfunction, which caused the braking rockets to fire early and the descent-braking rockets not to fire. Regardless, the plane crashed.”

  “All right,” Eagle said.

  “Again, though,” Dane said, “stay open to possibilities.”

  “Of course,” Eagle said dryly. “Possibilities. Vagaries.”

  “Listen,” Dane said, “most people think history is written in stone. But history is part of perspective. You’ve heard the saying that the victor writes history? Expand that to realize that humans write history. And those doing the writing are rarely objective. They approach it with an angle. Sometimes we know what happened but we don’t know why it happened. Sometimes we don’t know how it happened. Does that make sense?” Dane looked around the room, meeting each member of the team in the eyes. He got a nod from each one, some more reluctant than others.

  “So keep an open mind.”

  Dane looked at Scout, a faint smile on his lips. “I remember when women wore clothes like that. It was a different time. An exciting time, but also a time filled with tragedy, especially after all that happened in 1968—Robert Kennedy and King assassinated. Tet. That was a bad year.” The smile was gone and his gaze was a bit unfocused, but he quickly got back on task. He wrote on the board:

  1969—UCLA

  This time Eagle beat him to the punch. “ARPANET.”

  “Most likely,” Dane acknowledged.

  “English,” Scout said.

  “Advanced Research Projects Agency Network,” Eagle said. “Established under DARPA.”

  “Oh,” Scout said. “I get it now. Not.”