by Mayer, Bob
Moms considered that. “The avalanche is part of history. So it happens. And, in fact, it is the event that spurs the survivors to—” She paused, realizing she was going past the twenty-four-hour window she could speak of.
Correa seemed to understand that. “Then it must be about the beast. It will do something that changes things.”
“Yes,” Moms said. “Most likely.”
“It cannot just be coincidence the beast is here on the day the avalanche will occur,” Correa said.
“I agree.”
“Then we kill it before it attacks the survivors.” Correa pulled the blanket up around his chin and leaned over, melding his body into Moms’s.
She didn’t protest.
His voice was barely a whisper. “You have not told me your name, my friend.”
“I’m called Moms on my team.”
“Ah. Madre. It is a strange name to be given by your team.”
“It is a strange team.”
“There is a sadness about you,” Correa said. “A pain.”
“I recently lost a good friend,” Moms said.
“Ah.” Correa was silent for a moment. “I too lost someone recently. My lover.”
“I’m sorry,” Moms said.
“Death is part of the cycle,” Correa said. “We move on to a better place after this life, do we not?”
But it wasn’t really a question and not something Moms felt like delving into.
Correa patted her on the back. “You are a good person. I can tell.” And then he fell silent.
So Moms sat in the remnants of a plane, staring out, looking for a monster, with a handsome Argentinean man leaning against her, his warmth sinking through the blankets. She tried to remember the last time she’d been next to a person and felt their warmth. And she couldn’t.
Her mission had just begun, and already Moms had battled a creature of legend.
Nothing but good times ahead.
Not.
Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, 1980. 29 October
Eagle wasn’t there, and then he was there, but he’d sort of always been there. It was the best way to explain how he arrived, becoming part of his current time and place without fanfare or excitement among those around him. He was in the bubble of this day, not before, and hopefully he wouldn’t be here afterward.
“It’s hard to remember your mission was to drain the swamp when you’re ass deep in alligators,” Eagle muttered as he pushed through the knee-deep cold water and boot-sucking muck.
“Shut your trap, Ranger,” a dark figure ordered in a Southern drawl.
Eagle focused on two little spots of luminescence, cat eyes sewn to the back of the patrol cap on the man in front of him. Eagle lifted one foot out of the mud and pressed forward. He had no idea where in the patrol formation he was, what his position was, or what the mission was.
He would, no doubt, fail this patrol.
Not that he cared, since he wouldn’t be around for the end of it anyway.
But Eagle still had some professional pride. He’d earned his Ranger tab a long time ago, which was actually years in the future and . . .
Eagle shut down those confusing thoughts.
A tall, slender black man, Eagle’s head was completely bald underneath his patrol cap. The left side of his head was etched with burn scar tissue, the gift of an IED in Iraq almost a decade ago.
One thing he knew for sure: He was too old for this crap. Ranger School was for the young and dumb and hardcore. Eagle liked to think of himself as older, smarter, and more laid-back.
Those who knew him would say he had the first two of three right, but he might give Edith Frobish a run for the money in terms of uptightness.
He wondered when the next headcount came down the line whether he would be an extra man, or if he was already factored in somehow? How the hell did this whole time travel thing work?
The Administrator had been light on some of the details, but very positive Eagle would be assimilated in with no trouble. In fact, there was supposed to be someone here from the Time Patrol to help. Eagle suspected Dane was light on details because there was a lot the Administrator didn’t quite know himself.
The Ranger patrol was deep in the Florida swamp, somewhere on the Eglin Air Force Base in the panhandle. (Where, exactly, Eagle had no idea, another no-no for a Ranger student.) It was after midnight, and Eagle had just under twenty-four hours to accomplish his mission, the details of which were also rather vague, other than, apparently, making sure a plane crashed. Being a pilot, Eagle was bothered by this.
A lot.
Eagle lifted his foot up once more and was surprised to strike dry land. A hummock in the middle of the swamp, a haven of higher ground.
And their next patrol base.
Which meant—“Headcount.” The word was whispered by the cat eyes in front of Eagle, who dutifully passed it to the silhouette behind him. Knowing he had to make a decision in mere seconds, Eagle debated whether he should add his number to the count that would come back up the line, or to keep himself out of it.
He was here, so when the man behind whispered “Seven,” Eagle passed forward “Eight.”
Someone, most likely the assistant patrol leader, came by, put his hand on Eagle’s shoulder, and pushed him in a direction. “You’re there. Cover between there and there.” Eagle could barely make out the hand waving in the darkness, but he sunk down and took up a position, resting his M16 on top of his rucksack and scanning the assigned field of fire.
Ranger School.
Again. Eagle sighed.
This was going to suck.
The big figure who’d told him to shut up came over and knelt next to him in the dark. “I’m Master Sergeant Hammersmith. The next patrol is y’alls.” The accent was deep South, something even years in the Army traveling around the world can’t wash out.
Great, Eagle thought. He didn’t even know exactly where they were.
“Get your poncho out,” Hammersmith ordered.
Eagle took it out and Hammersmith pulled it over both of them. Then he turned on a red lens flashlight. In the glow, Eagle could see he was a bull of a man, with a red face and the veins of a drinker splayed across his nose. A drunken redneck Ranger Instructor, Eagle thought.
Great. Could it get any better?
Hammersmith opened up a map. “Y’all don’t know where we are, do you?”
Eagle opened his mouth, but before he could respond, Hammersmith pointed at the map with a twig held between dirty fingers. “We be right here, son,” he said, alluding to a spot in the big splotch of green that was the Eglin Air Force Base reservation in the Florida panhandle. The terrain was almost completely flat. Eagle remembered that during this phase of Ranger School, the last navigation was primarily by compass azimuth and pace count.
No GPS. It would be a decade before that was initially used by the military in the First Gulf War.
Eagle bristled at the “son,” but it was better than “boy.” He tried to remember what his pace count was, but it had been a while. He pulled out his compass and put it on the map, but right away knew something was wrong.
“Yeah,” Hammersmith said, noting the arrow spinning about uncertainly, never settling into north. “That’s been going on for a couple of hours. Not good.”
“You ever seen this before?” Eagle asked as he considered possibilities.
“No,” Hammersmith answered succinctly.
“Magnet nearby?” Eagle asked.
“No.” Hammersmith seemed pretty certain. “Something weird is going on in the swamp. I assume it has something to do with your arrival. Forget about that for now. We got to move using pace count and what few terrain features we got. Plus I’ve been crisscrossing this area for years so I know it well. Good news is, direction we want to go in, is mostly dry, ’cept for a few stream crossings.”
Hammersmith moved the twig, sliding it across the map. The direct path crossed a couple of streams, which Eagle knew indicated they were going
to get wet. It was about forty-five degrees and near the end of October, so that wasn’t going to be fun.
“You got Bob Sikes Road as your left limit,” Hammersmith said. “Means we gotta get down in this crud. We loop this way,”—he moved the edge of the twig to the right and down—“we only gotta cross one stream. They come together here. I know a spot. Kinda easy crossing but poor fields of fire.” He moved on. The twig stopped at an airfield set among the green. Two long runways met at an angle with a connecting taxiway near their bases. “Wagner Field.”
Eagle took a hard look at Hammersmith. “How do—”
“Lots of history at that there airfield,” Hammersmith told Eagle, while pointing with the end of a twig at the triangle of runways on the map. “March of ’42, ole Doolittle hisself brought his raiders there. Trained them to take off in a short distance, just like they was gonna do the next month off the Hornet when they bombed Japan. Can still see tire marks where they burned rubber on the tarmac, cranking those old birds to full power, then releasing the brakes. Those marks have lasted longer than the men who made them.
“Then right after the Big War, they tested some flying bombs they copied off the German V-1, launching them in this field, here, off the airstrip. Abandoned now, but some rusting launchers are still there. Use them as objectives sometimes for the students. Those old-timers used Nazi scientists for that ’cause after the war, the Russkies were the enemy. Kinda strange ain’t it, how yesterday’s enemy is today’s buddy, eh?” He didn’t wait for an answer and Eagle began to suspect there was more to Hammersmith than his first impression. “Airfield been abandoned for a long time though.” He looked up at Eagle. “Until lately. Been off-limits for a bit.”
“So,” Eagle finally said, “you’re my contact.”
“Yeah. Surprised, ain’t you, son? Takes all kinds to keep the timeline ticking. I ain’t gonna ask you when you come from. I don’t want to know dick about the future. That would fuck with my head and my head’s already kinda fucked up. I done two tours in ’Nam and sometimes I don’t think so straight. And I know you’re here only for twenty-four hours, so let’s not be dicking around. Let’s get this done. I don’t suppose you know what this is about?”
“You know what’s happening at Wagner Field?”
“Yeah. They’re testing a modified C-130 for short landings and takeoffs. Almost Doolittle like, which I kind of find interesting. I gotta assume it’s got something to do with the cluster fuck in the desert back in April. Know some fellows from the Battalion who were in on that. So maybe we’re going to be trying again? And you’re here to make sure that happens.”
The last sentence was said not as a question, and that was enough warning for Eagle to keep the details of today’s history from Hammersmith.
“Sort of,” Eagle said.
“Fuck me to tears,” Hammersmith said, and Eagle could only think of Nada saying the same thing, so many times. The Ranger Instructor was no fool.
“We gotta stop it, don’t we?”
Okay, Eagle had seriously underestimated the Time Patrol agent. “Yes.”
Hammersmith was silent for several long seconds. “Then that’s the mission.” A soldier accepting his duty. “Do we have to kill any of our own?”
“No.” Hope not, Eagle amended silently.
“All right.” Hammersmith nodded. “I can live with that. Time to get real.” Hammersmith shrugged off his rucksack and opened it. He dumped a sack on the ground. “5.56. Live ammo. Take the damn blank adapter off your weapon and lock and load. I’ll be your assistant patrol leader and I’ll navigate for you. The rest of the men have live ammo in their rucks and I’ve already passed the word to load up.” He slapped his own rucksack. “We got one M60 with eight hundred rounds of 7.62, claymores, some LAWs, grenades, pistol ammo. One of the fellas got an M21 if we need to pop someone at distance. Oh yeah, two M203s with fifteen HE rounds each.” He held up a shotgun with a short box magazine. “And I have my Lola. SPAS-12 shotgun, loaded with slugs.”
Eagle processed the inventory: Claymores were anti-personnel mines; LAWs were light-anti-tank weapons; an M21 was a sniper rifle. Live ammunition. The M60 was a medium machine gun, good firepower. The M203s were M16s with a 40 mm grenade launcher slung under the barrel. And there was Lola, a semiautomatic shotgun.
So they were prepared for battle.
It is 1980. OPEC raises the price of oil by 10 percent. A record number of viewers tune in to find out who shot J. R. Ewing. The Polish government recognizes Solidarity. An Australian baby disappears from a campsite near Ayers Rock, reportedly taken by a dingo. Richard Pryor is badly burned trying to freebase cocaine. Mobster (and Goodfella) Henry Hill is arrested for drug possession. An inmate convicted of murder in 1911 is released from prison after 68 years and 245 days. Tito dies. The US government bails out Chrysler.
Some things change; some don’t.
Eagle was starting to feel better about this mission, but Hammersmith put an end to that flicker of optimism. “We might not have to kill any of our own, but that don’t mean this is going to be a cakewalk. I been in these swamps for years, sonny. Grew up down here. Walked many a patrol so I can get us the airfield. But things ain’t right.” He nodded out toward the dark swamp. “There’s something out there. Something that don’t want us getting to that airfield. Something bad, real bad. Evil-like. And it’s between us and the airfield and whatever it is you gotta do.” He paused. “I don’t suppose you can tell me what it is exactly you gotta do?”
“No, Master Sergeant.”
Hammersmith sighed. “Figured.” They were still for a moment. “Can you tell me this at least, for my peace of mind since I’m putting my life, and the lives of my men here, in your hands. Are they capable hands? Can you give me an idea of your background? I assume this ain’t your first shit in the woods?”
“I graduated Ranger School,” Eagle said. “And I’ve been deployed four times in two different conflicts that—well, let’s say that are coming down the road. Served in the first Ranger Battalion in Special Forces and then I served in a classified unit I can’t tell you about, but it dealt with evil-like stuff. Stuff most people don’t think exists. Stuff that goes bump in the night. We were, are, the force that protects the world from that evil.”
Hammersmith’s white teeth shone in the red light as he smiled. “Well, damn, sir. Sounds like you’re just the man to lead this here patrol.”
He turned off the flashlight. They emerged from underneath the poncho and stood up.
Hammersmith became formal. “Let me know when you want to move out, sir.”
Eagle took a deep breath.
This was going to suck worse than doing Ranger School again.
Manhattan, New York, 1929. 29 October
Ivar wasn’t there, and then he was there, but he’d sort of always been there. It was the best way to explain how he arrived, becoming part of his current time and place without fanfare or excitement. He was in the bubble of this day, not before, and hopefully he wouldn’t be here afterward.
Today was a day of reckoning and the world was never, ever, going to be the same.
One way or the other.
But, Ivar mused as he walked down Wall Street, just after midnight, in the dark on October 29, 1929, was that a good thing or a bad thing?
As a Nightstalker he’d sympathized with Doc’s concern about the rest of the team’s shoot and kill first, understand later philosophy.
Not very scientific and a bit presumptuous.
Having experienced multiple Ivars during the Fun in North Carolina, he’d found himself having arguments inside his own brain and with echoes of other Ivar brains, which doesn’t make much sense to outsiders.
You had to be there.
He’d never told anyone, especially Frasier, the Nightstalker shrink, about the anomaly, because he had a feeling a padded room somewhere deep under Area 51 would be his immediate destination. Perhaps followed by his brain being removed and studied.
The
Nightstalkers were nice people and all, but those they worked for and with, not so much. Ruthlessness was an integral part of that world. Ivar didn’t know it, but he was about to step into another world just as ruthless, if not more so.
They’d been wrong about the Rifts. Ivar wasn’t surprised no one discussed that fact, because the Rifts were no longer a problem. But the Nightstalkers had always treated the Fireflies that came through the Rifts as the enemy, when in fact it was now apparent that whatever was on the other side of the Rifts simply wanted to make sure no more were opened from our end into their timeline. Especially since the first one we opened back in 1947 sent the Demon Core—a subcritical mass of plutonium—to the other side.
Not the best way to make an introduction to another timeline.
Now they were trusting this guy Dane, the Administrator, and his statement that our timeline was threatened by another timeline trying to adjust history, making ripples leading to a shift, perhaps leading to a time tsunami.
But what if the changes were for the better?
That was an issue Dane had shot down at the first mention, not allowing discussion or debate, which meant the Time Patrol wasn’t much different than the Nightstalkers.
Of course, trained as a physicist, Ivar knew any significant timeline change, aka a tsunami, would probably lead to him, and everyone else, snapping out of existence. Then again, there were other possibilities, but . . .
Ivar refocused on his here and now, because even he remembered the various Nada Yadas and one had something to do with “theory later, staying alive now.” A parallel to “shoot first, inquire later.”
It was early in the morning and the streets were pretty much deserted. It was surprisingly dark for downtown Manhattan, but Ivar had to remind himself of the year; thus the bright lights of Manhattan weren’t so bright. Ivar paused as a couple of shadowy figures appeared down the street, walking through a fog toward him.