by David Evans
“Where’s the special weapon?”
“I don’t know.”
“There’s only four. Do we take them now?”
Brian looked at her. “We let that U-boat submerge first. That should get this bunch into the trees where they can’t hear us close on them.”
Up to that point it went exactly the way Brian planned it. He and Dianna moved soundlessly through the undergrowth and came to within ten feet of the German agents and Clive Beattie. Then Brian stepped down on a dead branch. Its crack sounded as loud as a gunshot.
“Was ist das?” came a guttural demand.
“Gar nichts. Ein Tier,” responded Beattie.
“If it’s an animal, it walks upright on two legs,” the suspicious Nazi countered in rapid German. “Look over there. That is no animal.”
Starlight barely outlined Brian Moore. It proved enough to encourage instant response from the enemy agents. Three shots cracked loudly in the cricket-filled night. Fortunately for Brian, the Germans were poor shots. Especially with handguns in the dark. In contrast, Brian had the advantage of evolution and training to give him superior reflexes and gun-handling ability.
With a solid, flat report, the Webley in Brian’s hand spat a slug at the nearest enemy agent. With a soft groan, the man went to his knees. Brian fired again. The Luger dropped from the Nazi’s hand. To Brian’s side the air sizzled and gave off a tinge of ozone as Dianna fired an Attenuated Lazer Pistol at another German.
Virtually silent, the futuristic ALP operated on a microbattery with a built-in chip that allowed it to recycle in under a quarter second. She had cleanly bisected her target, both sides of the wound completely cauterized. The still-living upper portion of the German continued to live long enough to fire a 9mm slug at Dianna. The blue-green light lashed out from her hand almost immediately.
Deprived of a head, the Nazi agent ceased to function and fell to the ground, behind his lower half. Dianna changed her point of aim. Neatly severed from the trunk, a branch fell on the back of Clive Beattie, who had the moment before bolted from the encounter. It knocked him flat on the ground.
“Oh, damn,” Dianna spat.
“You weren’t trying for him, were you?” Brian asked as he sighted in on the last Nazi. He fired a fraction of a second later.
Before he went down screaming, the German got off a round that burned a hot line along the left side of Brian’s rib cage. Then the suppressed Walther PP dropped to the bed of leaves and its owner clutched his belly.
“Liebe Gott! Das verlessen ist,” he whimpered. It must have hurt a lot, because a moment later his groans turned to piercing screams.
Brian closed on him, while Dianna checked the other men. “Help me,” the German begged in English. “Don’t let me die.”
“Too late, I’m afraid.”
“Brian, the first one you shot has gotten away,” came Dianna’s unwelcome report.
They quickly found that, ignored by them, Clive Beattie had also escaped. They stood in silence a moment. In the distance they heard the blundering crash of the fleeing pair. Without the slightest consideration for the seriously wounded Nazi, they started off as one in pursuit.
It took only a short time to close the distance. Immediately, shots ripped through the night. Brian and Dianna heard only polite coughs and the crack of bullets. Not even muzzle fire revealed the shooters. The Temporal Wardens dived for cover behind looming tree stumps.
“Split up and keep low,” Brian advised. “If they get beyond the trees, meet me at the car.”
Twelve minutes later, Dianna Basehart approached the car at a brisk walk. “We lost them,” she summed up the evening’s operation.
“Yes, I suppose we did. Any idea where to find them?”
Dianna nodded down the road. “There can’t be many cars out at this hour. Not with the threat of air raids.”
“You have a point. I caught a brief glance of our quarry when they pulled away. Beattie has a big, black Austin four-door sedan. He can’t make very good time, those things have governors on them. They have been gone only five minutes. I say we go after them.”
Seated in the MG touring car, they drove off at high speed. Tape had made tiny horizontal slits of the headlight beams, which cut dizzying swaths along the black tarmac of the roadway. In five minutes they caught sight of dim red slices in the distance, hurtling along the highway in reckless haste. Brian lifted his left hand from the floor-mounted gearshift and pointed.
“That has to be them. No one else has reason to be speeding like that.”
A weak tone answered him. “Speak for yourself, Whitefeather. I’ve never gone so fast in anything with wheels in my life.”
“What about your Hov-V?”
Impatience joined the pain in Dianna’s voice. “It’s a ground-effect car, Whitefeather. It has no wheels.”
Brian protested, “I’m only doing seventy.”
“My God! We’re going to die.”
Brian snorted through his grin. “By the end of the twentieth century, race cars routinely ran in excess of two hundred miles per hour.”
“On wheels?”
“Yes, on wheels. Of course, they raced on closed tracks, not out in open traffic.”
Dianna scrunched down lower in the bucket seat and pointed forward. “You’re getting sort of close, aren’t you?”
Brian returned his gaze to the road. The high, rounded back of the Austin sedan loomed large only a dozen car lengths away. Suddenly the entire of the windshield spider-webbed and a hole appeared between the occupants. They had to be using suppressed weapons, Brian reasoned. How could he stay so calm and analytical?
It wasn’t every day someone shot at him. He wasn’t any Danny Danger from the pages of some pulp fiction magazine from the present, nor the hero of a holodisc story out of his own era. These people were seriously trying to kill him… and Dianna, he added parenthetically. So why was he hanging on the tail of this Austin?
Another bullet slammed into the rolled leather padding at the edge of his seat. Dianna leaned out the scooped side of the MG-TC and fired her ALP. It sliced off a neat section of rear fender. Brian had to swerve sharply to avoid it as the metal shard clanged noisily to the pavement and rebounded toward them.
“You’re as dangerous as they are,” he complained.
Tight-lipped, Dianna growled back, “Shut up and drive, Whitefeather.”
Brian drove. Dianna made a try for a tire. Severed metal glowed orange as she cut away a piece of the bumper. The engine of the Austin whined in protest as the vehicle slewed around a corner and began a steep incline. Another bullet cracked by overhead. Brian involuntarily ducked and slowed down. Ahead, the Austin dropped out of sight on the reverse side of the hill.
Then they were at the crest of the steep grade. A small village spread out ahead of Brian and Dianna, nested in a hidden valley, Not a light shone from the houses or lampposts. And they discovered that the Austin had completely disappeared. Brian braked and both Temporal Wardens swiveled their heads left and right in search of the vanished car. He slowed more and took a long look down the road to the east.
No taillights. Dianna looked away from the west and shook her head. They drove on another block. Same results. Dianna cursed under her breath in the long-forgotten language of Babylon.
“How could they have gotten away so fast?” she asked, highly perturbed.
Brian shook his head. “I don’t know. No, wait, I do know. Beattie has a safe house around here somewhere. It can’t be far from where we entered the village. We’ll have to look for it.”
Dawn on the thirteenth of October did not reveal the hiding place of Clive Beattie and the wounded German agent. Brian and Dianna had found only one place with a high wall and a large solid, double gate that suited their needs. They soon learned it belonged to the mayor. Brian looked haggard. He had a stubble of beard, a
gaunt expression, and dark crescents under his eyes. He had been awake for forty-eight hours. He hadn’t eaten since their picnic the previous afternoon on the beach.
Dianna looked hardly any better. She listened to the grumble of her stomach and tapped Brian lightly on his left forearm. “I think we should give it up for now and get something to eat.”
“I’ll agree. You do know that while we’re not prowling the neighbourhood, they can get away again?”
“Yes, but how far can one go in a car with large chunks carved off it?”
Brian brightened some. “Not far without being seen.”
“And remembered. We can track them that way. First, though, we’ve got to get some food.”
“Something to carry along, too,” Brian suggested.
They found a hole-in-the-wall eatery and filled up on bacon and eggs. Brian bought sandwiches and some apples. He picked up bottles of the low-proof Bulmer’s cider and they returned to the street where they had lost the Austin.
A man dressed in a white coat and trousers, with a cart and broom, swept the gutters. Brian stopped alongside and leaned from the MG.
“Have you seen an Austin sedan this morning?”
“Yup. Several of them.”
“How about one with close to two feet of its left-hand rear fender cut off?”
The street cleaner removed his white bill cap and scratched at thinning sandy hair. “As a matter of fact I did, guvner. Looked like it had been done with a razor. Bumper, too. Right funny that.”
“Thank you. Which way did the car go?”
Always helpful, the city employee pointed north. “Toward London.”
Brian and Dianna sped off. They took the most direct route, convinced that their quarry would do the same. When they entered the city, Brian drove only a block before he found a bobby on a bicycle. Again he asked his questions.
“Funny you should mention that. I did see such a vehicle. Why do you ask?”
Brian showed his identification. “Government business. We meed to know where the car went from here.”
Pointing down the street, the bobby complied. “That there’s Bristol Lane. They made a right and drove on, off, never saw the car again.”
“There were two men in the car?”
“Right. They looked somewhat nervous, come to think about it. One of them might have been hurt. Are they army deserters?”
Brian smiled in a friendly manner. “Something like that. Shy of coppers, you can be sure. Thank you, Constable.”
“That explains it, then. Hope you find them.” He peddled away.
“Yeah,” Brian said in a sour tone. “That’s all we have to do—find them.”
They searched through most of the morning. Ten minutes before the noon hour, the black bulk of an Austin came into view through the window of a private garage. Quickly, Brian and Dianna closed in on it. Brian raised on tiptoes and peered inside the building. He turned away to face Dianna with a beaming smile. “We’ve found it. Now we have to take them.”
Time: 1105, GMT, October 13, 1940
Place: Village of Chelmsford, Lincolnshire, England
Brian Moore broke the lock and entered the garage with ease. He went to the front of the Austin and opened the hood. He removed the distributor cap and coil wire, then secured the hood once more. That accomplished, he and Dianna proceeded through a small door in the back to a terraced garden. On the way, Brian picked up a roll of tape. The house fronted onto the next street over, which served to make their search more difficult. Brian motioned Dianna to one side, where a row of evergreen privet hedge would screen her approach to the dwelling.
When she disappeared behind the greenery, Brian took the direct route across the middle of the garden. Bent low, he strode heedlessly over the rows of crops. His shoe soles crushed brussels sprouts, bush beans, parsnip, and turnip tops underfoot as he closed on the safe house. What surprised him more than the well-tended winter vegetable plot was that he met with no resistance. He gained his flagstone terrace without a shot being fired or even discovery. Dianna waited for him there.
Brian nodded to a covered passageway along one side of the house. “You had better go around front in case they try to make a break that way.”
Although she saw the logic of it, Dianna felt it necessary to make protest. “What? And have you grab all the glory? Isn’t the saying this era, ‘Ladies first’?”
Brian gave her a crooked smile with half his mouth. “Not when there’s a chance of some shooting.”
Dianna produced a smirk. “You’ve got a point there.” She left without further comment.
Brian gave her a long ten count and then stepped to the tall French doors. He tried the handle and, true to his expectation, found it locked. No way to avoid making some noise. Brian fetched the tape from his jacket pocket and loosely crisscrossed the pane closest to the knob. Then he took the Webley from his shoulder holster and reversed his grip, holding it by the barrel.
A swift, sharp rap with the butt broke the glass. To Brian it sounded as though he had struck an empty fifty-five-gallon drum with a sledgehammer. He methodically loosened the tape ends and pulled it and the shattered pane away. Ears alert for the least sound from inside, Brian reached through the opening and undid the latch. The door swung inward at his touch. He crossed the room in long strides, only to come to an abrupt halt as he rounded a high-backed wing chair.
“I… had to… make you… come to me,” the wounded Nazi agent gasped out in German. He held a fat-muzzled, suppressed Walther PP in an unsteady hand, aimed at the center of Brian’s chest.
So much for the element of surprise, Brian reflected as he examined the man. Shot twice by Brian, the German had lost a lot of blood. Movement out of the chair appeared out of the question. Certainly he could not have intercepted an intruder. All of this flashed through Brian’s mind in the split second it took him to raise the muzzle of his .45 Webley and squeeze the trigger.
Brian’s ears made ringing protest when the revolver fired. His bullet finished what he had begun the previous night in the wood beyond the beach. An expression of astonishment on the face of the German was accentuated by the hole in his forehead. His pistol canted upward and discharged, which brought bits of ceiling plaster down in a cloud. Brian sidestepped and started for the sliding doors of the dining room. They must give onto the hallway, he reasoned. Brian opened them and stepped out ... into the balled fist of Clive Beattie.
Hard knuckles smashed into the lips of Brian Moore and split the lower one on the inside. Brian tasted the salty-copper flavor of blood. In all his years in the Warden Corps, he had never been hit in the mouth before. The history logs said that the twentieth century had been an era of extreme violence. There had been more people killed in wars and through crime than all past years combined. Six million in the concentration camps by Hitler; thirty million kulaks and Kazakhs in the Ukraine by the Red Army, at Stalin’s command. Sixty-four million were yet to die in Mao’s purges of Red China. Add to that those killed fighting the wars and in the bombed cities, plus victims of violent crime, and it totaled more than the population of the entire world from the time of ancient Rome until the nineteenth century. These random facts unreeled in Brian’s mind while he tottered backward. Clive Beattie came right after him.
Brian hesitantly raised the Webley, his face a work of confusion as he stared into the familiar features of Field Marshal Lord Mountbatten. The next instant Brian had the weapon kicked out of his hand. Beattie knew some sort of martial art it would appear. The rogue traveler followed up his advantage with a knuckle-edge blow to the middle of Brian’s chest. Brian’s legs churned to keep him upright. He managed to duck the next swing and rally his senses.
With a piercing scream, Brian Moore exploded into action. He cocked his right leg at the knee and hip and, rising on the ball of the other foot, snapped the pointed toe of his wing tip to the s
ternum of Clive Beattie. Propelled backward, Beattie stumbled and crashed into the doorjamb. He recoiled quickly, right in time to take an upraised palm to his nose.
A welter of blood flew from the injured appendage and Beattie heard cartilage crumble. Dressed and made-up in the impersonation that would let him get close enough to Winston Churchill two days from now, Clive Beattie knew his Aryan perfection had been ruined. Rage clouded out caution, and he went for Brian with flailing arms. Brian sidestepped and drove a blade hand to the base of Beattie’s neck, instantly numbing the right side of the body. Beattie sagged to one knee. Brian bore in on his target.
A kick between the shoulder blades sent Clive Beattie face first onto the Oriental carpet. Sprawled and breathless, the depraved time rogue fought to fill his lungs. Brian did not give him the time. He dropped with a knee in the small of Beattie’s back and reached for his cuffs.
Steel bracelets clicked loudly as Brian secured his prisoner. He had only started to rise when a sound from the open doorway jolted him into rapid motion. He dived for the Webley and snatched it from the floor. Completing his roll, he came up with the weapon pointed the right direction.
“Whoa! Take it easy, Whitefeather,” Dianna appealed from the doorway, arms raised, palms forward. By one finger she clutched the firing stud guard of her ALP.
“Dianna?” Brian came slowly out of his combat frenzy.
She produced a lopsided smile. “I couldn’t help hearing your friendly encounter. I decided I should pop inside and see how it came out.”
“We have Beattie. At least I think it’s Beattie.”
Dianna crossed the room and rolled the trussed prisoner over onto one side. Her eyes widened. “My God, that’s Lord Mountbatten… isn’t it?”