The Forever Engine

by Frank Chadwick

  Just before sleep closed my own eyes like the curtain after the final act of a play, I heard Gordon come back into the light. He rousted O’Mara and Melzer and had them post sentries.

  Good.

  I slept a dreamless sleep. I almost always did. I can hardly recall the last time I had a dream I remembered, other than that dream I had of Gabrielle the night in Munich. People who experience combat are supposed to have all sorts of tortured, violent dreams. I knew a few guys who did and a lot more who just didn’t talk about it, so I have no way of knowing. When I first got home from Afghanistan, I had some pretty nasty dreams, but not about what actually happened. They were sexual dreams, very vivid, and very violent. Just having had them made me ashamed, made me wonder what sort of creep I really was. Those dreams went away after a while.

  A few years later I used to have a dream where I was in bed and Joanne was beside me, asleep, still alive. Joanne was my late wife, Sarah’s mother. Nothing happened in the dream. I’d just be in bed and Joanne was beside me. When I woke up, she wasn’t there. I’d touch the bed where she had been, just to make sure she hadn’t gotten up to go to the bathroom or start breakfast, thinking maybe all the rest of it was the dream. But the bed was always cold. I only had that dream a few times, at least that I remember.

  After a while I stopped dreaming altogether, or at least stopped remembering my dreams.

  Some people think dreams are a window to your future. If so, I didn’t have a future. Either that or the window was closed pretty damned tight. Personally, I don’t think dreams mean anything, which is probably why I don’t remember them.

  Gabrielle and I woke in the predawn twilight. The fire was lower, but the sentries had fed it during the night, kept it alive. I don’t know which of us woke first, but both knew by the change in breathing of the other that we were awake. Gabrielle rolled over and faced me, eyes only inches from mine. Her face was streaked with dirt and wood smoke, her hair loose and tangled, and she frowned slightly in concentration, searching my eyes for something, I don’t know what. I’m not sure she knew.

  “Are you thinking about your daughter?” she asked after a while.

  “No. I was thinking about a different little girl.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “She was an orphan. She was physically awkward when she was young, not very good at sports or games, and the other girls always chose her last for teams. She felt like an outsider—unloved and unneeded. She wanted friends but did not make them easily, didn’t ever really understand the ease the other girls felt with each other. It was as if everyone else had been told a secret withheld from her. Or perhaps she hadn’t been paying attention at the right time, when everyone else learned it.

  “Her best friend was a doll, or maybe a stuffed animal, I’m not sure which.”

  “A doll,” she said quietly.

  “She found it much easier to bond with the doll than with other children. She could imagine the doll loving and understanding her, while the other children did not.

  “The other girls resented the order and discipline of the convent, but she liked it. She liked its predictable, unchanging routine. She thought the nuns would value her more for that.”

  “They did not,” she whispered.

  “No. Maybe that’s why she left. Leaving the orderly routine of the convent must have been unimaginably hard, the hardest thing she ever did, but she did it. She had determination and courage. She grew into a beautiful, intelligent young woman, and as she did, her physical awkwardness disappeared. But she never felt as if she belonged. Even in the company of others, she was always alone.”

  Tears welled up in her eyes, but I saw no other sign of emotion in her face. She wiped her eyes and sniffed.

  “I have never told you this. I have never told anyone this. How do you know these things about me?”

  “You think the world is divided into you and then everyone else, but it isn’t. There are lots of people who have gone through exactly what you have. It’s a mental condition. No, that makes it sound like a sickness, and it isn’t. There’s nothing wrong with you, Gabi, not one goddamned thing. You’re as close to perfect as God makes us. It’s just a slightly different way the brain is organized in some highly intelligent people.

  “Napoleon had the condition. So did a lot of great people in history, and some pretty amazing people in my own time. There was a guy named Albert Einstein, he went on—will go on—to become the greatest scientific mind of the twentieth century. He had it. It’s called Asperger’s syndrome.”

  “Asperger’s syndrome?” she asked. “What does it mean? Why has no one told me this before?”

  “Nobody figured it out until the 1940s, and even then a lot of people weren’t convinced until decades later. But it’s real. I mentored three doctoral students with the condition, all of them unique individuals. They shared some traits, though, and their childhoods were remarkably similar. The physical awkwardness in youth, the social awkwardness throughout life, the difficulty empathizing, sometimes hypersensitivity to noise, fascination with order and routine, sometimes liking to collect things or study things in minute detail—”

  “When I research a subject,” she broke in, interest growing in her voice, “I find out every detail I can. I fill notebooks, carefully organize them. I have a system I use to label them.”

  “Sounds right to me.”

  “Napoleon had this condition? You are certain?”

  “Well, judging from what we know about his life and behavior, it’s a pretty good bet.”

  “He was very lonely as a boy, was he not?”

  I brushed a lock of hair from her forehead and touched her cheek.

  “Yes, he was.”

  “It is real, this thing?”

  Is it real? My thoughts went back to a cocktail party, one of those joint things designed to bring all the humanities faculty together. Schwartz from the psych department had me backed into a corner, berating me about how there was no such thing as Asperger’s. Patel, also from psych, wandered over, his drink crowned with a small paper umbrella. The caterers did not provide those but Patel always brought his own.

  “Is Schwartz on about Asperger’s again?” he asked. “One more drink and he will start in on how there is no such thing as post traumatic stress disorder.”

  Schwartz turned on him. “It’s a fucking symptom cluster!” he shouted, jabbing with his index finger for emphasis, sloshing scotch from his glass. “It’s not a fucking disease!”

  “Ho-ho!” Patel said, rocking back on his heels, pleased at the reaction he had provoked. “Ho-ho!”

  I wasn’t a psychologist; I was an historian. What did I know about what was and wasn’t real? I knew that if only one person did something a thousand years ago, it never happened, but if ten million people did it, it was a historic trend. What was and wasn’t real depended on what we noticed, and then what we decided to call it.

  Symptom cluster? What did Schwartz know? Hell, life was a symptom cluster.

  “It’s as real as anything else I know,” I told Gabi.

  She was quiet for a while, absorbing it all.

  “There is a cure for this?” she asked finally, a tiny sliver of hope showing like a line of light under the tightly closed door of her inner sanctuary.

  “Gabi, it’s not a disease.”

  Her eyes wandered past my shoulder, her mind somewhere out in the glowing purple of the morning sky on the eastern horizon. Maybe even farther than that.

  “I see.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  October 10, 1888, The Lim River valley, Serbia

  We’d camped in the shade of a wood which stretched up the slopes of the foothills to the north and east. The ground opened up behind us down to the river, and I had a good view of Priboj, across the river and about a mile to the southwest. Its stucco houses with tile and shingle roofs sprawled along the riverbanks and up a ridge gray with granite outcroppings. Smoke rose from the town, thick smoke from burning buildings here an
d there, but I saw no other movement. There might be a few people moving around down there, but there sure weren’t a couple thousand.

  Refuse dotted the meadow along the river on the far bank—a cart, bundles of possessions, pieces of clothing fluttering in the light breeze, and silent lumps I took to be bodies. The number of bodies suggested a panic rather than a mass slaughter. No one stopped to bury those people, but we buried our own dead that morning.

  Two of the missing Bavarians were still alive, having climbed into a tree and spent the night there. Three of the Bavarians and one Marine were dead, and their bodies weren’t in good shape. I didn’t know the Bavarians, but the Marine was the youngster named Kane, the one who took a shot at the wolves back in Uvats, and who lost his lunch when he saw the bodies in the building.

  We’d started out with thirty-six people, and less than a day after stepping ashore at Uvats we were down to twenty-five. This was turning into a massacre.

  And we hadn’t gotten to the bad guys yet.

  Fear and depression showed clearly in the faces of the men. In my opinion, the Bavarians were finished. They’d taken most of the casualties and, between the dead buried here and the wounded sent back with the steamer, they were down to about half strength. They all had to be thinking about their chances of surviving day two of this death march.

  It might have been different if Melzer were more of a leader, but he wasn’t and I didn’t expect him to suddenly “find himself” in the crucible of combat. I didn’t think there was much there to find.

  Gabrielle and I ate a breakfast of tinned bacon, ship biscuit, jam, and sweet tea. The Marines cooked and shared with us, so in true British style the bacon was hardly warm. I knew it was sort of cooked before it went into the can, but it was still gross. It was nice of them to share, though, so I smiled and choked it down. Gabrielle didn’t seem to mind.

  “The weather turns cold,” she observed. “We will use up fat to climb the mountains.”

  From a fuel point of view, I didn’t have an argument. Other than that she didn’t have much to say over breakfast. She sat quietly with her thoughts, which wasn’t surprising. I’d given her a lot to process.

  Work details recovered the abandoned weapons and packs, and we leveled the supplies between those of us still standing. Corporal O’Mara walked across the trampled camp area with a rifle in each hand, stopped by us, and held them up for me to see.

  “Which one suits you, sir?”

  “I’ll take the Mauser.”

  “Don’t want poor Kane’s Lee-Metford?”

  “Your section shot off a lot of rounds last night. Split Kane’s ammunition up between your men. I’m betting there’s plenty of Mauser ammo to go around.”

  He looked at the Mauser and smiled ruefully.

  “Well, you’re right about that, sir, although I wouldn’t say it too loud. The Fritzes are a bit touchy this morning.”

  I took the Mauser, opened the bolt to eject the chambered round, and caught it in the air. It sure wasn’t the classic 8mm Mauser cartridge I was used to. It was bigger than I expected, fatter, and a good three inches long, most of which was brass. If it were loaded with modern propellant, this thing would shoot through stone walls, and probably break my shoulder, but I remembered the cloud of smoke over the Bavarian firing positions at the seawall and the smell of the fight last night—black powder. There was a slight neck-down in the cartridge, so slight I wondered why they bothered, and a round-headed lead slug that had to be 11 or 12mm.

  The long cartridge case was rimmed, center-fire, and stamped with “MÜNCHEN” on the base along with a couple numbers that didn’t mean anything to me, maybe lot numbers.

  There was no box magazine at all.

  “So, how does this thing work?”

  “The bullet comes out ’ere, sir,” O’Mara said cheerfully, touching the muzzle with his finger. “Beyond that you’ll have to ask a Bavarian.”

  O’Mara returned to his men, and not long after that Gordon joined us. I had the feeling he had waited until we were alone. He asked Gabrielle’s permission before sitting on the grass beside me.

  “I am concerned about the Bavarians,” he said.

  “Good. You ought to be. I think those animals are all that kept them from slipping away in the darkness last night. How are you going to keep them moving?”

  “They are Germans, after all, a martial race bred to obedience. You don’t think they will simply follow my orders?”

  I considered tackling the notion that people were bred pretty much like dogs, but what was the point?

  “No, I don’t think so. Not for long, anyway.”

  “What do you propose?”

  I pointed across the river.

  “Priboj looks deserted. I wouldn’t be surprised if the other towns and villages around here were as well. Whatever’s going on, it’s not limited to the Bosnian side of the border. Even if someone sees us, the authorities probably have their hands full. Originally we planned to move mostly at night and avoid the towns. I think we can stop worrying about running into the Serbian Army; they’ve got bigger fish to fry. You got your map?”

  Gordon pulled the map from his map case and spread it on the ground. It was about fifteen miles from Priboj to Kokin Brod, most of it over a mountain road.

  “We planned on moving at night and off the road to avoid detection. I don’t think we have to worry about that,” I said.

  “Near as I can tell we’re less than a mile from this first town, Pribojska Spa, just past this woods. I say we push through the woods to there and pick up the road. We’re also almost out of water, so we need to find some. If spa means the same thing in Serbia as it does everywhere else, it may have natural spring water and we won’t have to boil it, but either way we find some there. Another mile to this village—what is it? Banja?—then up the road five or six miles to that last village before Kokin Brod.”

  “Kratovo,” Gordon said, craning his neck to read the map.

  “Whatever. That puts us almost halfway to Kokin Brod, and it’s mostly downhill from there. We spend the night there and finish the march the next day, or hold up there a day and scope things out. The thing is, it gives us an objective for the day that ends up with us under roofs and behind walls. That’s got to sound better to the Bavarians than this.”

  “They might think marching back to Uvats is better still,” Gordon said.

  “Well, if that comes up, you could point out that you’ve got the only translator, so good luck explaining what happened to the Jandarma when the Turkish Army shows up.”

  Gordon smiled for the first time.

  “Yes, there is that. Very well, we will march to Kratovo today, and then we will decide how to proceed after that.”

  The Bavarians weren’t happy, but then who was? The important thing was they marched, and they kept their muttered complaints in German. Less than an hour through the woods brought us to the outskirts of Pribojska Spa. The town clung to the sides of a small valley and the mass of the mountains rose abruptly behind it, like a backdrop, covered with forests the color of dusty jade. The grain of the mountains ran from northwest to southeast, and our road to the east would take us along the foothills for a mile or two and then up and across.

  A bubbling spring near the road let us replenish our water without having to enter the town. There were still people in Pribojska Spa. I caught occasional movement in a window, a door moving slightly to give someone a view, but the locals kept their distance. We weren’t in uniform, but we didn’t look like we came from around here. We looked armed and dangerous. The town was large enough to at least have police, but they were either gone or hiding as well. In a way, this was good for morale. It was spooky, but the feeling someone was afraid of us made the men feel more confident.

  The road meandered, following the increasingly rocky and uneven foothills. Another hour of marching took us to Banja, a narrow string of whitewashed stucco houses, barns, and outbuildings sprinkled along either side of the road. We
were greeted by a musket shot at two hundred yards—obviously a warning rather than an attempt to do genuine injury.

  “What do you think?” Gordon asked.

  The men had spread out into a skirmish line, easily finding cover in the broken ground, and so far they had followed the order not to return fire. The Bavarians stirred restlessly, though, eager for a fight. No, they were eager for an easy fight, a cheap shot at redemption for having run the previous night. A ramshackle mountain village defended by some guy with a rusty musket probably sounded like the ticket.

  “I think we skirt the village to the north. If whoever’s in the village tries something, we’ll see it coming, have the high ground.”

  “The Bavarians seem anxious to prove themselves. I wonder if it might not help things if we give them their heads.”

  I avoided looking at him. He wouldn’t have liked what he’d have seen in my eyes.

  “Worst case, there are a dozen armed men in there who tear the Bavarians apart once they get in close, kill or cripple half of them and break the spirit of the rest. Best case? A bunch of murdered villagers, probably a few rapes. Or maybe that’s the worst case and a bunch of dead Bavarians is better. Except they’re your men. It gets complicated.”

  Gordon took off his cork helmet, scratched his scalp, and squinted up at the rocky ridge north of the village.

  “You think you’re so bloody superior,” he said after a moment.

  “Next time I tell you a story, I’ll make sure there are butterflies and kittens in it.”

  He glared at me but said nothing.

  We climbed the slope and made our way past Banja. The Bavarians grumbled until we got to a promontory with a good view down at the place. I called O’Mara and Melzer over and we squatted there on the granite, picking out the barricades by some of the walled gardens, the groups of two or three armed men moving from house to house, keeping us under observation. It wouldn’t have been the easy fight it looked like from outside. That gave the Bavarians something to think about.