The Maids of Chateau Vernet

by Steven Landry

  “It’s a rigid hull inflatable boat, or RHIB. Better suited for open water than the kayaks, especially through a storm like that.”

  “You’re soaked,” Sarah said.

  “But alive.”

  Simone peeked her head out of the cabin, followed by Nora. The members of Team Two were anxious to hear news of their families. “Couverture?”

  Simone nodded, disappeared for a minute, and came back cradling a woolen blanket. Sarah draped the fabric over Hiram’s shoulders.

  “Thank you. Let’s talk somewhere private,” he said. Sarah led him into the Captain’s day cabin located behind the bridge.

  “The plan’s a bust. Since there’re only eight of you, we don’t need this big ship. We’ll keep heading down the coast for a couple of hours, then disable the ship. We’ll take boats ashore and find a good hiding place for your team until I figure out our next move. I assume you’ve already disabled the ship’s wireless set?”

  “Yes, and the backup we found as well,” she replied. “But what are we going to do about our families? Where are they?”

  “According to a guard we questioned, they were shipped to Drancy two days ago.”

  Sarah slumped into a chair as her chest tightened. Her voice waivered as she held in her tears. “But you said we had two weeks to rescue them.”

  “I know. Your escape may have escalated the timetable.”

  “What are we going to do? We can’t let them die.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything we can do for them just yet. I don’t know how…” Hiram trailed off and drifted toward the map fastened to the wall of the cabin. “Unless, we can end this terrible war.”

  “What are you saying?” Sarah joined him at the map. The edges were worn, preferred routes permanently traced on its surface.

  “We have to stop the war,” he touched Auschwitz on the map. “Before they end up here. It won’t be easy.”

  “A nineteen-year-old Serbian managed to start the Great War all by himself,” Sarah said. “You have thirty maids to help stop one. You’ll figure something out. I need to go brief my team.”

  Sarah left Hiram staring at the map and returned to the bridge, where Ester and Maria watched the bridge crew. She brought both women out onto the flying bridge where they could watch the sailors without being overheard. Neither was happy with the news about the change in the timeline. Nor were any of their Team Two comrades.

  * * *

  Towards eight o’clock, the lights of the Costa Brava, Spain’s Mediterranean coast, came into view. An hour later, they ordered the Captain to stop the ship, then herded the entire crew into the forward cargo hold, locking the door after them.

  Hiram pulled one of the collapsed inflatable boats out of his tinderbox and assembled it on the deck. He reached into his pack again, this time two net bags full of rope emerged. One of the bags spilled onto the deck and turned out to be a ladder made of a material Sarah hadn’t seen before. “Nylon,” he replied as she bent to touch it. “A synthetic material.” The second bag contained a large coil of rope. Using a complicated-looking knot, he secured both the rope and the ladder to a bollard and threw the other end of the ladder overboard. It stretched down to the sea, then slowly swung aft as the ship drifted with the current. As Hiram passed out life vests, Sarah peered over the side of the boat. She didn’t like the thought of making that descent at all.

  Hiram tied the inflatable boat to one end of the rope with separate knots before tossing it overboard and climbing down. He tied a rope from the bow of the soft inflatable boat to the stern of the motorized RHIB.

  Maria climbed down next, then Sarah. She made it down about ten feet when her foot slid on the nylon ladder. Unprepared, she plummeted into the cool water. The instant her head slid beneath the surface, her life vest inflated. She popped back up to the surface, thankful for Hiram’s insistence on wearing one. Sarah had never been a strong swimmer and even the flotation device did not extinguish her fear as she drifted away from Hiram and the M.V. Calais.

  The six remaining members of Team Two settled into the boats without a problem. Sarah bobbed a few feet away and tried to control her breathing as she watched. Until at last, Hiram hauled her into the RHIB.

  “Thank you,” she sputtered, spitting out the salty water she’d taken in from the few small waves that had caught her by surprise.

  “Can’t lose my only scientist.”

  Hiram tapped an icon on his C2ID2 while yanking on the rope and ladder. Both came tumbling down into the water. She helped him gather them up and stuff them back into their net bags.

  The RHIB towed the smaller boat toward shore. Grateful to reach the rocky beach after the rough day at sea, Sarah jumped out into the shallows and fought to get the boat out of the surf and up on shore.

  Hiram signaled her to take charge while he packed up the boats.

  “Perform a weapons check and get formed up,” she said. “We still have a couple hours’ march ahead of us. But don’t worry, it’s all uphill.” The women muttered a few curses as they adjusted their packs for another exhausting exercise. Sarah felt their pain.

  They headed up the rocky slope, Hiram taking point. He led the tiny column of maids-cum-soldiers off into the darkness.

  12

  A temporal artifact of May 6, 2050

  Hiram craved a hot cup of coffee and decided to get it from the coffeemaker in his pod. The Turkish coffee reminded him of his late Mossad spotter Jacob. He insisted on a cup first thing in the morning, unlike his parents, who had emigrated from Istanbul in the 2020s where tea had been a more prominent staple. Hiram remembered Jacob telling him about the collection of teas his father had given him before their last mission. Jacob had stored them in his pod just in case he had a hankering for “a nice feminine, flowery blend while destroying the stinking Pakistanis.” Hiram smiled. Maybe his new soldiers would welcome a flowery cup of tea. Deborah probably enjoyed tea. Once he made it back to the campsite in France, to Deborah and the teams left behind, he’d retrieve the tea collection from Jacob’s pod.

  Hiram took another sip of his coffee. Jacob’s pod! Why hadn’t he thought of it before? He set down the small cup, unfinished. He located Jacob’s pack and the portal within it. Jacob’s pod was not a standard IDF-equipped pod, but rather a Mossad-equipped unit, which had been outfitted for the mission to Wah. Hiram removed Jacob’s C2ID2 unit from the pack and activated Jacob’s portal.

  The moment Hiram began his descent into the dead man’s pod, his head began to ache. The sudden pain surprised him enough that he almost lost his balance on the ladder. His feet touched the floor and he reached out to the nearest wall to stabilize himself.

  He had never gone through to a second pod from within a pod. As the space around him spun, he wondered if anyone had tried such a thing. The familiar effects of Hagar’s Curse seemed accelerated, almost ten-fold. Before the pod could do any permanent damage, Hiram reviewed the items inside. He worked as quickly as his body would allow. In less than five minutes, Hiram found a cache of state-of-the-art surveillance gear and the one item that might end the war, before the Jews now concentrated at Drancy stepped on to one of the death trains headed to the extermination camp at Auschwitz. At the far end of the pod, a Mark XII hyperbaric nuclear weapon sat nestled in a cradle.

  With his weapon of choice identified, Hiram climbed out of Jacob’s pod and into the one he had been assigned. His stomach roiled with relief. The intensity of pain in his head took a step back. It still felt as if he had been in the pod way too long. Without delay, Hiram climbed out of his pod and into the warm morning air.

  Hiram found a place to rest in the shade of a scrubby pine tree. He slowed his breathing, tried to calm himself while his stomach settled and the pain in his head dissipated. Close by, he heard Sarah talking followed by an outburst of laughter from the others. The sound brought with it a source of comfort.

  When the small words on Jacob’s C2ID2 display stopped blurring, he searched for the operating manual
on the Mark XII. He confirmed the weapon’s permissive action lock code was stored on the device, and copied the eleven character PAL code and the manual into his own C2ID2. He wouldn’t need Jacob to operate it. The only thing left – get it out of Jacob’s pod.

  Massing ninety kilograms, the Mark XII was designed to be carried short distances by two strong men. A pulley system came with the device that could to be used to lift the sixty by thirty-centimeter overpack up through the portal. Once he set the pulley up in his own pod, Hiram could drag the Mark XII over to a location beneath the portal and hook it up.

  The link between the portal in Jacob’s pack and the Mossad-equipped pod existed in a temporal artifact of 2050. Hiram couldn’t be sure that the link would be maintained if he were to bring Jacob’s pack out into the real world of 1942, and he wasn’t sure the link could be reestablished once it was severed. Once his head and his stomach were almost back to normal, Hiram went back into his pod and then into Jacob’s to extract the single Mark XII.

  Twenty-three agonizing minutes later, the Mark XII and several pelican cases of advanced surveillance gear sat in Hiram’s pod. Hiram closed the portal to the Mossad pod and stored Jacob’s C2ID2 in a storage cabinet. He climbed out of the pod as quickly as he could, his cup of coffee forgotten.

  The warm air hit him hard. He fell to his knees and expelled the contents of his stomach onto a patch of grass. Specks of red dotted the mess. The pain in his head screamed and the world around him spun. When he tried to stand, the ground seemed to fall out from under him.

  * * *

  0715 hours, Sunday, July 26, 1942, Catalonia, Francoist Spain

  Hiram stumbled into Team Two’s campsite, deep in the hills north of Canyet de Mar. His soldiers prepared breakfast in a small clearing among the tall oaks, the smell turning his stomach. Most had not slept that night. Red eyes and worn, sullen faces disclosed evidence of tears shed for family and friends. He wanted to get back to Danette and to Deborah. He wanted to hold Deborah in his arms, to feel her warmth as he explained what his meddling had done to the timeline. For a moment, he imagined running away from all of it with Deborah and Danette running alongside. Saving three lives seemed so much simpler than thirty. He shook his head in an attempt to lose such thoughts.

  He found Sarah sitting next to Ester, holding the older woman’s hands. When Hiram approached, Sarah patted the other woman’s hands and then got up. She rushed to him. He felt her arm slide around him.

  “I think I have a way to end this war quickly,” he said as he leaned into her. “Walk with me.”

  “You aren’t going anywhere. What happened?” She said.

  “Nothing. It doesn’t matter. I need to talk to you.” He looked around at the others now standing, ready to help. “Tell them I’m fine.”

  Sarah said something to the others. They hesitated but seemed to fall back into their previous positions. She helped him sit down on one of the fallen logs.

  “Have you ever heard of the strong nuclear force?”

  “Of course,” she said as she sat down beside him. “It’s the force that holds the nucleus of an atom together.”

  “Right. And in a few years the Americans will discover a way to release that force. They will develop something called an atomic bomb, which will end the war. One bomb with the explosive power of 20,000 tons of TNT.”

  “That’s enough to level a city!” Sarah said.

  “It is,” Hiram said.

  Vera brought Hiram a cup of water. She said a few words to Sarah, who seemed to reassure her that Hiram was, in fact, fine.

  “But how can you know this? Surely your friend the journalist wouldn’t be privy to such things.”

  The cool water helped. “No, it’s one of the few secrets the Americans actually manage to keep during this war.” He held up the cup. Vera came back, refilled it. The others watched the conversation.

  “So how do you know?”

  “Because I lied about coming from America. I came from Israel, by way of Pakistan and India.”

  “Israel?” Sarah let out an awkward laugh. “Israel hasn’t existed as a nation for two thousand years.”

  “Israel will become an independent nation again in 1948. I was born there, in the town of Nazareth, in the year 2020.”

  She shook her head. “Impossible.” Her eyes moved back and forth across his face, searching for truth. “You’re telling me you’ve travelled back in time? I-I don’t believe it.”

  “I’m a soldier in the Israeli Defense Force, or at least I was,” Hiram said. “I don’t know how it happened, but six weeks ago I was on a mission to the city of Wah in India. I went into my pod on May 15, 2050 and came out on May 15, 1942.”

  “Impossible,” she said again. “Time travel is impossible.”

  “And yet here I am. With technology from a hundred years in the future.” Hiram pointed to the small cache of M22s leaning against a fallen tree trunk a few feet away. “Including the pod and all it holds.”

  “You mean your magic tinderbox of death and destruction. Tell me exactly what happened to you.”

  He sat up straighter, the pain in his head easing. “As I said, I was on a mission to destroy a weapons facility in Wah, Pakistan”

  “I’ve never heard of Pakistan,” Sarah said.

  “After the war, the British will grant independence to India, however the Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims won’t be able to live in peace. After a civil war, India will split into three pieces, with Muslim Pakistan in the west, Hindu and Sikh India in the middle, and Muslim Bangladesh in the east. Pakistan and India will become bitter enemies. In my time, Pakistan falls under the control of a bunch of radical extremists called the Taliban who swear to use Pakistan’s atomic weapons to destroy Israel. So, we sent a small team with our own atomic weapon to destroy their main production and storage facility.”

  “And you were on that team?”

  Hiram nodded. “We ran into more resistance than expected, and the rest of the team was killed. I barely made it back into the pod before our bomb went off.”

  “And then the portal was open during detonation, when all that energy was released?”

  “It makes sense. Give me a moment.” Hiram checked his C2ID2, which had recorded both the countdown for the bomb, and all openings and closings of the portals in the pod. “According to my C2ID2, the portal closed within a second of the detonation.” He used the display unit to show Sarah data from the two countdowns, one ticking down to the detonation, and one ticking up to record Hiram’s dwell time in the pod.

  “What happened next?” Sarah said.

  “I tried to leave the pod through a portal that should have taken me back to Israel, but it kept returning ‘destination not found’. Eventually I had to leave the pod. You can only stay in one for a few hours. So, I went back out the way I entered, only to find myself in British India, in the year 1942.”

  Sarah stared down at the ground. Hiram sipped some water. After a few minutes, she shifted her gaze back to him.

  “Before the war, Einstein and his colleague Nathan Rosen published a paper about something called ‘worm holes’, shortcuts through space-time. All of the scientific speculation since has been about travelling through space or between universes, but what if they can also be used to travel through time, particularly when hit with a healthy dose of nuclear radiation?”

  “I’m just a soldier,” Hiram said. “I know how to use the thing, but I’m no expert on how it works. If it helps, I can give you a copy of the pod’s manual.” He handed her the C2ID2 and told her how to pull up a copy of the document.

  Sarah scanned the information on the screen. “For the moment, let’s say I believe you. If you’re from the future, then you know what is going to happen.”

  “Not anymore. The timeline is changing. According to the history I know, the Jewish prisoners in F and J Blocks were shipped to the camp at Drancy in late August, not mid-July. I believe rescuing you and the others accelerated the timeline.”

  �
�Why did you rescue us? I assume the story about Danette’s cousin is also a lie.”

  “My name is Hiram Jonah Halphen.” Hiram looked down at his hands. “Danette is my great-great-grandmother.”

  “I thought I noticed some resemblance.”

  “My father told me Danette’s story. She is the spitting image of my sister Rachel. After ending up in this time and with no way to get back, I figured I might be able to do some good. I decided I wasn’t going to let her die in one of the camps. Getting the others – you included – out of there was the right thing to do.”

  “And the story about shipping the inmates from Drancy to Poland, is it true?”

  “It’s historical fact. Or at least it was. Hitler’s Final Solution will nearly succeed in wiping out all the Jews in Europe.” He took the C2ID2 back from her and scrolled to a history of the Holocaust, required reading for all IDF personnel. “Six million Jews die in the camps; another six million undesirables follow if we don’t stop it.”

  “And you have a way to stop it?”

  “There’s a weapon in my pod similar to the atomic bomb I talked about before. It’s much smaller, more efficient and more precise than the original American device. And, we can replicate it many times. It’s called a Mark XII hyperbaric nuclear weapon.”

  “Assuming that I believe you have this powerful weapon, how do you propose to use it?”

  “We’ll have to drive the Nazis out of France first. Then, we force Germany to surrender.”

  Sarah laughed. “That’s your plan? Thirty of us to destroy a force hundreds-of-thousands strong. That must be some bomb.” Almost two million Nazi soldiers protected the western front. Then, add in the Vichy and Italian Fascist forces. Sarah’s numbers seemed insignificant, but he doubted this was the time to correct her.