TimeRiders Page 10

  ‘Was he a good man? A good president?’

  Foster shrugged. ‘If he’d been given more time, from what I’ve read in history books, perhaps he might have been a great president.’

  Liam nodded. ‘Pity.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Information: extraction window approaching,’ said Bob, closing his eyes and retrieving data from his embedded computer. ‘In exactly fifty-nine seconds.’

  ‘We’re going to leave now,’ said Foster. ‘Soon every building along this road will be crawling with police and federal agents. Bob,’ he said, turning to the support unit, ‘place the gun on the floor.’

  He did so.

  The old man led them away from the window of the sixth floor.

  ‘So, how do we get back, Mr Foster?’ asked Liam.

  ‘Any second now.’

  ‘Nine seconds to be precise,’ offered Bob.

  Liam looked about, but couldn’t see any large cylinders of water for them to climb into. Then, all of a sudden, he felt a puff of displaced air on his face. A yard ahead of him he could just about make out a shimmering circular outline.

  ‘Automated return window is now activated,’ said Bob.

  ‘Say goodbye to 1963, Liam.’

  Liam looked around at the storage room, the dusty stacks of school books, and heard the tearful commotion of women’s voices coming from the floor below.

  ‘Goodbye, 1963,’ he uttered obediently, and then followed the other two into the shimmering air, holding his nose and his breath as he stepped forward.

  2001, New York

  Liam felt that horrendous familiar falling sensation. Worse still, he anticipated finding himself floundering around submerged underwater.

  But instead he found himself standing in the middle of their field office, his feet on hard cold concrete.

  ‘Uh?… I thought we…?’ he blurted.

  Foster slapped his back gently. ‘We go out wet, we come back dry. I’ll explain why some other time.’

  Liam spotted the girls sitting at the breakfast table, both holding red and white cans of a fizzy sugary drink called Dr Pepper that they seemed to like drinking copious amounts of. Spontaneously they clinked their cans together and cheered the return of the boys.

  ‘We know exactly where you went, fellas!’ shouted Maddy. ‘Being the pair of complete freakin’ geniuses we are.’

  Foster spread his hands. ‘And?’

  She grinned triumphantly. ‘So, how was Dallas?’

  ‘Well done.’ He smiled.

  ‘I’m guessing you interfered in some way with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. You saved him maybe? But then you must have put it all right again.’ Her face dropped a little. ‘Unfortunately. I’d have liked us to have a mission to Mars on the go.’

  Sal cocked her head curiously. ‘You managed to stop an assassination attempt and then made it happen again… and also found some really disgusting clothes to wear… and you did all that in just under an hour?’

  Foster opened his mouth to answer.

  ‘An hour?’ cut in Liam. ‘We’ve not been gone that long, have we? Ten minutes at the most maybe –’

  Foster chuckled. ‘Time travel isn’t symmetrical, Liam. I could send you to one time location and arrange a return window for fifty years later. As far as you’d be concerned, fifty years would have passed… a whole lifetime. And yet to someone standing here you’d have disappeared as a young lad and returned again just moments later as an old man.’

  Liam shook his head and grinned. ‘Jay-zus, this timeriding thing is making my head hurt, so it is.’

  CHAPTER 28

  1941, Bavarian woods, Germany

  Kramer watched Karl with admiration. The man was a professional soldier, had served with some of the world’s elite special forces and thereafter been a highly recommended and highly paid mercenary. In the troubled world of 2066, there was plenty of work for men like him.

  Karl had been one of the first to be won over by Kramer’s dream of a better world. He’d spoken on Kramer’s behalf to other mercenaries he knew and trusted, men he knew who also longed for a better place, a better time.

  The world they’d left behind was a place that was dying, choked by pollution, strangled by dwindling resources, a world horrendously over-populated and ultimately doomed.

  Who wouldn’t want to leave that behind?

  It had been easy for Karl to recruit two dozen men he could trust for this mission. Every single man he’d approached had been ready to jump at the chance of leaving the twenty-first century for a chance to rewrite the twentieth century. And good men they were, all of them. Very experienced, very disciplined. They all spoke at least two languages, English being their shared language. Most of these men quietly stepping through the snowy woods with well-practised stealth were German, some were Dutch, a few were Norwegian, a couple of them British.

  But… only seventeen of them now. Kramer shook his head.

  We lost seven men just getting here.

  Suddenly up ahead Karl silently raised his hand and made a fist. The men understood the signal and squatted down amid the snow-covered foliage. In their mottled white and grey Arctic-camouflage tunics and waiting perfectly still, they were almost undetectable in the dark.

  Karl turned round and beckoned Kramer forward. He crunched lightly across the snow and squatted down beside him.

  Karl pointed through the trees ahead. ‘Is that it, sir?’

  Kramer craned his neck to get a better look. Up a winding track he could make out a couple of sandbagged machine-gun posts either side of a gravel track and a sentry hut bathed in the light of twin floodlights.

  ‘This is it, Karl.’ He smiled. ‘This is it! Hitler’s winter retreat!’

  ‘Der Kehlsteinhaus. The Eagle’s Nest. It does not appear that heavily guarded.’

  ‘It’s up this one road, perched on the side of a steep hill,’ said Kramer. ‘The building itself is defended by several dozen of Hitler’s personal bodyguards, the Leibstandarte SS. A little further up the hillside, only a few hundred yards away, is an SS garrison housing four or five hundred of them.’ He turned to Karl. ‘They will happily die to defend their leader. Your men will have to be very fast, Karl. The moment the first shot is fired, the alarm will be raised and the garrison alerted.’

  Karl looked back at his men, perfectly still in the snow, weapons ready and waiting for an order. They were expertly trained and well equipped with modern weapons and nightscopes.

  He smiled. ‘My men will get to him. Don’t worry.’

  Kramer wished he shared the man’s confidence.

  Just seventeen of them. If Karl’s men were unable to complete their objective before the regiment-strength SS garrison descended upon the Führer’s retreat, then it would be all over.

  Seventeen against five hundred?

  Even with the advantage of combat technology from 2066, he wondered for a moment if he was asking too much of these men.

  CHAPTER 29

  2001, New York

  ‘Why have you brought us here?’ asked Maddy, looking around the entrance hall of the Museum of Natural History. It was crowded mostly, it seemed to her, with Japanese tourists.

  ‘Because, Madelaine, this building, these exhibits, are what we’re all about.’ He gestured with his hand at the giant skeletal frame of a brachiosaurus looming over them and all but filling the grand entrance hall.

  ‘This is the history that was meant to be. This is the history that you – just like the other field teams – are tasked with defending.’ His eyes drifted down from the giant skull above to rest on them.

  ‘Madelaine – the analyst. Sal – the observer. Liam – the operative… and Bob – the support unit. You’re a team now. And everybody alive today and alive tomorrow is depending on you to keep an eye on the time. This museum records how history is… and it cannot be allowed to change.’

  Foster’s voice carried a little further across the grand hall than perhaps he’d intended, but sinc
e no one else here seemed to speak English Maddy thought it probably didn’t matter too much.

  ‘So, this afternoon, I want you to explore the museum. To reach out and really feel the history you’re defending. I’ll leave you to make your own way around and then we’ll meet back here in the entrance hall at five sharp.’

  They nodded in silence.

  ‘Then I’m taking you guys out to the best ribs and burger place I know. A celebration… Think of it as a sort of graduation party.’

  Liam found the display of dinosaurs breathtaking and was unable to tear himself away from the giant skeletons and the animatronic dioramas. He was soon left alone as the girls and Bob wandered off to view the other exhibits.

  Before he knew it, several hours had passed and he decided to make his way back to the entrance hall to await the others.

  He watched the busy area, full of snapping cameras and quietly whispered family conversations, overexcited children and mewling babies. Not for the first time, he felt a warm glow of gratitude to Foster for plucking him from the bowels of the stricken Titanic, saving him from the worst possible death he could imagine.

  In the last dozen or so days – he’d lost track of how long they’d been here – he realized he was the luckiest person born in the nineteenth century for the things he’d been privileged to see almost a hundred years into his future, and all the amazing things he was yet to see. He grinned like a fool, like a child promised every Christmas present he could wish for.

  His gaze drifted across to a milling crowd beside the large entrance doors. People seemed to be hesitating there on their way out. Curious, he crossed the hall.

  On a podium, a large leather-bound book lay open beneath the glow of a brass reading lamp. Beside it an old security guard with a ruddy face, topped with thick bushy eyebrows and an odd heart-shaped mole poking out from one of them, stood to attention.

  ‘Guest book,’ growled the guard, noticing Liam’s curious gaze. ‘Feel free to sign and add a comment if you wish, sir,’ he added reluctantly. ‘And keep it clean.’

  Liam looked down and noticed the scrawled messages of hundreds of visitors, so many different names, so many languages.

  ‘Keep it clean?’

  The guard cleared his throat. ‘I know what you damn teenagers are like.’

  Liam felt a tap on his shoulder and turned round. It was Maddy.

  ‘Guest book,’ said Liam.

  ‘Oh yeah… I know. I came here on a school trip once and left a dirty poem,’ she giggled.

  The guard scowled disapprovingly, his bushy old eyebrows knotted together, as if he actually recalled the very words she’d written.

  ‘You still archive them?’ Maddy asked the guard.

  ‘We do,’ he replied stiffly. ‘We keep every guest book, down in the basement. We’ve done that since before the beginning of the last century. A hundred years of comments,’ he said proudly. ‘Not all of them dirty poems, neither.’

  Maddy cringed guiltily. ‘Sorry.’

  But the guard was already busy directing a visitor to where the toilets were.

  ‘Go on, Liam. Why don’t you sign it?’

  He looked at her. ‘Uh… will I not change history, or something?’

  ‘I can’t see how you would.’

  He gingerly picked up the pen, attached by a chain to the podium.

  Liam O’Connor, 10 September 2001 – I loved the dinosaurs a lot.

  ‘That it?’ asked Maddy.

  He shrugged. ‘Don’t want to push me luck now.’

  She shook her head and snorted. ‘Ah… there are the others.’

  Liam followed her across the hall, casting one last glance back at the book.

  There, I left me mark on history.

  If he died tomorrow for whatever reason, at least there’d be a scribbled line on a page of a book somewhere that showed he’d once existed.

  ‘Well done,’ said Foster, clinking his glass tankard of beer against Liam’s, and Maddy’s and Sal’s glasses of Dr Pepper.

  Bob observed the ritual with a curious expression on his face, picking up an empty glass and tapping it against another.

  ‘You all did very well,’ added Foster, before slurping a large frothy mouthful of ice-cold beer. He wiped his lips and, cautiously glancing around at the busy restaurant, he lowered his voice. ‘You’ve all seen how it works now. You all understand the part you have to play in the team?’

  Maddy and Sal nodded.

  Liam shrugged. ‘But I didn’t actually do very much, Mr Foster.’

  ‘No… not this time. But you will. The agency uses the Kennedy incident as a standard training mission. It’s a little piece of history that corrects itself. But when you go back on a proper mission it’ll be down to you and of course the support unit –’ he looked across at Bob, studiously examining a steak knife – ‘to make things right.’

  ‘But how will I know what to do?’

  ‘You’ll know, Liam. Because you’re a very bright young man, quick on your feet.’ Foster placed a fatherly hand on his shoulder. ‘Initiative… that’s what you’ve got. You’re a smart lad. No amount of training can give a person that.’

  ‘Uh… thanks.’

  ‘What do you think, Bob?’

  The clone looked up from the steak knife. ‘Mission Operative Liam O’Connor is… good.’

  ‘There. I think he likes you.’

  Liam smiled. ‘Thanks, Bob.’

  Foster turned to Maddy and Sal. ‘And you two… you did very well.’

  They grinned, both very pleased with themselves.

  ‘But this exercise is just the beginning.’

  A waitress arrived with a tray full of plates. She prepared to deal them out like playing cards. ‘Who’s havin’ the rack of ribs?’

  Liam raised a hand. ‘I’m starving,’ he said.

  ‘The salad?’

  Sal raised her hand.

  ‘The burgers?’

  Foster and Maddy nodded.

  The waitress looked at Bob, confused. ‘I’m sorry, sir. What did you order?’

  Bob glanced up at her with his piercing grey eyes. ‘I do not eat human food unless it is a necessary mission requirement,’ he explained dryly.

  The waitress cocked her head. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about him,’ said Foster. ‘He’s just not allowed to eat on duty.’

  She smiled coyly at Bob, admiring his physique. ‘So… are you, like, some kind of undercover cop, then?’

  Bob turned to Liam. ‘Liam O’Connor, explain the term “cop”, please.’

  Liam shrugged and made a face. ‘You’re asking me?’

  ‘A “cop”,’ explained Foster, ‘is a slang term for a law-enforcement officer.’

  ‘I understand.’ Bob nodded slowly and closed his eyes. ‘I am filing the term for future use.’

  The waitress looked from Bob to Foster, bemused.

  ‘You guys ain’t from around here, are you?’

  Maddy finished chewing her first mouthful of burger. ‘Oh, you can forget about them – they’re Canadian.’

  CHAPTER 30

  1941, Berghof – Hitler’s winter retreat

  Kramer cowered behind a small oak bureau in the hallway. Shards of wood stung his face as a dozen rounds slammed into the far side and sharp slithers splintered off.

  He rattled a stream of curses out under his breath as the corridor filled with the deafening crack of machine-gun fire.

  At the end of the hallway several SS Leibstandarte were dug into covered positions, defending the double doors to die Groβe Halle, the main room of Hitler’s mountain retreat.

  Karl and several of his men returned fire, their shots peppering the overturned marble table ahead of them behind which the SS were putting up a valiant defence. Showers of powdered marble erupted from the once mirror-smooth table surface, now pockmarked with cracks and bullet craters.

  ‘We have to move, Karl! They’ll have reinforcements here any second!’

&
nbsp; Karl nodded. He understood the situation all too well.

  The attack had started out smoothly. He and his men had quietly slipped past the machine-gun posts either side of the winding road and made their way up the steep rise towards Hitler’s hillside chalet. But the game was up when a guard spotted them at the last moment approaching the building’s main entrance. He’d managed to fire off a single shot from his gun before Dieter had slipped a blade into his throat.

  Hitler’s hand-picked guards had been surprisingly swift to react, bustling their leader to safety behind the thick double doors of the main hall and setting up a defensive position outside it. The rest of the SS guard detachment in the building had been quickly and ruthlessly picked off by Karl’s men.

  It was just these stubborn guards at the end of the hall now. The problem was, though, that their attack had been stalled right here and time was rapidly working against them. Outside the chalet a distant klaxon was sounding and the regiment garrisoned nearby was undoubtedly already scrambling into their boots and on their way over.

  Karl’s five-man rearguard covering the front entrance of the chalet had as much chance of holding their position as they’d had holding the ground floor of the museum – they were certain to be quickly overwhelmed.

  Kramer was no soldier, but he could see that this last hurdle could be the one that finished them. If they remained in this stalemate a minute or two longer, then it was going to be all over. The numbers were quickly going to mount against them, and having modern pulse rifles and elite training wasn’t going to make a blind bit of difference.

  We’re going to die if we don’t take those men.

  He looked across the hallway to where Karl was crouched. Their eyes met. The man nodded, knowing what Kramer was thinking. A faint smile slipped across his face as he slapped in a fresh cartridge and racked his pulse rifle ready for action.

  The other men around Karl took his lead, quickly reloading their weapons and then readying themselves to burst out into the open and sprint the length of the hallway under fire.

  Silently Karl mouthed a countdown, turning back to his men, encouraging them with a final devil-may-care grin that told the mercenaries they were going to succeed or die heroes.