TimeRiders Page 16

  Until then Bob calculated his best course of action was to find somewhere to lie low and undetected. More importantly, his body had sustained several bullet wounds around his torso. No critical organs had been damaged and the blood had clotted, preventing further loss, but the wounds would need cleaning, disinfecting and dressing. His software informed him that failure to do so soon would result in an eighty-three per cent chance of a spreading bacterial infection and eventual systemic failure of his organic body.

  He would die… just like a human.

  He walked away from the other soldiers, some of whom had begun to glance suspiciously at his unfamiliar face. He strode swiftly across the grounds of the White House, passing unnoticed amid the flurry of activity going on – appearing in the gathering dusk as if he was just another trooper given an important errand to perform with all haste.

  CHAPTER 43

  1956, command ship above Washington DC

  Kramer turned round to look out of his sweeping observation windows down at Washington, a dark, still city. He had expected far stiffer resistance around the capital. Washington DC had fallen in just two days. The major battle had taken place just north of the suburbs on the first day. The American tanks, the lightly armoured and cumbersome Sherman MkIIs, had been outmanoeuvred and out-gunned by their Blitz Raptor MkVIs from the very first moment; the Raptors’ agile hovercraft weapons platforms had made pitifully short work of them.

  Their hastily assembled and dug-out defences, running east to west above the city, had been so easily bypassed. The American battle line fell to pieces in the early hours of this morning, the second day of the battle for Washington. When Kramer’s highly trained Fallschirmjäger, equipped with gas-propellant landing packs and their recently upgraded pulse rifles, had dropped behind the Americans’ crumbling line, further panic and disorder had soon spread among them.

  Today had mostly been a mopping-up exercise.

  The Americans had managed to muster together a few defensive clusters. His intelligence corps informed him a brigade-strength force of American marines was holding a strong position around one of the southern suburbs of the city, and there were pockets here and there within Washington DC. But the Americans had not had enough time to set up anything more than a shambolic line of battle-weary troops around the White House itself.

  Kramer shook his head. President Eisenhower’s last stand had been pitiful and undignified. He’d hoped for a much more dramatic conclusion to the campaign. America had surrendered with a whimper instead of a bang.

  The complete surprise with which they’d caught the Americans had left them scrambling from the very beginning. It had taken little more than eight weeks from the first massed amphibious assault on the beaches of New England… to today.

  It was of course better for the civilians this way, better than a long drawn-out campaign stretching into the autumn and winter, with innocent people dying unnecessarily. He genuinely felt no ill will towards the people of America. In fact, his mother had been American – a woman born in Minneapolis – and he himself had once had an American passport. He smiled at the absurd complexity of things. His mother, Sally-Anne Gardiner, all-American girl, wasn’t due to be born for another forty-five years, wasn’t due to meet and marry his father, Boris Kramer, for another sixty-five. And yet here was her son, leader of the German nation, the European states… and now also the United States.

  Such is the absurdity of time travel, Paul… eh?

  Background details, of course, known only to the few men he trusted around him: Karl Haas and the three other men who’d come through the time machine and survived to this day. Storming Hitler’s Bavarian retreat had proven costly. Just the five of them left by the time Hitler ordered his men to stand down.

  The people of Germany adored Kramer, their Führer – the one who led them to victory, the leader who’d replaced that confused anti-Semitic old fool, Adolf Hitler. They believed him to be German, they cared not that there was no record of his childhood, no record of a mother or a father, no trace of his existence in this world… until the spring of 1941. All they cared was that he had emerged from nowhere, like a guardian angel falling from heaven, and led them to victory. He’d united Europe under one proud banner, not that idiotic symbol, the swastika, but a banner of his very own design, the uroboros – the serpent eating its own tale – a symbol of infinity.

  What comes around… goes around.

  Europe, and now America, had at last been united – the combined muscle he needed to eventually bring the rest of the world to heel.

  And it was going to be a much better world. A world where no one starved. A world whose population could be responsibly controlled to not exceed what this earth could feed. A world whose resources would be carefully used and not squandered by disgustingly rich and self-serving politicians. A world not poisoned by vehicle exhausts or coal fumes. A world not dying because mankind could not control its greed.

  But more importantly…

  It will be your world, Paul. All yours.

  The quiet voice of his ambition made him stir uneasily.

  You’ve conquered more than any leader in history.

  Kramer knew he should be feeling elated, proud of what he’d achieved so far. But he wasn’t. And the reason for that was lying on the floor in front of him, brought up by the oberleutnant and his two men: a hideously deformed thing that once might have been a young German soldier, but was now a twisted mix of two, maybe three, young men.

  It lay in front of him in an unzipped body bag. Kramer had seen something like this only once before, over a decade ago in the snowy woods of Obersalzberg. He remembered he’d nearly vomited then, just as he felt like doing now.

  Karl squatted down beside the body and inspected it closely. ‘This could be the result of an incendiary weapon. The intense heat could have fused these poor men together.’

  Kramer nodded, tight-lipped, stroking his chin. It could well be that… or the result of one of their pulse bombs, designed to pulverize soft tissue with its shock wave. His modern weapon designs had a habit of producing unpleasant-looking casualties like this.

  Or it might be something else?

  That voice again. He bid it be silent.

  ‘Yes, Karl… it’s a possibility.’

  CHAPTER 44

  1956, outside Washington DC

  Liam looked out of the back of the truck as it rumbled noisily along a road away from DC lined with German troops on patrol, civilian refugees herded at gunpoint and pitiful lines of beaten American soldiers in their khaki greens, many of them wounded.

  ‘I’m Wallace, by the way,’ said the man in the suit. ‘Daniel Wallace. I work in the White House press corps. Well,’ he sighed wearily, ‘at least I did.’

  Liam held out a limp hand. He wasn’t sure what ‘press corps’ did, but he guessed it was to do with newspapers. ‘Liam O’Connor, from Cork, Ireland.’

  Wallace nodded. ‘You’re a long way from home, son.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ he replied with a lacklustre smile.

  Wallace spoke quietly. ‘I’m still puzzled about you and your friend. You said you were…’ Wallace looked around at the other prisoners; many of them were either in shock, or had retired into themselves, shutting out this grim reality.

  ‘Look, why don’t we forget what I said?’ Liam replied. ‘It’s not like it matters now, does it? I’m right here in the same boat as everyone else.’

  ‘What about the man you were with?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘I… I swear I saw him take gunshot wounds that… that he shouldn’t have survived.’

  Liam said nothing and Wallace let it go for now, turning to listen to a couple of other prisoners in the back of the truck talking quietly, a silver-haired army colonel and a naval officer.

  ‘… were all strung out, shell-shocked. I can’t believe two months ago the big story was Eisenhower meeting Kramer on neutral ground to discuss peace – an end to the growing tension b
etween us and them.’

  ‘And all the while,’ cut in the navy officer, ‘Kramer was putting the final preparations together for his invasion of America.’ The colonel ran a hand over his buzz-cut hair. ‘We never even saw it coming, Bill… We were just kidding ourselves that they wanted peace and would leave us alone.’

  Liam gazed out of the back of the truck, his mind a million miles away.

  My first trip… and it’s already over for me.

  The last few weeks of his life felt like a crazy dream. A little over three weeks ago, he’d been a junior steward on the Titanic, tending to rich, pampered passengers, looking forward to arriving in the land of opportunity, America. The plan had been to quit his job the moment the ship docked and begin a new life of adventure and discovery. He’d read so much about America and knew this was the place for him, the country in which he would make his fortune.

  Then a chunk of bloody ice at sea had changed everything.

  And with it came Foster… saving him from the sort of death he’d always had nightmares about – drowning. The old man had opened an incredible door for him. A stunning world of the future, a world of chrome and glass buildings, of neon lights and flashing screens of colour, of excitement, of movement, of technology that seemed out of this world. But also a world of the past, of any time he wished, for Foster assured him he would see so many wonderful things, wonderful moments, that in a way… no, definitely… he was the luckiest young man alive.

  Now here he was. Stuck. What he faced now along with everyone else in this truck was a frightening and uncertain future. They were going to be shot and, if not, then most probably put to work as prisoners of war.

  Some small voice inside tried to reassure him that at least he was alive instead of crushed and rotting fish-food at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. It did little to cheer him. He was stuck here. There was no way for him to return to that third and final extraction window. And, without any way at all to communicate with Foster, Maddy and Sal… that was it for him.

  Might as well forget those names, he told himself. I’m never going to see them again.

  The truck rattled past a picket fence plastered with photographs of all shapes and sizes, the smiling faces of those missing printed on Have you seen them? posters placed by worried husbands and wives, mothers and fathers. Along the bottom of the fence were piled posies of flowers, fresh and old, crosses, mementoes, teddy bears and dolls. It was a shrine to those who had vanished amid the whirlwind carnage of recent weeks.

  Several of the other people in the back of the truck watched the fence pass by, a painfully endless display of hope and sadness. A woman opposite him sobbed at the sight of it.

  So many dead and missing.

  A soldier in the truck ground his teeth. ‘Never even stood a goddamn chance ’gainst them Nazis.’

  Perhaps the only comfort, Liam considered, was that the war had been so short, that it was already over.

  CHAPTER 45

  1956, command ship above Washington DC

  Kramer watched the nervous young Fallschirmjäger officer and his two men leave the room.

  He had a million and one things to attend to, a steady stream of command decisions waiting to be made, not only to do with this recently conquered country, but also with affairs of state back home in Europe.

  But his mind was now on this one thing, the report he’d just heard from the young officer, the report of a shimmering window of air among the White House trees. There had been eye-witness statements that one man was ‘swallowed’ by it, only to be returned a minute later, his body appearing and instantly merging with that of another man who had accidentally stepped into the shimmering air.

  These were eye-witness statements made in the immediate aftermath of a battle; the men’s blood was up, adrenaline flushing through their veins. Soldiers, after the rush of combat, have always been prone to seeing things. Military history is filled with the stories of soldiers who saw armies of angels coming to their rescue. Kramer might have dismissed this as the overexcited rambling of young soldiers, except the officer had brought them this…

  His eyes drifted across the twisted, mutated thing in the body bag between them.

  Karl looked up at his leader. ‘You think this might have been the result of another time traveller?’

  Kramer said nothing in response.

  How could someone else travel through time?

  Waldstein’s carefully hidden prototype had been the only time machine. International law had come down hard and unanimously, and thoroughly closed the door on this technology. Any nation, any corporation, any individual caught developing it was subject to the ultimate punishment: complete obliteration. No warning. No arguments. No mitigating factors. Even in the chaotic troubled world of the mid-twenty-first century there was an accepted understanding that, for better or worse, time could not be allowed to change.

  ‘That machine was the only machine, wasn’t it?’ asked Karl. ‘Paul…?’

  Only Karl was allowed that privilege now – using his first name, and then only when it was just the two of them.

  ‘Yes, Karl… it was the only one.’

  By destroying Waldstein’s prototype behind him, Kramer had been certain that no one could follow them back in time and their efforts to change the world for the better be undone.

  But what if there was another machine?

  The thought sent a chill down his neck.

  And someone determined to come back after us?

  If this twisted body on the floor was the result of a time window opening, then someone from the future had chosen to zero in on today. Someone from the future was trying to correct history and assumed today, 5 September 1956, was the day history was changed.

  But it wasn’t today.

  History had in fact been changed fifteen years earlier, the day Kramer and his men had fought their way through SS guards to have an audience with Hitler. The day Kramer had explained that Hitler’s impending attack on Russia would be the beginning of the end of his dreams, an end that would come four years later in a bunker beneath Berlin with a bullet in his temple and a cyanide capsule crushed between his teeth.

  Kramer looked up from the corpse, out through the panoramic viewing windows. ‘Karl, we must completely erase history.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Everything before today… particularly everything since we arrived in 1941.’

  ‘Covering our tracks?’

  ‘Yes. But we should present this to the people as a symbolic gesture.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘This day will be known as Day One, a new beginning for all of mankind. We will announce that after so many thousand years of bloodstained history – countries, kings, popes, emperors fighting each other for land or money, or faith – that all war is over.’

  ‘No more wars, yes.’ Karl nodded. ‘It would be a popular message.’

  Kramer pointed towards the city skyline through the broad window. ‘America was our biggest threat, and now it’s part of our Reich. We can’t be challenged any more. We’re now looking at the chance that every person in this world can finally be united under one banner.’

  ‘The Russian and Chinese states still remain.’

  Kramer shrugged. ‘Their time will come.’ He turned to Karl. ‘I think now is the perfect time, anyway, to make this sort of a sweeping gesture.’

  He turned away from the smouldering body, glad the young officer and his two men were gone and that he could turn his pale face from the awful sight.

  ‘But, Karl, you and I must never forget that we’re strangers in this time. Even though it’s been fifteen years since we time-travelled, we must be ever vigilant of covering our tracks.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘By declaring today as the first day of a new era, we’ll be wiping the last fifteen years clean, Karl. Leaving absolutely nothing. No clues for anybody in the future to close in on. But, more than that, we’ll erase all of history. And why not? I
sn’t this also the reason we came back? To wipe the slate clean… A new beginning. A new order?’

  Karl nodded.

  ‘I will make an announcement over state television and radio. We shall decree a day of celebration across all the nations of the Greater Reich – a unity day of –’

  ‘Unity Day… it is a good name for it, Paul.’

  ‘Yes… yes it is. We’ll call it that, then. As well as this celebration, we’ll begin a systemic purging of history books, documents, relics. It all has to go. It all has to be burned.’

  Karl nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And we’ll tell the people of America that there’s nothing to be afraid of. They will not be enslaved, but instead will be invited to join the Germans, the French, the British and all the other citizens of the Greater Reich.’

  ‘I will have a speech drafted for you,’ said Karl.

  ‘Thank you, old friend. This…’ he said, pointing at the body on the floor, ‘is nothing for us to be alarmed at, do you understand? We control history now, Karl… you and I… it’s clay in our hands to be moulded exactly as we want. There will be no way for anyone from the future to find our entry point.’

  ‘If this body was the result of an attempt by somebody to find us –’ Karl looked at Kramer – ‘the fact that they tried today and not back in the spring of 1941… this proves…?’

  ‘Yes.’ Kramer smiled. ‘That they have no idea what date we went back to originally.’ He patted Karl affectionately on the shoulder. ‘I think this shows that we’re safe.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Karl crisply saluted. ‘I shall see to your speech.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Kramer watched Karl go, closing the grand double doors behind him, and then turned once more to look out of the panoramic windows.

  Will that be enough, though… erasing history?

  It would be a sensible precautionary measure, but Kramer still felt a chill of unease. Half an hour ago he’d been certain that Waldstein’s prototype had been the world’s one and only time machine.