Ides of March (Time Patrol) Read online

  Mac wanted to tell the guide that Guy Fawkes had fallen from the ladder leading up to the scaffold before being executed. The fall broke his neck; whether deliberately, if he were smart, or by accident, either way he’d saved himself a lot of pain. And Raleigh would almost not have been executed, if it hadn’t been for Mac’s intervention.

  Mac tipped back the bottle in the brown paper bag and took a long, satisfying gulp, then had to struggle not to retch. He settled for a couple of belches. A couple of tourists standing near him moved a few steps away. It wasn’t just the bottle in the bag; he hadn’t shaved since coming back from the Possibility Palace to the Gate in New York City and from there to the airport to board a flight to England. He also hadn’t bathed. His eyes were bloodshot and alcohol was oozing out of his pores after five days of nonstop indulgence. Before the binge, he’d looked like a younger version of Tom Cruise.

  “Hey, fellow.” Someone grabbed Mac’s elbow and he reacted instinctually. Pulling his elbow out of the grip, spinning in the opposite direction and using the other elbow to hit the man in the side of the head, knocking him to the ground. Only then did Mac notice the ‘bobby’ hat rolling away and the man’s uniform. The crowd dispersed, leaving Mac standing over the unconscious policeman. A half-dozen more coppers were running at him.

  Mac jiggled the bottle, estimated he had time to drain it, and began to guzzle it down. He’d just finished when the first cop tackled him. The bag fell to the pavement, the bottle breaking. Two more cops piled on.

  Mac didn’t put up any resistance, actually glad to be done with the binge. Some time in a cell would do him a fair amount of good.

  He was thrown on his stomach and cuffed, face pressed down, one cheek to the cold concrete. Mac wondered how far into the soil underneath the concrete remnants of Raleigh’s blood might still exist.

  There’d been a lot of it.

  Two cops pulled Mac to his feet, his hands behind his back. They were hauling him toward a waiting van, when a voice of authority stopped them.

  “Scotland Yard. He’s ours.”

  The man wasn’t wearing a Sherlock Holmes’ deerstalker hat, but then again, that was fiction too. And Holmes hadn’t been Scotland Yard; Mac vaguely remembered Eagle ranting about it one day in the team room back at the Ranch, located just outside Area 51. That seemed forever ago, a thought which caused Mac to laugh, because, really, time was relevant, wasn’t it?

  He knew that for a fact.

  The Scotland Yard fellow had a hard look about him, someone who’d seen a lot of bad stuff. Mac could commiserate with that.

  “Cuffs off,” the man ordered. “And clear out.”

  “He assaulted—” one of the cops began, but didn’t finish.

  “Cuffs off and clear out. Take your man with you.”

  Grumbling, picking up their unconscious comrade, the cops retreated to their cars and vans.

  “You’re a bloody mess,” the man said, folding his arms.

  “Just had a bloody time recently,” Mac said and then laughed once more at his own private pun. His satphone went off, playing Werewolves of London.

  “You a funny guy?” the Scotland Yard detective asked.

  “Someone is,” Mac muttered. “Mind if I check?”

  The man pointed past Mac, at a black helicopter coming in fast and low. “You can check once you’re on board that. You’re their problem. My job is to get you on that helly.”

  The chopper touched down, the side door slid open, and Roland and Neeley hopped out.

  Oh great, Mac thought. The dynamic duo.

  And then it occurred to him they might be working for the Cellar at the moment, in which case they’d probably be tossing him out of the chopper once they got to altitude.

  At the moment, that didn’t seem like too bad of an idea.

  Eglin Air Force Base, Florida

  EAGLE BROUGHT THE SNAKE in fast, barely a foot above the trees, before abruptly rotating the jet engines up and bringing the tilt-jet aircraft to a hover. Typical Florida panhandle terrain. Flat, scrub brush, low trees, and swamp.

  And a graveyard for the men who’d supported him here in his Black Tuesday 1980 mission. They were long gone, melting into the dank soil, becoming part of it. They’d been losers, outcasts, a form of Dirty Dozen who had, most of all, been expendable.

  Wars always needed the expendable.

  Eagle rotated the engines and went back to nap of the earth flying, then dropping down as he cleared the trees. He skimmed over one of Wagner Field’s landing strips. A twitch of his hands on the controls and he was on the runway.

  Eagle shut down the engines and dropped the back ramp. A black man with a rangy build, Eagle had scars scrolled on one side of his bald skull, the results of an IED explosion a long time ago (in relative terms), in a country far away. With Nada’s passing, in life and from this timeline, Eagle was now the team sergeant for the Time Patrol. But since they didn’t go on missions together, as they had as Nightstalkers, it meant a different role, one he was still new to.

  They were all new to it after only one mission under the new paradigm.

  Eglin Air Force Base was where Eagle had gone for his Black Tuesday mission, but it was also, where he’d gotten his first true taste of leadership as a young soldier, while going through Ranger School.

  A faint mark crossed the remains of a line painted across the runway. It was here, on this very field, that James Doolittle had trained his pilots to get a B-25 bomber airborne in the short distance they would have on the flight deck of the USS Hornet.

  Eagle knelt. The line was a marker, still here after all these years, an indicator where the pilot had to lift off. He placed his hand on the black rubber scar cutting across it and closed his eyes.

  He could hear the sound of bomber engines, the smell of fuel. An image flashed of a B-25 racing down the tarmac, pilots struggling to get it airborne.

  Eagle shivered and opened his eyes. The airstrip was empty except for the Snake. Not a person in sight. But he knew what he’d sensed was real; almost a memory. Or a memory to come? Whatever it was, Eagle had no doubt traveling in time had an effect, a lingering one. Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing was--

  His satphone came alive: Accidently Like a Martyr.

  Eagle gritted his teeth, not amused with Dane’s humor.

  He checked the screen, read the text, and jogged back to the Snake. He fired up the engines and rotated them from the usual takeoff position of vertical to horizontal. Turned to face the length of the runway. He couldn’t see the line, too faded at this distance, but he had a very good idea where it was.

  Eagle powered the engines, but kept the brakes on, feeling the aircraft vibrate. He released the brakes, accelerating, faster and faster.

  He saw the line, pulled back, and the Snake lifted a few feet short of the line. Eagle banked hard as he gained altitude. Then he flew over Wagner Field one last time, dipped his right wing in acknowledgement of the airmen who had practiced for such a dangerous mission and conducted it.

  Arlington Cemetery

  THE GRAVE WAS HALFWAY UP the hill to Arlington House, once the residence of Robert E. Lee. The house, and surrounding plantation at Arlington, had been appropriated by the Union during the Civil War and utilized for a very different purpose: burying Union war dead.

  This one gravesite covered three acres. There were three others subsequently buried here, besides President John F. Kennedy: His wife, and two brothers, Robert and Edward.

  Ivar felt a deep sense of accomplishment in preventing Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel from wiping out the Kennedy family on Black Tuesday in 1929. Of course, he had lied in his after-action report and debriefing. He’d broken one of the key rules of the Time Patrol: he’d told Lansky something of the future. Enough to insure Lansky didn’t put the hit on the Kennedy clan. At least that was his internal spin to justify breaking the rule to save his life when threatened by Lansky.

  It hadn’t worked. Lansky had sent Ivar to take a swim
with the fishes in concrete boots; technically concrete around a cinder block, the movies seemed to get that one wrong. The bothersome thing about the Time Patrol was that Lansky’s history before and after Ivar’s mission was the same. So which begat what?

  Ivar had been trying to wrap his brain around that ever since getting back. Then he’d decided it was simpler to accept: it is what it is. He’d saved them. Lansky and Siegel could have killed JFK and RFK as children in 1929, along with their father, Joe Kennedy, and then Edward Kennedy would never have been born in 1932. That certainly would have changed things.

  Ivar knew he had to shut down thinking any further into the what if’s, could have been’s, maybe’s, whatever.

  It is what it is.

  He was startled when his satphone activated. He didn’t recognize the tune, although any of the other members could have told him: Warren Zevon’s Excitable Boy. He was pulling the phone out when he saw Scout striding toward him; a young woman with a purpose.

  For the slightest of moments, Ivar wondered whether she was here to whack him. That Dane, Moms, Eagle, or somebody else had figured out he’d lied. But he realized that they’d send someone from the Cellar to handle that detail; most likely Roland’s whack job girlfriend, Neeley. The redundancy of ‘whack’ caused a crazy smile along with a twitch. He’d never been quite right after the Fun in North Carolina. Sometimes the others wondered if he were the original Ivar or one of the copies. He occasionally wondered the same thing.

  Ivar shuddered to think what Roland and Neeley were like when they were alone together. Discussing ballistics, which knife to use, how best to garrote someone?

  He glanced down at the text message and relaxed when he read it.

  “Chopper’s inbound,” Scout said, echoing the text, as she reached him. She pointed. “LZ is there.”

  She hadn’t even gone to college, Ivar thought, as he obediently followed. Actually, she hadn’t even graduated high school, getting ‘recruited’ into the Nightstalkers before that. And she was what, like nineteen now? But there was something about her that he’d picked up the very first time he met her back during the Fun in North Carolina.

  She was different.

  “What do you think—” Ivar began, but she waved a hand, without even looking back, and that was enough to silence him.

  “We’ve been Zevoned, Ivar. It means we’re going back.”

  Assembling For The Missions

  The Possibility Palace, Headquarters, Time Patrol

  Where? Can’t tell you. When? Can’t tell you (or Neeley would have to whack you)

  “WHAT’S GOING ON?” Doc asked.

  He stood on the edge of a balcony, looking down into the massive pit that was, in essence, staring back into history. A wide spiral track ran counter-clockwise around the outside of the pit, descending into a vague, distant bottom; the beginning of recorded history. Almost a mile deep.

  “Your team has been alerted,” Dane said. “We have another attack on the timeline in progress.”

  “How can it be ‘in progress’,” Doc asked, “if it happened in the past?”

  “You know better than to ask that,” Dane replied. His once thick black hair was still thick, but streaked with grey. He was lean, perhaps too lean, and had a thin haze of grey beard, not as a ‘look’ but simply the result of not sparing the time to shave recently.

  Dane, more than almost anyone, understood the value of not wasting time.

  The descending spiral deck was of varying widths, depending on the importance of the spot in the timeline and the number of Time Patrol analysts assigned to that era. The analysts wore varying outfits and sat at bland grey desks, which appeared to be Government Issue, circa 1950. There were no computers, no phones. There were, however, lots and lots of filing cabinets stacked along the outer edge, against the stonewall. There were occasional zip lines going across and ladders here and there, going from one level to another, making direct connections between certain eras. It all looked rather disorganized.

  Doc had learned, during his short time here, that it was anything but.

  To their right, as the spiral ascended ever so slightly, the ramp faded into a gray mist: the future that was yet to unfold,. Above them, like a ceiling, was a deep grey cloud. The future. If that got hit by a Time Tsunami coming from below and turned black, then it would be over an instant later.

  “See that?” Dane pointed across, and one spiral below, to the right. “Nineteen-ninety-six.”

  “Is that the mission?” Doc asked. “What are the others years? The date?”

  “No, it’s not the mission,” Dane said. “See that fellow in the baggy pants and sweater?”

  “With the long blonde hair?”

  “Yes,” Dane said. “He’s dealing with a ripple from the last mission. Fixing it.” Before Doc could ask, Dane explained. “Several men died on Eagle’s Black Tuesday op. Turns out one of them had some minor importance. Not much, but enough to be noticed in the timeline. Actually, to be more exact, a son of his, who now was never born, had the importance. So our agent there is working on smoothing the ripple.”

  “This happen often?” Doc asked.

  “Why do you think all these people are working here?” Dane asked. “They search for ripples. The Shadow’s efforts cause us to respond. And while our response stops the Shadow from enacting the six Cascade Events leading to a time tsunami and wiping us out, our efforts have their own consequences.”

  “About that,” Doc tested the reception.

  Dane folded his arms. “Yes?”

  “I’ve been going through the data. You know it would be easier if it was uploaded and catalogued and—”

  “No computers,” Dane said. “Learned that one the hard way.”

  “What happened?”

  “Not important. Go on.”

  “There’s a thing you say all the time. ‘The vagaries of the variables.’ Are you certain the Shadow has to succeed in all six Cascade attacks on the same day?”

  “We’re not certain of anything,” Dane said. “Why?”

  Doc pointed at the 1996 desk. “That’s a ripple. Even though Eagle caused it. And your agent is—”

  “Our agent,” Dane interrupted.

  “Our agent is dealing with it. But isn’t that a win for the Shadow? What if it’s a Cascade Event?”

  “The other five missions had no ripples.”

  “I know,” Doc said. “But what if it’s a blind? What if the Shadow is launching six attacks on the same day, in different years, to distract us?”

  “From what?”

  “From the fact that while it would be great for the Shadow if they hit six for six on the same day, maybe another, more likely possibility, is to achieve at least one Cascade success per six attacks. Thus, the alternative goal is to get the right combination of six Cascade Attacks after so many assaults, so that they culminate before we can correct them and cause a Time Tsunami?”

  “The Shadow is cunning,” Dane allowed. He rubbed the stubble of his beard. “If that’s the case, though, wouldn’t they have to succeed in their goal on at least one of the attacks? That ripple,” he pointed at 1996, “is from our success in stopping the attack. The Shadow’s goal was to allow Operation Credible Sport to go forward and for the United States to try a second Iranian hostage rescue in 1980.”

  “Right now we’re looking broadband; same day, six years.” Doc gestured at the hum of activity in the Possibility Palace. “For most people, time is linear. I think the attacks are designed both ways. Broad and linear.”

  “Explain,” Dane ordered.

  “I’ll show you, it’s easier.”

  Doc opened one of the many doors along the top level of the balcony, which represented the present. The two men went inside to the Time Patrol’s team room. Doc went up to a chalkboard and began drawing, starting with 29 Oct/Black Tuesday. Then he listed the six missions next to it.

  “This is what we think is going on.” Doc drew a horizontal line through all seven b
oxes. He turned to Dane. “Humor me. What’s the date of the upcoming mission?”

  “Fifteen March.”

  Doc whistled. “The Ides. Okay.” He drew a box directly below the Black Tuesday box, labeling it 15 Mar/Ides. Then he wrote one through six. Then below he did the same below it labeling it Day 3. “I could keep drawing more days, but you get the idea.”

  “What if the Shadow’s goal,” Doc said, “is to keep attacking, trying to succeed in all six on the same, but satisfied if it gets one or two. Because each one also goes linearly through time, in addition to sideways?”

  Dane was nodding. “All right. You’re saying each Cascade is possibly connected to a Cascade on another date.”

  “Right.” Doc quickly drew an arrow from one box to another on the line below, then one to the third line, crossing some of the arrows. Then again, from first to second to third. “Now envision more dates. They have three-hundred-and-sixty-five to work with. All they need is the right combination of Cascades and they win.”

  Dane looked at the drawing in silence for a few moments. “It’s possible you’re right. All six are real attack, but not just connected to each other laterally but linearly to other dates.”

  Doc nodded. “Yes. Like a Turing Machine. They’re dialing in attacks until they get six Cascades that line up. Maybe the Shadow doesn’t even know what the right combination is.” Doc put the chalk down. “It’s just a theory.”

  “True,” Dane said. “And the more likely possibility, and more imminent threat, is if they succeed on all six missions on one date.”

  “Let’s assume the probability of winning or losing is even,” Doc said, “between our Team and the Shadow. Fifty-fifty. Mathematically, it’s like flipping a coin. This is why Turing used zeroes and ones to break Enigma. Fifty-fifty chance, multiplied out. The odds of six heads, or tails, in a row, six wins, is point five times point five, six times. Which comes out to less than one percent. Point zero-seven-eight percent, to be exact.”