At the Narrow Passage (11 page)

," I heard a distant voice say. It may have had an Austrian
accent; I wasn't sure.
"
Guten Morgen, Zugsführer
," Sally von Heinen answered.
"
Guten Morgen, Fräulein
," the Imperial sergeant replied.
In German, she asked him to let her pass, please. She was really in a
great hurry. Her husband was expecting her by one o'clock this afternoon.
"
Wie heissen Sie, bitte
?" the sergeant asked politely.
"
Gräfin von Heinen
," Sally answered simply. She was playing it
straight. She knew she had to.
"
Graf von Heinen! Möge er lange leben!
," the sergeant said
patriotically. "
Jawohl! Vorwärts, bitte, gnadige Frau.
"
"
Danke
," Sally said, forcing friendliness I suspected.
And that's all there was to it.
As we pulled away from the sentry post I began making plans. Before too
much longer we would have to find a place to hide the car, a place of
comparative safety where I could leave the count and his wife for a few
minutes and try to contact Kar-hinter and bring him up to date. He was
going to have to get in and pick us up soon, or the whole thing would
have been so much wasted effort and wasted British blood.
That much settled in my mind, I turned my attention back to Sally and
tried to get her to talk, but she was unwilling to speak to a man who
had kidnapped her, shot her husband and God-alone-knew how many other
Germans who were her allies.
At last I sat back in the rear seat, checked Von Heinen's bandage,
wondered how long he would last, pulled a soggy cigarette from an inside
pocket, lit it, felt my bladder demanding to be emptied, wondered how
much longer I could stay awake, and looked across Sally's shoulder at
the ravaged French countryside.
And I thought about the world in which I now found myself, a world very,
very remote from the one in which I had been born.
As I said before, I am from a Europo-Macedonian Line and this one was a
Romano-British Line, Anglo-European Subsector; to be exact RTGB-307.
Our Timelines, Sally von Heinen's and mine, had split a long, long time
ago. In my world Alexander III of Macedonia, called "the Great," had
created the first and greatest world empire, an empire that before his
death at the age of sixty-one had spanned all the civilized world and
had survived its founder by more than a thousand years.
In the world of Sally Beall von Heinen, Alexander had died young and
his empire had never really come into being. In her world the Greeks
had gradually declined in power and influence, leaving only a great
cultural heritage. A little Italian village on the Tiber River had picked
up the pieces of the Greek world, adding a few ideas of their own, and
from that built an empire, one not so great as my Alexander's had been,
or quite so enduring, but a great one nevertheless.
The empire of this city called Rome flourished and grew, a new religion
called Christianity had sprung up, the empire had fallen -- ever read
a fellow named Gibbon? -- and the Western world slowly devolved into
barbarism.
I guess we Greeks never really had a chance without Alexander. Funny.
Anyhow, ten centuries or so after the collapse of Rome, the nations of
Europe had formed and Western civilization reached a peak it had not known
for a thousand years; ships sailed from Europe to India, China, Nippon,
and eventually -- there was an explorer named Columbus in these Lines --
the two unknown continents to the west; here they're called North and
South America.
Nations rose and fell; empires were carved out of the New World and
the Old.
By about the beginning of the eighteenth century after the birth of the
Jewish Messiah they call Christ, Europe consisted of Britain, France,
Spain, Portugal, the Holy Roman Empire, and assorted nations of lesser
importance. Britain, France, and Spain had come out as the greatest of
the European colonial powers, though by this time Spain was already in
decline and France was no real match for England on the high seas.
Britain took most of France's North American colonies away after
establishing some of its own, battled with Spain, but never really got
too much of a foothold in South America, looked east to China, India
and south to Africa.
There is a crucial historical period in the Anglo-European and
Anglo-American Subsectors in the latter years of the eighteenth century,
local time. That was when the American colonists attempted to throw off
what they called British Imperialism, for Britain was then the center
of a burgeoning empire, threatening to surpass anything this world had
ever seen before.
In many Lines the North Americans succeeded and the United States of
America -- as it is called in most Lines -- was born. In many others
they failed. This was one in which they had failed, Sally's world.
By 1775 the American Rebellion was in full swing in Sally's world, and
for a while it also seemed possible that the American rebels could beat
the British and gain the independence they wanted. And they probably
would have, in her world, had it not been for a certain Major Patrick
Ferguson, a British officer, who invented a new kind of weapon -- one
that loaded from the breech, rather than from the muzzle. It was a rather
crude weapon at first, and for a while it seemed that Ferguson would get
no help from the British lords -- but in one of those curious twists of
history that create the Lines of Time, aid was given him, resources were
put at his disposal, and Ferguson went on to develop his breechloader.
By late 1780 the weapon was perfected, even beyond Ferguson's earlier
dreams, a weapon with a rifled bore that could fire faster and more
accurately than anything anyone had ever used before. It was a gun that
could put the American rebel marksmen to shame. And it did.
By the summer of 1781 shiploads of the new Ferguson breechloaders were
crossing the Atlantic, with men trained to use them. For once the innate
conservatism of the generals was broken, and the bloody art of warfare
leaped forward a hundred years.
In the next two years the Americans were on the run, their foremost
leaders dead; Washington, a hero who made a valiant last stand at
Yorktown, had died as he had lived. Half the American Congress was
captured, tried for treason, hanged in the streets of Philadelphia.
Of the American generals only Anthony Wayne, "Mad Anthony," survived,
to lead his battered, decimated troops across the Appalachians, where
he held out for two more long, bloody years before he was finally pinned
against the western Virginia hills and shot as a traitor, still cursing
the British with his infamous eyes.
With the death of Mad Anthony Wayne the American cause collapsed,
and Britain was again the supreme ruler of North America east of the
Appalachians.
France, which had lent aid to the American rebels, feared an invasion
by the British, but the lords in London, worn out by the warm America,
let the French peasants punish the government.
The Peasants' Rebellion in France might have succeeded, very nearly did
succeed, and failed only because the British, seeing that they had much
to gain by supporting the French monarchy, finally came to the aid of
the embattled Louis XVI, and with the still-further improved Ferguson
breechloaders the redcoats shot down the French rebels as they had shot
down the American rebels.
Its continental position secure with the first years of the 1800's,
the crown sitting firmly on the head of the King of England, Parliament
subdued and reduced in power, Britain went on to expand its holdings in
North America, sweeping as far west as the Mississippi River and down
into Mexico to the isthmus of Panama. Indochina was British, as were
North Africa, South Africa, and the islands of the Pacific. Britain was
supreme on land and sea.
About this time, following years of decline, the Holy Roman Empire,
ruled by Franz III, found a rebirth, a growth in wealth and importance on
the continent of Europe as the Germans and their kindred finally united
under their emperor. The specter of republicanism, which had haunted
both Britain and France for so long, never bothered the Holy Roman
Emperor. Republicanism was a dead issue in this world -- the American
Rebellion and the Peasants' Rebellion in France had proved that.
By the end of the nineteenth century most of the world was divided
between four empires -- British, Spanish, Holy Roman and Nipponese --
and so it was into the twentieth -- and the final clash between the
British Empire and the Holy Roman Empire, in which I was now embroiled.
Well, I'm no historian, despite the ambitions of my youth. My facts
and places and dates may be a bit confused, and I admit that even what
I have told you is very sketchy, but basically that is how the world I
was in had come to be the way it was.
By noon, fatigue and the pain in my side were beginning to get the better
of me. I knew that I could not go much farther without some rest, and
I knew that I needed to talk with Kar-hinter.
At last, miles from any village or even any farm, I ordered Sally to pull
off the road, drive back along a cow-path as far as she could get the car
and stop.
It had finally stopped raining by now, though as yet we hadn't seen the sun.
Still the day was getting quite warm.
"What are you going to do now?" Sally asked as she climbed out of the car.
I shook my head, trying to clear it of the fog that filled it, the cotton
that seemed to be stuffed behind my eyes.
"Are you going to shoot us and bury us here?" she asked.
"Don't be stupid!"
"What's stupid about that?" she asked, standing outside the car, her hands
on her hips, the robe she wore somehow making her look smaller than she was,
a child dressed up in mommy's clothing. "You'll never get us to wherever
you were trying to take us. So if you're going to save your own neck,
you're going to have to kill us and go on without us."
"I'm not planning on that."
"Then what are you going to do?"
"Arrange for someone to pick us up," I told her sharply. "Now you untie
those lengths of rope from the tarp in the back seat of the car." When she
did not move, I made a motion toward the pistol in my holster and said,
"Go on!"
The girl went back to the car, and I stood there watching her, almost
admiring her, thinking that she reminded me a little of Kristin or the
way Kristin would have been if she had lived to be Sally's age. She had
only been seventeen when she died. I tried not to think about her.
Sally pulled the tarp out, untied several lengths of rope, and brought
them to me. She turned around, placed her hands behind her back, and
waited silently while I tied them.
"Sit down," I told her, then knelt and tied her feet. "I'm going to have
to gag you, y'know."
"I know. Don't tell me you're sorry. I don't want to hear it."
"Okay. Look, that robe you've got on, well, it's probably going to get
warmer this afternoon. You'll be miserable if you leave it on."
"You want me naked, is that it?"
"I don't give a damn what you've got on," I said angrily. "I was just
thinking about your comfort."
"Thanks!"
"Look, you've got that gown on under it. That's something."
"Not much." She paused. "Hell, take it off. You can rape me with the robe
on if that's what you're after."
"I'm not going to rape you."
"Why not?"
"Oh, shit, woman!" Then I paused, looked at her, laughed. "I'm too damned
tired, for one thing."
I knelt beside her, untied the rope, waited until she had unbuttoned
the robe, and helped her slip it off. Then I retied her hands, carefully
avoiding looking at her. She had the kind of body that was hard not to
look at.
Then I took a fairly clean handkerchief from my pocket, knotted it,
slipped the knot into her mouth, and tied it in place with another length
of rope. Finally I pulled her back to where she could lean against a tree
in what looked like a fairly comfortable position.
Von Heinen was sleeping or unconscious -- I couldn't tell which -- when I
heaved him out of the car, carried him to within a few feet of Sally and
tied and gagged him. I didn't particularly like the idea of trussing up
a man as badly wounded as he was, but I wasn't in any position to take
chances with his waking up and somehow freeing Sally.
"I'll be back in a few minutes," I told Sally, "and I won't be far away,
so don't get any silly ideas about making noise. I'd hate to have to get
rough with you."
Sally, of course, didn't answer, but she didn't have to. The way she
felt about me was clear enough from her eyes. She'd have cut my throat
laughing if she got the chance.
I looked one last time at Von Heinen, wondered how much longer he could
live in his condition and then followed the path on toward the stand of
young woods that lay a few yards from the grove of trees where Sally and
her husband lay.
The woods, which probably had been farmland not too many years before,
lay a half mile or so from the road, what there was of the road. And
there was very little likelihood of any traffic along it. It didn't look
as if there had been another motorcar on it for days.
When I was satisfied that I was well out of the range of Sally's
hearing unless I yelled very loudly, I stopped and doglike relieved
myself against the trunk of a tree. I felt better when I walked a few
feet away and began doing what I had come back there to do.
First I took off my coat and carefully spread it out on a fairly level
spot of earth and then sat down on the coat. Taking what appeared to be a
windproof cigarette lighter from my pocket, I pulled it apart. It wasn't a
lighter. It was a block of gray plastic with three tiny jacks in one end.
Next I removed what looked like a British-issue knife from its sheath
on my left hip, held the blade in my right hand, the handle in my left
and gave the blade a counterclockwise twist. The handle popped free.
Up inside the handle nestled several feet of exceedingly thin wire,
a fingernail-size microphone, and an equally small earphone.
I unrolled the wire, plugged one end of it into one of the jacks on the
block, and then looped it over a tree branch above my head. Finally I
plugged the microphone and the earphone into the two remaining jacks
and I was "on the air."