Written in Time (62 page)

“How much longer before the door closes and the time-transfer begins?” Jack asked his many-times grandson.
 

Alan consulted a wristwatch taken from his pocket. “They stole my Rolex, but this is a pretty nice Omega, though. I make it about another fifty-two seconds. We ought to all sit down, I think,” Alan advised.
 

The six men of the Seventh—Jensen, Armitage, Goldstein, Harek, Luciano and Standing Bear—all looked understandably nervous. Standing Bear, folding his legs under him and resting his submachine guns—two of them—across his thighs, was the first to sit.
 

Lieutenant Easley, who had volunteered to go, too, dropped to one knee, then to a seated position. As Ellen started to sit, she stopped. Jack thought he heard a noise. “I just had the goofiest idea, Jack.” The noise came again, louder. “What would happen, Jack,” Ellen queried, “if they decided to send someone or something into the past at the same time we were traveling into the future?”
 

“Good question,” Jack agreed. “Alan?”
 

“I don’t know. I don’t think anybody ever considered—”
 

The noise came again, louder, stronger.
 

Easley simply remarked, “My God.”
 

The door to the capsule began to close and the capsule itself began to shimmer almost imperceptibly.
 

“Jesus.” Alan made the sign of the cross. “We don’t start for another eighteen seconds, guys, but there’s a transfer in progress.”
 

“No shooting in here! Ricochet danger! No shooting under any circumstance unless it’s point-blank and you’re desperate,” Jack called out.
 

“What’s happening, Jack?” Ellen asked, her voice steady, controlled.
 

“What you said. They’re coming this way while we’re going that way.”
 

Ellen’s right hand touched to his cheek for an instant.
 

Jack whispered, “I love you.”
 

About a quarter of a Soviet-era tank was suddenly just there, and the pugilist’s face of Jensen was inside of it, part of it, and there was a shriek of horror and Jensen wasn’t there anymore.
 

Ellen wasn’t a screamer and she didn’t scream, but she drew in her breath so sharply someone who didn’t know her might have thought that she was about to scream.
 

Easley sprang to his feet with the speed of a wild animal.
 

More of the tank appeared for an instant, but Standing Bear had already gotten the other four men of the Seventh to their feet and away. As the tank flickered, Jack heard voices. Standing Bear had drawn a Bowie knife. Jack folded Ellen into his arms.
 

Jensen’s face appeared above the growing image of the tank. Easley reached for Jensen, said, “Here, man—take my hand!”
 

There was another voice, one Jack did not recognize. “I heard it again! Now I see a face! It looks like a fuckin’ Indian in a damn movie!”
 

On impulse—insane impulse, perhaps—Jack reached out to touch the tank. He could feel it, somehow, but it wasn’t there, was only empty space. “Maybe Jensen’s still alive and out there!” Jack announced.
 

“Mr. Naile, sir! I’m over here!”
 

“Jensen,” Ellen hissed through clenched teeth.
 

Harek was on his knees, reciting a prayer in a language Jack didn’t know but assumed was Turkish.
 

“Who’s out there?” The voice belonged to no one from the expedition to 1996, had to be from 1996.
 

“Who are you?” Jack called back.
 

“Are you ghosts?”
 

Jack shivered. By 1996 they would be—maybe.
 

“Get us out of here, Jack!” Ellen was breathing hard, close to hyperventilating, and her fingernails were digging into his left tricep so hard Jack knew that he was bleeding.
 

“If you can see us, Jensen,” Easley called out, “come toward us. Hurry, man!”
 

Jensen’s voice came again. “Who are you?”
 

“Who the fuck’s that guy?”
 

“Don’t shoot in here, Carpentier! Dammit, you crack-head! No!”
 

There was the sound of a shot, probably a pistol, but it was all around them, and the sound of the ricochet just went on and on and on. Jack drew Ellen closer against him still.
 

Goldstein shouted, “I’m comin’ for ya’, Jensen!”
 

Standing Bear punched Goldstein in the abdomen, doubling him over, stopping Goldstein from sacrificing himself.
 

The whining of the ricochet went on and on and seemed as though it would never stop. Easley called out, “Don’t shoot in here! That’s madness!”
 

The Soviet-era tank was more solid now, and Jack almost lost whatever remained from the last meal he’d eaten as Easley vaulted past him, onto the tank. Jack was a step behind the man. If ever Jack had thought of Easley as just a run-of-the-mill young officer, what transpired before Jack’s eyes would have contradicted the impression. Jensen’s right hand—or someone’s right hand—and forearm were reaching up from within the steel on the left side of the tank turret. Easley leaped on to the turret and grasped the hand, obviously trying—somehow—to tug Jensen free of the thing.
 

There was a man, shadowy seeming, but real enough, suddenly grasping Easley by the throat. The man had to be from the party of Lakewood people traveling back to 1900. Easley shoved the fellow away, reached again for the hand and forearm that were disappearing more deeply into the steel of the tank as the tank’s body solidified, completed itself. The shadowy man from the future was more distinct as well; he grabbed Easley by the shoulder, spun him around and thrust a suppressor-fitted pistol toward Easley’s face.
 

The tank and Jensen occupied the same space, Jensen enveloped within the tank.
 

Jack had his submachine gun up, the stock folded out, his left forearm flexing back, his right arm bending outward, snapping the weapon into a horizontal buttstroke across the jaw of Easley’s assailant.
 

Jensen’s hand and forearm were nearly vanished into the tank, and Jack feared that Easley, failing to let go, might be absorbed within the nearly completed armor-plated behemoth as well.
 

“Let him go, Lieutenant! Let him go!”
 

“I can’t leave a man behind, Mr. Naile!”
 

“He’s already ceased to exist,” Jack shouted, summoning as much authority into his voice as he could, given that he was only making an educated guess. “He doesn’t exist here, maybe somewhere else. Not here! Come on, Lieutenant.”
 

There was no way Easley could have known. But calling out the last name of Naile was a tactical error. Jack knew it the moment Easley uttered it. Lakewood people from 1996 would doubtlessly know that anyone named Naile was a high-value target.
 

“Get that guy dressed all in black!” The voice was alien to Jack, but he knew the source. “That’s Jack Naile!”
 

Alan’s voice sounded far away, more so than it should have, as he shouted, “That’s Lester Matthews talking, guys, Lakewood’s chief bad guy!”
 

Jack and Lieutenant Easley still stood on the Soviet-era tank. Jack shuddered, but not at the realization that Lester Matthews—the big guy he’d missed killing when he’d rescued Alan from murder—was in the time-transfer capsule with them. Jack realized that Easley and he were going in the wrong direction, back to 1900. “It’s the tank, Easley. We’ve gotta get off the tank! Jump for it!”
 

Jack took a step nearer the fender over the left track, With obvious reluctance, Easley let go of the hand that was still being absorbed into the tank. Where Jensen was, if he was, neither Jack nor any man could know, but that Jensen was gone forever from them was an almost perfect certainty. And if Jensen were somehow still alive, mere contemplation of what the man might be enduring would likely induce both madness and despondency.
 

The man that flung himself toward Jack from the rear of the tank was not shadowy in appearance, but as real looking as Easley. And the jaw Jack struck with the best left hook he could manage felt solid, fully real. Jack’s hand hurt. Already, the time might have passed to rejoin Ellen and the men of the Seventh on their way to 1996. Jack might be trapped in 1900 along with Easley—and along with Lester Matthews and his Lakewood henchmen.
 

Jack’s impromptu left—from a shallow angle and closer to a jab than a solid swing—merely deflected their assailant, didn’t stop him. The man’s submachine gun swung upward. Jack didn’t have time to get to his own. Easley shouted, distracting the man for a split second. What Easley’s intentions were—aside from fighting—Jack didn’t know. Jack snatched the long barreled Colt revolver from the gunfighter style holster at his right thigh, his left hand snapping outward, palm open, straight-arming the Lakewood man in the chest. Jack’s revolver cleared leather, and, punching it forward, the hammer cocked, he snapped the trigger.
 

The Lakewood man’s eyes went wide. There was a sudden smell of burning flesh. Jack shouted, “Jump for it now, Lieutenant.” Jack threw himself from the tank, hitting the floor of the capsule in an awkward roll that made his left elbow and shoulder seize with pain. Easley landed more gracefully. Jack didn’t know what to do, saw no sign of Ellen and the others, just called out to Easley, “Run deeper into the capsule, Lieutenant!” Jack’s elbow and shoulder hurt, but still worked. Somewhere behind them, mere feet only, were armed men who would kill them in the blink of an eye. And it might already be too late to reach 1996.
 

Jack heard shouts from the tank. One took his full attention. “It looks like they’re disappearing, Matthews!”
 

Jack shouted again to Easley, “Whatever we’re doing might be working! Keep running in the same direction!” The capsule hadn’t really seemed that deep, but it was impossible to judge distance, the light very poor again, nothing truly distinguishable except up and down, a fog that wasn’t really fog but was impenetrable surrounding them, all but ingesting them.
 

Jack felt something hard, and he almost lost his balance, wheeled round and started to raise his submachine gun. It was Harek, the Turk. “Allah be praised that you are alive!”
 

Jack only nodded. “The lieutenant?”
 

“Here, sir, right beside you.”
 

Jack could see Easley clearly, standing beside him, Ellen joining them. “Alan says we are there, in 1996. The capsule will open in a second or so.”
 

Jack Naile took Ellen into his left arm and embraced her, his elbow hurting. “Jensen didn’t make it, kid. Pass the word when you can.” Raising his voice so all could hear him, Jack announced, “Guns up, guys. When the chamber opens, the fight starts! Be ready!” Glancing at his wife again, Jack cautioned, “And you stay right beside me or behind me. Got it?”
 

This was a day for amazing things. His wonderfully independent, brave-as-they-come wife leaned up, kissed him on the cheek and said, “Yes.”
 

CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
 

The capsule door began to open.
 

Returning to the 1990s—Jack wanted to take time, time just to breathe, to see familiar things, do things. He realized that he missed the stupid and the pleasant almost equally—everything from getting caught in an Atlanta traffic jam to junk faxes to the ubiquitous unwanted telephone solicitations to Wendy’s wonderful double cheeseburgers and fries to the latest Jerry Goldsmith movie music. But he had other things to do. Save the world, or at least its history and probably its future.
 

Jack inhaled, treated himself to that before he would start shooting, and he kissed his wife full on the lips. “I love you, whatever time it is.”
 

Turning to Easley, he asked, “Are you and your men ready, Lieutenant?”
 

“Yes, sir. With regrets for what we must do, I am ready. God willing, they’re all combatants.”
 

Jack nodded, walked toward the nearly fully lowered door, addressing it as if it were a ramp, the angle progressively gentler. Ellen was on his left side, Easley to her left, the five remaining men of the Seventh Cavalry volunteers spread out, flanking them. Somewhere along the way, perhaps while the fight at the tank had been going on, Standing Bear had etched a few streaks of black war paint to his cheeks.
 

A Lakewood man, dressed in urban-cammie pants, a black T-shirt and white track shoes, just stared into the capsule. “Who the fuck are you guys?” The Lakewood man drew a pistol from a black fabric shoulder holster under his left arm.
 

“It begins,” Jack almost whispered. The H-K submachine gun was already to Jack’s shoulder. It was merely necessary to fire it. Jack let off three suppressed shots, stitching a ragged line from the man’s sternum into the man’s throat.
 

Easley whispered, “God forgive us,” then shouted, “Keep the lady safe. Now, follow me!”
 

Easley vaulted the last few feet from the capsule door into the 1996 time-transfer compound beyond, Standing Bear at his elbow. Despite the danger, Easley stared at the sky and proclaimed, “I am in the future!” In the next instant, Lakewood personnel—armed with M-16 rifles and MP-5 submachine guns—began pouring from the huts and trailers comprising the compound’s structures. A single shot, followed in a split second by a long, ragged burst of assault-rifle fire, hammered against the capsule, ricocheted.
 

Standing Bear, a submachine gun in each hand, wheeled toward the gunfire’s origin, his weapons firing from the hip. The man was a natural, Jack thought absently. Movies aside, firing a submachine gun from the hip was usually a total waste of ammunition. For Standing Bear, however, such a technique was not an exercise in futility. This man would have been a world-class fighting man in any century.