One Thousand Years (3 page)

Twack!
McHenry's plane shuddered hard when a bird struck his nose. The
impact rattled the cockpit, loosening a battered wiring harness. His
engine lost power. His prop was windmilling.

“My
engine's out,” he said, dropping away. He understood that his
radio must also be out, but followed up as a matter of procedure.
“Anyone read me?”

No
one replied. He could see Parker breaking off, and the other men
reforming. He took a deep breath and saw this for another point
where he would have to define himself. He'd either make it or die
right here and — either way — he was going to do it like
a man. He played with the yoke to test the controls, and scanned the
horizon for land. At well under four hundred feet, there weren't
many options other than to glide back toward land. He began
turning in that direction as smoothly as his damaged rudder could
handle.

“I've
got control,” he said, lowering his flaps. He turned off his
useless gun switches, and tried restarting the engine. When that failed,
as he knew it would, he recycled the battery and generator switches, and
then the circuit breakers. He was
indeed going down. Every retry of the engine was simply going
through the motions. He slid
open the canopy and felt the sharp breeze on his face. This was real
to him now.

Parker
pulled up, engine cut and flaps down, to pace him on his descent,
sliding open his own canopy. He made a
follow-me
motion with
his arm, and then turned right — away from land.

McHenry
followed without questioning, and saw. There was a Navy warship only
a few miles away. He gave his friend a thumbs-up gesture. He knew
that one of the men would be on the radio, telling them to prepare to
retrieve him. Indeed, as they passed
under 200 feet, the ship was already beginning its turn. They would
be coming for him. The other men in the squadron circled above,
marking the spot.

He could taste the salt spray in the air,
and knew that Parker should have leveled off long before now.
The end was coming.
He wanted so much to say what a pleasure it was flying with them all.
But there was no time left. He saluted crisply.

Parker
returned the salute, clearly saying words that McHenry could read on
his lips,
“Godspeed, Anthem.”

Already
dangerously low, Parker powered up to begin leveling off, watching
him continue his descent. The end was coming. McHenry pulled back
and flared in the last seconds.

The
plane touched the water and skipped nimbly once, allowing McHenry one
final moment of free flight, then slammed hard into a cresting wave.
He was struck unconscious immediately, still strapped to his seat.
Parker was calling to his dead radio, pleading for him to awake and
get out of the sinking plane.

He
couldn't hear the calls; he couldn't even hear the planes flying
overhead or the sound of the waves splashing against the broken
canopy. The blood dripped from his ears as the cockpit filled with
cold seawater, the engine's weight pulling it down. His fellow
airmen would still be circling when the ship arrived. But the spot
they marked was just an oil slick on the water now. His plane was on
its final approach to the bottom of the Tyrrhenian Sea.

To a man, each whispered a tearful prayer for
Sam “Anthem” McHenry, Lieutenant, United States Army Air Force.

*

Dale looked on as Vinson maneuvered them beside the sinking warplane.
Submerged, they moved slowly under the water.
Although passive sensors were limited here, the system gave the illusion of clarity up to the distant shore.

“Watch
out for that approaching ship,” she warned. “It will be
overhead in five minutes.”

“Not
a problem,” he answered, grinning confidently. “We will
get this one.” He slowed their pace again as their Tiger
neared the destination.

She smiled back. His confidence was infectious.

And why shouldn't it be? Others from the starship had twice tried to
recover twentieth-century men, but they failed each time.
Operational parameters required caution in such abundant quantities
that failure was almost guaranteed. Yet, they were so close now it
seemed as though nothing could go wrong.

“We are there!” said Vinson excitedly.

Dale sent the grappler after the primitive airplane fuselage,
stopping it from sinking further.
Now she just needed to extract the American. A second arm
tore away the canopy, and then cut the seat belts.

“It goes well,” said Vinson.

“Do not say that yet,” she said, pulling the near-lifeless body
toward the medical container in the small cargo bay. The main
grappler released the airplane and pulled back inside.

“No!”
she sighed. The arm was too large and unwieldy to manipulate the
container. She stifled a derogatory comment about the lack of more
suitable equipment. With years for careful planning, they should not
have needed to rely on the Luftwaffe.

“They
are designed for heavy work under combat conditions,” Vinson
explained.

She
tried to ignore him, focusing her attention on the task and making
several more attempts to transfer the unconscious man into the
container that could preserve his life. “He's dying out
there!” she gasped.

Vinson
released the restraint on his seat and snapped up. “How much
time is there?”

“Maybe
two minutes.”

“We are deep enough to avoid that ship.
You can still take us deeper if you feel the need to.”

“You
can't go out there” she said, incredulous.

“I
have my emergency pack,” he reminded her, holding one hand on
the harness strapped across his chest. “I will not put the
mission at risk but you may activate it if I do.”

He stepped toward the door without waiting for a response,
but then turned once more.
“I really mean that.
Do not feel any guilt if you need to do this.”
And then he ran out of the cockpit, disappearing from view.

Dale
turned back toward the front end of the dome and cursed herself for
not being more assertive. She held the authority, after all.
Besides that, he was only a
Leutnant
in the Luftwaffe. She was a
Sturmbannführer
in the SS. Then she looked at the rapidly fading life signs for the
American, and was a little bit glad that Vinson could be so reckless.

Was
he really going to swim out there?
she wondered. Her familiarity with the Tiger was rudimentary at
best. She had been trained to fly them in an emergency, but the
workings of the small airlock underwater was a different matter. She
didn't know how long it would take to cycle
and they were definitely running out of time.

Then
there was the question of the emergency pack Vinson wore, an awkward
term for a personal self-destruct device. They were very efficient,
and she was certain it could do the job even underwater. Vinson
would be killed, his body dissolved in milliseconds. There was no
doubt in her mind that she would indeed activate it if necessary, and
that she would feel no guilt, only regretful sadness. They were in
the twentieth-century. History was something she understood only too
well. She would do anything to protect it. That's why she was here.

The seconds would tick by
slowly before she saw the hatch open. Vinson's head popped out. She
was surprised to see he wore no spacesuit. He climbed toward the
American's body, crawling along
the mechanical arm, careful to avoid the hazardous materials
surrounding the ship. He worked like a man who knew what he was
doing, but she reminded herself of the dangers. Those dangers were
not just to Vinson alone. Were he to introduce some kind of change
into the present, the change could be magnified through time. This
would affect the
Führer
,
the Reich and all mankind. She watched the indicators on her SS
side-panel, reminding herself that she knew what she was doing, too.
Everything was still safe. She worried
anyway. That was her job at this moment.

Vinson
had moved the American's inert body into place, gingerly but firmly.
The capsule closed immediately, and he rushed back toward the
airlock. It was then that she realized she had been holding her
breath all this time until the hatch had sealed.

She
guided the Tiger to a safe distance. Her side-panel showed the
American's body being put into the resuscitating phase of its
program. The man would recover. The capsule will keep him alive
until a medical officer revives him.

“He's
going to make it,” she said as Vinson entered. His uniform had
dried itself quickly, such was the material of the modern Third Reich,
but his face and hair were still wet. And his nose was bleeding. She
guessed the quick change of pressure to be painful, but he was still
grinning.

“I'd
better get the medical kit,” she said, grinning back. “You
came out too fast. Maybe I should have increased the cabin
pressure.”

“No,”
he said. “I could have waited in the airlock. I wanted to see
how he is doing.”

“You
got him in time.” She wanted to be mad at Vinson, but
couldn't. He was willing to give his life for the Reich, the
mission, and for someone he didn't even know. That was worth
something.

She
thought about the moment that would arrive later, when the records
were ejected, and the recording was off. She knew better than to
imagine giving him that kiss. Perhaps another squeeze of the hand
would suffice until that day when they finally return to their own time.

*

“On this morning of
hope we may speak of our firm conviction. We may hope because we are
strong, because we believe. Our hope is in the victory and freedom
of the Fatherland, in the message of our sword.”
—
Nazi Party message on Easter morning, (April 9, 1944)

McHenry's
eyes fluttered open and looked up in the bright light. His
mind was still in mid-dream, but he sensed that this light was
different from the one in the other dream. It was a harsh light and
he didn't like it.

He
heard a man's voice. It was in German.

Another
man stepped over to the equipment encasing McHenry's body and peered
down into his patient's eyes. The man said something in German to
the young officer standing beside him. He took a quick glance at the
charts on the large screen behind the patient, as though to confirm
his reasoning. McHenry was dazed but coming around. “Do not
be alarmed,” the second said, in English with only a slight
German accent. “You are still healing but you will be fine.
Breathe deep.”

McHenry
was groggy and slow, yet alert enough to guess from the white tunic
that the young-looking man hovering above him was a doctor. “Where?”
he stammered. The word from his lips had somehow startled him —
as though another part of his brain was surprised to hear himself
talk.

“You
must breathe deep,” the doctor insisted. McHenry took the deep
breath and some of the fog lifted. The doctor could see the results
on a panel. “That is good. Take two more deep breaths.”

McHenry
couldn't remember where he was last, or how he got here, but he knew
this wasn't a good place to be. He was thinking more clearly now.
His worst suspicions were quickly confirmed when he saw the crooked
cross of a swastika on the man's collar. He took another deep breath
and turned his head to examine the other man.

The
doctor appeared youthful, tall and muscular, but the blond-headed
first man looked even more like a picture straight out of Nazi
propaganda imagery. He wore a light blue uniform. It wasn't exactly
like the Luftwaffe uniforms McHenry had seen black-and-white photos
of, but there were pilot wings on the man's lapel and, of course, the
swastika emblem on a button below his collar.

A
third man stepped into view. It was a black man in a black SS
uniform, armband and all — or something like an armband.
McHenry took another deep breath.
A
black Nazi!
That didn't
make any sense. He decided it must be part of a dream. The black
man said nothing although he must have known his presence frustrated
McHenry's comprehension.

The
junior Luftwaffe officer took the initiative. “You are on a
ship,” he said gently. He paused and looked at the doctor as
though looking for his approval. “It will not be easy for you
to accept this but you can consider us to be your friends. The
doctor tells me that you still have some healing to do. I promise
you it will be fast. You must lie still for a few minutes longer.”

McHenry
took another deep breath and felt much better. He was becoming fully
alert. The black Nazi reminded him of Mike Jenkins, a student at
Tuskegee. Jenkins was sharp and had been training with them for a
few weeks until the Army decided he was just too big to be a pilot.
But these men were even bigger than Jenkins. A lot bigger.

He
looked down and saw the metal box that enclosed his torso. There was
also a metal band strapped to one arm, and something on his head,
which he thought might be bandages of some sort. He couldn't see his
legs from the other side of the equipment but they felt free. He
stretched his legs as he looked around to examine the room. This was
a large room with two other beds like the one he was lying on. Each
bed had a large white panel on the wall behind it. He tilted his
neck back to look at the panel over his own bed, which wasn't blank
at all. It was brightly lit with lists of numbers and some German
writing in one corner, but most of the panel displayed what looked
like a brightly colored cartoon image of the inside of a human body.
His body? He stretched his free arm and the image on the screen
moved accordingly. Curiously, some of the numbers changed as well.