“So you figure we’ve found another here?”
“I can’t think of any other explanation, and it’s a one way ticket for some reason. Suppose now, in 1943, it’s easy enough to get around that bend in the passage. The man walks right in to a rift, and time spirits him away. But that inconvenient tether presents a little problem, so it just gets severed when he shifts. What you say might be correct. There could be a drop off there, or some other hazard. But think of it this way. If our men do shift to some other time, the passage may have changed. These formations have been fairly stable, but something could have happened between now and then that changed things. Suppose they shifted forward, but ten years before the time where they arrive, there was a collapse of this part of the passage. Now, when they look over their shoulder, there is no way back.”
MacRae thought about that, then something darker entered his mind. “Suppose they move in time as you suggest,” he said. “But there’s no clear space for them when they arrive at the other end. Taking your collapse scenario, they could just be shifting forward into rubble and fallen rock. They could be…”
The conclusion the Captain had presented was dark indeed. They could be dead, killed trying to manifest into solid rock. This rift, if that was what existed here, was unsecured. They had not found any engineered gateway, nor could they have opened it if they did, not having the key.
“So what’s our play?” said MacRae. “Do we send in another man? Pardon the metaphor, but won’t that be like throwing good money after bad? Do we all just follow suit and try our luck in that passage. If you want my advice, I say we should secure this site, leave a team here on watch incase those men do get back, and get the bloody hell out of here. This place is eerie enough without having men slipping through cracks in time.”
“The Macaque,” said Elena. “You know how damn clever those things are, and you saw what it had in hand with that candy wrapper.”
“You’re saying it used this passage here to get to the future somehow?”
“How else would it have that Milky Way bar? When we showed up, it fled this way on purpose. It must have known that this was no dead end. No… I think it knew exactly what it was doing. It went right up that rock to the top where we found that entrance. I think it used this passage before.”
“To come and go? Then why can’t our men get back here?”
“This might be a one way street,” said Elena, thinking. “Those Barbary Apes have been here so long that they must have explored every nook and cranny on the Rock. Nobody pays them any mind. They might have found another way back to this time—another segment of this rift. Look at all these caves and passages down here. Suppose the time rift here is like that, not just one locality, but a network like these caves. This route might go in one direction, and the Apes might get back here by another route.”
“And how does that help us now? Our men are still gone—god only knows where.”
“All I know is that the Macaque got through—to some place beyond that rock, and our men got somewhere as well. If they have their wits about them, they’ll try and follow that monkey.”
“Monkey business,” said MacRae, shaking his head. “That’s what this has all come down to now.”
Elena decided. “I’ll take your suggestion on how we proceed from here. We’ll leave a three man team here under Sergeant Keller, but I’ll not risk another man in that passage. Get Private Cooke back. I think we’ve proved there’s a rift here, but we haven’t found any gate or door that the key off Rodney might open. So we’re not in the correct place to transit this rift, and as we’ve seen, this is dangerous work.”
“No argument there. But I’d pay a high price to get those men back, or to even know where they’ve gone. What further business do we have here? Is there any way we can get ourselves home?”
“I don’t know. In fact, I’m not even sure that our home waters even exist any longer. The only way we’ll ever know where this rift goes is to either take that passage behind James and Barret, or to find that damn key that was on the Rodney.”
“Assuming we ever find what it’s supposed to open here.”
“Oh, we’ll find it Gordon. If it’s here, we’ll find it.”
“I wish I was so confident in that, but giving you the benefit of the doubt, I’ll be the first to give the damn thing a good hard knock. We’ve no key, and we won’t get it open, if there is a door here. What’s the point?”
Elena gave him a knowing look. Then she said something that opened a whole new set of questions for MacRae. “We’ll find that key,” she said. “Not here… not now. But we’ll find it.”
Part X
Stalemate
“To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.”
Chapter 28
On the Morning of January 12, 1943 O’Connor began his advance on Tripoli. Wimberly’s 51st Highland Division led off the ceremonies, the 2nd and 5th Seaforth Battalions advancing up the coast road behind the recon battalion. At this point, the main road turned inland at Homs before branching, with one road bending north again to the coast, and a second heading southeast to Tarhuna. Rather than taking either road, he sent the lead brigade of the 51st up a secondary road that still hugged the coast towards the defensive positions of the Italian Littorio Armored Division.
Much to their own surprise, they caught the Italians napping that morning. The enemy had only probed at the line with light recon elements for the last two weeks, and the appearance of the British recon battalion seemed nothing more to the Italians. When it was suddenly followed by waves of infantry, rushing forward with fixed bayonets, chaos rippled through the outer shell of the defense, and the unprepared tank companies began a hasty retreat.
Some men were still sleeping under their light M14 tanks. Others were just getting up to get morning fires started to shake off the desert cold and begin breakfast. The last thing they expected were the big Scottish infantrymen, raging in with bad intent. Behind them, the brigade artillery had followed the troops and was now starting to send a rain of 25-pounder shells over the leading edge of the infantry attack, concentrating much of that fire on the heights of Hill 151. That low nob was about 10 kilometers inland from the coast, and directly astride the main road which had bent that way again towards the village of Nagazza beyond.
The advance was harried only by German planes, and there were several incidents where the columns were strafed as they pressed forward. O’Connor’s problem was that the German operation in Syria and Iraq had siphoned off a good part of the Western Desert Air Force. Four wings, two other fighter groups, and a bomber wing were all assigned to operations in that sector, leaving him with only two dedicated fighter wings and two bomber wings, one the American 12th Bombardment Group on loan to the RAF. While those bombers could fly from fields around Benghazi, his air superiority assets had far too few fields close enough to allow for quick turnaround.
There was only the one good strip at Misrata, another at Bene Walid, and two more near Sirte, all well behind the front. It became necessary to establish two highway strip sites along the main coast road, one at Zliten, and the forward strip at Homs, but these could service only one squadron each of no more than 12 to 16 planes. So the early going saw Rommel enjoying something he had not had for a very long time—a slight advantage in the fighter duels contesting the airspace over the battlefield. His own fields were very close, west of Tarhuna, and numerous fields near Tripoli.