Of course, he thought. The technical experts had already started to examine the aircraft, which was now stripped of anything that could be moved. The strange luggage of the passengers had been examined; far too many of the technical gadgets made no sense to Roth, let alone the technical experts.
“Jan,” he called, and waited for the guard to enter the room. “Jan, go down to the cells and bring me one of the prisoners.”
“Jawohl,” Jan said. The limping SS guard wasn’t fit for active duty and resented it. Roth returned to the books and waited; it took Jan ten minutes to return, with a young blonde lady. Roth remembered her; she had been the woman who’d been holding the subhuman African.
“Good morning,” he said, in careful English. He’d sent for an SS translator, but the dummkopt hadn’t arrived. “I would like you to answer a few of my questions.”
“Go to hell,” the woman spat at him. Jan lifted his club to strike her; Roth caught his eye and shook his head at him. “I demand that you take us at once to the British embassy.”
“Lady,” Roth said carefully, “you are no longer in the year… ah, 2015. This is 1940; your nation and mine are at war.”
“And for some stupid nutzoid racial theory you have separated me from my husband, you…”
Words seemed to fail her. Roth smiled dryly; she had spirit. As an SS officer’s wife, she might have gone far. “Yes, we have,” he said. “Mrs… ah?”
“Horton, Jasmine Horton,” the woman – Jasmine – said.
“Mrs Horton, you, your husband and your mixed-race children are completely in my power,” he said conversationally. “For the mere crime of mingling your blood with one of the inferior races, you could spend the rest of your life in a rest home; your family, of course, would spend the rest of their lives in a camp.” Her look of pure rage should, by rights, have blasted him into dust and ashes. “If you cooperate with me… well, I am a Standartenfuhrer and I can and will protect you and your family.”
He held up a hand to forestall a second outburst. “I would like you to explain, carefully, to me and my men what each of the strange devices in the plane does and where it comes from,” he said. “If you do that, you will be reunited with your family, understand?”
Bright tears shone in her eyes. “Yes,” she said softly. “Let’s get on with it, shall we?”
Roth bowed politely. “Come with me,” he said, and led her through a maze of corridors into a big room. The luggage was spread out all over the floor, broken into different categories; clothes, books, toys and electronic devices. Roth pointed to a strange device, studded with numbered buttons. “What is that?”
The woman smiled through her tears, clearly enjoying his confusion. “That’s a mobile phone,” she said. “It was made in Britain.” She picked it up and pressed a button on the front; the small screen led up with an eerie green glow. “No signal,” she said, and then frowned. “There was a signal, for a moment.”
One of the technical experts backed a question in German. Roth translated; “are they useless here?”
“Without the transmission network, of course,” she said. “It must have been a fluke.” She glanced down at the phone again. “Yes, must have been a fluke.”
“A mobile phone,” Roth said. “How does it work?”
Jasmine shook her head. “I have no idea,” she said. She glared at him. “Next?”
“This thing,” Roth said, pointing to a black box on a second table. There were dozens of them, carrying strange Japanese-sounding names. Some of them had been opened, revealing more buttons and larger screens.
“That’s a laptop computer,” Jasmine said. She reached out and pushed a button; the screen came to life, showing a single word. PASSWORD? “Well, that’s torn it,” she said.
Roth wasn’t in the mood for humour; watching the scientists start to activate the other devices was depressing. “Explain,” he ordered curtly, and wondered if he would understand the explanation.
“The computer requires a password to work,” Jasmine said. She chuckled. “You understand the concept?”
Roth, in one smooth motion, slapped her hard on the buttocks. “You will cooperate,” he said sharply. “What is a laptop and why does it need a password?”
“It’s a device to store information,” Jasmine said. Her eyes had started to tear again. “You turn it on, input the information, and set the password. Without the password, the computer won’t work properly.”
“Who has the password?” Roth demanded. “One of the other prisoners?”
“Yes,” Jasmine snapped, all composure gone. “Now let me see my husband.”
Roth summoned Jan and gave him orders that the family was to be reunited. One aircraft from Britain had turned up – and a number of strange explosions near the coast had suggested that other aircraft had also arrived, but crashed far harder than the one he’d captured – and other strange aircraft had been sighted near Britain, apparently operating from the island nation. General Albert Kesselring had ordered him to find out as much as he could from the prisoners, without damaging them too much in the process.
Sighing, Roth went back to his office. The war had seemed so simple and certain only last night. Had it really been less than a day?
The SS – and Jim Oliver was now certain that they were the real thing – hadn’t been as bad as he’d feared, once he’d recovered from the shock. Their confusion at the various gadgets, ranging from wristwatches to mobile phones, had done much to restore his confidence, even stripped to his underwear. The other male passengers, apart from the flight crew, had all been shoved into the same large room. Many of them were now trying to catch up on some sleep; others were playing with a chess set that the guards had allowed them to keep.
He smiled to himself. The cell was securely locked, and there were guards outside, but he was certain that the Germans couldn’t build electronic bugs like his own nation could. There was opportunity here; opportunity that he could take advantage of. He didn’t think that the Germans would be able to use the laptops – unless they managed to run a current from whatever electricity lines they had without blowing it up – and the technical data he’d brought would be useless to them, but he could still be helpful. And besides, he wanted out of the prison cell – and sitting around wasn’t going to help, was it?
Standing up, he tapped at the door, and waited for the SS guard to open it. The guard wasn’t the SS guard of TV movies; he seemed fairly ordinary. Oliver was almost disappointed. Even though he knew it was stupid, he’d half-expected a group of jackbooted men shouting ‘Sieg heil, Sieg heil!’
“Take me to your leader,” he said, in flawless German. “I have vital information for him.”
“General, I cannot even begin to explain just how advanced some of the devices here are,” Roth said. General Kesselring seemed to expect immediate breakthroughs. “Sir, we don’t even understand the components; one of the phones was smashed and the technicians can’t understand anything about it.”
The phone – a normal German field telephone – seemed to vibrate with the General’s annoyance. “Herr Standartenfuhrer, we seem to be dealing with planes out of my nightmares,” Kesselring proclaimed. “Where are they coming from?”