Steven Landry
&
Katie Rae Sank
THE MAIDS OF CHATEAU VERNET
A SOLDIER LOST IN TIME
This novel is dedicated to the estimated 72,500 French Jews who died in the Holocaust, the 257,500 who survived, and the 3,995 French non-Jews who were awarded the Righteous Among Nations honorific for risking their lives to save the survivors.
FOREWORD
“Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks.”
It is estimated that about seventy-five percent of the Jews living in Metropolitan France survived the Holocaust. Perhaps that is why the role of the Vichy Government and French Police in feeding the Nazi death machine has been little noted by history. This novel is set during that time.
The authors would like to thank the members of the Harford Writers’ Group @ The Library for their reviews and encouragement during this project, and especially our first reader, Larry Garnett.
This is a work of fiction. All characters are either the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or deceased, is purely coincidental.
PART I
1
0400 hours, Sunday, May 15, 2050, Wah Cantonment, Islamic Republic of Pakistan
“Go, Go, Go!” Staff Sergeant Hiram Halphen rushed forward at the jumpmaster’s command and leapt into the night sky twenty-five thousand feet above the garrison city of Wah. A sniper in the Sayeret Special Forces Company of the 35th Paratroop Brigade, Israeli Defense Forces, Hiram had been tasked to support a Mossad operation in Pakistan.
Eight Mossad paramilitary agents followed Hiram off the CV-6 Speed Agile stealth transport. Hiram was a skilled night flyer, capable of precise maneuvering in his wing suit. One of the agents, less well trained on the new wing suits, crashed into the perimeter fence moments after Hiram touched down. Alarms blared throughout the nuclear weapons storage facility.
Hiram, followed by his assigned spotter Jacob, sprinted for the shadows along the wall of the nearest building. They found a ladder leading to the roof and scrambled up while gunfire erupted throughout the compound.
At the top of the ladder, Hiram paused and peeked out over the edge of the roof. Two Pakistani soldiers stood on the far side of the roof, both visible in his sixth-generation night vision goggles, scouring the area for the intruders. Hiram swung his M22 assault rifle up into position, settled the laser aiming dot on the back of the nearest man, and fired. With barely a whisper, the electro-magnetic rail gun launched a nine-millimeter bullet at nine-tenths the speed of sound and the Pak soldier pitched forward and off the roof. His companion spun around just in time to catch Hiram’s second shot in the chest. He fell back against the low wall, slumped to a sitting position, gasping for breath.
Jacob followed Hiram onto the roof, and they ran to the southeast corner of building. Hiram put his assault rifle down and pulled the ancient, but still effective M2010 precision sniper rifle from its harness on his back. The weapon had been handed down from his grandfather and was the only tangible memento he had left of the man who had taught him to shoot. Meanwhile Jacob set up his night spotting scope and began calling out targets. Hiram went to work.
Ten minutes later, the Mossad team leader called “Masada” over the squad radio net. Hiram glanced down at the combat communication and information digital device, or C2ID2, on his wrist. The counter was winding down from five minutes. When it reached zero, a Mark XII hyperbaric nuclear weapon would reduce the Pak nuclear complex to radioactive dust, taking out a significant portion of the newly established Islamic Republic of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.
Hiram looked up in time to see the wink of machine gun fire from a distant guard tower. Both he and Jacob dove for cover behind the low wall that rimmed the roof, but Jacob wasn’t quite quick enough. Two rounds punched through his body armor, killing him instantly. His C2ID2 display confirmed that Jacob’s heart had ceased beating. The device also reported that the other seven Mossad agents were injured or dead.
As bullets continued to fly above his head, Hiram low-crawled across the roof to a spot where he could engage the machine gunner and his assistant. Neither man saw Hiram rise up until it was too late. The gunner’s head exploded with Hiram’s first shot. To his credit, the gunner’s assistant tried to man the weapon himself rather than duck for cover. It was a fatal decision.
With a little more freedom of movement, Hiram ran to a spot where he could get a view of the nuclear weapon emplacement site. The counter on his wrist showed two minutes until detonation. The Mark XII remained in place, three dying Mossad agents around it. Pak soldiers advanced towards the nuclear weapon. Hiram gave them reason to be cautious, picking off several with his sniper rifle as the counter continued toward zero.
At thirty seconds, he judged the Pakistanis wouldn’t be able to reach the weapon in time, so he turned and sprinted back to where Jacob’s body rested. Hiram pulled off his pack and activated the portal to the combat logistics pod within it.
He wrestled Jacob’s body through the portal, dumped all of his and Jacob’s gear in after him, and then jumped through himself, a moment before the weapon detonated.
Hiram’s disassociated molecules converted to electro-magnetic energy, slipped through time and space, converted back to matter, and reassembled. Simultaneously, the trans-dimensional portal within the hyperbaric nuclear weapon opened, releasing a pressure wave of supercritical water with the energy equivalent of fifty kilotons of TNT with a small side of neutron radiation. The downward oriented pressure wave burrowed through the concrete and steel bunker beneath the device, compressing everything in its direct path into dust, including the Pakistani nuclear stockpile.
2
A temporal artifact of May 6, 2050
Hiram landed on the floor of the combat logistics pod as the sixty-six-centimeter ceiling-mounted portal snapped shut above him. He had been transported through time and space to a fifteen-meter-long, three-meter-tall, by four-meter-wide container located in a temporal artifact of May 6th, 2050, the day the logistical plan for the Wah mission had been finalized.
The inter-dimensional transit portal in the ceiling of the pod was a companion to the one in his backpack. He had travelled from the rooftop in Wah, Pakistan to an artifact of the IDF staging facility deep in the Negev desert, at the speed of light.
The container held everything an IDF infantry scout and sniper platoon could ever need in combat, from food and water to small unmanned aerial and ground vehicles, kayaks and inflatable boats, to twenty-five different types of individual and crew served weapons, along with ammunition, explosives and pyrotechnics. It even contained a fully equipped bathroom and a kitchenette.
Hiram walked to the opposite end of the container, stepping over Jacob’s body, where a second, larger portal was mounted vertically on the wall. The two-meter-diameter portal was meant to transport him to its companion at the IDF logistical facility in normal space. However, when he activated the unit’s controls, they didn’t respond. He ran a diagnostic test, which failed to identify the problem. “Destination not found,” blinked on the control screen in bold, red letters.