“I know. Your escape may have escalated the timetable.”
“What are we going to do? We can’t let them die.”
“I don’t think there’s anything we can do for them just yet. I don’t know how…” Hiram trailed off and drifted toward the map fastened to the wall of the cabin. “Unless, we can end this terrible war.”
“What are you saying?” Sarah joined him at the map. The edges were worn, preferred routes permanently traced on its surface.
“We have to stop the war,” he touched Auschwitz on the map. “Before they end up here. It won’t be easy.”
“A nineteen-year-old Serbian managed to start the Great War all by himself,” Sarah said. “You have thirty maids to help stop one. You’ll figure something out. I need to go brief my team.”
Sarah left Hiram staring at the map and returned to the bridge, where Ester and Maria watched the bridge crew. She brought both women out onto the flying bridge where they could watch the sailors without being overheard. Neither was happy with the news about the change in the timeline. Nor were any of their Team Two comrades.
Towards eight o’clock, the lights of the Costa Brava, Spain’s Mediterranean coast, came into view. An hour later, they ordered the Captain to stop the ship, then herded the entire crew into the forward cargo hold, locking the door after them.
Hiram pulled one of the collapsed inflatable boats out of his tinderbox and assembled it on the deck. He reached into his pack again, this time two net bags full of rope emerged. One of the bags spilled onto the deck and turned out to be a ladder made of a material Sarah hadn’t seen before. “Nylon,” he replied as she bent to touch it. “A synthetic material.” The second bag contained a large coil of rope. Using a complicated-looking knot, he secured both the rope and the ladder to a bollard and threw the other end of the ladder overboard. It stretched down to the sea, then slowly swung aft as the ship drifted with the current. As Hiram passed out life vests, Sarah peered over the side of the boat. She didn’t like the thought of making that descent at all.
Hiram tied the inflatable boat to one end of the rope with separate knots before tossing it overboard and climbing down. He tied a rope from the bow of the soft inflatable boat to the stern of the motorized RHIB.
Maria climbed down next, then Sarah. She made it down about ten feet when her foot slid on the nylon ladder. Unprepared, she plummeted into the cool water. The instant her head slid beneath the surface, her life vest inflated. She popped back up to the surface, thankful for Hiram’s insistence on wearing one. Sarah had never been a strong swimmer and even the flotation device did not extinguish her fear as she drifted away from Hiram and the M.V. Calais.
The six remaining members of Team Two settled into the boats without a problem. Sarah bobbed a few feet away and tried to control her breathing as she watched. Until at last, Hiram hauled her into the RHIB.
“Thank you,” she sputtered, spitting out the salty water she’d taken in from the few small waves that had caught her by surprise.
“Can’t lose my only scientist.”
Hiram tapped an icon on his C2ID2 while yanking on the rope and ladder. Both came tumbling down into the water. She helped him gather them up and stuff them back into their net bags.
The RHIB towed the smaller boat toward shore. Grateful to reach the rocky beach after the rough day at sea, Sarah jumped out into the shallows and fought to get the boat out of the surf and up on shore.
Hiram signaled her to take charge while he packed up the boats.
“Perform a weapons check and get formed up,” she said. “We still have a couple hours’ march ahead of us. But don’t worry, it’s all uphill.” The women muttered a few curses as they adjusted their packs for another exhausting exercise. Sarah felt their pain.
They headed up the rocky slope, Hiram taking point. He led the tiny column of maids-cum-soldiers off into the darkness.
12
A temporal artifact of May 6, 2050
Hiram craved a hot cup of coffee and decided to get it from the coffeemaker in his pod. The Turkish coffee reminded him of his late Mossad spotter Jacob. He insisted on a cup first thing in the morning, unlike his parents, who had emigrated from Istanbul in the 2020s where tea had been a more prominent staple. Hiram remembered Jacob telling him about the collection of teas his father had given him before their last mission. Jacob had stored them in his pod just in case he had a hankering for “a nice feminine, flowery blend while destroying the stinking Pakistanis.” Hiram smiled. Maybe his new soldiers would welcome a flowery cup of tea. Deborah probably enjoyed tea. Once he made it back to the campsite in France, to Deborah and the teams left behind, he’d retrieve the tea collection from Jacob’s pod.
Hiram took another sip of his coffee. Jacob’s pod! Why hadn’t he thought of it before? He set down the small cup, unfinished. He located Jacob’s pack and the portal within it. Jacob’s pod was not a standard IDF-equipped pod, but rather a Mossad-equipped unit, which had been outfitted for the mission to Wah. Hiram removed Jacob’s C2ID2 unit from the pack and activated Jacob’s portal.
The moment Hiram began his descent into the dead man’s pod, his head began to ache. The sudden pain surprised him enough that he almost lost his balance on the ladder. His feet touched the floor and he reached out to the nearest wall to stabilize himself.
He had never gone through to a second pod from within a pod. As the space around him spun, he wondered if anyone had tried such a thing. The familiar effects of Hagar’s Curse seemed accelerated, almost ten-fold. Before the pod could do any permanent damage, Hiram reviewed the items inside. He worked as quickly as his body would allow. In less than five minutes, Hiram found a cache of state-of-the-art surveillance gear and the one item that might end the war, before the Jews now concentrated at Drancy stepped on to one of the death trains headed to the extermination camp at Auschwitz. At the far end of the pod, a Mark XII hyperbaric nuclear weapon sat nestled in a cradle.
With his weapon of choice identified, Hiram climbed out of Jacob’s pod and into the one he had been assigned. His stomach roiled with relief. The intensity of pain in his head took a step back. It still felt as if he had been in the pod way too long. Without delay, Hiram climbed out of his pod and into the warm morning air.
Hiram found a place to rest in the shade of a scrubby pine tree. He slowed his breathing, tried to calm himself while his stomach settled and the pain in his head dissipated. Close by, he heard Sarah talking followed by an outburst of laughter from the others. The sound brought with it a source of comfort.
When the small words on Jacob’s C2ID2 display stopped blurring, he searched for the operating manual on the Mark XII. He confirmed the weapon’s permissive action lock code was stored on the device, and copied the eleven character PAL code and the manual into his own C2ID2. He wouldn’t need Jacob to operate it. The only thing left◦– get it out of Jacob’s pod.
Massing ninety kilograms, the Mark XII was designed to be carried short distances by two strong men. A pulley system came with the device that could to be used to lift the sixty by thirty-centimeter overpack up through the portal. Once he set the pulley up in his own pod, Hiram could drag the Mark XII over to a location beneath the portal and hook it up.
The link between the portal in Jacob’s pack and the Mossad-equipped pod existed in a temporal artifact of 2050. Hiram couldn’t be sure that the link would be maintained if he were to bring Jacob’s pack out into the real world of 1942, and he wasn’t sure the link could be reestablished once it was severed. Once his head and his stomach were almost back to normal, Hiram went back into his pod and then into Jacob’s to extract the single Mark XII.