Four hours later with his head pounding, Hiram tightened the last bolt, locking the portal that led to his backpack to the frame that held the aerial portal. If it worked, he could jump directly from his backpack to the sky above without having to climb down into the pod. It meant leaving the backpack behind after each jump. The pod allowed him to pick up another, as many as he needed. Remote activation of the self-destruct mechanism with the C2ID2 ensured no trace of the backpack or portal would be left behind.
Now I have to get out of here so I can test it. He’d prepared by retrieving Jacob’s backpack. He opened a portal to Jacob’s pod from inside his own and climbed down into it. From there, he jumped into the night sky from Jacob’s aerial portal. His headache blossomed and his stomach churned from just the few moments he spent in Jacob’s pod.
He landed in the meadow once again, then limped to the tent. Once inside, he picked up an uneaten protein bar and tossed it though the portal in his backpack. Without any wind to push the bar away from his location, he expected it to fall the five thousand meters from the open portal in the sky straight to the ground. About a minute later, the bar bounced off the outside of the tent. It works. Now for something living. He spied a large beetle on a nearby tree and scooped it into a plastic bag. He blew into the bag, inflating it as much as possible, then sealed it. The beetle earned its airborne wings a moment later. The bag drifted about a hundred meters on the way down, but Hiram easily tracked it with his night vision goggles. The beetle scurried away with no apparent injury when Hiram released it.
Hiram heard the distinct whistle of a nearby train. A bridge on the main railroad line through the Vosges Mountains required crossing trains to slow down to a few kilometers per hour. Hiram jumped once more, this time aiming for the roof of a slow-moving boxcar. On the way down, he used his C2ID2 to close both portals and initiate the self-destruct sequence for the backpack he left behind.
With the clunky cast on his left leg, he lost his balance and sprawled onto the surface of the moving target, grasping for any handhold that would prevent him from rolling off the roof. He caught the protruding upper edge of the boxcar’s sliding door mount just before he would have slid off and fallen to the rocky valley below. He crawled to the hatch, lifted the small door, and slipped inside, hoping the train would carry him west, in the direction of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall.
0600 hours, Sunday, August 9, northeast of Loches, Indre River Valley, Vichy France.
Hiram caught three separate trains to get within five kilometers of Team Bravo’s campsite. On the first train, the dark provided enough cover for him to slide into a box car filled with personal belongings. Suitcases had been packed on one side of the car in tight rows stacked almost to the ceiling. On the other end of the car lay neat piles of fur garments, organized so that coats remained separate from stoles, muffs, and gloves. Several flattened and beady eyed critters stared back at him as light filtered in from outside. He settled in near the doors, a wall of suitcases to one side of him and a stack of coats on the other. The second train carried Gentile passengers through occupied France, unaware of the horrors taking place around them except for the occasional inconvenience of having to show papers to a policeman strolling down the aisle. Hiram peered through a small window between the cars where he clung to the ladder leading up to the car’s roof. During the night, not even the policeman cared to check the outside of the train. It was ill advised to flash around a torch during blackout hours. The third train was on its return trip from dropping off a large group of Jewish prisoners somewhere outside of France. The Star of David had been painted on each of the box cars. Hiram chose a car near the rear of the train. A strong odor of excrement mixed with the scent of decaying meat remained inside the boxcar. The car had been poorly cleaned at some point and the doors left open to let the air do the rest. Despite the boxcar being an easy target, Hiram regretted his decision and found himself vomiting out the open door as the train clacked along the iron rails.
Hiram established communication with Team Bravo’s Icarus drone twenty minutes before sunrise. He pushed through the coordinates of his targeted stopping point. An hour later, he jumped from the train as it neared the stop in Loches. Agnes waited for him at the edge of the tree line with her railbike.
“Agnes, I left an Icarus drone and a surveillance drone flying over the northern Vosges Mountains.” Hiram said. “Can you contact them?”
Agnes said something in French. He held up his hand, asking her to wait. He poked a few icons on his C2ID2, bringing up the Babel Fish. He despised the thing, but with Sarah in England, hopefully, and Deborah out of contact, he’d have to rely on it. When the ready symbol appeared on the device, he spun his hand in a circle, indicating she should repeat what she’d just said.
For a moment, Agnes stared at him. Then she spoke. “We were worried when we didn’t hear from you,” the translator repeated in halting Hebrew.
“The plan did not go as intended. I left an Icarus drone and a surveillance drone flying over the northern Vosges Mountains. Can you make contact with Deborah and Danette?” The software proved to be a slow tool. “Hurry! You need to find them. If they survived the blast, they’re somewhere in those mountains near Lutzelbourg right now.”
Agnes nodded and turned her attention to the C2ID2 display, punching in a set of codes she read off Hiram’s C2ID2.
He let out a breath of relief. “Sorry. It’s been a long two days.” He touched Agnes on the shoulder.
She glanced up and offered a smile. Then, she climbed into the sidecar of the railbike and signaled Hiram should drive. Once Agnes contacted the drones, she would search for Deborah and Danette.
Team Bravo’s camp rested about thirty-five kilometers southeast of the confluence of the Le Cher, Indre and Loire rivers near Tours◦– a scant five kilometers south of the demarcation line between Occupied and Vichy France.
With no more than a set of coordinates from Agnes, Hiram drove the railbike toward the group’s temporary campsite. Team Bravo’s camp had been nestled in a shallow valley in the woods. Upon arrival, Ida stepped out from behind a large tree wielding an M22 and pointed toward a well-hidden path. The rest of Team Bravo◦– Nathalie and Isadore◦– gathered around, anxious for more information before Hiram had time to dismount. Even with Deborah and Danette still missing, having the others gathered here lightened the fear and exhaustion that he had been building since the event in Saarbrücken.
Ida slung the M22 behind her and embraced him. “Is everything okay?” She looked down at the cast on his leg.
“Bad landing. It’ll heal.” He hoped it would heal. “We had trouble getting close enough to the target,” Hiram said.
Ida gasped when the disembodied voice floated out of Hiram’s C2ID2.
“The border was more heavily guarded than I expected. The winds were all wrong when we arrived in Spicheren.” The Babel Fish struggled to keep up. “Deborah detected a Holocaust train approaching, so we had to act fast.” He fumbled with his C2ID2, hoping for a message from Danette and Deborah. Once again nothing. “I jumped across the border, the landing nowhere near the intended target. In order to impact the rail crossing, I had to dial-in a much larger yield than initially planned.