The Upkeep traveled to a depth of 112 feet, three feet farther than the designers wanted, but this failure actually ensured the success of the mission. Just as the Upkeep hit the bottom of the dam nearest the last of the solid granite masonry blocks where they joined clay and earthen bank, the shock wave as the hydrostatic fuse detonated the nine thousand pounds of explosive in the barrel-like weapon.
At first there was little reaction other than the giant waterspout above the dam’s upper superstructure. The wash inundated the German guards running about in a panic. Then the real magic started to happen as Mother Nature started to take an interest in the game. The initial cracks in the dam were small, but as the explosion reached out from the base, the return of water to that empty pressure void slammed into the wall of concrete at over a thousand miles per hour. It cracked. The sizable void traveled like a snake at maximum speed as it raced up the waterside of the dam. It hit the top and the first of the five-thousand-pound chunks of wall started to cascade into the small village below, whose residents had already started to run for their lives.
The Möhne Dam and the surrounding countryside had only minutes of life left to them.
“Get me my power back!” Thomsen said as a shower of sparks cascaded to the floor, making even Himmler duck low.
“Get me to my car!” Himmler said as calmly as he could as he was pulled by his security team from the glass-enclosed room. His eyes fell on a panicked Thomsen as he tried to find out what was wrong. The fool didn’t even realize his precious project had been attacked. Thomsen’s eyes showed fear as he knew then that his life and his project were done. He would never survive the Reichsführer’s wrath.
The lights flickered as the SS men cleared the room and ran for the elevator while they still had power to operate the lifts.
Himmler turned to two of his SS security men. “Remove Thomsen and only his most essential personnel. The rest need to be silenced, including the Traveler and her sibling, if she returns.”
The two men turned and made their way to the laboratory below and started to pull Thomsen from the room amid his cries to help stop the catastrophe to his experiment. Three of his assistants were also pulled out of the lab as others used fire extinguishers to try to stem the flow of the disaster.
Before anyone knew what was happening, bullets ripped into the laboratory below. Technicians froze at their consoles as their world exploded into chaos. Bullets ripped into their screens and then themselves as SS machine guns opened up from the stairwell in the far wall.
Thomsen and his three assistants were pushed toward the elevators. The second was waiting with an SS soldier. Professor Thomsen was hustled toward the lift. Suddenly he felt the large glass window blow inward and was inundated with shrapnel. The largest piece lodged into his thorax and jugular veins. His last view of his precious Wellsian Doorway was of men with weapons destroying it and his people. His last dimming vision was of the small brother of the Traveler as he ran away in fear. He wondered if the boy would ever make it out alive. Thomsen died with many regrets, but the boy’s fate was not one of them.
Before the murderers of the many technicians of the doorway could reach the elevator, exploding water from the destroyed Möhne Dam was forced from the conduit tunnel. The furious flow of water burst forth like the rush of an oncoming train. The laboratory started filling fast with water from the collapsing dam.
The girl saw the explosions with the view she had of the doorway before it collapsed. Her eyes had found the frightened visage of her baby brother as the world she knew vanished before her eyes. She reached up at the spinning vortex of color as their eyes met and that was when she saw the frightened face of her brother turn to shock as the bullets ripped into the floor near him. Then the doorway closed forever and she was left with her hand reaching for nothing but the blackness that was the bunker. Moira Mendelsohn collapsed to the floor with the newspaper clutched in her hand.
Three hours later the young woman who had become the first time traveler in the history of the world broke open the door that led to the clean fresh air of the outdoors. It smelled wonderful. She looked at the stars above and took a deep breath.
The Traveler vanished into the Wellsian Doorway on that dark night back in 1943—and then disappeared again into a war-torn world of 1942—almost one year before she vanished the first time.
The Wellsian Doorway was closed and would not be opened again for close to a century.
PART ONE
DEPARTMENT 5656
This is a tale left unfinished… so let us conclude the story our way.
1
The nondescript Black Hawk UH-60 helicopter eased its large bulk onto the painted heliport atop the hospital normally used to airlift critically ill patients to one of the most prestigious hospitals in the world. Before the wheels set down, one of the men in the passenger compartment felt the eyes on them in the darkness of the heliport. He knew that with those eyes came weapons — weapons that were right now trained on them and their air force flight crew.
Colonel Jack Collins looked over at his boss, Director Niles Compton, who was just placing paperwork back into his briefcase. Jack watched as the director removed the wire-rimmed glasses from his face and then watched as the fifty-one-year-old Compton rubbed the black eye patch that covered his right socket. Compton realized the colonel was watching him and quickly lowered his hand and replaced the glasses.
The two security men Jack had assigned to escort them to Los Angeles were politely not paying attention to the director nor his recent deformity received during the war with the Grays the previous month. The two men, Diaz and Voorhees, both U.S. Marines, were dressed in civilian attire. Collins unsnapped the seat belt and waited on Compton to gather his things just as the sliding door of the Black Hawk was opened from the outside. Before anyone could stand to leave, a rather large man in a navy blue Windbreaker stepped up to the door with four other men attired in the exact same manner. Jack assisted Niles as he maneuvered his cane to support his badly injured right leg. Collins knew Compton would never walk without the support of the cane again.
As Niles Compton straightened in the dying wind of the helicopter’s rotors, Jack thought it beyond curious that Compton was now afflicted with the same war-won deformities that their benefactor, Senator Garrison Lee, had suffered with since his final days in World War II. He didn’t know if the sight was ironic, or just a cruel joke for the man who was the most humanitarian gentleman he had ever known — notwithstanding the fact that he was also the most brilliant man in government service, if not the world. The respect he had for the director had grown leaps and bounds since he had first met Niles back in the summer of 2006.
“Gentlemen, we need to scan you before allowing you inside,” the large black agent said as he held out a small box. “Thumb, please.”
Jack went first by placing his right thumb onto the small glass pad on the top of the box. The Secret Service agent smiled a little when Collins hissed and then removed his thumb and looked at it. The agent looked from Collins to the readout on the black box.
“Sorry, Colonel, new SOP from Homeland Security and the home office, all visitors are now obligated for DNA scan before gaining access to Rough Rider.”