Feldhandler stopped and smiled at them. “You can relax fellows. I think we’re safe for now. ”
“Safe for now? What does that mean?” asked Shapira.
“I assure you Lieutenant that there are no Hezbollah guerillas out there—maybe a few cows or peasants.”
Yatom looked quizzically at Mofaz and Shapira who offered nothing in return.
“Itzak!” called Yatom. The newly minted lieutenant ran up to the colonel. “We are going for a stroll outside the perimeter. Take command here while we are gone. Radio check.” The sayeret checked their radios, which worked fine. Yatom waived to Nir, his own radioman. “Come with us.”
The little group walked into the forest. It was growing warm, and the air was muggy. Fleas darted around their faces. The undergrowth was modest. The trees, while large, were not old growth. The soldiers looked around nervously. Perchansky, now wearing the flak vest and carrying the Uzi slung over her shoulder, brought up the rear. Feldhandler reached a small clearing about fifty meters north of the capsule and stopped. “This should do” he said.
“Where are we?” demanded Yatom again. “Why don’t our GPS units work?”
“I have a theory?” Feldhandler said innocently.
“You’re not theorizing—you know” said Perchansky suddenly and angrily.
Feldhandler pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows stupidly.
“Don’t play games” Yatom growled, stepping very near the scientist. Feldhandler stood his ground.
“I believe that the device sent the capsule quite far off course and not just in terms of space” said Feldhandler. He paused for a moment to let his words sink in. “As you all know, and Andrea especially, the transport device, like all modes of transport, moves through space and time. It has been a primary objective of this project to move significant distances through the former, and very little through the latter. Until today we’d succeeded in that. But now I fear we have failed.”
“Failed? How?” asked Yatom.
“It’s apparent there was some kind of malfunction that sent the capsule off course, spatially and temporally.”
“What malfunction?” said Perchensky doubtfully.
“Andrea, you know as well as I do that it’s impossible to control the capsule from inside. All we can do is monitor and execute the directions of the control center and their computers.”
“Your sister operated the control center” said Perchensky. “You are saying she sent us wildly of course in the midst of a two second test?”
“Something else is wrong” said Shapira. “You brought all this extra equipment—extra supplies. You’re calm. I agree with Andrea—you know where we are.”
“Maybe.”
“Tell us what you know,” said Yatom, trying to stay calm. “Now.”
Feldhandler paused. “Look around you. Where do you think we are?”
“We’re wasting time” snarled Mofaz.
“Europe” said Shapira quickly, unable to ignore Feldhandler’s game.
“Good” said Feldhandler like a teacher encouraging a precocious student. “I can’t be sure until I walk around a bit further, but I believe we are in southeastern Poland.”
“When?” said Perchansky ominously.
“Again, until we move off a little further I can’t say for sure, but if I had to guess, I’d say 1942. Judging by the sun and the temperature, it’s a fine spring morning. Just like the day we departed.”
Chapter 9
Feldhandler’s words left the little group dumbfounded. Even Perchansky, who had reoriented herself somewhat after her miserable time aboard the capsule, and suspected that they’d hit a temporal rift, was shocked and confused. While they stood around speechless, Feldhandler walked off toward the north.
“Where are you going” called Yatom, still not having absorbed Feldhandler’s bombshell, but unable to come up with anything better.
“I’m looking for a rail line” called Feldhandler without turning back. “Tell your men to scout to the west—there should be a sizable stream about two kilometers from the capsule.”
Yatom ignored Feldhandler’s suggestion—he wasn’t sending his men out willy-nilly into these strange woods. “Maybe should send out scouts” said Shapira. “Not yet” Yatom snapped.
Feldhandler strolled along almost jauntily, allowing his slung Galil to bang noisily against his vest and webbing. The commandos followed holding their weapons at the ready, Perchansky still at the rear. They walked in silence for a few more minutes. Yatom figured that there was no point in pressing Feldhandler until they knew whether he was talking sense or had gone completely mad.
About a half kilometer north of the capsule’s landing site the woods gave way into an open field of knee high grass. The sun was rising to the east, and the sky was dappled with bland white clouds. Most significantly, a railroad track ran atop a small embankment roughly 200 meters from the tree line. Along the track on the north side was a line of telephone poles. Otherwise, there was no sign of human habitation. Feldhandler pulled out his binoculars and all the officers immediately followed suit. Perchansky felt around her webbing for a pocket with her own pair but came up with nothing. Feldhandler hadn’t packed her one.
Even with the binoculars nothing else significant was visible. Yatom could tell nothing from the railroad tracks—how could you tell a 1942 railroad bed from one seventy years later? The telephone poles did look antique. But then again they were supposedly eastern Poland. It wasn’t hard to believe that the modern Poles still had an antiquated phone system.
Feldhandler put down his field glasses and reached into a back pocket on his webbing, producing a mit’znefet which meant “clown hat” in Hebrew. The mit’znefet was a loose camouflaged net covering that went over the combat helmet. It looked somewhat silly, but it effectively broke up and distorted the helmet’s shape, making for a more difficult target. In grassy and wooded terrain it was particularly useful. Yatom looked over at Mofaz and Shapira and shrugged. They took out their own mit’znefetim and put them on. Yatom was annoyed.
He wasn’t thinking for himself but was following the lead of a middle-aged scientist. Yatom radioed Itzak.
“Have the men put on their mit’z’nefetim” he ordered.
“Already done” Itzak radioed back. Yatom scowled. “Send Chaim and Bolander to patrol due west of the landing site—no more than two clicks.”
“Acknowledged.”
While Yatom spoke Feldhandler walked off into the open field.
Yatom started to follow, but Mofaz grabbed him by the sleeve. “Let him go” said the Major.
Mofaz turned to Perchansky. “What do you think?”
“Madness?” she offered.
“Maybe” answered Mofaz. “In any case, I don’t see this as anything that requires our action. Even if the professor is right, our job is to get back home, not run around in some strange place and time.”
“Agreed” said Yatom. He looked over at Shapira for unanimity, but the Lieutenant looked doubtful. “What Lieutenant?”
Shapira gave a quick shake of the head, and pointed toward Feldhandler. “Look at him.”
The officers raised their binoculars again. Feldhandler was on the railroad embankment crouched along the track. He removed an item from his equipment bag that looked like a dun colored stone, but it had a detonator embedded in its side. It wasn’t a stone, but a small piece of plastique that Feldhandler had molded into that innocuous shape and then spray painted. They’d all seen many similar charges laid by Hezbollah in Lebanon.
“He’s laying a charge” said Yatom.
The scientist then trotted down the embankment toward the west and for a moment disappeared behind a copse of trees nearer to the tracks. He emerged a few minutes later.