World War 3.1: A novel of The Axis of Time, page 30
Nurse Radcliffe was a bit of an old battle axe. Nurse Ratched was more like it, Jules thought, but she kept her mouth shut and shuffled on. How many people here would get that reference anyway? And there was no intimidating this one. No bullshitting her, either. You had to prove yourself fit and worthy with Radcliffe whenever you wanted something. Jules struggled to keep her cool as the drainage tube they’d punched into her ribcage rubbed up against some poorly placed nerve bundle, sending a bright jagged flare of pain up her left flank and into her neck.
She gritted her teeth. She was leaving this ward, even if only for a few minutes.
The flowers bloomed outside, a riot of colour, all reds, and yellows against the impossible green of the manicured lawns. Her room in the recovery ward was pleasant enough—luxurious, she supposed, by the standards of most people’s homes. A new flat-screen TV hung from the ceiling on an adjustable arm. A lovely pair of Danish speakers streamed music or live radio from a tuner built right into her bedside table (probably to hide the bulk of the thing, she imagined). There was even a little bar fridge where she could keep Ratched-approved treats and snacks. Were it not for all the medical equipment and constant nursing staff surveillance, she might have been in a country resort somewhere. But she wasn’t. Julia Duffy remained under watch, if not under guard, at Saint Andrew's.
After a week and a half, it was starting to grind.
“Let me get that for you if you absolutely must,” Nurse Radcliffe said in her clipped, disapproving tone. Radcliffe unlatched the French doors, pushing them wide open and securing them with little metal hooks. Warm, sweet-smelling air from the garden wafted into the ward. Julia resumed her slow shuffle towards freedom before the nurse returned to help her.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, shall we?” Radcliffe cautioned.
“I don’t think there’s much chance of that, do you?” Jules said, her frustration getting the better of her.
“I’m just telling you to take it easy,” Radcliffe said in a softer tone. “You are recovering from surgery. Carrying some very serious injuries. You are not yourself, Miss Duffy.”
Already fatigued by the five minutes it had taken to inch along the corridor, Julia could not be bothered wasting the energy to correct her. She was not a ‘miss’ and never had been. But she suspected the old biddy knew that. Nurse Radcliffe seemed to know almost everything about her, including the exact location of every button to push and chain to yank.
Still, she did not stop Julia from walking out to the garden, for which she was grateful. The recovery ward was edged by ancient stone cloisters, at least on this side of the building. Jules decided that rather than tempting her balance and injuries trying to negotiate the soft grass, she would take her exercise in the shade of the covered walkway. Worn smooth by centuries of use, the dark grey paving stones were a simple but manageable physical challenge, which Radcliffe helped her negotiate by taking carriage of the IV pole.
It was a warm day outside, with only a few strips of cloud marring an otherwise flawless sky. Birds sang pleasantly in the trees scattered through the courtyard, and a gardener pruned a hedge with a small electric trimmer some distance away. It was a restful scene, and Julia was happy to take her ease on a wooden bench not too far from the entrance to the ward.
She needed Radcliffe’s assistance to lower herself onto the seat, and the same drainage tube which had pained her so fiercely just a minute ago put her in real discomfort again as she planted ass. But having achieved her goal, she was happy to enjoy the beauty of the gardens. It was also nice to escape the overpowering smell of disinfectant on the ward and the wounds and rot of broken bodies underneath it.
“Thank you,” she said, genuinely grateful for the assistance and the escape.
Radcliffe was a moment in replying as if Julia’s gratitude had surprised her.
“That’s all right, dear,” she said at last. “I’m just here to make sure you get better, despite your best efforts to the contrary.”
Jules might have pushed back on that if she'd had more energy, but her annoyance was fleeting. It was something in Nurse Radcliffe’s voice. She wasn’t admonishing Jules. She was giving her some gentle advice. The wooden bench creaked a little as Radcliffe settled onto it, where she could watch the monitors hanging from the stainless-steel IV pole.
“There should be contrails,” she said, confusing Julia for a second until she looked over and saw the nurse peering up into the clear blue sky.
“No way,” Jules replied. “You don’t want that. If you had Russian jets overhead, we’d be fucked. Sorry,” she added when the nurse bristled at her language.
“Oh, don’t bother,” Radcliffe said. “I’ve heard worse. But I remember those white trails in the sky as very pretty. I know what happened up there wasn’t pretty. But I was younger then, and it was marvellous to look up in the sky and see those boys of ours up there.”
Julia sketched the faintest of smiles.
“We happy few,” she quoted.
“But not such a band of brothers these days, are they?” Nurse Radcliffe said, obviously getting the reference. “I heard on the wireless the other day that over a dozen young ladies are flying fighters for the RAF now. Jets, too. What a time we do live in, Miss Duffy.”
This time, Julia’s smile was a little brighter.
“That would’ve happened anyway, you know,” she said. “It just would have taken longer.”
They sat silently for maybe a minute, each content with their thoughts. For Jules, her thoughts always turned to Harry. Agent Plunkett had returned just once with the vaguest news that her fiancé Harry was well, Plunkett said. MI6 had received word from the field, and Julia had nothing to concern herself with. She had raised one eyebrow at that, and Plunkett was polite enough to look embarrassed. They both understood the nature of Harry's work, and they knew too well the risks involved. Moreover, Plunkett understood that Julia knew his reassurances were not to be trusted. After all, she was lying abed full of tubes and holes because a simple job to make a pass at a German scientist in Cairo had gone all sorts of wrong.
She closed her eyes and breathed carefully, trying to let go of her fears. She steadied her breathing and focused only on those things she could hear. The gritty crunch of the gardener’s shovel biting into the soil of the rose beds. The tick-tick-tick of a lawn sprinkler. Leaves rustling in a light breeze, and birds twittering to each other from the trees.
But it was no good. It wasn’t just Harry. That was bad enough. But she could not let go of the memory of the man who had visited her while in hospital in Cairo. At the time, drifting in and out of her hazy, drug-addled delirium, she had thought herself lost in some long-ago dream. But the further away in time she was from Cairo, the less like a dream it seemed.
Dan had come back; she was sure of it. He had been on that Russian freighter, the Bulgakov, and at the hospital later. He was thicker through the waist and chest but not with the soft, slouching weight of middle age. He had always been a big man, but in her dream, he had packed even more muscle around his shoulders and neck. His hair was as thick as ever but cut short and sprinkled with the salt and pepper of middle age.
That’s why she could not concentrate on the simple sounds of the garden.
If she had dreamed of Dan, why had he aged?
“Where will it all end? That’s what I worry about,” Nurse Radcliffe said.
Jules opened her eyes, turning to the older woman a little too quickly. Her stitches pulled, and she winced. Her voice, when she spoke, was more challenging than she intended.
“It’ll end with women like Yazmeen Collins running places like St Andrews and doing research that makes life better for women like you and me decades before it would’ve happened,” Julia said, letting her frustrations get the better of her now. “A hundred years earlier.”
“Oh, I don’t mean that dear,” Radcliffe said. “Doctor Collins is an absolute marvel. Not just as a physician, you know. She’s rather an able administrator, too. I’ve never seen a place run so well as St Andrews after she took over. No, I mean the war. I’ve seen three of them, although I was just a little girl during the first one. But where does it all end, Miss Duffy? You tell me. You’ve seen it happen. The future and all that. Does it ever end? People being so utterly beastly to each other?”
Julia almost snorted.
She was about to say something very knowing and cruel but managed to restrain herself.
“It never ends, no,” she said with some care for the other woman’s feelings. “I’m sorry; I wish I could say that it will. But it doesn’t.”
“So it made no difference at all then?” Nurse Radcliffe said. “Women like Doctor Collins being in charge? The world ended up in a big mess anyway?”
It almost sounded like an accusation. Jules shrugged.
“I guess some things got better, some stayed the same, and some got worse,” she said. Radcliffe seemed to think that was an acceptable answer. She nodded as if the matter were now closed.
“You’re looking a bit peaky to me, dear. I think we will sit here just a little while until you get your colour back, and then I’m afraid it’s into bed for you for a nice long rest.”
Julia didn’t resist. The fact was, she did feel tired. The short walk from her room to the garden had exhausted her. But it had also convinced her that she wasn’t crazy. She had not been dreaming. She had seen Dan Black in Cairo. She resolved that she would return to her bed and rest and gather her strength. And when she had strength enough to go on, she would search for the man she had once loved and to whom she had done so much wrong. It was not her old reporter’s instincts coming back to life. It was not the rekindling of an old flame. She loved Harry, and she would make her life with him. But she remembered keenly the guilt and sorrow she felt lying in the sickbay of the Trident after being medevacked from the Ardennes.
For a long time, she had blamed herself for Dan’s death. She’d given him good reason to leave her. Even to hate her. And if he was alive, and she had a chance to apologise to him now, she didn’t feel she could go on with her life until she had made those amends.
She took a deep breath, very carefully, and said to Nurse Radcliffe, “I think I’m ready now.”
35
He now had an entourage big enough they couldn’t all squeeze into the small USAF commuter jet that carried him from Paris to a secondary RAF field north of London. Colonel Grieve had done outstanding work throwing together a small command team to run the Allied war effort in Europe. Just quietly, old Joe Stalin had done them a solid on that front by killing so many of General Cronauer’s staff In Germany. It made the clean-out of the SACEUR org chart that much easier.
His plane, a General Dynamics Gulfstream analogue cribbed from an uptime design by the same company, banked hard to the left and popped chaff as they spiralled down to land. There were no Soviet fighters within the threat bubble, and six USAF fighter escorts flew protective CAP thousands of feet above. But the Russians had salted deep-cover hunter-killer squads throughout Western Europe. Molniya or ‘thunderbolt’ squads, they called them, and you could never be sure some Smedlov with a shoulder-launched missile wasn’t hiding in a bush somewhere down below. Half a dozen thunderbolts had sown chaos throughout North America in the last few days simply by hitting a bunch of high-profile transport nodes. Murdering thirty-five commuters at New York’s Grand Central Station with hand grenades and pistols hadn’t done a damn thing to sabotage the US military machine, but along with the other Molniya attacks on civilian infrastructure, they had thrown a shit-ton of sand into the gearbox of the country’s broader mobilisation.
It seemed that rock and rap and microprocessors weren’t the only things that’d come back through the wormhole. Beria and Stalin had done their research on twenty-first-century urban terrorism.
Or, more likely, just Beria, Jones thought as he tried to clear his mind by staring out the window at the view. Stalin had been a pretty tired old communist for a few years now. And he was gone anyway.
It was a bright, hot summer’s day, and the greenery of the English countryside struck Jones. So different from all the places he’d fought, both uptime and back here. And different again from the grim tenements of Chicago where he had grown up.
“Goddamnit,” his Chief of Staff muttered from beside him.
“What’s that, Colonel?” Jones asked, turning away from the view.
“I’m sorry, General,” Colonel Grieve said, frowning at some text on the screen of his pager. “But I think there’s going to be a band and an honour guard waiting for us.”
Jones snorted, but his temper didn’t flare, even though he’d specifically instructed Grieve that he wanted to go straight from the airfield to the meeting with Kolhammer. Private Williamson was even sitting by the front door to the Gulfstream, ready to book it double time down the foldout stairs to get his Humvee rolling.
“Don’t sweat it, Bob,” Jones said. “You can’t stop some local yokel kicking out the jams if he thinks it’s the best shot he’s gonna get at polishing his resume today. Believe it; there’ll be some half-bird Colonel or baby General down there who decided to ignore you because in their heart of hearts, they knew what I wanted to do when I got off this plane was delay my meeting with the President to inspect the closely shaved ass cracks of some National Guard marching band.”
Colonel Grieve, who might once have had a sense of humour before the Army Medical Corps surgically removed it, frowned but said nothing.
“Anyway,” Jones continued, “it’s a better reception than we got in Paris. So there’s that.”
“I suppose so,” Grieve conceded but with no natural grace. He remained something of a mystery to Jones. A profoundly conservative man, prayerful to a fault, sceptical of so much that the uptimers had brought into his world, Colonel Grieve nonetheless exhibited genuine distress and affront whenever he encountered even a suggestion of disrespect directed at Jones, or for that matter, his driver, Private Williamson.
Jones didn’t ponder the matter too deeply. He took the man’s offering of loyalty and undeniable competence and thanked the good Lord for having sent him.
The other dozen men and women on the flight, primarily American and British, with a few German and French officers for regional seasoning, remained quiet as the small jet touched down with a gentle bump. Grieve had chosen and vetted them all, and so far, they had meshed well enough into a solid, working team. Jones was still getting to know most of them, except for the German Bundeswehr Major, Majella Hand, who had come through Pope’s wormhole on secondment to the Australians as a young lieutenant. It was wrong he should feel so much more comfortable around his kind, an uptimer, but there it was. Majella was a professional military officer, as they all were, but beyond that, she just seemed to see the world differently. Or rather—she saw the world in the same way he did.
The jet taxied off the main landing strip and came to a halt in front of a large hangar where a band was waiting to strike up a tune. Colonel Grieve seemed ready to jump down the stairs and start bending tubas over his knee when his pager buzzed again, distracting him momentarily. Private Williamson was already out the door and hurrying across the apron towards a small convoy which appeared to be their ground transport. Jones grabbed his document case and travel pack, about to follow her out when Grieve stopped him.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “But they’re telling me the president has been delayed by an hour and…”
Jones cut him off.
“I don’t need the details, Colonel,” he said. “Let’s get on the road and get our commlinks up. He’s the president. Shit happens.”
As Jones and his staff deplaned, the band struck up a creditable rendition of Grand Old Flag. There was an eager US Army General and a multinational brace of colonels waiting for him at the foot of the steps, and he took five minutes to inspect the guard with conspicuous graciousness. At the same time, Bob Grieve brought up the rear, playing bad cop, checking his watch every minute. They were on the road, heading north, within ten minutes, and pulled into another airfield a little less than an hour later.
The RAF base had once hosted Spitfires and Hurricanes, but it had been mothballed after the war's end, and the facilities were basic. It was a transit point, not a destination.
“General Jones just arrived on site, Mister President,” a young Ranger Lieutenant informed him. “Your chopper’s inbound. Wheels down in thirty-six minutes.”
“Thank you, son,” Kolhammer said before dismissing him with a casual nod towards the door. It wasn’t the kid’s fault they’d had to divert here. The Secret Service had insisted on the last-minute change after receiving intelligence of a possible hunter-killer squad waiting in ambush on their previous route. Almost certainly bullshit, Kolhammer thought. Possibly even misinformation fed to them by the Russians to disrupt and delay—and to test the reaction protocols of Kolhammer’s protective detail. Lord knows he’d authorised the US intelligence services to use all necessary means to locate and decapitate the Soviet leadership. This was not a dispute among gentlemen.
“Here he comes,” Andy Porter announced from over by the window. They waited on Jones in a dusty, cobwebbed Quonset hut that had been stripped of all its furnishings at some point in the last ten years and left to rot. The old concrete aprons of the airfield were not long enough for modern jet fighters. Although the Brits had enjoyed a faster economic recovery from the war than was the case initially, they did not have unlimited riches to spend on military infrastructure when so much of the country had desperately needed reconstruction.
The old fighter base was a neglected backwater, making it perfect for this meeting.
He heard Jones’s convoy pull up outside the hut and resisted the natural urge to hurry outside and greet his old friend. On his own, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe would make a tempting target. Together with Kolhammer, they could probably call down whatever remained of the Red Army’s missile arsenal on this old airfield.
