Time Travel in Rock: 1984, page 18
“Yes.”
“Good. We’re not far. I’ll send my assistant out to retrieve you. Ouch!”
The Devil! For such a wee thing, Zudge packed a vicious punch.
Before going our separate ways after the sewers, we’d agreed a rendezvous location. This was a 200-foot fluted stone column topped with a hairy gold something-or-other, which had gleamed like star fire in the sun of yesterday afternoon when Zudge and I had taken a look. London had suffered a big fire back in the 1600s and this monument commemorated it. The architects had sneaked a big telescope and observatory inside, which was a pretty neat idea.
I opened the door and there was no need to send out my pretty assistant because the Spaniards were already there. The monument was only twenty feet away. I had a sinking feeling that maybe my impressive secret plan was more obvious than I’d hoped.
We secured the doors behind us and descended once more to the depths of the abandoned King William Street underground station. We dropped to the tracks and headed south into the inky black of the running tunnel. The tunnel sloped down sharply. Took a tight left turn too.
The wisps of mist suddenly transformed into a clammy fog and the tunnel gradient grew steeper. We were about to walk underneath the Thames.
A metal door barred our way, a massive thing that would pass muster as an airtight blast door on a space battlecruiser. But we got it open and stepped over its lip… and into freezing water. It came over my ankles ruining my elegant new shoes. But they’d been killing my feet anyway, so I slipped them off and threw them away with a splash.
We shut the door. It clanged like the Devil’s anvil.
Then we were wading through the black water, our flashlights barely penetrating the dense fog. The water was so cold that it felt like knives slicing through my skin with each step. I cursed under my breath and tried to focus on the task at hand.
It grew worse. The brick vaulted tunnel beneath the river was narrower than the modern running tunnels and the air here was fetid and stale. By the time we’d crossed about a quarter of the distance to the south bank, I was regretting closing the door. But I gambled that the lack of ventilation was going to prove unpleasant rather than fatal and kept going.
Zudge, normally unflappable, was looking around nervously and I sensed the Spaniards were on edge too.
I figured it was the eerie atmosphere getting to us. The still dark of the water reflected our flashlights back through the distorting filter of the mist. The silence was oppressive, broken only by the soft splashing of our footsteps.
That was, until the waves pummeled the tunnel roof.
All four of us ducked. As if that would protect us if the immense weight of water collapsed the bricks above our heads and battered us to a pulp before we’d have time to drown.
“It’s the prop wash of the patrol boats,” Reyes said.
I supposed he was right, but the wave pulses sounded so close. Just above our heads. Did they have submersibles in this era? Perhaps the noises sounded so loud because the tunnel wall was so thin?
I told myself that this was 2029, and the tunnel had survived the weight of the river for – I accessed my brain add-ons – since 1890. Logic argued compellingly that the chances that this was to be the moment in history when the tunnel collapsed would be an unbelievable coincidence.
Logic be damned. I wanted to break into a run.
A dull metallic screech came from behind, echoing weirdly up and down the length of the tunnel. I looked at Zudge. She’d heard it too… someone opening the north door.
But the Spaniards, with their Mark-1 ears, hadn’t. “What is it?” Juan Reyes asked.
“Can’t a man’s eye be caught by a beautiful woman?” I replied defensively.
He laughed. “Of course. Forgive me. I’m a little nervous.”
“But you’re better off with this escape plan than by being stuck in that truck coffin.”
“Oh, yes.” He shivered with horror. “I don’t know if I would have survived a few hours in that truck without going insane.”
“Let’s pick up the pace,” Zudge said.
We did.
Shortly after, we all heard a rumbling engine noise that built in volume each time it reflected along the length of the tunnel until it reached deafening levels.
Motorbikes!
“Run!” I yelled, and I splashed along a forgotten tunnel under the Thames in just my sodden socks, pursued by secret policeman on motorbikes.
I had cursed the Time Dogz ever since I joined them, but I could never describe this life as dull.
We raced through the tunnel – the others fleeing pursuit in a blind panic and me desperate to reach what I hoped awaited us beneath the south bank.
I halted, a bitter coldness gripping my heaving chest, denying me breath. There were bikes ahead of us. Their headlights dimmed by the fog but shining into my eyes. We were trapped!
I blinked… and reassessed the situation.
“Get a grip,” I told myself, and threw myself forward.
The bikes were not ahead of us. The rumble was a reflection of the bike noise off a steel door that plugged the tunnel. The beam of light in my eyes was reflected off it too, and that gave me hope. If the reflection was that bright, the door couldn’t be too badly pitted with rust. We should be able to open it.
The motorbikes were closing fast. We didn’t have much time left.
We stopped at another watertight bulkhead door, like you’d find on a battleship, with a spinny wheel thing. When I got there, Reyes was trying to turn the wheel, but it wouldn’t budge.
I squatted down and pushed up at the wheel as Reyes pushed down.
All that grunting muscular testosterone proved to no avail. The women drew the pistols they’d taken from dead ISD men and prepared to meet their fate head on.
My destiny was to save Merrygold and… one day… to enjoy the Ox’s passionate embrace. I was convinced of this. My story couldn’t end here. Not yet. Not when all those women had yet to properly enjoy my company.
The thought injected my muscles with new strength. Something in the door mechanism snapped and the wheel turned.
Two full spins and the door opened.
The bikers started firing. Bullets pinged off the steel, but we crashed through unscathed.
We shut the door. Secured it.
“Get out of here,” I told Vasquez and Reyes. I activated my fusion torch and roasted the area where the wheel attached to the door.
They looked uncertain. I think our apparent noble sacrifice was so unexpected that they suspected we were luring them into a trap.
“We’ll hold them off,” Zudge said.
“Really?” Vasquez was a cynical old binta.
“Yeah,” I said. “We aren’t exactly bullet-proof, but we heal better than you. We can take a bullet or two. Probably.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“We’re the fucking Time Dogz,” I told her, with enormous satisfaction.
“As in, from the future,” Zudge elaborated.
“Hey! You’re not supposed to tell them that.”
“You told them we’re the Time Dogz,” she complained.
“That’s not the same at all.”
It didn’t matter anyway. When I glanced at the Spaniards for their reaction, they’d scarpered.
On the far side of the door, I heard metallic scrapes against the door wheel. Then a loud clang of metal on metal as a heavy hammer hit home. Whatever they were doing was working because the wheel moved a fraction.
I dropped the fusion torch to the floor and ran after the spies. It was time to accept defeat, I decided, and was about to tell Zudge we should return to the Kennel while we still could. But before I had the chance, she explained her plan.
It was insanely risky and would probably result in horrific deaths for both of us.
“To the Devil!” I told her. “Let’s do it.”
Chapter 34
South of the Thames, the abandoned running tunnels of the City of London and Southwark Subway continued for a short distance before joining up with the contemporary Tube system at Borough Station. Bomb shelters had been built here during the 1930s that matched the ones we’d encountered beneath the north bank.
The ISD broke through the door. The shouts of men and a few women pursued us, just out of sight. The motorbikes started up and raced to catch us.
We came to a row of cubicles marked ‘Ladies’ and hid inside one. This was getting to be a habit, the kind you didn’t want to admit to your mates over a beer.
My heart hammered away, and I sweated in the damp air. There was something particularly terrifying about hiding, the inactivity when the threat of discovery was imminent and there was nothing you could do about it. I’d rather be running or fighting. Anything but this.
Zudge drew my face down to hers. Our noses touched.
“Remember this,” she whispered. “You’re alive, Stillo. All this is a bonus. Every breath a privilege. Thrill to it.”
I realized she was struggling to string full sentences together because her little heart was hammering just as hard as mine.
We drew back a little, our gazes still locked. She was lightly biting down on her lower lip, almost as if in a state of sexual passion.
Or…
Or perhaps there was no ‘almost’ about it.
Zudge’s appearance instantly and permanently transmogrified into a new form.
It was like that shocking moment in the holo-movies when your lover morphs into a mutant insectoid alien with a dozen powerful limbs and you realize that she’s about to suck out your brain with her proboscis. It was exactly like that, though in Zudge’s case the transformation was reversed.
I’d always thought she was quietly pretty, if a bit weird looking with that lower jaw that was a couple of sizes too large, the face so square it suggested her ancestors had been gene-spliced with hamsters, and those flat eyebrows that made her look perpetually on the verge of laughter.
Quietly pretty. I couldn’t see her that way anymore. She was beautiful. Stupidly, uniquely, perfectly beautiful.
Her eyes were wide... and filled with me.
Women in a state of arousal have a powerful effect on the Stiletto psyche. I can’t help it. I wanted to put my palm on the heaving skin of her chest to feel the power of her heartbeat. I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to do a lot of things with Zudge in that moment, but they all depended on us both staying alive, so I mentally filed away that Zudge was crazily hot – or, perhaps, smokingly crazy – and helped her up onto the mountings in the wall that had long ago supported a wartime toilet.
I joined her in a kind of awkward chimney climb, bracing against the sides of the cubicle so that our feet wouldn’t be visible to anyone outside.
Just in time. The bikes sped past, the intense drone of their engines drowning out every other sound. By the time they’d passed through the bomb shelter complex, on the way to Borough Station, we could hear the sound of pursuers on foot who had already moved south beyond our position. We were trapped, just as Zudge had expected.
We waited another minute, Zudge and I not daring to look at each other. Then she gave me her pistol and dropped down from her perch. She undid a button on her shirt and slipped out of the cubicle, pushing it behind her so – hopefully – I remained invisible from the outside.
She emerged with her hands up to an empty tunnel. “Help,” she said in a small voice. “Hello?” she called a little louder. “Don’t shoot me. I want to surrender.”
The sound of running feet announced two men who swiftly arrived to capture her. They wore military-style uniforms, all in black, and carried assault rifles that looked like a matte-black AK-74 variant.
She whimpered in fear that I was fairly sure was faked.
I could see her capture through a hole in the cubicle door where the lock had once been. To get my eye up close, I had my feet precariously balanced on the plumbing fittings on the rear wall of the tunnel and had fallen forward until my hands were pressed up against the door. The chances of faceplanting the floor seemed overwhelming, but I needed to see.
One of the police soldiers forced her to the floor while his comrade looked on with his gun covering her.
I felt a mix of anger at what they were doing to Zudge with contempt for the inept way they were going about it. The latter was subdued because I was balanced like a drunken acrobat inside the cubicle. I couldn’t hold on. My hands pressing hard against the door, my head slipped down until my cheek was squashed into the door, sliding down millimeter by millimeter until my inevitable collapse.
Gunfire cracked from down the tunnel. They’d found the Spanish spies.
I fell onto the toilet floor and drew my pistols, praying that the gunfire would prove to be a distraction.
I pulled open the door.
The men were looking at each other, silently debating what the shooting meant for them. My partner was gasping for air, the full weight of a man’s knee pressed into her back as he tied her.
I shot the standing man in the head. Then in the chest to make sure.
Instead of reacting to the threat, the thug squeezing the air out of Zudge stared in horror at his dying comrade.
“Amateur,” I said and blew his head open.
I helped Zudge up. “You okay?”
“Okay?” Her breath was short, but she was overflowing with pure excitement. Suddenly, that weird thing between us in the toilet block made sense. So did a host of earlier little moments. Zudge’s arousal had never been about me. It was extreme danger that gave my friend the tingles. That explained why she’d volunteered for the Time Dogz and so much more.
“Okay?” Zudge repeated. Her eyes were so wide with exhilaration they looked about to pop. “We’ve just upgraded our pistols to assault rifles. Of course I’m okay.”
* * *
We found the Spaniards pinned down at the end of a row of sleeping cubicles by a squad of six police soldiers.
They had been the ISD’s true target all along, I guessed. That was the only reason my friends were still alive. The shots sent their way were meant to persuade them that their situation was hopeless, that the only way out was to surrender.
The return fire from Vasquez and Reyes was not so constrained. A pistol round pinged off a metal bunk frame narrowly missing a man dressed in military motorcycle leathers. The Spaniards were shooting to kill, and I suspect would train their last bullets on themselves.
Not today, though.
Zudge and I got into position, and then… I hesitated.
It was a weakness. I’m not proud to say I found it difficult to squeeze the trigger of that AK-74.
When the army had sucked me into its hopeless defense of Europe, I had been a desperate conscript.
Zudge, on the other hand, had been career military. Aerospace mechanic to be precise, but she’d trained in infantry tactics. And in that instant, it showed. Because she didn’t hesitate.
We’d been separated by a couple of generations and had been on opposing sides, but when we compared notes, we found we had both had the same tactical ideas rammed into us in training.
Winning battles is down to morale, logistics, and having more people than the bad guys at the right place at the right time. Most people find that easy to grasp.
But big battles consist of many smaller engagements. In the holo-movies, firefights are won by heroics, super-accurate fire, or big muscles, bare chests, and outstanding dental work. But we were taught that firefights are won by carrying out basic small unit tactics better than the other lot. Essentially, you apply maximum firepower at your opponents’ weak points.
Sneaking up behind them and gunning them down with automatic fire is an excellent example of that.
The ISD had not had infantry tactics rammed into them. They were policemen. Bullies. Terrorists. They were not infantry soldiers.
Not having assigned one of their number to watch the backs of the others, they had no idea we were there. So we cut them down like automatic scythes through wheat.
They didn’t stand a chance.
When the gunshots and screams had finished echoing through the tunnels, I listened hard. If any of our ISD pursuers still lived, then they were keeping quieter than a tunnel rat. It was over. We’d killed them all.
The bomb shelter on this side of the river was the mirror of the King William Street one. We ascended the emergency stairwell left over from the Victorian era and broke through locked doors into the basement of a modern building. Then we slipped out into the night.
Behind us, London Bridge shone brightly into the night sky, its security barriers still operating. Lights from the patrol boats we’d heard from the tunnel picked out the waves and wash on the Thames. But no one was looking for escapees south of the river.
We ran deeper into the night.
* * *
From here on, we were following the script of Vasquez’s original extraction mission. She led us to a small truck parked on a back road in Lambeth. Parking tickets with fat fines were stuck behind the wipers, and she took great relish in ripping them up, muttering curses about how socialist bureaucracy wouldn’t be curtailing her freedoms anymore (though somehow I doubted fascist Spain was a giant free parking zone).
“This is as far as you get,” she told us.
“You’re not going anywhere until you keep your side of the bargain.”
“Bulldog!” She laughed. “I had no intention of letting you go without a little talk on Bulldog. Reyes, get in the front and keep your eyes peeled.”
We clambered into the bench seats in the rear of the truck. Vasquez was smirking.
“What’s so funny?” Zudge snapped.
Because for a few moments back there you seemed all-powerful. I was almost in awe of you. First you had me wondering if you were space aliens and then there was that crap about being time travelers. But you don’t know a thing. All this for Bulldog? You really expect me to believe that?”
“Yes,” I said. “We really do.”
“Okay.” She shrugged. “This won’t take long. Bulldog was one of the CIA’s greatest failures. We knew what the KGB was trying to do and so did MI5 and MI6 in the old United Kingdom.”
“Good. We’re not far. I’ll send my assistant out to retrieve you. Ouch!”
The Devil! For such a wee thing, Zudge packed a vicious punch.
Before going our separate ways after the sewers, we’d agreed a rendezvous location. This was a 200-foot fluted stone column topped with a hairy gold something-or-other, which had gleamed like star fire in the sun of yesterday afternoon when Zudge and I had taken a look. London had suffered a big fire back in the 1600s and this monument commemorated it. The architects had sneaked a big telescope and observatory inside, which was a pretty neat idea.
I opened the door and there was no need to send out my pretty assistant because the Spaniards were already there. The monument was only twenty feet away. I had a sinking feeling that maybe my impressive secret plan was more obvious than I’d hoped.
We secured the doors behind us and descended once more to the depths of the abandoned King William Street underground station. We dropped to the tracks and headed south into the inky black of the running tunnel. The tunnel sloped down sharply. Took a tight left turn too.
The wisps of mist suddenly transformed into a clammy fog and the tunnel gradient grew steeper. We were about to walk underneath the Thames.
A metal door barred our way, a massive thing that would pass muster as an airtight blast door on a space battlecruiser. But we got it open and stepped over its lip… and into freezing water. It came over my ankles ruining my elegant new shoes. But they’d been killing my feet anyway, so I slipped them off and threw them away with a splash.
We shut the door. It clanged like the Devil’s anvil.
Then we were wading through the black water, our flashlights barely penetrating the dense fog. The water was so cold that it felt like knives slicing through my skin with each step. I cursed under my breath and tried to focus on the task at hand.
It grew worse. The brick vaulted tunnel beneath the river was narrower than the modern running tunnels and the air here was fetid and stale. By the time we’d crossed about a quarter of the distance to the south bank, I was regretting closing the door. But I gambled that the lack of ventilation was going to prove unpleasant rather than fatal and kept going.
Zudge, normally unflappable, was looking around nervously and I sensed the Spaniards were on edge too.
I figured it was the eerie atmosphere getting to us. The still dark of the water reflected our flashlights back through the distorting filter of the mist. The silence was oppressive, broken only by the soft splashing of our footsteps.
That was, until the waves pummeled the tunnel roof.
All four of us ducked. As if that would protect us if the immense weight of water collapsed the bricks above our heads and battered us to a pulp before we’d have time to drown.
“It’s the prop wash of the patrol boats,” Reyes said.
I supposed he was right, but the wave pulses sounded so close. Just above our heads. Did they have submersibles in this era? Perhaps the noises sounded so loud because the tunnel wall was so thin?
I told myself that this was 2029, and the tunnel had survived the weight of the river for – I accessed my brain add-ons – since 1890. Logic argued compellingly that the chances that this was to be the moment in history when the tunnel collapsed would be an unbelievable coincidence.
Logic be damned. I wanted to break into a run.
A dull metallic screech came from behind, echoing weirdly up and down the length of the tunnel. I looked at Zudge. She’d heard it too… someone opening the north door.
But the Spaniards, with their Mark-1 ears, hadn’t. “What is it?” Juan Reyes asked.
“Can’t a man’s eye be caught by a beautiful woman?” I replied defensively.
He laughed. “Of course. Forgive me. I’m a little nervous.”
“But you’re better off with this escape plan than by being stuck in that truck coffin.”
“Oh, yes.” He shivered with horror. “I don’t know if I would have survived a few hours in that truck without going insane.”
“Let’s pick up the pace,” Zudge said.
We did.
Shortly after, we all heard a rumbling engine noise that built in volume each time it reflected along the length of the tunnel until it reached deafening levels.
Motorbikes!
“Run!” I yelled, and I splashed along a forgotten tunnel under the Thames in just my sodden socks, pursued by secret policeman on motorbikes.
I had cursed the Time Dogz ever since I joined them, but I could never describe this life as dull.
We raced through the tunnel – the others fleeing pursuit in a blind panic and me desperate to reach what I hoped awaited us beneath the south bank.
I halted, a bitter coldness gripping my heaving chest, denying me breath. There were bikes ahead of us. Their headlights dimmed by the fog but shining into my eyes. We were trapped!
I blinked… and reassessed the situation.
“Get a grip,” I told myself, and threw myself forward.
The bikes were not ahead of us. The rumble was a reflection of the bike noise off a steel door that plugged the tunnel. The beam of light in my eyes was reflected off it too, and that gave me hope. If the reflection was that bright, the door couldn’t be too badly pitted with rust. We should be able to open it.
The motorbikes were closing fast. We didn’t have much time left.
We stopped at another watertight bulkhead door, like you’d find on a battleship, with a spinny wheel thing. When I got there, Reyes was trying to turn the wheel, but it wouldn’t budge.
I squatted down and pushed up at the wheel as Reyes pushed down.
All that grunting muscular testosterone proved to no avail. The women drew the pistols they’d taken from dead ISD men and prepared to meet their fate head on.
My destiny was to save Merrygold and… one day… to enjoy the Ox’s passionate embrace. I was convinced of this. My story couldn’t end here. Not yet. Not when all those women had yet to properly enjoy my company.
The thought injected my muscles with new strength. Something in the door mechanism snapped and the wheel turned.
Two full spins and the door opened.
The bikers started firing. Bullets pinged off the steel, but we crashed through unscathed.
We shut the door. Secured it.
“Get out of here,” I told Vasquez and Reyes. I activated my fusion torch and roasted the area where the wheel attached to the door.
They looked uncertain. I think our apparent noble sacrifice was so unexpected that they suspected we were luring them into a trap.
“We’ll hold them off,” Zudge said.
“Really?” Vasquez was a cynical old binta.
“Yeah,” I said. “We aren’t exactly bullet-proof, but we heal better than you. We can take a bullet or two. Probably.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“We’re the fucking Time Dogz,” I told her, with enormous satisfaction.
“As in, from the future,” Zudge elaborated.
“Hey! You’re not supposed to tell them that.”
“You told them we’re the Time Dogz,” she complained.
“That’s not the same at all.”
It didn’t matter anyway. When I glanced at the Spaniards for their reaction, they’d scarpered.
On the far side of the door, I heard metallic scrapes against the door wheel. Then a loud clang of metal on metal as a heavy hammer hit home. Whatever they were doing was working because the wheel moved a fraction.
I dropped the fusion torch to the floor and ran after the spies. It was time to accept defeat, I decided, and was about to tell Zudge we should return to the Kennel while we still could. But before I had the chance, she explained her plan.
It was insanely risky and would probably result in horrific deaths for both of us.
“To the Devil!” I told her. “Let’s do it.”
Chapter 34
South of the Thames, the abandoned running tunnels of the City of London and Southwark Subway continued for a short distance before joining up with the contemporary Tube system at Borough Station. Bomb shelters had been built here during the 1930s that matched the ones we’d encountered beneath the north bank.
The ISD broke through the door. The shouts of men and a few women pursued us, just out of sight. The motorbikes started up and raced to catch us.
We came to a row of cubicles marked ‘Ladies’ and hid inside one. This was getting to be a habit, the kind you didn’t want to admit to your mates over a beer.
My heart hammered away, and I sweated in the damp air. There was something particularly terrifying about hiding, the inactivity when the threat of discovery was imminent and there was nothing you could do about it. I’d rather be running or fighting. Anything but this.
Zudge drew my face down to hers. Our noses touched.
“Remember this,” she whispered. “You’re alive, Stillo. All this is a bonus. Every breath a privilege. Thrill to it.”
I realized she was struggling to string full sentences together because her little heart was hammering just as hard as mine.
We drew back a little, our gazes still locked. She was lightly biting down on her lower lip, almost as if in a state of sexual passion.
Or…
Or perhaps there was no ‘almost’ about it.
Zudge’s appearance instantly and permanently transmogrified into a new form.
It was like that shocking moment in the holo-movies when your lover morphs into a mutant insectoid alien with a dozen powerful limbs and you realize that she’s about to suck out your brain with her proboscis. It was exactly like that, though in Zudge’s case the transformation was reversed.
I’d always thought she was quietly pretty, if a bit weird looking with that lower jaw that was a couple of sizes too large, the face so square it suggested her ancestors had been gene-spliced with hamsters, and those flat eyebrows that made her look perpetually on the verge of laughter.
Quietly pretty. I couldn’t see her that way anymore. She was beautiful. Stupidly, uniquely, perfectly beautiful.
Her eyes were wide... and filled with me.
Women in a state of arousal have a powerful effect on the Stiletto psyche. I can’t help it. I wanted to put my palm on the heaving skin of her chest to feel the power of her heartbeat. I wanted to kiss her. I wanted to do a lot of things with Zudge in that moment, but they all depended on us both staying alive, so I mentally filed away that Zudge was crazily hot – or, perhaps, smokingly crazy – and helped her up onto the mountings in the wall that had long ago supported a wartime toilet.
I joined her in a kind of awkward chimney climb, bracing against the sides of the cubicle so that our feet wouldn’t be visible to anyone outside.
Just in time. The bikes sped past, the intense drone of their engines drowning out every other sound. By the time they’d passed through the bomb shelter complex, on the way to Borough Station, we could hear the sound of pursuers on foot who had already moved south beyond our position. We were trapped, just as Zudge had expected.
We waited another minute, Zudge and I not daring to look at each other. Then she gave me her pistol and dropped down from her perch. She undid a button on her shirt and slipped out of the cubicle, pushing it behind her so – hopefully – I remained invisible from the outside.
She emerged with her hands up to an empty tunnel. “Help,” she said in a small voice. “Hello?” she called a little louder. “Don’t shoot me. I want to surrender.”
The sound of running feet announced two men who swiftly arrived to capture her. They wore military-style uniforms, all in black, and carried assault rifles that looked like a matte-black AK-74 variant.
She whimpered in fear that I was fairly sure was faked.
I could see her capture through a hole in the cubicle door where the lock had once been. To get my eye up close, I had my feet precariously balanced on the plumbing fittings on the rear wall of the tunnel and had fallen forward until my hands were pressed up against the door. The chances of faceplanting the floor seemed overwhelming, but I needed to see.
One of the police soldiers forced her to the floor while his comrade looked on with his gun covering her.
I felt a mix of anger at what they were doing to Zudge with contempt for the inept way they were going about it. The latter was subdued because I was balanced like a drunken acrobat inside the cubicle. I couldn’t hold on. My hands pressing hard against the door, my head slipped down until my cheek was squashed into the door, sliding down millimeter by millimeter until my inevitable collapse.
Gunfire cracked from down the tunnel. They’d found the Spanish spies.
I fell onto the toilet floor and drew my pistols, praying that the gunfire would prove to be a distraction.
I pulled open the door.
The men were looking at each other, silently debating what the shooting meant for them. My partner was gasping for air, the full weight of a man’s knee pressed into her back as he tied her.
I shot the standing man in the head. Then in the chest to make sure.
Instead of reacting to the threat, the thug squeezing the air out of Zudge stared in horror at his dying comrade.
“Amateur,” I said and blew his head open.
I helped Zudge up. “You okay?”
“Okay?” Her breath was short, but she was overflowing with pure excitement. Suddenly, that weird thing between us in the toilet block made sense. So did a host of earlier little moments. Zudge’s arousal had never been about me. It was extreme danger that gave my friend the tingles. That explained why she’d volunteered for the Time Dogz and so much more.
“Okay?” Zudge repeated. Her eyes were so wide with exhilaration they looked about to pop. “We’ve just upgraded our pistols to assault rifles. Of course I’m okay.”
* * *
We found the Spaniards pinned down at the end of a row of sleeping cubicles by a squad of six police soldiers.
They had been the ISD’s true target all along, I guessed. That was the only reason my friends were still alive. The shots sent their way were meant to persuade them that their situation was hopeless, that the only way out was to surrender.
The return fire from Vasquez and Reyes was not so constrained. A pistol round pinged off a metal bunk frame narrowly missing a man dressed in military motorcycle leathers. The Spaniards were shooting to kill, and I suspect would train their last bullets on themselves.
Not today, though.
Zudge and I got into position, and then… I hesitated.
It was a weakness. I’m not proud to say I found it difficult to squeeze the trigger of that AK-74.
When the army had sucked me into its hopeless defense of Europe, I had been a desperate conscript.
Zudge, on the other hand, had been career military. Aerospace mechanic to be precise, but she’d trained in infantry tactics. And in that instant, it showed. Because she didn’t hesitate.
We’d been separated by a couple of generations and had been on opposing sides, but when we compared notes, we found we had both had the same tactical ideas rammed into us in training.
Winning battles is down to morale, logistics, and having more people than the bad guys at the right place at the right time. Most people find that easy to grasp.
But big battles consist of many smaller engagements. In the holo-movies, firefights are won by heroics, super-accurate fire, or big muscles, bare chests, and outstanding dental work. But we were taught that firefights are won by carrying out basic small unit tactics better than the other lot. Essentially, you apply maximum firepower at your opponents’ weak points.
Sneaking up behind them and gunning them down with automatic fire is an excellent example of that.
The ISD had not had infantry tactics rammed into them. They were policemen. Bullies. Terrorists. They were not infantry soldiers.
Not having assigned one of their number to watch the backs of the others, they had no idea we were there. So we cut them down like automatic scythes through wheat.
They didn’t stand a chance.
When the gunshots and screams had finished echoing through the tunnels, I listened hard. If any of our ISD pursuers still lived, then they were keeping quieter than a tunnel rat. It was over. We’d killed them all.
The bomb shelter on this side of the river was the mirror of the King William Street one. We ascended the emergency stairwell left over from the Victorian era and broke through locked doors into the basement of a modern building. Then we slipped out into the night.
Behind us, London Bridge shone brightly into the night sky, its security barriers still operating. Lights from the patrol boats we’d heard from the tunnel picked out the waves and wash on the Thames. But no one was looking for escapees south of the river.
We ran deeper into the night.
* * *
From here on, we were following the script of Vasquez’s original extraction mission. She led us to a small truck parked on a back road in Lambeth. Parking tickets with fat fines were stuck behind the wipers, and she took great relish in ripping them up, muttering curses about how socialist bureaucracy wouldn’t be curtailing her freedoms anymore (though somehow I doubted fascist Spain was a giant free parking zone).
“This is as far as you get,” she told us.
“You’re not going anywhere until you keep your side of the bargain.”
“Bulldog!” She laughed. “I had no intention of letting you go without a little talk on Bulldog. Reyes, get in the front and keep your eyes peeled.”
We clambered into the bench seats in the rear of the truck. Vasquez was smirking.
“What’s so funny?” Zudge snapped.
Because for a few moments back there you seemed all-powerful. I was almost in awe of you. First you had me wondering if you were space aliens and then there was that crap about being time travelers. But you don’t know a thing. All this for Bulldog? You really expect me to believe that?”
“Yes,” I said. “We really do.”
“Okay.” She shrugged. “This won’t take long. Bulldog was one of the CIA’s greatest failures. We knew what the KGB was trying to do and so did MI5 and MI6 in the old United Kingdom.”
