Written in Time (53 page)

“There are not, sir.”
 

Jack took two full-size Colt Single Action Army revolvers from his bag, rolled the butts in his hands and offered them to Roosevelt. “I know that you’re familiar with these, sir. Hammers are over empty chambers, of course. I’ll caution you that the actions are very light, much like the revolver I’m carrying. The trigger pull’s just a little heavier than fourteen ounces. They’re extremely reliable.”
 

“From your future, sir?”
 

“Only they cost a great deal more, Mr. Roosevelt.”
 

Jack took the flashlight from his bag.
 

“What is that device?”
 

“A battery-operated hand torch, Mr. Roosevelt.” Jack stood up and took off his suitcoat. The white shirt under his vest was not ideal for what he was about to do. But there was no time for anything else. He loosened his tie and opened his shirt collar. There was no reason to meet death while one was uncomfortable. “Ellen. You stick at Mr. Roosevelt’s side like glue. Got it? I’d suggest that one of you watch each door.”
 

“I’ll take the door at the front, Mrs. Naile. You stand guard at the rear door of the car,” Roosevelt ordered. As Jack started forward, Roosevelt added, “Good luck, Jack.”
 

“Thank you, sir.”
 

As Jack passed Ellen, she leaned up, and he put his arms around her and kissed her lips, then her forehead, and whispered to her, “You look cute wrapped up in that blanket, kiddo.”
 

“Jack—” Ellen began as he released her.
 

“I know. Take lots of chances and don’t be careful.”
 

“You’ve got it.”
 

Jack reached the rear door of the train car, Teddy Roosevelt a pace behind him. “There’s a box with fifty rounds of ammunition in my suitcase as well, sir. You might want to get it out. Ellen’s gun is also a .45.”
 

“Luck to you once again,” Roosevelt said, clapping him on the shoulder.
 

“Thank you. I don’t have to ask—”
 

“No, you don’t, Jack. They’ll not harm your wife as long as I draw breath.”
 

Jack nodded, drew his special Colt and put his hand to the door handle, turned it and tucked back. No one stood on the balconylike observation platform on the special car, nor on the rear of the car just ahead.
 

“Doesn’t look good, I’m afraid,” Roosevelt declared in a stage whisper.
 

“Amen,” Jack Naile agreed, stepping out into the biting wind of the slipstream, his eyes and the muzzle of his gun turning upward.
 

But, before the roof, he had to know what had transpired in the support car.
 

Jack held on to the railing and took the broad step across to the forward car, his gaze still cast upward for any sign of men on the roof. Maybe Ellen had just heard some normal creaking sounds, and maybe there was a perfectly logical reason why no one had answered the speaking tube, why no guard was present between the two train cars. Or maybe the Easter Bunny had just hypnotized the army personnel and Roosevelt’s secretary as well.
 

Who would do harm to Theodore Roosevelt? Why?
 

Roosevelt’s political rivals? Jack Naile had never had a great deal of use for the vast majority of Democrats, but planning bodily harm to a Republican vice-presidential candidate wouldn’t be part of the party agenda in 1900. Was it someone who had no interest in Roosevelt at all, Roosevelt only at risk as collateral damage?
 

Jack stopped conjecturing, noticed his hands were shaking, told himself it was the cold and stepped back from the door as far as he could. If there were men on the special car’s roof, they wouldn’t stay up there forever. Thrusting his revolver into his waistband, bracing his hands and his butt against the railing, he smashed the sole of his right foot against the door handle leading into the support car, dodged right to the hinge side and ripped his revolver free.
 

The door crashed inward, just like in the movies. There was no gunfire. There was no response whatsoever from inside the car. Whoever was on the roof of Mr. Roosevelt’s car might have seen the door being kicked open, but wouldn’t have heard it above the constant click-clacking of the wheels over the rails. The train moved along level ground and was an express, traveling at more or less sixty miles per hour. The wind rush of their slipstream was an incessant roar.
 

Jack stepped inside, darting through the doorway to his right, his gun close at his side. He’d learned years ago that the classic movie and television water-witching pose where the good guy kept his pistol at arm’s length was merely an invitation to being disarmed. He took the flashlight from the other side of his waistband and raised it over his head and to his left, then flicked it on for an instant.
 

He saw something he didn’t want to see, had only partially suspected, the horrible images lost in the darkness again.
 

Getting his breathing steady, changing position slightly, Jack executed the routine with the flashlight once more.
 

What he had glimpsed a moment earlier was reality, not the product of an overactive imagination, nor had fantasy been the impetus to Ellen’s alarm concerning noises heard on the roof.
 

Two dead corporals, one dead private, Mr. Roosevelt’s male secretary, the Army captain—Rogers—whom Ellen had called “handsome.” Their bodies lay strewn in the center aisle, except for Roosevelt’s secretary. He was lying only halfway out of his seat. There were various wounds, but each man, regardless of other injuries, had a bullet hole in the forehead or temple or back of the neck.
 

They had been methodically executed after being taken out of action. Everywhere there were spent shell casings; Jack picked one up. Modern-looking 9mm Parabellum brass.
 

From the number of wounds to each body and the total absence of the sound of gunfire—that would have been heard—Jack guessed suppressor-fitted submachine guns had been used. H-Ks were the best from his time, and Lakewood Industries only acquired the best.
 

The handguns of the dead military personnel were in various stages of readiness, some half out of their holsters, some clutched in the dead hands of the men to whom they were issued. The .38 caliber cartridge these weapons fired was next to useless against someone who didn’t care to fall down and die. He grabbed two of the revolvers anyway, stuffed them awkwardly down into his copious trouser pockets, pushing his holster back. The .32 ACP cartridge his Seecamp threw was a better manstopper than these puny .38s.
 

Jack hurried along the length of the car, reached the forward door, stepped to its side and cautiously opened it. No one stood between the passenger car and the coal car.
 

Holstering his special Colt and securing the hammer thong, Jack Naile bit his lower lip, made the sign of the cross and clambered onto the railing, grabbing hold of whatever he could as he held himself there and cautiously raised his head to the level of the support car’s roof.
 

He tucked back down in the same instant.
 

Three men, submachine guns slung tightly to their bodies, were jumping from the special train car’s roof and onto the roof of the support car.
 

“They figure everybody they have to worry about is dead,” Jack told himself. They were wrong.
 

At the support car’s almost exact center, there was some sort of large object; he’d caught only a glimpse of it.
 

A bomb?
 

Jack shivered, then ducked inside the support car, dropping into a low crouch behind the nearest seat. If the men entered the support car, they would do so from the rear doorway almost certainly, unless they were masochists. Otherwise, reentering the car was not in their cards. They would have no reason to revisit the dead they had left behind.
 

Doubtless, there was a fourth man who had taken out the army guard in the locomotive. The fate of the fireman might have been in doubt, but since most assassins didn’t have much training in how to run a locomotive, the best and most obvious course of action would have been to keep the engineer alive in order to run the train, until his services were no longer required.
 

The three men Jack had spied on the roof of the train car carrying his wife, Ellen, and Teddy Roosevelt, would be in radio contact with the man left to guard the engineer. They could speak en clair, of course, because there was no one in 1900—except, perhaps, their compatriot Lakewood Industries personnel at the time-transfer base hundreds of miles away—who had any kind of radio at all. Guglielmo Marconi’s British patent #7777 dated from this very year of 1900, and in 1901 he would first broadcast radio signals across the Atlantic Ocean; nobody but these guys had walkie-talkies just yet.
 

One of the semiworthless .38s in his left hand, the Colt Single Action Army in his right, Jack waited.
 

He only realized he’d been holding his breath when he exhaled as he heard footfalls on the roof, coming his way.
 

They were going to come down from the roof behind him, then signal their man with the engineer to stop the locomotive. There was likely some sort of transport ready for them, a Hummer, perhaps, or maybe Lakewood Industries had dared to send a helicopter into 1900. That meant a fifth man, possibly a sixth.
 

If the object of which he’d caught a fleeting glimpse was a bomb, its presence answered many questions. There were only two possible reasons why a bomb or bombs would be used against this train: Lakewood Industries wished to assassinate two members of the Naile family and didn’t mind killing Teddy Roosevelt in the process or Lakewood Industries intended to kill Roosevelt and Jack and his wife were merely an unsuspected bonus. Could Lakewood Industries have tried out scenarios that would have predicted Teddy Roosevelt’s involvement in an effort to counter their plans?
 

Jack shone his flashlight along the support car’s length. There were three Krag-Jorgensen rifles immediately visible. Their .30-40 cartridge was effective. There was a Model 1897 Winchester pump twelve-gauge. That was better.
 

Holstering his Colt, Jack moved by flashlight toward the Winchester, picked it up and gently checked the chamber: empty. The magazine tube seemed full. He couldn’t remember at the moment how many shells it held. The nearest dead man had more of the paper-hulled shells on his belt. Jack took four more and put them into his vest pockets.
 

He racked the slide; the hammer cocked. A fifth shell he fed into the magazine tube.
 

His flashlight out, he approached the still-open—this was the door he had smashed—entrance to the train car.
 

As these men either climbed down or jumped, he would kill them, then take a submachine gun—if he could—and do the same to the man riding with the engineer. Subsequent to that, if he carried off the task successfully, would be the matter of dealing with whoever manned the assassins’ transportation, and possibly the transportation itself.
 

As a child, Jack had pictured the West as a place where men stood opposite one another on a dusty street and someone drew, and no matter who was first to slap leather, the good guy was always faster or at least fast enough. Occasionally, Richard Boone would sustain a shoulder wound; James Arness, outdrawn every week by Arvo Ojala, got off the accurate shot that won the day.
 

None of the cowboy/gunmen/lawmen heroes of his boyhood ever shot a man in the back—not John Wayne, Ward Bond, John Russell or Chuck Connors, never William Boyd or Roy Rogers, nor Gene Autry or Clayton Moore or Jay Silverheels. The newer crop of good-guy Westerners never did that, either, from Yul Brynner and his six crusader/gunfighter associates to Tom Selleck’s long-range marksman avenger.
 

Classic Western writers like Zane Gray and E. B. Mann and, years after them, Louis L’Amour, would never have the hero gun a man from behind.
 

Reality was different.
 

This was kill or be killed, and he already had the beautiful girl to settle down with, and they’d done more than kiss and had the kids to prove it. But Jack Naile hadn’t “gone West” with the intention of living a reality that someday might haunt his dreams; yet reality imparted little choice to its participants.
 

There was an oft-quoted line from the western films, about a man having to do what a man had to do.
 

If there were explosives mounted to one or both train-car roofs, they would be remotely detonated, which meant that, as soon as the assassins left the train, the train would be destroyed. Forensic science being in its literal infancy—the eyes of one of Jack the Ripper’s victims had been examined to see if, photolike, they still held the last predeath image—any sort of futuristic detonating device would, if detected, never be understood, be relegated only to the status of some inexplicable crypto-scientific anomaly.
 

Philosophical/moralistic concerns aside, Jack took a reassuring glance at the raised hammer of the ‘97. His hands did not shake anymore, nor would they tonight. What he feared was that, someday, they might. He would cross the proverbial ethical bridge when it loomed before him; should it collapse beneath him, then would be the time to worry over whether or not he would swim or flounder in a dark river of guilt. Three men. They were the immediate situation with which he must deal.
 

He waited, hands dry and steady.
 

The men were coming. The first pair of combatbooted feet appeared on the observation railing immediately in front of him. Jack raised the shotgun to his shoulder. He had never liked firing a shotgun. Handgun recoil was something he handled better than most men, and the kick from a twelve-gauge was something he found most unpleasant. He reminded himself that the Winchester was loaded only with paper-hulled two-and-three-quarter-inch shells.