Written in Time (59 page)

“You stick beside me like glue unless I tell you otherwise. Got it?” Jack demanded.
 

Ellen took a half step back and feigned a salute. “Got it.”
 

“Let me show you how one of these MP-5 subguns works, kiddo,” Jack began.
 

Staying just outside the perimeter alarms, Jack wished he had night-vision optics. Standard binoculars had to do. What he saw as he scanned Lakewood’s time-transfer base below him was unmistakable, regardless of the less than perfect lighting.
 

Perhaps realizing that an attack on the time-transfer base might be imminent, someone had installed something new. “Dad, those weren’t here when Clarence and I were up here last.”
 

“I figured you would have mentioned them, David.”
 

Jack had never seen anything like the objects of his attention. They were smallish-looking guns, each mounted with a double drum magazine, the guns set on sturdy-seeming mounts at approximately chest height. Fixed atop each of the guns, scopelike, was what appeared to be a miniaturized video camera. Cables trailed across the ground from each of the guns—a half-dozen, set strategically, ringing the time-transfer base—connected to what appeared to be individual power supplies.
 

“If those do what I think they do,” David remarked, “we’re in trouble.”
 

“They probably do and we very well might be,” Jack told his son. “However, we’ll have to cope.” In this case, “cope” would translate into he wasn’t quite sure what.
 

“The guns fire automatically?” Lieutenant Easley said, repeating what Jack had just told him.
 

“I believe that to be the case, Lieutenant, yes,” Jack responded. Jack, Ellen and Lieutenant Easley crouched well back from the perimeter of rock that allowed the overlook on what could accurately be described as the enemy position: the time-transfer base. “There’s something analogous to a camera, something well in advance of this time. The camera is linked to or incorporated with a small computer, which is a machine which cannot think, but can perform many functions much like a human mind, and many times faster. The computer can be programmed, I believe, to start the individual gun shooting once it has acquired a predetermined target, meaning a human or possibly animal intruder. Each gun will have been programmed to cover a specific field of fire, just like a human marksman in an infantry defensive context. The guns will be able to move right and left, up and down, will continue firing until the target has been neutralized—met a predetermined set of conditions programmed into the computer—or, until the ammunition supply is exhausted. The double drums which serve as magazines are probably .223 caliber, the current service rifle caliber from our time. If that is the case, each drum will hold fifty rounds, for a total of one hundred rounds per gun. They—the guns, I mean—are probably preset to three-round bursts for every electronic tripping of the trigger mechanism. Potentially very deadly as we try to penetrate the time-transfer base perimeter.”
 

Lieutenant Easley spoke. “If I may interrupt, Mr. Naile, I’ve heard mentions of time-transferring and the future, regarding the six volunteers and now these guns. I know this is a highly secretive mission, but—”
 

“McKinley’s people didn’t tell you much of a damn thing, did they, Lieutenant?” Jack posited. “Just that you’d be briefed as appropriate, I imagine. Give the lieutenant the barebones version of this, Ellen.”
 

Ellen started with, “We’re from the future, and your six volunteers will be traveling to the year 1996 with us as soon as we knock out the resistance at the facility we’re about to attack. On the plus side, the jet-fighter aircraft and the helicopter—flying machines—haven’t gone airborne yet.”
 

Outside of seeing it in a motion picture or on television, or reading about it in a book, Jack Naile had never actually seen someone’s jaw drop—until he saw Lieutenant Easley’s drop.
 

The original plan had been to ignore electronic countermeasures and simply storm the time-transfer base by force, using what would appear to its defenders to be a frontal assault while, in fact, a second element of Lieutenant Easley’s force would accomplish a flanking movement that would become an envelopment.
 

The objectives were two, both equally important. First was to gain control of the time-transfer capsule to deny the accomplishment of a time-transfer that could alert Lakewood Industries’ forces in the objective future that there was trouble and to bring high tech reinforcements.
 

The second objective was to sabotage the VSTOL and helicopter aircraft so that they could not get off the ground and be used to interdict either or both attack elements.
 

Because of the present physical layout of the base, however, both objectives could be attacked as one. Upon inspection of the time-transfer facility from their observation vantage point, it was determined that the two VSTOL aircraft had been moved to within the fenced area surrounding the time-transfer capsule. So had the helicopter. On the plus side, all of the surface fighting vehicles were absent.
 

Except for the computer-regulated guns, a full-scale assault was still the plan, because it was the only workable one, since no means were at hand to disable any motion or heat sensors positioned as part of an alert system. The key to the problem, Jack concluded, was to deal with the guns—somehow—and go ahead with the attack before random chance kicked in and the time arrived for the aircraft to lift off. It seemed logical—but, unprovable except in the doing—that the guns would accept the fact that an adversary was terminated and no longer classifiable as a target when the intruder dropped below a certain artificially designated horizon line—fell down dead or wounded. If that were the case, in theory it would be possible to crawl along the ground beneath this horizon line without creating the conditions that would precipitate the guns being activated. The only trouble with that idea, if indeed such functional characteristics as he imagined were, valid, was getting past what heat, motion and other types of sensors were part of the extended perimeter defense and were likely also linked to the guns and would set them to firing.
 

Getting past these sensors was impossible, given the constraints of time and technology.
 

The guns were mechanical sentries. To get past sentries, it was often necessary to disable them permanently. The only remaining option was to “kill” the guns themselves with a shot to the brain.
 

“Do you think, Corporal Jensen, that you and the five best marksmen in your platoon can each hit the respective target simultaneously?” Jack asked as he pointed over the rocks toward the six computer-controlled guns. “The greatest distance looks about two hundred fifty yards. You’d have to hit the little boxlike affair on top of the gun, maybe using the red diode—that’s a light—as an aiming point.”
 

“Simultane—what you said—means all at the same time, don’t it, sir?”
 

Despite their desperate circumstances, Jack found himself smiling. “Yes, Corporal. That’s what simultaneously means, true enough.”
 

“I make the longest away of them guns at two hundred and eighty yards. Them box things with that there red light, they looks to be steel or iron.”
 

“Probably neither, because of the weight. Most likely, a relatively thin material your rifle bullet shouldn’t have any trouble penetrating. Can you and five other guys hit reliably at that range with those .30-40s of yours? That’s the question.”
 

“Yes, sir.” And the stocky corporal slapped the for end of his Krag-Jorgensen rifle for emphasis.
 

Private First Class Wallace Standing Bear, one of the lucky winners in the first round of the submachine gun sweepstakes, would, along with Jensen and the other marksmen, be part of the “aircraft interdiction unit.” Jack had drawn a crude picture of an airplane in the dirt and, by match light, pointed out things like landing gear, fuel pods, cockpit bubbles and the like. The second-element marksmen had the task of crippling whatever aircraft they encountered by the only means available—accurate rifle fire to vital components.
 

With all necessary watches synchronized to his Rolex, Jack watched the seconds tick by. Six shots would be fired in precisely forty-two seconds. For good or for bad, since there would be no time to verify whether or not the bullets of the marksmen had struck their targets, the assault would begin immediately.
 

Sergeant Goldberg, the platoon sergeant., held one squad of B Company, Second Platoon in the throat of a rocky defile twenty-five yards or so to the north of Jack’s position with Easley and nine other men.
 

Twenty-three seconds remained.
 

The men of the Seventh were among the most experienced, battle-toughened men in the United States Army. In the blue-gray predawn, their faces showed the resolute hardness battle breeds. Crouched, legs like coiled springs beneath them, rifles with fixed bayonets clenched in gnarled fists, they waited. Jack’s eyes drifted back to his watch.
 

Eight seconds.
 

Jensen and the five other marksmen would be letting that last breath before let-off catch in their throats, and, in another second or two, fingers would take up the slack in triggers, drawing them back to just before the break point.
 

For the zillionth time, it seemed, since he and his family had been swept back in time, Jack thought of a phrase attributable to the writer Ian Fleming: “It reads better than it lives.” Indeed, adventure and danger on the American frontier of western books and movies and television was far less scary to experience vicariously than in personal reality. Sometimes, it seemed almost as if he had done nothing but kill since he had come to this time.
 

Six shots rang out almost as one.
 

It was time to kill again. “Let’s go!”
 

In the next instants, it was evident only five rounds had connected with their targets. The sixth computer controlled weapon began spraying lethality throughout its field of fire the moment Jack and his men spilled down out of the rocks and charged toward the time-transfer base.
 

Almost louder than the gunfire were the alarms, screeching claxons resonating throughout the time-transfer base, reverberating, as did the gunfire, off the rocky terrain, the sheer cacophony maddening.
 

Jack raced forward, the killing ground for the electronically controlled guns made totally devoid of rocks or any other possible cover. Bullets rippled into the ground to his side. Bringing the submachine gun up to his shoulder, its folding stock already extended, he fired a long burst toward the still-functioning gun. The boxlike affair mounted above it—its eyes and brain—shattered.
 

Jack and Lieutenant Easley led one element of the attack force, Sergeant Goldberg the second. Fighting was everywhere, the whine of gunfire and the shrieking of the alarms all-consuming. Ellen’s heart might well have been in her mouth, but she realized that she wouldn’t have known, her entire being numbed by her fear for Jack and the horror of what she witnessed.
 

Her nephew, Clarence, and her son, David, on either side of her like protective bookends, Alan on David’s right—as if two bookends weren’t somehow quite enough—Ellen watched the battle for Lakewood Industries’ time-transfer base in 1900, a battle of immense historical importance that would never be recorded in history books, a battle unlike any other. In addition to David, Clarence and Alan, there were three of Lieutenant Easley’s men with her as well, their rifles shouldered. Clarence, Alan and David each had a rifle at the ready, the dual purpose to cover a withdrawal should one become necessary and to prevent any Lakewood personnel from escaping the time-transfer base. The goal was that none of the Lakewood personnel should be taken prisoner; that made Ellen’s skin crawl, although she realized the practicality, the inevitability of such a measure.
 

Jack was running again, firing his liberated submachine gun at almost point-blank range into two of the Lakewood Industries personnel. Jack dropped to his knees and Ellen knew exactly where her heart was—in her chest. It stopped dead for an instant, heavy as lead and cold as ice.
 

But Jack wasn’t hit. Letting his own submachine gun fall to his side on its sling, he was separating the fallen Lakewood guards from their weapons.
 

“Oh, my God! Jack doesn’t see him!” A man was coming up on Jack, blindsiding him, bringing a submachine gun to bear. As Ellen shouldered her own rifle and was going to try to shoot Jack’s attacker, Jack twisted his upper body left, his special Colt revolver springing into his right hand. Jack fired, twice she thought, although individual shots were impossible to detect. The man went down. Three submachine guns slung from his broad shoulders, Jack was moving again.
 

Sergeant Goldberg, well off to Jack’s right, shot a man point blank in the chest and reloaded. A second man tackled him. Goldberg stumbled, stayed on his feet, but his rifle fell from his hands. Goldberg took a single step back, into a boxer’s T-stance. His left fist flashed out as his opponent made to open fire. Goldberg’s left snaked outward again, then his powerful upper body pivoted and his right fist crashed across the Lakewood man’s jaw, knocking him down.
 

Goldberg snatched the man’s pistol, then the submachine gun. Goldberg’s rifle upraised in his right hand, he shouted—Ellen couldn’t hear him, but could see his mouth moving—and a half-dozen soldiers from the Seventh rallied to him. With Goldberg at its leading edge, they formed a wedge, fighting their way deeper into the time-transfer base, the fixed bayonets flashing in the brightening light. Ellen glanced to the East. The sun had winked up over the rugged horizon.