“Of course we’ll be winning, Kurt. Stop being such a bloody pessimist and get a grip on yourself!” Schiller gave a chuckle at the negative streak his friend almost always fell prey to in moments of indecision. “This’ll all be over in Europe by the end of the year, mark my words! Give us a few years beyond that to stabilise and reinforce, and we can seriously take a crack at the Bolsheviks on their own as Hitler really wants, with the help of the Japanese from the east. Russia’s already a pariah in the West because of their treaty with us — no one’s going to come to their aid when the time comes…” he grimaced, adding: “…assuming of course that we can stop the Japs from fucking things up by starting a war in the Pacific…”
Albert Schiller released his seat belt and stood, moving to the desk and placing both hands upon it as he leaned in toward Reuters. It aided the exorcising of his own personal demons while helping his friend and commander banish his.
“What happened ‘Before’ no longer exists, Kurt! Think of it! The Cold War, The Wall, Glasnost, Perestroika and all that shit’s gone, now! No more Khruschev, Kennedy, Reagan or fucking Gorbachev! They don’t exist…we don’t exist anymore! Consider for a moment how liberating that is!” Schiller grinned with his characteristically irreverent humour, squashing the fears and pain that tried to rise in his heart and forcing himself to believe what he was saying. “The moment we landed here all those years ago, everything changed. Nothing of what we knew from the future exists anymore. All these things and people may look and sound like the ones we knew or read about in school, but they’re all different somehow because of us.” He threw an outstretched and accusatory finger in the general direction of Carl Ritter and the airfield they’d left behind as his next words struck right at Reuters’ core. “That man back there is never going to try to kill the German Chancellor…and he’s no longer your father, nor will he ever be…!”
HMS Proserpine, Home Fleet Naval Anchorage
Scapa Flow, Orkney Islands
Morning broke in relative quiet over the Home Fleet anchorage and the inland Hindsight airbase complex to the south-west. No air raids disrupted the ongoing preparations being carried out, and in spite of their own wishes, Davies and Thorne were allowed to sleep in. In light of how much all had eventually drunk the night before, it was something for which they were ultimately grateful, and it was past ten by the time Thorne was shaken awake by Trumbull.
“Trouble…?” He asked groggily, sitting up and struggling to open his eyes.
“That depends on your point of view,” the squadron leader countered with a smile, shaking his head. “We had another arrival a few minutes ago carrying a message from Whitehall.”
“They took their time about it,” Thorne observed grumpily, finally awake and ruffling his hair. “Nick’s been expecting an official response since we bloody-well landed. Have you seen the message?”
“I — I suppose I have, yes…” Trumbull admitted, but his uncertain tone misled Thorne as to the reason behind the feigned concern: exactly what Trumbull was mischievously after.
“Well, what did they have to say?”
“I don’t know exactly,” Trumbull mused as the barest hint of a smile began to creep across his features. “Perhaps it might be better if you asked them yourself!”
“What…?” Thorne felt the nasty tingle of apprehension rise at the back of his neck. “What’re you talking about?”
“Take a look, Max…” Trumbull explained, gesturing to the window by Thorne’s cot, and the Australian quickly leaped across to it, his breath instantly catching in his throat in surprise.
Attached to the eastern side of the mess, the officers’ quarters were built to house close to thirty men, although they barely held a dozen at the present time. The windows Thorne were staring through looked out across the runway from the inside of the ‘reversed-L’ shape of the building. A hundred metres away, he could see a De Havilland Dragon Rapide short-range airliner parked at the near end of the runway, dwarfed by the giant aircraft in the distance. It sported the standard RAF Temperate Land Scheme of large dark green and dark earth camouflage patches, and in the foreground beside it, no more than thirty metres away, eleven people in various uniforms stood clustered together. Four of the group were Alpert, Green, Kowalski and Eileen Donelson, however it was the other seven present that caused Thorne to draw a sharp breath, and he recognised each and every one of them.
“My God,” Thorne whispered softly as he realised the desperate importance of the next few hours. He’d be meeting some of the greatest figures in history itself and would be expected, to all intents and purposes, to deal with them as something of an equal.
“Brigadier Alpert and Commander Donelson are escorting them to the Officer’s Mess, so I expect you’ll have enough time to put something on over your underwear,” Trumbull observed with amusement as Thorne continued to stare out through the window. Only as Thorne glanced down in reaction to the pilot’s words did he realise that he was wearing just the silk boxer shorts he’d slept in. He also realised how cold the morning still was in spite of the pot-bellied stove crackling softly at the far end of the bed-lined room.
“Uh, yeah…” he agreed sheepishly, blushing slightly. “Yeah, good call!” He turned to reach for a robe hanging by his bed as Trumbull frowned at the terminology he’d used. “Guess I can’t meet the most notable English political and military figures of the twentieth century without my gear on, eh?”
“Yes,” Trumbull mused thoughtfully, rubbing his chin. “I expect that should be an extremely…bad call?” He met Thorne’s glance at the use of the unfamiliar paraphrase with a single raised eyebrow and they both grinned.
Thorne knew he was holding things up as he finished dressing himself twenty minutes later. He was as nervous as he’d ever been in his entire life, knowing that the decisions made that day were in all likelihood going to effect the lives of every one of the personnel who’d arrived in that era with the Hindsight Unit, not to mention the entire population of the United Kingdom and to the rest of the world in a long term sense. As he stood in front of the mirror in the tiny bathroom attached to his quarters, Thorne almost gave a grimace at the uniform he wore. It was quite old — something he’d not worn in fifteen years — but it was immaculate and in fine condition nevertheless, and he was quite inwardly proud that in his mid-forties he could still comfortably fit into it. As a final touch, he snugged the officer’s cap down over his old RAAF Squadron Leader’s dress uniform and nodded approvingly to himself.