“You will curse at me, but yet not speak?” The Colonel hefted the knife in his hand, approaching Paul with bad intent. The blade was at his cheek, cold and sharp, and all vestiges of the fog that had bedeviled him soon fled. Paul’s heart thumped in his chest as the Turkish officer moved the knife slowly along the side of his face, resting the blade on his slender neck.
“You shave well, English.” The colonel smirked as he spoke, “but you miss a spot or two under your chin.” His features hardened as he used the knife to slowly force Paul’s chin up, looking him full in the face. “Now you will answer me, or I will finish the job for you, but I assure you, I am no barber.”
Paul felt the edge of the knife at his throat, and his breath came faster with the anxiety of the moment. His mind was beset with the arguments he had made to Nordhausen over their camp fire earlier. The risk of contamination was very real. If he said anything to this man he might alter the time line, change things in some unperceived way that no one would ever realize until the damage was done. The only moral thing to do would be to remain silent. Wasn’t he the one who had argued about committing suicide to avoid contamination? He remembered the conversation well, but here, with the cold edge of a knife at his throat, he was not so brave or righteous as he once thought. He felt his body tense up, instinctively squirming away from the edge of the blade, his neck tense, wrists straining at the leather cords that bound his arms overhead.
“Why do I find you here in the desert, English? I ask you one last time.” The knife twisted and he felt a sharp prick under his chin.
Paul knew that to be caught in British kit, behind enemy lines, was a quick ticket to torture and possibly death. What should he say? “Not English…” The words slipped out again, tumbling into the tense stillness of the room. The Colonel’s dark eyes were alight with the flickering flame of the oil lamp on the desk. He removed the knife, a pleased smile on his face.
“Not English? You wear English trousers, an English soldier’s shirt, though you hide them badly.” The Colonel’s hands groped along his sides, making their way down to his waist with hard searching fingers squeezing at his body as they went. “You are an English spy,” he breathed as he continued his search, forcing his hands into every pocket. He found Nordhausen’s lighter where Paul had tucked it away in his trouser pocket after they lit the fire.
“Another gift,” he grinned as he fished it out. Then, satisfied that Paul harbored no weapons, he stepped back, slipping the knife into its leather scabbard. His attention was momentarily drawn to the lighter, and he flicked it open, turning to retrieve a rolled cigarette from the desk behind him. The lighter sparked and flamed to life. Paul was grateful to have the man away from him, and the Colonel seemed somewhat mollified as he lit his cigarette.
The smell of burning tobacco filled the room and the officer took a long drag, breathing the smoke out slowly as he finished. “Very nice,” he said, seeming to warm to the situation. “So this new British General, Allenby, has a little fire in his belly after all. The Arabs took Akaba for him and now he thinks he can just waltz into Jerusalem. No doubt you have been sent here to scout the situation out, yes?” Then a strange look came over the man’ s face, as though another possibility had occurred to him. “Yes,” he said with a tight smile. “The Arabs and the British—like fleas on a dog. Well, we have heard these rumors about a British officer, who has been leading Arab vagrants on raids against our facilities and rail lines. And what do I have before me here?” He smiled again, eyes gleaming with suspicion.
Good lord, thought Paul. The man thinks I’m Lawrence! But what else would he think? When they decided on their costuming Maeve had come up with the idea for wearing British uniforms beneath Arab robes. It was a wonderful fail-safe if they ran into Arabs in the desert. The Turks were another matter, however, and Paul knew he was in very serious trouble. Here I’ve gone and done the one thing we had to avoid at all costs, he thought. The look on the Turkish Colonel’s face told him it was going to be a very long, painful night.
14
Kelly stared at the green progress bars on the temporal monitor as the retraction sequence progressed. The power outage had plunged the room into darkness, but emergency lighting kicked in, painting thin red cones of light across the consoles. He bit his lip, counting inwardly as Maeve rushed to his side.
“I’m sorry, Kelly. I was so wrapped up with what was happening that I just wasn’t thinking. I can’t remember if I closed the inner doors to the corridor or not. Isn’t there an indicator on one of these panels somewhere?” She searched about, a desperate, pleading look on her face.
Kelly finished counting, and a second or two later the overhead lights flickered on again. Power fed back into the consoles and he breathed a sigh of relief.
“Secondary systems kicked in,” he said. “We’re drawing auxiliary power from the city. Pacific Gas and Electric isn’t going to like us in the morning, but we have a contract to draw reserve power in the event of a turbine failure.” His mind soon returned to the problem that was uppermost in his thoughts, eyes searching the temporal monitor. The green progress bar moved from left to right across his screen, and digital numbers displayed above it, winking from the last reported variance position to show the latest readings.
“The math looks good, Maeve. The indicators are holding green and the variance factor is falling off towards zero.”
“Thank God,” she whispered. “What about the doors?”
“Don’t worry about it. The system won’t engage with the doors open. The problem was somewhere else.”
“What? Well why didn’t you say something?”
“I was too damn busy watching these readouts. If we had any more than a fifteen second gap before the auxiliary power kicked in we stood a chance to loose the spinout on the singularity. That really would have been a disaster. Looks like the power held above 85%, however. Jen, get down there and see what Tom says about this, will you? We can’t draw support from the city grid for very long. I need those turbines back up to speed, and fast.”
His attention was fixated on the temporal monitor now, as it continued the playback of the data on the shift. The event had already transpired, but the computer was lagging behind, its main processors just too slow to keep up with the data flow in real time. They had compensated for the lack of sufficient processor speed by installing huge arrays of memory. Now, as the computer read one bank of stored information after another, it ran its analysis and translated the results into graphics and numerical readouts on the screen.
“We should have had a stronger processor bank for this unit,” Kelly muttered. “I can’t react to anything that happens this way. If something went wrong this time, there’s not a thing I can do about it. Look how far behind the data flow is. I think we probably lost a processor bank in here when the power fluctuated. Damn things are so sensitive, and these battery backups just aren’t up to snuff.”
“How does it look?” Maeve pointed at the screen.
“Not bad…” Kelly kept watching. “The line is nice and green; numbers are falling off to zero…” He lapsed into silence as he watched.
Maeve was suddenly uncomfortable again. She looked at the screen and saw that the single green line began to change. Now it appeared that there were two bars that were making up the thickness of the progress line, and one was falling behind the other. She realized that there were two parallel lines moving in tandem, making a steady progress across the screen. Kelly noticed it as well.