Three Kings

“Yes!” he said enthusiastically. “Listen General. Hear that? Look at the sky,” he pointed to the stars. “It is last day of January, 1941. That is date and time here and now. The sky has changed, because the time has changed. Where is Sultan Apache? Think, General Kinlan!”

Think! Kinlan was a no nonsense man, but now his eye roved upwards, noting the clearing skies and the cold light of the stars. Something there seemed even colder than the desert night now, a lonesome feeling settling over him, chasing the irritating bother he had been sorting through with these men. O’Connor in a Blenheim bomber?

He had to think.

“Reeves, you’re certain of what you saw with that plane wreckage?”

“Yes sir. A Bristol Blenheim, and brand, spanking new-still warm as toast. That’s how we spotted it on infrared, sir. The engine heat was very evident.”

Fedorov seized on this, knowing that only one such plane existed in 2021, just like that Fulmar that had overflown his ship when Kirov first appeared. He remembered how he had broken citadel integrity to run out onto the weather deck to see it. He had seen the plane in England the previous year while on leave-in a museum. And now he remembered the single operational Bristol Blenheim he had seen on that same trip, at RCAF Bolingbroke.

“Only one Blenheim bomber exists where you have come from,” he said. “Explain how this one is suddenly here?” He was very pleased that he managed to get the English correct.

Brigadier Kinlan gave him a dark look. O’Connor was standing there with an indignant look on his face, not used to such treatment, and put off by some of what he was hearing now that made no sense. What was this bit about Talon andReacher the staffer had teed up? What did they mean that the satellite links were down? Who in bloody hell was this man? What was this unit doing out here, with vehicles that he had never seen before? Who was this Russian Captain here saying he had just seen Wavell? Why was this Brigadier being so damnably thick and obstinate?

“General,” Fedorov tried again. “Sultan Apache is gone because you are gone… moved… to a time where Blenheim bombers still fly, and General O’Connor commands the Western Desert Force in 1941. Can stars and moon change in one hour? Think, General. Impossible? Yes. But still all true.”

Kinlan did think… Popski, the Long Range Desert Group, old jeeps that should not even be able to run, a Blenheim bomber, General O’Connor, and the stars were all wrong. On top of that he had a Russian Captain off a KA-40 claiming he and his ship had a nuclear accident and actually moved in time! It was the stuff of science fiction, and he might have turned his head to look away from it all and just carried on, but for these stubborn things he was still struggling with. What happened to the bloody stars and moon? Was the whole earth off its kilter? And where the hell was Sultan Apache?

It was the first thing this Russian Captain had come to him with, telling him the place would not be there even before any of his men knew that was so. How could this Russian Captain know this? His men had confirmed it. The entire facility was gone, lock, stock and oil barrel, and that was an argument that he simply could not dismiss, like a man going out for groceries one Saturday morning and then coming home to find his house was missing, with nothing more than a vacant lot in its place. It was madness. The men must have gotten lost on their way back. This simply could not have happened. He looked up at the stars again… Impossible!

Brigadier Kinlan would not be satisfied until he got into a command vehicle and drove back to Sultan Apache himself. There he stood, his eyes scanning the craggy features of the escarpment, places he had come to know in the months he was there. He was standing right in the place where he knew a tall metal guard tower was suppose to be positioned. His boots should be on the hard black asphalt of the internal camp road network here, cleared daily by the heavy street sweeper vehicles that should still be sitting there in the maintenance facility-the 30,000 square foot building that was completely gone.

There was no wreckage, no sign of trauma or the fire of war at all. But it was all gone, the barracks facilities, mess hall, vehicle parks, oil workers village, and all the equipment and rigs and drilling tube and pipeline that should be stockpiled at the southern end of the zone-all gone.

There was only the sand and stone of the heartless desert, sand blowing listlessly over the toes of his service boots as he stared down at his feet. He was standing on solid ground alright, though he felt as though he had wandered into some episode of Doctor Who, a Twilight Zone of madness where nothing he ever took for granted as real could be believed again. It was all impossible, and yet it was as real as the hiss of that biting desert wind.