Johnny O'Brien - Day of the Assassins

The professor was listening, but because of his central position at the oars, he had his back to Angus. He gently eased the boat into a shallow pool off the main current and then pulled in both blades and let the craft drift for a while so he could rest and listen.

“Then what?” Jack said.

“The blindfold came off… and there I was!”

“Where?” Jack asked. “Where were you?”

“Well, here’s the strangest thing. You know when we were with Pendelshape that afternoon down in the control room and he was telling us all that strange stuff, and I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t sure I was really believing any of it, and it was like, when are we going to get out of here…?”

“Yeah…”

“Right. So the room I ended up in looked just like the underground control room at the school with the Taurus. Then basically, I found out it was a second time machine — another Taurus! But I tell you — it’s much bigger. You could fit a tank in it.”

“So it’s just as the Rector told us,” the professor said, nodding to himself thoughtfully.

“You haven’t heard the half of it, Professor. It was then that I met him.”

“Who? You met who?” Jack was sitting on the edge of his seat.

Angus’s eyes glazed over. He spoke in a hushed, reverential voice.

“Him.”

“Who?” Jack could hardly contain his curiosity.

“The Benefactor of course. The inventor of time travel. The man with the biggest brain ever.” Angus looked at Jack in awe, “Your dad, Jack. Your dad! I always wondered where you got your brains from.”

Jack shrugged, “Right. I thought that’s who you meant.”

“Is that all you’ve got to say?” Angus’s cheeks suddenly flushed red with anger, “You don’t get it, do you? Remember, he rescued me and Pendelshape then he sent me back using his Taurus to rescue you. I don’t know what has happened to the others who should have come with me — maybe they got caught out with the time signal. Anyway, you should be grateful… and, and you should be proud of him. Your father is a great man. And he has sent us on a mission. Us! Don’t you see?”

Jack felt himself getting angry now, “Not really. I haven’t been sent anywhere. I pressed a random button to escape some people who were about to kill my history teacher, and then you, and who looked like they were about to kill me as well. Then I find out they’re chasing me half way across Europe. We turn up here and they tell me that they’re trying to protect me from, of all people, my own dad. Why? Because if he gets hold of me then there’s apparently nothing to stop him playing God with history — with consequences too awful to imagine…”

There was a tense silence.

“Sorry,” Jack said finally. He sighed, “To be honest I’m not really sure who’s right and who’s wrong in this whole thing. I feel like a pawn.”

Angus replied sheepishly, “Yeah — I’m sorry too, Jack. Maybe it’s a bit more complicated than I thought.”

The professor pulled on an oar to steady the boat and keep it from drifting into a sandbank. “We’ll get through this, boys,” he said. “With my looks and your twenty-first century brains, we can’t fail.” Looking at the professor’s dishevelled yellow hair, his muddied clothes, his round glasses, now with one cracked lens, and two bits of cotton wool still stuffed up each nostril to stop any more bleeding from the balloon crash, the remark sounded ridiculous. Angus and Jack looked at the professor and then at each other and laughed.

The professor took up the oars again and rowed them out to the main channel. A fat orange sun was melting into the rocky horizon. In an hour it would be dark.

“Probably time to try to find somewhere to rest for the night,” the professor said. As they moved slowly down the gorge, they scanned each side for a suitable landing spot. The river was quite low at this point and twisted through a maze of large boulders, rocks and the occasional gravel bank. There were quite a few places where they could pull in and be well protected by the towering granite walls above. In some of the darkening pools off the main current, fish were starting to jump lazily at insects, which buzzed above the surface.

They rounded the next bend in the river and spotted a large, deep pool to the left, where another low sandbank rose gently towards the cliff wall. The professor manoeuvred the boat towards the bank and they alighted, yanking the boat as far up the slope as they could manage. The professor then scrambled back into the boat to retrieve the rod they had discovered earlier.

“Shall we give it a go?” he said as he looked at the pieces of rod and the reel and then at the box of flies. He had no idea what to do next.

“Allow me,” said Jack. He quickly assembled the three pieces of rod, attached the reel and threaded the line through the eyes in the rod. Then he opened the box. “Which one do you reckon?”

“Don’t ask me — you know I’m rubbish at all that stuff,” Angus replied.

Jack picked a fly at random and threaded a leader, which he had attached to the line, through the narrow eye of the hook.

“Ready.” He looked at the professor, “Fancy a go?”

“It’s not one of my skills, I’m afraid.”

Jack took the rod confidently and marched out to the edge of the sandbank, surveying the pool as he went. There was an occasional ‘plop’ followed by telltale concentric ripples in the water as the trout fed in the fading light.

“Here goes.”

He flicked the rod once, and then repeatedly, until a large loop of line was whooshing back and forth through the still air of the gorge. Then, he thrust out his arm, pointing the rod towards the last set of expanding circular ripples he had seen in the pool. The whole line raced forward across the river. The tiny fly, invisible in the gloom, presented itself just above the rippling water. There was a sudden disturbance and a brown fish leaped up from the surface with a splash. Jack was taken by surprise, but took the strike. He felt the tug on the line as the trout struggled to free itself. Slowly, he reeled it in.

Angus danced on the sandbank shouting, “You got him!” several times over.

“Hey, first time… what do you think of that? Never done that before!” Jack half-turned to Angus and the professor, delighted with his success. He plonked the medium-sized trout at their feet.

But he had been lucky. It took him a further forty minutes to land another fish — losing two flies and having to rethread several leaders in the process. The professor busied himself with lighting a small fire from some driftwood on the bank and improvising a cooking grill. He piled up some stones on either side of the fire and looked around for something that they could use to suspend the precious fish above the flames. In a minute, he emerged from the boat waving two metal pegs. With these, they skewered the gutted fish and then balanced them neatly above the fire, with either end resting on the stones. It wasn’t perfect, but it did the job and soon the fish were sizzling away. After twenty minutes, Angus removed one and cut it open on a flat stone.

“Prof?” he offered a piece of the moist, pink flesh to the professor on the end of his penknife. The professor popped it into his mouth and immediately started to gurgle appreciatively. In five minutes it was all gone.

Afterwards, they wrapped themselves, mummy like, in the blankets and canvas canopy. With the security offered by the gorge, their stomachs at least partly full and the fire still giving off a modest warmth, their spirits were lifted. Although only just dark, Jack was astonished by the number and brightness of the stars that twinkled down from the Austrian night.

The professor gently urged Angus to complete his story. They listened intently. Angus leaned up from his canvas bedding on one elbow. The dying flames from the fire flickered across his face, creating lines and shadows where none existed — making him look older than he really was.