Alex Scarrow - The Eternal War

He offered Liam his hand. ‘And you, sir … strangest of the lot. If I believed in such things, I would say you had dropped out of the sky from an entirely different century.’

‘Ah well,’ Liam grinned. ‘I’ve always been a bit behind the times, so.’

McManus let his hand go, tipped a nod at them all and turned to head back to his men waiting patiently in the shadow of the carrier’s hull. The time travellers watched the captain go, the afternoon thick with the noise of boots and harnesses, sergeants barking orders like trained Rottweilers and the clank and clatter of supply trolleys rolling down the ramps.

‘What now?’ said Sal.

‘North,’ said Liam. He looked at the others. ‘New York. We’ve got to find a way back home … right? Unless we hear otherwise from Maddy, that is.’

Bob nodded. ‘Affirmative.’

‘She’s in trouble,’ said Sal. It was stating the obvious. ‘She needs our help.’

Liam nodded. ‘We need to get there as quickly as we can.’ He glanced up at the sky, still another half a dozen carriers hanging there like storm clouds, waiting to descend and disgorge troops. ‘Before this lot head north and flatten what’s left of New York.’

2001, New York

Maddy hooded her eyes as she looked upwards. Becks and a technician from Wainwright’s regiment, Second Lieutenant Jefferson, were busy securing the antennae array’s motorized platform to the top of their archway’s mound of brick. It needed to be securely fixed, not wobbling in any way. It would have been steadier on the ground beside their crumbling home, but then it would have been too low, and obscured by the crater’s lip.

Jefferson suggested mounting it on the top of the overshadowing stump of the Williamsburg Bridge support. But it would have meant running out a lot of cable … cable that could easily be snagged and severed on the dense nest of twisted, sharp-edged metal above them. More than that, she felt insecure not having the array right beside them.

From the bottom of the platform a trunk of cables looped down the side of the skittering bricks, through a hole in the roof and down into the back room. There it snaked across the grit-covered floor, through the sliding door into the main archway, past the computer desk, over the small scooped crater towards the perspex tube, to the metal rack holding the displacement machine.

Maddy had spent most of yesterday spitting curses as she fiddled around the back of the rack. Cursing that she suspected had rather taken aback Sergeant Freeman, watching on curiously.

Half guesswork, half consulting the schematics diagram she’d made a while back, she hooked up the data cable via the computer system, the power cable feeding back via the computer system for computer-Bob to control and fine-tune the orientation of the dish. Of course, computer-Bob wasn’t aware of any of that just yet. The networked computers were offline right now and would remain so until they got the generator turning over — yet another job on the To Do list.

Their generator was simply finished with. More precisely, the motor. The fuel tank had ruptured when a part of the ceiling collapsed; all they had of their fuel was the dregs sitting in the bottom of the tank. The rest had spilled out and filled the back room with the stink of diesel.

However, the alternator and the voltage regulator were undamaged and only required an alternative source of mechanical input — another motor — to generate a usable electrical charge. The answer to that problem was straightforward in theory, if not in practice. They needed to jury-rig a motorized vehicle of some sort.

Devereau’s regiment — an infantry regiment — didn’t have a single truck, jeep, tank to offer. The only two possibilities the colonel could offer to Maddy were to cannibalize their solitary motor launch for its feeble outboard engine, or to try to disassemble and relocate the army’s ageing generator buried deep in their defence bunkers.

Wainwright had something more promising to offer: one of their older tanks, slowly rusting in the compound between their defence bunkers. ‘One of the Mark IV Georgian models,’ he’d said, and Devereau seemed to know what he was talking about.

‘Southern Chicken Friers.’

‘Chicken friers?’ Maddy looked at them both.

Wainwright nodded. ‘Thin armour plating and badly designed. Heat transferred from the engine through the whole vehicle makes it like sitting in an oven.’

‘But, also, the fuel tank is poorly positioned and exposed,’ added Devereau. ‘One could aim gunfire to damage the fuel tank knowing the fuel would flood downward into the vehicle … and …’

‘Indeed — ’ Wainwright nodded — ‘not called the “frier” for nothing.’

As she watched, Becks and Jefferson finished securing the mounting. On the far side of the East River a swarm of men in blue and grey were already busy with sparking welding torches, working industriously on the makeshift raft that was going to float the old Mark IV tank across to them.

Colonel Devereau was busy overseeing the repairing of the abandoned trench system. Both he and Wainwright had agreed that to defend the far side of the river, the Confederate side, would be a pointless exercise as the defences were all aimed the wrong way: northwards towards the river. The British would be arriving from the south. So it was to be here on this side that both regiments were going to hold the ground together.

The abandoned trench works had a commanding position over the flattened ruins that sloped gently down to the river. If the British really were planning an amphibious assault, this was where it was going to land. A kill zone, if they could make proper use of the trenches.

Maddy had asked why they’d do that — an amphibious landing. Why didn’t they just parachute their men down behind their defence line from one of those big sky navy ships?

She got two blank stares.

‘Para-shoot?’ Devereau frowned. ‘What the devil is that?’

‘Never mind.’

He followed her gaze towards the sparks on the far side of the river. ‘’Tis a heartening sight, is it not? Our men working alongside each other.’

‘Yes. I just hope we have enough time.’

Devereau nodded. A warrant for his own arrest had arrived this morning, delivered by an officer wearing the dark blue, almost black, uniform of the Union Intelligence Division, accompanied by a foot patrol of Foreign Legionnaires. Word had inevitably found its way up his chain of command already.

He’d been hoping to hear news that the men of the 5th Maine up along the east end of the Sheridan-Saint Germain line were going to be the first to follow suit and join them. But so far he’d heard nothing.

He looked to his right, down along the sweeping curve of the river. Among the far-off jagged spikes of ruined buildings he imagined his fellow Northern officers must be curiously watching the flurry of activity over here, wondering how long ‘Devereau’s Foolish Mutiny’ was going to last.

It would last a great deal longer … if you had the spit to make a stand alongside us!

Matters were no better for Colonel Wainwright. A warrant had arrived from Richmond for his arrest on a charge of mutiny.

He and Wainwright had spoken briefly this morning on their temporary phone line. The news he’d been hoping for from that side of the river hadn’t materialized. Wainwright’s broadcast inviting the other Confederate regiments up the line to join them had either not been received, or, as he suspected, they had not the will or courage to join their fellows.

The last detachment of men from the 38 thwas due to cross the river later on today and join them in digging in on this side. Just under six hundred men and officers in all. Not much to withstand the might of the British army, and quite possibly a regiment or two of Elite French Foreign Legion too.