John Schettler - Meridian

“Ah, English,” he said with a satisfied grin, though his lips hardened to a half smile that bore no good will. “English!” The officer’s hands were on him now, tugging at his Arabian garb until he had torn the robes open and exposed the khaki tunic and trousers that Paul wore beneath them. As he did so, the mess kit and a small cloth bag with the remnant of the coffee Maeve had given to Nordhausen, spilled to the floor. The officer knelt briefly to retrieve them. He set the miss kit on the wooden desk and slowly raised the cloth bag to his nose, snuffing the contents with a pleased look on his face.

“You are far from home, English.” The man’s speech had a thick middle-eastern accent, but Paul understood him. “Now what are you doing here wandering about in the desert a hundred miles from British lines?”

The officer was still holding the coffee bag at his lips, savoring the rich aroma of the beans. “This is very good, English. How could you know I was needing coffee tonight?”

The man set the coffee bag aside, his face hardening as he studied Paul more carefully. Light gleamed from a medallion pinned on his chest, and Paul’s eye was drawn to a silver star, the center finished in a thin, red enamel with a crescent moon superimposed upon it. The pointed arcs reached up around an emblem in the center. His long study of military history recognized it as the badge of honor that some came to call the Iron Crescent. He looked for other insignia, noting the braided shoulder pauldrons that designated this man’s rank. Yes, he was a Colonel, just as Paul had guessed. But Paul’s gaze was soon drawn to the man’s hand where he was drawing a long, sharp field knife from a leather scabbard at his side. His heart pulsed with a beat of fear.

“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.

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?”