Dragon Sword (12 page)

“
But —” one of the foot soldiers
began. The
praefectus
and von Braun stared at him. He
suddenly seemed terrified at having spoken out.

“
Finish,” the
praefectus
commanded.

“
But what if the lizard man
is
from the center of the Earth? What if he’s an Ancient
One? Didn’t our Fuehrer tell us there are beings —”

And here von Braun slapped him
across the face.

“
We build rockets to carry
explosives to foreign cities and German soldiers to the moon. No
matter what the Fuehrer says, I will not waste my energy on trying
to contact space aliens, find the Holy Grail, or discover the
secrets of time travel! This is all nonsense! The Reich should
stand for empirical science!”

Mother believed in science, too.
But not as an excuse to hurt people.

“
Who is this girl? This little
brown-skinned girl?” Von Braun squeezed my chin, forcing me to look
at him. “Why did you come, hmm? How did you get all these men to
believe you have a ship? Did the Americans send you? Why are you
here?”

He was really hurting
me.

Why were we there? I didn’t
know.

I prayed it wasn’t to find Eli. Not
in that place. It horrified me. But I was to see worse.

Chapter
Fourteen

Eli: Drachenjungen

December 24, 1941 C.E.

I can’t believe what I’ve just been
through in the last hour. My life is in danger — I nearly drowned a
few seconds ago — but it’s the picture of the mother and child I
can’t shake.

I only glimpsed them a little while
ago in a wrinkled photograph that A.J. had, and I only saw
that
for a moment in the wind, under the flickering glow of
a lighter held by Charlie.

“
Right here’s where I baptized Dan,
and right over there’s where he confessed.” Facts and figures have
been spilling out of A.J. ever since we left the car. He spoke in
between huffs and puffs and grunts, as we tried to stay out of the
way of patrol cars heading out to investigate the wreckage on the
road, and scrambled down the cliffs to the beach.

If I thought I was cold before, I
was even colder now, by the ocean at night.

Apparently A.J. knows all these
back routes because he used to work here, on this army base, the
Presidio — but not as a preacher, as a cook.

“
Preachin’s what I did on the
side,” he explained. “Makin’ scrambled eggs and potatoes and
chipped beef with gravy was what I did in the main. But the
preachin’s what got me known. I would just come down to the beach
and start talkin’ about visions I had, about how the world was
gonna be changed forever in our time, and not necessarily in good
ways. About how those who knew what was happening had to stick
together.”

It was funny, but in a way A.J.
sounded like Mr. Howe. Howe is always saying there’s only a handful
of people who really know what’s going on. But he would never use a
phrase like “stick together.” Howe’s the kind of guy who says you
have to use secrets to fight secrets.

But whatever it was that A.J. was
saying, apparently he’d get people down here on the beach to listen
“crack of dawn on Sunday mornings.” And as he talked more about
these visions he was having, he’d eventually get people coming up
afterward or drawing him aside and telling him things.

“
Unburdening themselves” is how
A.J. described it as we stumbled through some bushes on the way
toward the shore. “Because the unspoken things in this world are
becoming more and more terrible.”

So army guys who were getting
pictures from Europe of places called “death camps,” with “gas
chambers” in them, would come to A.J. to tell him about what they
were seeing, things they couldn’t put in the newspapers here.
“Things like this,” A.J. said as he held the picture out. It was a
fuzzy black-and-white print, showing a mother in a heavy overcoat
clutching a child. She’s turned away from a German soldier who
points a gun at her back. He’s about to kill the woman and child.
Maybe with the same shot.

Even in the dark, under a
sputtering lighter, the image was burned into my brain. What was
that soldier thinking? He had a mother. He might even have been a
father.

What kind of orders could possibly
force someone to do a thing like that?

“
German government got machine-gun
squads in eastern Europe, goin’ around, takin’ Jews, Gypsies,
whoever they don’t like, linin’ ’em up and killin’ ’em all. They
let the bodies fall in ditches. Then they force other people to
help bury the bodies before they kill those people,
too.”

The lighter was blown out by the
wind. “It doesn’t feel much like Christmas anymore,” Charlie
said.

A.J. shook his head. “The common
people ain’t safe after this war. Both sides are trying to build
rockets, and bombs that blow up entire cities all at once. They’re
workin’ on breakin’ atoms apart, too.”

He meant nuclear weapons. It was
weird to think about a time when they weren’t around. Them or the
laser and space weapons that would come later.

I mean, you just grow up assuming
there’s a chance the world could be blown up one day. You don’t
think about it; it’s just there. I wonder what it was like to be a
kid
before
they could blow everything up — did everyone feel
safer?

“
That’s not all. They’re workin’ on
time travel, too. Both sides.”

“
That’s not possible,” Charlie
said, sitting down in the sand. “Now you’re the one telling ghost
stories.”

Without thinking about it, I
brushed the cap on my head. How could I tell Charlie that it
was
possible?

Except they didn’t have time travel
back here in 1941. Speaking from personal experience, that didn’t
happen until 2019.

No, wait. Mom was blasted back into
time, and that was just over a year before I went. And then there’s
Thea, who I took across the Fifth Dimension with me, to save her
from the fires and the mobs in Alexandria.

And she was born hundreds of years
ago.

Maybe something
is
wrong
with history now.

“
Well, if they’re ghosts, they’re
all wearin’ uniforms and street clothes, and they’re all holed up
over there”— A.J. pointed —“trying to bend time itself.”

All I could see was the tide, the
bluffs above us, and the Golden Gate Bridge looming ahead. “You
can’t see it from here,” A.J. continued. “They’re in Fort Point.
It’s under the bridge on this side. The only way to get to it is
through the water.”

“
We have to swim in the ocean? At
night?” Charlie’s looking a little more agitated than he did about
the time travel.

“
There’s a boat tied to some
pilings. We can use it to get around the bluffs, then row back in
toward the fort. But we’ll run into guards soon enough. Our only
hope is to convince them that we know everyone working on Project
Split Second is in danger.”

“
How do you even know what it’s
called?” I asked him. I was getting really annoyed that everyone
seemed to know what my mom was up to but me.

“
Because I baptized Dan Sterning in
these waters one Sunday morning, Eli, and he confessed to me. He’s
been giving classified information to the Germans.”

Dan the Oboe Man. “He’s a
spy?”

And he was trying to date my
mom.

“
Evidently he has family back in
Europe. They’re in a camp somewhere.” A.J. had stepped into the
tide. “We have to work our way around these boulders here. The
boats are kept in a little cove on the other side. Normally, I
prefer parking by the bridge and climbing down the metal girders
underneath.”

“
You do?” No wonder this guy made
such a good preacher — he wasn’t afraid to dunk people in freezing
water at the crack of dawn on Sundays. “Why did Dan tell you all
this?”

“
We all got family, son. He feels
he ain’t got any choice but to protect his.”

“
How come you didn’t tell
somebody?”

“
I’m not allowed to share what
people confess to me. It’s sacred. And secret. Between preacher and
parishioner. That’s why they feel free to talk. But I told Dan to
tell someone else. To confess what he’d done and make
amends.”

He suddenly lapsed into silence.
“Well, what happened?”

“
I guess he told somebody
something
. But it wasn’t a confession. The captain came and
discharged me from my cook’s job. Said I was sufferin’ from
delirium, talkin’ about time travel and all. Thing is, I never
mentioned it to him. Must’ve been Dan, not quite able to own up to
what was happening, probably saying I told him about Project Split
Second. Captain probably doesn’t even know what’s going on under
his own nose. They’re tellin’ people they’re usin’ Fort Point as
medical quarters for sick infantrymen. Nobody knows what’s really
goin’ on there. Not even most of the army folk.”

“
But you do?” Maybe coming out here
with A.J. wasn’t such a smart idea, after all. What if A.J.
was
delirious? “And that’s why you’re telling us about his
confession?”

“
Dan broke the covenant, son. And
he used my pledge of secrecy to make matters worse. Now the Nazis
are convinced that Project Split Second is on the verge of success.
And they’ve been frustrated because they haven’t been able to
figure out how to travel through time on their own.”

“
So what are the Nazis doing about
it?”

A.J. didn’t answer; he walked out
farther on the rocks in the water. “Careful. It’s slippery. Don’t
fall in.”

“
Ow!” That was Charlie. “Something
stung me!”

“
Jellyfish. Be careful. We gotta be
quiet. We don’t want them shooting at us.”

Shooting at us! How come, if I have
to be tangled up in time, I can’t land in some
peaceful
moment in history?

The rocks were slick, and I almost
lost my footing and went under several times.

A.J. was just ahead of us, but with
only the light from a partial moon overhead, I couldn’t really see
him clearly — besides, my eyes were stinging from the saltwater
spray churning out of the sea.

A.J. crawled around the corner of
the largest rock, then disappeared. I didn’t hear anything, but
kept going.

“
A.J.?” I said, but I could barely
even hear myself in the wind.

“
Andrew Jackson!” I shouted, but
still nothing.

“
You all right?” Charlie had come
up right behind me.

“
I think so,” I told him, but my
teeth were chattering pretty badly. “I guess he must be waiting for
us by that boat.”

I turned the corner on the rock —
almost falling in again — and saw the small cove ahead of us. A.J.
was already there, and he had some kind of light — had he made a
fire? — glowing on the narrow strand of beach.

“
A.J.?”

I bumped into something, figuring
at first it might be the rowboat.

But it wasn’t. Not unless rowboats
were about twenty feet long.

“
What — ?”Then I heard roaring all
around, and my feet went out from under me completely, and I was
drifting underwater, under the cold saltwater, thinking about all
the places in time I’d like to see, thinking about that picture of
the mother and child A.J. showed me, and how sad it was, it is, how
sad that that’s what’s happening in this world, in this
time…

My world. Soldiers just following
orders, and what about me? What about me? As Danger Boy,
Danger…Danger…Danger Boy, they wanted me to go on secret missions
for them, for Mr. Howe, for Thirty; to follow orders, everyone just
following orders, no matter what, like everything is in the past,
even our futures, because we’re all stuck doing what we always do,
as if it’s already written down somewhere, in some old-fashioned
book or on some Comnet history review with pictures…all our
pictures…with Barnstormer pictures…I used to be little when I
played that game…that Dang Good Game…I used to be little…a little
boy, but I’m growing up now…growing up…blacking up…blacking out…I’m
blacking out —

And then I was slapped hard, and
found myself on the beach coughing and soaking wet. In the dark I
could just make out a little glint of light on the rims of A.J.’s
glasses.

“
You all right, son? Looks like
Charlie and I pulled you out just in time.”

I nod. I’m about to ask him
something else when I notice we’ve been joined by several others —
guys I don’t recognize, in wool caps and heavy coats; they look
like sailors. I guess they came with the giant boat.

One of them leans over to stare at
my face. He acts like he recognizes me. And then I recognize him:
the kid from the museum. The big snotty one who knocked me
over.

“
You’ve been following me, Roy
Rogers,” he says.

Following
him? “Who’s…Roy
Rogers?”

“
All you American kids think you’re
Roy Rogers. Think you’re cowboys. Well, too bad. We’re dragons. And
dragons eat cowboys.”