Second Chance

Chapter Two: Crash-Landing

Over North France

6^th July 1940

Captain Sidney Jackson peered out of the cockpit of the massive 747 and peered down upon the bright lights of France. The airliner, the last flight of the day – technically yesterday – was heading for Bordeaux, and Jackson was bored. There was nothing to do; nothing, but answer French messages and wait.

“Everything alright back there?” He asked, as the stewardess came back into the cockpit. He felt the shape of his pistol reflexively; after half-a-dozen hijackings the CAA had started insisting on their pilots being armed. “What are they like?”

“Nothing particularly special,” Syeda Begum said. She passed him his cup of coffee; he passed control to his co-pilot and sipped it gratefully. “We’ve got half a dozen businessmen, one army guy from God knows where, a handful of schoolchildren, and a highbrow academic.”

“Someone you should be chatting up,” Jackson said wryly. Her skin darkened; her desires to become more than a simple stewardess were the subject of much glossop. “What’s he like?”

“Very nice, but he has his wife with him,” she said. “A classic mixed-race marriage.”

“Really?” Jackson asked. “Sounds like your sort of person. Anything that looks remotely dangerous?”

“There’s a guy in second class who keeps looking at me when he thinks I’m not looking, does that count?” Syeda asked. “I can’t decide if he’s a sick pervert who finds me attractive, or a racist, or what.”

“Could be both,” Jackson suggested. “A racist who finds you attractive. How many movies have been made on that subject?” His radio buzzed. “Excuse me?”

He listened carefully. “Pardon?” He said finally. “This is Flight 719; please repeat.”

Silence. “I can’t hear anything,” he muttered. “It was strange; it sounded like a mayday call.” He lifted the radio. “Paris control, this is Flight 719; I need to report a possible distress call, two minutes ago.”

He scowled. “They’ve put me on hold,” he said. He shivered; the voice had been oddly familiar. “There’s no other British Airlines flight out here, is there?”

“Not until the morning,” his co-pilot, Fred Diarchal, said. “We’re the last.”

“How odd,” Jackson said. “Syeda; you’d better go back to tucking the little babies in. I’m going to keep a listening watch.”

“Yes, Captain,” Syeda said. “Good luck with the distress call.”

Jackson glared at her. “Don’t even joke about it,” he said. It was then that the shaking began.

The seat was cramped, the food bland and tasteless – and if the champagne had been real Jim Oliver would have eaten his hat. Still, for all the uncomfortable of the flight, it did have some advantages; it was not a regular flight for the underworld. The association – or gang of crooks to the unenlightened and the law enforcement people – that he worked for understood the dance between law enforcer and law breaker as well as anyone, and better than most.

Oliver smiled. The use of his laptop computer was forbidden on the flight itself, but there were many other ways to amuse himself. One way was thinking about the datachip he held within his small collection, one packed with games that were legal and high-tech computer information, which was anything, but. Packed within the thousands of lines of complex computer code were secrets that would be worth millions to the right people; commercial secrets that the French or German industries would pay through the nose for, if they were within France for them to grasp.

He smiled to himself, covertly, a hidden little smile, and winked at one of the stewardesses. She stalked off, having classified him as a male chauvinist pig, and he smiled again. It was safe to have a classification; let her see him as a pig and she would miss what lay beneath. His book, a tome on the recent war in Iraq, lay open in front of him and he began to read.

We come, not to conquer, but to liberate, he read, and then the shaking began.

Professor Adrian Horton sat back in the comfortable seat and gently stroked the cheek of his beautiful wife Jasmine. Her pale skin contrasted, as always, with his dark skin; she was the light to his darkness, as he was fond of remarking. Their children, Stuart and Emma, slept beside them, lost in dreams.

It was worth it, he thought, and sighed. Years spent arguing with the Dean, asking for permission to research in the French archives. Years of arguing with the French custodians, who believed that the free flow of knowledge should halt just because France was going through one of its periodic episodes of anti-Anglo feelings. Days spent convincing Jasmine that she could look after the children while he studied; all worth it in the end.

He smiled to himself, privately, and reread the letter. It was simple and to the point; it granted him access to the locked files of the 1945-50 war crimes trials, many of which had been sealed or restricted after DeGaulle’s second term in office. He could spend hours there, maybe even years….

He dismissed the thought with a chuckle, feeling Jasmine move against him in her sleep. There was no way that she would let him remain within a dusty cell for weeks, when the beaches were so close and the water so warm. Carefully, covertly, like he had done when they were both courting, he gently slipped his hand inside her blouse. She sighed in her sleep, pushing against him, as he stroked her breasts. It was then that the shaking began.

The first sign was a screeching noise coming from the headphones; all the radio channels had gone haywire at once, projecting a torrent of raw static directly into their heads. Jackson yanked his headphones off and threw them away, rubbing his ears in pain. Beside him, Diarchal was bleeding; blood fell from his ruptured eardrums.

“Call a medic,” Jackson snapped at Syeda, as a wave of light slashed in at them from the cockpit windows. The night sky was suddenly lit with all the colours of the rainbow, sleeting in against the aircraft and powering through it; screams echoed from the cabin. The aircraft shook violently, and shook again, and Jackson tried desperately to take back control. The aircraft swung from side to side, moving as if a giant was shaking it deliberately, and nothing he could do could change it.

“Mayday, mayday,” he snapped into the radio. The torrent of static abated slightly, then redoubled; he heard his own voice echoing through the airways. It taunted him; mayday, mayday, and he cursed. His swearwords vanished into the ether and re-echoed back through the radio. A shiver ran through him; he’d just sent the distress call they’d heard earlier.

Syeda was preying in Arabic, her words clearly Arabic; some schools were even offering Arabic lessons in a gutless act of political correctness. “Shut up before you panic them,” Jackson shouted at her, and saw her face crumple. The plane shook again, a wall of light moving towards it, and Jackson had only seconds to realise that the sheet of multicoloured energy meant certain death and it reached the plane and…

And they broke though into darkness. High above them, the stars glowed brightly; the altimeter reported that they had lost height. Jackson wasn’t surprised; he’d expected to slam into the ground. To have lost just some height seemed like a miracle.

“We have lost some of our engines,” Diarchal said grimly. His ears were still bleeding; his voice was louder than necessary. “We have to divert.”

“I know,” Jackson said, and flipped the emergency switch. The signal began pulsing; the automated transmission warning of an aircraft in distress. He scowled and opened the intercom; he had to tell the passengers something.

“Can I have your attention please?” He asked, keeping his voice as normal as he could. “We have encountered an unusual combination of St Elmo’s fire and high pressure turbulence.” He wasn’t sure if he believed himself, but it sounded good. “In the process, we have taken some minor damage and will be diverting to land at another airport. Please keep your seatbelts fashioned and keep your children calm.”

He closed the intercom, feeling his pistol with a sigh of relief. “Anything from Paris or Nantes?”

“Nothing,” Diarchal said. The co-pilot spoke again into the radio; there was no reply. “Systems failure?”

“Possibly,” Jackson said, thinking fast. He took the stick and moved it slightly; the 747 aircraft moved like a wounded whale. He met Diarchal’s eyes and they shared a grim thought; they might have to land on the ground without aid. The death toll could be considerable.

“Hey, where are the lights?” Syeda asked. Jackson stared out of the cockpit and gasped; the lights of France had vanished. Here and there, from place to place, there was a pinprick, but the main lights had vanished. They shared another look; this was turning into a disaster.

“Do a full systems check,” Jackson said, wishing that the aerospace companies had managed to complete the promised VTOL airliner. Landing a 747 on a motorway would be… tricky. He scowled; in fact it would be bloody dangerous. “Find out where the hell we are?”

“Captain… Sidney, everything outside the plane is down,” Diarchal said, horror in his voice. Jackson passed him control and glanced at the flight computer; GPS, emergency beacons, the French, British, German, Spanish airports seemed to be completely off the air. There was no contact at all with ground control; no signals from them at all.

“What the fuck happened?” Jackson asked. The plane shuddered again; one of the engines was starting to flicker in and out of use. “I think we’re going to have to put her down and hope.”

“We should be over farmland,” Diarchal said. Jackson tried not to think about the potential for disaster in modern-day French farmlands. “We have no choice.”

“We’ll lose our licences for this,” Jackson said. He picked up the intercom, hesitated, and then spoke in the firmest tone he could muster. “If I could have your attention please,” he said, “the problems have grown severe enough to warrant an emergency landing in a field. I assure you that we can manage such a landing; it will, however, require some cooperation from you.”

He took a breath. “I want everyone strapped in and secured,” he said. “Hold hands, pray, but it is vitally important that you do not panic or distract us. Once the aircraft is down, the emergency exits will open, and you must make your way away from the plane with as much care as you can muster.”

He closed the intercom. “Syeda, give them five minutes to buckle in, then go check on them,” he ordered. “Then go buckle in yourself, understand?”

Syeda nodded. “Good luck,” she said.

SS-Standartenfuhrer Herman Roth was bored. Despite his high rank, he hadn’t seen any service in the recent campaign, when the glorious Wehrmacht had crushed the French and proved the Fuhrer right about the French. Roth sniffed; the French innkeeper who’d – unwillingly – put his men up for the night had been careful to send his daughter away for the night. Some of the lower-ranking SS men had objected to this, but Roth had overridden them, asking who would want to lower himself to court a French peasant girl?

He looked down at the board again and sighed inwardly; calling on all the diplomacy he possessed to avoid showing his frustration, and moved his knight forward. The almost pathetically grateful innkeeper had been more than willing to play chess with him, but his skills would have been better employed on the battlefield. Roth wasn’t certain if he should mark the man down as a possible recruit – he’d gleaned that he’d once been a member of certain right-wing groups – or as a possible resistance leader. The man wasn’t playing consistently; showing flickers of a greater skill on the board, and then tossing away his advantages. It was so subtle that Roth half-suspected that he was imaging it.

“Excuse me,” the innkeeper said, and got up to put some more wood on the fire. Five of the fifteen-man squad lounged by the fire, playing cards; the others slept the sleep of the just in their rooms. The technical experts, the technicians who would evaluate the developments in French tank design in the factories near the armistice line, were also sleeping. They had had a busy day.

The French have no fight in them, so the Fuhrer said, Roth thought. Here were twenty-five men, the cream of the SS and technical experts who were quite important, and the innkeeper had made no attempt to poison them or shoot them or anything. He leaned back over the chessboard… and then the entire inn began to shake.

“What the hell was that?” He shouted, as… something passed overhead; the wake of its passage shaking the inn. It seemed to him as if it were at treetop height; he snatched up his Mauser rifle and ran outside; the entire village was awake. He stared in disbelief; a monstrous aircraft was moving through the air, heading down into the fields past the village. As he watched, the aircraft landed on the ground, glowing with light and fire.

No, not fire, he realised, although he couldn’t believe his own eyes. Those are electrical lights.

“Herr Standartenfuhrer?” Roth glanced around to see one of the technical experts. “It is a British bomber,” the man said with calm confidence. Roth wasn’t so sure; the British, unlike the French, were stubborn; their bombing raids had been as effective as the Luffwaffe’s own. Mere pinpricks, to be sure, but it showed the sheer determination that an Aryan race could call upon, should it need to fight.

And the British would not be so foolish as to send a bomber over the French mainland so brightly lit, he knew, and shook his head. The motion brought him back to himself and he started to bark orders; sending one of the men to call for reinforcements, while he led the squad forward. He cursed; he’d been deceived by the sheer size of the thing; it was further away than it looked.

“There are people there,” his deputy, Untersturmfuehrer Johan Schmidt, gasped.

“You were expecting men from Mars?” Roth asked. “Like in the Ami trash?”

“This might have come from Mars,” Schmidt said, awe in his voice. Roth had to agree with him; up close, the monstrous aircraft seemed like a dream. It wasn’t shaped like any bomber he’d seen, and he’d been privileged to guard some of the secret research facilities during the years before Hitler had revealed the German air force to the world, and how had it flown without propellers?

The crew were even stranger. They milled about, without any sense of discipline, and they were complaining loudly. Their complaints seemed trivial; if the aircraft had been forced to land, then they were lucky to be alive. Their babbling voices spoke in English; they were English then.

“They must be from their empire,” he said to Schmidt, who nodded. There were strange people; dark-skinned men, covered women, whites and blacks and even some Chinese. He felt a shudder of revulsion; no wonder the Aryan blood of the British was running thin, with all these people mixed in with them. A black man held a white woman and two brown children, and he felt loathing rising within his heart.

“Excuse me,” a man, clearly the Captain, said. His uniform seemed vaguely British, but unfamiliar; his accent strange and unknown. “I wish to report a crash landing.”

Roth closed his eyes, trying to remember the English lessons he’d had hammered into him at school. “I see that,” he said carefully. His accent caused the Captain’s eyes to widen, but he seemed to dismiss something, a thought from his mind. “Captain, what are you?”

“I am the Captain of British Airlines Flight 747,” the Captain said, and he recognised the tone of the British within his words. He stepped back and for the first time the Captain saw his uniform clearly. “Who are you? What are you?”

Roth reeled. Did the British know nothing about the SS rank structure? Was he looking for an equal? “I am SS-Standartenfuhrer Herman Roth,” he said. “Can I have your name, rank and serial number?”

The Captain stared at him. Roth saw horror and fear in his eyes. “I am Captain Sidney Jackson, British Airlines,” he said. “Ah… Herr standing fuehrer, can you tell me what year it is?”

Roth felt Schmidt stiffen behind him at the implied insult; he held up a hand to forestall any response. The pronunciation had been dreadful, but he suspected that it stemmed from unfamiliarly, rather than a desire to insult. The question, however, was stupid – and then it hit him that it might not be as stupid as it sounded.

“It’s 1940,” he said. “July 1940.”

“Dear God,” the Captain said. Roth saw the agony behind his eyes; the time traveller – for he was now convinced that that was what he was dealing with – seemed terrified of him. “I…”

Slowly, far too slowly to be a genuine combat trooper – even an Italian one – the Captain grabbed for a weapon at his belt. Before he could even begin to draw it, Schmidt pistol-whipped him, knocking him to the ground. As the crowd of… passengers began to protest, the SS men levelled their rifles at them. Silence fell, broken only by children weeping silently.

Scum, Roth thought disdainfully. “Quiet,” he thundered. He concentrated, wishing that he spoke better English. Did any of the technical experts speak English? He couldn’t remember. He wanted to speak gently, but he knew that his English wasn’t good enough for the task.

“You are all my prisoners,” he said carefully. “A state of war exists between your country and mine. If you cooperate, answer our questions and be helpful, you will be traded or returned to your homelands.” Several of the men looked as if they wanted to protest; had they grasped that they had travelled in time? “If you do not cooperate, I cannot swear to how you will be treated.”

He motioned to two separate corners of the field. “All the men are to go to this corner,” he said carefully, enunciating each word. “All the females are to go to that corner. Children are to go with their mothers.”

“No,” a man said. Roth looked at him; he was long-bearded and wore a strange white robe with a matching skullcap. His ill-trimmed beard imposed no discipline at all; Roth kept his face impassive by force of will. “I will not be separated from my woman.”

He waved a hand at a woman whose face was covered behind a black shawl. Roth shrugged and nodded to Schmidt, who lifted his rifle and shot the man neatly between the eyes. His body collapsed onto the ground, a neat hole drilled through his head.

“You will separate,” Roth ordered. Shaken, the sexes separated themselves. The children protested – and the suddenly widowed woman screamed – but they complied. One by one, starting with the men, the SS soldiers secured their hands behind their backs, leaving only the young children unbound.

“Go back to get the experts,” Roth said, as some of the SS worked to empty the pockets of their captives. Some was familiar; money, even with an unfamiliar face most of the time. A banknote with Winston Churchill’s face on provoked a rare grin. Other items made no sense at all; strange silver discs in machines that were attached to headphones.

“Jawohl, Herr Standartenfuhrer,” Schmidt said. Roth knew that it was dangerous, but he couldn’t resist; he climbed up the strange ladder into the massive aircraft, shaking his head in awe. In a daze, he wandered through the aircraft, staring at the evidence of riches beyond comprehension, until his foot kicked a book on the floor. Curiously, he picked it up.

“The Iraq War, by Murray and Scales,” he read. He opened the book and flipped through a handful of pages; the war the book talked about made no sense at all. Who was Saddam? Why had he been allowed to torment the great powers of his era for so long? Where were the Nazi victories he was certain would happen? The British seemed to be almost… lapdogs to the United States of America – where had that come from? The book spoke in cold clinical terms about a war that had smashed a medium-sized country in less than three weeks; the sheer power of the weapons described was horrifying, in a general way. He flipped through the pages faster and faster; the book mentioned Hitler only in passing, to say only that he had ‘influenced’ some nonsense called ‘Arab Nationalism.’

We lose the war; he realised, and then shook his head. Closing the book, he headed back out of the aircraft and ordered that it be searched from top to bottom for more books, for more weapons, for anything that might be useful. Lose the war? He thought coldly, with a passion he’d never known before. Lose the war, when the alternative was godless Soviet communism or American capitalism? Not on my watch!