Second Chance

Chapter Four: Prisoners of War

Over English Channel

6^th July 1940

It was a clear blue day, perfect flying weather. It was at times like these that Adolf Galland, Gruppenkommandeur of the JG-23 flying group, allowed himself to imagine that he was having a peaceful flight in peace time, rather than flying towards England. The Messerschmitt Bf 109 seemed to be humming, as if a flight of angels was escorting it, rather than three of JG-23’s other pilots. Galland smiled, feeling his moustache ticking him; the plane was one of the greatest planes in the world, a fair match for the British Hurricane.

He grinned. The British hadn’t been as ready for the war as the Germans had, but they’d fought well, although their leaders had been donkeys. He remembered providing air cover to the bridges over the Meuse; the British had left them alone until after they’d moved up anti-aircraft guns. He'd flown raids over Britain before, but this one was different. The Luftwaffe was burbling with rumours about strange aircraft being sighted over France, ones flying higher and faster than any known aircraft, and his mission was to investigate. If the British had produced a new fighter, the war might be… prolonged.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw a glint of light and he turned his aircraft heading towards it. Slowly, oh so slowly, a shape took form; a strange boxy aircraft moving along very slowly. He’d seen pictures of similar objects, but nothing so… bright. It was painted a bright yellow colour and seemed to be trying to evade the German aircraft. As it turned away from them, he saw the British flag on the rear of the aircraft.

What the hell is that? He asked himself, unaware that he was seeing his first helicopter. He’d seem some plans for experimental aircraft; had the British somehow tested, built and deployed a completely new class of aircraft without them catching on? Shaking his head, he pulled his aircraft level with the strange British aircraft, and when he was certain that he had the crew’s attention, he fired a burst of tracer past their nose.

Follow me, he indicated with his hands. There was a pause, it seemed as if the British would comply, and then a streak of light screamed across the sky and struck Heinz. An explosion flickered for moments – and then a Messerschmitt Bf 109 was gone! There wasn’t even any debris!

Enemy aircraft, Galland’s mind screamed, and he forced his plane into a steep dive. The water rushed up at him and he pulled up seconds before he would have slammed into the Channel, swooping away as fast as the plane could go. He felt a tingle between his shoulder blades and he swung the plane sharply to the left, narrowly avoiding a burst of tracer fire.

He was dimly aware of the first aircraft beating a retreat, but he ignored it; his eyes had finally spotted the attacking aircraft. He stared at it; it seemed to be playing with his wingmen, twisting neatly after them. A second aircraft blasted past his aircraft, so close that he could feel the turbulence, and then he saw one of his wingmen angle his plane just right, firing a long burst directly at the enemy craft. It leapt ahead, trailing smoke, and vanished into the distance. There was a pause, and then the second craft fired; a monstrous torrent of flame that disintegrated the Messerschmitt.

Shaking, knowing that he had to get the information back to General Kesselring, Galland tore his plane away from the battle and fled, knowing that he could be knocked out of the sky at will. One of the strange planes followed him for a while, keeping pace with ease, and then departed. The sight of a French airfield had never been so welcome; the news that he’d been the only survivor of the flight terrifying.

Sitting in the flight hat, drinking a bottle of terrible French wine ‘liberated’ from the local village, Galland tried to put his experience into words. The Fuhrer needed to hear about what had happened – for when the strange craft came over France, Galland knew that unless the Germans adapted their tactics, they would be defeated with ease.

German Army Base

Nr Calais

6^th July 1940

The more SS-Standartenfuhrer Herman Roth read of the strange collection of books from the future, the more puzzled he became. Mentally, he cursed the unknown owner of the books; the Iraq War, no matter how important it might have been in 2015, was hardly relevant to his problems. There were details galore of strange and terrible weapon systems – Conflict Iraq was very helpful in that regard – but tantalisingly little on the subject of the current war.

It was one of the great injustices of history that Stalin, unlike Hitler, never overreached himself, he read, and scowled. What mistakes would the Fuhrer make in the future that might still be? Clearly, the arrival of the time travellers had changed things, but were they for the better? Had learning about powerful weapons systems – what was a British-dominated nation like Iraq doing with tanks that seemed to exceed the capabilities of Panzer IIIs? – really helped them?

Of course, he thought. The technical experts had already started to examine the aircraft, which was now stripped of anything that could be moved. The strange luggage of the passengers had been examined; far too many of the technical gadgets made no sense to Roth, let alone the technical experts.

“Jan,” he called, and waited for the guard to enter the room. “Jan, go down to the cells and bring me one of the prisoners.”

“Jawohl,” Jan said. The limping SS guard wasn’t fit for active duty and resented it. Roth returned to the books and waited; it took Jan ten minutes to return, with a young blonde lady. Roth remembered her; she had been the woman who’d been holding the subhuman African.

“Good morning,” he said, in careful English. He’d sent for an SS translator, but the dummkopt hadn’t arrived. “I would like you to answer a few of my questions.”

“Go to hell,” the woman spat at him. Jan lifted his club to strike her; Roth caught his eye and shook his head at him. “I demand that you take us at once to the British embassy.”

“Lady,” Roth said carefully, “you are no longer in the year… ah, 2015. This is 1940; your nation and mine are at war.”

“And for some stupid nutzoid racial theory you have separated me from my husband, you…”

Words seemed to fail her. Roth smiled dryly; she had spirit. As an SS officer’s wife, she might have gone far. “Yes, we have,” he said. “Mrs… ah?”

“Horton, Jasmine Horton,” the woman – Jasmine – said.

“Mrs Horton, you, your husband and your mixed-race children are completely in my power,” he said conversationally. “For the mere crime of mingling your blood with one of the inferior races, you could spend the rest of your life in a rest home; your family, of course, would spend the rest of their lives in a camp.” Her look of pure rage should, by rights, have blasted him into dust and ashes. “If you cooperate with me… well, I am a Standartenfuhrer and I can and will protect you and your family.”

He held up a hand to forestall a second outburst. “I would like you to explain, carefully, to me and my men what each of the strange devices in the plane does and where it comes from,” he said. “If you do that, you will be reunited with your family, understand?”

Bright tears shone in her eyes. “Yes,” she said softly. “Let’s get on with it, shall we?”

Roth bowed politely. “Come with me,” he said, and led her through a maze of corridors into a big room. The luggage was spread out all over the floor, broken into different categories; clothes, books, toys and electronic devices. Roth pointed to a strange device, studded with numbered buttons. “What is that?”

The woman smiled through her tears, clearly enjoying his confusion. “That’s a mobile phone,” she said. “It was made in Britain.” She picked it up and pressed a button on the front; the small screen led up with an eerie green glow. “No signal,” she said, and then frowned. “There was a signal, for a moment.”

One of the technical experts backed a question in German. Roth translated; “are they useless here?”

“Without the transmission network, of course,” she said. “It must have been a fluke.” She glanced down at the phone again. “Yes, must have been a fluke.”

“A mobile phone,” Roth said. “How does it work?”

Jasmine shook her head. “I have no idea,” she said. She glared at him. “Next?”

“This thing,” Roth said, pointing to a black box on a second table. There were dozens of them, carrying strange Japanese-sounding names. Some of them had been opened, revealing more buttons and larger screens.

“That’s a laptop computer,” Jasmine said. She reached out and pushed a button; the screen came to life, showing a single word. PASSWORD? “Well, that’s torn it,” she said.

Roth wasn’t in the mood for humour; watching the scientists start to activate the other devices was depressing. “Explain,” he ordered curtly, and wondered if he would understand the explanation.

“The computer requires a password to work,” Jasmine said. She chuckled. “You understand the concept?”

Roth, in one smooth motion, slapped her hard on the buttocks. “You will cooperate,” he said sharply. “What is a laptop and why does it need a password?”

“It’s a device to store information,” Jasmine said. Her eyes had started to tear again. “You turn it on, input the information, and set the password. Without the password, the computer won’t work properly.”

“Who has the password?” Roth demanded. “One of the other prisoners?”

“Yes,” Jasmine snapped, all composure gone. “Now let me see my husband.”

Roth summoned Jan and gave him orders that the family was to be reunited. One aircraft from Britain had turned up – and a number of strange explosions near the coast had suggested that other aircraft had also arrived, but crashed far harder than the one he’d captured – and other strange aircraft had been sighted near Britain, apparently operating from the island nation. General Albert Kesselring had ordered him to find out as much as he could from the prisoners, without damaging them too much in the process.

Sighing, Roth went back to his office. The war had seemed so simple and certain only last night. Had it really been less than a day?

The SS – and Jim Oliver was now certain that they were the real thing – hadn’t been as bad as he’d feared, once he’d recovered from the shock. Their confusion at the various gadgets, ranging from wristwatches to mobile phones, had done much to restore his confidence, even stripped to his underwear. The other male passengers, apart from the flight crew, had all been shoved into the same large room. Many of them were now trying to catch up on some sleep; others were playing with a chess set that the guards had allowed them to keep.

He smiled to himself. The cell was securely locked, and there were guards outside, but he was certain that the Germans couldn’t build electronic bugs like his own nation could. There was opportunity here; opportunity that he could take advantage of. He didn’t think that the Germans would be able to use the laptops – unless they managed to run a current from whatever electricity lines they had without blowing it up – and the technical data he’d brought would be useless to them, but he could still be helpful. And besides, he wanted out of the prison cell – and sitting around wasn’t going to help, was it?

Standing up, he tapped at the door, and waited for the SS guard to open it. The guard wasn’t the SS guard of TV movies; he seemed fairly ordinary. Oliver was almost disappointed. Even though he knew it was stupid, he’d half-expected a group of jackbooted men shouting ‘Sieg heil, Sieg heil!’

“Take me to your leader,” he said, in flawless German. “I have vital information for him.”

“General, I cannot even begin to explain just how advanced some of the devices here are,” Roth said. General Kesselring seemed to expect immediate breakthroughs. “Sir, we don’t even understand the components; one of the phones was smashed and the technicians can’t understand anything about it.”

The phone – a normal German field telephone – seemed to vibrate with the General’s annoyance. “Herr Standartenfuhrer, we seem to be dealing with planes out of my nightmares,” Kesselring proclaimed. “Where are they coming from?”

“You read my preliminary report,” Roth said. “All the evidence suggests that they came from the future…”

“Nonsense,” Kesselring sneered. “Have you lost your mind?”

“Mein General, I may be having flights of fancy, but in that case my fantasises have become reality,” Roth said carefully. “I cannot give you any other explanation.”

Kesselring put the phone down without bothering to reply. “Bah,” Roth said aloud, and put his own phone down more gently. He stared at the books, lying on the table, knowing that he should be reading them again, or sending them to the tank designers. Knowing that something was possible was half the battle, but without Kesselring’s support it might be difficult to convince the Fuhrer. Without Hitler’s support, any possibility of using the new knowledge, as fragmentary as it was…

“Herr Standartenfuhrer,” Untersturmfuehrer Johan Schmidt said. “One of the prisoners would like to see you.”

Roth raised an eyebrow. He was tired and depressed, but perhaps the prisoner might prove to be the key to cheering him up. “Show him in, Untersturmfuehrer,” he ordered. Schmidt stepped back and waved in a man; Roth studied him with interest. He seemed to be in control of himself, with an air of general competence and an instantly-forgettable face. Spy, Roth thought coldly, and wondered why he’d thought that.

“It is a pleasure to meet you, Herr Standartenfuhrer,” the man said. He held out a hand; Roth shook it carefully. “I am Jim Oliver.”

The name was so… ordinary that Roth dismissed it at once as a nom de plume. “SS-Standartenfuhrer Herman Roth,” he said. “I understand that you wanted to see me?”

The man didn’t seem intimidated by the title. “I work for a group in Britain,” he said, and broke off, staring at the books. “My books,” he said.

Roth was amused to hear the note of warmth in his voice. “Your books?” He asked. “Tell me, how much do you know about history?”

“So you know that we’ve fallen back in time,” Oliver said. “I had wondered. I know quite a bit; it’s something of an amateur interest of mine.”

“From your books, I have gleaned the fact that Germany lost the war,” Roth said bluntly. “Tell me, how did that happen?”

Oliver laughed. “You’re an SS man and you ask me that?” He said. “You need a real historian for the specifics, but I can give you the generalities.” He took a breath, counting on his fingers. “You launch an aerial attack on Britain, that fails, then you send General Rommel to North Africa, which lasts until America enters the war.”

“America entered the war?” Roth asked in alarm. The Fuhrer had dismissed America as a nation of weaklings; could he be wrong?

“Yes, after Japan bombed Pearl Harbour, they fight you as well,” Oliver said. “But the real killer was the invasion of Russia; they – you – headed into a vast country without the power to subdue it. Despite fighting against both you and Stalin, the Russian people managed to evict you by force of numbers – and finally managed to crush you in an epic battle for Berlin.”

Roth felt numb horror spreading through his heart. He’d expected bad news, but this…? It was terrifying, shocking, horrifying… how could the Russians and Americans triumph over the Volk?

“In the meantime, the Americans crush the Japanese and occupy their home islands,” Oliver continued, remorselessly. “By 1945, they have mastered atomic weaponry, and use two atomic bombs on two cities. The world then settles down for forty-odd years of Russian-soviet rivalry, and then the Americans win the Cold War, and even the War on Terror.”

“I see,” Roth said finally. “Tell me – what do you want?”

The question seemed to amuse Oliver. “Quite frankly, I want to work for you, in exchange for certain monies.”

“Money,” Roth said coldly. “Anything else?”

Oliver smiled. “Ah, Standartenfuhrer, what do you think happens to Britain in history – the original history?”

“You are confident that history has… changed?” Roth asked. “This could be a freak incident.”

“If something like this had happened, I would have heard about it,” Oliver said. “Tell me, what do you think that the price of victory is for Britain?”

“I have no idea,” Roth said. “Tell me.”

“We lose the empire, we lose our independence to the French, thanks to our cocksucking politicians, and we are a laughing stock,” Oliver said. “If you manage to forge a peace with Britain now and invade Russia with a better chance at victory, you might just be more… accommodating than the American allies.”

“The Fuhrer has offered to forge a just and lasting peace,” Roth asked. “Now, perhaps you can help us to understand some of the devices that you brought.”

Oliver concealed a smile at the bemused expressions of the German technicians. The modern-day laptop was far beyond their ability to understand; he lined the laptops up and started to activate one of them, looking for one without a password. He could have used his own, but he was unwilling to expose the password too soon.

“This is a small portable computing device,” he explained, as the screen cleared to reveal the familiar WINDOWS logo. “You can use it for many different purposes.”

Digging through the small collection of books, he found a users manual and passed it over to the two technicians who were taking a plug to pieces to discover how it worked. Through trial and error, they were learning how to use it; the manual even provided the correct degree of current. Ignoring them, he picked up his mobile phone from the small pile of phones and turned it on, checking that the wireless link with his laptop was still working. There would only be enough stored power for a few hours use at full power, but there would be enough for what he wanted. Almost as an afterthought, he checked the connection with Britain, and he blinked. There was a signal; very weak, but it was there.

Dear god, he thought, the entire island must have come through the time warp. His mind reeled at the thought; it seemed incomprehensible. If he hadn’t read a lot of science-fiction, he might have been unable to even grasp the concept.

“Mr Oliver,” a voice said. He turned to see the Standartenfuhrer; the tall and disciplined Nazi. “I have been in touch with Berlin; they have demanded my presence and that of yourself, along with the gadgets.” The Standartenfuhrer’s gaze focused on the phone that Oliver was still clutching. “What are you doing with that?”

Oliver fought hard to conceal his reaction. “I think I have something important to tell you,” he said, and began.