The Maids of Chateau Vernet Read online

  The Maids of

  Chateau Vernet

  A Soldier Lost in Time

  Steven Landry

  &

  Katie Rae Sank

  Copyright © 2018 Steven Landry and Katherine R. Sank

  Published by Pine Ridge Technical Risk Management, L.L.C.

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 9781731098122

  DEDICATION

  This novel is dedicated to the estimated 72,500 French Jews who died in the Holocaust, the 257,500 who survived, and the 3,995 French non-Jews who were awarded the Righteous Among Nations honorific for risking their lives to save the survivors.

  Foreword

  “Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks.” — Jane Yolen, author of The Devil’s Arithmetic

  It is estimated that about seventy-five percent of the Jews living in Metropolitan France survived the Holocaust. Perhaps that is why the role of the Vichy Government and French Police in feeding the Nazi death machine has been little noted by history. This novel is set during that time.

  The authors would like to thank the members of the Harford Writers’ Group @ The Library for their reviews and encouragement during this project, and especially our first reader, Larry Garnett.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters are either the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or deceased, is purely coincidental.

  Part I

  1

  0400 hours, Sunday, May 15, 2050, Wah Cantonment, Islamic Republic of Pakistan

  “Go, Go, Go!” Staff Sergeant Hiram Halphen rushed forward at the jumpmaster’s command and leapt into the night sky twenty-five thousand feet above the garrison city of Wah. A sniper in the Sayeret Special Forces Company of the 35th Paratroop Brigade, Israeli Defense Forces, Hiram had been tasked to support a Mossad operation in Pakistan.

  Eight Mossad paramilitary agents followed Hiram off the CV-6 Speed Agile stealth transport. Hiram was a skilled night flyer, capable of precise maneuvering in his wing suit. One of the agents, less well trained on the new wing suits, crashed into the perimeter fence moments after Hiram touched down. Alarms blared throughout the nuclear weapons storage facility.

  Hiram, followed by his assigned spotter Jacob, sprinted for the shadows along the wall of the nearest building. They found a ladder leading to the roof and scrambled up while gunfire erupted throughout the compound.

  At the top of the ladder, Hiram paused and peeked out over the edge of the roof. Two Pakistani soldiers stood on the far side of the roof, both visible in his sixth-generation night vision goggles, scouring the area for the intruders. Hiram swung his M22 assault rifle up into position, settled the laser aiming dot on the back of the nearest man, and fired. With barely a whisper, the electro-magnetic rail gun launched a nine-millimeter bullet at nine-tenths the speed of sound and the Pak soldier pitched forward and off the roof. His companion spun around just in time to catch Hiram’s second shot in the chest. He fell back against the low wall, slumped to a sitting position, gasping for breath.

  Jacob followed Hiram onto the roof, and they ran to the southeast corner of building. Hiram put his assault rifle down and pulled the ancient, but still effective M2010 precision sniper rifle from its harness on his back. The weapon had been handed down from his grandfather and was the only tangible memento he had left of the man who had taught him to shoot. Meanwhile Jacob set up his night spotting scope and began calling out targets. Hiram went to work.

  Ten minutes later, the Mossad team leader called “Masada” over the squad radio net. Hiram glanced down at the combat communication and information digital device, or C2ID2, on his wrist. The counter was winding down from five minutes. When it reached zero, a Mark XII hyperbaric nuclear weapon would reduce the Pak nuclear complex to radioactive dust, taking out a significant portion of the newly established Islamic Republic of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

  Hiram looked up in time to see the wink of machine gun fire from a distant guard tower. Both he and Jacob dove for cover behind the low wall that rimmed the roof, but Jacob wasn’t quite quick enough. Two rounds punched through his body armor, killing him instantly. His C2ID2 display confirmed that Jacob’s heart had ceased beating. The device also reported that the other seven Mossad agents were injured or dead.

  As bullets continued to fly above his head, Hiram low-crawled across the roof to a spot where he could engage the machine gunner and his assistant. Neither man saw Hiram rise up until it was too late. The gunner’s head exploded with Hiram’s first shot. To his credit, the gunner’s assistant tried to man the weapon himself rather than duck for cover. It was a fatal decision.

  With a little more freedom of movement, Hiram ran to a spot where he could get a view of the nuclear weapon emplacement site. The counter on his wrist showed two minutes until detonation. The Mark XII remained in place, three dying Mossad agents around it. Pak soldiers advanced towards the nuclear weapon. Hiram gave them reason to be cautious, picking off several with his sniper rifle as the counter continued toward zero.

  At thirty seconds, he judged the Pakistanis wouldn’t be able to reach the weapon in time, so he turned and sprinted back to where Jacob’s body rested. Hiram pulled off his pack and activated the portal to the combat logistics pod within it.

  He wrestled Jacob’s body through the portal, dumped all of his and Jacob’s gear in after him, and then jumped through himself, a moment before the weapon detonated.

  Hiram’s disassociated molecules converted to electro-magnetic energy, slipped through time and space, converted back to matter, and reassembled. Simultaneously, the trans-dimensional portal within the hyperbaric nuclear weapon opened, releasing a pressure wave of supercritical water with the energy equivalent of fifty kilotons of TNT with a small side of neutron radiation. The downward oriented pressure wave burrowed through the concrete and steel bunker beneath the device, compressing everything in its direct path into dust, including the Pakistani nuclear stockpile.

  2

  A temporal artifact of May 6, 2050

  Hiram landed on the floor of the combat logistics pod as the sixty-six-centimeter ceiling-mounted portal snapped shut above him. He had been transported through time and space to a fifteen-meter-long, three-meter-tall, by four-meter-wide container located in a temporal artifact of May 6th, 2050, the day the logistical plan for the Wah mission had been finalized.

  The inter-dimensional transit portal in the ceiling of the pod was a companion to the one in his backpack. He had travelled from the rooftop in Wah, Pakistan to an artifact of the IDF staging facility deep in the Negev desert, at the speed of light.

  The container held everything an IDF infantry scout and sniper platoon could ever need in combat, from food and water to small unmanned aerial and ground vehicles, kayaks and inflatable boats, to twenty-five different types of individual and crew served weapons, along with ammunition, explosives and pyrotechnics. It even contained a fully equipped bathroom and a kitchenette.

  Hiram walked to the opposite end of the container, stepping over Jacob’s body, where a second, larger portal was mounted vertically on the wall. The two-meter-diameter portal was meant to transport him to its companion at the IDF logistical facility in normal space. However, when he activated the unit’s controls, they didn’t respond. He ran a diagnostic test, which failed to identify the problem. “Destination not found,” blinked on the control screen in bold, red
letters.

  He tried the aerial projection portal located on the floor in the center of the pod. Its virtual companion opened in the sky exactly 5,000 meters above the portal in Hiram’s backpack. The platoon had occasionally used the aerial portal as a means of crossing large obstacles such as rivers or guarded perimeters. Get as close to the obstacle as safely possible, jump into the pod, then back out into the sky, and glide across the obstacle using a parachute or wingsuit. This one also balked at returning Hiram to Israel, or anywhere else in 2050 for that matter.

  Hiram spent an hour trying to get either system working without success. With each passing moment, his level of concern grew. Living creatures could only occupy temporal artifacts for a short period of time. Natural cell death accelerated the instant an individual stepped into the pod, like a mountain climber venturing beyond twenty thousand feet, dying bit by bit. The body struggled to make the myriad of tiny repairs necessitated by the breakdown. Someone had called the effect Hagar’s Curse, and the name had stuck. Disorientation began to set in after about six hours, degradation of fine motor skills at about seven hours, partial paralysis took hold afterward, and by the ninth hour the effects were both irreversible and so severe that the sufferer would be unable to help himself. An automatic timer built into his C2ID2 helpfully chimed, indicating his remaining dwell time was down to five hours.

  Frustrated, Hiram returned to the other end of the pod and set about placing Jacob’s body in a cadaver bag and stowing his equipment. He put one of Jacob’s two ID tags into his own jacket pocket, leaving the other around Jacob’s neck on its chain. He then turned his attention to the portal on the ceiling of the pod. If he exited that way, he expected to find himself back in Wah, at ground zero of a hyperbaric nuclear blast, and likely in the middle of a major mobilization by Pakistani Taliban security and emergency response forces. He had little choice but to at least check it out.

  He donned a set of protective coveralls and a face mask. The outfit would do little to stop the neutron and gamma radiation sure to be flooding the area, but it would keep him from breathing in any radioactive particles and keep any beta particles off his skin. The plan had been to orient the weapon’s portal downward, maximizing the amount of residual neutron activation products created, thereby contaminating the immediate area without creating a substantial downwind hazard. That plan worked against him now.

  When all was ready, Hiram activated the unit and, while standing on the third rung of the ladder leading up to the portal, stuck the probe of a radiation meter through the opaque opening. The probe disappeared from view as if it had been dipped into a bowl of milk, smooth ripples flowing away from the point of contact. The meter showed only normal background radiation, which surprised him. Using one arm, Hiram lifted one of the small recon robots up through the portal and placed it on the ground outside before quickly withdrawing his exposed limb. He activated the robot’s camera using the C2ID2 and saw nothing on the unit’s auxiliary nine-by-nine-inch monitor but bushes and grass, where there should have been a smoking hole in the ground surrounded by a burning industrial complex.

  He sent the little robot moving away from the portal in a spiral pattern, but still saw nothing but bushes, grass, and eventually a cultivated area about a mile to the northeast. The robot’s on-board radiation meter continued to show only background radiation.

  3

  0548 hours, Friday, May 15, 1942, The Punjab, British India

  Satisfied that he wouldn’t be fried or fired upon the moment he passed through the portal, Hiram climbed out into the real world and confirmed the little robot’s observations. He also confirmed the absence of any GPS signal. Hiram returned to the pod and removed his protective clothing.

  He retrieved a small aerial recon drone from its storage locker and climbed back through the portal. He launched the drone into the air and sent it out from his position in a widening spiral. The drone had a dual mode onboard navigation system – one mode using GPS coordinates and the other an electron spin gyroscope, which provided positional information relative to its launch point. With no GPS signal available, only the latter mode was functional. Two hours later the drone was fifty kilometers out at 5,000 meters. Hiram sat in the shade of a young banyan tree surveying the terrain through the drone’s sensors. The local landforms, mountains to the west, a river to the east, told him that he was in the same place geographically as when he last entered the pod. Except that the Wah military garrison was gone, along with any trace of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

  Hiram launched a second drone, this one designed to listen, rather than look. He picked up an English language radio broadcast. At first, the broadcast made no sense. The Battle of Coral Sea? The Doolittle Raid on Tokyo? An hour later, he concluded that he had emerged from the pod in British India in May of 1942 at the height of World War II. Before India became independent. Before the civil war that resulted in the formation of Pakistan. Back when Wah was a part of the state of Punjab in British India.

  He had jumped almost three dozen times before without incident. Even with the technology still under development, he hadn’t experienced a transport that cost him any more than ten milliseconds. Now, he sat at the exact location of the facility he destroyed with a nuclear weapon less than eight hours ago, but one hundred years before the device ever existed.

  How in hell do I get home? He laughed. Maybe I don’t.

  His father Moshi and sister Rachel waited for him back home. He wouldn’t make tonight’s scheduled video call with them and, if he didn’t think of another way out, he doubted ever making the call again. Like his mother, who had been killed in a terrorist attack in 2040, one of the many events that prompted him to join the IDF, Moshi and Rachel would become part of Hiram’s irretrievable past.

  Hiram climbed back through the portal and into the pod. He checked each storage compartment, opened every door in search of something that might help to throw him back to his own time. His head ached, an unfortunate symptom of Hagar’s Curse. Inside one of the cabinets, he found the small wooden box his father had handed him before Hiram had taken off on his first mission almost ten years ago. The finish on the box had been worn away near the latch. He sat down on the floor of the pod and pushed open the discolored and worn brass latch.

  A young Rachel smiled up at him from inside. The picture was old, almost twenty years. The edges had softened by wear. He picked up the stack beneath and cycled through the memories. More photos of Rachel, of his father, of the family before Hiram had grown up and joined the military. A family picture, taken the day he graduated basic training at Bakum, highlighted the family traits: light blue, almost hazel eyes, brown hair, rounded cheeks, and long necks, as well as the disparities. Hiram had inherited his build from his mother’s side. At almost 90 kilos, he was a much larger man than his father, despite their similar, average height. The IDF had packed still more muscle on him since and his hair had eventually grown back, though he kept it short nowadays. Rachel and Moshi both looked so proud of him that day.

  “In case you need us and we can’t be with you,” his father had said. “I know. I could have dropped them all in some virtual storage facility or posted them to one of those family media sites. But I wanted you to have a hard copy. Just in case.”

  “Thanks Dad,” Hiram said out loud. The pod seemed too empty. He wanted to go home.

  He flipped through the stack one more time and stopped at an old black and white, plastic coated photo of his father as a child. A woman who resembled Rachel held him close. Three names had been written on the back of the image:

  Jonah, Danette, and Silas Halphen – May 7, 1938

  “Well, you’re not my father,” he said. He turned the photo over and stared at the smiling, faded faces. He had gone through the pictures a hundred times, maybe more, and never read the notation on the back of this single image. He scolded himself for not paying closer attention. But now that he travelled farther than he ever imagined from home, he wanted their support. He needed h
is family with him.

  The alarm in the pod dinged for the second time. Two hours. The intensity of his headache blossomed at the sound. He closed his eyes and took a few breaths before sealing the pictures back in the box. He gathered a bit of camping gear, tucked the wooden box inside his pack, and climbed out of the pod. Tonight, he planned to sleep beneath the stars.

  He settled in at the edge of the woods, started up a small camp stove, and prepared an MRE labeled chicken and rice. As he spooned food out of the desert colored pouch, Hiram looked through the box of pictures again.

  He stopped on the old black and white photo again. 1938. “Family is family” his father had once said during his early genealogical research. Moshi always rooted for their family. They had all survived terrible times because of his support and encouragement. The happy family stared back at Hiram from the plastic-coated image as if waiting for him to catch on to a master plan not yet disclosed to him.

  “Family,” he said. “I’ve got family here!”

  Hiram pulled up his father’s most recent version of their family history. Moshi Halphen held a professor of history position at Tel Aviv University and had been compiling a detailed study of the Halphen family’s history. Each time he discovered a new branch of the family or found a saucy bit of information, he sent it on to both Hiram and Rachel, highlighting the installment’s most intriguing contents. Hiram appreciated the small gifts more and more as he grew older. As he read the current revision date on the file, he realized this version would be the last.

  He scrolled through the early years of the Halphen family until he reached a section titled World War II. The bolded words made his heart stop.