Jaunt (34 page)

“Tell me this isn’t a joke,” Constantine’s voice cracked over Gilmour’s voxlink.

Gilmour turned to see Constantine and McKean dusting off their hazard suits, looking like they too had crashed face first. Both men scoured the darkened landscape as they stepped closer to Gilmour, who took again to looking at the docked boats. “This is perfect, gentlemen. Step one.”

Once Gilmour had consulted his topographs for directional data, all three men descended the gravel incline and set foot upon the planked path, which ran parallel to the shoreline and the docks.

“This is a marina where I met a captain named Clayton,” Gilmour explained, pointing to a distant dock. “His trawler took me to the North Pacific on my first jaunt.”

“You think he knows Nicolenko’s whereabouts?” McKean asked.

Gilmour nodded. “Or knows who got hold of him.”

The agents walked past several docking ports, and after a few minutes—shrouded by the night’s darkness—Gilmour led them to the Skippsen Marina’s office. For all purposes and intents a shack, the office nonetheless would contain any information on who had filed permits to dock in the marina and who might just have reported sightings of foreign trawlers or steamers. Or if nothing else, what actually became of Clayton, and where he might be found.

Gilmour’s gauntlet easily overpowered the rusted lock on the shack’s door, and the trio admitted themselves. Three bright helmet lamps illuminated the building, a tight, oneroom office, filled to capacity with wooden shelves and many re-bound books. A slender secretary’s desk—more of a tabletop, upon closer inspection—sat at one end of the room, accompanied by a stool. Sheets of paper were scattered throughout the room, some on the secretary’s desk, most on the floor, lending the room more the look of a child’s bedroom than a place of business. Another desk, this time situated with a transmitter on top, sat in the opposite corner of the office.

“All right, fan out and start looking,” Gilmour ordered, heading to the secretary’s desk.

Constantine sighed at the mess before them. “Hell, we could be here a week.”

Beams of light bounced playfully off the walls and floors as the three rummaged through the office’s paperwork for the next several hours. Dust and other accumulated detritus from years of neglect were thrown into the air, recreating an underwater diving expedition, with particles of reflected light shining back into their eyes.

“Gilmour, take a look at this,” McKean said, holding a logbook open to the light.

Gilmour and Constantine knelt next to McKean as he pointed to a recent entry on the ledger. Above it, and the pages preceding the entry, handwritten Cyrillic dominated. Taking the logbook from McKean, Gilmour flipped through it, skimming the pages.

“
Amiliji
,” he whispered, closing the logbook to read its cover.

“Wasn’t that the boat you were brought back on?” Constantine asked.

Gilmour nodded. “Most of this is in the original captain’s hand...the rest is Clayton’s.” Without wasting a second, Gilmour produced his holobook from a side pocket and booted it up. The device hummed while he optically scanned the log book’s yellowed pages for the next few minutes, committing the handwriting to quantum memory. “Thank you, Captain,” he said again, replacing his holobook. “Anything else, Neil?”

“Nothing I can find for a Captain Clayton.”

“Hmm. Looks like this logbook and the manifest file we found on this trawler
Eurus
are going to have to do the job. Will, think you can operate that antique over there?”

Gilmour asked, referring to the radio.

“If it doesn’t hiss or spit, I’m your man.” Constantine walked over to the desk, and raising his fullerene faceplate up, began work on the radio. Within a minute he had the transceiver on, filling the room with a strange and alien din while he rolled the metal dial across the spectrum.

Gilmour handed his holobook to Constantine, allowing a brief glance of the
Eurus
’

radio frequencies gleaned from the newly discovered logs. “There’s your frequency. Let’s see if anybody is home this morning.”

“Gilmour?! What in the hell is going on?!” Clayton’s static-filtered voice yelled over the transmitter headphones.

Gilmour grimaced at the radio noise and repeated, “I said what are your present course and coordinates,
Eurus
, over.”

“Why the hell are you radioing me three-twenty in the morning?! And how the hell did you find this transmitter frequency? Didn’t I leave you in the hospital?”

“It’s a long story, Clayton,” the agent answered, fiddling with the radio headphones he held over his right ear. “Are you out in the Pacific again?”

Clayton sighed over the line. “Everything’s a long story with you, isn’t it?”

“Just give me your coordinates so I can find you. There’s information I’m in search of, and you may be the only person able to help me.”

“There’s a first...Gilmour, I’m not anchored out here on some damned foolish deep sea expedition.”

Gilmour studied the logbook again. “That’s not important, I can get to you. Just tell me your coordinates.”

“Damned....” The insult trailed off as Clayton left for a moment, then returned, another voice sounding in the background. “All right, Gilmour.”

Clayton spoke over the headphones while the special agent nodded, hurriedly inputting the numerals into his gauntlet’s interface. “Perfect. See you soon,
Eurus
.” Gilmour toggled the radio’s power switch and returned the headphones to the desk.

“What?!” Clayton’s voice yelled before being cut off.

Gilmour looked to his two colleagues. “All right, gentlemen, here’s our next stop,”

he said, tapping a button on his interface.

On Constantine’s and McKean’s respective interfaces, a series of green numerals appeared, along with flashing chronometers.

“Set chronometers for eighteen hours ahead,” Gilmour commanded, tightening his helmet. He'd at least give Clayton a chance to bathe before they arrived. “Set?”

“Gotcha,” Constantine said, checking his interface one last time.

“All right, boys.”

Three whirling vortices ripped open their chests, and before the trio could think twice about venturing forth once more, spacetime had collapsed upon them, compressing and hauling the agents into the voracious, circling maw.

Smoke billowed from beneath the seam of the tiny closet’s locked door before a raised gauntlet cracked it open. Three smoldering hazard suits, helmet lamps piercing the haze, walked out into the corridor of the trawler, met by moonlight from the portside windows. After a series of three successive clicks, the artificial illumination had ceased, and the helmets were removed, revealing the perspiring visages of Special Agents Gilmour, Constantine and McKean.

Accessing his interface, Gilmour looked for confirmation that this was indeed the place. So far, two successful jaunts in a row with nary any trouble.

Gilmour peered momentarily at the passive beauty of the crescent moon, then eyed his colleagues and said, “Let’s get to Clayton. The less time I have to spend back on a trawler, the better.”

Helmets magnetically locked to their abdominal rings, the men moved out, heading to the fore of the
Eurus
without the benefit of a red carpet to guide them. Maneuvering to a central corridor, the men skirted past a half-dozen quarters doors and came near the threshold of the bridge, its metal door held open by a toolbox on the floor. Scanning the bridge at its outset, Gilmour’s holobook discerned six heat sources inside, the largest and hottest of which was located at the center; Clayton, seated on his butt.

Charging inside, Gilmour and the other two garnered the swift and startled attention of the crew. Strolling over to the front-facing seat—and the still oblivious Clayton—Gilmour announced, “Clayton! Good to see things don’t change much.”

“KEE—RRRRIIIST!!!” the skipper growled, jumping from his seat and tossing a set of ribs and barbecue sauce down the front of his shirt. A beer between his legs spilled to the deck floor, foaming like seawater.

“Sorry to be a nuisance.” Gilmour covered his mouth at the sight and smell of the cuisine, stifling a laugh.

Clayton wiped the red sauce from his forehead and shirt, nearly weeping. “What the hell are you doing here?!! How the holy hell did you get aboard?!!”

“I have my ways. Hope that wasn’t your only shirt.”

“Sod off!! Goddamn you, Gilmour!” Clayton flipped excess barbecue from his hands, which splattered the floor. For the first time, he took a good look at the three special agents’ attire and the gleaming mechanisms attached to them. “Sweet mother of God!

What the hell is that?!!”

Gilmour stepped closer to the skipper, for once towering over the man now that he wore the hazard suit. “My little secret. Now, where is Nicolenko?”

The skipper’s eyes bulged, his gaze skimming over the fantastical gauntlets, boots and bubble helmets at their sides. “Who the hell are you people?” he whispered, more to himself than anyone else.

“Nicolenko?!” Gilmour reiterated, his eyes boring into Clayton’s.

“Nicolenko...the NKVD man? Probably halfway to Vladivostok by now.”

Gilmour grimaced. “Did the Soviets find him?
 
ke him back?”

“Came in a transport ship...they said they were from the government in Moscow after I did some asking around,” Clayton said, wiping still more barbecue from his shirt.

“Bloody lucky, if you ask me. The sonovabitch was in a coma, just like you.”

“You have my thanks by the way, for what you did,” Gilmour said.

Clayton grunted. “Ehh, I’d just as soon leave him for dead and give you a fair chance at gettin’ home, considering all he’d done to my business. Managed to get a few gold notes off ‘em to cut my losses.”

Gilmour nodded, halfheartedly hearing Clayton’s story. “Good...good. Glad to hear all is well.”

“Well?” Clayton gestured to his spill and to the trio of strangely garbed men who had suddenly, inexplicably appeared. “You call this well?!”

“What about this transport ship,” Gilmour inquired, changing the subject. “A name, destination...a course?”

“Hell, I don’t read Cyrillic. If Ghoukajian was here, he could have told me.”

Scratching his chin, Gilmour gave askance looks to Constantine and McKean, then looked back to Clayton. “Thanks, Clayton. That’s a quite a bit of information.” One more quick look back to Constantine and then, “Say, Clayton, when and where exactly was this transport ship when you, uh, were in contact?”

“Must have been...oh,” the skipper paused, picking at his fingernails, “eleven days ago, just outside Skippsen’s Marina.”

Gilmour nodded. “Thank you, Captain, you just did us a major service. We’ll trouble you no more. Come on, gentlemen. Let the good captain tend to matters.”

Leaving Clayton in a permanent state of confusion and puzzlement, coupled with a gaping jaw, the trio of agents turned tail and headed out the trawler’s bridge, giving the crew of the
Eurus
ample opportunity to exchange furrowed eyebrows.

Clayton sat back down. “What in the
hell
was all that about?”

Hundreds of tinny voices, in dozens of languages and dialects, filtered through McKean’s holobook, each talking to one another from such varied distances as the Philippines, China, Japan, Hawaii, Alaska, the continental United States, Canada and the Soviet Union. Especially the USSR. Tapping a button on the device, McKean extracted a certain segment of the radio spectrum, highlighting it in green among a noisy background of red and blue traffic.

“I’ve isolated their favorite frequencies,” McKean reported, his head cocked while he listened to the varied voices, squeaks and pops of the segmented spectrum. “Sure seem to be busy chattering.”

“The Pacific’s a busy place in wartime,” Gilmour said, watching the stars wash out one after another by the impending dawn. The three stood far from the marina’s docks, taking refuge in an outcropping of hills. “Catch any call signs?”

“Loads. Right now, I’m working on pinpointing the origins of the radio transmissions. Can probably get a pretty good Doppler shift on them and coordinate each course and destination.”

“Good. Will, any progress on lidar?”

On Constantine’s holobook, dozens of red circles continued to converge and diverge at the marina’s southwestern tip, some two kilometers from the trio’s position. “Business as usual on the homefront. Looking out into the deep sea, I’ve got about four signals headed in the general direction of Asia.”

“Keep an eye on them. If one of them meets up with any other ships, give me a yell.”

Staking out traffic among the North Pacific was tedious, time consuming, and above all else, mighty boring. Several promising leads intrigued Gilmour’s interest, but so far, none could be positively identified as the transport vessel Clayton had contact with until McKean could satisfactorily monitor and cross-index every single transmission, which could take the better part of the day at his present rate. It was tempting to jaunt to every boat out there and cut their downtime in half, but the risk just edged the advantage gained; who knew who was out there, watching every single activity like a spider on its web, feeling out, waiting for the trio of agents to jaunt and unwittingly expose themselves and the Temporal Retrieve project to forces better left in the dark? For all Gilmour knew, Nicolenko had not acted alone, perhaps having colleagues spread from here out to the Asian continent’s many coasts and islands. It was not a thought Gilmour relished after coming this far, this close to Nicolenko, that he could almost smell the man, almost...
feel
his presence in this era. For once, the risk would not be worth it. Another time for the risk perhaps, another era.