And then, the road. Mud and gravel, winding up into the hills southwest of Czestochowa.
Pettimore knows this land. The echoes of Appalachian mining country run in these valleys. The reflections of the last time he came here flicker before his eyes. He taps Cat on the shoulder, takes point, leads off. The rest of the team follows, weapons pointed out. Pettimore isn’t concerned. The danger is ahead, not around.
And then, the mine.
Someone’s been busy since Pettimore and his last team walked away, leaving Poland’s holiest relic in the depths of a played-out copper mine. The tattered outbuildings and derelict heavy equipment are much as he remembers them, but a wooden palisade surrounds the mine entrance. Next to the heavy gates, a carefully hand-lettered sign reads, in Polish, DANGER - COLLAPSE HAZARD - KEEP OUT.
Betsy sizes up the obstacle. “This job was an ass-kicking. Whoever did this wasn’t using much powered machinery. Hand tools only. And they were following the Soviet manual for field fortifications.”
Cowboy settles her PKM’s bipod on a good-sized rock. “An obstacle is only an obstacle…”
“… if it’s covered by fire, yeah,” Betsy finishes. “Anyone see movement?”
Ellis lowers his binoculars. “Nothing. Miko, Cat: find us a quiet way in.”
Miko’s way in is a goat-scramble up a nearly sheer rock wall where the palisade’s southern end joins the face of the hill. Cat shakes her head, slings her M4, and follows with a bit more caution.
Miko swings his legs over the top of the palisade, intending to lower himself onto the fighting platform that runs along its inner face. The wood under his left hand emits an alarming crack, giving him a split-second to realize what’s coming. Off balance, he tumbles over the fighting platform’s edge. He bites back an alarmed squawk, but Cat hears the sound of impact as he belly-flops onto the ground three meters below. The bear pops out of his ruck and bounces across the ground.
Miko picks himself up. He’s bleeding from his nose and chin, but it feels superficial. To his left are the enclosure’s exterior gates. To his right, a small sally port sits beside the mine’s main entrance. Ahead of him, about ten meters past the bear in the center of the enclosed space, is a body. It’s been there a week or three, but it looks like man in the scraps of a Soviet uniform. Both legs are shredded from an explosion, and the crater where the feet should be tells Miko exactly what happened.
“Um. I think we’ve got a minefield,” he calls out.
“Shit,” Betsy mutters. “On the way.”
With Cat holding position atop the wall and spotting, the rest of the team negotiates the climb without incident. Ellis pauses as he swings himself over. “Miko. What is that?”
Miko follows Ellis’ gaze. “My… bear?”
“Where did that come from?”
“The… toy store?”
Ellis shakes his head in resignation.
Betsy carefully works her way through the space inside the palisade, marking the minefield’s perimeter. Miko, through blind luck, managed to faceplant at the angled point of the clear path through the mines. She clears away the dirt around one just enough to identify it as a PMN-series Soviet product. “I did not survive this long by trying to disarm those things,” she tells Ellis once she’s backed away.
“Roger that. So how do we get in?” Ellis eyes the mine entrance – and Pettimore’s taut posture, focused the same direction.
Betsy points to the personnel door that leads to what was once the mine’s front office and locker room. “Not there. It’s too inviting. I guarantee you there’s something under the floorboards that will go ‘boom’ if you set a foot wrong. The cleared lane is wide enough for a vehicle, and I can see where someone drove through there a little while ago. We use the main entrance.”
“Which has absolutely no cover or concealment.”
The engineer shrugs. “You asked.”
“I did.” Ellis moves up to Pettimore. “You ready?”
Pettimore nods wordlessly and starts moving forward.
The mine is unlit. Its mouth faces west, and the afternoon sun casts its light thirty or forty meters into the opening Past that, the team breaks out their flashlights.
As the first light comes on, a metallic rattle sounds from deeper within the mine. Pettimore freezes, bringing up Thoughts and Prayers. The sound goes on for fifteen or twenty seconds before cutting off abruptly. It sounds like chains, gears, pulleys – but no engine noise.
Nothing happens.
Beyond the entrance, the main passageway leads back toward the derelict elevator and the access stairs wrapped around its shaft. Side passages run left and right. Ellis eases up to the left passage and peeks around, rifle-first. “Vehicle,” he hisses.
“Anybody got a chemlight?” Cowboy asks. A chorus of soft negatives comes back. She sighs, lets her PKM hang on its sling, clicks on her own flashlight, and tosses it underhand toward the dark silhouette.
The bouncing light avoids breakage, and comes to rest a few meters in front of the vehicle. Its up-angled lens reveals the mud-flecked front end of a HMMWV. Its right headlight is missing; the metal of the pushbar and fender are scarred from a glancing RPG hit. Behind the old damage, that fender bears artwork of a cartoon ghost.
Pettimore hisses involuntarily. “Blinky?”
Ellis makes an interrogative noise.
“That’s our old HMMWV. But… we didn’t leave it here.”
As Pettimore steps forward, the ratcheting noise comes again, louder. Around the team, on elevated ledges, skeletons step out of the walls. Another pops upright through Blinky’s gun ring, seizing the grips of the DShK mounted there. They’re wearing maroon berets and wielding RPKs, which they’re bringing into line with the team.
Pettimore hip-shoots with Thoughts and Prayers. The skeleton on the ledge above Betsy shudders as the 7.62mm round shatters its left humerus. Betsy spins, tracks Pettimore’s fire, and walks a burst from her HK23 up the wall and into the skeleton’s chest.
Cowboy drops to a knee and levels her PKM. The skeleton in Blinky’s gun ring topples in a cloud of bone fragments as its clavicles, neck, and skull disintegrate. Its beret and jaw spin off in opposite directions.
Ellis raises his Mk. 11 but a subliminal recognition of something out of place freezes his trigger finger. In place of the skeleton Betsy just dispatched, he sees the remains of a matte black metal framework. The skeleton’s pelvis and the upper half of its spinal column are still wired in place. The tarpaulin that was painted to match the stone wall is crumpled beneath its dangling feet. “Check fire!” he yells. “Check fire! It’s Pirates of the fuckin’ Caribbean!”
The two skeletons still intact and in the team’s view raise their RPKs and rake fire across absolutely nothing important. It’s a sign of both Ellis’ command presence and the team’s trust that no one else fires back. The RPKs cease hammering.
“No fire,” Pettimore murmurs.
“That’s what I said,” Ellis responds testily.
“Not that.” Pettimore looks up, one hand running along his Dragunov’s receiver. “When we fought them before, in the catacombs, they burst into blue fire when I shot them. No blue fire this time.”
Miko stares at him, remembering another time when Pettimore’s rifle killed things it shouldn’t have been able to kill.
In the ear-ringing silence, a man shouts from deeper in the cave:
“John? Is that you?“
Pettimore goes pale. “Florian?“
“John! Stop breaking my skeletons! Do you know how hard it is to build them?” Then, more quietly, as the speaker approaches: “Don’t shoot. I’m coming out.”
Pettimore gestures for the team to lower their weapons as a shadow emerges from down the main passageway. It’s been a subjective year since he saw the man approaching, but there’s no doubt it’s Florian Filipowicz. Ellis murmurs an inquiry, gets a nod back from Pettimore, and narrows his eyes. According to Pettimore’s own attested memories and the Broadstreet Dossier, Filipowicz should be in Krakow on October 24, 2000 – with Pettimore.
Florian halts in easy conversational distance. He’s sporting a thick but well-trimmed beard rather than the unkempt five o’clock shadow he had when Pettimore last saw him. His eyes are still hard, but the unhinged fanaticism in them has been replaced by something calmer… more purposeful. He’s kitted out for a fight, but nothing in his stance suggests he’s ready to throw down now that he’s identified his visitors.
“Florian.” Pettimore’s voice is hoarse. “I gotta ask you something. What year is it?”
The Pole inhales sharply. “I was going to ask you the same thing. For me? I thought it was 2001. I remember… winter, then the first of spring. And I knew I’d already lived 2000. But when I walked into Lubliniec, everyone who lived there told me it was March. Of 2000.”
“Yeah.” Pettimore nods shakily. “It was spring. I found this village, wandered into it, was just… living there. Put away Thoughts and Prayers. Then some of these folks,” he gestures to Ellis and Miko, “showed up there, settled down… and we started… wakin’ up.” He sighs. “What’s the last thing you remember? From before? You know where the others are?”
Florian shakes his head. “You and I. Broadstreet gave you an envelope, didn’t tell me what was in it. We were headed west to Silesia. Taking your team’s truck.” He gestures toward Blinky. “We were supposed to meet my brother, try to convince him to send help, to stabilize Krakow before Stark and the KGB burned it down with whatever secret war they were still playing. Then… I was driving, you were in the gunner’s seat. We were in forest. Night. The truck died, all the lights went out…we rolled to a stop. Then… light pouring in from above, heat, pain –” he breaks off and gestures to the HMMWV’s roof, where the paint is blistered and scorched.
Pettimore’s face goes taut. He drops to his knees, lost in whatever memory Florian’s account has just unlocked. “The light! Oh, God, the light!”
Ellis takes a step but Florian is quicker. He lunges forward, leans over, puts his hands on Pettimore’s shoulders. “John. Listen to me. Listen! You are here, now. You are not there, not then. Whatever it was – it’s not happening again.”
Pettimore draws a deep breath, nods, forces himself back to his feet with a wordless sound of protest and negation. Ellis clears his throat. “You said you had a mission… from Broadstreet. What happened with that?”
Florian gives the agent a long, appraising look before replying slowly. “What I remember… I found myself in the forest, with the truck. I was… sleepwalking, you could say. I hid the truck, more on instinct. Found a town. Lubliniec. They took me in. They were having bandit problems, were glad to have another man who was good with his hands.” He pauses for the flicker of recognition that tells him Ellis recognizes the euphemism. “After spring planting was done, I went south, to what my brother says is his land’s border. I met some of his troops. ‘Silesian Lancers,’ they call themselves now. I didn’t tell them who I was. I wanted to hear what they’d tell an outsider.
“John.” Pettimore looks up and Florian captures his gaze. “You need to know this. My brother’s troops… they say he has a divine mandate. They say he has the protection of an angel.” Pettimore flinches. Florian nods and drives on. “They say he can’t be harmed. They say the angel is the same one who gave Szczerbiec to King Boleslaw. You and I both know where that sword is.”
“Krakow,” Pettimore grates.
“Krakow.” Florian nods. “If my brother claims a divine mandate, there are three symbols that will give him legitimacy. The crown jewels, which are lost. The sword, which is in Wawel Castle. And her. So I came back here, just as you have. I needed to know if my memory lied. It did not. You – we – hid her well, but she still needed a guardian.”
“You didn’t try to go back to Krakow?” Ellis asks.
Florian shakes his head. “Nor to the monastery where John and I first met. If it truly is 2000, it seemed… a bad idea, to risk meeting myself.” He looks around at the assembled group. “Would you like to see her?”
“Very much so,” Ellis answers for them.
Florian gestures for the team to follow. He leads them to the service stairway wrapping around the derelict elevator shaft. Betsy notes the eye bolts driven into the stone and the cables threaded through them, remote control mechanisms for the skeletal gun platforms, and silently indicates them to Ellis and Cowboy.
At the head of the stairs, Florian lights three lanterns, passes two to Miko and Octavia, and leads the way into the depths. The team descends, silent save for the creak of structural steel and the drip of subterranean water.
Four stories down, or maybe forty – the walls of the shaft seem to drink time and distance – Florian turns off at a landing. He hunches over, moving down a cramped corridor just large enough for a mine cart and a pony. After the second twist and the third turn, a gentle glow appears in the distance. Two more turnings, and the team emerges into a larger room. The walls glitter in the light of a score of candles, ore traces locked in the stone and polished gold and silver plates reflecting the flames. Against the central support pillar stands a table, upon which rests a flat, rectangular object draped in a deep red velvet cloth.
Florian genuflects and strides to the table. He turns to face Pettimore, nods solemnly, and carefully strips away the cloth. In candlelit radiance, the Black Madonna of Czestochowa gazes back at the team.