Book Reviews

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Note: All italics and footnotes in this eBook are disabled. To downlowad this demo chapter in PDF, log on to www.timeshipsaga.com (Book 1).

Copyright © 2005 by Bob Belfry. Prerelease final draft, saved: 2006-01-05

IN THE BEGINNING OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM, SOME EVENTS TOOK PLACE THAT WEREN’T SUPPOSED TO BE REVEALED TO THE PUBLIC. THEY WERE CAREFULLY PREPLANNED BY THE UNITED SPACE FORCES AND THEIR ADVERSARY TO REMAIN UNKNOWN. HOWEVER...


PROLOGUE: A NIGHTMARE

07-NOV-1943, 10:26 ZULU
UKRAINE, FORMER U.S.S.R.

HE RAN AS fast as he could, the smell of burnt flesh forcing him to puke his guts out. The Dobermans sounded so near! The prickly branches of the pine trees lashed his naked body as he pushed his way through the virgin forest avoiding the insidious swamp gaps under the muddy snow.
Nothing could stop him now.
Faster, he spurred himself. Faster!
Coughing and gasping, the boy felt his bare heels kicking him from behind as one kicks a stubborn donkey into galloping like a racehorse. He couldn’t get the flames out of his stinging eyes. He couldn’t get the screams out of his buzzing head. It was as if he were still there, at the—
“Uuugh…!” Stomach spasms made him trip. His freezing body couldn’t feel his vomit’s warmth, but he knew his pop had tempered him to survive any unpredictable Russian winter.
The boy saw his bleeding arms and ribs leaving scarlet droplets on the snow, baiting the snarling dogs of the SS Sturmbannführer. Get up and run, he ordered himself.
“Run, Aleksey, run!” the sixteen-year old Ukrainian boy heard his mother’s voice in his head again. “The front is coming at us, sonny!” His face buried in her shoulder not to look at his mother’s nakedness, he had barely understood her at first. He didn’t know what was more unbearable: the screams of stripped women and children locked up in the burning communal barn, or the increasingly raging fire. “Do you hear me, Aleksey? Look at me!”
Dodging another snowdrift, the boy relived the hellish moment looming up in his head again:
Hemmed in by screaming naked people crushing one another like terrified mindless cattle, Aleksey squeezed his mother in a final desperate embrace. His ears ringing in panic, he was choking from the smoke.
“Son, sonny,” Marya begged him through tears, shaking his shoulders to get his attention, but he wouldn’t unclench his arms from around her, as if he were a child. She took his shorn head and forced him to look at her. “Listen to me, dear!” She kissed his soot-stained cheeks goodbye. “Go find your father! You must warn the liberators about this new weapon! Run through the forest, you’re a runner, do you hear me? There’s no time, go-go-go!”
The farmers knew that the Liberation Army was just around the corner, driving the “gray pest” out of Kiev from the land of Gogol and Tchaikovsky’s ancestors. Kolkhoz Pravda was right in the way of the German retreat. The Nazis leveled to the ground every piece of land their boots were retreating from: Zhytomyr, Kazatin, Belaia Tserkov, Ovruch … the same towns and villages that had been providing them with food, housing, and slave work since 1941. For some time now, the people could hear the cannonades beyond the forest. Last night some brave men and women had escaped through the gaps in the vast frontline throughout the woods, which meant that Kiev, the Capital City, had been freed.
“I will not leave you, ma,” Aleksey cried in Marya’s arms. “I’m no coward!” He was ready to die with her. With everybody. He would never be able to forgive himself such dastardliness!
Ignoring his childish arguments, the strong woman looked decisively at the fuming boards of the nailed down window they were standing by. The smoke was becoming pungent, impenetrable. She grabbed her son around the waist and forced him up. “Kick the boards off. Kick them off, Aleksey Ilyich Repin!” she ordered with the undying determination of an officer’s wife.
The boy did it. Marya pushed him through the gaping window just before the fire broke in through the roof. He fell into the narrow passageway between the central barn and the cowshed, where the kids used to play hide-and-seek before the war. The gasoline flames hadn’t reached down here yet. He knew these tiny corridors like the back of his hand, just as he knew all the secret pathways through the forest. Without a guide, the Germans would be lost in that endless maze of merciless nature.
Aleksey heard gramophone music scraping loud ahead of him. The Germans were trying to deaden the screams. Every time they interrogated someone, they played German arias. This time it was Wagner’s Nibelungen , of course.
The naked boy ducked down the wooden drywall of the narrow passageway, its planks not burning yet, and peeped through a slit. The Germans were ready to retreat, their motorcycles revving on the slushy dirt road. Through the gasoline smoke looming down at him, he caught sight of the whirring Sturmbannführer’s black Mercedes, the Waffen-SS flags on its antennas flapping as if he were the Third Reich’s diplomat to the Ukraine.
“Run, Aleksey!” Marya’s voice reached the boy through the fuming window. She knew that if the soldiers weren’t shooting yet, her son was hesitating. “You can do it, sonny!” she cried out just before the roof began collapsing on the screaming people.
Overcoming his fears, the boy used the moment of distraction and ran through a loose plank the local kids used in their games.
“Ha, ha, ha…!” the Nazi laughed as they saw him sprinting out, dashing toward the woods like an Olympic sportsman.
“Ve vill give you one minute head start, young athlete!” Sturmbannführer Lehmke shouted through his megaphone, which he always used, like some evil movie producer…
The louder barks of the closing in Dobermans brought the boy’s mind back to the present. Running for his life, his lips all but an indigo line, he threw a quick glance behind him. The dogs were chasing him the way demonized wolves would, hindered by the unforeseen swamp gaps beneath the snowdrifts he had just avoided a moment ago. Thrashing through the icy mud, they unwillingly gave him time to steam ahead into the more hindering depths of the ancient forest.
Aleksey knew the price his mother was paying. He had to win this ominous race! He had to inform the Liberation Army of the weapon the skinny Herr Günter Lehmke had bragged about in his speech before starting with the execution. Having dragged everyone out of bed at dawn, the SS officer had initiated the final stage of what Germany called the Slavic Extermination Program.
“Vives and children of zhe Red Army soldiers,” Aleksey heard the spiteful voice in his head again. “Vho attempt escape zhe barn, vill be eaten alive by my cannibals.” That was what he called his trained Dobermans, which had terrorized every soul in the region for years. “Hereby, you are executed for zhe crimes of your red swine-Führer Comrade Stalin. Or perhaps I should leave you to his tender mercies, so he could kill you as enemies of zhe Soviet Empire in his Siberian concentration camps, huh? Mark my vords, you, stupid idiots, ve vere here to liberate you from zhe brazen lies of zhe Communism! Today ve are not retreating! Today ve vill repay your mozherland whore vith our Vergeltungswaffe ! Just as ve paid zhe British and as ve vill pay zhe Americans better zhan our Japanese allies did. But first, you vill pay for zhe crimes of your relatives, vho last night ran to join zhe Red Army…!”
Aleksey’s heartbeat poundered in his ears as if when swam deep underwater, pain squashing his lungs from lack of air.
“Pst! Pssst!” someone hissed at him from somewhere ahead.
It was a sniper hiding behind a tree about twenty meters away, a ski parachutist hooded in white coveralls to camouflage in the snow, pilot’s goggles on his eyes.
Razvedka , the boy realized, spotting three other men motioning for him to take cover and keep quiet. They were probably scouting the area for the approaching Soviet troops.
Instead of following their advice, the boy panicked, shouting with a hoarse voice, “Quickly, quickly! The Nazis plan to launch flying rockets!” Pointing at his chasers, he yelled before it was too late, “They’re burning everyone in the central barn! Sturmbannführer Lehmke is still there with his Waffen-SS marauders!”
The team leader threw a parachute rolled into a ball at the naked boy and motioned again for him to lie down and be still. His comrades, silencers on their rifles, put down the Dobermans with precise shots, targeting the approaching behind SS commandos.
When the Germans heard the dogs howling in pain, a terrible exchange fire began, the brave boy caught in the middle. An SS machinegun swath threw him down onto the parachute, blood gushing out of his throat, pins and needles crawling all over his writhing body like swarming ants. The bullet had crushed his chin exiting below his right ear with excruciating pain.
Out of the blue, Soviet warplanes attacked, pursuing with what the Russians had announced as The Beginning of the End, sworn to chase the “gray pest” all the way back to Berlin.
The boy lay there, prostrate on the silky parachute, his throat bleeding like a slain rabbit, the sun warming his face through the snow-laden branches of the pines. And the sky—oh, that December sky was so blue, so friendly, so happy, as though its faith that spring would come back again had just been restored.
A face veiled with sunrays leaned over Aleksey. An angel? It wasn’t blond, as he’d heard people depicting heavenly beings in their last moments. Now he wasn’t so sure all these stories were superstitions. However, this angel was swarthy and had Mongolian eyes. This creature, oh dear God, looked like a blue-eyed Siberian dog! No, their color was rather greenish, like oxidized brass—not exactly a typical Chukchi or a Tajik or maybe even an Uzbek? The face was foreign: part African, part Asian. But … there was no such race in any of the USSR’s republics!
“He’ll live,” the angel said in … English?
It was a female, one of the ski parachutists. Maybe the squad’s medic, for she began taking care of him immediately. Wrapping him up in the canopy like a suckling, she ripped off strips from the fabric and bandaged him. Her thick eyebrows arching worriedly, she was hooded, her face disguised with a ski mask and tight goggles. Unfortunately, she never removed them, but she was so beautiful, Aleksey could tell, so … out-of-this-world!
“How bad is it?” a man asked, as the skirmish finally ended.
The boy was sure this was American English. He recognized it from The Lone Ranger radio theaters the Germans used to listen and laugh at. It was much harder than the British English. He didn’t know the language, though, only a few words. Yet these secret US paratroopers were whispering, while his heartbeat or rather blood-gush was invading his ears with a terrible hiss. He was rapidly losing his hearing.
“The artery’s punctured, sir,” the female reported, definitely with an American accent. Smiling at the boy, she took out an odd aluminum gun. “Don’t worry,” she warned him, and shot him in the neck. No, she injected something into his wound. It was warm.
Alas, they were in a hurry. But instead of dashing into the kolkhoz to save Aleksey’s mother and the others, they ran back in the woods—totally in the opposite direction! It became clear that these strangers weren’t here to chase SS war criminals or help Russia to win what they called Holy War. No, they’d simply come out of nowhere, saved only him, and then vanished without a trace.
Yes, they just left him there, his consciousness slipping away, freezing, bleeding, inoculated … but not dying. All he could make out with his blurry eyes brimming with tears of confusion were the Liberation Army parachutists falling from the sky. They were like a multitude of blooming dandelions, wafting in the wind.
Well, if it weren’t for the canopy, the bandage, and the few American words that he remembered for the rest of his life, Aleksey would never believe that any of this had ever happened. Neither would the Soviet investigation believe his testimony.
Yet … it did happen. His survival was his only proof.

31-DEC-2009, 06:38
HOUSTON, TX, U.S.A.

“Father,” the sixty-year-old Russian Aerospace general raved in his sleep. He woke up drenched in sweat—not in blood. “Ah,” his gasp echoed in the dark hotel room, “it’s just a dream.” His heartbeat coming back to normal, he wiped the sweat off his face, realizing this was nothing more than a nightmare episode.
Nonetheless, Kuzma Alekseyevich Repin knew that it was more than just a dream. It was a memory—his father’s memory, to be precise. One of those endless war stories of long-suffering Russia, with which he’d been nurtured from babyhood.
He tossed away the blanket and swung his legs out of the bed. How could I dream my father’s memories? he pondered, quite perplexed. He had imagined the whole story with his grandmother and the martyrs of Kolkhoz Pravda a million times. But still … it seemed impossible for his mind to have come up with such stunning details. He had been born five years after the war. Then, his father was a newly fledged twenty-three-year old aviation engineer, and Aleksey Ilyich had never told him everything down to the last iota. He didn’t even show him a picture of his mother—everything had been lost in that terrible fire…
Unable to find a rational explanation, Kuzma thought his aging brains were playing games with him, or … whatever.
Red and blue flashes bathed his luxurious hotel room in annoying intervals, even though the blinds were tightly shut. Maybe that’s what had intensified my nerves, he mulled over. I should’ve pulled the drapes on top last night.
General Repin put on his slippers, grabbed his robe hanging on the nearby chair, and girded it over his striped winter pajamas. Approaching the balcony door, he opened a crack in the blinds. No, the flashes weren’t from police cars. It was the Christmas light decoration from the morning streets of central Houston. The sunrise was just breaking on the horizon and … it was snowing—a rarity in Texas, he had been told. The wide streets looked slightly dusted like cookies with sugar icing. A faint version of snow, of course, yet one the American weathercasters had been predicting for a whole week now. It was nothing even close to some of those Ukrainian blizzards, which…
The thought of his father’s homeland, long a sovereign nation after the collapse of the USSR, brought up vivid images from his nightmare. I’ve never dreamed of the Ukraine before…
In 1950, his dad had married a great looking Latvian girl from Riga and got three sons one after another. In 1968, they all moved to Moscow, where Larissa Donatas had been offered a job as a reporter at Ostankino . There, his dad’s nightmares had dwindled, until Air Force Colonel Aleksey Ilyich died in peace at the very New Millennium’s Eve. Not without previous KGB problems, of course. Some state sleuths believed he was Anglo-American spy. During the Cold War, he almost got sentenced to Siberia, as did many of his colleagues who had fallen victims to Stalin’s postwar purges. After the Brezhnev’s reforms, all that “spyophobia” was over, yet once Aleksey had nearly got killed under the wheels of a “drunk” driver—an attempt to silence his politically incorrect testimony. In fact, it was a miracle that he died surrounded with children and grandkids at the age of 73, strong like a rock. He died a saint’s death in sleep, as the people’s saying was. His last words to his firstborn were, “Kuzma, it’s your turn now. Take the torch.”
On the other hand, General Repin couldn’t remember having nightmares since the beginning of his recent international work in 1992. After the Perestroika, to be honest, he had nothing to worry about, except old age. His career was smooth, rapid, unobstructed … and the Americans, well, they had become allies all over again.
Why now? he contemplated, looking at the fogged up window, which seemed to be sweating more than he did. Because I’m here, in the country of my father’s dreams? That’s not my first visit to the States, so … why right now?
On the way to the bathroom—the Russian had gotten used to showering twice a day while in Texas—he turned on the plasma TV hanging on the wall like an empty silver frame, its painting stolen. NASA-Television appeared with closed captioning, tuned in from yesterday. They showed a live concert of electronic music from Vangelis, featuring his best hits with Jon Anderson from their Millennium Tour Godspeed 2000. A decade-old piece, yet a great show with dazzling pictures from the Hubble telescope, reinforced with artificial fog and laser lightshow effects.
Soon, the shower drowned out the music. Either way, Kuzma Alekseyevich couldn’t hear well. He had begun losing his hearing, which, unfortunately, was a sure roadmap for retirement. Long life and healthy heart, in contrast, was something that ran in his family, which he gladly enjoyed on his father’s behalf. He had it as a gift from the Heavens—a life he had decided to serve as his father’s legacy since he’d first heard his incredible testimony.
While showering, the Aerospace general reminded himself that as much as official history goes, US paratroopers had never been deployed to Russia during WW II. Not officially, anyway, and not before the fortunate Tehran Conference in 1943. It had begun twenty-one days after the massacre in Kolkhoz Pravda, and only after the Allies had come to a practical agreement about their fronts and future territories. It was true that in January of 1942, when forming the United Nations in America twenty-six countries had already pledged allegiance not to fight for a separate peace. The pact was to eradicate Nazism globally, destroying its apocalyptic dreads once and for all. Yet politics was politics. It was a long way to go before the Allies could become an ideologically feasible transnational mechanism, satisfying all parties involved. Not even war and genocide could make that work faster, indeed.
Kuzma also reminded himself that despite his unofficial research, this sole historic incident in the Ukraine remained an unsolved mystery—if not really an unparalleled miracle, as it had been remembered from generation to generation.
After a while, the phone rang.
Trying to make something of the TV music while shaving, the general knew this was his 7:30 wakeup call, so he ignored it. He applied his beloved Old Spice aftershave, and the phone rang again, the obliging voice of the receptionist leaving an extra message on his answering machine: “Mr. Repin, there is an overnight FedEx rush-delivery for you from Washington, DC. The sender is … Digital Microelectronix Corpo—”
Kuzma rushed to get the phone before the girl was done. “Yes?” he asked with his always-husky voice. After she repeated the whole thing, he told her, “Send it to my room right away. No, no breakfast for me today. Please be so kind to redirect my calls to the embassy’s phone number I have given you. Yes, that will be all. Thank you.”
He approached the door to the living room, opened it, and peered through. “Mitya, I have an urgent delivery,” he told his robust adjutant in Russian. “Sign it for me.”
The young sergeant in dark-blue Aerospace uniform jumped up from the couch, already waiting to leave as scheduled at 0800 hours. “Yes, sir,” he affirmed, muting the TV with the remote control, an old sci-fi movie playing in pre-digital-era pastel colors.
“Star Trek?” Repin chuckled. “You like this retro stuff?”
“Um … good morning, General,” the young man greeted him instead, unable to avoid the answer. “T.O.S. is history, sir.”
“History?” Repin grinned, unsure about that. Then he returned the greeting with a little delay, “Good morning, yes.” But now it sounded rather like: Wake up, young man! He added, “I hope it’s a good one, Mitya. We deserve it, don’t we?”
“Absolutely, sir.” Followed a flattery with a tone of familiarity: “You deserve it more than anyone I know, General.”
Repin nodded silently and went back to his bedroom. He did not like flatteries. Familiarities—that was okay. His adjutant was like a son to him anyway, body-guarding his every breath.
Meanwhile, as Kuzma finished putting on his parade uniform, a bellhop in a red outfit with a Turkish fez-like cap brought the small package. The sergeant scanned it with a pocketsize Antiterrorist Security Detector, and only then allowed himself to take it, signing the digital delivery slip.
Against the rules, Repin showed up at the doorway, buttoning up his heavily decorated tunic. He smiled at the bellhop and gave him five bucks for marveling at his Russian insignia.
“Aw, thanks, sir,” the youngster said with a toothy smile, flustering around at the sight of the general’s medals before leaving. Some of them bore the unmistakable crest of the fallen Soviet Union—the Communist hammer-and-sickle that had shaken the world with more than historic consequences.
Kuzma went back to his room and impatiently tore the packet open. There was a wedding-ring case inside. Gently, with two fingers, he opened it and took out one of the compact hearing aids.
“Digital,” he marveled, examining the transparent device as if it were a freshly cut diamond from a South African mine, the size of a bean. “Next-generation space industry micro-technology,” he read from the booklet manual, “with a built-in state-of-the-art digital microphone, offering hi-fi studio-quality sound with adjustable amplifier. Hmm,” the general doubted. “Let’s see if you are worth a thousand bucks.” Activating the miniature battery, he plugged the thing into his right ear.
The expression on his face revealed the product’s exceptional quality. He looked at the TV with great relief. “Now I don’t have to read the subtitles anymore. What a blessing.”
Kuzma enjoyed the concert. The old men’s performance, both about his age, was fascinating. Literally surrounded in a tower of synthesizers and racks with sound-effects equipment, Vangelis played extraordinary space music. Jon Anderson sounded like a strange electronic opera tenor, signing: “O Holy night, the stars are brightly shining…” It was their timeless hit, indeed.
Recalling something, the general searched in his pockets and pulled out a pinkish hearing aid with an auricle hook. Smirking at it scornfully, he threw the obsolete chunk into the trashcan. Then, with reluctance, he turned off the TV. It was time to go.
Before leaving, one hand on the doorknob, Repin looked at the ceiling and whispered in reverence, “Thank you, father. Thank you, grandma.” He crossed himself three times in the Russian-Orthodox tradition, and added, “Lord, let your Kingdom come on Earth as it is in Heaven. Amen.”
The sixty-year old military man had much to be thankful for. He had miraculously survived not only the postwar era but the entire Cold War madness as well. Unlike some of his compatriots, who had either ended with the old Soviet Union or drowned in vodka, he’d emerged through thick and thin. He stayed alive—that was what he did. Moreover, he did it because he knew precisely why he became one of the most prestigious intellectuals of the Glasnost and Perestroika during the breakdown of the Soviet empire. As a founder of the Russian Space Academy of Tsiolkovsky , he had a dream of saving humanity from the Third World War. A disaster, which for decades seemed to be unavoidable.
Yes, to save the human world from its intellectual arrogance and foolish self-destruction was his personal mission in life.
And, so far, Aerospace General Kuzma Alekseyevich Repin had carried it alone, as his personal cross.
But not any longer.

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