TW11 The Cleopatra Crisis NEW by Simon Hawke Read Free Book Online

Priest was a perfect example.
    Lucas should have died, thought Forrester, despite the fact that Col. Priest was his closest friend. He should have died and he should have stayed dead. What Darkness had done was inexcusable. Ever since he'd done it, Forrester had spent many sleepless nights, worrying about the possible consequences. As had Lucas Priest himself, on whom the strain was obvious.
    It had happened in the year 1897, while Priest, Cross, and Delaney were clocked out on a mission to Afghanistan, during the Pathan revolt against the British. A strike team of the S.O.G., from the parallel universe, had come through a confluence in the Khyber Pass and was working to change the course of history. Priest and Cross had been standing on a bluff with the British command staff, watching the fighting that was taking place below them, between the Ghazis and the Bengal Lancers. A lone Ghazi sniper who had concealed himself in the rocks had drawn a bead on the battalion surgeon, mistaking him for the British general. Priest had spotted the sniper and, without thinking about the possible consequences of his interference, had shouted out a warning. The surgeon, his instincts honed by combat, had immediately dropped to the ground, but by doing so, he had left the young Winston Churchill, who was present as a war correspondent, directly in the line of fire. Churchill was too slow to respond and Priest, in his cover as a missionary, had not been carrying a weapon. He had done the only thing that he could do—he flung himself at Churchill, knocked him out of the way, and took the bullet meant for him. Or, more accurately, meant for the surgeon with whose destiny Priest had interfered.
    Lucas was killed instantly. They had even buried him. But Dr. Darkness changed all that in a manner that Forester still could not completely comprehend. During a prior mission, Darkness had implanted each of the three commandos, as well as temporal agent Steiger, with a particle-level tracer device of his own design, one that bonded itself to their molecular structure.
    It allowed him to find them no matter where they were in space and time. What Darkness had not revealed to them was the fact that these tracer devices were also prototypes of a new invention he was trying to perfect—a new generation warp disc. The original warp disc, the one now issued to all temporal personnel, functioned on the same principle as the warp grenade and had superseded the more cumbersome, obsolete chronoplate of Dr. Mensinger. The new model Darkness had designed was not worn on the person, but was integrated on the particle level, actually bonding itself with the individual. Moreover, it was thought-controlled, an idea that still scared the hell out of Forester.
    The prototypes had all malfunctioned. The tracer functions worked perfectly, but the bonding process had damaged the temporal transponders, rendering them useless— all except Priest's. Rather than lose his only working prototype, Darkness had elected to bring Lucas Priest back from the dead.
    How he had done it was a Zen physics puzzle. The leader of the S.O.G. strike team from the opposing timeline had been Priest's twin from the parallel universe. A man whose personal history was apparently somewhat different from the Priest that Forester knew, but who was identical to him in every other respect, right down to his genetic code. After Priest had died, Finn Delaney had killed the "twin Priest." Darkness had tached through time and taken the body of the twin Priest, then tached back and, moving faster than the speed of light, had substituted it for their Lucas Priest, snatching him out of the bullet's path at the last nanosecond, pulling him into his tachyon field and taking him back to his headquarters on that unknown planet.
    There, he had activated the dormant, tachyon-based, thought-controlled transponder Priest had been implanted with. And now Priest had returned, to see his own name listed on the Wall of