Chapter VI
Bistritz, Romania
2014
Roddy sat at the back of the shop, the small antiques store he had owned and operated for the past fifty years, sorting items in a box he had pulled from the back storeroom.
"Grandpa?" interrupted Gwen. "Can we speak to you for a moment?"
Roddy looked up from his work. "Yes, yes. Certainly," he said absent-mindedly, returning his attention to the box. He should have paid more attention, he knew. Gwen was only here to help him, after all.
She was dealing with a customer who had questions about the region, and the history of some item he had recently purchased. Every item in the store had a history, and on a good day Roddy could tell you about any of it. Unfortunately most of those good days had been about twenty years ago.
Memory is a tricky thing. Roddy was quite certain that everything he had ever done, every experience he had ever had, every conversation was in there; it was just getting them out that was the problem.
Roddy thought of his mind as a jigsaw puzzle, with every piece representing some bit of information, each firmly interlocked with others around it. Except sometimes the key piece, the piece he desperately wanted to remember, was missing. He knew everything about it by examining the connecting pieces. He could tell its exact size and shape, all the colours associated with it, what it represented and how it interacted with all the pieces around it. But the piece itself just wasn't there. Or possibly it was lost in the jumble pile of blue pieces still awaiting assembly. The analogy started to break down eventually.
It seemed a very poorly designed system, at any rate. I mean, if everything was there but inaccessible to him, then what was the point?
Gwen and her customer appeared to have found what they were after, and left together. That was odd. She didn't normally leave with customers. Roddy tried to recall their conversation, and it seemed that she may have introduced the man as a friend. They had asked a number of questions, and Roddy was quite certain he had answered, but what the questions were and what he might have said in response were a mystery.
Roddy was fully capable of holding a sensible conversation, except this morning he was distracted with problems of his own. Still, it bothered him to think that others might look at him as a doddering old man. That wasn't who he was. He had seen a bumper sticker once that read, "Inside every old person is a young person asking, 'What happened?'" Roddy had been old a lot longer than he had ever been young, but he still wondered; what happened?
This box obviously did not contain what he was looking for. Roddy repacked the items and shoved the box to the side, making way for another that he retrieved from the storeroom behind him. He opened the interwoven top flaps, and immediately recognized the contents as exactly what he had been searching for.
"Here it is!" he exclaimed on finding his old military binoculars right on top. And digging a little further he soon found the other item he would need – his Webley service revolver.
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(@ @)
VVV
Roddy had made the trip out to the site of the old castle, the site of his own personal battle with reality, more times than he could remember. Which wasn't saying much, he laughed to himself. Still, it was a lot of times. After the war he had practically lived out there. Watching, waiting, wondering.
They had invented words for it after the Great War, World War I. Once they decided it needed a name they decided to call it 'Shell Shock'. In his war they renamed it 'Combat Fatigue'. Nowadays they want it to sound more like a disease for some reason and so 'Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder' or PTSD is the fashionable term. But Roddy had his own term for what he had felt after the war. He called it 'Duty'.
He had seen things, experienced things that no one else had during that time. He was a soldier, sworn to protect Britain against all enemies. No one else even knew there were enemies still. And so he remained. And watched. And waited.
After the war ended, Roddy had returned to the site. He felt a need to see it one more time, to make sure it really existed, to make sure what had happened was real. He knew at a glance that it was. And knowing what he did, he felt duty bound to remain, to watch and wait, in case the horror ever returned. He wrote letters of apology to family and friends telling them that he would not be returning to England, and took on a duty that would last a lifetime.
At first he had come out almost every day. He explored every tunnel, every room, collecting evidence of what they had done and destroying it. After a couple of years he decided to bury the entrance, using a large steel plate the Germans had left, then covering it with stones and gravel. Only a couple of times over the decades had he ever found it disturbed. Probably local kids who heard rumours of the tunnels and wanted to see for themselves.
When nothing happened for a couple of years Roddy fell into a pattern of coming out once a week, then once a month, and for the past twenty years it had been more like 'when he could manage'. Now he hadn't been out to the site in over two years. Roddy wondered if perhaps this might be the last time he made this trip.
The drive out to the castle took about an hour, leaving Roddy plenty of time to review his life, and his choices. One of those letters he had sent following the war was to a young woman who he knew expected him to come back to her. They had been very close, and yet with everything that had happened he couldn't see himself returning, even for her. He wondered what he would have decided if he had known.
It was over twenty years later when a young man had appeared on his doorstep, claiming to be his son. He didn't need to make any claims, though. Roddy recognized him when he walked in the door, as the face he had regularly shaved about twenty years earlier.
He wanted the young man to yell at him, hit him, accuse him of abandoning his family. Except that wasn't the relationship the young man wanted. They stayed in touch, and his son came out to visit every few years, eventually bringing a young girl, Roddy's granddaughter. Gwen.
Few things surprised Roddy in this life. Finding he had a son, and then a granddaughter, and that they would actually forgive him for everything he had done were certainly among the happiest surprises he had had. Gwen and her father came to visit him almost every summer. For the past few years Gwen had come alone though, as her father didn't like to travel now that he was retired. Another surprise, he had a son who was retired!
When she arrived for her visit this year, Gwen took one look around the shop and the apartment and announced she was staying. Roddy didn't feel he needed any help, but after a couple of weeks he had to admit he really had needed her. At some point he was going to have to admit that he couldn't do everything himself any more.
This morning Roddy had stopped in at the Golden Crown Inn, his local tavern, for breakfast as he usually did before these recon missions. There was a young girl there, no older than Gwen, preparing for her wedding day. Everyone had been quite excited for her. He hoped he might see Gwen's wedding some day. It might be a bit early to think of the wedding, when there was not even a prospect for the groom. But still, he didn't want to think about Gwen living alone. That was his life, not hers.
Roddy turned onto a road which led alongside of a sparse wood. There was an old, gravel side road up ahead which he always used that led a short distance into the woods. That distance had become shorter and shorter as the years passed, as the forest slowly reclaimed the unmaintained road. It was difficult to even spot any more, however Roddy found it, and drove about twenty feet to its current end. Far enough to ensure no one driving past would spot him, at least.
The side road led to a path through the woods. Roddy followed the path, which he knew would lead him to an open space on the other side. There he would find a narrow valley, and a short drop to the valley floor leading to the long, steep hill which led to the former castle.
These were the woods Captain Lupei and his men had used, so many years ago. Roddy would stand in the same spot his men had used, looking across the valley just as they had, searching for enemy movement. For seventy years there had been nothing.
Roddy arrived at his usual spot, a small rocky outcropping which allowed good visibility of the old castle while remaining camouflaged behind a tree, but most importantly it provided a perfect place to sit and rest. Roddy didn't have a chance to even sit though, before he realized something had changed.
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(@ @)
VVV
Roddy continued to watch the site across the valley through his binoculars. It had been over an hour and there had been no movement. But he was patient. He had waited seventy years. He could wait a few hours.
The hill leading up to the old castle site looked much the same as it always had. The tower base was cracked half way back, the front side having been blasted by the bomb into huge slabs of stone that spilled down the hill and were now long overgrown with grass and weeds.
But above that, where the castle itself had previously stood, the castle site had been completely transformed. The fire on that night, so long ago, had completely destroyed the research facility that the German army had built on the spot. Two years ago nothing remained, not even the few pieces of charred timber that had survived for a number of decades after. The earth had reclaimed it all.
Except now it was back. Over the past two years, someone had come and constructed another building on the site. Slightly larger than the previous occupant, the current construction could be another research facility, or possibly a small factory, with a sign over the entrance which read 'Strong Angel Industries'. And it was right over top of the entrance to the tunnels below. There was no way that anyone could build something that size and fail to find the tunnels. Roddy had to conclude that whoever was in the building, was in the tunnels.
Roddy noticed something, movement to the west of the site. Dark flashes through the trees, something was coming along the road leading up to the building. A few moments later a large, dark, BMW sedan pulled into the clearing in front of the building. A man in a dark suit and sunglasses got out of the driver's seat, straightened his jacket, and went up to the building. He let himself in and then all was quiet again.
Nothing happened for another twenty minutes. Roddy waited, patiently watching, until the driver finally reappeared. He emerged from the front doors and went straight to the sedan, opening the rear passenger door. A second man came out of the building, but stopped to hold the large front door. He waited patiently for a few moments until an elderly woman followed. Roddy watched as the woman made her way across the pavement to the car. She got into the back seat and the driver closed the door behind her. Then the driver and the second man ran around the car, got in the driver's side, and the sedan set off up the road.
Roddy had a choice to make. He could continue to watch the building, or try to follow the sedan. He had already watched the building for a few hours, and didn't see that there was much more to be gained there. He didn't think the two men were of any interest, but this woman, she seemed to be someone important.
Roddy picked up his few belongings and raced through the woods to his car, considering the possibilities. They could either be heading north, toward the Ukraine or any number of Eastern European countries, or west toward Bistritz or the airport. If they were heading north then they would already have a fifteen minute lead by the time he got to his car and crossed the valley, and so there was no chance of catching up. He would just have to hope they were heading west, then. In that case they would need to drive around the entire valley, and it was a fair race.
Roddy made it to his car in only ten minutes and dove into the driver's seat. Starting the engine and throwing it into gear he reversed out of the short lane, than raced through the country roads to the main highway.
Roddy pulled up and stopped in a cloud of dust as he arrived at the point where he hoped to intersect the sedan. He parked his car to the side of the road, then walked the last fifty feet to the highway. The road crossed the highway at a right angle, giving Roddy a clear view for about a quarter mile in either direction. Everything was still; there was no sign of the sedan. Roddy waited, and every second was torture.
"They're coming. They'll be here," he said to himself. The alternative was that he was too slow and they had already passed this point, and every second he waited he was irretrievably losing them. Or maybe they had gone north. Or maybe they had turned off at any number of side roads, going who knows where for an infinite number of reasons.
Two agonizing minutes later the sedan finally appeared. It sailed down the highway, driving right past Roddy. He let it get almost out of sight before he returned to his car and pulled onto the highway to follow.
A/N: This chapter is all about Roddy, in his 90s, looking back at his life; his mistakes, his successes. I wanted to explain Roddy's life, especially because he did make mistakes, and anyone who read Bride of the Wolf might wonder why he did the things he did. Now you know, and if you still can't forgive him then at least you can understand.
I also wanted to establish a baseline for 2014 Roddy. He's old, he's tired, his thinking is a bit fuzzy. But he's going to have to pull himself together and fast, because he has an adventure coming up!