The Last Mission Of The Seventh Cavalry. Charley Brindley

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      “It’s huge,” Katy said.

      “Pan around the horizon, Sparks,” Sarge said.

      “Look, an ocean,” Kawalski said.

      “How far away?” Autumn asked.

      “Probably around twenty miles,” Sparks said.

      “Mountains.”

      “Snowcap mountains,” Kady said.

      “Whoa!” Autumn said. “Back up.”

      Sparks stopped the pan and rotated back.

      “Zoom in,” Autumn said, “there, focus on that mountain.”

      “That looks familiar,” Kawalski said.

      “It should,” Autumn said. “That’s the Matterhorn.”

      “Holy shit!” Kawalski leaned closer to the screen. “It is the Matterhorn!”

      “How far, Sparks?” Sarge asked.

      “Um…maybe a hundred and fifty miles.”

      “Direction?”

      “Northeast.”

      Sarge unrolled his map on the grass. “Karina, show me the Matterhorn on this map.”

      She knelt beside him, studying the map. “There.” She pointed to a peak in the mountain range.

      Sarge put his finger on the Matterhorn and measured off a hundred and fifty miles to the southeast. “That river is the Rhone, and the ocean is the Mediterranean Sea.”

      “Here,” Karina said to Kady as she held the Dragonfly iPad out to her, “hold this.” Karina ran to her backpack to get her iPad, then switched it on and began flipping pages.

      “Sparks was right,” Autumn said. “We are on the Riviera.”

      “Thank you,” Sparks said.

      “But where are the highways and cities?” Kawalski asked.

      Sarge shook his head as he studied the map.

      “Hey!” Karina said as she came running back to the group. “Look at the elephants.”

      “What?” Sarge asked.

      “Bring the elephants up on the video,” Karina said.

      Sparks rotated the Dragonfly back to look straight down.

      “Zoom in a bit,” Karina said.

      Sparks worked the controls.

      “There! Stop!” Karina said. “Somebody count the elephants.”

      “Why?” Kawalski asked.

      “Just do it!”

      Everyone began counting the elephants.

      “Thirty-eight.”

      “Forty.”

      “Thirty-eight,” Kady said.

      “Fifty-one,” Paxton said.

      “Paxton,” Lorelei said, “you couldn’t count to twenty with your boots off.”

      “Thirty-nine,” Sarge said.

      “All right,” Karina said as she read something on her screen. “Can we agree on approximately twenty-six thousand soldiers?”

      “I don’t know about that.”

      “Thousands, anyway.”

      “I think more than twenty-six thousand,” Lorelei said.

      “Listen to this, people,” Karina said. “In two-eighteen BC—”

      Lojab laughed. “Two-eighteen BC! You dumb bimbo, Ballentine. You’ve gone completely off your rocker.”

      Karina glared at Lojab for a moment. “In two-eighteen BC,” she began again, “Hannibal took thirty-eight elephants, along with twenty-six thousand cavalry and foot soldiers, over the Alps to attack the Romans.”

      Several of the others laughed.

      “Stupitch,” Lojab mumbled.

      “So, Ballentine,” Sarge said, “you’re saying we’ve been transported back to two-eighteen BC and dropped into Hannibal’s army? Is that what you’re telling me?”

      “I’m just reporting to you what I see; the Rhone River, the Mediterranean Sea, the Alps, someone saying this place is called Gaul, which is the ancient name for France, no highways, no cities, no cell towers, and all our watches being five hours out of whack.” She looked back at her screen. “And I’m reading off to you the facts of history. You can draw your own conclusions.”

      Everyone was silent as they watched the screen on Sparks’s iPad. He reduced the zoom and panned around the horizon, searching for any signs of civilization.

      “The Vocontii were the ancient inhabitants of southern France,” Karina read from her iPad. “They cared little for trade or agriculture, preferring instead to raid neighboring tribes for grain, meat, and slaves.” She clicked off her iPad and put it away.

      Sparks brought the Dragonfly down to a soft landing on the grass. “It’s two-eighteen BC,” he whispered, “and that’s Hannibal’s army.”

      A momentary silence lingered as the soldiers thought about what Karina had said.

      “Sparks,” Lojab said, “you’d believe Ballentine if she said the moon was made of blue cheese.”

      “Green cheese,” Sparks said. “And she’s right about that, too.”

      Kawalski looked at Sarge. “We ain’t in Afghanistan anymore, are we, Toto?”

      “Can the Dragonfly go up at night?” Sarge asked.

      “Yeah, but we might lose her in the dark.”

      “Even with the video on?”

      “If we have a big fire going and we keep the camera trained on the fire, I guess I could bring her back down where we are.” Sparks flipped the switch on the Dragonfly and put it away. “Why do you want to go up at night, Sarge?”

      “I think we fell into a pocket of the past and it’s just this area around us. Maybe ten square miles or so.”

      “Like a wormhole?” Sparks asked.

      “Something like that.”

      “What’s a wormhole?” Kawalski asked.

      “It’s a hypothetical feature of the space-time continuum,” Sparks said. “Basically a shortcut through space and time.”

      “Oh.”

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