Part 13 (2/2)

The Doctor was pretty sure that his expression must have betrayed something of his surprise. The trees were guard posts, shaped and painted to look like pine trees.

They'd fooled him from fifteen feet away. Now he knew what he was looking for, he could see how there was a metal ladder bolted to the 'trunk' of the tree which led up inside the 'cone'. Twentyfive feet in the air, foot-wide slits allowed almost a 360-degree field of vision. Two German soldiers were posted in each 'tree'. How odd.

The Doctor bent down, rubbing the ground. It wasn't gra.s.s at all, it was tarmac.

'Green tarmac,' the Doctor mused. Keller was looking very pleased with himself. The Doctor twirled around.

'I'm standing in the middle of an invisible airbase,' he declared.

It was incredibly clever. These hillocks were almost certainly buildings of some kind, covered over with earth, just like Saxon burial mounds. Judging from the size of some of them, over a hundred feet square, they could only be aircraft hangars. There were smaller protrusions - fuel tanks? The barracks and laboratories were probably below ground: they would be sheltered from aerial bombardment down there, as well as being totally camouflaged. If they were really testing jet engines here, then it would be ideal soundproofing, too, as long as it was properly ventilated. What the Doctor had thought was a cottage was actually a control tower. An aircraft control tower with a thatched roof.

'This installation doesn't look like anything of the sort from the air,' the Leutnant was saying. 'Normally, everything at an airstrip is laid out logically and neatly. We've broken up all those lines. Everything is either covered up or painted.

We've left as much natural vegetation in place as we could, and supplemented it with the odd fake bush and concrete tree.'

'It's invisible from the air.'

'As you have discovered, it would be invisible from the ground if it wasn't for the fence. We need that, though, to stop the locals stumbling upon us. Again, the barrier is too thin to appear on aerial photographs.'

'You've deliberately left the route here as a dirt track.'

'It carries on out the other side of the base and leads to the sea eventually. The track runs straight across the runway.'

'The -?' The Doctor looked around. Yes, of course, the valley was a runway, a runway painted a mottled green. It was about two hundred feet long. He quickly made a series of calculations.

'You've been to Guernsey, yes? Did you see the Mirus batteries? We put some gun emplacements on the cliff tops there, and painted them to look like cottages. Crude compared to this. If you know about them, they are pretty easy to spot. The trick is not to tell the enemy about them.'

'Indeed,' murmured the Doctor. 'Just one thing. Why do you keep a herd of cows inside the perimeter? It's a nice touch, but it could be dangerous: you'd have to keep them from wandering all over the runway and - ' Keller cut him short.

'Herr Doktor, the cows are concrete. Did you not realize?'

The Doctor shut up.

This time last year, the Salted Almond on the Trocadero had got into trouble for an advertis.e.m.e.nt it had placed in a couple of the national papers. Under the caption 'All Set For Blitz-Leave', there had been a picture of a dinner-jacketed waiter ushering a couple of bright young things to their table. In the foreground, a navy admiral entertained a pretty young woman in an elaborate ballgown and hat. In the background, a band played, and a beautiful dancer danced. The advertis.e.m.e.nt went on to offer an escape from the Blitz, a place where the privileged could while away the hours, safe from German bombs. At a time when the government were desperately trying to instil a sense of national unity and urging restraint, this picture summed up the fact that, for some, there had been few real sacrifices. The poor huddled together in the Tube stations, without even basic sanitation, let alone any real organization; the rich dined in top restaurants, and retreated to their country homes when night fell.

The advertis.e.m.e.nt had been withdrawn, but as Reed and Forrester entered the restaurant it was clear that down here nothing much had changed. This was still a place for the Establishment to shut out the war, and the scene was just the same as that shown in the picture. As the door was closed behind her, Roz realized that she had just stepped into another universe. Who needs a TARDIS? All you ever need is money. Her parents lived like this, barricaded in their palaces, blaming the poor for the problems of the galaxy.

The waiter showed them to their reserved seats. Roz had grown used to the sideways glances that a black woman got on the street in this period. Here, the people stared. She looked back, hoping to convey just a fraction of the moral superiority that she felt. A few looked down at their plates, apparently ashamed. Mission accomplished.

Reed pulled a chair back for Roz, then sat down opposite her. He'd lived all his life in places like this.

'All right, what is going on?' His face wasn't really built for anger.

'It's lovely and warm in here, isn't it?'

'Tell me, Roz.' George sounded genuinely angry. Roz didn't want to push him too far. She produced the duplicate photographs that she had prepared using the facilities in the TARDIS. She had been careful to annotate everything by hand to make it look as if it was all her own work. There would be quite enough questions without the distraction of having to explain how she had managed to invent the computer.

'London, on the morning of March the second. That was the night you and Chris met me at that police box. The night before the library was. .h.i.t, yes?'

Reed agreed, adding that Paddington and St Kit's hospital had also been hit that night.

'You said the Germans were lucky, remember, and that a lot of the planes came from the Channel Islands,' said Roz.

'Now, what would you say if I told you that the spotters and radar both said that there weren't many planes in the sky compared with other nights?'

'I would remind you that Kendrick had taken us off raid a.n.a.lysis because we weren't getting anywhere and told us to look out for von Wer.'

'Von Wer isn't a problem.'

'And how can you make that judgement?'

A mental image of the Doctor's gormless grin swam across Roz's consciousness. 'I just know, that's all,' she concluded.

Reed sighed.

'Look, Lieutenant, trust me on that one. Now, logically, if, on only one night, less planes cause more hits, something odd is going on.'

'You think the Germans used the superbomber?'

'I know they did. Now, I got up early this morning and plotted out what happened on that night. This.'

She handed him the a.n.a.lysis prepared by the TARDIS.

Again, she had painstakingly copied it out in her own handwriting, rather than just making a hard copy. From the photographs, the computer had known where and when the damage took place. It was relatively simple for the computer to work out the yield of each bomb by measuring the damage each one caused. Knowing which planes were capable of dropping which bombs, and comparing this with radar data, it had been possible to match each bomb to each plane. In a matter of seconds, the computer had plotted the course of an eight-hour air-raid. Now, not even the TARDIS computer was perfect, especially when dealing with this sort of chaos. It had rejected its own first guess, because it hadn't quite managed to match up all the information. Its second attempt was a lot more convincing. The whole process took just seconds.

Forrester had then needed nearly three-quarters of an hour to scribble out the report, and had nearly been late for work as a result.

Reed was poring over the data. 'Roz, what you've managed to do is impossible.'

'Yeah, well, six impossible things before breakfast and all that. Which reminds me, let's order, I haven't eaten yet.'

'So we're too late? They've already built superbombers?'

<script>