Weaver

XV

The Sherman tank's great gun fired one round after another into the carcass of the squat concrete tower, the central fortification of the Richborough complex. The defenders seemed to have nothing left to respond with, nothing but machine guns and rifles whose bullets rattled off the tank's oblivious carcass. The booming of the tank's gun was huge, and though Mary kept her hands clamped over her ears she could feel it in her chest, the cavities of her skull.

Mary was huddled with Gary, Willis Farjeon and the young German prisoner, Obergefreiter Ernst Trojan, in a captured trench. More troops, a total of eight in the group, rested nearby. They were waiting for Tom Mackie. The trench smelled of blood and cordite, the stink of battle.

Gary touched her shoulder. 'Mom, are you sure you're all right?' He had to yell over the sound of the gun.

'What do you think?' she shrieked back. She felt self-conscious in her 'siren suit', her blue WVS coveralls, and her pack on her back contained the results of her researches into Geoffrey Cotesford's memoir – a pack of academic documents in a war zone.

Gary said, 'I never even got to see the arch I spent a year of my life toiling over. And now they've pulled it down to build a flak tower!'

'Same thing happened to Claudius's monument. When the tide turned against Rome, they tore that down too, to build the Saxon-shore fort.'

'I guess England's not a place you want to invade,' Gary said.

Perhaps that was true, she thought. And how strange it was that today, the last moments of one immense invasion might be played out on the scene of another nineteen hundred years earlier.

Ernst Trojan stirred. He wore his grubby Wehrmacht uniform, but he had been given a British army helmet for his safety, and he had his hands tied behind his back.

Willis yelled at him, 'You OK, Fritz? Anything I can get you? How about a beer?'

'Leave him alone, Willis,' Gary said.

There was another crash, and they all ducked.

Tom Mackie came crawling along the trench. He crouched down with them, holding onto his Navy officer's hat. 'Afternoon all.'

'About bloody time,' Willis said. 'Sir.'

'We're all doing our best, Farjeon,' Mackie said, unperturbed. 'Well, we're fit to go at last,' he said to Mary. 'The boffins have arrived.'

She risked a glance out of the trench. She saw that an armoured vehicle at the rear of the field was disgorging military types and civilians, some quite elderly. 'Who are they?'

'Some of my MI-14 colleagues. There are a few chaps from Bletchley Park who want to see if the Nazis have made any improvements to their Colossus calculating machines. And some American boffins.' He pointed. 'That is John von Neumann. An egghead among eggheads. He worked at Princeton in the time of Ben Kamen and Godel. Knows more maths and physics than they did, probably. Actually we have him on loan from the Americans' atomic bomb project. And that is a man called Thomas Watson. Head of International Business Machines. You know – IBM, the big calculating-machine corporation in the States. Not terribly ethical, so the rumours go. Got a medal from Hitler.'

Willis Farjeon said, 'Bloody Yanks, Captain? Over here stealing our women and now our calculating machines. What can you do, eh, sir?'

'All right, Farjeon.'

Mary spotted some other men in more unfamiliar uniforms, with cogwheels and spanners on their shoulder boards. They stood apart from the rest. 'And those?'

'Ah. Red Army technical experts.' Mackie smiled ruefully. 'All a bit delicate, isn't it? Can't shut Uncle Joe out of what we're offering to share with the Americans. Anyway let them have the Colossus and so forth; that doesn't really matter. In fact our pals here believe this is all part of a Nazi chemical weapons research programme. Sarin and Tabun. The verzweiflungswaffen.'

'The weapons of despair,' Ernst Trojan murmured.

'A lot more plausible, don't you think? Now, look, we don't have to wait until the tower falls. What we plan to do is take this group in ahead of the main party and break into the Loom bunker itself. We've always had pretty good intelligence about this place, and we're confident that right now in the bunker there's only Standartenfuhrer Trojan and Unterscharfuhrer Fiveash. They've always kept the Loom technology to themselves – waiting to pass it on as a gift to Himmler.' He glanced at Gary and Willis. 'Two Nazis, that's all, one of them a British woman. Think we can deal with them, boys?'

Willis grinned in that disturbing way of his, face blacked. 'Show us the way in, sir.'

Gary checked his weapons, but he was more circumspect. 'I think it would be a mistake to underestimate those two. Julia Fiveash in particular.'

'I agree,' Mary said warmly. 'But I'd like to get this over before I lose my nerve altogether.'

Gary said, 'I'll keep you safe, Mom.'

'I'll stay out of the line of fire, don't worry.'

Tom Mackie said, 'Right, let's get on with it. We can reach the bunker entrance by following this trench, and then hopping over that bit of wire over there. Corporal Wooler, if you bring up the prisoner – Farjeon, you lead the way, if you would.'

Willis grinned again. 'Aye aye, Captain.' He turned and scurried down the trench.

The rest followed, splashing through mud that stained their boots with blood and oil.