Саймон Морден - Another War

He put the paper to one side and took out the maps, and compared them to the sketches and figures that his detachment had made. The global positioning system had made quick, accurate surveying something so simple that even a private could manage it.

Thacker plotted out the details as accurately as his propelling pencil would allow. Then he did the sums in the margins. He looked at his watch, and added the time to his precise, spidery maths.

Dickson came striding back in, cigarette in his mouth and a clipboard in his hand. He slapped the clipboard down in front of Thacker.

‘That do?’ he said out of the corner of his mouth.

Thacker looked at the Ford receipt, and the technical details of the apparatus Dickson had commandeered.

‘Looks fine. You know what I have in mind?’

‘A couple of engineers are bolting it all together, then they need to test it. Should be ready to go in an hour.’

‘Thank you. Makes a difference, not having to explain everything five times.’ He grinned and drank some tea.

Dickson tugged hard on his cigarette, the end burning fiercely for a few seconds. ‘What’s your estimate?’

‘That we have ten hours, plus or minus an hour, until the field contracts to zero. The rate of retreat is relatively constant, but trying to measure the edge of something you can’t see and that is continually moving is a little tricky. Hence the error.’ Thacker shuffled the aerial photograph to the top. ‘More importantly, the field is centred in the west wing of the house.’

‘Is that significant?’ Dickson leaned over and expelled a cloud of smoke. Thacker coughed and waved it away.

‘Emily Foster was quite clear. Everyone lived in the east wing.’

‘And?’

‘Perhaps there was something going on that neither she nor Middleton knew about.’

‘Like what? We can hardly credit some secret government experiment. I’d know about it.’

‘Well, something made a large country estate disappear into thin air.’ Thacker threw his pencil down in annoyance. ‘It wasn’t David Copperfield. Or even Houdini.’

‘This is the point,’ said Dickson, lighting a new cigarette from the stub of the old one. ‘You can’t give me anything as a credible threat, yet you want authorisation to nuke half of Oxfordshire.’

Thacker regarded the Ministry man coolly. ‘Shout a bit louder. I don’t think they heard you in Whitehall.’

‘I apologise. I’m a bit spooked.’

‘Aren’t we all? I barely held that lot together down there. I genuinely thought they’d turn and run at one point. Felt like it myself.’ Thacker played with the dregs of his drink and swilled them down. ‘It’s all very strange.’

‘So why not just wait ten hours?’ asked Dickson. ‘Wait until the field has contracted to zero and then just stroll in?’

‘Because there might be nothing left to see by then. I want to get in there and find out before we maybe lose whatever is in there. Put it down to scientific curiousity.’

‘What are you taking in with you?’

‘The bare minimum. I’m not going to mount a full expedition. Me and a weapon, if I can get away with that. I expect I’ll have to take a radio in, but a pound to a penny it won’t work.’ Thacker stood up and manhandled the whiteboard from its stand, pocketing one of the pens that fell to the floor. ‘This’ll have to do instead, unless you know sign language.’

‘I’m only fluent in Russian.’

‘Pity. My daughter’s deaf, did you know?’

‘I’m sure I read it in your file. Amongst other things.’ Dickson finished his cigarette, and extinguished the butt under his heel.

‘Ah,’ said Thacker. ‘So you know about that as well.’

‘Military Cross. Shame you can’t tell your family about it. They’d be very proud.’

‘I trust they’d be proud of me if I was working on the bins.’ He hefted the whiteboard, and started for the tent flap. ‘Dickson, I don’t mean to needle you. It’s the situation.’

Dickson nodded, and patted his pockets for his lighter. ‘Stop being so bloody reasonable, man.’

They marched down the main drive in front of the Warrior, with the Heath Robinson arrangement Thacker was going to use installed inside. A squaddie had taken point, a surveying pole extended out like a pike, looking for the start of the forcefield.

Thacker carried a cage of white mice and a pressurised cylinder of halon.

Fifty yards on from the last surveying point, the man on point came to an abrupt halt, and held up his hand.

‘Right,’ called Thacker, ‘let’s unload. Time is fleeting.’

The other soldiers heaved the contraption out of the armoured car and carried it as close to the house as they could. It was a hydraulic car-ramp jack on a carriage. Bolted to the moving end of the jack was a man-sized wheeled board that bore a faded Ford logo. Slung under the carriage was a motor and a modified hydraulic pump. It would move at the achingly low speeds required to pierce the barrier.

But first, Thacker was going to send etherised mice through. And to anyone who would have argued, he would have insisted that of course he was more important than a couple of bloody rodents.

He put the cage on the very front of the trolley and gaffer-taped it down. The mice scampered around, sniffing the strange air full of odour.

‘Right, edge it forward.’

The men pushed the carriage until the trolley was abutting the field.

‘Gentlemen, start your engines.’

At the roar of the two-stroke, the mice dived for cover. Thacker could see their little noses twitch, trembling the sawdust. He gave them a blast of anaesthetic, and the twitching stopped.

He stood, and motioned for them to start the pump. As he watched, the cage started to buckle.

‘Slower! You’re going too fast.’

The needle valve on the hydraulics was closed even tighter. Thacker got back down on his hands and knees. The cage was keeping its shape. The trolley wheels were going round, their motion barely perceptible.

‘Steady.’

After a minute of pushing, Thacker called a halt. The cage was inside, intact. He couldn’t see the mice.

‘Do you want me to bring the cage back?’

‘Not yet. Wait.’

At first he thought it was his eyes, blurring with tears through the strain of looking too intently. Then he realised that the blurs were the mice moving about their tiny world. They seemed like fat white ghosts, sliding about behind the thin wire bars. Thacker blinked hard. He could just about make out features: a whisker drawn into a solid plane; a pink nose a drawn out smudge. Then he noticed the cage itself seemed strangely extended, stretched out through the forcefield.

‘Okay, wind it back in. Slowly.’

The mice were alive inside the area of influence. If they made it back out again, he’d be strapping himself to the board in a few minutes, and praying that nothing went wrong.

He took his knife and cut himself free. His hands were trembling, out of fear, out of cold. He had to make especially sure that he was slicing the tape that had held him still, and not the suit that could well be keeping him alive.

He cut by his neck, and sat up. He twisted around on the wheeled board and looked back through the forcefield to the life beyond. There was nothing to see. The estate extended on, all grey grass and skeletal trees. The end of the board stretched away, and grew indistinct.

Everything was wrong, and Thacker knew it, even as he freed his legs from the last bindings. The whiteboard was under him. He drew two letters on it, ‘OK’, and left it in the dust. He had to hurry, really hurry. It had occurred to him, far too late to do anything about it, that time moved differently inside the field. Even allowing for a year to have passed for Henbury Hall, he had about five minutes real time before…