16 - Men With Guns

I left McNish and walked back to Headquarters in the rain. I wanted to see Major Thompson. I found him in the café behind a pile of doughnuts. I sat opposite. He smiled, took one from the top, placed in onto a fresh off-white paper napkin which he had peeled from a large wad, and pushed it across the table to me. Then he licked his fingers.

‘Thanks,’ I said. I looked around quickly. ‘Has Captain Small been back?’

‘She’s gone to The Bunker with Norris,’ he mumbled through a mouthful.

‘Are you sure of that?’ I asked.

‘Mmm. Farbrace came in a while ago and picked up their swimming gear.’

‘Good,’ I said. I felt like speaking to Thompson alone.

‘How was McNish?’ he asked.

‘We’re doomed,’ I replied.

‘Hmmm,’ he nodded. Another doughnut disappeared. There was no doughnut on that plate whose number wasn’t up.

‘Seriously,’ I continued, ‘there’s absolutely no way that somebody like him can make any progress. Norris and Small have already turned on him. They can tell he’s got no chance, and they’re putting as much distance between themselves and him as they can. I’ve got half a mind to do the same.’

‘Only half a mind?’ He held up another doughnut as if to offer it to me. I shook my head and finished my first one. They weren’t actually that good. Nowhere near dense enough and hardly any jam.

‘I’m not clear where I fit in with the likes of McNish. Still,’ I told him. ‘I thought I was supposed to be concentrating on the shuttles, with Magath and Scharf. I told Cowper I couldn’t really get involved in the rest. For all I know, I contributed to his breakdown. But it’s different with Cowper: even when I let him down, I always felt he’d be ok. I don’t get that feeling with McNish. He’s the sort that needs a big team around him. The bigger, the better, I imagine. And it doesn’t matter in what language they communicate. I’m almost honour bound to give him some help, because he’ll be so utterly useless on his own. Is that what you want?’

‘You should certainly help your Captain McNish, as far as you can, without compromising your other responsibilities. Don’t forget: your priority remains the same: get those shuttles onto the landing strip. But if you can add value to other initiatives, don’t be afraid to. You’re a smart chap. You know your own limits.’

His non-committal infuriated me. I could quite easily have filled my entire day, not to mention the days of several others, picking up the slack that McNish had left dangling. I wondered how much use I could possibly be as a bit part player. And how much spare time did I have anyway? I wasn’t even sure of that. My responsibilities appeared to have been significantly reduced now that Norris and Young had arrived, and my influence had definitely waned, yet somehow I still felt accountable for the entire solution. I was losing a game I had never had any intention of joining.

‘I think I’ll tell him I can’t help,’ I decided. ‘Same as I did with Cowper. It’s best for McNish if he realises right now that he’s got to deal with this himself. If I raise his expectations, it’ll only be worse in the long run.’

Thompson shrugged. ‘If that’s how you want to play it,’ he said. ‘I suggest you keep an eye on him, though. You might not fancy getting involved, but you might not get the choice. I’ll be watching, too.’

I wanted to throttle him. Instead I asked him for a favour.

‘Will you do me a favour, please, Major?’ I said.

‘What is it?’ he asked. His hand hovered over the last doughnut. He gave me one final chance to claim it, which I eschewed. He looked happy enough about that. I asked my favour while he polished it off.

 

The next couple of days went as well as any I could remember. My team worked, and how, in a sea of inspiration. I barely emerged from The Bunker, except to take dips in the pool. Magath and Scharf and Mortenson and Small kept me company, both at the grindstone and in the glorious saltwater. The sun poured directly through the light tubes in golden rivers of treacle during the days and via the moon in icy fingers of blue during the nights. If we acted like teenagers it was because we felt like teenagers. To me, even if not the others, this was akin to the last long summer of childhood, before the looming spectre of the big bad world swallowed us. Except that in place of the traditional self-knowledge and sexual freedom, we had substituted geophysical husbandry and unshackling of the intellect. The distinction suited our more mature appetites. I also knew, as did the others, as did every carefree teenager, that it couldn’t last. And, just as any truly carefree teenager would, I paid not a jot of heed to that lurking, spiteful fact.

To a degree, our idyll was of Sergeant Scharf’s making. He had been spectacularly successful in the theft of the physical data on the shuttles, and he and Magath no longer needed to guess. For an entire twenty-four hours they recalibrated, refined and shaded with charcoal pencils; they whistled, pottered and, most reassuringly, tore strips from each other like they had not for some time. Our model took on an entire new dimension. Not only that, but Scharf had almost finalised arrangements for the development of a fully functional testing zone. I read and re-read the specification every few minutes. It was real. Each time I read it, I shivered. Somehow, a mere man had achieved what had previously been considered a logistical mirage, an unreachable trompe l’oeil.

Almost.

But mostly, Major Thompson was behind the genesis of our carefree commune, our fountainhead of fantasy.

‘Can you get rid of that idiot Norris for me?’ I asked him while he browsed on the last doughnut. ‘If only for a few days. Just a tiny respite.’

He continued to chew, and his face indicated little. No sign that he was surprised at my request, no indication that he could satisfy it, but no suggestion that it would be impossible. Just the slightly jaded and stodgy look one would expect on the face of a man who had overindulged to well past the point at which genuine pleasure gave way to mere acknowledgement. I waited for the final swallow.

‘A few days?’ he repeated.

‘Well, permanently would be ideal. I like to think big, but I thought I’d start small.’

He extracted a silver toothpick from his cuff and worked a way methodically around his molars, moving the liberated sugary mush around with his tongue until all the pieces had been integrated. Then he sucked it down like a goose into a jet engine.

‘It’s a terrible thing to ask, but I might just be able to help,’ he smiled.

What he did was disarmingly simple. He probably could have organised it at any stage since Norris had arrived, but I had not reached the point at which I needed to request such a terrible thing, until that day.

On the 20th floor of HQ, outside Colonel Watson’s spacious, dual aspect office, sat a man. A lieutenant, his official title was ‘Business Manager’ to the Colonel. Nobody could be sure what that entailed. He had occupied that space as long as anybody could remember. Some knew his name, others didn’t, the split was fairly even, but everybody knew where to find him. He was mostly unremarkable, except for one thing.

The world was overpopulated at every level. Countries were full, full to bursting; even deserts and swamps were full. Cities were even worse. Within the cities, individual neighbourhoods fared no better, and housing density had kept pace with the overpopulation. It stood to reason that offices suffered the same way. They were a part of the whole fabric of the overpopulated planet, after all. All around military headquarters, and the situation was no different anywhere else, nobody could lay claim to any meaningful expanse of personal space. It was just the way things were. Nobody particularly lamented. Nobody had ever known different.

Except for this man, who had a name known by around half of his colleagues. He positively luxuriated in personal space. His desk itself spread along a west-facing window, far beyond the limit of his physical reach, which was no more than average, toward a corner, thoughtfully created by an innovative architect who had placed the building’s cores around the perimeter in order to drive up the price of steel and make a killing. Wedged into that corner was a pristine chestnut-coloured leather armchair, which nobody could recall ever being sat upon. Behind his usual seated position, an L-shaped arrangement of bookcases, each taller than their owner, filled to capacity and locked every night, demarcated his study area, which consisted of two stiff-backed chairs and a reading table. Within any known context these were barely comprehensible riches, especially for a mere Lieutenant. But that was only the half of it. Over his left shoulder, bordering the one opaque wall of Watson’s office, lay an identically sized space, occupying as far as the next perimeter core. The space housed three standard issue desks, arranged in an arc, each fully furnished with ergonomic chair, computer, lamp, desk calendar and various items of stationery which one might expect in a well-organised workplace. The desks had remained unoccupied since time had begun. Nobody within the organisation had ever dared to question their proposed function, let alone lay claim to the unused space.

Into those desks, Major Terry Thompson moved Captain Norris and his two corporals. They arrived one morning and started work as if they had never been based elsewhere.

Norris himself was in heaven. Whenever Watson needed to leave his office, he would have to pass the captain and his crew. Maybe he would even talk to one or more of them. The prospect was enough to keep them all glued to their positions for days.

And those days were the magical days that we spent in The Bunker. Days without Norris’ orchestrated chaos, without Young’s turgid monologues of death, without Blackburn.

 

Funnily enough, when the spell finally broke, it wasn’t as a result of their reappearance. Lieutenant Mortenson took the initiative. In the end, I suppose, he couldn’t help himself. There’s only so much denial a set of sentient humans can indulge. So he roused one of our slightly smaller elephants and led it, every inch the circus ringmaster, into the centre of The Bunker for all to feast their eyes upon.

‘The superchiller,’ he started. We all stopped what we had been doing and focussed on him, daring him to continue. ‘I’ve been having some discussions. You are aware, aren’t you, that we’re proposing using this component in a way that nobody has ever done before?’

‘Project van Diemen is using it this way,’ Scharf corrected him. Magath winced slightly.

‘Van Diemen,’ Mortenson replied, ‘is doing no such thing. It isn’t using anything any way. Their story remains firmly on paper. They’d love to use the timelock, the superchiller, but they’re scared stiff of actually putting anything together in case it doesn’t work. They’re waiting for us.’

Scharf sniffed slightly, and shrugged. He knew, we all did, that Mortenson was speaking the truth.

‘Since you’ve brought it up,’ I said, ‘we might as well have it out. Are you saying that our design for the superchiller isn’t the correct approach? If you are, we need to think about an alternative.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Mortenson thought, out loud. ‘I think it’s the very best way the technology can be applied. Especially in terms of security. All my colleagues are tremendously supportive, theoretically, of what we’re trying to do.’

The superchiller was not a new invention. It was even in use already within our empire: a couple of the remote colonies used an older model for their own food deliveries. In those cases, the solar-powered devices were mounted to each shuttle, and acted locally upon that vessel alone. The shuttle was coated in a microscopically-thin layer of genuine cold, and a thin tongue of freezing air was shot ahead, like a wedge, to prepare the upcoming atmosphere. It was pretty crude and very effective. Whereas, what we were suggesting in our design was the chilling of the entire timelock. Every molecule. It was so much more secure, in fact it made the timelock notionally unbreachable, and put considerably less stress on the individual shuttles.

‘So,’ I questioned Mortenson, ‘what’s the problem?’

‘The problem?’ he asked. ‘The problem is simple. Nobody thinks it’ll work.’

My first reaction was exasperation at Mortenson’s negativity. I thought we had risen far above that. The faces of Scharf and Magath, though, at those words, told a very different emotional story. They looked like they had just been caught watching the fat girl over the road through the bathroom window again. Something was happening and I was way behind everybody else. That feeling had become rarer recently, but now it was back.

‘What do you mean, nobody?’ I demanded. ‘Who’s nobody? Why wouldn’t it work?’

Mortenson looked apologetic, as if that counted in his favour. ‘It’s the sheer scale,’ he explained. ‘The chillers are designed to operate this way, of course, and van Diemen can probably get it to stick, but I don’t know if we stand a chance. Our timelock is several orders of magnitude bigger than theirs. Even if we specify it right, it might turn out to be more expensive than thermodilution.’ Magath’s skin now turned the colour of an overripe plum. Who said black men can’t blush? ‘Yes, we knew all about those investigations,’ Mortenson smiled sadly. ‘We would never have let it happen. Just as well you dropped it before it got messy.’

I was at a total loss. ‘So, what you’re saying, Lieutenant, is that these superchillers are designed to work in a particular fashion, but nobody’s sure if they even can? What about Tom Sleep? Where is he? What does he say? He sells the things. He must know of somebody using them in this configuration?’

‘He’s as much in the dark as we are,’ Magath admitted. ‘Maybe more. None of his customers have the requirement to use the chillers this way, and there’s nobody remotely as big as we are, anyway. It’s simply not a situation that has ever arisen.’

‘And you knew this?’ I looked from him to Scharf, and back again.

‘Well, yes,’ he shrugged.

‘So how have you two been modelling?’ I asked them.

‘Guesswork. More so in this area than any other. We really do need our testing environment if we’re to get anywhere with it.’

‘I’ve almost secured it,’ Scharf added, hopefully.

‘How almost?’ I asked. ‘Is that for real, or are you just trying to placate me?’

‘It might be ours by tomorrow. Might be a few more days,’ he seemed animated. ‘I can’t see anything stopping it now.’

It would have been the easiest thing in the world to take his word for it. But when had our path ever followed the easy route? I had learned from everything that I had seen, and turned away from his maddening optimism with a scowl.

‘O’Hara has a question,’ boomed a voice from a distant corner of The Bunker. A shiver ran down my spine. I had totally forgotten about our visitor. RSM O’Hara had arrived unannounced in the morning and asked if he could bring himself up to date with our progress. I had happily admitted him, safe in the knowledge that our runaway progress could only impress the unimpressionable genius.

He had clearly worked his way around the majority of the perimeter chalkboards, into a darkened area where even his enormous bulk became indistinguishable from the featureless rock. I distrusted his ability to disappear in full view like that.

‘Men with guns,’ he said. I looked blanker than the rock which camouflaged him. ‘Each consignment of food must be accompanied by armed guard,’ he added, calmly, for my benefit. ‘Bandit activity is already increasing, and such an uplift to the volumes will be as an aphrodisiac.’

‘I understand,’ I told him. ‘I also understand that it’s already a legal requirement for all transports to be protected. We plan to simply reuse the current protocol. There should be no need to introduce any changes.’

‘Confirm,’ he confirmed. ‘The law states exactly what you suggest. Very clearly.’

‘Yes, I know,’ I reassured him. ‘And there’s no reason to alter the current solution. Right?’ My self-assurance was crumbling under his laser stare.

‘Current solution is deficient,’ he stated.

‘Deficient?’ By this time I had completely forgotten how angry I was with Magath and Scharf. Such was the weight under which we daily staggered, and the physical limits of the path which we were attempting to negotiate, that any single external nudge quickly took on life-threatening quality and demanded urgent attention. There was no room for multiple bugbears.

‘A small militia force, poorly trained and effectively unarmed. Only rare transports are accompanied. Even those with militia presence mostly surrender without a fight when confronted. The fight would not be equal.’

‘So, the majority of our food deliveries are completely exposed?’ I suggested.

‘All of them,’ he confirmed.

‘In direct contravention of the law,’ I suggested.

‘Confirm,’ he confirmed.

‘Right. I’m going to ask a question I might immediately regret, but that’s my job,’ I told the whole cave. Nobody caught my eye. ‘Why?’

‘Armed cover was not designed into the original infrastructure and distribution solution,’ O’Hara droned. Even at the distance, he loomed enormous and I could tell my hands would not even have reached around his gristly neck, much less have made any impression on his windpipe.

‘Why the hell not?’ I almost screamed.

‘Budgetary and time constraints,’ he deadbatted. ‘Implementation of a full security system would have had knock-on effects across the whole design, and proven fatal to the project. Instead, O’Hara blueprinted the vision. That blueprint led to the militia experiment within the year.’

‘The militia experiment?’ I spat out.

‘A wholly separate project. A blot on the record of the usually spotless Colonel Brown. A half-hearted and ineffectual effort. He will be as delighted to see it erased as O’Hara will.’

‘Are you telling me that you didn’t fancy doing the security for the original distribution network because it was quite tricky and costly, so you just left it out?’

‘Scope was adjusted,’ he confirmed.

‘Despite the fact that you were breaking the law by adjusting it?’

‘Law,’ he smiled. My whole arm would have fit inside his mouth. ‘Yes, you are wise to worry about the law. It is good discipline.’

‘I take it you don’t, then?’ I sneered.

‘Confirm,’ he confirmed.

My team became the focus of my attention once more. ‘Were you anything to do with this, Sergeant Magath? Was this some Special Forces stitch-up?’

‘I can’t take any responsibility,’ he started, in his own defence. ‘I don’t extend myself beyond the landing strips.’

‘But you knew about it?’ His face betrayed his guilt. Scharf’s, and particularly Mortenson’s, followed the lead. Mortenson was Security Services. He must have been keeping this under his hat since he joined us, waiting for the right time to drop it in, a time when it could simply not be ignored. Not only was I playing this game of chess blindfold, but my opponents possessed pieces of which I was completely ignorant.

I addressed Mortenson directly. ‘What does this mean, in practical terms?’ I asked.

‘We’ll need to implement the latest security protocol, from when the shuttle emerges from the chilled timelock, through the landing process and then all the way down the line. We dictate the protocol, so we’ll need to see it through the entire chain.’

‘Entire chain?’ I had learned to shudder involuntarily with expectation whenever words like ‘entire’ and ‘chain’ came out. They told both of scale and of complexity I had neither the time nor the residual strength to tame. To find them adjacent in a newly-minted sentence rang alarm bells in my head.

‘It’s going to require several discrete sets of guards,’ he continued. ‘The skill set, not to mention the equipment, required to guard a moving vehicle, especially a freight train, is completely different from that for a supermarket or warehouse. That means there will be handover points. Those handovers need to be instantaneous and foolproof. In other words, those handing over responsibility need to be sure that those they’re handing it to really are who they say they are.’

‘And how, exactly, is that achieved?’

‘They each have their own routine, which might involve physical elements, like handshakes or facial expressions, and verbal elements, kind of like a password. Those routines are unique to each set of guards, but are designated by a central authority who they both trust. Each party runs the other’s routine through a piece of recognition software and gets an acceptance key from the central authority. If the keys match, the handover is completed. Should all take less than eight seconds, even in the furthest-flung outposts.’

‘It all sounds a bit paranoid,’ I suggested.

‘Oh, paranoia is the lifeblood of our entire organisation,’ Mortenson assured me. ‘Without distrust, the world would seem a very different place. I have no idea what I would be doing, for a start.’

His pragmatic acceptance of the evils of man struck me as sanguine to the point of the slap-happy, and it awoke one of the bees in my bonnet. Over time, even before I became part of the military machine, I had become uncomfortable with a world more concerned with mollifying the outcomes of dishonesty than attacking its roots. Such an approach struck me as defeatism, unworthy of a race who had achieved almost everything else to which it had set its collective mind. In the land of proverb, prevention was better than cure, but in our reality we bothered with neither and simply treated the symptoms. Even when that treatment became more costly than the prevention abandoned far down the road, its value was never questioned. Not for nothing did I cherish my recurring dream, in which I found myself displaced to a simple island where trust and goodwill were the only currency, and unfettered love and creativity the natural by-product.

But my fantasy pulled up lame. Something was screaming inside my head.

‘Hang on a second,’ I asked of everybody. ‘Why is this on our doorstep? The teams of suitably skilled operatives, the weapons, the security protocol, all of that ought to be in place already. The law says so. Our design should simply be able to use what’s already there. Maybe increase the number of guards, provide more weapons, if we introduce added volume, but not fix the whole sorry shambles. Who made that our problem?’

‘First through the door,’ O’Hara sighed.

‘What in God’s name does that mean?’

‘You touch it, you fix it,’ Scharf explained. ‘It’s not practical, or even possible, for every current problem to be addressed as of itself. Even prioritisation would take years, by which time things will undoubtedly have grown no better. So the approach is to insist that the first project to identify a dependency on a failing service fixes that service.’

I gazed at Scharf. My mind was racing. The inter-relationship between every element in the food supply chain effectively meant that an initiative to improve any single part of the process would soon find itself responsible for the entire creaking machine. It became clear to me why no project could ever complete. Everything was fated to bloat until it filled the entire known universe. The only way to avoid that was to ensure another project got to its critical point before you did, which was exactly how van Diemen was operating. Theoretically, it was an ideal forerunner to our work: the introduction of the new technology at a more limited volume would highlight its strengths and weaknesses, and provide data, not to mention a well-specified testing environment, to allow refinement of deployment and management models, which we would take on and develop for our own needs. But no. The sheer network of related dog’s breakfasts it would have had to resolve before achieving any of the original stated aims rendered the whole thing terrifying and pointless. Hence, our project was spawned and placed on a fast-track. We had merrily steamed past, a while ago, and arrived at Chaos Central some time before I had noticed.

‘Another runway is out,’ Captain Small announced her arrival in an uncommonly pessimistic manner. She had just come off the phone, it seemed. Over her shoulder she carried a tiny, pink bag. A drawstring kept the bag pulled tightly shut and doubled as a strap. It could only have held a swimming costume and a small towel.

‘The surface has gone,’ she looked directly at me. ‘Just crumbled. One of the shuttles came in a bit heavier than it was supposed to. It was redirected to the longest runway because of its landing speed, and that one’s been on the verge of going for a while now. Apparently the result was like a fat bloke sitting on a biscuit.’

‘What happened to the shuttle?’ I asked.

‘Lost,’ she shook her head slightly. ‘It only ploughed through the asphalt for a couple of hundred metres before it fireballed.’

‘Oh dear. How long will the runway be out? How long until they can resurface it?’

‘Resurface?’ she stared at me. ‘It can’t be resurfaced.’

‘Why on Earth not? It’s the longest runway. Presumably we need it for the heavier shuttles. They can’t just let it sit there unused.’

‘What are they going to resurface it with?’ she asked.

‘Oh, don’t tell me we’re out of asphalt now, too?’

‘No, there’s plenty. But we’re not allowed to use the old stuff any more. It’s end of life.’

‘End of life?’

‘That’s right.’

‘You mean it’s dead?’

‘How can asphalt be dead?’

‘How can it be alive? So, what does “end of life” mean?’

‘It means it’s no longer a valid option. It’s been superseded.’

‘Does it not work any more?’ I asked.

‘It’s not that. It works just fine. But the manufacturer no longer recommends it, and they won’t take any responsibility, let alone fix it, if it goes wrong.’

‘Yet we’ve got plenty of it in reserve?’

‘Thousands of tonnes.’

‘And we’d rather let our best runway sit there, crippled and unusable, than resurface it with old asphalt which we already own?’

‘You’re talking as if we have a choice,’ she looked at me imploringly. ‘It’s end of life.’

There was no sign of anything in her look to which I could appeal. This was an irrefutable reality. The end of the bitumen’s life was, apparently, quite final. There was no hope of resurrection. I knew how it felt.

‘OK, so we can’t use the enormous stockpile. What’s replaced it?’

‘The next generation asphalt. It’s wonderful,’ she smiled. ‘It’s like a carpet of soft cardboard, and not much more expensive than actual cardboard would be.’

‘So, can we resurface the dead runway with that stuff? Do we have supply?’

‘We can get it. The manufacturer is waiting for our go-ahead. They can supply as much as we like just as soon as we give them the nod.’

‘Am I missing something here?’ I asked the whole cave. ‘What are we waiting for? Let’s get it delivered and resurface.’

‘We will,’ Small assured me, ‘just as soon as we can get it onto our permitted product list.’

‘Our what?’

‘We can’t purchase anything until it appears on the permitted product list.’

That sounded reasonable at a purely semantic level. I plucked up the courage to go deeper. ‘How do we get it written to the permitted product list?’ I ventured. She had surely anticipated my question.

‘It has to go through evaluation and acceptance. It can be quite a cumbersome process, but necessary.’

‘I understand.’ I really did. It was the truth. I understood what she was telling me. ‘But why is it not already on the list? If the old stuff is end-of-life, and that presumably came as no surprise to anybody, how come the acceptance work on the replacement product hasn’t been done? Whose job is that?’

Captain Small blushed everso slightly. She glanced around The Bunker, but this was her conversation, and hers alone. ‘It’s yours,’ she muttered.

I didn’t respond straight away. Even as the sounds had been forming in her mouth, I knew what they were going to be. That moment of realisation which just precedes the revelation of an unpalatable truth. It drops your heart down several inches, presumably to allow the words more empty vital area space in which to reverberate when they arrive.

‘First through the door,’ O’Hara’s bass boomed from his corner. It was devoid of pity.

Surely we had all the contacts we needed by now, I suggested, to rush through acceptance of the new material. By this stage, we had forged alliances with just about all the operational elements of the spaceport. And everybody wanted it. The process would be simple.

‘Racetracks,’ tolled O’Hara.

‘And some of the larger expressways being proposed,’ Small added.

‘What about them?’ I demanded.

‘They’re all consumers of the asphalt. You’ll need to identify their requirements and manage them as stakeholders also. Any model we introduce must consider them too.’

Our carefree last summer of youth finally turned to windswept, decaying autumn.

‘How d’you like yellow?’ It was Corporal Blackburn. There was no need to turn my attention towards him. I had to delay that moment as much as possible.

‘I love yellow,’ Small replied. ‘What’s the story?’ she was actually smiling while looking at him.

‘Our door!’ Blackburn bubbled. ‘We’re painting the door up there,’ he jerked his ridiculous paper-aeroplane-shaped head vaguely upwards to indicate the basement. ‘First part of Nipper’s plan, innit Nipper?’ Corporal Young nodded once, ponderously. ‘Had trouble locating it again today. We’ll get a new lock on it too. Only make a few keys available to start with. It’ll be safe as houses.’

The three of them hovered in the entrance to The Bunker. If they were trying to make me uneasy, they were doing a fine job.

‘Long time, Captain,’ I broke through the rapidly-forming ice between Norris and me. ‘What have you been up to? We’ve missed you.’

‘Don’t talk stupid,’ Norris remained rooted under the monstrous stone arch. The usual ripples of washed sunlight reflected from the pool and feathered back and forth across Blackburn and Young’s silhouetted forms, yet appeared totally static on Norris. I could only assume that his body automatically took on an equal and opposite movement in order to nullify nature’s waves. ‘You’ve been loving the time without us. But playtime’s over,’ he snapped self-importantly. ‘We’re on notice to go in front of Pfister.’ Corporal Blackburn’s face dropped into deadly serious mode at the mention of that name. I sought out my more knowledgeable colleagues for explanation.

‘Major-General Pfister,’ Scharf helped me out. ‘He’s General Mann’s right hand. A legendary hardcase. He’s sent people to the electric chair just for spelling his name wrong. The ‘P’ is silent.’

‘I guessed that,’ I said. If that was the limit of what this notorious henchman was precious about, we would be fine. I turned back to Norris. ‘Why does he want to see us?’

‘Simple. This project is the single most important piece of work under General Mann’s portfolio, in other words anywhere within the military, and he doesn’t feel connected with it at all.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen him since the day we started. But can’t he keep up to date via Major Thompson, or Colonel Brown, or Watson?

‘It’s not the way General Mann likes to operate. He has his trusted eyes and ears. He uses them to get close where he needs to.’

‘And he feels he needs to now.’ I paused for a second to consider. ‘But this is great, isn’t it? The higher profile we are, the more clout we have, yes? If we have a sponsor like General Mann, we can get just about anything we want. Finally, this could be the break we need.’

‘Nobody else sees it that way,’ Norris said.

I looked around the faces of the people who had heard exactly the news I had. Small, Scharf, Magath, Mortenson, O’Hara, Farbrace. I hated to admit it, but Norris was right: nobody else saw it that way.