lost heart by then. I arrived back just in time to get on the roster for this lot. Captain Hunter's coming out tomorrow anyway, I hear.'
Although he spoke with his usual cheerfulness, Fawkes did not look well. His face was pale and there was sweat on his upper lip.
'Are you all right, Fawkes?' asked Churchill. 'Feeling rough?'
'I have got a bit of a head, but it's nothing really.'
'Would you like me to get you anything? I can fix up a relief for you if you want.'
'No, I'll be okay, honest. Thanks very much all the same, Mr. Churchill.'
A buzzer sounded. The sergeant got up and went and looked through the thick panel of one-way glass in the door.
'It's the bloke with our tea, sir,' he said. 'Can I go ahead?'
'Certainly,' said Ross-Donaldson.
The sergeant pressed a stud and the door slid back. A well-built young man of perhaps twenty came in carrying two pint china mugs. At the sight of the two officers he straightened his back. Without looking ridiculous he managed to hand over the teas in a sort of posture of attention, then turned and saluted Ross- Donaldson.
'Signalman Pearce, sir,' said Fawkes.
'Good evening, Pearce,' said Ross-Donaldson. 'Do please carry on.'
Churchill remembered hearing the name from Hunter. He was struck by the healthy look of the young man's complexion and eyes and by the extreme smartness of his turnout. He would have made a good model for a recruiting poster, thought Churchill, had it not been for his air of intelligence.
The sergeant and Ross-Donaldson began discussing an arms inspection due to take place the following morning. Churchill turned towards them. He heard Pearce talking in an undertone.
'These were all I could get. I should take three now and another couple about one A.M. Remember I'll be on the switchboard at ten so you can give me a buzz there if you want anything.'
'Thanks, Andy. Don't worry about me.'
The internal telephone rang.
'Command Post, Corporal Fawkes speaking. Right. Go ahead in five minutes, at… twenty-one twenty- five hours. Okay. Cheers.' Fawkes turned to Ross-Donaldson. 'Just the floodlight check, sir.'
'Thank you, Fawkes… Well, I'm afraid they're going to have to turn up whether they've been up all night or not, Sergeant. I'm not going to lay it on twice over. Anything else? Oh, who's Duty Officer?'
'Captain Leonard, sir.'
As the officer directly responsible to the Colonel for the discipline of the unit, Ross-Donaldson evidently felt that it would be unsafe to react to this name in almost any way at all. He inclined his head about an inch without looking at anybody, said good night and left.
Churchill followed. In the hall again, the two entered their names in the Sign Out book that lay on a handsome gate-leg table. After writing down a local telephone number in the Location column and bracketing it against both names, Ross-Donaldson hesitated.
'I'd better just ring and make sure,' he said. 'You go on.'
Lighting a cigarette, Churchill strolled outside and moved to-wards the officers' car park. This brought him near Hut D4.
D4 was the long single-story building Churchill had been looking at just now on the Command Post television screens. Its contents were the reason for the Colonel's carefully planned system of guards. Overhead lights illuminated it and the pathway round it, where Churchill could see the two sentries pacing. Farther off, two other figures could be made out, members of the patrol that circuited the area at all times. They were passing the foot of the steel scaffolding that supported one of the permanently manned machine-gun posts. The other was in the roof of the farmhouse. The guns were heavy-caliber weapons mounted on tripods. The noise with which they fired their 12.75 mm. alloy-jacketed ammunition (as heard at a recent practice alarm) was immense. Such bullets would penetrate any vehicle which Colonel White considered at all likely to be used in an attempt to enter D4. A mere armored car would be riddled in seconds. In the event of a full-scale tank assault, agreed to be a remote possibility in peacetime, the Colonel was to call on a neighboring RAF base for assistance.
Churchill contemplated D4. The thought of what was inside it hardly weighed upon him. He had felt nothing but a remote excitement when, three weeks earlier, a pair of five-ton lorries escorted by a full platoon of motorized infantry had delivered there a number of large sealed boxes. What he disliked about the building tonight was its reminders of a world which had started to disappear almost as he was starting to walk and talk, but which he knew about from written and other records. Even this, however, was less unwelcome than the kind of future the sight of D4 seemed to promise. It felt to him like a personal rather than simply a general future. The memory of the dispatch-rider's death five days earlier came into his mind as he stood in the darkness waiting for Ross-Donaldson, that and the memory of the girl he had seen earlier on the afternoon in question.
Just then D4 and its environs became in an instant totally bright as the floodlights round it were switched on. Churchill flinched, and could have sworn that the sentries on the path did the same, each seeming to check in his stride. Near the single gateway in the fence they crossed and diverged, then one after the other passed out of sight round the angles of the building. For a quarter of a minute nothing moved. At the end of that time the lights went off and their image shrank and swirled and grew again on Churchill's retinas. The check had been successfully completed.
Ross-Donaldson came up and said, 'I suppose in a way one wouldn't have expected it. Second-stage concealment theory in a non-hostility context. Somebody with old Chalky White's history would have been much more likely to keep the beams on all night long so that even a Russian on a moon-run could see D4, let alone any inquisitive strangers in the village. I tried to get her but she was engaged both times.'
