I put another shot over his head, then it was time to move. I was in the blast radius. I rolled back, into a ditch, and flattened myself into the mud, pressing every inch of my body as far into the ground as I could. Back in the trench I’d spent my life trying to escape. Only this trench was barely a foot deep. Possibly enough to protect me. Possibly not. In any event, it was all I had, so it had to do.
I risked a look. Freddie had pulled himself to his feet. He took a step, but the injured leg failed him. He was out of time, and he knew it. We looked each other in the eye. He opened his mouth to curse me, as if that had some kind of power. There was a blinding flash as the fuse ignited the TNT, and in the next instant Freddie didn’t exist.
I ducked back down into the ditch, pressing myself into the mud as the blast wave went over. It sucked the air out of my lungs and lifted me up, then dropped me back down.
A thick cloud of dust and leaves followed, everything that could be picked up and moved, thrown through the air by rolling waves of concussion. I kept my mouth shut. Some of that dust was Freddie, in particulate form.
I pulled myself up, ears ringing. The transmission tower still stood, untroubled. One corner of its base was destroyed, where Freddie had mounted the explosive, but the other three corners held fast.
85
The shed was a dark rectangle in the mist. Unremarkable. Just a low, single-storey building with a sheet-metal door painted dull green. No attempt at hiding it. No set dressing in the form of moveable gorse bushes. No pretence it was some kind of cinema. Just a concrete shed with a corrugated-metal roof.
The door swung open as I passed. Adams stepped out, the scar on his face emphasised as he drew on a cigarette.
‘Job done?’ he asked.
‘Job done,’ I answered.
He ground the cigarette out and gestured back inside the shed. I followed him.
I stepped inside and found myself looking down the barrel of an Enfield number two pistol. It was held by a young woman with a tight, pale face, dressed in the light blue uniform of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. She was doing a good job of holding the gun steady, despite the adrenaline that must have been pumping through her body. She looked terrified, but there was a steely quality to her eyes that spoke of months of training and belief in the rightness of what she was about to do.
‘It’s all right,’ Adams said, as he filled a kettle from a tap. ‘He’s with me.’ The young woman lowered the gun, but kept alert.
We were in a small room, dark, with a greenish glow. Adams was at a sink on the left wall. In the middle of the room there was a metal desk with two chairs. Each chair was occupied. Two more WAAFs, both with headsets, wires trailing from a conduit that ran across the ceiling.
The woman with the gun put her finger to her lips. I nodded.
The WAAFs at the desk ignored us, intent on their work. They were focused on a glass dome, about the size of a dinner plate. It bowed out from the table, like a porthole on a ship. Some form of television. The screen glowed with a faint green light. A jagged line had been carefully drawn onto the screen with a white wax pencil. It was a shape recognisable to any Englishman – the south coast, from the Isle of Wight, along to Kent and up to the Thames Estuary. Below that line, a corresponding shape showing the coast of mainland Europe. A cloud of dots, too many to count, floated in what would be the English Channel.
The WAAF nearest the glass dome put a curved ruler over it and made a mark. She took a reading and relayed it to her partner.
‘Bogies. Numerous. Forty miles out. One hundred and fifty-four degrees.’
Her partner wrote in a notebook, reading back the information as she did so.
‘Forty miles, one hundred and fifty-four degrees.’
She pressed the side of her headset and spoke with a firmer voice, as if she were making a telephone call.
‘Chain Home, this is Aspidistra. Bogies at forty miles, one hundred and fifty-four degrees.’
She listened.
‘Too numerous to count,’ she said.
She listened again.
‘Copy Chain Home.’
The young woman with the pistol stepped between me and her colleagues at the desk, blocking my view.
Adams lit a match, igniting a gas ring under the kettle.
‘Any messages for Bunny?’ he asked.
I shook my head, then thought better of it.
