Doctor Who_ Battlefield - Marc Platt [5]
One at a time. Bambera’s turn had come round again.
She could feel a dull pain building up above her left eye.
The soft burr of the air-conditioning nagged at her head, far worse than the stridulant insect life of the Zambezi.
There had been a time when she never got a hangover.
There had been a time when she never had time to drink properly at all.
Why do they always give these jobs to me?
UNIT HQ was an old finishing school perched over the lake six klicks from Geneva. In her imagination, the girls were always white and insubstantial as wraiths. Clustering in the polished hallways, heads dipped towards each other as they exchanged confidences. Learning how to dance and curtsey in the large, high ceilinged rooms, before running like so many Isadora Duncans out on to the lawns to vanish in the sunlight.
The BOQ was a wooden annexe built in chalet style to the north of the main building. Bambera walked across the damp lawn. To her left a hydrofoil was cutting a white wake across the steel grey lake. The mountains beyond were shadows in the overcast sky.
She flipped her card at one of the Swiss guards in her glass box by the side entrance. The guard unsealed the door and she stepped inside. Both passenger lifts were out of order, so Bambera went down in the service elevator with half a tonne of electronics and a new coffee machine.
Two hundred metres down, the doors opened on to a long corridor with puff concrete walls. Black electrical cables spewed out of the ceiling and snaked across the floor. The air smelt of damp cement.
A young private snapped to attention as Bambera stepped from the lift. The private was young with wide Slavic features and small, close-set eyes; one of the new intake recruited directly by the United Nations. For a horrible moment, Bambera thought from the look of recognition that the girl was going to ask for her autograph. But she saluted instead. Bambera returned the salute with more crispness than usual; she’d been young once.
She found Bonderev chain-smoking in Operations. One of the consoles was open, its contents spilling out, a German contractor up to his elbows in fibre optics. He and Bonderev traded insults in French. their only common language. On the ten-metre main wall screen, red lines crawled over a relief map of the Gobi Desert. An inset repeater screen showed a close up NAVSAT image of the area.
Bambera leaned on the balcony rail and watched as Bonderev stubbed out his evil-smelling black cigarette.
Around him personnel stepped over cables, junction boxes and crates that littered the floor. With its unnatural light and regulated air, the workers called this room the
‘armpit’.
‘Bonderev,’ called Bambera.
The Russian looked up and gave her a sour look.
‘Shall I come down?’
Bonderev shook his head and walked up the stairway.
There was a loud Teutonic curse behind him as the Gobi Desert vanished from view in a blaze of visual static.
A squat man in his fifties, Bonderev was out of breath by the time he joined Bambera on the balcony.
‘Teething troubles with NAVSAT,’ he said, nodding below.
‘Who’s in the Gobi?’ asked Bambera.
‘The Ethiopians.’ He lit up another cigarette.
‘I thought we weren’t supposed to use national designations,’ said Bambera. ‘I read a memo or something.’
Bonderev shrugged. ‘It’s a tight ground sweep.
Meteorite impact.’
‘Oh, a rock hunt. Big, was it?’
‘Came in out of the eliptic,’ he said. ‘NAVSAT 81
spotted it. Gargarin Station tracked it down. You know the cosmonauts, very excitable people.’ He crossed to his console, ready for her inevitable briefing.
‘Who have we got in England?’ she said.
He scrolled the answer up. ‘Third Light Recce just back from Libya, laid up at Aylesbury.’
‘Tell them to have a couple of squads on standby, light weapons. I’ve got a Dull Sword in south-west England.’
Cyrillic letters rolled up on Bonderev’s screen. The big bulk translators in the house above would translate from Russian to English before sending orders to Aylesbury.
Aylesbury, thought Bambera, why is that familiar?
The answer