Doctor Who_ Just War - Lance Parkin [52]
‘Mind the cowpats,’ joked the Leutnant. There weren’t any. It was hardly the best joke in the world, and merely served to distract him from his train of thought. They were coming up towards the pine trees. A couple of guards were posted up in the tree, and they peered through the slits in the branches down at the Doctor and his escort making their way up the track. The couple in the next tree were keenly watching the sky. The Doctor fixed his attention ahead. The path had led to the end of a small valley. Strangely, the stream he had heard cut across it. He scuffed his shoe on the grass as it suddenly hardened.
Hang on.
The Doctor spun back to look at the pine trees. The concrete pine trees.
The Leutnant was laughing. ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’
The Doctor was pretty sure that his expression must have betrayed something of his surprise. The trees were guard posts, shaped and painted to look like pine trees.
They’d fooled him from fifteen feet away. Now he knew what he was looking for, he could see how there was a metal ladder bolted to the ‘trunk’ of the tree which led up inside the
‘cone’. Twentyfive feet in the air, foot-wide slits allowed almost a 360-degree field of vision. Two German soldiers were posted in each ‘tree’. How odd.
The Doctor bent down, rubbing the ground. It wasn’t grass at all, it was tarmac.
‘Green tarmac,’ the Doctor mused. Keller was looking very pleased with himself. The Doctor twirled around.
‘I’m standing in the middle of an invisible airbase,’ he declared.
It was incredibly clever. These hillocks were almost certainly buildings of some kind, covered over with earth, just like Saxon burial mounds. Judging from the size of some of them, over a hundred feet square, they could only be aircraft hangars. There were smaller protrusions — fuel tanks? The barracks and laboratories were probably below ground: they would be sheltered from aerial bombardment down there, as well as being totally camouflaged. If they were really testing jet engines here, then it would be ideal soundproofing, too, as long as it was properly ventilated. What the Doctor had thought was a cottage was actually a control tower. An aircraft control tower with a thatched roof.
‘This installation doesn’t look like anything of the sort from the air,’ the Leutnant was saying. ‘Normally, everything at an airstrip is laid out logically and neatly. We’ve broken up all those lines. Everything is either covered up or painted.
We’ve left as much natural vegetation in place as we could, and supplemented it with the odd fake bush and concrete tree.’
‘It’s invisible from the air.’
‘As you have discovered, it would be invisible from the ground if it wasn’t for the fence. We need that, though, to stop the locals stumbling upon us. Again, the barrier is too thin to appear on aerial photographs.’
‘You’ve deliberately left the route here as a dirt track.’
‘It carries on out the other side of the base and leads to the sea eventually. The track runs straight across the runway.’
‘The —?’ The Doctor looked around. Yes, of course, the valley was a runway, a runway painted a mottled green. It was about two hundred feet long. He quickly made a series of calculations.
‘You’ve been to Guernsey, yes? Did you see the Mirus batteries? We put some gun emplacements on the cliff tops there, and painted them to look like cottages. Crude compared to this. If you know about them, they are pretty easy to spot. The trick is not to tell the enemy about them.’
‘Indeed,’ murmured the Doctor. ‘Just one thing. Why do you keep a herd of cows inside the perimeter? It’s a nice touch, but it could be dangerous: you’d have