Doctor Who_ Just War - Lance Parkin [65]
‘The what?’ Two troops burst through the door in front of them, Sten guns blazing. The Doctor pulled his briefcase up, for cover, but Chris stood firm, oblivious to the bullets richocheting around him. Then he charged them.
‘ Banzai!’ Chris whooped. He fired twice, hitting each of his targets in the chest. The Doctor ran over to them but could tell before he arrived that the men had died instantly.
‘You killed them,’ he whispered.
‘Yeah,’ grinned Chris, ‘with my last two bullets. Neat, eh?’
The Doctor glared up at him. ‘Those were people, Chris, this isn’t a video game.’
‘Look,’ stammered Chris, ‘I know that. But they would have killed us. This is war, Doctor.’
The Doctor laid his hand on Cwej’s shoulder. ‘Chris, I’m grateful that you came to rescue me. But there is always an alternative to violence. It’s searching for that alternative that separates us from people like the Nazis.’
As the Doctor was speaking, Chris was bending down, picking up a couple of stick grenades and one of the Sten guns. ‘Sometimes we need to fight for what we believe. That was the motto of my Lodge at Spaceport Nine Overtown:
“Just fight for what’s just”,’ said Chris. All the same, he hesitated, and decided not to take the weapons.
An alarm bell started ringing. The Doctor’s head snapped up. ‘We need to leave.’
‘We’re boxed in here,’ said Chris. ‘We need to head for the main gate.’
‘That’s the one place we can’t go. They’ll be expecting us, and they’ll have all their guards there. They don’t know where we are yet.’
‘This base is tiny. We could easily blast our...’ Chris’s voice trailed out. ‘...find an alternative,’ he finished.
‘Quite,’ the Doctor said. He thought for a moment. ‘When we get outside, we need to follow the stream,’ he announced finally.
The Doctor went first, looking around the fake landscape for any sign of movement. A squad of guards was running for the hangars and another group were already posted along the track to the main gate by the concrete trees. Tentatively, the Doctor and Chris stepped from the accommodation bunker.
‘Because there’s no way out of the base, their priority is to protect the high security areas. They know that we’re not going anywhere. My guess is that they’ll call in reinforcements from Granville.’ The Doctor was striding confidently towards the stream. Chris followed. In his uniform, guards might think twice before shooting at him, and that was all he needed. He still had his mission.
‘Doctor, we have to get Hartung now we’re here. That’s why the SID sent me over.’
‘I’m not entirely sure that he’s here. He might be in Guernsey, or even back in Granville,’ the Doctor said.
‘Yeah, British intelligence has seen him in both those places. The British don’t know anything about this base, though. What do we do?’ They had reached the stream and were following its course.
‘Well, I’d love to have a look in those hangars, but they’ve doubled the guard on them, and that’s just what we can see. They’ll have done the same around Hartung. We need a breathing space, to work things out. We won’t get it here, and we won’t get it in Granville.’
‘The farmhouse,’ Chris realized. ‘We could go to the Gerard farm. They looked after me last night.’
‘We’d be putting them at risk,’ the Doctor warned.
Chris shrugged. ‘What else can we do?’
They had reached the fence. The stream vanished into a pipe, emerging on the other side of the barrier. Tantalizingly, fifty yards beyond was perfect cover: dense woodland. If they could reach that then they ought to be safe. The Doctor bent over.
‘This drain is only six inches across; we can’t get through.’
‘The fence is electrified.’
The Doctor looked up at it. ‘Yes, I thought it might be.’
‘I’ve only got a knife. How do you get through an electric fence?’
‘The traditional method involves a bicycle tyre, a partner and more than a little pot luck.’
Before the Doctor could elaborate, there was the sharp bark of a submachine gun. On