Doctor Who_ Just War - Lance Parkin [66]
They had been warning shots, fired at the Doctor. Now he was yelling something at him in German. ‘Are you all right, Leutnant?’
He thought that Cwej was a genuine soldier. Chris motioned that it was safe to come down, and made a threatening gesture towards the Doctor. His ‘prisoner’ played out his part, looking suitably terrified. The Nazi clambered down. As he reached ground level, Chris elbowed him in the solar plexus, then punched him hard in the jaw. The Nazi fell back, almost comically.
The Doctor blinked, bemused. He gazed at Chris for a second, then back at the fence. ‘Yes. It’s not perfect, but we don’t have time for anything else. Lodge one of that man’s grenades in the pipe.’
Chris did as the Doctor said, and they took cover. The grenade did its work, clearing the earth from the base, and even ripping the fence itself. The Doctor had broken cover and was heading that way before the smoke had cleared.
Chris followed.
‘It’s still live,’ the Doctor warned. Chris was careful not to touch the wire mesh, and was acutely conscious of the stream water lapping around his feet, but the gap was easily large enough for him to ease himself through.
There were dogs barking behind them. The Doctor clenched his fists in frustration. ‘I forgot to replace the dog biscuits.’ Chris looked blank, until the Doctor explained, ‘I had a bag of biscuits in my jacket to slow down the dogs, but the Germans took them from me when they emptied my pockets.
We’ll have to hurry.’
Once they were on the other side, they ran upstream, water splashing around their trouser-legs. Here, in the water, both their footprints and their scent should be obscured. They were soon ploughing through the woodland. Chris was surprised how fast the Doctor could run. As the Doctor predicted, the Nazis had heard the explosion: Chris could hear the Alsatians behind him, almost at his heels, but the undergrowth was so thick that he couldn’t see them.
9 Thought and Memory
They were meant to be looking for von Wer, the spymaster, but the search was proving fruitless. This didn’t surprise Roz, of course, because she knew that the Doctor wasn’t a German spy. What had surprised her was how easy British Intelligence had found it to pin the blame on the Doctor: they only had three sightings of him. The surveillance reports were astonishingly mundane: the Doctor walked down Oxford Street, the Doctor bought a cup of tea and an iced bun, the Doctor caught a train at Paddington Station. He had never been seen with anyone else, he had never dropped anything suspicious into a litter bin, something that might have been a dead-letter drop. Despite that, and without any apparent reason, they had linked him with a dozen known German agents and three break-ins at defence establishments. The Doctor was an enigma, and successive analysts had decided that he was their problem. The more she looked at the
‘evidence’, the more Roz was convinced that there wasn’t a spymaster at all. She continued to work on the ‘problem’, diligently plotting his movements.
Watching Reed across the desk, as the afternoon wore on, Forrester noticed that he was taking her for granted now, something Roz found flattering. While he had never behaved with anything other than impeccably good manners, there had always been a distance between them. She had been his Xosa Maiden, a dusky archetype from a schoolbook deep in his unconscious mind; someone he’d worshipped from afar from an early age, and had now come face to face with. Roz was uncomfortable being idolized. That gulf seemed to be narrowing. He accepted her on her own terms now, saw her as a person, a woman, a fellow officer.
Was she beginning to accept him, too? It had gone well beyond that. Looking at him now, as he jotted something down on a notepad, Roz realized that she could actually picture herself staying here with this man. The idea that she might live here with anyone — especially Reed — shocked her. Settling down had never occurred to