Doctor Who_ The Dying Days - Lance Parkin [98]
I was bolt upright with a rough hand over my mouth, in the darkness. Holding me down.
'Bernice,' a firm voice was saying. 'It's all right.'
I had stopped screaming, my mouth hoarse. I lay there, my heart pounding, pumping all that adrenaline around and around my body.
The rain was pattering against the corrugated iron roof of the officer's mess. It was the middle of the night.
'Are you all right?' Alistair asked me.
I slumped back. 'I've just had a dream.'
'The Doctor?'
'The Doctor.'
***
It was light just before six.
I was woken by the sound of the radio. The UNIT operators were collating information from the resistance cells, making a list of enemy positions and activity, just as they had been when I went to sleep. The toothpaste and soap were in the provisions box and I made my way outside. I didn't take my gun, and knew that would earn me a reprimand from Alistair when I got back.
I pulled the door open and stepped outside. The privates on guard duty saluted me, which I admit gave me a bit of a thril . The air was chil y and there was a haze of mist still hanging around. The ground was still damp from the overnight rain.
As you can imagine, I was at a low ebb. The Doctor had come back as someone else, and then just as I was getting used to him, he’d been taken from me, and this time he wouldn’t be coming back.
90
This was my second morning here. It had taken us a week to edge this far around London, avoiding the main roads. We had arrived in the area yesterday afternoon, and the UNIT people had been expecting us, or Alistair at any rate. The Royalist encampment had been set up in a natural dip in the earth, a clearing surrounded by woodland deep within Windsor Forest, south of Windsor itself. In it sat a dozen tanks and as many Harrier jets, not to mention armoured cars, jeeps, trucks and motorbikes. The hardware was either tucked underneath the trees or covered in camouflaged netting. We had known where it was, but driving along the track straining to see it, the camp had been completely invisible until we were within twenty yards - by that time, a dozen snipers concealed in or among the trees could have picked us off. If that wasn’t impressive enough, the base would also be virtual y invisible from the air - not that anything was flying. The Provisional Government were enforcing a strict 'no fly’ rule, at the insistence of the Martians. Bambera’s men didn't have to worry about satellites, either: the resistance movement's first action was to disable the surveil ance network. This had been a disconcertingly easy task, they told us, with a little covert help from the CIA.
There were a dozen resistance bases like this. Al of them were well away from the population centres, but close to the motorway network. The military were keeping their heads down, collecting intelligence, content to stay hidden.
Despite all the soldiers and their hardware here it was a world away from the chaos of the Martian Invasion.
The "officers' mess" was an old garage on the edge of the site, at the end of a mud track, off a disused country road. A decade ago someone had used it to fix up cars, it had probably been a barn or something of the sort before then. The UNIT troops had set up temporary stalls that made the garage look like the casualty department of a hospital, but did allow some form of privacy. The other troops slept in bivouac tents. The thrusting young archaeologist in me yearned for the romance of sleeping under the stars, but secretly I was rather glad to have walls and a roof around me.
There was already a well-trodden path to the "ladies", really nothing more than a screened off section of stream with makeshift chemical toilets and shower stal s. On arrival, I’d been surprised to see how many female soldiers there were there. Including Brigadier Bambera the commanding officer, there were about twenty. The precautions in place to keep the men and women from, ahem, 'fraternising’, were rather comical. The girlies had their own little area of the camp, and the men weren’t al owed in there. Fascinating from