Doctor Who_ The King of Terror - Keith Topping [109]
The Chinook came in to land and the UNIT men scrambled on board, the Doctor last of all. As the helicopter rose in the sky and turned away from Griffith Park, from the rear window the Doctor, the Brigadier and Paynter were able to see the first of the alien craft swoop down to within five miles of the highest point in Los Angeles.
The ship was a carbon copy of the one Paynter and Barrington had seen in the InterCom warehouse. Only the colour was different. ‘Impressive, isn’t it?’
he asked no one in particular.
The ship came lower and lower, almost touching the point where the grid would, eventually, repel it. But the grid was, as yet, inactive and the ship was able to hover in front of the enormous Hollywood sign behind Griffith Park.
The sign had stood there for decades, an announcement to the rest of the world that this place was unique. A monument to a city built on dreams and fantasies.
No one would ever know if the aliens on board the ship had any idea of its significance for millions of people. Whether their actions were a deliberate 206
and provocative terror tactic meant to stun the watching world. Or whether they did what they did for no reason other than pure effect.
But it was to become as memorable an image as the world had ever seen.
The ship charged up its weapons and fired off a series of laser bolts that smashed the proud letters of the sign to matchwood.
‘Oh dear,’ sighed the Doctor from the UNIT helicopter as the dust settled on the hill. ‘There goes the neighbourhood.’
Somewhere on a deserted highway miles north of Los Angeles, with tumbleweeds drifting aimlessly down the road – a scene that could have been drawn from the frames of a John Ford dust-howl Western – Control picked up the in-car telephone as it burst into life.
It was the call he had been waiting for. The single most important he would ever receive.
How ironic, then, that no one – not UNIT or the Doctor, not the great American public, nor even the President who didn’t realise who Control truly worked for – would ever know to whom he was speaking, or how the conversation was about to affect the future of the entire human race.
Because, on such anonymous, trivial conversations, the fates of worlds are decided.
‘Yes,’ Control said simply. ‘They’ve agreed to play it our way for once.’
There was a significant pause whilst, at the other end of the line, information was processed, analysed and, finally, commented upon. ‘I agree,’ said Control, when the voice finally spoke. ‘Let’s have us some carnage.’
The car drove off down the road, leaving the tumbleweeds to their perpetual lonely journey.
207
Chapter Twenty-Three
Waiting for Today to Happen
‘It’s a plan diabolical in its ingenuity, I’ll give the CIA that,’ the Brigadier had noted as the Doctor and his friends sat in one of UNIT’s nuclear fallout bunkers deep beneath the Mojave desert near Joshua Tree. The airlift evacuation had been a scrambled, hurried affair that had reminded Lethbridge-Stewart of Berlin in 1961. Particularly with a battle of cosmic proportions beginning to rage above them whilst slowly, inch by inch, the network grid was becoming fully operational.
‘Only the CIA were able to co-ordinate such efforts, getting NASA and the National Security Agency around the table with us . . . We could never have managed that,’ the Doctor agreed sadly. ‘I’m afraid that says something very significant about all of us.’
Thankfully, everyone was now accounted for. And everybody had a job to do. Tegan, Turlough, Natalie, Corporal Murphy, Tyrone, Paynter . . . They all sat at computer screens, earphones in place, in direct contact with one of the numerous UNIT tracking stations around the world, listening for any tiny scraps of information about the war taking place in the burning sky far above their sterile world of artificial light. For confirmation that the grid was in place, holding strong and deflecting