‘I’m not saying that I’m not going to ask you a thousand and one questions or use you as subjects in medical tests,’ continued Thacker, ‘but I will ask your permissions first.’
‘I don’t think we’ll get the same from Dickson, sir,’ said Adams.
‘I think you’re right.’ Henbury swung his leg out over the edge of the camp bed and Adams levered him upright. ‘Won’t he try and stop you?’ he asked Thacker.
‘Only if I, or someone else, tells him. And he’s busy trying to retrieve what’s left of the machine. He’ll need lifting gear. I told him there’s part of the roof on top of it.’
‘That’ll keep the cove occupied. Come on, Adams. Pass me those crutches and we’ll throw ourselves on the mercy of the Major.’
With a nod to the guards, Thacker led Henbury and Adams to his waiting Land Rover. ‘Get in.’
‘Should we lie down?’
‘Only if you want to make yourselves really uncomfortable. Trust me, you’re part of this convoy and no one wants to inspect the vehicles of a biological weapons unit. They just want to get rid of us as quickly as possible.’
Thacker jumped into the front seat, and tapped the dashboard. The driver started the engine and headed slowly towards the stretch of country road they’d driven in on.
‘Don’t look so nervous,’ said Thacker. ‘You’re supposed to be here, yes?’
Both his passengers were sweating, and looking around with sharp, bird-like movements.
They turned onto the road, and started to speed away. Down in the valley, the column of dirty smoke rising into the air was now joined by a twin of steam, as the fire engines damped down the embers.
‘Will he find it?’ asked Henbury.
‘Of course he will. Pieces of it, all over. He might even be able to put it together again, but he’ll never make it work.’
‘And if he does?’
‘We’ll shoot the Ankhani, one by one, or by the hundreds, just like we did last night. Time has marched on, gentlemen. We can destroy things now in ways you never dreamed possible.’
Chapter Seven
Henbury and Adams thought that the motorway was a dangerous insanity, and anyone who travelled on it had no regard for their own, or anyone else’s safety. Despite being limited to fifty by the Warrior, and that both men had travelled far faster on trains, they were amazed and appalled in equal measure by the sheer recklessness of the driving.
‘How is all this necessary?’ asked Henbury
‘Someone decided in the sixties that it would be a good idea. There wasn’t half of the traffic volume there is now, and your average car struggled to get to seventy. These days, everyone’s a racing driver, and it’s all so terribly important to get where you’re going quickly.’
‘Is it?’
‘No.’
They passed the sign which welcomed them to Wiltshire, and Thacker’s phone trilled. He checked the dialling-in number, and recognised it as Dickson’s.
‘I think we’ve been rumbled,’ he said to his passengers, and let the voice-mail take the message.
He gave enough time for a furious Dickson to scorch a set of choice expletives into a digital recorder somewhere in Britain, then retrieved the message with some apprehension.
At first, he couldn’t make out what was going on. The sound quality was awful. What he could hear concerned him enough to ask the driver to pull over onto the hard shoulder. The truck and the Warrior pulled in behind the Land Rover, and Thacker pressed his ear hard against the tiny loudspeaker on his handset.
There were screams. Real screams of anguish, of men who wanted to die but couldn’t. There was crying, bitter sobbing that came from the pit of the stomach. And there was Dickson whispering over the top of it alclass="underline" ‘Come. Worship. Bow down and worship our new god.’
Thacker felt faint and nauseous. Dickson wasn’t one to play a trick, was he? One way to find out. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
‘What’s the matter, Major? You’re as white as a ghost.’
Thacker brushed off Henbury’s concern and ran back to the truck where his men were wedged in with the crates of equipment. ‘Get on the radio. See if you can raise anyone at Henbury Hall.’
‘What’s up, sir?’
‘I don’t know. I think there’s been an accident of some sort.’
The radio operator turned on his rig and searched the airwaves. ‘There’s a carrier, but no traffic.’
Thacker tried his phone. Dickson’s mobile was busy. ‘Okay, listen. We’re going back. We’ll stop just outside the first checkpoint, and see what’s what.’
He told the same to the Warrior driver, and then to his own.
‘Henbury, Adams. I can’t let you go. I’m sorry. We have to go back and see what’s wrong.’
‘What did Dickson say?’ asked Adams. ‘What aren’t you telling us?’
‘I’m not sure it was Dickson. Not anymore. I can’t raise anyone at the site, either. We’ve lost contact with them all.’
He dialled the Ministry of Defence, and explained the problem.
‘Just let us out,’ said Adams as they drove up the slip road at the next junction. ‘Please, Major.’
‘I need you, Adams. I need you to tell me what’s happening back there.’
‘How can we tell you what we don’t know?’
‘I think you do know. I think if you wrack your brains hard enough you can give me the answers I’m looking for. If I were the Ankhani, and I’d suffered wholesale slaughter, what would I do?’
‘You’d run. Lick your wounds. They’re cowards, all of them.’
‘Of course they are. But don’t you think they’d want to take revenge as well?’
‘Yes. I don’t see…’
‘I do,’ said Henbury. ‘And I’ve told you already.’
‘That’s it. You did. You said that Jack thought the Ankhani were going to turn him into a god. I think they have. And they’ve sent him through from their world to ours. Jack Henbury is our new god.’
The checkpoint was deserted. There should have been a couple of bored coppers who waved away journalists with talk of a chemical spill and the possibility of contamination.
The police car was there, but no police. There were outside broadcast vans, too, parked in a field in neat rows. No sign of life from them, either.
Thacker stopped the convoy, and got everyone out.
‘We have another situation, potentially worse than the last one. We all saw what happened last night, when those creatures came at us out of the hall. There was a machine inside, built by Robert Henbury’s cousin, Jack, out of parts he found in Egypt. Once activated, that machine opens a gate between two places, two worlds if you like. We stopped the monsters, but something far worse has probably now come through. You’ll know him when you see him and you will shoot to kill.
‘Now, I’m going on alone. There’s no point in risking any more lives than absolutely necessary. I’m reactivating Captain Henbury’s commission, which isn’t normally the done thing, but this isn’t a moment to stick with the book. He’ll need a lot of help, but he’s an officer, and you’ll follow his orders. That all right, Henbury?’
Henbury, on his crutches, swallowed hard and nodded. Thacker handed him his automatic.
‘There’s a village down the road, Isherwood. Take over the church hall, or the pub if they haven’t got one. Evacuate the villagers, at gun point if necessary, and call the Ministry. I hope to God they’re taking this seriously. Give me a radio, and I’ll keep in touch.’
Thacker strapped the radio to his belt, and commandeered a rifle.
‘Right, Henbury, they’re all yours. Good luck.’
‘And you, Major.’ They shook hands awkwardly.
Thacker started to jog down the road to the Hall, keeping next to the hedge to obscure his progress. There was still smoke coming from the valley, a thin reed of soot climbing to the cloud base. The steam of earlier had dispersed.