'Not much,' Gareth answered. 'I know it's outside the territory they control. I heard a bit of conversation about it once – someone suggested taking it over but Karen said no, it wasn't worth it, Stonehenge was enough. I sort of gathered there were only a handful of villagers living there.'
'That's good,' Jean said, and Fred nodded with her.
'What's your point, Jean?' Greg asked. "Want a second honeymoon there?'
'All right, all right, have your joke. But Fred and I have been thinking. We knew the battle with Karen's lot was coming; now we know it's on 21 June, and it's pretty certain they'll be at Stonehenge. If we want a power-house for the PAG, why not Avebury? There's more power locked up there than anywhere in Britain – even than Stonehenge, though I know you think we're a bit biased about that, so let's just say it's in the same league as Stonehenge. And they've been linked together in people's mind for so long, the psychic channels will be there between the two. We could make it the weak point in Stonehenge's armour.'
Greg was already peering at the map. 'But it's about 150 kilometres from here, love.'
'So what?' Fred supported his wife. 'We could rustle up enough bicycles and horses to reach there in four days at the most. Or even take one of these useless vans we've got parked here – we've got enough petrol stored and you do still sec the odd vehicle on the move, using its last tank-ful to look for new lebensraum. People don't pay much attention to them – just look up at the unfamiliar noise and then get on with what they're doing. Especially if they see guns… We could take the PAG, which is eighteen, plus half a dozen strong-arm boys to protect them. Two van-loads altogether, say.'
'But what for?' Sam Warner interjected. 'Tire ourselves out travelling, just to get a little extra power out of Avebury? We could end up even.'
'Not with Avebury,' Dan said. 'You know what? – I like the idea. Oh, we all pull Jean and Fred's leg about the place, but some of us do know just how powerful it really is. And it's a psychic "in" to Stonehenge, as Fred says. What's more, the Angels wouldn't be expecting an attack from there. It could be organized… What do you think, Moira?'
'I think Jean and Fred may have something,' Moira said.
26
On a hill by the Swindon road, a kilometre or two outside Avebury, twenty-six men and women watched the sun go down on 20 June from an abandoned house on the edge of a wood. They had been there for two days; Dan had allowed eight days for the trek from Dyfnant Forest, to be on the safe side, thinking that Fred's estimate of four days was probably an underestimate. He had been right. With diversions to avoid communities and having to cross the Severn above Cheltenham (the motorway bridge at Chepstow was reported to be held by a brigand group), the journey had taken six days.
They had decided, after some discussion, that motor transport was worth the expenditure of stored petrol. The camp's petrol reserves were higher than they had foreseen, chiefly because Greg's water-driven power system was increasingly efficient and an electrical circular saw meant that the petrol-driven chain-saw was rarely needed, and ploughing and harrowing were entirely by horse. So with much back-tracking to avoid fissures, they had travelled with two mini-buses, a car and one motor-cycle for scouring ahead. The total party had grown to twenty-eight – eighteen in the PAG, eight armed guards and two radio operators trained by Geraint and Tonia. The pack radios, ingeniously built by Geraint and Greg from cannibalized ordinary radios and useless TV sets begged from the village, had a maximum range of about fifty kilometres; one operator, with a guard to defend him and keep him company, was already in position, well concealed, with a good view of Stonehenge and further armed with a pair of binoculars. Every hour, on the hour, he sent the code word 'Cabbage', which meant 'No activity at the Henge', and Miriam, who manned the set with the PAG, acknowledged. She kept continuous watch in case of developments but otherwise they kept radio silence except for the brief hourly report. The crucial code word would be 'Aconite', meaning that the Angels of Lucifer were occupying Stonehenge – for the watching operator was Bruce Peters, who knew Karen and John and several of their group by sight.
The time would come, obviously, when the 'dozen or so prepared code words would no longer be adequate and Bruce would have to describe what he saw in clear for the benefit of the PAG. But by then the ether would be alive with the Army messages of D-Day and one short-range voice on a non-Army frequency (Gareth had been able to inform them on that) would with any luck pass unnoticed.
Two of the guards had spied out Avebury village as soon as the PAG were installed in the empty house. The little cavalcade had apparently managed to arrive without alerting the village; the approach had been very circumspect, by moonlight and without lights, and with slow and careful reconnaissance ahead of the main party. The vehicles were -well hidden in the wood and camouflaged.
The Avebury community, the spies reported, consisted of seven adults and four children; they slept, without posting sentries, in the Red Lion, the village pub which had (the Thomases remembered) several bedrooms. This was good news, for it made the PAG's plan of operation simple. The last thing they wanted was a battle.
The White City stadium, on the western fringe of central London, was a fortress. The Army had commandeered it ten days before Beehive Red and since then no one had seen inside it. There had been much coming and going of helicopters in those ten days and nobody living around had bothered to keep count, so it was anyone's guess how many remained there after the earthquake. The wise deduced that it was a Beehive helicopter base, and the wise (even, very soon, the foolish) kept away, because anyone who approached within a hundred metres was sniped at – one shot as warning and the next to kill. Nobody, of course, could get high enough to see inside. It was something of an anomaly, as the only known Beehive presence on Surface – though gradually rumours circulated of other stadiums and football grounds (all of them completely surrounded by stands or high walls) scattered around the capital which it was inadvisable to approach. As the months went by, the few local civilians who had survived the Madness and the winter had come to take them for granted and ignore them, from a safe distance.
But tonight those who lay awake noticed there were unprecedented noises of activity inside White City. Peering out of their windows they saw the glow of many lights reflected from the thin night mist above the stadium and they wondered. Then, in what should have been the deadest hour of the night, no one slept any longer, for the first of the helicopters clattered up into the sky.
Harley, sitting at General Mullard's side in the Operations Room five hundred metres below Primrose Hill, glowed with a euphoria which for once did not exasperate the general. Mullard was a soldier to his marrow; intelligent and sensitive, he could be plagued with doubts beneath his impassive exterior as long he was confined to sedentary planning but once the die was cast (he had a habit of muttering 'Jacta est alea' with a puffed-out breath of relief) the doubts faded away. Action, for good or ill, was an elixir; his expression did not change but his eyes had a new sparkle and his staff could depend on hair-trigger decisions from him even in the face of reverses – particularly in the face of reverses. Operation Skylight was going smoothly into action; the intricate timetable of troop movements out to the helicopter bases was running without a hitch; the Z-minus-four helicopters, first of the day's flow of shuttles, were all reported away. The first entries had appeared on the virgin wall-charts, and the WRAC girls, like uniformed croupiers, were sliding the first coloured symbols on to the huge map of Britain painted on the Ops Room table. For the first time in months, General Mullard felt one hundred per cent alive.