I slept badly.
Things did not get much better when the morning started on a wrong note. I am afraid the Colonel, a stiff little man with a stiffer little moustache, did not take to me. From what I understood of my short briefing, I was to be seconded to this unit for the duration, to “do my bit against the Jerries”. But by the time he led me via a warren of corridors through and between a maze of Nissen Huts and showed me into the lab, I was still none the wiser. It was only when I was introduced to the head of the team that I began to have some inkling as to why I had been brought to this place.
I knew Professor Rankin by his reputation of being an iconoclast, a visionary, and as mad as a bag of badgers. The last thing I had heard was that he had gone over to the Yanks for a huge stipend at one of the West Coast think tanks. I never expected to meet him in a Nissen Hut on a Scottish loch-side.
His unruly mop of white hair shook as he grasped my hand. He was as thin as a rake, but his grip was as hard as cold steel.
“Ballantine. And not a minute too soon. Come over here, man. You need to see this.”
He dragged me over to a microscope.
“Look at it,” he said. “Just look.”
I looked. I had no idea what it was. It looked almost like the internal structure of an amoeba.
“What is this?” I asked.
Rankin looked down at the desk. He’d obviously prepared the microscope slide from something in a Petri dish at the side. It looked like nothing more than a pool of thick oil.
“It cost an arm and a leg to get it, but we finally managed to persuade the Yanks to give us some of the material from the Pabodie Expedition. We need it for experimentation.”
He lifted the Petri dish, studying the contents.
“It is something new,” he whispered. “Something no one has ever seen before.”
At least that was something I could agree with.
“Okay,” I said softly. “You have certainly got something here. But what has it to do with me?”
He smiled.
“This material was obviously manufactured. It bonds with other living tissue and builds.”
“Builds what?”
He laughed loudly.
“Anything we want it to. Do you not see, Ballantine? You and I are going to change war forever. We are going to make the ultimate defensive weapon.”
The protoplasm in the Petri dish suddenly surged against the glass, with such force that the dish jumped out of Rankin’s hand and shattered as it hit the ground. The tarry substance started to make its way across the floor, scuttling like a manic spider.
Rankin nonchalantly stepped forward and poured some of the contents of a glass jar on it. Steam rose. A vinegar-like tang caught at the back of my throat and forced me to close my eyes. When I looked again, there was nothing left but a smoking pool of oily goop on the floor.
“Molar Hydrochloric Acid,” Rankin said, holding up a half-empty jar and almost smiling. “It seems to do the trick.”
Suzie looked over at Noble.
“Sound familiar?”
A cold chill had crept up Dave Noble’s spine.
“It sounds all too familiar. Is there more?”
She nodded.
“I haven’t read it all myself yet… but there’re pages and pages of stuff. I…”
The phone rang, interrupting her. He knew from her face as she listened that the news wasn’t good. She had gone white by the time she put the phone down.
“They believe us now,” she said quietly. “We’re wanted at the Nothe Fort. They’re setting up a Command Post there to monitor the situation.”
“What situation?”
But she refused to be drawn further as she hurried him out of the lab and through the streets to Weymouth Harbour. He noticed that she had stuffed the rest of the document she’d been reading into a briefcase and carried it with her.
The outside of the fort looked like it would on any other day, with groups of tourists in small huddles, taking pictures and laughing loudly. Inside, the mood was much more sombre. They were shown to a conference room deep inside the fort. Noble knew several of the people already there by sight. He counted a local councillor, the police chief, and the Captain of the coastguard. All three looked grim and two women sitting around a long table had clearly been crying. Noble didn’t want to think what might have happened.
But if they’ve called for Suzie and me, then there’s only one thing it can be.
Suzie took his hand and they sat down silently when motioned forward by the coastguard Captain. The man wasted no time getting down to business.
“Some of you have already heard,” he said. “But I’ll recap, for the newcomers.”
He used a remote control to dim the lights. A screen lit up behind him.
“We got a confused call from a member of the public at one o’clock this afternoon. He had just arrived in the car park at Kimmeridge Bay. There were many other cars in the slots… but no people on the shore—no one alive, at any rate.
“I sent a team. Two of the men I sent are now doped to the eyeballs, trying to handle the shock. One of the others had enough presence of mind to search the beach for evidence.
“He found a video camera. This is what we found on playing it back.”
The screen behind him came into focus. The picture showed a group of men standing out in the sea. They seemed to be searching for something and there was a general air of frantic panic.
“Can you see him?” someone shouted. “Can you see any of them?”
A black bulge seemed to raise the water into a dome. Suzie squeezed Noble’s hand tight as the black sheet fell on the men, then kept coming straight at the camera, like a mini-tsunami. The viewpoint changed as the camera fell to the sand. People ran past, visible only from the knees down, trying to get away from the sea. A black shadow crept along the sand.
The screen went dark.
The coastguard Captain turned up the lights.
“Is that what you warned us about?”
Noble realized the question was directed at him and Suzie. He nodded.
“It looks like it. Do you believe us now?”
Nobody spoke. There was a long silence. It was the councillor that finally spoke.
“There were twenty cars in that car park Mr. Noble. We estimate that at least fifty people are missing, presumed dead. It’s too late now for any recriminations. We’ve brought you here because you’re the closest thing we have to experts. I’ve informed the MOD and they’re sending a team down.”
The coastguard Captain interrupted him.
“But in the meantime… I’d like to get ahead of the game. I’d like to get a sample of…. whatever this stuff is.”
Noble was about to say just how stupid an idea that would be when Suzie squeezed his hand again.
“My thoughts exactly, Captain,” she said. “When can we leave?”
July 22nd - In the Air
Ten minutes later they were in a chopper. Suzie sat beside him, still holding his hand, a fact that seemed to amuse the coastguard Captain.
“Just hold on tight,” he shouted. “We’re heading back out to where we picked you up yesterday to see what we can see. It’ll take the best part of an hour, so get as comfortable as you can.”