Weaver

Gary said, 'I'll keep you safe, Mom.'

'I'll stay out of the line of fire, don't worry.'

Tom Mackie said, 'Right, let's get on with it. We can reach the bunker entrance by following this trench, and then hopping over that bit of wire over there. Corporal Wooler, if you bring up the prisoner – Farjeon, you lead the way, if you would.'

Willis grinned again. 'Aye aye, Captain.' He turned and scurried down the trench.

The rest followed, splashing through mud that stained their boots with blood and oil.

XVI

The door blew in. In his chair, handcuffed, George cowered.

'Drop your weapons! Hands up, hande hoch! Drop your weapons!'

Running figures, silhouetted by daylight, came through the smoke and dust, fanning out quickly, rifles raised to shoulder height, shouting. Their faces were blackened. They were soldiers with guns, soldiers in British battledress, six, seven, eight of them, and other figures behind. Josef Trojan backed up to the Colossus machine uncertainly, his Luger in his hand.

Julia ran to George. She grabbed him under one armpit and hauled him to his feet, with a strength like a rugby player's. She pressed the barrel of her silver pistol to his temple.

And with her free hand she turned a switch on the glass tank. Ben had been struggling to stay awake; he had been fighting his restraints, if feebly. Now he was sinking into a deeper sleep. George had seen this done before, the medication automatically fed to the boy. It would take him some minutes to succumb.

One of the soldiers, blond hair under his helmet, peered into the glass tank. 'That's him, Gary, that's Ben Kamen! My God, he must be the unluckiest man alive.' He actually laughed at Ben's plight.

The other called, 'Ben, I told you I'd come back for you.' His accent was American. George recognised the voice; he couldn't believe his ears. Gary?

'Dunno if he can hear you,' the blond one said. He came closer to the tank, rifle raised.

Julia snapped, 'Another step and I'll kill the policeman and the Jew. Is that clear?'

George, dizzy from lack of food and water and sleep, crusty in a uniform he hadn't changed for two days, tried not to laugh. 'So we're reduced to this, Julia? What on earth did I ever see in you?'

His reward was an elbow in the kidney.

Another of the intruders stepped forward. He wore a peaked Navy officer's cap. 'All right, lads. Lower your weapons. Let's get this mess sorted out without anybody else dying. I said, lower your weapons.'

The others looked at him uncertainly before they complied. Julia, though, kept the pistol muzzle at George's temple.

The captain was distracted by the calculating machine. 'Look at that bloody thing. Puts my bloody bits of Meccano in the shade, Mary!'

Mary?

George called to the American soldier, 'Gary Wooler? It is you, isn't it?'

The American grinned at George, his teeth white in the black on his face. 'Should have known you'd be up to your neck in it, George.'

'I haven't heard from you since you got out of the stalag.'

'Sorry about that. Blame the Reich post. Hey, Mom. Guess who's here?'

And George was stunned when Mary Wooler stepped forward. She was wearing a blue coverall, the kind the WVS girls wore, and she had a pack on her back. Her greying hair was tied back, and her face was blacked.

'Mary? My God!'

'I suppose I should have expected you, George. You're still in thrall to Miss Fiveash here, are you?'

'Unterscharfuhrer to you,' Julia snapped.

Seeing Mary and Gary together brought memories flooding back to George, memories of Hilda he thought he had buried for good. 'I've been lost, Mary,' he said, hearing the gruffness in his own voice. 'I guess a lot of us have, this side of the Winston Line.'

'You always did your job, Sergeant,' murmured the Navy man. 'So our intelligence informs us. I'm Mackie, by the way. Captain, RN. Mary, I suggest we get on with what we came here for. We may not have time to interrogate these two. But the documentation here – look, there are heaps of it – that may be enough to tell us how far they've got.'

Mary walked to a set of shelves, where documents were piled in neat stacks. She began dragging papers down and spreading them out on a desk, and she dug out reading glasses from her blue overalls. She was a frumpy middle-aged woman preparing to study, George thought, while armed soldiers stood around with weapons raised.

Julia was getting more agitated. 'Do not touch our work – do something, Josef, you coward!'

But Trojan was distracted too. 'Ernst?' He sounded bewildered, and spoke in German. 'It's you, isn't it?'

Another figure stepped forward from the rubble of the doorway. He wore a Wehrmacht uniform, and had his hands tied behind his back. 'Josef. I think I imagined we would never meet again…'

'Do stick to English, you fellows,' Mackie said laconically.

'Well, well,'Julia said sourly. 'It's a day of reunions.'

Trojan seemed outraged. 'What is the meaning of this? Why have you brought my brother here? If he is a prisoner of war he should be treated as such.'

'Like Ben Kamen?' George spat, and got another jolt from Julia.

'Isn't it obvious, Josef?' Julia said. 'He's here to make you dance to their tune.'

'Oh, I wouldn't put it quite like that,' Mackie murmured.

'Liar,' Julia said calmly. 'Ernst is a hostage, just like Sergeant Tanner here. You are a hypocrite, Captain. It's the one thing I've always despised most about the English. The sheer bloody hypocrisy, when we are the worst butchers of all.'

Mackie studied her. 'Do you really loathe yourself so much, madam? Is that what this is all about?'

Ernst said to his brother, 'Josef, even on this day of all days, you skulk in the ground with women and absurd machines. What would Father have said?'

Trojan looked hurt. 'I am trying to win the war. And cement the Reich's power so that it will truly last a thousand years – ten thousand! If you understood, you would see.'

But to George, he didn't sound as if he believed it himself, not any more.

'My God, Tom,' Mary said now. 'They know all about us.' She held up sheaves of paper. 'Even the simulations we did. Here is your 1938-war counter-history. And – oh my Lord – my Dunkirk study.'

Josef said, 'We are the SS. Do you imagine your work was immune to our intelligence? I must say that MI-14 in particular was very prone to leaks.'

'Actually,'Julia said, 'we found your studies useful. You kindly worked out the corresponding Godel trajectories for us. We used these ideas as rehearsals.'

'Rehearsals?'

'You do understand how the Loom works?'

'I believe we have a good idea,' Mackie said.

'Ben Kamen is our messenger, our sleeping child. We have used your solutions as exercises, using hypnotic, mnemonic and other techniques to force the information into his addled head, the Godel trajectories and the counter-historical mandates.'

Mary looked at Julia over her reading glasses. 'My God. You actually, um, loaded in my Dunkirk scenario?'

'And the 1938 study. Of course we never let him sleep until these were out of his short-term memory.'

Mary leafed through the papers on the desk beside her. 'And this is what you have sent back. Yes?' She produced a set of papers covered with diagrams, like engineering sketches. George squinted to see. Aircraft with wings like birds', submarines like metal fish. 'Weapons designs, sent into the past. And gunpowder. You're sent back a recipe for gunpowder.'

'We call it the Codex,' Julia said. 'Rather proud of our research, actually. Not easy coming up with weapons that would make sense to a grubby-arsed monk of the Dark Ages.'

Ernst was staring at his brother. 'What is this madness, Josef? Into whose hands did you hope to place these weapons?'