UNIT UK 15: Not All Monsters Have Three Eyes

by ComsatAngel

Why is the genocidal traitor General Finch not worried about his 50 year prison sentence? What is Resurgam? And can UNIT cope with biological warfare?

UNIT UK 15: Not All Monsters Have Three Eyes and Green Skin

DEBRIEF DOC. 11872 "OPERATION GOLDEN AGE"

Dated: As Cover

Under: OSAEPA

By: Project Broom

Subject:William Alexander Holmes

Biography:Oxford Blue Rowing

MA in Applied Biochemistry

Member "Greener Earth" student pressure group

Keen hiker, swimmer, sculler

Arrested for trespass at ICI Chittern Hall

Arrested for criminal damage New Nuton AEA plant

Arrested for trespass NCB Nottingdene Coal & Coking

Verbatim transcript: I was approached by Adam Purcell after being bailed for breaking into the National Coal Board site at Nottingdene, he said that I'd proved a commitment to the environment that was unusual for a science graduate in my field. Would I be interested in a project that could save the human race?

Naturally! Yes, I was interested. No, I didn't know what he meant. I imagined some political pressure group – I warned him I wouldn't stand for anything remotely like terrorism or violence against people. Oh, nothing like that, don't worry – what he had to say was fantastic but comparatively simple.

To save the human race from a combination of greed, hatred and violence, a selected group of several hundred volunteers would be put into suspended animation, taken aboard a spacecraft and sent on a one-way trip to Alpha Centauri – the hot news amongst astronomers was the detection of an Earth-type planet there. The trip would take decades, which is why we'd be in suspended animation.

It sounded incredible, but he showed me the plans for a suspension suite – I know enough about physiology to know it was feasible. The technical background for the spacecraft I took on trust, astrophysics isn't my field. They were going to use a design called "pusher-plate", atomic propulsion I think. Yes, it was ironic – atomic power used to get us to a new world!

Given the lead time for construction, we volunteers were being frozen – not really, not actually frozen, that's just the term they used – and then placed in temporary isolation.

That's what they told us. We even got film of the spacecraft being built, and photos, before getting frozen. Yes. Fakes – models and spliced film of real rockets being built. I understand that Mister Butler and Mister Whittaker were behind that. Once the last volunteers were frozen, those two told us that we'd be transported to the "Columbus" and launched. A special team of volunteers would be thawed out on a regular basis to carry out medical and maintenance checks. Seventy years later we'd arrive at Alpha Centauri and be thawed out automatically on landing.

You cannot believe how – how absolutely and utterly devastating it was to find out the truth. I felt like a mountain dropped on me. We would have been the sole survivors of the human race, on a world where the most colossal genocidal act in history had been carried out.

Well, it would have been a fait accompli, even if we found out the truth. What else could we have done but carry on?

I'm not a violent or vindictive man, but when Butler gets out of prison, I'm going to kill him.

DEBRIEF ENDS

Not all the victims of Operation Golden Age ended up dead, just as not all the monsters UNIT engaged were non-human.

There were other documents like this one, all of which had the common theme of deceit, betrayal and bitterness. I got fed up reading them, all about the bright young things with dual-discipline achievements, flattered beyond words to be the representatives for humanity – only for the whole thing to collapse leaving a taste of ashes in the mouth.

This dismal review of shattered dreams came about because of my smart idea of putting a spy into ex-General Finch's prison cell, to wheedle information about the general's real aims from him. The Brig liked the idea, and plonked responsibility for it and it's execution into my lap.

The Proj Broom people discovered my involvement and couriered over a wedge of papers dealing with the OpAuAge debriefs, consisting of reams of reports like the one above. They had a floor plan of the underground bunker system beneath Whitehall used by the conspirators, and some photographs of what remained of the "time scoop" equipment built by Whittaker. The vital bits were sixty five million years adrift in time. And still none of it told us what Finchy planned, if anything.

Not only did I have all this lovely extra bumf to cope with, there were three Fox armoured cars – technically Fox, Combat Vehicle Reconaissance Wheeled – to get prepped for service. The captain in the Blues and Royals whom I rang to pester about them turned out to be ex-UNIT himself, and instead of one we got three.

'Treat with caution when cornering,' was the warning the drivers gave us when the three were delivered. 'Or they'll fall over.'

Untypically, the three armoured cars weren't physically knackered or shot to bits, unlike the usual stuff the MoD palms off on us. Less work for Lt. Walmsley, which I liked, being Lt. Walmsley. On the other hand, lots more paperwork, three times what I'd expected in fact, on top of the Proj Broom debriefs and verbatim reports from our spy in the ex-general's cell. And the UNIT diesel allocation needed to be upped, since we were now six vehicles above what the establishment had been when I'd started, which meant more arguments with the MoD on paper, the penny-pinching swine. Plus all the spares, and the training manuals for the fitters, and the driving lessons.

In actual fact, I thought, chewing a biro and thinking to myself, that information coming in from the Trojan Horse, Warrant Officer Talfryn Davies, was pretty palfry. After weeks in the cell together, we had less than a side of A4 paper containing notes, typed up from notebook pages.

Could our agent have been turned by General Finch and become a double?

Then we had the third party reports coming in from UNIT's redoubtable chameleon Captain March, who was in Wandsworth. I didn't know if he was in there as a guard or inmate or a piece of furniture, but his objective information was forbiddingly un-illuminating: Hector Finch did not exhibit any remorse, embarrassment, shame or pain.

" I do not believe that Hector Finch is suffering any form or remorse, nor, more relevantly, any concern about his term of incarceration. For a prisoner supposedly serving a term of five decades, this is a worrying observation."

It was, it was indeed.

I needed expert advice, so I went and got it.

"Surgeon Lieutenant Harold Sullivan RN" is the legend on the UNIT MO's door at Aylesbury. Harry's never told me why a Royal Navy Medical Officer got into UNIT, and I am discreet enough never to ask. To the outside world, he seems like a jolly-hockey-sticks Hoorah Henry. I know better.

'Good morning!' he greeted me, looking down at a collection of x-rays.

'Only barely still morning. What are you looking at? Twin cardio-vascular systems?'

An in-joke. We both knew Doctor John Smith.

'A ha ha. Are you here about hearing loss or back pain, Lieutenant Walmsley?'

Another in-joke. Wielding heavy machine guns or Nitro Express rifles is bad for vertebrae and inner ear.

I settled myself in the comfy chair opposite Harry's desk, cradling a pair of film canisters on my knee.

'Neither. Nothing to do with me.' He raised both eyebrows in a gesture of interrogation. 'No. What I want is informed opinion. I have here a couple of film reels – don't raise your eyebrows, Harry, these are not stag films! – these are films obtained covertly of Hector Finch, ex-general. I want a considered medical opinion of what he's thinking.'

Harry pulled a stethoscope out of his lab coat and tugged it like a muscle-developer.

'Good grief, John, you hold the medical fraternity in entirely too high a regard! Do you think I'm psychic?'

I glared at him. This is a look I am good at. On the ever-bouyant doctor it had little effect.

'What I want, Harry, is for you to use your medical skills in observing Hector Finch's behaviour on these films and deduce his frame of mind.'

Harry stopped using the stethoscope like a poor Charles Atlas substitute.

'Ohhhh. I see. Film, observation, behaviour. Right!'

He stopped chatting and looked at his tabletop, directly at a piece of graffiti, then waved a triumphant finger in the air.

'Okay! John, you're a genius! Give me that film and I'll sort out an analysis for us, within twenty four hours.'

Feeling a bit dozy and paper-logged, I went down to the canteen, where a bizarre sight greeted me: Lieutenants Munroe and Eden had pushed four tables together and were pushing cutlery, cups and glasses around, over scrim scarves and jackets piled on the tables.

'It's only half-eleven. You haven't been at the family malt already, have you?' I asked, after getting a cup of stewed tea with five sugars. Several squaddies in for refreshments were looking on with amusement and curiosity, or perhaps anger and hunger, since their tables were U/S.

Eden got down and stared at the arrangement on the tables from ground level, found it good and nodded to Nick, who rubbed his hands together and cackled in self-satisfied fashion.

'You don't watch telly on a Friday evening, do you, Lieutenant Walmsley?' he said over his shoulder. 'Charles Grant! Chap knows his stuff. Just you wait when the promo board sits!'

Up till now Nick had been one of the few officer's not making an effort to impress their seniors with masses of activity, his reason being that people would detect the difference between his normal behaviour and the more frenetic version.

The canteen NCO came up, not looking happy.

'Sir, when do we get our tongs back?'

'Nick, can you call a halt to your creative therapy? Thank you. Next time stick to what other loonies do and try basket-weaving.'

By dinner time I was only partly taking in the information on the debriefs, wondering what on earth Nick had been up to. Trying to make money would be the normal explanation, but Eden, displaying sound common sense, usually kept clear of any make-Munroe-richer schemes.

Nor was that all. Other chickens came home to roost at dinner, though the Brig did allow my food to settle before dropping the anvil.

'John, sorry to drop the news on you at table, but a liaison meeting's been set up at New Scotland Yard at short notice. A meeting of organisations investigating General Finch. Sorry, Hector Finch. Since you seem to have adopted the mantle of chief investigator, I'd like you to attend.'

Aha, and also oho.

'So, other people think there might be more to his plans than going to jail for fifty years, sir?'

The Brig nodded.

'I'm not going to talk shop in detail over coffee, John. It sounds complex.'

No kidding. This case got more complex the more you investigated. From being a straight-shooting soldier I transformed into a bureaucrat and secret agent. I took a lockable briefcase full of notes, my .45 and Landrover 7345 and drove off to Kensington Office straight after dinner, getting a taxi to New Scotland Yard. In dress uniform, which is less alarming to the public.

By three o'clock the full might of the investigative agencies were assembled, and we all trooped into a conference room, me feeling outnumbered. My telephone call to Accomplice Number One didn't seem to have had any results.

A Deputy Commissioner from the Metropolitan Police chaired the meeting, and introduced committee members from Special Branch, MI5, the Royal Military Police's CID branch, the Audit Commission, the Civil Service and myself. Our brief was to find out what Sir Charles Grover, Whittaker, Hector Finch and Butler had been up to.

One of the civil servants spoke first.

'When he was still plain Charles Grover, our subject was busy editing or destroying files that would have revealed the location of the Cold War bunker complex installed under Whitehall, as used by Operation Golden Age. Not only that, towards the end, where he risked disclosure, Sir Charles destroyed even more files.'

'I can confirm that,' added one of the Special Branch men, an older man with craggy features. 'We found the burnt remnants of approximately a hundred files, totally consumed and broken up, in the Aga cooker of his London apartment.'

With a spectacular knock at the door, Harry Sullivan arrived, with a long-haired brunette lady wearing denim in tow.

'Sorry I'm late!' he apologised in his incredibly sincere fashion, immediately getting everyone's sympathy. How does he do that? The duo made a bee-line for me in my solitary UNIT splendour.

'John – this is Jean,' said Harry in his best stage whisper. Everyone else in the committee room had stopped their business to look at us. 'A behavioural psychologist. I showed her the films.'

Jean held out her hand, which I limply shook. Brainy women seemed to be ten a penny at UNIT of late, and I couldn't afford another indiscretion. She did have a narrow, dark, intelligent face that seemed on the brink of smiling.

Steady, John, steady. I'd already fallen for two ladies in the recent past. Ignore bolt of electricity heading straight towards heart.

The people from the Audit Commission blathered on. If I can paraphrase for them, then they had a Master File of every document ever created across the entire Civil Service. They could identify which files Sir Charles had destroyed, given time.

Ah, yes. Given Time.

Colonel Urquhart in the Queen's Lancs used to get people's attention on outdoor exercises by shaking up a pop bottle and then hitting it with a hammer. I just coughed loudly.

'Oh! Did I get your attention? Thank you so much! Here's a pair of film reels you need to see.'

The film reels went up to be projected, which would take a few minutes.

'This is film of Henry Finch taken covertly whilst in detention, whilst at trial, being transported and in jail.'

The civilians sucked their teeth at this – infringement of civil liberties and all that. Sue me!

It took a few minutes for the film to get set up and ready, so I took the opportunity to thank Harry.

'Bit of a dash at short notice, old chap,' he agreed. 'I needed someone who could get clearance and was nearby, and Jean and I went to med school together.'

'Thank you, Doctor,' I thanked Jean. 'I'll give you the floor once the films have been shown. Any hostile questions, I'll step in and shout back.' Remembering, I turned back to her. 'And whatever you hear in here mustn't go any further.'

'I promise,' she said, drolly. 'Besides, that would scotch Harry's offer of a dinner at any restaurant of my choice.'

Harry you sly dog. Using national security to get a date!

The films were black and white, silent, sometimes out of focus, and very disjointed. A lot of short clips showing Hector sitting in his solitary cell, reading a book, sleeping, making notes in a diary. Then we saw Hector sitting impassively in the dock, from several different directions for several minutes, then standing in the dock for the sentence, during which sequence a person passed in front of the camera. Then came a short, rather dim clip of him sitting inside a vehicle in transit, whole long boring minutes of that, ten at least. The viewers became fidgety and restless towards the end of this clip. Finally a short clip of Hector in his Wandsworth cell, once again showing him lying on his bunk, reading a book and making more notes.

When the lights came up again, Doctor Jean strode out into the centre of the floor and began her presentation. Without notes, at short notice and in front of complete strangers, she still did very well.

'My name is Doctor Jean Westlake, I'm a behavioural psychologist at UCL. My colleague Doctor Sullivan asked me to look at these film clips and give a considered, professional analysis of the subject's state of mind, in as much as I can.'

Hey, I'd asked Harry – thunder-stealer.

'Criminology is a field I have considerable experience in, gentlemen, and from my study, I have to conclude that the subject is not reacting normally.'

'What would be normal?' asked an enquiring mind, and a sensible question, really.

'Typically, extremes of behaviour. Despair, apathy, depression, self-mutilation, rage, withdrawal, or a resort to faith, drugs or alcohol. This subject exhibits all the behaviour of a man enduring a short stay in a cheap hotel. Definitely not normal.'

She paused before adding an personal observation.

'This is my own opinion, and subjective, so you may wish to dismiss it. Your subject seems to be expecting an early release, and by "early" I mean within weeks.'

That set the conversational cat amongst the pigeons, with a lot of chatter buzzing around the table. Doctor Westlake sat down again, pleased with the fuss she'd created.

The meeting agenda went back to reports from MI5, who couldn't report any success at locating any master-plan in any of the files of Sir Charles, or General Finch, or Whittaker. No evidence of anything untoward.

Next up to report nothing to report were the redcaps, the Royal Military Police detail. Nothing in General's Finch's personal effects, official quarters, his club, his apartment, his country home or his yacht contained any reference to Operation Golden Age.

His yacht? I glanced at Harry. Must be good pay, being a general, if you can run to a yacht. Harry looked quietly thoughtful, too. Wondering about setting up in Harley Street after his UNIT term expired, I bet.

The Audit Commission people came back with an observation: the colonists from the fake spaceship bunker came to eight hundred and twenty five, but Oxford Scientific Supplies, who had built the suspended animation units, were on record as delivering eight hundred and thirty one to the holding company set up by Whittaker.

For wastage, I decided. Getting the damn things underground to the mock spaceship bunker couldn't have been easy. Bound to break a few.

A sudden silence made me realise that all eyes were on me. I stood up to deliver my speech.

'Gentlemen, I'm afraid we can't report much success from our man inside, keeping Finchy – excuse me, Hector Finch – under observation.'

The MI5 and Special Branch chaps abruptly paid close attention, looking surprised and unhappy.

'Hey, we have an agent inside Wandsworth!' declared the plump, well-groomed man who spoke for MI5.

'We've got an informer inside as well,' complained the Special Branch heavy.

'Good job we called this meeting!' interrupted the Deputy Commissioner with dry humour. 'What information do MI5 and Special Branch have from their inside sources?'

With a bit of waffle they confessed: nothing.

'What has UNIT discovered?'

'Not a lot. For the first week our man in the same cell provided general observations, which back up what Doctor Westlake has defined professionally: Hector Finch expects to get out of jail very soon. And he mentioned Finchy – er, sorry, Hector Finch – muttered "Resurgeon" in his sleep every night. Then, his reports dried up.'

Harry looked at me in startlement. Yes, worrying about that sleep-talking. Guilty conscience and all that.

'How do you know you can trust this insider? Remember Captain Yates,' asked the Special Branch heavy, bringing up UNIT's secret shame.

'We don't, which is why we also have a UNIT officer inside. His observations back up what our insider mentioned.'

'There's more agents than prisoners in A wing!' exclaimed the Audit Commissioner.

' "Resurgeon"? Perhaps – oh, I don't know, could he mean plastic surgery? Getting out of the prison by looking like another man?' asked one of the redcaps.

'No,' said Harry firmly, settling the question. 'Not unless the whole staff are working with him. Plastic surgery isn't a quick slice and stitch operation if one is trying to alter facial features significantly.'

'Gentlemen, may I recommend that the infiltration be scaled-back to something more reasonable?' asked the DC. Suited me.

When quiet settled after prompting from the Deputy Commisioner, I stood up to better put my point.

'I apologise for treading on any police or intelligence toes here, but we deemed speed to be of the essence in getting our insider inside, as it were. I feel rather stupid that he hasn't helped us at all.'

The Civil Servants were accountants, apparently, and were horrified at the expense of keeping surveillance going on Hector. Their opinion was that nil return from the redcaps and MI5 meant no reason to keep him under watch, no reason to carry on any investigation and no reason to waste any more of HM Government's money on the echoes of Operation Golden Age.

Alarmed, I got up again, standing in the middle of the floor to make my point.

'Gentlemen! I realise the idea of Hector Finch getting released early from jail is bizarre, not to mention impossible, and what you've heard today may not sound convincing. There are several large "howevers" that you must take into consideration.

'First, Operation Golden Age was not dreamed up from notes on the back of a fag packet. Sir Charles may have been deranged, but he wasn't stupid. Read Classics at Oxford, I think. Whittaker may have been mad as a box of frogs and completely amoral, but he was a technical genius. These people planned and plotted very astutely.

'Second, General Hector Finch is not stupid. I checked on his career. Infantry subaltern in the Far East during World War Two, promoted to captain, action in Korea – decorated by the Americans. Lecturer at Sandhurst, promoted again. Promoted to Brigadier, attached to NATO headquarters in Brussels. Lecturer at Sandhurst again. Secondment to West Point for a special series of seminars on nuclear, chemical and biological war-fighting in Central Europe. Promotion to full general, responsible for security at all UK mainland and overseas military installations, with special emphasis on NBC-capable sites. Lastly, appointed Officer Commanding during the State of Emergency.

'Some of you may have the common perception of British officers, and especially generals, as Colonel Blimps. Only able to swig port, send men to their deaths and be incompetent. It's a perception I think the British Army doesn't especially mind, given that the opposition always underestimates it. Please don't underestimate Finch, because I know he's planned a way out of his current dilemma.'

The Audit Commissioners looked bored, the senior Snivel Service bean-counters looked dismissive and Special Branch looked at their watches, bar the heavy.

'How do you "know"?' asked the Deputy Commissioner. 'A hunch?'

'No, sir. More concrete than that. There's a saying from Von Clausewitz – "No plan survives contact with the enemy". General Finch, as he was, knew that better than most, given his contacts with enemies over time. He will have had a back-up plan, an alternate, taking into account the failure of Operation Golden Age. He need have done nothing more complex than think "What if Sir Charles's plan fails?" to inspire a back-up.'

The sleek chap from MI5 spoke, looking appalled.

'That monster attempted to wipe out the entire population of the world! You mean he intends to have another try!'

'No, not that extreme, sir. Just that he has a plan to get himself out of jail.'

I couldn't have been more wrong. Still, that lay in the future.

The Auditors and civil servants were putting papers away and looking at watches.

'I think Lieutenant Walmsley has a point,' said the heavy from Special Branch, his weathered face looking at me and nodding. 'What can have made the inside man turn against UNIT? What could Finch offer him that was better than your deal?'

At a loss for words, I could only think of one thing.

'Er – freedom?'

'Exactly! Your source dried up because he got a bigger, better deal from Finch. Freedom. We can expect an attempt to free him.'

This unexpected support was very welcome. The Deputy Commissioner went into a huddle with Special Branch and within thirty minutes an armed police marksman team from the Met was speeding to Wandsworth. They based themselves inside the prison, being reinforced to a total strength of thirty within days.

Harry departed with his date after the meeting ended. I drove back to Aylesbury, getting there long after the mess shut and ending up in the canteen. Before heading for a shower I called in to see the Brig, whom I caught in civvy clothing.

'Oh, hello, John. I'm off on a spot of leave before the weekend. How was the meeting?'

'No wonder you palmed it off, sir. A lot of chin-wagging and paper-shuffling. Hopefully I convinced them that Finchy is still a man to be watched. The upshot is that Hector is going to be watched very closely by a lot of men with guns, and that MI5 and Special Branch will call off their observation.'

The Brig pulled on a suede cap and tweaked a moustache.

'That wretched man! Disgrace to the profession of arms. Dull stuff for a dashing young officer, I'm afraid, this investigation. Ah well, see you Monday.'

'Sir. Have a good time.'

The next day was Trafalgar Day, when the British gleefully celebrate duffing up the French at sea in 1805. The Spanish got pummelled as well, but mostly the celebration focusses on the French. Chaffing in the mess got directed at me, since my girlfriend is French.

'We may come round to thinking of them as allies, John,' remarked Captain Beresford. 'First we've got to forget centuries of giving them a good kick in the pants every couple of decades.'

'Sir, I will drink to the Entente Cordiale. Marie will make reference to Verdun and the Marne and the like if I so much as breathe mention of Trafalgar.'

Back in my office cubbyhole, I spent an hour prying loose more diesel from the MoD, who seemed to think they owned the stuff personally, or that we'll sit around and have diesel parties. Nick and Eden – I couldn't think of him as Martin yet – dropped in, both carrying clipboards and looking official.

'Ah, BTO, we have some technical queries,' began Nick.

'No you cannot have a vehicle for your date, no you cannot take jerrycans of petrol for a barbecue and no you cannot create another veg patch with the Sardine Tin.'

He'd done all three in his time. The "Veg patch" idea was to use our FV432 on the derelict grounds at Aylesbury, doing lots of low gear turning and cornering, which resulted in a half-acre of very, very churned-up soil, which became a vegetable allotment. The entire staff was impressed with the allotment created, I much less so at the loosened tracks on the APC, the mud it was covered with and the wear on the gearbox.

'Stiff upper lip, BTO. Nothing snidey or sly. We'd like to know the range of the Rarden cannnon as mounted in the Foxes we have.'

A technical question indeed. Just what a proper diligent officer might like to know, and foreign territory to Nick.

'The effective range is supposedly just shy of a mile. Fifteen hundred yards. The Blues and Royals driver I spoke to said that the best shot in the squadron could manage over two thousand yards in a static shoot.'

Both scribbled away. They looked diligent and official. So what were they up to?

'Top speed?'

'On roads, about fifty miles an hour.'

'Very good, BTO. Any other information worth knowing about the Foxes?'

'They are notorious for turning over on corners, you need to keep the speed down on bends.'

Nick and Eden exchanged looks.

'Oh, no worry about that, they'll be moving tactically.'

'They won't be moving anywhere without a signed order from me! I don't know what convoluted mischief you two are planning, but given the length and complexity of your plotting, I am filled with apprehension. Apprehension and woe.'

'Should we tell him?' queried Eden.

'No, I don't think so. John lacks tactical sophistication.'

I opened my mouth to reply with an appropriate barb, only for the phone to ring. "Saved by the bell" I mouthed as the duo departed.

'John! You've got to come down here!' exclaimed a very excited Harry Sullivan.

'No I haven't. You don't outrank me and my chair is too comfy.'

'Yes you jolly well do! This is about Hector Finch!'

Thirty seconds later I was pushing open Harry's office door, wondering what had sent him into such a fuss.

'Come in! Trafalgar Day got me thinking about old times, the Senior Service, a life on the rolling wave or beneath it, you know.'

A glass of what looked suspiciously like rum sat on Harry's desk. Next to it lay a book of photographs, also looking suspiciously rum. Ships, for the most part.

'I did a stint in submarines, John, not actually in them but part of the shore staff, and what do I find in the book I borrowed from the library?'

He'd marked a page, and showed me a sepia photograph of what looked like a surrealistic boiler, with propellor attached. The caption underneath read "Resurgam 1879".

Resurgam. "Resurgeon". A syllable out. Was this significant?

'The first practical submarine, John, invented by a Manchester clergyman. Resurgam. Don't you get it? Latin!'

'No I don't, you elitist fop. I only did French O Level. Okay, so Davies might well have misheard "Resurgam" or thought Finchy meant "Resurgeon".'

Harry raised his hands in despair at the obviously uncultured Philistine before him.

' "Resurgam", John, is latin for "I will rise again". Quite witty and apt when applied to the first submarine. Not so amusing when we hear Hector Finch using it, eh? Must be a codename for his back-up plan.'

Not funny in the least. How the hell could Finch rise from his solitary confinement? Escape in a hot air balloon?

'Take a seat, old chap, get the weight off your loafers. You look a bit stunned. Here, wait a bit.'

He poked around in a drawer and came out with a bottle of spirits, no label attached, then found a shot glass and poured me another.

'Marie's been pestering me to cut down,' I muttered, bothered by Resurgam.

'Nonsense! A drop of this is just what one of Britain's hardy sons needs in his moment of doubt.'

One mutual toast to the Royal Navy and the confounding of other's naval strength later, I sat and frowned at the floor.

'I feel a bit out of my depth in this business, Harry,' I confessed. 'Endless paper trails that lead nowhere, lots of chatter between different agencies, speculation without resolution. If this is what spies do, they can keep it.'

'Take the long view,' suggested Harry, sounding eminently sensible and practical. 'Remind yourself that Finch and Co. were going to get rid of five billion people. That's what you're attempting to prevent happening again, even if it is a bit diffused by bureaucracy. Your suggestion that he's got another plan to sweep the world clean certainly jollied-up that liaison committee.'

My air of general glumness receded.

'You know, Harry, I am going to go and have a look at the sinister underground base of Operation Golden Age. A little concrete reminder will work wonders about why I'm knee-deep in paper.'

Getting permission to venture into the 1950's bunker complex under Whitehall took until the next day. To my surprise, Harry rang and asked if he could "tag along".

'Professional curiosity,' he explained.

Leaving a note for Captain Beresford, I drove us back into London. We couldn't get into the bunker via the Underground, not since the Doctor blew half the station ceiling down. Engineers were carrying out repairs and safety assessments, behind a police watch and No Entry signs.

'Whitehall it is,' enthused Harry. 'The corridors of power. The beating heart of democracy. The Mother of Parliaments.'

'Harry. Stop babbling.'

'Hey, I don't get out much compared to you chaps. I have to seize my chances. I get excited.'

The above-ground entrance was via a suite of anonymous offices, now guarded by humourless RMPs, who checked our UNIT passes and waved us past. Instead of being able to use the powered lift, which was the size of a room, we needed to clamber down a ladder that descended below by way of a large hole cut in the floor. Electric lighting hung from stanchions in the liftshaft, casting not very illuminating light over the lift shaft.

'You don't think there's rats down here, do you?' asked Harry doubtfully.

'Rats I don't mind. I had one as a pet. Spiders, however, turn me into an eighteen stone ball of shivers.'

More dim lighting in the underground corridor we emerged into made the surroundings appear sinister. Police, UNIT and the Royal Engineers had been here before us, trying to see if any more hidden levels existed by drilling into the walls and floors, knocking bricks away, testing with stethoscopes and sniffer dogs. So far, nothing.

The first place we nosied into was the control room, where Whittaker had done the time-scoop business and ensured London got emptied. Nearly all the equipment had been removed, either for destruction or further study.

Store rooms ran off a side corridor, then a small room that had been painted completely in black, with a scattering of white dots in random patterns all over the floor, the walls and the ceiling. An inert and gutted CCTV camera sat in the floor, looking up at three lengths of wire that dangled from the ceiling.

'This is where they faked the feed to the supposed spaceship,' realised Harry. 'There would have been models dangling on those wires.'

We moved on to the much bigger, in fact cavernous space, where the colonists had been kept in suspended animation. Over eight hundred of them, brought down in ones and twos. Little of the trimmings remained, but the marks where power cables, scaffolding and other fitments had scoured the bricks were still there.

'Tragic,' murmured Harry. 'All that idealism wasted. Pointless endeavour. Sic transit gloria mundi.'

'Harry, don't add to the gloom down here! You wanted to see this place out of professional interest, so see away.'

He wandered back and forwards, avoiding the various pits and holes dug by the search teams.

'I wonder where those extra six SusAn cabinets went?' he asked me while craning his neck at the ceiling.

'Where? Used to replace damaged ones.'

'Or secured for General Finch. Lying in wait for him to creep into, perhaps?'

A horrid vampire-like analogy. Thank you, Harry. That image will stick with me.

'Hardly. The time-sweep effect was designed to eliminate anyone beyond a radius centred on here, and not a large radius. You couldn't hide yourself in a SusAn cabinet in the Blue John Mines, for example. The time-sweep effect would eliminate you.'

Harry stopped staring at the ceiling and asked the cold hard question.

'And what is the dead-zone radius? How large is the area in which people would not disappear?'

Nobody knew. Two hundred yards, half a mile, five miles – nobody knew. I guessed that the police would be busy searching for any hidden cubbyhole that the six missing suspension-suites might reside in, but given the sheer size of the possible catchment area, they might well search for months and not find it. If it actually existed and we werent chasing red herrings set up by Finchy.

'These SusAn chambers, Harry – could anyone not from Oxford Scientific knock them up?'

Harry chortled in his own inimitable fashion.

'I should say not! No, some bright spark from Wenley Moor went to OSS with the idea of a suspended animation unit. Took a good few years to work it out, but the biggest problem was solved with knowing that a suspended animation unit could be built. The OSS version is undoubtedly different from the Silurian's - '

'Eocenes,' I interrupted.

' - from whomever's, and it's under patent and uses trackable components to boot. No pirate versions possible.'

We stood silently in the stripped, dank underground oubliette.

Okay, I told myself. Here we see the end result of conspiracy, mania, dementia and delusion. A big dark underground chamber. A massive dead end.

A dead end.

Oho! John, you have a touch of genius about you!

Marie's arcane research at Swafham Prior happened to coincide that weekend with my leave, so I arranged to meet her there after the field exercise at Aylesbury early Friday evening.

Much to my surprise, a collection of civilian vehicles in abundance were present in the car park area, including three coaches. Had the whole of Cambridge come calling?

Yes, they had. Major Crichton inside the main hangar had a harrassed air to him; he instantly spotted me when I stuck an investigatory eyebrow round the corner.

'Walmsley! Lieutenant Walmsley! Over here!' Nosey and interested civilian scientists turned to watch me.

I did a smart double-time to him and came to a stampingly loud salute.

'John,' he hissed, leaning in close. 'I've got these damn civvies coming out of my ears! Can you help?'

Chalk one up to the Major, I'd never realised he knew my first name.

'Well sir, I came to collect Elaine Valdupont. If she leaves then Doctor Shaw will also leave.'

The Major calculated for all of one-tenth of a second, probably working out that the departure of two scientists would speed the departure of the rest.

'Splendid! Carry on.'

Marie, who is officially known as Elaine, was out on the Impact Testing Range. A big block of what looked to be Delph china sat on a metal plate, and was periodically hit by a huge metal block that fell upon it from a great height, dropped by a crane. Endless readings were taken by boffins, or so it seemed to me.

Marie had her safety glasses on, and couldn't see behind her, so my bearhug from the rear took her by surprise.

'Oh! What is this!' she squealed, until she managed to turn around. 'O! John you are a very bad man!'

I'd interrupted her test series of Deformation Co-efficients, apparently.

'Hello John,' said Liz Shaw from one side as I kissed Marie. 'Hello. Liz to John,' as I rather rudely continued kissing.

'Oh, hello Liz. Sorry, lack of love from lady in life.' Marie punched me in the bicep and hurriedly wrote down notes.

'You've got lipstick on your –' and Liz indicated my collar.

'How are you, fair lady Liz?'

'Not bad. Currently with a beau. You can tell Nick that.'

Oh boy would I ever! Nick is convinced that any lady who turns him down is of alternate sexuality. Helps to bolster his feeble self-image.

'Did you hear about the Doctor helping to end the invasion of dinosaurs? The crusty old duffer is worth keeping around, eh?'

Liz gave me a look several degrees colder than liquid nitrogen.

'I have finished,' declared Marie. 'My notes are – Liz?'

Liz unfroze herself, directing a worrisome look at me. Note to self: don't criticise the Doctor in front of Liz.

'Well, Marie, may I suggest we move swiftly along to The Barley Mow in Buckinghamshire, where your ardent officer suitor has reserved rooms.'

Six hours later I lay in bed next to Marie, cradling her head on my bicep. She found it difficult to switch off intellectually after a weeks work at Swafham. I helped the switching-off with food, wine and romance. We both seemed to be taking the relationship more seriously than at first, when it was founded on an attraction of opposites. Marie respected me as an intuitive thinker, able to deal with the hostile physical realities of life in UNIT. I respected her as a woman far smarter than I, with more maturity due to her extra four years.

'I think I might have a hidden weakness, you know,' I murmured.

'mmff,' said Marie, not very awake.

'Nick Munroe put his scabrous finger on it. "John likes them … wiser".'

'mhm,' agreed Marie.

'Take Ruth for instance.'

'Oh yes,' said Marie, suddenly awake and perceptive.

'And at the liaison meeting at New Scotland Yard – Harry brought in a female psychologist. Cue rapid heartbeat from John.'

'You romance her, I cut out your heart,' she warned, sleepily.

'mhm,' I agreed. 'No playing away from home.'

Silence from second party.

She had fallen asleep and I looked over her long brown hair, draped across her face. Sleep without care. I felt good that she felt safe – John the Cold Blooded Killer receded into the distant background with Marie present.

Saturday morning brought birdsong, a brilliant sunrise and Marie light-heartedly dancing around in my dress shirt, which naturally led to me chasing Marie to get my shirt back in pristine condition for fear of uniform loss, and not to render her utterly without clothing, honestly your honour.

'You look extremely good in just a shirt,' I consoled her whilst wearing the shirt myself at breakfast. 'Just the right amount of pert curvaciousness. Sadly with only one shirt between us I claim priority.'

'Ah, do not try your cutting humour on me, John.' She had a wonderful way of pronouncing "John". 'What shall we do for the morning?'

'I've got to be back on duty at HQ by twelve.'

She screwed her face up and made a rude noise.

'Hey, someone has to protect the planet, you know.'

'The nature reserve. We shall go there.'

The nature reserve was a RSPB site, lots of ponds and reeds and flocks of birds en route to warmer climes. Marie had already been there twice and enjoyed walking around in the bright and chilly October morning.

At one point she stopped on a wooden boardwalk, to lean on the railings and look at the birds.

'They are very happy, the birds. Nothing else to do but carry on with their lives. You and I, we have the knowledge which makes that difficult.'

I leaned on the railings, making them creak slightly.

'Is that why you like coming out here? A complete break with your work and my employment?'

'I think it is, yes. Come! Enough gloomy reflection! We shall have an early meal before you have to vanish away.'

Marie knew all the pubs within fifty miles of Swafham that did good meals, and we knocked back a caesar salad and ratatouille respectively. I kissed her goodbye in the car park and drove back to Aylesbury, and entered what was to become a hideously unpleasant time.

First course of action was to find a senior officer, preferably the Brig. The Guard Room told me that he'd disappeared off to a meeting with the local County Council, so I tracked down Captain Beresford, who heard me out and added a few refinements of his own to my plan.

Before close of play and end of day, three Black Maria's had drawn up to the inner courtyard at Wandsworth, taking on a single inmate each, and departing off to Parkhurst, Lancaster and Leeds Prisons. The inmates were all of a similar height and build, with heads covered by a towel.

My idea had been to get Finchy out of Wandsworth and away to another location, so his prospective team of rescuers wouldn't be able to help him Resurgam. Captain Beresford's idea had been to take Finchy away in the UNIT landrover to Pentonville Prison, clad in fatigues and face obscured by floppy beret and a scrim scarf.

'That'll take the spring out of his step,' gloated the Captain. 'We'll get The Hare back from Wandsworth. W.O. Davies can cool his heels in a cell on his own before we decide what to do with him. Finchy's friends aren't going to rescue a spare UNIT spy trapped in a different clink to their beloved general.'

In fact, once Finchy got transferred on the quiet, he behaved exactly as before. His escort reported that he'd been mildly annoyed at having to move from Wandsworth and the "silly pantomime charade" of dressing in uniform, but that was it. His new cell had CCTV in the corner, keeping him under watch all day, and the prison wardens who checked on him every thirty minutes agreed that he wasn't bothered at being in prison.

The next day I rang the Governor at Pentonville and asked to speak to one of the wardens dealing with Finch. He rang back and I spoke to him just for confirmation.

'I've been a warden for fourteen years, Lieutenant Walmsley. Seen 'em all, I have, of every kind and creed, excepting this Hector Finch.'

'What's so different about him?'

'He just isn't bothered. Not like some, who give up once they get a long sentence, give up and die inside 'emselves. No, this one, he's got a plan.'

'Yes, we rather suspected that. It's why we moved him.'

'Well his plan moved with him, then, because he intends to get out of prison. How I can't say, no, but he intends to get out.'

Feeling more baffled than ever, I thanked him and rang off, before typing up a report for the Brig and Captain Beresford. The Brig had been fending off the Audit Commission and their purse-clutching tactics; I had a wad of correspondence with them already, complaining about the cost of hiring Prison Service transport, complaining about the cost of mounting police and army searches of the Underground, complaining about the cost of trawling their master files – it must have been coming out of their own pockets, that money.

Back to the mundane BTO work, and the fitters had repairs to make to one of the Foxes already. Corporal Dene stoutly maintained that he'd run it into a wall whilst trying to corner too fast on the parade ground, "seeing how it handled, like, and buckled the mudguard sir."

I had my suspicions. Sarah was seen chatting to the fitters and trainee AC crews shortly before the incident, and she'd kept a low profile since then. Not that I'm accusing her, not quite.

Nick and Eden took me into their confidence about all the diligent scheming they'd been doing, and I was impressed, despite myself. Clearly Nick had put a lot of work into his brainchild, even if it lacked a convincing nemesis. I pride myself that I made the crucial suggestion about the Orange forces. This meant QMS Campbell needed to order one gross of NBC protective suits, colloquially known as "Noddy suits". Made of fabric impregnated with activated charcoal, they enable your average squaddy to operate in a chemical, biological or nuclear wasteland.

The Fox AC's that took so much effort to obtain were off-limits to myself, rather to my dismay, and the Scorpion also. I'm simply too big to fit into either, which amused the other officers no end, and one in particular. You can guess which one, and he pointed out the difference in our size when testing the Fox for himself.

'Indent for a Chieftan,' he sniggered in unkind fashion. 'You ought to be able to fit into one of those.' Then, weasel-like – or perhaps ferrety – he slithered into the turret of the Fox and acted like a little Napoleon.

'Traverse right! Target nine hundred yards! Gunner – engage! Driver reverse! Firing smoke!' came from the turrret.

'Nick! You witless wart! Pop a smoke bomb and I'll tan your arse with a Rarden round!' I shouted, convinced that he might just do that, even by mistake.

'I don't think that's permitted under the Queens Regs,' commented Captain Beresford from behind me, having quietly approached using unfair covert methods, that is, walking quietly.

'Sir! Actually I was talking in the Langlois dialect of France, which is easily misunderstood - '

'Save your bull, John, there's a frantic Warrant Officer Davies on the line. Wants to speak to you and you alone since the Brigadier's not here.'

Oh? I doubled into the Guard Room, where the duty soldier, Private Pooley, held the phone up to me.

'In a right pother, sir. Wanted either the Brig or you, nobody else would do.'

'Hello?'

'Hello! Is that Walmsley? Walmsley? Walmsley!' shouted Davies at the other end.

'Yes it's me, you heinous anus. What do you want?'

I wasn't pleased at his obvious defection to the camp of Finchy, and made it plain.

'Duw, man, I was trying to help, get on the inside! This thing, it's bigger than you know, and my mam's at risk. Finch, that diafol, he's got ECT-Four One Three, mark you well.' He repeated the phrase.

'What the hell are you on about!' I snapped, not understanding anything Davies meant, and puzzled at the strange Welsh words he slipped in.

'Hwch! Damn you, man, don't you understand! They'll use it! Achos dybryd – he's – oh God they're here –'

A scraping and banging in the background became louder, followed by loud yells, and the phone cut off abruptly, not even giving the dial tone.

Pooley and I exchanged looks of incomprehension.

'How'd he get to a phone, sir? Thought he was in solitary,' said Pooley, echoing my thoughts.

I tried to call the Governor of Wandsworth, and got the engaged tone. I tried every thirty seconds for ten minutes and got the engaged tone every time. Losing patience, I rang the Brig and got him between calls.

'Yes, I know, John. A riot has broken out at Wandsworth. The Governor and some staff are barricaded in his office and he's been ringing to try and obtain help. You say Davies called us – how did he manage that?'

'Don't know, sir. He was very agitated.'

'Not half as much as he will be when he comes face to face with me! I'm convening an Orders Group, all officers and senior NCO's, ten minutes time in the canteen. Get your battle dress on.'

Whilst pounding the corridor back to my room I encountered the reticent Lieutenant Spofforth.

'O Group ten minutes in the canteen, in battle dress,' I shouted to him, pivoting to call to his now rapidly-departing back.

Getting changed quickly is a knack you learn early in the army. It was still a race to get to the canteen, where senior NCO's and officers were filing in and watching the Brig. Private Pooley had swiftly swapped the recorded phone call tapes and put them on a tape deck. He played the frantic Welsh voice back, to a degree of consternation.

Nick took notes, then tip-toed off to a phone.

'Finch must have been blackmailing Davies, sir,' calculated Sergeant Horrigan. ' "Help me or your mam dies"'

The Brig sent off to have the home address of Davies' mum identified; Kensington Office phoned back to say she lived in Holyhead. The Brig rang the Anglesey police and asked them to carefully investigate Mrs Davies' home situation, check if any large men with guns were holding her hostage. Nick came back at the end of this running and radioing.

'Sir!' he smarmed, holding up his hand. 'Just rang the Royal Welch Fusiliers. According to them, "Duw" means something along the lines of "Good Lord!", "diafol" means "devil", "Hwch" is approximately "Oh no!" and "achos dybryd" is "a great and horrible act".'

'What is "Eee-Cee-Tee Four One Three"?' asked an officer in the audience. 'Welsh?'

'Sounds like a number plate,' commented Sergeant Whittaker.

Bingo! I had a brainwave. It turned out to be completely wrong, but it was still a brainwave.

'Sir! That could be a piece of heavy industrial plant – a bulldozer or mobile crane or similar. Whilst attention is focussed on Wandsworth, Finchy's friends break into Pentonville and demolish half the prison to allow him to escape.'

The Brig pointed his swagger stick at me.

'Good point, John! Go and ring the Met, see if any construction plant has been reported missing. Now, about our deployment - '

The Guard Room private on duty collared me before I rang anyone.

'Sir! The Deputy Commissioner on the line in the Guard Room for you!' so I followed him back there.

'Lieutenant Walmsley? Deputy Commissioner Harrison here. We finally found those six missing suspended animation units.'

'Where are they, sir?'

'In an abandoned tunnel off the Clarkenwell spur line. They'd been put in behind a walled-off section. Obviously the plotters must have opened up a hole in the wall, moved the units in, then blocked it off again. Powered by a portable electric generator. Positive arsenal of weapons in there with them, too, but oddly none seem to have been taken.'

Right. Too much to hope that Finchy's friends were still in them –

'Afraid not, Lieutenant. Of the six, five had been used recently and they were all empty.'

'Thank you for calling, sir. Oh, by the way, do you know of any large, mobile industrial plant that's been stolen or hijacked recently?'

'No,' he said with vigour. 'And I can say that with absolute authority. There's been so much property damage of late that construction plant is precious – we'd be informed if any were stolen.'

'Oh. Have you heard about the riot at Wandsworth?'

His voice in replying was slow and worried.

'I have, and it's more than a riot. The prison wardens are amongst the rioters, apparently. A special riot control force went in and haven't come out again.'

I took my leave and slowly went back to the O Group, bumping into Harry Sullivan on the way.

'Where's the Brig gone?' he asked. 'I've got a leave chit that needs signing and he's not in his office. Jean and I!' he finished, grinning slightly. Harry you dog.

'Emergency O Group in the canteen.'

'Emergency, hey? What alien terror are you due to confront?'

'A large truck, registration ECT 413,' I muttered sarcastically, turning to get back to the canteen.

A hand stopped me. Harry's hand. I looked back at him, and his face was chalky, petrified and animated all at once.

'It's not your car registration, is it?' I joked.

'What was that name?' he gasped. Any mocking amusement I felt disappeared. I'd never seen him so worried.

'ECT 413. We think it refers to a – Harry!'

Instead of explaining, Harry had gone off at a run, travelling so fast he'd got to the canteen and played the tape of Davies before I got there.

'Sir!' he practically shouted at the Brig, who was giving written instructions to Beresford and Edmonds. 'ECT 413 is not a vehicle registration – it's a biological warfare agent.'

A butterfly beating its wings would have easily been heard in the canteen.

'What!' exclaimed half a dozen voices, mine amongst them.

'Germ warfare, Brigadier. Finch intends his allies to use it.'

'Wrong tense, Lieutenant Sullivan,' replied the Brig. 'Given the rioting at Wandsworth, they have already used it.'

He informed Harry of the news about the supposed "riot" at Wandsworth.

'What does the stuff do?' asked Eden, nervously.

Harry looked more beyond Eden that at him.

'The symptoms are paranoia, aggression that increases to homicidal levels, followed by coma and death. Onset is typically within six hours of exposure. Brigadier, that prison must be isolated and quarantined immediately. Immediately, sir!'

The Brig frowned.

'Get a grip, Harry! It's a prison riot, which means it's been locked-down tight. Nobody's come out. Nor have the specialist riot teams returned.'

Harry remained insistent.

'Sir, anyone leaving that prison today could be infected. Anyone who has been in the prison today must be located and quarantined.'

The Brig nodded and left to make an emergency call to the MoD. Reports later stated that nobody leaving the prison had contracted any disease, which of course nobody could take for granted at the time, so a dozen people got stuck in isolation for forty-eight hours.

Harry kept right on, ringing a number and mentioning "Wildfire". Within minutes he was barking instructions down the phone.

'You need to assay your Echo Charlie Tango stock. No, now! Yes, I will hold.'

He stood tapping his feet and fingers until a voice on the other end reported back, and Harry didn't like the news.

'Check your vaccine stock. Yes now!'

Another long wait, and once again the news wasn't good, to judge from Harry's expression, which remained grim.

A runner from the Guard Room reported that Mrs Davies, resident of Burton Road in Holyhead, was just fine and had offered the nice PCs checking her house cups of tea and biscuits. Discreetly armed officers would be posted at her front and back doors, just in case.

The Brig came back in and got the news about Mrs Davies, which worried him as much as it puzzled us.

'Okay, Harry, tell us about this bug loose in Wandsworth. Is there a cure?'

Harry paced around a bit before stopping and sitting on a table.

'Yes. Or rather, there was. Porton say the vaccine bank for ECT 413 has been replaced with phials of distilled water, as have the phials of ECT 413 itself.

'Right. This agent was nicknamed "the backfire bug" because any nation that used it would, in the end, infect themselves unless they were an island. It was developed as a doomsday weapon in the biological warfare range, both for study in order to develop a vaccine, and as a last resort if anything similar was used to infect Western Europe. The stuff is as closely guarded as nuclear warheads and I can't imagine how it got out.'

'I can,' interrupted the Brig. 'Who was responsible for security at sites like Porton Down? General Finch.'

Entirely correct, and as for his friends on the outside – well, that lay in the future.

'It's dreadful stuff, spread by physical contact – blood, sweat, any bodily fluid. Technically it's an encephalo-toxin, ECT, and it targets the hypothalamus and the cerebral cortex, raises the victim's level of aggression to insane levels whilst destroying the grey matter of the brain.'

Great. A bug that transformed it's victims into raging psychopathic killers, and then killed them. Delightful. There were a lot of white faces in the canteen.

Harry's face twisted in a grimace of despair and anguish.

'And that monster Finch has had it used in London! A city of eight million people.'

'Steady on, Harry,' cautioned Major Crichton, silent until now. 'No other outbreaks are reported. No news of riots or killings outside the prison. In fact, given that a prison is one of the few access-controlled sites in London, I rather suspect it was targeted in order to keep infection within the walls. It wasn't visiting day, was it? No. There you go. An isolated environment. Minimal risk to the general population.'

More details came in on the line from the Prison Service. Wandsworth had a population of over twelve hundred, including prisoners, uniformed staff and support workers. The Governor and half a dozen staff were trapped in his office, safely barricaded in but unable to leave it. A small mixed group of wardens and inmates were trapped but safe in a kitchen store-room, and that was it. No further details of survivors, including the special anti-riot team of fifty prison officers in riot gear.

'Twelve hundred people,' muttered Harry.

And doubtless the body of W.O. Talfryn Davies. Still, he might have survived.

'If Mrs Davies is fine and dandy, what did Davies mean by saying that she's at risk?' asked Sergeant Horrigan. That provoked a round of fruitless speculation, until Harry snapped his fingers.

'Do we have an atlas?'

Does UNIT have atlases! We certainly did, the special intelligence ones that needed to be signed out and couldn't be removed from Aylesbury, not that Harry ever used them, since the highways and byeways he travelled sat inside human beings.

'Which one do you want, sir?' asked Sergeant Whittaker.

'Wales.'

The sergeant returned with the relevant brick-thick volume and riffled pages back and forth until he found a large-scale rendition of Anglesey and Holy Island.

Harry thumped the volume down on a table and twirled it round.

'Look at this map. What do you notice about Holyhead?'

Given the gravity of the situation, nobody cracked any of the usual jokes.

'It's on an island. "Holy Island"' said someone.

'Offshore from another island. Anglesey,' said Major Crichton. 'And your point is, Harry? I recall the explanation you made about islands and infections. Is Holyhead going to be a refuge for Finch and his jackals?'

'No! The exact opposite! Finch is going to target Holyhead and infect it with ECT 413!'

Another deadly silence fell.

'How do you work that out, Harry?' asked the Brig, quietly. 'It would agree with Davies shouting that his mother was under threat. Any other relevant facts?'

Picking up a teaspoon, our MO pointed to Holy Island.

'An island, only connected to Anglesey by two bridges, both of which can be easily blocked.' The teaspoon travelled to the town, indicated in red as a built-up area. 'At this time of year there are no ferries to Dun Laoghaire. An isolated environment, as the Major said. If the infection were to get across the bridges, then Anglesey itself is only connected at the Menai Straits Bridge and Bangor, both of which can be blocked.' The teaspoon tapped twice on the bridges across the Menai Straits. "achos dybryd" is "a great and horrible act".' Yes indeed.

Word came through from Whitehall that Hector Finch had deigned to communicate with his guards. Not much of a communication, only fourteen words.

"Wandsworth was an example. Holyhead will be next. I have the vaccine hidden away."

Blackmail. Finchy didn't expext anyone to break him out of jail, he expectd HM Government to allow him out, meekly and with a van full of money and guns – or so I speculated, since the evil little scrote didn't actually deliver an ultimatum. Oh no, he knew how to turn the screws on the politicians by making them sweat. The threat about the vaccine was, of course, the only thing that kept him alive. His prison guards were swapped out for RMP's, who weren't friends or associates of the prison staff at Wandsworth and so wouldn't be tempted to kill the prisoner.

The Aylesbury canteen became, by default, an operational HQ, with more maps of Wales and London pinned on the walls and unscrolled on tabletops. The Brig took me aside.

'Well, John, thanks to your persistence, we haven't been taken totally off-guard. The MoD have been going through personnel files all this time to locate your hypothetical allies of Hector Finch, and they think they've identified an ex-member of staff at Porton Down who might be on Finch's team of helpers.'

Strike one to us, about time Lady Luck started working for UNIT. Ports and airports would be put under discreet watch.

'Do we know how the Backfire Bug got into Wandsworth, sir?'

He shrugged.

'No, not yet. A bit academic, I suppose. One of this team of helpers must have introduced it into the prison. Utterly ruthless. No qualms whatsoever.'

Whilst the Brig may have thought that, Harry Sullivan didn't. He was quietly calculating and plotting, looking like death warmed-up, drinking pints of black coffee to stay alert. I found my errant feet led me to his rooms, where he didn't even notice me at first.

'Oh – hello John. No consultations today.'

He was reading handwritten loose-leaf notes in an A4 binder, stopping to make notations every few lines.

'Surgeon Lieutenant,' I intoned, making it sound dramatic. That got his attention.

'Eh? What are you on about, John?'

'Harry Sullivan, Medical Officer on attachment to UNIT. Now starting his second tour of two years, previous medical service in the Royal Navy, and a suspiciously accurate knowledge of the Backfire Bug. Harry, you seem to be quids-in with the boffins at Porton Down, and know their phone number, and all about ECT 413.'

Harry didn't say anything. Wise counsel. His eyes remained wary.

'There will be speculation about your behaviour today, Harry. Get your cover story sorted out, I say, before the mess conspire to interrogate you.'

He stood upright, rubbing kinks out of his back. An unusually hard expression played over his face.

'What makes you think you can come - '

'Harry!' I snapped, probably louder than necessary. 'You're here at UNIT. If your previous background drove you here, then all the better. Royal Navy or – well, other parts of the military establishment, shall we say – you're here at UNIT, which you chose.' I sighed. These things always go better in films and on TV. 'I don't especially care what you did before, only that you're here for the now. Hopefully that's clear.'

'Care for a snifter?' he asked, regaining his normal insouciance. 'One hundred proof Navy rum.'

'Good grief, no! I need my wits about me for the next twelve hours. Thanks for the offer. I came to ask if you have any idea how the Backfire Bug got into Wandsworth. The Brig thinks it's an academic question. Stable door, bolted horse.'

Harry raised an eyebrow.

'Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, John, does not have a background in applied epidemiology, pandemics or pathological vectors.'

'Me neither,' I confessed. 'You sound like the Doctor and his aliens. "Beware of invasion by the evil massed ranks of Pandemic Epidemiologies."'

'Now now. I was reviewing old notes when you burst in. How did the disease get into the target population? That's an important question. The "how" at Wandsworth might give us the "how" at Holyhead.'

Ah. Now, that was important. Holyhead remained in blissful ignorance of it's imminent demise. The government decided not to mass evacuate since the disease might be deliberately released once people started to move out in large numbers. Currently the Clwyd Coach Tours Company was discreetly moving people out to Anglesey, thirty at a time on it's coaches over Four Mile Bridge. With a population of twelve thousand, Holy Island would take several months to evacuate this way.

For half an hour, Harry bounced ideas about possible infection routes at Wandsworth off me. Later he modestly claimed that it was a two-way process; he fibbed, it was all him with me being the comedy foil. Coincidentally, by this time the riot within the prison seemed to have subsided. Nobody went in to check. Not with ECT 413 and raving homocidal maniacs on the loose inside.

Harry and I sat and thrashed out the matter of infection routes. A novelty for me, an infantry soldier more familiar with dead ground, beaten zones and platoon ammo stock. Instead of wielding a sword, Harry waved a pen and made notes instead of wounds:

Aerosol: no. Any infection carried on the air would breach the prison walls.

Water supply: no. Infecting the prison's water would lead to contamination of the London water mains.

Therefore: ingested. Contained in a point source of contamination that was discrete, targeted and unable to breach the walls.

Outbreak day was not visiting day, so the source had to be brought into the prison via a normal route.

Source: must of necessity be in a sealed package, unable to contaminate the environment until the seal is breached.

Delivery vector: by preference, a member of the prison staff, able to circulate around the prison relatively freely and thus infect other staff and inmates.

Posit: a source that only the prison staff have access to, which is sealed and only opened within the prison grounds, and which cannot be accessed before entry into the prison itself. Further posit: source substrate must be –

'Yoghurt!' declared Harry, loudly, to the heavens. If this seems rapid deduction, it wasn't. We took half an hour to get there.

'Yoghurt, excellent culture for breeding micro-organisms. Plastic pots covered with a foil seal, a seal that a syringe could penetrate in order to infect. Entirely off the menu for our prison inmates, who probably think it some hideous Mittel-European culinary monstrosity.'

'No they don't, Harry. None of them could spell that, let alone understand it.'

The results of our brainstorming session got sent into Whitehall, where they doubtless got mixed in with other sessions from Porton Down, the RAMC, NATO and who knows who else. Maybe they even made a difference. Who knows!

I also decided to declare what I considered to be my duty to the Brig, who convened a meeting of officers and senior NCOs in the gym as a result. Initially he'd dismissed the idea straight away, until he learnt about the Noddy suits in QMS Campbells' stockroom.

'John – that is, Lieutenant Walmsley - has declared his intent to get inside Wandsworth and find out how the infection got in there and spread. He also intends to release the Governor and any other persons trapped inside, besides trying to locate Warrant Officer Davies.

'Bear in mind the conditions inside Wandsworth. Possibly twelve hundred corpses, in heaven alone knows what kind of condition, and potentially dozens of raving maniacs on the loose. Not for the faint-hearted.

'If anyone would like to volunteer, please say so.'

For a long, long second, silence reigned supreme. I was facing the Brig, not wanting to see how few people were keen on risking their hides alongside Lieutenant Raving Walmsley.

'I'll go, sir,' volunteered Sergeant Horrigan, to my dismay.

'Oh how you will bloody well not!' I retorted. 'You've got a wife and a daughter and another on the way, Tom, so you are off the list.'

A strange choking noise echoed round the gym.

'Brigadier,' said Lieutenant Martin Eden, raising his arm. The choking noise got louder.

'No,' I said with finality. 'Thank you for the support, Lieu – Martin. Thanks but no thanks, you haven't been around long enough for us to work together properly.'

The choking noise became a strangled cough.

'Bloody hell, what does it take to get your attention for a suicide volunteer!' declared Nick Munroe, crossly. 'Me, I volunteer. I can't let Fatso hog all the glory.'

The Brig looked at Nick with the Mark One greasy eyeball.

'Why should you go, Lieutenant Munroe?'

Nick held up a fistful of Sterling magazines.

'Because of these home-crafted hollow-point nine mill magazines, sir.'

I looked him squarely in the eye and said what he could never forgive or forget.

'Thank you, Nick.'

The Brig was our entrépot. He rang Whitehall and the MoD.

'Listen, Mike – no, you pay close bloody attention!'

"Mike" was Field Marshal Michael Carver, the most senior military man in the entire UK establishment. He outranked the Brig by several grades. Hearing the Brig shout at him defiantly was entertaining, to say the least.

'I have two fully-briefed volunteers here, in complete NBC gear, with silenced automatic weapons, who can be airlifted into Hell's Kitchen via our helicopter. I know it'll take at least six hours to get permission from the MoD or Whitehall for your lot and the other agencies involved. We are ready to go, and to go now.'

Mike caved in and gave permission, hey whoopee.

Harry was waiting to give us a final warning as we donned the NBC suits.

'What every well-heeled young officer ought to be wearing this season, don't you think, Harry? You being well-groomed, unlike my sartorially-challenged behemoth friend.'

Hary ignored Nick's quipping, being very serious and matter-of-fact. This was so out of the usual that even Nick paid attention.

'Anyone infected will be in the final stages of the disease, and you might find some still walking around, probably in a pretty docile and passive state. The kindest thing to do would be to shoot them. They can't be cured, most of their brain will have gone and they will lapse into coma pretty soon.'

'How can we identify anyone who's caught Backfire?' asked Nick.

'You'll know,' said Harry. 'Believe me, you'll know.'

He handed us each a small golf-ball sized plastic container on a long chain.

'I've never had to issue these before. Put them round your neck.'

'And these are?' I asked.

'That's a protective case with a foam interior, containing a cyanide capsule.'

Nick had his suit hood on, so his expression couldn't be seen. I merely stared at Harry, who stared back.

'In case you get infected. Good luck.'

I put the hood up and checked the radio link; position one for communicating with Nick, position two for talking to the UNIT radio team, both working fine.

'Inform M.O. Sullivan that his bedside manner could do with some working on,' I wisecracked. Suicide pills!

Nick slung the official UNIT camera over his shoulder, I picked up the map case and equipment bag and we trudged outside to Windmill 123, Sterlings slung over shoulders.

My radio crackled as Nick spoke into it.

'Harry knows far too much about Backfire for comfort, John. Do you think he worked at Porton Down? Helped to create Backfire?'

I shrugged, a gesture lost in the suit.

'I don't know. UNIT etiquette is that you don't ask him, he has to tell you. If he did work there, designing hideous diseases, he might have felt working for UNIT was a better alternative.'

The Brig broke in on our link.

'Last chance to cry off, chaps. I won't mind if you do, this is a damn hairy business.'

'No, sir. I put Davies in there, I need to verify whether he's alive or dead. I can't accept anyone else trying to remedy my cock-up.'

'Sir!' replied Nick, sounding convincingly outraged. 'This will look fantastic in front of the promotion board!'

Windmill 123 took off with us two huddled inside, hoods down and breathing proper air instead of the charcoal-filtered stuff that comes in by the NBC suit respirator.

'I think we know how Finch the Grinch intended to sweep the Earth clean if OpAuAge went wonky,' I told Nick.

Nick responded with a splendid stream of curses about Finch.

'Hey, you sound on form tonight. You ought to have a swearing competition with Sergeant Benton.'

'Where is The Beast? I haven't seen him for a good few hours.'

'Don't let him hear you call him that! He doesn't carry brass knuckledusters as fashion accessories. I think he might be in Holyhead, actually, trying to track down Finchy's friends.'

Good luck to him, possibly operating in an enviroment about to be hit by germ warfare.

'Doesn't Harry know far too much about ECT 413 for your liking?' asked Nick after a pause in the conversation.

'Nick! Focus on the job in hand! Forget about Harry and his previous employment. You sound like a stuck record.'

'Sorry,' he muttered. 'I'm nervous.'

His face did seem a little pale.

'Nick, if these mikes were slightly more sensitive, they'd pick up the knocking of my knees. You're nervous? I'm worried.'

Any sensible soldier is worried witless by biological warfare. Having a nuke dropped on you means being instantly yet painlessly annihilated; chemicals sound nastier than they are, provided you aren't below ground-level; but germs that can turn your brain into Swiss cheese frankly scare the living wee out of me.

'Wandsworth five minutes,' warned the pilot, after a journey that took only six minutes. Well, no, actually it was forty, but fear jiggers your sense of time.

Hoods up, respirator check, suit seal check, radio link check. Buddy says okay, check silenced-Sterling. QMS Campbell produced these two items after we decided that being covert and sneaky was better than being loud and attention-gathering. Supposedly they wouldn't give our position away to any raving nutters hanging about inside Wandsworth without anyone to murder.

Windmill 123 came down low over A Wing, allowing Nick to shin down the knotted rope attached to the landing strut and onto the roof. I chucked our bundle of kit out and he caught it, before steadying the rope and my descent. Once on the roof we signalled thumbs-up to the pilot, who took off and landed in the street outside, keeping an eye on the roof with a pair of bins.

My landing on the roof had cracked tiles, which helped us get inside using the sledgehammer and pick. Five minutes work got us an access-way, after having smashed and hammered the slates aside across forty square feet of rooftop. Knock rope ladder into position, then Munroe slithers down inside covered by Walmsley.

I joined Nick on the upper floorway of A Wing, at it's extreme end opposite the rotunda. Wandsworth being a Victorian pile, the central rotunda housed the prison wardens, able to keep an eye on the inmates most economically from their central position. The five wings housed different categories of prisoner, ranging from those due to rotate out to different prisons to those settling down for a stay of several decades.

Whilst I never have bad dreams about the first man I killed, I often have nightmares about Wandsworth.

The power and lighting had been left on at normal intensity, allowing both of us to see everything with perfect clarity. Nick took a photo the moment we both got our boots on the walkway.

'Alternate movement forward,' I warned over the radio link.

'Ssst. Behind us,' warned Nick. I turned to try and locate the problem – the eyepieces in an NBC suit only allow forward vision.

A Thing slowly and painfully clambered up the spiral staircase at the the of the block, hissing and spitting blood. The Thing had part of a prison warden's uniform on, ripped and shredded. It hissed at us, stretching fingers, every one of which was missing their last joint, and spraying blood from the mess that existed where it's mouth had been. The left foot had gone from above the ankle, and gore splashed from a huge wound in the left calf. It snarled and tried to run at us, not very effectively.

I gave the Thing a bullet in the guts, which stopped it, and Nick gave it one in the head, which dropped it, to the total effect of two loud "pop"s.

Hand gesture, move forward along the landing, don't think too much about what you've seen.

The landing had bodies all along it's length. They appeared to have attacked and ripped each other to bits using only their own hands. And teeth. Walking meant treading on an obscenely soft carpet of bodies. I took care not to walk too closely to the open cell doors on my right hand side, just in case anything jumped out at me. Nevertheless, we took care to check them out. In one we found a man with his back to us, his heavy breathing indicating that he was under the influence of strong emotion.

So he was. When he turned to us his eyes were gone, great bloody pits in their place. This loss had been partly assuaged by his chewing noisily on the gory, meaty bones of a human hand.

'SSSSSSSS,' he shouted at us. Nick shot him in the head. The body slumped over in a corner, alongside a collection of bones and body parts.

'Brig, you can tell Harry his definition of "passive" or "docile" needs bloody well re-assessing!' I radioed back.

'That would be "Brigadier",' added Nick.

We made our way from A Wing along the landing down to the lower level and onto the ground floor. Dozens of bodies lay in heaps along the way, where inmates and staff had torn each other to bits. Blood, congealed, clotted or fresh, lay everywhere, spoiling the whitewashed walls. When I say "bits" I mean just that – whole bodies were rare. These people had ripped victims apart by main force, and used teeth when simple brute strength failed. We both stopped and conquered the urge to throw up several times.

The way to the Governor's Office was easy to find – just follow the raging, shrieking cacophony of infected maniacs trying to get in. We discovered about twenty raving psychos hammering on the door, rather more than predicted.

'Cover me,' I radioed Nick, then proceeded to get closer and shoot the infected maniacs one at a time, in the head wherever possible. I'd dropped a good half dozen before they realised anything was happening, thanks to the silencer on the Sterling. Nick joined in from his position on the walkway behind and above me. The surviving psychos began to look around, spotted me and gave a collective shout of anger, or rage, or despair, or who knows what.

Nick's nine millimetre hollow-point did the job. None of those hit got up again, regardless of where they were hit. Once they were static, we shot them in the head. None got closer than thirty feet.

Don't think that this ghastly, slow-motion massacre was risk-free. Nick and I had to continually look around to check for any psychos creeping up on our blind-side, left, right or behind. Plus, we only had one hundred and eighteen rounds of ammo for the Sterlings. Any more expenditure than that and we' be in trouble.

'Sir!' I bellowed, banging on the Governor's office door. 'UNIT rescue team.'

The Governor, poor chap, had been phoning reports to the outside world for hours. Shortly before Nick and I entered, the message about "UNIT rescue team" had gone in.

'How do we know it's really you?' came a muffled reply.

'Well, sir, we could stand here and discuss the UN Charter on Human Rights, yesterday's Coronation Street or Lieutenant Munroe and I could blow the door in with a satchel charge.'

The eyehole set five feet above floor level grated open.

'The unsettling apparition before you is a soldier in NBC protective gear,' I explained. 'I was exaggerating about the satchel charge. But we do have grenades.'

With much noise and protest, the cell door creaked open. I could see into the interior, beyond a barricade of desks and filing cabinets.

'Nick – stag outside. Call if hostiles arrive.' Nick knelt on the floor, looking alternately left and right.

The Governor was a large man in a beige suit, pretty worn out, and with six other members of the admin staff stuck in the same room. None of them were physically harmed, but none of them were exactly compos mentis.

Realising that a sinister apparition in Noddy suit was not conducive to good behaviour, I pulled the hood back and breathed in stale, sweaty prison air.

'Sir – you are the Governor? You need to follow me to A Wing's upper floor. From there you can get access to the roof. A UNIT helicopter will lift you to ground level and an isolation ward set up by the Royal Army Medical Corps.' We were going out via the roof deliberately – no way would I risk opening a gate at ground level.

The trip back up with our seven rescuees was unpleasant but no more than that; any infected maniacs in A Wing were already dead. The various dignitaries didn't enjoy a hair-raising trip via the landing struts of Windmill 123 to the street below, where they would be subject to medical internment, but they must have consoled themselves with the prospect of being better off than anyone still in the prison.

Namely, Nick and I.

Back on the landing, I motioned Nick forward. Our next goal was the kitchen, located on the ground level. We got there without any great worry, my preferred method of transit being on the landings. These might be choked with bodies, but the floors below were treacherous with blood. Blood, being a potential source of infection, needed to be avoided. Along the way we passed a cell with three psychos dining on the bodily remains of a third party. Nick tossed in a WP and the cell, plus cannibals, went up in smoke and flames.

Once on the ground floor and at the kitchen counter I took a moment to draw breath and focus. Nick set down the camera, nudged me and indicated removing the NBC hood.

'What?' I asked him in high temper thirty seconds later, having recovered from the dry heaves. 'Breaking seal for what?'

'Finch,' he replied. 'Finch is a dead man.' His face was taut and pale, not that I felt any better. 'I don't care if I have to resign my commission and leave UNIT, I am going to kill him.'

'You'll have to join the queue. The second we get that vaccine location out of him I'm going to beat him to death with a spade. Now suit up. To kill him we need to get out of here alive.'

Anyway, if plans were working properly, Finch was technically dead already.

I headed over to the locked pantry door where survivors were supposed to be hiding and knocked politely on the door.

'UNIT rescue team,' I shouted. The door opened a crack and a knife blade slowly emerged, followed by a shaking hand and an equally shaky prison warden.

'How many?' I asked, voice muffled by the respirator.

'Eight of us,' he whispered. Once again Nick and I led them to the roof, where they got taken down to the sealed tents for inspection. The warden told us a little of what happened – rioting broke out after a series of serious incidents, involving violent assaults by prisoners on each other and staff, then the wardens had started to attack each other, by which time he and his group were hiding in the pantry. Nobody else in the group spoke much, except for one tatooed bruiser, who shook my suited hand and said a "thanks" in a voice that quivered.

Struck by what Harry said about yoghurt, I returned back to the kitchen, and the big fridges there. Moving over the corpses wasn't easier second time around.

There they sat, pots of yoghurt, all conical Eden Vale stuff in Strawberry or Banana. Pulling a big catering pack out of the fridge, I set them down on the counter and told Nick to keep stag. I went over the wrapping with a magnifying glass that Harry had lent me, not finding any holes but not sure I'd checked properly. Removing the wrapping made it easier to concentrate on the close inspection, and also ensured I nearly jumped out of the Noddy suit when Nick shot another raving psycho.

'He came from another wing,' he warned. 'There might still be more of them around. Exactly what is so riveting about yoghurt pots anyway?'

'Harry thought they might be a – wow! Harry was right.' I changed the radio to the external link. 'Is Harry there? Listen, I have found three yoghurt pots with a small hole in the foil cover, small enough to be from a syringe, not large enough to notice unless you know what to look for and have a magnifying glass.'

With some buzzing and hissing at the other end, Surgeon Lieutenant Sullivan exclaimed in hope.

'John! Brilliant! If that's a live culture we can get a vaccine from it! Bag it in the hermetic sample bag.'

My hands shook alarmingly putting the humble yoghurt pots into the stout plastic bag sporting the Biohazard logo. Incredible to think that these curdled milk concoctions had killed over a thousand people.

'Okay, plan is to get these samples to Windmill, then do a sweep for any more survivors,' I told Nick, then sent the same message outside.

The Brig came on the radio link.

'Lieutenant Walmsley, I am ordering you out of the prison as of now. We can let the regulars send in a bigger search and rescue team. You've done your bit.'

Maybe. First I unfurled the map and found the location of telephones that could access the outside world. There weren't many, and one was in the Governor's office. We went back up to A Wing via the rotunda, checking out two more phones, and found what I presumed to be Davies' body in a separate room at the inner end of the wing. I guessed at that due to a tattoo with the Royal Welch Fusiliers crest on one arm and "Mam" tattooed on the other; his face was gone, the rest of his skull such a mess I didn't look very closely, so the tattoos were all we had to go on.

Finch and his friends were all going to die.

'Poor sod,' said Nick, taking a photo. 'This guarantees Finchy a painfully

slow death.' It did, just not the way we intended.

Windmill took us very carefully back down to the isolation tents set up by the RAMC, and I very carefully handed over the sample bag to a very careful doctor, who very carefully sealed it into a metal carrying container. It got transported to Porton Down by regular army helicopter, much to Windmill's relief – not the sort of thing you want to carry around as cargo.

Nick and I had to cool our heels for twelve hours, until we were declared officially free from ECT 413. The army had swept and cleared the prison, finding another thirty people either still locked in cells or hiding in obscure places, and killed a dozen more raving bloody psychopaths. The delay in getting medical clearance meant the Brig travelled down to see us in person.

'How was it in there?' he asked. The photos hadn't come back from the lab yet.

Nick shook his head, unable or unwilling to speak. We'd both been sick, from tension or relief or spiritual disgust, practically the moment we took the Noddy suits off.

'Ghastly, sir. Awful, absolutely awful. If that Backfire Bug gets into Holyhead you'll need atom bombs to deal with it.'

'You both look haggard. Soon as this op is over, leave for the pair of you. Oh, and congratulations on finding those contaminated samples. It'll take a while to make vaccines from them, but at least we can begin to fight back.'

'Is Finch technically dead yet, sir?' I asked. Nick gave me a very peculiar look.

A satisfied grunt from the Brig indicated that Finchy was "technically" dead.

That had been Captain Beresford's idea. Obviously Finchy couldn't communicate with his unfrozen friends on the outside, so the release of Backfire was a pre-arranged plan to help him get free. If we took Finchy out of the equation, then that might very well put a bit of sand in the conspirator's clockwork. A team of RAF interrogators went to Pentonville, where they sat in the prison warden's staffroom and drank tea. The story broken to the press via Project Broom was that the ex-general, not young or fit any longer, suffered a fatal heart attack whilst being interrogated. His body was now being held for cremation.

It was a calculated risk; the friends of Finchy on the outside might panic and target Holyhead anyway, without having a general to release. More hopefully, they'd disappear into the background.

When Nick and I returned to Aylesbury, our clever and chilly Major Crichton had worked it all out. He went to the Brig, and the Brig sent for me.

'Where can Finch go if he blackmails the government into releasing him?' asked the Major rhetorically. 'He's a marked man, his photo has been printed and broadcast across the land. Defect to the Russians? I put that to the UNIT branch of the GRU, and they said they'd execute him the instant he set foot in the Soviet Union. The Chinese say they'll give him a trial and then execute him. Even the Libyans and Rhodesians have their knives out for him. No sanctuary anywhere.

'So, whatever happens, he intends to release Backfire into the general population. That bio-warfare agent is his backup in place of Operation Golden Age. He'll use it to sweep the world clear of people. All except his people, those he chooses to survive, who will get the vaccine.'

I looked at Crichton in silence. Yes, I could believe Hector planning this.

'Pity we couldn't have dropped him into Wandsworth,' I muttered. 'We'd get the vaccine out of him quick enough then.'

The Brig tutted at me.

'We can't torture information out of him, John. Damn tempting though it is!'

'If Holyhead gets infected with this disease, sir, couldn't we whisk him over there?' I wheedled. 'Put his precious neck on the line, see how he likes it.'

Lethbridge-Stewart made a wry face. Major Crichton made a surprised one, cocked his head to one side and pointed at me.

'That, Lieutenant, is a very good idea.'

Windmills 123 and 287, the Bell and Wessex respectively, were needed to execute our plan. I flew in the Bell, sitting behind the pilot, with a hooded, handcuffed, ankle-chained Hector Finch sitting next to me. Sergeant Horrigan sat on the other side of Finch, expressing hatred in every line of his face. Finch had protested against being moved from his anonymous cell, in the tone of a man wearily resigned to being shunted around.

'When this is over, Hector, I am going to kill you,' I whispered in his ear, making him sneer. He had a great sneer, really convincing. Must have practiced a lot.

'I don't think so, Lancashire Lad. If I die, nobody gets the vaccine.'

'We'll see, Hector. I'd have to take my place in the queue. The relatives of everyone who died in Wandsworth will probably come calling, too.'

'Criminals. Prisoners. Rapists and robbers and the scum of the earth,' he sneered.

'Prison wardens. Prison staff. The last I looked, the sentence for robbery didn't amount to a death sentence.'

'Those with the wit and intelligence to survive didn't become zombies, and those without didn't deserve to live.'

I punched him hard under the ribs, where it wouldn't show.

'You call them that again and it'll be a riot baton across your face! Before your jackals infected them they were people. Human beings. Not zombies.'

He seemed amused at my anger. Damn it was difficult not choking him on the spot! We needed those vaccines, quickly, more quickly than Porton Down could produce then en masse.

'You can use my knuckledusters, sir,' offered Tom Horrigan. 'Bloody megalomaniac.'

'Holyhead five minutes,' announced the pilot. Finch gave a start, probably the first time he'd been taken by surprise for months.

'Holyhead?' he asked.

'Weapons check,' I announced. 'Co-pilot, check your weapon also.'

I had been issued with a man-pack radio and called the Brig.

'Coming into Holyhead, sir. Yes sir, we will be careful. Over.'

The chopper came down in the square, blowing rain and newspapers away in a short storm of its own. Finch got hustled out of the rear, shambling clumsily in the chains and looking frantic. At least I guessed he was frantic, not being able to see his face.

'Take off and circle at five hundred feet. You are not to return to land unless ordered,' I shouted above the rotor noise. Both pilot and co-pilot gave the thumbs up and took Windmill 123 into the night sky.

At my gesture, Tom whipped the hood off Finch's head, allowing him to blink owlishly and look around.

'What is the meaning of this!' he snapped, not looking happy.

'Welcome to your handiwork, Hector. Welcome to Holyhead!' and I indicated the dark, wet, empty square, where drab and dark pebble-dashed shops vied with white-washed ones, interspersed with houses. The street lights were off and no lights showed anywhere. Above the wind, away to the west the sea could be heard, noisy on this disturbed night. In the middle distance shots could be heard, echoing and resounding amongst the houses.

'What! You've no right to bring me here!' shouted Finch.

'We got about six hundred people away before your agents released their bugs, Hector. That's why we flew in – both bridges are closed. Now we can have a cosy little chat about vaccines, and viruses, and unfrozen friends.'

Hector didn't seem happy about my plans. He twisted around to try and watch behind himself, hearing a hoarse voice shouting for help in a street nearby, ending in a high-pitched scream.

'We've got to get out before they attack!' snapped Hector. 'If there are any zombies on the loose – OW!'

He howled in pain because I'd got him across the shins with my riot baton. He lay on the wet tarmac feeling sorry for himself until Tom hauled him upright.

'I warned you. Next time Tom will have permission to use his knuckledusters.'

'Sir!' shouted Tom, pointing. A man with his clothes covered in blood ran from between two shops, spotted us and ran at our party, snarling as he did so. Tom shot him, the SLR making a devastatingly loud bang between the houses. The noise of the shot echoed around the square.

'You fool! The noise will bring more of the – of them!' hissed Hector, nursing his shins. 'They're insanely violent!'

Tom loosed off another shot behind us.

'That was one in the alleyway sir. Got him in the head.'

'Yes I know how violent they can be, Hector. I've encountered them at Wandsworth. Feeling a little apprehensive, are we?' More shots in the distance, a whole fusillade of them.

Another raving psycho came at us from a dark alleyway, dragging one leg behind him. I gave him a three-round burst from the Sterling – normal model this time – and he went down.

Two more maniacs came at us at a dead run. My Sterling jammed before Tom dropped both of them.

'Bit hairy that, sir,' he warned.

'Yes. Well, we'll keep at it.'

'Get me out of here!' raged Finch.

Another pair of the diseased maniacs rushed us, and I dropped one with my .45 when the Sterling jammed again.

'Bloody duff ammo. That's scotched my plans a bit. Okay, Windmill 123, return to pick up.'

The noisy helicopter came down again, rotor wash sending stinging rain into our eyes. Tom clambered back in, and I kicked Finchy in the back of the left knee, causing him to collapse, before I climbed aboard.

The co-pilot, who was actually Doctor Jean Westlake, leaned back to shout at me. She'd been studying the prisoner from above, and whilst in transit, too. The helmet prevented Hector from seeing her face, women co-pilots not being common in UNIT. We'd picked her up in a rush, after a convincing phone call from Harry, which allowed Windmill 287 to get ahead of us and set up.

'Lieutenant! He's far more worried about being attacked than infected – he must have already taken the vaccine himself!'

'Did you get that, Harry?' I queried on the radio. 'Finch is a potential vaccine source himself.'

The Windmill pilot kept hovering at about nine feet above the ground, tempting and tormenting Finch, who tried to jump for the landing struts.

'Pick him up and bring him in!' shouted Harry. 'We can use him for the vaccine!'

Finch was shouting and raving below. I leaned out of the helicopter and cupped a hand to my ear.

'Sorry? What's that? Can't quite make it out, rotor noise, you know.'

'Let me in!' he shrieked. 'I can see them! In the alley!'

'Take her down for pick up,' I ordered the pilot. We touched down and Finch tried to throw himself in – being hindered by both of my boots, which kicked him out again.

'Please! They'll kill me!' he shouted.

'The vaccine? And your accomplices?'

'Luttrell! Luttrell! Has the vaccines!' he shouted, giving the name of the chap from Porton Down already suspected. Tom fired over his head, the SLR sending shudders through the chopper frame.

'More coming, sir,' he warned.

I leant closer to Hector.

'And where do we find Luttrell?'

'Chelsea Grove, in Wolverhampton. Flat 10, Number 18.'

I radioed the information to the Brig, who transmitted it to the police, who put the flat under observation. The SAS arrived within two hours, discreetly broke in and found Edward Luttrell had stabbed Conrad Tyler to death, but not before the latter had strangled the former. Phials of ECT 413 and the vaccine were found in the fridge, and contact details for the other three men still at large. Why had the two killed each other? We had to wait until Harry analysed the vaccine.

I got out of the helicopter and blew my whistle, three blasts, the signal for our little charade to end. The "corpses" got up and cursed the cold and rain, and various scrapes and bangs suffered rendering themselves realistically dead. Tom and I popped the mags full of blank rounds out of our weapons.

'Nice touch that, sir, your smudge jamming.'

'No acting, it really did jam!'

Finchy, of course, was furious that he'd been tricked, and made to look a fool and a cry-baby into the bargain. I put the hood back over his head, grinning triumphantly. UNIT personnel began to appear, amongst them Harry, who looked haggard, but pleased with our trickery.

The town wasn't Holyhead, either. Aberystwyth, on the west Welsh coast, as Holyhead took too long to reach. By hasty arrangement with the local electricity board we'd cut power to part of the seafront, evacuated the locals and asked the local police to cordon off a small part of the town. Since Finchy didn't see any of this thanks to his hood, for all he knew he had actually landed in Holyhead – one Welsh seaside town looking much like another; as long as he didn't see any signs with "Aberystwyth" we were safe. More blank rounds and some screaming from the team who arrived in Windmill 287 helped to set the scene. For an improvisation it didn't go too badly, and all from Major Crichton's brainwave.

Harry went at Hector with needles and swabs and took enough blood out of him to supply a transfusion ward. He wasn't gentle with the needles. The analysis made everybody happy, especially as Porton got cracking with producing proper vaccines. Everybody except Finchy, who looked as though he'd been smacked in the face with a spade.

That night Nick and I got our forty-eight hour pass, which we spent mostly in London, at Nick's batchelor pad. He hadn't invited me up there before, so this was an honour of unusual distinction. We got paralytically drunk, avoiding any mention of Wandsworth, and woke up next day with appalling hangovers. After a big greasy breakfast I fried for us, we went to the nearest pub for hair of dog.

'You've taken a lot of care about that model landscape in your back room, you hard working rascal,' I commented over a pint. Possibly one reason I'd been allowed into Nick's citadel was to admire a scale model of Aylesbury and grounds, and surrounding landscape. It was immense, easily nine feet square.

'Moi? Not I – all done by honest paid artisans.'

'Really? There are people making a living doing that?'

He nodded.

'More like cottage industry than proper businesses, but yes.'

'And those little model tanks?'

'Airfix. No, I didn't put them together or paint them. That was the boy Eden.'

Wow. Lots of work. My biggest suggestion to date had been getting the NBC suits.

'Given the Orange forces, can you prise some information out of the Doctor – weapons, tactics, order of battle? You and he are quids in.'

'Half an hour stuck in a lift and a couple of days in Russia don't make us best friends. Okay, okay, I'll see what I can do.'

The remaining three of Finchy's friends at large were collared at Heathrow, trying to board a flight to France, after their descriptions were circulated. It turned out they had chickened out of the whole deal once Operation Golden Age went toes-up. All the police needed to do to get an embarassing amount of information from these fugitives was to introduce Nick and myself as "the men who went into Wandsworth". We were standing in the car park of Bombay Street police station, after having been urgently flown down from Aylesbury but without having been told why, when a PC walked up and gave me a spade. The Deputy Commissioner who had run the liaison committee arranged for the prisoners to be walked past us; Nick and I didn't definitely know who they were, but we had a fair idea.

Finchy? Living proof that there is divine justice. The vaccine developed at Porton Down was, apparently, whipped up in a hurry: ECT 413 being a deterrent meant nobody would ever be insane enough to actually use it. Therefore, rush job, dodgy vaccine. Harry said it's no good at preventing anyone catching Backfire. Quite the contrary, any idiot who used it to inoculate themselves stands a good chance of developing the disease. We made sure that Finchy got told this, since his friends Luttrell and Tyler ended up as homicidal infected maniacs.

Finch may think we're lying; he may not ever develop the infection. However, I like to think of him, trussed up in a strait-jacket, in solitary on his prison island (the same one the Master escaped from a few years past), living in fear that one day, one fateful day, he will start to rant and rave and rip himself apart. And he'll have to live with that fear until he dies there.

In a fit of guilt, I also pestered the Brig to get Talfryn Davies posthumous recognition and reinstatement with UNIT. Without his call to us about ECT 413 we'd have been wrong-footed from the go.

'Oh, and John?' said the Brig before I got up to leave. 'I know you were a bit pressed, but "Brig" really isn't standard RT procedure.'

'Navy slang, sir, from hanging around with Harry,' I hastily replied. ' "Brig" means "prison" in the Senior Service. And since we were in Wandsworth …'

'I see your ability to twist the facts creatively hasn't deserted you!' he replied, drily.

Yes, but we still hadn't really found out why Finch wanted to rule the world.