UNIT UK 26

by ComsatAngel

What price eternal life? Two terminally-ill children lead UNIT to uncover the depths to which human - and alien - monsters can descend.

UNIT UK 26: SIC TRANSIT INNOCENTUM MUNDI

UNIT UK 26: SIC TRANSIT INNOCENTUM MUNDI

One: How to make a complete rse of yourself without even trying

One of the more surprising things about 1977 was the retirement of the Brig. Brigadier Alisatair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart had invented UNIT and been serving with it for the past nine years, so for him to decide on retirement might have been seen as coming out of the blue.

In fact, a few of us who knew about his involvement with a lady called "Doris" suspected that she might have a touch of responsibility for his decision. Not entirely wrong there – they were married at Easter-time the following year. Also, with a touch of wistfulness, the Brig revealed an ex-Army colleague of his had taken early retirement from a small public school in Dorset, leaving a vacancy for a mathematics tutor. Not wanting to fossilise in idleness, the Brig had thrown his hat in the ring, an informal chat ensued and he'd be teaching there in a few months.

It isn't widely known, but the Brig is a demon at arithmetic. More than once he's looked at charts or tables for spare parts, expenses, mileages or other tabulations I've had to present to him, added them up at a glance and informed me of the mistakes. As a subaltern he used to be given the chore of composing march tables for his company, then for his regiment and then for any higher formation, because he could do them in his head where other officers took hours of paperwork. So – teaching maths to a load of spotty youths didn't hold any great threat to him.

For his official retirement ceremony, the rarely used Function Room at UNIT HQ Aylesbury was given a polishing, we borrowed silver service from the Black Watch and hand-written invitations were sent out. This included that rarest of creatures – a journalist from the Times, who had connections at the Home Office. His copy would still get vetted by our censors at Project Broom before being published, though. We got apologies from the Home Secretary, hand-written, mind, and from the ex-Prime Minister. The senior Russian Military attache promised to come, as did the American equivalent when we casually informed him. The only person who couldn't be reached was our "Special Scientific Adviser", the Doctor. Typically, he was off gallivanting round in time and space. Yes, you read that correctly. The Doctor is – well, let's just say almost unique. And belive me, that "almost" came back to bite UNIT severely.

Given that a lot of VIP's would be attending the retirement ceremony, a large and imposing presence at the front gate was needed: me. Corporals Dene and Watson, properly scrubbed and starched, would be the checkers-in with myself, Lieutenant John Walmsley, to keep an eye on them.

Before departing to stand in the chill, I popped in to see the Brig whilst he was going over technical swap-over issues with UNIT's Second in Command, Colonel Crichton. These matters seemed to be helped along by a bottle of malt.

'No need to salute me!' joked the Brig when I did so out of sheer habit. Of course – he was out of uniform, which seemed strange.

'No, sir. I mean – well, the junior subalterns got together to get you a goodbye present, sir.'

'Really?' he replied, looking surprised. 'Not a clock!' he added, twitching his moustache.

'No, s - no,' and I handed over the envelope. 'Membership in perpetuity of the Prince Albert Fishing club. They have rights for fly-fishing on the River Lyle. In Dorset.'

'Oh,' said the Brig, at a loss for words. 'Ah. What a surprise! Tell the junior officers thank you from me.'

For a couple of hours various big-wigs rolled up, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Dennis Healey. His path and mine had crossed briefly in late 1976, when I created ripples in the politcal pool. He glanced at me and gave a nod of recognition, to which I responded with a swift salute.

Not terribly arduous duty, until a disturbing wheezing sound began to echo across the Aylesbury meadows. Having witnessed this previously, I knew what to expect.

'Sounds like a robot cow having a fit,' observed Corporal Dene.

'Ayup, the Doctor's back,' agreed Corporal Watson. 'Wonder what bird he'll have with him this time?'

Personally, I wondered why our resident alien would land out in the fields instead of the cosy basement lair he normally hides in.

Then, suddenly, a small man wearing a very large fur coat appeared in front of the gate.

'MoD property,' I called out, looking stern; Corporal Dene unslung his Sterling and Corporal Watson tried to look mean.

The small man seemed familiar. I'd probably seen him in the town. Given that his hair was glossy and black, I didn't associate him with Salamander, either.

'Oh no it's not,' he replied straightaway, approaching the barrier. 'Though it is easier to explain that United Nations Intelligence Taskforce property.'

All three of us were on our metaphorical toes straightaway; ninety nine per cent of the population don't know what "UNIT" stands for, and most of the one percent who do live in Aylesbury town, and are content to politely ignore us.

'Sorry, sir, no entry to civilians,' warned Corporal Dene.

'Not even to me? I am the Doctor, you know!' he said, sounding affronted.

From being suspicious, we now stared openly at him. He had a Beatle-cut hairdo, and a flute sticking out of a pocket of his giant fur coat. So, he was a wierdo.

'No you're not,' I replied, with a bit of vim. 'I know the Doctor, and you're not him!'

'Ah – which Doctor?' he asked, a wicked twinkle in his eye.

'The Doctor! What do – oh. The Fourth Doctor. And I knew the Third one before him.'

He pressed his fingertips together in glee.

'You can call me the Second Doctor, then. Splendid! All sorted?'

At that phrase I recalled that briefing session long ago, which listed different, earlier incarnations of Doctor "John Smith".

Great. I'd fluffed my introduction to both the Third and Fourth Doctors. Now I'd fluffed it with the Second version.

'Hang on, hang on! How can you be here at the same time as the Fourth Doctor!' I spluttered. 'Isn't that breaking time or common sense?'

'Our Doctor's not here at the moment, sir,' pointed out Corporal Dene.

'Quite!' agreed the Doctor. He looked slyly sideways. 'I'm not exactly breaking any rules. Just bending them a little,' and he mimed flexing a length of material.

'Come on,' I sighed. 'I'll walk you to the Guard Room or you'll have to explain to them all over again.'

We crunched up the gravelled driveway, the Doctor fairly brimming with exuberance.

'Can I ask what you're here for?' I asked, preparing for some grim news about a deadly alien menace to Planet Earth.

'Why, to see the Brigadier before he retires!'

'That's top secret!' I complained. 'How can – how did – oh never mind.'

Don't ask how a man from the past can trot around in the future where he also exists in a different version, even if both are from the far future. Hanging around the Doctor tends to send your sense of logic into knots.

I explained to the duty staff in the Guard Room exactly who our visitor was and they gave him an escort to the Brig's office. Apparently the cheeky rascal took a look at Colonel Crichton and quoted "yes my replacement didn't look up to much either", which implies that he knew what he'd look like in the future – logic in knots again. Then, if you can believe Rumour Dispersal, both the Doctor and the Brig got whisked off in time and space, had a big adventure and returned in time for tea.

TWO: Underwired and Undercut

Days after the Brig had left for the last time, I got a call from the Brig's office – which now had to be thought of as Colonel Crichton's Office – to attend, soonest.

I was nervous. Colonel Crichton is one of the cleverest people extant, having at least three degrees, and he normally hangs out at Swafham Prior researching alien kit that UNIT has got it's hands on. Being here at Aylesbury meant he was directing his beady eye upon us officers and enlisted men.

The Sergeant acting as Adjutant waved me through, with a warning nod of the head first. I paid attention. If your local NCO warns you of anything, pay attention.

Colonel Crichton sat with his back to the splendid picture windows, with a couple of military types lurking over on the right flank, over where the steps began.

'Ah. Hello Lieutenant,' he began, inspiring a big salute with stamping heels from yours truly. The floorboards shook a little under the impact of my DMP boots.

'Sir!' I snapped, every inch the professional soldier.

'At ease. In fact, take a seat. Do you recognise either of these two members of the Military Police?'

The Royal Military Police, universally known and disliked as the "Redcaps", are soldiers who police soldiers. I took a longer look at them: a Captain, who looked amused at the proceedings, and a female Sergeant, who managed to look simultaneously bland and cross with me.

'No sir. Should I?'

The Redcap Captain grinned in a manner the Cheshire Cat would have envied, whilst his sidekick looked even crosser.

Colonel Crichton leaned back in his chair and tapped a pen on his mouth.

'Congratulations, John. You've just passed your first Security Assessment Model Nine.'

I didn't have a witty come-back for that because I had to recall what the Model Nine was. Supervision? Being followed whilst off-duty? Socialising had something to do with it.

'You don't remember Sergeant Archer in a blonde wig and a push-up bra?' asked the Redcap captain, smirking hugely.

My mind whirled. A blonde wig and push-up bra? Where the hell would I – ah.

'At the Barley Mow, last week, right?' I recalled. True, there had been a woman trying to flirt with a couple of us off-duty officers, until I moved us on, away and back to HQ. The Barley Mow being our local, in fact the only local for miles, it tended to get used as an unofficial second mess by UNIT staff.

'I was behind the bar, listening in. You did a text-book job of closing down the conversation and departing, Lieutenant Walmsley. Well done,' congratulated the Captain. Both redcaps got up to leave before Colonel Crichton got his Parthian shot in.

'Sergeant Archer would have had better luck in a lab coat and glasses with the lieutenant, Captain,' he said, deadpan. Clearly, he was well aware of my weakness for clever women.

'I'll remember that, sir,' said the Sergeant, giving me a frosty look. 'That bra hurt,' she muttered.

Once we were redcap-free, the Colonel indicated a brand-new piece of furniture, a gleaming metal safe five feet tall, with an electronic keypad.

'Bought it myself,' he explained. 'The Brig's Edwardian cast-iron relic wasn't up to the job.'

'Looks expensive,' I commented, neutrally.

'Close on a thousand pounds,' he replied, making a face. 'And not nearly good enough.'

Well, it looked the business to me. The colonel carried on.

'When I opened it this morning, what did I find but this,' and he waved a sheet of paper at me, then passed it over. 'On paper from UNIT HQ in Geneva, no less!'

Quite right. It even had the UNIT watermark.

"Dear Colonel" began the elegant handwriting. "I regret that I won't be around quite as much as my predecessor to help you."

Then it wasn't left by the Brig. "predecessor" seemed to imply our occasionally present imp, the Doctor.

"However, I don't want to resign my post as Special Scientific Advisor" – aha! so it was from the Doctor. "And would like to leave this sheet to help inform you about potential threats. I can't be too explicit – causality and temporal flow, you see – and working things out for yourselves is splendid intellectual exercise."

I could almost imagine his cheerfully mocking smile whilst writing those last three words.

"Novitalin" was penned underneath his signature, carefully spelled out in upper-case. This was my first encounter with the ghastly, appalling nightmare of Novitalin.

'Some help,' complained Colonel Crichton. 'Unless he means that my safe isn't safe. Ten million combinations.'

'There's this word, sir: Novitalin.'

'What!' he exclaimed, snatching the letter back. 'That wasn't there five minutes ago!' He studied the paper carefully, then wryly shook his head. 'The Doctor!' he murmured. 'Common sense and logic go out the window when he arrives. Do you know, an earlier version of him turned up at the farewell reunion for the Brigadier?'

He sighed, an unusually human expression of weariness. Normally the Colonel exhibits all the demeanour of a computer.

'Are you alright, sir? You see unusually stressed,' I ventured, rather daringly.

'I am!' he agreed, with some force. 'The Cabinet are pressing for action, the Americans are begging us for liaison officers, Ulster is on the agenda again. Tomorrow I have to argue with the County Council about compensation for farmers whose land we want, and whose cows drop dead when we carry out a live fire exercise, and – oh, you get the gist. Plus I want a substitute for our absent Doctor. I was grateful you and the other off-duties got the thumbs up from the redcaps. And the Master has turned up again.'

The Master is the yin to the Doctor's yang: another alien humanoid, but as evil and corrupt as the Doctor is benign. He's on the hit list of Interpol and UNIT, MI6, the CIA and the Warsaw Pact. If he's around then he's up to mischief. Unofficially, I knew there was an unspoken agreement amongst the UNIT troopers that he wasn't going to be taken alive.

'Where was he spotted, sir?'

The colonel twirled a pen between his fingers.

'Florida. The FBI are panicking about what he was doing there. He left half a dozen miniature corpses behind, so they know it really was him. Anyway, that's beside the point. Saint Luke's rang – they need a Russian-speaker over there urgently, and you're it.'

The blood ran cold in my veins. Saint Luke's is a hospice for terminally-ill children; we first discovered it when one of my men nearly wrecked his motorbike at the gates, upon which the nuns looked after him. He avoided a painful death at my hands (it was a brand-new motorbike!) by suggesting that we "adopt" the hospice, which was an incredible boost for morale. Even the hardest-bitten troopers were liable to help; Assault Troop built an adventure playground in the back garden over the winter.

However. There are two things that turn me into a snivelling coward: weeping women and abused kids.

'Me, sir? Major Beresford is better at colloquial Russian than I am, sir,' I lied.

'Maybe so, but he's currently in mid-air over the Atlantic, so you're it.'

Great. I'd never been inside Saint Luke's and confidently never expected to. The Colonel looked at me with the ghost of a smile on his face.

'Not scared of a bunch of sick kids, are you, John?'

Mumble from me. He twirled his pen again.

'As I recall, you weren't in Belfast for more than thirty minutes before you clobbered someone for hitting a child, were you?'

I gaped in surprise. Yes; a drunken plonker had been hitting a small, dirty, poorly-dressed child of no more than five or six on a street corner. I'd been out of the Landrover and across the street in about two seconds flat, stamped on his foot, causing him to howl in pain, and then floored him with a left hook. The small child promptly kicked me for "hitting his da". I got shouted at by the battalion commander, but his adjutant shook my hand.

Now, my old platoon knew this, and my battalion commander, but nobody else. How Colonel Crichton found out is beyond me, since I didn't advertise my loss of temper.

'Off you go now,' said the colonel.

Great!

I needed a bit of moral support. Not human; it definitely wouldn't do to have a witness to my utter spinelessness at Saint Lukes, so I took Tig, who suffered to have a lead today.

'Captain Walmsley!' was my greeting at the doorstep of Saint Luke's – a whacking big old country house. 'Is that a fox?'

'Sister Callaghan, this is UNIT Trooper Seven Six One Two, "Tig". House-trained, sharp as a razor and good with children.'

Tig, canny little chap, sat down and looked at the nun with big, soulful eyes. She permitted him in with me and took me down the linoed corridor to a big, whitewashed room with high ceilings, where Sister Monaghan sat.

I'm not remotely religious, but I had a lot of time for Sister Monaghan. She's a doctor (who looked after Corporal Twiss when he came off his bike) who'd done medical missionary work in Indochina and Central Africa. She'd seen a lot in her sixty years and it took something bad to shake her.

She looked shaken now, which didn't inspire me.

'Ah – you needed a Russian speaker?' I began.

She took a drink of water before replying.

'This is so upsetting. We – we have two children who came in recently, brought here from Saint Ormond's. They can only speak Russian, and only a few words of that. So – I have no idea how to communicate with them. Can you help – oh!' she finished, catching sight of Tig.

Tig, realising he was in the presence of authority, sat on his haunches and pawed behind one ear, a trick taught to him that closely resembles saluting.

'Lead on,' I muttered. 'Oh – I brought Tig in because I am wretched with kids.'

Sister Monaghan then led me out of her room and across the hallway, where a small medical ward had been set up. These nuns didn't have two pennies to rub together, and what they did have, they spent on their children.

Only two of the six beds were occupied, by two small, dark-skinned children in a dreadful state. The boy was comatose and never regained consciousness; the girl was awake and coughed hollowly every few seconds. Neither of them had any hair left and their heads were covered in lesions and burns.

'Sdrasvuitye, dyevachka! Kak pojivayetye?' I began. No response from the girl. 'Moy imya Djon. Bolshye Djon. Kak vi?'

Still no response. Tig, feeling adventurous, got up and licked the girls hand, to the horror of Sister Monagahan.

'Zorro,' mumbled the girl, smiling. She lifted her head up to get a good look at Tig, then flopped back onto the bed.

'Novitalin,' she then pronounced, making me jump. I leaned in closer and stared at Sister Monaghan in amazement.

'Novitalin,' repeated the girl, quietly.

'You see?' said the nun. 'Tallinn is in Russia, and "Novy" is Russian for "New", so I thought – oh, what is it?'

Out of earshot, I stared at her with a Number One Ferocious Glare, which didn't bother her one bit.

'Sister, Tallinn is in Estonia. The Estonians would rather chew coal than speak Russian. She didn't recognise a word I spoke. She's not Russian.' I wasn't going to mention anything about the Doctor's mysterious letter about Novitalin, but I did wonder about mentioning that cheesy film hero "Zorro".

Back in her office, I got a cup of tea from Sister Callaghan, and needed it. The doctor took a deep breath and carried on about the two waifs.

'They have brain tumours and brain damage and they won't see the end of the week. The horrible thing is, Captain – well, I think this was done to them deliberately!'

My skin crawled, literally; it tried to creep off my bones.

' "Done"? What do you mean by "done to them"?' I asked, unpleasantly aware that the answer was going to be horrid.

'Radiation sickness.'

Ping! went the handle of the cup as I cracked it.

'Je – you mean somebody deliberately did that to those children!' I snapped, beginning to get angry.

Sister Monaghan nodded.

'Saint Ormond's thought so too. A fatal dose of very high-energy radiation, delivered only to the head.' She paused for another sip of water. 'I thought, you know, if they were Russians that the KGB might have behaved like that.'

I shook my head.

'Sister, Russians are even bigger softies about kids than I am. The KGB officer who proposed doing this would end up doing ten years in a gulag.'

She wrung her hands.

'Oh, John, I've seen all sorts of evil under the sun in my time abroad, but this – this is simply awful. Awful.'

Tig, once again showing how smart he is, went over and nuzzled her hand.

'Oh!' she gasped, then smiled. 'You're a charmer, aren't you!' and she looked at me again. 'Would you mind taking him back in to see Anna? I haven't seen her smile at all since she got here.'

She looked about ready to cry, so I ran away with Tig. The girl, christened Anna, was delighted to see Tig again, so I got to spend half an hour seeing a small child dying in front of my eyes.

When I got back to Aylesbury I was still furious. I signed in at the Guard Room and picked up their phone.

'QMS Campbell?' I barked down the line. He barked a "yes - sir" back at me. 'Order another punching bag for the gym.'

'Have you split open another one?' he asked, crossly.

'No, but I am about to!' I snarled back.

I did indeed spend half an hour knocking the punching bag around, ending up with bloody knuckles and a split bag, before I'd calmed down enough to report back to the Colonel.

'Good Lord, you look dreadful!' he commented, before I got a word in. 'Here, have a drop of this.'

Brandy, good stuff. It went down a treat.

'Bad?' he asked.

'Worse than you can imagine, sir.' I retold what had transpired, making him sit up and exclaim "WHAT!" when the quote about Novitalin came up.

' "Zorro"? Spanish for "fox", John. So they speak Spanish.'

He looked at me with his typical dispassionate air.

'This is your case, now, John. I want to knew who, where, why, when and what about those kids. Get The – ah, Lieutenant Eden to cover for your post, and take a trooper along to help.'

I chose Private Pooley, who is able to navigate by mysterious means and never gets lost. He didn't look happy at the news about "Boris" and "Anna", but then again no human being would.

First course of action: location. I rang the Leicestershire police, who told me all they knew, which wasn't much: a farmer had rung them to say two desperately sick kids were in his cabbage field, just outside Brompton. Gorse Farm. They would send a uniform to meet us there.

'Right, Trooper Pooley. Gorse Farm, just outside Brompton, Leicestershire.'

The drive wasn't long, and I used it to wonder why the hell someone had chosen to kill two mystery children in such a bizarre fashion. Nuclear physics isn't my field, but radiation poisoning is a wildly exotic way to murder someone. Which led to my next determination – to see the staff at Great Ormond Street, preferably without seeing any of the kids.

'There's the blubottle, sir,' said Pooley, breaking my train of thought. The constable was a great big cheery fellow, only slightly subdued by what he'd witnessed. He stood by the wire fencing at the roadside and pointed out over the flat fields of cabbages to the south.

'The farmer found them in that field, brought them round here to the road to meet us. You could tell they were in a bad way straight off, burned and all.'

I looked up and down the road. Out in the middle of nowhere, with woods on one side and farmland on the other. It would be bleak in winter, and even now it felt chilly and lonely.

'Is there anywhere local they might have come from?'

The officer shook his head.

'It's a good five minute drive to Brompton from here. Oh, that's another thing – they were barefoot, but their feet weren't cut or bruised or dirty, so they didn't walk here.'

More puzzling still! Why go to all the bother of giving your victims a dose of gamma rays, then take them for a drive and then let them wander off, to be discovered?

'No witnesses?' asked Pooley, to a shake of the head from the policeman, who shrugged and made his way back to the patrol car.

'I only wish! Whoever did this deserves a right roasting. You find them, give 'em one up the arse from us, eh?'

Pooley nudged me in the ribs as the panda drove off.

'Sir,' he said, nodding at the woods on the far side of the road. A plait of smoke was curling above the firs, coming from a point about a hundred yards in.

'Possible witness?' he suggested. A long shot. I'm glad we took it.

The brown layer of dead cones and needles on the ground kept our footsteps quiet and we came upon the fire and it's owner entirely unseen. He was a shabby-looking customer, dirty around the face, poking around the embers of his fire with a stick.

'Eh! Oh, ah, Jaysus, ye scared me!' he gasped in a thick Irish accent when Pooley and I came into his eyeline.

'Afternoon, dad. Feel like being helpful?' asked Pooley.

'I didn't steal 'em!' he croaked.

'Don't worry, we're not the police, and I don't care what you didn't steal,' I reassured him, giving the general area the once-over. Then I realised he was roasting several potatoes in his fire.

'It's about those kids who were found in the farmer's field, dad,' said Pooley.

The tramp spat and crossed himself.

'Ah, the wains. Aye, I was going to tell the farmer mesel, but he found 'em anyway.'

Result!

'You saw them? Did you see how they got there?' I asked, upon which his expression got crafty.

'Ye wouldn't have a drop upon ye, would ye, sir?' he asked, grinning. Pooley looked cross, and an earlier version of me would have applied choke-hold to throat.

'Nope, we don't drive around with alcohol. However - ' and I took a tenner out of my wallet. 'No romancing. Just the truth.'

'Ooh, the truth, ye say.' He looked at me and calculated. 'The truth, sir, is that I pass by this way every week. Every week. There's often some vegetables to be found in the fields here, ye see.'

Like his non-stolen potatoes.

'I heard a wagon stop by the other week, and I was worrit it may be the farmer, so I stay in the trees, but I look out and what do I see?'

With a sense of drama, he chose to poke the potatoes before continuing.

'A van, and a man pushing two wains out the back before driving off again.'

'Would you recognise the man again?' I asked.

'Wouldn't know him from Adam,' declared the tramp with relish. Damn! Bang goes a witness statement.

'The van, though, that was white, with a big blue "A" on the side. I'd recognise that again,' he stated, poking his potatoes and looking at me from the corner of his eye.

'Not bad for a tenner, sir,' observed Pooley as we clambered back into the landrover.

'Yeah. Wonder if I can claim it back as expenses? Right. Next stop Great Ormond Street.'

Great Ormond Street Hospital is a giant Victorian building dedicated to sick kids. The most interesting thing about it is that the creator of Peter Pan, J Barrie, gave them the copyright in perpetuity of "Peter Pan", so they have a constant flow of funds. And sick kids.

Typically, and slightly spookily, Pooley got us there in record time, despite it being his first ever visit.

'You alright, sir? You seem a bit peaky.'

I winced.

'Lots of sick kids in one place. I hope not to see any of them!'

He grinned an unsympathetic grin.

The starchy receptionist was alarmed at first to see two soldiers come into her building, and two soldiers from UNIT at that. She bristled at my request, of course.

'Can you see the surgeon who dealt with "Anna" and "Boris"? Certainly not!'

I rolled my eyes at Private Pooley, who looked on with interest, possibly anticipating a very loud shouting match.

That would have been my preferred option previously. Now it came down to low animal cunning.

'Do you like your job?' I cooed, with mock-sincerity, flashing my ID card. 'Because if I call my OC, it will take about thirty minutes for you to collect your P45 and be on the way to the dole office.'

'Probably only fifteen, sir. The Colonel wasn't in a good mood this morning,' put in Private Pooley.

The flinty receptionist remained silent, looking at me with ill-concealed dislike. She picked up a phone and muttered into it.

'In theatre,' she triumphantly declared. 'You'd have to wait at least an hour.'

'Fine. Then we'll wait. There. That wasn't too hard, was it?'

Pooley and I found chairs and sat, and waited. To break the monotony I sent the private out to get sandwiches, which he came back with in less than five minutes.

'Cheese and onion, ham and tomato, beef and pickle, sir. Take your pick.'

'How did you find a shop so quickly?' I asked. 'You'd have been hot stuff fighting the Minotaur, you know.'

We cooled our heels for another hour, whilst incoming and departing parents and children looked at us with a combination of curiosity and wonder. Eventually a big, balding man wearing tweeds came to collect us.

'Professor Arbuthnot,' he introduced himself. Unlike the receptionist, he couldn't do enough to help us, taking us back to his offices, where he stoked up a Meerschaum pipe. He took in our UNIT brassards without commenting.

'This, I take it, is about our discharged clients Anna and Boris.'

'Yes, Professor. I can't go into details, but they are connected with an investigation currently underway. We don't know if they're a cause or effect, so I've been sent to ask questions.'

He fired up the pipe and nodded at me.

'I'll need to get our specialist in. Doctor Pottinger. Radiologist.' A phone call went out and the other doctor arrived, a lithe West Indian with a plummy accent and a big cheery grin. 'Here about Anna and Boris,' explained Professor Arbuthnot.

That drove his cheery grin away.

'Desipcable business,' growled the doctor. 'Quite the worst incident I can imagine. Malicious to a degree.'

'I'm not a physicist, doctor, but I do understand something about radiation and it's effects on human beings. The Rule of Seven, alpha particles, ionizing radiation. Killing a person this way is - deliberately or not – is peculiar and difficult.'

Doctor Pottinger scowled again. UNIT were really putting a damper on his day.

' Oh, it was deliberate. The tissue damage, skin lesions, and the burns all indicate that the radioactive source was applied uniformly across the whole head. A deliberate use of a high-energy source, probably gamma. Whoever is responsible took their time and did the job very carefully.'

Private Pooley looked as bilious as I felt; who the hell could inflict that kind of slow death on a kid?

Professor Arbuthnot broke in, to add more puzzlement.

'What we found strange was the condition of these children. No, I don't mean the radiation effects. They'd been innoculated, had dental work carried out, given a proper diet. They'd been looked after quite effectively before they were irradiated.'

Once more this didn't make sense. Why would you fatten up your victims if you were going to kill them slowly and painfully? Why fatally irradiate them and then release them?

'I see. Rather, I don't see. Oh – we did discover that the girl spoke Spanish.'

Professor Arbuthnot's eyes narrowed.

'Not Russian, then? No, I didn't think so. Spanish?'

'Spanish-speaking,' I corrected.

The professor chewed a thumbnail reflectively.

'I think you've solved the question of where these children came from. Latin America.'

When he filled in more details, it made sense. You couldn't kidnap children from Spain, the Spanish authorities would notice missing kids. Interpol might be notified, other police forces get to know of the missing. No, a modern European nation made a poor hunting ground if you wanted to kidnap and kill children.

On the other hand, there were street gangs of orphaned and abandoned children who lived on the streets of countless towns in Central and Southern America. Nobody would notice or care if they disappeared. Kids like that would have poor teeth, bad nutrition, no immunisation; and nobody to protect them, either.

There still remained the purpose of kidnap. None of us had anything resembling a convincing idea; later on, I was to realise that Colonel Crichton had begun to suspect what had really happened and was taking steps by having me investigate. Doctor Pottinger also voiced a suspicion, that given the amount of effort needed to inflict fatal injury on these two children, there might have been other cases that hadn't come to light yet.

Once escaped from the hospital without having to endure the sight of sick children, I was struck by a brainwave. We had a description of our suspect's van, and here we were in Central London where my dead good mate Stan worked.

Actually he wasn't a friend of mine, he detested the air I breathed and he wasn't slow about letting me know I wasn't on his Christmas card list. Brave fella, Stan, but then you have to be in his line of work (Traffic Warden). Since being awarded the OBE and getting promoted, he didn't pound the streets of London any more, so I knew just where to find him. Behind a desk in the local council offices.

'You!' was Stan's venomous greeting when he saw Private Pooley and myself looming up in front of his typewriter. 'Come to grey me hair even more, eh?'

I sat myself down on the scuffed plastic chair in front of the desk whilst Pooley trimmed his nails with a wicked-looking knife. Wham wham wham went Stan's fingers on the keys, hinting that perhaps we weren't welcome, exactly.

'You know, Stan, Private Pooley and I were in the neighbourhood and I decided to call in on my very best chum in all the world.'

Cue a string of muttering from Stan, obviously swearing.

'Because we have a problem.'

Stan brightened at that.

'You see, we need to identify a van. And, I thought, who better to identify a van than my very best chum in - '

'You can cut that out, chum,' interrupted Stan as other council staff looked at us with interest and hostility combined. 'Get on with it.'

He got a description of the white van and blue logo.

'Why should I help you lot, eh? Kidnappers!'

He referred to my treatment of him earlier that year. Even so, it was too good to miss, and Pooley leant closer to whisper at the human acid-drop. Stan's face scrunched up into a malicious expression that curdled the milk in his mug of tea.

'Gimme yer number,' he barked, and snatched the card out of my hands. 'I'll call you back.'

For a curmudgeonly git, Stan could move fast when needed. I got his call at Aylesbury later that afternoon.

'The van you wanted to know about. Comes from Anax Pharma – A-N-A-X. Now, can I get on with me life and not fear imminent death from you lot? Thank you. Thank you so much.'

'No, Stan, thank you,' I smarmed, going for annoyingly sincere. He put the handset down with a resounding clatter.

Bingo! A result. Thanks to our eye-witness and Stan's transport contacts. I went along to see the Colonel, just to keep him up to speed on what we were discovering, and saw him visibly jerk in his seat when I mentioned the chemical company.

'Spell that, please,' he asked, getting up to open his spanking new safe and taking out a thin file with TOP SECRET in large bold lettering all over the front. He checked the file and shook his head, then looked back up at me. 'You didn't do Latin or Greek at school, did you, John?'

No. I managed to bumble my way through O-Level French because you needed that to get into University, then promptly forgot it all. This was a source of much amusement to Marie.

' "Anax" comes from the Greek. Bit of a stretch, but the closest equivalent in contemporary English is "Master". '

My lips remained sealed, while a long string of curses ran across my tongue. The Master! Right, and he'd been seen in Florida recently.

Colonel Crichton tapped the file.

'A precaution of mine. A list of different words in different languages that all translate to "The Master".'

Typical Colonel Crichton. Thinking ahead of the field. Other bits of the puzzle fell into place.

'The inhuman treatment of kids would be right up his alley, wouldn't it, sir?'

The colonel wrapped one hand around the other, his knuckles showing white.

'Yes indeed. We're a lower life form to him. Similar to monkeys or chimps. Anax. Let me see what else we can come up with on them.'

Anax Pharmaceuticals turned out to be a large factory in Berkshire, isolated and set amidst carefully-planted trees that shielded it from the nearby roads. We had photographs in large formats within a couple of hours of discovering what "Anax" meant, thanks to an overflight by the RAF and a delivery by motorcycle courier.

When I say "we" I mean the Colonel and myself. For the moment he kept his cards close to his chest and didn't want anyone else involved, so yours truly got to find out even more information. There were telephone calls to Company House, the Home Office and Berkshire county council, with the Colonel wielding his authority in order to get results by implying dire retribution to anyone who failed to co-operate fully. Quite a contrast to the Brig, who had relied more on his personable manner and history.

Before knocking-off time, the Colonel's office had a set of architectural plans from a firm that had done recent work on the factory, a list of staff, products that Anax made, and details of two sites based in London: an office suite that was their corporate headquarters, and a slightly-mysterious second office that was far smaller and set in a backwater in Camden. It appeared that Anax had been bought out by a front company over a year ago in a speculative investment.

Whilst collating all this data, my mind worked on exactly what the Master had been up to. He was ruthless, but didn't go in for pointless, casual sadism, so there must be a reason behind his involvement with Anax.

Next day brought more bad news: Anna had died. The joint funerals would be held at the nearby parish church of Saint Stephens-on-Wold, and the Colonel grimly informed me that I would be present as a reminder to anyone who might be monitoring their escaped victims that UNIT was going to track them down.

Another unpleasant arrival at Aylesbury was Major Mike Mirthless, an officer from the SAS whom we'd dealt with occasionally in the past. He made my unsmiling countenance look like Bungo the Happy Clown, and I'm sure he drowned puppies for fun. What he came for was secret and between himself and the Colonel. Once he'd gone I got orders to attend an ante-room where all the photos and drawings were pinned up on boards.

Stood in the middle of the room, the Colonel looked sideways at me and gave me the once-over – for no good reason.

'John, I want an operational plan to attack, occupy and control that factory. Get Lieutenant Munroe to draw it up. Don't divulge why or what. Need to know. To be named Operation Rubicon.'

I chewed my lip.

'I know what you're thinking, John: take the Swingfire troop up there, destroy the factory and bayonet anyone who survives! However, there may be kids still in there. And I want live prisoners, who can give us the full story.'

I passed on the instructions to Lieutenant Munroe in his well-appointed room, who creased his brow and looked at me with suspicion. Orders being orders, he called in the Assault Platoon NCO's and pored over the plans for the Anax factory site that I gave him.

'Are you feeling okay?' he asked. 'You look queasy. Too many pies?'

'Funeral to attend,' I told him, gloomily.

'Ah. The Russian kids. I'd offer to come - '

'Don't worry, just get cracking on those plans. The Colonel wants to see them within six hours.'

I tootled off to Saint Stephen's that morning in a UNIT lannie, and much to my surprise found half a dozen other UNIT landrovers outside the little country church. Once inside I realised why the transport: CSM Benton had rounded up thirty off-duty troopers and chivvied them along to the service. It was a very down-beat ceremony indeed, with us, the vicar, a handful of nuns and a mystery man-in-a-suit. He vanished after the coffins were taken to the graves, so I put him down as a Ministry of Defence wallah, that or MI5.

CSM Benton, looking grim, took me aside after the coffins were lowered.

'The people who did this are going to get a right stuffing, aren't they, sir?'

Clenching my fists, I nodded, not feeling up to talking. The Colonel might very well want live prisoners, so we couldn't kill them. We couldn't kill them, so anything short of that would be okay.

In fact, things were going to get even worse.

When I got back to my room and changed into combat dress, I got a call from the Colonel.

This time he had another officer in his office – Captain March, the human chameleon, in civvies and looking stunned.

'John, take a seat. Shame you put your uniform back on, because I want you to accompany the Captain here in mufti. You are going to be posing as members of the Charity Commision.'

So saying, he passed over a docket of papers and an ID card in the name of "Jack Wellington", featuring an hideous passport photo of me that I didn't suspect existed.

'Fitz will lead, all you have to do is nod and look stern. Oh, and Nick has come up with a plan that looks good. I'll be going over it in the hall tonight, so be back for six.'

Captain March had to cool his heels by his personal car until I raced back to my room and got changed, retaining my Colt in the bum-holster that Nick had "obtained" for me, and then ran back to meet him. My assumption was that Charity Commissioners operated in pairs, so two UNIT personnel were needed, and keeping me as one meant one less other person who didn't need-to-know.

On the matter of need-to-know, I knew there'd be trouble over not telling Nick what Anax had been doing to children. With his family contacts, old-boy networking and essential nosiness, he'd find out sooner not later, and he'd confront me.

'You don't smoke, do you, John?' asked the Captain whilst we drove into London. 'Excuse me while I light one. Okay, the Colonel wants us to have a word with one of Anax's sub-companies.'

This sub-company turned out to be that small property in Camden. The Colonel's poking around had revealed that it was the base for Anax's "Charitable Function" arm and he wanted people on the ground to have a look-see at what it was. He suspected that it was involved with the trafficking of street kids from South America in some way, and Fitz and I were to sound the ground.

'D'you think The Master is still around, sir?' I asked. I didn't know him that well and keeping a bit of formality seemed safest.

He snorted in reply.

'Don't bloody think so! He knows full well if he remains here on Planet Earth he'll have every policeman, secret agent, UNIT trooper and who knows else on his tail. Shoot to kill on sight without warning. No, I think he's long gone, but we have to follow procedure.'

Fidgeting, I pulled the Colt free from the holster and checked the action just in case we did meet The Master. Fitz frowned in alarm.

'Damn! That's a serious bit of kit, John. Don't put gun oil on the seats, it's hard to get out.'

The ammunition was more of Nick's special I-have-contacts-who-have-contacts stuff – armour-piercing and frangible dum-dums in alternate order. Technically illegal, but who's looking?

The Kensington office had already arranged an interview for us at three-thirty. We parked at Kensington and took a taxi over to Camden, where the Anax office resided as one of a dozen in a smart office block.

"FLOOR 4: ANAX PHARMA GOODWORKS" read the card set next to the buzzer. Fitz rang and a scratchy voice invited us in as the electric door lock buzzed open.

The building – Kestrel House – was new, bright, shiny and clean. Nice premises if you could afford them. Anax must be making plenty of moolah if they could afford to set a charity branch in a building like this. Fitz warned me in the lift about behaving.

'Right. Let me do the talking. If I lean or nod towards you, John, come in with an affirmative. A nod, grunt, "yes", that sort of thing.'

The corridor on Floor Four fronted several offices, and the one we wanted was at the far end. A small plaque outside read ANAX PHARMA GOODWORKS J MORBEN. Fitz knocked and got a muffled "come in", so we did.

I had imagined a secretary sitting in front of a switchboard, in front of a frosted-glass interior where her boss held court. In fact the office consisted of a desk, with a youngish man sitting behind it, an array of filing cabinets, and a potted palm. He stood up to greet us.

'Hello there! I'm Jeremy Morben.'

He stuck out a hand and we both shook.

'Frederick Montford, and this is my colleague Jack Wellington,' said Fitz. 'As you know, we're here from the Charity Commissioner's office. By some oversight your organisation has not been audited, or even examined, so we're here to – well, to prime the pump.'

His tone was matter-of-fact, as if he'd been doing investigations like this for years and years. Mister Morben nodded, apparently persuaded.

'Quite! Please, ask away. Oh – I have to warn you, to keep overheads down I am literally the only person here.'

'That smacks of good intent,' said Fitz, looking at me. I nodded and pursed my lips. 'Though I have to ask how you cope with the administration.'

Jeremy Morben shrugged.

'Dealt with by Head Office. If I want anything typed or carbon-copied or sent out then they do it all. Of course we keep the files to do with the kids here, but there is a delay of about a week before it comes back.'

Fitz nodded, so I nodded too. I would have been off after that quote about the kids, but Fitz was a lot cooler.

'Let's start at the beginning, Mister Morben - '

Mister Morben waved his hands frantically.

'Please! Call me Jeremy! Really, there's no need to be so formal. I know you need to keep a certain distance, but – Jeremy.'

'Jeremy. Can you give us a little background about yourself?'

Jeremy turned out to be an interesting character. He'd been a stockbroker by profession. After suffering a crisis of conscience and a breakdown about making amoral millions, he packed in stocks and shares to go travelling around the world. He witnessed things in India that propelled him towards volunteering for Christian Aid and Voluntary Service Overseas, eventually ending up in Africa. The Belgian Congo, then Biafra, then Angola. After being robbed at gunpoint for the third time, he decided that charity admin would be safer for him. A position at Anax came up, he applied, and here he was.

'What kind of model does Anax operate?' asked Fitz.

'I understand it's a tax-deductible hedge based in Monaco that provides capital for the charity. Mister Anax explained it all to me when he interviewed me,' explained the bright and breezy Jeremy. 'He's a Greek shipping magnate, who was looking to diversify. He bought up Schoon and Hollitzer Pharmaceuticals, and then went looking to do something humane with the profits. So he founded Goodworks.'

The word "humane" echoed a little hollow, since if we were correct, "Mister Anax" was actually The Master.

'Schoon and Hollitzer. Have you been out to the factory site?' asked Fitz.

Jeremy frowned.

'No, not yet at any rate. Mister Anax did explain why I couldn't go to see them, but I forget – uh – that is – '

He frowned for a second, then smiled again.

'Made perfect sense then, anyway!'

Yes, I bet it did. Just stare into The Master's eyes and obey his every whim. Evil alien !

'Right. Now, as I said already, we are only here to establish an overview. Get the basics. How do you operate?'

Our ever-cheerful host explained that he co-ordinated operations from here in London with that of Anax's overseas branch in Sao Paulo, in Brazil. They would notify him of an inbound transport of children, who would be picked up from Heathrow, then taken to the site in Berkshire. Up to sixteen of the little loves would be taken to the factory's on-site nursery, where they would receive state-of-the-art medical attention, innoculations, dental treatment, dietary analysis, exercise and general tender loving care. Prospective foster-parents would come to see them, fall in love and take them away.

Yeah. Right.

That session was one of the more unpleasant ones I'd undergone in UNIT. Here was Jeremy Morben, enthusiastic, commited and sincere, all in the pursuit of that alien dastard The Master's scheme. The crunch came when Fitz asked about numbers overall, a question I'd have asked in the first five seconds.

'Oh, yes, we're very proud of that. To date, we've managed to find homes and parents for a hundred and thirty seven children.. Imagine that!'

Mister Morben might have continued wittering on after that, but my traitorous clenching stomach, reduced to the size of a walnut, prevented me from paying attention.

One hundred and thirty seven children. Even Fitz, master of acting, went pale and blinked a lot. I must have made a noise, since Jeremy beamed at me.

'Impressive, isn't it!'

It truly was, but not in the way he thought.

'And – and what about new arrivals?' asked Fitz. Jeremy checked his desk calendar.

'Bit of a moveable feast. We can't guarantee to have kids here on schedule, not with how they get rescued from the streets of Sao Paulo. Within a month.'

Fitz pulled paperwork out of his briefcase and turned to me.

'Let's get out of here, sir,' I mumbled.

'Exactly,' he said aloud, turning back in the correct upright posture to face Jeremy Morben. 'Thank you for the background information, Mi – Jeremy. We'll be in touch soon, but in the meantime here's my card.'

In fact it was a card with a fake phone number – if rung, the Post Office's telephone branch would route it to our Kensington Office where a secretary would pretend to be a Charity Commission worker, the better to sustain our pretence.

I nearly threw up in the lift on the way down. Luckily Fitz had a can of coke in his briefcase and guzzling that prevented me from being sick. He looked as if he'd been punched in the stomach.

'Christ John – I expected a couple of dozen kids at the worst!'

Those numbers were way, way off. My intellect, not up to that of either the Colonel or the Doctor, nevertheless recognised that. One hundred and thirty five other kids who went through what Anna and Boris had suffered. The Master was no longer around, not now that he knew he'd be hunted down like a rabid dog. What connection did these children have with him, and why were they still being taken off the streets of South American slums?

There was news awaiting us at Kensington; a private stood by our lannie and requested that we follow him upstairs. A Deputy Commissioner from the Metropolitan Police was pacing around in the lobby, cradling a sheet of typed paper, looking restless and perhaps wondering about the big new plasterwork on the walls.

'Commissioner McKee asked me to give you the information in person,' he explained. 'Passed on from the Berkshire force. A van-driver called Bert Price committed suicide two weeks ago. He worked for a company called Anax, apparently. Is that any help to you?'

Fitz and I exchanged meaningful glances, but I let him comment, being the senior.

'Yes. Yes it is, thank you, sir.'

He gave us a doubtful look before passing over the sheet of paper.

'I hope so, I hope so. I don't really hold with paramilitaries carrying out police work.'

Says he! If the boot was on the other foot he'd be complaining – okay constable, take your truncheon and stop that group of Cybermen –

'Do the desk wallahs here have road atlases?' asked Fitz, looking over the typed information.

They did, for the whole of the UK. The Met's typed sheet had details about Bert Price, including his place of residence – Middle Dibney. A drive along the B roads from the Anax factory to Middle Dibney brought you right past Brompton and the farm where those two dying children had been let loose.

Nor was that all. Bert was a childless widower, living alone in a cottage. It took the neighbours a day to discover that his van hadn't moved from outside his home, that the lights weren't on and that full milkbottles sat on his front doorstep uncollected. They called the police, who came round and disturbed burglars – or so they assumed, initially. These burglars had broken in at the rear of the cottage and had ransacked it, then set a fire in the kitchen, which the constables promptly put out with a bowl of washing-up water before it got hold.

However. These burglars hadn't taken any of Bert's money. He had a goldfish bowl, empty of fish, sitting on top of his television, full of loose change - untouched. His wallet had been searched, emptied across the floor in fact, but the pound notes in it weren't touched. The few books he had were literally torn apart, ripped spine from pages. Carpets were turned up at the corner of rooms. Cupboards had been physically emptied of contents. Bert himself had been roughly searched, said the forensics people.

'Ghouls,' commented Fitz. Bert had killed himself in simple yet effective manner, putting both barrels of a double-barrelled shotgun into his mouth and pulling the trigger. The forensic's report on the sheet was concise and unemotional, but I knew the kind of damage a shotgun at that range would inflict. So, yes, the people doing the molestation of a man without any head were ghoulish indeed.

Snap! went my fingers, as I realised what had been going on.

Fitz sat on one of the plain plastic chairs in the lobby and watched the duty warden in his booth watch the both of us.

'Is this where you faced-off the dinosaurs, John? I just realised why there's so much new plastering.'

'Ah – yes, sir. I think I know why Bert Price's cottage was such a mess.'

He waved vaguely.

'The police report doesn't mention a suicide note. I think the so-called burglars were really from Anax, sent there to find out why their man wasn't at work. They find out why, big time!'

It made sense. Had Bert left a suicide note? Nobody knew. If he had, then the burglars had found it and made off with it. Perhaps he hadn't left a note, merely killed himself, and the intruders had frantically searched for an incriminating note that didn't exist, destroying the cottage's fittings to do so. As to the "why" of killing himself, pretty obviously he developed a conscience about what Anax were doing, poor sod.

Captain March stopped being vague and looked at me.

'Come on. Back to Bucks for the both of us.'

The next day was a long, slow accumulation of data, cross-referencing, collating, copying and fending-off an angry Nick.

He had, inevitably, found out what Anax were up to, and came into my office whilst I was trying to type up details of the Goodworks operation in Camden, and how it tied into the Brazilian connection abroad.

'Knocking gone out of fashion?' I enquired, still intent on my four-finger hammering. A loud grating echoed around the room as Nick threw himself into the plastic chair facing my desk.

'Don't give me that you Wigan - ' followed by a list of words that also began with "W". 'Why didn't you tell me what those - ' long Anglo-Saxon list of cursing deleted ' – at Anax were doing!'

This typing wasn't going to get finished unless I saw Nick off.

'Because the Colonel specifically ordered me not to tell you. Nick, you can't hate those bastards at Anax more than I can. What we need from you and Assault Platoon is a plan that gets us in there quickest, with the least shooting. If you knew beforehand what they were up to – well, join the dots.'

'Swingfire … bayonets … grenades …' he muttered.

'My idea exactly when the Colonel asked. I quite forgot that there may still be kids in there already. Anyway, how the hell did you find out about Anax?'

A nasty smirk that a crocodile would have envied spread across his face.

'Brother Duncan. You know, that pen-pushing arse-polishing desk-driver in the MoD. He says that there's one hell of a lobbying effort going on at Whitehall, and has been for the past couple of weeks, pushing something called "Novitalin". It's made by the company called Anax, whose factory I have to plot an assault upon, and I understand a couple of kids were kicked out of an Anax van in Berkshire.'

I stopped and stared.

'Lieutenant Munroe, please get your brother to detail the exact time this lobbying began.'

Whilst he can play the buffoon to perfection, Nick isn't actually stupid. He knew there were serious matters in play here, and me using his rank meant I was being seriously serious.

'Very good Lieutenant Walmsley!' he snapped, giving me a salute.

'Also, nip over to the Colonel and tell him what you told me.'

What I didn't know at the time, and only pieced together later thanks to Brigadier Billiere when we met again, was that Colonel Crichton had managed to obtain a favour from the Special Air Service. They had several teams in a perimeter around the Anax factory, watching and observing from hides in the woodland surrounding the plant.

The SAS, as they are known, are an elite branch of the British Army. Very few people outside the armed forces have ever heard of them, and they aren't that well-known within the regulars. What they are good at is mounting covert overwatch; spying, if you like. Their job was to watch the factory and make an alarm call if any new children arrived, or any other unusual arrivals or departures. According to their reports, which only Colonel Crichton saw, there might still be as many as three children still on the premises.

Next morning we had another visit from the Deputy Prime Minister, Denis Healey, whilst he was travelling north to the Labour Party conference in Blackpool. He made a slight detour to Aylesbury and a quick visit to the Colonel's office. He dropped off a phial containing 20cc's of fluid that had all the effect of a pocket nuclear weapon.

'Novitalin,' he'd informed the Colonel. A lobbying company (previously retained by the South African mining company De Beers and hence not to be trusted) was even at this moment desperately trying to pressure MPs in Westminster, and senior civil servants, and members of the police and fire service. Mister Healy trusted UNIT more than he trusted the Met, or the regular army's Military Police. Which is to say, not a lot, though a lot more than not at all.

Surgeon Lieutenant Harry Sullivan, the perpetually boyish doctor assigned to UNIT, was summoned to the Colonel's office and sternly warned to analyse the yellowish fluid quick-smart on the premises.

The Colonel called me into his office in the afternoon with my typed report and explained the above, before moving onto timing. The precipitate lobbying in Whitehall's corridors had begun the day after Bert Price committed suicide. Ergo, from the Colonel's perspective, Anax were trying to get Novitalin approved via political pressure aftre realising that Bert's abrupt way of saying goodbye may eventually lead to an investigation.

'I have a few more questions, sir. We strongly suspect that The Master is no longer around, since the last report of his presence we have is from the FBI in Florida. Why would he want this – I don't know, call it "harvesting" – of children to continue?'

The Colonel sat back and gave me a calculating stare, checking his wristwatch. He's not one for the social graces, the complete opposite of the personable and affable Lethbridge-Stewart. For all that, he's a very shrewd character.

'I wondered that too, John. I think Harry – sorry, Surgeon Lieutenant Sullivan's analysis will have a bearing on that.'

'Could - ' I began, when his phone rang.

''Scuse me – pre-arranged call,' he said, picking up the handset. 'Yes, put it through. Hello Sarah! Thank you so much for returning my call. No, I'm afraid this is business. No, don't worry about the typing, that's in hand.'

"Sarah" had to mean Sarah Jane Smith, a journalist with a vaguely-defined official relationship to UNIT. She's the current Doctor's assistant, which means accompanying him on mind-bending journey's into the far future half-way across the Universe. If she ever publishes her memoirs nobody will believe them. I'd been on a couple of trips with the Doctor and I didn't believe them, either.

'It concerns The Master, Sarah. I know you had extensive visual contact with him when he kidnapped you, and I wanted a description of what he looked like and how he behaved. Don't rush, take your time and think about it.'

The Master had taken over an East End criminal gang and had them kidnap Sarah, trying to decoy the Third Doctor into an ambush. In previous decades this might have been simply to murder our wandering savant, but not this time.

The penny dropped with me. The Doctor had been a target because The Master wanted to take over his body; having reached his twelfth regeneration The Master's last body was falling apart and, whilst he could use humans to boost his energy for a limited time, acquiring a proper Time Lord body to inhabit would transform him completely.

'Suffering from palsy. Blotchy, flaking skin. Coughing spasms. Involuntary constriction of major muscle groups. Does that sum it up?' repeated the Colonel back. 'Yes, Sarah. Very helpful. No, I can't explain at the moment. If you want a scoop, look for bombs in Berkshire. I hope to see you soon. Goodbye.'

Without speaking Colonel Crichton passed a sheet of headed notepaper over to me, that very same sheet which featured the Doctor's brief and cheerfully mocking note. This time "Novitalin" had vanished, to be replaced by: "Early Symptoms of Holistic Dodrecadral Collapse in Homo Tempus: palsy, blotchy and flaking skin, coughing spasms, involuntary constriction of major muscle groups."

'You've got the picture now, haven't you?' asked the Colonel. 'Just hang on here a few minutes.'

He spent the next few minutes reading my report, making notes on a pad and then ringing sickbay and telling Harry to get up to see him, straight away.

Our pet sawbones did not look happy or sedate when he came into the Colonel's office. Harry is one of the world's sunny-natured folks by disposition and I've rarely seen him cross, to the extent of raising his voice, never mind losing his temper. He still had his white coat on and dropped heavily into the chair alongside mine, pursing his lips and nodding briefly to acknowledge me.

'Well?' asked the Colonel, cocking his head to one side and not bothering to shout at Harry for lack of salute.

Harry sat up and hammered the phial of Novitalin on the desk with feeling.

'Frankly, sir, I can't fully analyse this concoction with the equipment I have. What I can determine is that it's a semi-synthetic, derived from human hypothalami.'

He sat back and crossed his arms, clearly furious.

'The plural of "hypothalamus". Part of the brain, isn't it?' asked Colonel Crichton. His specialisms were in cybernetics, physics and applied mathematics, so if he knew that he'd already been checking.

'Yes, sir. Situated at the base of the brain. If your subject was alive, removing the hypothalamus would most certainly kill them, even if they survived the extraction procedure.'

Ah. Harry must have picked up the rumours about Anax importing cartloads of kids. He hadn't finished.

'That's not all, sir. I remember very clearly from medical school about research into neurology involving hypothalami from sheep and cattle. To get any meaningful amount of material to work with, the research people ground up literally thousands of animal hypothalami, thousands and thousands.'

He clenched a fist and hit the chair. Colonel Crichton looked over at me.

'Plainly, John, you are bursting to impart your insight. Go right ahead.'

'Sir! That stuff - ' pointing at the phial of Novitalin ' – is a regeneration serum. I don't know the exact timeline, but when kidnapping Sarah Jane didn't work, I bet that alien bag of sh- ah, that is, The Master, I bet he came up with Plan B. Human brains. If you tally when Schoon and Hollitzer were bought out, it probably coincides with the failure of Plan A.'

The Colonel got up and strode over to the French windows, clutching one hand in the other behind his back and staring out across the lawns.

'Harry. Medically, what do you think would happen if you subjected the hypothalamus of a pre-pubescent child to a fatal dose of gamma radiation? Changes that would enable you to create a new chemical compound?'

Harry pointed at the serum.

'No idea, sir, because nobody human would try it! But if you want an educated guess, then it would be the precursor for this – this bloody stuff!'

The Colonel flexed his hands.

'Yes. And I further speculate that the process is not universally effective. Some of the victims merely develop fatal tumours and die, like Anna and Boris. He might have had to irradiate two children to get one effectively altered.'

Stretching his back, the Colonel turned to look back at us. His normally flinty expression was troubled. I imagine that the Brig would have been slapping his swagger-stick across the furniture by now. I don't think Harry had ever dared to swear in front of the Brig, either.

'Once again, speculation. I think you are correct, John: The Master is long gone. The process and system he set up to create Novitalin is still going strong, however.'

Harry shook his head.

'No sir. The Master's control over his slaves is a wasting asset. If he isn't there to constantly re-enslave them, they break free and gain self-control. I remember the Doctor, current version and the Third one, telling me that.'

Colonel Crichton leaned onto his desk, knuckles first.

'That's the worst thing about this whole ghastly business, Harry! The Master set up this abhorrent system with a set-up of his hypnotised drones to run it. After ten or twenty children are butchered to create enough Novitalin for him to stave off death, he absconds. We all know if he remains on Earth for any length of time, he'll be tracked down and killed.'

We both took a couple of seconds to realise what he meant, until Harry choked out a response.

'You mean the people at Anax are doing this of their own free will, sir!'

'Yes. They broke free of their mindless obedience long ago. A year or more.'

The big question for that was: why?

'Any pathological insights into the physiology of Homo Tempus and Novitalin, Harry?' asked the Colonel.

'Eh? Sorry, sir, not a lot. The Doctor doesn't make a good subject. He doesn't co-operate with anyone wanting to carry out checks on him. Why do you ask?'

'Because I suspect that Novitalin has a beneficial effect on human beings. For a Time Lord, it gives them an extension of their lifespan measureable in centuries, or possibly it gives them another twelve regenerations. Human beings aren't Time Lords, however, so again I have to speculate. It's a whole lot less effective on us. "Less effective" is still effective, to a degree.'

Harry sat bolt upright in his chair.

'Good God above! The elixir of life!' His animation was alarming. 'A serum that can extend human lifespan!'

Lost for words, I stared at him. At first incredible, the idea gained favour with me. After all, what other reason would you have for the abduction and murder of children? You'd have to be desperate indeed. Desperate, or old, or sick, or dying.

This was borne out later, when we got the personnel files for Anax and found them to be middle-aged, or with cancer, or to have an inoperable tumour, or Parkinsons.

The Colonel leaned back in his chair and pointed a pen, first at Harry and then myself.

'You, Surgeon Lieutenant, are going to be entering the Anax factory premises alongside Assault Platoon. Lieutenant Walmsley, you are going to be securing the "Nursery" premises. Minimal body count. And I strongly suggest that what passed between us here never meets the light of day again.'

That night in my quarters I had nightmares about Wandsworth Prison again, except that this time the zombies were all children and I didn't dare shoot them, while they were quite happy to rend me limb-from-limb. Things were clearly getting to me, since it was months since I'd relived rescuing the Governor in dreams, and never as bad as this one.

Feeling in need of human contact, I rang Marie, who was cross and grumpy for all of ten seconds before falling into a sympathetic mixture of French and English about me. Of course I couldn't explain what I was up to, which she was used to. We chatted inconsequentially for a few minutes.

'You be careful cheri, there's only one of you, you tell that abominable Brigadeur I want you mens sana rea. Will you be up at weekend?'

'I hope so, love. A two day pass at least. Ohhhh, sorry for waking you. Get back to bed and I will too.'

'Oui. What a shame they are not together, those beds …' she husked down the phone, which didn't help the arrival of sleep.

Ah yes sleep.

That's what I didn't get much of, since the alarm bell's started ringing across the site at 5:30 next morning, thickened up by a siren set over the vehicle workshops, which acted like an echo chamber and woke everyone at Aylesbury.

After a good ten minutes of confusion, panicked responses settled down to a realisation that we were about to be going tactical in thirty minutes. Colonel Crichton took the unusual step of addressing all officers and NCO's in the assembly hall.

'I'm sure you've all heard rumours about what's happening at our target destination. Rest assured, the rumours fall well-short of the truth. However. And that is a big however. I am relying on your training and experience to avoid needless bloodshed. If anyone at our target resists arrest, you have my permission to beat them to a senseless pulp, but I would appreciate the lowest body count possible. Having said that, since The Master is involved, Red Card Rules apply – shoot to kill on sight without warning.'

Assault Platoon were in their transport and revving engines by this point.

Three: Close Quarter Battle and Even Closer Quarter Battle

The Anax factory site lay in a shallow horseshoe-shaped and landscaped valley, surrounded by planted trees that screened it from the main road. The only road in passed a control booth with a powered barrier across the road, leading to the main site quarter of a mile away. Tellingly, there were armed security guards in the control booth and in the main glassed-in lobby for the factory.

I could tell that because I was looking at them thanks to a pair of binoculars that Nick lent me. I lay full length on the grass, behind a bush, overlooking the west end of the site. The grass was damp and full of insects. The bush prevented anyone at Anax from seeing me.

The bulk of the factory lay between the entrance road and the distant nursery, which was my particular destination.

Back to the control booth. There were two guards sitting in it, both armed, one reading a paper. Anyone trying to get access to the site would need to satisfy them, or risk crashing through a steel gate that looked to weigh at least a couple of tons. A telephone line ran from the booth alongside the road to the factory lobby.

My eyes shifted to the lobby. This was a glass structure that sat in the ninety-degree angle of two factory sub-units, cantilevered, airy and light. The architect must have won awards. A large multi-level semi-circular desk sat dead centre in the lobby, staffed by more armed security guards.

Memo of the day to all incipient world-controlling dictators: if your front-line staff are armed, then there's something wrong!

Back to the front gate and the control booth. Up drove an Anax van, ready to deliver a consignment of chemical percursors to the site.

'All units overwatch, be advised covert entry now underway,' came a metallic voice echoing from the radio truck behind us on the reverse slope. That was the Colonel, here in person to oversee what happened and to ensure not too many Anax staff died in the process.

On the drive here from Aylesbury, I had noticed that this was the most bad-tempered operation I'd ever encountered. Normally on an op you have troopers chatting, gossiping, taking the mickey out of each other, trying to hide pre-op nerves by being chatty, chaffing the officers, here at UNIT or on any major exercise. Not this time. An air of sullen, silent violence sat over everyone, and I couldn't help but feel that any Anax staff who failed to surrender instantly and convincingly would regret it, shortly before they died. Private Pooley had been detailed to me as a driver, and he, reticent and laid back as he was, took great delight in fixing a spike bayonet to his Sterling SMG: "just in case, sir."

My attention went back to the approach road. The Anax van had slowed and now stopped at the gate as the driver wound his window down. The two guards began to pay closer attention to him. One stood up and gestured at him. Clumsily, he passed a clipboard through his open window and managed to drop it. Whilst this pantomime was happening, the rear doors of the van silently opened (silent thanks to four cans of WD40 and a can of heavy-duty grease) and two men from Assault Platoon emerged, carrying silenced Sterlings, out of sight of the guards.

The security guards may have been given the chance to surrender, but I doubt it. The two UNIT troopers darted from around the back of the van and suddenly there were bullet holes in the control booth windows. One guard sagged at the knees and dropped like a stringless puppet, and the other went arse-over-tit on his seat in what would have been funny in Benny Hill, but was bloody unfunny here. A faint pop-pop-pop was all that came back up to us from the valley; Nick's patent hollow-point ammo at work. A single 9mm round may not inflict a serious injury on the victim unless hit in a vital spot; a 9mm hollow point will make a hole the size of a tennis ball and two or three will render the victim dead thanks to shock alone.

One of the troopers leaped into the control booth and triggered the gate, which slowly rolled open. The Anax van slowly chugged forward and stalled. Out got the driver – Captain March in make-up – to see what was the matter. Once he understood that the attack was underway he got back into the driver's seat and moved the van slowly uphill towards the lobby.

'All units Able Able Able!' came Colonel Crichton's voice from the radio vehicle. I was back on my feet and racing towards my lannie before the first "Able" sounded. A whole column of vehicles were revving engines and beginning to move out once they got the Go signal. Private Pooley and I were half-way down the column so I could see the impressive array of hardware that surged over the valley rim and down towards the front gate and lobby. In the lead was a Scimitar light tank, followed by a Bedford 3 tonner and then a flock of Landrovers, backed-up by another Skim. The first Skim went for the lobby, not gently, up the steps and smashed the glass structure into a sleet of shards. One of the security guards was rash enough to reach for his holster, which meant the forensic people had a horrid job of piecing his shattered body back together after it was hit by two Rarden rounds. Behind the Skim came the Bedford of troopers, led by Nick in full-on Black-Watch-Kill-Sassenach mode. They secured the lobby and began to move on into the building. Two more of their landrovers moved past the lobby and around the end of the factory, where one of them came to a halt and debussed troopers. The other one carried on round to the north side of the factory and debussed, with a trooper standing behind a pintle-mounted Browning .50 calibre and threatening to shoot dead anyone trying to escape.

The lannie that stopped at the west end of the factory had connected chains to the fire escape there, and was set to begin pulling the door off by sheer brute force. I noticed this as Pooley shot us past them at forty miles per hour over the lawns, aiming at the entirely separate Nursery building. An enormous crinkling and shattering noise followed us. This was the second Scimitar from Assault Platoon driving over staff cars in the staff car park, "to prevent them escaping sir" as Corporal Dene later explained and excused.

Pooley did a fantastic handbrake turn over the lawns, killing a lot of bedding plants and skidding us up level with the entrance to the nursery. He and I bolted out of the lannie and into the low-rise building, kicking the glass entrance doors open. The interior design was utterly incongruous, all pastel shades and paintings of happy gambolling lambs and kittens. An L-shaped corridor led to a series of rooms which we could instantly disregard for the most part, as they were all open to inspection.

On the other hand, that door with the painting of a happy sun smiling down on a field of daisies was locked, and faint female shrieking could be heard from behind it. Pooley tried the handle.

'Locked, sir,' he snapped, bringing up his Sterling and shooting half a dozen rounds around the handle in a semi-circle. The door swung open when he kicked it and we both ran inside.

Far from being a domain of daisies and sunshine, the interior was a laboratory with benches, Bunsen burners and retort stands. It looked white and clinical, an image spoilt only by the two figures struggling over towards the inner wall.

When Private Pooley and myself burst in after the gunfire, this struggle paused. The taller figure was a man looking horrified and surprised in equal amount, his right hand held high and clutching a hypodermic. His left hand was around the throat of a small, dark-skinned girl in a print dress who appeared to have bitten him deeply several times already on that arm.

At their feet were the crumpled forms of two other children, with blood and vomit covering their faces and fronts.

'Jesus Christ!' shouted Private Pooley, moving forward to try and get any life-signs from the collapsed children. The doctor and his victim backed slowly way, still frozen in their bizarre tableaux.

'Both dead, sir,' called Pooley from the floor. Doctor Death looked at me and the private and the girl in his left hand.

'It's not -' he began before I interrupted.

'Do you understand English? Then close your eyes and open your mouth,' I warned the child. Her initial nod indicated that she did understand what I was telling her.

A couple of hours previously the Colonel had looked at me in a disapproving manner when I brought along my Nitro Nine elephant gun for the exercise. Yes, I got it to deal with the dinosaurs, make all the jokes you like, but it's a fearsome-looking weapon guaranteed to instill fear and obedience into any onlooker. "For moral purposes only sir" had been my explanation back at Aylesbury.

Doctor Death got both barrels at point-blank range, which knocked him into a pile of bloody rags against the wall. Private Pooley went over and shot him in the head several times just to make sure.

'Two more like him, they escape,' said the little girl, who seemed to be made of pretty stern stuff.

'Into the woods?' I asked, and she nodded.

Big mistake on their part, it turned out. The landscaped woods surrounding the factory were the domain of the SAS, who had instructions not to let any escapees get away alive and who had heard the rumours, too. Allegedly – third hand information that I wasn't there to be a witness to – two of Doctor Death's accomplices in the nursery fled the instant they heard our attack underway. They got into the trees, there were several screams, and an SAS trooper briefly moved into view from the undergrowth clutching a pair of severed human heads.

Obviously completely over-the-top third hand urban legend. However, Major Mike Mirthless was in charge of the overwatch teams, and I wouldn't put it past him to chainsaw the escapees into mincemeat.

'What's your name, princess?' asked Pooley. The girl looked at him very solemnly before replying.

'Alicia. Are you los soldatos buenos?'

'Let me give you a lift, darling,' he replied, and took her up on his shoulder. 'Me and the lieutenant are here to stop the bad guys.'

She spat in the direction of the shattered corpse of the man who'd been trying to murder her.

By the time we got to the lannie outside, Harry and an escort were racing over the lawns towards us. There weren't any children inside the main factory premises so he'd come down to see if he could help at the nursery.

'Two dead children inside,' I grated at him. 'And a - . Ah. I can't even be bothered to swear about him. Anything up at the factory?'

'No,' he responded, looking at the small girl who sat on Private Pooley's shoulder. 'I say, you got one out alive? Well done John!'

I didn't feel that splendid, thinking that we'd been too slow to save the murdered children. In fact, by sheer coincidence, Doctor Death (actually Professor Gladden, MSc, sufffering from Hodgkins Lymphoma, whom I never failed to refer to as Doctor Death) had been killing the three surviving children to get access to their hypothalami.

'Two of them got away,' I warned Harry, waving back at the treeline. He shook his head.

'Two of them got as far as the trees,' he added. 'There are watchers up there from the regular army thirsting for the chance to get to grips with these wretches.'

When we got back up to the main factory site the staff inside had been ungently bundled outside and were lined up in the car park, between the factory wall and their shattered cars. Nick maintained a hostile eye over the several dozen staff, who were being systematically stripped naked, put into a khaki boilersuit, cuffed and placed in waiting Bedford 3-tonners. There were only three body-bags on the tarmac, which would shortly be joined by another five from the nursery.

Without warning, Colonel Crichton turned up at my elbow.

'So much for "moral effect",' he said. It took me several seconds to realise that he was making a Colonel Crichton joke.

'Yes, sir. The physical to the moral in this case was about three thousand to one.'

'Napoleon, eh?'

'How come the other body bags, sir?'

A moot question. One of the Anax staff had been Doctor Philip Gelling, who bore more than a passing resemblance to The Master, greying hair, goatee and all. Probably intentional on the part of The Master, in order to have a decoy present if necessary. Sadly for Dr Gelling and his family, he'd started to run when the UNIT troopers smashed into his lab. The section emptied five magazines of SMG ammunition into him, almost a hundred and fifty rounds. The body bag was essential to prevent his corpse from falling apart if moved.

The second body bag was for Mister Hollitzer, the managing director of Anax. He had kept a Webley revolver in his desk drawer. When UNIT broke into the factory he decorated the oak panelling in his office with his brains, courtesy of the revolver.

Most of the Anax staff were cowed and docile. One man protested bitterly, at which he was set upon by several troopers wielding batons.

'Oy!' shouted CSM Benton. 'You lot! What do you think you're doing?'

He stormed over and snatched a baton, then smacked it across the recalcitrant staffer's shins with an audible crack.

'That's how it's done!' he told them as they hoisted the weeping man upright and ungently stripped him.

The only odd-one-out in the thirty staff was a scared young man in his early twenties, who looked appalled and scared, and who kept repeating "UNIT? UNIT?" to himself. The Colonel seized on this instantly.

'How old are you?' he asked when a couple of troopers frog-marched him over to us.

'T-t-twenty three,' stammered the young man. 'Why are you - '

'Terminally-ill?'

'N-no. Look - '

'Job title.'

'I'm only a lab assistant, for haematology, I – I'm covering for one of the – the staff, they're off in hospital.'

'Keep him isolated from the others. You, son, are lucky.'

Or unlucky. He was indeed a temp, brought in by the manager from a science agency to cover for one of their less-well colleagues, off having an operation to remove a tumour. After a brief interrogation session at Aylesbury he was bailed and solemnly warned to stay far away from the newspapers.

Our convoy of vehicles and prisoners drove out of the valley, stopping to collect the bodies of the two security guards at the front gate. Once the Colonel's radio truck got to the crest of the hill leading away, he stopped it. Curious as to what he was up to, I stopped as well (my driver Private Pooley being unable to disentangle himself from Maria, who clung to him like a limpet).

Fifteen minutes later and rapidly getting bored I heard the sound of approaching jets, and a pair of RAF Phantoms went howling over the Anax site, banking and coming back again.

There was no subtlety about their approach, they went over skimming the treetops and dropped a stick of bombs each onto the factory, which went up in pieces and came down in smaller pieces. The show wasn't over. They came back again and this time dropped napalm canisters, sending the now battered factory remnants up in flames.

Colonel Crichton came out of his truck to examine the damage via binoculars. Nothing bigger than a beermat remained of Anax.

'Laser-guided,' muttered the Colonel. Those SAS teams with laser-spotters had ensured the bombs landed exactly where they were needed.

There was quite a stink about this destruction when a Commons Select Committee sat in camera on the whole operation, with talk of "exceeding authority" and "wanton damage". Privately I suspect they wanted lots more information about how to extend life and beat disease at the expense of someone else, and the whole factory being blown to bits, with it's paper and computer files gone, put noses out of joint. UNIT Geneva got to hear of this and the committee suddenly stopped meeting.

The Sao Paulo end of the Anax connection rashly tried to shoot it out with the Brazilian police, who killed all six of them.

Probably the most innocent person in the whole horrid mess was Jeremy Morben, who disappeared when he was informed about the real destination of the children sent to the factory. His shoes and a suicide note were found on the Embankment. We never turned up the note that Bert Price left; the people who had stolen it were amongst the dead security guards at Anax.

Four: In the clear cold light of dawn

The prisoners were detained temporarily in a shed at Aylesbury before being interrogated and then passed over to Bluebottle.

Colonel Crichton did the interrogations in person, with a stenographer borrowed from the MoD after signing the Official Secrets Act Addendum, and a trooper with a truncheon. Unusually, the interrogations took place in the observation room, whilst half a dozen of us stood around inside the interrogation room. The Colonel wanted us as reinforcement, and gave us a pack of cards and a brief: "Imagine you're given carte blanche to kill a member of the Anax staff." Then the prisoners were marched in, and we could hear the process over the speaker system.

It was disgusting hearing some of the science staff justifying mass-murder of children.

"They would have died anyway," was one excuse. "The Master hypnotised us into doing it" was another popular one. The Colonel, chilly but correct, siezed on this instantly.

'That might work with the police, or the Redcaps. Not with me. I know The Master's control decays over time and is completely gone within a month or two!'

One man stammered out that The Master had been at Anax only a few days before, and got shot down again.

'Lies. Your plant has been under observation for weeks. The Master was last seen sunning himself in Florida, months ago.'

More staff tried to explain that they didn't know what had been taking place. Having their managing director top himself and two nursing staff run at the first sight of trouble put the skids under that.

Only a couple of the staff dared to defy the Colonel, as he had expected.

'I've got leukemia and six months to live at the most. You don't scare me!' sneered one male voice.

Long silence.

'I command over seven hundred and fifty men, and I'm the only one I can trust not to kill you monsters on the spot.'

A click came and the one-way mirror became completely transparent. The Colonel pointed into the room.

'All I have to do if you don't co-operate is tap on the window. The men in there will cut that pack of cards and the winner will come in here and kill you.'

More silence.

'You wouldn't dare,' came the voice, quieter now.

'Try me!' snapped the Colonel. 'I see Private Pooley with a lump hammer and a cold steel chisel. Corporal Dene with a bayonet. No weapons, Lieutenant Walmsley?'

I held up my fists.

'And Mister Benton has an axe and a nail-gun. What's the roll of plastic for, CSM?'

'To keep blood off the floorboards, sir.'

The previously-stout party collapsed like a pudding when the CSM's matter-of-fact explanation came.

The bare facts that I got to know were that The Master had turned up at Anax, in a bad way. One by one he'd brainwashed the staff there into becoming loyal slaves, moving in others to beef up production. The South American kids turned up on the conveyor belt. Once they were healthy again, they got head-scanned by a gamma-ray emitter The Master gimmicked up; this caused critical damage to the hypothalamus, which was cut out of the dead victim. The glands got processed when there were twenty of them, The Master injected himself and within hours was rejuvenated anew. This tallied with reports from the FBI in Florida about Mister Suave, looking a million dollars and entirely unlike his scrofulitic self when he'd kidnapped Sarah Jane.

Bodies? Another gadget gimmicked up: a big metal box that Harry had seen, which he described as being the size of a chest-freezer. Anything deposited in there was disintegrated when it was activated; hey presto no embarassing evidence. Given time and no interruptions, I bet Bert Price's body would have ended up in there.

Now, once The Master got his magic syrup, he was off and away. The staff at Anax gradually regained self-control. A few of them realised what they had access to: a means of creating a drug that with sufficient dosage would heal any human disease or disorder and that could increase lifespan. Lab testing suggested six to eight months increase for every injection of serum, and a similar length of time to cure even the most serious illness.

Those staff who disagreed with continuing production took a one-way trip to the disintegrator. Extra staff were taken on to replace them, care being taken to select people with a vested interest in Novitalin being made – old, infirm or due to die.

All these plans went up the spout when Bert Price developed a conscience. He must have had one from the beginning and waited until he could smuggle out two of the children. Shame he didn't act sooner.

The Anax staff disappeared into the judicial system. They got uniformly long sentences from the English equivalent of a Diplock court but since they hadn't acted against UNIT and The Master was so long gone, they didn't get sent to the Swale Island prison. Instead they got sent to regular prisons, which was far worse for their sanity and wholeness of skin; child-abusers are the lowest of the low in prisons, the very bottom of the pecking order and guaranteed to be the target of every other criminal. Those sentences would be served out in permanent solitary confinement for their own protection. Many have committed suicide, with few tears shed.

Five: After the After Effects

For me, the story continued on. I got my weekend leave with Marie, and then had to get back into running the transport at Aylesbury on Monday morning. That was the plan. It got scotched by a call from Colonel Crichton at nine-thirty, telling me to report to his office pronto.

The headed sheet of UNIT paper was out of his safe again, sitting on his desk. Once again the information had changed, to "Well Done Chaps!".

No, I have no idea how the Doctor does it.

The Colonel gave me a long, hard stare, which is a disconcerting experience, somethat akin to being impaled on twin roasting spits.

'How are you feeling, John?' he asked.

'If you can have the mental equivalent of a bad taste in the mouth, that's what I've got, sir.'

He nodded.

'Horrible business. I shouldn't be surprised at what The Master will stoop to. He is, by definition, inhuman. But for dozens of our fellow men seeking to murder children for profit and self-help - I don't know.'

Nod from me. I didn't know quite where this was going, so mute agreement seemed best.

'Do you know whom I've just had on the phone, John? Professor Elaine Valdupont.'

That made me sit up and pay attention!

'Marie, sir. She hates her given forename.'

'Hmm. She rang me because she is concerned about your mental state. You didn't tell her anything about Operation Rubicon, which is right and proper, but you have been talking in your sleep. On Saturday she had to prevent you from getting your Colt and shooting scientists.'

This didn't look good. I swore silently at Marie for dropping me in it – this meant a trip to the MoD psychiatrist.

The Colonel flicked a chit across the desk at me.

'Two week pass, effective immediately. Go romance the Professor, get out into the country, go fishing, do whatever, but take a break.'

'Er – I'm not up on the rota for ages, sir.'

'Don't look a gift horse! I can't have one of my permanent officers having a breakdown. Also, you've been in this ghastly business from the start. I seem to remember you having to sit and entertain a dying child at Saint Lukes. The next sound I want to hear is you closing the door on your way out.'

Not being one to argue with a senior, I quietly packed up and hied me hence to Swaffham Prior, where Marie and her tweedy scientist friends muck about with captured or abandoned alien artefacts. The converted aircraft hangar they use was, as always, echoing to the sounds of bits of kit I couldn't identify.

One of the Cambridge dons explained that Marie and Liz were outside with the Rover group. When I left the hangar and looked for "Rover" I wondered if it was going to be a remote-controlled car, a robot dog or a big white beach ball that roared.

None of the above. Rover was a white delta-winged miniature aircraft, about an arms-breadth wide and long, swooping and banking over the cracked concrete runway. The knot of boffins making it fly were having an enjoyable time of it, judging by the laughter. Suddenly one of them pointed at a television screen and Rover came flying directly over me, in a long slow circling manouevre. Another scientist turned to look at me, then came running over, with such haste that she jiggled under her lab coat: Marie.

At first I was puzzled at how she recognised me from such a distance, easily half a mile from the group clustered around their portable table and computer kit. A mad hug and kiss prevented me from asking.

'Can I breathe now?'

She hugged me again, then linked one arm in mine and walked back to the science group.

'You are not cross at me calling the Brigadeur?'

'Hardly! I've got two weeks leave thanks to your phone call. And he's a Colonel, not a Brigadier, not yet.'

'Hello, Captain,' greeted one of the boffins, waving a pipe at me. He and the others were glued to the television screen, which showed a colour image of the concrete runway fifty yards below. The image scrolled along and we came into view below, whereupon another boffin began fiddling with controls and the image zoomed in to focus on us from shoulders upward.

'Wow,' I commented. 'An RPV?'

'Prototype,' muttered one of the seated crew, a hairy young chap with big sideburns and lots of denim. 'Put together with Cyberman technology.'

The picture quality was excellent, including the ability to scan or zoom without losing picture resolution.

'Bring it back in to soft-land,' ordered the pipe-wielding prof. He looked appraisingly at me. 'What do you think?'

'I'm impressed. I've seen a few Remotely Piloted Vehicles that the Israelis and the Yanks use, and they're light years behind this.'

Liz smirked at me, then changed the smile to a rueful one.

'Well, first we have to reverse-engineer the hardware and software that makes this one work in order to build our own. That's the hard part.'

'Is Marie needed for that?' I asked, all innocent inquiry. She wasn't fooled.

'Trying to poach my staff?'

Marie draped herself around the tweedy professor and blew in his ear, flirting shamelessly and getting herself a week's leave beginning in two days time.

By arrangement, we spent the week in Paris, where Marie infrequently shared an apartment with her father, a Professor Emeritus of Modern European History at the Sorbonne. Whilst there, I took the opportunity of explaining to Marie the outlines of Operation Rubicon. She wasn't a loyalty-testing Redcap in disguise and the apartment wasn't bugged.

Her dad was a crusty, grumpy, white-haired old sod who hated the English, English soldiers, English soldiers in UNIT and anyone romancing his daughter: he hated the Germans slightly more than the English but there wasn't much in it. Given that Marie was four years older than me, she ought to have been allowed the benefit of making her own mind up about who the man in her life was. She stood in no little awe of him, thanks to his involvement in French politics as an adviser to various Presidential aides. I got the impression that he had well-connected friends in high places still.

Now, the Professor didn't believe in accomodating his daughter's boyfriend. He would only speak French in the apartment, despite being fluent in English and German, and glared from beneath shaggy eyebrows if I used English. His manner was usually disdainful and cool at best, which made the last morning of our stay in Paris such a surprise.

Marie was having a lie-in, so I went to the kitchen to brew coffee, practice my French on the morning paper and heat up a few croissants for breakfast. Outside in the Rue de Faubourg the sun beamed down, pigeons cooed and I felt measurably better for not having to think about work.

In strode the Professor, fully dressed, with a bow-tie. His normal patrician air was absent this morning. Perhaps hung-over?

'Bonjour, Monsieur Le Prof - ' I began politely, trying to roll the "r" in proper Gallic fashion.''

'Non,' he cut in, swiping his hand in a cutting gesture. 'Today, we speak English.'

I nearly fell off my chair.The Prof settled himself opposite me, ate a croissant and delicately

drank a cup of milk.

'Come. I have important things to show you.'

The insides of my intestines? He led and I followed, out of the apartment and down the staircases, nodding to the weaselly concierge before emerging into bright morning sunlight.

'Where are we going?' I asked, when he indicated the run-around Citroen that he or Marie used to drive in the city.

'Get in and I will show you. Here. Take this key.'

Once safely in and strapped-down he set off. Thankfully it was early morning and traffic was light, since the French, and especially in Paris, are utterly insane drivers. Off went the Prof, whistling. He caught me staring at him, or the alien-shape shifter that had replaced him, and grinned.

'I apologise for being so repellent to you, Lieutenant. You were under test.'

Test? Testing for what?

'You've lost me,' I said, watching the streets of Paris pass by. The route taken was novel, not that I was an expert on the streets of the city. Humming, the Prof nodded sagely.

'Good. Marie was most reluctant to observe discretion. Eventually she agreed, and from your bafflement I know she kept her word.'

Whilst we stopped for a red light, he explained.

'You recall Yves? Marie's ex-husband?'

Oh yes. Our paths had yet to cross. If they did, Yves would be eating porridge through a straw.

'He married her for her money. This I suspected. Marie would not listen.' He gave a shrug. 'Eh, women! Who can fathom the female heart?'

Once again this made no sense. Marie got a pretty fair wage as a professor doing research into exotic technology. She wasn't remotely rich, however.

'What money?' I asked. The Prof made a rude noise with his lips.

'Pah! From her research, young Walmsley!'

We began to move into the suburbs whilst I got the rest of his story. Marie, and others in her research team, got an honorarium for major discoveries. In fact, Marie got royalties from her discoveries. Not being especially money-conscious, her father had prevailed to put the money in trust, which ensured the wolfish Yves didn't get his hands on it after the divorce. Plus, the Prof had powerful friends in the Paris legislature and local government. His connections ever higher up had given me a vetting and found me, if not squeaky clean, then not objectionable.

'Marie is rich?' I said, talking aloud. The Prof laughed at me.

'Oh, not rich. Just very well off. I invested the money in property.'

By now the suburban streets were within view of the countryside, and rolling hills. We turned up a private drive and were stopped by a padlocked steel gate, which the Prof sent me to unlock with the key I'd been given.

The house wasn't quite a mansion. Still, it was big enough. It appeared to be a converted farmhouse and barn combined, big enough to house a family of fifty, made from quarried stone. The garden was enormous, and full of rose bushes. The Professor drove to the garage, which already housed a battered French ex-Army four wheel drive, and led me round the back of the house. Another big garden, with a stone mausoleum square in the middle of it. Silently, Marie's father gestured at it.

"Yvette Valdupont 1915 – 1957

Beloved wife and mother"

- the first inscription read. Below that:

"Guillaume Valdupont 1945 – 1952"

'My son,' said the Prof, simply yet with feeling. His son and Marie's brother – now I understood her once berating me for putting myself in harm's way and thus risking becoming like her brother. 'Leukemia. Not diagnosed until he was gravely ill.'

He continued looking at the huge stone vault.

'Marie is a dutiful daughter. She told me the things that happened on your Operation Rubicon.' He caught my look of alarm. 'Ah! Do not worry. I am not a gossip, your secret is safe with me.'

We stood and looked at the mausoleum for a few seconds longer, before he took my elbow and led me away.

'I have something here, more cheerful,' he muttered, digging around in his waistcoat pocket. 'Et voila!'

He gave me what had to be the world's smallest present, wrapped in crisp white paper, an inch on each side, which I took to be a joke on his part. We sat outside in the sun and shared a bottle of wine, chatting inconsequentially about nothing very much, before heading back to the Rue de Faubourg. Marie had been up for ages by the time we got back, and was sitting in the kitchen with her feet up, wearing slacks and a denim shirt.

'Papa!' she squeaked in alarm. 'What have you done with John?'

'We went for a drive and discussed matters, young lady,' he told her, sternly, wagging a finger. 'I showed John our country house and the family vault. Now, I have papers to look over in my study, so I shall leave you two alone. Bon chaunce!'

I sat down opposite Marie and nodded at her.

'All true. Apparently he was testing me by being horrid all this time. I was under suspicion of being a gold-digger.'

'Tiens! Not by me!' retorted Marie, hotly. 'I know you are a noble man. Papa, he is more suspicious.'

Not until we were getting ready to go did Marie pat down my jacket pockets for the car keys, finding the minute parcel instead. She held it up and crinkled her forehead in an unspoken question.

'Your father's sense of humour. Probably a stack of centimes. Go on, open it.'

Some sense of humour: it turned out to be an engagement ring, a family heirloom dating back to the mid-nineteenth century and worth more than my annual salary.

The strangeness didn't end there. Private Pooley and I took a couple of hours to drive to Gorse Farm near Brompton where Anna and Boris were found. We took a bottle of Nick's family whisky for the old tramp who'd given us that big break about the Anax van, because without him we'd have gotten nowhere. Pretty obviously we didn't expect to meet him, so the idea was to leave the bottle in care of the farmer.

We explained this to the big solid farmer on his doorstep, and he progressively looked paler and more worried. He asked us to describe the tramp, and we did, pretty accurately.

'Yes, that was Auld Tam. Always after a few vegetables, he was. I'm afraid you can't give him that bottle.'

'Why not?' asked Pooley, jumping in first.

'Because he was found dead of pneumonia not far from here.'

We both ahhh'd in sympathetic appreciation.

'Three years ago!' added the farmer, giving us the greasy eyeball and shutting the door promptly.

Pooley and I looked at each other, too surprised to speak.

'He was pretty solid for a ghost, if you ask me,' muttered Pooley. Together, we went back across the road to the forest clearing where we'd met Auld Tam, and yes, the ring of stones with sodden ashy clinker were still there. A strange sign had been scratched into one of the sooty stones – perhaps a memento left by whoever had been impersonating Auld Tam. I kept the stone, and Pooley and I both settled our wits with a swig or two of whisky.

'Don't mention this to the Colonel!' I cautioned. 'He'll have me writing reports on the supernatural next!'

'Leave the bottle, sir,' suggested Pooley. 'In case he – or whoever – comes back.'

A good suggestion, which I followed. Leaving, it was difficult not to feel eyes boring into your back, even if nothing unusual happened.

One evening later that week I mentioned what had happened to Nick, who, far from being put out at his whisky being left in the forest, laughed like a drain.

'Don't you get it, John? Genius Locii!'

'Not more language buffoonery,' I grumbled. 'No have Latin or Greek.'

He sniggered again.

'It means "Spirits of the place". Rather apt with a bottle of pater's best malt sitting there.'