Part Seven: Testing to Destruction

Nick and I were still not assigned to a regular formation within UNIT UK. For an undetermined period we'd be floating, sent off to perform stand-in or relief when needed, whilst remaining based at Aylesbury. This had led to our despatch to Maiden's Point at short notice, which had been both an interesting and unpleasant experience, but it also meant we carried out routine and boring staff duties at the HQ.

Using a notebook to keep track, I tried to learn more about the various life-forms detailed in the Bestiary, and found quite the best person to ask was the Doctor. He might look like a sartorial scientist of dubious sanity, and that's pretty much how I thought of him, yet his mind was quick and exceedingly sharp. Any question about Daleks or the Nestenes got an in-depth reply, with far more details than were ever included in the Bestiary or the weekly Sitreps from Geneva or locally. How did he know? "Personal experience" he would reply, tapping the side of his nose. One of his more bizarre tendencies concerned historical figures like Horatio Nelson, Marco Polo or HG Wells, whom he talked about in the present tense. It was hard to make out whether he was an insane genius or genuinely insane.

Lieutenant Munroe, far from dealing with theory, dealt with money if he could and with practical items if he could not. I suspected that he and QMS Campbell were sending in bottles of whisky to Maiden's Point, which the garrison there were happy to pay lots for. More usefully, he rapidly lost interest in the staff duties we got assigned to.

'This paper-pushing isn't what I joined up for. I'm not simply a clerk in uniform. I want to blow things up!' he complained in the mess. Captain Beresford shook his head sympathetically.

'Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Your time will come, Nick.'

It certainly did, sooner than anyone expected.

Several weeks after his outburst in the mess, Guard Room put through a call from Portsmouth, asking for "Mister Munroe". Seconds after the phone call Nick came tearing into the vehicle park, where I was Transport Officer for that week's rota, eying our one healthy Bedford and the two U/S ones.

'Yes, Lieutenant Munroe? Can the Battalion Transport Officer help you?' I asked, cool and detached.

'Yes, you stuffed shirt! I need a three-tonner soonest, for a long-range recce.'

'How long is the long part of long-range?' I asked, suspiciously.

'Portsmouth. Come on, time is wasting!'

'And what does this have to do with your duty rota as Inspection Officer?' I asked, still suspicious.

'I've got wind of equipment going spare that the Brig might like, except he can't officially acknowledge it exists, let alone put in a tender for it. Satisfied?'

'No. You can have the truck. Don't get friendly, I haven't finished. You can have the truck, but without me signing it out officially.'

Cue major scowls from Nick, but since I technically outrank him, no worries. He took the point, and also the truck, with driver, so for my sake I hoped he had a decent excuse. My final warning was that, if this was merely one of his make-Munroe-rich schemes, he'd never beget children.

Next job, just in case, had to be sorting out more Battalion Transport.

'Hello, Guard Room? Get hold of the fitters for me, will you? Couple of rush jobs.'

Of course, inevitably, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart turned up in the late afternoon, accompanied by his escort, Sergeant Benton. Equally inevitably, he made a bee-line for the vehicle park and, of course, wanted transport.

'Lieutenant Walmsley, we need transport to shift the Doctor's box of tricks.'

Which was? I asked myself. What did our resident boffin-stroke-wierdo have that needed a large truck to carry it? The Brig did a double-take and looked at me with a touch of annoyance.

'Where's the working truck?'

'Lieutenant Munroe borrowed it, sir. He's gone to get a shipment of supplies. I can let you have either of these two, if you need transport straight away.'

'I do, Lieutenant, I do. Sarn't Benton, get this one round to the other side of the east wing, under the crane.'

Sergeant Benton scrawled his mark on my clipboard, got in the cab and drove the truck out of the courtyard. Silently my thanks went up to the fitters who'd put both remaining Bedfords into working order, finishing only quarter of an hour before the Brig arrived, spurred on by a two-hundred cigarette bribe.

The Brig made to leave, then turned back and asked the question I least wanted to hear.

'Supplies? I didn't think we had anything on order. Where has he gone?'

'Portsmouth, sir.'

'Portsmouth! What on earth –'

With a loud crunching of gravel, the missing Bedford made it's way under the archway and into the courtyard, towing a large, mysterious object.

'You can ask him yourself, sir,' I replied, a happy man.

'Munroe! Explain yourself!' snapped the Brigadier. Our Nick remained unfased, climbing down from the cab with a smug expression to salute smartly when on the ground.

'Sir!' he replied, brightly. 'It's common knowledge that UNIT UK is persistently under-manned, by several hundred personnel. I hoped we might make up the shortfall with firepower in lieu of manpower.'

Looking at the towed object more closely, it resolved itself as a Bofors anti-aircraft gun, outriggers and stabilisers folded up against the breech for compact travelling. The rear of the Bedford was stacked with boxes, crates and drums.

Nick waved an imperious arm at the truck bed.

'A contact of mine said the Navy were getting rid of a lot of anti-aircraft stuff, guns for the most part. Being replaced by missiles, you see. So I borrowed the truck to get hold of it down at Portsmouth.'

Despite himself, the Brig looked impressed and amused, his moustache twitching.

'I don't need to know the details, Lieutenant. Carry on!' he ordered and strode off.

'What have you got?' I asked, honestly curious.

'Well, those long crates there are L1A1s's, tuned-up by the Navy artificers to fire at about nine hundred rpm.'

"L1A1" translated into "Browning Heavy Machine Gun" in my mind.

'And those wider boxes are twin Browning 7.62's. The really long crate is a twenty millimetre Oerlikon cannon – don't look too impressed, there wasn't any ammo for it. What d'you think?'

Truth be told, my first impression was that Nick had gone stealing at an armoury.

'How much ammo do you have for them?'

'Let's see – about fifteen thousand rounds of all sorts. And one hundred and forty shells for the Bofors.'

Even the stoic Sergeant Benton seemed impressed when he came to inspect the unloaded weaponry in the armoury, giving a whistle of appreciation. I picked up one of the L1A1's, a monster of a machine gun five feet long, just to see if I could.

'Think you could fire it?' joked Nick.

'I wouldn't, sir,' advised Benton. 'That's a big bundook. The recoil would knock it out of your hands with the first shot.'

'Just testing.' I laid the gun by it's tripod mount. Next job for me was to allocate time for the fitters to put pintle mounts on our Landrovers and trucks, so I went back to my room to sort out the rota. Not dashing stuff, exactly, yet it needed to be done to help Protect the Planet.

The next week brought another vehicle onto strength. A cut-down truck, driven by Nick, and towing a length of drainpipe on wheels, intruded on my small domain of Battalion Transport.

'What -' I asked, pointing with my pen for emphasis, ' - is that!'

'Don't get shirty, Battalion Transport Officer. This is an air-dropped modified Bedford, lightened specially for the Paras. No upper cab, as you can see.'

'And the drainpipe?'

He got down and led me round to the towed article. Actually it wasn't a drainpipe, it was a Wombat recoilless rifle. The truck bed lay deep in boxes of the huge shells for the Wombat.

'Now, before you ask, Battalion Motor Man, yes this is legal. The Paras were getting rid of the truck and the gun came with it.'

There was no reply from me.

'Here's the vehicle log, service details, requisition order – you need to sign that – maintenance schedule and repair history,' continued Nick, handing over the paperwork. 'And I got two hundred cannon shells for our Oerlikon.'

With that, Nick's reputation as a fixer-and-finder was established firmly in everyone's mind. I remained the chap who'd chatted with a fish-monster.

Like all boys with toys, Nick and I wanted to test-fire our new hardware. The Brig approved of this, maybe since it got two unassigned officers out of his hair for a day or two, although he might have had second thoughts if we'd told him exactly what we were going to test the weapons on. I drove one Landrover, Nick drove another and our cut-down truck was brought along by Corporal Horrigan, with Private Ely in attendance. Thus we arrived at Swafham Prior, booked in on the authority of the Brig, armed to the teeth and beyond. With ear-protectors.

'Civvie vehicles,' pointed out Nick in the car park.

This did not sit well with me. Part of the reason for coming all the way out here was to cavort beyond the view of civilians, applying deadly force with no onlookers.

'We'll deal with them if they get nosey. I doubt it, given the noise we'll be making.' How wrong I was.

The test firing range was behind the huge storage hanger, and consisted of a long, wide lane between sheets of corrugated iron backed with sandbags, which ended in an earth wall, backed with more sandbags. Vertical white stripes were painted on the iron walls every ten yards, allowing firers to judge their distance from targets. Nick went into the hangar and dug the Range Safety Officer out of his cosy den, then waved the Brig's permissory note under his nose.

His eyes widened when he saw the vehicles and the weapons brought along.

'Now, we'll need one each of the following,' declared Nick, producing the list I'd typed out at Aylesbury.

'You can have them. I'm not wheeling any of them out, you can do that yourselves.'

The Autons were first. Nice and light, so I brought out two, then stuck them at fifty and one hundred yards down the range. The RSO put up the firing flag, Corporal Horrigan drove up the Landrover with the fifty-calibre, made sure the handbrake was on and vehicle left in first gear once the engine was off.

'Okay, Corporal. Give that plastic rascal a quick burst.'

Horrigan adjusted his ear-protectors, cocked the gun, squinted down the sights and loosed off a burst of ten rounds. A couple of the tracers in the burst raced to the first Auton, which blew apart in a cloud of plastic. I signalled the RSO, who lowered the flag, and went out to examine the corpse.

"Bits of corpse" would be more accurate. The big armour-piercing rounds had shattered the plastic body into dozens of large pieces and hundreds of smaller ones, leaving nothing bigger than a fist-sized chunk of whitish plastic.

'Overkill,' I decided. 'Next target, only five rounds, if you can.'

The Auton still broke apart into uncountable bits. By taking rounds out of the belt that fed the machine gun, we managed to eventually fire bursts of only two or three rounds. At ranges over two hundred yards, it took three bullets from the Browning to disintegrate an individual Auton.

'Scribe diligently, oh senior officer,' mocked Nick. I frowned at him. What did he mean, the buffoon? Regardless, I made notes on my clipboard.

'Okay, Private Ely, try the Oerlikon.'

The Oerlikon, a twenty-millimetre anti-aircraft cannon, made a percussive crack when it fired, and made the noisy Browning seem sedate and quiet. BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG went Ely, before stopping and swearing.

'What's the problem?' I asked.

'It's the Lannie, sir. The suspension's not built to take the recoil from summat like this. It threw me off, all the rocking.'

'Single shots, then.'

BANG. The replacement Auton out at the hundred-yard marker flew apart. When I went out to look, the head was intact, and so were the feet, but nothing else.

'Evil alien invader, nil. Human beings, one,' I muttered. Walking back to the parked vehicles meant I could see behind them, and realised why Nick had been so smugly amused. Several civilians from the hangar had come out to see who was making all the noise, and why. One of the onlookers was Liz Shaw, and her duenna Mme Valdupont. Giving them a controlled, ambiguous wave, I motioned to Ely.

'About what we expected. We're going to try the Daleks next. Take the Lannie into the hangar and pick up that empty chassis unit. Lieutenant Munroe, if you can function with that smirk, please accompany him.'

The last sentence got spoken extra-loudly for the benefit of our audience.

'What on earth are you up to, Lieutenant?' asked Ms Shaw. 'We can't hear ourselves think in there for the racket you're making.'

Mme. Valdupont muttered in French, her expression not kind or forgiving at all.

'Practical testing, Miss Shaw. Determining what effect differing calibre rounds have on our enemy at different ranges. For your information, we intend to use a recoilless rifle, shortly.'

Blank looks from Liz, Mme Valdupont and half a dozen other male scientists come to goggle at us.

'A lightweight artillery weapon that makes a considerable amount of noise. Un Grand Puissance Filiuex!' I added in French for Mme Valdupont, who coloured and frowned.

'Think she gets out of bed on the wrong side whichever it is, sir,' commented Corporal Horrigan, deadpan.

'Corporal! That is a wicked and malicious thing to say. Even if it does appear to be true,' I replied.

Nick brought the empty Dalek chassis, which took two of us to unload and trundle down the range.

'Oh, dahling, where has our baby gone!' commented Nick, in a mock-falsetto. 'Our pram is empty.'

'Behave with the dignity becoming a British officer, you hysterical old woman,' I growled. 'We are being watched. By single women.'

The next five minutes were amusing for the onlookers. We fired the fifty-calibre and the Oerlikon at that wretched chassis, from which the rounds ricocheted to the four points of the compass, in a wild firework display of tracers. The chassis trundled about the target range under the impact of the rounds, hunted by the incoming rounds, followed by appreciative hoots of laughter and jeers from our audience.

'Bring on the big gun!' I shouted. Horrigan drove up the Bedford. I waved to the RSO.

'Wombat!' I warned. We checked the back-blast area, shooed a scientist away, and Horrigan let loose with the recoiless rifle. A shattering blast shook the air, a huge cloud of gas and smoke vented from the gun's rear and the shell flew downrange, hitting the Dalek squarely.

It took ten minutes to dig the chassis from the earth bank, and it still remained unpunctured, although a few of the electronic sensor pods on the exterior had been shattered loose.

'Evil alien invader, one point. Human beings – oh, call it a draw,' I commented. 'Those things couldn't dig each other out of the ground.'

'Bravo!' cheered Liz Shaw, clapping. 'Our heroes.'

'Formidable,' commented Mme Valdupont, icily. 'Mon braves. Vraiment .'

The Cybermen were less difficult than the Daleks. Still, it took a couple of fifty-calibre rounds to put one of them down. The Oerlikon made a terrible mess of the last target Cyberman, blowing a large exit hole in the creature's back, causing it to leak unspeakably vile black goo. The remnants of the creature's organic component, I supposed.

One of the more unexpected targets was a Yeti – actually a robot covered with fur that imitated a Yeti. Only three surviving models were kept at Swafham, meaning we could only shoot bits off one of them. The thing had to be towed out of the hangar on a cable, since it weighed so much and lacked any means of convenient transport, which caused it to bounce across the old runway like a yo-yo, once more to the amusement of all assembled. Nick and Horrigan rolled it across the range, dragging and scraping the fur exterior. By the time the RSO put up the flag, our unfortunate Yeti looked moth-eaten and sorry for itself.

Such a large target was easy to hit, but more difficult to damage, at first. One of the Browning's first tracer rounds ignited the fur, which caught and burnt completely with surprising speed. The smell wafted to us made people retch.

A bald, red-hot robot stood facing us when the smoke died down. The fifty-calibre knocked holes in it, the Oerlikon shot holes completely through it, scattering corroded internal machinery across the range.

The final test, for comparison, involved a NATO-standard Bren. Private Ely emptied the magazine at an Auton, all thirty rounds, at fifty yards. I made notes on my clipboard. The audience, now the entertainment was over, disappeared back into the hangar.

Out of politeness and wanting to be able to return to Swafham, we collected buckets, shovels and empty sandbags and went at the varying rubbish out on the firing range. The stink from the damaged Cyberman chased us away, until Horrigan threw a bucket of sand over the slimy black puddle it lay in. The Auton's were no bother, merely being swept up into bags. The assembled pile of sandbags were stocked in the Landrover, which was driven back to the hangar, then dumped off in a dark corner away from scrutiny. All four of us sat down to dine off packed lunches in the bench-and-table area of the hangar that passed as a canteen.

'Not a bad day's work,' preened Nick. 'We got pretty useful data from that.'

'It seemed to us that you were playing with large, dangerous and expensive toys,' commented a familiar voice. Liz Shaw, with the glum Mme Valdupont and four male scientists, who either wore tweed or denim. They, too, were about to eat.

Manners propelled me to my feet.

'Of course, Miss Shaw. You missed out "complex". These weapons need to be tested. I would be highly embarrassed, not to mention dead, if they were needed in a scrap and didn't work.'

Giving a small bow, I sat down.

'Is it permissible to ask what you scientists are working on?' Nick asked, hoping to change the subject.

'Non,' declared Mme Valdupont flatly, without even looking up.

'Sorry,' apologised one of the beared chaps in tweed. 'House rules.'

' 's'okay,' I mumbled around a doorstop sandwich. 'We've got rules like that ourselves. My guess, Nick, is that they're analysing Dalek armour with a view to replicating it for use in human AFV's, giving a comparatively lightweight protection for stuff like the Chieftan.'

A guess, but not a bad one. Mme Valdupont looked at me sharply, Liz Shaw looked impressed and the man who'd spoken looked surprised.

'But that's a only a guess,' I continued. More military staff came to eat at the tables and the conversation ended.

'Okay, ten minutes for fag break, then back to HQ,' I ordered once the plates were clear. Naturally this left me indoors, coincidentally with the scientists.

'Quite a shrewd guess, Lieutenant Walmsley,' commented Liz. 'Even if I can't say whether it's correct or not.'

'Really. Well, a person being large doesn't necessarily imply that they're dim, you know,' I replied, driven by one of the bugbears of my youth and how people saw me. 'Ah, Mme Valdupont. I apologise.'

Taken by surprise, the Frenchwoman wrinkled her nose at me.

'Eh – hmm, what do you mean?'

'For Agincourt.'

Liz elbowed me in the ribs for that.

'Ow! Okay, okay. For Crecy, too.'

Glowering looks from Mme Valdupont, who looked less than amused.

'You are not funny, m'sieur.'

'Perhaps not, but we're on the same side. Human. I may be the same size as a Cyberman but you don't need to treat me like one, you know.'

Nick waved at me from the hangar door.

'Excuse me, duty calls, as does the HQ at Aylesbury!' I apologised (genuinely this time) and departed with a swift salute. Liz shook her head in exasperation and Mme Valdupont stared at her shoes.

'Where have you arranged to meet?' asked Nick, to the poorly-hidden amusement of Horrigan and Ely.

I favoured him with a short phrase of colourful description.

'No date? Oh, I am disappointed. All that body language misread.'

'Nick – oh never mind. Let's get moving again.'

Nowadays, whenever I hear about Chobham armour, I always wonder if the pundits know where it came from and who invented it. I hope Liz Shaw gets royalties.