7: The Trident
Roger darted over to the look-out position, a wooden platform built up atop the halest mud building. The sentry on duty there started briefly at the arrival of his officer, before looking back out to the south and the desert depths.
Roger's first inclination was to curse the sentry for alarming him about three trucks, until he dragged a memory from the depths of recollection, a wheelbarrow falling down a slope – back at Makan Al-Jinni when he'd been arrested.
These three widely-spaced objects weren't trucks, they were much too squat for that. Dark, too, and uncamouflaged against the dusty desert floor they stood out in a harsh contrast. Were they on tracks? A caterpillar arrangement supported them, becoming apparent when the trio drew closer.
The more clearly Roger saw them, the less he liked them. At a guess, they stood six feet high, a big opaque cylinder mounted on a broad chassis, which sat upon a pair of tracks. Various appendages projected from the cylinder at differing heights, waving in the wind of passage, and a set of what might be aerials projected from the rim of the upper cylinder.
'Sound the alarm,' he told the sentry.
Down below, the Doctor waited patiently, keeping a weather eye on the nearing vehicles. Lieutenant Llewellyn jumped down off the platform, ready to race back and alert J Force.
'Definitely non-human technology, wouldn't you agree?' said the Doctor mildly, to an incoherent snarled reply from the young officer.
Between Sarah and the Australian soldier, they shooe'd the Italian PoW's back into the truck, none of them wanting to hang around and all looking anxious.
The croupy siren wailed once again over the depot, bringing Captain's Dobie and Jolyon out of the former's mud hut, where he had been arguing over exactly how many supplies J Force could depart with.
'What the devil's going on!' called Dobie to Roger, who had mustered a dozen men of the garrison and was warning them to get ready to take cover.
Roger ran over to his superior, dogged by the Doctor.
'Looks like Italian – well, infernal devices, sir. Like an oil drum on tracks, three of them.'
Dobie spun round to glare at Jolyon, who in turn was looking at the Italian prisoners.
'Have you brought an enemy force out here, Jolyon!' Another thought struck him. 'They're going to try and free the prisoners!'
The Doctor shook his head, which got both officer's attention.
'They aren't Italian, but they may very well be infernal.'
Captain Dobie could see the middle vehicle of the three, as the other two split off and began to skirt the depot. This single middle vehicle drove straight into the depot, slowing down to walking pace and splaying out several "arms" to either side.
' "Aren't Italian!" Don't talk rot – they can't be German, they're still on the docks at Tripoli,' blustered Dobie. Captain Jolyon, paying closer attention to the Doctor, began to edge backwards to his own convoy.
'Stay away from the arms!' shouted the Doctor.
He didn't recognise the architecture, or the design, but plainly these devices were not human, and not contemporary, either. The tracks were more akin to slightly deflated balloons than caterpillar design, and the whole artefact displayed behaviour unpleasantly similar to a stalking predator. Those waving arms seemed hostile, a combination of sensor and claw.
'You men! Get out there and stop that – that thing!' shouted Dobie at a huddle of soldiers in a shallow trench.
Two of the depot soldiers, pointing rifles at the intruder, left the trench and stood squarely in the middle of the roadway.
'Get back –' called the Doctor, before Dobie rounded on him with a clipboard in one hand and a pistol in the other.
Both soldiers aimed as the vehicle slowed in front of them, but before they could fire two of the flailing arms whipped forward and struck them, slicing into flesh and clothing. Instantly the men went rigid, not even managing to scream. A brief display of bright blue light played around the aerial atop the cylinder; whilst it did so the men's bodies visibly shrank and shrivelled within their uniforms, collapsing into boneless heaps on the roadway. Still the attacker's arms remained fimly attached to the bodies, until all that remained of the men were two loose heaps of crumbling clothing, covering matted, stringy, dried husks.
'Good God!' exclaimed Dobie, his eyes bulging in horrified disbelief. Further behind, Captain Jolyon sprinted back to the column of stationary vehicles, waving his arms to alert the lounging soldiers and officers.
A ragged salvo of shots rang out from the soldiers crouched in the trench, their bullets ricocheting from the opaque black monster with no visible effect.
Glass! realised the Doctor, seeing flakes and chips fly off the matte surface under the bullet's impact. A machine composed of fused silicon dioxide. If he could get close enough with the sonic screwdriver then he might be able to shatter the tank-like machine.
Rumbling slowly forwards, the machine lashed out with it's arms and caught another soldier in the trench, once again causing him to shrivel and waste away into rags and papery remnants.
Hmm. Perhaps getting close isn't really viable, realised the Doctor, sorting out possible alternatives that didn't involve dying suddenly.
The surviving soldiers abandoned their trench and ran backwards, loosing off more ineffectual shots. Captain Dobie levelled his Webley and emptied the chambers, gritting his teeth with determination.
'Bulletproof, damn it!' he cursed. 'Fall back! Fall back and watch out for the two on the flanks.'
The various trucks, light tanks, armoured cars and scout vehicles of J Force were now revving their engines and manouvering in the narrow roadway. Captain Jolyon stood up in the lead car, a captured Italian Sahariana, and aimed a Lewis machine gun from the shoulder. He fired over the heads of the soldiers now running towards him, only to see the tracer rounds bounce off the attacker.
Seeing the machine advance again, the Doctor dashed back to the Marmon-Herrington armoured car, an ugly vehicle mounting a Bren gun in the turret, alongside –
'I say, is that a Boyes anti-tank rifle?' he shouted above the din of engine noises.
A startled crewman poked his head above the turret, looked down at the Doctor and then up at the slowly-approaching black machine.
The Doctor stood on the running board to shout more effectively.
'That thing –' and he waved at the intruder, now only thirty yards away, ' – is made of fused glass. A high-velocity round ought to shatter it.'
One of the energy-draining arms whipped out, catching a running soldier across the legs and shrivelling him into near-nothingness.
The crewman ducked down again, the armoured car jerked into reverse and began to accelerate backwards. More rounds from Captain Jolyon's Lewis gun bounced off the glassy-hulled machine. His Sahariana surged forwards and swung hard left, narrowly avoiding being hit by the attacker's swinging arms.
They're not going to bother, after my advice –
With a terrific bang, the long anti-tank rifle fired, kicking up volumes of dust from the engine covers. Turning, the Doctor saw the bullet impact high on the black cylinder. Large-bored and high velocity, the round drilled right into the machine, leaving a small entry hole, then a much larger exit one, scattering chunks of black glass across the road.
Abruptly, the machine stopped. It still functioned, as the deadly arms continued to flail the air. The Doctor felt it had come across a stimuli never encountered before and was taking stock of the situation.
Behing the armoured car, the Vickers light tank edged forward, away from the truck holding Italian PoW's. Of an approximately equal size to that of the sinister alien machine, the tank's turret swivelled to bring twin machine-guns to bear, just as the other machine began to reverse.
These machine guns were fifty calibre Vickers, firing armour-piercing rounds far bigger and more deadly than the depot's rifles. They banged out a stacatto rhythm for three seconds, blowing big holes in the alien machine, ricocheting around the interior and throwing delicate glass debris all over the road. When firing ceased the machine had run backwards into the wall of a mud hut, the cylinder breaking apart and collapsing inwards.
'Cor! We stopped it!' exclaimed the nervous crewman the Doctor had seen, now sticking only his nose and eyes above the turret.
'There are still two more,' cautioned the Time Lord.
Sarah stayed in the lorry with the Italians, crammed in amongst them, standing up to see what on earth was going on. The big black tank had advanced slowly down the roadway, killing several soldiers in the process. Bullets merely bounced off the horrid machine, and she saw the Doctor running back to an armoured car.
The truck driver favoured discretion over valour, reversing the truck into the gap between two piles of net-covered crates, then driving forward across the roadway and into another symmetrical arrangement of boxed supplies, before stopping.
More gunfire sounded from J Force, rising to a crescendo, then abruptly stopping.
'I'm going to see what happened to the Doctor,' called Sarah to the truck driver, who sat fiddling with a sub-machine gun. 'Can I get past?' she asked the Italians, packed in like sardines, standing upright.
With startling suddenness, half a dozen Italian soldiers to Sarah's right froze into immobility. She turned to look at them, too surprised to speak, and caught the silent agony in the face of the nearest man. His eyes went white and then shrivelled to nothing, his cheeks hollowed then fell in, as the skin on his face contracted to become a paperlike tissue stretched over his skull. Which in turn collapsed inwards as his body became little more than cords of stringy tissue unable to hold up his uniform. Barely able to react, Sarah saw the other victims disintegrate also, and behind them the bulk of the evil alien machine loomed.
The whole ghastly process took place in a second, leaving the machine free to attack more victims. One of the arms slashed at Sarah –
- who found herself knocked over the side of the truck in a diving tackle by one of the more alert soldiers. She hit the hard ground hard, getting all the wind knocked out of her.
'Jump! Jump and run for it!' yelled the Australian soldier, suiting action to words and jumping. Alongside Sarah the Italian who had saved her put a steadying arm around her shoulder and helped her to her feet. Stumbling off, she turned to see another half dozen soldiers caught in the truck, bodies collapsing into wasted oblivion. The Australian soldier fired a couple of shots that merely bounced off the armour of their assailant.
It followed us off the roadway, realised Sarah.
Then she heard firing suddenly flare up a couple of hundred yards away to the north. There were more machines lurking among the pyramids of supplies, hunting humans.
The second machine, moving in from the north, proved to be more cunning and calculating than it's destroyed cousin. It remained behind the scattered piles of crates, darting from cover to cover, never exposing itself for long enough to be fired upon. Small, pathetic, ruined bundles of rag in it's path showed where soldiers had been surprised by the machine.
They had to be using a shared intelligence network, so that information acquired by one was passed to all. How to disrupt that! wondered the Doctor.
Slowly, with a crewmember peering cautiously over the turret rim, the Marmon-Herrington armoured car crept around a pile of wooden crates. The Doctor followed the car, careful to keep well to the rear, out of the reach of any lethal arms. He cocked an inquisitive eye at the wooden crates, came to a decision and clambered up them. From the top he spied the glassy black intruder, quarter of a mile away, moving stealthily between cover. Cover arranged like a chess board –
An idea sprang into his mind and the Doctor jumped down onto the rear deck of the Marmon Herrington, nearly killing the crew with fright.
'You need to hold your position here, and aim that Boyes rifle directly north along the open lane between all these supplies. I'm going to arrange a little beating party!' he explained, beaming with the enthusiasm of either a genius or a madman.
Back to the top of the twenty foot high pile, and he spotted what was needed; the Vickers light tank, currently revving like mad and driving up and down the main roadway. Checking the position of the intruder, the Doctor once more sprinted over to the light tank, knocking politely on the small turret. A worried-looking young man wearing a black beret popped up from the hatch like a jack-in-the-box.
'Could you move forward five hundred yards, and point your guns to fire north along one of the lanes in the supply dump? We're going to box the killer in.'
Shrugging, as if to deny any responsibility, the officer sank back into the tank, which headed off to take up position five hundred yards away. The whole of the small armoured vehicle swung to face north.
'Excellent!' chuckled the Doctor. With a tinge of apprehension he saw Captain Jolyon driving another Sahariana, this one mounting a captured Breda cannon.
'Captain,' he gasped after running and catching the car. 'Excuse me – I've set up two of your vehicles to box the killer tank in. You need to drive north along the cleared lane to the left of that armoured car, and have this formidable-looking sidearm pointed east.'
More flexible of mind that Dobie, Captain Jolyon merely nodded and drove carefully around the milling vehicles to get to the Doctor's suggested location. The abrupt dual rattle of the Vickers tank's two machine guns warned that the killer "tank" had tried to move outside the no-go zone. Seconds later the echoing bang of the Boyes told that it had tried to escape on that side. The commander of the light tank was quick enough to realise what had happened, and moved his tank backwards along the roadway, guns once again pointing north along another clear lane between the supplies. The area the alien machine could move in was suddenly reduced.
This boxing-in process took time, which the Doctor chafed at. He knew a third killer machine was loose in Mersa Mertuba, and worried about Sarah. She ought to know to keep well clear of the evil thing. But what if it was stalking her specifically?
'Captain! Captain! Three o'clock!' he yelled, suddenly seeing the black tank move out into the open, it's space for manouevre constricted by now to nothing. Captain Jolyon's Sahariana darted forward and the cannon hammered away with a twenty-round burst. The first few shells missed, but then Jolyon got the range and the target began to fly apart as great dinner-plate sized holes appeared in it, slowing the vehicle to a halt in a pile of shattered silicon dioxide.
'Howzat!' shouted the Doctor, now turning to look for the third machine.
To his alarm it had crossed the roadway and was now slowly circling the supply stack below him, wary soldiery keeping a safe distance from it.
'Oh dear,' he said quietly. 'Shared intelligence network. I've been identified as the greater threat.'
From across the roadway, hiding behind wooden crates, Sarah looked on with horror as the glassy black killer began to circle the Doctor's pyramid. The vile thing had been stalking her, the surviving Italian prisoners and the depot soldiers, until it suddenly stopped before darting across the road. Now it was hunting the Doctor.
The Australian soldier from the lorry, reeking of perspiration, dropped to the ground beside her, levelling his rifle at the black tank, before stopping and swearing in an impressively unrepetetive stream of expletives.
'What's wrong? Why aren't they shooting?' snapped Sarah, aghast that nothing was being done to help her mentor.
'The crates, Miss, the bl – the crates. That's a stack of two pounder ammo in there and if an armour-piercing round hits them it could set the whole bl- set the whole lot off. It'd demolish the camp.'
Sarah stood up and cupped her hands, shouting this information to the Doctor, who waved to show he understood.
'Impasse,' he muttered, wondering where Captain Dobie had vanished to, since he wasn't trying to organise the depot garrison. Surely not killed? A bit of a pompous ass –
Below, the black tank nudged the pile of crates, making it shiver. The machine moved to a corner, hitting the crate with more force, making the Doctor teeter atop the now-threatened pyramid, flailing his arms for balance. One of the alien machine's arms swung dangerously close to him as he wobbled uncertainly. Then the machine drew back for a third rush at the crates, which would surely knock him completely off them.
'Ah, yes,' muttered the Doctor to himself. 'Shared intelligence and innate problem-solving abilities, too.'
Eight: Pieces, and bits
Captain Dobie emerged from his mud hut at speed, wearing an expression the Doctor considered best described as "murderous".
I should be concentrating on balancing or escaping, not the CO's temper, he told himself. One mis-step and I'll be so much organic kindling.
'You monster! I'll show you!' bellowed Dobie, pitching a small round object at the black tank. The Doctor frowned at the –
'Hand grenade!' he hissed to himself, practically falling down the pyramid on the opposite side. A terrific percussive bang came from the other side, shortly followed by another. Shrapnel thudded into the wooden crates, and the Doctor witnessed at least two of the killer tank's arms fly apart in the air. Grasping the opportunity, aware of what Sarah had shouted about the contents of the crates, he used his sonic screwdriver to loosen the staples holding a corner together, prised it back, ripped open the tin-foil and pulled out a two-pounder shell. It was the size of a handy club,
He had an idea, and a destination, both inspired from his vantage point on the crates. Dropping down to the ground, he sprinted eastwards, hearing the black tank drive after him, scooting along the sands. A few scattered shots came from soldiers or J Force vehicles, coming far too close to him for comfort, until an authoritative voice bellowed "cease fire!".
Risking a quick glance behind, he saw the black tank only thirty feet behind, the glassy armour scarred and crazed where Captain Dobie's hand grenades had pummelled it. Only two of the arms remained intact.
The Doctor put on a sprint and darted around the corner, leaping for the front hull of the abandoned A13 tank, hauling himself onto the turret by the barrel of the gun and dropping inside through the open hatch. In front of him sat the breech of the two-pounder gun, which he studied for a split second.
Simple technology, no electronics involved, no electricity, only kinetic moving parts – here goes! he thought, mentally crossing fingers.
The two-pounder shell went in smoothly enough, and the breech closed with only a little grating.
A sudden darkness blocked sunlight that had been streaming in through the large gap in the turret next to the two-pounder. The black tank had arrived.
'Say cheese,' muttered the Doctor, pulling what he assumed to be the trigger mechanism, closing his eyes and clenching his teeth together tightly.
His guess was correct. The two-pounder shell was capable of penetrating an inch of armour plate at five hundred yards. At a range of ten feet, against an artefact composed of silicon dioxide, the effects were literally shattering: the black killer blew apart from the tracks upwards in a million shards, a tinkling explosion that deposited black glass fragments over half an acre.
More relieved than he cared to acknowledge, the Doctor slumped backwards in the gunner's tiny seat, exhaling hugely.
After a few seconds a rapping could be heard on the tank's armour.
'Hello? Doctor?' came Sarah's plaintive voice. 'Are you alright?'
The Doctor popped up out of the turret like a jack-in-the-box, startling the young woman.
'Never better!' he grinned at her. 'Don't cut yourself on the remnants of our alien caller.'
The upper surfaces of the tank were indeed liberally covered with shards of black glass, which crunched like crisps underfoot.
Captains Dobie and Jolyon crunched around the mud hut, surprised and pleased that the Doctor had survived.
'Damn plucky, that, Mister Smith,' blustered Captain Dobie, kicking the tracks of the third machine. 'What the hell – oh, beg your pardon, Miss Smith – er, what on earth is this thing? Some Italian infernal engine?'
' "On Earth" isn't the right phrase, Captain,' remarked the Doctor, drily.
'It isn't Italian!' interrupted Sarah with some heat. 'It killed fifteen or sixteen of the prisoners.'
Poking around in the shattered track section, Captain Jolyon whipped his finger back, swore briefly and sucked it.
'Cut my finger,' he muttered. 'Damn thing's sharp as a razor.'
'Fused silicon dioxide, Captain,' explained the Doctor. 'Glass, in other words. Must be making use of local resources,' he continued in an undertone.
When the sad, pathetic bundles of rag that constituted the dead were tallied, it was found that nineteen of the Italian PoW's had been killed, along with nine soldiers of the depot garrison. All that remained to identify the deceased were their identity tags. J Force remained long enough to help dig two communal graves, one for the Italians, one for the British, and fired three rounds over the freshly dug earth.
'No idea what to tell Middle Eastern Command about this, old feller,' said Captain Jolyon briskly as the convoy of vehicles moved off down the roadway from Mersa Martuba.
'RASC Headquarters will send me to see an alienist if I tell them the truth,' grumbled Captain Dobie. He had called the Doctor, Lieutenant Lewellyn and Corporal Mickleborough into his office. Sarah, uninvited, hung around the door until frowned away by the captain.
'The truth is more alarming than you think, Captain, because the threat is not over.'
Nobody wanted to hear news like that from the Doctor. Captain Dobie scowled at him, then went back to tidying up his desk drawers, which he had wrenched open and emptied in order to find the two hand grenades left there for emergencies.
'I beg to differ, Doctor Smith. We shot and blew those things into bits. We haven't seen any more because there aren't any more.'
Roger directed a cutting look at the Doctor.
'Trans-mat indeed! I know what happened to our missing soldiers. And the workers at Makan Al-Jinni, if it comes to that. All those monstrous things leave behind them are a bundle of dry tissues, and the wind would soon disperse or conceal them. No trace of anyone remaining after a few minutes.'
The Doctor conceded the point with a languid wave of the arm.
'Yes, I happened to be theorising without sufficient data,' he admitted, 'But my point about that plinth being a trans-mat is still correct.' He gave a rueful grin, then straightened up suddenly. 'D'you suppose Professor Templeman is still alive and whole?'
Captain Dobie looked startled.
'Good Lord, you know, I'd forgotten all about the interfering old duffer. Someone ought to go and see.'
All eyes turned upon the Doctor.
'We're going to be struggling here, with nine men less and all the work still to be done,' explained Captain Dobie.
'Ah. Well, I suppose I do rather fit the bill.'
Privately, the Doctor wanted to get over to the dig and see what had transpired there, and he wanted to do it without risking anyone else's life. Those glass vehicles would also bear examination. Clearly their construction out of silicon dioxide meant that they'd been built using what was available locally. Then there had been the peculiar blue nimbus of light that played around the circular antennae arrays every time the machines killed a man. What was the purpose of that?
Before leaving he tried one last gambit.
'Those machines were built with a purpose in mind, Captain. There is a rational intelligence operating behind them, and I urge you to exercise caution.'
Captain Dobie smiled pityingly and handed over a set of ignition keys for a Chevrolet 3 tonner.
Making his way to the ranks of parked trucks under their shady camouflage netting, the Doctor decided on a small detour and checked out the carcass of the first black tank to be destroyed. Solid glass outer casing, arrays of delicate spokes, wheels and levers inside, all made from the same black glass, and a smashed centrally-located metal box that must have been the vehicle's electronic brain. All the internal components were unseated or smashed, telling him little he couldn't already deduce. The machine wasn't a design he recognised.
'Which doesn't mean a great deal,' he sighed to himself. 'Now, to the dig.'
Sarah moodily kicked a stone down the dusty, potholed roadway. The men – make that The Men, she chided them mentally – obviously didn't trust her to do or think or say anything constructive or sensible.
Men! she scornfully sneered. Especially these men – behaving as if she were some spun-sugar princess who might faint if she heard bad language. The Doctor was no better – he'd gone sneaking off and driven away in a lorry before she caught up with him. Lieutenant Llewellyn merely told her the Doctor had gone to see Professor Templeman, before rushing off himself to arrange sentries.
So here she was, on her own. Not even the TARDIS to take refuge in.
On a whim, she clambered up a pile of crates with Italian writing stencilled on the side, trying to spot any sign of the familiar old blue box.
Nothing, in all directions. Heat haze, dust, sand. And the inevitable, irreconcilable sun, beating down. Sarah felt the truth of the verb, the heat here did hit you like a physical force.
She tried to recall what the Doctor had told her about the HADS, and about the TARDIS's ability to manouvre in time and space in a non-linear fashion.
Well, it might turn up tomorrow, or not for three months.
Sarah looked at the landscape more closely. There were dips and hollows, deep cuttings, potholes, depressions – more than enough places to conceal the TARDIS, their mutual escape route. If it had landed out there, then simply standing here and looking wouldn't reveal it. She ought to go out and look herself. Perhaps she ought to inform the Doctor – and then again perhaps not, considering that he wasn't actually at Mersa Martuba to be informed. She couldn't tell any of the garrison why she was really going to go searching in the desert, and no lie that came to mind would be compelling enough to persuade the suspicious soldiery.
Not being stupid or hasty, she went along to Lieutenant Llewellyn's tent, and borrowed an empty water bottle. Borrowed being a long-term verb. She filled it from the handy faucet located on the rear of what looked like a petrol tanker but was actually a water tanker.
'Sorted!' she chuckled to herself, before catching the exultant tone in her voice. Going into the deep desert with nobody to help was not really "sorted", more sort of "desperate".
Another item "borrowed" from Roger's tent was a compass. Sarah knew that locating her own position in the featureless wastes of Cyrenaica would be difficult without a point of reference. Hence the compass. Which, she had to admit, seemed a lot more complex than she imagined. There was a movable dial around the compass face, and a folding cover that indicated positions of the sun, and the interior of the compass was full of liquid.
Her plan was to strike out from the supply dump, on a fixed compass bearing, get a mile or two out and then find the highest ground possible. She ought to be able to view the surrounding desert well enough to spot the TARDIS if it had appeared yet.
If only that Italian count in his aircraft hadn't been so trigger-happy! she told herself, trudging over the pea gravel. Really, what kind of pilot wasted a bomb on a police-box?
After a good half hour, Sarah could see her tracks stretching backwards to the east as she travelled due west, the camp lost to view amidst heat haze and undulations in the desert floor. Sticking to her self-appointed restriction, she swallowed a little water out of the bottle, making a face at the nasty chlorinated after-taste.
'Yuck! No wonder they make tea out of it!' she told the desert air. Now to find higher ground, and hopefully the TARDIS.
The nearest vantage point lay still further to the west, more north-north-west, so she manfully set her shoulders and hiked on. Before she got there, a wide dry wadi opened up at her feet, so abruptly that she nearly fell into it. Detouring around it would add another five minutes to her walk, so she braced her knees and jumped down the side in a small shower of rocks and dirt, sliding awkwardly and knocking her hat off.
The first thing she noticed were the strangely-regular shapes of big bushes under the far lip of the wadi, bushes with outlines broken up by netting.
'Oh! J Force!' she realised, out loud, giving them a wave. This probably saved her life, since the brawny, hairy left forearm that snaked around her neck from behind didn't exert crushing force, and the big bayonet stuck in her throat at the right barely broke the skin.
Petrified, Sarah noticed the ingrained dust in the pores of the arm that held her, the acrid smell of sweat and garlic, the notches in the bayonet blade.
'Silence!' hissed a voice. 'I you try to run or cry out I will kill you.'
The sweaty arm withdrew, allowing Sarah to turn a little and see who threatened her.
A burly, moustachioed man in grey-green uniform, dusty and sweaty, clutching a bayonet in his right hand.
'A woman! You are lucky I heard you, woman. Few people walk away from my embrace. Now, walk to the vehicles.'
Jarringly, Sarah realised she was a prisoner of the Italian Army.
From beneath the cover of the camouflage netting, Tenente Dominione watched Sergente Maggiore Cappriccio prod the prisoner forward, toward the command car. It took several uncomprehending seconds before Dominione realised that the unusually slim British soldier, with the unusually long hair was actually a woman. What in the name of the Blessed Virgin was a single woman doing wandering around in the wastes of Cyrenaica? A nurse? Separated from her unit? Not in uniform, either, but given the piratical dress that desert-canny Britons wore that wasn't entirely surprising.
He held up the netting to allow them both to enter, dropping it carefully afterwards, making sure it didn't sag off the pole. His English was limited, and he might need to summon Caporale Balduccio, who spoke it fluently, to interrogate the prisoner.
'Miss,' he said, bowing slightly. He dismissed the rouguish Capriccio with a nod and dart of the eyebrows. There was no risk from the woman, not with a private sitting behind him in the Sahariana, watchful behind a machine-gun.
'Who are you, and what are you doing out here, miss?' he asked in Italian, remaining polite. The steel fist could be revealed soon enough.
'My name is Sarah Jane Smith and I'm a journalist,' replied the woman, in excellent Italian.
Dominione put his hands on his hips, frowning. A journalist? A reporter?
'You are here to report on the war?' he asked.
'Oh, no! No, I'm only here by accident.'
The officer snorted in amused disbelief.
'How coincidental that is, Miss Smith. You just happen to stumble upon our camp by accident.'
The woman grinned weakly.
'It is a bit feeble, isn't it? I was trying to find my – transport. We lost it earlier and had to take shelter with soldiers at the camp.'
Sarah realised, with a thrill of horror, that she'd said entirely the wrong thing.
'Soldiers, eh? How many?'
'A lot less than there used to be!' snapped Sarah, going on to the offensive. 'We were attacked, you know. Black tanks, three of them, that killed a lot of the soldiers. And the Italian prisoners, too.'
Carro Armato Negre? wondered the lieutenant. The Tedeschi were unloading tanks at Triploli, he knew that, and some of the heavier models were still in black European paint schemes.
'They weren't human,' continued Sarah stubbornly, seeing the officer's look of interest become one of disbelief. 'Alien. Not from Earth.'
Dominione cast a pitying look at the obviously deranged woman, who nevertheless managed to seem nearly normal. The private behind him sniggered unkindly.
Quarter of an hour later, Sarah sat in the back of the command Sahariana, the vehicle used by the tall, slender Italian officer. Her thumbs were tied securely together with wire, not tight enough to hurt, tight enough to rebuff any attempt to wriggle free. A driver and radio-operator in the front of the big desert car looked at her with frank appreciation, a look that Sarah was beginning to understand if not like: a woman amongst countless men. The Tenente looked at her, too, with considerably less longing and a lot more worry, his bright blue eyes expressing concern. A female civilian, babbling about murderous black tanks that killed everyone they touched – just what he didn't need! He wasn't about to break radio silence to report in to Camionista HQ about the prisoner, not yet.
After the raid, he decided. When he'd gotten some revenge for the humiliating retreat he made across the desert of Cyrenaica in January, he and his platoon. Most of them had volunteered for the Camionista group, eager to get their own back at the British. For too long, eight months, the British had been raiding and ambushing behind Italian lines. Now the Camionistas would be repaying that "Jackal Force" in kind.
'Once it begins to get dark, we remove the netting and move out,' he told the radio-operator. 'To Rendezvous One. Pass the message on to the other cars.'