RAF Croughton was seventh in the list.
He studied the entry he himself had written, with satisfaction. Then he got up, ran his fingers along his collection of large-scale Ordnance Survey maps and took down the Croughton map. He examined it closely alongside the maps and plans he had drawn for the original report. Then he turned on Google Earth, looking over towards the door as he did so. He scaled up to the largest image of RAF Croughton he could find, closed in on the south-west corner of the airfield and studied it carefully, committing three things to memory: the boundary fence and where two areas he had himself surveyed lay in relation to it: one adjacent to the fence itself, the other a couple of fields away.
A minute later the officer in charge knocked at the door and came straight in.
‘Professor Foale? Time to go, sir.’
Less than an hour later Arthur found himself approaching RAF Croughton on the A43.
Even had he not studied the map and Google Earth earlier, he would have known the road. As it was, he knew what to look for, particularly the southern perimeter which they passed before turning into the well-guarded entrance: a high wire fence, checkpoint and white-helmeted military police. Charming.
It all looked very different from the way it had when he had done his archaeological fieldwork around the site three decades before. There were aggressive KEEP OUT signs, legal notices to would-be trespassers, towers, electrical and telephonic structures and satellite dishes beyond.
It looked like a mock-up of a space station and, despite the millions that had probably been spent on the place, even before going through the checkpoint it had an eerie, derelict air. There were squat, pale, ill-painted buildings, concrete barricades, men in the distance in uniform, stopping and staring at passers-by who lingered too long; and, probably, dog patrols, CCTV and listening devices.
Derelict but also unpleasantly futuristic.
But then, he knew, despite its RAF tag, it was a United States Air Force base with a particular speciality, which was why Bohr had chosen it for the location of his ad hoc symposium. RAF Croughton was the most important of the USA’s telecommunication centres in Europe. Aeroplanes might be thin on the ground, the runways modest, but the place buzzed with covert electronic activity.
The perimeter fence was certainly higher than he remembered and now had razor wire along the top.
But he knew from experience of other airbases where he had done fieldwork before runways were extended or new buildings put up, that the outer fence was show, the real security lay inside and around the core buildings.
A raggle-taggle group of people with placards stood by the RAF Croughton sign, as near as was legally permissible, shaking placards which read: US RENDITION IS INHUMANE AND ILLEGAL. STOP ALL FLIGHTS HERE.
The driver ignored the protesters, one of whose placards grazed the side of the vehicle as they drove past. The shouts faded away behind them.
Stern-faced, crop-haired, uniformed guards as muscled as bull-terriers stopped the car. The barrier stayed where it was. Other guards, armed, watched coldly from a distance.
Windows whirred down, the vehicle, its driver and the passengers were checked, quiet words exchanged, a salute given and the barrier rose up.
As the car moved forward through the gate, Arthur looked back. The protesters on the road were staring after him, the barrier coming down swiftly, the guards turning back to face a hostile world.
Within seconds, as they drove forward into the base its closed world came down upon him. Unlit, unmarked buildings sped by, anonymous tarmac everywhere, sharp turns to right, to left, the roar of a helicopter engine, silhouettes of men standing, a pause, another guard checking and far glimpses of the same high fence; and sheep grazing on rough grass.
Sheep!?
He might have smiled had not a flock of gulls risen suddenly up from the roof of yet another faceless building and swung, screeching and scattering, over the car.
He already felt restrained, as if his hands and arms were pinned to his side and a fist thrust against his chest. His throat went dry with premonition.
The car stopped.
A blue door opened onto a wide, well-lit, windowless corridor blocked by another officer.
His car door was opened from outside.
‘Professor Foale? Good. This way. Your bag will be taken to your room.’
‘My papers . . .’
He leaned back into the car, they spilled from his briefcase; he fumbled about and felt a fool.
When he re-emerged, the smile on the face of his greeter was fixed, his welcome not a real welcome at all. He might just as well have been a military asset being shelved. Perhaps he was. One being put into cold storage so the enemy couldn’t get at it.
The steps he followed, and those to his side, were military. Dammit, this is an armed guard, he told himself.
Arthur’s final glimpse of the outdoors was an angled piece of darkening sky through a door.
He was taken to a room whose windows were too high for him to see out of unless he clambered up on a chair. Which, the moment he was alone, he proceeded to do. He had the uncomfortable feeling he was being watched by hidden cameras. The view was not beautiful and he had seen some of it already: nondescript airbase buildings, a sorry-looking baseball field and three structures that looked like giant golf balls, one white, two red.
At least I know where I am, he told himself, relative to where I need to be.
The room had a desk and the phone on it rang.
‘Twenty-seven minutes, Professor Foale,’ someone said.
‘Has Dr Bohr . . . ?’
The operator was gone.
He tried the door.
It opened onto a corridor in which two armed men stood.
‘Sir?’ one said unsmilingly.
Arthur retreated, shaking his head.
He went through his papers, his head clearing. He worked out what his line needed to be about the Hyddenworld. It was to say little and imply less. He wondered now how long he was going to keep them at bay. Not long if circumstances made them think it was imperative to know more, especially if they thought that the hydden might offer a solution to a problem that otherwise seemed beyond the capacity of humans to solve.
But that depended on a lot of things, not least the extent to which Bohr had discussed his brief and foolish revelations concerning Hyddenworld with others. He glanced at his watch: eight minutes to go.
He could play the fool, he could lie, he could try to confuse them, he could plead ignorance. None of it would work, not with some of the sharpest minds he knew, including that of Erich Bohr. His watch showed three minutes before time.
Arthur felt panic and a kind of hopelessness.
He had to get away and fast.
He had to get away before the questions really started, which was going to be tomorrow, early probably.
He . . .
His door opened.
‘Professor, please. This way.’
His phone rang again.
The officer took the call.
‘He’s on the way.’
The briefing room had low windows which gave him a panoramic view to the west and north of the base. The satellite terminals were across the fields to the left, a road to personnel accommodation to the right, while straight ahead, past the baseball field, the tussocky grass stretched for several hundred yards to the south-west corner of the base. The perimeter fence converged from north and east, beyond it rough grass and a public highway behind trees. He could see occasional traffic, but that was a long way off.
The windows were shut tight and locked. He was going to have to use the door.
‘Ah, Professor Foale . . .’
He began to shake hands. In different circumstances the greetings on all sides would have been more effusive and taken longer. As already indicated by Bohr, he knew most people there and had collaborated closely with one or two, but the mood was sombre and businesslike and there was no small talk.
Erich Bohr had
filled out in the decade since Arthur had last seen him. His face was grey and lined. Responsibility and power had not so much corrupted but worn him down, sucked him dry and removed the last vestiges of humanity from his eyes, his being.
His advisory post was in the gift of the President of the United States, his job was to distribute research funds to the many who needed them. He was therefore both politician and paymaster, a scientist no more. The wonder and excitement of discovery in the brutally ambitious young man Arthur once knew had evaporated in the face of the conflicting realities of the world of men.
Yet not quite all of the Erich Arthur had known, for whom Margaret had had a soft spot, was gone. In the brief moment they half-embraced, Bohr’s momentary pleasure at seeing him again was apparently genuine.
But then: ‘I’m sorry, Arthur . . . and . . . I hope . . .’ and an apologetic smile as he retreated into the shadow land of compromise and impossible decisions, in which he was both king and subject.
He hopes, thought Arthur, interpreting the ambiguity in that whispered ‘I’m sorry’, that I’ll tell them all about the Hyddenworld but if I don’t, he has the power to make me.
He knew that humans, even when they count themselves as friends, are capable of anything if they believe it to be a matter of survival.
His gaze involuntarily drifted towards the window and the wide expanse beyond, across which lay his only possibility of escape and so keeping from them the knowledge needed to access the Hyddenworld.
‘Ladies and gentlemen . . .’
The introductory session began.
They were briefed by Erich and two others about terrestrial events so far and the threat of meteorological ones as well, the wall behind them turning into a firework display of images, graphics and live links. Arthur paid very careful attention. He realized what was happening. By their very presence at that briefing, he and the others became participants in secrets of a kind that it was treasonable to divulge. No wonder Bohr had sent his people to descend on Arthur so fast, and got him somewhere secure. He had been afraid that the few others in the know about the Hyddenworld, particularly Professor Liadov of MIIGAiK, the Moscow State University of Geodesy and Cartography, and Dr Hsueh of the Department of Astronomy, Beijing Normal University, both in the pay of their respective governments, might have triggered those governments’ interest in him. Of them all, Liadov was the one he would have trusted most, the only one to whom he might have divulged what he knew.
But neither man was there and Arthur had no intention of asking if they were likely to be. Wrong question to the wrong people. It would have given too much away: that he had something to divulge, that he trusted some more than others.
They were given an agenda for the discussion that was to start after a meal.
‘Questions?’
Arthur bided his time, affected to look tired and breathless, which was not difficult.
Eventually he raised his hand.
‘I’m not used to being cooped up. Never have been. Do we have access to the great outdoors?’
Erich Bohr smiled his pale and puffy smile.
‘I can see no reason why not,’ he said slowly, glancing questioningly at one of the military.
It was answered with a reluctant nod before one of the other officers said cautiously, ‘For your own safety, ladies and gentlemen, it is better that you are accompanied if you want to go outside. Ask one of the orderlies, and someone will show you where you may go.’
‘Tell them to come in trainers,’ Arthur called out affably. ‘I intend to sprint round the perimeter before supper . . . it’ll sharpen my mind.’
He said it with an irony that would have been lost on most of those present had he not smiled with a self-deprecation intended to suggest that the last thing Professor Arthur Foale was capable of was jogging, let alone sprinting around an airbase.
He had created his chance. In the next few days he must find a way to take it.
11
THE QUINTERNE
‘Jack! Jack!’
‘Stort!’
It was Katherine, shaking them. It was six in the morning, it was urgent and it was extraordinary.
They each woke from deep sleep, aware enough of the potential danger their arrival at Abbey Mortaine the night before and the discovery of the bodies of the hydden monks had put them in, to stay silent.
Stort slowly sat up rubbing his eyes.
Jack, always instantly alert, rose up and grabbed his stave. ‘What is it?’ he whispered.
It was Katherine’s watch and she was doing her job.
‘Has one of the threads been triggered?’ murmured Stort, struggling with his trews.
Sensible hydden went to bed with their trews on in such situations but Stort said he could not sleep without a certain airiness.
The dark hours of night had been trouble-free. Now it was dawn, and cool air and a lingering mist hung in the trees about them, and among that part of the ruins they could see through the trees below. The mist was thickest along the river and it blocked out the disturbing sight of the murdered hydden.
‘Listen!’ she said.
It was quiet singing, a duet. It came from the steep hillside to their right but the mist made it impossible see who was singing, or exactly where they were.
Jack relaxed.
This was not the sound of enemies and it seemed benign.
Stort smiled. What they were hearing more than justified the stops and starts, hesitations and shocks of their journey from White Horse Hill.
‘Ancient and old,’ he said, ‘a music made to an unusual scale which means . . .’
‘They can’t know we’re here,’ said Jack. ‘They probably saw us arrive yesterday and watched us leave. The sight lines are such that they wouldn’t be able to see us from over there, or see us leave higher up. They just assumed it.’
‘Ssh!’ said Stort. ‘Listen! This is a rare privilege indeed. I doubt that hydden have heard such voices or such song for many centuries, but for those who lived here . . .’
First an old, cracked, male voice, as of one who is dying. The voice of a hydden who hasn’t got much time left now but needs to pass on what he knows to a new generation. Then, in answer and in counterpoint, a much younger voice, a tenor, pure as a lark’s flight. It rose above the first, back and forth across the sky, playing and dancing with the deeper notes it had been given, transforming them to something new that sang of life and hope.
Then the old voice again, deeper, broken, warning, encouraging, questioning, challenging, shot through with yearning for an era and youth gone by, shot through with sorrow.
A pause before the reply, which suddenly flew up from the withered undergrowth of the base, beating its wings into the thin air to gain height and find direction, encouraging the older voice in its own turn; the young giving the old a reason to live.
They sang and counter-sang, a duet that was beautiful in its sadness and loss, yearning and discovery. Its thought was all around them, but no more substantial than the mist itself which, as they listened, filled with the light of the rising sun so brightly that they had almost to hold their hands in front of their eyes not to be blinded.
The music that came to them then seemed as if made by the very Earth herself.
The words that were sung were distinct in parts but Katherine and Jack did not recognize the language. They looked to Stort for an explanation. He was standing now in his undershirt, trews round his ankles because he had forgotten to pull them up, head to one side as if to hear the better.
‘It’s plainchant,’ he murmured, ‘but of an unusual kind. Its sensuality and feeling of visceral communion borders on the blasphemous. The voices might be mortal lovers, the song an act of procreation.’
Jack ignored him, preferring to concentrate on practicalities because of the danger of Fyrd and his consciousness of the bodies that still lay below.
‘Since they don’t seem to know we’re here,’ he said, ‘we’ll stay just as we are until the
mist clears or they show themselves. My guess is that they managed to escape the carnage below and have gone into hiding until they think the coast is clear.’
Stort hauled up his trews.
‘This song is a liturgical rite of some kind, a song of celebration for lives led and a farewell to those who can no longer share the future. It will be followed by a funeral.’
Jack quietly packed up the camp while Katherine made breakfast for them all.
‘We can’t be sure the Fyrd won’t return,’ said Jack. ‘In fact I think they will, and we’re going to have to get out of here fast sooner rather than later. Stort, if you’ve business here, the moment the mist clears you’d better see to it. These choristers may know about the musical instrument.’
‘The Quinterne. They almost certainly do; the question is will they tell me what they know? Knowledge of its musica may help us in some way in the weeks to come if and when we find the gem of Autumn.’
‘Not if, when,’ said Jack. ‘We have to find it.’
‘Why should they tell us?’ said Katherine, giving him some mead to fortify him for the day.
‘Why indeed?’ said Stort. ‘If Brief couldn’t get it out of them, why should I do any better?’
The sun rose higher and burnt off the mist, revealing the three bodies among the rocks. Already rooks were hopping from rock to rock, eyeing each other, negotiating a pecking order.
‘Look!’ said Jack, ‘There!’
A tall and sturdy young hydden emerged from the mist halfway up the hill. He was leading a much older one, white of hair and hunched, out of a cave and down the slippery slope.
He did so with infinite care, holding the older one’s hand and waiting patiently while he summoned up strength and perhaps courage for the next alarming step downwards.
In this way, very slowly, they made it safely back to the riverside, stopping finally a few yards from the corpses.
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