Overland

by Graham Rawle

  Later, when the other women had packed up their lunch things and returned to work, Kay lagged behind, looking up at the tarpaulin.

  “Where do you think that fishing hook came from?”

  Queenie was already heading back. “Beats me. Come on. We’re late.”

  “All that way, and it ended up right there in front of my face. It was as if it was intended just for me. Don’t you think that’s strange?”

  Queenie pretended to give the question careful thought before answering. “Er. No.”

  “What do you think goes on up there?”

  “Nothing. They’re putting up some kind of camouflage I think. Somebody must be up there working on it.”

  “With a fishing rod?”

  Queenie shrugged, incurious. “Come on.”

  “I have to take a powder. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “Donaldson will have your ass if you’re late back.”

  Kay waved her away and Queenie left her to it, stepping into the relative darkness of the hangar.

  Inside, Donaldson pulled Queenie to one side. When he asked her where Kay was, she feigned ignorance, shrugging herself from his clutch and returning to her bench.

  He went out to where the girls had previously been eating lunch, but none of his workforce were there now. He headed back to the hangar, failing to spot Kay who had climbed the scaffolding tower to the overhead gantry and was now standing on the crosswalk immediately under the surface of the turquoise tarpaulin.

  George was napping. An insect buzzing around his face partially stirred him, but he gradually closed his eyes again to enjoy the lazy stillness of his surroundings. From the roadway at the top of the hill, soft music from the Overland speaker system floated gently on the breeze.

  Kay found she was able to touch the tarp canvas above her head. Up close she could see that it was formed from a series of strips, each about twenty feet wide, fastened together along their edges. A hole the size of a ship’s porthole had been cut into the fabric. The unfiltered sunlight, glowing golden in contrast to the cool aquamarine, punched through the opening and shone directly onto Kay’s face like a theater spotlight. Above her, she could see clouds scudding across the sky.

  Keen to see more, she stepped up onto the crossbar of the safety rail. Bringing her outstretched arms together above her head like a diver, she pushed herself up through the hole until—

  —she emerged, as far as her middle, into the empyrean blue yonder.

  Beneath the surface, her lower half—dirty overalls and work boots—carried all the grimy evidence of her existence in the netherworld;

  above it, her upper half felt cleansed and unburdened, like an ethereal spirit of the divine waters, or something poetic like that—a woman clearly divided between two worlds.

  Romantic music rose and faded on the veer of the wind. With her fingertips resting lightly on the surface of the tarp, she looked slowly around her, taking in her first view of Overland.

  Immediately in front of her, set against lush woodland undergrowth, was a handsome red-roofed cabin. A cute pink rowboat with a red stripe painted along its side was moored to a wooden post where the gentle grassy slopes met the edge of the blue tarpaulin. Looking across the rippled expanse of blue, she began to realize that she had surfaced in the middle of what was supposed to be a lake.

  Despite this puzzling note of inauthenticity, she felt an immediate connection with the place, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Then it came to her, as though the words had appeared like a picture caption. “When Evening Shadows Fall.” It was, as old Mr Cochran had said, a little piece of heaven on earth.

  George slowly stirred back to consciousness, breathing deeply to bring himself fully awake. As his eyes floated open, he was seized by a growing sense of Kay’s presence. He sat up suddenly and found himself facing a vision of loveliness, a mysterious Lady of the Lake rising from the waters like a goddess from mythology. The light reflecting off the lake’s shiny surface brought a soft glow to her exquisite features. George was captivated. Overland’s piped music swelled in his head: “You Stepped Out Of a Dream” played by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. He continued to stare, afraid to move lest she should disappear.

  When Kay finally caught sight of him, she was a little taken aback; she had assumed she was alone. The lakeside scene on her calendar had been unpopulated and, though it was irrational, she had not expected to see anyone here either. She couldn’t quite figure out where the stranger had come from—why hadn’t she spotted him until now? How long had he been watching her? She couldn’t help but observe that he was tousle-haired, ruggedly lean and unassumingly handsome, and that he fitted perfectly into the picture.

  A voice from the underworld, heard only by Kay, broke the spell.

  “Hey. You. What are you doing up there?”

  George watched as the vision raised her arms and slipped noiselessly below the surface of the water like a synchronized swimmer from a Busby Berkeley sequence. He instinctively held his breath in anticipation of her resurfacing, but the enchantress remained submerged and George, lungs burning, was finally forced to let out his breath with a spluttering cough.

  On the top road, Jimmy and the lieutenant were approaching the slopes to the lake.

  “So how come you haven’t enlisted?”

  “I have, sir,” said Jimmy. “Completed my basic training. Waiting for my Duty Assignment. I volunteered for the five hundred and ninth Parachute Infantry Regiment, Second Battalion. I’m just helping out here until I start my special training. Assuming I’m accepted, that is.”

  “Not everyone is. Still, you look like you’ve got what it takes.”

  “Thank you sir.”

  “So you’re ready to see some action, huh?”

  “My brother is already out in the Philippines so I’m pretty keen to get out there after him.”

  “Where is he based?”

  “Bataan Peninsular.”

  The lieutenant winced. “Ooh. That’s tough. Have you heard from him?”

  “Not recently. Why?”

  “I’m sure he’ll make it out of there just fine.”

  Jimmy frowned, unsure what the lieutenant meant.

  They rounded the corner of a bungalow and looked down the slope to see George gazing into the lake. He seemed transfixed by some vision, yet there was nothing there.

  The lieutenant called out. “Mr Godfrey!”

  George turned. He was still dazed, uncertain whether what he had just seen was real.

  “Meeting with Major Lund!” The lieutenant tapped his wristwatch impatiently. “He’s waiting.”

  George checked his own watch. He nodded slowly, bringing himself back to normality.

  Donaldson was up on the gantry. Kay stepped down from the rail and, wanting to avoid the confrontation, began to make her way back down to the factory floor. Donaldson grabbed her wrist.

  “I said, what were you doing up there?”

  “Nothing.” Kay pulled her arm free.

  “That’s a restricted area. You’re not allowed to be up here. What were you doing?”

  “Nothing. I was just curious.”

  “You’re not paid to be curious.”

  “I was on my lunch break.”

  “And you decided to poke your nose in?”

  “No. I—”

  “How did you get a job here anyhow? You look like a Jap to me. Show me your identity card.”

  She produced it from the breast pocket of her coveralls. Donaldson studied it.

  “You sure you’re not Japanese?”

  “No, I’ve never even been abroad.”

  “Your family, then. They must be Japanese.”

  “No, they’re American. Like me.”

  “You’re not an American,” he sneered, handing back the card.

  “There’s some Chinese ancestry on my mother’s side, that’s all,” said Kay feebly.

  “What did you see? Up there. What did you see?”

  “Nothing.�
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  “You’d better not have done. And if you did see something, you’d better keep your trap shut about it. I could give you the boot for this.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t see anything. I promise.”

  “Get your butt down there.”

  She headed along the gantry towards the scaffolding tower; Donaldson followed.

  Down on the factory floor, Queenie watched as Kay entered Section D and headed back to her bench. Donaldson followed at a distance, eyeing her suspiciously. Kay kept her head down and tried not to draw further attention to herself, but Queenie could sense that something had gone on between them.

  “What happened? You in trouble?”

  “Tell you later.”

  They both got back to work. Queenie, curious to know the full story, sneaked a sly glance at Kay, but Kay already had her welding helmet on and her visor pulled down, and was giving nothing away.

  THIRTEEN

  THE MAJOR AND first lieutenant were in Shangri-La Cottage standing beside the scale model of Overland. With their hands clasped respectfully behind their backs, they bowed dutifully to view the miniature construction, like awkward visitors at an exhibition of Etruscan artifacts. George, the reluctant curator who regards the public’s presence as an intrusion, looked on uneasily.

  The lieutenant had identified their present position, pointing, for the major’s benefit, to the exact house they were in, its roof no bigger than a matchbook. Shangri-La Cottage, and even the street on which it sat, was only a tiny part of a much larger model. George had built an entire town including houses, commercial buildings, roads, vehicles, fields and woodland, crafted in miniature with painstaking consideration. Another set designer, an architect or professional model-maker would have recognized the scale as 1:144, often thought-provokingly described as the scale of a dollhouse made for a dollhouse. George’s fourteen-feet-square tabletop model represented Overland’s one hundred acres.

  “Congratulations, Mr Godfrey. Wonderful job. The lieutenant here’s been giving me a tour. Your attention to detail is quite something. I’m not entirely sure how much of that detail is essential to the mission, but nevertheless …”

  Lieutenant Franks took up the slack. “Colonel Wagner saw the post-camouflage reconnaissance photos taken last week. For a week now they’ve had a bunch of planes flying over taking pictures. He was so impressed, he wanted to see it up close for himself so he took a P-38 up and flew over the area. He was totally fooled—couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t. From the air this entire area looks like any other suburb of Los Angeles. He was planning to land here, but he couldn’t even find the runway—the one thing we thought would be too difficult to hide. He was at a thousand feet with it right there in front of him. Couldn’t see a darned thing.”

  “As a matter of fact, you’ve presented us with quite a problem, Mr Godfrey,” said the major. “As you are probably already aware, every plane manufactured here has to undergo a number of flight tests at altitude before it can be put into service. The pilots responsible for these tests have learned to negotiate the camouflage-painted runway when they’re taking off, but when they return, they just can’t find it. So they end up having to land at Clover Field fifteen miles away.”

  The lieutenant nodded affably. “What goes up must come down.”

  George felt unable to humor them. They were so full of themselves.

  “Despite what we tell them is a runway,” said the major, getting into his stride, “the optical illusion is so strong, every instinct in them as pilots tells them that it’s not safe to land there. So we need to devise a system of ground markers that the pilots can recognize—but we can talk about that later. For the moment, I think we should congratulate ourselves on the success of the project …”

  George looked up. “Ourselves?”

  The major plowed on. “… Time to wrap things up here and move on to the next site where we can make use of the lessons we’ve learned here at Lockheed. Your motion-picture studio, Mr Godfrey, has agreed to loan you to us for just a little while longer—six weeks to be exact—so we’d like to get you up to Seattle to start laying plans for the Douglas factory. Now, the plant there is—”

  “Just a minute, Major, I can’t go to Seattle. There’s a lot more work to do here. Besides, the success of Overland relies on constant maintenance. There’s the road system, keeping the vehicles moving …”

  “Fine. We’ll get a couple of kids to keep an eye on that.”

  A couple of kids? George was insulted. The major clearly had no idea what was involved in the day-to-day running of the town.

  “There are a hundred other things that need to be done here. Things I need to oversee.”

  “For instance?”

  George picked one example: “The parked cars outside the houses. We move them out during the day and put them back late afternoon to suggest that the man of the house is driving to work and returning home at the end of the day.”

  “You really do that?” The major touched one of the tiny cars on the model to see if it was glued down. It wasn’t.

  “Of course. It’s important to create a living, breathing community. We also need to move the sheep around. There are three fields of them.”

  “You move the sheep around? You’re kidding. Why?”

  “I would have thought that was obvious. An enemy plane photographs the farm from the air—”

  “He’s just taking a snapshot. He can’t tell if the sheep are moving.”

  “No, but if he comes back the next day and photographs it again, when he compares the two pictures he’s going to notice that the pattern of white dots is identical, suggesting that the sheep are in exactly the same position. A farm with sheep that don’t move? He’s going to know right away that they’re phony. That means our whole cover is blown.”

  “Yes, well, we might be being just a little overcautious here. They’re not flying over every day, Mr Godfrey. Between you and me, we don’t know that a Jap plane has ever flown over this area. This is what you might call a precautionary measure—being one step ahead of the enemy. Don’t you think it would be better to wait until after a plane sighting before rearranging the livestock?”

  “I was told that comparative referencing would be used.”

  “Well, yes, but if features like grazing sheep require this level of maintenance, maybe they’re an unnecessary detail.”

  “Perhaps I’m the best judge of what is necessary. You tell me that Overland is a success. An entire aircraft plant housing twenty-five thousand employees and a strip of tarmac three hundred feet wide and nearly a mile long—all made to completely disappear into the surrounding landscape. How do you think I was able to hide it so convincingly, Major? With what you call unnecessary details.”

  The lieutenant stepped in. “Now let’s not get overexcited here. We’re just saying that—”

  George was indignant. “This is the level of detail that would normally be required by a director for a long shot in order to make the scenery seem convincing. I normally go that bit further with certain areas, just in case a closer shot may be required. I find it saves time.”

  The stillness of the air in the low-ceilinged room was oppressive. Both George and the major were becoming fractious, annoyed by each other’s querulous self-importance.

  “Well there won’t be any close-ups, will there,” said the major testily, “because our cameraman is a little guy who’s going to be seeing this, not as a tourist strolling around town, but from a goddamn Zero flying overhead at three thousand feet. He’s hardly going to notice flowers in gardens, oranges on trees or the price of a baby’s bonnet in a goddamn store window.”

  Before George could respond, the major snatched up a handful of air-recon photos. “Look! Look at the photographs.” He thrust one under George’s nose. “This is taken at fifteen hundred feet. See the roads? See the houses? See the trees and hedges? Just about … maybe.” He took another photograph. “This is five hundred feet, the lowest any air
reconnaissance is ever going to fly without running into power lines and church steeples. At this height, you might see a car moving along a highway, you may even see a person waving a big red flag, but I assure you, Mr Godfrey, no Japanese air-recon photo is going to show the stripes on the tie you’re wearing or the goddamn house number painted on your front door. The level of detail you have introduced is a waste of government money and time—time you and your workforce could be spending on other strategic military buildings.”

  George was feeling bullied. “I’m used to doing things properly.”

  “Street signs, Mr Godfrey? Who in hell is going to read street signs?”

  “They’re more for the benefit of the Residents. Gives them a sense of place. The success of this operation depends on the psychological aspect. If the Residents don’t believe Overland is real, how can you expect the enemy to believe in it?”

  “Believe in it?”

  It was the inclusion of the word “in”; that’s where George went wrong. “Believe in it”—like the tooth fairy or Santa Claus. He should simply have said “believe it.” The major was all over it.

  “What the hell are you talking about? Who are we building this place for, Peter goddamn Pan?”

  “I was hired because of my expertise in this area, Major. Kindly allow me to get on with my job.”

  “No, Mr Godfrey. You were hired because of my expertise in this area. I am the country’s leading authority on military and industrial camouflage and it was my decision to recruit you.”

  There was a moment while the major’s remark settled. George had been put in his place.

  “You are working for the United States Army and now that this project is complete, you are being transferred to a new location.”

  “That’s just not possible. Overland is far from complete. There are many details yet to attend to.”