“I’m sure it has been,” Trumbull agreed, inspecting the instruments Lloyd controlled with the well-faked air of someone who had some idea as to what their intended use was. “What is it you’re actually doing?”
“On radar watch, sir: four hours of keeping an eye out for any aircraft heading our way and trying to decide whether they’re hostile or not.”
“That little thing is a radar set?” Trumbull was impressed, although the technological surprises were no longer ‘amazing’ him so much. The control unit itself was a flat, dark screen set into the lid of a plastic, oblong box roughly the size and shape of a very large suitcase and coloured army green. Luminous green symbols flickered and disappeared across it like the science-fiction equivalent of unintelligible runes, first moving one way then another. The only radar installations Trumbull had ever seen were the ‘Chain Home Low’ stations that dotted the coastline and warned Fighter Command of impending attacks, and those towers of those were a good forty metres or so high — 130 feet tall in Trumbull’s world.
“This one’s only a small set, sir: detection range is only about a hundred and fifty kilometres at high altitude, although that reduces significantly as you approach sea level. Those little green ‘V’ symbols are ‘visible’ aircraft along with their altitudes in metres and their relative airspeed in knots. We’re the small dot at the centre of the screen, and those static green lines are an overlaid map of The Orkneys and Scapa Flow.”
“Metres and kilometres, eh…?” Trumbull said dubiously. He was aware of the European system of measurements but cared for it little. The conversions were simple enough with a bit of practice, but he couldn’t see the point of using such a complicated system when Imperial measurements were a viable alternative.
“Hardly anyone uses the ‘old’ Imperial system where I come from, sir,” Lloyd grinned, suddenly noting one of the myriad differences that separated his world from Trumbull’s. “The British use metric as well now, and even the Yanks are starting to use it…”
“Even the Americans…?” The pilot was inwardly a little disheartened by that news — he was as aware as was any informed man of the stubborn and reactionary nature of the American psyche. “My God, we must beat the Germans!”
“No, sir — it’s not like that at all,” Lloyd laughed softly, thinking Trumbull must’ve feared the metric system forced upon its 21st Century users. “The world just decided it was a simpler system to use.”
“If you say so, trooper…” Trumbull decided uncertainly, frowning at the idea. At that point the soft music intruded on his thoughts and he was drawn to the iPod sitting in its dock by Lloyd’s left arm. It was an almost identical model to the one Thorne carried with him, although the calibre of music playing there seemed an improvement at least to Trumbull’s ears.
“The music, sir…?” Lloyd noted the officer’s interest. “It’s called an ‘iPod’…” he explained, sounding out the word more phonetically than was probably necessary. “Where I come from we use them, and devices like them, to carry music with us so we can listen to it any time we want.” The Green Day song Wake Me Up When September Ends played as Trumbull approached and had a closer look.
“An ‘Eye-Pod’…?” Trumbull repeated the unfamiliar name as a question. “It plays music, you say?” He craned his neck to glance at the rear of the unit, as if the view from a different angle might somehow make the device’s inner workings more explicable. “Like a reel-to-reel tape player?”
“Something like that…just a bit smaller, though,” The SAS trooper nodded with a grin, removing the iPod Classic completely from the dock to afford Trumbull a closer look, the music ceasing instantly. He handed the player across and the RAF pilot turned it over in his hands. At just a little more than 100mm tall, 60mm wide and just 10mm deep, the tiny music and video player weighed in at just 140 grams and felt incredibly light.
“Just a little smaller, eh?” Trumbull have a wry smile. “And just how many thousands of songs does this little thing surely contain, I wonder?” He added with the hint of light sarcasm, choosing a number he expected to be a wild exaggeration.
“About forty thousand sir, give-or-take…depending on the formatting of the music files of course…” Lloyd answered honestly, not catching the attempted humour in the question.
“Of course,” Trumbull chuckled out loud at that, shaking his head in bewilderment and taking solace in the fact that at least the trooper hadn’t seemed to realise the joke had fallen flat and he’d made a fool of himself.
He handed the iPod back to Lloyd, who in turn immediately placed it back into its speaker dock and restarted the music. Trumbull took time to actually listen to the music now as the song continued where it had left off. It wasn’t Cole Porter or good jazz, but there was a strangely hypnotic quality to it that appealed to the emotions more than to the mind. As the track ended, Trumbull couldn’t for the life of him work out whether or not he actually liked the stuff. It was certainly an improvement over the caterwauling, so-called ‘music’ Thorne had played in the F-35 on the flight up to Scapa Flow the day before.
The song came to an end in that moment and the shuffle feature picked another Green Day song at random. The opening bars of ‘American Idiot’ issued from the speakers with substantially greater volume, and the RAF pilot gave a disapproving grimace, his unaccustomed ears again finding the raucous rock riffs of electric guitars quite unpleasant. Revising his initial assessment of the music, he gave the grinning trooper a sour look.
“Are you certain we won this war?” He asked with a dubious frown, and Lloyd could only chuckle at that question.
The barn was relatively small and barely larger than the main farmhouse to the north. It was also quite dark inside as Ritter slowly approached its half-open doors, the only visible light streaming in beams from the open loading bay in the loft above the doors, and through the multitude of tiny spaces between roof tiles and the wooden planks of the walls. Dust motes swirled and eddied in those sparkling streaks of illumination beyond the control of any noticeable breeze. Hesitating a moment, Ritter turned back toward Wisch standing a few yards behind him.
“Take your men and stand back a dozen metres or so…” Ritter ordered softly, making no sudden movements as he spoke in soft, level tones. “Under no circumstances are you to come any closer or enter the barn without my express command…is that clear?”
“Completely, Mein Herr…” Wisch nodded, beckoning to the three panzer crewmen standing nearby. All four men began to back away carefully.
With a nod, Ritter once more began to move toward the opening, attempting to seem as if he suspected nothing. At the entrance, his hand rested upon the edge of one of the large, wooden doors as he hesitated momentarily, wondering how he should proceed. Although there was no immediate emergency, time was certainly of the essence. His flight was scheduled to take-off in just an hour and there was still a lot of pre-flight preparation to be made. The possibility of being late wasn’t a particular concern –he was the commanding officer after all, and could demand a little latitude as a result — however excessive tardiness would cause interest in potentially unwanted places and that kind of interest was something he could definitely do without. Although his conscious mind was as yet unaware of it, the beginning of an idea was forming in his subconscious that might’ve seemed unthinkable just two days earlier.