A couple of destroyers were moored a hundred metres or so along the pier, and in the channel between Hoy and the smaller island, Flotta, two battleships and a cruiser stood at anchor, silent and dark. Midway between the ships and the dock, a Sunderland flying boat taxied up to its own mooring, a phosphorescent bow wave starkly visible as it sprayed up on either side of the nose and disrupted the black water beneath. At that distance, the aircraft’s engines were no more than a soft splutter and hum.
To her left, piles of sandbags surrounded a static 4.5-inch AA gun with its pedestal mount set into solid concrete foundations. The crew manning it seemed relaxed, more interested in preparing to fight the cold of night than the Germans. Darkness was approaching quickly, and with sunset came a dramatic reduction in the likelihood of enemy air attack — a likelihood that wasn’t high to begin with.
“You’re a hard person to find,” Kransky observed as he drew near and she turned her upper body in his direction, a wan smile showing at the sound of his voice.
“I wasn’t exactly in the mood to be found,” she admitted, turning back to face the water once more. The lab coat was gone, and she instead now wore the Howard Green jumper over her T-shirt and jeans. Even Kransky could feel the chill in the air that was beginning to penetrate the long-sleeved shirt and fatigues he wore.
“Do you want me to go…?” He asked instantly, not wanting to upset her. “I don’t mind…”
“No… it’s fine, Richard… don’t go.” And with those words, he stepped across to pick up an empty packing crate from nearby and drag it over to the bollard. The wooden box wasn’t overly large, and with his long legs, his appearance was almost comical as he seated himself beside her.
“You okay?”
“Aye, I’m fine, really,” she shrugged, the attempt at a smile mostly fading. “Just in a funny mood today.”
“That, I gathered,” he admitted with a wry grin. “You’re still mad at Max…?”
“Oh, I’m well pissed off at him, but not for that stupid carry-on earlier. We had something of a disagreement on business matters this afternoon, but being the CO, he won of course.”
“Wanna talk about it…?”
“One of us needs to go down to London to help streamline the reorganisation of British production. My opinion is that I’m the most suitable person to do that, but Max wants Hal to go instead. He’s sticking to some ‘official’ bollocks about my being too bloody ‘valuable’ to send because of my memory.”
“Your memory…?” Kransky didn’t understand.
“I have what’s known as an eidetic- or photographic memory. I can literally see pages of text or technical drawings in my head, even if I’ve only had the chance to study them once. With the bombings of industrial centres and factories going on in Southern England at the moment — which is only likely to get worse — Max fears that if I were killed, the loss of the information I carry in my head would be too great a risk.”
“Is that what you meant earlier when you said that you’d definitely have remembered it, if you’d heard of me?” Kransky queried, making the link to their discussion earlier that day.
“Aye, that’s what I meant right enough,” she nodded, paused for a short sigh, then shook her head slowly. “I suppose he’s right when it all comes down to it, but I’m still not happy about it. It’s exactly the kind of thing I’ve trained for my whole life. Hal will do a good enough job all right, but I was meant to do it!”
“There’ll be plenty here for you to do, I’m sure,” he smiled. “Plenty of field operatives to nursemaid and provide with swell little gizmos.”
“Aye, that there’ll be, I reckon,” she agreed with a smile of her own. “I can’t stay angry with Max for long anyway: I know he’s only doing what he has to. He’s a brilliant man, and in some ways he’s a born leader, but he can’t stand the idea of being in command instead of just being ‘one of the boys’. He’s too much of a big kid at heart to enjoy making the kind of hard decisions he has to make as CO.”
“He did say something was playing on his mind, now that you mention it,” Kransky mused, his thoughts running back to his conversation with Thorne in the hangar.
“Really…?” Eileen was suddenly very interested. “What did he say?”
“Well, I’m not sure if I should say anything, but… is there something wrong with a ‘Sookie and Bill’ that he knows? He said he was kinda concerned about how they were doin’ back where you guys came from.” As she heard those words, Eileen forgot her melancholy for a few moments and broke openly into outright laughter, the lilting sound making Kransky feel much better himself, although he didn’t understand exactly what it was he’d said that was so funny.
“On, my God…!” Eileen wheezed, gasping a little for breath as her mirth eventually began to subside. “The man truly is a great bloody bairn…!”
And the smiling naval officer went on to explain to an uninitiated Richard Kransky about the concept of syndicated cable television shows and the world of the TV show True Blood.
Shakespeare Cliff Observation Post
Farthingloe (near Dover), Kent Coast
Sunday
July 28, 1940
The White Cliffs stretched sixteen kilometres around the Kent coastline, from north of Folkestone to just south of Deal. At some points towering as high as a hundred metres or more above the surface of The Channel, the imposing walls of white chalk, streaked with black flint, had served for centuries as a symbolic natural ‘fortress’ against would-be invaders from Continental Europe. Keeping watch above the Straits of Dover, the iconic British landmark was clearly visible from the opposite French coast across little more than thirty kilometres of water at The Channel’s narrowest point.
Just a few kilometres south-west of Dover, Shakespeare Cliff Halt Railway Station lay on a section of the South Eastern & Chatham line running between Dover and Folkestone. The siding lay upon a small flat section of land quite literally carved out of the chalk face of the cliffs, originally created toward the end of the 19th Century as part of a serious attempt to build a rail tunnel between England and France. The project failed to eventuate due to political and public pressures, however the exploratory tunnelling subsequently revealed a rich source of coal that resulted in the opening of the Shakespeare Colliery in 1896, in support of which the railway station had been constructed.
Little more than a pair of sidings, signal box and open wooden shelter, the halt was completely isolated from the cliffs above save for the Abbott’s Cliff rail tunnel to the south-west, the Shakespeare rail tunnel to the north-east, and a narrow set of zig-zag steps cut into the cliffs near the Dover end to allow pedestrian access. The colliery had closed in 1915, but the siding, although never listed in any public timetable, had continued to be used as a drop-off point for rail staff living in the area.
A landslip had closed the tracks for some time during 1939, but even after re-opening in January of 1940, there’d been little ongoing use of that section of the line. Daytime operations had basically ceased altogether following the fall of France and the arrival of occupying German forces along the opposite coast. The line between Dover and Folkestone ran right along the edge of the cliffs for the most part, and was completely exposed and vulnerable as a result. Trains were generally too fast to present a viable target for cross-channel heavy artillery, however a single shell hit on empty track could derail a train or at the very least render the track useless all the same. In any case, there was always the ever-present danger of aerial attack and it was generally considered far safer to redirect services on that line to the Chatham route, via Faversham and Priory Stations.