They watched and followed, twitchingly alert for the appearance of sentries, guards, giant soldiers, insomniacs, astronomers or any other unexpected night strollers. Aubrey wouldn’t have been surprised to stumble upon smugglers, nightwatchmen or bat-fanciers, such was the outlandish nature of the goings-on at the complex thus far.
The groaning Théo was taken to one of the wings of the old building, past the concrete animals. After some hammering on the door, a light came on and the trio was admitted. Soon after, Théo’s comrades emerged and hurried back toward the barracks. The light stayed on in the infirmary and Aubrey suggested that they hide in the nearby garden while they waited for Théo to be treated and the physician to retire again.
This was signalled by the light going out in the infirmary. They waited another ten minutes, to be sure, then it was Caroline’s deft work on the lock that gave them egress – only to find Théo stretched out on the bed, insensible in the moonlight that spilled through the uncurtained window.
‘Théo!’ Sophie gasped, then she clapped her hands over her mouth at George’s fervent hushing. She rushed to the bed – the only occupied bed in the four-bed infirmary – just as Théo began snoring.
He was unmistakeably a relative of Sophie. He was short, and his blond hair and fine features were a masculine version of the Delroy physiognomy.
Aubrey kept an eye on the only other door in the sparsely outfitted room, but his mind was working. He’d been expecting to find wards full of wounded soldiers, the poor souls he’d seen transported and delivered to the factory, but the infirmary was tiny. Four beds only, it was doing its best to be unwelcoming, without going to the actual extent of having a ‘Malingerers Not Wanted’ sign.
So where are those wounded soldiers?
Caroline knelt at Théo’s bed and rolled back one of his eyelids. ‘It appears that your brother has been given some treatment.’
‘Treatment?’ George pushed up Théo’s sleeve. ‘Some sort of opiate jab, it looks like. He must have been persuasive.’
And my spell might have been a little more painful that I expected, Aubrey thought. Some more work needed on that spell before using it again, perhaps.
‘So what shall we do?’ Sophie was concerned but determined. ‘We cannot leave him now we have found him. Not like this.’
‘This looks like my cup of tea,’ George said, rubbing his hands together. With a grunt and a heave, he lifted Théo and positioned him across his shoulders. ‘Tally-ho.’
Théo was no great weight, but Aubrey knew that George would have borne the burden even if Théo had been a giant. He wasn’t going to let Sophie down.
‘Which way?’ George said, jauntily. ‘Back to the farmhouse or would we like to go dancing first?’
‘Do we have enough information, Aubrey?’ Caroline asked.
A tricky question. ‘One never has enough information. I’d like to get a closer look at those super soldiers.’ He weighed up the options. ‘George, do you think you could get Théo into our elephant? Could you and Sophie wait for us there?’
‘Can do, old man. How long will you be?’
Aubrey raised an eyebrow at Caroline, conferring. ‘An hour?’
‘I’ve seen the layout of this place, and the way it’s guarded. We’ll need two.’
‘Two hours,’ George repeated. He glanced at the stillcomatose Théo. ‘Then we really must be leaving.’
‘Agreed,’ Aubrey said.
George grinned. ‘Just because I know how things can go astray, I have a suggestion. In two hours, the power will go out.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You see, old man, sometimes I think you work better with a deadline. A sense of urgency, if you will. Left to your own devices, you’re likely to wander all over this place until the cows come home.’
‘There isn’t any danger of that,’ Caroline pointed out. ‘I’ll be with him.’
‘I appreciate that,’ George said. ‘And if anyone is likely to keep Aubrey under control, it’s you, Caroline. But on the other hand, just in case things get a bit sticky, it might be handy to know that the lights are about to go out.’
‘It could be useful,’ Caroline allowed.
‘Wait,’ Aubrey said. ‘Exactly how are you going to achieve this?’
‘Never mind,’ George said. ‘Leave the details to Sophie and me.’
Aubrey sighed. Faced with such confidence, who was he to argue?
Thirty
Caroline was an expert at getting into secure places. Aubrey was happy to follow her as she led the way through a facility that was rather more active than Aubrey would have preferred. He supposed they should take some of the blame, with Caroline’s fire having the same effect as hitting a wasp’s nest with a stick.
Nevertheless, after some shadowy lurking, a considerable amount of belly crawling, and a hair-raising wall scramble or two, she brought them to the far side of the warehouse, away from the invitingly open double doors that faced the parade ground.
For a moment, they stood with their backs to the corrugated metal. The north perimeter fence was fifty yards away, with the deep woods just on the other side. The nearest guard tower was a good distance away at the front of the complex. Aubrey could just make out the upper storeys of the old buildings. The chimneys of the factory building were smoking away, and he could see the other guard towers on the perimeter fence, but their position was well away from most of the lights in the facility. They were swallowed up by darkness.
‘Too good to be true,’ she said in answer to Aubrey’s whispered query as to why they hadn’t sneaked in through the double doors. ‘It must be guarded.’
‘So how are we getting in?’
‘Where there’s a train,’ she said, trotting off, following the long side of the warehouse, ‘there must be ... Here we are.’
If Caroline moved more than a few yards away, it was hard to see her. Yet, some distance ahead, Aubrey could make out something blacker than the blackness around them, a mound higher than their heads, with a familiar, nose-tickling smell.
‘Coal,’ he said.
‘Correct. And where there’s coal outside a building, there must be a way to get it inside the building. I was prepared to look for a water tower if we had to, but I think scrambling in via a coal hopper would be easier than swimming underwater, in darkness, through a water inlet pipe.’
‘Good thinking.’ He paused. ‘There is a lot of coal here, wouldn’t you say? Rather more than would be needed to refuel a locomotive?’
Caroline craned her neck. ‘You’re thinking that it’s needed for something else? For the manufacture of your enhanced coal?’
‘From the amount of coal here, I’d say this facility is the source of it.’ He wrinkled his nose at the tickly coal smell. ‘If the plan is to ship those mechanical soldiers by train to wherever is needed, then they’ll need to ship the fuel as well. Make it here, pop it in the cylinders, and off it goes. Neat, efficient, and very much the Holmland way.’
Caroline clambered up the side of the huge mound of coal and peered over the top. Then she slid back down in a controlled and elegant manner that Aubrey could not have hoped to duplicate in a million years. She stood and started to dust her hands together before realising that she was so filthy it would make little difference. She made a small moue of disapproval, then as Aubrey watched, fascinated, she dismissed it from her mind. He knew it wouldn’t bother her from that moment on.
‘What are you looking at?’ she said.