The operation had gone like clockwork. Unfortunately these days clockwork wasn’t quite enough.
Colonel Charles Marchmain was studying a map of the London Underground, a map with which even he was unfamiliar. A map that showed a network that extended into what was now another city, another country. And this map from the distant past, from another world had been written on. Recently. By someone in a hurry, someone who had disappeared into a tunnel underneath St Bride’s. Marchmain had every reason to believe that person was Harry Stark. What he didn’t know was the significance of the two square boxes drawn in pencil on a spur of the old Northern Line, a spur nowadays used only by trains from the other side.
Instances of closed stations and through tunnels being used by deserters had fallen to zero since the above-ground entrances had been demolished and their location, or very existence, faded from popular memory. Marchmain showed the map to his oldest officer, a man on the brink of retirement who had been in the Military Police during the war. Did it mean anything to him. The old man had looked at the colonel with some surprise, then delight in being able to provide his superior with important intelligence so late in his professional life: ‘I can’t be certain, sir. And I don’t really understand the significance of the little squares, but I do know what is down there: the old Deep Shelters. Including the one used by General Eisenhower.’
Marchmain’s eyes lit up. Was it possible the people Stark had got involved with, the dissident scum who had escaped his men in the raid on the church, had a hideout he knew nothing about, improbably close to Stalingrad Square. Today of all days he was extremely uncomfortable about that. He had deliberately allowed Stark a slack rein, knowing the risks of the policeman becoming a loose cannon, in the hope that his past would work in Marchmain’s favour, giving him an ‘in’ to the so-called ‘underground’ that his own men had failed to achieve.
But the possibility could not be ruled out that he had somehow been deluded – or deluded himself – into playing his father’s game, or whatever he might have been led to believe that was. Within minutes – a call to the Ministry of Works records office from Social Security was an event seldom enough to warrant immediate attention – Marchmain was perusing ancient plans, drawn up in 1942, for a shelter he had no idea existed. He all but snarled. Whatever was going on down there required attention, and now.
Within less than forty minutes a dozen armed DoSS operatives were assembled on the platform of Covent Garden Underground station. The veteran military policeman aided by a rapidly co-opted member of the London Transport Cooperative led Marchmain and his men down to a passageway behind the main lift shaft to a locked door that had not been opened in decades. The Tube man said he was certain he would be able to find a key somewhere. Marchmain blew the lock away. The door swung back to reveal an antechamber to a lift, descending beneath the main shaft. On the wall was an ancient red trip switch of the sort used for emergency power cut-offs. The colonel nodded to one of his men who flipped it. Against expectations there was a low hum and a light came on in the lift.
Nonetheless, Marchmain led his men, and their muzzled dogs, in single file down the stairs.