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Protect and Survive by JJPOR [Reviews - 39]  Chapter or Story Author's Notes: As a child in the 80s, the strange and slightly scary notion of nuclear war was never far away, and it was even reflected in some of the Doctor Who stories of that era; Warriors of the Deep is practically a lecture on nuclear war, 80s style; Battlefield is peppered with references to it. It seemed to me that Ace, as a child of the 80s herself, moreso than some other companions for whom that is nominally their home era, would particularly thrive in such a story environment. So, this is my attempt, and I admit it draws heavily on some of the films and television programs depicting that particular brand of Armageddon; Threads, The Day After, Failsafe, and in particular Dr Strangelove, which remains one of my very favourite movies of all time. As always, I do not own Doctor Who or any of its associated copyrights; that would be the BBC and/or their individual creators. | |
“Based on the findings of the report, my conclusion was that this idea was not a practical deterrent for reasons which at this moment must be all too obvious…”
“Emergency Action Message!” The communications officer’s voice crackled on the intercom channel, momentarily cutting across the dull roar of the bomber’s eight turbojets. “Repeat, we have an Emergency Action Message incoming!” The pilot considered this for one long moment, staring out of the cockpit windows at the bright, curved surface of the Earth far below. From up here, you could not see any borders or boundaries; from up here, the world had probably looked the same since long before humans had walked it; would probably look the same long after they were gone.
“Shit,” the pilot murmured into his oxygen mask; it seemed like the only logical response. He opened the comm. channel again as he began to unbuckle his seat harness, disconnect the pipes and leads shackling him to the cockpit instrument panels: “Okay, I’m coming; Ike, you have command of the aircraft.”
“Roger that,” the co-pilot acknowledged, inscrutable behind black Ray-Bans, as the pilot made his way through the narrow aisle between their seats, back into the dark belly of the aircraft.
The B-52, callsign “Alabama Angel”, continued to orbit at her failsafe point, in the blue haze far above the Himalayas, the whole of Asia spread out below her, an AGM-28 Hound Dog nuclear missile slung under each wing. The missiles were slim white darts, aggressive shapes, looking almost as if they were straining to be unleashed. An in-flight refuelling tanker had topped her up twenty minutes ago, ready for the low, fast dash into Soviet Russia, should the message, the long-expected, long-dreaded, message, arrive. Well, here it was. The pilot climbed the short ladder down into the electronics pit, where the communications officer and the electronic warfare officer sat side by side. It was a stygian cave, lit only by a single lamp and the glow of cathode ray tubes.
“Message authentication group,” the pilot said, tersely, trying to keep it all business, trying to bite down the nervous, acid feeling in his stomach.
“Message authentication group is Charlie, Yankee, X-Ray, Juliet, sir.” The pilot was already scanning the laminated card in its holder above the comm. officer’s seat, changed daily. There it was: CYXJ.
“I confirm message as authenticated,” he announced, mouthing the familiar words of the ritual they had rehearsed a thousand times in drills and exercises.
“I concur, message is authenticated,” the comm. officer agreed, sounding as sick as the pilot felt. “Message reads; Foxtrot, Golf, Delta One-Zero-Niner.” He pulled down a heavy binder from the shelf above him, flipped it open and ran a thickly-gloved hand down the page: “FGD 109. That’s Wing Attack Plan R for Romeo, sir.” The pilot examined the page as well, a long list of alphanumeric codes, each indicating a different mission profile.
“I concur,” he nodded, reaching into his flying suit to remove the key hanging around his neck. “Wing Attack Plan R.” The comm. officer also had a key; together, they opened the safe next to the communications panel, sorted through the stack of sealed envelopes contained therein until they found the correct one: R. It contained typed orders, maps, reconnaissance photographs snapped by high-flying U-2s. Primary target; ICBM launch facilities at Plesetsk, 1.1 megaton airburst; secondary target, command bunker at Zhiguli, 1.45 megaton groundburst. The pilot examined the orders for a moment before whispering the first thought that came into his head. If the others present heard, they gave no acknowledgment: “May God have mercy on our souls.”
* * *
“Attack warning red! Attack warning red! This is not a drill! Repeat, this is not a drill!” The police constable manning the switchboard nearly dropped his bacon sarnie; instinct took over as he slammed the phone down and turned the key in the grey metal HANDEL console at his left elbow; the red light came on and he pressed and held the button. The banshee wail of the air attack siren started immediately, cranking up from a low, mournful moaning felt in the bones to an ear-splitting screech. In the street outside the police station, people were already starting to run, to whatever shelter they could find, some of them dragging or carrying terrified children. Others were paralysed by the horror of the moment, no doubt thinking of loved ones; children, spouses, parents, and how they could get to them in the three or four minutes remaining. The sirens were sounding all across Britain, all across the world, as the bombers flew and the missiles arced through the skies.
And in a bunker, deep beneath the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, a shadowy figure watched it all unfold on the big electronic wall map, rocket trails and aircraft flight-paths crisscrossing across the continents, and nodded in grim satisfaction.
* * *
“So, when you say the seaside, Professor, you mean the English seaside, right?” The Doctor considered the question for a moment, picking a loose strand from his question-mark-patterned sweater while adjusting one of the controls on the console beside him.
“Of course I do, Ace,” he decided eventually. “There are many other regions of your planet that have a coastline, even coastal resorts, but only one that has what you might call a “seaside”. Ace nodded, unimpressed by this insightful analysis:
“You said you were taking me for a week in Benidorm,” she pointed out.
“I did say that,” he admitted, turning his full attention back to the console, in a decidedly shifty manner, “but then I thought, what is there to see in Benidorm, that would seem worthwhile to travellers of our expertise and experience?”
“I dunno, Professor,” she replied, “but at least it doesn’t rain all the time and they occasionally have a bit of sunshine.”
“Fish and chip shops,” the Doctor continued as if he had not heard this interjection. “Fake Irish pubs; English people getting drunk. Overcrowded beaches. You get all of that in Britain, but for some reason there it seems to have a certain…” he trailed off, browns beetling in thought.
“A certain charm?” Ace wondered, sceptically. The Doctor’s face lit up in one of his sudden, twinkling smiles:
“Yes, a certain charm.”
“So, I shouldn’t bother with the sunglasses or the swimsuit, then?” she asked, with a grin. “In fact, I think I’ve got my winter woollies here somewhere…”
“Yes,” the Doctor continued to muse aloud as she disappeared somewhere into the interior of the TARDIS, presumably looking for cold weather gear. “Donkey rides and sticks of rock and buckets and spades…” He flipped a switch on the control panel, pulled a lever, turned a dial. “Sandcastles and Punch and Judy shows; piers and promenades, and…and…” And then it hit him; a feeling of dread and terror that sent him reeling, as if the whole universe was screaming, screaming just at him. The console room span around him as he grabbed for the nearest handhold and succeeded only in pulling the hatstand down on top of himself. As he lay there, listening to the sound of Doc Martens approaching rapidly across the hard floor (and he knew it was hard from the way he had crashed down upon it), the feeling gradually receded, leaving behind it only a sense of terrible wrongness, a dull psychic ache that would not go away.
“Oi, Professor!” Ace was shouting, from right beside him and yet seemingly so far away. “Professor, are you all right?” She pulled the hatstand off him and put a hand on his arm: “Professor?” She hesitated, before adding in a more plaintive tone: “Doctor?”
“I’m quite all right, thank you, Ace,” he insisted, opening his eyes and trying to sit up; not an easy task with her leaning over him.
“Well, you didn’t look all right,” she shot back. “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” he confessed, climbing to his feet and headed for the console. “It was a strange sensation of…something going horribly wrong somewhere.”
“Like someone walking over your grave?” she asked, quietly, looking as if he had given her quite a fright, and trying at the same time to hide her fear. He turned and gave her another twinkle of reassurance:
“Yes. Like somebody just walked over my grave; a whole marching band, by the feel of it.” He scrutinised some readouts on the console, tore off a long strip of anachronistic printout paper and looked at if for a moment before crushing it into a ball and flinging it carelessly over his shoulder. “Well, the TARDIS doesn’t know what it was,” he said, thoughtfully. “Very helpful of you,” he told the console, chidingly.
“I thought…” Ace paused, looking uncomfortable. “I thought maybe…Just don’t do that to me again, all right Professor?”
“I’ll try not to.” He forced another smile and reached out to give her nose a little tweak. “Now go and get ready, if you’re coming. We’re here.”
“Where’s here?” she asked, heading off down the corridor to get her things. The Doctor turned back to the console when she was out of sight, forehead furrowed with concern:
“The Great British seaside…” he muttered.
* * *
“Gordon Bennett, Professor; I was joking about the winter woollies, but…” Ace kicked at the frost-encrusted shingle underfoot, dislodging a great white flake of ice; the long strand of beach was deserted; there was nobody moving about on the promenade at the top of the blank grey seawall or the skeletal strip of pier that that stretched horizontally before them. The sky was the same colour as the choppy sea; dead grey, the colour of smoke. “Where are we, anyway?” she asked, following him along the high water line, avoiding patches of half-frozen seaweed and dead jellyfish. In fact, there were more than jellyfish; there seemed to be a lot of dead sea life in general, washed up willy-nilly on the beach.
“Cromer,” the Professor answered, poking a deceased fish with the tip of his umbrella. “North Norfolk.” He produced his battered old fobwatch from his jacket pocket and consulted it gravely. “And it’s supposed to be May 1963. I think the weather is a little unseasonable, even for your native country.”
“Thanks for that,” she retorted, moving her head about, huddling in her bomber jacket as she tried to sniff the thin, bitterly cold breeze. “Do you smell that?” she asked, distractedly, trying to put together the little jigsaw clues in her head; there was something wrong here, she realised; something very wrong.
“I do,” he agreed, flaring his nostrils like a bloodhound, giving a little grimace as he did so. “What do you make of it?” She did not really want to say, but it was obvious; that cloying, stomach churning smell:
“Burning, Professor.” She looked up at the sky, and shivered, and realised what the other thing was that was bothering her; it was completely silent. No noise at all apart from the gentle crash of waves on shingle and the keening of the breeze; no traffic noises, no voices; not even the scream of seagulls overhead. Silence. “This is well creepy,” she told him, starting to feel as if they should just run back to the TARDIS and go, but they couldn’t do that; the Professor couldn’t, anyway. He was going to suss this situation out whatever she said, and he needed her to watch his back while he did it. “Something happened here,” she said.
“Yes.” The eyes under his bristling brows were as grey and hard as the sky and the sea, and he had that set to his jaw, as if he had a bad taste in his mouth. “Something terrible, judging by the weather patterns and the state of this fish, all of these fish,” he gestured at the graveyard of rotting sea life scattered along the tide line, and for the first time she saw the seagulls. Dead seagulls, lying beside the dead fish they had presumably been eating. He did something to the pocketwatch, twisted something, and stooped over the dead fish at his feet; the watch started squealing like a pig in an abbatoir:
“Interesting,” he observed, as if “interesting” was the worst thing you could say about anything, and put the watch away. Suddenly, in his hand, as if by magic, there was a small metal box. “Take one of these,” he told her, quietly, tipping half a dozen small white pills into her hand; “and one more every couple of hours, until we’re back in the TARDIS.”
“What are they, Professor?” she asked, doing as she was told and swallowing one. It tasted like poison.
“Anti-radiation meds,” he replied, offhandedly, as he popped one of the pills himself.
“Radiation?” Ace asked, a nervously. “You mean, like…?”
“Come on, Ace,” he called, setting off towards the road at the top of the beach at a brisk pace, swinging his umbrella as if he were on a country stroll. “We need to get to the bottom of this.” She took one last look at the dead seagulls, shivered again, and followed him.
The Esplanade, said the road sign on the promenade running across the top of the beach; there were what had once been elaborate flower-beds laid out on the grass verge; the flowers had withered to crispy, frost-dusted ruin; the grass was brown and dead. There were abandoned cars parked by the roadside, rusted bodywork and flat tyres; some had doors hanging open or windows smashed. As did some of the shops that stood empty, stripped of their stock, and the big three-storey Victorian villas, most of them converted into guesthouses, some of them with windows boarded up. There were more dead birds here, lying among the litter and debris and slivers of broken glass that clogged the gutters. There was glass everywhere, in glittering pieces great and small, the only thing that seemed bright or clean in this grimy, washed-out place. Ace could feel it crunching under the soles of her boots.
“The place is deserted,” she said, which was obvious, but it was more to break up the eerie silence than anything else. The Professor nodded, and detoured in his path down the middle of the road, avoiding something lying beside one of the cars.
“Careful, Ace,” he warned, and for an instant, when she saw the black shape in the road, she thought it was a dead body; her stomach flipped. Then, she saw that it was a dead dog, some sort of mongrel, its mangy skin spotted with sores, stretched thin over protruding ribs. That seemed nearly as bad; her stomach flipped again. And then, she saw what the dog had in its mouth, and really did nearly lose her lunch:
“Oh God…” she exclaimed, backing away, trying to pretend to herself that those weren’t skeletal human fingers between the dog’s teeth.
“I’ve heard of biting the hand that feeds you…” the Professor said, and stopped himself in mid sentence.
“That’s really not funny, Professor,” she told him, trying to look away, but finding that she couldn’t.
“No, it’s not,” he agreed, grimly. “Still, a dog has to eat.”
“What happened here?” she asked, in that tone that told him she wanted answers and wasn’t going to put up with his mysterious routine for a moment longer. He looked at her from under the brim of his Panama:
“Unnaturally cold weather conditions,” he said. “Major settlements abandoned. That smell of burning, and radioactivity intense enough to make birds fall dead from the sky. What do you think happened here?” She had a nasty inkling, because she could put two and two together and was pretty far from stupid, but she had wanted to be wrong, had wanted him to say it was something else.
“Nuclear winter,” she replied, in a very small voice, feeling sick to the stomach and not just because of the dead dog and its last meal. “Nuclear war.” And there was a whole load of images and associations that went with that, subliminally drummed into her from childhood. Maggie Thatcher and Ronnie Reagan; Brezhnev with his eyebrows and Gorby with his birthmark. Well-meaning women in anoraks and knitted hats, marching against Cruise; the peace camp at Greenham Common. Pershing II. Threads. Bland leaflets that told you to build shelters out of wooden doors and cushions, stock up on tinned food, fill all of your available containers with water, paint your windows white; as if that would do anything to stop the heat flash and blast front from an exploding nuke. Handy hints on how to wrap up your dead family members in bin bags and leave them out for an orderly collection that was never going to happen. Protect and survive. She fingered the silver-thread CND badge on the front of her jacket, even as another thought occurred to her: “Hang on, though, Professor; you said it was May 1963.”
“Oh, it is; I’m quite sure of that.”
“Well, maybe I fell asleep in one of my history lessons or something, but I think I’d remember if there had been a nuclear war in 1963. You know, somebody might have mentioned it to me some time.” The Professor ignored her sarcasm, giving the issue genuine consideration:
“Yes, you’re right, of course,” he decided. “I’d say that the authorities were quite capable of covering up the detonation of a single weapon, just as they managed to keep all of those alien invasions under wraps, but…” He regarded the ashen sky for a moment, toying with the handle of his brolly. “To affect the climate like this, it would have to be a global exchange…” He looked up and down the street until he saw what he was looking for; a newsagent’s on the nearest corner: “Aha! Of course, in these sort of situations, Ace, it’s usually a good idea to head for the nearest newspaper shop.” He led the way; Ace managed to tear her eyes away from the dog and follow him.
The interior of the shop was dim and musty-smelling, littered with dangerous knife-sized shards of plate glass from the shattered front window; it had clearly been abandoned for some time. Somebody had emptied the till, the shelves behind the counter where the sweets and chocolate would have been; the little fridge in the corner where the soft drinks had been kept was similarly bare. The papers and magazines had been left, though; shelves of yellowed newsprint, slightly shrivelled and brittle from months of neglect. The Professor picked up a copy of the Daily Express from the counter, glanced at it, and then passed it on to her. The grainy black-and-white picture on the front page showed a beach, a bit more tropical-looking than the one they had just left, with soldiers in old-fashioned-looking helmets wading ashore from boxy landing craft. The headline yelled at her:
“U.S. Invades Cuba,” she read aloud as the Professor opened up the gate in the counter and disappeared into the back of the shop, investigating. “United States Marines, Paratroops secure Tarara and Mariel, Havana threatened.” She shook her head as she started reading the main body of text: “As the bombing campaign against Russian missile sites in Cuba enters its fifth day, American forces have begun airborne and amphibious landings on the communist-controlled island…” She frowned; that wasn’t how it was supposed to have happened, she was fairly certain. “Oi, Professor!” she yelled after him. “Did you see this?”
“Yes,” he called, from wherever he was beyond the bead curtain behind the counter. “It makes for pretty disturbing reading, don’t you think?” He was right; it did:
“Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev has demanded an immediate and complete withdrawal of U.S. forces, while Cuban leader Fidel Castro has vowed to defend against the invasion to the bitter end. In the meantime, Red Army tanks have blockaded West Berlin…” She shouted through to him again: “Professor, this is all wrong!”
“I know,” he replied. She turned the crackling yellow page over and saw a photograph of a white-painted bomber coming into land, jet pods slung under its vast wings:
“Supermac Orders V-Force on Full Alert. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan has placed Britain’s atomic bomber force on a state of ten minute readiness in response to the ongoing Cuban invasion crisis…” As she read it, the Professor reappeared from behind the curtain, his face if anything even graver than it had been before.
“What’s back there?” she asked, still holding the newspaper.
“Nothing,” he replied, too quickly. She made for the bead curtain:
“Let me see.” He put a hand on her shoulder, gently but firmly. He wasn’t very big, but the feel of his hand told her that he was easily strong enough to stop her if he wanted to:
“Don’t go back there,” he rasped.
“Professor…” she protested. The look he gave her was enough to convince her that whatever he had seen behind the curtain, it was worse than that dog in the road:
“Don’t go back there,” he repeated. “Not everybody in this place left, it would seem. Some of them stayed in their homes.” He left it at that, but she knew perfectly well what he was talking about, voluntarily turned away. “What’s the date on that newspaper?” he demanded, probably to take her mind off it. She rustled her way back to the front page and looked:
“1 November 1962.” She stared at him. “The Cuban Missile Crisis, right?”
“Right,” he agreed, darkly. Normally, he would have complimented her on her historical knowledge, but he didn’t seem to be in the mood.
“But this isn’t how it happened,” she insisted. “I did about this in school; Mr McKendrick and his poxy O-Level history class; the Russians put nuclear missiles in Cuba, but the Americans didn’t like it, and they nearly had a war over it, but in the end President Kennedy, him that got assassinated, managed to patch it up, and the Russians pulled the missiles out, provided the Americans agreed not to invade Cuba. That’s what happened, isn’t it?”
“More or less,” the Professor said, picking up a copy of the Radio Times and perfunctorily flicking through it before discarding it on the floor. “Not here, however,” he added. “Here, somehow, things turned out differently…” She gave that a moment’s thought:
“So, you’re saying this is some sort of parallel universe, or something?” she wondered. “Can the TARDIS travel to parallel universes?”
“No, it’s not another universe,” he said, very certainly. “The TARDIS would have told me; this is very much our universe, only…changed, somehow. That shouldn’t be possible. Changing history shouldn’t be possible; the Time Lords would prevent it, if nothing else.”
“The Time Lords?” she asked. “That’s your lot, right?”
“Yes, and ordinarily they would take a very dim view of anybody meddling with history…” He stirred some of the broken glass on the floor with one of his two-tone golf shoes, face creased in contemplation.
“So, there was really a nuclear war here?” she asked him, voice rising in distress. “They really dropped nuclear bombs on Britain?”
“Not just Britain,” he pointed out. “This thing has probably affected most of the world; a global thermonuclear war in 1962 wouldn’t necessarily be as apocalyptic as one in your era; the opposing sides just didn’t have as many bombs, for one thing, but it would certainly be apocalyptic enough for anybody.”
“So, why is this town still here?” she asked, desperate somehow to disprove what he was saying. “If it had had a nuke dropped on it, it wouldn’t even be here any more.”
“Nobody would waste a nuclear weapon on a town like Cromer,” he replied, dispassionately, “but there were plenty of U.S. Air Force installations in Norfolk and East Anglia in general; I imagine that the fallout from the attacks on those would be quite enough to…” Another thought suddenly occurred to her; she seized his arm, urgently trying to drag him towards the door:
“We’ve got to get to London!” she almost shouted at him. “My Gran! My Mum! They’re there, right now! We need to save them!” She pulled at him, desperately, but he was as immovable as a rock. “Come on, Professor! We’ve got to help them!”
“Ace,” he said, softly, in a tone calculated to slide through her desperation like a dagger slipping through a chink in armour; she felt the tension going out of her, despite herself, and wondered if he was laying some sort of Jedi mind trick on her. “Ace, listen to me; whatever happened to your Mum and Gran happened six months ago; we’re too late to save them; what we have to do is change what happened; find out who did this, and how they did it, and change things back to the way they’re supposed to be.” The way he said it calmed her, soothed her; she had heard there were some people who could tame animals, just by whispering to them, just by the tone of their voice. She didn’t like the implications of that, but she was powerless to resist. She relaxed, and looked up into his hard, steely eyes:
“Well, how are we going to do that?” she asked him. He opened his mouth to answer, but suddenly, from the doorway, there was a sound of broken glass grating under a heavy footstep; the shop bell chimed desultorily as somebody pushed open the door. As one, they turned towards the sound. There was a figure in navy blue overalls standing there in the doorway, silhouetted against the light; it was pointing a matt-black submachine gun in their general direction:
“Stop where you are!” it barked, voice muffled by its black rubber gasmask; its eyes were blank panes of glass, reflecting the weak sunlight. “Civil Defence Corps! By order of the District Controller, and by the powers vested in me, all looters are to be summarily executed!”
To be continued…
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