The comforting musk of saltwater tightened its embrace with each smooth stone step down to The Bunker, but a sight, altogether less expected, stopped me in my tracks. It lay on the beach, opposite. An enormous, immovable lump of flesh. As difficult as it was to be sure about its exact composition, arms and legs appeared to be attached in the conventional way, although it certainly did not belong to any of the soldiers I had previously encountered within the complex. Silent, illuminated by borrowed late afternoon rays, the bulk lifted and sank almost imperceptibly in a rhythm that signified actual life.

‘Hello?’ I called across the peaceful pool.

For a moment the sharp sound of my voice became the only living organism in the scene. Almost immediately it died and was buried deep in the walls of the echoless chamber. The figure shifted slightly onto its right side. It moved slowly and after some time I couldn’t be sure if it had come to a complete halt.

‘Hello? Who’s there?’

‘Alright, alright, keep your shirt on!’ the fleshy mass spluttered from across the cave. It was still raising itself upright via its right elbow. I had already recognised the voice.

‘Major Thompson?’ I asked.

‘You’re late,’ Thompson sounded irritated. He sat up and faced me. ‘I’ve been waiting for hours. The others are out already. Where the hell have you been all day?’

I gave him brief details of my trip with Corporal Cowper. Apparently he had heard of him. He gave no indication that he had formed an opinion.

‘Colonel Watson wants to see you,’ he said.

‘Colonel Watson? Oh, OK,’ I replied. I was happy to hear it. Watson’s was the name which occurred more often than any others. My world was settling into an orbit around his centre, while he remained a mystery to me. ‘I’ll go up first thing in the morning. Is he at Headquarters?’

‘Not the morning. Now,’ the Major insisted, and sunk back onto the sand.

I found Colonel Watson’s room on the 20^th floor. A couple of stony-faced Majors had escorted me officiously up in response to my query at the reception desk. They remained with me while I knocked, and finally withdrew once I had been admitted.

He was watching the sun, slowly setting behind the distant sea. The light flattered him, I thought. I had only encountered him from a distance before, and that through glass walls, during his animated meeting with Major Thompson, and he cut a very different figure from this viewpoint. Firstly, he was much younger than I expected. He was probably a few years younger than I was, and for that matter could easily have passed as Thompson’s son, if necessary. Despite his relative youth, there was nothing out of place about him in his rank whatsoever. He was tall. Not as tall as O’Hara, but around the same height as Magath, with whom he shared a catlike litheness of limbs which was apparent even while he remained mostly static. I stayed as far away as possible, so as to avoid direct physical comparison. His vibrancy and gravitas were illuminated by the dying purple rays of the sun which strafed his face and deepened the velvet blue of his immaculate uniform. If I had been him, I would have stood in exactly that spot at exactly that time at every possible opportunity. There was steel in his eyes and all of his angles appeared well-defined and regular. I could spot no obvious weakness as he gripped my hand in friendly greeting.

‘Delighted to meet you at last,’ he showed me his teeth. ‘Sit down! I won’t take too much of your time. I know you’ve got plenty to keep you occupied without the likes of me adding to your load.’

I took the offered seat and joined him in following the downward progress of the day for a few seconds, until he turned back to me. He remained by the window. For a moment his nose appeared a little too long for his face, a grotesque anomaly I had somehow missed at first sight, but a slight tilt of his head destroyed that shadowy illusion. He was perfect once more.

‘I’ve heard all about you,’ he said. ‘Everyone is very happy. That means I’m happy, too. But there was a hole in my team. I couldn’t put a face to your growing reputation. Needed to set that to rights straight away. You’ll forgive me if I’ve rather summonsed you here today, but it’s so very difficult to find a totally convenient time.’

His manner was quite charming. I felt I was doing him a favour just by showing up to his office. I relaxed completely.

‘Tell me how things are going with your team. You’ve got our best men, and women, on the job, I see. No problems, I trust?’

‘Yes, I’m very happy,’ I started. ‘With the team and with the progress we’re making. Having Sergeants Magath and Scharf together is a real bonus. Watching them operate is an education. I don’t know how long it can last, but I’m trying to make the most of it while I can.’

‘You do right,’ he nodded. ‘Scharf tends to get spread pretty thin. We’d clone him if we were still allowed to. But we have to deal with what we’re dealt, as they say.’

‘Forgive me for asking,’ I ventured, ‘but is Sergeant Scharf not under your control? It would be a great coup if I were to be able to guarantee him for the foreseeable future.’

‘Ah! Those words! Control. Guarantee.’ He held out his powerful hands in front of himself then clasped them tight as he drew them into his chest, as if to grab and secure the very essences of the words as he spoke them. He turned to the window once more. ‘You come to me with your fine ideas, and I should have expected it, given what I’ve heard of your penchant for pinpoint. Like a blue laser, they say. And you haven’t disappointed! But you might just as well ask me to stop that sun from setting, or drain the sea to its very bed, or excise pain from our emotional portfolio. Whatever of a man I may be, I’m still just a man, and as powerless in the face of Nature as the most insignificant insect or the sugariest wisp of cotton wool cloud.’

He turned to look at me, something playing about his lips. ‘That’s a “no”, by the way.’

‘OK.’ I said. ‘But for now we’re flying. As far as I can tell, we’ve got all the right people involved and we’re moving in the right direction.’

Colonel Watson slunk reluctantly away from the window and sat behind his desk. ‘Tell me about today. I understand you’ve spent some time with Corporal Cowper. What do you make of our latest recruit?’

‘I have. It was an educational day. I couldn’t quite believe how much, in fact. I feel a little giddy recalling it. But I can see he’s making some real strides. It’s quite amazing, in fact, what he’s managed to achieve in one day. He gives the impression that he’s almost on top of things, and he’s formed some deep relationships. Quite a remarkable man, I’d say.’

‘Good. I’m glad. I wasn’t convinced. He’s a bit of a gamble. Not my only one, but possibly the most exposed, given his background and the situation in which he’s landed. That Canning character didn’t exactly leave the most stable legacy.’

‘If you don’t mind, Colonel,’ I said, ‘can I ask what has happened to Colonel Brown? He was very much a part of this when I came on board, but I’ve not seen anything of him recently, and now his number one man has been removed.’

‘Colonel Brown’s been given a special assignment,’ Watson said. He looked out of the window like he was pretending not to. The sun had completed its journey into the sea and only a pale blue arc of glow remained at the horizon.

‘I can’t understand,’ he continued, engaging me suddenly, ‘why you’re still working on your designs.’ He fixed me in his frown. His face seemed much darker under just the electric light. I said nothing. I hadn’t expected the change in tone. ‘You are aware of the importance of this work, I presume?’

‘I’m aware, of course, Sir,’ I stuttered. ‘And we’re making excellent progress. But we have so many elements to consider that we have to make sure we’ve addressed them all. I would hope that we could publish an early draft of our designs within another week or two.’

‘It doesn’t sound difficult to me,’ he appeared to ignore my rather pointless prediction. ‘Project van Diemen have put together an identical solution, have they not? What are the specific elements you refer to?’

‘Well, the biggest concern I have…..’

‘Can you let me see what you’ve come up with so far?’ he asked.

‘I can,’ I said. ‘Would you like to come to our Bunker?’

‘Just send me some pictures. I’ll figure things out.’

‘Very god, Sir. I’ll send up a detailed summary first thing in the morning.’

We looked at each other across his desk. The legs were silvered and the top nothing more than clear glass. It was totally free of adornment except for a glass, half-filled with water. A crystal jug stood behind where he sat, on a chilling cabinet.

‘We know what we need to do,’ I continued. ‘Our difficulty remains the same as when we started. We have no representative testing zone, and it’s going to prove impossible to accurately size the solution unless we can test.’

‘You’re telling me you can’t test your design? Why are you telling me that?’

‘There’s no dedicated area, Sir. What is used today is completely unfit for our purposes. We need a fresh part of the atmosphere to deliver the shuttles to the surface, totally new landing strips, preferably improved road and rail networks, or at least the hubs. It’s all been laid out and submitted. Sergeant Scharf did that work some time ago, although he’s busy updating it now with what we’ve learned in the last few days. But we need to reprioritise the workloads of our engineers. All the people who can make it happen are already fully occupied. And our team doesn’t seem to be able to break into their pipeline of work.’

‘They won’t. There’s nothing in that pipeline that can be reprioritised, as you put it. They work at over 100 per cent capacity just to stand still.’

‘I was hoping that maybe you could exert some influence, get our requests moved up the pecking order. So at least we could understand when they might be addressed?’

‘Forget about that. I’m not sure what you’ve heard, and I have no idea how far you think my powers extend, but there’s no way I’m asking those unions to do anything to compromise their current workload. Don’t mention it again. You say your designs are mostly complete? You know what needs to be built?’

‘I think so, yes. Very nearly. You’ll see when I send through the designs. Every component is covered in some detail.’

‘I look forward to it. The way I understand it, you’re setting up the superchillers to work on the compressed dimension. Is that right?’

I confirmed his understanding.

‘Nobody has done that before, you know?’ he told me.

I confirmed that I knew it.

‘How do you know you have enough capacity?’ he asked.

‘In a word, I don’t,’ I replied. ‘We can’t know until we’ve tried it for real. The suppliers are confident, and we can scale them indefinitely, but nobody can give accurate figures at this stage. That’s why we’re so dependent on the testing zone that we can’t build.’

‘You need to deal with that. We can’t have uncertainty in such a vital area. The timelock and the superchiller represent the two most expensive individual components in the whole design. Sure, you can scale, but any explosion in requirements there might be the difference between worthwhile investment and economic suicide.’

It was impossible to disagree with his reading of the situation. He clearly understood where the difficulties lay in the situation at hand. There was a very real possibility that the only feasible solution would actually bankrupt the country. Everybody understood that, and nobody could confirm or deny it.

He also understood the other pressing constraint. ‘I feel I have to point out at this stage that we don’t have time for all of this. You were given six weeks, and a significant amount of that time has already ticked away. It seems superfluous to remind you, but the consequences of failure are quite dire. And,’ he sipped at his chilled water, ‘others could benefit from your output also. Project van Diemen, for example, are crying out for their own testing zone. It wouldn’t take much for you to integrate their requirements into your own. Let’s share the benefits.

‘Frankly,’ he continued after a short pause, ‘I’m getting nervous. I’ve not seen you until now, and the first thing you’re telling me is that you have no idea what you need. It’s not exactly what I expected. But I have faith. I must. I’ll assume it’s just a bad day and that you’ll return to form tomorrow. I’m not used to failure, and I certainly don’t intend to strike up acquaintance with it now. I didn’t risk everything bringing back those Special Forces from certain death just to see them sink into oblivion. “Let them go,” they told me. “What good can three men alone do,” they said. Well, I knew, and that was the deal. If they’re going to remain in my care, they must constantly prove their worth. So far they have. I’m relying on you to make sure that state of affairs continues.’

‘Three men?’ I asked. Of my team I could only identify Sergeant Magath as a remnant of Special Forces.

‘O’Hara is always available for you,’ he sighed. ‘I hope you’re not put off by his reputation. You don’t seem the sort to be distracted by that kind of canard. It keeps some demands on his expertise at a manageable distance, but you need him. Use him, but use him wisely. And don’t annoy him.’

I wondered if anybody had ever really annoyed O’Hara and, if so, what had happened to them.

‘Can I just clarify one thing, Colonel?’ I could sense the interview careering toward a close and needed to shoehorn in at least one more point. Watson looked at me with a withering stare approaching boredom. ‘How far does my role stretch? By which I mean, do I just concentrate on the landing of the shuttles, the work I’m doing with Magath and Scharf and Mortenson, or should I be involved with Corporal Cowper too?’

‘Corporal Cowper,’ he said slowly, with a slight smile. ‘My opinion of him develops almost by the minute. He has a unique approach, and organisational skills most of us can only dream of. Any misgivings I might have had upon first meeting him, and I admit to many, have totally evaporated. But, yes, he probably needs some assistance. Even he can’t possibly find enough dead time to squeeze in everything he needs all by himself. Having said that, it’s just possible that the good Corporal is the only person in the entire country who is capable of pulling off the unpulloffable. I feel I ought to keep a close eye on him.’

‘You’re probably right,’ I said. ‘There aren’t many like him. But my worry is that he’s parading me to the whole world as some kind of panacea. I doubt my ability to deliver on his promises.’

‘You doubt your ability?! That’s very good!’ The Colonel burst into an unexpected show of animation. ‘Very good indeed. Nobody has the slightest chance of delivering what Cowper has been selling. That’s not the point. Help him, don’t help him. With respect, I’m not convinced it will make any difference at all to the final outcome. If you genuinely don’t think you can spare the time to accompany him, then you must let him know. And straight away. He’ll be disappointed.’

‘So, what will happen? Can somebody else be assigned to him? He’s got some very good ideas. It seems a shame not to capitalise on his momentum.’

‘It does. And yet it sounds as if that’s exactly the route you’ve chosen. I imagine if I were to give it any thought then I couldn’t blame you. I would probably make exactly the same decision in your position. I’m not in your position, of course. Neither am I in Cowper’s. That’s probably a good thing, knowing what I know about him. No, Corporal Cowper has a destiny of his very own to follow. We all do. Sometimes our destinies diverge, sometimes they crash together like a pair of cymbals. He’ll find his. The thing for you to remember is, once you’ve decided to leave him to face that destiny alone, you must do so completely. Your own will naturally become so very much more important. It will require your full concentration.

‘I imagine you’re running late,’ he glanced at his watch. His meaning couldn’t have been clearer. I pictured his finger searching for a hidden button under the trick desktop, a button which activated a large humming neon sign over the door which read “THIS WAY OUT”.

I left Watson’s office and made my way back to the port for my appointment. He was right: I was late. And I knew I had to tell Cowper everything, for his own good. The only problem was that I had no idea what that meant.