Gary came out of the line. One of the SS officers stepped forward to meet him.

'Oh, Christ,' somebody groaned. 'It's the SS bird. It's not fair.'

From beneath a black peaked cap, a startlingly beautiful face smiled at Gary. 'So you're Corporal Wooler. I've been hearing about you – and your notorious mother, whom I actually met once. We have high hopes for you, Wooler. You're a significant figure. The American fighting for the British. The neutral who refuses a safe passage out of the stalag. You've made yourself prominent, among the Prominente!'

The accent was pure upper-class English. 'My God. What are you?'

Her smile broadened. 'I am SS-Unterscharfuhrer Fiveash. But you can call me Julia. We've quite a day ahead of us, Corporal. Come now.' And she turned and walked away.

Gary glanced at the SBO, who nodded.

Behind him the men, recovering their nerve, got into the catcalling. 'You lucky dog,' shouted Willis Farjeon. 'You lucky dog, Wooler!'

He was led to the gate, where he was briskly searched, first by an SS man and then by stalag guards. The guards, knowing the prisoners' tricks, were a lot more thorough, but he was spared the indignity of a strip search and a cavity inspection.

A small group of staff cars was waiting outside the stalag gate. Julia Fiveash sat in one of these, behind a Wehrmacht driver. The car door was open, and she patted the seat beside her. Gary joined her, bewildered.

The cars pulled away, and formed up into a small convoy. They were heading east, he saw from the angle of the sun, towards the coast. Gary reflexively considered the possibilities of escape. This was no steel-barred truck; this was an open car, and he could just hop over the side. But he had no doubt that weapons were trained on him.

Fiveash said, 'We don't have far to go – a couple of miles.'

'Where to?'

'You'll see.' Fiveash was watching him. 'So how do you feel? What are you thinking? Come, Corporal, I hope you won't cling to that name, rank and serial number routine; I do want us to get to know each other.'

How did he feel? He ran a fingertip along a seam of the leather seat cover. The car was gleaming inside and out, and the woman beside him was crisp and sharp in her jet-black uniform. It was a bright, fresh English fall day, and the car, bowling along, threw up a rooster-tail of leaves that smelled of wood smoke. 'I haven't been in any sort of vehicle outside of a steel-walled prison truck for a year. I feel grimy. Hell, I am grimy.'

'Well, you don't need to be grimy. Not any more.'

Soon they approached a cluster of buildings, gathered around a crossroads.Gary's first impression was of whitewashed concrete. It was nothing like the compact little villages of Kent; it looked new, alien, as if it had been dropped from the sky. And it didn't look like another prison, at least, though there was a fence of chicken-wire and barbed wire around it.

They stopped at a barrier, where an SS-schutze, a private, checked papers handed over by the drivers.

Gary studied the sign before the barrier. 'Nova Rutupiae." What the hell kind of name is that?'

'Latin,' said Fiveash. 'Or at least some Party scholar's idea of Latin. Rutupiae, you see, is the old Roman name for Richborough. So it seems appropriate. You know Richborough; you've been working there. I'm told that you will be able to see the invasion monument from the podium of Rutupiae's thingplatz.'

The barrier was raised. They were driven through into the fenced-off inner area, where they climbed out of the car.

'Of course the fence is such a bore,' Fiveash said. 'It will be such a relief when the armistice is signed, and we can tear down all these barriers, even the First Objective itself – don't you think? Now, come, follow me, we've a lot to see.'

She set off briskly. He followed. They were tailed, reasonably discreetly, by a couple of SS men.

XVIII

They walked along a kind of street. The buildings were white-painted with rendered walls, flat roofs, shuttered windows, little scraps of lawn neatly cut. But the houses were odd, built like long halls, stretching back from the street. There was no sense of individuality about them, as if they had been stamped out of a mould in some factory. And none of the houses looked occupied; they all had their shutters closed.

There was nobody about save more SS, and a party of workers, shabby, exhausted, shuffling along under the watchful eye of guards. Gary wondered if they were prisoners on labour detail. None of them looked at him.

'These are residences, obviously,' Fiveash said. 'It's a pity they weren't built in a more sympathetic style, but for now labour and materials are understandably short… The larger building is the manor house, where the controlling SS officer will reside.'

'What the hell is this place?'

'A village,' Fiveash said. 'Some of the Ahnenerbe thinkers call it a colony", but that word has regrettable overtones. This one is meant as a model of its type – a show home, a demonstration of the possible. This is a lebensborn village, Gary. Now come and see the public facilities.'

At the heart of the 'village' were unopened shops with their functions displayed on hastily painted signs, and a space with sheds and stock-yards, like an agricultural market. There was even a British pub, mocked up in concrete and white paint; it had no name, but the sign outside carried a stern portrait of Hitler. What Fiveash called the sportplatz was a complex of arenas and facilities, including a soccer pitch and a shooting gallery. There was a large open field which Fiveash said would be a cemetery – very important in this community, she said, a place to honour the dead. 'It's all very Iron Age,' she said drily.

The most imposing facility was the thingplatz, an arena like an open-air theatre with a raised podium. Flagpoles soared, and Gary saw searchlight mounts. You could hold a hell of a rally here. All this was brand new, unused; Gary could smell paint. The only colour amid all the white was the vivid green of the lawns.

'You're one of the first candidates to see this.' Fiveash smiled, her teeth dazzling white in the sun. 'You may not feel this way now, but you're honoured. Really, you are!'

She led him back through the village to the residential buildings, and opened up one of the houses. Inside the decor was functional – more white paint, with false pillars to mask the concrete, and solid-looking furniture of wood and leather. The house was in two halves, he found, looking around, with a family living area at one end, and an open space at the far end that Fiveash said was meant as a barn.

The living room felt cold, all that concrete sucking out the warmth. A television sat mute in one corner, and there was a fireplace, unlit. Standing in this clean space Gary felt even more shabby, like a scarecrow brought in from the field.

There was a knock. A young soldier walked in with a tray laden with biscuits, fruit and a jug of coffee. He put this on a low table and left.

Fiveash smiled at Gary. 'Eat. Drink. Go ahead; there are no strings.'

He hesitated for one second. Then he sat, pulled the tray to him, and stuffed a biscuit in his mouth. It was shortbread coated with sugar; the crystals seemed to burst on his tongue. While he chewed on that he poured out a coffee, slopping it a little, and sucked up a great hot mouthful.

'I'll take mine white,' Fiveash said, good humoured. She took off her cap, revealing blonde hair tightly plaited.

He poured her a coffee and found a jug of cream. He continued to cram his mouth. 'Sorry,' he said. 'Shit, this coffee. Makes the tea we get in the stalag taste like dishwater. Probably is dishwater.'

'What do you think of the design? I mean the village as a whole. Himmler himself had a hand in it, you know. The house is based on a Roman era design called a wohnstallhaus" – the remains of such houses are found all over Germany. You could say this village is an Ahnenerbe experiment. There is a scheme called the Generalplan Ost which will see a great belt of such communities as this serving as a buffer between the Slavic homelands and the Reich. This is when the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy is destroyed, and the Slavs pushed back.' She said this as neutrally as if she were describing some feature of the house.