The Forgotten Army (6 page)

Oscar smiled. This sounded like a promotion to him. He couldn't wait to tell the rest of the boys that he was on the personal instructions of the Commander.

'One thing, Henderson,' Strebbins continued. 'I 55

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can't have this being reported. You know how this place works. It's all time sheets and duty logs and explaining ourselves to a higher authority. I'm not having any of that.

You'll take the next few days as leave. If you want to ring in, I'm giving you my personal cell phone number.' She handed Oscar a blank card with a number written on it in biro.

'Thank you, ma'am. This is a great honour.'

Strebbins cut him off. 'Can it, Oscar. You're doing this 'cos you're the only guy here that the girl talked to. I need you to get close in to them. So lose the grateful act.'

Oscar was smiling as he left the office. If taking care of the two eccentrics was all he had to do, he was going to have an easy time of it.

Strebbins was obviously more concerned than Oscar.

She punched a speed-dial button on her desk phone.

'This is Commander Strebbins. Status update on the apprehended creature, please.'

Oscar could hear the reply through the speakerphone:

'It's out cold. We're clearing the dog pound for it. Until then, it stays on the flatbed.'

'Forget the dog pound,' Strebbins ordered. This thing needs proper protection. Take it to the zoo.'

'Are you sure?' queried the duty officer.

Strebbins's lower lip trembled with anger. 'If I hear you haven't done it, you're fired.'

*

THE FORGOTTEN ARNY

Ever since the sleeping mammoth had been taken away by the cops, Sam Horwitz had been hiding deep in the basement of the Natural History Museum. He'd seen how quickly the ginger girl had been handcuffed, and he had slipped quietly back into the Museum in the hubbub. He knew he'd have to face his fate sooner or later, but for now he was trying to piece together the mystery of the mammoth.

Working furiously at his desk, he'd been going through every scan and test he had run on the mammoth. It had been improbable enough that the beast still had fur when he first found it, let alone that it could breathe. He sighed, and put his head in his hands.

This wasn't how the day had been meant to go. By now, he thought, he should have been interviewed countless times on television and radio, answering questions in as many languages as the world spoke. He would have answered humbly and calmly, explaining how he alone had found and preserved the mammoth. Then, after an exhausting but triumphant day, he would have asked Polly Vernon out to dinner. Tired, but sparkling, she would have seen in him what he saw in her, and all the months of working alone would have been worth it.

Now, instead, his career was over. In the space of a few minutes, he'd gone from being the rising star of Palaeontology to the biggest booby in all of America. He'd brought a living creature into the

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sacred heart of the Natural History Museum and let it loose on hundreds of people. Priceless displays had been destroyed, and the two strangers that had leapt upon its back had almost been killed.

He couldn't stop remembering Polly's face asking him what she should do. It was so obvious to him now that he should have led her and her school to safety. That's what a hero would have done. Instead, he'd told her to run, and tried to talk to a mammoth. Some kind of hero he was.

But even through all of this, part of him couldn't get over how incredible it all was. His dreams of seeing living specimens of magnificent animals from the past had come true. He'd never imagined he would know how it felt to have the breath of a mammoth on his cheeks, or to quake in fear as one stampeded along the corridor. Sam thought that this must be how the cavemen had felt. He had seen new dangers in the world, and emerged unscathed.

There was a timid knock on the door, and Sam's evening of woe instantly got a whole lot better. Polly Vernon was at the door, smiling brightly.

Is it safe to come in?' she asked.

Sam laughed, so relieved to see a good friend like Polly.

Even better, she was carrying boxes of Chinese takeaway.

'Thought I might find you here...' she went on. 'Maybe we can just stay in tonight? Out of everyone's way.'

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Sam couldn't help but give Polly an enormous hug. He'd turned his cell phone off after the hundredth news crews rang for the thousandth time. All demanding interviews and statements. 'Was this a hoax?' 'Where was it found?' 'Who is responsible?'

Sam had turned on the TV earlier - only to see himself facing down a mammoth, and the Director of the Museum talking sternly to camera about the internal investigation to be launched, and saying plainly and pointedly that this was the brainchild of one of their junior colleagues - Sam Horwitz.

'What are they saying out there?' Sam asked Polly.

She looked at the floor. 'Don't you worry about them, they'll calm down. No one was hurt, that's the important thing.'

'Except the Barosaurus,' Sam said glumly.

Polly nodded. 'Yes, but that's been dead for millions of years, so no one counts it.'

Sam was so pleased Polly was there. But he had to ask her.

'Are you disappointed in me?' He could feel his eyes welling up with tears and blinked them back.

Polly said nothing. She just opened her arms, and gave him a big hug. 'It wasn't your fault,' she said eventually.

'Who could have known they were able to survive hibernation like that?'

'I'm so sorry, Polly. I was so scared.'

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Polly was shaking her head. Today, you were the bravest man I've ever seen. That thing is one crazy animal. It can probably eat a Tyrannosaurus Rex before breakfast, and you went toe to toe with it! You didn't even run. I was so proud of you.'

'But it's all my fault,' Sam moaned.

'You tried to get everyone to be calm. There were five hundred people in that room, and only one person thought of saving everyone else. You.'

Sam felt the happiest he'd been in hours. Maybe it wasn't going to be so bad. Even though he knew his time in the Museum was over and he'd be lucky to get a job teaching fourth graders, he was proud that he had friends like Polly.

'So, Mr Explorer,' Polly was saying, 'I think it's time you told me where on Earth you found that monstrosity. I thought you'd been eaten by moths or something you'd spent so much time at work. Now I know you were keeping this secret. No wonder I didn't see you for so long.'

Sam realised that the burden of the secret was lifted and he no longer had to hide. For the first time in months he felt able to tell Polly the truth.

When he'd first met Polly, Sam's life had been very different.

He'd been a lowly research assistant and, for all his jokes and games, he had been learning to forget his dreams. As a boy, Sam had always loved reading about prehistoric creatures and imagining what the past was like. He dreamed of 60

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seeing the days when Tyrannosaurus Rex ruled the world, and when herds of Diplodocus grazed the vast plains. But after months of boring work in the Museum he had thought that he would never get to be an adventurer, or to blaze his own trail through undiscovered mountains and dangerous jungles.

But then, one day, while he was cataloguing reindeer droppings, he had found a piece of paper tucked inside an old map of Svalbard. It had claimed to be the location of a hidden treasure of dinosaur bones, buried beneath hundreds of metres of Arctic ice, high in the icy plains of Svalbard.

The notes on the edge of the map claimed that dinosaurs had gathered around a volcanic spring to shelter from the last ice age, only to be trapped when the ice sheets advanced.

Dinosaurs from all over the continent had gathered around the oasis of warm water and, as the longest winter crept in, the dinosaurs had been frozen deep down under the glaciers.

If the story was right, the dinosaurs would have been frozen so quickly, and kept in conditions so cold, that they would be the best preserved dinosaurs ever. And if the map was right, there would be types of dinosaur in the hidden valley that no one had ever seen before.

So when Sam had heard there was a spare place on an Arctic mission he knew it was too good an opportunity to miss. Whilst his colleagues were labelling whale bones in Stockholm Museum, he

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had set off with two huskies and a warm coat to search for the mysterious Dinosaur Oasis and its treasures. They had all thought he was mad.

But Sam had surprised them all when he'd returned to Stockholm, his borrowed fishing boat weighed down with a very unusual cargo. Sam Horwitz had found the first ever Polar Woolly Mammoth.

Standing four metres tall, its tusks were two metres long, and it's eyes the size of dinner plates. Its teeth were long and still sharp, unblemished by the years in the cold, and its muscles still rippled, preserved in all their might and glory.

The beast had a coat of pure white fur, and a mouth as wide as a car. It was truly fearsome to behold. And Sam had found it.

The mammoth had been shipped back to New York in great secrecy. Sam hadn't told Polly because he knew she'd have wanted to see it. And he knew if even a few people saw it - even Polly - the secret would get out.

They'd been successful in keeping the mammoth under wraps and, until this fateful day, hardly anyone had seen it.

Rumours had spread around the Museum of what Sam was working on. People had speculated that he'd found the

'missing link' of the chain of Evolution, or that he'd found a new kind of prehistoric human skeleton.

But now the creature had turned out to be 62

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something entirely different. And Sam desperately wanted to do something to put right what he had done.

63

When Oscar arrived at
the Midtown Police Station, he was horrified to find most of the uniformed police were standing outside drinking cups of takeaway coffee.

'What are you doing?' he asked, finding it hard to believe they were all outside.

'We're on orders from Scotland Yard,' an older cop answered. 'Girl with red hair, she was very insistent we wait outside. Nice girl though, she bought us all these.' The cop nodded to a big box of doughnuts, most of which had been eaten.

Oscar cursed and ran to the main doors, only to find the front desk was shut down and the police station locked.

'They can't lock me out of a police station!' he 65

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yelled. But it seemed that they could.

Keeping an eye on the Doctor was going to be harder than Oscar had imagined.

The Doctor woke up behind bars. He was lying on a metal bunk in a New York Police Department cell.

On the wall beside him, someone had scratched what looked like a tally of years. For a short moment, the Doctor panicked.

Had he been in the cell for that long? Where was Amy? Still cloudy from the tranquilliser, he couldn't quite piece together the last few hours.

A familiar voice broke his thoughts.

'Oi, Dozy of Alcatraz!'

The delicate sound of Amy Pond brought a smile to the Doctor's face. She was standing at the cell door with a bored expression.

'Do you have any idea how long I've been waiting for you?'

she went on. 'It's not like they have magazines in the waiting room here. You missed the best bit: me, a box of doughnuts and twelve skinny lattes, and the NYPD were mine for the taking. You should have seen me, I was pretty impressive. Anyway, looks like New York has taken a shine to the mammoth.'

She unfurled a copy of the New York Times and held it up to the hatch so the Doctor could see the front page headline: 'New York Welcomes Woolly the Mammoth'.

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The Doctor sprang to his feet, instantly tense. 'Right, we've got to get to it. Er... how long have I been here, then?'

'I was coming to that.. .'Amy told him. 'I thought you'd have woken up earlier, being all Super-Human Time Lord and all that...'

The Doctor counted the number of holes in his trousers.

'They hit me with six tranquilliser darts. Even two hearts take a while to get rid of that kind of dose. I must have been asleep for... No!'

With a sense of dread, the Doctor looked at the time. Six hours. He'd been asleep for six hours. He rattled the door of the cell. 'We have to get out of here!' Pulling himself up on the window ledge he could see that the sun was setting. 'Oh no, no, no, no, no.'

Amy told him to calm down. 'Woolly is safe in the zoo, all behind bars. Job done. Us one, mammoths nil.'

The Doctor wasn't ready to celebrate. 'We must be too late... We need to get to it...' He realised he wasn't making much sense to Amy and launched into a passionate explanation. 'I know what's wrong with the mammoth!

When I was on its back I could hear it, and beneath the muscle and the sweat there was another noise. There was a ticking, and a clanking of old machinery getting back into action. The mammoth isn't real. It's a fake. A giant mechanical creature, disguised to look like a vicious 67