The meeting was held below street level, as most important ones were these days.
Rain tapped softly against the narrow windows. The only light in the room came from green-glass desk lamps and a projector that clicked noisily every few seconds as it advanced through aerial reconnaissance slides.
On the screen was a sequence of photographs taken from a high-altitude British scout plane: the Catalonian ridge, or what was left of it.
It looked like Hell had skimmed the earth with a hot blade.
Sir Alistair Fenwick; who was a senior analyst at the Royal Ordnance Technical Board stood beside the projector with a small remote clicker in hand. He did not smile. He never did.
"Slide seventeen," he said without looking at the men gathered around the long polished table.
The image that appeared next showed a close-up of a shattered defensive emplacement:
concrete fused and bubbled, sandbags scorched but oddly intact in shape; carbonized husks.
