Colin looked furtively in all directions, even up, you could never be too careful. "Come on into my lab." He said rubbing his hands together, his eyes wide in manic glee, doing his best mad scientist impression. He ushered the three young men into the medium-sized shed in his back garden before looking around again and carefully closing the door.

The men looked at him expectantly in the stark glare of about twenty neon lights, they almost covered the ceiling to the point you couldn't see the wood below. "Bright enough in here?" Nik asked.

"Got to be able to see my work! Got them out a skip outside a job site I was working on, work a treat eh?" He said with a flourish.

"So, you said you wanted to show us something?" Guy asked, looking around the interior which was a little cramped with four full-grown men inside.

"Aha!" Colin held up his index finger and looked through a little covered peephole back to the outside. "Right, just pull this little lever over here..." He reached under the bench and pulled something the others couldn't see, immediately the floor under Nik's feet started to rise. "Ah, yeah, best you don't stand there." He said as Nik stumbled off the uneven ground.

It took a few seconds for the section of the floor to hinge upwards, revealing a heavy steel trapdoor and a ladder leading down into the earth.

"So, when you were nice enough to build me that raised bed last month, did the earth you filled it with come from here?" Rich asked, knowing the answer.

"Nope. Well, not this shaft. More down the tunnel a bit." Colin replied hopping over the carpet and onto the ladder. "Come on."

They reluctantly followed, glad that at least the tunnel was well lit.

Nik hung back slightly and turned to Rich, "He's not going to murder us all and steal our teeth is he?"

"Like anyone would want your teeth!" Rich replied, pushing Nik forwards, not before noticing the hatch lowering above them ominously.

"True I guess." Nik reluctantly agreed. The tunnel was only about twenty yards long and ended at a sturdy steel door studded with rivets, everything looked like it had been constructed fairly recently.

"How on earth did you do this Colin? I know the steel is all the stuff you've been blagging off me over the last year but this is a ridiculous amount of work." Guy asked, inspecting the patchwork of welded steel which coated the tunnel as Colin rotated a large safe tumbler embedded into the door.

"Doing it was easy. Getting rid of the spoil was what caused me the most problems." He pulled a large lever hidden in the floor and the door opened with a clunk. "All my friends and family have new raised beds, my garden is about six inches higher all over. I had started just dumping it on the riverbank trail but the colour of the earth changed the further down I got. Anyway, I used hydraulic pumps and rams once I got down far enough. That huge digger ram I blagged off you last year actually. Nice and silent." He stepped into the room beyond and ushered them in with a flourish. "Welcome to my laboratory."

The other three men stepped into the brightly lit room. It was a very large area with a meter high wall topped with a domed roof. The men looked around in wonder.

"No way you dug this out." Nik said in wonderment, "The whole place would have collapsed. This has to have been a cut and cover job. How could you have hidden that from the Jacks?" Nik was referring to their ever-present German overlords and their local enforcers who many people called Jacks due to their hobnailed jackboots which they liked to use to step on people's necks.

"Ah! Now that's the clever bit. It was always here!" He said wiggling his fingers as if performing magic. "It got covered over and forgotten about during the long calm because it flooded." The long calm was what the ceasefire a few years into the war had been called, a time before Germany ruled this corner of the world, it seemed like a myth to those who had been born in the years following who had never known a time of peace.

"So, you found it and decided it would make a cool secret base? Like a little child?" Nik asked, trying to wind him up.

"Hey, I resemble that remark!" Colin said, pulling a unicycle down from the far wall and proceeding to ride rings around his friends. "So, want a beer?" He stopped and kept the unicycle steady, wheeling back and forth slightly as he poured a cold frothy beer from a tap in the corner. "Made it myself." He said, downing half the glass whilst again riding around the men.

"Sure," Nik said, always one to try illicit home-brews. He went over and poured them each a glass. "Where'd you get the grain?"

"One of the perks of being a sanitation engineer!" Colin said proudly as he hung his unicycle up. "I was clearing a ditch on a farm out west, happened to need to remove about a couple feet worth of grain from either side so I could work. Couldn't let it go to waste could I?"

"Are you telling me you malted this barley yourself?" Rich asked, tasting the amber liquid tentatively. "Hey, that's not bad! It's really hoppy!"

"Well, I know where the hops grow through the hedges, nobody minds me gathering them. Nothing stopping me from using extra since it cost me nout!" He downed the last of his beer and went to a tap in the corner to wash it out.

"No way! Running water and a drain? What was this place?" Guy asked amazed at the utility of the room.

"Come on! Plumber!" Colin said, pointing at himself. Obviously, the water had been a recent installation.

"We should get a couch or some chairs in here, kettle in the corner." Rich started.

"Lathe over there, Mill beside it. Perhaps a bandsaw and a bending jig, oooh, a sheet metal brake! And an English wheel!" Nik continued Rich's line of thought, Guy nodding beside him.

"Remember, there's a three feet square shaft you have to get everything down. And we cant get caught pulling some kind of clown car trick by the Huns." Colin reminded them, pulling over a folding deck chair. "It is bloody well soundproofed though. I put on the loudest music I could down here and you can't hear anything up in the garden."

"So, what is your intention for this place? You seem to have gone to a lot of trouble to make what is essentially a kids clubhouse which could get you in serious trouble with the Jacks." Guy asked, still sipping his beer.

"Vive la resistance?" Colin said with a raised eyebrow. "I'm pretty good with explosives, I know some people who like blowing things up, figured I might do my bit."

"If we were to kit this place out we could make some serious projects. How would you like some working parts for those old guns on your tank?" Nik suggested, "Or we could fix up that old American motorbike you've had sitting in the back of the yard for years."

Colin meanwhile was moving things around in the back corner of the bunker, an area which seemed to be the dumping ground for everything that he had dragged down, it was an absolute mess, but at least it was a localised mess.

"What are you looking for?" Rich asked, noticing the banging and clanging coming from the corner. Colin was dragging out a large piece of equipment which looked like a vacuum cleaner bolted onto a hot water cylinder.

"It's my sprout master two thousand!" Colin said proudly, "You asked how I malted my grains?"

"What, you used that thing? Did you make this?" Rich asked, peering at the maze of tubes, valves and dials. "It looks like it's more likely to explode than make malted grains."

"It does use a small amount of propane, and I may have had a few small mishaps in the development stage." He looked pointedly at the ceiling where there appeared to still be some burnt grain sticking to the roof.

"What makes it two thousand?" Nik asked in a droll voice.

"Everything sounds cooler with numbers after!" Colin happily answered.

"Hmm." Nik didn't sound impressed. "I think we could build a concrete lathe down here. That would allow us to fit the parts through the hatch. We can probably dismantle most of a mill, you would easily get a pillar drill down. I think we could make this work.” He said, changing the subject.

“Nik likes nothing more than shoving something huge into a tiny hole,” Rich said with a straight face.

”I can’t believe you went there. So early too.” Nik said shaking his head. “But he’s not wrong. Is that for the propane?” He asked, holding a tube with a regulator which was hanging off the device.

”Yeah, I like propane... and fire. You should see my backpack flamethrower!” Colin started raking further back in the pile.

”First order of business is going to be racking. I can’t work in a room with this mess.” Rich said cringing.

“It’s in the corner, you said yourself this place is huge,” Colin said, finally finding the widget he had been looking for. Again, it looked like a vacuum cleaner with a mess of pipe soldered onto it.

”But I would know it was here! You know that messes with my head. It’s like leaving the tails on the cable ties.” At this, he glared at Nik who looked suitably guilty.

”Okay, I have some racking with only minimal rust in the yard, that will satisfy Rich’s OCD. We have a munted lathe that fell off the back of a lorry, you can strip that for parts.” Guy said, “No really, the guy dropped it taking off the flatbed.” He insisted at Colin’s knowing smile ”Anyway, as long as you keep brewing the beer, I’m in.”

Nik and Rich shared a look, “Us too, with bells on.” Rich said enthusiastically. "Hey, what are we into? I wasn't paying attention."

Nik shook his head, "We are going to kit out Colin's shed to use for nefarious construction projects. We are fighting against antidisestablishmentarianism or something."

"Oh, that's okay then. What does the English church have to do with anything though?"

***

Over the next few weeks, they kept up a steady stream of small parts and easily explained equipment into Colin's shed. They had one visit from the constabulary the day after they carried all the racking into the shed, fortunately, however, they had thought to build some of the racking inside the shed so when the shiny booted men with their guns demanded to see the shelving they simply pointed at the racking and since the busybody reporting the unusual activity just said 'lots of steel beams' they assumed their definition of lots was a little different to everyone else's. After that, there was a lot more care taken.

"That was a stroke of genius getting these chairs in here." Guy was sitting in a car seat welded into a steel frame, it matched perfectly the couch made from a rear seat which Colin and Rich were sitting on. "Nobody would notice a car arriving with all its seats and leaving with just the driver's seat."

"Yeah, we need to do it again though. It would have been nice if we could have taken the driver's seat too." They were relaxing with a mug of tea whilst Nik fiddled with a wooden frame in the corner. "Are you not coming for a brew Nik?" Rich called, slightly concerned since his friend almost never passed up the excuse for tea.

"I want to pour this concrete tonight, we have all the parts we need for this lathe down here, it would be a crime not to build it." He was spraying the inside of the wooden form with some kind of white goop.

"Are you sure that is going to work? I've never heard of a concrete lathe bed before." Guy asked, sipping his tea.

"It worked for the Brits at the beginning of the war. I've even seen some of the old lathes still in use, they aren't pretty but it's only the solid base that is made from concrete." He finished spraying the inside of the form and came over to sit on Colin's old deck chair. "We need that last chair." He said as his bum almost touched the floor.

"I expect you are going to want our help to mix all that concrete?" There were ten large bags of the stuff stacked by the new form and no cement mixer in sight.

"If you want to use my lathe, you need to help build it. The release agent is all sprayed on, we have to do this before it dries so, drink up." He said, downing his own mug in one impressive swig. The effect was spoiled by the fact he then struggled to get out of the deckchair. "Someone help me up will you?"

They all took turns on the shovels, mixing the concrete and throwing up cloying clouds of cement dust, it was hard work and they could only mix a third of the bags at a time without the mix spreading too wide to be able to get to the middle. They shovelled each load into Nik's form, by the end of the second load there was a worrying bulge in the centre.

"I think perhaps some bracing is needed," Nik said, leaning on his shovel. "Where to brace to is the question." He grabbed a length of two by four and quickly measured the distance from the wall to the back of the form and cut the wood before wedging it into the back. That resolved the rearward bulge but the front was still sagging alarmingly.

"Mind if I cut into your floor?" He asked Colin, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.

"As long as you patch it afterwards, do what you like," Colin replied, already pouring the last of the cement mixture into a pile.

Nik grabbed a bolster and hammer from the tool chest they had assembled and set to making a hole in Colin's nice flat floor, once he was finished he cut the wood at an angle and wedged it between the hole and the form.

"That should do it, I'm sure there's a joke about solid form in there somewhere but I can't quite get it." He said, admiring his handiwork.

"I don't think it was a good joke Nik, just get back to mixing," Guy told him, sweat pouring off his brow.

Once they had shovelled the last of the concrete into the form, Nik took a trowel and a flat piece of wood and was about to smooth the surface when Colin exclaimed "Wait!"

"What?" Nik asked as Colin frantically rummaged through his pile of junk.

"Aha!" Colin called, dragging a large electric motor out of the pile. "My vibratey machine. It takes all the bubbles out."

He took the machine and rested it against the wooden form before plugging it in. It made a dreadful noise and shook the form enough that Nik and Rich had to grab the hastily applied bracing to prevent it from coming loose, there were a lot of noticeable bubbles floating to the surface though. "See! Eh?" Colin said pointing to the bubbles.

"Yes Colin, very good. Thank you." They waited whilst Colin applied his machine to all four sides of the box. When he was finally happy Nik smoothed down the top to a shiny finish.

"So, how does the lathe attach? Do we have to drill holes or something?" Guy asked, inspecting the finish.

"Ah! Yes, thank you for reminding me." Nik went over to the pile of Lathe parts on Rich's new racking. "I made this negative mounting hole jig thingy." He lifted a steel frame with a lot of bolts sticking out and carried it over. "The idea is, you insert this in the concrete." he proceeded to do so, then he took out a spirit level and checked it was square on all sides. "Then once it's dry we can undo the nuts from the steel, lift it off and the bolts will be in the right place, Roberts your mother's brother."

"Cunning. Time for a brew?" Rich asked.

"I think we're done for the day. Perhaps a beer?" Nik suggested.

***

They gradually got the underground workshop tooled up and functional, with the lathe going they started off by fixing the inactive weapons which Guy had been provided for his antique tank restoration project. Every weapon was missing a firing pin and had its barrels welded solid. Machining new firing pins was a simple job, even the hardening process was only a few minute job, the weld, however, was a bit more difficult. They drilled out the plugs on the lathe and then had to machine up some rifling broaches which then got pulled and pushed through the barrels using a machine that Colin thought up. The machine used both a mechanical screw and an impact driver to pull the broach from one end whilst a hydraulic ram pushed from the other side, the carbide cutters embedded in the broach at regular intervals then cut the spiral into the inside of the tube. It was a slow process involving large volumes of tea and hearing protection.

"Why are we doing this again?" Colin asked, having finished the second large gun barrel, It was only the two of them this time, Rich was apparently celebrating his birthday. "It's not like the resistance is going to use an antique tank with six-pound guns!"

"Because I want a fully functioning tank," Guy replied with a shrug. "Anyway, you love doing this stuff!"

"No, I love making zany interesting inventions. I don't love doing work for the sake of it." He griped, adjusting his tie.

"You sound like Nik! 'Why can't I make it go fast?' or 'I could give it some suspension so it goes over rough terrain easier.' I want a reproduction tank that looks and feels like the real thing. Is that too much to ask?" Guy was getting a little bit irate and starting to rant.

"Hey, you are the man funding this whole endeavour, whatever you want!" Colin said defensively raising his arms.

"Sorry, I just like things that are at least almost historically accurate. Talking about guns though, I heard someone got caught trying to assassinate the high command, now that is something I support." Guy said, raising his glass in a toast to the failed assassin.

"Yeah, things have been different since the last of the Kaiser's men died. Who would have thought Vorbeck would be the liberal amongst them! We really could do with another change of leadership." Colin started fiddling with something with lots of wires on his bench, "Shame the poor guy will be publicly executed now though."

"Perhaps the Japs will step up the fight again. Surely we are due another few of their missile strikes soon." Guy said despondently.

"You know the lead curtain is too good for that to work. It's all our factories have been churning out for the Huns for years. The only way its going to work is if they stop going low, come in from the top and get high enough that the bullets and missiles cant get them." He finished tinkering with his device. "If I was their researcher I would be going for full-on outer space weapons platforms." He threw his newly completed device to Guy.

"That's just because you like rockets. What is this?" He asked, turning the device over in his hand.

"It's a detector. Hopefully, it flashes if the Jacks' handheld radios come within five hundred feet. No good down here though, the steel acts like a Faraday's cage and stops all signals in and out. If it works I might make another that can be 'planted' in my garden somewhere with wires down to here." Colin was already pulling out some pipe, ready to start another project.

"Right, when do you envisage me using this? You know my only nefarious goings-on are done down here?" Guy placed the little box on the ground.

"Well, take it home with you. At least tell me if it works, you have them coming around to your business almost every day don't you?" Colin asked, pouring himself a mug of tea.

"It's a hazard of the job, you can't be seen decommissioning and scrapping military equipment without them checking constantly that you are doing your job. I don't know why they don't just do it themselves, not that I want them to, it's money for old rope and you get some really cool stuff coming through." Guy explained.

"Like that old tank? How are the guys going with the refurbishment?" Colin knew the tank job had already been going on for most of the year.

"I would be surprised if there is any original metal from the tank left! Nik is forever taking the grinder to it, the engine was scrap and most of the tracks had to be remade. At least it looks like a tank now." Guy had thought the job would make a lot of money but it was looking now as if they might just cover their wages and expenses. "It keeps the boys busy though."

They finished their tea and did a final tidying of the workshop before turning the lights out. "Hey, don't forget the detector," Colin said, passing the box to Guy again.

They climbed the ladder and Colin had just pressed the button to open the hatch when Guy noticed the light on the detector going on, "Close it, close it." He hissed urgently, Colin's reactions were quick and he closed the hatch before it had opened too far. "Your detector went off," Guy whispered.

"Shit. It's either not working or there are Jacks on the street." Colin checked his watch. "Almost midnight, damn. If there are militia out there it won't be a regular patrol, they normally ignore this area after ten at night." They descended the ladder quietly and Colin pulled another hidden lever a short distance into the tunnel and a periscope dropped from the ceiling.

"Holy crap! I forgot I gave you that, you must have had that for almost ten years now." Guy whispered.

"I knew it would come in handy. I disguised the other end by building a bench over it, you can't see the lens unless you bend right down." He peered through the viewfinder. "Well, that isn't good. The lights are on in the house."

"You didn't leave them on?" Guy asked hopefully.

"No, and I locked the doors," Colin said, pacing back and forth.

"I'm not sure why they would break into my house. I can't think of any reason they would be watching me." He went back to watching through the periscope.

"Have you been associating recently with the people you said liked your explosives?" Guy asked, shaking his head incredulously.

"Oh, yeah. I did say hello to one of the guys in the pub on the weekend. You think they've been watching him and are investigating me because of that?" Guy just raised his eyebrows, "I guess that's a yes. Arse."

"Okay, you keep watching the house. Once they leave we will give them an hour and then open the hatch, see if there is a radio signal and if not we scarper over the back wall and head to the boys' house. Our story will be that we went around for a drink and decided to stay the night. Okay?" Guy patted Colin's shoulder and went to have a sit-down since he had at least an hour to kill. "Perhaps we need beds down here!" he said over his shoulder as he turned the lights back on. "And an escape hatch."

Guy spent some time moving the chair beside the couch to give it more length before turning the light off and trying to sleep, it was fairly uncomfortable with his feet hanging off the edge but it was better than trying to sleep sitting upright. After about an hour where he dozed off and on, he decided to go check on Colin.

Colin had at some point left his post and visited the workshop, he was sitting on his unicycle swaying back and forth whilst looking through the periscope.

"What on earth are you doing?" Guy asked shaking his head again at his friend's antics.

"It's more comfortable than standing, and it's great for my core!" Colin said waving his hands up and down his torso. Admittedly he was fairly trim. "They seem to be making a move. They've stolen my document case, my computer and I think I saw them with the bottle of whiskey I was saving."

"Bastards! That is going way too far. You never steal another man's whiskey." Guy looked livid.

"Well, I can't say I don't deserve it. I did steal it from them initially. In my defence, the job they had me doing in that warehouse was worth way more than they paid me and I did drink the other five bottles." Colin hopped off his unicycle. "Right, that looks like the last of them. Now we just hurry up and wait?"

"Yeah, let's give them a while to get bored of watching an empty house before we sneak out. In the meantime, do you have a roll of cable in your pile of junk? Perhaps we can make a start on running some kind of warning system in here, then we can make sure someone is in the house to keep a lookout whenever we are down here." Guy suggested, feeling really bored and not wanting to try sleeping again yet.

"Sure, we have to run it through the cable brackets I welded under the tunnel floor though, otherwise Richard will have one of those OCD meltdowns." They raked out the wire, a massive roll of low voltage speaker cable which Colin 'procured' some time ago on a worksite, and got to work. When building the tunnel Colin had really planned ahead, there were access points in the floor at regular spaces and he had a long set of screw together pull rods for exactly this kind of job. By the time their self mandated hour was up the cable was neatly run from the workshop door all the way to the top of the ladder.

They turned the lights off again and this time made sure the tunnel was also completely dark before opening the hatch a tiny crack. The detector didn't light up so they opened it progressively further until they could finally get out. Guy closed the hatch after himself as Colin peered through a little fish-eye peephole he had installed above the door frame out of direct sight. He spent a good few minutes watching before quietly opening the door and letting Guy out and then, just as quietly closing it after them.

They tiptoed through the back garden and used the handily positioned raised beds to hop the high fence rather than use the gate which they both knew had rusty, squeaky hinges. Once they were in the alleyway between the gardens they ran in a crouch away from the house and in the direction of Nik and Rich's house. Their hearts beat fast, more from the tension than the exercise and they had to work hard to breathe quietly. The tiny light on their detector flickered a little about halfway to their destination as they were passing through an allotment, so they hid behind a shed for a few minutes, anxiously watching the little box, expecting the light to go on any minute. Colin passed the time by stealing some vegetables from people's veg plots, just enough to make soup for lunch. Once they had decided the Jacks hadn't found them they made their way to the boys' house. The lights were off but Guy had a key, for emergencies of course, which he considered this one of.

They silently let themselves in and avoided turning any lights on, quietly sneaking up the stairs. They could hear someone snoring in one of the rooms so they let themselves in, it was Richard, laying on his back in the bed and snoring like a banshee. "Rich!" Guy said, giving him a little nudge.

"What the-!" Rich exclaimed before Guy put his hand over his mouth.

"We have a bit of an issue," Guy whispered, "you two haven't been raided by the Jacks tonight have you?" Rich shook his head, Guy's hand still over his mouth. "And you didn't go anywhere, leave the house at any time?" again the shaking head. "Good. Can you go wake Nik, quietly?"

Richard rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and reached for his glasses before swinging his legs out and sitting up. "This had better be good." He warned them before standing up in his boxers and grabbing his dressing gown.

"Hey, Nik." He called softly at a door down the corridor.

"Hmm." Came the sleepy reply. "Whadywn?"

"Come through here a minute." He requested, wandering back to his own bedroom.

When Nik showed up a couple of minutes later looking thoroughly unimpressed, Guy and Colin explained the situation.

"So you thought you would drag us into it? Perfect." Nik grumbled.

"Just give us a bed and back our story of coming here, having a few drinks and staying the night," Guy told him, getting a bit irritated from lack of sleep. "And you can come in late tomorrow with me and blame it on a hangover."

"You should have led with that," Nik said, turning to go back to bed.

"I guess I should show you the spare room." They were led through the house to a musty smelling room with a double bed by Rich. "I would suggest top and tail."