CHERUB: The General (24 page)

The deserted stretch of tarmac leading down to the building was brightly lit and easily visible from the vehicle gate, so Sarge cut down a steeply sloping footpath carved into the rocks. The only illumination came from distant car headlamps and James gave himself a fright as his shoulder brushed a rock, causing a lizard to scuttle away.

‘I’ll cover you,’ Sarge said, pulling his rifle into a firing position and giving James a shove towards the shed.

All James could hear was his own breathing as he dived across the single lane of tarmac in front of the building. The heavy steel door groaned and he stepped into a dark passageway.

‘Hello?’ James said, trying to sound innocent in case he had company.

The generator buzzed behind a door with a million yellow warning stickers on it and the burnt smell in the air reminded him of the time he’d melted a circuit board in science class.

Once he was confident that he was alone, James walked down the hallway, which opened into a double height space. This contained a huge drum-shaped water tank with a six-rung inspection ladder up the side.

He grabbed his radio. ‘Looks clear, Sarge.’

By the time Sarge arrived, James had the bag of Phenolphthalein out of his backpack and was ready to slit it open with his multitool.

‘Don’t,’ Sarge gasped. ‘Swallow three specks of that powder and in eighteen hours’ time you’ll be blasting off like the space shuttle.’

Sarge threw James rubber gloves and a paint-sprayer’s mask before clambering up the side of the tank. He flipped up the inspection hatch as James slit the bag and passed it up to him.

Sarge dumped the drug into the giant tank as James went into the SAS man’s backpack for the second load.

‘Piece of cake,’ Sarge grinned as he came down the ladder.

They put the empty drug packets inside a large zip-lock bag, then dumped their gloves and masks inside before sealing it up and dumping it in a large bin nearby. Sarge handed James a bottle of alcohol cleanser.

‘Use plenty,’ Sarge ordered. ‘Do your hands, then your nose and mouth. When you get back to the apartment, ditch the uniform by sealing it in a bin liner then take a hot shower. Until then, don’t eat or drink anything you’ve touched and don’t put your fingers anywhere near your mouth.’

James was stunned by the degree of caution. ‘How toxic is this stuff?’

‘It’s military grade, designed for special ops,’ Sarge explained, squeezing his eyes shut as he slathered his face in the gel. ‘The drug is encased in microscopic plastic caplets that start leaking the drug twenty hours after they first contact water. It takes a thirtieth of a gram to induce severe stomach cramps and diarrhoea.’

‘Not nice,’ James said, glancing at his watch as he slung his pack over his shoulder and headed towards the exit. ‘So in theory, in twenty and a half hours from now every American on this base is going to get a severe dose of the shits?’

‘That’s what Kazakov’s hoping,’ Sarge laughed.

Mission accomplished, James and Sarge headed back up the rocky path towards the main part of the base. The last of the Hummers stood in a short queue near the gate, waiting for orders on which area they were expected to patrol.

The voice of the officer organising the patrols still ripped across the near deserted parking lot. ‘I want information. I want to see asses kicked! You’re my boys – now get out there.’

‘We were supposed to be in and out before they discovered we’d attacked the drones,’ James complained. ‘How the hell are we gonna get back to base with five hundred guys searching for us?’

Sarge shrugged. ‘If there’s five hundred guys searching for us out there, can’t be many left in here.’

He stepped inside the first of the sixty-metre-long accommodation tents, and shouted, ‘Anyone seen Corporal Smith?’

If the tent had turned out to be full of men he could easily have backed out claiming it was all a mistake. But as Sarge expected, every man and woman had been sent out on patrol. James followed him inside and you could tell from the scattered clothes and miniature TVs flickering in the gloom that everyone had cleared out in a hurry.

The tent was divided into bays, with four beds to each side of a bay. Every fourth bay was a lounge area, with a big TV and either a pool or foosball table. James and Sarge only encountered one man as they passed through. He had a foot in plaster and lay on his bunk in underpants, rocking out to his iPod.

‘This looks as good as any,’ Sarge said when they stopped in the seventh bay, which was just over half-way between the middle and the end of the long canvas dome.

He grabbed clean uniform, towel and boots from an open locker before pointing James towards a plastic shower unit in the far corner.

‘Didn’t we just poison the water?’ James asked warily.

‘There’s plenty in the pipes between here and the tank,’ Sarge explained. ‘It’ll take a good hour or two for it to feed as far as here.’

‘What if anyone comes through?’

‘We’ll figure it out,’ Sarge said casually. ‘I want a shower and clean clobber. Then we’ll chill here for an hour or two and head for home when things calm down.’

James liked Sarge’s plan: he wasn’t comfortable with either the pungent odour of Lieutenant Lopez’s aftershave, or the idea that his clothes might be contaminated with tiny caplets of the Phenolphthalein powder.

The shower was a peculiar affair. The grubby plastic basin flexed when he stepped behind the curtain and he was mystified by the lack of controls until he saw that the shower only worked when you picked up the nozzle and squeezed a trigger.

When he stepped out two minutes later, a heavily tattooed and naked Sarge threw him a towel before stepping in after him. The uniform James put on was still someone else’s, but this time the green T-shirt and sand-coloured trousers were freshly laundered. The only reasonable boots he could find were too big, so he found two pairs of clean socks and gave them a good blast from someone’s deodorant before pulling them on.

‘What did you see?’ a woman asked.

James looked around. His brow shot up as he recognised the female guard from the gate, accompanied by a female officer. They were two bays along, talking to the man with the broken foot. James dived across the aisle towards the shower.

‘Company,’ James said anxiously.

‘So what?’

‘They’re searching. It’s the woman from the front gate.’

‘You serious?’ Sarge gasped, bursting through the shower curtain and grabbing James’ damp towel off the end of a bed.

James took another peek and saw the female guard coming towards them.

‘You go,’ Sarge ordered, as he hopped into a pair of trousers. ‘I’ll catch up.’

But James was spotted as he crossed the centre aisle for his backpack. There was a sharp crack followed by a chalky pink explosion as he dived on to the ground between two beds.

Dressed only in trousers, Sarge grabbed his rifle and did a double tap: two well aimed rounds fired in quick succession. While Sarge covered, James skidded across the vinyl floor and crawled into the next bay, but three male soldiers were coming through the flaps twenty metres ahead.

The tent had zipped exits in the leisure areas and some of these were even left open to let in fresh air, but James wouldn’t get to one before the guards. His only hope was the slot where a portable air conditioner protruded through the fabric.

‘I bloody know her,’ Sarge gasped, firing shots in both directions as James jumped up on a bed. ‘That woman on the gate: she was at a NATO special forces conference in Malta last year. Must have sussed us after we rushed through.’

James hit the air conditioner with all his might. The bed grated backwards and the tent fabric billowed. Most importantly, the air conditioner broke away at the point where it was clipped to the tent fabric. James held the fabric taut with one hand and pounded repeatedly on the air conditioner.

After a dozen painful blows, the air conditioner tilted backwards off its mounting and hit the sand outside with an almighty thunk.

‘Nice one,’ Sarge smiled, keeping the approaching guards at bay with more covering shots as James threw his backpack through the square hole in the fabric and hauled himself up off the bed.

James got his head through, but his shoulders were a tight squeeze and Sarge had to break away from firing to give him a shove. The domed shape of the tent acted like a slide, but James’ palm hurt from pounding on the air conditioner and a hard landing on the sand made it worse.

‘Take both packs,’ Sarge yelled, as he threw his pack through the hold.

James was disorientated and it took him a couple of seconds to realise that Sarge wasn’t coming with him: if his sixteen-year-old body needed a push to get through the hole, Sarge didn’t have a hope in hell.

‘I’m dead,’ Sarge shouted, as the shooting inside the tent finally stopped. ‘Use smoke cover and get out of here.’

Hoping to buy a few seconds, James unhooked a smoke grenade from inside his pack. He pulled the pin and lobbed it through the square hole before starting to run. In basic training cherubs are taught to always be tactically aware, but James realised he’d been relying on Kazakov and Sarge to do everything. Now he had to think for himself.

The odds were stacked against. James was trapped inside a secure base on a high state of alert and everyone would be looking for him as soon as the guards inside the tent stopped breathing smoke and called out on their radios. The main gate was less than fifty metres away and James’ best and probably only shot at getting out was a surprise assault.

He ran to the end of the boarded path between tents and ducked out. The gate was now closed and the guard had been doubled to four men, but despite the circumstances they still didn’t look particularly alert.

James looked back over his shoulder before grabbing his rifle. The spot lamps around the perimeter gave him good light to make a shot. He laid a stun grenade and two smokers in the sand before going down on one knee, bracing the rifle stock against his shoulder and lining up the first guard in his scope.

From fifty metres, he hit the first guard dead in the centre of the back. A jerk left enabled him to take out the second with a pink explosion.

‘Attack,’ the third man shouted, diving for cover as James’ shot sailed over his head.

James ripped the pin out of the stun grenade and lobbed it towards the gate. He hurled the first smoke grenade into the no man’s land between the tent and the gate and left the second on the ground between his legs. After switching his rifle to automatic firing, James broke cover and started running towards the gate as the flash from the stun grenade turned the sky white.

The fourth guard’s senses were temporarily blitzed by the stun grenade, but the third man lay on his belly firing randomly into the increasingly dense smoke cover. Other men were coming out of the tents behind and a bullet whizzing past James’ left side made him realise that he hadn’t pulled up his goggles after taking the first shots through the scope.

The thought of being blinded scared him, but he kept running. The smoke filled his lungs and he could hear men approaching from all directions as he closed to within five metres of the gate.

A gap in the smoke gave James a clear shot at the last remaining guard. Surging with panic, he missed. The guard took longer to aim and his shot came so close that James felt it go by. The last round in James’ magazine hit the guard in the thigh.

Wild shots came from all directions, but the smoke gave James excellent cover. He grabbed the gate, realising almost too late that he had to lift a metal peg out of the ground to release it. Two bullets thunked the wire gate as he looked anxiously at the four guards. They’d almost certainly get a roasting from their commanding officer if he broke free, and one of them grabbed his ankle.

‘Cheat,’ James shouted, as he lashed out with his boot.

Almost without knowing it James had got the gate open far enough to make it through. The thick smoke made his eyes stream. His lungs burned and he felt like he had concrete blocks tied to his legs, but somehow he managed to pull up his goggles and sprint away from the compound.

James ran several hundred metres over the open ground outside the base, with smoke covering his back and randomly aimed paint exploding on the ground close by. Eventually he reached a maze of low-lying huts designed to resemble a shanty town.

Unlike a real-world shanty made from scrap, the sanitised Fort Reagan version comprised concrete sheds with electricity, water and sewage. The closely packed accommodation didn’t afford much privacy, but in many ways it resembled the college dorms the residents were used to.

Music blasted from all directions and barefoot girls danced around a bonfire built in the area’s baked earth marketplace. To give a more authentic atmosphere, food in the shanty was sold from market stalls and the engineers’ unit which ran Fort Reagan even released chickens and goats into the streets for the two-week duration of each exercise. Most of them were tame and the college kids fed them corn chips.

The partying left the back streets deserted. James took several turns before ducking into an alleyway between huts and catching his breath. He looked about suspiciously, but no American troops had followed him into the area.