CHERUB: The General (29 page)

‘Maybe they shot her,’ Jones said anxiously.

‘This is just great!’ Sahlin sighed, before slapping James hard on his bare arse. ‘Looks like you’re not the only one who got caught with your pants down, bucko! We’d better shift out of here.’

Sahlin and Jones grabbed their rifles and packs.

‘What about our handsome little captive?’ Jones asked.

Sahlin smiled as she placed the handcuff key on the table in front of James’ mouth.

‘Ah come on,’ James complained. ‘How am I gonna get them off with my hands behind my back?’

Sahlin smiled. ‘Bucko, do I look like a woman who gives a shit?’

Jones had picked up James’ pack. ‘He’s better armed than us,’ Jones noted, as she clipped grenades from James’ pack to her belt. ‘You want any of this, Lieutenant?’

‘Pass me a paint grenade,’ Sahlin said, smiling nastily as she dangled the grenade in front of James’ eyes before pulling out the pin with her teeth. ‘You’re a real nasty piece of work, bucko. Putting that drug in the water supply. Some very good friends of mine are in a bad way.’

With that, Sahlin wedged the grenade down the back of James’ T-shirt before snatching her pack off the floor.

‘Nighty night, Bucko,’ Sahlin smiled, flicking off the light switch and slamming the metal door of the hut. ‘Have a blast.’

‘Bitch,’ James shouted, as he jumped frantically to his feet in pitch darkness.

His trousers were around his ankles, his hands were cuffed behind his back and no matter how much he wriggled the grenade wouldn’t budge. It would go off in under ten seconds.

Sending a posse of two hundred insurgents to the militar y compound’s well defended front gates might seem suicidal, but Kazakov had already sent two pairs of SAS men into the base to soften things up.

As Kazakov’s Hummer approached, the first team cut the power lines from the main generator, plunging the entire US base into darkness. Simultaneously, the second team triggered a sequence of jerry-rigged paint grenades taking out the three able-bodied guards on the gate.

Kazakov’s Hummer charged through, smashing the gates apart before cruising on towards the front doors of the command and control building. The following pack of insurgents continued to chant
USA, USA
as they poured into the camp.

Half were untrained insurgents who’d only been given guns within the last few hours. The remainder comprised crack teams led by SAS officers and each was tasked with securing a strategic location within the base, such as the communications centre, or the hospital.

Bruce, Jake, Rat and Gabrielle moved with a small team of insurgents led by the Welsh SAS officer they’d chatted to back at the apartment earlier that afternoon. Their target was the main weapons-storage locker, which was expected to be one of the toughest buildings on the base to secure. But a different picture emerged as the group raced through the darkness over the wooden boards between the accommodation tents.

Men could be heard groaning desperately in their beds. Others stooped in the canvas doorways looking like sweaty ghosts. None of them cared about the base being under attack and a nauseating acidic stench hung in the air.

The base’s sewers had been unable to cope with more than six hundred cases of diarrhoea. Toilets had backed up and men had resorted to using everything from buckets to hastily dug holes in the sand and even their own helmets. Once used the articles were thrown outside.

‘I’m gonna spew,’ Gabrielle complained, zipping her combat jacket and burying her nose under the fabric.

‘This is beyond nasty,’ Rat said, fighting back the urge to gag.

At the rear of their group a college girl who’d never shot a gun until the previous day grabbed hold of a tent pole and retched into the sand.

‘Keep moving,’ the Welshman said determinedly. ‘It’s in your heads, black it out.’

Beyond the accommodation tents the base was desolate and the air mercifully clear. Weapons storage would normally be the most secure area on a military base, but all they found was a single private sitting by the front door. He looked so pitiful that nobody even had the heart to shoot him.

*

The grenade wouldn’t kill James, but the paint inside was compressed at high pressure and triggered by an explosive chemical reaction that would scorch his back.

James jumped in the air, grabbed handfuls of his T-shirt and madly wriggled his shoulders to free the grenade. With less than five seconds left the grenade’s handle finally unsnagged from the collar of his shirt and it dropped to the ground, but instead of hitting the concrete floor with a thunk, it landed softly in the seat of the trousers gathered around his feet.

‘Shitting shit!’ James panicked.

He now had horrible visions of the paint exploding upwards and plastic casing shooting up and whacking him in the nuts. He stepped on the heel of one trainer and banged his knee on the dining table as he freed one foot. Once the foot was clear he put his sock down on the floor and kicked hard with his other leg, which still had his trousers and shorts bundled up around them.

This flung the grenade up high. There was a white flash as it exploded in midair two metres across the cabin. The grenade contained a highly compressed liquid that expanded into several litres of pink foam the instant it hit the atmosphere.

Doors and windows rattled with the force of the blast and James crashed into the wall as the warm, hissing foam hit him at more than fifty miles an hour. It trickled down his legs, out of his hair into his eyes as he tripped over a chair leg and felt himself tumbling through the blackness towards the floor.

His temple grazed the wall, but it wasn’t serious and he stayed down for a couple of seconds, catching his breath as the foam hissed.

James was less seriously hurt than he would have been if the grenade had exploded next to his skin, but he still faced the reality of being half naked in the dark with his hands cuffed behind his back. He stood cautiously and realised that he needed the light on if he was to have any hope of finding the handcuff key.

With only a vague idea of the furniture layout, James felt his way towards the door. He’d come in face first and been slammed down on the table, so he’d not seen the light switch. But he knew roughly where it was because Sahlin had turned the light off an instant before she’d headed outside.

He felt around with his back to the wall, but you can’t raise your hands very high when they’re cuffed behind your back so he ended up turning to face the wall and eventually felt out the light switch and turned it on using the squishy tip of his nose.

The pink dye had saturated the room, including the surface of a bare bulb mounted on the ceiling. James got his trousers up before hobbling through the pinkish-hued light and sitting on a dining chair.

He shuffled the handcuffs under his bum, straining painfully at the wrists as he squeezed his butt cheeks together and wriggled until the cuffs were around the back of his thighs. Once this was done he fed his legs through and brought his hands around to the front.

Now he just needed to find the key under the pools of foam so that he could get the cuffs off.

*

The US forces put every able-bodied man behind the defence of the command building. General Shirley and several of his most senior staff had dosed themselves up with scant supplies of anti-diarrhoea medicine and stationed half a dozen healthy guards in well defended positions around the building’s perimeter.

The insurgent mob tried getting close, but more than a dozen were expertly picked off by soldiers barricaded behind sandbags. Kazakov’s Hummer took a hit from a well-aimed paint grenade, but the man himself dived out in the nick of time.

Kazakov ducked behind the paint-spattered vehicle, surveying the building with binoculars while seven SAS men stood around waiting for his orders. These were some of the most able soldiers in the British Army yet they doted on Kazakov like pilgrims awaiting orders from their guru.

‘We aim everything at one spot,’ Kazakov decided. ‘Lots of smoke, lots of paint grenades. Find planks of wood, bed sheets, anything that will shield the paint.’

‘Maybe we could wait it out?’ an SAS man suggested. ‘No water, no electricity. They can’t do anything.’

‘No,’ Kazakov said firmly. ‘This is our time. Most of the poisoned water will have drained through the pipes when the diarrhoea broke out and the toilets were repeatedly flushed. As soon as the soldiers get clear fluid into their systems they’ll start feeling better. The balance of power could swing back in their favour in less than an hour.’

It took a few minutes for everyone to prepare for the assault. A dozen smoke grenades were already starting to fume when two of the biggest SAS men approached Lauren and Kevin.

‘Kazakov just had a bright idea,’ one of them said. ‘You two are riding piggyback.’

‘You what?’ Lauren asked.

‘It’s a single storey, we’ll rush up to the side and when we get close we fling you two up on the roof. There’s bound to be a skylight or a service hatch which you can climb through and cause some mischief.’

Lauren was knackered and would have settled for an early night, but Kevin was keen to prove his worth after being left out of the raid on the aerodrome.

The two soldiers gave it a few seconds for the smoke to build up before crouching down to let the kids sit on their shoulders. Kevin was no problem, but Lauren was a pretty chunky thirteen-year-old, especially with a rifle and a heavy equipment pack.

‘You’re a lump,’ her ride groaned, as he lifted her into the air.

The insurgents came under heavy sniper fire as more than a hundred bodies rushed the command centre. The tactics of fighting with paint were different to killing with real bullets: mattresses and wood worked as shields, but the snipers aimed at the ground or aimed shots at walls knowing that there was no distinction between a direct hit and a ricochet of chalk dust.

Even in this final battle there was little sign of cheating, probably because the soldiers would be reprimanded and the civilians would lose all their pay if they were caught out.

It had been a few years since anyone had carried Kevin on their back and he couldn’t help laughing as he was borne piggyback through the chaos. Shots cut holes through the curling smoke, but the SAS man reached the side of the command centre without being hit. Kevin grabbed the guttering before standing up on the man’s shoulders and pulling himself up on to the roof.

‘Where’s Lauren?’ he shouted.

The soldier looked around, but there was no sign either of Lauren or the soldier who’d been carrying her.

‘Looks like you’re on your own, kid.’

The smoke made it hard to see more than a couple of metres and the flat plastic roof flexed ominously under Kevin’s trainers. The building was rectangular, fifteen metres wide and thirty long. It had no windows along the sides, so the only light entered through skylights which also opened up for ventilation. Most of these were partially covered with sand and Kevin was forced to crawl over the rooftop, sweeping away the sand with his elbow before peeking down inside. The main power grid was out, but he could see emergency lighting and computer screens running off backup power inside.

Fighting spread to all sides as the insurgents closed in and the odd stray shot skimmed the rooftop as Kevin crawled cautiously. Ten metres in from the gutters, he encountered a raised aluminium dome with a ring of angled skylights around the edge.

He peered down into a large room filled with torchlight. There was a giant map of Fort Reagan on the table and desks for several dozen men, but there were only three men present. Kevin recognised General Shirley. He looked stressed, with an elbow resting on the map table and a phone in his hand.

Kevin could barely hear over the noise of battle, but General Shirley seemed to be talking to the camp commander:

‘Commander, you’ve got to understand that we have a major health crisis on our hands. Kazakov has gone beyond the parameters of decency … You know I have no wish to surrender. I don’t want that on my record, but I’ll be covered if you call a halt to this exercise on well founded health and safety grounds …’

As the general squirmed, Kevin measured the gap between two ventilation slats. It was just big enough for a paint grenade. The trouble was, the general and his staff would hear it drop and have eight or nine seconds to evacuate.

Kevin took a grenade – his last – from his backpack. He pulled the pin, released the trigger and counted eight seconds on his watch before letting it drop inside. There was a chance that the grenade would shatter the windows, so he rolled away and buried his face against the domed roof.

The explosion was instantaneous and when Kevin looked down he saw that the grenade had exploded across the tabletop less than a metre from General Shirley. The two other officers in the room had also been hit.

‘Christ,’ the general was shouting. ‘That Russian bastard!’

The general wasn’t accustomed to being blown up at his desk, so he hadn’t been wearing goggles and had foaming paint in both eyes. Excited by his success, Kevin lay on his back and launched a sequence of two-footed kicks, knocking the toughened glass out of its frame before sliding through the hole and dropping feet first on to the map table.