CHERUB: The Recruit (16 page)

Three and four were Connor and Callum, the twins James had met on the running track a few days earlier. James had had a few conversations with them and they seemed OK.

Five and six were Gabrielle and Nicole. Gabrielle was from the Caribbean; her parents had died a few months earlier in a car wreck. Eleven years old, she looked tough as boots. Nicole was smaller. Twelve, red-haired and overweight.

Number eight, James’ partner, was Kerry. She was eleven years old, small and boyish with a flat face and dark eyes. Her black hair was shaved down to a number one. James had seen her in a red shirt with shoulder length hair a few days earlier. Now she looked totally different. She didn’t look as nervous as the others.

*

Large led them out to the assault course at a jog.

‘Do exactly what I do,’ Kerry said as their feet squished in the mud.

‘Who made you boss?’ James asked.

‘I’ve been at CHERUB since I was six,’ Kerry said. ‘I did sixty-four days of this course last year before I broke my kneecap and got chucked off. You’ve been here what? Two weeks?’

‘About three,’ James said. ‘Why did you cut off your hair?’

‘Quicker to wash, quicker to dry, doesn’t get in your face all day. If you do things quickly and get a few minutes’ extra rest, it makes a difference. I’ll do everything I can to make life easy for you, James, if you do one thing for me.’

‘What?’ James asked.

‘Protect my knee,’ Kerry said. ‘There are titanium pins holding the bits together. When we do karate, please don’t kick me on that part of my leg. If we have to run with heavy packs, take some of my weight for me. Will you help me, James, if I help you?’

‘Whatever I can do,’ James said. ‘We’re partners anyway. How come they’re letting you take this course if your knee isn’t better?’

‘I lied. I said the pain was gone. All the kids I grew up with are living in the main building and going on missions. I spend my evenings watching six-year-olds cut up sticky paper. I’m getting through basic this time or I’ll die trying.’

*

Kerry knew all the cheats on the assault course. One side of the muddy tunnel was drier than the other. There was a knack to how you caught the rope to swing across the lake. She pointed out one of the hidden video cameras. The instructors dragged you out of bed at 3 a.m. and made you re-run the whole course if they caught you cheating on videotape. Best of all, Kerry knew there was a raised bar under the water, which cut ten metres out of the swim across the lake.

‘You swim like a five-year-old,’ Kerry said.

After fifty minutes, James was muddy and freezing cold, but they’d finished tons ahead of anyone else. Kerry found a standpipe, turned on the water and pulled off her T-shirt. She started washing out the mud.

‘James, always wash out your T-shirt. Use it to wipe yourself off, then wash it again. It will be freezing when you put it back on, but we do the assault course first thing every morning and have to wear the same clothes for the rest of the day. If you leave the mud on it dries out and itches like crazy.’

‘What about the trousers?’ James asked.

‘Won’t get time to wash them. But first chance you get, pull off your boots and wring the water out of your socks. You hungry?’ Kerry asked.

‘I never had breakfast despite what Large said. I’ll be starving by this evening.’

Kerry unzipped a pocket on her trousers and pulled out a king-size Mars bar.

‘Cool,’ James said. ‘I’m sorry it’s my fault we’re not getting any food till this evening.’

Kerry laughed. ‘It’s not you, James. There’s always some excuse why you don’t get lunch. Or why everyone has to do an extra run of the assault course. Or why everyone has to drag their beds outside and sleep in the open air with no covers on. They try and find ways to make you hate everyone else. Don’t let it get to you, everyone will get their turn.’

Kerry bent the Mars bar in half.

‘You want this, James? Make the promise first,’ Kerry said.

‘I promise I’ll help protect your knee,’ James said.

‘Open wide.’

Kerry crammed half a Mars bar into James’ mouth.

Shakeel and Mo were heading across the last obstacle, with Callum and Connor a few metres behind. James could hear Large shouting at Nicole in the distance:

‘Move that bum before I stick my boot up it.’

James felt a bit sorry for her; but on the other hand, as long as they were shouting at Nicole, they weren’t shouting at him.

*

Everyone had to do physical training in the mud. Crunches, squats, push-ups, star jumps. After an hour James was numb all over from cold and muscle pain. His uniform was a heavy sheet of mud.

Nicole was on the ground, too tired to move. Miss Smoke put her boot on Nicole’s head, dunking her face in the mud.

‘Get up, tubby,’ Smoke screamed.

Nicole got up and stormed towards the gate.

‘You can’t come back,’ Smoke shouted. ‘One step outside and that’s it.’

Nicole didn’t care. She went out the gate. Fifteen minutes later she was back. Bawling her eyes out and begging for another chance.

‘Come back in three months, sweetheart,’ Large shouted. ‘Get rid of that wobbly arse or you’ll never make it.’

*

It was a bit of a sensation being down to seven kids on day one. All the trainees talked about it. Nicole seemed soft giving up so early. On the other hand they were all envious, imagining her back in her room watching TV after soaking in the bath.

James had warmed up as much as he could in the shower and now sat at the table with the other six trainees, waiting for dinner. Having Kerry for a partner was great. Especially watching the other kids make all the mistakes Kerry warned him about.

The dinners got wheeled up from the main building in a heated trolley. Smoke handed out the dishes. James ripped off the metal lid. The stir fry rice was a bit dry from being kept warm, but it tasted OK and everyone was starving. Kerry got her plate last. James could tell something was wrong from the noise when it hit the table.

Kerry lifted up the lid. She had no food, just an empty Mars bar wrapper in the middle of her plate. She looked gutted. Large rested his massive hands on Kerry’s shoulders.

‘Kerry poppet,’ Large said, ‘you’re not the first kid to come back here. You may think you know all the tricks, but so do we.’

Large walked away. Kerry stared at her empty plate. James couldn’t let her starve after all the help she’d given him. He made a line down the middle of his plate and gave half to Kerry.

‘Thanks, partner,’ Kerry said.

Imagine you are on an early level of a video game. It seems hard. Everything happens too fast, but you eventually make it through. You progress through the game to much higher levels. One day you try the early level again. What was once fast and difficult now appears easy.

This is the principle behind basic training. You will be asked to perform difficult tasks while under physical and mental strain. You will achieve things far beyond what you dreamed possible. When basic training is over, your mind and body will be able to perform at a higher level.

(From the introductory page of the CHERUB Basic Training Manual)

Callum dropped out on day twenty-six. He fractured a wrist on the assault course. The course wasn’t that hard, but it was easy to have an accident when you’d already done three hours’ physical training and hadn’t slept the night before because Large blasted everyone in their beds with a fire hose.

Connor got partnered up with Gabrielle, but he’d never spent more than a few hours without his identical twin before. He was thinking about giving up and restarting with his brother in a few months’ time.

The physical training was the hardest thing James had ever done. The first time he threw up from exhaustion he froze in shock. Kerry told him to keep running but James didn’t listen. Speaks shoved James in the back, then crushed James’ hand under his boot.

‘If you stop training, you’d better be dead or unconscious,’ Speaks shouted.

That was the closest James had come to quitting.

James was getting used to life in hell. He counted twelve scabs and twenty-six bruises on his body. That didn’t include places he couldn’t see. He showered twice a day, but he never had time to scrub the filth from difficult spots like nails or ears. His hair felt like straw, and grit sprayed out if he ran his hand through it, even if he’d just washed. If he got a chance for a haircut he was having the lot chopped off.

The worst part about training wasn’t exhaustion, it was always being cold. James slept under a wafer-thin blanket in an unheated room. In the morning the floor was like ice on your soles. The instructors forced everyone under a freezing shower. Breakfast was always cereal and cold juice. Clothes never dried, they were damp and stiff as soon as you put them on. Not that it mattered for long. After five minutes on the assault course you were drenched in icy water and mud that crept down your trousers and kept you soggy for the rest of the day.

The trainees only felt tiny hints of warmth and each was bliss. Hot drinks at lunchtime, the warm evening shower and meal. If you were lucky you got an injury serious enough for a visit to the medical centre but not so bad you were thrown off the course. Then you got to wait for the nurse in a room kept at 22°C with a coffee machine and chocolate digestives, which you could dunk in your coffee and eat soggy and warm. Shakeel and Connor got these golden injuries; James could only dream.

The five hours of lessons sandwiched between physical training were the easiest part of the day. Weaponry was coolest. Shooting was only part of it. James now knew how to strip and clean a gun, how to defuse a bullet so it doesn’t go off, how to put a gun back together wrong so it jams. Even how to take a bullet apart so that it explodes inside the chamber and blows away the finger on the trigger. They were starting knives in the next lesson.

Espionage was all about gadgets. Electronic listening devices, computer hacking, lock picking, cameras, photocopiers. Nothing as fancy as you see in the movies. Mrs Flagg, the ex-KGB espionage teacher, always stood in the unheated classroom wearing fur-lined boots, a fur coat, hat and scarf while the trainees shivered in damp T-shirts. Occasionally she would bang her gloved hands together and moan about the cold not doing her varicose veins any good.

The best espionage lessons were about explosives. They were taught by Mr Large. He dropped his usual psycho persona and took childlike pleasure in showing off the finer details of dynamite sticks and plastic explosive putty. He blew stuff up at every opportunity, even sticking a directional charge on James’ head. The charge leapt up and blew a golf ball sized hole in the ceiling.

‘Of course, little James would have been killed if I had placed the charge upside down. Or if the charge had misfired.’

James hoped he was joking, but judging by the size of the hole in the ceiling, he wasn’t.

Survival Skills was taught by the three instructors and took place outdoors. It was interesting, building shelters, learning what parts of animals and plants were safe to eat. The best lessons were on fire-building and cooking because you got a chance to get warm and eat extra food, even if it was squirrel or pigeon.

There were two lessons James hated. The first was Language. Kids like Kerry who had been at CHERUB for a few years already had good language skills. Kerry was fluent in Spanish and decent at French and Arabic. For basic training everyone started a new language from scratch and had to master a thousand word vocabulary by the end of the course. CHERUB picked a language from a country that matched your ethnicity. Mo and Shakeel got Arabic, Kerry got Japanese, Gabrielle got Swahili, James and Connor got Russian. The languages were extra hard because none of them use a Latin alphabet, so you had to learn to read and pronounce weird-looking letters before you could try saying the words.

For two hours each day James and Connor sat next to each other while the Russian teacher barked orders and insults. He smacked pens out of their hands, whacked them with his wooden ruler and showered them in spit as he spoke. By the end of a lesson Mr Grwgoski left the two boys with sore hands and blurred minds. James wasn’t sure he was learning anything except that learning Russian made his head hurt. On his exit, Grwgoski often shouted to one of the instructors that James and Connor were bad pupils and deserved to be punished. This usually cost the pair an hour of precious sleep while they were made to stand in the cold wearing shorts. If Large was bored he might give them a good blast with the fire hose too.

The other lesson James hated was Karate.

*

‘Day twenty-nine,’ Large said.

Large had a green baseball cap on his head. His two sidekicks weren’t beside him, for the first time ever. It was 0550. The six remaining trainees stood rigid at the foot of their beds.

‘Can anybody tell me what is special about day twenty-nine?’

They all knew the answer. They wondered if it was the answer Large wanted. Your answer to Large’s questions could have nasty consequences. Best to cross your fingers and hope somebody else took the bullet.