CHERUB: The Recruit (21 page)

He blacked out for a few seconds. The next thing he knew, he was floating in the river, surrounded by smoke and chunks of wood. His ears were ringing and petrol in the water was stinging his eyes so badly that he couldn’t open them.

‘Kerry,’ James shouted desperately as he thrashed about. ‘Please … Kerry.’

The petrol was burning his throat and he felt like he was choking.

‘Kerry, I can’t see.’

‘Stand up,’ she shouted.

James could barely hear her voice over the ringing in his ears. Her hands slid under his armpits.

‘Put your feet down.’

James felt a surge of relief as his boot touched the sandy river bottom, just over a metre below the surface.

‘I thought I was gonna drown,’ James gasped, as Kerry steadied him. ‘I thought it was deep.’

Kerry led James by the hand towards a boulder sticking out of the water. His eyes felt like they were on fire. All he could see were blurs of light.

‘Sit there a minute,’ Kerry said. ‘Keep blinking as much as you can.’

‘Are your eyes OK?’ James asked.

‘Fine,’ Kerry said. ‘I jumped off the back of the boat and swam away from the debris.’

Kerry had spotted her backpack tangled in a bush on the riverbank and waded to its rescue. By the time she got back, the stinging had died down enough for James to keep his eyes open for a couple of seconds at a time.

‘Give us some drinking water,’ James said.

Kerry looked inside her sodden pack.

‘There isn’t any,’ Kerry said. ‘My canteen was out on the deck.’

‘How far do you reckon it is to camp?’

‘Three kilometres,’ Kerry said. ‘We’ll have to swim it.’

‘I’ve never gone more than a hundred metres,’ James said warily.

‘I’ll make you a float out of the backpack.’

‘It’s a long way,’ James said. ‘Couldn’t we could walk along the bank?’

Kerry pointed at the tangle of branches and leaves hanging over the edge of the river.

‘You’ll never crawl three kilometres through that lot in a million years.’

‘I suppose,’ James said.

‘You’ll swim better without boots. Give them to us and I’ll tie them around my waist.’

‘Seriously, Kerry, I don’t think I’m up to this.’

As James pulled off his soggy boots, Kerry found the roll of plastic bin liners in her pack. She stripped out everything but absolute essentials: knife, map, insect repellent and compass. Then she got one of the bin liners and blew it up until it was big enough to fill the backpack.

‘We’ll both hold on to the straps and float downstream,’ Kerry said. ‘Just kick gently, the current will do most of the work for us.’

*

Training was supposed to push you to the limit. They could starve you, humiliate you and work you until you were begging to quit; but at the end of the day, they didn’t want to kill you. The route downriver had been carefully selected by the instructors, so that the danger to anyone who could swim was minimal. The water was never more than a few metres deep, the currents were moderate and the banks were rarely more than twenty metres apart.

That still left water snakes and sharks to worry about. The sharks were only little, but they looked perfectly capable of nipping off fingers and toes, and it wasn’t a nice feeling when one swam up close, showing off rows of teeth. James panicked a couple of times when he lost sight of Kerry and grazed his thigh on a jagged rock, but they reached the checkpoint as it was turning dark, with three spare hours before the 2200 deadline.

They were desperate for water and James had a couple of leeches stuck on his back, but apart from that, they felt OK as they staggered out of the water. The checkpoint was on an open stretch of land that had been cleared out by a logging company. There was a tin shed that had once served as sleeping quarters to half a dozen loggers. Ever wary of traps, James nervously poked his head inside the metal door and was surprised to find Mr Speaks sitting in a hammock doing a crossword.

‘Good trip?’ he asked, pushing his ever-present sunglasses down his nose and giving them the once-over.

‘Not bad,’ Kerry gasped.

Their eyes fixed on a giant bottle of mineral water, glinting on the window ledge.

‘Help yourself,’ Mr Speaks said. ‘There are fresh packs and equipment for both of you, plenty of food in the ice box and there’s a tank of rainwater on the roof that links up to the shower head if you want to use that. After that, I suggest you read your briefings and try to grab some sleep before the helicopter picks you up. It’s the only rest you’ll get in the next thirty-eight hours.’

‘Aren’t we sleeping here tonight?’ James asked.

‘If you want to reach the fourth checkpoint, you’re not sleeping anywhere, either tonight or tomorrow night. The chopper picks you up here at 2200 and drops you on a footpath 188 kilometres from your final checkpoint. That’s the exact distance from London to Birmingham and you’ve got until 1000 hours on the final day to get there. If you fall asleep, you’ll never make it.’

Going 188 kilometres in thirty-six hours works out at slightly over five kilometres an hour. That’s about normal walking pace, but you had to stop to eat and drink, to check you weren’t veering off an overgrown footpath in the middle of the night, and when the pain got so bad that you couldn’t take another step. It wasn’t just James’ and Kerry’s legs that hurt from the walking, their whole bodies ached with tiredness.

Precautions went out of the window. Sweaty and covered in insect bites, there wasn’t time to put on dry clothes or insect repellent. Their canteens were empty. They didn’t have time to stop and collect rainwater, so they had to drink water trapped on giant palms and leaves. James and Kerry dumped most stuff and carried one light pack between them, with nothing in it but a torch, compass and maps.

They reached the final checkpoint less than half an hour before the deadline. As they staggered towards a wooden building, Gabrielle and Shakeel ran out and gave them fresh water.

‘We were getting worried about you two,’ Shakeel said. ‘You cut it pretty close.’

The building was locked, but there was a tap on the outside. Kerry filled a rusty bucket, threw half at James and poured the rest over her head.

The trainees were too tired to do anything but crash out on the shady side of the building, waiting for the instructors to turn up.

‘I hope we don’t get malaria,’ James said, scratching the bites on his neck.

‘It’s not a malaria zone,’ Gabrielle said, matter-of-factly.

‘What makes you say that?’ Kerry asked.

‘I knew we were going to the jungle and they didn’t give us malaria tablets before we left,’ Gabrielle said. ‘That made me think. The night we were in the hotel I sweet-talked the guy behind the front desk and he let me use the Internet. No malaria in this part of Malaysia.’

‘Smart thinking,’ Kerry said. ‘You could have told us.’

‘I told James in the helicopter before the drop,’ Gabrielle said. ‘Same time I told Shakeel.’

‘You didn’t,’ James said defensively.

‘She told both of us. I saw you nod,’ Shakeel said.

‘Oh,’ James said. ‘It was noisy. I thought you were saying good luck, so I nodded.’

Kerry punched James on the arm.

‘Dumbo,’ Kerry said. ‘You know how much time we could have saved not changing clothes so often? And I was worried to death we were going to get sick.’

‘I’m sorry,’ James said. ‘There’s no need to start hitting me.’

‘Idiot,’ Kerry laughed. ‘I can’t wait to get you in that dojo.’

‘What?’ James asked.

‘Remember our deal after you stomped on my hand? The day after training stops I get to fight you in the dojo.’

‘I thought you were joking,’ James said.

Kerry shook her head. The others were all laughing.

‘She’ll mash you,’ Connor said. ‘Can we watch?’

‘Who says you’re both gonna make it through training?’ Mo asked. ‘It’s a four-day course and it’s only the morning of the fourth day. I bet the instructors will have something else up their sleeves.’

*

The instructors led them inside. The trainees each had a chair with two buckets in front of it. Speaks covered their eyes with a mask. Smoke tied their ankles to the frame of the chair.

‘Welcome to the ultimate test,’ Large said. ‘Before we can make you six tired little bunnies into operatives, we need to be sure you can cope with the worst thing that could ever happen to you. Number eight, what do you think is the worst thing that can happen on a mission?’

‘We could be killed,’ Kerry said.

‘Death would be easy by comparison,’ Large said. ‘I was thinking about torture. What happens if you’re captured on a mission? You know something, and some people will do anything to get that information from you. Don’t expect mercy because you’re children. They’ll still slice your toes off. Rip out your fingernails or teeth. Wire you up and blast those sweet little bodies with a thousand volts of electricity. We hope it never happens to any of you, but we have to know you can take the pain if it does.

‘This test will show us if you’ve got guts. It will last one hour. You each have two buckets in front of you. Miss Smoke is placing a jellyfish in the buckets to your left. Its tentacles have hundreds of microscopic spikes; each one packs a dose of poison. A few minutes after contact your skin will start to burn. Within ten minutes the pain is extreme. A few years ago an operative jumped a fence, misjudged the jump and ended up with a metal railing stuck in her back. Afterwards she said it was less painful than this test.

‘The bucket on your right contains an antidote to the poison. Within a few seconds of touching the antidote the pain will begin to decrease. After two minutes the pain will be almost gone.’

James felt his head being grabbed.

‘Open wide,’ Smoke said.

Smoke shoved a rubber plug into James’ mouth. It was held in with an elastic strap that wrapped around the back of his head.

‘You are being given mouth guards,’ Large continued, ‘because it is not unknown for people in extreme pain to bite off their own tongues. You will each place your hands in the bucket, knuckles touching the bottom, for thirty seconds. The jellyfish will grab you. You will feel nothing at first. You will have to tolerate the pain for one hour. Anyone placing their hands in the antidote before one hour has elapsed has failed the entire course. Due to the toxicity of the poison you may not retake the test. Any questions?’

None of the trainees could talk with the plugs in their mouths.

‘OK then. Put your hands in the bucket.’

James leant forward, feeling blindly for the bucket. He’d thought he had the measure of training but this was scary. What if the pain was so bad he couldn’t help sticking his hands in the antidote? Ninety-nine days of training for nothing.

The water was tepid. He felt something light and rubbery wrap itself around his wrists.

‘Take them out,’ Large said. ‘If the jellyfish sticks, slide it off gently.’

James lifted his hands and pushed off the gripping tentacles. He sat up straight and waited for the pain to start.

‘Two minutes,’ Large said. ‘It should start hurting soon.’

James’ hands started feeling hot. Sweat was running down his forehead, building up along the rim of the eye mask. He didn’t wipe it off in case it spread the poison to his face.

‘Five minutes,’ Large said.

The heat in James’ hands was gone. He wondered if he’d imagined it. Kerry sounded like she was struggling with her mouth guard. It looked like the pain had got to her sooner.

‘Ten minutes. You all seem to be holding up quite well. But I can see some twisted faces,’ Large said.

Kerry shouted out:

‘What would be the point of an animal stinging you if it didn’t hurt straight away?

Large ran over to Kerry.

‘Get that guard back in now.’

James could hear Kerry squealing as they shoved the plug back in her mouth.

‘The next person who spits out their guard has to go two hours without touching the antidote,’ Large shouted.

Kerry had made James think. There still wasn’t any pain from the jellyfish and what Kerry said made sense. What good would an animal sting do if it only hurt its enemy
after
it had been eaten or attacked?

‘Fifteen minutes,’ Large said.

‘Two hours without the antidote?’ Gabrielle shouted. ‘Why not make it ten? Tell you what, I’ll stick my head in the bucket.’

James couldn’t see the commotion, but heard water running and a plastic bucket rolling across the floor.

‘This is totally bogus,’ Kerry said calmly.

James was sure it was a trick now. He pulled down his eye mask. Kerry had plucked a harmless white squid out of her bucket and was holding it up for inspection. James took off his mouth guard.

‘OK people,’ Large said. ‘Glad you all enjoyed my little joke. Don’t forget to untie your ankles before you stand up.’