Authors: Robert Muchamore
As James crammed the clips into the pockets of his shorts and hooked the M4 over his back, he noticed that Kazakov was wearing thick gloves.
‘Did you get a pair for me?’ James asked.
‘You should have put them on,’ Kazakov said, as James turned back towards their tent. ‘I’m not your mother. Where do you think you’re going?’
‘To get my gloves.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ Kazakov shrugged. ‘They’re only babies.’
James didn’t want to seem weak in front of Kazakov, so he turned back. But his confidence drained when he flipped the lid to unveil seventy-two overheated vipers.
‘You undo the zips,’ Kazakov said.
As James crept up to the four trainees’ tents, Kazakov ripped the pin from the first of four smoke grenades hanging from a belt slung over his shoulder.
James shuffled along the ground unzipping the tents, closely followed by Kazakov who’d push his arm between the flaps of fabric and roll a smoke grenade into some far corner of each tent. None of the trainees stirred. After a parachute jump and a twenty-kilometre hike they were all dead to the world.
Once the grenades were in position, Kazakov dipped his gloves inside the box of snakes, grabbed a handful and began throwing them on the baked earth in front of the tent flaps.
‘Muck in, James,’ Kazakov said firmly.
Without gloves, James decided that the best strategy was to pick the box off the ground and tip the snakes out. The method was fast and effective, but one of the reptiles had already slithered on to the side of the box. It reared up, swivelled its head and snapped its jaws shut around James’ bare nipple.
‘JEEEEEEEEESUS!’ James screamed, as the first of the smoke grenades began erupting.
Within ten seconds, all four trainee tents were billowing smoke and within fifteen the seven trainees had scrambled outside, barefoot and coughing. Even at night the jungle was extremely hot and the trainees soon found the young pit vipers snapping at their toes and ankles.
As they screamed, Mr Kazakov backed up behind the fire and began shooting at them. The simulated ammunition wasn’t lethal, but it was like paintballing on steroids and you knew all about it if it hit your bare skin.
Naturally, the trainees’ reaction was to run away from the hail of bullets and the snakes around their tents, but Mr Kazakov began shouting orders between blasts of gunfire. ‘All trainees, gather your equipment from the tents. Smoke-damaged equipment will not be replaced. I repeat, smoke-damaged equipment will not be replaced.’
As well as making everything stink, the pungent smoke would do serious damage to the trainees’ navigation equipment and would stain their briefings for the following day, making maps and vital sections of text illegible. The youngsters had no option but to brave the smoke, bullets and snakes and rescue their precious equipment.
Meanwhile, James had his own problem to deal with. He should have been standing alongside Kazakov shooting simulated rounds at the trainees, but instead he was in excruciating pain, with the fangs of a baby viper embedded in the flesh around his nipple.
He twisted its surprisingly rigid body, but the jaws didn’t budge. Pulling on the snake just made its fangs tear deeper into his skin, so James grabbed a section of the upper body with each hand, then did a Chinese burn; squeezing with all his might while twisting his hands in opposite directions.
It took all his strength, but eventually the viper’s backbone fractured and James ripped the bottom half of its body away from its head. He’d assumed that decapitation would make the snake let go, but while its body writhed on the ground the snake’s head remained latched to his nipple.
Infuriated, James looked around and saw that the barefoot trainees had come up with a method for clearing the snakes from around their tents: they’d ducked to the opposite side of the fire from where Mr Kazakov was shooting at them and pulled glowing sticks out of the embers.
While snakes are surprisingly blasé about being ripped in half, they don’t like fire and sprang away as the trainees swept their flaming sticks across the ground.
As James moved in to grab his own stick, Kevin Sumner became the first trainee to get back inside his tent. As he reached into the billowing smoke, feeling blindly for the chunky canister, one of Mr Kazakov’s simulated rounds hit him up the arse.
Powdery yellow paint spattered up Kevin’s back as he found his hand wrapped around the hot smoke canister and – with a move he would later swear was accidental – ripped it out of the tent and threw it with all his ten-year-old might towards his tormentor.
‘I’m sick of you picking on me, dickwad,’ Kevin shouted.
James didn’t hear this because he’d grabbed a dried-out palm frond from the fire and he could feel its heat as he brought the flame towards the snake’s head. As soon as the flame licked the snake’s eyeball, its mouth sprang open and the head briefly joined the body on the floor, before James booted it into the flames.
After a glance at the blood streaking down his torso, James looked up and realised that the shooting had stopped. The trainees had all thrown their smoke canisters out of their tents and now stood over Mr Kazakov, who lay unconscious on his back with a cut the shape of a smoke canister on his forehead.
‘What happened?’ James yelled.
‘I think one of the smoke canisters hit him on the head,’ a twelve-year-old recruit called Ellie said.
‘Accidentally,’ Kevin added. ‘Because there’s no
way
I could have seen where he was through all the smoke . . '
James realised he was in charge. ‘OK,’ he said firmly. ‘If a couple of you help me to drag Kazakov into the command tent, the rest of you had better go back and vent the smoke out of your tents and equipment.’
‘Where’s Pike and Dana?’ Kevin asked. ‘Can’t they move him?’
James shook his head. ‘Pike’s still on the mainland. Dana’s off with the guide, setting up your equipment for tomorrow morning.’
‘So you’re the
only
instructor,’ a tough-looking Irish lad called Ronan smirked. ‘There’s seven of us and only one of you…’
‘Grab him,’ Kevin yelled, and before James had a chance to go for his gun, he had a trainee latched on to each arm while another knocked him down from behind with a Karate kick to the back of his knee.
‘Tie him up,’ Ellie squealed. ‘He’s third dan black belt, you can’t let him get loose.’
The seven trainees were a lot smaller than James, but they’d all done combat training and they worked together to pin him to the ground. Within seconds, several trainees had run into the command tent.
‘There’s tons of grub in there,’ Kevin shouted, as he emerged holding a length of climbing rope.
‘You’re all gonna get punished for this,’ James screamed. ‘You’ll all fail training.’
‘We’re showing initiative,’ Ronan giggled, digging his knee into James’ back as he tightened the rope around his wrists. ‘Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?’
‘It’s true, James,’ Kevin nodded. ‘And besides, CHERUB is always short of agents. There’s no way they’d fail all seven of us.’
‘We’ll see,’ James said, trying to sound cocky even though he knew the youngsters were right. Physically, basic training was as tough as when James had done it three years earlier, but Mr Pike wasn’t especially scary and the trainees got away with stuff you wouldn’t have dared even think about when Mr Large ran the show.
There were a couple of boys who weren’t involved in tying James up and they were clearly worried about getting in trouble. ‘Help me out,’ James begged. ‘I’ll make sure that you get off easy.’
But the two trainees were indecisive: they weren’t the strongest characters within the group and they were outnumbered five to two. Then a shout came up from inside the command tent. ‘I’ve found a cooler box full of chocolate and Coke!’
The trainees’ evening meal had been an evil-smelling bowl of fish-head soup and the thought of chocolate made up the waverers’ minds. James was now lying face-down with grit coating his bloody chest. He tried wriggling, but the trainees had made a decent job of trussing his arms and legs and there was no chance of escape.
‘I can’t believe you’re doing this to me,’ James yelled, as the sounds of a kids’ party erupted from inside the command tent. ‘I’m always looking out for you guys. Don’t expect any favours out of me from now on.’
James heard Ronan’s grubby feet scuffing through the dirt behind him. The boy crouched down and waved the chewed up end of a Snickers bar under his nose.
‘Fancy a bite?’ he chirped.
‘You bloody wait,’ James growled.
‘Temper temper,’ Ronan grinned as he stuffed the remainder of the Snickers bar into his own mouth, before rolling the wrapper into a ball and flicking it in James’ face.
It had been twenty-five years since a CHERUB agent had died on a mission. Zara Asker had only been the organisation’s chairwoman for ten months and she’d learned about the worst crisis of her career while sitting in a hospital ward, comforting her three-year-old son Joshua, who’d broken his arm after deciding to jump from the top of the slide at his nursery school.
It was a complex break and Joshua had been kept in overnight, following a minor operation to insert a metal pin. He was tearful and restless, and Zara felt guilty abandoning her own child to go and look after someone else’s. But Joshua had his father Ewart for comfort, and while Joshua would undoubtedly cry for his mum when he got tired, his arm would heal and his cast would be off in a month or so. Gabrielle’s fate was nowhere near as certain.
Zara was flashed by a dozen speed cameras as she took the family Lexus from the car park of the hospital nearest to CHERUB campus to another hospital on the outskirts of Luton. At one point she got pulled over by police while cutting through the crowded traffic, but a glimpse of her high-level security pass earned her an escort of flashing blue lights along the fast lane of the M1.
On top of being worried about Gabrielle, she was dreading the political consequences of what had happened. Only the Prime Minister and the Intelligence Minister know that CHERUB exists. Both had been reassured that cherubs are well trained, closely monitored by mission controllers and that the chances of a cherub being seriously injured or killed are slight.
Zara was going to be in for a grilling when they found out that one of her agents was on life support following a knife fight between rival drug gangs. But she was confronted with a more basic drama when she stepped past the two police officers stationed at the entrance to the intensive care unit in case of trouble between the rival gangs.
Mission controller Chloe Blake and her assistant Maureen Evans stood up and hugged Zara as she entered a waiting area between two intensive-care rooms. Chloe had been a full mission controller for less than a year and Maureen was a Trinidadian ex-cherub who’d only been appointed as Chloe’s assistant after leaving university the previous October.
Zara respected them both, but knew questions would be raised about whether two of CHERUB’s least experienced mission controllers should have been allowed to handle a high-risk mission.
Michael stood at the end of the room, staring out of a dirty window and trying his best not to cry. A tear broke free as Zara kissed him on the cheek and rubbed his back. Michael was much younger than his big sisters and to avoid splitting his family he’d joined CHERUB at just three years of age. Zara could remember him riding around campus on a tiny pushbike with stabilisers, back when she’d first been appointed as an assistant mission controller.
‘What’s the medical situation?’ Zara asked, as she let Michael go.
Chloe answered. ‘Gabrielle’s in a sterile room to prevent infection. She’s under sedation and her breathing is being supported mechanically. They’ve given her clotting agents to stem the bleeding.’
‘How are they describing her condition?’
‘Critical but stable. The doctor has been checking in every half an hour and the surgeon came by forty minutes ago. She said they’ve stemmed most of the external bleeding, but that the knife went in deep and is still lodged in Gabrielle’s back.
‘Five Runts were also seriously injured. At the moment a boy who took a shotgun blast in the back is in surgery, but as soon as he’s out of theatre they’re going to wheel in Gabrielle and try removing the knife. The trauma surgeon said they won’t know how severe her injuries are until they open her up.’
‘Sounds grim,’ Zara said, as she swept her hand through her hair and looked around anxiously. ‘Is it safe to speak here?’
‘As long as you’re quiet,’ Chloe nodded. ‘There’s tight security around the hospital. The police think that some of Major Dee’s men could come by the hospital and try to finish the job.’
‘Major Dee has previous on that score,’ Maureen explained. ‘In 2005 a witness who’d agreed to testify against him on an attempted murder beef was shot in her hospital bed.’
Zara shook her head in disbelief. ‘The ethics committee can’t have realised that this gang war was so hot when they authorised the mission.’
Chloe twisted her trainer awkwardly as she addressed her boss. ‘I wrote the risk assessment, Zara. I’ll tender my resignation if you ask me to.’
‘Chloe, you’re an excellent mission controller,’ Zara said reassuringly. ‘I’m sure it won’t come to that.’
Michael turned away from the window and spoke. He was only fifteen, but he was taller than the three women and his voice carried a certain authority. ‘The Runts have declared war on the Slasher Boys, which nobody could have predicted. You can’t blame Chloe.’
‘I appreciate that, Michael,’ Zara said. ‘I’m not blaming anyone.’
‘You’re not going to pull the plug on the mission, are you?’ he asked.
Zara seemed uncertain. ‘The circumstances make it very difficult—’
‘You
can’t
,’ Michael interrupted. ‘We’ve been at this for two months and Major Dee is really starting to put faith in us. Besides, after today there’s no way I’m going back to campus before these gangs are
hammered
.’
‘Keep your voice
down
, Michael,’ Chloe said anxiously, as the policeman at the entrance poked his head between the doors.