‘How’s Joshua these days?’ James asked.
Zara broke into a smile. ‘He’s grown a lot since you last saw him. His back teeth are pushing through and he’s driving me and Ewart crazy. As a matter of fact, any time you fancy coming over to the staff quarters to baby-sit …’
James laughed. ‘I’ll give that offer a miss, thanks.’
‘OK,’ Zara said, returning to business. ‘I take it you all know what a recruitment mission entails? We’ve put together a background scenario and false identity for each of you and you can expect to be sent off to a children’s home within the next week. As with any other CHERUB mission, you have an absolute right to refuse to undertake it. However, if you refuse in this instance, I expect Dr McAfferty will issue you with an alternative punishment, which you can expect to be a lot less pleasant than a few weeks in local authority care.
‘When you arrive at the children’s home, your job is to check everyone out. You’re looking for a potential CHERUB recruit, which means a smart, physically fit kid. Family ties are a big no-no. Foreign language skills and identical twins will be looked upon very favourably. It’s all in the mission briefing.’
Zara leaned across her desk and handed James, Kyle and Gabrielle a photocopy of the standard briefing for recruitment missions.
‘Good candidates can get shipped off to foster homes in no time,’ Zara continued. ‘So if you spot someone who looks the business, get on to me or one of the assistant mission controllers straight away and we’ll arrange to have the kid drugged and brought here to undertake the recruitment tests …’
There was a gentle knock on Zara’s open door.
‘John,’ Zara said, breaking into a smile. ‘Good to see I’m not the only mission controller who comes in on Sunday afternoons.’
James turned around and instantly recognised the silver-rimmed glasses and pale, bald head of John Jones. John had only just taken a job as a CHERUB mission controller, but James had worked with John the year before when he was still employed by MI5, the adult branch of British intelligence.
‘I thought I spotted James in here,’ John said awkwardly. ‘You’re not sending him out are you?’
‘He got himself in another spot of bother,’ Zara explained. ‘Mac wants him to go on a recruitment mission, but I’m sure he’ll yield if you’ve got James pencilled in for something important.’
James’ heart leapt at the prospect of escape.
John Jones nodded. ‘Perhaps I could have a quick word, in confidence?’
Zara looked at the kids. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Would you step out into the corridor for a jiffy?’
As soon as James shut Zara’s office door, Kyle glowered at him.
‘I can’t believe you’re gonna weasel your way out of this, James,’ he said indignantly.
James folded his arms and broke into a smug grin.
It was ten minutes before Zara pulled her door open and the three kids filed back in. ‘Well, James,’ Zara said. ‘I just rang Dr McAfferty and you’re off the hook, provided you accept the mission John is going to offer you at a briefing later this evening.’
‘So jammy,’ Kyle whispered under his breath.
James couldn’t help smiling.
‘I wouldn’t look so satisfied if I was you,’ John Jones said. ‘You might decide you’d prefer the recruitment mission when you see what I’ve got lined up for you.’
5. ROPE
Eleven kids had started basic training three months earlier. Lauren stood to attention in the snow with the five others who’d made it to the final checkpoint on their snowmobiles. Mr Large, the head instructor, was eyeballing her.
‘Can anybody here tell this young lady what polar bears do in the winter?’ he shouted.
A couple of kids grumbled a response: ‘Hibernate.’
‘That’s right, Miss Thicko,’ Large grinned. ‘They dig a big hole under the ice and they drift off to snoozy land until the daffodils pop up in springtime. If you’d bothered to study the training manual, you’d also have seen that bears eat fish and live on the ice floes near the coast. Not out here, over a hundred kilometres inland. Is that understood?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Lauren said meekly.
‘And the radio. Why did you forget to switch on the encryption device?’
‘I was cold and tired, and …’ Lauren saw Mr Large’s eyes bulge out behind his snow goggles and realised she was giving the wrong answer. ‘Sorry, sir … No excuse, sir,’ she said sharply.
Mr Large shoved Lauren to the ground and plunged his size-fifteen boots into the snow on either side of her head.
‘When I woke up this morning, Lauren Adams,’ Large spat, ‘my back hurt. It hurt the same way it’s hurt every single morning since a nasty little girl hit me with a spade five months back. Can you remind me who it was that did that?’
‘Me, sir?’ Lauren inquired innocently.
‘If I’d had my way, you would have been permanently excluded from CHERUB.’
Lauren had been surprised that Mr Large hadn’t made training harder for her from day one. Now she had the horrible realisation that he’d saved up his revenge for the very end.
‘And so,’ Mr Large said, ‘to the ultimate test of courage that was mentioned in all of your mission briefings. There’s been a slight change of plan. The briefing should now read, Ultimate test of Lauren’s courage.’
Lauren felt a tear welling up behind her snow goggles as the icy ground chilled her back. She didn’t reckon she could face a third attempt at basic training. Failure now would be the end of her CHERUB career.
Mr Large crushed Lauren’s knuckles as he tugged her back to her feet.
‘Who’s the best swimmer out of you six trainees?’ Mr Large asked, eyeballing Lauren again.
‘Me, I suppose,’ Lauren said.
‘That’s riiiiight, isn’t it?’ Mr Large said cockily. ‘Quite the little mermaid, I recall … So if one of you had to swim across a fast-flowing river, grab six lovely grey CHERUB T-shirts and then swim back again, you’d be the ideal candidate. Wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes sir,’ Lauren barked, trying desperately not to show Mr Large how upset she was. He absolutely loved it when he made a trainee cry.
Mr Large took a step back and addressed the whole lineup. ‘I’d suggest that all of you do what you can to help Lauren out; because if she doesn’t come back with the T-shirts, I’ll make each of you swim across individually and fetch your own. The river is four hundred metres away, over the brow of the next hill. I’d suggest you get moving if you want to be indoors by sundown.’
Lauren led the row of kids scrambling uphill through the deep snow, dragging their equipment sleds behind them. Mr Large and the two assistant training instructors, Mr Speaks and Miss Smoke, followed them.
The rushing water made a roar that overpowered all but the most persistent howls of wind. The river would have been over a hundred metres wide in the summer, but the banks were iced up, cutting Lauren’s swim to less than sixty.
Miss Smoke, a woman who was butch even by the standards of retired kickboxing champions, pointed her muscular arm at the opposite embankment. ‘Your grey T-shirts are in a waterproof backpack behind that traffic cone,’ she rumbled.
The six trainees huddled up and pulled their balaclavas away from their mouths, so they could hear each other speak. As their steaming breath mingled, nobody could look Lauren in the eye. They felt sorry for her, but at the same time it was a relief not to be suffering alongside her.
‘It could have been worse,’ Lauren said, trying to sound cheerful and break the silence. ‘I’ll have to go in naked. If I’m wearing clothes, they’ll freeze solid the second I step out of the water and I’ll never get them off.’
A twelve-year-old Kurdish boy called Aram replied. ‘We’ve all got Vaseline in our first-aid packs. It will act as insulation if Lauren smears it on.’
‘That’ll help keep me warm,’ Lauren nodded.
‘What if we tie our rescue ropes together and
knot them under Lauren’s arms?’ Bethany suggested. ‘It should be long enough to reach across the river and we can haul her in if she gets in trouble.’
‘Good idea,’ Lauren grinned. ‘I’ll still have to swim out, but you guys can pull me back with the rope.’
‘Do you think you can make it over?’ Aram asked.
‘It’s gonna be cold and the current looks vicious,’ Lauren said. ‘But the distance is only a bit more than one length of a swimming pool.’
The six trainees tied their rescue ropes together. Lauren double-checked all the knots, then the kids burrowed inside their sleds and grabbed their tubs of Vaseline.
Bethany led the way out to the riverbank and began helping Lauren unzip her outer layers of clothing. The kids knew from their survival manuals that any water flowing in these parts would be a couple of degrees above freezing. You wouldn’t swim in it out of choice, but it was survivable. Lauren’s real problem was the air outside the water, which was more than fifteen degrees below freezing. A few minutes’ exposure to temperatures this low would blister Lauren’s bare skin, as surely as if she’d jumped into a bath of boiling water.
Two of the boys laid a foam-insulating mat on the snow and weighted down the ends with sleds to stop it blowing away.
‘OK,’ Lauren said. ‘Does everyone know what their job is? I don’t want any hold-ups.’
After a line of nods had satisfied Lauren, she sat on the foam mat and two of the boys started tugging at her snow boots. Once they were off, Lauren stood up, and stepped out of her snowsuit and outer fleece layer in a single frenzied movement. Next, she peeled away the tightly fitting inner fleece, followed by her socks and underwear. Bethany gathered up the inner layers of clothing as they were cast off and pushed them inside her snowsuit so they didn’t freeze up.
As soon as Lauren had hurled her knickers away, she dived on to the foam mat and the boys threw a couple of sleeping bags on top of her.
Bethany leaned in and yelled, ‘Are you OK?’, forgetting that Lauren no longer had three hats covering her ears.
Lauren shuddered as she poked her head from under the sleeping bags and nodded. ‘Give me the grease.’
Aram and his younger brother, Milar, began passing Lauren the tubs of Vaseline. She sunk her numb fingers into each tub and smeared it thickly over her body, trying not to wriggle too much because she didn’t want any grease wasted by rubbing off on to the sleeping bags.
When Lauren was well slathered, Bethany pushed one end of the nylon climbing rope under the sleeping bags. Lauren wound the rope under her arms and tied it into a bowknot, like a shoelace. That way she could pull on the bow and release herself easily if the rope became snagged.
‘All ready?’ Aram asked.
‘As ready as I’ll ever be.’
Bethany and Aram each grabbed a corner of the insulated mat and dragged it on to the ice at the edge of the river, with Lauren curled up under the sleeping bags. They stopped a couple of metres shy of the water’s edge where the ice looked dangerously thin.
Miss Smoke was waiting for them. She pulled back the sleeping bags and tested the knot in the rope under Lauren’s arms.
‘Remember, the air is much colder than the water,’ Smoke said gruffly. ‘Keep your head under, except when you have to breathe, and don’t hang around when you get to the other side.’
With no sleeping bags over her top half, Lauren was shivering too badly to speak, but she managed a nod.
‘OK,’ Smoke said. ‘Get going.’
Bethany whipped the sleeping bags away from Lauren’s legs. As Lauren sprang up, Aram gave her a quick inspection, before moving in with a Vaseline-smeared glove and patching up a few areas where the coating looked thin.
Lauren had too much on her mind to give a damn about everyone seeing her naked. She took three quick tiptoe leaps over the thin ice and took a huge breath as she speared into the water. Because Lauren had acclimatised to a temperature nineteen degrees colder than the water, a sense of calm passed over her as she began to swim. It almost felt warm.
She set off in a powerful front crawl, turning her head to breathe whenever the choppy water allowed her to. After two minutes’ swimming flat out, Lauren thought she must have almost reached the opposite bank. She raised her head out of the water to get a look. A blast of sleet pounded her face, but she managed to keep her eyes open long enough to see that she was barely halfway across.
Lauren felt crushed as she dived back under, swimming at a diagonal into the fierce current; pushing as hard as her aching body would allow. She now had serious doubts about her ability to make it across. The next minutes were the most agonising of Lauren’s life. Her skin felt numb and she was fighting a stitch down her left side.
Finally, more than four shattering minutes after setting off, Lauren spotted the orange cone less than five metres from her face. Touching the ice sheet on the embankment was a relief, but getting out of the water was another challenge.
Lauren’s fingers were numb and the ice gave her nothing to grip on to. Her first three goes at climbing out of the water failed and she started getting desperate. At the fourth attempt, a wave pushed her at exactly the right moment and she managed to lift a knee on to the ice.
The danger now was of her bare skin freezing to the ice beneath the snow. The only way to prevent this was not to let any part of her body touch the ground for more than a fraction of a second.
Shivering so violently that she could barely control her movements, Lauren quickly smeared the soles of her feet through some extra thick grease on her ankles. By the time she’d done this, a few dozen drips of water that hadn’t been repelled by the Vaseline had frozen to the skin on her back. Every bead felt like a nail drilling her flesh.
Lauren stood up to an eruption of encouraging screams from the opposite embankment. She took four quick leaps towards the orange cone and plucked the small backpack out of the snow behind it. When she’d hooked it over her shoulders, Lauren allowed herself a moment of triumph, turning to the other trainees and raising a thumb in the air.
The first step back towards the water made Lauren scream out, as a layer of skin tore from the ball of her foot. The grease had rubbed away and her damp sole had taken less than two seconds to freeze to the ground. She glanced back at the trail of blood in the snow, then took three painful steps and dived into the water.
As soon as Lauren hit the water, she felt the rope dig into the joints under her arms as the other trainees began hauling it. She thought about trying to swim, but she was being dragged through the water too fast for it to make any difference. In fact, Lauren thought the five kids standing on the embankment were overdoing it. The rope felt like it was tearing her arms out of their sockets and it was a struggle getting her head above the water for long enough to take a proper breath.
At least the return journey was fast. Within sixty seconds, Lauren found herself being lifted out of the water and on to a sleeping bag by the two Kurdish boys. Once they’d dragged her away from the thin ice, they grabbed the soggy backpack off Lauren’s shoulders, while the other three trainees descended on her with towels. They rubbed off as much water as they could, before rolling Lauren’s gasping body on to the foam sleeping mat and throwing all their sleeping bags on top of her.
Lauren felt her vision go out of focus as Bethany waved a thermal vest under her nose.
‘Snap out of it,’ Bethany shouted. ‘You’ve got to get your clothes back on before …’
*
When Lauren came around, she got a sniff of the grease still smeared over her body and shots of pain from the dressing over her foot and the rope burns under her arms.
‘Hey,’ Bethany said gently. ‘Welcome back, partner.’
Lauren realised she was on the floor, at the base camp where they’d set off on their Alaskan trek five days earlier. The building was fantastically warm, with electric light and proper central heating. The other trainees were scattered around the carpet on giant floor cushions, dressed in sh
orts and grey CHERUB T-shirts. Their hair was wet and mussed, like they’d towelled off after a shower. Most of them held steaming mugs.
‘How long …?’ Lauren asked, erupting into a coughing fit before she could finish her sentence.
Bethany looked at her watch. ‘You’ve been out for about forty minutes. Miss Smoke says you’re suffering from mild hypothermia and exhaustion. She reckons you’ll be fine after a few hours’ rest and some hot food and drink. And you’ll be pleased to know that you making it across that river put Mr Large in a stinking mood.’
‘Where’s my grey T-shirt?’ Lauren asked drowsily.
Bethany smirked. ‘You’re holding it in your hand. I didn’t take it out of its packet in case you got grease over it.’
Lauren’s fingers still felt numb, but now she realised the T-shirt was in her hand, she pulled the polythene-wrapped square up to her face and stared at the grey fabric with the CHERUB logo on it.
‘No more training,’ Lauren grinned.
‘Yeah,’ Bethany smiled. ‘Undercover missions here we come.’
6. MISSILES
John Jones showed James into his office. It wasn’t as nice as Zara’s, but it was a decent size with three computers, a giant LCD television hanging on the wall and a long suede-covered sofa. It was dark outside and the floor-to-ceiling window overlooked moonlit trees.
A sixteen-year-old wearing a black CHERUB T-shirt was sprawled over the sofa. James got excited when he realised it was Dave Moss. Dave was a legend. He’d earned his navy CHERUB T-shirt at eleven and his black T-shirt at thirteen, on a mission that brought down half the Ukrainian mafia. He spoke five languages and had won every CHERUB Karate and judo tournament he’d ever entered.
There were lots of talented kids at CHERUB, but Dave was one of the ones who managed to pull it off without everyone thinking he was a swot. His looks helped. Dave was tall and muscular: handsome in a grungy sort of way, with bright green eyes and long blond hair. His girlfriends were always the hottest on campus and there was even a rumour he’d got one of them pregnant. James had pretended to be appalled when Kerry told him; but as far as all the guys were concerned, the whiff of sex made Dave seem even cooler than he was already.