CHERUB: The General (17 page)

‘Oh that,’ Mac said. ‘It does look like fun, but why are you asking me?’

‘Lauren said you were in charge.’

‘I dealt with some of the sign-ups,’ Mac nodded. ‘But only because I know most of the agents better than Mr Kazakov. He was the one who got the invitation to do red teaming.’

‘Red what?’ James asked.

Mac tutted. ‘Lauren’s
supposed
to be going on this exercise but she either hasn’t read her briefing yet, or hasn’t bothered telling you. The Americans run war games at various centres around the world. Fort Reagan is the newest. It’s specifically designed to train soldiers in dealing with modern, open-ended urban combat situations like the wars in Iraq or Somalia.

‘Kazakov has donkey’s years’ experience fighting with the Russians in Afghanistan, then with training NATO special forces and advising on tactical operations in the Balkans and Baghdad. The Yanks invited him to lead the team in one of their most sophisticated war games ever and they still use cold war language. So the bad guys are always known as the reds, and running the red team is called …’

‘Red teaming,’ James nodded. ‘I get it. So I need to speak to Kazakov?’

‘Yes,’ Mac said. ‘I think you’re in luck, because he was looking for more experienced agents like you, but Zara was reluctant to release too many in case they were needed for missions.’

James looked around the room. ‘I haven’t seen Kazakov this morning.’

Mac burst out laughing. ‘The man has a heart of granite! Could you see our Mr Kazakov getting up early to go all gooey-eyed over the red shirts opening their presents?’

‘I suppose not,’ James smiled.

‘He got back when basic training ended last week,’ Mac said. ‘If you’re interested in the exercise, I’d suggest you pay him a visit upstairs in the staff quarters ASAP.’

James had been at CHERUB for over four years, but it was only the second time he’d ventured into the staff quarters on the fifth floor of the main building. The corridor needed a lick of paint and the carpet was tired, but the mostly young and single staff who lived here had got competitive with their Christmas decorations. The space outside each room was festooned with tinsel, flashing lights, ceiling decorations and tacky plastic snowmen.

The exception was room eighteen at the far end of the hallway, where the walls were bare and music from
Swan Lake
boomed through the closed doorway.

‘Mr Kazakov,’ James shouted, as he banged on the door. ‘Are you in there?’

James realised Mr Kazakov had to be in his room, unless he was in the habit of going out while leaving his CDs playing at full blast. He tried the door handle and peered into an airy space, with white walls, balcony doors and a trendy wooden floor.

‘Mr Kazakov,’ James shouted again, as he stepped into a lobby area. ‘Sir?’

The staff quarters were bigger than the kids’ rooms on the floors above, with a separate bedroom and living space complete with its own compact kitchen.

James leaned into Kazakov’s main room and saw him sprawled out over a recliner chair. A pair of expensive floor-standing loudspeakers blasted out Tchaikovsky’s most famous ballet, while Kazakov conducted the non-existent orchestra with a Berol marker pen.

‘Hello,’ James shouted, edging towards Kazakov before gently tapping him on the shoulder.

Kazakov looked around, startled, before pulling up his legs, doing a spectacular head over heels roll and somehow grabbing James around the neck. Before James could react, Kazakov swept his legs away and pinned him to the floor with the tip of a Soviet army dagger poised between his eyeballs. Its handle was gnarled and the blade had worn away after two decades of regular sharpening.

‘Bloody hell,’ James gasped. ‘Let me go!’

‘I’ve killed three Afghans and stabbed a big-breasted Serbian mugger with this knife,’ Kazakov growled, as
Swan Lake
reached a booming climax. ‘I don’t like people sneaking up on me.’

‘I didn’t mean to startle you,’ James shouted nervously. ‘I knocked, I shouted, but your music’s so bloody loud.’

Kazakov rolled off James and tucked the knife back into a leather sheath on his belt as he stood up. The burly Ukrainian straightened his combat trousers and vest before grabbing the remote and turning off his music.

‘Merry Christmas, Mr Adams,’ Kazakov laughed. ‘You should train more for speed. You have the reflexes of an old lady.’

James grunted as he used the kitchen worktop to lever himself up. Kazakov was at least the tenth CHERUB instructor to comment on his slow reflexes, but even a special programme of speed training devised by Miss Takada hadn’t done much to help.

‘My brother was slow,’ Kazakov said, as he pointed towards a shelf of photographs. ‘It got him killed.’

James looked at Kazakov in black and white. He wore Russian Army uniform and stood beside an identically dressed and similar-looking soldier. Neither could be more than twenty years old.

‘Helicopter got hit by the Taliban as we were taking off,’ Kazakov explained. ‘I bailed; my brother left it another half second and got burned up by the exploding fuel.’

‘I’m sorry,’ James said awkwardly as his eyes were drawn to the next picture. It had been retouched in bright colours, as was the fashion in the old Soviet Union, and showed a slightly older Kazakov in a dress uniform with a line of medals, a stick-thin wife in a tutu and ballet shoes and a boy aged three or four in a slightly odd-looking sailor suit.

‘Was that your wife?’ James gasped. ‘She’s absolutely
stunning.’

Kazakov furrowed his brow, before reaching up and slamming the frame face down so that James couldn’t see it.

‘Marriage is a difficult thing for a soldier,’ Kazakov said bitterly. ‘She remarried, my parents are dead, my brother is dead. My son is twenty-four and alive as far as I know. But I wouldn’t know where he is, or even what he looks like.’

Kazakov simmered silently as James scrambled for something appropriate to say.

‘You’re a good man, James,’ Kazakov said. ‘You can come to America if you like.’

James smiled. ‘What makes you think that’s what I was gonna ask?’

‘A young man is much like a cat,’ Kazakov smiled ruefully. ‘He wants food, sex and fun. The food in the canteen downstairs is better than I have here, I
very
much hope you didn’t come to my room looking for sex, and the only fun I have to offer is a place on my red team. So am I right?’

‘Of course you’re right,’ James laughed.

‘With the blond hair and blue eyes you really do remind me of my brother,’ Kazakov said fondly. ‘Do you want to see where we’re going?’

James actually wanted to get back to his friends, but he was stung by the accusation of selfishness and knew it would do no harm to keep on the training instructor’s good side.

‘Here you see the compound,’ Kazakov said, leading James towards a kitchen worktop covered with scribbles, Post-its and random scraps of paper. The biggest was a collage of satellite photos which comprised a dozen inkjet prints stuck together with Sellotape.

James was astonished by what he saw. He’d been impressed by the SAS training compound a few kilometres from campus, but it would have been the size of a postcard on Kazakov’s metre-long map of Fort Reagan.

‘A quarter million acres of Nevada desert,’ Kazakov explained grandly.

James studied the outlines of dozens of apartment blocks, more than a thousand houses, shopping areas and town squares, and the whole shebang fringed with golden desert. Some areas were set out in broad avenues like an American suburb, while others had tight pedestrian alleyways and Middle-Eastern style homes built around courtyards, or lines of shacks to represent the accommodation in a third-world shanty town.

In the far corner of Fort Reagan was a military barracks with dozens of tents and permanent buildings, a full-sized air strip and a vast car park filled with the green outlines of everything from Hummers up to Abrams battle tanks.

James saw construction equipment and lots of newly planted trees. ‘It all looks brand new,’ he noted.

Kazakov nodded. ‘Opened last year. It cost six point three billion dollars to build. It’s the second biggest military training facility in the world, designed to give American soldiers a taste of what they can expect in urban warfare.

‘Each exercise uses up to two thousand troops and ten thousand civilians – mostly college students and the unemployed, bussed in and paid eighty bucks a day. An exercise lasts between ten days and three weeks and costs upwards of a hundred million dollars to stage.’

‘And we’ll be playing the bad guys?’

‘Exactly,’ Kazakov smiled. ‘They’ve already run a few exercises using teams of American officers and Special Forces to play out the role of insurgents. But what they really need is people from outside of the American military who can challenge their standard battle tactics during an exercise. The British are sending some troops to train at Fort Reagan with the Americans for the first time and when the question of a red-team commander came up, they threw my name into the ring.’

‘Is that a golf course?’ James gasped, as he tapped the greenest section of the satellite map.

‘Certainly is,’ Kazakov grinned. ‘You won’t find many of those in downtown Baghdad or Mogadishu, but those generals need to get eighteen holes in once in a while.’

James sensed the cynicism in Kazakov’s voice and laughed. ‘You’re not big on the Americans, are you?’

‘Ignorant scum!’ Kazakov spluttered. ‘They trained the Taliban that killed my brother and supplied the missile that shot our chopper down. Me and the co-pilot got out. Sixteen others, including my whole unit, got fried.’

James was confused. ‘I thought the Taliban were the dudes with the beards the Americans are fighting against?’

‘In 2007, they are,’ Kazakov nodded. ‘But in the eighties the CIA trained the Taliban and supplied them with weapons to fight against the Soviet Union. Same with Saddam Hussein: America supplied all the weapons for when he invaded Iran. American technology was also used to produce Saddam’s chemical weapons which he used to gas the Kurds.’

James smiled uneasily. ‘Politicians are a lot like five-year-olds. You know: one day they’re best friends and five minutes later they’re rolling around in the sandpit biting chunks out of each other.’

‘Good analogy,’ Kazakov said. ‘I’ve got my strategy: ten CHERUB agents, thirty Special Forces officers and a hundred sympathisers amongst the civilian population. I’m planning to have those American generals on their knees, begging to surrender, within forty-eight hours.’

James was surprised at Kazakov’s vehemence. ‘It’s just a training exercise, though,’ he pointed out. ‘And the Americans
are
our allies.’

‘Screw that,’ Kazakov said, as he pounded on his kitchen worktop. ‘I’ll teach those pompous Yanks with their war games and their military academies a thing or two about climbing down in the gutter and fighting a proper street battle.’

James was slightly perturbed by Kazakov’s attitude. It didn’t sound much like the holiday in Vegas followed by an enjoyable training exercise that Lauren had sold him on.

‘So when do we fly out?’ James asked.

‘New Year’s Day,’ Kazakov said. ‘I’ll send all of you an itinerary later in the day.’

‘Well,’ James said, glancing at his watch as he backed up to the door. ‘I’m meeting up with the gang down in the dining-hall for some breakfast. You have a good Christmas; I expect I’ll see you downstairs for Christmas lunch.’

‘Perhaps,’ Kazakov said darkly. ‘But Christmas isn’t really my thing, and there’s still much to plan.’

James sat in the front row of a twenty-six seater coach and yawned as they pulled through the gates of the military airbase ten kilometres from campus. He’d been up until half-past two seeing in the new year and felt half dead because he’d drunk a couple of beers and had to get up early to wash and dry a bundle of dirty laundry so that he had enough clothes for a two-week trip.

The hydraulic coach door hissed open and an RAF security officer climbed aboard. ‘Travel documents please.’

Staff members Mac, Meryl and Kazakov along with agents James, Lauren, Rat, Kevin, Jake, Bruce, Andy, Kerry and Gabrielle all held out their passports. Bethany went into a panic until she found hers in an obscure pocket at the side of her backpack.

‘I’ve got export licences for weapons, explosives and drugs too,’ Mac explained, as he held out a stack of paperwork.

‘Haven’t seen you come through here in a while,’ the officer said, as he inspected each sheet before stamping them clumsily, with only a springy foam headrest to rest them on.

‘You neither,’ Mac smiled. ‘I’m semi-retired now.’

‘Ready to roll,’ the guard said, handing the papers back to Mac before stepping up and giving Instructor Pike – who wasn’t travelling on the exercise but had volunteered to drive the coach – instructions on which taxiways to use to reach their plane.

Large groups of CHERUB agents often used RAF planes, which offered an experience way more varied than the predictable rows of seats on a commercial jet. Your ride could turn out to be anything from a tiny unpressurised military transport plane to one of the clapped-out Tristar airliners used to ferry troops to bases in the Middle East.