CHERUB: The General (25 page)

He pulled his radio out of his jacket. ‘Kazakov,’ he whispered.

‘Loud and clear, James,’ the Ukrainian answered. ‘How’s it going?’

‘The goods are in place, but we had to fight our way out. Sarge got shot and I’m gonna need some backup out here to make it home.’

‘Negative,’ Kazakov said. ‘We don’t need you here and you could easily be followed in the dark. It’s best to steer clear of the apartments until daylight.’

James tutted. ‘So what do you expect me to do? Where am I gonna sleep?’

‘Use your initiative; I’ve got enough on my plate. Kazakov out.’

The way Kazakov said
out
made it pretty clear that he didn’t want to hear from James before morning.

‘Unbelievable,’ James mumbled to himself. ‘After everything I’ve done for that Russian git.’

While James’ weapons afforded some protection, the combination of youth and badly fitting US army clothing made it impossible to blend in. It was going to be a long night and he had to find somewhere to hide quickly.

*

As soon as the drones were disabled, Kazakov radioed his SAS teams. They climbed into preselected rooftop positions with sniper rifles and began taking pot shots at the American soldiers.

He led Lauren, Bethany, Rat, Gabrielle, Bruce, Jake and Andy on a rapid march away from the airfield and towards the apartments. They were heavily armed and they shot first when they eyed an army checkpoint, taking out three soldiers with bullets and paint grenades and scaring the hell out of half a dozen civilians queuing for a random search.

The soldiers struggled with conflicting demands. They’d been sent out to make friends with civilians, but suddenly faced bullets whizzing down from rooftops and paint grenades being lobbed at them from balconies.

Every soldier knew that ten per cent of the population was getting paid extra to support the insurgency and the banter between troops and civilians quickly got replaced by suspicion. It might only be a training exercise, but every soldier had a real-world incentive to do well: a good performance could lead to promotion and the higher wages that came with it, a bad one to a stagnant career or even redeployment to a less prestigious back up unit.

Within twenty minutes of the attack on the drones, General Shirley had ordered dozens of extra checkpoints to stop insurgents from moving about freely. In the most troubled areas soldiers announced curfews and told everyone to get indoors.

Many college-age civilians had been drinking and got aggressive because they didn’t want to be shut up inside bland apartments at eight-thirty in the evening. They faced being stopped and searched by angry troops for the second or third time in a matter of hours and even though it wasn’t for real, people got angry having to queue at a checkpoint for ten minutes just so they could walk to the next street to visit a friend or buy groceries.

Kazakov’s detached house was vulnerable to a surprise raid, so he joined the kids in the comparative anonymity of the apartment block. Sweating and breathless, everyone piled into the girls’ apartment, threw down their equipment packs and sprawled over the furniture.

‘How’s my eyes and ears?’ Kazakov asked, as Kevin came out of a back bedroom with binoculars hanging around his neck.

‘Good,’ Kevin smiled, although he was still upset that he hadn’t been allowed on the main raid with all the others. ‘A team came into this building searching door to door. I ran down to the third floor and set up a booby trap with the paint grenade like you showed me. Took out all three of them.’

‘Nice work,’ Kazakov nodded. ‘And the SAS snipers?’

‘Seems to be working out,’ Kevin nodded. ‘They shot up all the soldiers hanging out near the canteen and grenaded the roadblocks until they all pulled out of the area. I haven’t seen any army for over half an hour.’

Meryl came through from the kitchen holding a plastic tray stacked with steaming pizza slices. ‘Where’s the other two?’ she asked, as the kids all grabbed food.

‘Kerry and Sarge are dead. James is hiding out.’

‘Shall I save some food for him?’ Meryl asked.

Kazakov shook his head. ‘I’ve told him to hide out overnight in case he’s being tailed.’

‘He sounded really pissed off when Mr Kaz told him,’ Bethany grinned.

‘More pizza for us,’ Jake smiled, as he grabbed a second slice.

‘What about all this equipment?’ Lauren asked. ‘We’re sitting ducks if the army starts searching this building.’

‘We sit tight,’ Kazakov said firmly, as he pulled a small video receiver out of his trouser pocket. ‘We keep all the weapons here. Someone will have to keep lookout on the front and rear exits. If the army shows up for some reason, we should have time to mount an ambush on the staircases before they get close.’

The apartment had a wall-mounted TV with a protective Perspex screen over it.

‘This should be good,’ Kazakov said, grinning like a kid with sherbet as he ran an AV lead from the receiver to the TV. He cursed the remote until he found a button that brought up a grainy colour image. It looked like the edge of a desk and a couple of blurry computer screens set at a slanted angle. A date and timecode scrolled at the bottom of the image.

‘Nice camerawork, Spielberg,’ Jake grinned.

‘I only had a few seconds to position the device,’ Kazakov said irritably. ‘Shut up and listen.’

The hard disk in Kazakov’s receiver could store several hundred hours of video. He set the recording to play back from a couple of minutes before they’d blown up the drones. The TV showed a pair of army boots resting on the desktop and what sounded like a game of poker being played by bored admin officers out of shot on the other side of the room.

The kids gathered around the screen, holding cans of Pepsi and stuffing the last of the pizza as the report of the raid on the aerodrome came in. The picture was fixed on the tabletop and the fuzzy screens, but audio quality was excellent.

Boots ran in and out. A soldier announced that the shit was about to hit the fan and then General Shirley came running in.

‘Gimme status,’
he shouted.

‘One of the drone pilots radioed, sir. They’re under attack. The drones are being destroyed by a group of masked teenagers.’

‘Pardon me?

‘The drones, General. They’re used for—’

‘I know what they’re used for, Corporal! Do you think I’m some kind of asshole? Get troops up there now to investigate. If it’s insurgents I want them nailed.’

‘Drones ain’t cheap,’
the corporal continued.
‘Haven’t you deployed a security team up at the aerodrome?’

There was a prolonged silence.

A new voice: ‘
General … What do you want us to do?’

‘Goddammit!’
the general raved.
‘They’re supposed to be acting like insurgents! They’re supposed to be on the streets planting paint grenades, not coming through the front door and destroying my aerodrome. What kind of insurgency is this supposed to be?’

‘Had a lot of incoming mortar fire on all of our bases when I was in Iraq,’
the corporal noted.
‘Insurgents will attack anything if it’s improperly defended.’

‘Corporal, you are
dismissed,’ General Shirley shouted.
‘When I want your opinions I’ll ask for them. Kazakov, that son of a bitch! There’s over six million dollars of hardware up there . .
.
‘

A phone rang once before a woman answered.
‘General, it’s Sean O’Halloran, the base commander,’
she said. ‘
He wants to know if you’re aware that explosions have been heard inside the aerodrome—’

‘I’m busy … A head-on assault on my base. That Russian … OK, these are my orders. Checkpoints on every main street. Screw being
Mr
Nice American. Get every able-bodied soldier out of this base and cracking heads. I want weapons seized and insurgents arrested or shot
.
‘

The woman spoke again.
‘The base commander is demanding to speak with you, General. He says you’re personally responsible for any hardware entrusted to your men during this exercise.’

‘Hand me that phone,’
the general ordered.
‘Commander, we’re investigating the situation and I’m sure it’s not as serious as it sounds.’

As the general spoke into the phone, a new voice sounded across the room.
‘General, we’re receiving reports that our troops are coming under sniper fire throughout the streets of Reaganistan.’

Kazakov paused the playback and smiled at the kids perched on the furniture around him. ‘I’m not Russian – I’m bloody
Ukrainian,’
he shouted, before erupting into a booming laugh. ‘I don’t give out praise often, but you kids were great tonight. This time tomorrow, we’ll be driving a victory parade through General Shirley’s precious base.’

James used the darkness, a casual demeanour and his US Army uniform to bluff his way through a checkpoint on the main thoroughfare out of the shanty town while the officer running the show seemed more concerned with grilling a twenty-year-old student about his contraband camera phone than bothering with James’ ID.

He ended up in a three-storey shell building less than a kilometre from the apartments. James couldn’t turn on the electric lights because they’d be spotted in the darkness, so he navigated to a second-floor room by torchlight. There was a cold water tap on the wall and a toilet with hundreds of dead insects floating inside on the landing.

There was no furniture, so he sat on the sandy concrete floor as cold desert wind howled through badly fitted doors and windows. He rearranged the contents of his backpack to try and make a pillow, but it was rock hard. In any case he was too tense to sleep.

Every so often an American Hummer would drive by in the narrow street outside and he’d hear shoot-outs between regular soldiers and SAS snipers, or the dull blast of a paint grenade. Judging by the amount of fighting, the Special Forces teams were also arming insurgent sympathisers.

However hard James tried there was no way he could doze on bare concrete, and grains of sand down his back and inside his boxers were driving him bananas. He’d filled his canteen from the tap, but he was hungry and he rummaged inside his pack for something to eat. There was no food, but he did find a little hotel gift bag with the pack of cards and the
Ultimate Blackjack Manual
he’d bought the day before.

There were bulbs ablaze in some apartment blocks two streets away. James shuffled up near to the windows where the pages caught the stray light. He blew away the sand on the floor between his legs, spread his cards out and started to read.

After a couple of chapters devoted to basic blackjack strategy and some short biographies of ‘Blackjack Hall of Fame’ members who’d
made fortunes and were now banned from every casino in the world,
James passed on to chapters detailing the mathematics and strategies used by the most successful card counters.

Most people would have given up on seeing the first simple equation, but James’ inner maths geek liked the idea that you could actually use mental arithmetic and a few relatively simple strategies to beat a casino and win millions of dollars.

As James read more he realised that card counting didn’t even require you to be brilliant at maths. What it required was the ability to keep count of five things at once: the dealer’s current hand, your current hand, the running count of high and low cards, the total number of cards left in the card shoe and finally – if you wanted an extra edge – a separate count of the number of aces left in the deck.

According to the book, anyone practising with a pack of cards a couple of hours a day could master basic card-counting skills within a few days. James already understood standard blackjack strategy in terms of when to stick and when to ask the dealer for an extra card. The next step was to practise the rapid dealing of blackjack hands, trying to play with perfect strategy while keeping a basic count of every card dealt.

James began to flick the cards down on the concrete between his legs, starting off slowly and building up speed as he got a feel for it. There was no rush: it was ten hours until sun-up and four and a half years until he’d be old enough to sit at a casino table.

*

‘Morning, knob-head!’

James’ head hurt as he opened his eyes and jerked forward. The low sun blitzed his retinas and he half expected to find the muzzle of a gun in his face. Much to his relief, his eyes eventually focused on Gabrielle’s pencil thin legs in a pair of running shorts.

‘What’s with the cards?’ she asked.

‘That’s my brother,’ Lauren smirked. ‘Always playing with himself.’

James hadn’t had anything like a full night’s sleep and it took him a few seconds to suss everything out: his neck ached because he’d fallen asleep sitting against a concrete wall while dealing cards. Lauren and Gabrielle were here because he’d radioed the coordinates on his GPS through to Kazakov the night before. The girls had come out to meet him because he needed a set of civilian clothes before he could move safely in daylight.