CHERUB: The General (27 page)

Jake put on his best scared little boy act. ‘I’m alone, sir. My dad’s out buying cheeseburgers.’

‘Don’t worry, boy,’ the major smiled, resting a paw on Jake’s shoulder. ‘We’ve got a job to do, but we’ll be in and out in a flash.’

Three more soldiers were running up the driveway, while squads of four ran around the back of the house on either side.

‘Come in then I suppose,’ Jake said sheepishly.

Upstairs, James and Rat found their packs. They tooled up with grenades and clipped fresh magazines into their rifles. They had to keep low so that they couldn’t be seen by the soldiers running around the back of the house.

‘I’m counting twelve men,’ James whispered, as he bobbed up to glance out of the window. ‘I’ll cover the staircase, you shoot from up here.’

Lauren and Bethany made similar preparations in the kitchen.

‘You’ve got nothing to be scared of, son,’ the major said calmly, as he nudged Jake down the hallway and through to the living-room. ‘But I need you to kneel on the floor with your hands on your head.’

Three colleagues rushed in after the major with their guns raised. One followed the major into the living-room, one headed back towards the kitchen, while the third started creeping up the stairs.

‘Radio,’ a lieutenant said anxiously, as he spotted someone’s headset on the floor.

The major glanced at it suspiciously, before eyeballing Jake and speaking in a much firmer tone. ‘Does that belong to your father?’

Jake scrambled for an excuse. ‘I was playing outside and found it in the street.’

‘You don’t say?’ the leader said happily, bending over to pick it off the floor. ‘We’ve been on the lookout for one of these so we can hear what our enemies are talking about.’

Jake was on edge, knowing that things might kick off any second. The soldiers all had guns, the other cherubs all had guns and he didn’t fancy being stuck in the middle when the shooting started. His only hope was a pistol he could see holstered under the major’s jacket.

The first sign of trouble was the near simultaneous blast of two paint grenades in the back garden. Lauren and Bethany had pulled pins and dropped them silently through a vent in the kitchen window, before ducking down behind the cabinets.

Four soldiers were hit by the flying paint. As two more stood dumbly and inspected their clothing to see whether they were alive or not, Lauren stood up behind the counter and took them out with well aimed blasts. Bethany spun around and shot the guard who’d come along the hallway.

Upstairs, Rat took aim through a back window and shot one soldier, but narrowly missed the last man standing as he vaulted over a hedge and made a run for it. At the same instant, James poked his rifle between the banister rails and shot the soldier coming up the stairs.

Back in the living-room, Jake made his move. He wailed like the blast had frightened him and wrapped his arms around the major’s leg. By the time the big man realised Jake’s real intentions, the eleven-year-old had already grabbed the major’s pistol and shot him from point blank range.

At that kind of range simulated bullets pack a real punch. The major bawled a torrent of swear words as he crumpled to the floor, clutching at his thigh. Simultaneously, James jumped the entire staircase and shot through the front door, hitting a soldier standing on the front lawn.

Bethany had continued down the hallway and covered Jake’s back, aiming through the living-room doorway and shooting the last of the four men who’d come through the front door.

James was startled by the shot directly behind him and launched a vicious back kick that hit Bethany hard in the stomach. Before she could scream a warning, James spun around and shot her twice in the belly.

‘Ooops,’ James said, as Bethany writhed on the ground clutching her guts with the top half of her body streaming with chalky pink paint. ‘Sorry.’

‘You idiot,’ Bethany groaned. ‘Do I look like a soldier to you?’

‘I think we got them all,’ Jake gasped, as he ran into the hallway. He saw his sister on the lawn and burst out laughing. ‘Oh dear!’

‘Was that deliberate, James?’ Bethany growled.

‘Of course it wasn’t,’ James smirked. ‘Just a happy accident.’

Bethany was tempted to shoot James back, but Mr Kazakov would have her running punishment laps if he found that she’d deliberately shot one of his team.

‘Dead girls can’t talk,’ Jake said, as he pointed at the paint-spattered soldier lying silently on the lawn. ‘See you in twenty-four hours.’

‘Jake, I just saved your butt in case you didn’t notice,’ Bethany growled.

Lauren came out of the kitchen and Rat jogged down the hallway to see what was occurring.

‘Pretty impressive,’ Rat said. ‘Eleven to one kill-ratio against trained soldiers.’

‘Who got away?’ James asked.

‘One bloke scarpered away into the bushes,’ Rat explained. ‘I think he legged it, but we’d better not hang around ‘cos he’s bound to have called for backup.’

James was the senior agent and he had to make some decisions. ‘Jake, Rat, booby trap the inside of the house and the Hummers with grenades,’ he ordered. ‘Lauren, go inside and pack up as many weapons as you can carry. I’ll update Kazakov on the radio, then I’ll be in to give you a hand.’

Bethany headed towards the processing facility to declare herself dead. The dead soldiers walked alongside and they were understandably curious about being taken down by a group of kids with British accents and expert marksmanship.

Bethany stuck to their prescribed back story: ‘Our parents are military staff who live on a British cold-weather training facility in a remote region of Canada. There’s not much to do, so our parents set up a cadet group where we all learn self defence and go paintballing on weekends.’

‘No kidding,’ the major smiled. ‘That little brother of yours had me fooled. Almost shot me in the one place a man don’t wanna be shot…’

As his comrades laughed, Bethany smiled and felt proud of Jake for probably the first time ever.

‘This man Kazakov,’ the major said. ‘Have you seen him? None of us knows what he looks like.’

Bethany smiled coyly. ‘You’ve gotta work harder than that to wheedle information out of me.’

One of the soldiers was dragging behind and the major looked back at him. ‘You OK, Martin?’

‘My stomach,’ the soldier answered grimly. ‘Feels like I’ve got a basketball lodged in my belly.’

‘Know what you’re saying,’ a colleague nodded. ‘I got the same. Must have eaten some bad chow in the mess hall last night.’

*

Jake, Lauren, Rat and James dumped their rifles and equipment back at the apartments before heading off to buy burgers. James dozed through the early part of the afternoon. He woke to find the apartment crowded: Gabrielle and Bruce were back from a sabotage operation, along with Mac and the four SAS toughs who’d been keeping him on the move and guarding him since the beginning of the exercise.

James headed into the kitchen. Everyone crowded around the breakfast bar, listening to a walkie-talkie.

‘What’s up?’ he asked, opening the fridge and downing several mouthfuls from a four-pint carton of orange juice.

‘We’re monitoring the bug in the army command office,’ Mac explained. ‘Looks like your little experiment with the water supply is starting to have consequences.’

James wasn’t sure about Kazakov’s most extreme tactic and was decidedly uncomfortable about sharing the blame. ‘I was following orders,’ he said defensively. ‘Sarge didn’t even tell me what was going on until we were inside the base.’

‘Remember history class? The Nazis on trial at Nuremburg,’ Lauren grinned, before adopting a German accent. ‘I was only following orders.’

‘And the Nazis all got hanged,’ Rat added.

Dark laughter erupted around the breakfast bar. James looked to Mac for some reliable information. ‘So what’s going on right now?’

‘We’re arming sympathisers and making efforts to ambush the snatch squads. Over eighty American soldiers have reported sick already and men from all over are returning to base with stomach cramps.’

‘Sarge told me twenty hours,’ James said, glancing at his watch. ‘So it’s probably just the beginning.’

‘Kazakov’s chuffed to bits,’ Mac nodded. ‘He reckons up to ninety per cent of the American troops will be wiped out with diarrhoea and vomiting by six this evening. He’s got insurgent sympathisers posting fliers inviting the entire population to a free booze-up in the shanty town.’

‘That’s right next to the army base,’ James said, as the full ambition of Kazakov’s plan became clear in his head. ‘There’s a thousand American troops. But over a hundred and fifty have been shot and if ninety per cent of what’s left are sick that’s gonna leave less than a hundred in fighting condition …’

‘We’re talking about full-scale revolution,’ Jake grinned.

A gruff-voiced Welsh SAS officer spoke admiringly. ‘I don’t think the Yanks knew what they were letting themselves in for when they invited Kazakov to do red teaming. He was our main tactical consultant for a decade and I don’t think anyone ever bested him, either in training or on a live operation.’

The youngest of Mac’s guards nodded. ‘The guy’s been fighting wars since before I was born. It’s criminal that they didn’t make him our regimental commander.’

‘Why didn’t they?’ James asked.

‘Protocol,’ the Welshman explained. ‘Kazakov has only ever been a consultant. It would have ruffled a lot of feathers if they’d appointed an outsider. But the man’s a tactical genius.’

As if on cue, Kazakov’s voice came through their walkie-talkies. ‘I need bodies,’ he announced. ‘Thirty-three beer kegs and two hundred bottles of vodka ain’t gonna shift themselves.’

*

General Shirley had started off trying to make friends, then attempted to clamp down with roadblocks after the aerodrome attack. But without the drones providing aerial surveillance the roadblocks were vulnerable to snipers and paint grenades so he’d been forced into using snatch squads.

Casualties were lighter with this tactic. Insurgents were arrested and weapons seized, but with no permanent presence on the streets Kazakov’s insurgents had freedom to move around setting ambushes, blockading roads and recruiting insurgent sympathisers.

War zones in the real world suffer from high unemployment and are filled with bored youngsters. The young men and women inside Fort Reagan were the same, with one TV channel and dwindling reserves of booze.

Most of those receiving the extra twenty dollars a day to support the insurgency were happy to take a rifle and receive basic military instruction from the teams of SAS officers, if for no other reason than that it was something to do. More than a hundred and fifty men and women had been armed and given basic tactical firearms training over the space of a day and a half.

Spies in the shanty town spotted convoys of troops leaving the nearby army base and as the day wore on the SAS officers trained insurgents in more advanced techniques, such as burying paint grenades close to roads and rigging lengths of wire so they’re tripped when a vehicle passes over.

Under Fort Reagan rules any vehicle hit with a spot of paint more than ten centimetres in diameter was deemed to be disabled and the crew inside had to get out on foot.

By 6 p.m. the sun was dropping below distant sand bluffs and ambushed Hummers littered the streets. More than eighty additional troops had been shot for losses of less than half that number of insurgents.

Kazakov sheltered inside a concrete hut in the shanty town, listening to the bug in General Shirley’s command post. The American was suffering stomach cramps and getting increasingly irate as more and more of his troops went down with diarrhoea. He’d even called base commander O’Halloran and asked that the exercise be abandoned because of a possible health scare, but the commander gave him short shrift: you can’t abandon a real war if there’s an outbreak of food poisoning, so why should you abandon an exercise?

In the central square of the shanty town more than a thousand young men and women had gathered to party around a huge bonfire. The thirty kegs of beer hadn’t lasted long, but Kazakov had arranged a plentiful supply of wines and spirits. Rock music blasted, barbecued steaks were served in fresh baps and he’d even brought in a few fireworks.

Almost half the crowd were either armed insurgents or unarmed sympathisers. Normally it would have been unacceptably risky to gather so many poorly trained men and women together less than half a kilometre from a US Army base, but there weren’t enough healthy troops left to take any action.

The only sign of an army presence was an occasional rapid drive-by, with the driver circling the shanty town at his vehicle’s maximum 15 mph speed, while two men in the back surveyed the situation with night-vision binoculars.

James and the rest of the cherubs hung out in a big group just off the main square. Young men were flirting, dancing and joining long queues for the rapidly diminishing supplies of alcohol. Many of them carried their weapons openly and a few of the drunkest even took aim at the fireworks.

‘Need a slash,’ James said, crushing a plastic beer cup and strolling away from the gang.