Cherub: New Guard Part 23

'And what are you planning to do, boss?' Lauren asked, sarcastically. 'Put your feet up?'

'I'm going to get the generator running,' James said. 'Then if you're extremely lucky, I'll plug in the mini boiler and make you all a nice cup of tea.'

36. p.u.s.s.y.

It was 5 a.m. and Bruce sat on a stack of plastic bread crates, beneath the bird-limed frame of what had once been a supermarket roof. Five screens glowed in the dark, reporting info from night-vision cameras, motion sensors, the unboosted UHF signal James had successfully retrieved from the well control room and a web browser, set to automatically receive chatter reports and any other info British or Israeli intelligence sent their way.

Bruce wasn't the kind of person who could spend long periods with his thoughts, and after checking all screens and refreshing the browser, he stood. The supermarket's floor remained intact, so Lauren and Tovah had created a waterproof shelter by stretching a tarp between two lines of looted metal shelving.

Kyle snored inside a sleeping bag as Bruce stepped over, using a little black torch to show the way. Lauren clearly liked to be cosy, and Bruce smiled when he saw her snuggled on a bottom shelf with knees almost up to her chin. He crouched in front of their water boiler and rummaged through a box of dehydrated food packets. The writing on the packs was in Russian, so Bruce had to guess based on dodgy photos and feeling the hard lumps inside.

In the end, he tore a pack at random, removed the plastic spork inside and two-thirds filled it using the tap on their water boiler. The steaming packet burned fingertips as he stepped back to his position. He took an experimental sniff when he was back on the bread boxes and was pleasantly surprised by the aroma of chocolate and banana custard.

After a good stir and a few sickly-sweet mouthfuls, he was alarmed by a sc.r.a.ping sound in the next aisle. In theory, nothing human could get past the motion sensors without setting an alert, but something was going on because the birds up on the I-beams were chirping restlessly.

Bruce flipped down a set of night-vision gla.s.ses and ripped a silenced pistol out of a holster. He considered waking the others, but the sound wasn't far away, so he figured it was better to act alone.

Another crowd of birds flew up as Bruce rounded a corner. A black object moved just to his right. A powerful shoulder, reaching out to grab. Bruce swung and shot, the gun's muzzle silenced, but a bullet tore bone and flesh before splinters clanked noisily off the metal shelving. James and Ryan woke as hundreds of birds spewed into the air.

'Who's on guard?' Tovah asked, as she shot up and reached for her rifle.

'Bruce?' James hissed.

'I'm round here, I think I shot someone.'

Tovah was first to join Bruce in the next aisle. She shone a torch, lighting up Bruce's back and the body of a wildcat. Similar to a domestic cat, but half as big again, the shoulder Bruce had seen had actually been the back of a creature that had strolled in looking to catch an unwary bird.

'Great smell,' Tovah noted, as she looked at strands of brown and pink goo splattered up the back of the shelf. 'Bullet must have ruptured the bowel.'

'Nice shooting, buddy,' Kyle noted, pulling down the front of his trousers as he walked towards a bucket to take a pee. 'Everybody back to bed.'

'No,' James said firmly. 'Hopefully n.o.body was close enough to hear the shot, but we'll need at least a couple of extra people on alert just in case.'

'Agreed,' Tovah said, as she glanced at her watch. 'I'm game. I'll not get back to sleep now anyway.'

'Too tense to sleep much in the first place,' James noted, as he checked their cameras and motion sensor readouts. First light had just breached the horizon. 'I have to say I envy Sleeping Beauty here.'

There were a few smiles as James shone his torch on Ryan, who remained blissfully unaware, with his head buried deep inside quilted nylon.

'b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l,' Tovah moaned, as she joined James looking at the screens. 'Bruce got the last chocolate and banana.'

'Tea or coffee?' Kyle asked, as he came back from peeing and wiped hands with a disinfectant wipe.

Lauren nodded as she wriggled off her shelf and sat up, rubbing her eyes. 'Who shot who?'

'Bruce murdered a cat,' Kyle explained. 'Easily mistaken for an armed a.s.sa.s.sin.'

'Explains the smell of cat mess,' Lauren noted, as she stood up.

James nodded in agreement. 'Bruce, you'd better throw that thing outside, before it turns all our stomachs.'

As Kyle made instant coffee, Lauren cooked up porridge and a big powdered egg omelette on a two-burner butane stove. Ryan kept snoozing as the others propped on bread crates and ate breakfast.

'UHF pick-up,' James noted, as he crouched over a screen. 'Sounds like someone's in the office.'

The laptop was set to record any voices picked up in the control room. Since the bugs were only producing a crackly backup signal and in Arabic, Tovah shuffled across and replaced the tinny laptop speaker with a set of headphones.

'Two guys b.i.t.c.hing about their wives,' Tovah explained. 'Their accents are rough.'

'Meaning what?' Kyle asked.

'Workers, I'd guess,' Tovah replied. 'Waiting for their boss to arrive and give instructions ... They're b.i.t.c.hing about how they were told to be here super early, but there's n.o.body else there yet.'

'So something's happening today,' James said brightly.

Ryan opened one eye, then sat up when he saw Lauren, Bruce and Kyle looking at him. 'What?' he said, stifling a yawn. 'What I do?'

'Nothing,' James said, smirking. 'As someone who tossed and turned all night, worrying about this s.h.i.t, I envy your ability to switch off and sleep for ten hours.'

'It's called being a teenager,' Ryan said, giving up on the stifling and going full yawn. 'Besides, what's to worry about? We're just camped out eighty kilometres inside the territory of a dangerous terrorist group who'll torture and chop our heads off if they capture us. Have all the eggs gone?'

Ryan felt pampered as Lauren dished him eggs and Kyle brought coffee. Tovah made him jump by slapping her thighs and yelling, 'We got tha s.h.i.t, dudes!'

'What you got?' James asked.

'Boss man just arrived. Told the workers to get all the burned control consoles out of the hut, because they have to be cleared out before replacements arrive.'

'When?'

'There's a local electrician coming in to replace the burned-out supply box at 0800. Replacement consoles and the repair team are due in by lunchtime. Then the guy asked when they expected the well to be fixed. Boss guy said it depends on the engineers but hopefully they'll be pumping oil again by tomorrow.'

'Nice,' Bruce said. 'Looks like we timed our arrival just right.'

'Don't want to stick around any longer than we have to,' James noted. 'Be good to have a couple of cameras in the area before it gets too light.'

'We can land a pair of micro-drones on the oil derrick,' Tovah suggested.

'Won't they give the game away if they're spotted?' Ryan asked.

James got up and pulled a boxed micro-drone out of his backpack.

'Three centimetres, weighs less than ten grams, but has an HD camera,' James explained. 'Battery lasts three kilometres in flight, and transmits a picture for up to twelve hours. You just program coordinates, after which it's totally autonomous apart from the landing. In flight, it looks like an insect. Chances of it being spotted in situ are very slim and the plastic is corn starch, so after a couple of days the structure and rotors dissolve and the remaining components look like plastic sc.r.a.p from a kid's toy or something.'

Ryan picked it out of the box.

'Don't break it,' James smirked. 'That's twenty-seven thousand pounds' worth.'

'Whoa!' Ryan said, thrusting the device back at James.

'Two will give us complete video coverage over the well site,' Tovah said. 'As long as it doesn't rain.'

37. SURRENDER.

At 13:05, Ryan lay chest-down on stony ground, sixty metres from the oil derrick. Two bearded men stood outside, using a crowbar to open a crate. When the plywood side panel snapped free, a torrent of Styrofoam packing peanuts subsided to reveal the side of a reconditioned Offsh.o.r.e Marine control console. He looked across at James.

'See the gouge in the side panel?' Ryan said. 'I'd swear I saw that exact machine in Uncle's warehouse five weeks back.'

'Probably did,' James agreed, wiping sweat off his brow as Kam Yuen stepped down from the control cabin.

Kam had grown a wispy beard and walked with a slight limp. He spoke to the guys unpacking, as Gordon Sachs stood around the back talking to the electrician. But while the two engineers were running the repair job, a trio of bulky armed guards never let them out of sight.

'Heavy,' Ryan noted of Sachs. 'Ten kilos at least since the last photos we saw.'

But James was distracted, speaking to Tovah through his in-ear com unit. 'I have both targets in plain sight. Three bodyguards; Ryan and I have clean shots at all of them.'

'Understood,' Tovah said. 'Drone is in position. Lauren and Bruce are in position. Is it a go?'

Ryan looked across as James felt like his chest was being crushed.

'It's go,' James said.

Back at the supermarket, Kyle stood guard while Tovah activated a half-metre-square quadcopter drone, which Lauren had placed on the ground two hundred metres from the well. The rotors spun up and the craft took off for a pre-planned coordinate, thirty metres from the hut. While the direction was pre-programmed, Tovah used a targeting screen with facial recognition capability. It had picked out Sachs, Yuen, the electrician and the three bodyguards.

Tovah used the touchscreen to green-light the three bodyguards' faces, then pressed T on the keyboard to make them active targets. As soon as the In Range icon flashed up, Tovah pressed the Q and W keys simultaneously.

Out by the well, James instinctively covered head with hands as the drone skimmed overhead. Its final approach was the last thing the bodyguards ever saw, turning their heads as a pair of drone-mounted machine guns blew them apart.

As Sachs, Yuen and the electrician dived for cover, Lauren and Bruce moved from the opposite side of the derrick towards a line of parked vehicles. Bruce shot the driver of the equipment delivery truck through the head as he stood smoking a cigarette. The two Mercedes that Sachs and Yuen had arrived in had armoured gla.s.s, which made them more problematic.

As Lauren lobbed a grenade under the equipment truck, Bruce fatally shot the driver of the first Mercedes as he stood by his car making a call. The second car was an ML-cla.s.s four-wheel drive people carrier. There was a reserve bodyguard asleep on the back seat, but the driver was at the wheel and got the engine running.

The tyres were reinforced, so Bruce targeted the pa.s.senger side window, taking chunks out of the bulletproof gla.s.s as the driver hit the gas. Bruce was almost through the gla.s.s, when he saw the bodyguard open a port in the side window and take a couple of shots back.

's.h.i.t!' Bruce shouted, starting to run as the Mercedes roared off and the grenade under the equipment truck exploded.

While Lauren and Bruce dealt with vehicles, James and Ryan approached their targets.

'Come with me,' Ryan said. 'We've got bikes to get you out of here.'

James covered the electrician. 'Wrists together,' he shouted, as he pulled out a set of plasticuffs. 'Put these around. We won't hurt you if you don't give us s.h.i.t.'

'Where's the boy?' Ryan asked, referring to a lad of about thirteen who'd been running back and forth helping the electrician.

'I think he went to the electrician's van to fetch something,' Sachs said, as he glanced warily at the a.s.sa.s.sin drone hovering fifty metres overhead.

As James pulled the cuffs tightly round the electrician's wrists, Ryan saw the boy dart out from under the hut and charge towards him with a screwdriver, screaming something in Arabic. Ryan tried to kick him down, but the a.s.sault rifle and a heavy pack threw his balance and the kid somehow got the screwdriver deep into Ryan's bicep.

Ryan roared in pain, feeling his arm lock up and his neck muscles spasm.

The boy kept running. James took aim and had a clear shot between the lad's shoulders that would have blown his heart out through his ribs. But the electrician was yelling, 'Have mercy for my son,' in Arabic.

James raised his muzzle a few centimetres and sent the boy scrambling for cover with a shot that went high over his head.

'Get back here, boy,' James yelled, in wretched Arabic.

'He's just going to cuff your hands,' Ryan added, as James fired another warning shot.

As the boy stopped running and turned, hands raised in surrender, Tovah's drone swooped in from behind and ripped him in half with a dozen bullets. James swore furiously as the electrician started screaming. James wanted to say something, but what do you say to a man who just watched his son die? All James could do was keep rolling.

'Bikes,' James spluttered, head spinning as he made hand signals for Sachs and Yuen to get moving. 'Ryan, can you take Yuen with you?'

'Haven't got much choice,' Ryan said, as Lauren and Bruce came running in from the side.

'Mercedes got away,' Bruce said. 'Why'd Tovah shoot the boy?'

'How the h.e.l.l should I know?' James roared furiously. 'Let's get out of here.'

There were four dirt bikes hidden at the roadside. Smoke from the burning truck cut the air as James grabbed his bike and eyeballed Sachs.

'You been on a bike before?' James asked, as Bruce and Lauren kick-started theirs.

Sachs shook his head anxiously.

'You let me ride,' James said. 'Sit up straight, put your arms around my waist. Tight, but not so tight that I can't breathe. OK?'

'There's roadblocks,' Sachs protested. 'We're eighty kilometres from the border.'

'You think we're that dumb?' James said irritably. 'Just do what you're told. We need to get out of here.'

The drone stood sentry overhead as Lauren and Bruce sped off across country. Ryan and James made more gentle starts, so as not to terrify their greenhorn pillion pa.s.sengers.

'Tovah,' James said, shielding his view to avoid a final look at the teenager. 'We're heading out. Bruce said one Mercedes got away, so they could have radioed for help. What can you see?'