by Stuart Gibbs
“Okay,” Erica told me. “Grab the casing with both hands and we’ll lift it off. Very carefully.”
I grabbed the casing. So did Erica. We lifted as gingerly as we could. It came off with surprising ease, revealing the guts of the bomb beneath.
There were two yellow canisters marked with radiation symbols and more skulls and crossbones. They were strapped together with duct tape and surrounded by a nest of red wires, all of which were connected to a digital timer.
The timer indicated there were only two minutes and five seconds left until detonation.
My stomach was well past doing backflips. Now it did a triple axel roundoff with a twist.
Even Erica seemed shaken. “Crap on a cracker,” she said under her breath.
“Another problem?” asked Cyrus.
“We have less than two minutes to defuse this thing,” Erica reported. “And there’s a whole rat’s nest of wires.”
“Just clip the red one,” Cyrus told her.
“They’re all red,” Erica informed him.
“They are?” Cyrus asked. “Curse those Soviets! Everything always had to be red with them.”
“So which one should I cut?” Erica asked.
“It’s hard to know without looking at it,” Cyrus said.
There were now only ninety seconds left on the timer. Erica pulled out her phone. “I’m going to take a picture and send it to you,” she said, then glanced at the screen. “Actually, scratch that. I don’t have any reception.”
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to wing it, then, sweetheart,” Cyrus said.
“Wing it?” Erica’s normally calm voice cracked. “But . . .”
“No ‘buts,’ ” Cyrus said. “You know more about bombs than any girl your age. More than most people, period. You can do this.”
Erica nodded, gathering herself, and then looked at me. “One of these wires must connect to the detonator. The rest are triggers. So we need to find the right one and yank it. If we pull the wrong one . . . we all go kablooey.”
I inspected the bomb. I couldn’t even see the detonator. It was wedged below the yellow canisters beneath the snow. And it looked like every wire was snaking down toward where that might be.
The snow groaned and shifted again. A few chunks by the edge split off and dropped into the canyon.
The sound of the helicopter’s rotors grew louder and louder. A wind kicked up around us. I figured Cyrus was lowering the copter toward us, and Alexander was probably playing out the tether, but I couldn’t take the time to look up. I needed every bit of focus, every last fraction of a second to scan the tangle of red wires, looking for the one that would shut the bomb off.
There were only sixty seconds left.
I didn’t have the slightest idea which wire was the correct one to cut. And neither did Erica.
But then something occurred to me. “Why would all the fake wires be triggers?” I asked.
“Because that’s the way bombs are made,” Erica said.
“Is it? I mean, building in a whole bunch of triggers seems kind of overzealous, doesn’t it? That assumes someone’s going to be defusing the bomb, which probably doesn’t happen very often. I mean, I know we’ve had to defuse a bomb before, but overall, that’s pretty rare, right?”
“I suppose,” Erica said.
“Honestly, I’ve never defused a bomb in all my years in the Agency,” Cyrus admitted.
I looked to Erica, who seemed just as surprised as I did. “Never?” she asked.
“It’s not like this kind of thing happens every day,” Cyrus replied.
“Well, maybe all these other wires are just a busted goose,” I suggested. “They’re only there to distract us. You know, so we waste time trying to figure out which wire’s the right one, until it’s too late.”
Erica considered this. A few more seconds ticked by. We were down to only twenty-five.
The snow groaned and shifted more. A large chunk only three feet from us fractured off and fell away.
“I don’t have any better ideas,” Erica admitted. “Let’s pull all the wires.”
“Really?” I asked.
“It’s better than doing nothing. If the bomb’s gonna blow, it’s gonna blow.”
“I agree,” Cyrus chimed in. “Yank them.”
So we did. We ripped every last wire out of the bomb.
It didn’t blow up.
But the timer didn’t stop, either. It kept on ticking down. Eight seconds. Seven seconds. Six.
I looked to Erica helplessly, out of ideas.
She was looking at me the same way.
And then, to my astonishment, she kissed me.
I had encountered a great number of startling things since coming to spy school, but this rocked my world more than all of them put together. It was very quick—after all, the world was about to end—but it was definitely the greatest few seconds of my entire life. I was terrified of dying, but at the same time, oddly thrilled that I was getting this experience in right under the wire.
The timer ticked to zero.
Nothing happened.
Erica pulled away from me, looked at the bomb curiously, then rolled her eyes. “Oh, man,” she muttered. “We disconnected the bomb, but not the timer.”
It took me a bit longer to recover. “So . . . we’re not going to die?”
“Not from the blast. Plummeting is still a likely option, though.” She glanced up toward the helicopter and spoke over the radio. “We need that tether ASAP.”
“We’re getting it there as fast as we can,” Cyrus replied.
“Well, get it here faster,” Erica said. She was behaving as though the kiss had never happened, back to her normal, rational, unemotional self.
But then, I needed Erica to be her normal, rational, unemotional self in that moment. Because I was on the verge of freaking out.
The snow we were on was definitely sliding toward the edge of the cliff. And even though the bomb we were with hadn’t exploded, it was still a nuclear bomb. Dropping it from a great height might very well still set it off.
The helicopter hovered fifty feet above us, as close as Cyrus dared get. Any closer and the rotors might have clipped the steep slope. Alexander was lowering the tether as fast as he could. The big reinforced loop at the end dangled just above our heads.
Erica stood to reach for it. The snow shifted ominously with her movement.
She was about to grab the tether when a wind kicked up, jostling the helicopter. The loop swung past her fingertips.
“There’s a spool of filament wire on my utility belt,” she told me. “Tie one end to the bomb, then get ready to move out. We’re going to have to act fast.”
I grabbed one end of the filament and did as ordered. It wasn’t easy, though. My hands were growing cold without my gloves, and the thin wire was hard to handle with my numb fingers. Plus, the bomb and I were both sliding toward the edge of the cliff. I raced to get the wire looped around one of the yellow canisters, then tie a knot.
More snow dropped away into the chasm, only a foot away from us. The chasm was now so close I could see down to the bottom of it. It was like standing at the top of a skyscraper.
The tether swung back over us. Erica lunged and grabbed it. “Ben! Time to go! Now!”
“One more second,” I said, struggling to cinch the knot.
“Now,” Erica ordered.
I pulled the knot tight, then stood. The snow under us heaved and rushed toward the edge of oblivion.
Erica already had the tether’s loop around her torso. She quickly swung it over my head and brought it up beneath my armpits.
A second later, we slid over the edge of the cliff.
Only, we didn’t drop. The tether held us in the exact same place, as though we’d stepped onto some invisible platform.
The bomb dropped, though. It toppled over the edge of the cliff and plummeted until the filament snapped taut with a twang. Erica grunted in pain from the sudden extra weight.
But that was all the discomfort she allowed herself. “We’re good,” she told Cyrus over the radio. “Get us out of here.”
“Roger.” The earth dropped away below us as the helicopter lifted us up.
The tether was pinioning Erica and me together, face-to-face. We were now dangling several thousand feet above the ground, in a freezing wind, with a nuclear bomb tied to us. But we were still alive, and we’d saved a good section of Colorado from nuclear annihilation. So we had that going for us.
Erica plucked the microphone out of her ear and indicated I should do the same.
As we were face-to-face, this seemed like a perfectly good time for another kiss. A much longer one, maybe.
Only, I didn’t get it.
“That kiss didn’t mean anything,” Erica told me. “We were in a tight spot, and you were about to lose it, and I didn’t want your last moments on earth to be terrifying.”
“Okay.” I was disappointed that a second kiss hadn’t come, but at the same time, I couldn’t help smiling. Because for once in my life, I knew something that Erica was trying to keep secret. I’d overheard her on the lift with Zoe. And Mike, who knew far more about girls than I did, had provided confirmation.
Erica Hale liked me.
Maybe she didn’t have a massive crush on me, the way I had a crush on her. And maybe she was way too focused on becoming a spy to even consider having a boyfriend. But she at least liked me enough to be jealous of Jessica Shang, which was something.
Which meant she was lying. She hadn’t kissed me merely to calm me down in my final moments alive. Erica had thought those were her final moments too. She’d wanted to kiss me.
“Why are you smiling?” Erica asked.
“I’m just happy to be alive,” I said.
Erica gave me a hard stare, like she didn’t believe me. “You can never tell anyone about what happened here. If you do, I will find you . . .”
“. . . and you’ll kill me,” I finished. “I know the drill.”
We were rising slowly as Alexander winched the tether into the helicopter. In a few seconds, we would be back inside, safe and warm again.
But despite the cold and the height and the nuclear bomb and the fact that my feet were in agony after way too much time in ski boots, I found myself savoring those moments, dangling high above the mountains with Erica. Because I knew Erica as well as anyone. Once we got back home, she would do everything she could to avoid a relationship with me—and to be honest, I now understood why. As Operation Snow Bunny had just proved, emotions could severely complicate missions. And Erica and I had many more missions ahead of us.
So that kiss was probably all I was going to get from her for a long, long time.
And yet . . . she’d still kissed me.
It was a start.
January 1
To:
CIA Director of Operations
RE: Operation
As I’m sure you’re aware by now, despite your concerns, our junior agents performed exceptionally well on their recent mission. Not only did they uncover , but they also were of invaluable assistance in . Due to their efforts, Leo Shang has been captured, along with several associates (although once again, that rapscallion Murray Hill appears to have escaped).
Therefore, I recommend commendations—as well as high grades in Undercover Work and Bomb Defusion—for agents and on this endeavor. I also recommend passing grades for young agents and . As for agent , the less said about his performance, the better. We might consider holding him back a year.
One final note. An issue I have expressed concern about before came back to haunt all of us on this mission: . However, while young appearance at first threatened to derail , he ultimately proved himself surprisingly capable and resilient in the face of danger. To that end, please disregard my previous recommendation that we deal with Mr. by termination. Instead, I believe we should recruit him to the . He would make a welcome addition to our ranks, and given his performance, possibly even rival as a young agent someday.
Sincerely,
Cyrus Hale
P.S. My sources indicate that may not only still be in existence, but fully recovered from and plotting . In the very near future, we may have to activate agents and for Operation Muskrat.
STUART GIBBS is the author of the New York Times bestselling Spy School and Moon Base Alpha series, the FunJungle series, and The Last Musketeer. He has also written the screenplays for movies like See Spot Run and Repli-Kate; developed TV shows for Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, ABC, and Fox; and researched capybaras (the world’s largest rodents). He has never worked as a spy—but then, if he had, he couldn’t tell you anyway, because it’d be classified. Stuart lives with his wife and children in Los Angeles. You can learn more about what he’s up to at stuartgibbs.com.
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Simon & Schuster
New York
Visit us at
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Also by Stuart Gibbs
The FunJungle series
Belly Up
Poached
Big Game
The Spy School series
Spy School
Spy Camp
Evil Spy School
The Moon Base Alpha series
Space Case
Spaced Out
The Last Musketeer
SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2016 by Stuart Gibbs
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Book design and illustration by Lucy Ruth Cummins
Map illustration by Ryan Thompson
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gibbs, Stuart, 1969– author.
Title: Spy ski school : a Spy school novel / Stuart Gibbs.
Description: First edition. | New York : Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, [2016] | Summary: Twelve-year-old Ben’s unexpected success outside the classroom causes the CIA to activate him for a mission to become friends with Jessica Shang, daughter of a suspected Chinese crime boss.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015037993|
ISBN 9781481445627 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781481445658 (eBook)
Subjects: | CYAC: Spies—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Skis and skiing—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.G339236 Ss 2016 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2015037993
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