Black Op

by Tom Palmer

  Hatty realized she had to do something radical, so she snapped.

  ‘Go upfield!’ she shouted at Rio. ‘We need a goal. You’re the only way we’re going to get one.’

  ‘While you lot let another one in?’ Rio yelled back. ‘How can I?’

  ‘So what if we let one more in? We need to take a risk. We’re better at attacking than defending, therefore we should attack. If we don’t score in the next three minutes, we’re out anyway.’

  With that, Rio paused. Hatty was right. But would he admit it? She waited for a response from her team captain.

  ‘OK,’ Rio spluttered. ‘But I’m going to go mad after this! It’s a joke you lot playing for England.’

  ‘Fine,’ she agreed. ‘Go mad. But let’s get out of this hole first.’

  And, to her surprise, Rio did what she said. He went to stand on the halfway line.

  Hatty made sure the next time the Faroes came forward that she won the ball. She gave it everything, took possession and fired a long hard pass upfield.

  To Rio.

  Hatty watched Rio control it, take it past two defenders, advance on goal, wait for the keeper to commit himself, then hammer the ball to his left. It flew hard and straight, a few centimetres off the ground all the way into the back of the net.

  4–4.

  The England players mobbed their captain. Everyone off the pitch was looking at him, cheering. He’d saved them.

  Hatty caught the eye of Jim on the touchline. But he wasn’t looking at Rio, like everyone else. He was looking at Hatty and he was clapping her.

  A 4–4 final score meant a penalty shoot-out. Five shots each. The team that scored the most would win.

  Adnan saved every shot aimed at his goal. Three out of three. Leaping to his left, leaping to his right and tipping the third over the bar. And that was enough because England had converted their first three. The shoot-out ended 3–0.

  It was over. England had won.

  At the end Rio jogged over to Hatty and Adnan, who were standing together. Hatty was not sure what to expect, so she was surprised when Rio shook Adnan’s hand.

  ‘Well played. You’re a good keeper,’ Rio said to him as Kester caught up with them and clapped Adnan on the back.

  ‘Brilliant, mate,’ Kester said.

  Then Rio stopped in front of all of them, glaring at Kester. ‘But just because he saved three penalties, don’t think that I’m not going to go crazy in there. The argument is only just beginning. I want you five off the team.’

  Kester’s Challenge

  Kester drew back from the players as they funnelled towards the tunnel under the main stand. He wanted to be sure to shake every Faroe Island player’s hand, having noticed that Rio, the so-called captain, hadn’t. He knew it was important to show respect to the opposition, whoever they were and whatever the score.

  He had another reason to hold back too. If Jim wanted to talk to him, this would be the only opportunity before they were with everyone else in the dressing room, before the inevitable post-match squabble.

  ‘How are we going to play this?’ Kester asked Jim when they were alone.

  Jim smiled. ‘It won’t be easy, Kester. That was a close game. If Rio starts saying our defence is shaky, he’ll have a point.’

  ‘He’s a big problem,’ said Kester.

  ‘He is,’ Jim nodded, ‘but spying is a problem, a series of problems that we have to overcome. Look: you were in danger when you monitored the target last night. But you improvised and came back with more information than we imagined you would. If anything, this new situation is more dangerous. If we don’t get you close to that group of men in the next few days, we’ll have nothing. The whole mission will be washed up. We need to get out there again tonight …’

  ‘Tonight?’ Kester was shocked.

  ‘Yes. Tonight.’

  ‘The others are shattered, Jim.’

  ‘Well, we’d best go and get Rio sorted, so you can all go and have a sleep then,’ Jim continued. ‘We need intelligence, like what’s inside the metal container that Lily saw and what they are planning to do with it. If we can find that out, then we’ll be so much closer to knowing what Svid is planning and how we can stop it. The hardware they have will determine what they’re going to do – and how.’

  ‘But why would Svid want to do anything like this?’ Kester asked. ‘I still don’t get it.’

  ‘A number of reasons. But the main one is that he hates the Russian government because they are England’s allies now, sort of, so he wants to undermine Russia’s relationships with other countries. And this would be perfect. Imagine a Russian murdering the whole of the England team. Diplomatic relations would never survive that. Svid liked it best when no one trusted anyone else, when the Russians spent a lot of money on spies and defence. If that all comes back, he’ll be rich and powerful again. That’s his motivation.’

  ‘Sounds like a headcase,’ Kester offered.

  ‘He is that,’ Jim smiled. ‘Look. I suspect our team will be going out in the next round, so then we’ll all be on our way home. That makes tonight all the more important.’

  ‘OK,’ Kester said. ‘That’s fine. Who have we got in the next round anyway?’

  Jim grinned.

  ‘Who?’ Kester pressed.

  ‘Spain,’ Jim replied, deadpan. ‘The favourites.’

  Kester put his hand to his head. ‘Oh no …’

  Jim and Kester could hear shouting as they approached the England dressing room, but as soon as Jim entered the room, the noise stopped.

  ‘OK,’ said Jim. ‘What’s going on?’

  Rio stood, red in the face and surrounded by discarded boots, shin pads and towels.

  ‘Yes, Rio?’ Jim pressed.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Rio stated in a quiet voice.

  Kester almost smiled. This was good from Rio. He was showing uncharacteristic control.

  ‘You don’t understand what, Rio?’ Jim asked, still calm.

  Rio edged forward across the tiles towards a massage table that stood in the centre of the room.

  ‘This new defence, with respect, Jim, is not good enough. We’re representing England here. And, apart from Adnan at the end, I’ve seen nothing to suggest these are quality players.’

  ‘Give it time, Rio,’ Jim countered. ‘You’ve not played together before. And we improved as a team as the game progressed.’

  ‘With respect again, Jim, we were playing the weakest footballing nation in Europe. I take it Spain beat Poland?’

  ‘They did, Rio.’

  ‘So we have to play Spain next. If anything, Spanish youth players are better than the adults. They’ll pass the ball through us like a knife through butter.’

  Jim nodded. ‘Like I said, Rio, we’re improving as a team. We’ll do more defensive work. It’ll be OK.’

  ‘Not against Spain,’ Rio argued. ‘They’ll crush us.’

  ‘We have the players we have, Rio,’ Jim said, his voice rougher now. ‘I’m the coach and I’m going to get you through this. You’re the captain, Rio, and a good one. Let’s try to sound like we’re on the same side, yes?’

  Rio shook his head, but said nothing: Jim had argued him down. But now Georgia was on her feet.

  ‘They’re not good enough to defend for England,’ Georgia stated, glancing at the Squad, who were sitting with their backs to a tiled wall.

  ‘Like I said,’ Jim repeated, ‘they’re improving.’

  ‘But they’re not good defenders,’ Georgia went on. ‘They don’t know how to do it. They’re not fit to wear the shirt.’

  Jim was cross now, but there was not much else he could say. He was in an impossible position. The Squad were weak defenders. They weren’t fit to wear the shirt. Not this shirt. If only he could explain to the rest of the team that the new defenders had been brought in to protect the England men’s team, then he fe
lt sure that even Rio and Georgia would understand. But the mission was a secret and it had to stay that way.

  And because Jim had no answer that would satisfy Georgia or Rio, there was still too much doubt about the Squad, meaning the success of the mission was in the balance. Kester knew that it was now or never. He had one card that he thought he could play. Something that Georgia had said. It might work. It might not. But he had to give it a go.

  ‘Rio?’ he said, standing to face the captain.

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Do you agree with that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That if we can’t defend, we shouldn’t be allowed to play. That if someone doesn’t do their job, they shouldn’t be allowed to do it again.’

  Rio nodded.

  ‘So what is a captain supposed to do?’ Kester asked.

  ‘Captain,’ Rio replied with a grin.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Boss the team on the pitch.’

  ‘And …’

  ‘Er …’ Rio looked puzzled for a moment before answering. ‘Represent the team off it.’

  ‘So why did you storm off the pitch after the game and not shake hands with any of the Faroes players?’ Kester held up the Faroe Island shirt he had just swapped for his England top. ‘We’ve just scraped past a minnow. They nearly had the result of their lives against a massive footballing country – England. The home of football. And the England captain didn’t even shake their hands at the end.’

  Rio looked embarrassed. He had no answer to that.

  ‘So do you accept that if we failed as defenders, then you failed as captain?’ Kester concluded his argument. Rio didn’t respond. He just looked furious.

  There was silence in the room. A silence that none of the players or Jim seemed ready to fill. Kester understood that he could take control now, he could fill the silence.

  ‘How about a challenge?’ he said.

  The rest of the Squad looked at Kester, puzzled.

  ‘How about you try to captain five of your attackers against my four defenders and Adnan in goal? Attack against defence. Then we’ll see who lives up to their title. Good captain or good defender?’

  Rio was grinning. ‘Bring it on,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be a walkover.’

  Kester looked at the Squad members’ faces as Rio spoke. All four were open-mouthed and horrified. But Kester hoped that, rather than having put them in an impossible and humiliating position, he had just in fact saved the day and deflected the heat from Jim and their mission tonight.

  Plain Sailing

  The Squad met Jim in Adnan’s room after the rest of the players had gone to bed. Jim needed to brief them about the night’s mission: the helicopter was picking them up in two hours at the same spot as the night before.

  ‘Right,’ Jim said, ‘we know where the target has settled for the night. They’ve crossed the border into Poland, as we expected. We have images from the drone and satellite.’

  ‘Where are they?’ Kester asked.

  ‘About two hundred kilometres away in a steep valley with a meandering river at the bottom,’ Jim said. ‘There’s a single track to the building they’re staying in. It’s a mountain refuge in a canyon: just a wooden hut really. There are lots of huts like that scattered through the mountains.’

  ‘And they’re guarding the track,’ Hatty added. ‘So we can’t go along that.’

  ‘They appear to have set tripwires on the track, yes. But that does create an opportunity.’ Jim’s voice was slightly uneven as he spoke and the five children knew they were about to hear why they were not going to have an easy night.

  The helicopter took the Squad swiftly across the mountains and forests of the far south-east of Poland, covering part of the same terrain as it had the night before. It dropped them in a remote part of the Bieszczady National Park, by a wide river, with no towns or villages for kilometres. Just like the night before, they had all changed into black clothing and smeared their faces with cam cream.

  Soon the five children were standing by a wide, shallow river under a dark but star-scattered sky. According to Jim’s briefing, the last part of their journey would be made by raft.

  They found the raft easily. Six medium-sized trunks bound to each other by twisted rope.

  ‘Is that thing safe?’ Hatty asked. ‘I mean we arrive on a secret twenty-first-century helicopter to find that the next stage of our journey is on a pile of logs.’

  Now everyone was looking at Adnan who knelt to study the raft, testing the tension of the rope and feeling the wood to make sure it was sound. Eventually he turned to Kester.

  ‘You’re in charge now, Adnan,’ Kester said. ‘Anything on the river is your call.’

  Adnan nodded, a serious look on his face. ‘The raft is sound,’ he said. Then he picked up a long wooden pole. ‘The pole is to steer it with and it’s only effective if a river is calm. And the intelligence said it was calm all the way, didn’t it, Lesh?’

  Lesh consulted his SpyPad. ‘Yes. All the way down to the target and beyond. It should be flat with no rapids. We’re just going to be drifting.’

  ‘Good,’ Adnan said. ‘Look, we trained for this in England. It was pretty rough there too. This is going to be like punting in Cambridge compared to that. It’ll be fun. Let’s get on board.’

  ‘Fun?’ Lesh muttered. ‘There’s an armed gang of psychos at the other end.’

  They launched the raft by pushing it into the shallows and quickly distributing their weight. Hatty stayed in the water at first, to guide the raft away from the bank, up to her hips in the river before she scrambled aboard.

  ‘Cold?’ Adnan asked her.

  ‘Just a bit,’ Hatty said with a false smile.

  Adnan took the wooden pole and began to use it to guide the raft along the river in the dark. Lesh and Lily sat at the front, night-vision goggles on, directing him away from outcrops of rock. There were not many obstacles though, and the water was slow and easy to navigate.

  Lesh sat with the SpyPad hidden under his jacket, so that its light didn’t show, having linked it to a satellite above. He monitored where they were, a red dot flickering on the map of the river as they made their way. When he looked up, he saw Adnan smiling.

  ‘Why are you grinning, Adnan?’

  ‘Good memories actually,’ Adnan replied.

  No one responded: they knew he was thinking about his parents in a happy way. He often talked about how they had taken him rafting. The others knew to let him enjoy it. Most of the time their memories were bad.

  The Squad had three hours to complete their mission.

  First, take the raft seven kilometres downriver to the target.

  Second, observe the target and check out what materials the men had with them.

  Third, get back on the raft and navigate it to a helicopter pick-up point another eight kilometres downriver.

  All without being seen.

  The rafting along the river was, as Adnan had said, easy. No rapids. No dangerous bends. No sudden drop in the water level. They moved swiftly without any worries, until they neared their target, the river moving faster as they got closer. Now they were near, they started tensing up: there was less talking, tighter body language and invisible signals passing between them to say that it was nearly time to get to work.

  For the last kilometre they travelled in silence. Adnan kept the raft in the deeper, smoother water, to avoid making noises that might give them away.

  In their minds they were all rehearsing their role in the mission.

  Kester, Lesh and Hatty had to climb the gorge’s side and direct – using the night-vision equipment and radios – what Lily and Adnan would do below.

  Lily and Adnan needed to get close to the hut, locate the container that Lily had seen the night before and work out what was in it. Was it military hardware? And if so, what?

  Lily
also had to listen in to gather any more intelligence and, if possible, put tracking devices on rucksacks and the large metal box.

  That was it.

  Then they had to get out of there.

  When the raft reached the place they needed to disembark, the Squad climbed off one by one, as Adnan held it steady.

  They were at the bottom of a dark canyon. It was a black enough night, but without light from the moon, it was dismal. They all fitted their night-vision goggles to help them see, but it remained murky. Tree branches and other plants dangled around them, dripping water on their faces. There was no sound of animals or birds. They could smell the rotting vegetation in the still air.

  ‘OK,’ Kester whispered, their heads all close together. ‘We all know what we have to do. Just remember we’re up against men that Jim rates as among the most dangerous in the world. They won’t be expecting us, but they’ll be brutal if they catch us.’

  Everyone nodded, then they were off.

  Kester, Hatty and Lesh scrambled up a steep hillside to where they needed to be within ten minutes, moving round the back of the target to stay concealed. They had to negotiate rocks and scree, but it wasn’t too difficult. When they emerged above and behind the mountain hut, there was no sign of the men, just a night-vision green scene below. So green it was like they were at the bottom of the sea.

  When Lesh saw a flicker of light coming from inside the wooden shack, he nudged Kester. The men must be inside. There were no other bodies visible.

  ‘All clear,’ Kester whispered into his mic and he settled down to monitor Lily and Adnan.

  Because they were higher than the river now, they could hear its sounds. It was noisy, water being thrown wildly against rocks and forced through channels.

  ‘I thought the river was meant to be calm,’ Hatty whispered. ‘For us to get away.’

  Kester nodded. ‘It does sound like rapids.’

  ‘How are we going to get the raft down rapids when we’re done?’ Lesh asked.