Jane Blonde: Spylet on Ice

by Jill Marshall

  Janey told her about the news item. ‘I’m sure it was really near the Sol’s Lols headquarters.’

  They checked again by Googling the news item, and sure enough, when G-Mamma magnified the picture a hundred times on to the fridge, the lolly structure of the headquarters building could clearly be seen. ‘There’s something going on,’ said Janey. ‘A big chunk of ice just pops out of nowhere, really near a SPI location?’

  G-Mamma pointed at the fat seal enjoying his siesta on the iceberg.

  ‘Seems fishy to you, does it?’ G-Mamma snorted. ‘Get it? Fishy? Seals eat fish . . . oh, never mind. Maybe it is a bit suspect.’

  ‘A bit? Copernicus has broken his spies out of captivity in the Antarctic, and that’s right where Dad is, and suddenly there’s an iceberg at his headquarters?’ Janey pulled a Back-boat out of one of G-Mamma’s many cupboards. Last time she’d gone to Sol’s Lols HQ it had been very useful. ‘They know there’s nobody covering Sol’s Lols.’

  She ran around the room, yanking open cupboard doors and pulling out hats and scarves, a new Girl-gauntlet and a woolly left glove, and a broader ASPIC she’d spotted on a back shelf, white and gleaming and decorated with pink snowflakes. ‘Is this a snowboard?’

  G-Mamma was watching her with folded arms. ‘Kinda. It’s an ice pick.’

  ‘Oh.’ Janey looked at the board, disappointed. ‘But aren’t ice picks supposed to have pointy bits on them?’

  ‘Not an ice pick,’ said G-Mamma. ‘An ISPIC: Ice SPI Conveyor. It’ll get you around in snowy conditions much better than your ASPIC, which can freeze up after too long in the cold.’

  ‘Great!’ Janey added it to the pile on the workbench. ‘Then I think I’m ready to go.’ She wrapped a fluffy scarf around her neck, jammed on some pink fluffy earmuffs and grinned at her SPI:KE.

  ‘You’re going nowhere, Missy Christmas! Better go and spend some QT with that mother of yours or she might get suspicious.’

  Janey stopped short. G-Mamma was right. Not only would her mum wonder what had happened to her if she disappeared now, but the news teams sent to cover the iceberg might question what a young girl in a Lycra snowsuit was doing crawling all over it in the middle of the afternoon. ‘OK, but I’m going tonight,’ she said eventually.

  ‘Yes, you are.’ G-Mamma suddenly grinned delightedly. ‘Seems like you’re getting your icy mission after all, Blondette. Cold and bold, that’s you, girly-girl. Cold and bold!’

  The rapping had begun before Janey could get out of the room.

  ‘Yo, there’s a story to be told

  About a Spylet cold and bold.

  Cold and bold, yeah, good as gold!

  Cold and bold and not too old!

  Yerp-yerp, let me hear you,

  Yerp-yerp!’

  Back home, Janey tried not to laugh on her way downstairs. Her dad might think that he didn’t need her, and that she couldn’t cope in snowy conditions, but here was her chance to prove him wrong. She was going to help him whether he liked it or not.

  Jane Blonde was back in action.

  icebergs, spicebergs

  As Janey’s cells shot out into the stratosphere, thinking became a little more difficult, but she still had enough power in her separated brain particles to hope that they’d got the footprint right. If the Satispy by which she was now whizzing around the Earth didn’t land her in the correct place – directly on top of the iceberg – then she was in for a cold, damp night. She’d left a pillow in her bed to look like her, but she’d better be back in time to dry out.

  She tried to focus on the downward journey as her various body parts began to drift back together and one eyeball and then the other returned to their rightful positions. Her nose took another moment to arrive, just as her feet reconnected with her ankles. Below her was the iceberg, and there, visible through the night-vision lenses of her Ultra-gogs, was the plump, lazy seal as seen on TV.

  ‘Whoops!’ said Janey. She didn’t have an awful lot of control over where she landed, but she knew that seals could be quite nasty and territorial; she certainly didn’t want to make one mad by falling on it, so she angled her legs to the left and managed, just, to avoid contact by landing at an awkward angle and slithering over the side of the iceberg. Just before she plummeted into the freezing water, Janey plunged her frozen ponytail into the ice. Like a tiny platinum axe, it split the solid iceberg just enough to wedge itself into a crack enough to stop Janey’s slide into the water. She ground to a cold and painful halt, her feet dangling perilously over the icy depths.

  ‘Not as painful as a seal bite,’ she told herself sternly, then stopped short. As her Ultra-gogs had kicked in only when she was just above the seal, she had no information yet to tell her whether there was anything – or anyone – but seals on the little frozen mountain. For all she knew, the other side of the iceberg could be swarming with spies. Added to that was the fact that various spies involved with her past missions had been turned into animals by her father’s processes, so the seals themselves might be the enemy. Anchoring herself on her bottom, Janey slid upwards until her hair popped out of its crevice, and looked around.

  The lazy seal peered at her with eyes like chocolate buttons, and for one moment Janey was very tempted to reach over and pat it. How could something so cute be dangerous? Then she checked herself. Trouble was about as adorable as an animal could get, but if he didn’t like or trust someone then he made them very aware of the fact, spitting and arching his back and sometimes popping out his lethal sabre claw. At least this seal appeared to be on its own.

  On hands and knees, Janey crawled around the entire iceberg. It was the size of a large house or maybe the roof of a small palace, with its craggy outline and slippery sloping surfaces. It took her about twenty minutes to go full circle, during which time she met a dozen more seals tucked away in sheltered corners, found a series of little holes that she’d seen on the TV (where geologists had bored down to discover more about the iceberg) and negotiated a lot of chilly, jagged ice.

  ‘G-Mamma,’ she said into her SPIV – the SPI Visualator she hung around her neck whenever she was on a mission, ‘I can’t see anything funny about this iceberg. Other than that it’s here where it shouldn’t be.’

  G-Mamma’s mouth appeared, chewing furiously.

  ‘What are you eating?’ hissed Janey.

  ‘Cake,’ mumbled G-Mamma. ‘Battenberg. You know, iceberg, spiceberg, Battenberg – it was driving me wild. So is it time for the Back-boat?’ she said indistinctly through a mouthful of marzipan.

  Janey nodded. ‘I’ll get to the shore and go up to Sol’s Lols, see what’s going on up there.’

  ‘Check in again when you get there.’ An enormous upright thumb appeared in the SPIV, and then it fell silent.

  Grinning, Janey reached around for her Back-boat. It looked exactly like an ordinary school backpack, but as soon as she flung it in the water it let out an enormous hiss, startling a couple of the seals. They slid into the water, alarmed, as the little rectangle of rubber expanded, inflated and turned into a decent-size dinghy with a small but powerful outboard motor. Janey climbed in a little unsteadily, keen to stay out of the water herself, and pretty soon she was safely installed. She pulled the cord to start the motor and puttered across to the lake’s edge.

  Beyond the bundles of reeds she could see the tall lolly of Sol’s Lols, mostly in darkness now as it was the middle of the night. It was all Janey could do not to laugh – the only other time she had been here was for her very first mission, when she had known so little it was amazing she hadn’t been killed. Now here she was, alone, unworried, trusting that all her spy instincts that sat below the surface would ensure that she would triumph.

  Janey drew up at a small pebble beach and looked around. Nothing. She was relieved to find there were no reporters camped out nearby, but when she climbed to the top of the small shale hillock that cut off the lake from the grounds of Sols Lols she discovered that there was nothing else either. ‘Zoom, ill
uminate,’ she instructed her Ultra-gogs. Now, through the enhanced binocular vision of her spy-glasses, she could look around the whole of the building. It sat in darkness. Apart from a lone security guard, who appeared to be playing Grand Theft Auto and not doing much security, Sol’s Lols was empty.

  ‘Oh.’ Janey was almost disappointed. She’d been so sure that she’d get here to find hordes of enemies poisoning the place with their evil, and she’d been even more sure that she’d be able to take them on single-handed and win back her father’s favour. In truth, she’d been looking forward to the battle. ‘Maybe I’m turning into G-Mamma,’ she thought. ‘G-Mamma,’ she said into the SPIV, ‘there’s nothing here. My spy instincts must be out of tune . . . I might as well— Hang on.’

  ‘Have you seen something?’ squeaked her SPI:KE, as excited as Janey at the thought of a proper mission.

  ‘No, but I’ve just had an idea while I was thinking about my instincts. Which are all under the surface, aren’t they?’

  In the Visualator screen G-Mamma’s round eyes blinked rapidly. ‘You’ve lost me.’

  ‘What’s special about icebergs?’

  ‘I don’t know! They’re . . . pointy? Slippy? They . . . star in films with Leonardo wotsisname?’

  ‘Yes!’ hissed Janey. ‘Ships like the Titanic bump into them because most of an iceberg is UNDER THE SURFACE.’

  ‘Aha!’ G-Mamma’s face started to bop up and down as she started one of her cheerleading chants. ‘She’s got it, oh yeah; Spylet’s got it, oh yeah! Hey, where are you . . . ?’

  Without waiting for instructions, Janey had turned around, jumped back into the boat and pushed herself out on to the lake. As soon as the Back-boat was in deeper waters, she chewed hard on her SPIder and tipped herself over the edge. The water was icy, and in seconds she could feel every bit of her that wasn’t protected by her SPIsuit start to pucker with cold. Her cheeks ached with it as oxygen shot through her nasal and throat passages, but she tried to ignore it as she forced herself deeper into the black depths, moving towards the iceberg. Treading water, she strained to see through the Ultra-gogs. What could she make out? A light . . . a light of some kind, and shapes moving around in it, but nothing she could work out. It was too cold and too dark to be clear.

  She broke the surface, gasping. ‘G-M . . . M . . . Mamma . . . There’s something g . . . going on . . . but I can’t stay in the water.’

  ‘Climb back in the boat, Blonde,’ instructed G-Mamma, ‘and X-ray the iceberg.’

  Once in the boat, Janey pointed her face at the iceberg and muttered an instruction to her Ultra-gogs. The ray first revealed a dozen or so seal skeletons, just as they would appear on a hospital X-ray. Below the surface of the water it was hard to make anything out, but Janey did notice a large outline, just below the waterline. It was seal-shaped, but it wasn’t throwing out a skeleton like all the other seals.

  ‘Okey-doke, Blondey, get closer and hold the Gogs up to the SPIV,’ instructed G-Mamma.

  Janey edged the Back-boat as close as she could to the iceberg. In the water beneath her loomed the dark outline of yet another sleek, enormous seal, and Janey clung to the sides of the dinghy as the seal’s movements rocked it from side to side. ‘I’m X-raying now,’ she said as the turbulence subsided. ‘Um, take a picture.’ To Janey’s relief, her glasses clicked and whirred. She held the SPIV up to the Ultra-gogs. ‘Can you see that?’

  ‘Whoo, I certainly can!’ G-Mamma clapped her hands ecstatically. ‘And it’s not a real-deal genuine seal at all. I’ve never seen one before, but I’ve heard about them. Can you see that little wheel inside it? And the other mechanisms? It’s a mini-submarine disguised as an aquatic mammal, used only by spies, as far as I know – a Navy Seal. Get in there, Blonde!’

  Janey looked around as she heard G-Mamma clapping and chanting,

  ‘We’ve got a seal,

  A seal with a wheel,

  And how does that feel?

  It’s a Navy Seal!’

  Janey grinned. Here was a new challenge. The mini-sub was completely submerged, and she couldn’t begin to imagine how she was supposed to get into it without the right code or control. There was certainly no way, however, that she was going to find out by hanging around on the surface of the water. Grabbing her SPIder again, she backward-rolled over the edge of the boat and swam down to the Seal.

  Adjusting her Ultra-gogs, Janey paddled all around the submarine, which didn’t take long – although it was vast for a seal (and looked amazingly like one), it was tiny for a submarine. Janey estimated that it would hold one person, who would have to get in at the back and lie full length inside the Seal.

  Swimming as quickly as she could, Janey made her way to the triangular fin that pointed out from the back of the mini-sub. Below it were two large feet, or . . . propellers! Looking at them more closely, Janey could see that these flippers would waggle back and forth to drive the mini-sub through the water. The entrance had to be somewhere around the tail fin. There! thought Janey, spotting a ring around the body of the Seal, a few inches up from the tail. The tail fin was actually a seal-sized plug that screwed in like the top of a hot-water bottle.

  Janey beached the Navy Seal up on the iceberg, so that it was half in, half out of the water, and scrambled up beside it. Once its tail was clear of the lake, she took hold of the fin and pulled. Nothing. She tried to brace her feet against the surface of the iceberg, but couldn’t get any grip and instead found herself slipping down and under the submarine. It was too close; any more mishaps and she might just find herself trapped between the Seal and the iceberg, never to be released.

  Suddenly she heard a noise below her. Two more Navy Seal subs were about to emerge from the cloudy depths of the lake. Janey couldn’t hang around any longer. She needed to be either inside the Navy Seal, or out of the way completely. So she turned to the trusty gadget that had saved her dozens of times before.

  ‘I wish Trouble was here,’ she muttered, thinking enviously of his sabre claw. With mere seconds to go before she was discovered, she held up her Girl-gauntlet and popped out her new titanium blade from the index finger. Wriggling it into position in the ring around the tail-end of the Navy Seal, she started to saw. Just as the noses of the other two Seals peeked above the surface, Janey felt the tail give under the pressure of her Girl-gauntlet; she chiselled away for a moment more, then grasped the tail in her Gauntleted hand and twisted. ‘Yes!’ She’d probably broken the screw mechanism – it might even leak – but at least she could get out of sight.

  The plug-end of the submarine now lay on the iceberg behind the body of the Seal, and there would be nobody to fasten it up again after she crawled inside. Quickly Janey squatted down and thrust her entire body into the Navy Seal. Next she positioned her Fleet-feet facing the plug-end of the submarine. ‘Don’t let me down,’ she said under her breath. Her Fleet-feet had worked magnetically before, and to her delight this time was no exception. The metal tail of the Navy Seal spun on the ice a couple of times then headed straight for her Fleet-feet and the plug slammed into place. She was locked inside the Seal. Janey whooped loudly, then reached out her hands for the controls.

  ‘Where . . . where? What do I need? Oh, it must be that,’ Janey muttered.

  There were two buttons in front of her – a red one marked ‘Launch Missile’ and a green one labelled ‘Go’ – as well as a joystick. She smacked the green button and ducked her head as two Navy Seals glided past her, straight into the side of the iceberg. Then she made her way down into the chill, inky depths of the water, towards a mysterious light in the distance and the other two Navy Seals, who appeared to be burrowing straight into the rocky sides of the lake.

  sol's lols revisited

  ‘G-Mamma, this is wrong,’ said Janey.

  A booming voice erupted from her chest. ‘What’s wrong? Don’t get yourself trapped in there, Bungling Blondey. I’m not right behind you this time.’

  Janey winced. She didn’t want to remember the terr
or-tube incidents. ‘I’m looking at something very peculiar. Right under the lake, just round from this little shale beach I was on, the cliff goes way down. And there’s a hole in it with light coming out of it.’

  ‘You mean the cliff’s going to collapse? Get yourself out of there, Blonde, and that’s an order!’ G-Mamma’s voice was shrill with worry.

  ‘It’s not going to collapse – at least I hope not, because there are loads of Navy Seals, and . . . divers, yes, ordinary divers, going in and out of the hole. And I just saw two Seals disappear straight into the iceberg. There must be tunnels, in the cliff and in the iceberg.’

  ‘Which means it’s not an iceberg at all, it’s a spiceberg! Some offshore spy station. The only question is, is it your father’s?’

  Janey had no idea. Just because her father was involved in a mission at the Antarctic didn’t mean he would have stopped operations elsewhere. There was every chance that these were her father’s spies. But what would they be doing under the lake? There was only one way to find out. ‘I’m going through the hole,’ she said firmly.

  G-Mamma sounded as though she was smiling. ‘Go to it, Blondette.’

  So to it she went, right up to the cliff-face, nudging her way along between other Navy Seals. She couldn’t see in to assess whether the Seal pilots looked like friend or foe – one-way glass, she suspected – but just to be sure she couldn’t be recognized, she tucked her ponytail down the back of her SPIsuit and thrust her red woolly hat over the top.

  ‘Here we go,’ she murmured. The massive hole in the cliff-side was only a few metres away. Keeping her face as much out of sight as possible, Janey pushed the little wheel in the Seal slightly upwards and entered the tunnel.

  ‘Wow!’ she gasped. It was not at all like Janey had imagined it would be, like pot-holing, having to squeeze herself along a tube like a rat in a drainpipe. This tunnel resembled an underwater motorway, with heavy traffic of Seals, slightly bigger submarines with great drills on the front of them that reminded Janey of swordfish, and occasional lone divers swimming in either direction in strict lanes.