She waved a hand held gadget up and down my body and confirmed the chip was working properly. She smiled again, ticked a box on a paper form, asked me to put my shirt back on and called in her next victim.
Chapter 7 - Boot Camp
Early the next morning, and still nursing our bruises, three army transport vehicles arrived to pick us up from outside the Academy building. Each truck took about ten of us, sitting five aside in the back. Perkems was allowed to ride up front, in the passenger seat of the first truck. We were driven further than I had ever travelled before. It must have been a hundred miles or so.
The convoy left the web of roads, that interlinked cities such as Jasperton, far behind. The quality of the road surface gradually diminished until we were driving along a dirt track and occasionally having to avoid fallen trees and boulders. Eventually we arrived at a checkpoint and were waved on by the guards into a huge restricted area comprising both moorland and woodlands set aside for artillery and infantry training manoeuvres.
We piled out of the lorries onto a grassy clearing, surrounded by trees. Major General Horton was there to meet us. The gold star on each of his epaulettes sparkled in the sunlight. He twirled the ends of his magnificent handle-bar moustache whilst Perkems got us into line and standing to attention.
The Major General welcomed everyone to ‘Camp Wildfire’, and he introduced a Major Rufuss who was apparently responsible for designing and setting up the forthcoming exercises. ‘While here, all you Academy people will be known as Red Troop,’ he said. ‘You will be competing against your opposite numbers in Green Troop and Blue Troop - they are to be made up of regular army recruits. If they do well this week they will be officially awarded the rank of Private. You have been specially invited to give them some decent competition. My old friend Perkems tells me you have been training hard and are ready for this challenge. Rest assured, you will not be at any disadvantage during the exercises. Advanced personal electronic devices are to be banned. Therefore like you, every trainee or recruit will have to rely on their own physical strength and mental agility. I expect you to give them a good run for their money. Good luck to you all.’
The Major General also had a surprise for us. He put his hand on Perkems’ shoulder. ‘As a mark of respect for a former colleague, I am temporarily giving Perkems here his old rank of Colour Sergeant back. He will be gathering information on your individual performance during these exercises and you are to listen carefully and obey his commands for your own safety.’
At that moment, Green Troop and Blue Troop arrived on the scene and Major Rufuss handed out the first batch of written orders to their Cadet Officers and also to Perkems.
After reading his orders, Colour Sergeant Perkems puffed up his chest and barked loudly at us, ‘Right you ’orrible lot. This is your first exercise. The Troop to erect all their tents first gets to put up the Mess Tent and as their reward they will also get to eat first.’
Perkems looked over his shoulder for a signal from Major Rufuss and then shouted, ‘At the command to pitch tents. PITCH TENTS,’ and we all set to work.
Our practice sessions at the Academy had been really worthwhile. We took off our backpacks and smoothly erected our personal tents ready for inspection.
Despite the other Troops arriving later than us, and starting to pitch their tents after us, they beat us to the finish. The regulars had inflatable tents. Each guy just had to pull a tab and up went their personal shelter. All they had to do after that was knock in a few tent pegs into the metal eyelets protruding around the base.
We didn’t mind this initial defeat, however. Firstly, we all thought the use of inflatable shelters was cheating. Secondly, the winning Blue Troop then had to erect the rather more conventional and very much larger Mess Tent which took them a couple of hours and was a sight to behold.
Green Troop, finishing second, were ordered to put up a smaller Command Tent but that had to be completed to perfection. It had to be fit for use by the Major General and his cronies.
Naturally, there was a penalty for coming in last. Perkems made our Troop dig soak away drains for the showers and similar holes, a short distance away, for the Toilet Tents.
We were starving hungry by the time the smell of hot food came wafting across the camp. We queued up behind the others and eventually we were given a warm drink, a dollop of creamed vegetables, and a bowl of rice pudding.
Over the next few days, we had a very early breakfast then cleaning details and tent inspections. This was followed by a number of activities intended to see what we were capable of doing, both individually and in teams of four. We also kept a close eye on the regular trainees in order to see what kind of opposition we might be up against later in the week.
The army had provided a number of Officer Cadets and Lance Corporals to guide and instruct the teams of four as they arrived at the start of each exercise. They also timed how quickly we could carry out activities such as mountain biking and what Tom declared as his favourite sport, white water rafting.
It was then we first noticed that Tom had a habit of producing a wild Tarzan-like cry when he felt he was out-of-control. He briefly yelped, ‘Oi-aye,’ every time his raft suddenly dropped through rapids. He shrieked, ‘Aye-eee-aye,’ as he pushed himself off to fall down the sheer face of a death slide. He emitted a deeper and more sustained ululation as he swung through the trees on a rope. All these crazy sounds earned Tom a new nickname, ‘The Loon’.
Perkems came to watch us climbing cargo nets and abseiling between some of the tallest trees in the woods. He shouted a surprisingly wide range of ex-military profanities to gee us on. His outbursts were particularly effective at extracting that last ounce of effort, when our lungs were burning and our muscles were telling us to quit. He also used some colourful language to strongly advise Tom he should cut out all that yodelling noise, unless he actually wanted to give his position away to an enemy.
For many of the recruits, it was the first time they had experienced the great outdoors for real. On one of the nights we had to leave our tents behind and sleep in our own shelter made by bending over young trees and covering them with ferns.
We were pleased to discover the Academy had provided us with the physical fitness to rise to these challenges and also the discipline to listen to and remember what our instructors were telling us.
This first few days of trials went smoothly apart from one incident. We were paired up to shoot clay pigeons. In our pairs, we were asked to rotate around a number of canvas hides with a different type of gun in each. Most of the firearms were antique shotguns.
Well, Ellie and Gerland had just left one of the hides when Tom and I took their place. Tom seemed particularly eager to get into the hide first. The next thing was he very nearly shot me. Fired at such close range, the blast punched a big hole in the canvas to the side of the hide.
An instructor ran over and reprimanded Tom for not pointing the shotgun in a safe direction, towards the open front of the hide, at all times. Tom admitted that he should have known better, but he also insisted he had not pulled the trigger. The instructor checked his story by snapping open the barrels and reloading the weapon. Sure enough, as he closed the action, the gun went off - this time harmlessly making a small crater in the grass. The instructor apologised to Tom for giving us a faulty weapon and swapped it for another one. Later on he came looking for us. He said he had found some grit inside the trigger mechanism, but had no explanation as to how it had got there.
My favourite activity was driving an ultra-modern tank and firing its laser cannon at targets more than a mile away. I found aiming a laser was very much quicker and easier than firing a bullet or shell, and I became really good at it. It was particularly satisfying to find I could accurately vaporise any target I chose.
Ellie liked the half day paint balling session more than anything else. She was fascinated when learning about military strategies and enjoyed putting them into practice. She found that donning camouflage, and
then hiding under bushes, behind trees, and inside derelict buildings, all very exciting. She loved the thrill of successfully ambushing a detachment of trainees from Blue Troop.
Furthermore, during that same paint balling exercise, Gerland actually did emerge as the strong leader we all thought he had the potential to become. He had a knack of coordinating the final stages of an attack by silently directing us with his fingers. As expected, Perkems was delighted with him.
The week drew on, and the activities grew more and more physically demanding. We had to complete a ten mile assault course. It was a gruelling ordeal which involved crossing rivers on rope swings, climbing up walls made of tyres and mountains of hay bales, negotiating barbed wire and electric fences, running through fire, wading waist deep in mud and crawling through plastic tunnels - some half underwater - to finally arrive at a group of purpose built, smoke filled, derelict houses. There we had to climb through windows, run through doors and jump off a roof to finish.
Whilst I was in one of the mock burning buildings, there was an explosion in another room. No-one was hurt. I assumed it was just part of the exercise.
Back in the Command Tent, the Major-General and his senior officers were able to watch our progress as little dots on an interactive display. The position of each dot was determined using information obtained by bouncing radio signals off those tracer chips under our ribs. On the whole, the officials were very pleased with our results. They confirmed Perkems had indeed prepared his people well for these exercises. I believe they even opened a book so they could bet on which of the Troops, Red, Green or Blue would win our last challenge.
Later on, I was standing, fully clothed in the showers, along with a dozen other lads, as we washed off thick cobs of mud from our uniforms. Gerland was in the middle of gelling and spiking his hair when he slid back to being his old self for a moment. ‘Did you see the Loon stuck on top of that wall?’ he said. ‘He looked like a sitting duck on a fairground shooting range.’
Tom tried to laugh it off but he admitted his legs seemed so heavy at that point. ‘It was not just the effort of climbing up there,’ he wailed. ‘It was also the weight of the mud filling all these pockets down the length of my trousers. I just couldn’t swing my legs over the top of the wall for a minute or more.’
That night, several cadets and teams of recruits met up in the Mess Tent for some cocoa and a snack before going off to bed. I overheard a trainee Ordnance Officer complaining that a box of hand-grenades had gone missing, and that got me thinking about my experience in the burning building. I walked over to several other tables and asked the men whether they had encountered an explosion in the mock village. They looked at me as though I was mad. Quite emphatically, ‘No,’ they all agreed. You can probably guess what I started thinking, but who would do such a thing and why would they do it? Any other night I would have lain awake puzzling out an answer to those questions, but I was exhausted and tomorrow was going to be a very big day for us.
After breakfast we were addressed by Major Rufuss who explained that the final exercise was yet another assault course, this time involving the use of live ammunition. To heighten the feeling of being in a war-like situation, we were also to be issued with rifles that had fixed bayonets attached; another first for the Academy students.
Perkems gave each of our teams of four a paper map of the course and strict instructions to stay true to the route marked on it in red. He put Gerland in charge of our team and made it clear this was a race. To win the race we had to get all our team members over the finishing line before anyone else.
There was a cross country run to start with. ‘To sort out the men from the boys,’ the Major had said. Ellie fumed. ‘I’ll be showing your men a thing or two,’ she muttered under her breath.
We started to run. It was hard going. There were dug out trenches, bomb craters, gorse bushes, hills and mud slides to negotiate.
We had to shoot our rifles at several targets positioned along the way, and stab at swinging punch bags with the bayonets. Large field binoculars and strategically placed television cameras allowed the officers to watch us from a safe distance and to assess our performance.
At one point, we had to crawl on our stomachs under coils of barbed wire. On either side of the course there was a battery of remotely controlled weapons. We scrambled along the ground with real bullets whizzing over our heads for only about thirty seconds but it seemed like an eternity.
Gerland snagged his jacket on the barbed wire and had to leave it behind. Then, as we started to run through a wooded area he caught me up. I had slowed down trying to find my way. There was a maze of broken brick buildings and crumbling concrete shelters that were half hidden between the trees. Gerland flagged me down and because he was ‘in charge’, he insisted I gave him my jacket. I cursed, but handed the jacket over to him. It would not have gone down well with Perkems had I disobeyed a direct order from teacher’s pet.
Tom had a painful stitch in his side when he met up with us, and Gerland was well out of breath. So they decided to stay put for a while. I left them resting there and ran on.
Ellie was well in the lead now, determined to prove her metal and beat the men. I could see her starting on the final leg of the race. It was just a sprint across a long thin open field. To up the ante, robotic artillery positions were firing live shells all over the field. As Ellie ran, I could see plumes of dirt bursting into the air just behind and in front of her. Of course this was a training exercise, and we all knew the robot guns were using our tracer chip information to deliberately miss us. Nevertheless, it was frightening to look at and really awesome to partake in.
I started my run and got about a third the way across the field. I looked over my shoulder to confirm Tom and Gerland were still behind me. I could see them emerging into the open between some trees on the edge of the field.
In the fleeting moment that I was looking at Tom and Gerland, they suddenly disappeared. I realised they must have fallen into an old basement. I looked around for help, but no-one was nearby. In the distance I could see Ellie reach the finish line, pursued by half a dozen exhausted looking young men.
I turned around, and started running back towards the trees. Then quite unexpectedly everything went quiet. On the earlier part of the course, the remote controlled machine guns stopped working. The robotic shelling, of the field that I was in, had also ceased.
After running just a few paces, I noticed all the artillery gun barrels swivelling around and pointing towards the entrance of the field. They then started a relentless barrage. Shell after shell burst all around the hole where Tom and Gerland had fallen. Just a couple of direct hits and that old basement roof would have collapsed.
Something had to be done and quick. On the side of the field I spotted a row of parked up tanks. They were the tanks we had trained on the other day. I had to disobey orders now. I had to run off the course. I have never run as fast in my life. I ran to the nearest tank and climbed in.
Mercifully the engine started up first time, and its primary weapon powered up in just a few seconds for me. I set the sights and fired the laser cannon at one of the artillery positions. The now hostile gun leapt into the air engulfed in flames, its unused shells exploding and bursting out of the fireball in random directions.
Turning the turret of my tank, I fired more laser blasts, systematically taking out all the artillery positions. Job done, I switched off the engine and climbed out into the daylight. Once again the whole area was deathly quiet. I ran over to the basement Tom and Gerland had fallen into, ahead of several other recruits now running back from the finish line.
What a relief. The basement was not very deep. When the shells started exploding around them Tom and Gerland had given up trying to get out of the hole. They were still crouched together, hiding from the light, when I found them. They were trembling, and covered in dust. I held out my hand, Tom grabbed hold and I helped him out. Then I pulled Gerland from the hole. They were both somewhat deaf a
nd shell-shocked but otherwise okay. They had been incredibly fortunate to have fallen into that basement just before things turned really nasty.
A couple of recruits helped Tom to stand up. I assisted Gerland onto his feet and we started walking towards the finish line.
As we strode across the field, I asked Gerland why he thought the artillery had developed what appeared to be a personal vendetta against him and Tom. I had only just asked that question, when Gerland noticed there was something strange in his jacket pocket. He put it into my hand and I could see that it was some kind of electronic device. I called Tom over to look at it.
‘I know what that is,’ Tom said. ‘It’s a homing beacon. It works like painting a target with laser light. The guns were aiming at that.’
‘But how could they? They were programmed to miss us, weren’t they,’ I exclaimed.
Tom thought for a moment and said, ‘Well, perhaps the Ether is out of action. That would change the priorities of the guns. A local homing beacon might take precedence over the training programme.’
Gerland suddenly regained all his faculties, pushed a finger into my chest and blurted out, ‘I am wearing your jacket. It must have been you the guns were really aiming at!’
By now a number of trainees and officers had gathered around us and the three of us were carried shoulder high to the finish line. We were given a hero’s welcome. Pushing through the gathering crowd, Ellie came over to give the three of us a pat on the back as soon as she could. She didn’t seem as overjoyed to see us as the others. I suspect she was disappointed at not being the centre of attention, having won the race. In her haste to prove herself better than the men, she must have forgotten our team of four had to finish first to win properly. Anyway, after our little incident no-one cared who had actually won the race.
When the last straggler had crossed the line, we were in for another surprise. Major Rufuss ordered us to march over to the Command Tent and assemble there in ranks. There was going to be a very important announcement of some description.
Escaping the Sun Page 5