The General

by Robert Muchamore

  ‘Wasn’t there a bus stop back the way we came?’ Kevin asked.

  ‘I think that was the massive queue we walked past,’ Bethany said. ‘We’ll probably be better off walking.’

  23. HOME

  Like most real developing-world towns, Fort Reagan had few street signs, and to confuse troops the maps everyone was issued with contained many inaccuracies. Of course, this also confused civilians and Meryl and the ten cherubs ended up doing several detours before they finally found their homes for the next two weeks.

  Fort Reagan had sections designed to mimic different real-world cities, so the accommodation varied from low concrete sheds made to resemble shanty towns, to large private houses and high rise blocks. Meryl’s party had four apartments on the fourth floor of a drab concrete block. Kazakov and Mac had been allotted a pair of detached houses in the next street.

  The apartment interiors had been designed to minimise the chances of anything getting broken by the bored and frequently drunk college students who usually occupied them. They had bare concrete walls, white tiled floors and bathrooms with indestructible steel fittings like you’d expect to see in a prison cell. The kitchens had a few cheap utensils, plastic plates, plus a fridge and rather sorry-looking cooker and washing machine.

  ‘Depressing,’ James said to Rat, as they unpacked their clothes in a cramped bedroom with two single beds covered with army issue blankets and a sign on the wall saying that the United States Army reserved the right to charge for property damage.

  ‘I like the bare concrete walls and the vague whiff of plumbing,’ Rat smirked.

  ‘Aye aye,’ James said, staring out of the window and seeing a college girl standing in the opposite block. She was reaching back to put her long hair into a clip and her raised arms accentuated her breasts. ‘Oh for a face full of those beautiful watermelons.’

  The thought of watermelons sent Rat charging towards the window, but he was slightly disappointed. ‘Nice,’ he said. ‘But they’re mangos at best. You were doing better than that with Dana.’

  James turned sharply towards Rat. ‘Don’t talk about her.’

  Rat didn’t answer because the college girl had spotted them ogling her and was flicking them off and mouthing something that ended with the word perverts.

  ‘Aww, come on baby,’ James shouted. ‘Give us a flash.’

  Rat collapsed on the bed laughing as the girl opened her window and yelled at James. ‘I’ll get my boyfriend over there and he’ll kick both your asses.’

  ‘I’ll pay five Reaganistan dollars per nipple,’ James shouted, as the girl furiously slammed her window shut and pulled down her roller blind.

  Rat thought this was hilarious, and he was still lying on the bed convulsing half a minute later when Lauren walked in.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Rat snorted. ‘Just observing James’ ultra-smooth technique with the ladies.’

  Lauren waved a hand in front of her face. ‘It’s probably better if I don’t know … Meryl had a phone call from Kazakov. He’s calling a strategy meeting in fifteen minutes, he says we’ve got to get ourselves organised before the Americans start searching.’

  James stepped out into the hallway and was surprised to find a heavily built Englishman peering out of the living-room window. He was only average height, but he was almost as wide as tall and he definitely wasn’t the kind of guy you’d want to mess with.

  ‘Have you met the sarge?’ Lauren asked. ‘He’s on the level, he’s worked with CHERUB before.’

  ‘Sergeant Cork, SAS,’ the big man said, raising one eyebrow as he gave James and Rat crunching handshakes. ‘We’ll have sixteen of my boys helping out Kazakov with the day to day running of the insurgency.’

  ‘Cool,’ James said. ‘And what’s so exciting about our balcony?’

  ‘Looks like you can clamber on to the roof from that window ledge. We’ll be able to set up a lookout and see any army patrols coming all the way down from their base.’

  ‘Sounds a bit much,’ James said.

  ‘Not if we want to keep our weapons for more than a day or two,’ the sarge smiled. ‘I’ll pencil you in for a midnight to four a.m. watch, shall I?’

  ‘Not bloody likely,’ James grinned. ‘Besides, if you start using kids as lookouts the Yanks will suspect us. Better to use one of your boys.’

  To minimise suspicion they walked to Kazakov’s house in small groups. James went with Rat and Lauren. At the end of their street was one of the two dozen cafés run by soldiers which would sell you a meal for two Reaganistan dollars. Despite his giant breakfast James stopped off for a burger while Lauren and Rat bought cans of drink and samosas.

  As they stepped out with their food a pair of patrolling soldiers offered them a polite good afternoon and said that there was a hundred Reaganistan dollars for anyone who gave them accurate information about weapons or insurgents.

  ‘There are a few shops in the town centre that sell PSP games and stuff,’ one soldier added. ‘So it’s worth your while if you hear anything.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Lauren said brightly, as the soldier looked away. But her tone changed once they were out of earshot. ‘Everyone in town is gonna snitch on us if they go around doing that.’

  ‘At least the veggie samosas are good,’ Rat said, before looking up towards a faint buzzing sound in the sky overhead.

  The pilotless white drone had a reflective dome built into its belly, which bristled with surveillance equipment.

  ‘No expense spared,’ James said warily, as he looked up. ‘Those things have laser guidance systems controlled by the remote pilot. They fire an invisible beam down at the target. The missile detects the beam and it hits the target dead on.’

  ‘Can’t blow buildings up on a training exercise,’ Rat said. ‘But that thing would certainly spot one of Sarge’s rooftop lookouts in two seconds flat.’

  *

  Kazakov’s house was luxurious on the outside, with a mowed lawn and neatly trimmed hedge, but apart from the rooms being bigger it was fitted out in exactly the same spartan style as the apartment where the kids were staying.

  The eleven CHERUB agents, plus Meryl and the SAS sergeant gathered in a basement room which couldn’t be looked into either from the paved street or from the apartment block directly behind it.

  ‘I’ve split insurgent operations into three cells,’ Kazakov explained. ‘The sarge and I are the only contact points between them. Cell one is already working to create a secure environment for Mac. Cell two consists of the majority of the SAS team, who will be working with our eight hundred civilian sympathisers.’

  ‘We just got offered money to snitch on the way over here,’ Lauren said. ‘How do we know we can trust them?’

  ‘You can’t be totally sure,’ Kazakov said. ‘But the insurgents are on an extra twenty dollars a day and they won’t get that if they switch sides. Plus, I’ve been given my own supply of Reaganistan dollars so we can do some bribery of our own if the right opportunity arises.’

  ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme,’ Jake shouted. ‘I’ll shoot all the Yanks you like if you give me enough for an X-box game.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Bethany tutted. ‘This is serious.’

  Kazakov continued. ‘Cell two’s job is to keep supplies of weapons and ammunition secure, harass and shoot at American patrols with simulated ammunition, plant paint bombs and smoke grenades and generally make life difficult for the Americans.

  ‘Cell three comprises the people in this room and our job is to implement my special strategy.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Jake asked.

  Kazakov smiled. ‘The Americans are expecting us to be ducking and weaving. So our plan is to go all out and attack their base and force a victory.’

  James looked aghast. ‘Well I count fourteen people in this room and there are supposed to be fifteen hundred American troops.’

  ‘I can count,’ Kazakov said. ‘But the Americans have rigged the ratios so that they ca
n make their training exercises look good. Conventional military wisdom is that you need one soldier for every ten civilians to successfully crush an insurgency. In Iraq, the American forces peaked at one soldier for every one hundred civilians and that’s why they kept getting their asses kicked.

  ‘On this exercise there are eight thousand civilians and one thousand troops. That’s one soldier for every eight civilians. That’s enough troops to roadblock every street and search every home on a daily basis. If we play the way they’re expecting us to, we’ll be lucky if we can keep an insurgency going for a week, never mind put up a fight for the entire two-week exercise.

  ‘Luckily I’ve had a couple of months to plan and I’ve had access to reports on all the training exercises at Fort Reagan since it opened eighteen months back. The first part of my plan was successfully implemented while you lot were having your safety briefing.’

  Kazakov pulled a small receiver unit out of his pocket. ‘The base commander, General O’Halloran, kindly took me on a tour of the military headquarters while you lot were going through induction. Sarge and I managed to place a video transmitter in the room.’

  Sergeant Cork smiled. ‘We’ll know what they’re up to at all times. I’ve got the boys in cell one taking turns to monitor the signal twenty-four hours a day.’

  The CHERUB agents all smiled at this, but they failed to see how one listening device – no matter how well placed – could give them the edge over a thousand trained US troops.

  ‘We can’t do much while the Americans are watching our every move,’ Kazakov continued. ‘Drones like the one James and Lauren saw on the way over here can be left to glide over an area in virtual silence for ten to twelve hours and watch every move we make. As soon as it gets dark, we’ve got to take them out.’

  24. DRONE

  It was dark by six. Fort Reagan felt like a holiday camp, as college-age civilians hung out around the food joints and tiny supermarkets on chilly street corners, eating junk food, talking trash and flirting.

  There was no alcohol on sale and you weren’t supposed to bring any in, but the searches on entry concentrated on X-rays for knives and weapons and it seemed like half the population was getting loaded on vodka smuggled inside mineral water bottles.

  The gainfully employed didn’t have two weeks to take part in military training, so the population divided starkly between college kids and pensioners. Inevitably this caused friction over loud music and people running up and down the corridors between apartments, hurling water and flour at each other.

  The soldiers were ever present. If James looked out of an apartment window he could guarantee that at least one soldier would be in view. Sometimes they were knocking on doors or conducting good natured searches in the street, but as in a real engagement the US Army had been ordered to start gently by winning over the civilians.

  This mainly took the form of soldiers chatting up college girls and letting old men hold their rifles and talk about old wars. James leaned anxiously out of the living-room window when he heard some shooting, only to see that a couple of soldiers had a team of boy scouts standing at the bottom of a drained swimming pool, shooting simulated ammunition cartridges at Pepsi cans.

  For all the realism of the buildings and the weapons at Fort Reagan, James saw a major flaw: the civilians were ninety per cent white and a hundred per cent English speaking. With no language barrier or cultural differences the situation bore more resemblance to freshers’ week on a university campus than a war zone in the third world, while facing the threat of compacted chalk and coloured paint instead of death left a distinct lack of menace in the air.

  James set his watch alarm for 6.30 p.m. and headed down to the lobby with Rat and Jake after it went off. They met up with Bethany and Lauren before heading out into the darkness. Fort Reagan had been open less than two years, but the streetlights were deliberately gloomy and the pavements were laid unevenly.

  A couple of turns took them away from the noise around the fast-food joint and into a narrow alleyway which had been daubed with graffiti and filled with battered rubbish cans to give a sense of atmosphere.

  Torches shone in their faces as they reached the end. Men’s voices and the clank of military hardware sent a chill down James’ back.

  ‘What you kids doing out in the dark?’ an army officer barked.

  ‘Exploring,’ James shrugged, playing up the role of surly teen. ‘There’s sod all else to do.’

  As the three soldiers closed around the kids, one pulled a rustling paper bag out of his flak jacket. ‘Peanut brittle, or marshmallow?’ he asked.

  The kids all dug into the bag.

  ‘Thank you sir,’ Rat said, feigning good manners as he bit into a piece of toffee.

  ‘I wouldn’t stray too far from home in case you get lost,’ the officer said. ‘And it’s best to put your goggles on if you’re walking in the dark. The simulated ammunition we’re using here only stings if it hits your body, but it could damage an eye from close range.’

  The five cherubs nodded obediently as they pulled up their goggles and moved off. James checked back over his shoulder a couple of times, but there was no sign that the soldiers were following as they turned a corner and moved quickly down a metal staircase into the basement of a building designed to resemble a shop.

  The homes, plus small shops and restaurants run by the army, were fitted out, but even the United States military budget didn’t extend to paying for the hundred thousand civilians you’d need to fill the whole of Fort Reagan, so many of the buildings were bare concrete shells.

  There was electric light in the basement, but nobody had bothered sinking the wiring into the walls so strands of loosely tacked cable ran between low-energy bulbs. A nearby water pipe was leaking and mildew sprouted in a puddle at the far end of the room.

  ‘Sarge, Kazakov,’ James smiled, as he stepped in. ‘How are we doing?’

  ‘Good,’ Kazakov whispered. ‘Kerry and Gabrielle are already up there scouting the area. Apparently there’s between six and eight soldiers working the landing strip. Engineers and techies, no sign of any guards.’

  ‘Here’s your kits,’ the sarge said, pointing to a stash of guns and ammunition. ‘Compact machine guns, paint bombs, stun grenades, smoke grenades – don’t get those mixed up – plus gas masks and walkie-talkies. I assume you can all handle that stuff?’

  ‘Course,’ Jake said, as he unzipped his pack and stuffed ammo clips into it before attaching grenades to the belt of his jeans.

  ‘The patrols are everywhere,’ Sarge explained. ‘We’ve got to assume that we’ll be stopped and searched somewhere between here and the landing strip. Bethany, I’ll carry your equipment, you can walk twenty metres ahead. If a patrol stops you, scream like they startled you and we’ll come from behind and ambush them.’

  ‘Are we planning to cheat if we get shot?’ Lauren asked. ‘You know, try washing the paint off or something?’

  ‘No,’ Kazakov said firmly. ‘We want to win, but if you cheat in a war game the whole thing becomes pointless.’

  ‘Besides,’ Sarge added, ‘to discourage dishonesty the paint will foam and spread if you try washing it off with soap and water. If you get shot, spend your regulation fifteen minutes lying dead, then head straight to the cleaning station where they have the proper chemicals.’

  ‘You’re only dead for twenty-four hours, anyway,’ Rat noted. ‘And I heard one of the college kids who’s been here before saying that the food’s better up at the army base.’

  ‘Might as well get shot then,’ Bethany grinned, but Kazakov glowered at her.

  ‘If I see anyone slacking off, they can expect a nice twenty-kilometre speed hike with a heavy pack when they get back to campus,’ Kazakov growled. ‘Is that clear?’

  ‘I was only joking,’ Bethany gasped anxiously.

  ‘How far is the airfield?’ James asked.

  ‘Two kilometres,’ Kazakov said. ‘But we’re taking an indirect route through the back all
eyways so it ends up more like three.’

  As they started heading up the stairs, Sarge pointed at a sealed plastic bag filled with granulated powder. ‘James, you need that as well.’

  ‘What the hell is Phenolphthalein Suspension?’ James asked, reading the label and feeling slightly alarmed by several hazard symbols as he crammed the giant bag inside his backpack.

  ‘It’s a special treat for all my American friends,’ Kazakov said, before smiling cryptically.

  Sarge explained. ‘While the others deal with the airbase, you and I are going to sneak inside American HQ and dump the contents of that bag into their water supply.’

  ‘Laxative,’ Kazakov said, before roaring with laughter. ‘They’ll be shitting like there’s no tomorrow.’

  *

  The tiny jet engine inside the drone cut out as it landed on the short airstrip and rolled silently for a couple of hundred metres before crashing into a green net stretched across the runway. Two technicians ran out and wheeled the craft a few metres backwards before one bent forwards to open a fuelling hatch. Neither man realised that he was being watched through binoculars from scrubland less than twenty metres away.

  ‘That is a nice butt,’ Kerry said. ‘The one thing I don’t like about Bruce is his bony arse.’

  Gabrielle lay flat on her chest as the two men wheeled the drone back towards its hangar. ‘James has a nice butt,’ she said.

  ‘I still can’t believe that ignoramus,’ Kerry snorted. ‘Thinking he can dump me for Dana and then have me back as soon as he fancies it.’

  ‘Men are all pigs,’ Gabrielle sighed. ‘You might as well go for the cute ones, because at least you’ll have some fun.’

  Kerry smirked as Kazakov’s voice sounded in her earpiece. ‘We’re in position. Tell me what you’re seeing, girls.’

  Kerry flipped her microphone down over her mouth and took a quick confirming glance through her binoculars. ‘Two on the runway, one female technician inside the hangar, plus two possibly three remote pilots inside, controlling the drones. Best time to move is when they open the main doors to push the drone in and that should be within the next minute or so.’