‘Death or glory,’ the Führer spat. ‘Adolf never surrendered and I’m buggered if I’m going to. Now grab a gun and help me get the hell out of here.’
The Führer turned as he heard boots coming up the stairs. ‘Stay back,’ he shouted, before spraying bullets indiscriminately down the staircase. Then he looked at James. ‘Why just stand there? Grab a gun or something.’
Despite years of training, James had lost concentration at a critical moment and squandered the opportunity to knock out the Führer before he’d grabbed a weapon.
‘I’ll stay here if it’s all the same,’ James spluttered. ‘Take my chances, do a few years in young offenders.’
The Führer swung the MP7 towards him and smiled menacingly. ‘I wasn’t making a request,’ he said. ‘Fight or die, you little pussy.’
A chill went down James’ back. It wasn’t the first time he’d had a gun pointed at him, but he’d never felt so certain that the person holding the trigger would kill him at the slightest provocation, or maybe even for the fun of it.
There was more screaming downstairs as James rounded the bar. It sounded like Kerry. He stepped gingerly over the blood surrounding Rhino and reached towards the last MP7 lying on the table, but something hit the floorboards a couple of metres behind him and the room began filling with smoke.
‘CS,’ James shouted.
‘Think you’re clever?’ the Führer screamed wildly, before firing the machine gun out of the window.
James’ eyes and the back of his throat burned as the incapacitating gas swirled around him. It was like breathing hot soup, but the Führer managed to grab the collar of James’ leather jacket and yank him towards the back of the room.
He opened a fire door with an almighty boot and James inhaled fresh sea air. They were on a wooden balcony overlooking the waves. In good weather it was Kam’s most sought-after dining space, but today’s wind was bitter and the sea crashed against jagged rocks stretching down more than thirty metres.
The cops had surrounded the three sides of the building that backed on to dry land. They’d assumed that nobody would be crazy enough to jump over the balcony on to the cliff face and the gas billowing out of the first-floor windows made it difficult for them to see what was going on.
‘It’s probably not as bad as it looks,’ the Führer said, as he gave James a half smile. ‘You jump first.’
*
Kerry fell awkwardly, turning her ankle as she slipped between the bodies of the two firearms officers and knocked her chin against the side of the payphone. For a horrible moment, the officers thought they were under attack.
‘Don’t shoot,’ Kerry squealed.
In a state of confusion, one officer backed out of the building, while his colleague found her feet. She aimed her gun up the staircase as planned, but Liam already had his arms aloft in a gesture of surrender.
As Kerry untangled herself from Mr Xu she saw Dirty Dave holding Alison by the throat. He pulled back his arm and punched her in the face with his huge fist.
‘You set this up, didn’t you?’ Dave roared, as he punched Alison again. ‘This isn’t over. We’ll get you. We’ll burn your daughters for this.’
Dave was powerfully built and Alison flopped like a doll as he threw her around. Kam stood in the kitchen doorway yelling at Dave to stop, but could barely move with his dislocated shoulder.
Kerry looked outside hoping to see a line of cops charging to the rescue. But the unarmed officers had retreated back in the road, awaiting an all-clear from the firearms team.
‘Hey, dick wad,’ Kerry shouted, as she stormed into the restaurant.
She ducked as she heard machine-gun fire upstairs. This was Rhino being shot dead, but Kerry had no way of knowing and was scared for James.
Dave laughed at Kerry’s determined expression. Alison was barely conscious after the punches and Dave held her up by the hair, like a limp trophy.
‘Were you in on this too?’ Dave shouted. ‘Come closer, see what you get.’
Kerry didn’t need a second invitation. She hopped forward and pivoted on the ball of her left foot. Before Dave knew it Kerry’s right foot had swung through the air and smashed into his temple. As Alison slumped to the floor Dave crashed against the bar in a daze.
‘Not such a big man now, eh?’ Kerry screamed, and launched the hardest Karate chop of her life. It hit the base of Dave’s skull with such force that his head snapped back, dislodging one of the vertebrae in his neck.
Dave now lay on the ground in between two bar stools, gasping desperately as he realised that he couldn’t feel his legs. Meanwhile, the firearms officer had regained his composure and was coming back through the swinging doors.
‘Hands where I can see ‘em,’ he shouted, approaching with his gun ready to shoot.
‘We’re all good here,’ Kerry shouted as she raised her hands in the air.
‘I can’t move my legs,’ Dirty Dave howled.
Kerry breathed deep as three unarmed officers rushed into the room to take control. Then she looked anxiously up at the ceiling, not knowing whether James was dead or alive.
*
James yelled as he made the three-metre drop from the first-floor balcony. He hit the rocks hard. The tough leather jacket saved his arms, but his jeans ripped and both legs bled as he rested on a natural ledge. It was another twenty-five metres down to the waves.
James had climbed steeper cliff faces during training, but this one was nasty. The sea spray created a perfect microclimate for the slimy green algae that covered most of the rock face. It was slippery as hell, and turned to an oily paste under your fingertips when you tried to get hold of anything.
Up above, the Führer tucked the compact machine gun into his belt and swung his legs over the side.
‘Who wants to live forever?’ he told himself, and jumped off the railing.
The results weren’t good. James was seventeen, he had climbing experience and was in great shape. The Führer was almost sixty and carried a lot of excess weight. After bouncing painfully off the cliff face, he grabbed at a jutting rock, but couldn’t hold on and gained momentum as he tilted sideways and plunged.
James dived to one side, narrowly avoiding the Führer’s falling boot. He’d have bet his last pound that the Brigands’ president was going all the way to the sea, but the Führer’s leg hit a narrow gap between two rocks and became wedged.
The full weight of the Führer’s falling body wrenched against the trapped leg. The thigh bone shattered as a jerking motion dragged the Führer’s lower leg deeper into the gap between rocks. The Brigands National President patch on the Führer’s jacket flapped in the wind as his body dangled upside down, supported by the smashed thigh bone speared through his jeans.
James had seen grisly injuries on missions and in training, but this looked the most painful by far.
‘Please,’ the Führer pleaded. ‘Somebody help me out here!’
James considered climbing down, but the algae-covered rocks were lethal and his eyes and throat burned from the CS gas. Even if James made it there was no way he’d be able to lift the Führer. Instead, he studied the rocks, working out his best path back to the top.
After a precarious swing supported by a single finger hold, James had a simple climb of less than two metres before he reached a steeply sloping shelf. From there he crawled up to the road, troubled only by the last few plumes of CS.
‘Please,’ the Führer was bawling. ‘Somebody get me.’
There were three cops waiting to arrest James when he reached the top of the cliff. He raised his badly grazed hands and they handcuffed him without any fuss. Hopefully John Jones would get him released before he reached the police station.
A smile from Kerry was some relief as he got frogmarched to a police van, but the cuts on his thighs made walking excruciating.
‘How the hell do they get him up from there?’ one of the cops asked as James walked past. ‘Helicopter or something?’
‘
Let him stew,’ an elderly officer standing close to the Führer’s Mercedes replied cheerfully. ‘It’s about what he deserves.’
James thought of all the things the Führer had done - in particular the way he’d killed the entire family of fellow CHERUB agent Dante Welsh - and decided that he wouldn’t mind if the rescue team took its time.
4. NURSE
It was dark by the time Kerry approached the automatic doors of South Devon Hospital. The stress of the mission was off. She was tired but cheerful as she crossed scuffed blue floor tiles and smiled at the nurse reading heat magazine behind a counter top.
‘James Raven,’ Kerry said. ‘He’s in room sixteen J.’
Sometimes you know you’re going to get nowhere and the nurse’s thin lips and raised eyebrow told Kerry this was one of them.
‘Visiting hours is between three and six-thirty.’
‘But I took two buses,’ Kerry lied.
She was on a mission. Her expenses would be paid, so she’d taken a taxi.
‘Rules are rules. Patients need to rest.’
‘But I was told I could see James at any time because he’s in a private room.’
‘Who told you that? Whatever, they’re wrong! Nothing after six-thirty.’
Kerry gritted her teeth. ‘I checked the hospital website before leaving home.’
‘Oh, the website,’ the nurse said, as she cracked a mischievous smile. ‘You can’t take any notice of that. It hasn’t been updated since we opened three years ago.’
Kerry groaned as she backed away from the counter. ‘Thank you for being so helpful,’ she said sourly.
The nurse was used to unhappy customers and took no notice. Outside, Kerry squatted against a bollard and pulled out her phone, intending to call James and tell him that she couldn’t get in. But before dialling she got distracted by the ambulance rolling up at the accident and emergency unit.
A patient and her oxygen bottle were wheeled through another automatic door. Kerry glimpsed a crowded waiting room inside and a glance up the face of the building confirmed that accident and emergency was in a separate building to James’ room, but a covered walkway linked the two.
Kerry hesitated. Her natural instinct was to be good, but she wanted to see James and she’d spent ages working out how to download the news footage of the Führer on to her mobile phone so he could watch it. And besides, this was hardly major crime. The worst that could happen was a security guard kicking her out.
The accident and emergency waiting room was as hot as hell. Druggies and drunks staggered around, sick kids screamed and there were old people who looked like they should be dead already. The only thing missing was the kid with the potty stuck on his head like you always see in movies.
Kerry’s CHERUB training kicked in. The first rule of any break-in was to case the joint. She found a seat in between a kid with a badly gashed knee and an overweight man with breathing difficulties and started looking around.
There was a numbered ticket system for non-urgent patients, but the figures on the dot-matrix board never seemed to change. The receptionists were stressed out with forms and ringing telephones. The PA system paged doctors, requested cleaners, or ordered porters to take patients upstairs for X-rays.
Kerry had come to cheer James up, so she’d dressed skimpily in open sandals, short black skirt and a denim jacket over a tight white T-shirt. Trouble was, it also pleased the dude with barbed wire tattoos sitting opposite.
‘If you stare any harder they’ll pop out on stalks,’ she said acidly, before standing up.
Amidst the chaos, Kerry decided to act confident and hope for the best. She cut purposefully around the main counter, walked between a row of cubicles with the sick and wounded inside, then peered down the corridor that led to the wards.
The door at the far end needed a swipe card, so she pretended to read a leaflet – Are you entitled to a winter flu vaccination? - until a porter strode towards it. She kept a few metres behind, then dived forward after he’d passed through the door, grabbing the handle an instant before it locked.
She held the door until the porter had disappeared, then passed through and turned in the opposite direction. For all her efforts, Kerry found herself standing by a lift, five metres from the receptionist she’d approached ten minutes earlier. Fortunately, the woman remained engrossed in a soap-star sex scandal and didn’t glance up as Kerry waited for the lift to the fifth floor.
The rattly elevator was big enough for two beds. A helpful map on the back wall told Kerry where to go. The corridor into which Kerry emerged had large windows overlooking the car park and surrounding countryside.
James was in 16J, a single room, usually reserved for private patients. When he clambered off the cliff top, James was losing a lot of blood from the cuts on his legs and soon began feeling faint. He’d been ambulanced to hospital and admitted under his mission alias of James Raven. He was still under arrest and had a police guard sitting outside his room.
‘I had a call from the boss to say you might be coming,’ the young officer grinned, as his eyeballs walked up Kerry’s legs. ‘I’ll have to pat you down before you can go in though.’
‘Knock yourself out,’ she said, before sighing and holding out her arms.
‘Biker scum like that in there, doesn’t deserve a pretty girlfriend like you,’ the officer moaned, as Kerry let him look at the phone in her pocket and peek inside her little black handbag. ‘These dudes might look cool on their bikes but…’
‘Spare me the lecture, Granddad,’ Kerry interrupted. ‘Can I go in or not?’
‘Can you believe this shit?’ James called, as Kerry came into his room.
He angrily jangled a hand cuffed to the frame of his bed.
Kerry laughed, then shrugged. ‘It was more important to get you stitched up before you lost too much blood. John said he’s sorting out a helicopter to take you back to campus. You’ll be James Adams again by tomorrow morning.’
‘You know what the worst part is?’ James asked. ‘I can’t go for a piss without that pig out there unlocking my cuffs. He falls asleep, so I was shouting for like half an hour. Then the pervert stands right in the room with me while I’m going. I hope I don’t need to take a crap before they let me out of here.’
‘Now there’s a mental image I could have lived without,’ Kerry grinned.
James wore a hospital pyjama top and boxers. As he sat up Kerry saw the dressings covering large cuts on his thighs.
‘You look bloody amazing,’ James said, sliding his free hand up Kerry’s leg as she perched on the corner of the bed. ‘You should dress like that more often.’
‘Thought you’d like the slutty look,’ Kerry smirked. ‘But never again. Guys keep ogling me, it’s creepy.’
‘You should be flattered,’ James said. He tried pushing his hand up between Kerry’s thighs but she clamped her legs together. ‘Come on. I could totally nail you in that outfit.’
Kerry laughed as she pulled James’ hand off and placed it on the bed. ‘You’re a randy goat. You’d want to nail me if I’d turned up wearing an Eskimo suit.’
‘Yeah,’ James grinned. ‘But not as much.’
‘Lauren said she texted you but you didn’t reply,’ Kerry said. ‘Dante’s well chuffed about the Führer. He says he owes you one.’
‘Cops took my mobile when they arrested me,’ James explained.
Kerry reached into her pocket. ‘I’ve got something for you, actually.’
‘Condoms?’ James asked eagerly.
‘No,’ Kerry said, tutting and shaking her head. ‘Do you ever think of anything apart from sex?’
‘I do think about football a lot, but not when I haven’t touched you all week.’
Kerry ignored James and played with the menus on her phone until she found her video clips. She cued up a news report and passed the handset to James.
The clip started with a helicopter shot of the Surf Club. As the camera zoomed in a voiceover explained how motorcyc
le gang leader Ralph Donnington had tried to escape from a police raid.
‘The picture’s all blocky,’ James complained.
‘I think you can get higher quality, but I was trying to do it quickly,’ Kerry explained.
But once the zooming stopped, the picture improved and James saw a close shot of the Führer dangling by his horribly fractured leg.
‘Oh my god,’ James gasped, as he looked away. ‘That’s bloody horrible. Was this local news, or national?’
‘It started off on local,’ Kerry said. ‘But it got picked up. Now it’s on the BBC, Sky, ITN, everywhere.’
The news reporter spoke through the phone’s tinny loudspeaker. ‘Donnington was left dangling for nearly three hours as an RAF helicopter and the local lifeboat crew tried to find a way of safely lifting the middle-aged biker clear of the rocks. Police also say that they’ve seized over four hundred thousand pounds in cash and a cache of automatic weapons from a lock-up garage near Bath.’
James looked up from the screen as one of Kerry’s sandals hit the floor beside his bed. She then swung her leg across James’ waist and moved forward so that her long black hair dangled in his face.
‘Knew you couldn’t resist me for long,’ James grinned.
‘There’s a cop right outside the door,’ Kerry said. ‘So you’re only getting a snog.’
5. EWW
A week after the Surf Club shoot-out James Adams was back on campus. He had stitches in both thighs, so he walked awkwardly and had to wear shorts or loose-fitting tracksuit bottoms. It was a warm May Friday and most of the bedrooms off the sixth-floor corridor were at least partly open for ventilation.
Bruce Norris’ door was an exception. James figured that his mate was getting dressed or something and charged in hoping to catch him out. A naked girl squealed as she hopped across the floor and wrapped herself in Bruce’s duvet.
‘Haven’t you heard of knocking?’ Bethany Parker shouted.
James’ brain scrambled as he tried to process the scandal before his eyes. Bruce was sixteen but Bethany was two years younger. Bruce struggled with girls, so it was good to see him getting some action, but on the other hand he couldn’t stand Bethany.
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