He grabbed his radio. ‘Looks clear, Sarge.’
By the time Sarge arrived, James had the bag of Phenolphthalein out of his backpack and was ready to slit it open with his multitool.
‘Don’t,’ Sarge gasped. ‘Swallow three specks of that powder and in eighteen hours’ time you’ll be blasting off like the space shuttle.’
Sarge threw James rubber gloves and a paint-sprayer’s mask before clambering up the side of the tank. He flipped up the inspection hatch as James slit the bag and passed it up to him.
Sarge dumped the drug into the giant tank as James went into the SAS man’s backpack for the second load.
‘Piece of cake,’ Sarge grinned as he came down the ladder.
They put the empty drug packets inside a large zip-lock bag, then dumped their gloves and masks inside before sealing it up and dumping it in a large bin nearby. Sarge handed James a bottle of alcohol cleanser.
‘Use plenty,’ Sarge ordered. ‘Do your hands, then your nose and mouth. When you get back to the apartment, ditch the uniform by sealing it in a bin liner then take a hot shower. Until then, don’t eat or drink anything you’ve touched and don’t put your fingers anywhere near your mouth.’
James was stunned by the degree of caution. ‘How toxic is this stuff?’
‘It’s military grade, designed for special ops,’ Sarge explained, squeezing his eyes shut as he slathered his face in the gel. ‘The drug is encased in microscopic plastic caplets that start leaking the drug twenty hours after they first contact water. It takes a thirtieth of a gram to induce severe stomach cramps and diarrhoea.’
‘Not nice,’ James said, glancing at his watch as he slung his pack over his shoulder and headed towards the exit. ‘So in theory, in twenty and a half hours from now every American on this base is going to get a severe dose of the shits?’
‘That’s what Kazakov’s hoping,’ Sarge laughed.
ESCAPE
Mission accomplished, James and Sarge headed back up the rocky path towards the main part of the base. The last of the Hummers stood in a short queue near the gate, waiting for orders on which area they were expected to patrol.
The voice of the officer organising the patrols still ripped across the near deserted parking lot. ‘I want information. I want to see asses kicked! You’re my boys – now get out there.’
‘We were supposed to be in and out before they discovered we’d attacked the drones,’ James complained. ‘How the hell are we gonna get back to base with five hundred guys searching for us?’
Sarge shrugged. ‘If there’s five hundred guys searching for us out there, can’t be many left in here.’
He stepped inside the first of the sixty-metre-long accommodation tents, and shouted, ‘Anyone seen Corporal Smith?’
If the tent had turned out to be full of men he could easily have backed out claiming it was all a mistake. But as Sarge expected, every man and woman had been sent out on patrol. James followed him inside and you could tell from the scattered clothes and miniature TVs flickering in the gloom that everyone had cleared out in a hurry.
The tent was divided into bays, with four beds to each side of a bay. Every fourth bay was a lounge area, with a big TV and either a pool or foosball table. James and Sarge only encountered one man as they passed through. He had a foot in plaster and lay on his bunk in underpants, rocking out to his iPod.
‘This looks as good as any,’ Sarge said when they stopped in the seventh bay, which was just over half-way between the middle and the end of the long canvas dome.
He grabbed clean uniform, towel and boots from an open locker before pointing James towards a plastic shower unit in the far corner.
‘Didn’t we just poison the water?’ James asked warily.
‘There’s plenty in the pipes between here and the tank,’ Sarge explained. ‘It’ll take a good hour or two for it to feed as far as here.’
‘What if anyone comes through?’
‘We’ll figure it out,’ Sarge said casually. ‘I want a shower and clean clobber. Then we’ll chill here for an hour or two and head for home when things calm down.’
James liked Sarge’s plan: he wasn’t comfortable with either the pungent odour of Lieutenant Lopez’s aftershave, or the idea that his clothes might be contaminated with tiny caplets of the Phenolphthalein powder.
The shower was a peculiar affair. The grubby plastic basin flexed when he stepped behind the curtain and he was mystified by the lack of controls until he saw that the shower only worked when you picked up the nozzle and squeezed a trigger.
When he stepped out two minutes later, a heavily tattooed and naked Sarge threw him a towel before stepping in after him. The uniform James put on was still someone else’s, but this time the green T-shirt and sand-coloured trousers were freshly laundered. The only reasonable boots he could find were too big, so he found two pairs of clean socks and gave them a good blast from someone’s deodorant before pulling them on.
‘What did you see?’ a woman asked.
James looked around. His brow shot up as he recognised the female guard from the gate, accompanied by a female officer. They were two bays along, talking to the man with the broken foot. James dived across the aisle towards the shower.
‘Company,’ James said anxiously.
‘So what?’
‘They’re searching. It’s the woman from the front gate.’
‘You serious?’ Sarge gasped, bursting through the shower curtain and grabbing James’ damp towel off the end of a bed.
James took another peek and saw the female guard coming towards them.
‘You go,’ Sarge ordered, as he hopped into a pair of trousers. ‘I’ll catch up.’
But James was spotted as he crossed the centre aisle for his backpack. There was a sharp crack followed by a chalky pink explosion as he dived on to the ground between two beds.
Dressed only in trousers, Sarge grabbed his rifle and did a double tap: two well aimed rounds fired in quick succession. While Sarge covered, James skidded across the vinyl floor and crawled into the next bay, but three male soldiers were coming through the flaps twenty metres ahead.
The tent had zipped exits in the leisure areas and some of these were even left open to let in fresh air, but James wouldn’t get to one before the guards. His only hope was the slot where a portable air conditioner protruded through the fabric.
‘I bloody know her,’ Sarge gasped, firing shots in both directions as James jumped up on a bed. ‘That woman on the gate: she was at a NATO special forces conference in Malta last year. Must have sussed us after we rushed through.’
James hit the air conditioner with all his might. The bed grated backwards and the tent fabric billowed. Most importantly, the air conditioner broke away at the point where it was clipped to the tent fabric. James held the fabric taut with one hand and pounded repeatedly on the air conditioner.
After a dozen painful blows, the air conditioner tilted backwards off its mounting and hit the sand outside with an almighty thunk.
‘Nice one,’ Sarge smiled, keeping the approaching guards at bay with more covering shots as James threw his backpack through the square hole in the fabric and hauled himself up off the bed.
James got his head through, but his shoulders were a tight squeeze and Sarge had to break away from firing to give him a shove. The domed shape of the tent acted like a slide, but James’ palm hurt from pounding on the air conditioner and a hard landing on the sand made it worse.
‘Take both packs,’ Sarge yelled, as he threw his pack through the hold.
James was disorientated and it took him a couple of seconds to realise that Sarge wasn’t coming with him: if his sixteen-year-old body needed a push to get through the hole, Sarge didn’t have a hope in hell.
‘I’m dead,’ Sarge shouted, as the shooting inside the tent finally stopped. ‘Use smoke cover and get out of here.’
Hoping to buy a few seconds, James unhooked a smoke grenade from inside his pack. He pulled the pin and lobbed it through the square hole before starting to run. In basic training cherubs are taught to always be tactically aware, but James realised he’d been relying on Kazakov and Sarge to do everything. Now he had to think for himself.
The odds were stacked against. James was trapped inside a secure base on a high state of alert and everyone would be looking for him as soon as the guards inside the tent stopped breathing smoke and called out on their radios. The main gate was less than fifty metres away and James’ best and probably only shot at getting out was a surprise assault.
He ran to the end of the boarded path between tents and ducked out. The gate was now closed and the guard had been doubled to four men, but despite the circumstances they still didn’t look particularly alert.
James looked back over his shoulder before grabbing his rifle. The spot lamps around the perimeter gave him good light to make a shot. He laid a stun grenade and two smokers in the sand before going down on one knee, bracing the rifle stock against his shoulder and lining up the first guard in his scope.
From fifty metres, he hit the first guard dead in the centre of the back. A jerk left enabled him to take out the second with a pink explosion.
‘Attack,’ the third man shouted, diving for cover as James’ shot sailed over his head.
James ripped the pin out of the stun grenade and lobbed it towards the gate. He hurled the first smoke grenade into the no man’s land between the tent and the gate and left the second on the ground between his legs. After switching his rifle to automatic firing, James broke cover and started running towards the gate as the flash from the stun grenade turned the sky white.
The fourth guard’s senses were temporarily blitzed by the stun grenade, but the third man lay on his belly firing randomly into the increasingly dense smoke cover. Other men were coming out of the tents behind and a bullet whizzing past James’ left side made him realise that he hadn’t pulled up his goggles after taking the first shots through the scope.
The thought of being blinded scared him, but he kept running. The smoke filled his lungs and he could hear men approaching from all directions as he closed to within five metres of the gate.
A gap in the smoke gave James a clear shot at the last remaining guard. Surging with panic, he missed. The guard took longer to aim and his shot came so close that James felt it go by. The last round in James’ magazine hit the guard in the thigh.
Wild shots came from all directions, but the smoke gave James excellent cover. He grabbed the gate, realising almost too late that he had to lift a metal peg out of the ground to release it. Two bullets thunked the wire gate as he looked anxiously at the four guards. They’d almost certainly get a roasting from their commanding officer if he broke free, and one of them grabbed his ankle.
‘Cheat,’ James shouted, as he lashed out with his boot.
Almost without knowing it James had got the gate open far enough to make it through. The thick smoke made his eyes stream. His lungs burned and he felt like he had concrete blocks tied to his legs, but somehow he managed to pull up his goggles and sprint away from the compound.
REPLAY
James ran several hundred metres over the open ground outside the base, with smoke covering his back and randomly aimed paint exploding on the ground close by. Eventually he reached a maze of low-lying huts designed to resemble a shanty town.
Unlike a real-world shanty made from scrap, the sanitised Fort Reagan version comprised concrete sheds with electricity, water and sewage. The closely packed accommodation didn’t afford much privacy, but in many ways it resembled the college dorms the residents were used to.
Music blasted from all directions and barefoot girls danced around a bonfire built in the area’s baked earth marketplace. To give a more authentic atmosphere, food in the shanty was sold from market stalls and the engineers’ unit which ran Fort Reagan even released chickens and goats into the streets for the two-week duration of each exercise. Most of them were tame and the college kids fed them corn chips.
The partying left the back streets deserted. James took several turns before ducking into an alleyway between huts and catching his breath. He looked about suspiciously, but no American troops had followed him into the area.
He pulled his radio out of his jacket. ‘Kazakov,’ he whispered.
‘Loud and clear, James,’ the Ukrainian answered. ‘How’s it going?’
‘The goods are in place, but we had to fight our way out. Sarge got shot and I’m gonna need some backup out here to make it home.’
‘Negative,’ Kazakov said. ‘We don’t need you here and you could easily be followed in the dark. It’s best to steer clear of the apartments until daylight.’
James tutted. ‘So what do you expect me to do? Where am I gonna sleep?’
‘Use your initiative; I’ve got enough on my plate. Kazakov out.’
The way Kazakov said out made it pretty clear that he didn’t want to hear from James before morning.
‘Unbelievable,’ James mumbled to himself. ‘After everything I’ve done for that Russian git.’
While James’ weapons afforded some protection, the combination of youth and badly fitting US army clothing made it impossible to blend in. It was going to be a long night and he had to find somewhere to hide quickly.
*
As soon as the drones were disabled, Kazakov radioed his SAS teams. They climbed into preselected rooftop positions with sniper rifles and began taking pot shots at the American soldiers.
He led Lauren, Bethany, Rat, Gabrielle, Bruce, Jake and Andy on a rapid march away from the airfield and towards the apartments. They were heavily armed and they shot first when they eyed an army checkpoint, taking out three soldiers with bullets and paint grenades and scaring the hell out of half a dozen civilians queuing for a random search.
The soldiers struggled with conflicting demands. They’d been sent out to make friends with civilians, but suddenly faced bullets whizzing down from rooftops and paint grenades being lobbed at them from balconies.
Every soldier knew that ten per cent of the population was getting paid extra to support the insurgency and the banter between troops and civilians quickly got replaced by suspicion. It might only be a training exercise, but every soldier had a real-world incentive to do well: a good performance could lead to promotion and the higher wages that came with it, a bad one to a stagnant career or even redeployment to a less prestigious back up unit.
Within twenty minutes of the attack on the drones, General Shirley had ordered dozens of extra checkpoints to stop insurgents from moving about freely. In the most troubled areas soldiers announced curfews and told everyone to get indoors.
Many college-age civilians had been drinking and got aggressive because they didn’t want to be shut up inside bland apartments at eight-thirty in the evening. They faced being stopped and searched by angry troops for the second or third time in a matter of hours and even though it wasn’t for real, people got angry having to queue at a checkpoint for ten minutes just so they could walk to the next street to visit a friend or buy groceries.
Kazakov’s detached house was vulnerable to a surprise raid, so he joined the kids in the comparative anonymity of the apartment block. Sweating and breathless, everyone piled into the girls’ apartment, threw down their equipment packs and sprawled over the furniture.
‘How’s my eyes and ears?’ Kazakov asked, as Kevin came out of a back bedroom with binoculars hanging around his neck.
‘Good,’ Kevin smiled, although he was still upset that he hadn’t been allowed on the main raid with all the others. ‘A team came into this building searching door to door. I ran down to the third floor and set up a booby trap with the paint grenade like you showed me. Took out all three of them.’
‘Nice work,’ Kazakov nodded. ‘And the SAS snipers?’
‘Seems to be working out,’ Kevin nodded. ‘They shot up all the soldiers hanging out near the canteen and grenaded the roadblocks until they all pulled out of the area. I haven’t seen any army for over half an hour.’
Meryl came through from the kitchen holding a plastic tray stacked with steaming pizza slices. ‘Where’s the other two?’ she asked, as the kids all grabbed food.
‘Kerry and Sarge are dead. James is hiding out.’
‘Shall I save some food for him?’ Meryl asked.
Kazakov shook his head. ‘I’ve told him to hide out overnight in case he’s being tailed.’
‘He sounded really pissed off when Mr Kaz told him,’ Bethany grinned.
‘More pizza for us,’ Jake smiled, as he grabbed a second slice.
‘What about all this equipment?’ Lauren asked. ‘We’re sitting ducks if the army starts searching this building.’
‘We sit tight,’ Kazakov said firmly, as he pulled a small video receiver out of his trouser pocket. ‘We keep all the weapons here. Someone will have to keep lookout on the front and rear exits. If the army shows up for some reason, we should have time to mount an ambush on the staircases before they get close.’
The apartment had a wall-mounted TV with a protective Perspex screen over it.
‘This should be good,’ Kazakov said, grinning like a kid with sherbet as he ran an AV lead from the receiver to the TV. He cursed the remote until he found a button that brought up a grainy colour image. It looked like the edge of a desk and a couple of blurry computer screens set at a slanted angle. A date and timecode scrolled at the bottom of the image.
‘Nice camerawork, Spielberg,’ Jake grinned.
‘I only had a few seconds to position the device,’ Kazakov said irritably. ‘Shut up and listen.’
The hard disk in Kazakov’s receiver could store several hundred hours of video. He set the recording to play back from a couple of minutes before they’d blown up the drones. The TV showed a pair of army boots resting on the desktop and what sounded like a game of poker being played by bored admin officers out of shot on the other side of the room.
The kids gathered around the screen, holding cans of Pepsi and stuffing the last of the pizza as the report of the raid on the aerodrome came in. The picture was fixed on the tabletop and the fuzzy screens, but audio quality was excellent.
Boots ran in and out. A soldier announced that the shit was about to hit the fan and then General Shirley came running in.
‘Gimme status,’ he shouted.
‘One of the drone pilots radioed, sir. They’re under attack. The drones are being destroyed by a group of masked teenagers.’
‘Pardon me?
‘The drones, General. They’re used for—’
‘I know what they’re used for, Corporal! Do you think I’m some kind of asshole? Get troops up there now to investigate. If it’s insurgents I want them nailed.’
‘Drones ain’t cheap,’ the corporal continued. ‘Haven’t you deployed a security team up at the aerodrome?’
There was a prolonged silence.
A new voice: ‘ General … What do you want us to do?’
‘Goddammit!’ the general raved. ‘They’re supposed to be acting like insurgents! They’re supposed to be on the streets planting paint grenades, not coming through the front door and destroying my aerodrome. What kind of insurgency is this supposed to be?’
‘Had a lot of incoming mortar fire on all of our bases when I was in Iraq,’ the corporal noted. ‘Insurgents will attack anything if it’s improperly defended.’
‘Corporal, you are dismissed,’ General Shirley shouted. ‘When I want your opinions I’ll ask for them. Kazakov, that son of a bitch! There’s over six million dollars of hardware up there... ‘
A phone rang once before a woman answered. ‘General, it’s Sean O’Halloran, the base commander,’ she said. ‘ He wants to know if you’re aware that explosions have been heard inside the aerodrome—’
‘I’m busy … A head-on assault on my base. That Russian … OK, these are my orders. Checkpoints on every main street. Screw being Mr Nice American. Get every able-bodied soldier out of this base and cracking heads. I want weapons seized and insurgents arrested or shot. ‘
The woman spoke again. ‘The base commander is demanding to speak with you, General. He says you’re personally responsible for any hardware entrusted to your men during this exercise.’
‘Hand me that phone,’ the general ordered. ‘Commander, we’re investigating the situation and I’m sure it’s not as serious as it sounds.’
As the general spoke into the phone, a new voice sounded across the room. ‘General, we’re receiving reports that our troops are coming under sniper fire throughout the streets of Reaganistan.’
Kazakov paused the playback and smiled at the kids perched on the furniture around him. ‘I’m not Russian – I’m bloody Ukrainian,’ he shouted, before erupting into a booming laugh. ‘I don’t give out praise often, but you kids were great tonight. This time tomorrow, we’ll be driving a victory parade through General Shirley’s precious base.’
STALK
James used the darkness, a casual demeanour and his US Army uniform to bluff his way through a checkpoint on the main thoroughfare out of the shanty town while the officer running the show seemed more concerned with grilling a twenty-year-old student about his contraband camera phone than bothering with James’ ID.
He ended up in a three-storey shell building less than a kilometre from the apartments. James couldn’t turn on the electric lights because they’d be spotted in the darkness, so he navigated to a second-floor room by torchlight. There was a cold water tap on the wall and a toilet with hundreds of dead insects floating inside on the landing.
There was no furniture, so he sat on the sandy concrete floor as cold desert wind howled through badly fitted doors and windows. He rearranged the contents of his backpack to try and make a pillow, but it was rock hard. In any case he was too tense to sleep.
Every so often an American Hummer would drive by in the narrow street outside and he’d hear shoot-outs between regular soldiers and SAS snipers, or the dull blast of a paint grenade. Judging by the amount of fighting, the Special Forces teams were also arming insurgent sympathisers.
However hard James tried there was no way he could doze on bare concrete, and grains of sand down his back and inside his boxers were driving him bananas. He’d filled his canteen from the tap, but he was hungry and he rummaged inside his pack for something to eat. There was no food, but he did find a little hotel gift bag with the pack of cards and the Ultimate Blackjack Manual he’d bought the day before.
There were bulbs ablaze in some apartment blocks two streets away. James shuffled up near to the windows where the pages caught the stray light. He blew away the sand on the floor between his legs, spread his cards out and started to read.
After a couple of chapters devoted to basic blackjack strategy and some short biographies of ‘Blackjack Hall of Fame’ members who’d made fortunes and were now banned from every casino in the world, James passed on to chapters detailing the mathematics and strategies used by the most successful card counters.
Most people would have given up on seeing the first simple equation, but James’ inner maths geek liked the idea that you could actually use mental arithmetic and a few relatively simple strategies to beat a casino and win millions of dollars.
As James read more he realised that card counting didn’t even require you to be brilliant at maths. What it required was the ability to keep count of five things at once: the dealer’s current hand, your current hand, the running count of high and low cards, the total number of cards left in the card shoe and finally – if you wanted an extra edge – a separate count of the number of aces left in the deck.
According to the book, anyone practising with a pack of cards a couple of hours a day could master basic card-counting skills within a few days. James already understood standard blackjack strategy in terms of when to stick and when to ask the dealer for an extra card. The next step was to practise the rapid dealing of blackjack hands, trying to play with perfect strategy while keeping a basic count of every card dealt.
James began to flick the cards down on the concrete between his legs, starting off slowly and building up speed as he got a feel for it. There was no rush: it was ten hours until sun-up and four and a half years until he’d be old enough to sit at a casino table.
*
‘Morning, knob-head!’
James’ head hurt as he opened his eyes and jerked forward. The low sun blitzed his retinas and he half expected to find the muzzle of a gun in his face. Much to his relief, his eyes eventually focused on Gabrielle’s pencil thin legs in a pair of running shorts.
‘What’s with the cards?’ she asked.
‘That’s my brother,’ Lauren smirked. ‘Always playing with himself.’
James hadn’t had anything like a full night’s sleep and it took him a few seconds to suss everything out: his neck ached because he’d fallen asleep sitting against a concrete wall while dealing cards. Lauren and Gabrielle were here because he’d radioed the coordinates on his GPS through to Kazakov the night before. The girls had come out to meet him because he needed a set of civilian clothes before he could move safely in daylight.
‘How’s things?’ James asked, holding his back and groaning as he stood up.
‘Kazakov’s on cloud nine because the army is on the run. The drones are wiped out, General Shirley is going psycho in his command post, changing his orders every few hours, running around like a headless chicken and generally making sure that he never gets a second star on his helmet.
‘The SAS have recruited and armed sixty bored college kids and wiped out more than a hundred and fifty US troops. Oh, and Andy gave Bethany a massive love bite.’
This last piece of information made James laugh. ‘What a slapper! How many boys has she snogged?’
Lauren tactfully ignored the jab at her best friend and picked James’ book off the floor. ‘The Ultimate Blackjack Manual,’ she snorted. ‘Gimme a break. You don’t seriously think you can beat the casinos do you?’
‘It’s a proven technique,’ James said, snatching his book back.
‘All credit though,’ Lauren grinned. ‘It’s the first time I’ve seen you with a book that doesn’t have pop-ups.’
‘Why, you’re so funny this morning,’ James said sarcastically, as Gabrielle handed over a set of his clothes. ‘Did you have a tough time getting over here?’
‘We picked our moment,’ Gabrielle explained. ‘The bug Kazakov placed in the army control room means we know what orders the troops are getting before they do. General Shirley gave orders to step down the checkpoints because our snipers kept picking them off and lobbing paint grenades at them.’
‘The only trouble is, we couldn’t get you on your radio,’ Lauren complained. ‘Deaf git.’
‘Sorry,’ James yawned. ‘Earpiece must have fallen out while I was sleeping.’
‘The Americans don’t like it,’ Lauren grinned. ‘One of the General’s criteria for success is minimum civilian casualties. Every time an explosion goes off at a checkpoint half a dozen civilians end up getting blasted.’
James spoke admiringly as he swapped his army kit for ripped jeans and battered Adidas running shoes. ‘Kazakov’s a natural born warmonger. I mean, he may be psycho but you’ve got to have a certain admiration for the guy.’
‘He hates the Yanks so much,’ Lauren nodded. ‘I think he wishes that the weapons were real.’
*
Inevitably the Americans had uncovered some caches of weapons, brought some insurgents in for questioning and inflicted a few casualties in more than twelve hours of intense cat-and-mouse through the streets of Reaganistan.
As soon as General Shirley gave the order for his troops to retreat to base, Kazakov – who’d slept for less than an hour – gave orders for all the insurgents to change positions. Instead of meeting up at the apartments, Lauren and Gabrielle took James to Kazakov’s detached house.
They stopped off at one of the small supermarkets along the way and spent fifteen Reaganistan dollars on bacon, readymade pancake batter, orange juice, icing sugar, Nutella, aerosol cream and maple syrup so that Lauren could make breakfast.
Rat, Bethany and Andy had already arrived at the house with a cache of weapons, while Mac was being guarded by a five-man SAS team in the house next door. Gabrielle offered to help make the pancakes, but Lauren enjoyed cooking and said she didn’t want anyone to see her secret recipe.
Gabrielle ended up on one of two large couches in the living-room, facing James.