CHERUB: Divine Madness - Robert Muchamore Page 0,102

and slid along the rope on to the deck of the catamaran.

As two male officers took down the rope, a woman headed up to the bridge. She was taken aback by the amount of blood smeared over the decking.

‘Oh, sweetheart,’ the woman gushed, as she saw Dana slumped in the captain’s chair, hardly able to keep her head up. ‘How do you feel?’

‘Faint,’ Dana said weakly. ‘I didn’t take my shoe off in case it made the bleeding worse.’

‘That’s good,’ the woman nodded. ‘I’m Dr Goshen. I’ll get one of the lads to carry you down to the mess, then I’ll take a proper look at you where there’s a bit more room.’

The larger of the two male officers scooped Dana into his arms and took her on an unsteady trip downstairs, laying her out on one of the sofas at the back of the mess.

He smiled as he put her down. ‘You’re a heavy old lump.’

Dana struggled to smile back. ‘I do triathlons. It’s all muscle.’

‘I can believe that,’ the officer nodded. ‘He’s a heck of a size, that fellow you tackled up there.’

‘What about the dinghy?’ Dana asked. ‘Did you find Eve?’

The man shook his head. ‘They’re rubber and plastic, virtually impossible to pick up on radar, even when the sea’s as calm as it is tonight. I doubt she’ll last more than a couple of hours out there with an open hull. One big wave will flood her out. Even if she makes it to Indonesia, they’ve anchored the tankers a couple of kilometres offshore and vented off the gas in the jetty.’

‘That’s good,’ Dana said, sniffing involuntarily as she imagined Eve ploughing through the sea, desperately bailing out her tiny boat.

The coastguard officer looked anxiously at his colleague, as if to say I didn’t mean to make her cry.

‘Try not to worry, we’re doing all we can to find her.’

Dana waved her hand in front of her face. ‘It’s not your fault,’ she sniffed. ‘It’s … My foot really hurts, and I’m tired and Eve … Eve isn’t really a bad person, you know. She’s only fifteen. It was just the lot she got in with.’

As Dana said this, the light-headedness suddenly overcame her. She heard one of the coastguard officers shouting for the doctor, then everything went black.

*

James looked at the row of flickering lights and Ernie’s desert boot on the bottom rung of the ladder. He stared down at his clothes: his shorts and trainers were soaked in brown water and there was a humungous cockroach crawling up his arm.

‘I …’ he gasped, unable to curse, unable to think; angrier than he’d ever been in his life before. ‘There’s a light switch,’ he spluttered finally.

As he looked around, he realised that the switch also powered a fan that was venting off the fumes. He also made a final discovery that made him totally insane: a gantry. If James had gone left instead of right when he’d stepped off the ladder, he’d have found the metal gantry stretching over the sewage from one ledge to the other. You wouldn’t have wanted to eat your dinner off it, but it beat wading through filth by about a billion per cent.

‘This better be a dream,’ James groaned.

Ernie hopped from the ladder on to the gantry without so much as getting his boot wet.

‘James,’ he gasped, ‘what in the blazes are you doing down there? Look at the state of you.’

Lauren’s head popped down through the hatch and James thought he saw a tiny grin. He pointed at her. ‘Don’t you dare laugh.’

Lauren screwed up her face in horror. ‘Is that toilet paper stuck on your leg?’

Ernie walked along the gantry and grabbed a ladder that hung horizontally from two hooks on the wall.

‘I don’t know what kind of welcome we can expect when we get out there,’ he said gravely.

James realised he had to forget his personal embarrassment and focus on the mission. ‘Lauren,’ he shouted. ‘My radio’s knackered. Get yours out and try telling Chloe what’s going on; we don’t want TAG units shooting when they see us.’

‘Gotcha,’ Lauren nodded.

She squatted down in the damp passageway and pulled off her trainer. Meanwhile, in the tank, Ernie was using the top of the ladder to push the hatch open.

‘Chloe, do you copy me?’ Lauren shouted.

Chloe came back in her ear: ‘Loud and clear, Lauren.’

‘We’re about to head out via the sewage tank. We’re between the fourth and fifth turrets. Can you make sure nobody starts shooting at