tops.
‘Hello,’ James yelled.
As he stepped further into the house, James noticed a few photographs tacked on the fridge door. Most of them were regular scenes: two little dudes wearing armbands beside a swimming pool, a school photograph, an elderly couple sitting in a restaurant at some sort of family event. But one of the pictures made him gasp.
‘Oh, shit.’
James instantly recognised the little lad, who stood on a pebble beach on a drizzly English day. James had met him two years earlier, on his first CHERUB mission. His name was Gregory Evans and his father was Brian ‘Bungle’ Evans, a Texan biologist and a member of Help Earth who’d tried to kill two hundred oil executives and politicians with deadly anthrax bacteria. Brian was one of the world’s most wanted men, but he’d never been found. Nor had the laboratory or any of the equipment used to manufacture the anthrax.
James’ brain raced. Everything made sense: Ernie said that one of the men who lived here was called Brian and paint production involves mixing up chemicals, making it a perfect cover for a facility that produced biological weapons or explosives.
This was a big result. Uncovering the Help Earth laboratory would be front-page news all around the world, but James faced a massive problem: he’d met Brian Evans on several occasions when he’d been working in Wales under the name of Ross Leigh. As soon as Brian saw James’ face his cover would be blown apart.
James felt his stomach shrink into a tight ball, knowing things could turn nasty any second. He realised that the best strategy was to grab hold of the biggest weapon he could find and he figured there would be knives in one of the cardboard boxes on the table. But before he had a chance to grab anything, he heard footsteps and a voice with a familiar Texas twang.
‘Hi there son.’
*
After breakfast, Dana, Barry, Eve and Nina headed off to train for their attack. Barry took them to a deserted stretch of beach in a Subaru wagon, towing a three-metre dinghy behind the car.
They pulled up on a stretch of squishy sand. There was a strong breeze and the sea looked choppy. Once the four of them had hauled the dinghy off the trailer, Barry and the girls sat on the edge of their car seats and changed into wetsuits. Nina stayed behind with the car as the others set out to sea.
As the shore receded and the outboard motors threw up a giant wash, Barry began speaking in a monotonous voice. ‘What you’re going to learn this morning is not complicated, but you must listen or we’ll fail in our operation tonight.’
He started off explaining how to use the twin outboard motors and gave each girl a few minutes’ practice steering the boat and controlling the throttle. Next, he pulled out a couple of GPS receivers and showed the girls how to use them for navigation. He gave Eve a set of coordinates from a waterproof chart and told her to find it.
A five-year-old can navigate with a GPS and it took less than ten minutes to reach their target, a natural harbour shielded from the waves by two lines of jutting rocks. The water was clear and the upturned hull of a recently stricken motor launch shimmered a couple of metres beneath the surface.
‘OK, cut the power,’ Barry said. ‘Put the GPS back in its pouch and pay attention.’
Barry unzipped a backpack and pulled out three chunky metal discs.
‘It’s not easy to sink a large boat,’ Barry began. ‘When you’re talking about something that weighs over a hundred thousand tons, with watertight compartments and a double hull, you’re either gonna need a whole boat packed with explosives crashing into it at speed, or you’ve got to position your explosives very carefully.’
‘What about oil spills?’ Dana asked.
‘Help Earth only attacks empty tankers, but they’ve really upped the security. Every navy in the world is keeping tabs on them. This time we’re trying a different tack and going for LNG.’
‘LN what?’ Eve asked.
‘Liquid Natural Gas. This region has some of the world’s largest natural gas deposits. Japan, on the other hand, has no natural gas of its own but is the world’s second largest consumer of the stuff.
‘Natural gas explodes under high pressure, so the only way to move it over long distances is by chilling it to about seventy below zero, when it turns into a liquid. It has to stay at that temperature until it