‘So you’re laughing at nothing? What’s the matter? Have you gone mad? Get to your feet, girl. Everyone stands to attention when they’re talking to me.’
Lauren stood up sharply.
‘I see you’ve earned a navy T-shirt already,’ Mr Large spat. ‘And the black hair to suit your black little heart. I still think of you every morning, Lauren Adams, when I wake up with that pain in my back where you hit me. I should be in Norway with Mr Speaks and Miss Smoke right now, running basic training. But my bad back means I’m stuck here, looking at your disgusting, fat, little face. You’re puke, Adams. What are you?’
‘Puke sir,’ Lauren answered, brimming with rage as she remembered the hours of torture Mr Large had put her through during basic training. She would have felt guilty if she’d injured anyone except him.
‘Stand up front by the blackboard. You can help me with a little demonstration in a moment.’
Lauren took a stroppy walk towards the blackboard, while Mr Large looked around the room. ‘Is everyone here?’
After a pause he answered his own question. ‘Where is the elder brother of Puke?’
‘He got called on to a mission early this morning,’ Bethany explained. ‘But he should be back by eight o’clock.’
‘Perfect,’ Mr Large steamed, scowling at Lauren as if she was somehow to blame for this.
Lauren propped herself against the blackboard. Gabrielle and Kerry both looked at her sympathetically and shrugged, as if to say What can you do?
‘So, my little cupcakes,’ Large said. ‘This exercise is designed to give you all experience of working as a team in a highly pressurised environment. For some of you it will be your first experience of mission training, while the older members will have their leadership and team-building skills put to the test.
‘The basic rules are as follows. There are four teams of five. Each team is led by an experienced agent ranked navy T-shirt or higher. They will be accompanied by three other qualified agents ranked grey or navy. Finally, each team contains a nine-year-old red shirt who will be getting their first taste of advanced CHERUB training. Every team member will be given six eggs, with their names written on the shells – that’s thirty eggs per team. You must carry these eggs about your person at all times.
‘After a short drive to the SAS training centre down the road, the four teams will be released into the urban warfare training compound at twenty hundred hours this evening. The winners will be whichever team is in possession of the largest number of their own unbroken eggs twelve hours later. That’s zero eight hundred hours tomorrow morning. To help focus your tiny minds, the team or teams finishing up with the lowest number of unbroken eggs will enjoy an extra-long cold shower, before accompanying me on a cross-country run with heavy packs, immediately after the training session is over.
‘The team leaders must decide on strategy. You can be passive, by hiding yourselves. Or aggressive by going out and hunting down members of other teams to destroy their eggs. You’ll find useful extra equipment scattered around the training area. The only rules are that you must release any prisoners you capture as soon as they have surrendered their eggs. Also, you can’t remove anyone’s protective clothing, use physical torture, shoot your weapons at targets less than three metres away – oh, and you can’t kick the boys in the balls.’
The girls all groaned.
‘You will be wearing tracking devices fitted with emergency buttons. That means I know where you are at all times and I can come into the compound and pluck you out if you break the rules, or if there’s an accident. There are also surveillance cameras throughout the compound. A siren will go off to signal the end of the exercise, or if we need to suspend the exercise while we deal with an emergency.
‘You will all be armed with the latest in combat simulation technology. It’s a system of synthetic ammunition that was designed for training the United States Marines. In order to demonstrate the difference between this system and conventional paintballing, I’m going to use my un-beautiful assistant, Miss Puke.’
Mr Large handed Lauren a wooden tile thirty centimetres square and two thick.
‘Hold it in front of your chest and move across to the opposite side of the room.’
When Lauren was in place, Mr Large grabbed a paintball gun off a desk and fired a shot. It hit the wood