CHERUB: The Sleepwalker - Robert Muchamore Page 0,25

protection. Won’t the simulated ammo tear us to shreds?’

Mr Pike took the answer. ‘The simunition is grade three.

It’s not as powerful as the ammo some of you might have used over at the SAS training ground in conjunction with full body armour. However, it will still hurt a great deal if it hits bare skin. I would seriously recommend doing everything you can to avoid getting shot, and you must wear your goggles at all times.’

‘OK,’ Kazakov said, as he went along the line of black shirts, holding out a sack filled with goggles. ‘When I blow my whistle you can start to run. I’m giving you forty seconds, then I blow again and the white and red shirts will be on your arse.’

James snapped on his goggles as Kazakov raised the whistle to his lips.

11. DITCHED

James, Dana and Lauren ran at full pelt. Forty seconds is scant advantage when your opponents have quad bikes that do sixty kilometres an hour and weapons that can knock you flat on your arse from two hundred metres.

‘I’ve got an idea,’ Lauren gasped as they ran. ‘I spent months digging ditches out behind the training compound. I know them like the back of my hand and nobody’s gonna be keen to follow us through a bog.’

‘Sod wading through all that mud though,’ James said. ‘I say we keep it simple: run flat out and hope we get lucky.’

‘We’ll get nailed in two seconds,’ Lauren sneered, as the trio cut off the path into the trees and began crackling through dense undergrowth. They had no torches and a million things scratched at their bare legs.

Something cracked from the trees above and James yelped in pain.

‘Red shirt,’ Dana gasped as they all dived for cover.

‘No way that’s forty seconds,’ Lauren complained.

Dana shook her head. ‘I think you’ll find that forty seconds is however long the person with the gun says it is.’

James inspected his arm. The simulated rounds were fired out of real rifles, but they were made from a compressed powder that broke up on impact. It was excruciating if you took a direct hit, but he’d been lucky. The round had caught him at an acute angle and only brushed his arm before deflecting upwards into the branches.

James and Dana made it into a gap between the trunks of two trees and tried looking back to see who was shooting at them. They’d been out in the dark long enough for their eyes to acclimatise, but they still couldn’t see the sniper up in the canopy. Worse still, there was a pair of quad bikes roaring down the path.

Another shot thudded into a tree trunk, flooding the sky with frightened birds.

‘Sod this,’ James said. ‘I’m never doing the instructors a favour again, that’s for sure.’

‘I’m splitting off and going for the ditches,’ Lauren said. ‘The white shirts will work in pairs, which means they can’t go after all of us if we split up.’

‘Maybe we should go that way,’ Dana said.

But James was resolute. ‘It stinks out there and the bugs eat you alive.’

‘I guess I’ll stick with James,’ Dana said. ‘Good luck, Lauren.’

Lauren smiled. ‘A pound says I beat you home.’

As Lauren rustled away through the bushes, there was a flash from the front lights of two quad bikes sweeping by on the dirt path. The quads were useless amongst the trees, so James and Dana weren’t surprised that they were heading for open ground.

‘They’re gonna nail our arses when we try to cross the rugby pitches,’ James said.

But at least the noise of the bike engines gave them an opportunity to scramble out of the undergrowth without the sniper being able to hear them moving off.

‘Just hope the red shirts don’t have night vision,’ James whispered.

‘Of course they do,’ Dana said irritably. ‘How the hell do you think he shot at us?’

*

The sniper wasn’t a he. Siobhan Platter was nine years old. She’d spent two years on CHERUB campus, during which she’d earned two black belts and two first places in the red-shirt target shooting tournament. Knowing that the black shirts would have to cut off the path before the quad bikes came after them, she’d positioned herself high up in the fork of a tree fifty metres from where they’d set off.

With a straight shot at James’ back she’d hoped to get at least three hits. The first in the back would knock him down, the second and third would be aimed at his legs. Then she could radio through