CHERUB: The Sleepwalker - Robert Muchamore Page 0,26

to the white shirts and with luck they’d pick him up before he had a chance to run off the pain.

But Siobhan hadn’t accounted for the effect adrenalin can have and the way that a live target in your scope messes with your brain.

After the disappointment of missing her target, Siobhan overheard Lauren saying she was going for the ditches. The lone twelve-year-old seemed like a much more attractive target than fifteen-year-old James and sixteen-year-old Dana.

She unhooked the safety harness from around the trunk and fixed night-vision goggles over her eyes before stepping down on to a thick branch. By this time the quad bikes were coming and she knew that their noise was her best shot at jumping out of the tree without James and Dana hearing.

Siobhan landed on a tree root. The weight of her rifle and the equipment in her backpack made the touchdown hard on her knees, but she screwed up her face, squeezed her mouth shut and resisted the urge to groan.

Fortunately, James and Dana were more concerned with making it quickly to the main building than in going after the sniper. Siobhan slung her rifle over her shoulder and began moving swiftly east. As she jogged she reached up and turned the knob on the side of her goggles, switching the sensor from light amplification to heat detection. This made it harder to see where she was going, but the infra-red camera revealed tiny differences in temperature, including the difference between the warm surface soil and the slightly cooler soil turned over by Lauren’s boot.

It wasn’t easy because undergrowth covered much of the ground, but there was enough open mud for Siobhan to stay the trail.

‘This is SP,’ she whispered into the radio mic hanging in front of her face. ‘I’m tracking Lauren Adams east. She’s planning to use the ditches and cut through the basic training compound.’

Mr Pike’s measured voice came back at her. ‘Good work, Siobhan. Try keeping Lauren within visual and we’ll arrange for someone to nail her when she comes out of the compound.’

Siobhan was flattered by the instructor’s compliment, but after fluffing her golden shot at James she was determined to do more than follow Lauren through a succession of muddy ditches and then let someone else grab all the glory by taking her down.

*

James and Dana faced a trade-off between risk and speed. Keeping to the undergrowth was safe but took forever. Marked paths were faster, but the chances of being spotted much greater. After crawling for five hundred metres their limbs were covered in grazes and Dana had a coating of mud where she’d skidded down a hill into a bog. Under normal circumstances James might have taken the mickey, but he was tired and all he wanted was a warm duvet to curl under.

‘Red shirts up ahead,’ Dana whispered, as she peeked out from behind a bush.

James shook his head with contempt as he saw the two young boys standing in a clearing for all to see. ‘How dopey can you get?’ he smiled.

‘They’ve got two guns, night vision and packs full of ammo,’ Dana said. ‘Grabbing that lot would definitely improve our odds of making it across the open ground.’

James nodded. ‘I say we creep around from opposite sides and nail them in a pincer.’

Dana kept low as she moved towards the two red shirts. One boy spoke into his radio, giving the impression that he was lost, but a second before James and Dana were ready to pounce, the boys turned purposefully and started walking down a path.

Being older and far larger than their opponents, James and Dana were sure they’d be able to emerge from cover and grab the red shirts before they could turn and shoot. Without communicating, they dived out of cover and scrambled out to jump on the red shirts.

James made it on to the path first, but as he crossed the line between two trees he heard the high-pitched gasp of a red-shirt boy. ‘Spring it!’

James didn’t see the lattice of ropes shooting out of the mulch to form a barrier, and he ran straight into them. As he tipped forward, Dana was knocked back by another set rising up behind him. The ropes snagged Dana’s boot and dragged her painfully on to her bum. For a moment James thought it was two separate barriers, but the ropes closed around as his feet came off the ground.

‘Net,’ James shouted, grabbing at the sides and trying to clamber out over