CHERUB: The Sleepwalker - Robert Muchamore Page 0,29

forced to go on training exercises. ‘You volunteered for this, didn’t you? What are you bawling for?’

‘I …’

‘If I were you, I’d run back to the junior block before you freeze to death in those wet clothes,’ Lauren said.

‘OK,’ Siobhan said weakly, as she dug a foothold in the muddy embankment and grabbed hold of a tree root to haul herself out.

Lauren didn’t have a lot of sympathy and she muttered to herself as she waded through the ditch towards the basic training compound, dressed in boots and underwear with the rifle balanced on her shoulder above the waterline. ‘What kind of stupid kid volunteers for a training exercise then breaks down in tears as soon as she gets her head dunked? She’s been on campus for two years; it’s not as if she doesn’t know how it works …’

Lauren agreed with every word she was saying, but it didn’t stop her from feeling bad. No amount of reasoning would make her feel OK about making a nine-year-old cry.

*

Running with one boot on made Dana lopsided, but she didn’t want to take it off because then she’d have two damp, freezing cold feet instead of one and she’d double the risk of slicing herself open on a thorn or a broken bottle.

She thought about giving herself up so that she could start again with James, but so far all the evidence pointed to Lauren’s theory being correct: the red shirts and white shirts were working in teams of two or more which made it impossible for them to track everyone. You just needed a bit of luck …

She found an old path through campus that had been barricaded here and there with logs and water traps. It was designed for training runs for younger red shirts and new arrivals who required a gentle introduction to assault courses.

Keeping to such an obvious route was a risk, but she ran as fast as the darkness and her missing boot would allow. Within ten minutes of James’ capture she was at the top of the knoll overlooking the lawns around the campus lake and the games pitches beyond it.

It was lighter here. CHERUB had an energy efficiency policy, but lights had been left on inside some of the changing rooms. The lake itself was surrounded by illuminated booths containing life-saving equipment and emergency telephones.

Dana shielded herself behind the last line of trees. There was no sign of the white shirts but she knew they were out there, squatting on rooftops ready to shoot her in the back before the quad bikes rode out to scoop her up.

She thought about her training. The only things that came to mind were the urban warfare tactics she’d learned at the SAS training compound a few kilometres away: keep low, move from building to building and leave yourself exposed to enemy fire for the shortest time possible. But while the urban warfare compound had no open spaces wider than a four-lane road, there were hundreds of metres between some of the buildings on CHERUB campus.

Still, it wasn’t like Dana had a choice. She stood up and eyeballed a group of trees halfway between the lake and the edge of the woods. Beyond that was a shelter and the changing room at the edge of the lake. She wondered about swimming across. It was a fair way, but she wouldn’t be seen in the dark and she’d emerge less than fifty metres from the back of the dojo.

Dana lay on her belly and crawled as fast as she could. Once she was thirty metres out into the long grass she decided that it was safe to stand up and break into a crouching run. But although she hadn’t been spotted, she’d been detected by a motion sensor at the edge of the woods and Kazakov had radioed all the white shirts. As Dana made it to the first group of trees she heard the buzz of quad-bike engines.

‘Shit!’

The three vehicles stormed out of the trees and came roaring downhill towards her, headlights ablaze. She broke into a run towards the lake but the bikes had a top speed of over sixty kilometres an hour and she didn’t have a hope in hell.

She found herself trapped in no-man’s-land, halfway between the lake and the trees with three quad bikes in a triangle around her. Getting hit by a quad bike can kill you and the white shirts had strict orders not to use them as offensive weapons. Instead the