New Guard (CHERUB) - Robert Muchamore Page 0,54
fit protective clothing and use the voice-operated microphones inside their helmets, before sending them off for an experimental ride back and forth along the single-track road that ran between the hostel’s main admin building and the dock where supplies got landed.
With clear skies and a mid-afternoon temperature touching twenty degrees, James led riders with varying degrees of confidence along a dirt track. Kyle moaned that his shoulders hurt, and almost inevitably Leon, Daniel and Alfie earned James’ wrath, first by starting a race, then by charging across a stream and soaking Kerry and Capstick.
The last kilometre took them down a steep dirt footpath to the edge of the strip where their plane had landed the day before. James opened his throttle and there was a deafening wail as the other bikes and their dusty riders took off in a plume of exhaust. After turning a gentle arc, they stepped off bikes on the part of the landing strip that jutted into the sea.
Tovah was waiting. She had a bright yellow pick-up filled with equipment, and a strange contraption on the ground. It looked like a two-man bobsled, but it had rubber wheels set wide apart at the back and a third directly below its bullet-shaped nose.
‘Gather round,’ Tovah said, as she thumped on the carbon fibre tub. ‘Here’s a question for all of you. Imagine that you’ve driven or parachuted into enemy territory under cover of darkness. But getting away won’t be so easy, because you’ve blown up the local oil well and rescued a pair of engineers. There’s only one road in or out of the area, and there are half a dozen Islamic State-controlled checkpoints between your butts and the Turkish border. The question is, how do you get away?’
As Tovah spoke, she hit a plastic catch, opening up the tub. Within a few seconds she’d reached inside, pivoting and telescoping various carbon fibre struts. She clipped a Plexiglas screen to the outside of the tub, flipped out a control stick, and finally pulled a cord, activating a compressed-air cylinder that rapidly turned sagging nylon into an eight-metre aerofoil wing.
‘The PX1 was jointly developed by US and Israeli special forces,’ Tovah explained. ‘It has a range of two hundred kilometres with a payload of a hundred and fifty kilos. It flies at around a hundred kilometres per hour if there’s no headwind, makes less than eighty decibels of noise from a distance of fifty metres and since it’s small and mostly made of carbon fibre, it’s invisible to all but the most advanced forms of radar. Now, who wants to come for a ride with me?’
James stepped up and Tovah nodded.
‘I thought he was too heavy,’ Alfie noted.
Tovah smiled. ‘He needs to be lighter for a hundred-kilometre mission flight,’ she explained. ‘But we’ll get him off the runway for a little demo.’
James took a helmet and went to sit in the rear passenger seat, but Tovah told him to go up front before helping him fix the five-point harness.
‘This one’s a trainer,’ she told James, as she straddled a seat close behind. ‘I’ve got duplicate controls in the back.’
James was looking at three smartphone-sized instrument screens and a dozen switches and buttons.
‘Where are the rocket launchers?’ he joked.
Tovah’s voice came through a microphone in his helmet. ‘Guess which one you press first?’
James saw a circular red button marked start directly in the control stick between his legs. When he pushed it there was a barely perceptible whirr from the engine above his head.
‘Now go to menu, launch, take-off and set parameters to three and weather to good.’
James followed the instructions until the left-hand display flashed up a green go sign.
‘Now gently raise the throttle lever, which is down on your right.’
The little propeller behind Tovah’s head grew noisier as the microlight plane started rolling.
‘Good,’ Tovah soothed. ‘Now all the way up, full throttle. And when you see sixty kph on the speed dial, you need to gently pull the control stick towards yourself.’
James wasn’t exactly sure where the speedo was, but the microlight had been designed for special forces rather than professional pilots and the screen started flashing yellow as soon as he hit sixty.
‘Is this too much?’ James asked, feeling the control stick shudder as the nose began to lift.
‘All good,’ Tovah said. ‘Now watch your altitude. The island rises, so unless you want to hit a hillside, you need to bank gently left once your altitude hits seventy metres.’
James had been on plenty of passenger planes,