New Guard (CHERUB) - Robert Muchamore Page 0,64
a light on inside and a man in the cabin seemed to glance around, as if he’d heard something.
The drone shot up slightly and hovered over the shed’s fibreglass roof. The image on the big screen split and Tovah pointed to the right-hand side to explain.
‘That’s a high-resolution camera, underneath the body of the drone,’ Tovah explained.
The right of the screen showed a metal arm sliding out of the drone. There was a slight rocking of the image as the arm dropped a coin-sized listening device on to the cabin roof. Then the drone skimmed a couple of metres along the rooftop, dropping another, as Tovah translated more commentary.
‘They’re testing the audio. Apparently they’re getting a good signal from both devices.’
Ryan looked at James and spoke in a whisper. ‘Will we get that audio while we’re in the field?’
‘That’s the plan,’ James said.
As the arm retreated inside the body of the drone, its remote pilot steered gently towards an electrical supply box at the side of the hut. It fed from a chunky mains cable and there was a backup diesel generator to compensate for erratic local electricity.
The drone pilot flew as close to the box as he dared and lowered a metal probe, the size and width of a man’s lower arm. It was an electromagnetic pulse generator (EMP), capable of creating a super-intense magnetic field that would fry any electrical equipment within a ten-metre radius.
The sabotage would be obvious if the generator got left behind, but the drone’s own sensitive electronics were also susceptible to being fried. So the EMP had been jerry-rigged with seventy metres of strong fishing line, which reeled out as the pilot took off.
After stabilising at seventy metres, the pilot activated the pulse. The image on screen flickered for several seconds. Everyone looked anxiously towards Tovah as the two remote pilots babbled frantically in Hebrew.
‘What’s happened?’ James yelled anxiously. ‘Did it just crash?’
‘The pulse wasn’t supposed to damage the drone, but it looks like it did,’ Tovah explained. ‘They’re getting no signal from the drone. They’re trying a backup frequency …’
Suddenly the image on the left side of the screen came back, showing the view from a healthy drone, hovering several hundred metres off the ground with the oil derrick visible below.
Tovah continued to translate the stream of Hebrew. ‘They seem to think the drone defaulted to an automatic self-protection routine when the pulse interrupted their signal. All systems normal, but they’re not sure if the cable linked to the EMP snapped.’
The right side of the screen came back to life, showing a length of cable getting wound around a motorised fishing reel. A half minute went by before the silver EMP probe came into view and the pilots started yelling triumphantly.
‘They’ve got it,’ Tovah translated unnecessarily, as the probe disappeared back into the drone’s belly. ‘Now they’re going to do surveillance.’
The drone backed up and dropped down to around a hundred metres. From this range it was clear that several lights around the derrick had blown out. When the co-pilot zoomed his night vision on the hut, it showed smoke pouring out the door, while the man who’d been inside was around the back using a fire extinguisher to fight a small blaze in the supply box. A couple of guys in hard hats were running across from the main pumping station, desperate to find out what had gone wrong.
‘They’re elevating to fifteen hundred metres and switching the drone to autopilot for the ride home,’ Tovah said, as she smiled at James.
‘Godspeed, Mr Drone,’ James said, as he strolled to a wall behind the TV and switched the gym lights on. ‘We’ve got two planes booked for tomorrow,’ he yelled. ‘Folks going to Turkey for mission mayhem need to be on the tarmac at 0600 ready to load planes and equipment. Take-off is scheduled for 0700. The RAF plane taking the rest of you back to the UK is due at eleven. Chef and the training instructors will need help packing up, so the four remaining Currents need to eat breakfast and have bags packed and asses down by the pool by 0900.’
‘Once James is out of here I’m in charge,’ Capstick added. ‘And I haven’t handed out a punishment lap in almost a month, so you’d better not muck me around.’
34. BLACK
It had always been an off-the-books black mission, but up to this point James had been comforted by familiar surroundings: the hostel, old friends, CHERUB agents, training instructors. Now it felt