Special Forces Cadets 1

by Chris Ryan

  Hector paused. Max felt his pulse rate increase. The Chinese girl was looking directly at him from across the room, suspicion in her eyes. Max looked away as Hector continued.

  – Abby. You’ve been a fighter for as long as you can remember, right? You’ve had to be. Can’t have been easy, being born in prison. Especially a tough, sectarian prison in Northern Ireland. Abby’s mum was doing time for murder. She was pregnant with Abby when the sentence started and Abby was a prison child for the first few years of her life. After that, she went to live with her grandmother. Not easy, is it, Abby, fighting off the other kids, who victimise you because your mum’s a murderer? You’ve got a police record as long as your arm. Hardly surprising, when you have to fight just to be able to walk to school. Most employers would take a dim view of a record like that. Not us. We had our sights on you even before your grandmother died, Abby. You’re clever and fierce and independent. Like Lukas, it was obvious you’d make it through selection the moment you arrived at Valley House. You had the swagger. And I know something else. The people taking over this school are just bullies. Sure, they’re bullies with guns and explosives, but they’re bullies all the same. You’ve already shown that you can deal with people like that.

  Abby was staring into the middle distance. Max had no way of telling what effect Hector’s words were having on her.

  – I bet a few of you thought Sami was never going to make it through selection, right? Too small, too lightweight, too damn nice. Well, let me tell you this: Sami’s one of the toughest guys I’ve ever met, and I’ve met a few. He comes from Syria. His father was a leading anti-government protester. In Syria, that’s a dangerous thing to be. When things went bad in his country, Sami’s family were forced into hiding in the town of Aleppo. Maybe some of you have heard of it. If you look at pictures of Aleppo now, you won’t find a single building still standing. That was Sami’s home for two years.

  Sami, as always, was unable to hide his emotions. If anybody else in the hall was looking at him, they’d think he was scared. Max realised it was something else.

  – Sami’s father managed to stay alive for six months. But the building in which they were hiding was hit by a government air strike. One bomb killed a hundred and thirty-eight people, including Sami’s dad. His mother and two sisters survived, but they were all still on the government’s hit list. Sami moved them to a new hiding place and protected them from government troops for nine months. You want to know why he was even better than Lukas on the range? It’s because he spent those nine months with an AK-47 in his hand, protecting his family from people who wanted to kill them. I don’t know how many government troops he was forced to shoot. I’ll never ask him, and I hope none of you do either, when you get out of here.

  Tears ran down Sami’s cheeks. The Chinese girl, who was striding up and down in front of the stage and did not know the real reason Sami was upset, sneered at him.

  – It was another air strike that killed what was left of Sami’s family. After that there was nothing to keep him in Aleppo. He made the dangerous journey from Syria across Europe to the UK. We picked him up when he claimed asylum. I guess I don’t need to explain why he’s exactly the type of person who would thrive in the Special Forces Cadets.

  There was a moment of silence. In one corner of the hall, four terrorists were conferring. A couple of them looked at their watches. Max wondered why. He felt a wave of sickness. Were they on a schedule?

  He was distracted by Hector’s voice again.

  – Jack’s out of the game. We don’t know if he’s alive or not. There will be time later to mourn him if he isn’t. Which leaves Max.

  Yeah, Max thought. Which leaves me. No grand backstory. No tales of incredible courage. I’m an orphan, sure, but there’s nothing special about me. No wonder I didn’t pass selection, if that was what the Watchers were looking for.

  – Maybe I should have told you this before, Max. I knew your dad.

  Max suddenly felt disconnected from everything that was happening around him. He couldn’t hear the crying of the kids. He barely saw the terrorists, or even felt the danger he was in. He was aware of nothing but Hector’s voice. ‘What?’ he whispered, not even bothering to hide the movement of his lips. T6 looked at him sharply, but then lost interest.

  – He was a soldier, Max. A damn good one. Probably the best I ever met. I served with him in Afghanistan. Before that in Iraq. He was always the first man in and the last man out. Brave to a fault. Like his son, from what I’ve seen. And you know what I’m wondering now? I’m wondering, what would he think if he knew that his boy was doubting himself? What would he think if he knew that you were considering giving up now, when so many people’s lives are at risk, and they all depend on you? Because, make no mistake, if you four fail, this siege will end only one way: in innocent people being killed. You may be killed. It’s you, or it’s them.

  Max was stunned into stillness. He had a thousand questions, but he couldn’t ask a single one. In his mind’s eye he saw a soldier, tired and dirty, in the battlegrounds of Afghanistan. The soldier was older than him, but looked like him. He was, Max realised, the person whose photograph he had seen on the wall in Valley House. In Max’s imagination, the soldier looked back at him with a calm, confident expression. An expression that said, you can do this …

  Max’s attention cut back to the real world. The Chinese girl was shouting at a young boy to be quiet. The kid had lost it and was shouting out in panic.

  ‘I want to go home! Let me go home!’

  T3 and T11 strode up to him. One pulled the kid up by his collar. The other cuffed him round the side of the head. A few children started crying again. The Chinese girl looked on with her familiar smug expression.

  Something snapped inside Max. He looked across the hall at the others. They looked back. Hector’s pep talk appeared to have done the trick. Lukas, Abby and Sami were looking at the Chinese girl with undisguised contempt. Their demeanour had changed. They were no longer cowed. They were steely and confident. Max locked gazes with each one in turn. Almost imperceptibly, Sami, Abby and Lukas nodded back at him.

  Max buried his head in his hands once more, as if in distress. He put all thoughts of his father from his mind. There would be time enough to think about that when they got out of here.

  Which they would.

  Unobserved by T6, he spoke quietly over the comms.

  ‘What do you need us to do?’ he said.

  16

  T7

  Hector continued to speak in a calm, insistent voice.

  – First things first. The terrorists with guns taped to their hands. They’re not terrorists at all. They’re probably teachers. They’ve been dressed up in balaclavas and overalls and had the weapons fixed to them to make us think they’re terrorists. They’re decoys. It’s a common trick. The terrorists know that we might have snipers trained on them. By dressing up some of their hostages, they increase the chance that we shoot the teachers instead of them.

  ‘Nice,’ Max breathed.

  – The Chinese girl you mentioned? It’s possible she’s displaying signs of Stockholm Syndrome. That’s when hostages start sympathising with, and even admiring, their captors. Be extremely wary of that girl, but watch out for the signs of Stockholm Syndrome in yourselves. It’s a very real thing. If you start feeling sympathy for any of these terrorists, remember: these people woke up this morning intending to kill children.

  From now on, I will refer to the teachers as decoys and the real terrorists as targets. But our first priority is going to be neither the decoys nor the targets. It’s going to be the IEDs – the improvised explosive devices. Max, we agree with your analysis. We think the targets are waiting for our assault team to make a move. As soon as there is any sign of that, they’re going to detonate the IEDs and their suicide vests. It’s a way of increasing the collateral damage and gaining more publicity for their cause. It makes it look like the atrocity is our fault. We’re working on a strategy for ta
king out the targets individually, but first we need to disable the IEDs – because if they explode, nothing else matters. Max, the next voice you hear will be Angel’s. She’s a demolitions expert. She’ll talk you through it.

  Max didn’t say anything. For the second time, the Chinese girl was looking straight across the hall at him. He couldn’t let her see him move his mouth. He let Angel do the talking.

  – Max, we think all the IEDs will be on the same circuit. There will likely be a battery pack somewhere, but we’re going to presume that will be too difficult to access. The targets are probably keeping watch on it anyway. Your best bet is to cut a main cable. Can you see two cables circling the room? One of them is the main cable. The other will have spurs leading off to each individual device. You need to identify the right one, then cut it using the blade hidden in the heel of your shoe.

  Again Max didn’t reply. The Chinese girl was still watching him. Why was she doing that? Why couldn’t she just look in the other direction? Max glanced at the cables circling the room. Angel was right: there were two. One was red, the other black. From his position at the back of the hall, he couldn’t tell which was the main cable and which was the spur cable. He tried to look over the heads of the crouching kids blocking his view but it was no good. He would have to get closer.

  He looked at the stage. The others were still in the same position, under surveillance by T1. They could do nothing to help. If he stood up and walked towards one of the devices, he’d instantly attract attention. And to remove the blade from his heel in full view of everyone would be reckless. He needed a plan. He glanced in the direction of the toilet block. There was nobody queuing right now, but Max was faintly aware that a couple of kids had just gone in. He raised a hand. T6 approached him. ‘What?’ he demanded in a low, harsh voice.

  ‘I need to go,’ Max said, pointing at the toilet door.

  The gunman pulled him to his feet, gripping his arm hard with strong, gloved hands. ‘Wait outside,’ he said. He pushed him towards the door. Max almost tripped over a couple of other kids. He winced – his ankle was still a little sore from the paracord incident – but regained his footing and waited outside the toilet door.

  He felt as if everyone in the hall was watching him. He wasn’t far wrong. The other recruits were looking in his direction, and he didn’t dare catch their eyes. But he’d caused a disturbance when he stood up. Now most of the hostages and even the targets and decoys were looking his way. He cursed silently. How could he examine the cables when everybody was watching him?

  It was the Chinese girl who helped him out, even though she didn’t mean to. Max had become used to the low-level noise of little kids crying. He had started to block it out. But one child was making more noise than the others. He was sitting close to where Jack lay in front of the stage. The little boy was sobbing noisily and uncontrollably. As Max looked across the heads of the other hostages, he could see why. A gruesome trickle of blood was flowing from Jack’s nose. His face was white. He looked like a corpse.

  The sight chilled Max, but he was distracted by the Chinese girl striding up to the wailing kid. She pulled him roughly to his feet and started hissing something at him. Then she clipped him hard round the back of the head.

  One of the teachers dressed as a decoy reacted immediately. From her – she looked female to Max – position by the blacked-out window, she lurched towards the little boy. He was crying even louder now, and the Chinese girl was hissing even more intensely at him, like an angry goose.

  ‘Get back!’ T1 barked. ‘Get back now! Or somebody will get shot!’

  The teacher stopped. She spun round helplessly. T14 strode up to her and dragged her back to her original position by the window.

  ‘Take that child to the back of the room!’ T1 instructed the Chinese girl. She did as she was told, roughly pulling the crying kid away from the sight that he found so upsetting. It was clear that she was not doing it because she felt sorry for him. An unpleasant, self-satisfied smile played across her lips.

  This gave Max the opportunity to examine the cables. From his position outside the toilet door, he could see the nearest IED. It was by the wall, a few metres away. He saw that the red cable snaked into the IED and emerged on the other side. The black cable continued in a circuit around the room. That meant the black cable was the one he needed to cut.

  He felt a surge of anxiety. What if Angel had got it wrong, and cutting the cable triggered a detonation? His mouth went dry at the thought. But then a memory hit him: Angel, controlling the chopper in the wild blizzard above Valley House. She was calm, capable and borderline scary, but above all she knew what she was doing.

  The toilet door opened. A frightened-looking boy with wonky glasses exited, accompanied by one of the targets: T7, the smallest, who seemed to have taken over this duty from T16. The boy scurried back to his group. The target turned to Max and made a ‘get inside’ gesture. Max made a show of meekly obeying. As he passed the target, however, he scanned what he could see of his face. Only his eyes and mouth were visible behind the balaclava, but they told him a lot. The target had a cleft lip, and there was an uncertain look in his eyes. It occurred to Max that letting kids in and out of the toilet was the worst job available to the terrorists. That meant this guy, along with T16, was bottom of the ladder.

  He remembered Angel’s advice. If you can, form a rapport with them. Talk about your family – real or invented. Talk about your hobbies and your life outside the siege. Don’t allow them to dehumanise you. It won’t work on all of them, but there’s often a weak link somewhere in the terrorist team. You might be able to use that to your advantage.

  Weak link? If there was one, maybe this guy was it.

  The toilet door closed behind them. They were in a locker room, with lines of dented metal lockers and pegs. There were three doors. One led to the girls’ toilets. One led to the boys’. The third was the locked door through which they had tried and failed to enter. Max headed to the boys’, but then stopped to look at his new companion. ‘You, er … you look like my brother,’ he said, aware that he sounded very nervous. The idea had just dropped into his head. He pointed to his own lips. ‘He has that thing you have.’

  T7 stared at him through the balaclava. His eyes had widened slightly. Max had his captor’s attention. Something told him nobody had ever talked kindly about his appearance before. He even felt a pang of sympathy for him …

  He heard Hector’s voice in his head. Watch out for the signs of Stockholm Syndrome in yourselves. It’s a very real thing. If you start feeling sympathy for any of these terrorists, remember: these people woke up this morning intending to kill children.

  ‘I got in trouble the other day,’ Max continued. ‘Some boys were giving my brother a hard time. I got in a fight with them.’ He shrugged. ‘They won’t mess with my brother again, anyway.’ He smiled and stepped towards the boys’ toilet.

  ‘What is your brother’s name?’

  ‘Bruce,’ Max said. It was the first name that came to him. ‘He had a sore throat when he woke up today, so he couldn’t come to school.’

  T7 looked momentarily at the floor. ‘I have brother too,’ he said in broken English. ‘Back in Chechnya.’

  Max looked at the target. ‘Do you want to see your brother again?’

  T7 looked away again.

  ‘I think you do,’ Max said quietly. ‘I want to see mine too. I … I think you can help me make that happen. I don’t think you’re like the others.’ And that, Max realised, was the truth. There was something different about this one. ‘We will see our brothers again, won’t we?’

  The target’s eyes narrowed. Did he know he was being played? He pointed at the boys’ toilets. ‘Go,’ he said. He crossed his arms to show the conversation was at an end.

  Max headed towards the boys’ toilets. But then he turned back. ‘If I get out of here, I’ll tell them you’re not like the others,’ he said. Then he entered the toilet alone.

  – That
was good.

  Hector sounded almost proud. Max didn’t reply. Not yet. He wanted to make sure he was alone. There were six urinals and five cubicles. A line of washbasins. No windows. Three of the cubicles had closed doors. Max checked the gap at the bottom of each door to ensure nobody else was in here. Only then did he speak. ‘I’ve identified the wire,’ he said. ‘I’ve come to the toilets to remove my razor blade. But I don’t know how I’m going to cut the wire without anyone seeing. You said earlier you can create a distraction. Can you do that now?’

  – Negative. We’ve had to change our strategy. If we’re right and the targets intend to detonate, we can’t risk doing anything that will encourage them to do so. You’ll have to do it covertly.

  ‘Great,’ Max whispered. ‘Just eight terrorists and two hundred and fifty hostages to worry about … Are you sure I’m going to be cutting the right wire? I’m not going to lie – physics was never my strong point.’

  It was Angel who answered.

  – Not going to lie, hun: I aced it.

  Max chose the leftmost cubicle and locked himself inside. He closed the toilet seat and sat on it, then took off his left shoe. He unclicked the heel and removed the razor, leaving the button compass inside. He gently slid the razor blade into the back pocket of his jeans. Clicking the heel shut again, he put the shoe back on. Then he stood up, flushed the toilet, and exited the cubicle. As he headed to the door, he caught sight of himself in the mirror above the washbasins. He was shocked by how pale his face was, and by the dark rings under his eyes. He ran a cold tap and splashed some water on his face. Then he dried his face. It wasn’t much, but it gave him a little bit more confidence.

  ‘I’m heading back out,’ he said into the comms.

  – Roger that.

  He tried to think of something he could say to the target waiting outside. Something to make him seem more like a human being, less like a victim. Maybe he’d ask him about the rest of his family, he thought. It would make more of a bond between them. He found himself thinking of questions in his head as he stepped out of the boys’ toilets and into the locker room. Do you have any sisters? Where do your mum and dad live? Do they know …