Jet Skis, Swamps & Smugglers

by Robert Muchamore

  The third building lay at the end of this gap. It still produced paint for cars and had been fenced off from the abandoned sections, with security cameras and floodlights.

  ‘Could the women work in there?’ Marion asked.

  ‘Unlikely,’ Emma said, as she kept sweeping the thermal camera. ‘It would be hard to mix regular employees and slave labour.’

  The fence stopped you going past the ends of the two abandoned buildings, but most doors were open or missing. Robin peered in through an archway big enough for a truck and saw bright dots of street lamps on the opposite side.

  ‘I think we can cut through here, rather than go all the way back.’

  He was startled as his voice echoed inside. Back, back, baaack . . .

  Robin’s shoes crunched dust and broken glass as he moved in further. Marion swung up a big torch, casting dim light over a space filled with gantries and pipes, many with missing chunks where scrappers had stripped out copper and other valuable metals.

  Besides bats and squirrels, the interior hid stolen cars and several huge graffiti murals.

  ‘Robin Hood, how do you feel right now?’ Lynn asked, as Oluchi pointed the camera at him.

  Robin shrugged and sounded grumpy. ‘It’s past midnight. I’m soaked. I’ve got blisters from walking in wet shoes. Right now, a comfy bed would be very nice.’

  ‘So it’s exhausting being a hero?’ Lynn said.

  Before Robin could answer, Marion groaned and blurted, ‘Robin’s ego is big enough already!’

  ‘My friend Marion is jealous of my incredible talents,’ Robin joked to camera, then flinched as Marion lobbed a big metal bolt, deliberately aiming way over his head.

  ‘The banter between Robin and Marion is gold,’ Lynn whispered to Oluchi. ‘Keep the camera running.’

  Marion led the way out of the far side of the building and found herself on a railway platform. The rails had been taken, but you could see the outline of the track bed through the weeds. There was even a line of railway tankers, rusted in place, with faded logos of the Porthowell Chemical Company.

  Beyond the railway sidings a stretch of wet road had crisply painted markings and modern street lighting. This section of the chemical plant had been demolished and replaced with four identical metal-sided warehouses. A rooftop sign and hundreds of waiting delivery vans bore the logo of Two Tu, the online shop that brought the world to you.

  ‘How about Two Tu, using forced labour?’ Robin speculated, as Emma stepped out onto the railway platform.

  Emma smiled. ‘The place we’re looking for won’t have logos or signs.’

  ‘This is a bust,’ Robin moaned, then stretched into a big yawn before jumping off the railway platform into weeds and gravel. ‘And it’s gonna be way after three when we get home in Diogo’s crappy boat.’

  ‘Don’t let Diogo hear you diss Water Rat,’ Marion warned, as she landed beside him. ‘He loves that crazy boat more than anything.’

  Robin managed a weary laugh. ‘He’ll be angry enough when he finds out I smashed his good sunglasses.’

  Neo jumped off the platform, but the other adults did the grown-up thing and used the ramp at one end.

  Emma kept scanning with her thermal camera, but the only heat came from rats, birds and rows of little dots left by fox feet. As they neared the dock after a circular half-hour search, everyone felt tired and pessimistic.

  Mostly out of boredom, Marion hopped onto the bed of a rusting, wheel-less truck trailer. As she strolled along, she glimpsed a chink of light from a door opening. It was a long building behind trees and a fence that only seemed to rise half a storey out of the ground.

  ‘I saw a door open,’ she said excitedly, as she jumped down and pointed. ‘Neo, show us your map. What’s over there?’

  Neo opened the diagram of the site on his phone and zoomed.

  ‘Waste-water treatment,’ Marion read.

  ‘Sure you didn’t imagine it?’ Robin asked.

  ‘I’m not stupid,’ Marion snapped back.

  ‘See what you get with the thermal camera,’ Emma suggested.

  Marion jumped back on the truck bed and Emma reached up to pass the camera.

  ‘Don’t drop it,’ she warned. ‘They’re sixteen hundred quid.’

  Robin jumped up as well. It took Marion a few seconds to relocate the gap between the trees where she’d seen the door open. The thermal camera showed a distinct yellow blur.

  ‘Does this zoom?’ Marion asked.

  ‘Big lever on the front,’ Emma answered.

  When Marion zoomed, the blur turned into wafts of smoke, a glowing white cigarette tip and a human-shaped figure.

  ‘Believe me now?’ Marion growled to Robin, before turning to Emma. ‘Big building, no lights or signs. Isn’t that exactly the kind of place you said we were looking for?’

  32. ACROSS THE FENCE

  Oluchi stood back, filming, as Emma used wire cutters to snip a hole in a rusty fence. Robin and Marion felt re-energised now they’d found something, and beat the adults to the other side by climbing a tree and dropping from overhanging branches.

  Neo suggested the waste-water treatment ponds might still be used by the paint company at the other end of the plant. But the tatty fence, weed-strewn paving and lack of lights didn’t give that vibe.

  ‘Careful, you two!’ Emma warned, as Robin and Marion crossed cracked paving and approached a metal door surrounded by hundreds of cigarette butts.

  The bunker-like two-storey building was set in a trench with steep grass embankments along either side, while the gently sloping roof was braced with huge concrete beams. Circular water-treatment ponds stretched into the distance along one side, but the only liquid in them was puddled rainwater.

  ‘Danger: Hazardous Material,’ Marion read from a faded sign. ‘Employees entering this building must carry an emergency respirator at all times.’

  ‘I guess that concrete roof is to contain a blast if something inside goes bang,’ Robin said.

  Marion nodded. ‘Though with all these cigarette butts, I’m hoping there’s something less explosive in there now.’

  While Marion and Robin inspected the area by the door, Neo and Emma checked a row of giant wheeled bins. Neo peered into one and almost got flattened by the glue fumes. When he held his breath and tried again, he pulled out little triangular scraps of leather and a lattice of spongy synthetic rubber with dozens of foot-shaped holes punched out.

  Robin wandered around the side of the building, peering down into the steep-sided trench in which the building was set. Narrow windows with lights on the lower floor and spinning ventilation fans suggested there were people inside. When he looked up, he was alarmed by a rooftop mast with two satellite dishes and cameras pointing in every direction.

  ‘Loads of cameras,’ he reported as he backed up to the others. ‘I don’t think we should stick around.’

  Oluchi filmed as they retreated through the fence and regrouped next to the flatbed truck. Neo kept lookout, but there was no sign of anyone coming after them.

  ‘Seems they’re making athletic shoes in there,’ Emma told everyone.

  ‘I saw logos when we looked in the trash,’ Neo confirmed. ‘Designer gear, probably fakes.’

  ‘I guess it makes sense,’ Lynn said. ‘I spend a fortune on trainers for my boys. But shoes are bulky, so they bring workers to make shoes, rather than the shoes themselves.’

  Marion looked at Robin. ‘If you saw all those cameras, why has nobody come after us?’

  Robin had hacked the security system at Sherwood Castle Resort a few months earlier and knew the answer.

  ‘There are millions of security cameras in the world,’ Robin explained. ‘But hardly any are watched all the time. Most only get looked at after an event, like a robbery or something.’

  ‘So what now?’ Neo asked. ‘The women from Swamp King are surely in that building. But there could be armed guards and hundreds more workers.’

  Emma nodded in agr
eement. ‘The six of us can hardly launch a raid, and if we call the cops, we’re more likely to end up in jail than the bad guys.’

  Marion laughed. ‘Especially if your name is Robin Hood.’

  Robin thought for a second. ‘If any of you has a laptop with a network port, I can get up on the roof, plug into their computer network and try to find out what’s going on inside.’

  ‘How?’ Lynn and Emma asked simultaneously.

  ‘IP security cameras are just devices connected to your computer network,’ Robin explained. ‘Like a printer, router or webcam. So, I unplug the cable on the back of one camera, plug it into the laptop and I’ll be connected to the computer network inside the shoe factory.’

  ‘How long will that take?’ Emma asked.

  ‘Getting onto the network takes seconds,’ Robin said. ‘The big question is, how good is their security? If they’ve locked down every computer and device, I won’t see anything. But not many people password-protect their printer, or bother enabling encryption on security cameras.’

  Marion nodded enthusiastically. ‘The worst thing that can happen is Robin falls off the roof and dies. So I see no downside to this at all.’

  ‘Two in the morning and you still manage to be hilarious,’ Robin said drily, before moving on. ‘Does anyone have a laptop?’

  Lynn’s bag of camera gear had a beaten-up video-editing laptop with Channel Fourteen logos. Robin opened it up, tethered it to his phone and downloaded a bunch of network hacking tools that he kept stored online.

  Marion had become a decent archer since Robin started teaching her, so he gave her his bow and told her to keep an arrow notched in case anyone came after him.

  The danger made Robin feel less tired as he climbed back through the fence with Neo, then stood on the older boy’s shoulders before straddling a fragile-looking rain gutter and stepping onto the roof. But it had been an exhausting day and his brain felt fuzzy as he walked up the gently sloping roof between thick concrete braces.

  He dropped to a crawl when he got near the camera pole. He’d expected that he’d have to plug into the network by disconnecting the cable coming out of a camera, but helpfully the eight cameras and two satellite dishes all fed into a weatherproof box with a network switch and two empty ports.

  The engineer who’d installed the cameras had even left a spare cable she’d used when setting the system up. Robin took the Channel Fourteen laptop out of his backpack, plugged it in and stretched in a mammoth yawn as he waited for his packet sniffer program to detect all the devices connected to the computer network.

  Robin had expected computers, printers and cameras, and hopefully an internet connection. But the list showed he wasn’t looking at some crude sweatshop. Among more than fifty networked devices were a vacuum moulding machine, two laser cutters, an embroidery machine and several industrial robots.

  The level of technology made Robin worry that there would be good security too, but although the computers were locked down or switched off, he had no problem getting a live feed from the cameras. There were twenty-six on the network, and since they had numbers, the only way to find what each one pointed at was to access them in turn.

  After connecting to a couple that stared outside, Robin hit the jackpot with a wide-angle camera showing a well-lit production floor. Although it was two in the morning, more than fifty workstations bustled with women sewing and cutting leather trainer uppers.

  Robin made a short recording from this camera, before flicking through others that showed a moulding machine, a huge warehouse filled with boxed shoes, a bathroom and showers that looked spotless but had no shower curtains or cubicles around the toilets, a commercial kitchen and a tightly packed dorm with triple-height bunks and sleeping women.

  Most of the spaces were clean and brightly lit, but black uniformed guards and metal doors made it obvious the workers weren’t there willingly.

  Robin took a recording from each camera. But it would be better still if he could enable remote access to the network to see what was going on after coming down off the rooftop.

  Fortunately for cybercriminals, almost nobody installs security updates on their network equipment, so after a two-minute search of the software library on his favourite hacking site, Robin downloaded a tiny program that exploited a badly written code in the factory’s internet router.

  After a couple of clicks to install the program on the router, Robin had a back door that would let him log in and watch the underground factory’s cameras from any device with an internet connection.

  Neo was waiting when Robin got back to the edge of the roof.

  ‘How’d it go?’ he whispered, as he helped Robin to the ground.

  ‘Almost too easy,’ Robin said, smiling awkwardly. ‘You know when everything goes so well that you feel sure you must have forgotten something?’

  PART IV

  33. LEAVING THE STATION

  Three days after the incident on Skegness island, Robin was still in the news. For close to two months he’d been hiding in the delta, but now the whole world knew he’d been in the area and everyone would take a closer look when they saw the athletic little teen with scruffy hair.

  Even more worryingly, an elderly Italian had wandered into Boston Church Hall. He looked offended when the chef asked if he’d come to join the seniors’ lunch club. Then he came out with a convoluted story about how he lived nearby and was looking for two kids who’d ridden over his front lawn on dirt bikes.

  The chef knew he was lying because she’d lived in the village her whole life and had never seen him before. She told the Italian she didn’t know any kids with dirt bikes, then called Emma because the guy had a creepy vibe and the description fitted Ross and Mary, the two kids staying with Diogo who’d been clearing out the storage room.

  Emma realised it was Dino Bullcalf hunting the bounty on Robin’s head, and that meant it was time for him to leave The Station.

  Robin felt sad as he took a last look back at the little room he’d slept in for the past two months. Then he grabbed a backpack crammed with clothes, books and archery gear and carried it down The Station’s spiral stairs.

  Marion had already brought her stuff down and sat on the floor cushions, ready to go.

  ‘What are you wearing?’ Marion said, tutting and smirking.

  Robin dropped his bag and stretched out the Robin Hood Lives T-shirt that Neo had bought him. ‘They’re the height of fashion,’ he explained. ‘And here’s the clever part: no fugitive would be stupid enough to wear a shirt with his own name on, so I can’t possibly be Robin Hood.’

  ‘Your genius knows no bounds,’ Marion said, rolling her eyes. ‘I’ll bet any money Emma makes you take that off the second she gets here.’

  Robin headed out onto the balcony to enjoy the delta view one last time. Diogo sat on the swinging sofa with Napua’s head in his lap and broke into a booming laugh when he saw Robin’s shirt.

  ‘Did you ever get to twenty muscle-ups?’ he asked.

  Robin held the tips of his thumb and index finger a tiny bit apart. ‘Nineteen yesterday. But I’m gonna get a chin-up bar in my den at Designer Outlets. So next time I come here, I’ll be able to do at least fifty.’

  Diogo raised his eyebrows. ‘Who says you’re invited back?’

  ‘Won’t you send an invite when you two get married?’ Robin teased.

  ‘You keep safe at Porthowell later,’ Napua said firmly, as she rolled off Diogo and stood up to give Robin a goodbye hug.

  ‘I’m always highly responsible,’ Robin said, unable to smudge the tear rolling down his cheek because his arms were around Napua. ‘And I’ve only got one thing to blow up on tonight’s mission.’

  ‘Robin’s blubbing,’ Diogo yelled inside to Marion. ‘Get out here and do the thing where you say something sarcastic.’

  But Marion felt sad too, hugging Napua, then crouching down to rap Water Rat’s plastic hull with her knuckles.

  ‘I’ll miss our trips on this mad thing,’
she told Diogo.

  A couple of minutes later, Emma blasted the horn of a big double-cab pickup truck. Neo got out from the passenger side and laughed when he saw Robin come up the beach in his Robin Hood Lives shirt.

  ‘Very funny, now go change it,’ Emma said, snapping fingers.

  ‘Told you,’ Marion sang.

  Neo loaded their bags onto the pickup bed while Robin stripped off.

  ‘I set up a remote server so anyone can see what’s going on inside the shoe factory,’ Robin told Emma, as his head popped through a polo shirt. ‘Did you get the link and password I sent?’

  ‘It works great,’ Emma said, nodding. ‘I already passed the link on to Lynn Hoapili and Oluchi. They’re bringing a senior camera operators from Channel Fourteen too this time, so we should get good footage.’

  ‘The more proof we get, the harder it is for government and CIS to spin our story into something it isn’t,’ Neo added.

  ‘Did you show the factory footage to Srihari at the reception centre?’ Marion asked, as she opened one of the pickup’s rear doors.

  Emma nodded. ‘Of course. She watched hours of footage. She eventually spotted Bejo’s mum walking to the workshop to start a shift.’

  Marion smiled. ‘I wonder how Bejo will react when he sees her.’

  Neo sounded wary as he got back in the front passenger seat. ‘There are fifty things that could go wrong between now and then.’

  ‘It’s a good plan. I feel confident,’ Robin said, as he slid into the rear seat next to Marion.

  They both looked out of the back window as Emma started the engine. Napua stood on the jetty waving as they pulled away from The Station for the last time. Diogo gave Napua a quick kiss before straddling his big Harley Davidson and rolling out behind the pickup.

  ‘The Station’s cool,’ Marion said, as Diogo opened his throttle and accelerated past the pickup in a blaze of noise and pollution.