Jet Skis, Swamps & Smugglers

by Robert Muchamore

  ‘Recent events have taught me not to trust cops,’ Robin said, as Bejo lurched forward like he was trying to get away. ‘And we definitely don’t trust Customs and Immigration.’

  ‘Robin Hood, thank you!’ Lynn said, then turned to the camera operator and made a cut gesture.

  ‘I didn’t know you were here,’ Robin said, smiling as Srihari reached in and took Bejo back.

  ‘Just now,’ Srihari answered. ‘To help translate.’

  Robin turned to Lynn. ‘Did you arrange to have her hand Bejo to me?’

  ‘Your expression was gold!’ Marion said in the background.

  Lynn smiled mischievously. ‘I’m a journalist, Robin. If I put out a grim report about poor Indonesian women forced to work as slaves in a shoe factory, people will reach for the remote. But a story about Robin Hood reuniting an adorable baby with his mommy will be the biggest thing ever.’

  37. ROLL UP, ROLL UP

  Emma felt more like a travelling circus ringmaster than the organiser of a covert rescue operation. But while the convoy of bikers, buses and a TV van sparked the curiosity of anyone who saw it, their intent wasn’t obvious and everyone had orders to keep off social media.

  Brigands ran their bikes without mufflers to make them roar, but thirty deafeningly loud bikes are useless for sneaking around, so they parked half a kilometre from Porthowell and piled into the back of a container truck along with Marion and Robin.

  Last to board the truck were Tara and Hannah, two members of a New Survivors security team, wearing tactical vests that bulged with weapons.

  Robin was sweating because he’d been given a military helmet and bulletproof vest. As the truck’s rear doors slammed, plunging everyone into darkness and body odour, he wondered when some of the Brigands had last washed.

  ‘Who farted?’ someone joked as the truck started a wobbly ride.

  There was no view out as they rode past the giant Two Tu warehouse complex, through a break in the fence around the abandoned part of the Porthowell chemical plant, then a bumpy final stretch over the torn-up railway sidings.

  Emma, Neo, Srihari and the TV crew had driven ahead. As Robin and Marion jumped out into the day’s final rays of sunlight, Cut-Throat told his men to squat out of sight behind the truck bed, put their phones on silent and keep the noise down.

  ‘Team one, ready?’ Emma asked sharply.

  Robin stepped up to Emma, along with the two New Survivors.

  Tara and Hannah’s camouflage, body armour and holstered handguns contrasted with the gentle manner and green polo shirts of the New Survivors back at Boston church hall. The fierce-looking pair made Robin uneasy, reminding him what Marion had said about the cult’s giant underground compound and the rumours that they brainwashed people.

  Neo had a laptop set up on a rusty barrel, monitoring the live cameras inside the factory. He wasn’t the greatest with computers, so he made sure Robin looked on as he logged into the factory’s computer network and disabled the eight outdoor cameras.

  Now that the factory guards couldn’t see out, Robin grabbed his arrows, checked his walkie-talkie and followed Tara and Hannah through the fence near the bins.

  Hannah gave him a boost onto the rooftop as Tara rolled a wheelie bin up to the wall. The women then used the bin as a step to climb onto the gently sloping roof and sat on a concrete beam directly above the black metal exit door.

  Two days observing the factory’s comings and goings had revealed that this door was used more frequently than the main entrance around the front. Sometimes it was for a guard to smoke, but Neo was watching a larger group on the laptop feed.

  ‘Coming your way,’ he warned over the radio. ‘Three women, sandwiched by guards.’

  Robin, Hannah and Tara heard the door’s hinges squeal. A guard led the way, then the three women. They were scruffy, barefoot and each struggled to push a huge wheelie bin filled with factory waste. Last out was another guard, who jabbed the third woman with his baton and growled something sinister.

  As the three bins rattled over the rough pavement, this second guard stayed by the door and took a cigarette from his top pocket. Tara leaped down and coshed him across the back of the head. Robin kept an arrow locked on the first guard in case he tried to run, but Hannah tackled him, taking him down before he knew she was coming.

  Robin watched from the roof as the three enslaved workers froze in shock and several Brigands came in through the fence, along with Srihari.

  ‘Please keep quiet,’ Srihari whispered in Indonesian, as she pointed to the fence. ‘We’re here to help you. Come this way, quickly!’

  As the three women stared nervously, four Brigands dealt with the flattened guards. Emma had instructed them to restrain guards with plastic zip ties and take them away with a minimum of fuss. But the Brigands couldn’t resist swinging their boots as Tara reached in to snatch a big bunch of keys hooked to one guard’s belt.

  38. THE BIG BOSS

  Hannah and Tara’s next task was to move stealthily through the factory building, entering the guards’ break room and securing the gun locker. As the pair strode through the black door, Robin sprinted across the factory roof.

  The plan called for Robin to do this alone, but as he began a hundred-metre dash, hurdling the thick concrete support beams, he saw Channel Fourteen intern Oluchi giving chase with her shoulder-mount camera.

  The squat building had been built to store dangerous chemicals, so cooling, heating, and other systems that might start a fire if they went wrong were located in a separate utility building.

  Robin went down on one knee, looking from the edge of the roof across a steep grass embankment and three rows of parking spaces towards the utility building. This was a perfect metal-sided cube, apart from three big chimney ducts rising out of one end.

  ‘Hood in position,’ Robin told his radio.

  ‘Let me confirm,’ Neo answered, as he stood outside the compound flicking through the camera feeds. ‘Hanna and Tara have the break-room weapons secured. You’re free to shoot.’

  ‘Nice,’ Robin said, then looked back at Oluchi, who’d crept up close with the camera. ‘Keep low if you don’t want your eyebrows singed.’

  Robin had only shot one practice arrow, so he’d fixed explosives and detonators to three more, giving him extra shots if he missed. He used the same routine as earlier, lining up his shot on a metal cooling vent. Since his shot at the tree had gone low, he made a larger upwards correction so that the dangerous end almost pointed at an emerging moon.

  As Robin let go, he thought the shot might skim clean over the target building. But it lost height rapidly and vanished into gloom. As Robin had the horrible thought that he might have to use the second arrow without even knowing where the first one went, he heard a deep thud.

  With as much luck as skill, Robin had hit his target. The building had muffled the explosion but the metal wall bulged out, and dense grey smoke began spewing from one of the chimneys.

  ‘I think I got it,’ Robin told his radio.

  ‘I’m in the guards’ break room,’ Hannah replied. ‘We’re on emergency lighting, all the machinery has stopped.’

  ‘Camera feeds are down too,’ Neo added. ‘Looks like you’ve done it.’

  Robin and Oluchi peered over the edge of the roof as the building’s main entrance swung open. A guard and an engineer with a toolbox strode purposefully up the steep grass embankment towards the plant building to see why the power had failed.

  They stopped walking when they saw the billowing smoke, then got scared as a swarm of Brigands spilled from behind a low wall at the end of the parking lot and began a charge down the embankment towards the main entrance.

  Oluchi filmed as several confused women wandered out through a side door, while Brigands poured in.

  ‘They felt that!’ Robin said, as Cut-Throat sent the guard and engineer rolling down the embankment with an enormous double headbutt.

  As the remaining guards got dragged outside by Brigands,
they were thrown down, frisked for weapons, then made to lie face down as their wrists and ankles were bound tightly with plastic zip ties.

  The Brigands weren’t about to win any awards for gentle handling of prisoners, but were pussycats compared to some of the freed women, who picked up batons stripped from their former captors and used them to settle scores.

  After a hefty chain was snapped with bolt cutters, a gate swung open and the four green buses rolled into the car park. Srihari and two of the women they’d rescued by the bins were shouting frantically in Indonesian, encouraging the nervous barefoot women to board.

  A lot of the freed workers were confused, maybe because bikers don’t fit most people’s image of what good guys are supposed to look like. New Survivors who’d stepped from the buses in their neat green polo shirts did a better job, by holding up laminated cards printed in Indonesian:

  We are here to help.

  Please board our buses

  quickly and quietly.

  ‘Check that,’ Oluchi said, nudging Robin’s arm and pointing down.

  Robin peered down over the front of the building at suit trousers and polished shoes dangling from an upper-floor window. A small, grey-haired man in a suit jumped five metres. He landed awkwardly, then grabbed a briefcase he’d thrown out first.

  The man’s knee kept buckling as he limped up the grass embankment. Robin recognised him as the guy with designer luggage he’d seen get off the trawler at Landing Dock Y.

  ‘I bet he’s the boss,’ Robin said, as he realised that nobody down below had spotted him.

  ‘Wait,’ Oluchi said, as Robin scrambled off along the roof.

  While it had been easy to climb up the side of the building, here at the front the drop was fifteen metres. So Robin ran across the roof until he saw a drainpipe, then swung out over the side and mixed clambering and sliding to get down.

  Robin lost sight of the limping man as he ran up the steep embankment, but when he got to the top he sighted him at the far side of the car park, heading for the water treatment ponds and Porthowell Dock beyond.

  Robin thought about shooting an arrow as the man clanked up steps onto a metal observation gantry that spanned one of the empty concrete pools.

  Fortunately he didn’t have to. It was almost dark now and scrappers had stolen a circular manhole cover from the middle of the walkway. When the man’s front foot went through the hole, his forward momentum saved him from a ten-metre drop, but in doing so he banged his already weakened knee, then face-planted into the walkway, bursting his nose.

  As Robin closed warily, in case the man had a weapon, he heard someone running behind and saw Luke, the teenaged Brigands prospect.

  ‘I saw you chase him,’ Luke said, slightly breathless. ‘You OK?’

  ‘Pretty sure he knocked himself out,’ Robin said, pulling a torch from his pack and shining it along the gantry at the slumped figure.

  Emma’s orders were to tie up anyone they caught and hope the cops did something more than set them free when they were found. The Brigands had been given heavy-duty zip ties to do this, though before Luke bound the unconscious man’s wrist to the gantry railing, he stripped a gold Rolex watch.

  Robin was more interested in what the man had chosen to stuff in his briefcase before fleeing. Popping the lid revealed a half-eaten bag of Pickled Onion Monster Munch, a swanky miniature laptop, some papers that looked like they’d been flung in hastily and a fat brick of £100 notes in an elastic band.

  ‘I’ll give the case to Emma,’ Robin said, as Luke extracted a wallet from inside the man’s jacket. ‘Could be evidence. For all we know, there are loads of factories like this.’

  Luke’s eyes were locked on the money. ‘We’re not giving her that,’ he said firmly.

  Robin had seen how much abuse Luke took from the older Brigands and thought he deserved a break.

  ‘Our little secret,’ he said, splitting the money into two and passing the slightly smaller half to Luke. ‘Sixty–forty in my favour, since you got the watch.’

  39. HOLD THE BABY

  While Robin dealt with the businessman, Lynn, who had lost both camera operators in the chaos, struggled to make her report, Emma was desperate to get the women away from Porthowell before cops or CIS showed up, and Cut-Throat wanted the four buses to clear out so he could bring in trucks and start loading thousands of pairs of knock-off trainers from the warehouse.

  Srihari spotted Bejo’s mum heading towards a bus. As the two young women shared a tearful hug, Marion snatched up a snoozing Bejo from Emma’s pickup and jogged across the car park towards them.

  ‘I need that on camera!’ Lynn screamed when she saw what was about to happen. ‘Steve, Oluchi, where are you? Marion, can you please hold back the baby reunion for five seconds?’

  But nothing was going to stop Bejo’s mum when she saw her baby, so Lynn scrambled to capture the moment with her phone.

  Bejo was moody after being woken up and, as his mum scooped him up for kisses, the eight-month-old furrowed his brow crossly, as if to say, Where did you run off to?

  ‘I hate to spoil this party,’ Emma said, approaching as the first busload of women pulled off in the background. ‘But double-deckers won’t outrun cop cars, so we have to clear out of here.’

  Robin and Luke jogged towards the gathering, though Luke kept going because he needed to help the Brigands.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Marion asked suspiciously.

  ‘We cuffed a guy to a gantry over a pond,’ Robin explained, slightly breathless. ‘He’s the boss, I think. Emma, I’ve put his ID and briefcase in the back of your pickup. There’s a laptop and phone. I can probably get information off them when I have time.’

  ‘Good work,’ Emma said.

  As Srihari, Bejo and his mum headed tearfully towards the last bus, Hannah and Tara approached.

  ‘Great work in the guard room,’ Marion told the security officers. ‘We were watching on camera when you splattered the three guards.’

  ‘Cheers,’ Tara said, then looked at Emma. ‘Some of the women speak English. They’re saying they’ve got things in their dorm. Clothes, medication, wedding rings.’

  ‘A lot of the women are also saying that their children were taken away when they arrived,’ Hannah added.

  Emma sounded stressed. ‘Missing kids, more slaves in more factories, corrupt CIS officers. Who knows how big this scandal could get?’

  ‘Some of us New Survivors would like to go down to the women’s dorms and gather their personal items,’ Tara said. ‘I’d also like to smash some of the expensive factory equipment so they can’t set up another factory.’

  ‘Happy to help,’ Robin suggested, as Marion nodded in agreement.

  ‘If I ever find my camera people, I’d like to film inside the factory too,’ Lynn said, glancing about.

  ‘I must leave with Neo now,’ Emma said. ‘I’ve got extra volunteers but it’s going to be chaos when two hundred women turn up at a welcome centre designed to handle twenty at most. You adults can do whatever you think best, but remember, cops could arrive at any time. Robin and Marion, you’re travelling back to Sherwood with Cut-Throat, yes?’

  Marion nodded. ‘We’ll spend the night there, and my dad’ll take us back to Designer Outlets tomorrow.’

  ‘But you’ve got our luggage in the pickup,’ Robin said. ‘We can’t carry all that on bikes.’

  ‘You might have to wait a few days, but you’ll get your stuff,’ Emma said. ‘And I’ll go remind Cut-Throat not to leave without you.’

  ‘I’m his daughter,’ Marion said indignantly. ‘He’d better not.’

  ‘Ten minutes inside the factory,’ Emma warned as Robin and Marion ran off. ‘Don’t get left behind!’

  40. PACKING UP AND MOVING OUT

  After watching the factory through security cameras, Robin felt weird seeing it for real. It had seemed clean and well lit, but as Oluchi filmed him walking along a corridor with dim orange emergency lighting, Robin was struc
k by fierce heat and a throat-burning stench from glues and chemicals that weren’t properly ventilated.

  Robin worked out where he’d seen the boss man go out the window and found an office with three desks and laptops.

  ‘If I took this, could you get it working for me?’ Marion asked, as she eyed a laptop. ‘My computer is older than I am.’

  ‘I could sort you out for a modest fee,’ Robin said cheekily.

  She put the slim laptop in her bag and another for her family. There were shelves full of files. Some might have valuable evidence on CIS corruption and how the factory operation worked, but they faced a long trek through Sherwood Forest to get back to Designer Outlets, and now Emma and the pickup were gone, they’d have to carry anything they took.

  They walked down steps to the factory floor. Oluchi broke away to film machinist tables with half-finished shoe uppers that women had been working on as the Brigands stormed in.

  Tara had crawled under a laser cutter designed to turn leather hides or vinyl into shoe parts and was using her stun stick to fry the circuit boards. Hannah took a more athletic approach, battering the control panel of a bonding machine with a fire extinguisher.

  ‘These lights are on battery back-up,’ Robin warned them. ‘I doubt they’ll last much longer.’

  The last stop on Robin and Marion’s tour was the women’s dorm. Three New Survivors swept efficiently through a space that reeked of sweat, waving torches, lifting mattresses and dropping personal items into plastic tubs.

  Robin couldn’t walk between the triple bunks without turning sideways and he could barely imagine what it must have been like packed with women, who used the bunks in shifts while the rest worked.

  ‘Do you need help?’ Marion asked.

  ‘We’re good,’ one of the New Survivors said. ‘Almost finished.’

  A rat jumped off a counter as Robin and Marion crossed a dining area with half-eaten plates of rice on the tables.