Black Friday

by Robert Muchamore

  They’d been taught how to ram a roadblock, but you had to slow down to no more than thirty miles per hour to avoid a whiplash injury, and even then hitting other cars wasn’t an exact science. Grace decided that her advantage was big enough to take the safer option.

  Ning considered going for the lead, but she’d already been deducted five of her eight points during earlier tests, and while a win might be good for her ego, her real goal was to finish within twenty seconds of the winner and not hit too many obstacles to pass Advanced Driving.

  As Ning followed Grace through the twisting diversion, Leon charged the roadblock. He hit the rear of the two cars spot on, making a nice hole between them. While Leon had slowed down to crash the roadblock, Alfie took advantage of his hard work and whizzed through the gap at full speed.

  Ning had made up most of her gap to Grace on the twisting go-kart section and came back on to the main track behind Grace, with Leon right on her tail. Alfie was on the outside and still last, but he had enough momentum to overtake the others if he could find a way through.

  As they turned on to the main straight to complete the lap, Alfie got his nose in front of Grace, while Ning and Leon ran side by side less than a car-length behind them. Up ahead, James and Bruce and their assistant Kevin Sumner had livened things up by turning the straight into a slalom using a mixture of polystyrene grannies, cardboard mums with pushchairs and a sinister-looking dummy soldier holding a bazooka.

  Grace and Alfie refused to submit the lead, but Ning was focused on passing the course, not winning the race. Knowing that she only had to finish within twenty seconds of the winner, she slowed down and neatly weaved around the few dummies that hadn’t already been hit by one of the two leading cars.

  Ning kept this strategy up for the next half a lap, and made it up to third when Alfie barged Grace off-track into a barrier. Grace tried to rejoin, but her front right tyre had come off its rim. Technically this meant Grace had failed the course, but Ning suspected James and Bruce would give her another shot rather than fail a good pupil.

  Leon had the lead as they approached the final straight and cut into the pit lane. Alfie was almost on his rear bumper and while the boys battled, Ning smartly left a gap big enough to take evasive action if one of the lads had an incident.

  After pulling under the grandstand, hay bales marked out a separate route for each car. A twisting path took Ning to a sign indicating that she had to change direction with a handbrake turn. She hadn’t done one in the Golf since Thursday and made a complete hash of it, but she was sure that this was the first point she’d be docked and she only had a few hundred metres left to drive.

  The final stretch was slalom between hay bales, then a long twisting reverse drive, and up a ramp into the rear of a truck. Ning clipped her door mirror as she backed into the truck, but the paintwork was already battered and the dink was so slight that she doubted anyone would notice.

  Ning gasped with relief as she turned off the engine and released her safety harness, but when she opened the door, she saw there wasn’t room to get out. After a moment’s thought, she pulled off her crash helmet and made an ungracious exit through the Golf’s sunroof, followed by a slide down the bonnet and a jump out of the truck’s rear.

  Leon and Alfie had made it out of their trucks in the same fashion a couple of seconds earlier, but the two boys were furious about their battle on the track and both claimed to have won. Alfie had a big size advantage, but he wasn’t prepared for Leon charging forwards and belting him across the side of the head with his crash helmet.

  ‘You’re a maniac!’ Leon shouted.

  ‘I’m a maniac?’ Alfie roared, as he dodged a second swing of Leon’s helmet. ‘You slammed me into that barrier at the start.’

  ‘You got a crap start,’ Leon shouted. ‘You should have yielded.’

  As Leon’s initial bravado wore off, he once again realised that tangling with Alfie wasn’t a good idea. But as he backed off, Alfie hooked Leon’s ankle and swept his feet away before jumping on his back.

  ‘You’re hamburger,’ Alfie shouted.

  Alfie landed three hard punches on the smaller boy before Ning grabbed Alfie under the arms and hoiked him off.

  ‘Pack it in,’ Ning ordered, as she shoved Alfie away. ‘You’re both idiots.’

  Bruce and James were also now jogging towards the scene.

  ‘Ning, well done, you passed,’ James said, as Leon struggled off the ground, badly winded but trying not to let Alfie see that he was hurt. ‘You two boys totally lost your heads.’

  Bruce screamed right in Alfie’s face. ‘What’s the number one rule?’

  ‘Safety first,’ Alfie said meekly.

  ‘Your driving was unacceptable,’ James yelled. ‘You two were so busy fighting one another, that you hit more obstacles than I’d care to count and broke safety rules too. You’re both decent drivers. You should have passed easily, but instead you’ve made complete tits of yourselves.’

  ‘We’ve tried to be cool with you all week,’ Bruce added. ‘But that madness could have caused a serious accident. We can’t dish out punishment laps because we’re not official instructors.’

  Alfie smiled cheekily, much to James’ annoyance.

  ‘But I can write a report,’ James said, as he poked Alfie in the chest. ‘So you can both expect a call to the chairman’s office at some point in the next few days.’

  Grace and her Golf had been picked up in a tow truck driven by the black shirt Kevin Sumner. She looked pretty upset as she jumped from the cab with her helmet under her arm, but Bruce cheered her up straight away.

  ‘You passed,’ Bruce told her. ‘We’re not gonna hold a burst tyre against you. Congratulations.’

  ‘Now we’re done,’ James said, glancing at his watch, then glowering at Leon and Alfie. ‘Ning and Grace can drive back to campus with us. Alfie and Leon can stay here and pick up all the obstacles and hay bales. If you work quickly, Kevin might give you a lift after he’s driven all the cars back and locked up the garage. If you’re slow, I hope you enjoy the twelve-kilometre walk back to campus.’

  18. POLITICS

  Ryan caught up with Max Black and a few other campus mates over lunch, before heading upstairs for his second meeting of the day. While the first meeting had been personal and friendly, this one was more like an inquisition.

  The campus conference room was equipped with a telepresence system. Zara saw the other participants’ torsos in life-size on LCD screens along three walls of the room. It was a high-powered group, which included Dr D from TFU in Dallas, the British Intelligence minister in Manchester and the US Intelligence Secretary who was on a visit to Pakistan. The meeting was being chaired from Washington DC by Senator Madeline White. She was the head of the US Senate Joint Intelligence Committee and rumoured to be considering a run for president in 2016.

  Amy and Ryan watched the meeting through one-way glass from a side room. Dr D read a brief report, summarising how her unit had taken control of the Aramov Clan and was slowly winding down Aramov operations while trying to take as many other criminal groups as possible with it.

  ‘Approximately five months ago, a Mr Elbaz contacted an Aramov Clan representative based in South America,’ Dr D said. ‘He wanted to hire a freighter aircraft and crew. At this time, Elbaz did not disclose that he was working for IDoJ. However, this became apparent as negotiations continued.

  ‘Elbaz also had links to corrupt military officials willing to sell high explosives in the People’s Republic of China, and hinted that IDoJ was building a terrorist cell inside the United States. We used the Aramov Clan to help Elbaz to devise a plan, involving a freighter aircraft travelling from Kyrgyzstan. The aircraft would collect eleven tonnes of explosives in China, then travel on to Manta, Ecuador, from where Elbaz claimed he would be able to move the explosives into the United States using a hijacked cargo aircraft.

  ‘TFU’s plan was to intercept this cargo of explosives, along with Elbaz and as many members
of the US-based IDoJ cell as we could lay our hands on. Unfortunately – for reasons that are still not entirely clear – Elbaz tripped us up by changing the US landing site at the last moment. This enabled him to proceed to the next stage of the operation.’

  Senator White rattled a bunch of papers and spoke noisily. ‘Dr D, I think everyone here is fully aware of what has happened over the past few days. What I want to know, is how you thought you could justify an operation in which failure would lead to a large quantity of explosives entering the United States?’

  Dr D had been in hundreds of meetings like this and wasn’t flustered by the senator’s aggressive tone. ‘We felt it was vital to unearth the IDoJ cell within the United States. The only way to do that was to track the explosives to their arrival point in Alabama.’

  ‘And the cost to the pilot Tracy Collings?’ the senator asked. ‘Her family held hostage, before she’s blackmailed and then executed in cold blood. Plus two more dead FBI men who tried boarding the plane, a British agent killed at the ranch, six dead and three critical in Jackson, Louisiana. And that’s before we mention half a billion dollars in property damage, and the incalculable economic effect of half the shops in the United States closed for business on the busiest shopping weekend of the year.’

  The Intelligence Secretary interrupted. ‘Senator, I think you’re being very emotive. There’s no need for your political grandstanding. The objective of this meeting is to understand the operation.’

  ‘Really?’ the senator asked. ‘Perhaps the Intelligence Secretary could clarify for the record whether the President personally approved this operation?’

  The Intelligence Secretary looked uncomfortable. ‘The President was apprised of the operation in his daily intelligence briefing. However, it’s not his job to take responsibility for, or to authorise, individual intelligence operations.’

  The senator made a grumpy humph before resuming her attack. ‘And how do you think the President’s approval ratings will look, if the American public finds out that the entire IDoJ operation was only made possible by the Aramov Clan, while the Aramov Clan is currently controlled by the United States Intelligence Service?’

  Zara Asker chimed in at this point. ‘I think we need to calm down and look at facts. There were mistakes and sadly lives were lost. But IDoJ planned to kill at least ten thousand people in the Black Friday attacks. We lost less than one per cent of that number, and in the process captured Elbaz, killed his deputy Mumin and arrested many members of the US-based IDoJ cell. Anyone who thinks you can undertake an operation of this complexity without any mistakes is a fantasist and if you leave out emotive political arguments, the result was a qualified success.’

  Now Senator White turned her wrath on Zara. ‘You work in intelligence, Mrs Asker. I work in politics. The risks taken in this operation may be fine for you intelligence folks, but as far as I’m concerned when you’re talking about American civilians being killed on home soil the only acceptable level of casualties is zero.’

  Dr D spoke. ‘The Aramov Clan has over seventy planes in its fleet. But there are hundreds of these old Russian planes in the sky. If we’d turned Elbaz away, he could have got his explosives from China to Ecuador using any one of a hundred smaller smuggling outfits. And I should remind you, every single slab of that explosive has now been accounted for.’

  ‘More by luck than skill,’ Senator White snapped. ‘I’ve come into this meeting today with a single proposal. After this weekend’s events, it is no longer acceptable for a US government department – even a highly secretive one like TFU – to run illegal smuggling operations. I propose that instead of winding down the Aramov Clan over two or three years as planned, we set a target of ninety days. If we’re smart, we can produce evidence showing the Aramov Clan’s links to IDoJ and make it look like the elimination of the clan was revenge for their involvement in the attacks.’

  Dr D looked furious. ‘Controlling the clan represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity. The Aramov Clan’s transportation network is used and trusted by dozens of major crime syndicates. The only reason we haven’t moved against more bad guys already is that we have to pace ourselves, otherwise it will be too obvious where all the information is coming from.’

  The Intelligence Secretary sighed. ‘As a representative of the President I reluctantly agree with Senator White. I appreciate the value of the Aramov Clan as an intelligence asset. But the Aramov operation was signed off on the basis that we were dealing with a smuggling network based in central Asia. Nobody expected it to involve terrorists turning up in Alabama on Thanksgiving.’

  Dr D cleared her throat. ‘If it helps, I’d be willing to resign my post and let someone else take over TFU. We could establish new ground rules, so that no Aramov-related operation should come anywhere near US territory.’

  Senator White looked less than keen. ‘First of all, Dr D, after the debacle over the past weekend, I’d assumed that your resignation was already on the table. Secondly, you can have all the ground rules you like, but the cat is out of the bag. TFU is responsible for a partially-successful terrorist attack on US soil. The faster we tidy this mess up, the less chance there is that the intelligence service’s role will become public. The Aramov Clan operation must be drawn to a swift conclusion and TFU must be shut down.’

  ‘Would it be possible for British Intelligence to take the Aramov Clan operation over?’ Zara asked.

  At this suggestion, the British Intelligence minister gave Zara a filthy look, before chiming in nervously. ‘The British Government are firm friends to the US Intelligence Services. But we’ve got elections coming up and no politician wants this hot potato dumped in their lap.’

  The meeting rambled for another hour, but the politicians couldn’t be persuaded and when the telepresence screens faded out nothing had changed.

  After what the media had now named The Black Friday Raid, politicians were scared of what would happen if the public learned that an organisation run by their own intelligence service had hired out the plane that IDoJ used to help smuggle eleven tonnes of explosive into the USA, and had known about the kidnapping of Tracy Collings’ family before it happened.

  TFU was being shut down, Dr D was being bounced into early retirement and Zara Asker was fully expecting a one-on-one telephone bollocking from her boss the Intelligence minister when she got back to her office.

  The Aramov Clan’s fleet of aircraft would be taken out of service and the Kremlin base shut down, though the politicians had accepted that this might not be possible within Senator White’s ninety-day target.

  ‘I feel like a naughty kid coming out of the headmaster’s office,’ Zara said, shuddering as Amy and Ryan emerged from behind the one-way glass. ‘Everyone talks about how great democracy is, but I’d feel a lot happier if the politicians could see beyond their next set of poll ratings.’

  Ryan sounded frustrated. ‘But Aramov has links to every major criminal network on earth. If we shut it down, the whole operation will have been for nothing.’

  ‘I’ve been saying that for the past two hours,’ Zara said. ‘But unless you plan on storming Parliament and staging a coup, CHERUB ultimately does what the politicians tell us to.’

  Amy was upset for more personal reasons. ‘With Dr D and Ted Brasker both close to retirement I thought I had a good shot at a senior job in TFU in a few years. Now I’m a junior operator, with my reputation tarnished by working for a unit that messed up and got closed down.’

  ‘CHERUB is set to expand,’ Zara said. ‘The first mission control vacancy that comes up is all yours.’

  Amy shrugged. ‘Appreciated, Zara. But I’ve never seen myself back at CHERUB. I want to carve my own niche, rather than fall back on my past.’

  Ryan smirked. ‘If I was as hot as you, Amy, I’d marry some old billionaire and wait for him to croak.’

  Amy appreciated Ryan’s attempt to cheer her up, but gave his ear a flick for being cheeky. Zara was leading them back down the hallway towa
rds the stairs when Amy’s phone rang. It was Ted Brasker.

  ‘Dr D called me in tears,’ Ted told Amy. ‘But I say screw the politicians. I’m getting old. I’ll probably get the boot once we’re done with the Aramov Clan anyway. TFU’s got at least ninety days and old Ted plans to go out with a bang not a whimper. Are you with me, Amy Collins?’

  ‘Why not?’ Amy laughed. ‘My career’s not worth shit now anyway.’

  ‘Pack your kit and sort your flights, then,’ Ted said. ‘We need you and Ryan back at the Kremlin to finish what we’ve started.’

  19. KYRGYZSTAN

  Ryan had been on the move for so long that jet lag had started to feel like the normal state of things. He’d flown from London to Dubai with Amy, but they couldn’t be seen arriving together so he spent the night in a hotel before flying from Sharjah to the Kremlin on one of the Aramov Clan’s semi-regular passenger flights.

  It was Wednesday lunchtime as Ryan walked through the Kremlin lobby, with dirty snow dripping off his new Converse. The bar was open and fruit machines flashed, but none of the grubby mechanics and aircrew paid the blindest bit of notice as he walked to the lift. They didn’t know where Ryan had been, and it would be a while before news filtered through the Kremlin that his ‘father’ Kazakov was dead.

  Aramov crews were a tight-knit community, but while they’d drink all night and gossip about landing conditions, sources for aircraft spares and who was screwing who, they rarely told other crews where they were going or where they’d just been. Smuggling is a risky business. People might blab if they were arrested, and information on where a plane loaded with fifty million dollars’ worth of cocaine is heading is worth a lot of money to someone who wants to hijack it.