Survival

by Joe Craig

  Jimmy wanted to say something, but what could he say? And in a way she was right – Jimmy had never signed up to be in any army, but he’d been created by British military intelligence and now he was here acting on instructions from French military intelligence. One tattoo and I’d be a soldier, he realised.

  There was still a rumbling from the tunnel they’d escaped from, as the earth settled into place, but soon it died and there was a long silence. Jimmy and the girl threw glances across the pit, each checking that the other wasn’t going to attack. Both were fully aware that Jimmy had just saved the girl’s life. Both were trying to work out exactly why.

  From the little the girl had told him, Jimmy was beginning to suspect that she was probably fully human after all. The chance of her being another assassin was just too small. And yet her strength, skills and speed had been incredible…

  “How did you know how to use these drills?” Jimmy asked eventually.

  “I have been studying this place all my life. This is my country. Which means these should be our resources – not French. My community is…” She stopped herself again and all the life in her eyes seemed to die.

  Jimmy couldn’t see any way of talking to her without bringing back all the horror of what must have happened. He could see something about her – perhaps it was the way her shoulders slumped forwards, or the down-turned corners of her mouth. It told him that she had lost people she cared about.

  “How did you survive the missile blasts?” Jimmy asked, before he realised it was another tactless question.

  “I have not survived,” she replied.

  “What?” Jimmy tried to laugh, but it came out more like he was choking.

  “I am dead.”

  Jimmy wasn’t in the mood for jokes, but the expression on the girl’s face told him she wasn’t trying to be funny. Perhaps the confusion was because of her strange English.

  “The blast did not kill me,” she explained, “because I was lucky. But the radiation will. I may as well already be dead.” Suddenly panic seemed to attack her. “You should get out now!” she yelled. “There is actinium here. The second missile…”

  “I know,” Jimmy reassured her. “The heat might have ionised it. But—”

  “It did – I have seen the readings in the control centre,” she gabbled. “But you perhaps might still survive. You are not here as long as me and we are far from the depository. You are perhaps lucky, I—”

  “So a minute ago you wanted to drill through my skull, but now you’re trying to save my life?”

  The girl shrugged. “You saved mine,” she said softly. “In the tunnel. It means you are not French or British.”

  Jimmy felt a laugh coming, but the pain in his ribs killed it.

  “I am sorry,” said the girl. “I was wrong to attack you.” She looked around, everywhere but at Jimmy. Where had all that self-confidence gone? “I am Marla Rakubian,” she said, pulling herself up to stand tall again.

  “Marla,” replied Jimmy, “I’m Jimmy and I need you to take me to the actinium.”

  “What?” Her eyes expanded into huge circles.

  “It’s complicated. But can you take me there?”

  “No,” Marla insisted. “You are already too exposed. You will definitely get ill, but you might still survive. If I take you closer the damage will be worse. You will die. It is too late for me, but you can still survive if you leave now.”

  Jimmy didn’t listen to what Marla was saying. He was already climbing out of the pit. He saw for the first time that the pit was the centrepiece of a large warehouse. The space at ground level was filled with more drills, more machinery, scaffolding and stacks of equipment that reached to the ceiling, high above him.

  One thing in particular caught his eye: the control deck Marla had used to send the drills to attack him. It set off a chain of thought in his head that ran with the force of an express train. He pictured the drills hurtling down the tunnels, all at the same time. He imagined the heat and the sparks, and the fuel in their engines. He heard the rumble of the shock waves through the ground below.

  I could collapse the whole tunnel complex, he thought, without realising he was even thinking it. Dozens of small explosions. A chain reaction. Destroy everything…

  He clutched his head in his hands. “No!” he screamed. His heart was pounding. Do this properly, he ordered himself. Don’t waste this chance. “Make them listen!” he shouted.

  Marla had been talking all this time, but she stopped at Jimmy’s outburst. Jimmy was motionless except for the heaving of his chest. Then slowly he lifted his head and looked at Marla. She stared back.

  “Take me to the actinium,” Jimmy insisted. There was a long pause. Thousands of thoughts were fighting each other in his head. Finally he drew himself to his full height and sighed. “I suppose I should explain a couple of things about myself…”

  Helen, Georgie and Felix were being housed by NJ7 in a council estate in Chalk Farm, North London. And they were being watched. The place was perfect from a surveillance point of view – a ground-floor flat with no back door. And there was a raised walkway separating the front door from the road, so nobody could run straight into a car without being seen first – and shot if necessary.

  Zafi kept her head down, with her hair tucked up inside her cap, but her eyes took in everything as she swept along the street. The more she saw, the more she was impressed by NJ7. They’d chosen the perfect spot: the corner of a busy junction, with no tall buildings or trees to interrupt the views along the four roads that converged here. Hardly realising she was doing it, Zafi counted the buses and noted how often they pulled up at the bus stop in front of the building.

  Directly opposite the estate was the perfect surveillance base – the Gregor’s Elbow pub. The paint-work was chipped and faded, and the pavement all around it was carpeted with pigeon droppings. But more importantly, it wasn’t too busy and wasn’t too deserted. Nobody would notice the extra coming and going. Nobody but Zafi, that is.

  She glanced up at the flats above the pub. There were boards on the windows, but a chink of light crept through on the second floor. Were there NJ7 agents inside, huddled over video equipment? There wasn’t any need for them to be on site – it was quite simple to have all the surveillance data transmitted to NJ7 Headquarters, in real time. They want agents here, Zafi realised. In case Viggo comes. Or even Jimmy.

  She hurried past the block and along Malden Road, one of the adjacent streets. She couldn’t help smiling. Thanks to Jimmy blowing up the oil rig – and wearing a mask while he did it – NJ7 thought she was dead too. It made her task much easier.

  But she immediately tensed up again. She couldn’t let herself be seen, or have her face caught on camera. And now she started to spot agents everywhere. They weren’t just relying on their cameras and microphones. Zafi picked out a plasterer in one of the houses. He was wearing jeans that fitted him too well. There was also a parking attendant who wasn’t issuing any tickets. To Zafi, they couldn’t have been more obviously NJ7 agents if they’d had green stripes stamped on their foreheads.

  Then finally Zafi saw something that NJ7 hadn’t been able to control. Rolling towards her in a straggling bunch were half a dozen boys. One was definitely older than her – he must have been at least sixteen. He was dragging his bike along with him. The others looked between thirteen and fifteen. But Zafi wasn’t bothered about age. Her eye homed in on the shortest: a pale boy, not much taller than Zafi, swaggering across the pavement with a grim smirk on his face, barely visible beneath the huge hoodie that cloaked his whole head. Perfect, thought Zafi.

  By the time this gang had noticed Zafi, she already knew exactly what they were going to say to each other and what they were going to do to her. Or try to do. Her ear picked up their conversation at a distance, while her instincts read their body language. Then, when most people would have done their best to get ot of the way, Zafi made sure she walked straight into them.

  “Hey,” grunted
the boy with the bike.

  Zafi immediately turned to him, grimaced and puffed out her chest. “You asking for it?” she barked, perfectly imitating the London accent and the rhythm of the boy’s speech.

  “You what?” His face was a mixture of confusion and amusement. He looked round at his mates and gave an awkward laugh. Zafi held herself totally still, staring up at the boy, who was at least 50 centimetres taller than her.

  “Get out my way,” the boy ordered, his face returning to his usual sneer.

  “It’s my way,” Zafi snapped back. “But I’ll let you walk on it.”

  The boy ignored her and shoved his way past, jerking his elbow at Zafi’s face. She calmly swayed backwards to avoid it and let him walk on. But the others were eyeing her, half amused, half nervous.

  “Sorry, mate,” Zafi called out after him. “Can’t talk to you now, I’ve got to go and fix your mum’s face.”

  The boy whipped round, scarlet with shock. “You wh—?”

  “Calm down,” Zafi cut him off. “I’ll try your sister’s too, but I’m a plastic surgeon, not a miracle worker.”

  The boy lurched at Zafi, stumbling over his bike, but Zafi darted away with ease, slipping between two houses to escape. She could hear the others yelling and chasing after her, but it didn’t matter. There was no way they could catch her. You’ll see me later, she thought, already concentrating on the next stage of her plan and heading for the nearest grocery shop.

  Half an hour later she was climbing up the fire escape at the back of the Gregor’s Elbow. She was so light on her feet she barely made a sound. When she reached the roof she sprinted across to the other side of the building and lay down on her front, ready to watch.

  She had a perfect view of the flat where Helen, Georgie and Felix were living. She knew that soon Georgie and Felix would be coming home from school, so she waited. Meanwhile she turned her attention to the transmission equipment on the roof next to her.

  NJ7 had set up a sophisticated network of receivers – black metal boxes of various sizes, wires and small dishes, all pointed straight at the flat’s front door. Without touching the equipment, Zafi made a quick analysis of the structure of the system and waved her hands around the various parts, assessing which were warm and which were cold. She was relying on the fact that all the visual and aural feeds from the whole operation came to this unit, before being relayed downstairs to the flat, where the agents could watch and listen.

  From her examination it looked like she was right, but she knew that almost anything she did to tamper with the unit would backfire. It was probably alarmed, and in any case, it would be immediately obvious to all of the agents in the area that somebody was on the roof disrupting their equipment.

  So instead of cutting the wires, magnetising the boxes or even nudging the dishes off target, Zafi reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a large wedge of brie. She ripped the plastic from the cheese with violent energy because the packaging was covered in Union Jacks – the corner shop she’d found had only sold British cheese. English brie, she thought. Ridiculous. Even the smell, which would usually have made her mouth water, turned her stomach.

  She carefully laid the cheese at the heart of the network of electrical devices, right on top of the hottest of the metal cubes. That was all she needed to do. A few minutes later she spotted Felix and Georgie arriving home together. Shortly after that, Zafi saw the same gang of kids hanging about outside the estate. Everything was falling into place and by now the brie was melting into the receivers. Just a little more, Zafi thought, delighted that the stench of cheese was getting stronger.

  At last the first pigeon flapped down. Time to go, thought Zafi. She sprinted back across the roof and down the fire escape. How long would it be before the glutinous coating of cheese disrupted the NJ7 surveillance? And when an NJ7 engineer or agent came to investigate, there’d be a flock of feasting pigeons pecking the wiring to tatters. Too bad she wasn’t going to be around to see the result of her handiwork.

  Keeping her head low, she charged across the road. There was no time to waste. Who knew how long it would be before NJ7 solved their surveillance blackout? Zafi headed straight for the raised walkway outside Felix’s front door. The boy with the bike saw her straight away. Then his mates did too and they moved like a pack of dogs to cut her off.

  Not yet, thought Zafi, counting down the seconds in her head – ten, nine, eight… The boys caught up with her a couple of metres from the front door of the flat. Do nothing, Zafi could hear in her head. Seven, six, five… In the corner of her eye she could see the plasterer across the road, watching. She turned and saw the parking attendant bending his head for a better look at what was going on.

  BAM!

  A fist slammed into the back of Zafi’s head. She stumbled forwards, thinking her eyes might fall out of their sockets, but still counting: four, three, two… She heard the cackles of the group of boys. Then came a knee, punching into her nose. Zafi jerked her head backwards, absorbing the force of the blow, but still didn’t fight back.

  The seconds ran out. She glanced back towards the road. There it was – the next bus. It pulled up at the bus stop. Lightning fast, Zafi’s eyes flicked in the direction of the plasterer, then the parking attendant – the bus cut off their sightlines. Zafi exploded into action.

  She kicked both legs up behind her, flipping on to her hands. Her feet connected with two of the boys, instantly flattening them. Zafi completed the flip, her heels crunching into another boy’s head on the way down. The oldest boy reached for a knife in his pocket; Zafi had already read the contour of his jeans. She swivelled on the ball of her foot, snatched the bike and twisted the handlebars. The front wheel chopped into the boy’s knee. He crumpled. Zafi snapped the handlebars the other way to send the back of the wheel into his groin.

  That was all it took. As one, the boys staggered away from her, desperate to escape. Before they could run, Zafi grabbed the smallest by the shoulder. In one movement, she slapped his arms above his head and hauled off his hoodie. Just as the bus closed its doors, Zafi planted her cap on the boy’s head, spun him round and pushed him away to follow his friends. She pulled on the hoodie the exact moment that the bus pulled away, then she went for the front door of the flat.

  While three NJ7 agents were arguing with a pest control expert and an engineer on the top of the Gregor’s Elbow pub about how to clean their surveillance equipment of cheese and pigeons, an undercover plasterer and a fake parking attendant saw a young boy in a hoodie waiting at the front door of the flat they were watching.

  They both shook their heads in disappointment – they’d seen the gangs hanging around and now it looked like Felix and Georgie had fallen in with the wrong crowd. There was nothing worth reporting though. They even thought nothing of the massive grin on Felix’s face when he answered the door.

  Contact had been made.

  17 STONE IN A BARREL

  The PVP 360 was proving to be a poor operations centre for Uno Stovorsky. With the roof up there was limited communications access, but without that roof the desert sun was unbearable. To compromise, he’d had to instruct his driver to pull back to the nearest town, Tlon, where they were parked in the shade of a fading Coca-Cola billboard.

  Then a message buzzed on his phone. It was from Zafi.

  “Good news,” said Stovorsky, sitting in the passenger seat, but with the door open and his feet planted on the ground. “Our London operative has made contact.” Despite the sweat dripping down his neck and the flies dancing round his bald spot, he sounded relatively satisfied.

  “Do you want me to radio Jimmy?” asked the driver, a young soldier. “He’ll be pleased.” Stovorsky huffed and shook his head. “Are you contacting Zafi then?” the younger man continued, peering over Stovorsky’s shoulder, trying to get a look at the computer. “She’ll wait with the subjects until you issue the extract and secure order.”

  Stovorsky shrugged. “It might suit us more,” he explained, �
�if Jimmy thinks his family is still in danger, for now.”

  “You don’t trust Jimmy?”

  “Do you?” Stovorsky looked up for the first time and gave the driver an examining stare. “But that’s not what matters,” he said casually, returning to his laptop. “We need to keep him in the dark for now because he doesn’t trust me.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Stovorsky sighed. “Jimmy thinks that by showing NJ7 he’s alive he can somehow stop Britain attacking France.” His fingers tapped away at the keys while he spoke. “But if he turns up NJ7 will immediately use his family against him. So as long as Jimmy thinks his family is still being looked after by NJ7, he’ll stay out of sight and do this job for us.” He looked up again, a businesslike calm on his face. “As soon as he’s secured the mine, I’ll give him the good news.”

  Jimmy kept his head down and his eyes firmly on his feet while he stomped through the mine compound alongside Marla. It was almost as if he was trying to keep pace with the words rushing off his tongue.

  At last he ran out of steam. He knew he had left out so much, but couldn’t bring himself to say any more. He looked across at Marla and waited anxiously for her reaction. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had to tell anybody so much about himself. Hearing it aloud felt as foreign as the desert setting, and as frightening as the burnt-out shells of the mine buildings and the lumps in the ground where the wind was quickly covering bodies with sand.

  Marla nodded slowly. “There is a man you should meet,” she said.

  “Is that it?” Jimmy gawped. He wasn’t sure what reaction he’d been expecting, but such a calm one shocked him. “I just told you I’m 38 per cent human and that’s all you can say?”

  “What do you want me to do?” Marla asked. “Cry? Shout? Pretend I do not believe you?”

  “Yeah, I mean, I don’t know.” Jimmy could hear agitation in his voice and he felt anger in his chest. Relax, he told himself. She’s helping. But the thoughts came with a rush of suspicion. “How do you speak English so well?”