The General

by Robert Muchamore

  ‘You talk rubbish, Rat,’ Andy said, aghast. ‘I said I liked her one time and you’ve been going on about it ever since.’

  ‘Shitter,’ Rat repeated.

  By this time they’d all reached the sixth-floor landing, but Kevin peeled off into the corridor.

  ‘Where you going?’ Rat asked. ‘We’re all supposed to be going down for slingshot practice.’

  ‘I don’t want to get these muddy,’ Kevin explained, as he looked down at his glowing white Nikes. ‘I’ll nip to my room and change.’

  Ronan shook his head. ‘Change your trainers! How much of a girl are you, Kevin?’

  ‘At least I don’t stink of piss,’ Kevin yelled back.

  Ronan was half-way down to the fifth floor, but he spun around and squared up to Kevin. ‘Say that again and I’ll stomp on your head.’

  ‘Leave it out,’ Rat sighed. He was one of the strongest thirteen-year-olds on campus so he had no problem pulling the two eleven-year-olds apart. He shoved Kevin down the hallway towards his room before grabbing Ronan by his collar. ‘We’re gonna be stuck in a minibus for two hours on the way to the ATCC. If you smell like anything other than soap or deodorant, you’re riding on the roof rack.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Kevin smirked as he walked backwards down the hallway towards his room. ‘Take a bath, loser.’

  ‘See you down in the weapons room, Kev,’ Rat said, as Andy and Jake resumed the charge downstairs.

  Kevin’s room was like all the others in the main building: small sofa by the door, double bed, desk with a laptop near the window, wardrobes along the length of one wall and a bathroom off to the side. But he was surprised to see a rusted toolbox in his bathroom doorway.

  Karen, the campus plumber, leaned out of the bathroom. She wore battered denim dungarees over a white CHERUB shirt and held a toilet seat in her gloved hand. ‘Hello,’ she said warmly. ‘Just fitting your new toilet.’

  All the toilets on campus were being replaced with water saving units. It had been announced in morning assembly that Monday but Kevin had forgotten all about it.

  ‘I’ll be done in ten minutes, but if you need to go, you can christen the one I’ve just fitted across the hall.’

  ‘No probs,’ Kevin nodded. He sat on the edge of his bed and leaned forward to grab an old pair of trainers from underneath.

  After lacing his shoes Kevin wished the plumber a merry Christmas before running back to the corridor. He reckoned it was a good idea to take a leak before heading out into the December cold to shoot slingshots, so he grabbed the handle of the door directly across the hallway and stepped into James Adams’ bedroom.

  4. BLAG

  James ducked in fright as heat from the flames popped a tyre on one of the burning cop cars. Sirens wailed in the surrounding streets, while the crowd pushed and shoved. James was tall enough to breathe, but some of those lower down were getting crushed and starting to panic.

  ‘Please remain calm,’ a police tannoy announced. ‘You will be dispersed in an orderly fashion.’

  Eighty demonstrators had leaked up the side streets before the petrol bombs had gone off, leaving a rump of three hundred protestors trapped between the police lines.

  Fifty officers blocked the crowd into place at the eastern end of the Strand and dozens more cut off side streets, but while the cops were outnumbered five to one, none of the protestors fancied their chances against shields, helmets and extendible batons.

  A veteran protestor standing close to James explained police tactics to his girlfriend. ‘Bastards will keep us here for hours, letting us out two or three at a time. They’ll take all our photos and details before letting us go.’

  ‘SAG, SAG, SAG!’ someone shouted, but the reply from the crowd was half-hearted and people were being blinded by the spotlight on a police helicopter sweeping overhead. James suspected they were prowling for Chris Bradford and other senior SAG members, but a lot of high-profile SAG members had been imprisoned after Birmingham and those who remained on the outside had slipped away before the protest reached its peak.

  A bigger explosion ripped off behind James as the fuel tank of a police car exploded. On the side of the street away from the fire, the police had rolled a couple of lightly damaged cars out of the blockade and begun marching through the gap to block the crowd from the rear. The cops drumming on their riot shields panicked the crowd into an even tighter formation and a woman standing close to James screamed out that she couldn’t breathe.

  The crush wasn’t caused by a lack of space, but by the fact that none of the protestors wanted to be on the edge of the crowd when the police closed them down completely. They were huddling from police batons the same way emperor penguins huddle from the cold.

  ‘I’ve got to get out,’ the woman screamed. ‘Let me out of here.’

  The crush seemed pointless to James and unlike the slender female, he had the muscle to make headway through the crowd. As he pushed past bodies he grabbed the panicking woman and put his arm around her back.

  ‘Calm down,’ James said firmly as they reached open space and found themselves in no man’s land between the protestors and a line of riot shields thirty metres away. Across the street, the eastbound traffic that had been trapped between the two police lines was being allowed out one car at a time.

  As the girl – who looked like she was in her early twenties – rummaged inside her shoulder bag and grabbed an asthma inhaler, James took a bottle of water out of his backpack and offered her a drink.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, speaking with a heavy French accent before pausing to down some of the water. ‘I got so scared in there.’

  ‘No worries,’ James smiled.

  Once the traffic on one side of the road was clear, the crowd moved into the extra space and tensions eased as it dawned that the riot cops weren’t going to charge in and start whacking people.

  James and his new friend backed up to a column between closed shutters in front of a jewellery store and an electrical store.

  ‘Smoke?’ the girl asked, as she pulled a packet of ten and a lighter out of her bag.

  James shook his head and laughed. ‘Cigarettes and asthma. Nice combo!’

  But his smile vanished when he glanced at his watch. He was supposed to be covering Chris Bradford’s back at a meeting on the other side of London in less than three hours’ time. It was important for the mission, but James didn’t have a hope of making it if the police were planning to disperse the protestors by releasing them two or three at a time over the space of several hours.

  ‘I need to be somewhere else,’ James said.

  The French girl smiled. ‘If you ‘ave a plan I’m all ears.’

  James studied her clothing for the first time. Her black stockings and expensive-looking striped coat didn’t fit the mould of a SAG activist or an urban yob.

  ‘How’d you find out about the demo?’

  ‘I’m studying journalism,’ the girl explained. ‘I’m working three months at the London bureaux of a Paris newspaper. I was at a party last night, I heard some guys talking about the possibility of trouble.’

  ‘Looking for a scoop,’ James said, before smiling absent-mindedly.

  He usually paid attention to what pretty girls said, but his eyes had strayed towards the metal shutters at the front of the electrical store. Each shutter had metal clasps that were designed to be padlocked from the outside, but they’d been pulled down in a hurry and he wondered if there was any way to lock them from the inside.

  ‘Where are you going?’ the French girl asked, as James moved two paces to his left and peered between the slats of the roll-down shutters.

  All the lights were on inside the store. There was a display area at either end of the shop’s frontage, and in between them a recessed area behind which were six glass doors, all locked.

  ‘There must be a way out of the back,’ James said.

  He kept a wary eye on the line of policemen before squatting down, lifting the shutter quickly and duckin
g beneath it.

  ‘Where are you going?’ the French girl asked.

  ‘Don’t stare,’ James said anxiously.

  He stood up slowly in the recessed area between the shutters and the door. It was a relief to see that everyone had left the store except the manager, who stood at the rear playing Pro Evo Soccer on an X-box.

  James stepped gingerly across the tiles and pushed each of the six glass doors, but wasn’t surprised to find them locked. Cherubs are trained in lock picking using a mechanical lock gun, but it wasn’t something James carried routinely so he’d have to rely on his multitool to get inside.

  A quick glance up towards the door handles provided some relief. The shop’s main security was provided by tough padlocks on the shutters. The doors also had deadlocks, but as with the shutters they were designed to be operated from the outside when the shop was closed up for the night. The two outer sets of doors were bolted from the inside, but the pair in the middle was designed to open electronically by swinging inwards. The current had been switched off, but there was no obvious physical barrier preventing them from being forced open.

  James would be able to force them open as long as he could get his fingers between the two doors. The French girl blew cigarette smoke through the shutters as James crouched low and prepared to try.

  ‘Are you OK? Can you get inside?’

  ‘Don’t stare, for Christ’s sake,’ James said irritably.

  There were hundreds of protestors and dozens of cops nearby and it was a minor miracle that he’d got this far without being spotted.

  He pushed the toe of his boot against the bottom of one door, opening a small gap into which he hoped to wedge his fingers; but they were too chunky. To get around this James pushed the saw-toothed blade of his multitool into the gap between the two halves of the electronic door, then used it as a lever until the gap was big enough to squeeze in four fingers of his right hand.

  The whole weight of the door pressed on his fingertips as he pulled and he couldn’t help making a noisy grunt. When the door had moved another centimetre he was able to get the fingers of his other hand into the gap, but it only budged when he shifted his whole bodyweight backwards.

  The hydraulic pistons that usually operated the doors hissed in unison, but James’ sense of triumph only lasted for the half-second between the doors breaking open and the loud clattering sound as his fingers lost their grip and his entire body slammed the grille behind him.

  As James recovered his balance and stood up, the French girl clambered under the shutter. Fellow protestors who’d heard the rattling shutters saw the whole thing.

  Inside the store, the manager had dropped the X-box controller and vaulted over the cashier’s counter where he pressed the emergency alarm button.

  ‘Get out of my store,’ he shouted defiantly.

  Unfortunately, sounding the alarm was the worst move he could have made. A couple of protestors were already following the French girl under one shutter, but everyone heard the alarm and the protestors were rejuvenated.

  ‘Oggy, oggy, oggy,’ someone shouted through a megaphone.

  ‘SAG, SAG, SAG!’ the protestors shouted back, as the remaining shutters opened and a scrum formed around the automatic doors.

  Inside, James dragged the French girl by her arm and they ran together towards a door at the back of the shop.

  ‘It’s zee storeroom!’ she shouted, her French accent thickening as panic set in.

  As James spun to exit, the manager blocked his path. If he’d known how much combat training James had done he wouldn’t have dared and James effortlessly grabbed the squat salesman by his company tie and bundled him sideways into a rack of battery chargers and mains adaptors.

  ‘Stay back or I’ll hurt you properly,’ James ordered, before setting off towards a fire exit sign on the opposite side of the store.

  They were no longer alone. More than fifty protestors had made it through the double doors and were now fighting over access to a single fire door at the back of the store. While most wanted to escape, others couldn’t resist thousands of pounds’ worth of electrical equipment.

  Dozens more alarms were set off as laptops and DVD recorders got ripped off their display stands. The youths who’d mugged several bystanders earlier on were standing behind the photography counter stuffing boxed cameras and iPods into the biggest carrier bags they could find.

  Out on the Strand, the police at both ends had rushed in to stop the getaway, but this spooked some sections of the crowd who feared that the police would lash out when they got close. Others were emboldened. The formations of police drumming on riot shields had been intimidating, but the cops’ lack of numbers was plain to see once the lines were broken.

  About seventy protestors made it into the electrical store before six officers with riot shields blocked it off, but none of them risked following the crazed mob inside. The remaining demonstrators divided between a charge through police lines towards the Savoy Hotel and a smaller breakaway group that forced its way past a pair of officers blocking one of the alleyways leading towards the river.

  Outnumbered and out of formation, the cops made the situation worse by lashing out with batons and swooping into the crowd to randomly arrest anyone they could get their hands on.

  Back inside the store James and the French girl made it through the crush around the fire door, down three steps and into a second, larger stockroom. Double doors at the back opened directly on to a narrow alleyway, but you had to fight through looters ripping off electrical goods to get there.

  James wouldn’t be allowed to keep anything he stole on a mission, so he wasn’t interested. But the French girl couldn’t resist cutting between two racks of stock and grabbing a pair of small boxes.

  ‘Toshiba laptop!’ she beamed, as she handed one to James. ‘Très cher! Lightweight, ideal for journalist.’

  They exited nervously into fresh air and a single-lane road. There were dozens of looters heading off in either direction, but it was the kind of space that could easily be blocked off by a pair of police cars, so James grabbed his companion’s skinny arm and began running at full pelt.

  After a two-hundred-metre sprint they found themselves at a Y-shaped junction with two wider roads and despite there being no officers in sight, James was shocked by the distinctive blue lanterns hanging on the front of Charing Cross police station.

  ‘This way,’ he gasped.

  ‘I’m so breathless,’ the girl protested.

  By some miracle a black cab hurtled around a corner and deposited a newspaper photographer on to the pavement less than twenty metres away. James harried the driver as he fiddled with some change.

  ‘Take us to Islington,’ James said. ‘Caledonian Road.’

  ‘Keep your green hair on, sonny!’ the taxi driver said. ‘I’m just writing this gentleman’s receipt.’

  James’ heart leaped as he saw a police officer in riot gear staggering around a corner towards the station, but he was in no state to arrest anyone: limping badly and with a huge crack in one side of his helmet, like he’d been hit by a paving slab or something.

  As the photographer made a dash towards the scene of the rioting James was horrified to see three huge looters in tracksuits and bling jewellery running towards the taxi.

  ‘That’s our cab, man,’ they shouted.

  The one leading the way held carrier bags stuffed with cameras, while his two mates had stacked one of the electrical store’s trolleys with boxes containing PCs and laptops.

  ‘I said, that’s our cab,’ the big man repeated, giving James a mean look as he grabbed him by his shoulder.

  James was pumped from all the action. He grabbed the hand and twisted the giant thumb until it dislocated. Meantime, the French girl had climbed into the taxi and was banging on the glass partition inside.

  ‘Just drive me,’ she said.

  James reached for the door handle but the cab driver pulled away without him. James couldn’t believe it.
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  ‘I saved your skinny butt,’ James yelled after her.

  As he stepped back on to the kerb a clumsy fist swung towards him. He grabbed the arm out of the air and used the giant’s momentum to roll him over his back. The big man’s skeleton crunched as he landed hard in the gutter.

  His two mates thought about moving in, but each held a three-wheeled trolley stacked with thousands of pounds’ worth of computer equipment and they were reluctant to let it topple into the road.

  James was pissed off at the way the French girl had ditched him, but he knew he had to swallow his pride and concentrate on the mission. After giving the bag of iPods and camera stuff an almighty kick that scattered half its contents over the road he started running again with the Toshiba box swinging in his hand.

  James didn’t know exactly where he was, but he’d kept his sense of direction and knew that if he headed north-west he’d reach Oxford Street within ten minutes. Once there he’d blend into the thousands of Christmas shoppers for a kilometre or so before going down the Underground and riding a train home.

  5. FLUSH

  Kevin’s pee disappeared with a slight gurgle and a whoosh of air from James’ newly installed eco-toilet. He’d been in James’ room a few times, but he’d never used the bathroom. It felt awkward being in James’ private space, but he was also curious about all his stuff.

  As Kevin rinsed his hands, he reckoned that the big difference between being eleven and sixteen was the amount of stuff you needed to maintain yourself. His bathroom across the hall had shampoo, soap, toothpaste and a tub of hair gel he’d only used twice. James had around fifty bottles, ranging from shaving mousse and zit cream to expensive aftershaves and hair dye. There was also loads of Dana’s stuff around and much to Kevin’s amusement a box containing ‘48 Assorted Condoms’.

  Kevin wasn’t into girls yet, but he knew that would change pretty soon and he was intrigued by the whole idea of sex and girlfriends. He’d only ever seen a condom in a picture, so after drying his hands on a grubby towel he cast a wary eye towards the unlocked bathroom door before picking one of the little foil-wrapped packets out of the box. The foil felt cold as he turned it over between his fingers and he was tempted to rip it open.