AWOL 2 Read online

  ‘No, I mean you’ve got to climb those shelves behind you and jump off.’

  ‘Bex, I –’

  ‘Do it,’ she said, like a PE teacher telling him to climb a rope in the gym.

  He was too tired to argue. He grabbed a high shelf with both hands, put his right foot on a low shelf, and started to climb.

  It seemed to take forever, and his muscles kept screaming at him to stop. The folded wings dragged him backwards relentlessly. Several times his fingers slipped or lost their grip and he almost fell, but eventually he pulled himself onto the empty top shelf. He gazed up into the space around him, between the top of the shelving and the cables and ventilation tubes attached to the ceiling high above.

  ‘That was the easy bit,’ Bex said firmly. ‘Now you have to jump.’

  ‘I really –’

  A bullet flashed past him, clipping the top of his ear and cutting through a lock of his hair. Hot blood splattered across his forehead. Calling on energy he didn’t even know he had, Kieron scrambled to his feet and stumbled towards the edge of the shelf.

  ‘Red button, dead centre of the control plate –’ Bex’s voice reminded him of all the teachers he’d ever hated at school – ‘that’ll activate the jets. Then there are two joysticks, one on either side. The left one takes you up and down; the right one takes you side to side. Now … run!’

  Several holes suddenly appeared in the metal surface ahead of him, sharp edges reaching up like tiny claws. Bullet holes.

  The edge of the shelf was coming up fast. He fumbled for the control plate and pressed the button in the centre. It might have been red, it might not; he couldn’t see it.

  Something seemed to kick him hard in the middle of his back. He staggered and almost fell, but somehow he kept on running, running … until he launched himself off the shelf and into empty space.

  He assumed he was going to drop straight to the ground. He was convinced of it, but behind him, the wings snapped out, unfolding into the graceful curves he’d seen in the video back in Albuquerque. Instead of shielding his head protectively, his arms tucked back so his hands could grasp the controls.

  He felt the heat of the jet exhaust against his legs. The kick became a push, the push became a shove, and he was flying! He was really flying! Beneath him he saw shelves, crates, boxes and canisters sliding past like the landscapes he’d seen from the windows of the aircraft as he, Bex and Sam had flown in to Albuquerque.

  No difficulties for him. He tested the controls: swooping right and swooping left, then up and down. It was so easy!

  Except, he suddenly realised, he was fast running out of building.

  ‘Can you see the door ahead of you and to the right?’ Bex’s voice asked.

  ‘No!’ he shouted.

  ‘Look down, near the ground.’

  ‘Oh yes, I see it now.’

  ‘Aim for that. I’ll make sure the door stays open.’

  Kieron jinked down towards the ground, then levelled out. He was heading along one of the aisles between the crates, shelves and boxes. He thought he saw Todd Zanderbergen’s face flash past, contorted in comical surprise, but that was behind him now and the doors were ahead of him, getting closer really fast.

  His hands jerked the controls, and suddenly his path curved upwards. The doors disappeared below him, and the wall above them flashed past so close he could have reached out and touched it.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Bex’s voice was a frustrated shout, like the PE teacher’s voice when he’d struggled up her damned gym rope then pulled the end up after him and refused to come down.

  He altered his path again, so that he was flying upside-down along the ceiling, away from the doors and back into the building. Pipes, cables and vents formed a bleak cityscape. For a second he imagined that he was flying along the surface of the Death Star out of Star Wars and he laughed joyfully. Then a quick twist of the controls and he was the right way up again.

  ‘I’m doing what has to be done,’ he shouted, hoping that Bex could hear him over the rushing of air and the roar of the jet engine. ‘This thing is armed. I remember seeing it on the video. How do I fire the missiles?’

  ‘Kieron –’

  ‘Just tell me!’

  He looked around, trying to get some sense of where he was. The ANCIENT MARINER canisters were stored in the centre of the building, he remembered. He adjusted his course into a spiral, and gazed down intently, looking for them.

  Bright orange. Yes, there they were.

  Todd Zanderbergen stood beside them protectively. He raised his missile gun and fired it. A line of bright orange and yellow flame headed straight for Kieron, but he adjusted his flight controls gently and moved slightly out of the way. The missile passed beneath him. He thought he heard the boom! as it hit the roof.

  ‘There are two buttons, one on each of the directional controls. They fire the left and right rockets. Kieron –’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure,’ he said.

  He adjusted his course, straightening and dipping so he was heading right for the bright orange canisters. His fingers touched the buttons on top of the flight controls, and suddenly, from beneath the wings behind him, two small, pencil-like objects flashed ahead of him and towards the crates of Project ANCIENT MARINER. Todd – a small figure on the ground – saw what was happening and raised his hands desperately, like King Canute trying to hold back the inevitable tide. Kieron steered his course off to one side, but a tall stack of shelving was in the way. He spotted a gap between two stacks of crates and aimed for it. The crates flashed past him, then he was in the open again.

  He couldn’t see what was happening behind him, but he felt a wall of heat pass over him. The air itself seemed to ripple.

  ‘I’m keeping the doors open,’ Bex said, ‘and I’ve disabled the fire-suppression system. Are you going to get out now, or hang around and do some sightseeing?’

  ‘Time to leave,’ he said, pulling the jet wings around and heading for where he thought the doors were located. ‘I don’t know how much fuel I’ve got left.’

  The approaching wall was alive now with dancing orange and red light. Whatever was happening behind him, it was big and it was impressive and it was spreading rapidly. He just wished he could see it.

  ‘Can I keep this thing?’ he asked as he swooped through the doorway. The brightness of the clear blue sky blinded him for a moment, but the hot Israeli air was cool in contrast to the burning building behind him.

  ‘If you’re not careful,’ Bex said, ‘I’ll make you fly back to England in it.’ She paused. ‘But good work, kid. Really good work.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  They flew back to England first class. Bex thought the boys deserved it, after everything that had happened. The business couldn’t really afford it, but that’s what credit cards and overdrafts were for. They’d get the money back – somehow.

  ‘Did you report what happened, back there?’ Kieron asked. He had the remains of a lobster thermidor on the plate in front of him, along with a glass of champagne Bex had allowed him to order. Sam, beside him, had discovered that his seat could go completely flat. He was lying down, covered with a blanket, playing a game on the tablet he’d been handed when they boarded. Bex suspected he might never want to get off.

  ‘I’ve briefed Bradley about everything,’ she said, ‘and he’ll pass it on to MI6. They need to know what Todd Zanderbergen was up to. They’ll liaise with Shin Bet and the FBI to close the company down.’

  ‘And we just go home and pretend nothing happened?’

  She nodded. ‘That’s right. Nothing did happen. Remember that. Or, rather, don’t remember that.’

  He took another sip of his champagne and glanced around the first-class cabin. ‘I could get used to this lifestyle,’ he said appreciatively, settling back in his seat. ‘I swear there are movies on these tablets that haven’t even been released in the cinema yet.’

  Bex closed her eyes briefly. Mention of MI6 had caused a s
eed of concern to germinate in her mind. They weren’t any closer to finding out who the traitor was in the organisation – the one who was working with the neo-fascist Blood and Soil thugs in the UK. That was next on her agenda. As soon as she got back, she and Bradley needed to investigate that.

  And make some money, quickly.

  Kieron suddenly seemed to perk up. He sat up straight, gazing intently ahead of him.

  ‘Sam,’ he said urgently. ‘Sam!’ He hit Sam’s leg underneath the blanket.

  Sam emerged like a tortoise coming out of hibernation. ‘What?’ he asked, blinking. ‘I’m on level twenty!’

  ‘See those blokes on the other side of the cabin?’ Kieron pointed, and Sam turned his head to look. ‘Do they look familiar to you?’

  Bex looked as well, feeling a slight twinge of concern.

  ‘Dunno,’ Sam said. ‘They look pretty radical.’

  ‘That,’ Kieron said firmly, ‘is Lethal Insomnia.’

  ‘You’re kidding!’

  Bex settled back in her seat and closed her eyes. The boys were fine. She’d be fine too, with a bit of sleep.

  Look out for more spy action from

  Someone is trying to kill Bex and Bradley, but they don’t know about Kieron and Sam. That may be their only saving grace. But how were the explosions triggered? And who wants them dead?

  Coming in 2019

  Turn the page for more …

  CHAPTER ONE

  ‘What’s your name?’ the red-haired girl asked, smiling at Kieron.

  ‘K-Kieron,’ he stammered. ‘What’s yours?’

  She sighed and tapped the name badge pinned to her shirt. ‘Beth. And I just needed your name so we can call you when your coffee’s ready.’ She ostentatiously wrote Keiron on a post-it note and stuck it on the side of a cup with a Sharpie. ‘Like, when it’s ready, you know?’

  ‘Oh. OK.’ He wondered whether to mention that she’d spelled it wrong, but decided to keep quiet. Everybody got his name wrong. Either they spelled it the way the girl had, or they put an ‘a’ instead of the ‘o’ at the end. He’d got used to it. Once he’d asked his mum why she and his dad had given him the most unusual spelling of his name they could manage. ‘Oh,’ she’d said vaguely, ‘did we? I think it was the name of one of your dad’s friends. He might have been at the wedding.’

  ‘Anything else?’ the red-haired barista asked brightly. ‘Something to eat, maybe?’

  Kieron scanned the shelves of the refrigerated area to his right. ‘Er … what do you recommend?’

  ‘The gluten-free lemon drizzle cake is very nice.’

  Which means they’re not selling enough of it and want to shift some more slices, he thought cynically.

  ‘Just the coffee, please,’ he said.

  He handed over a five-pound note, grimly surprised at how little change he got, then moved to the end of the counter where the coffee would magically appear with his name on it. Spelled wrong. Well, as long as they pronounced it correctly, he didn’t really care.

  He glanced around. The cafe was new, in a side street close to the shopping mall he usually went to. Bex had taken him there a couple of weeks ago, when they’d got back from America. This was where the more unusual shops lurked – the ones selling black or purple women’s clothing with a lot of lace or embroidery on it, or men’s clothes that seemed far too tight and probably required you to have a hipster beard before you even tried it on. Oh, and there was a comics and gaming shop. Someone he knew from school worked there. Sometimes Kieron managed to score a staff discount, if the manager wasn’t watching.

  ‘Kieron?’

  ‘Yes?’ He glanced around.

  It was Beth. ‘Your coffee is ready.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  He’d put his stuff on a small two-person table, just to secure it. His bag was there, with his laptop inside. And his schoolbooks.

  As he sat down, his gaze slipped to his rucksack. In there, in a hard case, were the ARCC glasses that he’d found, months ago now, on a table in the food court of the shopping mall. Those glasses had opened up a world of adventure, excitement and danger for him. They’d also introduced him to Bex and Bradley – the two MI6 agents (well, freelance contractors, Bex would always point out) who had changed his life. Given him confidence. Trusted him with their lives. And those ARCC glasses could access any computer anywhere in the world – not just the obvious ones, like the Internet, but secure databases as well. Secret ones.

  So why did he have to painstakingly prove a mathematical equation when the sum of all human knowledge was right there, in his bag? Why did anybody have to learn how to do anything when they could just ask about it and get an answer in a few seconds?

  He sighed. He knew why – kind of. Because intelligence came from knowing these things and being able to apply them and extend them, or at least that’s what his teachers would have said. What if he was on a desert island or, God forbid, the Internet had failed because of a zombie apocalypse? How would he be able to survive then?

  Still, if his survival during a zombie apocalypse depended on his being able to prove the derivation of a magnetic field of a solenoid from a current loop, then he was in serious trouble.

  He opened up his laptop, sighed, leaned back in his chair and took a sip of his coffee. Just a few weeks ago he’d been flying through the air with what could only be called a high-tech military jet pack, risking his life in order to stop an insane billionaire from selling biologically engineered viruses that could target particular types of person based on their DNA. A few weeks before that he’d been helping Bex prevent the detonation of a series of neutron bombs around the world. And now, here he was, sitting in a cafe that smelled of burnt coffee beans trying not to look at the cute red-haired barista.

  Life sucked. And he couldn’t tell anyone apart from Sam why it sucked. It wasn’t the bullying per se. It wasn’t the fact that he felt like a loner, an outsider – he was quite proud of that. No, it was the huge gulf between the life that he’d experienced over those weeks and the life that, for want of a better word, life seemed to want to push him back towards.

  Helping Bex and Bradley wasn’t sustainable. He knew that. He was a temporary solution, a last resort while Bradley was medically unable to use the ARCC kit. Bradley was meant to support Bex while she was on missions by passing her useful information, like blueprints of buildings or identities of people she was looking at. Once Bradley had recovered sufficiently to work again, and once he and Bex had discovered who in their MI6 parent organisation was working with the neo-fascist group Blood and Soil, they wouldn’t need him any longer. That was why he didn’t want to go into school any more. That was why he was depressed. It was like being in a car on a motorway and seeing the exit ramp you wanted to take, needed to take, passing by, and knowing that the road you were stuck on just kept on going into the distance, monotonously, forever.

  ‘A horse goes into a bar,’ a voice said from behind him, ‘and the barman says, “Why the long face?”’

  He recognised Sam’s voice instantly. Without turning around, he reached out with a foot and pushed the other chair away from the table so his friend could sit down.

  ‘So, why the long face?’ Sam asked, sitting. ‘It’s long even from behind.’

  Kieron shrugged.

  ‘A white horse walks into a bar,’ Sam went on. ‘The barman says, “We’ve got a whisky here named after you!” and the horse says, “What – Brian?”’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be in school?’ Kieron asked.

  Sam shrugged. ‘You know what – I probably should.’ He sniffed. ‘They’ve burned the coffee beans. You can tell. My mum’s into all that. She’s been watching videos on YouTube on how to make the perfect cup of coffee, from selecting the right bean from the right country all the way up to choosing the absolutely optimal steam pressure on the machine. And she’s got one of those fancy machines as well. Dad bought it for her for Christmas last year.’ He nodded his head at the counter. ‘Like the one they’ve
got. Well, I say bought, but it might have come out of the back of some van in a pub car park. You can never tell with my dad.’

  ‘That joke, by the way,’ Kieron pointed out, ‘only works if you know that there’s a brand of whisky called White Horse.’

  ‘I thought everyone knew that.’

  ‘In your world, maybe.’

  Sam shrugged. ‘It’s all my Uncle Bill drinks. He gets a bottle for Christmas from everyone in the family – I mean, a bottle from each person, not just one bottle from everyone. Same on his birthday. That pretty much sets him up for the year.’ He paused. ‘OK, a horse walks into a bar and says, “Pour me a pint of beer, will you?” The barman rubs his eyes in disbelief and says, “Did … did you just talk?” The horse says, “Yes, why?” and the barman goes, “It’s amazing! I’ve never seen a talking horse! You know, you should really go talk to the local circus – they would love to have someone with your skills!” The horse replies, “Why? Are they short of plumbers?”’

  This time Kieron sniggered. ‘Yeah, OK, that’s good. I like that.’

  ‘I’m thinking of setting up a website – all the best “horse walks into a bar” jokes in the world.’

  ‘How many have you got?’

  Sam winced. ‘You’ve heard them.’

  ‘Just three?’

  ‘I could expand the website to other animals. “A bear goes into a bar –”’

  ‘Don’t,’ Kieron interrupted. ‘Just … don’t.’

  ‘Just let me do this one. A bear goes into a bar, right, and says, “I’d like a pint of … beer,” and the barman goes, “Why the big paws?”’ He stared at Kieron. ‘Big paws. Like, bears have got big paws. And he paused before finishing the sentence.’

  ‘Yes, it was funny when you told it and it was funny when you explained it.’ Kieron looked properly at Sam for the first time, and sat up straighter in his chair. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘No, really. Nothing’s wrong.’