Black Op by Tom Palmer

Author:Tom Palmer [Palmer, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141337807
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2011-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

Plain Sailing

The Squad met Jim in Adnan’s room after the rest of the players had gone to bed. Jim needed to brief them about the night’s mission: the helicopter was picking them up in two hours at the same spot as the night before.

‘Right,’ Jim said, ‘we know where the target has settled for the night. They’ve crossed the border into Poland, as we expected. We have images from the drone and satellite.’

‘Where are they?’ Kester asked.

‘About two hundred kilometres away in a steep valley with a meandering river at the bottom,’ Jim said. ‘There’s a single track to the building they’re staying in. It’s a mountain refuge in a canyon: just a wooden hut really. There are lots of huts like that scattered through the mountains.’

‘And they’re guarding the track,’ Hatty added. ‘So we can’t go along that.’

‘They appear to have set tripwires on the track, yes. But that does create an opportunity.’ Jim’s voice was slightly uneven as he spoke and the five children knew they were about to hear why they were not going to have an easy night.

The helicopter took the Squad swiftly across the mountains and forests of the far south-east of Poland, covering part of the same terrain as it had the night before. It dropped them in a remote part of the Bieszczady National Park, by a wide river, with no towns or villages for kilometres. Just like the night before, they had all changed into black clothing and smeared their faces with cam cream.

Soon the five children were standing by a wide, shallow river under a dark but star-scattered sky. According to Jim’s briefing, the last part of their journey would be made by raft.

They found the raft easily. Six medium-sized trunks bound to each other by twisted rope.

‘Is that thing safe?’ Hatty asked. ‘I mean we arrive on a secret twenty-first-century helicopter to find that the next stage of our journey is on a pile of logs.’

Now everyone was looking at Adnan who knelt to study the raft, testing the tension of the rope and feeling the wood to make sure it was sound. Eventually he turned to Kester.

‘You’re in charge now, Adnan,’ Kester said. ‘Anything on the river is your call.’

Adnan nodded, a serious look on his face. ‘The raft is sound,’ he said. Then he picked up a long wooden pole. ‘The pole is to steer it with and it’s only effective if a river is calm. And the intelligence said it was calm all the way, didn’t it, Lesh?’

Lesh consulted his SpyPad. ‘Yes. All the way down to the target and beyond. It should be flat with no rapids. We’re just going to be drifting.’

‘Good,’ Adnan said. ‘Look, we trained for this in England. It was pretty rough there too. This is going to be like punting in Cambridge compared to that. It’ll be fun. Let’s get on board.’

‘Fun?’ Lesh muttered. ‘There’s an armed gang of psychos at the other end.’

They launched the raft by pushing it into the shallows and quickly distributing their weight.

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