Black Op

  TOM PALMER

  PUFFIN

  Table of Contents

  Death in the Desert

  After the Funeral

  A Difficult Choice

  Foreign Land

  Spy Footballer

  Training

  Fight

  Night Vision

  The Enemy

  Late

  England v Faroe Islands

  Kester’s Challenge

  Plain Sailing

  Rapids

  Defenders

  Black OP

  England v. Spain

  In the Church

  Assault

  Into the Dark

  Leaving it Late

  The Sacrifice

  The Fall

  The Sculpture

  Never Again

  Breaking and Entering

  The Unthinkable

  Team Players

  Thank Yous

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Tom Palmer is an author and football fan. He is a frequent visitor to schools and libraries to talk about reading, writing and football. He has also worked with the National Literacy Trust, the Reading Agency and the Premier League Reading Stars scheme in his quest to promote a passion for reading among boys.

  Tom is the author of the Football Academy and Foul Play series. He lives in Yorkshire with his family where he loves to watch football and run.

  Find out more about Tom and read his blog at www.tompalmer.co.uk

  BOOKS BY TOM PALMER

  Foul Play series in reading order:

  FOUL PLAY

  DEAD BALL

  OFF SIDE

  KILLER PASS

  OWN GOAL

  For younger readers

  Football Academy series in reading order:

  BOYS UNITED

  STRIKING OUT

  THE REAL THING

  READING THE GAME

  FREE KICK

  CAPTAIN FANTASTIC

  To Nikki Woodman.

  Lovely neighbour. Lovely friend.

  Lovely woman.

  Death in the Desert

  Three small figures moved rapidly across the night-time desert floor, sliding over shifting sands, keeping low.

  Low because if they were visible they could be shot within seconds.

  They stopped when they located a flickering light coming from an isolated camp. Their target. They knew from satellite images taken earlier in the day that the camp consisted of a large tent, a fire, a dozen camels, a Land Rover and a small army of men. They also knew that the target was heavily armed and, no doubt, under strict orders to fire at anything that moved. It was the base of one of the most dangerous terrorist cells in the world and it would be well defended.

  The three figures had to get close to the tent without being spotted and listen to what was being planned.

  It was a tough mission, but the trio was up to the job.

  Rob, Lesh and Lily worked for the British government, half of a team of six who were deployed around the world and were known as the Squad. They were extremely clever, highly trained and had already been involved in a number of successful missions. The only difference between them and the other spies working for the British government was that they were all just thirteen years old.

  Each of them had a role or a speciality that made them perfect for this mission.

  Rob – tall, with short black hair – was the leader. His job: to make decisions and give orders.

  Lezsek – or Lesh as he liked to be known – was in charge of getting the three of them in and out of the camp without being seen or heard. He was an expert in using navigational equipment.

  Lily had to listen to what the terrorist leaders were saying, memorize it and translate it when they got back to base.

  If they got back.

  Rob held the Squad in position, giving himself time to focus a pair of night-vision goggles. Now he could see the camp in perfect detail, everything green and clear, including three shapes lying motionless on the desert floor.

  ‘Dogs,’ he whispered to Lesh.

  Lesh – shorter and stockier than Rob – nodded and directed his two friends to the north of the camp, changing direction because the wind was coming from the south and the dogs would be less likely to smell them if they came in from the north.

  Ten minutes later, the three children were next to the tent, as planned, having crawled an exhausting last fifty metres on their stomachs, a manoeuvre known as the leopard crawl.

  They had rehearsed this operation five times before, less than a hundred kilometres away at a replica camp. But that had been practice and this was for real.

  You could never predict the kinds of things that might go wrong, however many times you practised. But, so far, nothing had gone wrong: no camel had groaned, no dog had barked, no guard had taken the safety catch off his gun. The desert was so quiet, in fact, that the noise of a plane flying overhead had distracted the guards, causing them to gaze up at its blinking lights. One guard pointed his gun at it, baring his teeth in a wide grin.

  Rob smiled and put his thumb up to Lesh. He’d done his job. They were inside the camp and none of the guards had any idea they were there. Now Rob looked at Lily because the next bit was down to her.

  Lily nodded – knowing what was required – and put her left ear against the fabric of the large tent, focusing quickly on the voices inside. She stuffed her blonde curls under a black hat, so that they didn’t get in her way.

  There were three men speaking Arabic in fast, low voices, but Lily could still understand every word. She had an amazing skill: she could speak dozens of languages. It was her life’s ambition to learn every language in the world.

  As she listened, Rob looked one way and Lesh the other. Both were squatting, covering every angle, alert to the high possibility of being discovered.

  Lily knew she had to focus all her attention on the words coming from inside the tent, leaving everything else to Rob and Lesh.

  ‘The hour is nearly upon us,’ she heard one voice saying. Not a Saharan voice. Lily knew most Arab dialects and what she was hearing was not local to this part of North Africa. ‘Soon,’ the voice went on, ‘we will have all of our people in position. Our attack will be irresistible. But first we must …’

  At that moment the canvas of the tent caved in and snapped back painfully against Lily’s ear.

  Something had gone wrong. Terribly wrong.

  Lily looked to her left to see Lesh, illuminated by the soft light coming from the tent, staring past her, his face tight with shock. So she turned to her right to see that Rob had fallen against the canvas and was now sprawled on the ground.

  Rob had heard what he thought was a shrill alarm going off right next to him and had stumbled in shock against the tent. But it had been no alarm, just a tiny fly fizzing about inside his ear.

  Loud voices broke the sudden silence.

  Questions.

  Orders.

  Shouts from inside and outside the tent.

  Without a word, the three children stood and ran at top speed, just as they had practised, making use of their special studded shoes to get a better grip on the loose sand. They knew exactly where they had to run: a fixed point one kilometre to the east. Their only chance of surviving.

  Rob then shouted into a mic in his watch as he ran. ‘Abort mission. Abort!’

  Cracks of gunfire filled the air as rounds of ammunition came over their heads, accompanied by the thump of the guns. The glow
of tracer rounds fizzed about them.

  Lily was ahead of the others to start off with. She was a good runner, as well as being a gifted linguist. Her dad had taken her running on the hills where they used to live when she was very young.

  They ran as fast as they could for one minute, then at half speed to conserve energy. Lily had played her part well. But had they got away? Should they go to ground? It was for Rob to decide. He had to keep his cool, even though he was painfully aware that it was his fault that everything had gone wrong.

  Before Rob had a chance to make his mind up about what to do next, the trio was lit up from behind at the same time as they heard the scream of an engine.

  ‘The Land Rover!’ Lesh shouted.

  Rob knew Lesh was right. It was the vehicle they had seen back at the camp. He remembered that it had been fitted with four headlamps above the windscreen. He had seen it through the night-vision goggles and grimaced at the irony that they were being hunted down by a vehicle that was made in the UK, the very country they were there to protect. He had no doubt that there would be a machine-gunner leaning out of its passenger window.

  Now they were running at full speed again. It was exhausting and painful, but they had no choice.

  Rob saw more red-hot tracer rounds skimming the sand dunes ahead of them. There were a dozen sounds to identify at once: guns, dogs, shouts, engines. It was impossible for his head to take it all in.

  But then there was something else. A louder noise drowning out everything. Rob looked up instinctively, still running, to see something looming over them, something huge and black, so black it was darker than the sky. A double set of rotors were moving the air, the sand and everything in between.

  Rescue in the form of a massive night-operational Chinook helicopter.

  ‘Down!’ Rob shouted. ‘Down. Down. Daaaa …’

  Lesh hit the ground, arms over his head, to avoid both the incoming fire and the sand the helicopter was whipping up. He knew exactly what the Chinook would do and that an Apache attack helicopter, armed with four Hellfire missiles, would be coming in as an escort. This was how the British army responded when a mission went wrong.

  Although they were in an extremely dangerous situation, Lesh was thrilled by the military hardware that was hanging over them and by what it was about to do, and he felt a new explosion of adrenalin rushing through him as he grinned and cowered at the same time.

  Lily squatted on the ground and put her hands over her ears, protecting herself, waiting to feel Rob crouch down next to her.

  But Rob was not next to Lily.

  She closed her eyes now because she knew what was coming. Two missiles from the Apache to stop the camp guards in their tracks, to buy the three of them time to get on to the Chinook, which was now touching down.

  The missiles came a second later. Whoosh. Thump. Whoosh. Thump. Sand and shrapnel and pieces of Land Rover tossed across the desert floor, everything lit up by all the colours of the rainbow in a series of blinding flashes and pulses.

  As the lights faded, the only sound Lily could hear was coming from the Chinook’s rotor blades. A violent whirring.

  Lesh lifted his head off the sand and looked back, waiting for Rob’s order to board the Chinook. His mouth was full of sand and he could feel grains in his eyes and inside his clothes. But there was no word from Rob. All Lesh could hear was a muffled cry coming from near to where he knew their leader had last been.

  Lily sat up. She had known instinctively what was wrong from the moment Rob had not crouched next to her. ‘He’s hit!’ she yelled above the sound of the helicopter.

  ‘Come on!’ Lesh shouted back. ‘I can see him.’ He had spotted a shape in the sand ten metres away illuminated by the burning Land Rover, whose petrol tanks had just caught fire. They ran to what looked like a bundle of clothes twisted into a heap.

  Rob.

  On his back, holding his leg, his fingers grasping at a black-red hole the size of a tennis ball in his thigh. He was screaming with pain now.

  Lily and Lesh hesitated. But only for a second. It was a shock to see Rob so terribly injured and in such agony, and they felt sick and frightened, but, overriding all that, they felt calm. This was a job they’d been trained to do and they were going to do it.

  Lesh and Lily each took one of Rob’s arms over their shoulder, then they ran hard towards the back ramp that was coming down from the Chinook. A soldier, sitting at a fixed machine gun, moved out of the way to let them board. They fought through the whirring air and a billion particles of sand, on to the chopper.

  Towards safety.

  The pilot shouted, ‘Lifting!’ and immediately the Chinook was airborne, the sky and the desert floor swirling with stars and fires and bullets as the children sprawled on the bottom of the ascending aircraft.

  Immediately a pair of medics leaped from the benches on either side of the Chinook’s fuselage to treat Rob’s leg, first tying a tourniquet round his upper thigh to reduce the blood loss, then giving him a massive injection of morphine to ease the pain.

  Lily and Lesh looked to the far end of the helicopter and saw a figure studying them. She was dressed in a white jacket and skirt, her nails painted, her hair a perfect copper bob. She looked absurd in this terrifying setting, next to the medics dressed in regular army fatigues. It was as if she’d just stepped out of a smart London restaurant and wasn’t in a helicopter that was screaming across the Sahara Desert.

  Julia. Their commander.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked calmly, her eyebrows arched.

  ‘They heard us,’ Lily answered, gasping for air, glancing at Rob on the floor of the helicopter, where the two medics were now leaning over him, one with his hands on Rob’s chest, pushing down in short, sharp jerks.

  ‘How?’ Julia pressed Lily. ‘How did they hear you?’

  ‘It went wrong,’ Lesh coughed, not taking his eyes off Rob and the medics.

  Then another voice filled the aircraft. The pilot over the speakers. ‘We’ve got a choice now. We can either go smooth and slow, or fast and …’

  ‘Fast!’ one of the medics shouted. ‘As fast as possible.’

  After the Funeral

  Five children emerged from a beautiful stone church set among fields in the English countryside. The sun blazed down on trees and hedges and birdsong, creating the perfect rural scene.

  The children crossed a country lane and headed into a field of long grass that was baking in the heat, a church bell tolling every few seconds. Three hundred metres away, next to a half-collapsed barn, a woman was waiting for them. She was dressed all in white and her short copper-coloured hair shone in the sun.

  Julia again.

  The five children were wearing black and they all looked miserable.

  A tall girl with long blonde ringlets. Lily.

  A pale stocky boy wearing a black coat and a frown. Lesh.

  A beautiful black girl wearing a flowery scarf. Hatty.

  A short Asian boy with his hair shaved close. Adnan.

  And the tallest, a good-looking tanned boy with brown hair. Kester.

  The Squad, minus one, a week since their leader and friend, Rob, had died in the helicopter above the Sahara Desert.

  They walked towards Julia without speaking. What could they possibly say? They had been trained to spy, to evade capture, to fool people into thinking that they were just ordinary children, but they had not been trained to deal with the death of one of their own.

  They were all heartbroken.

  Every government needs spies. In Britain there are two major organizations that use them.

  The first – MI5 – keeps things safe at home. It protects the United Kingdom from people who want to cause chaos: bombers, thieves, kidnappers, terrorists and more.

  The second – MI6 – looks out for threats coming from abroad. Countries that jeopardize the security of the UK government and its citizen
s. Individuals and groups from any of the world’s other 196 countries that might want to attack, destabilize or steal from the UK.

  The government directs MI5 and MI6, but some spies are special, so special that they need to be kept secret even from the government, from everyone apart from a small community of people who live to serve their country whoever is in charge.

  The Squad.

  These six – now five – children take orders from a handful of adult spies, but, apart from them, nobody knows who they are or what they do.

  There is another thing that binds the Squad together. Something that happened two years ago and led directly to them becoming spies. A terrible, unimaginable, unforgettable day.

  As she walked towards the barn, Lily was thinking about that day: the last time, before Rob, that she’d had to face the death of people she loved. She could remember it more clearly than she wanted to. It had been a summer day and all six children had been with their parents. They’d known each other since they were babies because some of their mums and dads worked together. They hadn’t really known what work their parents did before that day, but now they all knew that their parents had been spies.

  Lily stopped herself dwelling on that: she wanted to think about Rob.

  In the week since his death she had felt restless and uneasy. This was the first time that someone from their unit had died. The shock was horrible. But this was what being a spy was really like. If adults spy, some will die. If children spy, some will also die.

  Their handlers had kept them busy all week, taking them to the Lake District where they had carried out training in the woods, river-rafting, snorkelling; they’d even had them playing football. It had felt like a multi-sports week that a school might organize and the children hadn’t been sure if they were being trained or being given things to do that would take their minds off the events in the Sahara Desert.

  Lily had spent some of the time alone during the week. They all had. Adnan had gone off in his canoe for hours. Lesh had escaped to his room to work on his electronic devices.