CHERUB: Guardian Angel (2 page)

Soooo good!

He practically inhaled the second, but as the third Jaffa Cake neared Leon’s mouth a hand touched his shoulder, making him jump.

‘You just gonna scoff them all yourself?’ Leon’s twin, Daniel, asked quietly.

Leon turned to face his brother and spoke in a whisper. ‘You got dinner last night. I’m
starving
.’

‘I’ll tell Ning,’ Daniel threatened, as he aimed his pointing finger at her back. ‘She’ll crack you like an egg.’

Leon knew his brother wouldn’t really grass, but this knowledge also reminded him of his bond with his twin. He pulled the biscuit apart and gave Daniel the bigger half.

As Daniel made a quiet-but-appreciative
mmm
, the sliding door at the rear of the trawler’s cabin opened with a crash.

‘Wipe your top lip,’ Leon said anxiously, as he chewed fast and flicked chocolate flakes off his shirt. ‘If he sees us eating we’re dead.’

As Leon zipped Ning’s pack and swallowed the evidence of his crime, Instructor Speaks stepped on to the lilting deck. Everything about Speaks said
hard man
, from the wraparound sunglasses and shaved black head, to the mirror-shined size-fourteen combat boots on his feet.

‘Sleep well, maggots?’ Speaks boomed, cracking a smile as he woke Ning with a dig in the ribs. ‘On your feet. Line up at the double.’

Sleepy eyes blurred as Ning disentangled herself from the fishing gear, and both shoulders burned where her pack had rubbed them raw on the previous afternoon’s speed march. When Speaks closed up, Ning expected a shove for being slow, but his arm delved past her into the rope mound and swooped on the wrapper from a pack of Jaffa Cakes.

Speaks held it up for inspection, jaw agape in mock horror. Ning realised one of the twins must have swiped it from her pack and glanced back to scowl at them.

‘Well, well!’ Speaks said, as the three trainees attempted to stand in line on the swaying deck. ‘A
serious
breach of the rules. Mr Kazakov, come look at this.’

Kazakov was in his mid-fifties, but the grey-haired Ukrainian instructor looked as fit as he’d been thirty years earlier when he’d fought for Russian Special Forces in Afghanistan. He was already on his way outside when Speaks called and he came on deck holding a mesh sack filled with fluorescent life vests.

‘Who ate these Jaffa Cakes?’ Speaks shouted. ‘Fess up now and I won’t be too hard on you.’

Ning was anxious: if the instructors started an investigation and searched her pack they’d find the other biscuits she’d nabbed on the plane.

‘It’s just litter, sir,’ Leon said. ‘It probably blew on deck while the boat was docked.’

But it was a poor lie and Speaks instantly noticed chocolate stains where Leon’s front teeth met his gums. The giant instructor squished Leon’s cheeks between thumb and forefinger and yanked him out of line.

‘If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s liars,’ Speaks roared, as he gave Leon a shake, then grabbed his bad thumb and squeezed hard. ‘Still snivelling over that pathetic little graze?’

Leon winced with pain as the scab over his broken thumbnail split and blood trickled down his hand.

‘How dare you lie to me!’ Speaks hissed. ‘Just because it’s the last day of training, don’t think I’ll take it easy on your bony arse. Get your kit bag over here. Let’s see what other contraband you’ve got.’

Leon had teary eyes and drips of blood pelting the deck as he walked back to the rope mound and grabbed his pack.

While the instructors concentrated on Leon, Ning yawned and took in her surroundings. The trawler was idling into a natural harbour, with near-vertical cliffs rising out of the mist a couple of hundred metres away.

Kazakov pointed towards land and began a lecture as Speaks ripped open Leon’s pack and threw all his stuff out over the sodden deck.

‘It’s now just before seven a.m. and basic training ends at midnight,’ Kazakov began. ‘Somewhere on that island you’ll find three grey CHERUB T-shirts. If you find a T-shirt and put it on, you can congratulate yourselves on passing basic training. Give us a call on your radio and we’ll come and pick you up. But if anyone’s not wearing a shirt by midnight, I’ll see you back on campus in three weeks’ time and you’ll start training again from day one. Questions?’

Daniel raised his hand. ‘Sir, are our T-shirts all together, or hidden separately?’

Kazakov considered the question as he reached into the sack and handed Ning a life vest.

‘Figure it out,’ he said eventually.

Once her life vest was zipped up, Ning went down on one knee and began pulling a waterproof rubber cover over her backpack. While she did this Leon began gathering up his gear, which was washing around the deck. But as he bent forward to take his water bottle Instructor Speaks grabbed a handful of his shorts and lifted him into the air with one muscular arm.

‘Jaffa Cake-eating mummy’s boy,’ Speaks yelled, as Leon dangled centimetres from his face. ‘I want you out of my sight, so you can make do without your kit.’

With that, Speaks took two huge strides to the stern of the trawler and lobbed Leon over the side.

‘Happy swimming,’ Speaks shouted, as he threw a life vest after the trainee. ‘You might need this as well!’

Kazakov glared at the other two trainees as Leon made a big splash. ‘Off you go then,’ he ordered. ‘That water’s not getting any warmer.’

Ethan Kitsell had spent the first twelve years of his life in California. Home was an eight-million-dollar beachfront house, living with a mother who owned a computer security company and drove a Ferrari. He was a self-confessed geek, whose hobbies were chess and robot building.

But that life had been built on a lie. Ethan’s mother wasn’t Gillian Kitsell. Her real name was Galenka Aramov, daughter of Irena Aramov who ran a billion-dollar criminal network headquartered in the landlocked Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan.

The Aramov Clan ran sixty cargo planes that moved stuff normal airlines wouldn’t touch: drugs, weapons, fakes, criminals, mercenaries and illegal immigrants. Ethan had only found this out five months earlier, when two assassins broke into his California home and executed his mother.

They’d wanted Ethan dead too, but he’d survived because the killers mistakenly killed his best friend instead. When Grandma Irena found out what had happened, she’d kidnapped Ethan from under the noses of the US authorities and smuggled him back to Kyrgyzstan.

The good news was that whoever wanted Ethan Aramov dead would be unlikely to touch him on his clan’s home turf. The bad news was that Ethan hated everything about Kyrgyzstan. He often found himself thinking that a bullet through the back of the head would have been better than getting stuck in a place that felt like hell.

It was a mild spring afternoon and kids were piling out of the depressing three-storey block of Upper School Eleven (US11). Bishkek was Kyrgyzstan’s capital and the wealthiest part of the country, but Ethan still found himself in classrooms with mildewed walls and ragged classmates who’d cast hungry eyes when he unpacked his lunch.

Two things kept Ethan from completely losing the will to live and one of them quickened her pace to catch up with him. After a gentle tap on the back, the girl spoke to him in Russian.

‘How was your day?’ Natalka asked.

She was only a month older than Ethan, although a quirk in the calendar meant she was in the year above him at school. She was a little shorter than he was, but while Ethan was stick thin she had an athletic build, pretty face and curves in all the places that boys like to find them.

‘My day was shit,’ Ethan told her.

‘We had the same day,’ Natalka said, as her freckled face cracked a smile. ‘I’m
dying
for a smoke.’

They were passing a group of older lads and one spoke loudly. ‘Why hang out with that loser, Natalka?’

‘Just cos he’s an Aramov,’ another boy added.

Natalka gave the lads an up-yours gesture. ‘Ignore the pricks,’ she told Ethan, as they kept walking.

Being related to the super-rich Aramov Clan was a huge deal, especially in a place where some kids weren’t even getting enough to eat, but Ethan’s status wasn’t the basis of his friendship with Natalka. They’d clicked as soon as they’d met and Natalka’s
I hate everything
attitude meshed nicely with Ethan’s state of depression.

‘I had to sit next to Kadyr all afternoon,’ Ethan moaned. ‘Bad enough that he stinks of BO, but he sits with his hand down the back of his tracksuit scratching himself, then he borrows my calculator without asking.’

‘Eww!’ Natalka said, as she fished a cigarette packet out of her jeans. ‘Bloody poor people. Screw charity. Gimme a machine gun and I’ll shoot the smelly bastards.’

‘Exactly,’ Ethan said, laughing but only half sure that Natalka was joking. ‘I couldn’t even touch that thing after poo-fingers was all over the keys. I just left it there.’

‘You still trying to persuade your grandma to send you abroad?’

‘Trying,’ Ethan said. ‘But she’s got this thing about me
not living in a protected bubble
, and having to
learn my own people’s culture
. Whatever the hell that means . . .’

‘It’s mostly slaughtering goats and kidnapping brides around here,’ Natalka said, as she took a puff on her cigarette before offering it to Ethan. ‘You want?’

Ethan took a long drag on Natalka’s cigarette. The nicotine gave him a nice buzz as he looked up at the sky and spoke dreamily. ‘Right now I’d give
anything
for a big greasy burrito, a movie at the multiplex and a big Apple Store spend-up on my mom’s credit card.’

‘I’m with you,’ Natalka said, as Ethan took another long drag. ‘When you take me to America we’ll go crazy spending all the Aramov money you inherited from your mum! And give my ciggie back. I’ve only got two left and you’re smoking the whole bastard thing.’

‘Nobody smokes in America,’ Ethan said, laughing as he risked a cheeky final puff before giving the cigarette back. ‘They’re even worried that breathing
other
people’s smoke will give them cancer.’

Natalka laughed. ‘Everyone here drinks themselves to death long before they’re old enough to worry about cancer.’

By now they’d reached a main road a couple of hundred metres from the school, where the
Kremlin Bus
was waiting for them.

The Kremlin was the nickname given to a large, mostly residential, building at the edge of the airbase from which the Aramov Clan ran their operations. The locals had named it after the Russian president’s Moscow fortress because the Aramovs and most of the pilots and mechanics who lived there were Russian or Ukrainian, rather than native Kyrgyz.

Most Kremlin residents were men working away from home. But some had school-age kids, including Natalka’s mum who was a tough-as-boots Ukrainian-born cargo pilot.

All Kremlin kids made the half-hour drive into Bishkek to attend US11 where lessons were taught in Russian, rather than one of the rural schools where lessons were in Kyrgyz.

The little Kremlin kids got out of school twenty minutes before the older ones, and were already bouncing around the bus, bored off their heads. The twenty-four-seater was a quarter of a century old and was actually a crude Soviet design that wasn’t so much a bus as a truck with a corrugated aluminium hut welded on the back.

The driver was Alex Aramov, the sixteen-year-old son of Ethan’s uncle Leonid. He stood by the doorway with his nineteen-year-old brother Boris, both of them swigging bottles of Dutch beer.

Ethan had nothing in common with his two cousins, who’d both abandoned education at fifteen and now dedicated their lives to pumping weights on the massive outdoor stack behind the Kremlin, riding horses, chasing girls and generally using the Aramov name to act like big shots.

Once his empty beer had been smashed on the dirt road, Alex got behind the wheel. His driving style was about what you’d expect from a drunken teenager, and like everyone in Bishkek he drove with one hand on the steering wheel and one hovering over the horn, giving a blast every time he got near a junction, a sharp corner, or a fit woman.

The bus was only half full so Ethan and Natalka each got double seats and sat sideways with their trainers on the bench and their heads resting against the window. They didn’t bother talking, because it was too much effort competing with horn blasts, five little kids crawling under the seats throwing pistachio shells and the glassy-eyed stoner daughter of a Belarusian mechanic who had some kind of heavy beat coming out of her iPod.

‘Get me out of this zoo,’ Natalka groaned.

Ethan nodded in agreement as his teenaged cousin drove a corner way too fast. As Bishkek’s shabby low-rise streets passed by Ethan noticed that Natalka had undone two buttons on her plaid shirt, giving him a top-notch view down her cleavage.

‘Hey,’ a boy said, in English.

For an instant Ethan thought he’d been caught staring, but it was his little cousin Andre. It was hard to believe that this angel-faced ten-year-old was the son of Leonid Aramov, and brother of thuggish Alex and Boris.

‘Put your feet down,’ Andre said, as he squished on to the seat beside Ethan. ‘I want to practise my English on you.’

Andre had a certain charm which enabled him to be bossy without you really minding.

‘I’m kinda beat,’ Ethan said. ‘Maybe later, in my room?’

Natalka liked teasing younger kids and shouted in Andre’s ear, ‘Give me your cigarettes.’

‘I’m not dumb enough to smoke,’ Andre said indignantly. ‘It’s bad for your health and it makes you smell like an old sock.’

‘Are you saying I smell?’ Natalka growled, as she bunched her fist. ‘Gimme your ciggies or I’ll bash you.’

Andre gave Natalka a pitying look to show that he wasn’t intimidated and spoke to Ethan in English. ‘I read a joke and I don’t understand.’

‘Go on then,’ Ethan said wearily.

‘What’s the Internet’s favourite animal?’ Andre asked.

‘Dunno,’ Ethan said.

‘The lynx,’ Andre said. ‘Do you get it?’

Ethan smiled. ‘It’s a pun; you know when a word has two meanings? A lynx – L Y N X – is a type of wild cat. Links – L I N K S – are what you click when you’re on the Internet.’