CHERUB: Backwater

1: Beach

December 2013

Rex Reynolds' trainer squelched into a mixture of mud and sand as he cut behind the deserted caravan park and into the sand dunes. It had rained all day and only stopped in the last hour, and the wind whipping across the Irish Sea would've chilled him to the bone if he hadn't just jogged the best part of three miles up the coast. He'd watched the sun set as he'd run, so it was now getting dark and he was navigating partly by moonlight. The heavy bag on his back contained a clean pair of trainers, a towel and other things you might expect a fourteen-year-old boy to be carrying, but there was also a lock gun, several lengths of rope cut into lengths for tying people up, and a serrated hunting knife.

Panting, Rex crouched low as he dashed the last hundred metres across the dunes, dislodging a big lump of wet sand as he skidded to a halt twenty yards from a Mitsubishi truck parked on the beach.

"What kept you?" Liam Driver hissed, grabbing Rex's jacket and manhandling him into a spot between Liam and the truck.

"Needed the bog," Rex replied, brushing off his jacket where Liam had grabbed it with a sandy glove.

"Maybe you should plan your diarrhoea so that it doesn't disrupt carefully-planned operations," Liam sneered, but he left it there. Both boys had stretched nerves, but they'd just spotted a light flashing out in the estuary.

"Three flashes. That's them," Liam said, shifting to his other foot since one was going dead with the weight of equipment on his back. "I reckon another ten minutes."

Rex glanced at his watch, but it was too dark to see the face. He used a gloved hand to press the button on the side which lit it up, and made a mental note of the time.

Liam was a sixteen-year-old black shirt who'd been assigned to the mission with Rex. Although Liam was a bolshie lad from the Wirral with an inflated opinion of himself and their egos clashed regularly, they'd found they operated well together and Rex felt reassured that he had the older boy on his side as they waited.

A drop in the wind meant they could hear the outboard motor of the fishing boat crawling its way up a channel in the mud bank.

"You fancy a rumble with that lot?" Liam asked, nudging Rex with his elbow and pointing out three guys who'd come out to the beach to help.

Rex laughed nervously. "They're big guys," he said uneasily.

"Remember your training," Liam said, smiling. "You've got the element of surprise, and they're not trained in combat."

Over the course of the last four months, Rex and Liam had shared a titchy Welsh cottage near Aberdovey on the Welsh coast with their mission controller, Chloe Blake. This was the climax of the whole mission and Rex could feel nerves rising in his chest again. He hated waiting, and having to hang around the cottage for two hours waiting for the tide with nobody but his thoughts for company had contributed to why he'd had to spend twenty minutes on the toilet before coming out.

An Irish voice startled them both as it cut across the wind.

"You boys ready to go? You know your positions?"

The voice belonged to Hugh Patrick, the mastermind of the operation. He'd been a champion boxer in his youth and had the crumpled nose to prove it, but he'd lived on fried food for the past ten years and was carrying a gut these days. He was squeezed into a Superdry coat and his little patch of curly black hair on top of his head flopped around in the wind as he crouched behind them.

"All good, boss," Liam replied for both of them. "We'll move in when we see the signal."

"Hopefully this is the last one of these I'll need to do," Hugh said, taking on a friendly tone. "You're both well-trained and I think I can trust you to take some risks on your own. With an appropriate reward, of course."