The Recruit

19. Merry

Imagine you are on an early level of a video game. It seems hard. Everything happens too fast, but you eventually make it through. You progress through the game to much higher levels. One day you try the early level again. What was once fast and difficult now appears easy.

This is the principle behind basic training. You will be asked to perform difficult tasks while under physical and mental strain. You will achieve things far beyond what you dreamed possible. When basic training is over, your mind and body will be able to perform at a higher level.

(From the introductory page of the CHERUB Basic Training Manual)

Drew dropped out on day twenty-six. He fractured a wrist on the assault course. The course wasn't that hard, but it was easy to have an accident when you'd already done three hours' physical training and hadn't slept the night before because Lt Surge blasted everyone in their beds with a fire hose.

Brendan got partnered up with Shauna, but he'd never spent more than a few hours without his identical twin before. He was thinking about giving up and restarting with his brother in a few months' time.

The physical training was the hardest thing Ash had ever done. The first time he threw up from exhaustion he froze in shock. Serena told him to keep running but Ash didn't listen. Brawly shoved Ash in the back, then crushed Ash's hand under his boot.

"If you stop training, you'd better be dead or unconscious," Brawly shouted. That was the closest Ash had come to quitting.

Ash was getting used to life in hell. He counted twelve scabs and twenty-six bruises on his body. That didn't include places he couldn't see. He showered twice a day, but he never had time to scrub the filth from difficult spots like nails or ears. His hair felt like straw, and grit sprayed out if he ran his hand through it, even if he'd just washed. If he got a chance for a haircut he was having the lot chopped off.

The worst part about training wasn't exhaustion, it was always being cold. Ash slept under a wafer-thin blanket in an unheated room. In the morning the floor was like ice on your soles. The instructors forced everyone under a freezing shower. Breakfast was always cereal and cold juice. Clothes never dried, they were damp and stiff as soon as you put them on. Not that it mattered for long. After five minutes on the assault course you were drenched in icy water and mud that crept down your trousers and kept you soggy for the rest of the day.

The trainees only felt tiny hints of warmth and each was bliss. Hot drinks at lunchtime, the warm evening shower and meal. If you were lucky you got an injury serious enough for a visit to the medical centre but not so bad you were thrown off the course. Then you got to wait for the nurse in a room kept at 22°C with a coffee machine and chocolate digestives, which you could dunk in your coffee and eat soggy and warm. Clemont and Brendan got these golden injuries; Ash could only dream.

The five hours of lessons sandwiched between physical training were the easiest part of the day. Weaponry was coolest. Shooting was only part of it. Ash now knew how to strip and clean a gun, how to defuse a bullet so it doesn't go off, how to put a gun back together wrong so it jams. Even how to take a bullet apart so that it explodes inside the chamber and blows away the finger on the trigger. They were starting knives in the next lesson.

Espionage was all about gadgets. Electronic listening devices, computer hacking, lock picking, cameras, photocopiers. Nothing as fancy as you see in the movies. Mrs Flagg, the ex-KGB (Russian version of MI5) espionage teacher, always stood in the unheated classroom wearing fur-lined boots, a fur coat, hat and scarf while the trainees shivered in damp T-shirts. Occasionally she would bang her gloved hands together and moan about the cold not doing her varicose veins any good.