cut the word into its three syllables and spat them out. “I have you for twelve days and they expect me to give you the sort of training that should take fourteen weeks. That’s not just mad. That’s suicidal.”
“I didn’t ask to be here,” Alex said.
Suddenly the sergeant was furious. “You don’t speak to me unless I give you permission,” he shouted. “And when you speak to me, you address me as ‘sir.’ Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Alex had already decided that the man was even worse than his geography teacher.
“There are five units operational here at the moment,” the officer went on. “You’ll join K Unit. We don’t use names. I have no name. You have no name. If anyone asks you what you’re doing, you tell them nothing. Some of the men may be hard on you. Some of them may resent you being here. That’s too bad. You’ll just have to live with it. And there’s something else you need to know. I can make allowances for you. You’re a boy, not a man. But if you complain, you’ll be binned. If you cry, you’ll be binned. If you can’t keep up, you’ll be binned. Between you and me, boy, this is a mistake and I want to bin you.”
After that, Alex joined K Unit. As the sergeant had predicted, they weren’t exactly overjoyed to see him.
There were four of them. As Alex was soon to discover, the Special Operations Division of M16 sent its agents to the same training center used by the Special Air Service—the SAS. Much of the training was based on SAS methods and this included the numbers and makeup of each team. So there were four men, each with their own special skills. And one boy, seemingly with none.
They were all in their mid-twenties, spread out over the bunks in companionable silence. Two of them were smoking. One was dismantling and reassembling his gun—a 9mm Browning High Power pistol. Each of them had been given a code name: Wolf, Fox, Eagle, and Snake. From now on, Alex would be known as Cub. The leader, Wolf, was the one with the gun. He was short and muscular with square shoulders and black, close-cropped hair. He had a handsome face, made slightly uneven by his nose, which had been broken at some time in the past.
He was the first to speak. Putting the gun down, he examined Alex with cold dark brown eyes. “So who the hell do you think you are?” he demanded.
“Cub,” Alex replied.
“A bloody schoolboy!” Wolf spoke with a strange, slightly foreign accent. “I don’t believe it. Are you with Special Operations?”
“I’m not allowed to tell you that.” Alex went over to his bunk and sat down. The mattress felt as solid as the frame. Despite the cold, there was only one blanket.
Wolf shook his head and smiled humorlessly. “Look what they’ve sent us,” he muttered. “Double 0 Seven? Double 0 Nothing’s more like it.”
After that, the name stuck. Double 0 Nothing was what they called him.
In the days that followed, Alex shadowed the group, not quite part of it but never far away. Almost everything they did, he did. He learned map reading, radio communication, and first aid. He took part in an unarmed combat class and was knocked to the ground so often that it took all his nerve to persuade himself to get up again.
And then there was the assault course. Five times he was shouted and bullied across the nightmare of nets and ladders, tunnels and ditches, towering walls and swinging tightropes that stretched out for almost a quarter of a mile in, and over, the woodland beside the huts. Alex thought of it as the adventure playground from hell. The first time he tried it, he fell off a rope and into a pit filled with freezing slime. Half drowned and filthy, he had been sent back to the start by the sergeant. Alex thought he would never get to the end, but the second time he finished it in twenty-five minutes, which he had cut to seventeen minutes by the end of the week. Bruised and exhausted though he was, he was quietly pleased with himself. Even Wolf only managed it in twelve.
Wolf remained actively hostile toward Alex. The other three men simply ignored him, but Wolf did everything to taunt or humiliate him. It was as if Alex had somehow insulted him by being placed in the group. Once, crawling under the nets, Wolf lashed out with his foot, missing Alex’s face by an inch. Of course he would have said it was an accident if the boot had connected. Another time he was more successful, tripping Alex up in the mess hall and sending him flying, along with his tray, cutlery, and steaming plate of stew. And every time he spoke to Alex, he used the same sneering tone of voice.
“Good night, Double 0 Nothing. Don’t wet the bed.”
Alex bit his lip and said nothing. But he was glad when the four men were sent off for a day’s jungle survival course—this wasn’t part of his own training. Even though the sergeant worked him twice as hard once they were gone, Alex preferred to be on his own.
But on the tenth day, Wolf did come close to finishing him altogether. It happened in the Killing House.
The Killing House was a fake—a mock-up of an embassy used to train the SAS in the art of hostage release. Alex had twice watched K Unit go into the house, the first time swinging down from the roof, and had followed their progress on closed-circuit TV. All four men were armed. Alex himself didn’t take part because someone somewhere had decided he shouldn’t carry a gun. Inside the Killing House, mannequins had been arranged as terrorists and hostages. Smashing down the doors and using stun grenades to clear the rooms with deafening, multiple blasts, Wolf, Fox, Eagle, and Snake had successfully completed their mission both times.
This time Alex had joined them. The Killing House had been booby-trapped. They weren’t told how. All five of them were unarmed. Their job was simply to get from one end of the house to the other without being “killed.”
They almost made it. In the first room, made up to look like a huge dining room, they found the pressure pads under the carpet and the infrared beams across the doors. For Alex it was an eerie experience, tiptoeing behind the other four men, watching as they dismantled the two devices, using cigarette smoke to expose the otherwise invisible beam. It was strange to be afraid of everything and yet to see nothing. In the hallway there was a motion detector, which would have activated a machine gun (Alex assumed it was loaded with blanks) behind a Japanese screen. The third room was empty. The fourth was a living room with the exit, a pair of French windows, on the other side. There was a trip wire, barely thicker than a human hair, running the entire width of the room, and the French windows were alarmed. While Snake dealt with the alarm, Fox and Eagle prepared to neutralize the trip wire, unclipping an electronic circuit board and a variety of tools from their belts.
Wolf stopped them. “Leave it. We’re out of here.” At the same moment, Snake signaled. He had deactivated the alarm. The French windows were open.
Snake was the first out. Then Fox and Eagle. Alex would have been the last to leave the room, but just as he reached the exit, he found Wolf blocking his way.
