Read Tomorrow 7 - The Other Side Of Dawn for Free Online

to the next stage until you’ve said it, like teachers, when we stopped for lunch on excursions, and they’d say, ‘Make sure you pick up all your rubbish; don’t go to the toilet on your own; make sure you’re back here by half past one ...’
    So Ryan made his speech, only he got into some very heavy stuff which we hadn’t been put through before, not so specifically anyway.
    ‘If you get caught,’ he said, ‘your first line of defence is that you don’t know anything. “I know nothing.” You’re just kids acting on your own initiative. You’ve never seen me. You may have noticed that I didn’t bring any newspapers or magazines, and if you look closely at the food you’ll find all the processed stuff has got labels from Stratton, and use-by dates that suggest it was made before the invasion. That’s so if, God forbid, you get caught, there’s nothing to prove you’ve had a visit from New Zealand. You could have picked up all this stuff locally.
    ‘OK. Your second line, if they break that down, is that I dropped in here with the chopper, and I gave you certain tasks to carry out, without any explanation as to why you had to do them.
    Your third line, if you’re getting desperate, is to change the details of what you’re doing, and to change them in a way that will make them convincing. That needs a bit of imagination, but you could pull it off, and it might buy you time. If you’ve ever told a fib to your parents, and they tell me it’s not unknown for teenagers to do that, you’ve probably used that technique already.
    ‘And your last line ...’ He paused and looked at us meaningfully, like he was about to tell us where babies come from, or why we shouldn’t use drugs, or the true reason Mrs Lance had to leave the school. ‘Your last line is to tell the truth. Obviously that’s not something we’d welcome. But these people are tough and they’re ruthless and the stakes are high. If they don’t believe your other three stories they’ll put extreme pressure on you. Mental and physical pressure. They’re very good at doing that. So they might break you down.’
    I glanced at Fi who was white-faced, staring at him.
    ‘If that happens, all we can ask is that you put it off as long as possible. If you know you’re cracking up, try to hang on for another six hours. Or twelve. Or twenty-four. At this stage of the war every hour gained is critical.’
    He made us go through the four points, repeating them, to prove we’d absorbed what he said.
    Only then did he get onto the big stuff.
    ‘Have you had any news since you’ve been back here?’
    ‘Not really.’
    ‘Well, I’m not sure where to start. Seems like I’ve got to be the NZBC. “And now, here is the news.” OK. In the time we’ve got I don’t think I’ll be able to give you a full history of what’s happened. But in some ways things have been going a lot better. The biggest difference is the international pressure. Sweden in particular: they’ve led the way. And France, and Japan. America , and the imf too. They’ve been working away in the United Nations and nato, and with the asean nations. Gradually it’s had an effect.
    ‘Unfortunately though that’s not enough. We keep coming back to a military solution. For some time now we’ve been planting what the Intelligence people call “disinformation”. In practice that means we’ve been conning them, getting them to think that we’re weakening, losing our spirit, our heart, our resolve. Our Intelligence sources tell us that it’s working. Mind you, if this information’s up to the normal standards of our Intelligence Department it probably means that there’s now a few thousand Scud missiles lined up along the coast pointing at us.
    ‘Still ... this time it seems like they might have got it right. And of course as you can now guess, the reality is the complete opposite. What’s about to break in the next couple of days is our big push. It’s the most important