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

mission is to spread chaos and confusion behind their lines, in every manner, shape and form that you can, so that while we’re hitting them with heavy artillery from the front they have to keep turning round to see what’s going on behind them. Not only that, but if you’re effective, they’ll have less hitting power. They’ll be attacking us with softer punches. That’s good news for us.’
    Now we did show some emotion. Ryan quickly added: ‘You don’t have to win the war on your own. Even a few little attacks, like this morning, will help enormously.’
    ‘Little attacks,’ I thought furiously. ‘You should have been there.’ I couldn’t believe he’d said something so patronising, especially after he’d just told us what a good job we’d done.
    But he went on: ‘And you won’t be a solo act. There’ll be other groups doing the same thing in other areas. But you will be the only ones in the area I’ll assign you. So you won’t get in each other’s way. And you’re absolutely free to turn me down. Colonel Finley told me three times I had to make that clear.’
    Most of us laughed at that, me included. It was a sarcastic laugh. When was the last time we had a free choice, a really free choice, about anything?
    For a minute Ryan looked a bit offended at our laughing, then he shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, as free as any choice in wartime can be,’ he said.
    ‘So let me get this right,’ Homer said. ‘We’d be running all over the place, wrecking everything we can? What we’ve been doing all along, except you want us to step up the pace? Is that right?’
    ‘We want you to go for it, twenty-four hours a day. We want you to be totally destructive. To do it on as big a scale as you can manage. But with one critical difference.’
    ‘What’s that?’
    ‘Those cases I brought. The ones we hid on the island. They contain a few bits and pieces that I think you’ll find interesting.’
    ‘Bits and pieces?’ I asked.
    ‘Specifically, grenades, automatic weapons, ammunition and plastic explosives.’
    ‘No wonder they were so heavy,’ Kevin said.
    ‘What’s plastic explosive?’ Fi asked.
    ‘It’s very efficient, very adaptable, and very safe – if you can use that word in connection with explosives – and it’ll blow up anything quickly and easily.’
    ‘But we don’t know how to use stuff like that,’ Fi said.
    ‘Hey, give us some credit,’ Ryan said. ‘We chose it because it’s so simple. I could teach you in half an hour. In fact I’m planning to teach you in half an hour.’
    Fi looked worried. ‘I don’t want to carry explosives around with us,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t sound very safe. What if we fall over or drop it?’
    ‘Wait a sec,’ Ryan said.
    He went to one of the packs we’d brought. We’d already made quite a mess of it by digging into the food for our breakfast orgy. Ryan pulled out a cardboard box that had been pushed down the side. It must have gone the full depth of the pack. It had orica explosives in big blue and orange writing.
    ‘This is it,’ he said.
    The lid was taped down but Ryan ripped along the top and tipped out two big fat things that looked like salamis wrapped in plastic.
    He picked one up and waved it in front of us.
    ‘Plastic explosive,’ he said. ‘ Powerpacks .’
    Suddenly he lost his grip. The salami seemed to slip from his hand. He made one grab at it, nearly got it, grabbed again, missed it, then threw himself backwards, as it dropped to the ground. I heard him yell: ‘Mother of God!’ I didn’t wait to see what the others did. I rolled across the rocks, covering my face as I went. There was a bit of a slope behind me, and that helped me roll. I went like a maniac, hoping to reach a tree I knew was there. I thought if I got behind it I might have a chance. I didn’t know how long this stuff took to go off, but I’d seen Ryan’s expression, so I knew this was serious.
    About fifteen metres from the tree I stopped