Blood Sun Read Free Page B

men.
    He was so close to them he could hear their banter, the crackle of their radios and their slurping of tea.
    A good hunter would stalk his prey as near as he could, and Max had wanted this final hour to test himself. How close could he get to the men who had hunted him for the past three days without being seen? Max had broken the outline of his body by snapping off gorse and fern, jamming it into his shirt and belt and the tops of his boots. With stealth and patience, he crawled ever closer, past soldiers who moved across the perimeter, around men whose legs were so close he could have reached out and touched them.
    Finally he stood up from the gorse cover, barely five meters from the officer in charge, who carried a clipboard and had a radio operator at his side. Max’s body was covered in slime, his clothing was sodden and his hair matted with something disgusting. His eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep and flecks of dirt. And he stank.
    The officer was momentarily taken by surprise at theapparition that emerged from the bogland. Then he smiled. “Lads! He’s here!”
    The soldiers jeered and cheered, shouted insults and encouragement—all meant to welcome the boy as he pulled the bits of camouflage free.
    “You took your time!”
    “Don’t stand upwind, mate!”
    “We almost had you.”
    “Look what the cat dragged in.”
    “The Creature from the Black Lagoon.”
    “You’re not coming in my lorry smelling like that!”
    The flare had been the signal that the exercise had ended. Escape and Evasion, the paras and special forces called it. Cast adrift out on the moor without any means of shelter, food, money or weapons and issued with the most basic clothing, potential recruits were dropped off to be hunted down and captured. Then they would face another two days of intense physical and mental interrogation. Thankfully they didn’t do that with the schoolboys and girls who had passed the tests to get on to this exercise. And they allowed them basic rations and groundsheets for shelter. Only five schools in the country could compete, and Dartmoor High had always had an entrant. All schools wanting to participate had to have competed in the annual Ten Tors competition, administered by the army, where four hundred teams of six teenagers would face the grueling task of marching for two days, anything up to seventy kilometers between the ten nominated Tors. Those teenagers had to be determined and self-sufficient. Backup teams of the army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force were always on hand to help.
    But despite the Escape and Evasion exercise taking place in a demarcated area, this challenge was tougher. You were treated as the enemy and hunted down. And the colder it got and the more exhausted the competitors became, the more real it seemed. On the run, in enemy territory. Even hardened soldiers had died out here on the moor, and it was a huge risk for youngsters—they were on their own, no one else in a group to help if they got injured or lost. On the third night, at 2100 hours, the survivors had to report to this assembly point.
    That was what the mortar flare meant. ENDEX—end of exercise. If anyone was left out there and didn’t report, then a major search and rescue would be undertaken within the hour. But so far all had been captured. Only one boy came in under his own steam.
    The last survivor.
    Max Gordon.
    Stanton and Drew looked through Max’s room while Mr. Jackson stood in the doorway. They made little fuss and barely disturbed anything. The room was small. There was a bed, a small table that doubled as a desk, a bookshelf and a small trunk for bits and pieces. On the shelf were a few artifacts Max’s explorer-scientist father had sent him over the years. A Cook Island figurine, a rock crystal from the Himalayas, an amber teardrop from Russia that was a hundred million years old.
    “Do you know where he’d keep his computer?” Drew asked, breaking Mr. Jackson’s thoughts of faraway