Free CHERUB: Shadow Wave by Robert Muchamore Page B

about the locals? Is anyone warning them?’
    ‘We tried ringing while you were at the village,’ Iona explained.
    ‘One signal bar,’ Kyle said, as he pulled the phone from his pocket. ‘Probably none at all in the village.’
    ‘A couple of hotel staff have called their families, or rushed off to be with them. We’ve moved our bags and everything up to the roof.’
    ‘Kyle,’ Large shouted, leaning over the wall built along the hotel’s flat roof. For once his tone was purposeful rather than mean. ‘Get that food up here pronto, we might need it. Then come and speak to me.’
    Kyle and Iona, along with her training partner Dante, grabbed the boxes of food and carried them up to the hotel’s rooftop restaurant. Everyone was scared, but it didn’t play on their minds while they were occupied.
    Large sat at a dining-table on the flat roof, with his laptop computer and the satellite phone on the slatted wooden table alongside him. Mrs Leung, the elderly lady who owned the hotel, sat nearby, staring anxiously out to sea.
    Two trainees had been stationed on the corners of the roof with binoculars, looking for any sign of a large incoming wave, while the other pair sat on sun loungers, shattered after their workout on the tennis courts.
    ‘What do you know about tsunamis?’ Large asked Kyle, as he pointed towards a map of South East Asia on his laptop screen.
    ‘Only what I picked up in GCSE geography,’ Kyle replied.
    Large tapped the western tip of Indonesia and spoke with uncharacteristic honesty. ‘Kyle, this is a serious situation. Every decision I take could be a matter of life and death. You’re the only trained agent here. Speaks is out in the jungle, so I need you as my second-in-command. I’m not infallible. I want you to speak frankly if you think I’m wrong about something.’
    ‘OK,’ Kyle nodded, then gulped at the sense of responsibility.
    Paradise had turned to hell in the space of a few minutes. Kyle put his hands in the pockets of his shorts to stop them from trembling as Large continued the explanation.
    ‘According to the control room on campus, the earthquake hit two hours ago in the ocean around this spot here, north-west of Indonesia. The resulting tsunami reached the Indonesian mainland within thirty minutes. Early reports say it’s ripped up the entire coastline. God knows how many have been killed, but it’ll be hundreds, if not thousands.
    ‘The shockwave is now radiating outwards from the epicentre. There are tsunami warnings all along the western coast of Thailand. They’re expecting it to hit within the next twenty to forty minutes and we won’t be far behind. The waves that hit Indonesia were up to twenty-five metres high, but the shockwave gets weaker as it radiates outwards, so hopefully what hits us won’t be anywhere near as bad.’
    Kyle squinted and touched the laptop screen. It was shielded under a large sunshade, but the LCD still wasn’t easy to view in the bright sunlight.
    ‘So the earthquake’s here and we’re on Langkawi here … Which means the Indonesian mainland lies between us and the epicentre of the quake.’
    Large nodded. ‘Hopefully being out of the shockwave’s direct path will do us some good, but I can’t get clear information on that. The control room on campus is trying to contact the meteorological office in London to work out what we can expect, but I’ve not heard from them.’
    ‘But Norman!’ Mrs Leung blurted, as she pulled off a pair of giant sunglasses on a chain. ‘It may not be twenty-five metres like Indonesia, but even two or three metres of water coming up the beach will flood my pool, wreck my ground floor and do god knows what to the fishing villages.’
    ‘Is there higher ground inland?’ Kyle asked.
    ‘There is,’ Large nodded. ‘But it’s thickly forested once you go beyond the beach and the coast road. There’s no guarantee that we’ll be able to get to ground before the wave hits.’
    ‘But this building