Free Instinct (2010) by Ben Kay Page B

hours of travelling had been as dull as stale bread.
    And he wanted his mum. From the moment the two soldiers had left him in the driving rain with Bishop,trepidation had started to dissolve the excitement. But he had no one’s hand to hold, no one’s arm around him to pull him close and reassure him that, despite the way it looked, everything was going to be OK.
    By the time the second plane skidded to a landing in the jungle, he was tired, lonely and fed up with so many strange new places. He didn’t know when it was going to end, but that was all he wanted.
    Bishop had hurried him into the small white building, down the elevator and into his quarters, where he had kept him out of sight since their arrival.
    That was a day and a half ago.
    Andrew’s interest in Bishop’s DVD collection had waned dramatically with the passing time. Sleep had been choppy hours snatched on a couch, and he was now leafing through old operations manuals and playing with the lid of a memory stick for want of something to do.
    ‘Mr Bishop?’ he asked softly.
    Bishop grimaced at the inconvenience of having his work interrupted yet again. ‘What?’
    ‘When am I going to see my mum?’
    Bishop looked up from the report he was writing. ‘Huh? Very, very soon, I promise. Just hang on a little longer. Oh, what? Oh, don’t cry! Don’t cry, Andrew! For heaven’s sake.’
    He couldn’t help it. Bishop had given him exactly the same answer on both planes, and several times since. Andrew had now stopped believing it.
    Bishop had no idea how to deal with this situation;he had thought it was going to be easy. Keep the kid shut away while he finished the admin reports, then wait for the team to bring his mom back from operations. If a demographic as dim as the world’s au pairs could manage it, then it should hardly prove beyond the ability of a man who finished twelfth in his class at MIT.
    But of course it did. Caring for a ten-year-old who had been parted from his mother was as complex as separating spiders’ webs in the dark, and Bishop’s feeble efforts were hardly making the best of things. And now the boy was crying, so he had to do something more than simply ignore him. It was time to make a phone call.
    ‘Taj? Patch me into Hawk One ASAP.’ As he waited, he did his best to pretend there was no small boy sobbing in his office.
    ‘Hawk One, this is Bishop, state your ETA please … OK, thank you.’ He replaced the receiver.
    ‘Andrew, Andrew, hey, hey, hey … your mom is going to be here in exactly one hour. How’s that?’
    Andrew wiped his nose on his blue school jumper.
    ‘Thank you, Mr Bishop.’
    After a pause, he returned to fiddling with the memory stick, and Bishop prayed for that hour to pass at speed.

10
    The Spartan was losing altitude again. The soldiers looked out at the trees below and started to put away their magazines and iPods. Laura’s pulse quickened. She checked the view in every direction through the small window next to her, trying to take in as much of the surrounding area as possible. But even when they had descended beyond the clouds all she could see was jungle: dense, spinach-green treetops interrupted by patches of mist that clung to the broad leaves like wisps of white cat fur. It could certainly be Venezuela. It didn’t matter. Just as long as Andrew was down there somewhere.
    The wheels crawled to a stop at the edge of the tarmac. This was the cue for the soldiers to jump out of the side of the plane and fan out across the grass, stretching and groaning their way back to life. Despite her desperation to see Andrew, Laura was last to disembark, her movement to the exit blocked by soldiers who considered their comfort more important than anything the civilian could want.
    The sun screaming into her face, the first thing Laura noticed was the heat. It was stifling, thick and close, something she had not experienced since an expedition to gather red-ant samples in Ecuador.Shielding her eyes, she