Tomorrow 7 - The Other Side Of Dawn by John Marsden Read Free Book Online

rolling, got up onto my hands and knees and scuttled towards the trunk, hoping to dive for it if I could get close enough. In fact I was almost into my dive when I heard the last sound I expected.
    Laughter.
    Laughter? I rolled over in shock and looked back. Ryan was sitting on his haunches, having a good old giggle.
    ‘Bloody moron,’ I thought furiously, getting up and dusting myself off. To my left Homer was doing the same, and Fi was emerging from behind a tree. Kevin had gone for a sprint across the clearing. He’d covered a lot of ground in a short time. Lee had jumped down a series of rocks and was standing by the creek looking up at Ryan. If looks could kill, Ryan might as well have kissed his wife and kids goodbye.
    I walked slowly back. I’ve never been a big fan of practical jokes – they always seem kind of boy-y to me – and I sure wasn’t a big fan of this one. We’d seen enough real explosions in this war – a lot more than Ryan had, I’d guarantee that – and I for one didn’t need any fake ones. We had been through a terrible morning while Ryan sat under a tree getting a sun-tan. We were exhausted, stressed about the past and terrified about the future. I decided then that I didn’t like Ryan much after all.
    He wasn’t too bothered though. He didn’t apologise, just proceeded to scare the life out of me again by bashing the orangey-yellow explosive with his fist.
    Again nothing happened. Ryan grinned at Fi . ‘Does that answer your question?’ he asked.
    Fi shrugged. ‘You could have just told me,’ she said. ‘I’d have believed you.’
    ‘Oh well,’ Ryan said. ‘Nothing like seeing it with your own eyes. It gets hot quickly is all. ’
    ‘So does anything make it go off?’ Kevin asked.
    Of all of us Kevin was the one most into scientific stuff, and he was getting interested in Ryan’s demonstration.
    ‘Of course something makes it go off,’ Homer said. ‘It’s a bomb, isn’t it?’
    Ryan dived into the pack again and pulled out something I did recognise. It was a roll of fuse wire, fifty metres long at least, and with it came a box of what could have been fifty silver .303 shells, but weren’t.
    Plain detonators look a lot like .303 shells. I’d last seen plain detonators when Homer and I left some behind in the ship we destroyed in Cobbler’s Bay.
    Ryan also had new watches for all of us, and cigarette lighters that were like those trick candles for birthday cakes: the ones that don’t blow out, no matter what you do. These lighters kept their flame even when we blew hard on them. We had a bit of fun playing with them and the watches.
    His last little treasure was something I hadn’t seen before, but as soon as I picked it up I knew what it was: a pair of special pliers for handling explosives. Metal on one side of the jaws and plastic on the other, so you couldn’t accidentally strike a spark by having metal against metal.
    They would have come in handy for our attack on Cobbler’s Bay.
    Those pliers reminded me again that even plastic explosive was still explosive. Maybe you could safely bash the daylights out of it with a baseball bat. But at the end of the day it was designed to blow big targets into shreds that looked like tissues after they’d been through a washing machine.
    For the next hour Ryan gave us an intensive course in guerilla fighting. I have to admit, he knew his stuff. It wasn’t just technical information about how to use plastic explosives and grenades. It was more general: tactics and camouflage, and overall cunning. He went on and on about something called the Pimlott Principles. The only problem with the Pimlott Principles was that the guy who invented them had been killed by a hand grenade he was playing around with in his own home, in 1997. I wish Ryan hadn’t told us that.
    Anyway, the Pimlott Principles are that first you achieve surprise, then you build momentum and keep the enemy off-balance, and you always go for objectives that can