Mission Jaguar, page 11
It stopped unwinding with a couple of metres left. Beck started to pull it in again, gently, until he could feel he was now lifting the weight of the rock off the bottom of the pool.
“Now, keep an eye on it,” he said. “Let me know the moment the rock comes back out of the water.”
He ran the vine between both hands and held them as far apart as he could, then started to pull the vine up, one outstretched-arms-length at a time. One, two, three…
“There,” she said.
“Cool. Okay, the distance between your outstretched arms is basically the same as your height, so the water here is three Beck Grangers deep.”
She looked him up and down, and made the mental estimate.
“So, almost five metres?”
“Ideally we would have as much depth as we do height of the jump. We will just have to do a shallow entrance jump.”
“And that is what?” she asked.
“Just thrust your arms and legs out wide, as soon as you enter the water. That will stop you going too deep. Then once we’re down, swim for the far side. We’re heading north and the river flows north west, so we want to be on the right bank.”
She nodded, biting her lip, staring hard at the drop, and he suddenly realised something.
“What’s the highest you’ve ever jumped?” he asked softly. She shot him a grateful look, glad he understood.
“Not this high.”
“It’ll be fine. Hold your arms out, like this, to balance you, and keep your legs together. You need to punch your way through the surface with your feet. We’ll do this together. It will be fine. Just go for it, with a really positive movement, and everything else will take care of itself. Step back, and one, two, three …”
Beck knew that you didn’t compromise with fear by taking it bit by bit. No. You wrestled it to the ground and you showed it who was boss. You threw yourself into the challenge with maximum power. That was always Beck’s key for the most effective way of reaching a target.
And so they jumped. Side by side, with one huge leap out.
Their momentum carried them out into the air above the pool, and the foaming surface flew up towards their feet.
SPLASH.
And they were under, foam and bubbles roaring around their ears. The moment he was in, Beck started to kick with his arms and legs, fighting the downward plunge. He could feel the constant shockwaves of the fall pummelling him. His head broke the surface and he looked quickly around for Dian. And there she was, bursting back into the air with a huge grin on her face.
“I so totally want to do that again!” she shouted.
They struck out for the shore, where the jungle vegetation came down to the water, and pulled themselves out onto dry land. Dian flopped down onto her back.
“Let’s keep moving,” Beck said automatically. “We keep ourselves warm that way, and also speed up the drying process for our clothes.”
“Hey, five minutes, right?”
Beck didn’t want to waste any more time than he had to, now that they were down and free from the fall. But he also realised that a break was a good opportunity to try the radio again.
“Okay. You earned it. We’ll take five.”
He paced back and forth while he pulled the handset from his pack.
“This is Beck …”
They both froze as a voice, very faint and very distant, came out of the little speaker.
“Say again? You’re very faint …”
They both fought back a little cheer.
“Okay,” Beck said. “We can’t hear you — you’re broken — but if you can hear us, we are on the edge of the lowlands, heading north. Over.”
But there was no reply, though he tried several more times. They must have been at the outer limits of the radio’s reach. He put it away with a grimace of irritation.
“We can send robots to Mars but we can’t talk to helicopters …”
“But I presume they’ll keep trying to contact you?”
He shook his head.
“Problem with doing that, you never know if you’re calling at a bad moment. Say we were hiding in the cave back then, and my friends chose that exact moment to put a call through? No, we arranged that I’d always be the one to make contact, whenever it was safe. They just have to keep listening out.”
He zipped the pack up and crouched down by the water to refill the water bottles, holding them under so that they glugged and gurgled.
“Beck …” Her voice was suddenly, quietly urgent. “Don’t move.”
He froze at once. With that tone, you didn’t argue, even if your instinct was to look around to see what the trouble was.
“What?” he whispered back. His mind ran through the possibilities. Alligator? Snake?
Or had the jaguar he had almost seen twice before finally shown itself?
“Men,” she said. “At the top of the cliff. Looking down at us.”
Chapter Forty-Five
If anything, Beck went even stiller. Nothing catches the human eye like movement.
Dian had seen them as moving outlines against the sky. Which meant that if they were looking down, he and Dian in their jungle clothing would just be patches of dark green against more green. That was in their favour. But, they were people-shaped patches, and the human eye is as good at picking out body outlines as it is at picking out faces.
“They’ve gone,” Dian said.
“Then we move.”
They sprang together for the deeper cover of the jungle, only stopping when they were safely behind a pair of tree trunks. They couldn’t see the cliff, which meant that no one on top of the cliff would be able to see them either.
“Do you think they saw us?” he asked as he screwed the tops back onto their water bottles.
“I couldn’t tell. It was just a glimpse. They didn’t start moving suddenly, or pointing. Did we leave a lot of footprints up there?”
“Mm.” Beck thought. “A few probably, but an expert tracker would probably pick us up even without any. Does Ric have ever use people like that?”
“Trackers?” She snorted. “No. Expert bully boys, but not trackers.”
Beck smeared a handful of dirt over his face, then tugged the binoculars from their pouch and slowly peeked out again, running his magnified view up to the top of the cliff. He found the highest point of the fall, moved the circle of his vision over to one side — and a man stood there, looking straight down at him through a pair of much more powerful binos. He wore rough looking fatigues and a forage cap, and he had what looked like a submachine gun slung over one shoulder.
But the guy hadn’t seen him. After that one accidental look in Beck’s direction, he panned the binos slowly from side to side, sweeping them across the lowlands, taking in mile-long stretches at a glance. Like Dian said, not experts.
Beck had seen him before.
“I’m pretty sure it’s the guy who was in charge at the cave.”
“Silvio.” He heard the loathing in her voice. “He’s the worst of his bullies.”
Beck tucked his binos away.
“Well, it took us over an hour to get down the falls, so even if they did see us and they start coming down right now, we’ve got an hour’s lead. Let’s use it.”
“But Beck, your friends aren’t the only ones with a helicopter. They could call one up and get down here in minutes.”
“Let ’em.” Beck peered through the trees back at the pool. “There’s nowhere for them to land.” He checked the compass grinned. “And even if they do get down here some other way, I bet they’ll think we’re just following the river, which flows west from here. But we’re going to stick to the plan and head due north. They won’t come near us that way.”
He looked thoughtfully at the river and the pool. There would be fish in there, and probably freshwater crabs around the edges. If they had time to look, it would be a good source of food. Their last meal had been raw palm leaves — it was about time for something hot, and they needed calories.
But they didn’t have the luxury of time, and they would have to come out into the open and be plainly visible to the men at the top. So, they would find food on their way instead.
He shouldered his pack decisively.
“Come on. Let’s get moving.”
Chapter Forty-Six
“… and that’s Al,” Beck said finally. “Since Aunt Kathy died, it’s just been him and me.”
Immediately they were away from the river, she experienced first-hand the difference between the highlands and the lowlands. It was in the air around them. Dian had always understood that hot air rises — but she hadn’t known that hot, humid air sinks.
If the highland jungle had been a sauna, down here it was a full-on steam-bath with the dial turned to max. Every surface, every leaf and branch and their own skins, was covered with a thin layer of moisture which couldn’t evaporate into the already supersaturated air. It felt like if you wanted a drink, you just had to clench your fist and wring the water out of it.
But try telling that to their bodies, which were still programmed by nature to react to heat by pumping out moisture onto the skin to carry heat away through evaporation. So instead of keeping water inside them where it could do some good, they sweated, and they sweated — and the sweat clung to their skin and to their clothing like treacle.
So water breaks were frequent. The first time they had stopped for one, Dian had asked about her new family — or rather her old family, rediscovered. She wanted to know everything.
But there was far too much to tell for a brief break, so Beck had kept going as they pushed further into the jungle with a brief biography of Professor Sir Alan Granger — environmentalist, scientist, diplomat, and the man he regarded as his second father. Plus he had added some of his own memories which hadn’t quite made it into the public record. The man who could burn salad. Who had once managed to break an arm falling up stairs.
Beck loved him more than any other human being alive.
“He sounds a good guy,” she said thoughtfully. “Quirky, but good.”
He glanced at her as he pushed a vine aside with his stick so they could keep walking.
“There’s a ‘but’ coming,” he said.
“But … Beck, once we’re out of here, where do I go then?”
Chapter Forty-Seven
Bam.
Al had said this moment would come, and ever since she had guessed his identity, Beck had felt it hovering above both of them, ready to fall down at any time.
In his dream world, they got Dian safely away and she came to stay with him and Al back in England and they all lived happily ever after.
But as Al had pointed out, she had had a lifetime of other experiences, and she might not want to. She might have formed her own attachments, and those had to be respected. They had no right to force anything on her.
“Where would you want to go?” he asked quietly.
“Well …” She sighed. “How you feel about Al — that’s how I feel about Kim. You and me — hey, I know we’re going to be the best friends for ever, we’re going to be everything a brother and sister can be, and Al has to be the coolest adult — the coolest male adult — on the planet, but Kim’s the only person I could ever feel at home with — and I know she’d have me in a heart-beat.”
“Of course,” he said. “We’ll see what she says, then. First, we have to prove we’re brother and sister — that’ll just be a simple DNA test with saliva swabs. Then, we have enough evidence back home to show that your adoption was illegal — as we’ve got the testimony of the guy who stole you. After that, Al will technically be your legal guardian, but I can promise you he won’t make you do anything you don’t want to.”
He forced a smile, which he hoped she would think was genuine, and he made himself a silent promise that one day it would be genuine.
Her smile in return was completely un-faked.
“You’ll like her, Beck, I just know it.”
Which seemed a good natural break and a time to change the subject. Beck checked his watch. It was coming up to 4p.m. If you were surviving somewhere and you knew you only had a couple more hours of daylight, then there was only one thing you should be doing with those hours, and that was getting ready for the night.
He looked around them. Yes, this would do.
“You know, I think this is where we’ll be stopping.”
“Uh-huh?” She turned a slow circle as she took it in. It wasn’t quite a clearing — there weren’t any real clearings in the jungle, but one side of where they stood was dominated by a tall, forked tree with thick overhanging branches.
Beck eyed it carefully.
A thick cluster of ferns grew to head height over to one side. He used the machete to lop the first one off at the base, then passed it to her hilt first.
“Could you cut the rest off like that? We want a good pile.”
“Okay …” She took the machete and hefted it in her hand. “And meanwhile you will be …?”
“Looking around,” he said with a grin, and disappeared into the undergrowth.
He knew exactly what he wanted — three branches, good and solid, more or less straight, two metres minimum. And absolutely not rotten, which probably meant they would still be attached to their trees when he found them, not lying on the jungle floor.
He was testing one particular branch — hanging his whole weight on it to see what happened — when he heard her suddenly calling through the jungle, urgency and suppressed panic creeping higher and higher in her tone.
“Uh — Beck? Beck! It’s a … a snake … uh, Beck!”
Chapter Forty-Eight
Beck burst through the bushes, scenarios running through his mind. Most snakes would rather just avoid you, but they would attack if they felt threatened or trapped. A poisonous snake would be neurotoxic or haemotoxic — meaning that its poison would either attack your nerves, shutting down the network that ran your body, or your blood, turning it into sludge that was incapable of carrying the vital oxygen around to fuel you.
Or some, just to really make sure, were both …
And there was Dian, up ahead, standing poised with her back to him. He didn’t run up to her. If she had something nasty like a bushmaster cornered and on the verge of attacking, his sudden appearance could tip it over into striking.
And so instead he skidded to a slow walk and casually moved towards her, angling himself so that he could see past her.
His first reaction was relief. His second was to be impressed — that was a big one.
The snake was a boa constrictor, a mass of glistening coils, slowly slithering, heaped in a mass about a metre wide and half a metre high. Which meant that, fully stretched, it would be over three metres long, getting on for the largest known size for this particular creature.
Its head was raised up out of its coils and its tongue flicked angrily in and out, so it was obviously disturbed and upset. And why wouldn’t it be? It had been having a quiet snooze on the ground, maybe sleeping off and digesting its latest kill in the protection of some nice overhanging ferns, and then a human bursts in wielding a machete and cutting away its shelter.
“Could it kill us?”
“Well, it’s not technically poisonous, but you wouldn’t want to camp with this guy around. And yes, if it got hold of you it could wrap around you then steadily squeeze and constrict until it no longer sensed your heartbeat. Then it would begin to try and eat you. Although you would be a big meal for this guy. But a monkey for example, no problem. You know, some of these big constrictor snakes have even been known to eat alligators. And not just small ones! They are incredibly powerful — solid muscle — and the ultimate predator.” Beck paused. “But he isn’t as clever as us.”
The snake gaped its mouth open at them with an extra loud hiss, and they both winced.
“How can you be not technically poisonous?”
“By not having any venom or fangs.” He held his hand out for the machete and she passed it over. In its place he passed her a long stick. “But if that thing just bit either of us, and we got away, it could still kill us with blood poisoning. Its saliva will be absolutely rotten with bacteria.”
He thought back to his recent adventure in China, where he and Ju-Long and Jian had encountered a colony of Five-Fingered Golden Dragons, whose bite could also cause a severe infection. Beck wasn’t normally given to bad dreams, but he still sometimes woke in a cold sweat remembering what he had had to do to save Jian’s life after the older boy was bitten. “So, wave that stick in front of its face and distract it, will you?”
While Dian did that, Beck slowly moved around behind it.
As he had expected, the boa took the stick for the main enemy because it was closest. It coiled its body back in preparation to strike, and then when the stick still failed to take the hint, it sprung out and bit the end of it, almost hard enough to tear it from Dian’s grasp.
Beck imagined that bite going into one of their legs or arms.
But that was the last thing the boa ever did, because Beck was then close enough behind it to strike. In a single stoke he brought the machete down just behind the snake’s head.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Beck aimed for an imaginary point on the other side of the snake’s body, so that the blade sunk well in and severed its spinal cord. One blow was enough to kill it instantly, though its body trembled and thrashed. Another stroke separated the head from the body and it fell onto the ground, still opening and closing its mouth.
He used the blade to flick it away into the undergrowth. Getting a bite from a snake you had just killed was equally dangerous and very possible — not to mention embarrassing.
