Mission Jaguar, page 13
“Nope. All clear. Why?”
“Because if we’d been visited by a vampire bat during the night, that’s where they’d have nibbled. They don’t really go for the throat. That’s just in the movies.”
“What?” She stared at him aghast, then gave her fingers a third going-over, just to be sure. “Why didn’t you say?”
He shrugged.
“Because there’s no protection against it happening, and I didn’t want you lying awake worrying. Even if you did get bitten, it wouldn’t mean you’re going to turn into a vampire. It would mean that when we get back to civilisation, you would need a couple of routine shots, but that’s all.”
“Routine shots against what?” she asked suspiciously.
“Rabies,” he replied. And as she was drawing in a breath to scream at him, he added quickly: “hey, really, it’s okay. Hardly any of them actually have it. But we’d have to make sure. If you were bitten that is. Which you weren’t. So that’s okay.” He tried an apologetic, goofy, hopeful smile on her and she slowly let the breath out.
Yesterday, the feeling of liberation from Jaguar had meant she was ready to go anywhere. Just a day later, the reality was setting in. There were predators out there, four-legged as well as two, and seen through their eyes, she and Beck were prey. This wasn’t an adventure, this was still survival, and it had to be taken seriously.
“Well, let’s get on,” she muttered. They would have to reverse their route along the branch to get back down to the ground. She ran her eyes along it to plan the way.
A flash of bright green halfway down the tree trunk, in the crook of some branches, where they would have to put their feet if they climbed down, made her freeze.
“Uh — Beck.” She nodded with her eyes. He followed her gaze and his face went still.
This snake was nowhere near as big as the boa from yesterday. It was only about a metre long, and as thick as her wrist. But there was something deadly about the way its green scaled coils slowly glided over each other. The boa had been bad tempered and hissy because it had had to make a noise to defend itself. This one just sat there because it knew it didn’t need to be any more dangerous than it already was.
“Pit viper,” he said softly. “Haemotoxic. Kill you in two hours.”
Chapter Fifty-Four
“It …” She swallowed. “It could have come along the branch while we were sleeping. It could have dropped onto us …”
“Yeah, but the jungle is full of what ifs,” he replied casually. “It’s just the nature of it. Anyway, the snake would be more likely to want to track down a small rodent its own size if it felt hungry. The real problem is it’s sitting on top of our route down.” He peered over the edge of the platform. “We’ll just have to jump instead. I’ll go first, but hold on ‘cos it’ll get wobbly up here …”
She had already seen what would happen, and she clutched onto the pole next to her as he levered himself out over the edge of the platform and dropped down. His weight unbalanced the whole platform for a moment as he hung on, and then the platform pendulumed back again as he let go so that the whole jungle spun around her. All she could do was clutch on for dear life.
Slowly the swinging died away. He was standing below her.
“It’s good,” he called. “Once you’re hanging down from the edge, you’ve only really got your own body height to drop, and the ground’s soft with leaves. Did you see how I landed?”
“No,” she said through her teeth, “I was too busy trying not to be thrown out.”
“Okay. Well, it’s a parachute landing roll, pretty easy and very effective.” He jumped up into the air, knees and feet together, elbows at his waist, and the moment he landed he flung himself sideways and rolled as he landed, so that the impact ran up his thigh and hip and the side of his back. “Like that.”
She frowned.
“Could you do that … one more time?”
He smiled, jumped up and flung himself down to the ground again.
And by the time he picked himself up, she had hit the ground herself.
“Sorry,” she laughed. “You looked like you were having so much fun. Would you like to do it again?”
He looked at her with narrowed eyes, but if he was trying to scowl it didn’t work and a grin spread over his face.
“Maybe later. Right now — breakfast.”
“So, the snake’s not breakfast?” she asked.
“Nope. He won’t bother us if we leave him up there. But these are! Found them yesterday …”
And with a proud grin he held up an absolutely massive grub, the size of a small sausage.
“Oh.” She forced a smile. “Yum.”
“Let’s get these down us and get going. The jungle’s still relatively cool after the night, so we’ll get further before we have to take a break.” He started to fill his pockets with more of the grubs. “You could stoke the fire up if there’s an ember still burning …”
They skewered the grubs on a thin stick and held them over the revamped fire that Dian had nurtured back to life. It wasn’t the full blaze of the night before but it gave off enough heat to crisp the grubs, making them slightly crunchy, piney and warm in the mouth, rather than just tasting like cold snot which Beck told her would be the alternative.
They washed breakfast down with the last of the water in the bottles. After that they only needed to put the fire out, which Beck did in the most direct way possible by standing over it and peeing. He did give her enough warning to look away.
So this is what it’s like to have a brother, she mused. We get on like a house on fire, and we wind each other up, and he pees on stuff …
He slashed the machete through the vine that held the platform up so that it fell to earth with a crash. Then he held his arms wide and turned slowly on the spot, facing away from Dian, as if speaking to the jungle.
“Jaguar. See?” he called. “We’re leaving as little trace as we can. We’re just passing through. The jungle’s yours. We salute you.”
She raised her eyebrows in query, and he shot her a slightly embarrassed look as he shouldered his pack.
“Just pointing it out,” he said with a smile, “to whoever’s in charge. ‘Cos we aren’t.”
“You really think some jaguar can understand …?” she asked. But he just set a course with his compass, and they pushed on through the jungle.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Beck stood on tiptoe next to a tree, the machete held above his head, slicing gently into one of the many vines that covered the trunk.
“Vines exist to draw fluid and nutrients up from the ground,” he said. “They’re basically very long roots that are plants in themselves. So …”
He stepped away from the tree. The little nick he had made in the vine above his head showed like a bright green gash.
“That kills the capillary action — all the fluid inside it will now just follow gravity downhill to where our mouths are waiting.”
He knelt down and sliced all the way through the bottom of the vine, then pulled it away from the tree and studied the sticky, yellow sap that oozed from the severed end.
“Or not. Like those fruits you saw yesterday — yellow, red, milky, anything that isn’t pure and clear you do not put in your mouth. Okay, next one …”
They had trekked for a couple of hours, and it didn’t get any easier. The day was still young and the lowlands hadn’t quite reached their full steam-bath intensity that she remembered from the day before, but it would come. And they had finished off their water reserves in the bottles before they broke camp. Dian tried to picture dying of dehydration in a rain forest. Somehow it suddenly didn’t seem to out of the question.
But Beck knew other ways, like the vine trick.
“Now, this is more like it.” Clear liquid trickled from the end of the next vine he had cut. He gestured her over. She had to kneel down to get her mouth beneath the severed end. “Just let it drip,” he advised. “Don’t let the vine touch your mouth — the contents might be clear but the vine can still irritate your lips and mouth.”
The fluid was lukewarm and tasted of wood, but it was obviously mostly water and she sucked it up greedily. She imagined a cool gush, like from a showerhead, that she could spray all over her head. Sadly not.
“There must be plenty of water around,” she commented, straightening up. She held her hands out. “All this plant life doesn’t just appear from nowhere.”
“Plenty, but most of it’s in the plants themselves,” he agreed, between sips from a vine of his own. He stood up. “Rivers and rainwater will be the main sources. Lots of rain, of course, but not many rivers — not down here. Just a few like the one we saw. The lowlands are one big limestone plateau that reaches all the way to the coast, with a thin layer of soil on top of it, so if there’s water it tends to be beneath the stone, with no way of getting at it, except where the stone has a hole in it. But there are always other ways …”
He pushed a cluster of ferns aside with the blade of the machete. Nestling inside was a circle of green-striped spiky leaves all radiating out from one point. They gradually turned red as they converged at the centre, and deepened, so that they formed a red cup, the size of a tea mug. It was full of water. A few dead insects floated on the surface and Beck used the tip of the machete to flick them out.
“Some pitcher plants secrete enzymes to kill trapped insects,” he said, “but this is a bromelia and it just drowns them with trapped water.” He crouched and pulled on one of the spiky leafs so that the contents of the plant overflowed, channelled down by the leaf into his mouth. He took a couple of sips and let her finish the rest.
Trying not to think of the insects that had died in it, she finished it in a few swallows.
“So this is it from now on?” she asked. She wiped her mouth. “Drinking out of plants whenever we’re thirsty? I mean,” she added quickly, “I’m not complaining, but it really is pretty hand to mouth existing, Beck.” She paused. “I guess that’s your trademark!”
“Yeah, well, the goal here isn’t to practice survival but to get out of this jungle as fast as we can, and alive. And for that we need to stay hydrated until we make contact. That’s the key. Keep ahead of the enemy and keep hydrated.” He took a final suck of fluids. “I have to admit though, I thought by now—…”
A low rumble of thunder drifted across the jungle and his face creased in a smile.
“We’d have that,” he finished. “They don’t call this rainforest for nothing, you know.”
As she found out, when a few minutes later the rain began in earnest.
Chapter Fifty-Six
It hit the leaf canopy above like a sledgehammer, and the raindrops came through like the massed hordes of an invading army determined to conquer and possess the world below. It was a huge open shower — Beck said they would get about fifteen centimetres in an hour, and she could believe it. There was no escape from it, no chance of sheltering, but she didn’t want to. It made such a change from the humidity. The air grew fresh and cool, and at long last there was something to carry away the surplus heat from their bodies. You just had to accept being wet.
There were palm leaves growing near the ground — natural V-shaped channels that the water could run down, to spray out in a glistening arc at the end. Beck set the bottles on the ground so that they could fill naturally. When the bottles were full, which only took a few minutes, he and Dian drained one each, and then set them back to fill up again.
Then they pressed on together through the transformed jungle, where suddenly everything was several degrees cooler, and the air smelled fresh and clean.
But it didn’t last. The rain stopped first, though the drops from the soaked foliage continued for a long time after that. The jungle noise grew slowly louder as the wildlife crept out of wherever it had been sheltering, pushing the dripping to the edges of her hearing. And then there was no more rain, and a stronger light shone down through the canopy, and the steam began to return. Gentle wisps at first, wrapped around the returning aromas of wet, rotting vegetation that tickled the inside of her nose. She felt the softest touch of clamminess against her skin and she knew that very soon they would be back to marinating in their own sweat. Oh, joy.
Beck had stopped and was peering ahead.
“Now, that’s handy. We can finally get some bearings.”
She had picked up some of his jungle sense — his ability to sense your way through the undergrowth, knowing which bits were too thick to push through, which bits would yield. And through the trees she could see a very solid mass indeed, too dense to be just matted vines and branches.
“It’ll be another ridge, like the one I landed on,” he said. “I’m going to climb up and take a look.”
“What’s wrong with the compass?” she asked as they pushed their way through.
“Nothing — but it really helps to know the lie of the land as well. What if we were rigidly sticking to our route — but later we discovered we’d been wearing ourselves out going through dense, boggy terrain when it turned out there was a clearer patch a few hundred metres away? Come on, let’s do it.”
They were at the foot of the mass of stone. Beck kicked experimentally at the foliage and exposed a layer of tumbled rocks. He stepped up onto it and began to climb — Dian close behind.
It was surprisingly easy going. The sides of the mound were steep, but not sheer, and there were plenty of footholds that let them half clamber, half crawl their way to the top.
They climbed about ten metres before the mound levelled out in a flat top a few metres across, with a jumbled pile of rocks in the middle. They were slightly above the level of the tree canopy and Dian drank in the view.
Down below, you could sense the ground rise and fall but the big picture was hidden by jungle. Up here it became clear.
They were on the edge of an area where the trees were slightly lower than around them, as though some giant object the size of a city block had rested here once and pushed the canopy down in all directions. There were other mounds like theirs scattered about, also rising above the canopy. She wondered if it was something in the soil that stopped the trees growing to their full height. Beyond an invisible barrier, the tree cover returned to its usual height and undulated away from them, showing the course of hidden valleys and plateaus and beneath it. A gentle wind blew on their faces from the East, the direction of the faraway coast.
Beck was looking back the way they had come. The horizon to the South was the ridge that marked the start of the highlands, still close enough to be noticeably higher than the rest. The waterfall was a white thread against the green-grey blur.
“We must be out of Ric’s airspace by now,” Beck said. He pulled out the radio handset and held it to his mouth. “This is Beck. Anyone there?” He paused hopefully, but there was only a buzz of static in reply.
“This is Beck …”
More static, and he grimaced.
“One last time. Hello, hello, this is Beck, radio check, over …”
A woman’s voice spoke, loud and clear.
“Arabella here. Situation?”
Beck punched the air, and he almost fell over backwards with excitement.
Chapter Fifty-Seven
“Hi, Arabella, Beck here. We …” Beck flashed Dian a grin as he emphasised the word “we”. “…Yes, we are ready for pickup whenever you are. Where are you? Over.”
A pause.
“Currently, forty km east of Jaguar. Over.”
“Roger that. We went north.” Beck held his compass towards the South and squinted over the dial at the far-off escarpment. “There’s a waterfall on the ridge two ten degrees from our position. I repeat, that’s 2-1-0 degrees. I reckon it is fifteen, maybe twenty kilometres from our position. We’ll try and make a signal fire. Roger so far?”
“Yes, roger that. We have the waterfall on the map. Give us twenty minutes and we’ll be close enough for you to guide us in. We have to fly around Jaguar airspace. Do you have a pickup point? Over.”
“We do. We’re above the canopy. How are Al and James? Over”
“Safely back at the apartment. Over.”
Beck puffed out his cheeks in relief.
“Okay. We’ll look out for you. See you in twenty minutes. Out.”
He tucked the radio back into his bag, biting his lip while his eyes shone, and she suddenly realised how badly he cared about James and Al, despite the casual tone.
“Well, you heard.”
“Twenty minutes …” she breathed. It seemed so … normal. Twenty minutes, and she would be in a helicopter, flying towards freedom. Just like that.
She pinched her pocket to check that the stolen circuit board was still there. Even if it had got a soaking in the river, it wouldn’t matter. She didn’t need it to work. She just needed it in her possession, with its incriminating serial number.
And then a much more prosaic thought crossed her mind.
“Uh, Beck — will there be any facilities on this helicopter?”
He smiled and shook his head.
“Nothing so grand. It’s only a six seater.”
“Well …” she sighed. “In that case, I need to go back down to ground level one last time.”
He grinned as he started to gather some small twigs together as tinder, while she set about picking her way back down to go have a pee.
It was only a little harder than climbing up had been. The hidden stone was solid and secure, not crumbly. There were plenty of flat ridges to support her, with little danger of taking a tumble. As long as—
A particularly treacherous vine looped around her ankle just before she made it to the ground and she stumbled, clutching wildly at the nearest shrub, which came away in her hands so that she landed with a cry of alarm flat on her face in the leaf mould.
