They’d cleaned their wounds, put on insect repellent and were now in dry kit – a spare set of clothes they’d brought for eating and sleeping in so that they didn’t have to stay in the sweat-sodden ones they had worn all day. But the evening meal wasn’t a big comforting stew in a large pot around the fire. They couldn’t carry any large utensils, just a tiny personal gas stove each. Cooking consisted of boiling a mug of water and dunking a rations pack in it to warm – although later on they planned to catch local game and roast it, as they couldn’t carry enough rations packs for the whole trip. For now, though, the fire in the middle of the camp was for light, heat and to keep insects away.
Hex swallowed a spoonful of food and grimaced. ‘What
is
this?’ He lifted the pack and looked at the label. ‘English beef stew,’ he read. ‘They must have searched every school kitchen in the land to come up with something as bad as this.’
Alex dipped a spoon in but before he’d even brought it to his mouth he wrinkled his nose. He reached into his bergen, pulled out a tube of curry paste and squeezed a dollop in.
Amber was watching him. ‘Dad’s advice?’
Alex nodded, his mouth chewing.
Amber looked down at her rations pack with distaste. ‘Have you got any of that stuff to spare?’
Alex tossed the tube to her.
She caught it one-handed, squeezed some in and took a mouthful. She swallowed and nodded enthusiastically. ‘Those SAS guys really are masters of survival. Anyone else?’
For a while it was nice to concentrate on eating. Trekking through the jungle had been physically and mentally exhausting, and now the camp was made they were looking forward to sleeping. They hadn’t realized how dark it was getting until the dusk chorus started and the trees came alive with noise. Quails, hawks, toucans, parrots, guans, wrens, honeyleggers, motmots, iguanas, howler monkeys, spider monkeys, coatimundi, tapirs, peccaries, deer, ocelots and all sorts of insect – all of them called, chirped and howled as the sun slid down for the night.
When they started eating, the camp was shadowy, with chinks of light visible through the canopy. As they crumpled up the empty foil bags the darkness behind the trees was total and the only light was from the flickering fire.
Hex reached for his bergen and drew out a dark leather case. It contained a leather harness with straps and a device that looked like a pair of binoculars.
‘Ah,’ said Amber, making tea with the hot water she’d heated her rations pack in. ‘Our homework.’ It was a set of infra-red goggles for seeing in the dark – and the second element of their mission. The manufacturer, who knew her uncle, needed them tested to see how they stood up to the jungle humidity.
Hex slipped the harness plus goggles over his head.
Li, sipping a cup of tea, spluttered. He looked like someone with a couple of tubes strapped to his head, trying to be an alien. His dark hair stuck up in tufts between the straps of the headpiece.
‘Dios
,’ said Paulo, ‘you look like a bounty hunter from
Star Wars
.’
‘It’s not a good look without a helmet,’ giggled Amber.
‘I’ve never seen anything so ridiculous,’ said Alex.
Hex hardly heard their remarks; he was far too intent on seeing what would happen when he switched on. And it certainly was different.
The darkness suddenly became see-through like gauze. The jungle was vast – greyish green and full of glowing white moving things. Small creatures scurried through the trees like mice; larger ones slunk after them, flashing in and out of view like lights as they passed behind grey foliage. Sleeping birds roosted next to dozing lizards. Snakes coiled like shadows around branches, their images dim and sinister as they watched the brighter warm-blooded creatures around them.
Hex looked at his four friends sitting in their hammocks. Their hands and faces were bright white, their bodies more shadowy where they were covered with clothes. There was Paulo’s hair, wild, curly and white as though someone had unpinned the curls of a judge’s wig. Amber’s ebony skin was the same intense white as everyone else’s. It made her look like a different person. Li’s long plait faded into her clothes and looked like a scarf. Only Alex looked about the same as always.
Hex looked at the fire and the image flared with the intense heat. The jungle floor was teeming with life. Hex pulled his legs up sharply onto the hammock. Spiders scuttled across the ground, fat white blobs on spindly legs. Centipedes and millipedes were everywhere. He lifted the goggles away from his eyes. Everything was black and the ground next to the flickering fire looked as clear as if it had been swept. He put them on again. It was like an alternate universe. All those long spiky centipedes moving with a strange flowing motion, the tiny dots of smaller insects darting around.
‘Hex,’ said a voice sternly. An American voice. ‘It’s someone else’s turn.’
‘There’s a centipede going up your trouser leg,’ replied Hex.
In a millisecond Amber was out of her hammock, stamping furiously. ‘Which leg?’
Hex grinned. There wasn’t actually anything there but she didn’t know that. ‘Left.’
Amber shook her left foot vigorously, her mouth and eyes wide and worried. ‘Has it gone?’
‘I mean your right. I forgot, I’m looking at you.’
Amber stopped shaking her leg. Hex didn’t make mistakes like that. He was having her on.
Hex saw Amber’s head tilt to one side in an expression that was so familiar. Her baleful glare looked particularly malevolent through the goggles. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘you’re as white as a sheet.’ He handed the goggles to her with a grin.
Amber took them and put them on. She saw the alternate universe of busy insects and wished she hadn’t. She took them off. ‘Anyone else?’
Li stretched her hand out. ‘Yes please. I want to know what I’m sharing my bedroom with.’
Paulo ran his fingers through his hair and gave her a macho look. ‘Tell me, do I look as handsome in infra red?’
Li looked at Paulo through the goggles. ‘Just big and hairy.’
He put his tongue out; the inside of his mouth glowed like a white-hot furnace.
She pointed the goggles towards the floor and saw what Hex had seen. White bodies scurried everywhere – crabs, millipedes, centipedes, tarantulas.
Alex, lying in his hammock, tucked up in his sleeping bag, heard Li call his name. ‘Mm?’ he replied.
‘You’re covered in those little crabs,’ she said.
Alex felt so sleepy. The hammock and sleeping bag enveloped him like a cocoon and his bones felt like lead. ‘They’re keeping me warm,’ he said.
‘They’re even in your hair. It looks like you’re wearing a veil.’
‘Hmm,’ said Alex. It was so blissful to be in the hammock, he didn’t care.
He heard yawning and the others getting into their sleeping bags; Hex putting the goggles away. Alex imagined him tucking them back in their case lovingly.
Normally if they were sleeping somewhere strange they would set up a watch rota. But in the jungle only the animals moved at night, and the worrying ones lived close to the ground. Alex looked forward to eight hours’ uninterrupted sleep.
A scream. Alex was instantly awake, panting in the darkness, listening. Had he really heard that? Had he dreamed it?
It came again. A dreadful scream. It went through to his marrow like a saw. What was it? Human? Animal? He groped for his torch and flicked it on.
Another torch beam flicked on at the same moment. Then the other three. The beams played around the camp area like nervous searchlights. Alex flinched as one caught his eyes.
‘Is everyone OK?’ He wasn’t sure who shouted it but there were four replies of ‘Yes’.
Still the noise went on. The scream was full of pain and fear. Again and again, like the crying of an inhuman child.
Paulo was sitting up. ‘Li, are there jaguars in the jungle?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But they eat small things.’ She was panting, trying to control herself after the fright.
‘Well, that sounds like a big thing,’ said Hex.
‘But it’s quite a long way off,’ said Li.
‘Hex,’ suggested Amber, ‘get those goggles.’
Hex was already rooting in his bergen. ‘Believe me, I’m getting them.’ He pulled the goggles out of their case and put them on.
As before, it was like a black curtain had dissolved. Small white creatures were scuttling along on the ground; bigger animals were scurrying through the branches or looking around wide-eyed, startled by terrible noise. ‘Nothing here.’ He took the goggles off. The blackness descended again. He stowed the goggles in his bergen and got back into his hammock. ‘Whatever it is, I don’t think it’s close,’ he said.
‘Dios!’
‘What’s that!’
‘What the—?’
A sound of wood splintering. Crashing. Like something moving.
‘It’s being chased,’ said Hex.
They listened, their hearts in their mouths. Was it coming closer? No, it just seemed random; like something going mad. And still it screamed.
‘What if it comes this way?’ Paulo asked.
‘The fire will keep it away,’ replied Alex.
They lay there, torches still on. It was like the terrible screaming thing was trying to break out of something. Break out of what?
Alex turned his torch off. ‘I think we should try to go back to sleep. I don’t think it will come near us.’
‘If it does, I’ll show it what a real scream is like,’ said Amber.
Everyone laughed. That felt a bit better.
One by one, the other torches went off. Still the creature screamed and thrashed. Alex was wide awake to every sound and could hear the others moving restlessly, the trees creaking as they turned over in their hammocks. His heart was pounding as though he had been running. He turned over and then back again, trying to settle.
He must have been awake for ages before the noises began to subside. The crashing stopped. The scream became less constant, as though the creature was running out of breath. Gradually, as the five friends drifted into sleep, its cries died away.
4 D
ESTRUCTION
For a moment Alex thought he’d woken up on the moors. It was dark. The air was misty and dank, like a wet morning in Northumberland. Then the dawn chorus started. Not the polite chirrups of a few thrushes and sparrows greeting the day, but a full-throated, deafening rabble of jungle creatures up in the canopy as the sun rose.
Alex squirmed out of his sleeping bag and shivered. As he got out of his hammock, he saw Paulo sitting up, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. Amber was already on her feet, bent over, injecting her insulin. Hex was checking that his palmtop was still in its protective carrying case – a reflex action on waking. Alex smiled at the sight and then found he’d just checked he had his survival kit and knife. Maybe Hex wasn’t so strange after all.
Alex filled his cup with water from the sterilized supply. Hex was next to him and he handed over the container. Hex’s face was grim. ‘This bloody noise,’ he said through gritted teeth, before stomping away to boil water on his little stove for breakfast. But Alex was enjoying the dawn chorus. It certainly beat waking to the breakfast show.
‘Aaaargh.’
Alex looked round to see Amber hopping about on one leg as though she’d trodden on a spike. The other leg was thrust into her camouflage trousers. The fabric was soaking wet and clung to her skin.
‘What’s up?’ said Alex.
‘It’s slimy, and clammy, and gritty—’ She took a deep breath and put the other leg in roughly, pulled them up and fastened the waistband quickly, then did a vigorous jogging war dance to warm them up. ‘Urgh, that is disgusting.’
Hex dunked his rations pack in his mug and smiled. ‘That’s why it’s called wet kit.’ Then he put his shirt on and his smile disappeared.
Li pulled on her wet shirt and trousers as quickly as she could, then launched into an explosion of karate kicks, trying to get warm.
Alex had got his shirt and trousers on with gritted teeth. Now he was psyching himself up for a very wet sock. He turned it inside out and found a glistening leech clinging to the material.
Paulo shrugged his wet shirt onto his bare back. Amber and Hex watched him, waiting for the reaction. He didn’t even flinch. Not a flicker. They looked at each other, amazed.
Li came up behind them, still jogging on the spot, as Paulo pulled his trousers on, taking his time as though they were perfectly comfortable. She was rubbing her wet socks together in her hands, trying to warm them. ‘Wet, dry, smelly – he simply doesn’t notice, does he?’
She wasn’t just talking about the wet kit. At times they’d had to go undercover in slums and Paulo had happily put on putrid rags, stiff with filth.
Paulo leaned over, inspected a wet sock and put his bare toes into it without a murmur. Silently, Amber and Hex shook their heads again.