by Ryan, Chris
Zak nodded.
‘And I’m still worried about Malcolm. If that wound gets infected, he’ll go downhill fast.’ He swore under his breath. ‘I don’t know how we ended up babysitting him in the jungle. Something’s not right about him.’
Zak gave him a half smile. It was true that Malcolm was rude. True that he was hardly the kind of kid you wanted hanging around when the going got tough. But Raf and Gabs had taken a dislike to him from the get-go. Malcolm was OK when you got to know him. Kind of. Back in London, he’d shown that he had guts. And he was no doubt cursing his bad luck at being here just as much as Raf and Gabs were cursing their bad luck at having him along.
‘I’ll look out for him—’ Zak said, but he was interrupted by another sound. An excited babbling. He had heard the same sound yesterday, and Gabs had said it was chimpanzees. Now it was much closer. Zak looked up. In the half light of the dawn, he could just make out dark shapes in the treetops above. Four of them? Maybe five? It was difficult to tell.
He heard Raf curse under his breath. ‘Wake the others,’ he instructed. ‘We need to get moving.’
As he spoke, something came crashing out of the trees. It landed directly on the smouldering fire, kicking up a cloud of ash and sparks and forcing Zak to jump away. He just had time to see that it was an old branch, about the length of a man’s forearm, before a second branch – twice as long as the first – came hurtling through the air. It whacked Zak on his right shoulder.
‘Ow!’ he shouted. ‘What the . . .?’
Suddenly the noise of the chimpanzees was twice as loud. It was like mad, hysterical laughter. Sticks and branches were raining from the canopy, thudding down on the forest floor.
Zak ran to the shelter, where Gabs and Malcolm were already waking up to the noise.
‘What is it?’ Gabs asked, her eyes keen.
‘Chimps,’ said Zak in disgust.
Gabs’s lips thinned. She looked like she wanted to tell somebody off. But then a branch flew straight into the shelter, missing her head by inches. She grabbed Malcolm and pulled him towards one edge of the clearing, just as some kind of fruit, the size of a small melon, splatted onto the ground half a metre from where Zak was standing.
‘Thanks a bunch!’ Zak shouted. Then he jumped out of the way as two more fruits pelted towards him. He looked over at Raf, who was hurriedly stamping out the fire and sprinkling dirt over it. Zak ran over to help him. It took another twenty seconds to extinguish the fire to Raf’s satisfaction. Then they sprinted to where Gabs and Malcolm were standing, ignoring the chimps’ missiles all the while.
They plunged back into the thick forest, settling easily into their marching order of the previous day. For a moment, Zak thought the chimps were following them across the treetops. But after a few minutes, the sound of their babbling faded. Once more, Zak and his companions were on their own.
He was very hungry. They hadn’t eaten properly for two days, after all. It was a great relief when, after about an hour of trekking, Raf stopped next to a tree with a familiar fruit. ‘Mango,’ he said.
‘Bit strange to find it growing here, isn’t it?’
‘Not really.’ Raf looked around, as though he was searching for something. After a few seconds he saw it: a dilapidated old shack, only just visible about twenty metres into the forest. It had clearly been deserted for decades. ‘An old hunter’s house, probably. Someone ate a mango here years ago and left the seeds. You don’t have to make things grow in the jungle, you just have to let them. Anyway, we’re lucky nothing else got to it first.’ They picked the fruit, and even Malcolm ate greedily, allowing the juice to dribble down his chin and smear his fingers. Then they moved on, relentlessly, through the jungle.
It was about midday when Raf suddenly lifted up one hand. They stopped immediately. Raf pointed to a tree about seven metres from his position and, with a shudder, Zak saw another straw man with a tiny animal skull pinned to the bark. And five metres beyond it, another tree, with another warning sign.
They huddled together. ‘I think we’re close,’ Raf breathed. ‘Have you noticed how the vegetation has been getting a little thinner?’
Now he mentioned it, Zak saw he was right. Over the last hour or so, Raf hadn’t needed to use his knife so much to cut a path through the forest. Now they had a good ten or fifteen metres of visibility.
‘Zak, Malcolm, I think you two should wait here while Gabs and I scout ahead. Gabs, give Zak your weapon.’
Gabs handed over the AK-47 she’d confiscated from the guy at their pit stop. ‘Locked and loaded, sweetie,’ she murmured in warning. ‘Don’t use it unless it’s an emergency. It’ll be heard for miles around.’
Zak accepted the weapon – he’d learned how to handle it safely back at St Peter’s Crag – then bent down and examined the ground beneath the tree that played host to the first straw man. It was dry, and there were no insects that he could see. He settled down with his back against the trunk, the assault rifle laid over his crossed legs. Malcolm joined him.
Raf and Gabs slipped off into the jungle. Within seconds, Zak could neither see nor hear them. It was as if they had melted away.
Malcolm was trembling slightly. He kept glancing across his shoulder at the maggoty wound on his elbow. Zak thought it best to take his mind off it.
‘Bet you’re wishing you never came,’ he said quietly as they sat with their backs against the tree.
Malcolm took off his glasses and started cleaning them with his dirty T-shirt. He said nothing.
‘When all this is finished, I can try to get in touch with your cousin . . .’
‘I don’t want to talk about it, OK?’ Malcolm said sharply.
A pause.
‘I know what it’s like to be on your own, Malcolm,’ Zak said in a very quiet voice. ‘I know what it’s like to miss people. Seriously, if you can’t talk to me about these things, who can you talk to?’
‘Which bit of “I don’t want to talk about it” don’t you understand?’ Malcolm snapped.
Zak fell silent.
They sat quietly for ten minutes, the bad feeling between them festering.
Then, from behind, Zak felt a hand over his mouth. His body went rigid. A quick glance told him that Malcolm’s mouth had been covered too. He tried to shout out, but his voice was muffled.
‘It’s me, sweetie,’ said Gabs’s voice behind him in little more than a whisper.
Relief flooded over him. His body relaxed and Gabs’s hand dropped from his mouth. She and Raf walked round to face them, then crouched down to their level.
‘We’re closer than we thought,’ Gabs breathed. ‘Fifty metres, max.’
‘What have you found?’ Zak asked.
‘Come and see. Tread very softly. You too, Malcolm.’
Zak’s heart was pumping hard again as they continued carefully through the jungle. Each time a twig snapped underfoot, he winced, as though it could be heard for miles around. In truth they were very quiet, and after ten minutes Raf signalled at them to stop again. He pointed. ‘There,’ he whispered.
Zak peered through the forest. Twenty metres away he could make out a wall.
It had two layers. On the outside was a thick, wire mesh with diamond-shaped holes which were big enough to see through, but too small to get your fingertips into – the sort of thing that a sturdy fence might be made from. Only this was much higher than your average fence – twelve metres at least. Inside the mesh, but touching it, was a secondary wall made from long, straight wooden logs. These were not so high – maybe only seven or eight metres – but they completely obscured his view through the mesh.
‘What’s going on in there?’ Zak whispered.
Raf shrugged. ‘The walls are too high. We can’t see over. And I don’t fancy trying to climb any of these trees, do you?’
Zak looked around. Raf had a point. All the trees in the vicinity were very tall and straight with thick trunks. Their branches only started spreading from the trunk about ten metres a
bove the ground. They were impossible to climb.
Malcolm had slumped, dejected, at the foot of one of these trees. ‘Look after him,’ Gabs said quietly. ‘I’m going to try and get a closer look.’
‘Wait,’ Zak said sharply. ‘It would be much better to get into the treetops, wouldn’t it?’
‘Didn’t you hear Raf?’ Gabs said, with a hint of impatience. ‘They’re too high.’
But Zak shook his head. ‘No they’re not,’ he said. ‘I’ve got an idea.’
Zak needed a stick first of all. It only took a minute to find a suitable one; it was about fifty centimetres long, perfectly straight and no thicker than his forefinger. He peeled off the rough bark, then asked Raf for his knife. While his Guardian Angels watched with expressions of deep suspicion, he carefully cut a perfect cross into one flat end of the stick, taking each of the two incisions about five centimetres into the wood.
From his rucksack he took the small notebook they’d found in the plane. He’d had no idea what good this would be in a survival situation, but he was glad to have it now. He tore out two pages, then carefully folded each one in half then positioned them at right angles. Then he slid them, corner to corner, into the incisions at the end of his stick. He nodded with satisfaction. It was starting to look like an arrow, and this makeshift feathering would help it fly straight.
He took the coil of fishing twine from the survival pack and started winding one end of it around the end of the arrow, just above the point where his feathering ended. This would keep the paper in place, and would also fix the twine to the arrow. He took the rope from his pack and tied the other end of the twine to it. Then he turned his attention back to the arrow itself.
Zak carved a groove around the circumference of the stick, just below the feathering. Next, he removed the lace from his right trainer and tied a knot in one end. He threaded the knotted end of the lace around the groove, stretched the remainder along the length of the arrow, and wrapped the other end around his hand. The knot kept the lace in place, but it would unravel as soon as he catapulted it up into the treetops.
He turned to his Guardian Angels. ‘Get the idea?’
‘Very good, sweetie,’ Gabs murmured admiringly. Even Malcolm looked quite impressed, though he looked away quickly when Zak caught his eye.
Zak looked up and raised the arrow above his head. He positioned it at an incline of about sixty degrees, his eyes fixed on the lowest branch of a tree about ten metres away.
He squinted slightly, then flicked his wrist.
Kept steady by the paper feathering and catapulted by the boot lace, the arrow shot from his hand. There was a faint whistle as it lifted the fishing twine into the air behind it, before arching over the branch Zak had been aiming at. As the twine hit the tree, the arrow fell, hanging limply over the branch.
Zak picked up the coil of rope along with what remained of the twine, then carried both over to the tree. Standing directly underneath the suspended arrow, he gently eased more twine upwards, so the arrow gradually lowered back down to earth. When it was within reach, he started tugging that instead.
The twine tightened. Now, as Zak pulled, the twine yanked the rope to which it was attached up and over the branch, then back down to earth. In a minute or so, Zak was holding two ends of the rope, which was looped snugly over the branch ten metres in the air.
There was now no need to explain to Raf and Gabs what to do. They each took one end of the rope. Raf tied his end round the base of the tree trunk to secure it while Gabs tied hers to a thick tree root that was emerging from the jungle floor just a few metres away.
Raf looked up. ‘Nice work, Zak.’ He squinted a little. ‘It’s not the thickest branch in the world, though. I’m not sure it’ll take my weight, or Gabs’s. I think you’ll need to be the one to climb the rope. When you get up there, you can loop it over something sturdier.’
Zak nodded. He was happy with that. He’d climbed ropes in the school gymnasium back in the day. How different could this be? He stretched out one hand to grab the rope.
‘Hold on, buddy,’ Raf said. ‘Have you ever heard of a prusik knot?’
‘A what?’
There were still three or four metres of slack rope where Gabs had tied her end to the root. Raf took the knife and cut it off, then cut it again into two. Wordlessly, he walked over to Zak. ‘Let me see your belt,’ he said.
Zak lifted his T-shirt, and allowed Raf to tie the rope around his belt in a configuration Zak hadn’t ever seen before.
Raf then tied the other end to the climbing rope. ‘I’d kill for a carabiner,’ he said.
‘A what?’ Zak asked.
‘It’s a metal loop. Makes this stuff much easier. Remind me to take you climbing when we get back home.’ He indicated the knot where the two ropes were tied. ‘This is the prusik,’ he said. ‘You can slide it up the climbing rope when there’s no weight on it, but it’ll hold tight when there is.’ He tied a loop at the end of the second piece of rope, then tied the other end to the climbing rope with another prusik knot. ‘Put your foot in here,’ he said, indicating the loop.
Zak did as he was told.
‘Now,’ Raf instructed. ‘Push your foot down and move the top knot up the rope. Then take your weight off the foot knot and move that up. Keep doing it and you’ll get up to the branch in no time.’
Zak slung his rucksack – now only containing the spotting scope – over his shoulder, then did as Raf had told him. Little by little, he worked his way up the rope. In less than a minute he had left the ground far behind and was grabbing hold of the branch supporting his climbing rope.
He looked towards the fencing. Even at ten metres up, there was still too much tree foliage to see through the mesh clearly. He’d need to get higher. No problem. The branches were more numerous here. He would be able to clamber quickly and silently up into the treetop.
He looked down. Raf and Gabs were untying the rope from its supports and Zak pulled it up so he could loop it round a thicker branch, then started climbing higher.
After only thirty seconds, his head emerged above the canopy of the jungle. The sight was awe-inspiring: deep blue sky, but with threatening rainclouds boiling somewhere in the distance. Green jungle as far as his eye could see, interrupted only by a lazy azure river about a mile away, snaking into the distance. Brightly coloured birds chirped and flittered above the trees.
But Zak quickly pulled his attention from all that, and looked towards the compound they’d stumbled over.
He could tell at once that something strange was happening there.
11
LATIFAH
It was some sort of camp.
Zak realized immediately, without fully knowing how, that the high walls and barbed wire were not there to keep people out. They were there to keep people in.
The log-and-mesh fencing formed a rough circle. The distance from one edge of the circle to the other was about 300 metres. Inside was a series of huts with corrugated iron roofs. There were eight or nine, arranged in no particular order that Zak could make out. On the far side, almost exactly opposite Zak’s observation tree, was a large gate. It was the only way in or out of the camp and was guarded by two armed figures, one on either side. They had headsets that covered one ear, and a boom mike by the side of their mouths. This was clearly how they were communicating across the camp.
Zak checked the position of the sun. It was behind him. Good. He could use the scope without the sun reflecting in the lens and giving away his position. He put it to his eye and focused in on two other guards towards the centre of the camp.
They were no older than Zak himself. Each carried an assault rifle and wore the same sort of headset as the guards at the gate. They wore mismatched clothing – camouflage vests, black T-shirts, khaki trousers, bandanas. And they both had scars on their cheeks. Just like the kids who had abducted him back in Jo’burg.
Kids.
The camp was full of them, and not just the guards. They sat
in rows between the huts, cross-legged. To their left, Zak could just make out piles of soft toys. Dolls, bears, elephants. There were also packets of white powder. Zak found he was holding his breath as he homed in on one child. He couldn’t see the kid’s face, but guessed from the long, matted hair that she was a girl. She took a cuddly bear in one hand, and a packet of white powder in the other, stuffed the powder inside the bear, then rested it on her crossed legs. Zak couldn’t see her hands, but could tell from the movement of her elbows that she was sewing.
A minute passed. The girl placed her handiwork to her right, then started all over again, stuffing another toy and sewing it up.
Zak counted thirty-two children doing exactly the same work. The piles on their left grew smaller. The piles on their right grew larger. And all the while, the guards walked among them, carrying assault rifles and wearing insolent, aggressive looks on their scarred faces.
One of the workers put up his hand. Instantly, two of the armed guards stalked towards him. They spoke for a moment, then one of the guards whacked the worker hard against the side of his head with the butt of his rifle. The other guard shouted something, his voice curt and aggressive, the sound reaching Zak above the treetops. The kid sat up again, head bowed, and carried on working. The two guards laughed and continued their rounds.
Zak had to fight back an urge not to yell out at these two bullies from where he was. But he reminded himself why he was here. He’d be doing nobody any favours by getting captured now.
Then came a commotion on the far side of the camp, just outside the gates where there was a rough jungle path leading up to them. It was clear for about twenty metres, then it disappeared into the rainforest. Approaching the camp along this road, Zak saw a group of people. He trained his scope on them.
