by Chris Ryan
Right now, their challenge was a seven-day trek through the deepest jungle – to refresh survival skills and hone their navigation techniques.
The map was unlike any they’d seen before. On most maps there were tracks, railway lines and rock features; here there was nothing. Just a big area marked with wavy red contour lines, height markers and the odd tree symbol. Endless, featureless jungle.
Li sat up and slapped her palms against her thighs decisively. ‘That’s enough of being lost. Hex, just get out your box of tricks and tell us where we are.’
Hex carried a sophisticated palmtop computer on his belt. It could do many amazing things – one of which was to use satellites to calculate precisely where they were – a global positioning system. But he wasn’t using it. ‘No good,’ he said. ‘The tree canopy here’s too thick. It can’t punch through.’
‘Damn,’ said Li. ‘Thought I could tempt you to try.’
‘For this trip it’s old-fashioned map and compass, I’m afraid,’ said Alex. He identified where they were from a grid reference taken in the heli and scored the map with his fingernail to mark it. ‘You can’t always rely on boxes of tricks. There are times when GPS might not work.’ But he knew they all understood the importance of this exercise. In the kinds of places they worked in, they might find themselves stranded without any equipment. And as they would probably be coping with all sorts of other problems – such as surviving – their navigation skills had to be second nature.
Alex stood up. ‘Ready to go?’
They shouldered their bergens and got into single file. Completing this exercise would take teamwork. There were clear roles: Paulo would go first; Amber and Alex would follow with a map each, checking and double-checking the route – with no horizon to help them and no landmarks, sticking to the map was vital; Li and Hex would bring up the rear, keeping track of how far they had travelled.
‘Follow the ridge,’ said Amber to Paulo.
Paulo looked down at his feet. There was a ridge, easy to see because it was used as a track by animals; but it forked into a Y shape. ‘Which one?’
Amber and Alex consulted their maps. They hadn’t even set off but the tiniest detail, easy to miss, could make all the difference. ‘Left,’ said Alex.
Paulo walked on. After a little while, the ground to the left fell away into a steep slope.
Alex looked at the map. ‘Is that marked?’
Amber looked at her map. Everything had to be checked. She nodded, showing it to Alex. ‘Yes. This ridge line. Looks like it’s nearly a hundred metres deep.’
‘Dios,’ said Paulo. He suddenly had visions of blundering over a precipice, his heavy bergen pulling him over like a lead weight. He’d thought the jungle would all be flat. He’d have to be careful where he put his feet.
Hex seemed to read his thoughts. ‘Just when you think it’s getting boring.’
‘You know what?’ said Alex. ‘I think there was an earthquake here. Dad said you came across places like this.’
‘You’re loving this, aren’t you?’ said Amber. ‘Look at your face.’
Alex was grinning. His dad was in the SAS and had told many stories of his jungle training in Belize. Now here Alex was, following in his footsteps. He felt very good indeed. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I like it here.’
Hex wasn’t feeling quite as much at home. ‘Did your dad say how often earthquakes happen here? It might be good to know.’
‘I think we’re OK.’ Li pointed down into the valley. ‘That one occurred quite a long time ago. The vegetation is well established. Those trees are at least fifty years old.’
‘Quite a long time ago – or quite recent, depending on how you look at it,’ said Hex.
They plodded on.
‘Ten-metre check,’ called Li and Hex simultaneously. This was the other vital element in the equation. As well as knowing what direction they were going in, the party also had to know how far they had travelled. On other training exercises they had learned to count their paces and judge when they’d done ten metres, adjusting for uphill or downhill slopes. Li and Hex carried hand-held clicker devices and pressed them every time they’d done ten metres, comparing the score to check they were both still accurate.
The team’s roles were carefully allocated according to their skills and aptitudes. Paulo, leading the way, had to notice whether they were going downhill or uphill. If they found themselves climbing or descending, it could mean they were going wrong. Without a horizon it was surprisingly difficult to tell, but Paulo was extra sensitive to changes in his balance after spending a lifetime in the saddle.
‘Going down,’ he called as he felt his feet moving faster and the bergen pushing him like a hand in his back.
Amber and Alex looked at the maps again, tracing the ridge lines. Yes, their ridge went down and the one next to it stayed level. ‘Down is good,’ said Amber.
Alex was a good choice for map reader because he had spent years camping alone in the Northumbrian moors where he grew up. He could look at a map and visualize the contours in three dimensions. He could tell if what looked like the shortest route would take him up a steep hill, or if he would be better taking a longer way round. The map of the Belize jungle would test this to the limit.
Amber, as second map reader, was also used to finding her way in featureless spaces. Out on the open sea in her parents’ yacht, she’d had to know exactly where she was on sea charts. Now her finely honed sense of direction was coming into its own.
Hex and Li, at the back, were the most accurate at judging distance. Li was good at it because she had trained as an athlete from an early age. She knew exactly how long her stride was and could keep it accurate. Hex was a talented hacker; his brain handled details well and he was able to lock out other thoughts and concentrate, the way he did when he was programming and one missing comma might mean disaster. He gave the job his absolute attention.
However, not all of them found their roles easy. While Alex glowed with pride, and Paulo tromped ahead in his usual happy-go-lucky way, Amber found herself longing for a breeze. The air was still and muggy. Sweat drenched her. She could have sworn moisture was pouring off the leaves onto her, otherwise why was there so much? There was no sky. When she looked up it was just deep green, with branches springing back as animals ran away from them.
Li found their progress slow and frustrating. She liked doing things fast, with the wind in her long hair and the whip of adrenaline through her veins. Her mind wanted to wander. All around her was fantastic wildlife. The jungle was literally shrieking with it: birds and animals called to each other; leaves rustled as creatures skittered away from them. She dug her toe into a mound to see if it was safe to step on and insects ran all over her black jungle boot. Even the dirt was teeming with life. With a wrench she brought her mind back to the task in hand.
But if Li longed for time to gaze around at the natural world, Hex wanted the opposite. He wasn’t keen on jungles. Leaves touched his shoulders, whipped his face. Branches prodded him like nagging fingers. Vines tangled around his legs. Things hopped and scuttled out of his way. He was claustrophobic and began to feel that the trees were closing in. It was sweltering, too. It was just as well he had the pace-counting to do; otherwise he’d have been thinking about the fact that his palmtop couldn’t get a signal. Their only contact with the outside world was the signal balloon they’d brought in case they needed to call for help. Hardly the state-of-the-art communications Hex was used to. Without access to the web, Hex felt very isolated indeed.
Click. Li counted another ten metres. ‘Check,’ she called, and Hex echoed her.
Amber cursed. Her foot was caught in something. She felt something like claws in her leg. She looked down to see a tangled mass of spiky thorns, like brambles.
‘Amber, stop!’ Alex said. ‘Don’t try and struggle. It’s a wait-a-while. If you struggle you’ll just get more stuck. It’s like barbed wire.’
Amber stood up straight, hands on hips. ‘Well
what do I do? Wait for them to dissolve?’
‘I’ll help you.’ Alex handed the map to Paulo and knelt beside Amber. He grasped one of the barbs and pushed her leg carefully back.
‘Ow,’ said Amber. ‘That hurts.’
‘Sorry. You have to unhook it back the way you came.’ The first barb came out. He got to work on the second. ‘This stuff used to be the bane of my dad’s life.’
‘You know,’ said Paulo, ‘I think he’s pleased we’ve found some because he can show us what to do. Look at his face.’
Alex tried to hide his smile but it broke out at the corners of his mouth anyway. He tried burying his chin in his collar instead.
Amber tutted with frustration. ‘Well, the least you could do is thank me for enabling you to demonstrate another vital SAS survival skill,’ she said. ‘This stuff isn’t poisonous, is it?’
Li shook her head. ‘No.’
‘Ow!’ said Amber again, more insistently.
‘Oh, quit complaining,’ said Hex. ‘You probably feel worse when you inject yourself.’ Amber was a diabetic and had to inject herself with insulin twice a day. She carried an insulin injection kit in a small leather pouch on her belt pack.
‘It’s different if you do it to yourself,’ she said.
‘Last one,’ said Alex. ‘You got off lightly. Dad said you can get really stuck in these. We’d better look at the scratches when we get to camp.’
They got back in formation and walked on.
In the jungle, they knew that you could become disorientated if you didn’t have complete confidence in your map and your navigators. It was easy to lose track of time. It was monotonous terrain – the same kinds of trees, the same kinds of animal noises, hour after hour. Even though Paulo was alert, when he saw the landscape change, he felt like he had been shocked out of a sleepwalk.
‘What’s that? Over to the left? There aren’t any trees.’
The others followed where he was pointing. The trees on the right-hand side were not nearly as thick. Beyond, there seemed to be some large open space.
‘Brilliant,’ said Hex. ‘No more trees.’
Paulo hacked into a tree with his machete, carving a shape like an arrow so they knew where to come back to. They picked their way through the vegetation. Ahead, the tree canopy disappeared and brilliant blue sky showed through. The sun shone down. It was like moving close to a fire.
Paulo was through first. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Careful, I’m quite close to the edge here.’
They stepped forwards until they were level with Paulo. He was standing on the edge of a crater fifty metres wide. It was as if the floor of the jungle had fallen away and left a great circular hole, lined with limestone cliffs. Forty metres down, a still pool of water reflected the blue sky and their five faces at one edge – tiny and insignificant.
‘A sinkhole,’ said Alex. ‘Dad told me about these. They used to abseil into them and go swimming. He said he never touched the bottom of one.’
‘Typical,’ snorted Amber. ‘Hundreds of years ago these sinkholes were sacred to the ancient Maya civilization. They made sacrifices to the gods in them. And you guys went swimming in them.’
‘Didn’t know you were such a hippy,’ said Hex.
Li looked at the water and imagined diving in, slipping beneath its cool surface. She grabbed Paulo’s arm and made to throw him in. ‘Go on, jump – I’ll rescue you.’
For a moment Paulo thought she would. He imagined plummeting straight to the bottom with his bergen and ran backwards smartly. She looked at him, a teasing glint in her eye. He grinned back but he knew that if she’d really wanted to throw him in he wouldn’t have got away.
The five friends looked at the water longingly. They were so hot and sticky and it looked so refreshing.
Hex checked his watch. ‘I don’t want to be a spoil-sport, guys, but we haven’t got our camp sorted yet and we should do that in the next hour. We don’t want to be tramping through the jungle in the dark.’
Alex nodded. ‘You’re right. We’re bound to see another sinkhole.’ He led the way back to Paulo’s mark.
‘Anyway,’ said Amber, ‘we’d have to find some rope.’
‘Maybe,’ suggested Li, ‘we’ll find some abandoned in a tree – what do you think, Paulo?’
‘Not a chance,’ said Paulo. ‘Nobody would do a thing like that.’
As they walked reluctantly away from the sinkhole, they didn’t see what happened next. One moment the water was absolutely still, like a painting. Then it trembled. The entire surface shivered, as though the rocks around it had been shaken, hard. Gradually, it settled.
An earth tremor.
3 JUNGLE NIGHT
‘Have you seen this?’ said Hex. ‘I thought you said the jungle was uninhabited.’
They had stopped in a clearing to see if it was suitable for their camp. While Li looked for water and Alex and Amber checked the tree canopy for broken branches that might fall on them, Paulo and Hex checked the ground to make sure there were no swampy patches.
Now Hex was looking at a row of stones like cobbles about a metre high. They continued in a straight line into the undergrowth.
Paulo joined him. He brushed away some earth on the top of the wall with his hands. ‘It’s not a wall, it’s a platform.’
Hex straightened up. ‘Well, the furry tree creatures didn’t make that.’ He put on a spooky voice. ‘We are not alone.’
‘I know what it is,’ said Paulo. ‘It’s an ancient Maya settlement.’ His eyes were glittering with excitement. ‘This might have been a city.’
‘That explains this,’ said Li. She had found a hole in the limestone like a miniature well, about twenty-five centimetres in diameter and filled with water. ‘Looks like it’s been here a long time.’ She dipped her finger in and smelled it. The water was reasonably clean. ‘Not bad. We should be able to purify it.’
Alex smiled. ‘We’ve got water, the canopy looks safe, the ground is dry . . . ideal place for a camp.’
Amber was looking at Hex’s low wall. ‘I don’t think we should camp on somebody’s tomb.’
‘Well, what harm would it do?’ said Hex.
Amber shrugged. ‘We’re going to eat, drink, sleep and – er – do other things here. It doesn’t seem very respectful. It makes me really cross when people in the US put trailer parks on sacred Indian sites.’
Paulo started tracing the wall. It ran for some distance in a straight line. ‘I don’t think this is a tomb. More like some kind of agricultural terrace.’ He came back and eased his bergen off. ‘There’s probably nothing sacred about it.’
Hex took his bergen off too. It was a relief to put it down – and let the air get to the sweaty patch of material underneath it. ‘Who are these Maya anyway?’
Paulo swung his arms to loosen his shoulders. ‘Lovely people. They lived in central America a few hundred years ago and were good at art, pyramids and bloody sacrifices.’
‘Damn,’ said Hex. ‘We forgot to appease them by throwing a sacrifice into their pool. They’ll hate us.’
Amber reluctantly took her bergen off too. She didn’t look happy. She glared at Hex. ‘You mean you don’t know who the Maya Indians are? You must at least have seen them in a computer game.’
Hex swiftly moved up behind her, grabbed her and made his hand into an imaginary knife at her throat. ‘Better than games,’ he hissed menacingly, ‘let’s appease the gods right now.’
Amber shook free. ‘Get off me, you nerdy creep.’
Alex saw her discomfort. ‘Amber, I’m sure that’s not a tomb. I think they’re a bit taller than that.’
‘Yes,’ chipped in Hex. ‘Pyramids, in fact.’
‘Well, aren’t you a mine of information?’ said Amber. ‘A moment ago you didn’t know a Maya from a moron.’ But she did look a bit happier.
‘How long until dark?’ asked Paulo.
‘About an hour,’ said Alex.
They got to work. Having stacked their bergens neat
ly, they enlarged the clearing by hacking down the undergrowth. Paulo used the machete and Alex used the hunting knife he carried at his belt. They each found a pair of trees for their hammock and put up green nylon ponchos – waterproof sheets, to act as a roof. In no time the small jungle clearing looked like a proper camp – the hammocks in a circle, each with a bergen beside it and a mosquito net. A small fire in the middle threw up a plume of smoke.
Alex was tying a piece of string to one of his hammock straps. He’d done the other ones already. ‘Hey, guys, you should do this.’
‘Why?’ said Paulo.
‘In case it rains. The water will run down the string. Otherwise it runs down the straps and makes a nice pool under your backside.’
They took off their wet clothes. Underneath they wore black lycra shorts to minimize rubbing from the constant sweating. Li and Amber had lycra sports tops too.
Li shed her shirt and trousers with visible relief. ‘Yuck. I don’t think I’ve ever been so filthy.’ She put her black jungle boots upside down on sticks to stop wildlife getting into them and then put her clothes on hangers made from twigs.
Alex laughed. ‘There’s no point hanging those up. They’ll never dry.’
‘Is that the voice of Belize SAS experience I hear?’ teased Amber.
‘I don’t care if they don’t dry,’ said Li. ‘I feel better if I try.’
