‘I took my theory and my findings, along with a fully costed proposal to undertake the enterprise, to Hal Hunt. He could see that what I envisaged made scientific sense. He knew that I could accomplish this great feat, that I could harness the resources of TRACKS to change the world. But he said no! No! He said no to the greatest achievement in the history of science!’
Drexler had become, by his standards, very animated, his voice getting louder until he was almost shouting. But then he recovered his composure and continued in his dry, level tone. ‘And that is why I had to look elsewhere for help with this. And it was natural that I should go to my great benefactor.’
Drexler bowed towards the Maharaja, and the little man smiled and nodded back.
‘He had some of the resources necessary. But, although rich in land, he was …’
Here the Maharaja took over.
‘Yes, yes, ever since the end of the good old days when the British ruled India through we great landowners, the Indian state has stolen and swindled us out of our wealth. And so, understanding as I did the great project that my good friend Doctor Drexler was attempting, I had to bring in a … business partner, let us say.
‘This man Kaggs, whom you mentioned to Doctor Drexler. He is not a … nice man. But he knows about money. And so on my reserve in the south, a unique and special place, we set up both a scientific research station and a … well, my dear, you shall find out what it is we have set up there.’
‘Why? What do you mean?’
‘It is time, I think,’ said Drexler, ‘for a family reunion.’
The Maharaja said something to the guards in Hindi. They began to move towards Amazon.
‘What is this? What are …? I …’ Then Amazon decided that it was time to do something she had never done before in her life. The scream for help, however, lasted less than a second. It was terminated by a hard hand, clamped round her mouth.
And then Amazon saw Dr Drexler open his medical case. She could not see what was inside until he raised his hands. In them was a gleaming metal and glass object, which it took her a moment to realize was the biggest syringe she had ever seen.
‘I would like very much to be able to say that this will not hurt,’ said the doctor, his voice suddenly softer. ‘But I’m afraid that it will. But not for long, I promise you.’
And then one of the guards pulled up the sleeve of Amazon’s school blouse and Drexler plunged in the needle.
He was right. It did hurt. But, even before Drexler had pulled it out again, the library around her dimmed and darkened, and then Amazon Hunt was dead to the world.
Such was the shock, Frazer didn’t know straight away that he had been bitten. For a second, he thought that he had blundered into a thorn bush.
But his mind had, at a deeper level, registered the blur of the long shape and the snap of the broad head, and he certainly felt the searing pain in his upper arm and the brute strength that had hurled him back on to the floor of the jungle.
And then the fear and the pain and the panic tumbled and surged together in his head. He yelped and flapped and kicked, half expecting to find the snake’s deadly coils already encircling him.
But there was nothing. Nothing, that is, except for the shock and pain of the bite. And then he thought he saw the sinuous form of the snake retreat back into the deeper murk of the undergrowth, and the darkness made it seem even more monstrous.
But the fact that the snake had released him meant, Frazer realized, that it had probably been a defensive strike, intended to warn him off. Back off! it said. Back off!
He peered into the darkness around him, his every sense alive. There was not a sound from the jungle. The langurs had fled through the treetops, leaving him to his fate. He put his fingers to his arm. The teeth had punctured his jacket and penetrated the flesh, like a fork going through mashed potato. But, despite the pain, the wound did not, in reality, seem too bad. Blood, at least, wasn’t gushing through the holes in his jacket. He guessed that the needle-like teeth had merely punctured the muscle, but not torn through it or raked it away from the bone.
‘Nice snaky snaky,’ he said softly, as he slowly raised himself from the leafy ground. He hoped that Randeep had found his father, and that help was coming.
He began to edge away. As he did so, he eased his rucksack off his back. It contained one of his most prized possessions – a machete he had been given by a Polynesian friend, on an island in the South Pacific. Frazer would never hurt an animal if there were any alternative, but he’d decided that when confronting a giant snake you really do want a long, sharp weapon in your hand.
He’d have felt much more comfortable if he’d known where the snake was. He stared into the blackness around him, convinced that every root and vine was a giant serpent, tasting the air with its thin tongue.
But there was nothing to see, and he breathed a little more easily. His hand was still fishing inside his rucksack for the machete, which was caught up in something.
Time, he decided, to yell for help.
He got as far as taking a deep breath when the snake struck again, coming at him from right under his feet. The whole time he had been backing towards it, rather than away. This was going to be the death grip – the bite it used to hold its prey still long enough to loop the killing coils round its body.
A cavernous jaw surged up towards him, two rows of razor-sharp white daggers, glinting in the fading light. Frazer instinctively threw up his arm in defence – the arm that was still thrust inside the backpack.
A juddering surge of pain swept through his forearm and there was a muffled crunch as teeth pierced the contents of his bag and clamped down on fabric, machete and flesh.
The bag and its contents gave him some protection, but still he was caught like a rat in a trap. gripping could feel the gripping teeth, and knew that if he tried to pull his arm free he would rake his flesh from the bone. So he put all his might into three hard punches to the snake’s head, delivered with his left fist – the one outside the bag.
They were good punches, but it was like punching rock – there was no give. And now the snake was able to engulf him in its coils, as quickly as water poured from a tap covers the ice in a glass.
‘Aaaarrgghh!’ Frazer managed a scream or rather a short guttural shout of rage and frustration. He did not plan to die like this, the life squeezed out of him by some big dumb reptile.
It was another mistake. To scream meant to exhale and, as he exhaled, the python squeezed again. That was the killer’s technique – to squeeze each time its prey breathed out. Death would come in a very few minutes.
Frazer tried to remember everything he had been taught about snakes. The problem was that almost all of it was about handling poisonous snakes, not giant constrictors. A spitting cobra or a deadly poisonous krait he could have fought, but the thing that held him now seemed utterly invulnerable.
Frazer was getting light-headed. The pain from the bites was less, and even the terrible ache from the squeezing round his middle seemed to have diminished a little, but he knew that that was because he was beginning to fade away, to lose consciousness.
And that meant death. And, after death, the thing that was even worse than death: being swallowed, whole, and slowly digested over a couple of weeks by the strong acids in the snake’s gut.
Something.
He had to do something.
He tried to withdraw the arm holding his machete inside the rucksack, but it was impossible: the teeth held him like a vice. A vice as sharp as broken glass.
And then Frazer remembered something about alcohol …
He’d read that if you were ever grabbed by a python you could pour a little alcohol on its head and it would let go. He had some hand sanitizer in his rucksack, and hand sanitizer contains alcohol, but there was just no way to reach it.
And then, from somewhere deep in his subconscious, another memory floated up. The tail. The python’s tail. Strange to think of a snake as having a tail – it se
emed, in a way, all tail. But the last section of that long body – the area behind the tiny bones that were all that remained of its long-lost back legs – was the tail, and it was, he recalled, highly sensitive.
Frazer still had one hand free. The snake was colossal, but most of it was wrapped round his body. He followed the coils with his eye and saw, there on the jungle floor, the twitching tail. It was as thick as his arm, but tapered to a point. He stretched for it with his left arm, and felt the python’s jaws tense and tighten round the rucksack that enclosed his other arm, the needle-pointed teeth digging in just a little deeper.
He was so close to the snake’s head now that he could see the starlight glinting in its yellow eyes. There was no malice or evil there, Frazer saw, just the relentless, implacable hunger that drove it to kill without thought or mercy.
The tail wriggled a couple of centimetres out of reach. Frazer knew that this was his last chance to avoid death. He made one last huge effort, lunging against the weight of the beast that surrounded him, and YES! His fingers caught and then gripped the tail. He had only a second to do what he had to do – as soon as the snake realized what was happening, it would simply send a shimmer through its great length and shake its tail free.
And so, using his last reserve of energy, Frazer yanked the scaly tail towards his mouth and bit down, crunching through the scales and flesh until he reached the bone below.
The effect was instantaneous. The python hissed like water poured on a raging fire, flinched, writhed, uncoiled and lurched away. Frazer dragged some air into his lungs. There was a sharp pain in his chest. Not quite enough to signal a cracked rib, but it still hurt like hell. But there was no time to worry about that now or about the two bites – one nasty, one superficial. The snake would be back and now it was mad as well as hungry.
Frazer pulled the machete out of the rucksack. The blade was slick with blood that had run down from his bitten arm. He reached in again to get the hand sanitizer. His plan was to squirt it in the mouth and eyes of the python as it lunged. Then he’d go in with the machete.
It was black night now. He recovered the torch from his pocket. The snake could smell and taste him in the air, and he needed to even things up by giving himself the chance to see it.
He pressed the ‘on’ button and stuck the torch in his mouth. The strong beam lit up a circle of jungle that moved as he turned his head. He panicked when he couldn’t see the snake, and spun wildly, convinced it was behind him.
But then he found it again, right in front of him. It was moving slowly towards him, its eyes fixed on him, its tongue tasting the air.
For the first time Frazer was able to get a good look at the beast. Its colours were muted by the torchlight, and the creature looked a muddy grey. But the size was truly awesome. Frazer could not believe that he had managed to escape from such a monster.
This is gonna be one heck of a story, he thought. If I survive …
And then he realized that he should be screaming for help. The trouble was that his mouth was full of torch. He backed away and tried to shout with the torch in his mouth, but all that came out was a muffled, ‘Nnnnnngthhhh.’
And then the torch fell out of his mouth. He tried to catch it and dropped his machete. At the same moment the python struck, firing itself at him like a harpoon the size of a tree. Frazer staggered back and squirted the hand-sanitizer gel at the python’s face. As he did, he sensed movement all around him.
It’s Dad, he thought. He’s here to save me.
The snake’s strike never hit home. A big canvas tarpaulin was hurled over it.
Strange, thought Frazer, I don’t remember us having anything like that with us …
A dozen bodies leapt on top of the covered snake, wrestling to control it.
There was a snap as a foot stepped on a twig behind him and Frazer turned, expecting to see the face of his father, and maybe Bluey as well, grinning that huge grin of his.
But it was not his father or his friend.
It was another face that he’d come to know rather well, back in the South Seas.
A look of horror crossed Frazer’s face. The snake may have been contained, but he was still in grave danger.
He tried to shout, but this time he was stopped, not by the encircling coils of the world’s biggest snake, but by a rough cloth clamped over his mouth. His nose filled with a sweet chemical smell. He tried not to breathe, but it was impossible. The last thing he saw before he lost consciousness was the leering face of Leopold Chung, animal collector, gangster and, quite possibly, lunatic, looming over him.
Part 2: Hunted
Amazon didn’t want to get up. It was cold outside. Heck, it was cold inside! The headmistress was so mean she never let them put the central heating on unless the duck pond in the grounds was frozen solid. Her bed was the only warm spot in the entire universe and she wasn’t getting out of it. Certainly there was nothing on the breakfast menu that could tempt her. In fact, could you even call it a menu when it contained only one item: porridge? It wasn’t even good porridge. It was made from old tweed jackets and earwax. If you were a goody two-shoes or a prefect, you got a dollop of jam in your porridge. But Amazon wasn’t a goody two-shoes. She was always getting into trouble.
So, no, she would stay right here in bed and keep warm.
Anyway, outside the bed it wasn’t just cold. There was something else there. Something … not nice.
The trouble was that her bed kept moving. It was rocking from side to side, as if she were on a ship. That must be it: she was on a ship. And that’s why she felt seasick.
But no, that still wasn’t it. There was something she had to do. Her homework? She imagined a sheet of impossible equations she was supposed to solve. She stared at the numbers and indecipherable squiggles. There was a meaning in the numbers, in the shapes. She stared more closely, pulling the paper close to her eye. Close enough for her to see that the shapes were not abstract, but tiny pictures. She peered again, touching her eyeball with the paper. At last she could see what it all was.
It was the sinuous form of a snake. And it was growing ever larger by the second. It soon filled the page. It was a monstrous hybrid of a python and a cobra – it could poison or crush you as it chose. And now it was bigger than the page, bigger than her bed, bigger than her room. She screamed, but no noise came out of her mouth. The snake drew back and, with a vicious crack that resounded through her world, slapped her.
Amazon was suddenly wide awake, but some instinct told her to keep her eyes shut. Her face stung, and her head felt as though there were a giant snake trying to get out of it, using her eyeball as the main exit.
She was on the floor of some kind of vehicle. A truck probably. A truck that was bouncing over a rough road. Her mind was still foggy, half trapped in the drugged dream she’d been having. And yes, she knew she’d been drugged – that syringe.
‘Girl not wake up,’ said a voice. It belonged to the man who had just hit her. She sensed that he was looming over her, and she could smell the garlic on his breath. He sounded eastern European, perhaps Russian. Amazon fought the urge to scream and struggle. If they thought she was still unconscious, she might learn something vital. ‘Still in drug. Sleep like baby.’
‘We do not need to hit,’ came another voice. Amazon thought that it belonged to an Indian. ‘The boss says we have got to keep her safe.’
The first man grunted, and Amazon felt him moving away. ‘I don’t like screamers,’ he grouched.
Amazon tried to get her brain working.
Drexler.
The diary.
The Maharaja.
She tried to make them fit together so she could understand what was going on. Her thoughts were interrupted by the voices.
‘How far to hunting place?’
‘An hour, maybe two.’
Hunting place? What could that mean?
Well, she didn’t plan on finding out. Very carefully Amazon opened her eyelids to admit a sliver of lig
ht. She saw that she’d been half right about the truck. She was in the back of an old four-wheel-drive vehicle. She was lying on the floor. On one side of her she saw the Russian – he was wearing a sharp dark suit, which seemed wrong both for his voice and for India – that’s if they were still in India …
The other person was a slender Indian, with spectacles and a thin moustache. He looked like a harmless small-town pharmacist.
Beyond them were the back doors of the jeep. They were the sort that swung open to the sides. Amazon was too low down to see out of the windows, or rather all she could see was what may have been blue sky, at times interrupted by green leaves as they passed under and between trees. She knew that there was no point trying to escape if they were in the middle of nowhere. Even if she managed to leap out of the vehicle, they’d just run after her and bring her back.
What she needed was people. She’d come to know and love the ordinary Indians, who seemed always so kind and so gentle. If she threw herself on their mercy, they’d help her, she knew they would.
She just needed the right moment to act.
Eventually, after a nerve-wracking half-hour, it came.
The driver cursed, and at the same moment Amazon heard the lowing of water buffalo and the excited chatter of a group of people. She hoped against hope that they were driving through a village or settlement. She imagined a crossroads with villagers milling around, and the street full of men and women and children and dogs, as well as the buffalo and bony cattle you saw everywhere in rural India.
Python Adventure Page 5
