Python Adventure

by Anthony McGowan

  It was now or never.

  She sprang for the door, passing right between the startled guards. The Indian was slow, but the Russian moved with surprising speed. He half grabbed her, but she twisted out of his grip and made it to the door. There was a handle – again she had to hope that it was unlocked.

  She was in luck! She turned it, pushed and suddenly she was out in the hot, dry air. For a second she was dazzled by the light, as well as baked by the heat. She was right about the water buffalo – they were all around. Beautiful blue-grey beasts, huge but placid.

  And there were people. A couple of old men with loose turbans, carrying long sticks that they used to nudge and guide the buffalo in the right direction. And some children. A woman with an earthenware jar on her head. But there was no village, no crossroad, no crowd.

  ‘Help … please help me,’ she said, her voice cracking with fear and emotion and the dryness of her mouth. ‘These men … they’ve kidnapped me. They want to hurt me. Please …’

  The figures stared back at her, uncomprehending. And a little fearful.

  Suddenly she was grabbed from behind, a hand on each of her shoulders. There was no way she could run.

  It was the Russian who had her. The Indian spoke a few words to the peasants, who listened in silence, their faces still showing no emotion. Amazon looked around her as the man spoke, trying to gauge where she was. The land was much greener than the places she had visited up until now, in the north of the country. They were in an area of fairly open forest, with tall trees leaning gracefully over them.

  But it was not the natural features that made her gasp. Further along the road they were travelling on she could see a huge wall that stretched, it seemed, for miles on either side. It looked ancient, as if created by some long-dead civilization.

  But she had no more time to gape. The Russian seized her by the hair and forced her back into the truck.

  ‘Blindfold her,’ said the Indian. Dutifully, the Russian tore a strip from a piece of filthy cloth, before placing the rag over Amazon’s eyes. She winced in pain as he tugged fiercely on the cloth, binding it in a tight knot.

  ‘That was a silly thing to do,’ the Indian continued. ‘There is nowhere for you to run to. And all of the peasants in this area belong to their feudal lord.’

  ‘The Maharaja of Jaipod,’ said Amazon bitterly.

  ‘That is correct.’

  ‘What are you going to do with me?’

  ‘All will soon be revealed.’

  ‘Hands?’ said the Russian.

  ‘Oh yes, hands,’ said the Indian, and the Russian tied them tightly behind her back.

  It was incredibly uncomfortable, but luckily it didn’t last long.

  The truck drove on for another half an hour. Amazon guessed they must have passed through a gateway in the wall and were now … where? In whatever lay beyond it.

  They pulled up and the Russian dragged her out. Unable to see, she felt utterly helpless. She stumbled on some steps and then sensed that they had moved indoors. Footsteps echoed on a hard marble floor. Then the echoes changed and Amazon thought she had moved into a bigger space. She heard a hubbub, as if a group of people were talking excitedly.

  The blindfold was removed from her eyes. She was in a large room, hung with beautiful tapestries that shimmered with deep reds and lines of gold thread. There were men standing around. A few she thought she recognized from the banquet the day before. Others were new to her. Some were sleek-looking, with hard faces and cold eyes. Others were overweight and doughy, their tiny eyes squeezed between folds of fat, bald heads glistening in the electric light.

  The tall African she’d seen at the banquet was there as well, his face stern and unyielding.

  The men looked at her and laughed or murmured to each other. She found their gazes unbearable. She saw the Maharaja, a glass in his hand, his voice as friendly and bubbly as the champagne he was drinking. The Russian gave her a sharp shove and she stumbled forward.

  ‘You filthy, cowardly scumbag,’ she spat, meaning it for the Russian, but it fitted the Maharaja as well.

  Then the Maharaja turned and saw her. His face hardened.

  ‘Not here, you fools!’ he said. ‘Take her down with the others.’

  He waved his hand and she was dragged out of the room by the Russian thug. She aimed a kick, but he evaded her easily, and cuffed the back of her head lightly, but in a way that said ‘do that again and I’ll hurt you’.

  She managed to get a rough sense of the place as she was shoved and shunted. This wasn’t a palace like the one she had been in the day before. It was large, but not that large.

  The Russian kicked a wooden door open and pulled her down a narrow spiralling stone stairway. She stumbled twice, but he stopped her from falling on her face – she would not have been able to save herself as her hands were still bound.

  Now Amazon found herself in a long space beneath the main hall where the men had leered and jeered at her. There was a strong smell in the air. It was heavy – nauseating almost – and yet, to her, oddly comforting. It was the smell of animals. Yes, animals had been kept down here. Big ones. Small ones. Hunters. Hunted.

  It took her eyes a couple of seconds to grow accustomed to the gloom, but she knew immediately that there was a cage and something was in it. The animals, she thought at first.

  The cage was like something from backstage at the circus, or the kind of old-fashioned zoo where bored animals paced backwards and forwards, with despair or rage in their hearts.

  It wasn’t actually one long cage, as Amazon had first thought, but a series of smaller cages lined up next to each other. And each contained a living thing. An animal, yes, but a very special one.

  A human being.

  A person.

  She moved forward until she touched the bars.

  ‘Mum …’ she said in a faltering voice, as her eyes filled with tears. ‘Dad … Frazer …’

  Frazer’s journey to the cage in the cellar of the hunting lodge of the Maharaja of Jaipod had been even less comfortable than that of his cousin, Amazon.

  What made it particularly unpleasant were his travelling companions in the back of the big truck, although only one of them – the giant reticulated python – spent the entire journey with him.

  It had begun with that suffocating cloth, saturated with chloroform. It had only put him under for a few minutes, but it was long enough for Chung and his gang of smugglers to get him and the snake away through the jungle. Frazer woke to find himself trussed up like a turkey, being carried over the shoulder of one of the thugs. The first thing he did was to puke up over the backs of the man’s legs – one of the unfortunate side effects of chloroform. It was too gross to give Frazer any satisfaction, but that didn’t stop the man from hurling him on the ground and kicking him in the ribs.

  Chung came over and spoke sharply to the guy in Chinese. Then he said to Frazer, ‘Good, you wake up. Now you run. You stop running and we have to shoot you, which would be a very great shame.’

  To stop him from escaping, his guard slipped a length of rope round his neck. Frazer was very aware of the fact that, if he fell over, he’d get throttled. It greatly concentrated his mind.

  There were about twenty of them – it took ten to carry the enormous body of the snake. They seemed to be heading on a circuit round the village and back to the road, jogging almost blind along narrow paths.

  Frazer lost track of time – the fear and the pain and the nausea from the chloroform combined to make the jungle run more like a nightmare than a waking experience.

  Twice he fell, but luckily each time there was just enough slack in the rope to save him from strangulation, and he was dragged back to his feet and urged on with harsh words.

  Finally they reached the road and running became a little easier. Soon afterwards they found the truck and a cluster of jeeps. Frazer was bundled into the back of the truck with the snake and four of the men. The others climbed into the jeeps, and together the c
onvoy rolled off into the night.

  Frazer found himself tightly bound and lying on the bed of the truck next to the snake. It was still shrouded in thick canvas tarpaulin, and lay as still as death. It had obviously been tranquillized. But Frazer couldn’t help but wonder what would happen when it eventually awoke.

  ‘Don’t worry, American kid, you’re not food for the snake.’

  It was Leopold Chung, riding, for the present, in the back with Frazer.

  ‘What the heck are you doing here, Chung?’ Frazer said, his voice a little shaky, both from the chloroform and the grim jungle trek. ‘And how did you get off that island?’

  Frazer and Amazon had last seen Leopold Chung as they paddled away on a home-made raft from a deserted island in Polynesia. Chung, working with a corrupt local chief, had been attempting to steal the baby turtles TRACKS were trying to protect. The same tropical storm that had swept the cousins to a tiny atoll also brought Chung there – half mad from drinking seawater and, Frazer suspected, his own urine. When the cousins had gone back with help to pick him up, there was no sign of the crafty animal smuggler.

  Frazer found Chung both fascinating and repellent. He could appear completely insane one moment and then coldly rational the next. In fact, Frazer had come to the conclusion that most of his eccentricities were a sham, designed to make the world underestimate him.

  ‘Like giant squid, Chung has many tentacles. They reach far. Also my men, they love their boss. They not let him die on island. Not like the murdering American boy and English girl.’

  ‘Hey, it was you who tried to kill us! Anyway, we came back for you.’

  Chung shrugged. ‘Maybe, maybe not. But I guess, if you came back, it was to put Chung in jail. Well, Chung is not a man to be jailed.’

  ‘We’ll see about that,’ said Frazer, with more confidence than he was actually feeling. ‘And what is it with you and the snake? Money, I guess.’

  ‘Yeah, I got a buyer.’

  ‘Some zoo?’

  ‘Who says zoo? It would be a big hassle to get this long fellow out of India. They like paperwork in this country. Very old-fashioned. Means a big, big bribe. No, I have found buyer here, not bother with import-export papers. That’s where we’re going now.’

  ‘But why kidnap me? I’m no use to you …’

  ‘Ah, that was just lucky break. You see, turn out that buyer is also interested in the Hunt family. So, kill two birds with one stone, to use an old Chinese proverb.’

  ‘English, you mean. That’s just like you to even steal a proverb.’

  Frazer’s mind was coming back into focus. Chung liked to talk; it might be that he would let slip some piece of information that might save him.

  ‘Who is this buyer?’

  ‘Someone who wanted the snake very much. And someone who also was very interested to find out that the Hunts were chasing the same animal. He offered me even more money if I could bring back you and your old man. Too dangerous to tackle the old lion, but we got the cub, eh?’

  And then, laughing his high-pitched laugh, Chung climbed through to the cab of the truck, and the journey continued right through the night and into the next day.

  It was long, hot and uncomfortable. Frazer spent most of it lying next to the snake. He grew to dislike intensely the musty, heavy smell of the thing. And he was petrified that it might stir and wrap him again in an embrace that must this time be fatal.

  ‘Steady, snaky,’ he would say, and the snake would seem to settle down.

  He did manage to sleep, drifting in and out of dreams, thinking at times that he was safely in his bed. There was no hope of escape. The four men in the back of the truck saw to that, not to mention the ropes binding him.

  He tried speaking to them a couple of times. But either they couldn’t speak English or they had orders not to communicate with him. Eventually, one – a Filipino with a scar that ran from his scalp down to his chin – slid his finger across his throat in the universal language that said, ‘If I were you, old chap, I’d quieten down.’

  Once the snake did stir, and the bag over its head moved to and fro – almost as if the creature were trying to shake itself into wakefulness.

  ‘Hey, fellas, you might want to check this out …’ said Frazer, his voice rising in pitch, but one of the guards was already on it and sunk another syringe into the beast.

  For the rest of that day, Frazer saw nothing of the outside world. He knew that he was still in India, but where was a mystery.

  It was night again when the truck arrived at its destination. Frazer was bundled out as he’d been bundled in. He sensed the effort and tumult behind him when it was the turn of the snake to be removed from the truck. Chung’s men passed him on to some rather more impressive specimens in uniforms and turbans. But they were no more friendly.

  Chung himself made a brief appearance. He stood in front of Frazer and seemed to be about to say something. A word formed on his lips. Frazer thought it might have been ‘sorry’. But then, whatever the word was, he scurried away without uttering it.

  With his hands still tied, the new guards led him down some stairs and thrust him into the dark interior of what looked a lot like a dungeon. In it there were cages, barely illuminated by a dim bulb, but it was enough to show him that he was not alone. There were two other figures in the cages: a man and a woman. They were holding hands through the bars.

  His captors untied his hands, opened a door to one of the cages and pushed him in, locking the door behind him.

  ‘Er, hi,’ he said, for want of anything better. ‘I, er, guess we’re in the same fix.’

  As the man came towards him into the light, he saw a face he’d only ever seen in photos, a face with the same strong jawline and glittering, intelligent eyes of his father.

  ‘Well, I’ll be …’ the man said. Then he turned to the woman, who looked ill and drawn. ‘Stand up, Ling-Mei, and meet your nephew, Frazer.’

  ‘You’re, you’re …’ stammered Frazer.

  ‘Yep, Uncle Roger and Aunt Ling-Mei. And I’m sorry to see you here, young man.’

  Ling-Mei staggered towards him.

  ‘Amazon,’ she said, ‘Amazon, is she …?’

  Frazer shook his head.

  ‘She’s safe and a long, long way from here,’ he replied.

  ‘And your dad?’ There was hope in Roger Hunt’s voice.

  ‘He wasn’t captured when I was. He’s free, somewhere. And, if I know anything in the wide world is true, it’s that he’s on his way to find us.’

  Roger smiled. ‘Come sit down as close as you can,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot of news we need to hear.’

  ‘And I guess there’s a few things you could tell me, as well,’ said Frazer.

  So, when Amazon Hunt cried out and ran to the bars of the cage and stretched her hands through to meet those of her mother, Ling-Mei and Roger Hunt were both horrified. They had thought her safe and sound, yet here she was, in the clutches of their greatest enemy.

  ‘MUM!’ said Amazon, but already her voice was thick with tears.

  ‘No, no, no,’ sobbed her mother. ‘You should not be here.’

  Amazon knew why her mother said these words. Her presence meant danger, possibly death. And yet she could see the conflicted expression on her mother’s face. Her anguish could not quell the joy at seeing her only daughter again after so long.

  Her father was in the next cage, and she stretched her other arm out so she could touch him too.

  ‘I thought I’d never see you again …’ Amazon said, sobbing, smiling, sobbing.

  ‘If only it had been in some other place, some other way,’ said Roger Hunt, entwining his fingers with hers.

  ‘Hey, just ignore me, why dontcha,’ came a voice from the other side.

  Amazon looked up and saw Frazer. Now it was her turn to be both delighted to see someone and yet to wish fervently that they were not there.

  ‘Well, what a delightful little scene. It’s enough to make the heart melt.’
>
  In the emotional swamp that had engulfed her, Amazon had totally failed to realize that the dismal cellar, stinking of animals, had filled up with people.

  She spun round and saw the group who had been up in the main room of the lodge. Some of the guards were holding burning torches, which added their eerie, flickering glow to the dim electric light from the single bulb.

  The man who spoke appeared strangely both old and ageless – his face was lined, but his wiry body was still vigorous. There was a knotty hump of muscle and sinew between his shoulder blades. His eyes were narrow slits, and his mouth was moist and red. There was something … carnivorous about him.

  Amazon felt waves of malice, perhaps even evil, pulse from the man, like radiation from a damaged nuclear power station. And, without needing to be told, she knew who this was. It was the old enemy of her father and her uncle. It was …

  ‘You’re scum, Kaggs,’ spat her father. ‘And, like all scum, you’re going to get wiped away.’

  ‘Ho ho ho,’ said the man called Kaggs, ‘this is exactly the attitude, the spirit, I need. I was a little afraid that time might have dulled you, left you stooped and old and weary, Roger Hunt. And that would have been no fun at all. You were such a lively little fellow, always up to mischief. Always in trouble. I’m only sorry that your oaf of a brother is not here to complete the picture. It’s so nice for a hunter to be able to bag a family group – a male, a female, a couple of cubs. Yes, that’s the photo we all want.’

  ‘Look, Kaggs,’ said Roger Hunt, standing tall. ‘You’ve got a beef with me and my brother going back to when we were kids. I know that. But these others here, my wife and daughter, and young Frazer, they’re nothing to do with our old feud. Let them go and, when this is all over and you’re in jail, I’ll tell the authorities to go easy on you. I’ll explain that you’re a madman or a halfwit, whatever it takes to make them treat you leniently. Believe me, you don’t want to spend your dying days in an Indian prison.’

  Kaggs smiled. His teeth were grey and blunt and strong.