Python Adventure

by Anthony McGowan

  ‘Oh, if only it were that simple, Roger. Personally, I bear your spouse and your offspring no malice. But things have gone too far. Commerce is at stake. Money has been paid. The die is cast.’

  ‘What are you blathering about, Kaggs? What is this …?’

  ‘You know what it is, Roger. You see around me some of the world’s richest men. Add to that the fact that they’re all men who share a passion for the thrill of the hunt and we have a match made in heaven. Even something as exciting as killing gets boring in the end – shot one moose, shot them all. So I supply them with the rarest animals on the planet, to add a challenge and a touch of flavour to the killing. And when they heard that I had the famous Hunt family here – a family dedicated to spoiling their pleasure – well, they just had to come along to say … goodbye.

  ‘So, let me introduce you to a few of my associates here.’ He made an expansive gesture, covering the ten or so other men – not including the servants and guards – who had followed him into the cellar.

  ‘Our dear friend the Maharaja you know already,’ he said. ‘Rich in land and property, with more palaces than he can use, but short on actual folding money.’ Kaggs rubbed his fingers together, pulling a ludicrously crafty face. ‘I like to think that we’re partners in this enterprise.’

  The Maharaja had the decency to look a little ashamed.

  ‘And Doctor Drexler here, you know so very, very well.’ Drexler had been lurking in the shadows, and they had all failed to spot him. ‘I’ve helped to fund some of his more interesting … experiments, which will both advance the cause of science – I’m all for furthering human knowledge – and provide an extra bit of spice to my, or rather our, business.’

  ‘Is this strictly necessary,’ said Drexler who was looking faintly uncomfortable. His grey face carried a film of sweat.

  ‘You’re a filthy traitor,’ yelled Frazer, gripping the bars of his cage with white-hot intensity. ‘We trusted you. You were supposed to be my dad’s friend. Well, you’re going to find out that, if you double-cross the Hunts, you –’

  Frazer never got any further. On some wordless signal from the Maharaja or Kaggs, a guard stepped forward and rapped his knuckles with one of the long sticks used for crowd control by the Indian police.

  Frazer uttered a yelp of agony and nestled his damaged fingers in his armpit.

  Drexler’s eyes opened in surprise and, perhaps, disapproval at the violence, but he said nothing.

  ‘That’s quite enough of that,’ said Kaggs. But it was clear he was talking about Frazer’s outburst, not the brutality of the guard. ‘Do be a good boy – I don’t want to have to inflict any damage on you before the fun starts.’

  Drexler shook his head, as if dealing with some inner spark of conscience for the first time. He appeared to be taking a great interest in his own feet all of a sudden.

  ‘But now,’ continued Kaggs, ‘I must introduce you to my paying guests – without whom none of this would be possible. We have gathered together the world’s best – which is to say wealthiest – big-game hunters. This,’ he gestured to a fat, red-faced man Amazon recognized from the Maharaja’s party, ‘is Mr Laramie of Texas in the good old US of A.’

  ‘Pleased to meet y’all,’ said Laramie, a pleasant smile on his fleshy face.

  ‘Mr Laramie might look and sound like the sort of character who would fire a Colt 45 pistol or a Winchester rifle, but I understand his preferred weapon is a Bushmaster .223 assault rifle, with the selector switched to full automatic. Am I right, Mr Laramie?’

  ‘Finest gun money can buy,’ smiled the American, showing a set of gleaming white teeth one could only possibly get through cosmetic surgery.

  After that, to Amazon, the hunters began to blur together. There was a French aristocrat called Leconte, and a German called Herr Frapp, with skin so pale it was almost translucent, like a deep-sea fish brought to the surface. There were two more Americans, one a drug dealer with an Uzi, the other a Wall Street banker, who looked bored and impatient with the whole thing. There was a drawling English lord called Smethwyck, and an Australian media magnate called McKlintock, but Amazon had stopped listening. They were all, in their various ways, repellent.

  The very last to be introduced was another that Amazon recognized from the Maharaja’s palace. It was the tall, austere-looking African. He remained back in the shadows, as if too important to have to engage with the prisoners.

  ‘And here is Chief Amunda Banda,’ said Kaggs, ‘who has managed to cream off millions of pounds of aid money intended to help the poor in his own country. Well, good I say. They’d only waste it on luxuries like food and clothes. I’m hoping to see the good chief use a spear before the fun is over. How about it, chief?’

  The African said nothing, but merely bowed. His face showed no emotion and was as unreadable as one of the burnt pages in Roger Hunt’s diary.

  ‘Well, your family has been a thorn in the side of these men for too long. We were put on this Earth as the most intelligent of species, my friends. It is our instinct, our role, our nature to hunt and gather. We shouldn’t be ashamed to hang the heads of our kills on our walls as trophies. That is how we truly show respect for those creatures we conquer. In the same way we have for millennia. Needless to say, no one here will shed a tear at the demise of you and that excuse for an organization you call TRACKS.

  ‘Now, gentlemen. You have a busy day ahead of you tomorrow, so, if you wouldn’t mind leaving us to make your final preparations, I’d like to have a last little private talk with my old compadre and his family.’

  The hunters, guided by the servants, filed back out of the cellar.

  ‘Alone at last!’ said Kaggs, stepping closer to the cages. Amazon could smell him now. It was a harsh, musky smell, only partially obscured by cologne and whisky. She could tell that he was enjoying every moment of this long-anticipated revenge.

  ‘But let me tell you a little more,’ he continued, ‘about the set-up here. As you may know, we are in the cellars of the grand hunting lodge built by the Maharaja’s illustrious great-grandfather. It sits in the middle of his hunting estate, which has been here for very much longer. We are surrounded by ten thousand acres of the most varied and rich ecosystems in the whole of India. We have, within the boundaries of the estate, prime dense jungle, open forest, savannah, a noble river. It’s like a perfect world, a little Eden, ripe for … violation.

  ‘It has been stocked – with great help, I might say, from TRACKS,’ he nodded generously at Drexler, who continued to look down – ‘with animals mainly, of course, from India, but also from the wider world. We have tigers and leopards, naturally, but also zebra, the saiga antelope that my old friend Roger was studying out in central Asia. We have those charming near relations of ours, the chimps and gorillas, and orang-utans. The rarer the better, of course, which is why we also have a few giant pandas, sweet fluffy darlings that they are.’

  ‘You beast!’ exclaimed Amazon, unable to keep quiet any longer.

  ‘Beast? Well, we’re all beasts under our clothes, my dear,’ replied Kaggs in a friendly way.

  At that moment they were interrupted by a violent commotion. For a happy second or two, Amazon thought that perhaps it was Hal Hunt, arriving to rescue them with a platoon of local police.

  But then she recognized the voice. It was one she had, in the past, feared and loathed.

  ‘What is this ten thousand dollar? Promise was million dollar. You got big snake, you got boy. Chung wants million dollar, like promise!’

  All eyes turned to the figure who had bustled down into the cellar. He was struggling with the tall, moustachioed guards, trying to break free of their grip. He bit one and kicked at the shins of another.

  ‘Bring him here,’ said Kaggs in a low voice that was full of menace.

  The guards threw the Chinese smuggler at his feet.

  Chung struggled to his knees, still gabbling about the money.

  ‘I gotta pay my men. They good men, not cheap …
’

  But then Kaggs, without another word, walked over and kicked him in the stomach.

  Suddenly the cellar became utterly silent. Kaggs loomed over the fallen man, and Amazon saw he had a pistol in his hand.

  ‘I told you to kill them all or bring them all back here. All you’ve done is leave a trail for the most dangerous man I know. He will, unless I am much mistaken, come looking. This has put my organization in jeopardy. By rights I should have killed you on the spot. I let my generous nature get the better of me, and offered you enough so that you broke even. Now what is broken is my patience.’

  He thumbed off the safety catch and pointed the pistol at Chung’s head.

  Chung didn’t seem to understand what was happening. He stared at the barrel of the gun as if he’d never seen anything like it before. The Hunts looked on in horrified silence. Kaggs was going to murder this man, right before their eyes.

  And then Kaggs appeared to change his mind. A smile again played over his lips.

  ‘I’ve got a better idea. You can keep our friends the Hunts company until morning. Then I’ll come back and kill you all, after you’ve spent the next eight hours marinating in your own misery and defeat. And put the brat in with her mother. Only a monster would deny them a last night together.’

  ‘No!’ screamed Chung. ‘Not fair! Not fair!’

  But Kaggs wasn’t listening. He had already gone.

  The guards thrust Chung into the empty cage at the end. It wasn’t easy – he clung to the bars around the door, and his fingers had to be prised open. When he was finally in and the door locked, he squatted in the corner and stared at the ground.

  She was hungry now. And confused. Nothing that had happened to her in the past hours was understandable. She had been in her own jungle, its smells and sounds so familiar. But now she was here, in this other place, and she didn’t know how or why.

  That situation could not be helped, but something could certainly be done about the hunger.

  She tasted the warm air with her tongue. Oh yes, there was something out there. The taste was strong. She moved silently through the thick undergrowth, each rhythmic undulation taking her closer. It was dark, too dark to see, but she didn’t need vision on this hunt. And now she was close enough to use another of her senses. Little pits lined her upper lip. They allowed her to ‘see’ heat, like an infra-red camera.

  There were five of them. Three big ones. Two smaller. Their outlines were clear to her, warm and red against the cooler background. One of the big ones was very big indeed. She would avoid that one. But yes, a smaller one was separate from the others. She moved closer again. It was sitting hunched over, intent on its meal of fruit.

  She felt the powerful digestive juices in her long, long gut begin to flow. She was so close now her senses were crackling and fizzing. The smell, the taste and the heat that she saw were like hot waves of fire.

  And then her other sense – the hearing that was really a feeling of vibrations – pinged awake. Something was hurtling towards her. Something big and powerful that made the ground beneath her shake as it approached.

  The big male gorilla, silver-backed and magnificent, had heard the rustle as the snake moved over the forest floor. He had encountered big snakes before, back in Africa, but nothing quite like this. It was as long as a tree, and he sensed the power beneath the scaly skin. But that didn’t matter. His job was a simple one – to protect his family.

  He knew that he should have had them safely up in the trees by now, but he hadn’t been himself since their ordeal – the capture by the men with the guns that fired stinging darts resulting in long sleeps. Everything in this forest was different – the plants, the animals, the smells and tastes. And he had been ashamed that he’d let them be taken here. But now his moment had come.

  He bellowed out a roar that was both a war cry and a warning to his family, and then charged at the snake as it was preparing to strike at the little two-year-old female.

  He grabbed the snake in his strong hands and tried to bring it to his powerful jaws. But the snake threw a coil round the gorilla’s neck and began to tighten. Another coil wound round the gorilla’s legs. But then, with a great shudder, the gorilla expanded its mighty chest and shrugged free of the python. At last it got the chance to bite. It was a bite that would have broken the back of a leopard. And then the gorilla lifted the snake above its head and hurled it away.

  The snake didn’t go very far – it was simply too heavy, too long and awkward a shape, but the bite, behind her head, had hurt her. Her scales gave her some protection, as did her sheer size, and meant the gorilla’s jaws couldn’t exert their full force, but that did not take away the deep unpleasantness of the experience. This was not what she had expected. There was nothing like this black hairy creature in her own jungle. It was not a fight she relished. And so she slithered away, leaving the triumphant male gorilla and his startled family behind.

  She would find easier pickings soon enough.

  Amazon was on the hard stone floor of the cage. Her mother was next to her, holding her in an embrace so fierce it might almost have been an attack. Amazon’s mind had been full of the horror of what Kaggs had just told them – that they were to be held for a night and then slaughtered like animals, but now it was flooded with love and warmth. They had at least this last night together. And they filled the first part of it with talk.

  Ling-Mei told the story of their discovery of Kaggs’s vast scheme, of their flight across Asia and Canada and the small explosion that brought them down, caused by a device planted by Kaggs’s agents. It had been Roger’s idea to stay in hiding in the wilderness, making Kaggs believe that they were dead. He planned to return secretly to TRACKS HQ to give the whole story to Hal, but then Kaggs’s men had finally found them and brought them, after a long and terrible journey, to this place.

  ‘I think his plan was to get us together here – Roger, Hal, me, you and Frazer – and kill us all. It was just a terrible sick revenge for all the times the boys had got the better of him back when they were young.’

  And then Amazon almost lost control. ‘But he has beaten us,’ she cried. ‘We’re trapped here and there’s no way out, and, except for Uncle Hal, we’re all going to –’

  ‘Don’t say it,’ said Frazer.

  Amazon looked up at him, thinking he was just putting a brave face on their situation. But then she saw where he was looking. Amazon could sense that her father was up to something. She peered through the gloom of the dungeon, trying to make out what he was doing. He appeared to be working away at one of the old metal bars to the cage. He almost seemed to be sawing, but it looked to Amazon as though he were sawing with thin air. Had her father gone mad? Then she caught a faint smell in the dank air of the dungeon.

  Something … minty.

  ‘Dad, what are you doing?’ she whispered, curiosity taking over, momentarily, from the fear and desolation she was feeling.

  He looked up. The sweat glistened on his forehead.

  ‘I managed to persuade Kaggs’s guards to leave us with a few scraps of civilization. Including these.’

  Roger held up some dental floss and a tube of toothpaste.

  ‘I remembered reading somewhere about an Italian Mafia boss who’d used dental floss to cut through the bars of a prison he was being held in. It seemed worthwhile giving it a go.’

  ‘But surely it can’t work?’ said Amazon, squeezing as close as she could to try to see. ‘I mean, floss …’

  And now she did see the thin white line of the dental floss – and, amazingly, it had cut through more than half of the bar.

  ‘It’s actually tougher than you think. The toothpaste helps to lubricate it, so the floss doesn’t fray.’

  ‘Uncle Roger, you’re a genius,’ said Frazer.

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ said Roger. ‘But I’m damned if I’m going to let that madman kill my family. Now another few minutes and I may be able to kick through this bar, and then –’

&n
bsp; Amazon’s father was silenced by a scraping noise coming from the far wall of the cellar. And then, to their astonishment, they saw a trapdoor swing open from the floor and a head appear. Amazon’s heart was in her mouth as she thought it was a guard coming to check on them. In the next cage, her father had clearly assumed the same. He was trying desperately to hide what he was doing, but the floss snagged in the cut he had made in the bar. Toothpaste foamed around it. The guard would be sure to see.

  And then the weak light in the cellar fell on the face of the man. When Amazon saw who it was, she felt as though she could burst with joy and a smile lit up her face. It was the mute servant who had tried to help her back at the Maharaja’s palace.

  ‘It’s OK, it’s OK,’ she gasped, ‘I know this man.’

  ‘And so,’ said her father, ‘do I. ‘Hello, Mehmet, my old friend. It’s been many, many years.’

  The mute servant – Mehmet – bowed at Roger, and made some incomprehensible sounds with his ruined mouth.

  Roger Hunt looked at him strangely. ‘Mehmet, what’s the matter?’

  ‘Dad, he’s lost his tongue,’ said Amazon. ‘It was probably the nasty little Maharaja.’

  Her father spoke some words in broken Hindi to Mehmet, who was already opening the cages, one by one, with a heavy set of keys.

  Then Mehmet signalled them urgently to follow him.

  ‘What about me?’ came a voice from the shadows. It was Chung. They’d completely forgotten about him.

  ‘Let him rot,’ said Frazer. ‘He tried to kill us in Polynesia.’

  ‘Not true!’ squealed Chung. ‘I’m just a businessman. I never kill anyone that didn’t deserve it.’

  ‘We haven’t got time for this,’ said Amazon’s father. ‘Let him go, Mehmet. He can come along with us until we’re out of here, then we’ll think again.’

  Mehmet unlocked Chung, and then led them all back down through the trapdoor.

  ‘Mehmet’s been here for many years,’ said Roger Hunt. ‘I suppose he must know all the secrets of the place …’