by Andy Lucas
Pace crouched down and crabbed across the last few feet, the moist soil giving beneath his running boots. Fortunately, no beast rose up to sink its teeth into his legs and he reached the very edge without incident. Ruby hung back, ready to dive back into the safety of thicker cover if something went wrong.
He half expected to see a horde of machine-gun toting killers spill out of the jungle. His imagination, fuelled by lack of proper sleep, worked flat out against him and he struggled to rein it in. The stench of burned human flesh was tempered, thankfully, by the closeness of the damp earth and of a sweet-scented, broad-leafed plant that brushed against his left knee.
With the help of the natural air fresheners, he watched the road and the edges of the forest opposite for another full half an hour. In that time he saw nothing, except a few spider monkeys playing mad games near to the very top of roadside trees opposite. They were barely distinguishable as specks but their recognisable cry defined their species as they talked noisily amongst themselves, very likely about the strange antics of the two-legged creatures on the ground below.
Finally satisfied, he crabbed his way back to Ruby, whose anxious expression underlined his own thinking; that staying put was doing them no good. They had to move on and try to get to the river rendezvous.
He got no argument from Ruby when he voiced his feelings. Her face broke into a relieved smile and she turned on her heels to retrieve their bike before he could reconsider. She picked it up and swung it across to him, taking a firm grip of the front bars and leaving him to grip the saddle of the second seat. Together they carried the lightweight machine back to the road.
Remaining at its very edge, they started up the road again, eyes staring all around in painful concentration. When they had left the pile of bodies several hundred feet behind, they made another quick check around before cautiously wheeling the tandem back out onto the centre of the road.
Pace looked one way and Ruby checked the other. Nothing was seen to move.
At first they rode slowly, pushing up the road for several miles, closely watching the jungle walls and road horizon, both ahead and behind. Pace rode in the front seat, holding the Sten with his right hand and swinging it first one way then another on its shoulder strap.
Stopping after fifteen minutes, they eyed each other speculatively. Could it be that they had they escaped? Pace wasn’t sure but he knew it was time to sacrifice caution in favour of speed. He twisted in the saddle to look at her, his eyes fixing upon hers. She met his gaze squarely.
‘Are you up for a bit of manic pedalling?’
‘Really? Okay. What about your chest?’
‘It’s fine,’ he said quickly. It wasn’t fine at all. It had been hurting fiercely, despite the pain killers and the antibiotics.
The air was so hot and humid around them that it felt like an almost solid entity. Sweat dripped into the corners of his eyes and Ruby looked flushed and sweaty beneath her poncho. Quickly he pulled off his pack and rummaged around until he pulled out a bottle of fruit juice and another of fresh water. The juice was infused with added vitamins and salts, and they shared both bottles equally, draining them fast.
The remnants of each bottle, crushed, went back in his pack.
‘Come on then,’ Pace smiled wanly, feeling refreshed. ‘How are your legs?’
'Ready as they’ll ever be.’
‘Good. Once we start, we don’t stop, understand? We go flat out; take our chances with the road conditions. Speed is our only protection and we must keep it up for as long as we can.’
With no time to look for signs of pursuit, they just kept their heads down and pedalled; the Sten poking out over the front handlebars.
The staging post for the river section lay barely three miles north and the thought of being so close to safety spurred them on. The humidity took an unhelpful leap further upwards as their legs powered them up the road in a monotonous rhythm.
It was heading into late afternoon and the direct sunlight, though lower in the sky, also was becoming obscured by an untidy pile of cloud.
Ruby glanced skyward and had just decided it was about to pour with rain again when a dazzling flash arced across the sky, followed almost immediately by a tumultuous crash of thunder so powerful it threatened to shake the teeth from her head. A ferocious storm exploded with typical, sudden fury and rain tipped out of the leaden clouds in solid sheets of water. The slightest of breezes began to blow but it was not enough to move the water one way or another. It fell straight down, in a second plunging visibility to barely ten feet and drowning a million bugs in mid-air.
Lightning stabbed into the road in front and behind them, terrifyingly close, supported by deep growls of disapproving thunder.
‘If we stay in the middle of the road, we might get through to the staging area without being spotted,’ he said; not having to shout above the storm because the intercom remained clear and sharp.
‘Then don’t talk about it, just keep pedalling,’ came the smart reply and Pace found himself grinning into the pounding rain, despite himself.
Then, without warning, they smashed into a wall that had been hidden by the pelting rain. The bike tipped over and they were both spilled across the rapidly flooding road. He tried to stagger to his feet but a crushing weight descended upon him as the wall pounced on him and pinned him flat.
A sharp, female scream cut above the storm to his left, chilling him rigid, as a rough hand clamped over his mouth. Then he was being dragged across the road. His legs kicked for purchase but just slipped all over the place and his arms flailed wildly at his sides. Thunder still reverberated all around and his blurred vision was filled with a disoriented view of the underside of the high canopy as he was manhandled into the jungle.
Then the last thing he could have imagined happened. There was a flash of perfect white teeth, opening in the middle of a recognisable face.
It was a beaming face and, more importantly, the face of a friend.
5
Leading Team One into the depths of the rainforest had been a thrill for Bailey. Careful planning and a pick of the finest athletes and academic minds had ensured that all the teams comprised a range of amazing talent.
He was delighted with the preparations, although as troubled as anyone else by the disappearance of Doyle McEntire’s daughter. And then there was James. Still unsure of how useful he would be in the field, Bailey was no fool and he accepted that the huge sums of extra sponsorship could be directly attributed to the unlucky Englishman.
He wasn’t convinced Pace’s physical health would stand up to the rigors of jungle racing but he wished the man well. That said, his pride and personal craving for success meant that he planned to beat the other teams convincingly. He would gain the glory, publicity and star status that would surely come as leader of the winning team.
All had been going so well, too, he mused. The rain hadn’t been as bad as he feared, though it had deluged at times, and they had made good progress on the battered highway. Even the first challenge had turned out to be a simple climbing exercise; in a way he felt a little cheated and had immediately wished for something tougher for the next challenge.
The agony in his skull was so intense that he kept staggering as his vision blurred, before he managed to force it into focus again. He couldn’t afford to stumble, or collapse. Then they would just kill him, he had no doubt. Behind him, low murmurs told him that their captors were still alive, which meant the muzzles of several automatic weapons were loosely trained on his spine.
It had all been so crazy. They had picked up the mountain bikes after a gruelling final few miles on foot. As a team they had agreed to push on immediately, and try to get the drop on the competition. Spirits had been high, even if bodies had been exhausted. As his feet moved unsteadily beneath him, his thoughts cast him back to the point, two days previously. They had been riding hard for hours when the nightmare found them.
‘How you doing up there?’ Dungannen’s cheery tone sounde
d lightly in his earpiece. The young doctor had proved himself to be a resilient character so far and his jokes had kept their spirits up when the weather had closed in, or fatigue had sharpened its teeth. His legs were also doing most of the pedalling on his tandem, as Poranchez seemed less than keen. Nobody would have known it; Dungannen said nothing and just pedalled.
‘Fine,’ Bailey replied. In truth, his legs felt like lead and his whole body cried out for a rest. ‘Hey, Costoza,’ he called to the Italian cameraman; riding behind with the others,’ ‘how long until we get to pull over?’
‘Another ten minutes should do us,’ came the deep, thickly-accented reply. ‘Then we can sleep for a few hours.’
It was music to Bailey’s ears. He realised that he hadn’t spoken to Chi-Lu for a while and was just opening his mouth to call her when his front forks slammed into a length of steel wire, stretched out across the width of the road, from tree-line to tree-line. Purposefully taut, and several centimetres thick, the thin cable acted like a sudden brake. Bailey’s own speed worked against him and he was up and flying over the handlebars before his heart had time to skip a beat. His already open mouth managed to utter a surprised cry before he crashed down onto the water-pocked surface.
Such was the speed, he had no time to throw his arms out to ward off the impact, which caught him straight on the front of his forehead. The mud was only a soft surface layer, with the road beneath still being hard in this section. Fiery detonations of yellow, crimson and green flared up inside his head, followed instantly by a heavy, insidious darkness.
When he stirred into consciousness, ten or so minutes later, he was met with a sight that was so surreal that he assumed he was still unconscious. It had to be a dream, but why the hell would I dream of this? It was a question he asked himself a few times as he shook his head slowly and raised himself up onto his knees. Why would anybody dream of such a thing?
His bike lay where it had fallen. It was a solid machine and could be ridden again. The cable was clearly visible, stretched across the road at a uniform height of about one foot. Behind him; about ten or so metres away, lay the discarded tandem bikes of the rest of Team One. There was no second wire but the reason for the bikes being riderless was plain to see.
As he staggered to his feet and finally accepted that he wasn’t dreaming, the three twisted, heavily-bloodied bodies lay still and lifeless in the mud. The rain, which had held off for several hours, had returned while he was unconscious and it fell in heavy sheets across a scene of evil destruction.
‘Oh my God,’ he breathed, not wanting to believe what he saw. Rubbing the base of his neck to try and clear the ringing bells in his ears, he walked closer to his dead friends. Dungannen would never again crack a joke, nor would Costoza manage to catch another shot of him taking a jungle shower. Also, tragically, no longer would Chi-Lu’s passion for animal rights light the fires of change around the globe. All three were clearly very, very dead.
Bailey had expected the odd accident, perhaps snake bite or a case of tick paralysis. Never this. How could he have ever imagined that death would come in the form of bullets? He was no fool, and recognised the multitude of small entry wounds and the larger, jagged exit wounds. The dead had been sprayed with bullets and their blood, still freshly flowing, was staining the mud around them in an increasing radius; mixing with the dark, muddy puddles to form elegant swirls and pirouettes of pink on brown.
Snapping out of his stupor with difficulty, he knew he was badly injured. Despite the initial adrenalin rush of terror and disgust, his vision soon began to swim and he dropped to his knees amongst the dead; a deep groan escaping from his lips.
He might have given up at that point and slipped back into unconsciousness but the sound of approaching voices stung him back onto his feet. It was only as he staggered back upright that he realised that there were only three bodies, not four.
Suddenly the obvious thought managed to find its way past his dazed senses and flash up a warning. Someone had done the shooting and the closing voices were likely to be them coming back. Bailey had no idea why they hadn’t killed him too, or if they had captured Poranchez, but he knew he needed to get away. Unfortunately, his body chose that moment to switch off his sense of balance; buckling his legs at the knees and pitching him down onto the muddy road again.
Head spinning, vomiting foul-tasting bile and still bleeding heavily from the massive cut on his head, he resorted to dragging himself on his stomach, heading desperately away from the voices, aiming towards the opposite tree line. He couldn’t tell if there were people on the side he was heading for, hidden in the jungle, but the voices only came from one side of the road. He knew he had to get away from it. Clawing at the mud for purchase, digging his strong fingers in until the nails tore and split, he inched his way towards safety.
‘I thought you’d be dead by now. You must be a strong one.’ The male voice sounded frighteningly close and was surprisingly soft in its tone. ‘We decided to leave you to the jungle.’
Resigned to his fate, Bailey stopped crawling and forced himself to roll over onto his back. The rain, growing heavier by the minute, pounded into his eyes and cruelly stung at his open wound. As he suspected, several men were standing nearby, all looking down at him. Wearing military jungle uniforms and carrying stubby automatic weapons, their faces were blacked up, their eyes cold and calculating.
‘Go on,’ Bailey managed to whisper, fighting against the suddenly overwhelming urge to close his eyes. ‘You bastards. Go on!’ he managed a half-hearted yell. ‘Get on with it.’ He was about to die and steeled himself for the end, feeling strangely calm. At least the pain would stop.
‘Brave words,’ snapped the nearest man harshly, a bruiser who easily matched Bailey’s own hefty size. ‘We wanted one prisoner to take back, now we have two. That’s a good thing. It just means more money. There has been enough killing for today but the message we need to send to the others does need to be made a little clearer, that’s why we’ve come back.’ A snigger sounded from several men behind him. It was a vicious sound. ‘And, in case you think I am a nice man, I’m gonna make you watch us write our message.’
‘Message? What are you on about?’ Bailey still expected to be shot at any time but he needed to know what they meant.
‘Watch and learn,’ sneered the man, who seemed to be the only one speaking and carried himself with the confidence of a leader. Then, to his men. ‘Let’s send our message.’
With that, the little group separated and the leader stepped behind Bailey, leaned down, gripped him under his arms and pulled him to his feet. Bailey was a big man and it took a bit of straining to get him onto his feet. Once up, the world dissolved into a kaleidoscope of starbursts again but the sight of Poranchez, hands bound tightly behind his back, gave him a shot of hope.
‘Miguel! Miguel! Are you alright?’’
Poranchez looked over at him and Bailey easily read the terror in his eyes. He made as if to reply but several mercenaries appeared from the jungle edge behind him and one of them laughed as he landed a hefty punch against the back of the prisoner’s head. Unable to see it coming, Poranchez took the full force of the blow and staggered to his knees, crying out in a mixture of pain and surprise.
‘Hey, you prick, cut that out!’ Bailey was incensed and still expecting to be killed, so bawled at the man across the sodden red mud road with as much venom as he could muster. He figured he didn’t have anything to lose by annoying them. Maybe it would hasten the end – he would rather take a bullet than a beating.
The mercenary started as if to approach Bailey but a hand signal from the leader stopped him in his tracks. Eyes burning with frustration at not being allowed to pulverise the stupid American, the man contented himself by giving Poranchez a heavy cuff to the side of his head.
‘Let’s do this and be on our way. Our money is waiting for us at the other end and I don’t plan to stay in this swamp for any longer than I have to.’
What happened
next so shocked Bailey that he didn’t raise a word of protest. It all happened so fast too. He counted about a dozen men now and three of them pulled out large machetes from their belts and set about desecrating the bodies of Dungannen, Costoza and Chi-Lu.
Like a scene from a gory movie, blades flashed through the soaking air and limbs were hacked off; arms, legs and poor old Costoza even lost his head. The bloody scene became even more crimson as the bits and pieces were tossed together to form a pile of dead human flesh.
A metal can of petrol appeared from somewhere and the pile was quickly doused. A match flashed, followed by a whoof of ignition; the petrol easily winning against the rain and starting a rapid blaze. As if trying to assist them, the rain suddenly eased and the flames licked higher into the grey sky, hungrily devouring its macabre meal.
Numb and half dead, Bailey then found himself and Poranchez frogmarched up the road, with mercenaries both in front and behind them. After a mile or so, the leader spotted what he was looking for. They had been forced to cut their own trail in from their insertion site; a slog of three days, and he had no intention of wasting time cutting another one. Their team would use the same trail to make faster time back out.
Suddenly drawn back to the present by the pain of a gun barrel being jammed against his spine, Bailey forced his feet to pick up the pace. That had all happened a couple of days ago. Since then they had been marched up this never-ending jungle trail, occasionally beaten, tripped, spat at and regularly threatened. He knew now that there were fifteen mercenaries in the group but he only ever had anything to do with a few of them. Most marched a few hundred metres up ahead, or the same kind of distance behind, with three main tormentors keeping an eye on them in the middle.