On the one hand, carrying weapons didn’t exactly marry up with being a honeymooning couple. On the other, abseiling into a place such as this without some form of protection would be potential suicide.
The longer they’d argued, the more it had become clear that to carry no weapons at all would just seem strange. This was wild Africa after all, red in tooth and claw. No one ventured into this kind of terrain without the means to protect themselves.
In the end they’d each opted to bring a P228, plus a couple of magazines. No silencers, of course, for those were the preserve of professional killers and assassins.
Reassured that his pistol hadn’t come loose during the long march in, Jaeger glanced at Narov. She too had been checking her weapon. Though they were supposed to be acting as newly-weds, old habits died hard. The drills had been hammered into them remorselessly over the years, and they couldn’t just stop functioning overnight as the elite warriors that they were.
Jaeger was seven years out of the military. He’d left in part to set up an eco-expeditioning company called Enduro Adventures, a business he’d pretty much abandoned when Luke and Ruth were stolen from him. That had led in turn to the present mission: to get his family and his life back, and very possibly to prevent an incalculable evil.
The light dimmed further and a series of deep, throaty snorts echoed around the enclosed space. The elephants were surging into the cave behind them. It was the prompt that Jaeger and Narov needed to move.
Signalling Narov to do likewise, Jaeger reached down, grabbed a handful of dung and rubbed it up the legs of his plain combat-style trousers, doing the same to his T-shirt and the exposed skin of his arms, neck and legs, before lifting up his T-shirt to do his belly and back. As a final gesture, he rubbed the last of the elephant dung through his recently dyed blonde hair.
The dung had a faint smell of stale urine and fermented leaves, but that was about all he could detect. Yet to an elephant – whose universe was defined first and foremost by its sense of smell – it might make Jaeger appear to be just another harmless pachyderm; a fellow tusker.
That was his hope, anyway.
Jaeger had first learned this trick on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest peak. He’d been on a training exercise with one of the Regiment’s legendary survivalists, who’d explained how it was possible to move through a herd of Cape buffalo if you first rolled yourself head to toe in fresh buffalo dung. He’d proved it to them most powerfully by making each man in the troop – Jaeger included – do exactly that.
Like Cape buffalos, elephants had poor eyesight at anything other than close range. The light from Jaeger and Narov’s head torches was unlikely to bother them. They detected food, predators, sanctuary and danger via their sense of smell, which was second-to-none in the animal world. Their nostrils were positioned on the end of their trunk, and so sensitive was the elephant’s smell that it could detect a water source up to nineteen kilometres away.
They also had an acute sense of hearing, which could detect sounds well outside of the normal human range. In short, if Jaeger and Narov could take on the smell of an elephant and keep largely silent, the herd shouldn’t even know they were here.
They pushed onwards across a flat shelf thick with dry dung, boots kicking up puffs of detritus as they went. Here and there the heaps of old faeces were streaked with splashes of dark green, as if someone had been through flicking daubs of paint around the cave.
Jaeger guessed it had to be guano.
He flicked his head up, his twin beams sweeping the roof high above. Sure enough, clusters of skeletal black figures could be seen hanging upside down from the ceiling. Bats. Fruit bats, to be precise. Thousands and thousands of them. Green slime – their digested fruit droppings; guano – was smeared down the walls.
Nice, Jaeger told himself. They were pushing into a cave plastered from floor to ceiling in faeces.
In the light of Jaeger’s head torch, a tiny pair of orange eyes flickered open. A bat that had been sleeping was suddenly awake. The flare of the Petzl woke more of them now, and a ripple of angry disturbance pulsed across the animals hanging from the roof of the cave.
Unlike most bats, fruit bats – often called megabats – don’t use the echo-location navigation system, in which high-pitched squeaks and squeals are bounced off the walls. Instead, they possess large, bulbous eyes, which enable them to find their way in the twilight of cave systems. Hence they are drawn to the light.
The first megabat broke from its perch – where its claws had been hooked into a cranny in the cave roof, bony wings wrapped around itself like a cloak – and took flight. It plunged earthwards, no doubt mistaking Jaeger’s torch for a beam of sunlight flooding through the cave entrance.
And then a cloud of the things were upon him.
36
Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!
Jaeger felt the first of the megabats cannon into his head, as the dark horde tried to fly down the beam of light. The ceiling was over one hundred feet high, and from that kind of distance the bats had appeared minuscule. Up close, though, they were monsters.
They had a wingspan of up to two metres, and must weigh in at a good two kilos. That kind of weight going at great speed sure hurt, and with their bulging eyes shining an angry red and their gleaming rows of teeth set in long, narrow, bony skulls, they looked positively demonic.
Jaeger was knocked to the floor, as more of the ghostly forms swooped from the heights. He reached up and killed the light with his cupped hands, which also served to shield his head from the blows.
Just as soon as he had doused the light, the bats were gone, drawn instead to the sunlight seeping in through the cave entrance. As they swept out in a massive black-winged storm cloud, the big bull elephant leading the herd trumpeted and flapped his ears angrily. He clearly appreciated the megabats about as much as Jaeger had done.
‘Megachiroptera,’ Narov whispered. ‘Also called the flying fox. You can see why.’
‘Flying wolf, more like.’ Jaeger shook his head in disgust. ‘Definitely not my favourite animal.’
Narov gave a silent laugh. ‘They rely on their keen sense of sight and smell to locate food. Normally it is fruit. Today they obviously thought it was you.’ She sniffed ostentatiously. ‘Though I am surprised. You smell like shit, Blondie.’
‘Ha, ha,’ Jaeger muttered. ‘And you smell truly delectable, of course.’
Blondie. The nickname had been inevitable. With his eyebrows and even his eyelashes dyed peroxide blonde, he was amazed how much his appearance had altered. As disguises went, it was surprisingly effective.
They picked themselves up from the dirt, brushed themselves down and pressed on in silence. Above them, the last ghostly whisperings of the bats died away. The only other noise came from behind now – the steady, ground-shaking beat of a hundred or so elephants pushing ever deeper into the cave.
To one side of the cavern floor ran a dark, sluggish waterway, which vented out of the cave entrance. They climbed over a series of ledges that took them higher than the water by a good few metres. Finally they crested a rise, and a stunning sight unfolded before them.
The river widened out into a massive expanse of water, forming a vast lake beneath Burning Angels mountain. Jaeger’s torch beam couldn’t even reach the far shore. But even more fantastical were the intricate forms that lunged out of the water in bizarre, seemingly frozen animation.
Jaeger stared for several seconds in astonishment, before he realised what exactly it was that they had stumbled upon. It was a petrified jungle – here, the jagged-toothed skeletal forms of giant palm trees thrusting out of the lake at crazed angles; there, a serried rank of hardwood trunks puncturing the water like the pillars of a long-lost Roman temple.