The sound had stopped. The boys looked at one another uncertainly, then at Toma. They turned in the direction his weapon was pointing. The menacing darkness of the jungle, were unknown and unknowable. On Toma’s forehead a tiny red dot, a pin-prick of crimson light. He couldn’t see it, wasn’t aware of it. The other boys saw it. Moved away from him, quietly as they could, towards the undergrowth. “Hey, where you all going, what are you…” he didn’t finish his sentence.
A strange hissing sound, then a whoosh and a crackle. Toma exploded into a ball of bright white light before their eyes, his scream engulfed in the flames, echoing in the night sky even after his body had been incinerated. The other boys watched, horrified, stunned. They had seen weapons, seen war wounds, seen limbs hacked from corpses, but they had also seen their enemy. Knew his face before he went on the attack. The thin hissing sound began again, the build up. This time the boys’ only reaction was panic, running for their lives into the trees. Too late. Ed Garner had decided to experiment with the settings on the new weapon. He broadened the width of the plasma pulse. A diameter of 25 metres, a wider flash, this time it lit up the jungle around him, a frozen moment of bright white light, like a still from a black and white film, the bodies of young boys caught mid-flight. Then darkness.
There was whimpering to his left, two voices. He switched to night vision. Two forms cowering behind the trunk of a tree. Children, he thought in disgust, raising his side arm and emptying three bullets into each of them. He made a mental note of the distance they were from him when he fired. Something for Centurion to work on, apparent ineffectiveness on the left-hand parabola. He scanned the jungle to the left and to the right. No other living forms. Just corpses.
He turned to his troops and signalled for them to move out. Didn’t say a word. No time. Their stop-start march through the jungle was beginning again.
High in the treetops Jumo breathed deeply. The hands he used to hold onto the branches were shaking uncontrollably, causing the leaves to rustle, the sound of a gentle breeze. He watched the shadowy forms below moving stealthily along the path. They didn’t look like any soldiers he had seen before. They were bigger, each one bulked out by a large pack on his back, the equipment he carried with him. And the way they moved, the stop-start motion, always wary, scanning the path ahead for trip wires, mines, enemy soldiers.
Jumo shimmied down the tree. He knew another way back to the camp. A different path that would enable him to overtake them. These were his forests and he could find his way faster than any other soldier, through the undergrowth and back to the camp, warn the general what was coming his way.
50
It was still dark when Jack awoke. The dawn was still a distant sliver of pale grey on the horizon, an idea taking shape, silent and unborn, not yet the clamouring chorus that greeted first light. Two hundred miles to the east, his father was already awake, inspecting the helicopter Spike had organised for him. He didn’t much like the look of it, if it had been made out of Lego it would have inspired more confidence. He had checked the tracking device twice in the night, an imprecise machine, almost out of range, the signal fluctuating and fading, hardly there at all, but he had nothing else to go on. Once they were in the air he should be able to home in on it, get closer to it, find his son.
Jack shifted on the table, back aching, side aching, throat parched. The table creaked. He let his eyes get used to the dim light. A shadowy form nearby, the boy guarding the door. He had no way of knowing what time it was. If there was a moment to escape, this was it. The boy stirred, the sound of the table creaking, interrupting his sleep.
“You wouldn’t mind getting me a glass of water would you old chap?” Jack said.
“Huh?” the boy replied, still half asleep.
“Never mind.” Jack said.
Further down the corridor, Jumo banged heavily on the General’s door. Any fear he would normally have felt at disturbing the man in his sleep had been swamped by the adrenaline rushing through his blood. The door opened a crack. One of his Clement’s personal bodyguards peered warily through.
“What do you want boy?” He hissed through stained yellow teeth.
“Please sah, the General, I must report back.” The bodyguard took in the wild-eyed expression, the dilated pupils, the way the boy was out of breath and shaking.
“What have you taken, been on the jungle brew? Chewing cocoa leaves? Whatever prank this is, it is not worth it. You should not always do what the older boys tell you to do. Nobody disturbs the General’s sleep.” He closed the door, disappeared from view.
Jumo tapped at the door again, more insistently. “Sah, please sah, very important.”
The guard opened the door, took a swipe at him.
“I tell you once, I will not tell you again. Get out of here. You cannot disturb the general’s sleep.” Jumo ducked his punch and backed away towards the wall. The bodyguard stepped into the corridor, shaking his fist angrily and pulling a baton from his belt.
“Get out of here, before I give you a proper beating.”
The last time he had allowed someone to interrupt Clement’s sleep it was him that had received the beating. He watched in satisfaction as Jumo scuttled off down the corridor.
Jumo shook his head at the man’s stupidity. The guard was as stupid at Toma, waving his gun at what he thought was a gorilla in the night. Why did the General employ such stupid people? He stood outside, looking up at the night sky, the first glimmer of grey dawn now visible above the canopy. This was a time to stand up for himself, not to run away. His mind made up he charged back into the house, up the stairs and flung himself at the General’s door. Hammered his fists as hard as could, called out “Emergency! Emergency!” He was sick of other people deciding what was and wasn’t the right thing to do.
Gavin McCallister had reached the General’s runway, the broad strip of grey cut through the jungle like a concrete river. Over a mile long, it was an impressive and somehow ominous sight. The effort and expense required to construct and maintain it was a supreme act of will. For one brief moment, Gavin wondered whether the bosses at MI6 had underestimated their man. Anyone who could organise a building project on this scale in the heart of the jungle was likely to be able to organise an army.
He signalled to the men to stay down. There would be some kind of surveillance. Even if it was just a pair of sleepy soldiers in the ramshackle wooden hut at the far end.
“Right boys, I want these charges evenly spaced. We can stay on this side of the runway. The main purpose of these explosions is to simulate a sustained rocket attack, so we need them the last as long as possible. According to the GPS, the camp is only a couple of miles away and there’s a track to it. If you’re quick and we finish this before first light we can take the track. If not, we’ll be cutting a path through the undergrowth. Questions?”
His men shook their heads, already unhitching the rucksacks that contained the explosives, checking the remote detonators.
“Good, we’ll do this in pairs. One person to set the charges and another to keep look out.”
Six kilometres away, close to the camp, Ed Garner wiped his brow with his sleeve. It was a hot and humid night, the backpacks heavy and unwieldy. The sweat that formed on his forehead kept running into his eyes, catching the end of his lashes. It was an arduous trek, slow going, the constant threat of landmines at the back of his mind and dawn not far off.