Wildfire (26 page)

Paulo waited, grumbling to himself in his native Spanish. He wasn’t too squeamish about wildlife, but this spider wasn’t exactly his first choice of company in a confined space. Its body was dark and torpedo-shaped and marked with fine yellow flecks. Its legs were as long as Paulo’s fingers and sported yellow bands. They shifted and fidgeted and Paulo imagined hypodermic needles ready to offload poison. Not that it would really be poisonous, of course. Not in a TV game show; Paulo knew that. He just had to keep telling himself.

‘Sorry, Paulo,’ called the technician. ‘This is going to take longer than we thought. Make yourself comfortable.’

‘Looks like we’re stuck with each other,’ Paulo told the spider wryly. ‘Got any yarns you’d like to spin while we wait?’

Alex meanwhile was also crawling – even more uncomfortably. He was on his hands and knees in a trench that had been turned into a miniature swamp, complete with weeds and leeches – and an authentically rank smell. As Alex moved along he felt the
bottom for the tell-tale hard edges of a yellow star. Actually, although the trench was most people’s idea of hell, Alex didn’t find it too unpleasant. It reminded him of stories his father had told him. Alex’s dad was in the SAS, and survival lore – along with deliciously hair-raising stories of SAS selection – had been as natural a part of Alex’s upbringing and education as football and double maths.

Alex’s fingers found a target under the mud and he yanked it up, pulling it free of the weeds. The mud slurped thickly and released a pungent gust of gas – a clammy, rotting smell that caught the back of Alex’s throat and made him gag. He paused and closed his eyes tightly, willing the nausea to pass. His dad had once told him how he had had to crawl through a sewer on a covert mission in Colombia – or maybe it was after a night on the tiles in Glasgow? Either way, Alex told himself he would have to be prepared for anything if he was to follow in his father’s footsteps.

The mud was up to his shoulders and hips at this point and felt like thick warm slurry inside his T-shirt and shorts, but Alex looked on the bright side: at least
it kept the mosquitoes away. He paused and slicked some of the mud over his face and neck like camouflage cream. This would be heaven if I was a hippo, he thought.

A short time later, the fifth member of the team, Amber, was wading chest-deep in a lake a few hundred metres away, making her way towards a clump of reeds where she could see a star target. Fronds of water weed brushed against her bare legs and occasionally she felt something more solid slither past, but that might have been her imagination. She was wear
ing
her walking boots, so she felt fairly well protected. On the whole she was finding the games good fun. The lake formed an open clearing in the heart of the jungle, and Amber was enjoying being out in the sun, her black skin soaking up the rays greedily. It was the first time she’d seen the sun since Alpha Force had arrived in the rainforest the day before. So far they’d stayed under the immense canopy of trees; even at high noon it was like a dark, damp underworld. The green light filtering in shifting patterns through the leaves had reminded her of scuba-diving in the gloom
of the ocean floor. Now she felt as if she had swum up and broken through the surface.

Water was a natural habitat for Amber. She was as much at home
on
water as
in
it. Her parents had been software billionaires and had owned several yachts. As well as being an expert sailor, she was proficient at all water sports, skiing, horse riding and archery,. After her parents had died in a plane crash, Amber had discovered that they were a good deal more adventurous than she had ever imagined. Secretly they had put their skills and wealth to good use, exposing human rights abuses and smuggling film from oppressive regimes to newsrooms around the world. Amber had led a sheltered rich-kid existence up till then. Now she, like Alex, was determined to uphold the family tradition.

As Amber untangled the first target, she caught sight of Hex at the water’s edge. He must have finished his game. Let’s see how alert he is, she thought. With a flick of the wrist she frisbeed the target out of the lake.

Hex caught it in a smooth movement. ‘You throw like a girl,’ he shouted.

‘Yeah? You catch like a geek,’ said Amber, flashing him a grin.

Tracey, a production executive in her early twenties, was standing on the bank waving her wide-brimmed bush hat. ‘Over there, Amber.’

Amber looked round. There was a second yellow star on a rock a little way off. She set off towards it, wading purposefully.

On the bank, Hex tapped Tracey on the shoulder. ‘Excuse me, but have you seen that?’ He pointed to a clump of reeds. A crocodile skulked low in the water, its rough back glistening in the sun like a wet log. Its half-closed eye was just visible above the water line.

Tracey looked up from her clipboard and peered at Hex over the top of her rimless glasses. ‘It’s not a real crocodile,’ she said in a laboriously patient tone, as if talking to a small child rather than a teenager with genius-level IQ. She pointed to other dark shapes in the water. ‘Look – there, and there. They’re just props. Plastic.’

‘I can see those other ones are plastic,’ replied Hex. ‘But I just came up from that direction and there wasn’t a crocodile there then.’

Tracey gave him a condescending smile. ‘They’re plastic,’ she said again. ‘That means they float, and they tend to drift around a bit once people wade in and start stirring up the water.’

Another target came whizzing across. Hex caught it on reflex, even though he hadn’t been looking. As he turned, he noticed a couple of men in green ranger uniforms standing near the water’s edge holding what looked like tranquillizer guns.

‘Smart catch,’ said Tracey.

‘Are they for authenticity too?’ said Hex, nodding towards the men.

‘Yes, we’re going to use them during filming. It makes the audience think it’s all for real, you see.’

Amber was wading towards a third star target when she stopped abruptly.

Hex instantly tensed. Something caused the hairs on his neck to prickle. ‘Amber, you OK?’ he called.

‘My foot’s stuck in some weed,’ replied Amber. Hex could see her shoulders jerk as she pulled hard. But she didn’t move. ‘Darn,’ she muttered. ‘Must be caught on my boot.’ She jerked her foot again, harder.

Hex’s uneasy feeling hadn’t gone away. He looked
over to the crocodile again. It looked much the same as it had before. Or did it? Hex had an excellent eye for detail. He could explore high security computer systems and erase all trace that he had been there. He had learned to trust his instincts.
Think
, he told himself.
What’s wrong with this picture?

He looked at the other crocs. They were just as low in the water as the one he’d noticed, moving from side to side in the ripples created as Amber tried to pull her foot free.

And then Hex realized what was wrong. All the other crocodiles were moving. But this one was dead still. It was real! It had sensed that Amber was in trouble and was stalking her.

In the water, Amber swore again, took a deep breath and sank below the surface.

Hex yelled at the top of his lungs, ‘Amber, no!’

In the murky depths, Amber didn’t hear him. She couldn’t see a thing either. She had kicked up so much silt that the water was like vegetable soup. She groped around her ankle and felt the rope-like weed that had snared her foot. Her fingers explored it and she found a thick section, with some thinner fronds that had
caught on the hooks of her boots. She was stuck fast.

Breathing out hard, Amber surfaced. The first thing she heard was Hex shouting furiously: ‘Amber! Get out of the water! There’s a crocodile!’

Amber’s head shot round. She saw Hex waving his arms frantically, while Tracey was rooted to the spot. Next to them, the rangers were raising tranquillizer guns to their shoulders. Her heart pounding, Amber followed the line of the barrels and saw a dark shape, low in the water. She yanked her foot hard but it remained tethered to the bottom. She was helpless – an animal in a trap.

Tracey was crying, her voice hysterical. ‘It’s no good. The guns aren’t loaded yet!’

‘It’s my boot,’ shrieked Amber. ‘I’m going to try to get it off.’

Hex saw Amber sink down again. Keeping her head above the water, she was feeling for her bootlaces. Her face was a mask of desperation as she scrabbled to undo them. Hex knew the type of boots Amber wore. They were built for strenuous outdoor hiking, durable as Kevlar and tightly fixed around her ankles with criss-crossed lacing. When the others were waiting for
Amber to get ready, they often complained about how fiddly those boots were. ‘That’s the whole point,’ she always said. ‘I know they aren’t going to come off in a hurry.’

Now those reliable boots had become a death trap.

‘The croc’s gone,’ said one of the rangers. He lowered his gun warily.

‘It’s underwater somewhere,’ said the other ranger.

Amber’s fingers must have worked like lightning. She was free of her boot and powering towards them in a strong front crawl.

‘Go, Amber, go!’ shrilled Tracey. She was jumping up and down in almost a cartoon parody of panic.

With a hungry crocodile in the water behind her, Amber needed no encouragement. She hit the lake edge, and all eyes were on her as she splashed through the reeds and out onto the shore. Weals showed bright red on her dark skin where her leg had been cut into by the cable-hard weeds. She scrabbled across the mud and collapsed at Hex’s feet, gasping.

‘Where is it … ?’

Tracey stepped closer to the water’s edge and peered down. ‘It’s gone,’ she said. She turned and looked
back at them with a smile. ‘Vanished. We must have scared it off.’

Realization hit Hex like a thunderbolt. He moved back, dragging Amber with him. ‘Get away from the edge!’ he shrieked. ‘Get away!’

Tracey turned, puzzled. At that moment the water beside her exploded as the crocodile erupted from the lake like a missile. Hex saw the great hinged jaws outlined in a spray of water. It was a sight to inspire shock and awe: a gaping prehistoric mouth filled with uneven reptile fangs. It was a frozen fragment of time, an uncanny glimpse into a Jurassic morning.

Adrenaline made Hex move like Max Payne in bullet time. He seized one of the useless tranquillizer guns. Swinging it directly over his head like a kendo stick, he brought it down with all his strength. The blow landed solidly on the soft part of the crocodile’s nose. The reptile twisted round, still with a fixed expression of cold-blooded glee, and hit the water with a heavy splash.

‘Run!’ yelled Hex. This time nobody bothered to ask questions. As one, the party raced for the tree line. Hex knew that the croc might possibly follow them
onto the lake shore, but one glance back told him that it had had enough. It was heading back towards the centre of the lake.

Then they stood, leaning on trees, panting and gasping, as they got their breath back. Tracey was on all fours, her stomach heaving in and out like bellows, her eyes wide and horrified.

Amber fell to her knees and then rolled onto her backside. ‘Ow, my foot,’ she yelped, sitting up and inspecting her bare sole. ‘I’ve trodden on something I shouldn’t have.’

One of the rangers looked at her. ‘I thought you’d had it there, girl.’

Hex stretched out flat on the ground and let out a long sigh. ‘It wasn’t Amber it wanted after all. It was more interested in the people standing on the shore.’

‘I feel quite offended,’ said Amber, laughing in sheer relief. ‘What is it? Don’t I look tasty? Not enough fat on me, or what?’

‘Oh my God,’ said Tracey to Hex. ‘You just saved our lives.’

‘Yeah … ‘ Amber looked at him, shaking her head slowly. ‘How did you know to do that?’

‘I thought I’d better learn a martial art so I took advantage of a cut-price, fourteen-day holiday at the Shaolin Temple,’ said Hex.

Amber gave him her sternest look.

Hex propped himself up on his elbow and grinned.

‘OK, I saw it in a game.’

They were all quiet for a moment. Then Amber said brightly, ‘Well, the next game is to find my lost boot. Any volunteers?’

CHRIS RYAN joined the SAS in 1984 and has been involved in numerous operations with the Regiment. During the first Gulf War he was the only member of an eight-man team to escape from Iraq, three colleagues being killed and four captured. It was the longest escape and evasion in the history of the SAS. For this he was awarded the Military Medal. He wrote about his remarkable escape in
The One Who Got Away
(1995), which was also adapted for screen.

He left the SAS in 1994 and is now the author of many bestselling thrillers for adults, as well as the
Alpha Force
series for younger readers. His work in security takes him around the world and he has also appeared in a number of television series, including
Hunting Chris Ryan
, in which his escape and evasion skills were demonstrated to the max, and
Pushed to the Limit
, in which Chris put ordinary British families through a series of challenges. More recently, he appeared in
Terror Alert
on Sky TV, demonstrating his skills in a range of different scenarios.

Wildfire
is the second title in a new series of thrillers for younger readers:
Code Red
adventures.