Tracks of the Tiger (5 page)

‘Like on the plane.'

Peter meant the plane they had been forced to jump out of over the Sahara to escape diamond smugglers who wanted to shoot them. They had searched the cargo area for anything that might help them stay alive in the desert. There had been a first aid kit, some water bottles, a knife and food. This time . . .

‘There's nothing here!' Beck exclaimed in disbelief. ‘Not even a first aid kit! Who goes driving in the jungle without a first aid kit?'

Beck was frantically looking under the seats, then in the side door pockets. He soon found an oil-stained roll of canvas wrapped around the jeep's wheel-changing tools. They came tumbling out onto the ground. He couldn't see a use for most of the items, but at least there was a crowbar. One end had the solid grip that fastened onto the wheel nuts. The other end was a flat wedge, like a giant screwdriver. Now, that had to be useful.

One thing there wasn't, though, was a knife. Beck couldn't imagine getting by in the jungle without one. On the other hand, fragments of the windscreen lay all around. One in particular caught his attention. It was almost fifteen centimetres long – a thin, jagged triangle that came to a very sharp point. He carefully picked it up between two fingers, holding it firmly on its flat sides. This was probably the closest he was going to get to a knife.

He leaned into the back of the jeep where they had been sitting, and pressed the tip of the glass into the seat leather. It easily punctured the covering. Beck worked it back and forth and the seat's stuffing burst out of the cut. It was dry and yellow and fluffy.

Peter was looking really anxious. ‘Um, the lava's still getting closer . . . What are you doing?'

‘I'm making a knife. You gather up as much stuffing as you can and put it in our packs. It will act as tinder later on,' Beck explained.

Heat from the lava burned into his back and he blinked trickles of sweat from his eyes. He had to work quickly.

He had now cut off a strip of the leather. He needed two hands for the next bit of the job, which meant using his right hand – and that hurt. But he managed to wrap the leather round and round one end of the glass shard, and tie it off. There was still half the shard's length sticking out. Now he could grip it properly, like a knife, without slicing his hand open.

Unfortunately he didn't have any safe way of carrying it – not without breaking it or giving himself a nasty cut. He opened up one of the pockets of his daysack and dropped it in.

‘The lava's getting
really
close,' Peter pointed out. He had crammed as much stuffing as he could get into both the packs.

‘Right.' Beck could feel it without turning round. The front edge of the lava was maybe two metres away now. He took one last look around, but there really didn't seem to be anything more they could use. They had daysacks, with water bottles and a lot of seat stuffing. They had a knife, of sorts. They had the crowbar. And that was it.

And then he gave Nakula a final check. The force of the crash had pushed the wheel and the dashboard right back against the driver. Nakula's body was pinned in the wreckage. They could probably get him free, but it would be a lot more complicated than just undoing his seat belt. It would take time that they didn't have.

I'm sorry
, he thought.

The air around him was shimmering with heat. A cluster of bushes right next to him suddenly burst into flame and Beck staggered backwards. Peter just managed to prevent him from falling.

Beck picked up his daysack and swung it onto his back. He look around and saw what looked like an animal trail leading away from the crash site. It was a line of slightly less densely packed vegetation, anyway. It was as good a way to go as any.

‘Come on,' he said.

The lava reached the wrecked jeep before Beck and Peter had even gone another ten metres. There was a high-pitched whine and then a violent explosion. A blast of burning air slammed into their backs and knocked them to the ground – though the mass of vegetation absorbed most of the impact. As Beck and Peter picked themselves up, they saw orange flames flickering through the trees and heard the crackling of burning wood and smelled scorched rubber.

Beck sent up a final silent prayer for the soul of Nakula. He wondered what religion the keeper had been. Indonesia was officially Muslim but had a strong Hindu past. He was pretty certain Muslims preferred to bury their dead. Hindus went in for cremation, didn't they? In that case he hoped Nakula was a Hindu. But whatever the man had been, he would surely have understood why they had to leave him. Beck prayed to the God he knew; he prayed silently and quickly – for Nakula, and for the strength to survive themselves.

‘So, now what?' Peter asked quietly.

‘I don't know. Let me think.'

Beck took in their surroundings. He couldn't see the lava but it might still be coming. Hopefully it would cool down before it got much further. A burning smell still forced its way through the damp leaves, and there was the small matter of an enormous exploding volcano a short distance away. They needed to check how that was doing.

The animal trail they had been following had just vanished, dissolving into the foliage – a common experience in the jungle. Dead leaves and vines were thick beneath their feet. Above them the canopy made it as gloomy as an overcast day – they couldn't see the sun or the sky. The surrounding trees and vines trapped the heat and the moisture of the jungle. It would be at least seventy or eighty per cent humidity – one hundred per cent being the point where the air is so saturated, the water starts falling out of it as rain or mist. The air here was so damp that nothing it touched could ever feel completely dry.

Beck looked his friend up and down. Peter's hair was matted and his clothes clung to his body. Beck knew he didn't look any better – probably worse, in fact, thanks to the cut in his arm. They were both sweating, but in this humidity the sweat wouldn't be able to evaporate and would therefore have no cooling effect. And the wound to his arm was only going to get worse. Jungles are like that: everything grows bigger faster in the jungle, and that includes bacteria. An open wound could go septic very quickly indeed. If gangrene set in, as cells of his body died and rotted, his arm could need amputating just to save his life.

‘We've got to get back to civilization,' Beck said. ‘End of.' He looked up at the canopy above them. ‘But first we need to—
Arghh!
'

He had reached up with his right hand to wipe the sweat from his eyes. The cut in his arm had died down to a dull throb, but the movement made it spark with pain again.

‘You need to bandage that,' Peter said decisively. He swung his pack off his back and started to rummage around in it, carefully pushing the seat stuffing to one side.

‘There wasn't a first aid kit,' Beck muttered sourly, but he knew Peter was right. Even if he couldn't bandage it, he could clean it up. He started to look around for anything he could use. Peter's triumphant ‘Ta-da!' made him turn back.

Peter had produced a clean T-shirt from his pack. ‘Mum always packs me a spare,' he explained. ‘Will this do?'

Beck's face creased into a grin. ‘She fusses, but she knows her stuff!' he replied. ‘I can cut it up and make several bandages out of it . . .' He glanced quickly at the shirt's owner. ‘If that's all right with you?'

Peter shrugged. ‘Be my guest. It's only an old school one. If it was my favourite Marmaduke Duke T-shirt then you'd just have to bleed.'

‘I didn't know you liked Marmaduke Duke.'

‘It's a recent thing!' Peter added wryly.

‘OK.' Beck laughed. ‘Anyway, first up I need to put some disinfectant on the cut.'

‘You said there wasn't a first aid kit.'

‘There wasn't' – Beck had seen what he needed – ‘but there is this!'

Every tree in sight was draped with vines. They snaked their way through and around the trunks and interwove with other vines. Beck was after one in particular. Its stem was thick, three or four centimetres, and its leaves were thin and spiky.

‘This is rattan,' Beck explained. He poked about through the leaves – gingerly in case he disturbed something with teeth or a stinger that didn't want to be disturbed. ‘It looks like a vine, but it's actually a palm that
thinks
it's a vine. It has about a hundred and one different uses, and one of them . . . Hah!'

Beck had found a cluster of rusty brown-red berries that clung to a stalk sprouting from the vine. ‘And one of them,' he repeated, ‘is as an antiseptic. It's used a lot in Chinese medicine.'

He picked five or six of the berries, held them in the palm of his hand and pressed his hands together. He felt the berries split and their juices spurt against his skin. Beck rubbed his hands together to work the mangled berries into a red paste, which he wiped onto his right palm.

‘Um – could you roll my sleeve up for me . . . ?'

Peter folded the sleeve up to Beck's shoulder and got his first close-up view of the wound. It was long and jagged but he was glad to see that it seemed quite clean. The skin had been torn roughly by he wasn't sure what, but there was hardly any debris or dirt in the wound. That was a good sign at least.

Beck dabbed the fingers of his left hand into the paste and cautiously wiped it onto the cut.

‘
Ee-ahh!
' His breath hissed between clenched teeth. It stung like an army of ants gnawing into his flesh.

Peter opened his mouth and Beck glared at him. ‘If you say anything your mum would say, like
If it's not hurting it's not working
, then I'm leaving you here.'

Peter closed his mouth again.

‘Now, get some water and pour it on. It'll just start to fester if I leave it in the wound.' He realized he was sounding a little curt. ‘Um, please?'

Peter silently did as he was asked, pouring water up and down Beck's arm out of one of their bottles so that it washed over the wound. It streamed red with lumps of rattan fruit and clotted blood. Next Beck used the glass knife to cut off a broad strip of clean T-shirt and a couple of shorter, thinner strips. Peter wrapped the broad strip around his arm, over the cut, and used the thinner strips to tie it in place.

‘How does that feel?'

‘Much better. Thanks.'

It still ached like anything, but Beck felt better knowing that it was clean and covered. He let his sleeve fall down again and buttoned it up at his wrist.

‘So, what do we do now?' asked Peter.

‘First . . .' Beck studied the nearest tree carefully. Its trunk was sturdy, it wasn't too wide and there were enough branches to provide footholds. ‘I want a look at that volcano. See what we're up against. Could you give me a hand up?'

Peter wrapped the fingers of his hands together and held them out at waist height in a stirrup. Beck put his foot into it and found that he could now reach the first of the tree's branches. After that it wasn't hard just to keep going up. His arm ached but he seemed to be managing.

Beck made his way up through the layers of jungle. For the first six or seven metres it was all bushes and saplings – young trees. Above them was the fruit layer. Hiding away in the confusion of leaves he saw clusters of green bananas, twenty or thirty to a bunch, and the smooth green balls of figs, among others.

This was where the branches began to get thinner and he had to take a bit more care where he put his feet. Every time he moved a foot to a new place, he checked it carefully to see if it would hold his weight. He climbed trees exactly the same way he would climb rocks or cliffs. The human body has four points of contact – two hands, two feet. Beck had always been told to keep three of those steady and only ever move one foot or one hand at a time. That way you always kept yourself supported, even if one point of contact failed.

Up and up. After the fruit was the layer of palms and ferns and bamboos, all covered with lichens and mosses. And finally there was the tree canopy. It was a solid blanket of leaves strung together by liana vines that provided natural bridges for the animal life up here. And it all took its energy from the sun, which powered the ecosystem of the rainforest. Beck emerged, blinking, into the sunlight.

He felt like a small animal poking his head out of the ground. The jungle canopy was a green plain that stretched away on all sides, a mad mixture of shapes and shades of green. He didn't have time to admire it. Mount Lasa occupied all his attention.

It was about a mile away. At this time of day – mid afternoon – Beck knew the sun would be halfway between the north and the west. The sun was behind his left shoulder and he was looking straight at Lasa, which he knew was to the north. Streaks of glowing red lava ran down its sides, but the most impressive sight was the smoke. It was a black, sulphurous, fan-shaped cloud that billowed up from the peak. It rose up and up until Beck's neck ached trying to see how high it went and he almost fell backwards out of the tree. It looked more solid than the mountain – like some hideous growth, a massive organism that had burst out of the earth.

Towards the top it leaned over, blown towards the east. Beck let out a cautious sigh of relief. Medan was to the north-east. If the smoke and ash from the volcano was heading due east, it would miss the city and Peter's family.

It still lay between them, though.

Beck took a final look around but there was no sign of civilization – no hint of the hand of man. They really were on their own. In the middle of the jungle.

Thoughtfully he started to climb back down again.

Peter was waiting for him at the base of the tree. Beck sat down next to him and reported what he had seen.