Mission Jaguar Read online

  There was an absorbent sweat scarf around his neck and on his feet were jungle boots made of tough leather. High sides supported his ankles and protected from snake bites and the jabs of thorns and branches, and they also had vents to let any water out and to stop his feet rotting away beneath him in their own personal sweaty steam bath.

  In his backpack was everything he could think of that he and his sister might need. A machete hung at his belt, which he had personally sharpened.

  The helicopter put its nose up and slowed, and Arabella pointed out the thing they had been heading for, the mission’s starting point that she had picked out from satellite images and geological surveys: a limestone ridge that rose up above the level of the leaves.

  The pilot gently levelled out just above the ridge’s highest point. They were higher than the treetops but still there was barely any stone visible beneath a matted mass of vines and leaves, dead and alive, buffeted like the trees around them by the blast of the rotor. It took an act of faith to believe there was anything solid beneath it. Beck gave Arabella a final nod, and unbuckled and stood up, holding onto the top of the door while he stepped out onto the skid. Then he jumped the last half metre onto the top of the ridge. He crouched down while the engine roared, the buffeting wind doubled in strength and the helicopter lifted away.

  Beck gave them a final wave as the chopper turned to head back to Guatemala City, and he started on the first part of the mission which was to climb down from the ridge.

  It had begun.

  Chapter Seventeen

  One day earlier …

  “Uh, yeah, hi, is that Kim Bretscher? Uh — you don’t know me …”

  Beck hated using the phone. It should be so easy — you picked it up, you talked — but there was something about not being able to see the other person’s face, not being able to read the cues of expression and body language, that just reduced him to a stammering wreck. Beck was also speaking to a complete stranger, dialling the number in faith that Dian had written on James’s pad. That made it even more awkward.

  It sounded like Dian and James had had a long and interesting conversation, in writing, entirely silent to Ric Valcarcel’s hired goon waiting a short distance away. It had all been James finding out about Dian — she still had no idea why James was really there. And a lot of stuff had come out of it.

  Static crackle seemed to whistle down the invisible connections by wire and satellite between the apartment in Guatemala City and a home five thousand kilometres away, somewhere in Oregon, USA.

  “Kid.” The voice of the woman at the other end was tired and weary. “You sound too young to be a salesman and that’s the only reason I’m not hanging up …”

  “Okay! I’m a friend of …” He hated to use the name, but technically it was correct. “Anita Valcarcel …”

  And suddenly the woman at the other end, who had raised Dian from a baby, was all ears.

  Still stammering a little, but with increasing confidence, Beck passed on the message from James of exactly how the escape attempt had gone wrong. When he mentioned the volcano he heard a distinct intake of breath, over the simmering rage he felt himself. That was the moment he and Kim became of one mind.

  “Kid — you got a name? Beck? Okay — Beck, I don’t know who you are, but if you … if there’s anything you can do, anything at all to get her out of that place, you have to do it. She is desperate to get away. Desperate. Apart from the fact that he’s the kind of guy who will abandon his daughter on the side of a volcano to teach her a lesson, and who monitors every phone call, there is something seriously screwy about the Jaguar set-up. Add that to the kind of people he hangs out with, and it’s definitely not a safe place for anyone, let alone a young girl.”

  Beck frowned.

  “What’s screwy?”

  “Nothing that … I can prove. I just have bits and pieces. For starters, Ric Valcarcel firmly believes that the days of the western world are over. Europe, North America — slowly dying, like dinosaurs, and when the collapse comes, it’ll be quick and unstoppable. The future for him is Central and South America. Vibrant economies, huge natural resources, hard-working populations. Sounds harmless, doesn’t it?”

  Beck listened even more carefully.

  She continued. “But it’s fragile. Where there is growth there is danger of exploitation. All over the continent there are still the old warlords, the old gangsters — they never went away, and they’re having a comeback. I kept seeing evidence of it around Ric and when he learned what I was doing, I was out on my ear. I’d only stayed until then because someone had to look after Anita. We’re talking South American radicals combined with North American technology and skills.”

  She paused. “And can you think of anyone who effortlessly moves between north and south? Who has business interests in both areas that just happen to combine in a country that is nicely positioned halfway between them?”

  Beck thought.

  “You think …”

  “Kid, I don’t think anything. I only think what I can prove. Don’t think he hasn’t been investigated, but there’s a difference between an investigation, all nicely planned and scheduled in advance, and a raid, which just happens with no warning. That would be a whole different outcome, I can assure you.”

  She gave another sigh, before Beck could get the right words together to respond.

  “But there’s not a single thing I can prove, and not a single thing I can do about it — except try to help Anita get free of it all — for her sake, for her future. For her happiness above all.”

  There was silence then a panic to her tone.

  “I have said too much. I don’t even know you. I am sorry. I must go now.”

  And with that, the line went dead.

  Beck slowly replaced the receiver at his end and gazed at the wall.

  “So must I,” he whispered. “So must I.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The sounds and the hot, damp smell of the jungle were all around him.

  The top of the ridge was as wide as a couple of tables, and it was hard to see beneath the vegetation what was stone and what was just air. The tropical heat and humidity of Guatemala meant that if something could grow, it did. So, he couldn’t just walk down to the base of the jungle ridge.

  It took half an hour to find his way down, picking his way carefully, kicking his feet into the rock face to feel for footholds and handholds. The only advantage of making plenty of noise and vibration was that anything lurking in the undergrowth and the nooks and crannies — snakes, spiders, bats — would get the message that something big was coming through and hopefully go away before he got there.

  By the time he reached level ground, sweat was pouring down his face and soaking into his clothes. He stopped for a good swig of water, then checked the compass hanging at his belt — a compact dial in sturdy rubber casing. The bearing he wanted was three hundred and forty degrees, close to north by north west.

  Beck had plenty of cause to check the compass again and again over the next few hours. You couldn’t just walk in a straight line in the jungle — it had other ideas, and what the jungle wanted, it generally got. It was home to over five thousand species of plants, and it felt like most of them seemed to be in his way. He was like a small organism being swept along in the blood stream of a mighty animal. You just had to work with the jungle rather than against it. If the undergrowth grew thickly together, you went around it, not through.

  The ground beneath was wet and slippery with generations of slick, mulching leaves, quietly rotting and turning to slime in the clammy jungle air. He quickly realised that this was secondary jungle, dense and gnarly. Primary jungle had grown on its own over thousands of years, and everything had found its own balance. Then along came humans, in this case the Mayans, who cut everything down and used the land for agriculture. Which was fine, while it lasted. But then the Mayans went away and the jungle came back twice as big and nasty with nothing to stop it.

  But Beck knew the tricks. He had learned them when he had stayed with his parents in Borneo, and he had had plenty of chance to practice them since then — with Christina and Marco in Colombia, with Peter in Indonesia, and most recently with Ju-Long in China. He had also carefully gone back through his memories, and read up on the Guatemalan jungle in particular, to put himself in the zone. As Beck understood: knowing your environment always increases your survival chances.

  The jungle was never going to be a solid mass. There were always places that were easier to get through than others. Often an animal had done the hard work first of all, which made it slightly less difficult for the next animal, and then the one after that, and so on until you had a well-defined animal trail going through the undergrowth that was easier to follow. And the jungle floor rose and fell, which you couldn’t always see clearly, but the trained eye knew the signs to look for in the foliage.

  Beck cut a stick with the machete and made sure that when he pushed into a cluster of underbrush or moved a thickly leaved branch aside, it was the stick that went first. And Beck knew that there were eight known types of poisonous reptile in the Guatemalan jungle — so using the stick like this was smart work.

  And those eight types of snake only scratched the surface of the several hundred other animal species around him, which included the highest population of jaguars anywhere in the world. The last time Beck had seen a jaguar, it had been crushing the skull of the corrupt Colombian policeman Ramirez with its powerful jaws. So, Beck knew what a jaguar could do and he had no intention of getting on the wrong side of one.

  Just as he had been thinking all this, something blurred in the corner of his vision. Just the barest hint of a sleek, muscular body. But it couldn’t be. Surely he had jaguars on the mind — but it was enough to make him whip around.

  But Beck had been standing on a layer of moist, rotting leaves, and the sudden motion made his feet slip out from under him.

  “Whoah!”

  He reached out instinctively to grab for the nearest tree.

  And then he saw the danger.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Beck only just snatched his hand away in time.

  The tall, thin trunk of the tree he had almost grabbed was literally covered with thousands of needle-like spikes, each one a couple of inches long. There wasn’t a square centimetre of smooth bark anywhere on it.

  If he had grabbed it, the spikes would have shredded his fingers.

  He landed on his shoulder and backside, thumping into the mulch with a muffled thud. Without a pause he scrambled back to his feet, staring in the direction he thought he had seen the movement. He kept his back to the spike-studded tree so that at least there was something solid behind him.

  But even though he strained his eyes into the undergrowth, he could see nothing.

  Not that he would have done. Maybe people didn’t realise it if they just saw a jaguar in the zoo, but the predator’s spots were the perfect camouflage for the dappled shadows of the jungle. It was designed by nature to blend in, and nature never skimped on its designs.

  But he could see nothing, and he shook the image from his brain and told himself he surely had imagined it. If there was a jaguar out there, either he would have found out by now, the hard way, or he wouldn’t even see it. There wasn’t much in between when it came to the ultimate stealth predators.

  “It’s just nerves,” he told himself. “Get a grip, Beck.” Then he turned his attention to the other thing — the thing that really had almost caused him a lot of damage. He studied the trunkful of spikes on the tree.

  “Note to self,” he muttered. “Avoid these dudes!”

  The tree could be an extremely dangerous surprise for the unwary traveller but it did have an unexpected gift to offer too — which was why the locals called it the ‘give-and-take tree’. Beck pulled out his machete and used the flat of the blade to knock away an area of the thorns, then used the sharp edge to cut away the bark underneath.

  The inner bark was an excellent natural painkiller. He hoped to avoid any situation where he might need to kill pain, but since the jungle had provided this source of it, he knew he should take some with him.

  From the ridge, it took three hours to reach his destination, pacing himself with a pause for a drink every twenty minutes.

  Finally he had reached the river, forewarned by the increased daylight through the trees, and then the sound of water rushing and gurgling over boulders. It was five or six metres wide, and the water was clean and fast flowing. The trees came right to the edge. Now he could follow the river, he no longer needed the compass.

  Soon after, the river dropped away in a waterfall into the giant natural hollow that was the home of Jaguar Studios.

  The lip of the limestone bowl was bare rock and no trees grew there. Before he ventured any further, he gouged up a handful of dirt from the ground and smeared it over his face. A big splodge on one side, a couple of finger streaks on the other, specks dabbled on his forehead.

  It wasn’t a case of trying to darken up but to break up the natural symmetry of his face. The human brain is cued to spot familiar shapes, like a face — two eyes, a nose, a mouth — which is why people see them in clouds or rocks or on food.

  Distorting the lines like this was the most effective way of concealment and camouflage.

  Then, and only then, he dropped down onto his front and crawled forward, to peer over the edge. He pulled a pair of compact sport binoculars from a pouch on his belt — cased in rubber, water- and shockproof — and swept his gaze over the bowl.

  The ground twenty metres below was a continuation of the jungle. Below him, the river had carved out a frothing pool in the limestone that wound its way through the trees and out into the estate.

  From up here he could see where the centre of the bowl had been cleared away.

  There was the modern complex of buildings that were the studios and Ric Valcarcel’s home, dotted around the jaguar temple James had mentioned. Beck wondered what a jaguar would make of someone like Valcarcel. Would it approve, one fearsome creature to another? Or would it despise Ric for picking on the weak when he didn’t need to? Jaguars hunted to survive, not out of any need to control. Jaguars don’t manipulate or trap. They protect and nurture their young and teach them the true ways of the forest.

  No. The jaguar and Ric were very different beasts, for sure.

  The stone of the cliff was yellow-grey and felt smooth to the touch, though the rock face was jagged and broken. James had said the rock was mostly clear of vegetation, and he had been almost right — it was too steep for much to grow on. But vines and roots dangled down it, reaching almost to the ground, in places clustered so thick that they obscured the cliff.

  And that was what Beck wanted.

  He was dressed for the jungle, so he would stand out against a bare limestone surface. He withdrew into the trees and made his way around the bowl until he came to a place where the matted dangling vines provided him with the perfect backdrop.

  He opened up his backpack and pulled out the coiled thirty metres of climbing rope. Then he looped one end around the tree nearest the edge with a bowline knot, and threw the rest of it out over the edge.

  Ready to go!

  Chapter Twenty

  A helicopter swooped low and Beck ducked as the downwash buffeted the trees around him.

  He lurked in the belt of forest that lay between the Jaguar estate and the cliff. Five minutes earlier and the helicopter crew might have seen him climbing down. But it wasn’t looking for him. The descending pitch of the engine noise told him it was coming in to land. He made his way cautiously forward and watched it settle down on the landing pad.

  He had the layout of the estate memorised, from James’s description and from Arabella’s satellite photos. Right next to the pad was the hangar which James had said held Ric Valcarcel’s private chopper. Tarmacked tracks led away from the pad in two directions — one towards the residence area and the studios, and one straight to the nearby warehouse that was the stores.

  A golf cart was trundling down from the stores now.

  The helicopter was smartly painted and white letters down the side read ‘Electrónica de Sonido’, in a curly script that was also probably the company logo. Beck’s basic grasp of Spanish translated it as ‘sound electronics’. Well, Jaguar’s music and movie studios were known to be absolutely state of the art with the latest, most expensive equipment. Valcarcel must do a lot of ‘trade’ in the electronics business, Beck mused.

  Some men hurried forward, ducking down, and began to unload boxes from the cabin onto the golf buggy, while another checked things off on a clipboard. The helicopter didn’t power down and the crew didn’t get out. The unloading took no more than five minutes, while the rotor kept running. Finally it revved up and lifted back into the air, while the buggy set off back to the warehouse.

  Okay, so that was that. Now to rendezvous with James and Al. Beck withdrew into the forest belt and began to make his way around the edge of the estate.

  It was cooler than the jungle he had landed in, because the clear area of the estate just a few metres away meant that the air was freer to circulate. But that was only relative — it was still blinkin’ warm — and the plant growth itself was just as challenging so Beck had to pick his way carefully.

  In the jungle, if you saw a way ahead then you took it because there might not be any other. Here, Beck was acutely aware he was a trespasser, so he had to keep out of sight of anyone on the estate, and he had to stay ultra-vigilant at all times.

  James had said there weren’t guards.

  The biggest security was around the stores and all their expensive equipment. Apart from that, Valcarcel just worked on the basis that he was surrounded by miles and miles of jungle, so no one would be coming in or out except by helicopter. But that didn’t mean there weren’t people around. It would be game over if he bumped into someone taking a cigarette break behind a tree.