Daring Dooz (The Implosion Trilogy (Book 2)) (26 page)

Chapter 60

Despite
Jim’s worries that some of the more
shortsighted
caimans might mistake their dugout canoe for a tasty bit of skirt, they arrived
safely back at the village.

It seemed everyone
was waiting at the pier, shouting and waving. Hamish stood at the front of the
crowd with a huge smile on his face.

Mrs
Hathaway stood up and shouted, ‘What’s all
this
about?’

‘We were
all theer tae see yoos,’ said Hamish, as he helped the trio out of the canoe.

‘All
where
?’

As the
crowd thronged around Mrs Hathaway, Mick and Jim, and they trailed slowly back
to the village, Hamish explained that, once word got around about the
challenge, everyone headed to the top of the waterfall, and had hidden in the
jungle to watch.

‘But you
didn't come and help us when we got stuck,’ said Jim, trying as unobtrusively
as possible to give his ravaged groin a comforting stroke.

‘Hey!’ said
Hamish. ‘Gerra grip pal! We’re talking about the wee Enfield Bin Lady here. We
knew she’d play a brammer.’

‘But
I
did quite a bit,’ said Jim feeling rather
left out.

Hamish
explained that that fact
had
been
noticed, particularly by some of the younger women in the tribe.

‘Ye could
be in fa’ a wee bit of fun taneet!’ said Hamish digging Jim in the ribs and alternately
raising and lowering his eyebrows.

This, as
far as Jim was concerned, was Sod’s Law in overdrive. Half a dozen beautiful
girls would be begging for his favours, and all he had to offer was something
that looked like two badly squashed beetroot and a decomposing carrot.

Mick had
tuned in to the conversation. He would not easily forget the phenomenal speed
with which Jim had constructed the Mick-mobile.

‘Heaven’s
to Betsey, James,’ he said, placing his arm around Jim’s shoulders.

‘What
rotten luck! Still, your old pal-aroony, Micky-Boy is prepared to step into the
breach on your behalf. You know me, one pull on the rip cord and the old
two-stroke fires up, ready for action.’

In reality,
Mick realised Jim
had
saved the day,
and Jim realised that, given his prodigious levels of Viagra consumption, Mick
was on the brag, yet again. So, as with all Mick and Jim’s tiffs, it was over
almost as soon as the stirring started.

Mrs Hathaway
slipped quietly away from the revelries to call Giles with the details of Challenge
Three.

Needless to
say, he was ecstatic, but Mrs Hathaway soon got down to basics.

‘Challenge
Four?’

‘Came with
Challenge Three - separate envelope.’

‘Oh, Hamish
must be hanging on to it.’

‘Hamish? Who
the
hell
is Hamish?’

‘It’s a
complicated story, Giles - what’s the challenge?’

‘The Black
Pool.’

‘But isn't
that that seaside place with the tower, where people go to get drunk and see the
Krankies and Little and Large?’

‘No,’ said
Giles, ‘this is a couple of day’s trek away, up the jungle. We spotted it on the
aerial photos my team took. It’s a mysterious black pool. We want you to dive
down to the bottom and see what’s there. Some of these pools are hundreds of
feet deep, and who knows what might be lurking in the depths?’

‘You don't
have to sound so delighted.’

Giles
laughed in that carefree way people laugh when an extra £20 million pounds has
recently arrived in their bank account.

‘There are
manuals and all the equipment you and the cameraman need in the Catalina. We’re
going to call the issue, Black Pool Terror.’

‘Well,
we’re
going to have a rest for a couple
of days, plan the route, check the equipment and manuals - all that sort of thing.’

‘Great!’

‘Good - well
I’ll say goodbye, then.’

‘Good bye,’
said Giles. ‘You’re doing a
great
job.’

‘Thank
you.’

‘Oh, and
one more thing.’

‘Yes’

‘Bring me
back a stick of rock.’

He was
still laughing when she terminated the call.

Chapter 61

When Mrs
Hathaway returned, the celebratory lunch was well underway. Both Mick and Jim
were downing vast quantities of
Glenfiddich
Urban Alternative and eating things off large, green leaves. She told them
about the Black Pool, and put up with their chuckling about Kiss Me Quick hats,
Reginald Dixon’s organ and Billy’s Weekly Liar. They both laughed until they
fell over backwards, which is what would have happened anyway, sooner or later.

After half an hour had dawdled by, Mick got
up and announced his decision to retire to bed.

‘Well, James, m
y old carbuncle, there’s
little left in this neck of the shire to keep this man-about-jungle amused. I’m
off for some zeds.’

And
with that, he
spent the last of his
energy tottering off to his bed area, while Mrs Hathaway went to the Catalina
to check the deep-sea diving equipment.

As Jim was now alone and left to his own
devices, he indulged himself in his favourite pastime - brooding on the fact
that life had it in for him.

He didn't like the jungle, his steel-reinforced,
chamois-caressed boots weighed a fucking ton, and now he was faced with a two-day
hike to some puddle. The only good thing was that Mick would have to do the
dive, while he waited up top. Rather generously, he thought for a moment that
Mick was always getting the difficult and dangerous things to do. But it was
only a moment. He soon switched to pondering the fact that it was
James Redfern Chartwell,
the sound engineer, who, despite getting all the apparently cushy numbers, was
the one with the groin which looked like it had gone through 30 minutes of
unarmed combat with a meat tenderiser.

The journey
through the jungle was bound to be terrible. He hated everything about the sodding
place. It was hot and sticky; there were flies, mosquitoes and leeches, not to
mention spiders, snakes and pumas. And he would be at it for two days there,
and two days back.

But as he
sipped his
Glenfiddich Urban Alternative
in extra large gulps, his brain ambled over to trying to rationalise his fears.

Mrs Hathaway
wasn’t frightened of anything. Mick, as long as there was 100 grand in it, was
only mildly perturbed. Perhaps he ought to confront his fears. Perhaps he ought
to stand up and go for a leisurely stroll in the fetid undergrowth. Not just a
couple of feet, but, maybe, half a mile. Striding boldly forward, filling his
lungs with jungle air, whistling a merry tune. Let everything know he was in
charge. He was the boss. All the endangered species lurking in the foliage could
go fuck themselves. Because Jim was here, and Jim was King. He had another gulp
of GUA and decided that’s what he’d do.

The first achievement
of this newly assertive, newly empowered James Redfern Chartwell was to get
four or five men to help him stand up and point him in the direction of the
jungle.

It went very
well. Perhaps the GUA had dulled his senses, and he had no real idea of what he
was getting into.

After about
10 minutes of manly striding, he thought he heard a strange noise low down, to his
left. It was a rustle, accompanied by a low grunting sound. Somehow, his
prodigious GUA intake had decided it was now time to amplify any sounds. And
with each additional decibel, his fear ramped up more keenly than ever.

‘Fuck off,’
he shouted at the rustle. ‘Fuck off.’

He held onto
a nearby tree trunk, and suddenly realised what a waste of time it was shouting
‘Fuck off’ at a wild animal. And anyway, this was Brazil - and they’d only
understand Portuguese. And as he had no idea how to say ‘Fuck off’ in Portuguese,
or, in fact, whether Portuguese people even said ‘Fuck off’, he decided to switch
his attention back to his fear.

The tree was
covered in vines, which made lots of places you could grab, and places where
you could wedge your steel-toed boots. Within a few seconds, he had begun a
GUA-powered ascent of a magnificent kapok tree.

When he’d got
about 15 feet up the trunk, he sat on a branch to take a breather. Nothing had
showed up, down below. Nothing had tried to climb the tree. Which was just as
well for whatever hadn't showed up, and hadn't climbed the tree, because James
Redfern Chartwell had steel books caressed with chamois leather, and any World
Wildlife Fund-protected fucker coming up the trunk would get a gob full.

He grabbed a
vine to steady himself. Strangely for a vine, it had an evil-looking head which
twisted round rapidly to bare its fangs and hiss. For someone as pissed as Jim,
his reaction to the situation was extremely rapid, and the snake hit the ground
spitting, before slithering off to find a place where no drunks would be yanking
its tail.

Jim was not
amused. He clung tightly to the tree, rapidly twitching his head in all
directions to see if any other vines wanted to add him to this month’s Amazon
Basin mortality statistics.

He pushed his
head closer to the trunk, and distinctly heard a scratching, gnawing sound. He
moved his head away quickly and scrambled higher. He reached out for a branch, and
one of the leaves sprang forward and attacked the back of his hand. He dropped
down a couple of branches and a small green frog hopped onto his face. He
brushed it away and found himself swinging by one hand. The swarm attacked on
the second swing. Bees, hornets, he didn't care. He thrashed out with his remaining
arm and legs and, fortunately, they left, presumably to look for another inebriated
Englishman swinging from a tree.

Jim grabbed
at the trunk and a large, hairy spider scuttled out of a hole and ran up his
arm. Panic was setting in, and his rate of climb would have amazed the average
F-16 pilot. Now he was a good hundred feet up in the canopy. His heart was
pounding. His clothes were ripped. And he had little cut marks on his skin
where things had pecked at him on the way up. He popped his head into the air
above the canopy. Even here, the humidity levels were astronomical. He felt his
lungs were struggling to find oxygen. During this search, a couple of disgusting
looking
yellow-headed
vultures landed on a nearby treetop and began fighting and squawking -
presumably about which one was going to have first go at him.

He
decided it was time to go down. His first hand-hole was full of something soft,
warm and sticky - he pulled out a handful of large, partially squashed grubs. A
group of monkeys arrived from nowhere and bounced and danced and screamed around
him, trying to grab the grubs from where he had wiped them on his designer
safari jacket. He lost his footing and crashed down through the branches.

Eventually,
Jim found himself bruised, bleeding and battered, sitting on the low branch,
where it had all started. He paused for a few seconds and listened. There was
no
rustling,
no grunting and no sign of the snake. He looked up. The vultures had buggered
off to vulch somewhere else. Having spent the best part of an hour climbing up,
around and down the tree, he was totally exhausted. However, the exercise had
helped to sober him up, and, as the panic subsided, more rational thoughts took
over.

The villagers
walked through the jungle, without worry. Mrs Hathaway walked through the
jungle, without worry. Even Mick waddled through the jungle, without worry. All
he had to do was steel his nerves, think positive and take command of the
situation. Jim determined to drop down to the jungle floor and walk confidently
back to the village. It took another hour of thinking before he’d convinced himself
this was the only course of action.
And anyway, light was beginning to fade.

He found
the walk back to the village almost a pleasant experience. He took large
strides, didn't check the undergrowth for anything and ignored any strange
sounds. It wasn’t a walk in the park, but it might as well have been.

After
what seemed no time at all, Jim saw the long house through the trees. He felt
great. He had faced down a terrible fear. He felt he had grown as a human
being. He had shown that the only thing to fear is fear itself.

Jim stood
on the bamboo ramp to the door of the long house and turned to face the jungle.

Flinging
his arms out wide, he shouted into the humid tropical twilight, ‘And here are this
evening’s results. Amazonian Jungle 0 -
James Redfern Chartwell 1. That takes Jungle Jim to
the top of the Championship!’

Announcement
made, he turned on his heels, opened the door and went into the long house
without a worry in the world.

He closed the
door, leapt in the air and greeted the villagers with a highly theatrical ‘Ta-rraaarr!’

Just outside,
as Jim was delivering this triumphant display, a 20-foot green anaconda, mouth
gaping wide, shot out from the undergrowth and struck the long house door with
unbelievable power, almost ripping it off its plaited fibre hinges.

Half an hour of
stalking what looked like a very reasonable evening meal, had come to nothing.
Still, tomorrow would be another day.