As usual, Sami had been right.

  ‘We have to do something about this,’ Max said. ‘It’s about more than rescuing the SAS men now. It’s about stopping Oscar Juwani. He can’t be allowed to continue.’

  Sami nodded. ‘I agree,’ he said. He was a mild young man, but there was something inspiring about his determination. ‘The Blackshirts are armed all the time,’ he said. ‘I think that they like killing. The Redshirts have been forced to do it. If we disable the Blackshirts, I think the Redshirts will come quietly. How many Blackshirts do you think there are?’

  ‘I’ve been counting,’ Max said. ‘I make it fifteen. But they’re heavily armed. We can’t risk fighting them without backup. We have to get that watch back somehow.’

  They looked up to the plateau where Babaka had led Lukas. A fire was burning brightly up there, and they could just make out some people standing near it. Max thought one of them might be Lukas, but he was too far away to tell.

  ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ Sami said.

  ‘I don’t know. What are you thinking?’

  ‘Lukas is the one who can get closest to Babaka. If we can somehow get him to –’

  ‘No. Lukas is a traitor.’

  ‘Maybe he’s just like all the other Redshirts,’ Sami said quietly.

  ‘It’s different,’ Max said. ‘He was one of us. I agree we need to get the watch, but I’m not involving him. We can’t trust him. If and when we get out of here, I never want to see him again.’

  Sami was about to argue, but he didn’t get the chance. Night was falling and three Blackshirts approached. The children around them let their shovels fall to the ground, so Max and Sami did the same. The Blackshirts didn’t need to issue any instructions. They simply led the Blueshirts – Max and Sami included – towards one of the bamboo cages. It was large enough to take them all, though not comfortably. As they filed in at gunpoint, Max and Sami lingered at the back of the line. The door to the cage didn’t look very secure. Maybe, Max thought, they could force it open somehow during the night. If they were last into the cage, they could sit by the entrance and break out.

  No chance. Once they were inside the cage, one of the Blackshirts wrapped a long chain several times round the door and locked it with a heavy padlock. He put the key on a string round his neck. Maybe he suspected that Max and Sami had thought about escape, because he leered at them as he did this. Then he and the other Blackshirts turned their backs on the cage and walked through the gloom towards one of the fires burning in the clearing, where the monkeys were being roasted.

  The rest of the Blueshirts were too exhausted to do anything but lie on the rough ground. A couple of them tried to talk to Max and Sami, but they had no language in common so they soon gave up and fell asleep. All except one. The boy whose hands Max had tended shuffled up to him. He was shivering and obviously ill. The boy rested his head on Max’s knee and began to weep softly. All Max could do to comfort him was to stroke his hair gently – and turn his thoughts to plans of escape.

  Night had fallen. The fire outside Oscar Juwani’s hut had burned down to glowing coals. What remained of the animal carcass after they had stripped the meat from it was smouldering on the fire. Oscar Juwani had returned to his hut, which was still heavily guarded by Blackshirts. Two remained by the hut’s entrance and two more at the top of the steps that led down into the clearing. Several others circled the plateau. They all had assault rifles. Babaka sat on a log by the fire, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, watching Lukas.

  Lukas had been given his own watch point: a tree stump next to the snake pit. His job, Oscar Juwani had explained, one fat hand gripping Lukas’s shoulder, was to keep watch on the jungle behind the plateau. It was as thick and impenetrable as any vegetation Lukas had seen in the past forty-eight hours.

  Lukas wasn’t stupid. He knew this was an unimportant position. Nobody really expected a threat to come from that area, and Lukas had certainly not been trusted with a firearm. He was not there to keep watch. He was there to be watched. Oscar Juwani wanted to trust him – a sharp-shooting American kid would be a great prize for the leader of this gruesome cult – but he didn’t trust him yet. Lukas had been placed close to the snake pit to remind him what would happen if he let Oscar Juwani down. He had got used to the smell and tried not to think about the snakes, but he couldn’t help hearing them under the lid as they hissed and seethed from time to time.

  The moon was bright. So bright that it cast shadows. Lukas sat with his back to the fire and the hut, but he could see the patrolling Blackshirts by the shadows they cast as they circled the fire. And he could almost feel Babaka’s gaze drilling into his back. He was bone tired, but sleep wasn’t an option. Sounds drifted up to the plateau from the clearing. Bouts of brutish laughter. Sometimes an aggressive shout. Occasionally a scream. In his mind, a tumult of images. The snakes. Oscar Juwani. Babaka. Sami and the gorilla. And of course, Lili and Abby, and the expressions on their faces in the seconds before he squeezed the trigger.

  He stared at his hand. It was shaking. There was no way he could accurately fire a gun, even if he had one.

  Time passed. He wanted to walk to the edge of the plateau and see if he could find out what had happened to Max and Sami, but that was impossible. He had to pretend not to care about them. Only then would the Blackshirts start to trust him.

  Only then could he get close to Babaka.

  Finally, Babaka seemed to have lost interest in him. He had his weapon on his knee. He removed the magazine and held it up, checking it in the moonlight. A wild thought crossed Lukas’s mind: he could sprint over to him, grab the watch and activate the PLB. He almost did it. But then, squinting through the moonlight, he realised that the watch wasn’t on Babaka’s wrist. Good thing too – they’d have killed him, and the others, instantly if he’d acted on his instinct. But he couldn’t help wondering where the watch was. In Babaka’s pocket, maybe? Somewhere else? Then Babaka caught him staring. He replaced the magazine in the assault rifle then pointed towards the jungle as if to say, You’re supposed to be facing that way.

  Which Lukas did. The moon illuminated the line where the plateau met the jungle. It was a thick knot of scrub, trees, vines and bamboo. And there was nothing to see.

  Nothing to see.

  Nothing to see.

  Then there was a movement.

  Lukas blinked. He glanced back at Babaka, but the Blackshirt wasn’t there. He had wandered over to the hut and was talking quietly to the guards at the entrance. Lukas squinted back at the jungle, at the place where he had seen movement. At first he saw nothing. Maybe he had imagined it. But then he saw it again. Two broad leaves, head-height from the ground, parted like curtains. And between them was a face.

  Lukas’s pulse raced. The moon was bright but it wasn’t daylight, and the face was a good twenty metres away. He squinted to make out its features.

  Suddenly he had the most curious sensation: tension draining from his body like water from a bath.

  Lukas inclined his head. He didn’t dare speak.

  The head nodded. The curtains closed. The face was gone.

  Lukas swallowed hard and glanced back over his shoulder. Babaka had finished talking to the two guards and was walking over to the steps. He gave no indication that he’d seen anything, but he looked over suspiciously at Lukas then pointed towards the jungle again before disappearing down the steps.

  Lukas turned back and continued his watch, the ghost of a smile on his lips.

  13

  Ziploc

  Max knew he should sleep. He had no chance of getting out of the cage tonight. If he was going to find his watch the following day, he needed his strength.

  But sleep was impossible. First there was the lack of comfort: the ground was hard and bumpy. Then there was the steady weeping of the kid with the septic hands. And the moon, bright enough to cast a shadow. And the noise. The Blackshirts were rowdy, at least at first. When they grew quieter, the strange noises of the jungle rang in the air. Max wondered if he would ever get used to them.

  He sat there, hugging his knees. Anybody watching him would think that he was just staring into space. He wasn’t. The moonlight went to the far edges of the clearing and he could hear Hector in his head, holding forth on one of his favourite themes. Situational awareness is everything. Whenever you’re in an unfamiliar environment, you need to familiarise yourself with your surroundings. Where are your entry and exit points? Where are the danger zones? Where are threats most likely to come from? Where can you take cover? The main difference between a professional soldier and the man in the street is nothing to do with weapons or military gear. It’s to do with observation. The more you see, the more you know. And in a theatre of war, knowledge is power.

  Max knew he needed all the power he could get. So he plotted the clearing in his head. The position of the plateau and the tree with the hanging cage. The location of each hut. The opening into the jungle through which they had entered the clearing, and the number of armed guards standing there: three. He estimated how long it would take him to run to the plateau, or from the plateau to the entrance. The thought even crossed his mind that if he really – really – needed somewhere to hide, the toilet pit was the place to do it, because who would want to search for him in there?

  Next to him, Sami was doing the same. Max could sense him clocking the locations and pinning them in his mind. Stuck in the locked cage, it was all they could do.

  ‘It’s going to be a long night,’ Sami said after a while. The other Blueshirts seemed to be asleep, even the kid with the damaged hands.

  ‘We’ve had long nights before, I guess,’ Max said. He thought of the care home where he’d been brought up, and of the many nights he had spent wide awake, staring at the same moon that floated above them now. Would he swap places with the old Max? he wondered. The answer came quickly. No. Despite everything, no.

  ‘When I was in Syria,’ Sami whispered, ‘during the war, the quiet nights were the worst. When they were bombing us, at least we knew what was happening and where bombs were falling. You could try to do something about it. When it was quiet …’ His voice trailed off. ‘Sometimes waiting for a thing to happen is worse than the thing happening,’ he said finally. A pause. ‘You know Lukas had no choice, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about –’ Max cut himself short. ‘What was that?’

  ‘What?’

  Max didn’t answer. He had seen something on the edge of the clearing. A person, running past Oscar Juwani’s stronghold before disappearing into the jungle. ‘It looked like …’

  ‘Like what?’

  Max didn’t reply immediately, because he knew how crazy he would sound. ‘Nothing,’ he whispered. ‘I just … I thought I saw someone. It’s nothing.’

  ‘We should get some sleep,’ Sami said.

  Max squinted across the clearing again. There was no sign of the figure. ‘I wish I could,’ he said. ‘Do you think the SAS men are alive?’

  ‘Yes,’ Sami replied. ‘If they were dead, Juwani’s men would have burned or buried them. Rotting bodies would attract wild animals, cause disease. There’s a reason the Blueshirts are digging those pits, you know. They have to do something with dead bodies. Hey, look!’

  Sami pointed towards the plateau. They could just see, through a jumble of huts, the steps leading up to it. A figure was walking down the steps. Max could only make out the figure’s silhouette in the darkness, but he recognised the swagger. It was Babaka. At the bottom of the steps he turned and started walking towards Max and Sami. His face was bathed in moonlight. There was no doubt who it was.

  ‘Is he coming here?’ Sami asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Max said. ‘Quick, pretend to be asleep.’

  They lay down, but Max only half closed his eyes so he could watch Babaka approach the cage. He stood just on the other side of the bamboo railings and stared down at them. Max checked out the man’s wrist. The watch wasn’t there. Babaka stood watching them for about a minute, his face unreadable. Then he turned away and walked back towards the huts. He stopped at one hut, kicked the door open and entered.

  ‘Did you see –’ Max started to say.

  ‘No watch,’ Sami confirmed.

  Silently, they surveyed the hut for five minutes, then ten, waiting to see if Babaka would leave. He didn’t. It looked as if he would spend the night there. That was surely his hut.

  ‘Do you think that’s where he’s left the watch?’ Sami said finally.

  ‘Yeah,’ Max replied. ‘Perhaps. Tomorrow we have to get in there.’

  ‘If they catch us doing that, we’ll end up in one of the holes we’re digging.’

  ‘I’ve got a feeling,’ Max said, ‘that we’re going to end up in one of those holes anyway. I’d say we’ve got nothing to lose, wouldn’t you?’

  Sami didn’t answer. Max went back to plotting the layout of the clearing in his head.

  The jungle creatures knew dawn was coming before it grew light. Their cacophony woke Max up. He couldn’t remember falling asleep. It must have been in the small hours. His body ached from lying on the hard ground and he felt more tired than he had before he went to sleep.

  He immediately sensed that Sami was awake next to him.

  ‘We need a distraction,’ Sami said.

  Max stretched. ‘What?’

  ‘If we’re going to get into Babaka’s hut, we need a distraction. Something that will get all the Blackshirts looking the other way. The Redshirts too. That will give one of us the chance to slip over to the hut and search it.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Max said.

  ‘Maybe one of us can pretend to be ill,’ Sami said.

  Max shook his head. ‘You think they’d care about that?’ He pointed at the kid with the sore hands to prove his point. ‘The only way we’re going to distract the Blackshirts is if they’re worried about themselves.’

  ‘How do we do that?’

  It was suddenly much lighter. There was movement in the clearing. Figures were stoking the fires with fresh logs.

  ‘Fire,’ Max said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘They need fire. They need it to cook, to boil water, to keep animals at bay. And to make fire, they need logs.’ He indicated the log pile by the pits they’d been digging. ‘Those logs.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Sami said.

  ‘If we set fire to those logs,’ Max said, ‘I reckon they’ll freak out.’ He pointed across the clearing towards the stream. ‘They made a mistake, I reckon, putting the log pile at the opposite end to the stream. I suppose they were worried about the wood getting wet if the stream flooded. If we set fire to it, it’ll keep them all busy ferrying water across the camp to put it out.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Sami said uncertainly. ‘But how are we going to do that? We don’t have matches or anything.’ He frowned. ‘We could maybe take a burning branch from one of the other fires …’

  ‘We don’t need to,’ Max said. ‘We’ve got everything we need.’ Surreptitiously, he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a corner of the Ziploc bag Lukas had kept his biscuits in.

  Sami blinked at him. When he spoke, it was slowly, as if he was explaining something to a small child. ‘That is a plastic bag, Max,’ he said.

  ‘Glad to see your powers of observation haven’t deserted you.’

  ‘You can’t make fire with a plastic bag.’

  Max winked at him then shoved the corner of the bag back into his pocket. A Blackshirt was marching up to them. Max recognised him as the guy with the key round his neck. He unlocked the padlock and removed the chain from the cage. He barked at the Blueshirts. Some were still asleep, but they woke quickly. They obviously knew better than to linger. They were on their feet in seconds, queuing up to be let out of the cage. Only the little kid with the sore hands moved slowly. He was shivering badly and was having trouble standing. Max pulled him to his feet and, despite an unpleasant glare from the Blackshirt, helped him out of the cage and back towards the pits.

  They were allowed a few mouthfuls of water from a plastic canteen, and a tiny portion of stale bread which Max hungrily devoured. After that, the Blueshirts automatically went back to digging. A couple of Blackshirts approached with axes. They held them up. None of the Blueshirts seemed keen on taking one. It was obviously harder work than digging. One of the Blackshirts handed an axe to the kid with the sore hands. Max stepped up to him, pointed out the kid’s bandages, and gave the Blackshirt a ‘c’mon, be serious’ look. He took the axe and pointed to himself. The Blackshirt shrugged. Sami approached the other Blackshirt, took the second axe and he and Max walked over to the logs. There were two piles: the logs that were already split and stacked under the frame, and a larger pile that needed chopping.

  ‘What now?’ Sami hissed.

  ‘We chop,’ Max said. ‘We can’t do anything else until the sun is high.’ He bent over one of the tree trunks. The bark was dry and papery, with thick patches of dried moss and lichen. He picked some of it off. ‘We need this,’ he said. ‘It’ll make good tinder. Then we need smaller fragments of wood to get the fire going.’

  ‘Max,’ Sami said, ‘you still haven’t told me how you’re planning to get the fire going.’

  ‘You ever do that magnifying glass thing?’ Max said. ‘You know, when you concentrate the sun’s rays and aim it at an ant or something?’

  Sami appeared genuinely puzzled. ‘But that would kill the ant,’ he said.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I would never kill an ant, Max.’

  Max had to smile. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Anyway, the thing is, you can start a fire with a magnifying glass – or any kind of lens.’

  ‘But we don’t have one.’

  ‘Yes, we do,’ Max said. ‘If you fill a clear plastic bag with water and seal it, it can act like a lens and focus the sun’s rays.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Well, I’ve never done it, but I …’