“Quick! Now!” Nadia shouted.
Ben didn’t need to be told twice. He sprinted off the mark, darting to the dangling rope and the salvation which lay at the top of the long climb. But, as he was within arm’s reach, another croc broke the surface, jaws gaping open, breath foul and stinking. Somehow, King, marginally faster, twisted out of range, staggered back, hit the wall. The living dinosaur closed in, coming about for a second attempt.
King fumbled inside his satchel, found his own flare gun, jammed a cartridge into the barrel, pressed his back against the wall, closed his eyes and fired!
The flare shot out of the gun and drove straight into the crocodile’s gaping mouth. It exploded inside the beast’s head, blasting out skull, bone, teeth and brains in a downpour of gore.
The body rolled off the shelf and was instantly set upon by the other crocs, all thrashing about, tearing great lumps of flesh from one of their own. The crocodile that had been plodding up the ramp rolled into the water to join the feast, thus leaving King’s way to the rope free. He didn’t waste a second as he ran forward, grasped the rope and heaved himself up.
Sid and Nadia took the strain and tried to pull him up but, half way to safety, a commotion below caught his attention.
He glanced down to see the crocodiles suddenly discard their meal, lunging beneath the water in a new frenzy, one which smacked of fear and survival themselves.
Beneath the floating carcass a dark shape moved, twisting and undulating, sliding through the water carelessly. Whatever it was, it was massive and whatever could scare away ten-foot long crocodiles was not something he wanted to hang around to see.
He continued with renewed haste towards the hole in the ceiling and was helped through by Sid and Nadia, while below him, the carcass was dragged silently beneath the surface.
He afforded a quick glance back down the hole to note that the chamber was still once more, that the crocodiles and whatever leviathan that had scared them had vanished. Then he turned his attention to the object he retrieved from his satchel and stared wide-eyed at his prize.
The Moon Mask.
3:
Sari… Sari…
The Huey swung low over the treetops, its downdraft blasting at the canopy of the Amazon rainforest. Sprawling for thousands of miles in all directions was an endless ocean of green, broken only by the snaking meanders of the Orinoco’s tributaries.
The small helicopter hurried south, passing mountain ranges and plateaus, magnificent waterfalls and gaping chasms. The noise of its propellers caught the attention of some of the jungle’s higher life forms, breaking into the grooming patterns of monkeys and scattering flocks of brightly coloured parrots.
Nathan Raine threw the chopper from side to side, banking sharply, twisting and spinning the aircraft in ways that stretched the laws of physics to their limits.
As tumultuous clouds gathered to the south, purple and menacing, he dropped the Huey into a nose dive and then pulled up sharply, flying only meters above the uneven canopy of the Amazon. The green ocean whipped by beneath him in a blur as he pushed the engines to their maximum one hundred and thirty miles per hour.
It was a waste of fuel, he knew. But after being cooped up around Caracas Contract Choppers headquarters for so long, he used his fortnightly supply run as a chance to stretch his wings. Besides, he knew exactly how much the Huey could take, exactly how much fuel he needed to get to Sarisariñama and back again.
The storm hit him violently, the sudden down pour hammering against the metal skin of the helicopter. The rain fell with such intensity that even with the Huey’s wipers on full, his view was obscured. But he did not decrease his speed but kept ploughing ahead, thundering through the vortex that whirled around him, battling to control the aircraft in the buffeting wind, even as its skids screeched by precariously close to the canopy.
All it would take, he knew, was a single giant tree standing out above the rest and it would all be over. But he welcomed the danger. Nathan Raine wasn’t a man to live a comfortable, safe lifestyle. He thrived on peril, on knowing that any moment could be his last.
After forty minutes, he spotted the river and swung the Huey across the treetops, dropping down even lower into the narrow chasm the churning brown water had cut through the trees. The rain continued to pound down, rippling in the water and swelling the river so that it burst its banks and flooded the surrounding jungle.
He raced along the river’s course, following its sinuous twists and turns, banking left and then right until he saw it branch ahead into an obvious V-shape.
He pulled up hard on the Huey’s control stick and the helicopter responded in kind, arching back and shooting, nose first, almost vertically up the side of an immense wall of rock. The river broke into two, forming a natural moat around the base of the cliff. He knew that over three hundred miles away, on the other side of the immense topographical anomaly, the two stunted rivers eventually reformed and continued their combined journey.
The Huey barrelled its way into the clouds and inky blackness roiled over Raine. He continued powering up the vertical northern face of the table-top mountain until, with an almost triumphant flourish, he burst out above the storm clouds.
Bright sunlight glared down at him and he pulled on his mirrored aviator sunglasses as he continued the Huey’s climb, eventually flying up past the mountain’s summit.
At last, he dropped the helicopter level and eased back on the engines, slowing almost to a stationary hover as he got his bearings and took a moment to admire the view.
Wreathed amidst a halo of cloud, the summit of Sarisariñama looked like an emerald island floating above the earth.
With an area of almost three hundred and fifty square miles, the topography of the table mountain’s summit was startlingly flat, affording Raine with a stunning view of the entire site.
Meaning ‘House of the Gods’, there were one hundred and fifteen ‘tepuis’ scattered across La Gran Sabana, the vast area of southern Venezuela bordering Brazil and Guyana. The remnants of a great sandstone plateau that had been eroded in distant pre-history, the isolated monadnocks now gave the illusion of jutting out of the earth. They were some of the most ancient and unspoiled places on earth, giving rise to legends among the Indian tribes who lived far below, and inspiring Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous novel ‘The Lost World.’
Yet, beyond their antiquity and the process of their formation, there was little uniformity to the vast islands of the rainforest. Each was home to an endemic, unique eco-system as far removed from one another as from the rainforest far below.
Auyantepui was the largest, with a surface area of almost five hundred miles and was home to Angel Falls, the highest waterfall in the world. Mount Roraima formed the border between Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana. Matawi was also known as Kukenán, the Place of the Dead, and a cave ran the entire way through the heart of Autana, from one side to the other.
But there were numerous features which set Sarisariñama apart from all the others.
Its four almost perfectly circular sinkholes, one of which was over a thousand feet wide, harboured an eco-system unique even from its own summit. Raine’s position high above the mountain gave him a view of the huge dark holes which burrowed almost a thousand feet down into the isolated island of rock.
Other than the recent discovery of artificial tunnels burrowing through the mountain, Sarisariñama was unique in that its summit was choked by thick jungle with trees climbing almost eighty feet into the oxygen thin sky. This jungle environment gave birth to a far richer diversity of life, much of it endemic, than the sparsely vegetated summits of its neighbours. It also gave it a startlingly emerald green colour set against the azure blue sky. Cut off, hundreds of miles from civilisation, Sarisariñama hung below Raine like the Garden of Eden.