Banks looked around, trying to find Hynd and McCally. Both men were stood still, staring at the remains of the pyramid.
And at the impossible thing dragging itself up and out of the rubble.
To call it a snake would be to deny the magnificence, the majesty of it. The head came up first, even bigger than the cube of the altar room had been on the self-same spot minutes earlier. Two golden eyes, the slits in each pupil fully as big as a man, stared down the causeway directly at the chopper. The mouth opened, showing brilliant white fangs and a flickering tongue that tasted the air as if eager for feeding. The body that rose up below the head was thicker still, 10, thickening to 15, feet wide. It glistened, gold and green and blue and yellow where the sun hit the shimmering scales.
It kept coming out of the hole to wrap around the remains of the pyramid, each slithering coil causing the hilltop ridge to buck. Ground fell in, as if a void had been created underneath them. One of the few remaining buildings to Bank’s right tumbled, not into a hole, but over the edge of the cliff, that was itself eroding rapidly, as if the whole hill might be in the process of coming apart.
McCally raised his weapon, but Banks called out to him.
“Leave it, Cally. I’ve got a feeling we’re going to need a bigger gun. Get to the chopper!”
McCally and Hynd moved to obey, leaving only Banks standing between the snake and the aircraft, which was side on to the beast, not in any position to defend itself against an attack. But for now, the snake was still in the process of pulling itself up and out of the ground, the great coils now entirely obscuring the foundations of the pyramid below it. Banks was more worried about the hill disappearing completely. He struggled to keep his footing as the paved causeway dropped several feet, throwing worked stone and rubble into the air.
“Time to go, Captain,” the chopper pilot shouted in his headset. Banks turned, saw that McCally and Hynd were up and inside the chopper, then had to make a grab for the ladder as a hole formed at his feet. He managed to get one hand on the bottom rung, and looked down to see the whole hilltop collapse below him, a swirling cloud of dry dust almost immediately obscuring the view.
McCally and Hynd hauled him aboard as the chopper rose, inches ahead of the dust cloud. Banks was still looking down when the snake’s head came up, impossibly fast toward them, and snapped its jaws shut only feet below them. A purple tongue, 12 feet and more long, slid out and tasted, almost tickled, the chopper’s landing rails. Banks got his rifle unslung and sent three rounds into the fleshiest part of it, causing the tongue to draw away. The chopper kept rising, clear of the roil and tumble of dust, circling ever higher above what remained of the hill and temple complex, all of which was now little more than a collapsed pile of stone and dirt little higher than the high canopy of the surrounding jungle.
The snake moved through the rubble, its enormous girth and weight demolishing what little was left even further. It seemed to have lost all interest in them now, and was focused on removing all trace of the temple complex from the face of the earth.
“The gold,” Buller wailed.
“Should I fire, Captain?” the pilot said at Banks’ ear. “We’ve got enough to give it a fright if nothing else, maybe even enough to take it down.”
“Negative,” Banks replied. “Get us out of here. I think we’ve done enough damage for one day.”
“My gold,” Buller wailed again, as the snake ground down the last of the hill, and with a surge and whoosh of water, the river ran in to wash away what little was left of the hill and temple complex. There was a new bend in the waterway as the chopper took them away downstream, and not a sign that anything else had ever been there.
- 21 -
“What was all that bollocks with the gold melting, Cap?” Wiggins said, shouting to be heard above the rotors.
Banks looked directly at Buller.
“The wanker here said it himself,” Banks replied. “Magic. Snake magic. I think somehow the gold and the snake were part of the same thing. And if the wanker here wants to come back and fuck with it again, that’s up to him. But we’ll be leaving it well alone.”
He went up front and was looking out of the window as they passed over the dredger rig. Boitata had come down river with them, her bulk sending a wake crashing across both sides of the river as she surged and with one smooth movement flowed over the facility, crushing it down into little more than bent metal and splinters of wood in a matter of seconds.
By the time the chopper had passed fully overhead, the whole platform was a mass of debris in the water. The pilot banked around to give Buller a final look at his failure.
The last thing they saw was the river god, Boitata, swimming back upstream, the wash from her passing sending more great waves against the bank on either side.
“Time to go home, lads,” Banks said, to an array of smiles from the squad.
“Good. I never want to see a snake that size again,” Hynd said.
“Funny, that’s what your wife said to me,” Wiggins replied.