Burning Angels

Jaeger believed in portents. The baobabs were here for a reason. They spoke to him: you’re on the right path.

He knelt before a dozen fallen fruit pods — each a delicate yellow in colour and looking like a dinosaur egg lying in the dirt.

‘The baobab is known here as the upside-down tree,’ he whispered to Narov. ‘It’s like it’s been uprooted by a giant’s fist and thrust into the earth the wrong way around.’ He knew as much from the time he’d spent soldiering in Africa, which was when he’d picked up some of the local language too. ‘The fruit is rich in antioxidants, vitamin C, potassium and calcium: it’s the most nourishing on earth. Nothing else comes close.’

He scooped several of the pods into his rucksack, urging Narov to do likewise. They’d brought ration packs with them, but he’d learned in the military never to pass up the opportunity to gather a little fresh food, as opposed to the dried stuff they carried. Dry rations were great for longevity and weight. They weren’t great for keeping the bowels regular.

A sharp cracking sound echoed through the grove of baobab trees. Jaeger scanned all around. Narov was equally alert, eyes searching the undergrowth, nose scenting the wind.

The noise came again. Its source seemed to be a nearby grove of African stinkwood trees — so named because of the foul odour given off when a trunk or branch was cut. Jaeger recognised the sound for what it was: a herd of elephants were on the move, snacking as they went — ripping off bark and tearing down the juiciest, leafiest branches.

He had suspected they would encounter elephants here. The caves had been hugely enlarged by the actions of the herds over the years. No one knew for sure if it was the cool shade or the salt that had first drawn them in. Whichever, they had adopted the habit of spending days at a time underground, intermittently dozing on their feet and gouging at the cave walls, using their massive tusks as makeshift wrecking bars. With their trunks they’d whisk the broken rock into their mouths and grind it between their teeth, so releasing the salt bound up in the ancient sediment.

Jaeger figured the elephant herd was heading for the cave entrance right now, which meant that he and Narov had to make it in there before them.

They locked eyes. ‘Let’s go.’

Boots flashing across the hot earth, they crossed a final patch of grassland that grew within the shade of the crater wall, and darted towards the darkest patch of shadow. The rock face loomed before them, the cave mouth a massive, jagged-edged slash cut into it, some seventy feet or more across. Moments later — with the elephant herd hot on their heels — they had darted inside.

Jaeger took a moment to glance around. The best place to position any motion sensors was in the choke point of the cave entrance, but they’d be next to useless without cameras.

There were numerous types of motion sensors, but the simplest were about the size and shape of a shotgun cartridge. British military sets came with eight sensors, plus one transmit/receive handset, which looked something like a small radio. The sensors would be buried just below ground level, and would detect any seismic activity within a twenty-metre radius, sending a message to the receiver.

The cave entrance being seventy feet across, one pack of eight sensors would cover the entire expanse. But with the amount of wildlife that passed in and out of here, anyone guarding this place would require a video camera plus feed, in order to check whether the movement was caused by a hostile intruder, as opposed to a herd of salt-hungry tuskers.

Buried, the motion sensors would be almost impossible to detect. It was the hidden cameras that Jaeger was alert for, plus any aerials or cabling. He could see nothing obvious, but that didn’t mean a thing. During his time in the military, he’d come across CCTV cameras disguised as rocks and dog turds, to name just a few permutations.

He and Narov pressed ahead, the cave opening out before them to form an enormous cathedral-like edifice. They were in the twilight zone now — the last vestiges of grey before the darkness stretched unbroken into the bowels of the mountain. They fished out their Petzl head torches. There was no point in using night-vision goggles where they were going. The technology relied upon boosting ambient light — that thrown off by moon and stars — to enable a person to see in the dark.

Where they were headed, there would be no light at all.

Only darkness.

They could have used thermal imaging kit (TI), but it was heavy and bulky and they needed to travel light and fast. And if caught, they didn’t want to be carrying anything that would distinguish them from a couple of over-zealous and adventurous tourists.