There were many tactical dreads to progressing through an environment like the Dematri jungle.

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The first was that even if you encountered no enemies, there were plenty of dangerous and lethal inhabitants – all at home in these surroundings. Apex predators such as Purcel’s jaguar were masters of silent approach and devastating assault. A venomous snake could have its fangs into you in the time it took to blink. Your awareness has to be absolute if you’re to have a hope of detecting something about to kill you. Even our resident joker, Pitt, didn’t risk a distraction by unnecessary speech once we were inside the jungle.

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The second tactical risk: flat open ground can be considered a 2D zone, jungle is most definitely 3D. All around you, and even underfoot, are layers of threat. A single tree can hold death on any of its multiple, uneven tiers of boughs. Trunks, vines and other dangling greenery might be blocking your view of something or someone about to pounce. Beneath the thick foliage you walk upon might lay a coiled viper... And after thirty yards, our jungle had become one of the densest I’d ever encountered. Some people will argue a rainforest is worse than a jungle, since its high canopy blocks out the sky, but the light penetrating into a jungle causes low-lying vegetation to turn into a tangled morass, and impedes both movement and sight. Our surroundings were hues of green, spotted with bright-coloured flowers and fruits.

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Trees ranged incredibly in height. The gods of the forest were the immense kapoks, rising up to two hundred feet high – looming towards the sky as if they held up the heavens. These giants could be ten feet in diameter, and were gnarly and vine-wreathed. Their thick roots snaked across the floor before sinking deep into the earth. To my uneducated eyes, ramón trees looked like kapoks; although they rose to only a hundred and twenty feet high, ramóns could have trunks three to five feet thick. Far more plentiful were varieties of palms, up to eighty feet tall but usually with trunks no more than seven inches in diameter. The smallest full-grown trees were still between twenty and forty feet in height: copaiba, recognisable by their smooth grey bark and dense crown of leafage; cannonball trees, possessing trunks up to ten feet thick and clustered in orange-yellow ‘cannonball’ fruit; occasional cacao, the reddish-brown pods of which could be refined to produce chocolate; and other trees I couldn’t name.

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Distances between trees varied from five yards to two feet. Vines criss-crossed boughs and branches in the manner of foliage tentacles. Shadows danced in the spearing shafts of sunlight. At ground level there were species of fern, moss adorning exposed clumps of rock, orchids, and other unusual flowers... I even passed a corpse flower – four feet in height and resembling an ice cream cone with a central rearing spike. Its rich colouring did not balance the awful rotten-flesh reek, designed to drawn in pollinating insects.

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Sound was a third factor in our environment. Add a slight breeze rustling higher branches, to the calls of unseen birds and other creatures, and the zipping and buzzing of insects, and you have a continuous background noise. Amid this you hear what could be sounds of movement – you might catch a glimpse of a monkey speeding through the leaves above you, or a bird or large bug in flight, or you might never identify the source. The ‘voices’ of this living maze obscured our quiet movements, and we were very aware the same would be true for approaching stealthy enemies.

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Fourth, the jungle was also home to plentiful pungent scents: the greenery, the flowers, the thick layers of rotting leaves under the ground foliage, spoor from creatures recently in the area... It was all so varied and so powerful, that identifying one odour amongst the endless tide would be near-impossible (the corpse flower being an exception).

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My fifth dread was the damned heat and humidity. You sweated until you were sure you couldn’t sweat any more, then you sweated more. Hot moist air made breathing fractionally but noticeably more difficult. I could imagine the jungle wanted its intruders dead.

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*     *     *

 

A sound snapped my focus to straight ahead: the quick, keen thrust of a blade.

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“Lizard,” Venny explained over the radio. She didn’t waste words. “Dead.”

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We had reached three hours into the jungle, three-quarters of the way to our destination. Venny, Pitt and Neumann had long ago reduced their distances apart to less than ten paces, and Venny was ten paces from myself, Purcel and Flomo. Any further away in this overcrowded vegetation and we’d lose sight of each other.

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“Find us a spot to rest again,” I said. “We’ve earned it.”

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“Will do.”

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The best nearby location was for us to sit in a circle with our backs to a massive kapok tree. This allowed us to keep our eyes on the jungle while we sat, ate and drank.

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“Man,” Purcel said, after a long swig from a water bottle. He was slumped to my right. “This is some walk in the park. No way we couldn’t have started closer to the shrine? Maybe abseiled down?”

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“Any closer,” I replied, “and they’d have heard the chopper for sure. Better a punishing hike than an ambush and getting slaughtered.”

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“No arguments there.”

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“Besides which,” Venny commented from my other side, “didn’t you want to see the wildlife?”

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“I’ve changed my mind. I just wanna shoot some folks.”

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“And bag us a demon,” I added. “Don’t forget the prize.”

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“Uh-huh. Weirdest mission objective ever.”

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Soon we were back on our feet and moving. One hour and about one mile from the shrine. I didn’t need to warn my companions that the nearer we got, the higher the odds on us encountering one of the cultists’ roaming patrols.

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Half an hour later, we came close to walking right into an enemy team.