Somewhere in the back of his mind he admitted that maybe Robin’s anti-insect campaign might not be such a waste of time after all. And he wondered vaguely what other jungle scourges might be returning to the river and its margins if the mosquitoes were making a comeback. But the thoughts were subsumed beneath an overwhelming tide of breathtakingly vivid sensation. He was chewing on the last of a breakfast sandwich prepared with flatbread and highly spiced bush bacon – made, he was relieved to hear, from dried beef – washed down with strong black coffee. The flavours on his tongue were suddenly drowned by the stench of exhaust from the choppers idling on the flat grass field; the rumble of their motors and the thrumming of their rotors drowning out the morning bustle of the camp he was just leaving behind him. Workaday bustle augmented by the arming of the squads of locals destined to board the choppers and the detailing of those Russians getting ready to board the Zubrs. Ahead of him, the square bulk of the nearest sand and sage-coloured Super Puma’s fuselage was dwarfed by the simple enormity of the morning.
