tents, Mr Kazakov was standing by the fire with an M4 assault rifle over each shoulder.
‘Are they loaded?’ James asked, as Kazakov handed him a rifle and half a dozen ammo clips.
‘Simunition rounds,’ Kazakov whispered. ‘The trainees won’t be wearing any protective gear, so aim above their heads unless you’re got a clear shot at their legs or back.’
As James crammed the clips into the pockets of his shorts and hooked the M4 over his back, he noticed that Kazakov was wearing thick gloves.
‘Did you get a pair for me?’ James asked.
‘You should have put them on,’ Kazakov said, as James turned back towards their tent. ‘I’m not your mother. Where do you think you’re going?’
‘To get my gloves.’
‘You’ll be fine,’ Kazakov shrugged. ‘They’re only babies.’
James didn’t want to seem weak in front of Kazakov, so he turned back. But his confidence drained when he flipped the lid to unveil seventy-two overheated vipers.
‘You undo the zips,’ Kazakov said.
As James crept up to the four trainees’ tents, Kazakov ripped the pin from the first of four smoke grenades hanging from a belt slung over his shoulder.
James shuffled along the ground unzipping the tents, closely followed by Kazakov who’d push his arm between the flaps of fabric and roll a smoke grenade into some far corner of each tent. None of the trainees stirred. After a parachute jump and a twenty-kilometre hike they were all dead to the world.
Once the grenades were in position, Kazakov dipped his gloves inside the box of snakes, grabbed a handful and began throwing them on the baked earth in front of the tent flaps.
‘Muck in, James,’ Kazakov said firmly.
Without gloves, James decided that the best strategy was to pick the box off the ground and tip the snakes out. The method was fast and effective, but one of the reptiles had already slithered on to the side of the box. It reared up, swivelled its head and snapped its jaws shut around James’ bare nipple.
‘JEEEEEEEEESUS!’ James screamed, as the first of the smoke grenades began erupting.
Within ten seconds, all four trainee tents were billowing smoke and within fifteen the seven trainees had scrambled outside, barefoot and coughing. Even at night the jungle was extremely hot and the trainees soon found the young pit vipers snapping at their toes and ankles.
As they screamed, Mr Kazakov backed up behind the fire and began shooting at them. The simulated ammunition wasn’t lethal, but it was like paintballing on steroids and you knew all about it if it hit your bare skin.
Naturally, the trainees’ reaction was to run away from the hail of bullets and the snakes around their tents, but Mr Kazakov began shouting orders between blasts of gunfire. ‘All trainees, gather your equipment from the tents. Smoke-damaged equipment will not be replaced. I repeat, smoke-damaged equipment will not be replaced.’
As well as making everything stink, the pungent smoke would do serious damage to the trainees’ navigation equipment and would stain their briefings for the following day, making maps and vital sections of text illegible. The youngsters had no option but to brave the smoke, bullets and snakes and rescue their precious equipment.
Meanwhile, James had his own problem to deal with. He should have been standing alongside Kazakov shooting simulated rounds at the trainees, but instead he was in excruciating pain, with the fangs of a baby viper embedded in the flesh around his nipple.
He twisted its surprisingly rigid body, but the jaws didn’t budge. Pulling on the snake just made its fangs tear deeper into his skin, so James grabbed a section of the upper body with each hand, then did a Chinese burn; squeezing with all his might while twisting his hands in opposite directions.
It took all his strength, but eventually the viper’s backbone fractured and James ripped the bottom half of its body away from its head. He’d assumed that decapitation would make the snake let go, but while its body writhed on the ground the snake’s head remained latched to his nipple.
Infuriated, James looked around and saw that the barefoot trainees had come up with a method for clearing the snakes from around their tents: they’d ducked to the opposite side of the fire from where Mr Kazakov was shooting at them and pulled glowing sticks out of the embers.
While snakes are surprisingly blasé about being ripped in half, they don’t like fire and sprang away as the trainees swept their flaming sticks across the ground.
As James moved in to grab his own stick, Kevin