Ghost Flight (2 page)

With a superhuman effort he moved his right arm.

It was just the barest fraction, but still he felt as if he were trying to lift the entire world. Each centimetre that he managed to raise it, his shoulder socket and elbow joint screamed out in agony, his muscles spasming with the puny effort he was forcing from them.

He felt like a cripple.

What in God’s name had happened to him?

What had they done to him?

Gritting his teeth, and focusing on the sheer force of will, he drew the arm towards his head, dragging his hand across his ear, scrabbling at it, desperately. The fingers made contact with . . . legs. Scaly, spiny, insect-savage legs, each twitching and pulsing as it tried to force the cockroach body deeper into his ear hole.

Get them out of there! Get them out! Get them OUUUUTTT!

He felt like vomiting, but there was nothing in his guts. Just a shitty dry film of near-death, which coated everything – his stomach lining, his throat, his mouth; even his nostrils.

Oh shit! His nostrils. They were trying to crawl in there too!

Jaeger cried out again. Longer. More despairing.
This is not the way to die. Please God, not like this . . .

Again and again his fingers scrabbled at his bodily orifices, the roaches kicking and hissing their insect anger as he prised them free.

At long last the sound started to bleed back through to his senses. First, his own desperate cries echoed through his bloodied ears. And then he became aware of something mixed in – something more chilling even than the scores of insects that were intent on feasting on his brains.

A human voice.

Deep-throated. Cruel. A voice that revelled in pain.

His jailer.

The voice brought it all flooding back. Black Beach Prison. The jail at the end of the earth. A place where people were sent to be tortured horribly and to die. Jaeger had been thrown in here for a crime he’d never committed, on the orders of a crazed and murderous dictator – and that was when the real horrors had begun.

Compared to waking to this hell, Jaeger preferred even the dark peace of unconsciousness; anything rather than the weeks he’d spent locked away in this place worse than damnation – his prison cell. His tomb.

He willed his mind to slip away again, back towards the soft, formless, shifting shades of grey that had sheltered him before something – what was it? – had dragged him up to this unspeakable present.

The movements of his right arm became weaker and weaker.

It dropped to the floor again.

Let the cockroaches feast on his brains.

Even that was preferable.

Then the thing that had woken him hit again – a rush of cold liquid to the face, like the slap of a wave at sea. Only the smell was so different. Not the ice-pure, bracing aroma of the ocean. This smell was fetid; the salt tang of a urinal that hadn’t seen a lick of disinfectant for years.

His tormentor laughed again.

This was real sport.

Chucking the contents of the toilet bucket in the prisoner’s face – what could be better?

Jaeger spat out the foul liquid. Blinked it away from his burning eyes. At least the blast of putrefying fluid had driven the roaches away. His mind searched for the right words – the choicest expletives that he could fling in his jailer’s face.

Proof of life. A show of resistance.

‘Go and . . .’

Jaeger began to speak, croaking out the kind of insult that would for sure secure him a beating with that same flex hose that he had learned to dread.

But if he didn’t resist, he was done for. Resistance was all he knew.

Yet he didn’t get to finish those words. They froze in his throat.

Suddenly, another voice cut in, one so familiar –
so brotherly
– that for several long moments Jaeger felt certain he had to be dreaming. The incantation was soft at first, but growing both in power and in volume; a rhythmical chant replete somehow with the promise of the impossible . . .

‘
Ka mate, ka mate. Ka ora, ka ora.

Ka mate, ka mate! Ka ora, ka ora!
’

Jaeger would know that voice anywhere.

Takavesi Raffara; how could he be here?

When they’d been teammates playing the British Army at rugby, it had been Raff who’d led the haka – the traditional Maori pre-match war dance. Always. He’d rip off his shirt, ball his fists, and ripple forward to get eyeball-to-eyeball with the opposing team, hands thumping his massive chest, legs like pillared tree trunks, arms like battering rams, the rest of his team – Jaeger included – flanking him, fearless, unstoppable.

His eyes had bulged, tongue swollen, face frozen in a rictus of warrior challenge as he’d thundered out the lines.

‘
KA MATE! KA MATE! KA ORA! KA ORA!
’ Will I die? Will I die? Will I live? Will I live?

Raff had proven equally relentless when standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the battlefield. The ultimate fellow warrior. Maori by birth and Royal Marines Commando by destiny, he had soldiered with Jaeger across the four corners of the earth, and he was one of his closest brothers.

Jaeger swivelled his eyes right, towards the source of the chanting.

Out of the corner of his vision he could just make out a figure standing on the far side of the cell’s bars. Massive. Dwarfing even his jailer. Smile like a shaft of pure sunlight breaking through after a dark storm seemingly without end.

‘Raff?’ The single word was rasped out, ringing with a barely suspended disbelief.

‘Yeah. It’s me.’ That smile. ‘Seen you looking worse, mate. Like that time I dragged you out of that Amsterdam bar. Still, best get you cleaned up. I’ve come to get you, mate. Get you out of here. We’re flying BA to London – first class.’

Jaeger didn’t respond. What words were there? How could Raff be here, in this place, seemingly so close at hand?

‘Best get going,’ Raff prompted. ‘Before Major Mojo your buddy here changes his mind.’

‘Yah, Bob Marley!’ Jaeger’s tormentor forced a mock joviality from behind evil slits of eyes. ‘Bob Marley – you the real joker man.’

Raff grinned from ear to ear.

He was the only man Jaeger had ever seen who could smile at someone with a look that could freeze the very blood. The Bob Marley reference had to refer to Raff’s hair – worn long, in braids, the traditional Maori way. As many had learned on the rugby field, Raff didn’t take well to anyone disrespecting his choice of head apparel.

‘Unlock the cell door,’ Raff grated. ‘Me and my friend Mr Jaeger – we’re leaving.’

2

The jeep pulled away from Black Beach Prison, Raff hunched over the wheel. He handed Jaeger a water bottle.

‘Drink.’ He jerked a thumb at the back seat. ‘There’s more in the cooler. Get as much down you as you can. You need to rehydrate. We’ve got one hell of a day ahead of us . . .’

Raff lapsed into silence, his mind on the journey that lay before them.

Jaeger let the quiet hang in the air.

After weeks in that prison, his body was a mass of burning. Every joint screamed with agony. It seemed like a lifetime had passed since he’d been thrown into that cell; since he’d travelled anywhere in a vehicle; since his body had been exposed to the full blast of Bioko’s tropical sunlight.

He flinched in pain with every jolt of the vehicle. They were following the ocean road – a narrow stretch of blacktop that led into Malabo, Bioko’s one major town. There were precious few surfaced roads in the tiny African island nation. Mostly, the country’s oil wealth went into funding a new palace for the President, or another of his fleet of giant yachts, or to further inflating his Swiss bank accounts.

Raff gestured at the vehicle’s dash. ‘Pair of shades in there, mate. You look like you’re struggling.’

‘Been a while since I’ve seen the sun.’

Jaeger flicked open the glove compartment and pulled out what looked like a pair of Oakleys. He studied them for an instant. ‘Fakes? You always were a bloody cheapskate.’

Raff laughed. ‘Who dares wins.’

Jaeger let a smile creep across his battered features. It hurt like hell to do so. He felt as if he hadn’t smiled in a lifetime; as if the smile was cracking his face right in two.

In recent weeks Jaeger had come to believe he was never getting out of that prison cell. No one who mattered had even known he was there. He’d become convinced that he would die in Black Beach, unseen and forgotten, and that, like countless corpses before, his would be thrown to the sharks.

He couldn’t quite fathom it – that he was alive and free.

His jailer had let them out via the shadowed basement – the place that housed the torture cubicles – sliding wordlessly past blood-spattered walls. The place where the trash was dumped, plus the bodies of those who’d died in their cells and were ready to be thrown into the sea.

Jaeger couldn’t imagine what kind of deal Raff had cut, to enable him to walk.

No one walked from Black Beach Prison.

Not ever.

‘How did you find me?’ Jaeger let his words fall heavy into the silence.

Raff shrugged. ‘Wasn’t easy. Took a few of us: Feaney, Carson, me.’ He laughed. ‘You glad we bothered?’

Jaeger shrugged. ‘I was just getting to know Major Mojo. Nice guy. The kind you’d want to marry your sister.’ He eyed the big Maori. ‘But how
did
you find me? And why . . .’

‘Always there for you, buddy. Plus . . .’ A shadow fell across Raff’s features. ‘You’re needed back in London. An assignment. We both are.’

‘What kind of assignment?’

Raff’s expression grew darker still. ‘I’ll brief you when we’re out of here – ’cause there ain’t gonna be no assignment until we are.’

Jaeger took a long pull on the water. Cool, clear bottled water – it tasted like sweet nectar compared to what he’d been forced to live off in Black Beach.

‘So what’s next? You got me out of Black Beach; doesn’t mean we’re off Hell Island. That’s what they call it around here.’

‘So I heard. Deal I cut with Major Mojo – he gets his third payment once you and I are on our flight to London. Only we won’t be making that flight. The airport: that’s where he’ll grab us. He’ll have a reception party waiting. He’ll claim I busted you out of Black Beach, but he recaptured us. That way, he gets two paydays – one from us, and a second from the President.’

Jaeger shuddered. It was the President of Bioko – Honore Chambara – who’d ordered his arrest in the first place. A month or so back there had been an attempted coup. Mercenaries had seized the other half of Equatorial Guinea – Bioko being the country’s island capital – the half that lay just across the ocean, forming part of the African mainland.

In the aftermath, President Chambara had rounded up all foreigners on Bioko – not that there were many. Jaeger had been one of them, and a search of his digs had turned up the odd memento from his time as a soldier.

As soon as Chambara had heard, he’d figured Jaeger had to be in on the coup;
their man on the inside.
Which he wasn’t. He was here in Bioko for an entirely different – and innocent – set of reasons, but there was no convincing Chambara. On the President’s orders, Jaeger had been thrown into Black Beach Prison, where Major Mojo had done his best to break him; to force him to confess.

Jaeger slipped on the shades. ‘You’re right – we’ll never make it out of here via the airport. You got a Plan B?’

Raff threw him a look. ‘Way I heard it, you were here working as a teacher. Teaching English. At a village in the far north of the island. I paid them a visit. A bunch of fishermen there figure you’re the best thing that ever happened on Hell Island. Taught their kids to read ’n’ write. More than President Chugga ever did.’ He paused. ‘They’ve readied a canoe so we can make a break for Nigeria.’

Jaeger thought about it for a second. He’d spent close to three years on Bioko. He’d got to know the local fishing communities well. The journey across the Gulf of Guinea by canoe – it was doable. Maybe.

‘It’s thirty klicks, or thereabouts,’ he volunteered. ‘The fishermen do it now and then – when the weather’s set fair. You got a map?’

Raff gestured at a small flight bag lying at Jaeger’s feet. Jaeger reached for it, painfully, and rifled through the contents. He found the map, unfolded it and studied the lie of the land. Bioko lay in the very crook of the armpit of Africa – a tiny island thick with jungle, no more than a hundred kilometres long by fifty kilometres wide.

The nearest African country was Cameroon, lying north and west of there, with Nigeria set further to the west again. A good two hundred kilometres south lay what had been, until recently, the other half of President Chambara’s domain – the mainland part of Equatorial Guinea – that was, until the coup plotters had seized it.

‘Cameroon’s closest,’ Jaeger remarked.

‘Cameroon? Nigeria?’ Raff shrugged. ‘Right now, anywhere’s better than here.’

‘How long till nightfall?’ Jaeger queried. He’d lost his watch to Chambara’s thugs, long before he’d been dragged into his Black Beach cell. ‘Under cover of darkness, we might just make it.’

‘Six hours. I’m giving you one hour max at the hotel. You spend it scrubbing all that shit off, and necking water – because no way are you gonna make it unless you rehydrate. Like I said, big day still to come.’

‘Mojo knows which hotel you’re staying at?’

Raff snorted. ‘No point trying to hide. Island this size – everyone knows everything. Come to think of it, reminds me a bit of home . . .’ His teeth flashed in the sunlight. ‘Mojo won’t cause us any trouble – not for a good few hours. He’ll be checking if his money has cleared – by which time we’ll be long gone.’

Jaeger drank the bottled water, forcing gulp after gulp down his parched throat. Trouble was, his stomach had shrunk to the size of a walnut. If they hadn’t beaten and tortured him to death, the starvation diet would have done for him pretty soon, that was for certain.

‘Teaching kids.’ Raff smiled, knowingly. ‘So what were you really up to?’