Ghost Flight (21 page)

‘Where?’ he hissed. ‘Which side?’

‘Eleven o’clock,’ Narov whispered. ‘More or less dead ahead. Forty feet. Closing fast.’

It was coming at them in his blind spot.

‘Hold tight,’ Jaeger yelled.

He released his grip on the weapon on his left, slipped free the knot that held the combat shotgun, grabbed it and dropped off the raft, diving beneath it, kicking hard with both legs. As he came up on the far side, he caught sight of a massive black snout knifing through the water towards him, a ribbed, scaly, armoured body snaking out behind it a good five metres or more.

It was a black caiman all right, and a real monster.

Jaeger levelled the weapon just as the caiman’s jaws yawned wide before him. He was staring down its very throat. There was no time to aim. He pulled the trigger at close to point-blank range, his left hand jerking the pump action backwards and ratcheting in another round, and another.

The impact of the repeated shots blew the reptile’s giant head clean out of the water, but it wasn’t enough to halt its forward progress. It might have been killed instantly, a blasted funnel of lead shot tearing into its brain, but still its bloodied corpse slammed into Jaeger with all the force of a 400-kilogram beast.

Jaeger felt the air being crushed out of his lungs as he was driven deep down under the raft, the dark and turbid waters closing all around him.

Above, the bloodied mass of the caiman’s front end came to rest with a sickening crunch, its dead eyes staring hungrily, its lacerated jaw slamming down into the forward arm of the raft.

The lightweight craft lurched alarmingly, the impact half breaking it in two. Moments later, the limp, lifeless weight of the caiman’s corpse began to slip below the surface of the river.

The stricken craft keeled over still further, the muddy water beginning to lap around Narov’s head and shoulders as it cannoned off rocks and was swept into the first of the rapids.

She sensed that it was going down. For a moment her muscles tensed as she tried to hold on.

But the effort was too much for her.

Finally Jaeger forced his way back to the surface, lungs choking out the fetid water of the Rio de los Dios. He’d been down deep and long fighting for his life and he felt half drowned. For a long moment he struggled for breath, his body screaming out for oxygen and desperate to drag the life-giving air into his system.

To either side of him were more caimans, closing in on the corpse of the monster he had just killed. They were drawn by the smell of blood. As Jaeger had been driven down towards the riverbed he’d lost his combat shotgun, and he was pretty much defenceless now, but the caimans weren’t paying much attention to him.

Instead, they had one of their own to feast upon, and the taste of the blood thick in the water was driving them wild.

For a long moment Jaeger tried to orientate himself, and then he too was dragged into the rapids. He tried to protect his torso as he was swept against the rocks, keeping his feet downstream to push off any obstacles and his arms out to the sides to steady himself.

He pulled himself into the slower current at the edge of the white water and did a 360-degree sweep, scanning for the raft. But as he eyed the river all around him, he couldn’t seem to locate it in any direction. The lightweight craft had completely disappeared, and its loss made his blood run cold.

He kept searching, growing ever more frantic, but still there was no sight of the makeshift craft.

And as for Irina Narov – there wasn’t the slightest sign of her anywhere.

35

Jaeger hauled himself on to the riverbank.

He sank to his knees in a sodden, exhausted heap, his limbs burning, his lungs gasping for breath. To any watching eyes he would appear more like a mud-encrusted, semi-drowned rat than a human being – not that he expected many to be watching.

For hours on end he’d quartered the Rio de los Dios searching for Irina Narov. He’d scanned the river from bank to bank, searching everywhere and yelling out her name. But he’d been unable to find the slightest sign of her, or the raft. And then he’d discovered what he’d most feared to find: his pack and the canoe flotation bag, still lashed together, but torn and shredded by caiman tooth and claw marks.

The battered remains of the makeshift raft had drifted into the shallows a good distance downstream. On an adjacent mudbank Jaeger had discovered one unnerving sign of the woman he’d tried so desperately to safeguard: her sky-blue headband, now sodden and torn and stained with mud.

Still he’d continued to search the riverbanks as far as he could go, but even as he’d done so, he’d feared his efforts were futile. He figured Narov must have been thrown from the raft, even as the caiman’s dead body had thrust him deep into the river’s inky depths. The rapids and the caimans would have done the rest.

He’d fought for the best part of a minute to regain the surface, but it was still enough time for the raft to have been swept completely out of his sight. Had it still been intact and afloat, he’d have been able to see the makeshift craft. He’d have been able to catch it and draw it into land.

And had Irina Narov still been with it, he might have been able to save her.

As it was . . . Well, he didn’t like to contemplate Narov’s exact fate, yet he didn’t doubt for one moment that she was gone. Narov was dead – either drowned in the Rio de los Dios, or torn apart by ravening black caimans; and most likely a mixture of the two.

And he, Will Jaeger, had been unable to do anything to save her.

He struggled to his feet and stumbled further up the muddy riverbank. In the dark shock of the moment, his training began to kick in. He slipped into full-on survival mode; it was all he knew how to do. He’d lost Narov, but the rest of the expedition was still out there somewhere in the jungle. There were eight people presumably waiting at that distant sandbar; reliant upon him.

Right now they had no coordinates to make for; no way to head towards the air wreck. And without a way forward, there was no easy way out of this savage Lost World; no exit strategy. To withdraw from a place as remote and as seemingly damned as the Cordillera de los Dios took a great deal of planning and preparation, as Jaeger well knew.

If Narov’s loss were to mean anything, he had to get himself reunited with his team and get them on the move. He had to lead them to the site of that wreck, and to do that he had to get himself to the sandbar – although the odds of him doing so were rapidly turning against him.

He proceeded to empty out the contents of his pockets, plus those of his belt pouches. After the chaos of the river crossing, he had no idea what if any of his kit remained. The rucksack had been rendered useless – shredded by the caimans and voided of its contents – but as he scanned his meagre possessions, Jaeger began to count his blessings.

His single most vital piece of kit – his compass, stuffed deep in a trouser pocket and zipped tight – was still there. With that one piece of equipment alone he stood a chance of making it through to the distant sandbar. He dragged out the map from his trouser side pocket. It was sodden and battered, but just about usable.

He had both map and compass; it was a start.

He checked his chest-mounted knife. It was still there, clipped firmly into its sheath; the knife Raff had given him; the one he’d put to such good use during the epic fight on Fernao beach – the fight in which Little Mo had been killed.

So much death; and now one more to contend with.

36

What Jaeger wouldn’t have given to have Raff alongside him now. Had the big Maori been here, Narov might have lived. There were no guarantees, of course, but Raff would have helped him fight off the killer caiman, and one or other of them would have likely escaped unscathed from that first attack, and so been able to safeguard the raft and its precious cargo.

But Jaeger was alone, Irina Narov was gone, and he had to steel himself to the hard facts. He had no choice. He had to go on.

He continued with his kit check. He had two full bottles of water slung in his belt rig – although the Katadyn filter was gone. He had a little emergency food, the roll of paracord that he’d used to lower Narov and himself from the canopy, plus two dozen rounds for the shotgun.

He dumped the shotgun shells. They were a useless deadweight without the weapon.

Amongst the few other bits and pieces that the kit check revealed, his gaze came to rest upon the shiny form of the C-130 pilot’s coin. The Night Stalkers’ motto glistened in the sunlight:
Death Waits in the Dark.
No doubt about it – death red in tooth and claw had lurked in the dark waters of the Rio de los Dios.

And it had found them; or at least, it had found Narov.

But that wasn’t in any way the pilot’s fault, of course.

The pilot of that C-130 had got them out of his aircraft at exactly the right release point. That was no mean feat. The disaster that had followed – it was none of his doing. The coin went with the rest of Jaeger’s meagre possessions – deep into his pocket. Hope was what kept people alive, he reminded himself.

The last piece of equipment that he contemplated was also the most difficult: it was Irina Narov’s knife.

After he’d used it to cut them free from the abseil line, Jaeger had slung it on his own belt. Amidst all the chaos, and with Narov so incapacitated from the spider bite, it had seemed like the right thing to do. Now it was all he had that linked him to her.

He held it in his hands for a long moment. His eyes traced the knife’s name, stamped into the steel hilt. He knew all about the history of the blade, for he’d researched his grandfather’s.

In the months following Hitler’s spring 1940 blitzkrieg – his lightning war that had driven the Allied troops out of France – Winston Churchill had ordered the creation of a special force, to launch butcher-and-bolt terror raids against the enemy. Those special volunteers were taught to wage war in what was then a very un-British way – fast and dirty, with no holds barred.

At a top-secret school for mayhem and murder, they’d been shown how to hurt, maul, injure and kill with ease. Their instructors had been the legendary William Fairbairn and Eric ‘Bill’ Sykes, who over the years had perfected the means to terminate silently, at close quarters.

From Wilkinson Sword, Sykes and Fairbairn had commissioned a combat knife to be used by Churchill’s special volunteers. It had a seven-inch blade, a heavy handle to give firm grip in the wet, plus razor edges and a sharp stabbing profile.

The knives had rolled off Wilkinson Sword’s London production line. Etched on the square head of each were the words: ‘The Fairbairn–Sykes Fighting Knife’. Fairbairn and Sykes had taught the special volunteers that there was no more deadly weapon at close quarters, and most importantly, ‘It never runs out of ammunition.’

Jaeger had never got to see Narov use her blade in anger. But the
fact that she’d chosen to carry such a knife – the same as his grandfather had used – had somehow drawn him to her, though he’d never got the chance to ask her where she had got it, or what exactly it might mean to her.

He wondered how she’d come by it: a Russian; a veteran of the Spetsnaz, with a British commando knife. And why that comment she’d made –
good for killing Germans
? During the war, every British commando and SAS soldier had been issued with one of those knives; doubtless the iconic blade had accounted for more than its fair share of the Nazi enemy.

But that was many decades and a whole world ago.

Jaeger replaced the knife on his belt.

For a brief moment he wondered if he’d been wrong; wrong to insist that Narov come with him. If he’d done as she’d asked and left her, she more than likely would still be alive. But it was in his DNA never to leave a man behind – or woman, for that matter – and anyway, how long would she have lasted?

No. The more he thought about it, the more he knew that he had done the right thing. The only thing. She’d have perished either way. If he’d left her, she’d just have died a longer, lingering death, and she’d have died alone.

Jaeger forced all thoughts of Narov to the back of his mind.

He took stock. A daunting journey lay ahead: twenty-plus kilometres through thick jungle with only two litres of clean water to sustain him. A human could survive without food for many days; not so water. He’d have to ration himself strictly: a gulp every hour; nine gulps per bottle; eighteen hours walking, max.

He checked his watch.

Last light was barely two hours away. If he was to get to that sandbar in time to make the emergency RV, he’d most likely have to keep marching through the night hours, which was a big no-no in the jungle. It was impossible to see in the pitch black beneath the night-dark canopy.

He had nothing with which to defend himself, apart from his bare hands and his knife. If he stumbled into serious trouble, the only thing to do would be to run. He had one advantage: with Narov gone, he no longer had her weight to slow him down.

He was equipped only with what he stood up in, which meant he could move fast. All things considered, he figured he stood a half-decent chance. But even so, he dreaded the coming journey.

He got to his feet, placed the compass in the palm of his hand and took a first bearing. The point he’d aim for was a fallen tree trunk lying more or less due south – the direction in which he needed to travel. He replaced the compass, bent down and picked up ten small pebbles, placing them in his pocket. Every ten paces he’d transfer one pebble to his other pocket. When all had been moved across he’d have completed a hundred paces.

From long experience Jaeger knew that it would take seventy left footfalls for him to cover 100 metres of terrain, on the flat and under a light load. With a full pack, plus weapon and ammo, it would take him eighty, for the legs made less of a stride under a heavy load. When going steeply uphill, it might take him one hundred left footfalls.

The passing of the pebbles was a simple system that had worked for him countless times during epic yomps across tough terrain. And moving them from pocket to pocket would keep his mind focused and busy.