Ghost Flight (23 page)

‘Peaceful contact!’ Alonzo glanced at Jaeger. ‘You know, I just spent a year doing peacekeeping ops in Sudan; the Nuba mountains. About as remote as you can get. Some of those Nuba tribes, they still wander around pretty much butt-naked. But you know something – man, I grew to love those people. And one lesson I learned from the get-go: they wanted peaceful contact, they’d let you know about it.’

Alonzo shrugged. ‘Long story short, James and Santos set out around lunchtime on day one. Santos argued she knew what she was doing; she was Brazilian, and she’d spent years working with Amazonian tribes.’ He shook his head. ‘James: man, he’s stir-crazy; a total loon. He’d scrawled some note to the Indians; scribbled some pictures.’ He glanced at Dale. ‘You got the footage?’

Dale grabbed his camera, flipped open the side screen and scrolled through the digital files stored on the camera’s memory card. He pressed ‘play’. An image appeared on the screen – a close-up of a scribbled note. The thick, Kiwi-accented voice of Joe James could be heard reading out the words in the background.

‘Yo! Amazon dwellers! You like peace, we like peace. Let’s make peace!’ The shot panned out to reveal James’s massive Bin Laden beard and his craggy biker features. ‘We’re coming into your domain to say hello and to make peaceful contact.’

Dale shook his head in disbelief. ‘Can you believe this guy? “Yo! Amazon dwellers!” I mean – like the Indians read English! A genuine wacko – spent too long in his cabin in the woods. Perfect for the camera. Not perfect for the mission!’

Jaeger signalled that he’d seen enough. ‘He is a little unusual. But who isn’t? Anyone who’s a hundred per cent sane wouldn’t be here. A little crazy is okay.’

Alonzo scratched his stubble. ‘Yeah, but man, that one – James – he’s kinda off the scale. Anyhow, he and Santos set out. Twenty-four hours later there was no sign of them, but we’d had no sign of trouble either. So the second tier of the Hugger Brigade – the Frenchie, Clermont, and bizarrely, the German, Krakow; you’d never have him down as a natural-born hugger – they set out to link up with James and Santos.

‘I shouldn’t have let ’em go,’ Alonzo growled. ‘I had this bad feeling. But hell, with you and Narov gone, we had no expedition leader and no deputy. Around midday – an hour after Clermont and Krakow had left – we heard yelling and gunfire. Sounded like a two-way range; like an ambush, with return fire.’

Alonzo glanced at Jaeger. ‘That was it: hugging declared over. We set out as a hunter force, tracking Clermont and Krakow’s trail to a point maybe a half-mile out. There, we hit major disturbance of the undergrowth. Fresh blood. Plus there were several of these.’

He pulled something out of his pack and handed it to Jaeger. ‘Careful. Figure that’s some kind of poison.’

Jaeger studied what he’d been given. It was a thin piece of wood around six inches long. It was finely carved and sharpened at one end, the point being smeared in some kind of dark and viscous fluid.

‘We pushed on,’ Alonzo continued, ‘and we picked up James and Santos’s trail. We found their camp, but no sign of them. No sign of any struggle, either. No sign of a fight. No blood. No darts. Nothing. It was like they’d been teleported out of there by aliens.’

Alonzo paused. ‘And then there was this.’ He pulled a spent bullet casing from his pocket. ‘Found it on the way back. Kind of stumbled across it.’ He handed Jaeger the casing. ‘It’s a 7.62 mm. More than likely GPMG or AK-47. It ain’t one of ours, that’s for sure.’

Jaeger rolled the casing around in his hand for a couple of seconds.

Until a few decades back, 7.62 mm had been the calibre of round used by NATO forces. In the Vietnam War, the Americans had experimented with a smaller calibre: 5.56 mm. With lighter bullets a foot soldier could carry more rounds of ammo, which meant more sustained firepower – crucial when undertaking long missions on foot in the jungle. Since then, 5.56 mm had become a common NATO calibre, and none of those gathered on the sandbar were using a 7.62 mm weapon.

Jaeger eyed Alonzo. ‘There’s been no further sign of the four of them?’

Alonzo shook his head. ‘None.’

‘So what d’you make of it?’ he prompted.

Alonzo’s face darkened. ‘Man, I dunno . . . There’s a hostile force out there, that’s for sure, but right now that force remains a mystery. If it is the Indians, how come we’ve got a 7.62 mm weapon in the mix? Since when does a lost tribe pack a punch like that?’

‘Tell me,’ Jaeger asked, ‘what was the blood like?’

‘At the ambush? Pretty much what you’d expect. Pools of it. Congealed.’

‘Lot of blood?’ Jaeger queried.

Alonzo shrugged. ‘Enough.’

Jaeger held up the thin sliver of wood that he’d been given. ‘Blow-dart, obviously. We know the Indians are armed with them. Supposedly poison-tipped. You know what they use to arm their darts? Curare – made from the sap of a forest vine. Curare kills by stopping the muscles of the diaphragm from working. In other words, you suffocate to death. Not a nice way to go.

‘I learned a bit about it while out here training Colonel Evandro’s B-SOB teams. The Indians use them for hunting monkeys in the treetops. Dart hits; monkey falls down; tribe collects monkey and retrieves dart. Each is hand-carved and they don’t tend to leave them lying around. But most importantly, if you are shot by a curare-tipped dart, it sticks in you like a pin; you hardly bleed at all.

‘Plus there’s this.’ Jaeger took the dart and put it to his mouth, tasting the black goo on the pointed end. Several of his team flinched.

‘You can’t get poisoned by ingesting curare,’ Jaeger reassured them. ‘Has to go direct into the bloodstream. But the thing is, it has an unmistakably bitter taste. This? My guess is it’s a syrup made of burned sugar.’ He gave a bleak smile. ‘Put it all together and what’ve you got?’

He glanced around the faces of his remaining team members. Alonzo: square-jawed, open-faced, exuding a homely honesty – every inch a former Navy SEAL. Kamishi: quiet, expectant, body like a coiled spring. Dale and Kral: two rising stars in the media intent on shooting their slick, blockbuster movie.

‘No one was shot by blow-darts.’ Jaeger answered his own question. ‘They were ambushed by gunmen; the blood alone proves that. So unless this lost tribe has somehow managed to get seriously tooled up, we’ve got a mystery force out there. The fact that they left this,’ he held up the dart, ‘and did their best to clear away their bullet cases suggests they’re trying to fit up the Indians for the crime.’

He stared at the dart for a second. ‘No one is supposed to be here apart from us and this lost tribe. At present, we have no idea who this mystery force of gunmen is, how they got here or why they’re hostile.’ He glanced up, darkly. ‘But one thing is clear: the nature of this expedition has changed irreversibly.

‘Five have been taken,’ he announced slowly. There was a cold steeliness in his gaze now. ‘We’ve barely set foot in the forest and already we’ve lost half of our number. We need to consider our options – carefully.’

He paused. His eyes were etched with a hardness few had seen before. He hadn’t known any of the missing that well, yet still he felt personally responsible for their loss.

He’d been drawn to the openness and the lack of guile of the big crazy Kiwi, Joe James. And he was painfully aware that Leticia Santos was Colonel Evandro’s presence on his team.

Santos was striking-looking, like a more streetwise – or maybe jungle-wise – version of the Brazilian actress Tais Araujo. Dark-eyed, dark-haired, impetuous and dangerously good fun, she had been pretty much the polar opposite of Irina Narov.

For Jaeger, losing one – Narov – had been a tragic disaster. Losing five within the first forty-eight hours of his expedition – it was unthinkable.

40

‘Option one,’ he announced, his voice tight with the tension of the moment. ‘We decide the mission’s no longer tenable and we call in an extraction team. We’ve got good comms, this is a usable landing zone; we could conceivably get pulled out of here. We’d remove ourselves from the threat, but we’d be leaving our friends behind – and right now we have no idea if they’re dead or alive.

‘Option two: we go searching for the missing team members. We work on the assumption that all are alive until proven otherwise. The upside: we do right by our fellows. We do not turn our backs on them at the first sign of trouble. The downside: we’re a small, lightly armed force, facing one with potentially greater firepower, and we have zero idea of their numbers.’

Jaeger paused. ‘And then there is the third option: we continue with the expedition as planned. I have a suspicion – and this is only instinct – that by doing so we’ll discover what’s happened to our missing friends. One way or another, whoever has attacked us, it makes sense that they’ve done so in order to stop us getting to our goal. By continuing, we’ll force their hand.

‘This is no military operation,’ Jaeger continued. ‘If it were, I’d give my men orders. We’re a bunch of civvies and we need to make a collective decision. As I see it, those are the three options – and we need to vote. But before we do, any questions? Suggestions? And feel free to talk, ’cause the camera isn’t running.’

He cast Dale a menacing look. ‘The camera’s not running, is it, Mr Dale?’

Dale brushed back his longish, lank hair. ‘Hey, you vetoed this stuff, remember. No filming of this meeting.’

‘I did.’ Jaeger glanced around for questions.

‘I am curious,’ Hiro Kamishi remarked quietly, his English all but perfect, apart from the faint Japanese lilt. ‘If this were a military operation, which option would you order your men to pursue?’

‘Option three,’ Jaeger replied, without a moment’s hesitation.

‘Would you mind explaining why?’ Kamishi spoke in an odd, careful way, each word chosen seemingly with great precision.

‘It’s counter-intuitive,’ Jaeger replied. ‘The normal human reaction to stress and danger is fight or flight. Flight would be to pull out. Fight would be to go directly after the bad guys. Option three is the least expected, and I’d hope it would throw them: force them into revealing themselves; into making a mistake.’

Kamishi bowed slightly. ‘Thank you. It is a good explanation. One I agree with.’

‘You know, buddy, it’s not five,’ Alonzo growled. ‘It’s six. With Andy Smith, that makes six gone. Never thought Smith’s death was an accident, and even less after what’s happened.’

Jaeger nodded. ‘With Smith it makes six.’

‘So when do we get the coordinates?’ a voice prompted. ‘Those of the air wreck?’

It was Stefan Kral, the Slovakian cameraman on Jaeger’s team – his English tinged with a strong, guttural accent. Jaeger eyed him. Short, stocky, with almost albino looks, Kral was the Beast to Dale’s Beauty, with pitted, pockmarked skin. He was six years older than Dale, though he didn’t look it, and by right of seniority alone he should have been directing the film.

But Carson had put Dale in charge, and Jaeger could pretty much figure out why. Dale and Carson were birds of a feather. Dale was slick, easy and cool, and a master at surviving in the media jungle. By contrast Kral was a clumsy, somewhat nerdy bag of nerves. He was one hell of an oddball to be trying to cut it in the TV industry.

‘With Narov gone, I’ve made Alonzo my deputy,’ Jaeger replied. ‘I’ve shared the coordinates with him.’

‘And so? The rest of us?’ Kral pushed.

Whenever Kral spoke, an odd, lopsided half-smile played across his features, no matter how serious the topic at hand. Jaeger figured it was his nervousness shining through, but still he found it oddly unsettling.

He’d known enough guys like Kral in the army – the semi-introverted; those who found it tough relating to others. He had always made a point of nurturing any who made it into his unit. More often than not they’d proven to be loyal to a fault, and absolute demons when the red mist of combat came down.

‘If we vote for option three – to continue – you’ll get the coordinates once we’re on the river,’ Jaeger told him. ‘That’s the deal I cut with Colonel Evandro: once we start our journey down the Rio de los Dios.’

‘So how did you manage to lose Narov?’ Kral probed. ‘What exactly happened?’

Jaeger stared. ‘I’ve already explained how Narov died.’

‘I’d like to hear it again,’ Kral pressed, the lopsided smile creeping further across his features. ‘Just, you know, to deconflict things. Just so we’re all clear.’

Jaeger was haunted by Narov’s loss, and he wasn’t about to relive it all again. ‘It was a God-awful mess that went ugly fast. And trust me – there was nothing I could do to save her.’

‘What makes you so convinced she’s dead?’ Kral continued mulishly. ‘And not so with James, Santos and the others?’

Jaeger’s eyes narrowed. ‘You had to be there,’ he remarked quietly.

‘But surely there was
something
you could have done? It was day one, you were crossing the river . . .’

‘You want me to shoot him now?’ Alonzo cut in, his voice rumbling a warning. ‘Or later, after we cut out his tongue?’

Jaeger stared at Kral. A distinct edge of menace crept into his tone. ‘It’s a funny thing, Mr Kral: I get the impression you’re interviewing me here. You’re not, are you? Interviewing me?’

Kral shook his head nervously. ‘I’m just airing a few issues. Just trying to deconflict things.’

Jaeger glanced from Kral to Dale. The latter’s camera was lying beside him on the ground. His hand crept towards it, furtively.

‘You know what, guys,’ Jaeger rasped, ‘I got something myself that needs
deconflicting
.’ He eyed the camera. ‘You’ve taped over the red filming light with black gaffer tape. You’ve set it on the ground, lens facing my way, and I presume it was already filming before you put it down.’

He lifted his eyes to Dale, who seemed to quake visibly under his gaze. ‘I’ll say this one time. Once only. You pull a trick like this again, I’ll ram that camera so far up your backside you’ll be able to clean the lens as if it were your teeth. Are – we – clear?’

Dale shrugged. ‘Yeah. I guess. Only—’

‘Only nothing,’ Jaeger cut him off. ‘And when we’re done here, you’re going to wipe everything you’ve filmed from the tapes, with me watching.’