Ghost Flight (38 page)

They’d set camp near the start of the race. The Pen y Fan Challenge was inspired by British special forces selection. In one of the toughest stages, candidates had to ascend the almost sheer face of the Fan, descend Jacob’s Ladder, then push onwards along the undulating old Roman road, at the end of which they’d hit the turnaround point and do it all again in reverse.

It had become known as ‘the Fan Dance’, and was a brutal test of speed, stamina and fitness – things that Jaeger found came naturally to him. Though retired from the military, he still liked to remind himself every now and then what he was capable of.

They’d gone to sleep that night with Jaeger’s body aching from a hard day’s training, and his wife and son likewise exhausted from mountain-biking across the snowy lowlands. Jaeger’s next conscious memory had been of coming to his senses a week later in intensive care – only to learn that Ruth and Luke were missing.

The gas used against them had been identified as Kolokol-1, a little-known Russian knockout agent that took effect in between one and three seconds. It was generally non-fatal – unless the victim suffered prolonged exposure in a closed environment – but even so it had taken Jaeger months to fully recover.

The police had discovered the boot of Jaeger’s car stuffed full of Christmas presents for his family – ones that would now never be opened. Apart from the 4x4’s tyre tracks, no trace of his missing wife and child had been found. It had appeared to be a motiveless abduction, not to mention possible murder.

While Jaeger wasn’t exactly the prime suspect, at times the line of questioning had left him wondering. The more any motive or leads had evaded the police, the more they had seemed to want to dig for reasons in Jaeger’s past as to why he might have wanted to make his wife and child disappear.

They’d trawled his military records, highlighting any history of extreme trauma that might have triggered post-traumatic stress disorder. Anything that might account for such apparently unaccountable behaviour. They’d questioned his closest friends. Plus they’d grilled his family relentlessly – his parents in particular – about whether there were any problems in his marriage.

That had in part precipitated his mother and father’s move to Bermuda – to escape the unwarranted intrusions. They’d stuck around to help him through the worst, but when he’d gone AWOL and fled to Bioko, they’d likewise seized the chance for a clean start. By then the trail had gone utterly cold anyway. Ruth and Luke had been missing almost a year, presumed dead, and in the relentless search Jaeger had come close to tearing himself apart.

It had taken days, months – and now years – for the hidden recollections of that dark night to start bleeding back to the surface. And now this: he’d reclaimed some of the very last of the memories, those most deeply buried, at the hands of an Amahuaca warrior and a good dose of a
nyakwana
-infused drink.

Of course, it wasn’t any old
Reichsadler
that he’d seen on that knife hilt. It was the same design that his great uncle Joe had found so utterly terrifying in a cabin deep in the Scottish hills. His words flashed into Jaeger’s mind now, as he trudged through the sodden jungle, along with the look of sheer terror that had flitted across his gaze.

And then this precious boy comes here with that. Ein Reichsadler! That damn cursed damnation! It seems as if the evil has returned . . .

According to the Amahuaca Indian chief, it was a similar
Reichsadler
that had been carved into the bodies of his two captured warriors – and by the same force with which Jaeger and his team were locked in a life-and-death struggle.

But what confounded Jaeger most was that he seemed to have recognised the voice spitting at him from behind the gas mask. Yet as much as he might rack his brains, no name or image came into his mind.

If he did somehow know his chief tormentor, the man’s identity remained utterly lost to him.

67

It was approaching midday on their tenth day in the jungle by the time Jaeger had started to shake free of his malaise. It was their impending arrival at the air wreck that had dragged him out of the dark and troubling past.

In spite of that morning’s disquiet, Jaeger still had his pebbles and compass gripped in hand. He figured they were maybe 3,000 yards short of the line at which the forest would start to die. Beyond that it would be only the bleached bones of toxic dead wood leading up to the wreck itself.

They entered a particularly sodden patch of jungle.

‘
Yaporuamuhu˜ a
,’ Puruwehua announced, as they began to wade deeper. ‘Flooded forest. When the water becomes this big, the piranhas tend to swim in from the rivers. They feed on anything they can find.’

The dark water was swirling around Jaeger’s waist. ‘Thanks for the warning,’ he muttered.

‘They are only aggressive when driven by hunger,’ Puruwehua tried to reassure him. ‘After such rains, there should be plenty for them to eat.’

‘And if they
are
feeling hungry?’ Jaeger queried.

Puruwehua glanced at the nearest tree. ‘You must get out of the water. Quickly.’

Jaeger spotted something sleek and silvery streaking through the shallows beside him. Another and another darted past, one or two brushing against his legs. The bodies looked silky-green on the dorsal surface, with large yellow eyes turned upwards, and two rows of massive teeth likes spines.

‘They’re all around us,’ Jaeger hissed.

‘Not to worry – this is good. This is very good.
Andyrapepotiguhu˜ a.
Vampire fish. It eats piranhas. It spears them with its long teeth.’

‘Right, let’s keep ’em
close – at least until we reach that warplane.’

The water deepened. It was almost at chest height now. ‘Soon time to swim like the
pirau’ndia
,’ Puruwehua remarked. ‘It is a fish that holds itself vertical, with its head out of the water.’

Jaeger didn’t reply.

He’d had enough of fetid water, mosquitoes, leeches, caimans and fish jaws to last him a lifetime. He wanted to get hooked up to that aircraft, lift himself and his team out of there, and start searching for his missing family.

It was time to finish the expedition and start afresh. At the end of this crazed road he felt certain he’d know his wife and son’s fate one way or the other. Or if not, he’d have died in the attempt to discover it. Living in the half-light as he had been was not living at all. This was what his awakening had shown him.

Jaeger could feel Puruwehua’s eyes upon him as they walked onwards in silence.

‘You have a clearer mind now, my friend?’

Jaeger nodded. ‘Time to wrest back control from those who seek to destroy your world, Puruwehua, and mine.’

‘We call it
hama
,’ Puruwehua remarked knowingly. ‘Fate or destiny.’

For a while they waded on in companionable silence.

Jaeger felt a presence in the water beside him. It was Irina Narov. Like the rest of his team she was moving ahead holding her main weapon – a Dragunov sniper rifle – high out of the water, in an effort to keep it dirt free and dry. It was backbreaking work, but with the air wreck so close, she seemed driven by a relentless energy.

The Dragunov was an odd choice of weapon for the jungle, where combat was invariably at close quarters, but Narov had insisted it was the weapon for her. Sensibly, she’d opted for an SVDS – the compact, lightweight variant of the gun.

But it hadn’t escaped Jaeger’s notice that her two chosen weapons – the knife and the sniper rifle – were so often the tools of the assassin. The assassin; the loner. There was something about Narov that set her apart, that was for certain, but there was also a part of Jaeger that found those traits oddly familiar.

His son’s best friend at school, a boy called Daniel, had exhibited some of Narov’s characteristics: his speech had been oddly matter-of-fact and direct, sometimes seemingly bordering on the rude. He’d often failed to pick up on the social cues that came naturally to most kids. And he’d found it painfully difficult making and holding eye contact – not until he really knew and trusted someone.

It had taken Daniel a good while to learn to trust Luke, but once he’d done so, he’d proved the most loyal and constant of friends. They’d competed over everything: rugby, air hockey, even at the local paintball facility. But it had only ever been the healthy competition between best friends, and they’d stuck up for each other against all outsiders.

When Luke had disappeared, Daniel had been devastated. He’d lost his one true companion – his battle buddy. Just as Jaeger had.

Over time, Jaeger and Ruth had become friendly with Daniel’s parents. They’d confided in them that Daniel had been diagnosed with Asperger’s, or high-functioning autism – the experts didn’t appear sure which exactly. As with many such kids, Daniel proved to be obsessed by and brilliant at one thing: mathematics. That, plus he had a magical way with animals.

Jaeger cast his mind back to the close encounter they’d had with the
Phoneutria
. Something had struck him then, although he hadn’t quite realised what it was. Narov had acted almost as if she had a relationship with the venomous spiders – like she understood them. She’d been reluctant to kill even one of them, not until there was no other option.

And if there was one thing that Narov would obsess over and excel at, Jaeger had a good idea what it might be: the hunt and the kill.

‘How far?’ she demanded, her voice cutting through his thoughts.

‘How far to what?’

‘The air wreck. What else is there?’

Jaeger pointed ahead. ‘Around eight hundred metres. You see where the light breaks through the canopy – that’s where the forest starts to die.’

‘So close,’ she whispered.

‘
Wir sind die Zukunft
.’ Jaeger repeated the line that he’d heard in the closing stages of his
nyakwana-
induced vision. ‘You speak German.
Wir sind die Zukunft
. What does it mean?’

Narov stopped dead. She stared at him for a long second, her eyes frozen. ‘Where did you hear that?’

‘An echo from my past.’ Why did this woman always have to answer a question with a question? ‘So, what does it mean?’

‘
Wir sind die Zukunft
,’ Narov repeated, slowly and very deliberately. ‘We are the future. It was the rallying cry of the
Herrenrasse
– the Nazi master race. Whenever Hitler tired of
Denn heute gehort uns Deutschland, und morgen die ganze Welt
, he’d try a bit of
Wir sind die Zukunft
.
The people lapped it up.’

‘How come you know so much about it?’ Jaeger demanded.

‘Know your enemy,’ Narov replied cryptically. ‘I make it my business to know.’ She threw Jaeger a look that struck him as being almost accusatory. ‘The question is – how do you know so little?’ She paused. ‘So little about your own past.’

68

Before Jaeger could answer, there was a terrified scream from behind. He turned to see a blaze of fear flash across Leticia Santos’s features as she was dragged beneath the water. She broke the surface, arms flailing desperately, her face a mask of terror, before she was ripped under once more.

Jaeger had caught the briefest glimpse of what had hold of her. It was one of the massive waterborne snakes that Puruwehua had warned him about: a constrictor. He charged through the shallows, diving for the deadly serpent and grappling with its tail as he frantically tried to wrest the coils free from her body.

He couldn’t use his shotgun. If he opened fire he’d blast Santos at the same time as hitting the snake. The water thrashed and boiled, Santos and the serpent entwined in a blur of snakeskin and limbs as she fought a battle that she could never win alone. The more that Jaeger fought it, the more the monster constrictor seemed to tighten its murderous grip around her.

Then from behind him Jaeger heard a sudden crack. It was the distinctive sound of a sniper rifle. At the same moment, somewhere in amongst the blur of snake and human, something erupted in a burst of blood and pulverised flesh as a high-velocity round hit home.

A second or so later the struggle was over, the snake’s head hanging limp and lifeless. Jaeger could see where most of its skull had been blown away, the high-velocity sniper round leaving a telltale exit wound. One by one Jaeger started to unwind the dead coils, and along with Alonzo and Kamishi he hauled Santos free.

As the three of them tried to pump the water out of her lungs, Jaeger glanced at Narov. She was standing in the swamp, the Dragunov still at her shoulder in case she needed to take a second shot.

Santos spluttered back into life, coughing frantically, her chest heaving up and down. Jaeger made sure they’d got her stabilised, but she was badly traumatised, and still shaking with terror at the attack. Alonzo and Kamishi agreed to carry her the final stretch to the warplane, leaving Jaeger free to rejoin Narov at the head of the party.

‘Nice shooting,’ he remarked icily, once they were on the move again. ‘But how could you be sure you were going to blow the snake’s head off, and not Leticia’s?’

Narov eyed him coldly. ‘If someone hadn’t taken the shot she would now be dead. Even with your help it was a losing battle. With this,’ she patted the Dragunov, ‘at least I stood chance. A fifty-fifty chance, but still better than none. Sometimes a bullet saves a life. They are not always fired to take one.’

‘So you flipped the coin and pulled the trigger . . .’ Jaeger lapsed into silence.

It didn’t escape him that Narov’s bullet could just as easily have hit him as Santos, yet she had barely hesitated before taking such a shot – such a gamble. He didn’t know if that made her the ultimate professional or a psychopath.

Narov looked over her shoulder towards where the snake had been killed. ‘It is a pity about the constrictor. It was only doing what comes naturally to it – trying to get a meal. The
mbojuhua. Boa constrictor imperator.
It is a CITES Appendix II listed species, which means it is in
high danger of extinction.’