Ghost Flight (25 page)

‘Agreed.’ Dale paused. ‘Say – would you be up for filming something like this every day, kind of like a video diary?’

Jaeger set off across the sandbar towards camp. ‘Maybe, time permitting . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Let’s see how it goes.’

43

Night falls quickly in the jungle.

With the approach of darkness, Jaeger slapped on insect repellent and tucked his combat trousers well into his boots to stop any creepy-crawlies from sneaking in during the night hours. He’d sleep like that – fully clothed, boots on, and with his combat shotgun cradled in his arms.

That way, if they were attacked during the hours of darkness he’d be good to fight.

But none of this could entirely defeat one diehard adversary here in the Serra de los Dios – the mosquitoes. Jaeger had never seen such monsters. He could hear their fierce whine as they circled his body like mini vampire bats, intent on wreaking blood-sucking, disease-ridden mayhem. And sure enough, they could chomp through his combats; Jaeger could feel the odd one driving its tiny insect jaws in.

He climbed into his hammock, his limbs burning with exhaustion. After his fight to save Narov, and his solo trek across the jungle, he was utterly, utterly spent. He had barely rested at all the previous night. He didn’t doubt that he would sleep the sleep of the dead, especially as Alonzo had promised to keep guard all through the hours of darkness.

The former SEAL had set a sentry routine, so that there would be eyes on the jungle all night long. If anyone needed to leave their sandbar camp for any reason – even to take a crap – they had to do so in pairs, buddy-buddy fashion. That way, everyone had back-up in case of trouble.

A thick and velvety darkness enveloped the sandbar, and with it came a cacophony of night-time sounds: the mindless rhythmic beat of the cicadas –
preeep-preeep-preeep-preeep –
which would continue until sunrise; the bumbling, fizzy thud of massive beetles and other flying things cannoning about; the all but inaudible high-pitched shrieks of giant bats swooping across the water, hunting on the wing. The air above the Rio de los Dios was thick with them, wings beating the darkness. Jaeger could see their fleeting forms silhouetted against the faint glow of the stars that filtered through the feathery treetops. Their ghostly shapes contrasted markedly with the eerie, pulsating glow of the fireflies.

Those fireflies peppered the silken night like bursts of falling stardust. All along the riverbank they formed a blur of fluorescent blue-green, dipping in and out of the trees. And every now and again one would disappear –
phffutt
; a light being snuffed out – as a bat swooped and plucked it from the air. Just as four of Jaeger’s team had been plucked from the shadows of the forest by a dark and ghostly force.

Alone in the night hours, Jaeger found himself besieged by the doubts he’d kept hidden during the day. They were barely days into this and already he was five people down. Yet somehow he had to rescue his expedition’s fortunes, and in truth, he didn’t know how he was going to do that.

But this wasn’t the first time he’d been so deeply in the shit, and he’d always managed to turn things around. He had an inner strength born of such situations, and a part of him thrived on the uncertainty and the overwhelming odds.

Of one thing he was certain: the answers to everything – every misfortune that had befallen them – lay deeper in the jungle, at the site of that mystery air wreck. That was the one thing that kept driving him onwards.

Jaeger kicked his feet higher in the hammock, and reached to unlace his left boot. He removed it, delved deep and pulled something out of the insole. He flashed a torch across it briefly, the light and his eyes lingering on the two faces that stared up at him – the green-eyed, raven-haired beauty of a mother, and the boy who was Jaeger’s spitting image standing protectively at her side.

Some nights – many nights – he still said a prayer for them. He’d done so during the long and empty years in Bioko. He did so tonight, lying in a hammock slung between two trees on a sandbar on the Rio de los Dios. At that distant air wreck he knew there would be answers, and perhaps even the ones he most longed to learn – about what had happened to his wife and his boy.

Jaeger rested, cradling that photo.

As he drifted off to sleep, he sensed somehow that a truce had been declared in whatever war it was they were fighting here. For the first time since parachuting into the Serra de los Dios, he couldn’t detect any watchers – any hostile eyes in the jungle shadows.

But he sensed also that this was a temporary lull. The first skirmishes had been fought. The first casualties suffered.

The war proper was only just beginning.

44

They’d been three days on the Rio de los Dios – three days during which Jaeger had brooded over the next stage of their journey until it had driven him almost to distraction. Three days travelling due west on a river flowing at an average speed of six kilometres an hour: via the water, they’d covered a good 120 kilometres.

Jaeger was pleased with their progress. That kind of distance would have taken many times as long and proven many times more exhausting – not to mention fraught with danger – had they attempted it overland.

It was approaching mid-afternoon on the third day when he spotted what he was looking for: the Meeting of the Ways. Here the Rio de Los Dios was joined by a slightly smaller watercourse, the Rio Ouro – the Golden River. Whereas the Rio de los Dios was full of silty residues from the jungle, and dark brown – almost black – in colour, the Rio Ouro was golden-yellow, its waters being rich in sandy sediments swept down from the mountains.

Where the two converged, the colder, denser waters of the Rio Ouro proved reluctant to intermingle with those of its warmer, less dense cousin, hence what Jaeger could see ahead of him – a striking section of river where black and white ran side by side for a good kilometre or more, almost without mixing.

At the Meeting of the Ways, the smaller confluence – the Rio Ouro – would become subsumed into the Rio de los Dios. And at that moment, Jaeger and his team would be just three kilometres short of their must-stop position – for ahead lay an impassable barrier, the point where the river tumbled close to a thousand feet over the Devil’s Falls.

The journey thus far had taken them across a high plateau cloaked in jungle. Where the Rio de los Dios thundered over the falls marked the point at which the plateau was torn in two by a jagged fault line. The land to the west of there lay a thousand feet lower, forming an endless carpet of lowland rainforest.

Their end point – the mystery air wreck – lay some thirty kilometres onwards from the Devil’s Falls, in the midst of that lowland jungle.

Jaeger nosed his canoe ahead, his paddle dipping into the waters noiselessly and causing barely a ripple. As a former Royal Marines Commando, he was well at home on the water. He’d led the river leg, helping those behind navigate through the more treacherous shallows. He reflected upon their next move. Decisions now would prove critical.

The journey downriver had been relatively peaceful, at least compared to what had gone before. But he feared that with landfall approaching, this transitory period of stillness was about to come to an end.

He could detect a new threat resonating in the air now: a deep, throaty roar filled his ears, as if a hundred thousand wildebeest were thundering over an African plain in a massive stampede.

He glanced ahead.

On the horizon he could see a tower of rising mist – the spray thrown up by the Rio de los Dios as it cascaded over the edge of the rift, forming one of the world’s tallest and most dramatic waterfalls.

There was no way over the Devil’s Falls – that much had been obvious from studying the aerial photos. The only possible route ahead appeared to be a pathway of sorts leading down the escarpment, but that lay a good day’s march north of here. Jaeger’s plan was to leave the river shortly and to undertake the last stage of the journey – including the steep descent – on foot.

Skirting around the Devil’s Falls would take them a good distance out of their way, but there was no alternative as far as he could determine. He’d studied the terrain from every angle, and the path down the escarpment was the only way to proceed. As to who or what exactly had made that path – it remained a mystery.

It could be wild animals.

It could be Indians.

Or it could be that mystery force that was out there somewhere – armed, hostile and dangerous.

45

The secondary problem that Jaeger was grappling with was the fact that they’d always envisaged making this final part of the journey as a ten-person team. Now they were reduced to five, and he was unsure what to do with the missing team members’ kit. They’d packed their personal effects into the canoes, but there was no way to carry them onwards from here.

To leave such kit behind would be tantamount to telegraphing their acceptance that the missing team members were dead, but Jaeger couldn’t see any way around it.

He glanced behind him.

His canoe was leading, the others in line astern. There were five vessels in all, each an Advanced Elements convertible kayak – a fifteen-foot semi-foldable inflatable expedition craft. The kayaks had been parachuted in by Kamishi and Krakow, packed in the para-tubes. Each twenty-five-kilo craft folded down to form a cube measuring around two square feet, but opened out into a boat capable of carrying 249 kilos of kit.

Back at the sandbar, they’d unpacked the kayaks, inflated them with stirrup pumps and launched them into the water loaded with gear. Each vessel boasted a triple-skin rip-stop hull, for extreme puncture resistance, built-in aluminium rods for added stability, plus adjustable padded seats, allowing for long-distance paddling without getting chafed raw.

With six inflatable chambers per canoe, plus flotation bags, they were pretty much unsinkable – as they had proven on the few sections of white water that they’d encountered.

Originally, Jaeger’s plan had had five kayaks on the water, each crewed by two of his team. But with their numbers so depleted, the crafts had had the seating reconfigured so that each accommodated just one person. Dale and Kral had seemed the most relieved at not having to undergo a three-day river journey sharing the one cramped canoe.

Jaeger figured the film team’s animosity was all down to one thing. Kral resented Dale’s seniority. Dale was directing the filming, while Kral was only an assistant producer – and there were times when the Slovak’s antipathy flashed through. As for Dale, Kral’s unfortunate habit of sucking his teeth bugged him something rotten.

Jaeger had been on enough such expeditions to know how, in the crucible of the jungle, the best of friends could end up hating each other’s guts. He knew he needed to get the problem sorted, for that kind of friction could endanger the entire expedition.

The rest of the team – Jaeger himself, Alonzo and Kamishi – had bonded pretty well. There was little that made alpha males pull together more than knowing they faced an enemy as unexpected as it was predatory. The three former elite forces soldiers were united in their adversity – it was just the film crew who were bitching behind each other’s backs.

As the arrow-like prow of Jaeger’s craft cleaved a furrow through the Meeting of the Ways – golden-white water on the one side, inky black on the other – he reflected on how he’d been almost happy on the river.

Almost. Of course, the loss of the five team members had cast a dark and continuous shadow over their progress.

But this had been the kind of thing that he had looked forward to back in London – a long paddle down a wild and remote river, in the heart of one of planet earth’s greatest jungles. Here the rivers were corridors of both sunlight and life: wild animals flocked to their banks, and the air thrummed to the beat of a myriad bird wings.

Each kayak had elasticated deck lacing, providing quick access to vital gear. Jaeger had his combat shotgun meshed into that, just a hand’s reach away. If a caiman tried to cause him any trouble, he could draw and fire within seconds if needed. As matters had transpired, most had chosen to keep their distance, for the kayaks were about the biggest thing moving on the river.

At one stage that morning Jaeger had allowed his kayak to drift silently downstream, as he watched a jaguar – a powerful male – stalk his prey. The big cat had padded along the riverside, taking great care not to raise a ripple or to make a sound. He’d got to the point where he was in a caiman’s blind spot, and had swum across to the mudbank upon which the reptile was sunning itself. This was a yacare as opposed to a black caiman, so the smaller of the two species.

The big cat had stalked up the mudbank and pounced. The caiman had sensed danger at the last moment and tried to swing its jaws around to snap. But the cat was far quicker. Legs astride the caiman’s front shoulders, claws sunk deep, he’d gripped the beast’s head in his mouth, sinking his fangs into its brain.

It had been an instant kill, following which the jaguar had dragged the caiman into the water and swum back to shore. Having watched the entire hunt, Jaeger had felt like giving the big cat a round of applause. It was one–nil to the jaguar, and Jaeger for one was happy for it to remain that way.

After his earlier battle with one of the giant reptiles, and his loss of Irina Narov, he had developed a dislike of the caiman that went more than skin deep.

There had been one other joy to travelling by river: Dale and Kral’s kayaks had been positioned at the rear of the flotilla. Jaeger had argued that they were the least experienced canoeists, and so they should be kept the furthest away from any likely trouble. As a bonus, putting them at the rear had kept him well away from Dale’s camera lens.

But oddly, during the last day or so Jaeger had found himself almost missing the on-camera conversations. In a weird way the camera had been someone to talk to; to unburden himself to. Jaeger had never been on an expedition where he’d been so bereft of a soulmate; of company.