Ghost Flight (34 page)

‘I’m sure you have,’ Jaeger enthused. ‘But today, right now, you’re going to learn to fly for real.’

Puruwehua’s gaze remained expressionless, devoid of even the slightest hint of fear. ‘If it is the only way down and the quickest, we will jump.’

‘We can get seven of you down for certain, maybe more if some fly solo,’ Jaeger explained. ‘And at least this way we can be first to that wreck.’

‘We will jump,’ Puruwehua announced simply. ‘Those who cannot will descend via the long route – the path – and from there they will chase after and harass this Dark Force. In this way, we hit them from two sides.’

Gwaihutiga volunteered a few words, punctuated by the brandishing of a weapon. ‘My elder brother says that after today, we will follow you anywhere, even over the falls,’ Puruwehua translated. ‘And he used a new name for you: Kahuhara’ga. It means “the hunter”.’

Jaeger shook his head. ‘Thanks, but here in the jungle it’s you guys who are the true hunters.’

‘No – I think Gwaihutiga is right,’ Narov cut in. ‘After all, Jaeger means “hunter” in German too. And today, here in the jungle, you have been given that name for a second time, and by an Amahuaca warrior who could not know the meaning of the original. That has to signify something.’

Jaeger shrugged. ‘Fine. But right now I feel more like the hunted. Right now I’d rather avoid a fight with whoever we’re up against. That means getting to that air wreck first, and there’s only one way to do that.’ He glanced towards the falls. ‘Let’s get moving.’

‘There is perhaps one problem
,
’ Narov ventured. ‘The flying bit I am happy with, not so the landing. I have no desire to end up dangling from the canopy again, getting eaten alive by
Phoneutria
. Where do you intend that we land?’

In answer, Jaeger led the way to the very lip of the Devil’s Falls.

He glanced over, his arm jabbing downwards. ‘See that? That pool carved out of the jungle at the base of the falls? When we were planning the expedition, we considered that as an alternative touchdown point. We discounted it, for any number of reasons. But right now, we’ve got zero options: that’s where we’ll land.

‘One of the reasons we discounted it,’ he continued, ‘was we figured it would be full of caimans. Are there, Puruwehua? Caimans? In that pool at the base of the falls?’

Puruwehua shook his head. ‘No. No caimans.’

Jaeger eyed him. ‘There’s something else, though, isn’t there?’

‘There are
piraihunuhua
. How do you call it? A black fish that eats bigger fish. Sometime even large animals?’

‘Piranha?’

‘Piranha,’ Puruwehua confirmed. He laughed. ‘There are no caimans because of the piranhas.’

‘Man, I hate freakin’ fish,’ Alonzo growled. ‘Hate ’em. We’re gonna jump off a cliff, fly down a waterfall, land in a river and get munched alive by the world’s most deadly fish. A Jaeger classic.’

Jaeger’s eyes glowed. ‘Oh no we’re not. You follow me in close and land in the same patch of water that I do – we’re going to be just fine. All of us. Don’t linger. It still isn’t a great time to take a bath. But trust me, we can do this.’

He flashed a look at each of his team. The faces that stared back at him were streaked with sweat and grime, pockmarked from insect bites and furrowed deep with stress and exhaustion. His eyes came to rest upon their cameraman. The only one who wasn’t ex-military, Dale seemed to possess hidden reserves of strength, not to mention sheer guts and determination.

Incredibly, nothing yet seemed to have beaten him.

‘That spare camera,’ Jaeger announced. ‘Let’s double-check that the date, time and location function is disabled. When we do this, I
want
the camera rolling.
I want you to film.
And I want you to shoot everything you can from now on. I want a record of everything, just in case of the worst.’

Dale shrugged. ‘I take it you’re going first. I’ll set the camera running when you jump the Devil’s Falls.’

60

Jaeger stood on the very edge.

Behind him, his team was bunched up close. To his left and below, a massive volume of water seethed over the lip of the falls, and beneath his feet the rock was slippery. Glancing across the wall of falling water, it seemed as if the very earth were moving.

As he turned to face the emptiness, there was only a whirling mass of mist and swirling water vapour, along with a powerful upwelling of warm tropical air.

Plus, there was Puruwehua, lashed tight to Jaeger in the tandem.

Every one of Jaeger’s team bar one was leaping tandem, with an Amahuaca warrior strapped to his or her person.

Joe James – one of the strongest of the lot of them, and the most experienced base-jumper – would also be making the short flight with the extra weight of a folded-up kayak roped to him. Narov had had a novel idea of how they could make use of that canoe, once they’d jumped the Devil’s Falls.

Because he was filming it all, Dale would be the last over. Being non-military, he was their least experienced parachutist, and he had a challenging enough task as it was filming all the jumps. To try to make it a little easier on him, Jaeger had suggested that he alone should jump solo.

Jaeger leaned further into the void, nudging Puruwehua forward. A final pause, a deep breath and then he shifted them past the point of no return, and together they took the plunge.

As he had anticipated, there was no need to leap a great distance from the pinnacle of rock on which they were standing. The overhang was significant and Jaeger had kept them stable as they dived. But even so, it was to Puruwehua’s credit that he didn’t panic and flounder, which might have sent them into a spin. It was his calm warrior mentality coming to the fore.

As they accelerated, the upwelling of warm, wet air caught them, and propelled them away from the cliff face into the swirling mass of opaque whiteness.

Two thousand, three thousand . . .
Jaeger counted inside his head
.
‘And PULL!’

He’d packed the BT80 himself, which was hardly ideal, and for a moment he feared the chute had failed to deploy, in which case he and Puruwehua were going to end up very wet and very dead, very fast. But then he felt the familiar billowing jerk as a vast expanse of silk caught the air above them, the individual panels of the parachute dragging at the hot, steamy atmosphere.

The thunder of the tumbling water was thick in his ears as Jaeger felt himself and Puruwehua dragged upwards by the shoulders, until they were left floating in the sticky, damp whiteness five hundred feet below the lip of the falls.

For the briefest of moments, Jaeger found himself staring into a wall of rainbow colours, the plume of spray from the falling water caught in the intense sunlight. And then the moment was past, and he was turning away from the falls towards the open jungle.

He steered right with the toggles, bringing the chute into a series of gentle loops, but taking special care to avoid the thick spray from the mass of white water cascading through the air beside them.

If he blundered into that, it would collapse their chute, and he and Puruwehua would be finished.

He corkscrewed towards the pool below.
Piranhas.
There wasn’t much that scared Will Jaeger, but getting chomped to death by scores of jet-black gnarly fish jaws was one of them. Relative to its size, the piranha had a bite more powerful than a
Tyrannosaurus rex
, and three times that of a caiman.

For an instant he checked the sky above. He counted four chutes already in the air, and a fifth pair of figures tumbling off the rock face. His team was coming in good and tight, which was just as he wanted it.

He glanced down.

The water was maybe four hundred feet below and coming up fast.

He unzipped his chest pouch, and his fingers curled around the cold steel of the grenade.

During the three lost years he’d spent on Bioko, Jaeger had learned to perfect the little-appreciated skill of killing time. One way he’d found to do so was by researching the fate of the
Duchessa
– that mystery Second World War cargo ship that Britain had seemingly risked all to capture.

Another way had been to try his hand at fishing.

Invariably, he’d done so in the company of the Fernao village boatmen – only they hadn’t used traditional nets or lines very often. The villagers’ favoured means of catching fish was by using dynamite. It was bad for wildlife and for conservation, but undeniably effective in terms of netting their catch – or rather, blowing them out of the water.

Jaeger removed the grenade from the pouch and ripped the retaining clip out with his teeth whilst holding the release lever flush with the metal casing. He had Colonel Evandro to thank for the few grenades he was carrying, though he’d never once envisaged using one in the way that he was intending to right now.

When he judged the timing and distance was just right, he let the grenade fall, the clip springing free.

It was now armed and plummeting towards the base of the waterfall. It would explode in six seconds, by which time Jaeger reckoned it would be six feet or more under the water.

He saw the grenade hit, the ripples from the impact pulsing out across the pool. A second or two later it exploded, throwing up a plume of white water before the eruption crashed back to the boiling surface below.

As Jaeger steered for the heart of the explosion, he just had time to release a second grenade. His demolitions instructor had once told him that PE – plastic explosives – actually stood for ‘plenty everywhere’ if they were ever in any doubt how much was needed for a job.

The second grenade detonated; this time the plume of spray blasted almost as high as Jaeger’s feet. Already he could see stunned fish floating to the surface, belly to the sky. He prayed like hell that this was going to work.

His boots hit, and the instant they did so, Jaeger tugged at the release straps that allowed him to ditch his parachute harness, freeing Puruwehua at the same time. To his left he saw Irina Narov hit the water; to his right, Leticia Santos. Alonzo followed a moment later to his front, with Kamishi to his rear – each of them with an Amahuaca warrior likewise strapped in the tandem.

Five down – ten with the Indians included.

It was time to make for shore.

After studying the waters intently from their vantage point high above, Puruwehua had advised Jaeger exactly where to make splashdown. He’d chosen a point adjacent to an
evi-gwa
– a place where a tongue of land jutted into the river, ending in a sharp drop to deep water.

A few powerful strokes with arms and legs, and Jaeger made dry land. He hauled himself out and turned to check behind him. More and more stunned fish were bobbing to the surface, and his team – Indians included – were striking out for land.

Above him, the unmistakable form of Joe James spiralled in to make the last but one splashdown. James had Gwaihutiga strapped to his person, plus the folded kayak hanging on a line below him. The kayak hit first, James and the Indian followed, and they too unclipped themselves and struck out for land, James towing the kayak in his wake.

Last down would be Dale.

He’d remained on the high point filming the jumps, until the final man was gone. Then he’d powered down his camera, stuffed it into a canoe bag so as to keep it safe and dry, and shoved that deep into his backpack.

Jaeger watched him jump and pull his chute, floating towards the surface of the pool.

Suddenly, there was a yell of alarm: ‘
Purug!
The fish! They are jumping!’

It was Puruwehua. Jaeger looked where he was pointing. Sure enough, a gleaming black form broke the surface and leaped high. In amongst the flash of glistening water Jaeger caught sight of its gaping mouth, lined with two rows of fearsome serrated teeth, below eyes that were staring wide and black as death.

It was like a miniature, and intensely evil-looking, bullet-headed shark, all powerful body and cruelly armed jaws. An instant later, the patch of water where Jaeger and his team had landed began to seethe and boil.

‘Piraihunuhua!
’ the Indians yelled.

Jaeger didn’t need the warning.
He could see the black piranhas tearing into the dead and dying fish thrown up by his grenade blast. There were hundreds of them, and Dale was headed right for their very midst.

For a split second Jaeger was about to hurl a third grenade, but Dale was too low and he would be caught in the explosion.

‘Piranha!’ Jaeger yelled at him. ‘PIRANHA!’ He jabbed his hands at the water at his feet. ‘Land here! Here! We’ll drag you in!’

For a horrible moment he feared that Dale had failed to hear him, and that he was about to plunge into the centre of the feeding frenzy, where his body would be stripped of its flesh in seconds.

At the last moment Dale made a tight left turn – too tight – and came whooshing in towards where Jaeger and his team were standing. He approached too fast and at the wrong angle, his chute striking the treetops where they reached out over the water.

The topmost branches splintered under the impact, and Dale became stuck fast, dangling over the water, swinging to and fro.

61

‘Let’s get him down!’ Jaeger cried.

His words were drowned out by an explosive crack from above, as the main branch holding Dale snapped in two. He plummeted downwards, his chute ripping as he fell, and moments later he hit the water.

‘Drag him in!’ Jaeger yelled. ‘GET HIM IN!’

All around Dale he could see powerful black shadows darting to and fro just below the surface. All it would take was one bite and the taste of blood, and the piranha would realise that Dale was prey. It would send a signal pulsing through the water to the entire shoal:
come and eat,
come and eat.

Alonzo and Kamishi were nearest. They dived in.

Even as they hit the water, Dale let out a fearful scream. ‘Shit! Shit! Shit!
Get me out! Get me out!
’