Ghost Flight

1

His eyes opened.

Slowly.

Peeling apart eyelash by eyelash, straining against the thick crust of blood that fused one with the other. Cracks sprung a fraction at a time, like broken glass over bloodshot eyeballs. The brightness seemed to scorch into his retina, as if a laser was being focused on to his eyeballs. But who by? Who were the enemy… his tormentors? And where in God’s name were they?

He couldn’t remember the slightest damn thing.

What day was it? What year was it, even? How had he got here – wherever here might be?

The sunlight hurt like hell, but at least his sight was returning to him, little by little.

The first concrete object that Will Jaeger became aware of was the cockroach. It swam into focus, looking blurry, monstrous and alien as it filled his entire vision.

As far as he could tell, his head seemed to be lying sideways on a floor. Concrete. Covered in a thick brownish scum of God only knows what. With his head at this angle, the cockroach appeared to be approaching as if it was about to crawl right inside his left eye socket.

The beast flicked its feelers towards him, at the last moment drifting out of sight, scuttling past the tip of his nose. And then Jaeger felt it claw its way up the side of his head.

The cockroach stopped somewhere around his right temple – the one that was lying furthest from the floor, fully exposed to the air.

It started feeling around with its front legs and mandibles.

As if it were searching for something. Tasting something.

Jaeger felt it begin to chew; biting into flesh; insect jaws carving their way in. He sensed the hissy, hollow clacking of the roach’s serrated mandibles, as they ripped away shreds of rotten meat. And then – as the scream left his lips soundlessly – he sensed that there were dozens more swarming over him… as if he were long dead.

Jaeger fought down the waves of nausea, one question crashing through his brain: why couldn’t he hear himself scream?

With a superhuman effort he moved his right arm.

It was just the barest fraction, but still he felt as if he were trying to lift the entire world. Each centimetre that he managed to raise it, his shoulder socket and elbow joint screamed out in agony, his muscles spasming with the puny effort he was forcing from them.

He felt like a cripple.

What in God’s name had happened to him?

What had they done to him?

Gritting his teeth, and focusing on the sheer force of will, he drew the arm towards his head, dragging his hand across his ear, scrabbling at it, desperately. The fingers made contact with… legs. Scaly, spiny, insect-savage legs, each twitching and pulsing as it tried to force the cockroach body deeper into his ear hole.

Get them out of there! Get them out! Get them OUUUUTTT!

He felt like vomiting, but there was nothing in his guts. Just a shitty dry film of near-death, which coated everything – his stomach lining, his throat, his mouth; even his nostrils.

Oh shit! His nostrils. They were trying to crawl in there too!

Jaeger cried out again. Longer. More despairing. This is not the way to die. Please God, not like this…

Again and again his fingers scrabbled at his bodily orifices, the roaches kicking and hissing their insect anger as he prised them free.

At long last the sound started to bleed back through to his senses. First, his own desperate cries echoed through his bloodied ears. And then he became aware of something mixed in – something more chilling even than the scores of insects that were intent on feasting on his brains.

A human voice.

Deep-throated. Cruel. A voice that revelled in pain.

His jailer.

The voice brought it all flooding back. Black Beach Prison. The jail at the end of the earth. A place where people were sent to be tortured horribly and to die. Jaeger had been thrown in here for a crime he’d never committed, on the orders of a crazed and murderous dictator – and that was when the real horrors had begun.

Compared to waking to this hell, Jaeger preferred even the dark peace of unconsciousness; anything rather than the weeks he’d spent locked away in this place worse than damnation – his prison cell. His tomb.

He willed his mind to slip away again, back towards the soft, formless, shifting shades of grey that had sheltered him before something – what was it? – had dragged him up to this unspeakable present.

The movements of his right arm became weaker and weaker.

It dropped to the floor again.

Let the cockroaches feast on his brains.

Even that was preferable.

Then the thing that had woken him hit again – a rush of cold liquid to the face, like the slap of a wave at sea. Only the smell was so different. Not the ice-pure, bracing aroma of the ocean. This smell was fetid; the salt tang of a urinal that hadn’t seen a lick of disinfectant for years.

His tormentor laughed again.

This was real sport.

Chucking the contents of the toilet bucket in the prisoner’s face – what could be better?

Jaeger spat out the foul liquid. Blinked it away from his burning eyes. At least the blast of putrefying fluid had driven the roaches away. His mind searched for the right words – the choicest expletives that he could fling in his jailer’s face.

Proof of life. A show of resistance.

‘Go and…’

Jaeger began to speak, croaking out the kind of insult that would for sure secure him a beating with that same flex hose that he had learned to dread.

But if he didn’t resist, he was done for. Resistance was all he knew.

Yet he didn’t get to finish those words. They froze in his throat.

Suddenly, another voice cut in, one so familiar – so brotherly – that for several long moments Jaeger felt certain he had to be dreaming. The incantation was soft at first, but growing both in power and in volume; a rhythmical chant replete somehow with the promise of the impossible…

‘Ka mate, ka mate. Ka ora, ka ora.

Ka mate, ka mate! Ka ora, ka ora!’

Jaeger would know that voice anywhere.

Takavesi Raffara; how could he be here?

When they’d been teammates playing the British Army at rugby, it had been Raff who’d led the haka – the traditional Maori pre-match war dance. Always. He’d rip off his shirt, ball his fists, and ripple forward to get eyeball-to-eyeball with the opposing team, hands thumping his massive chest, legs like pillared tree trunks, arms like battering rams, the rest of his team – Jaeger included – flanking him, fearless, unstoppable.

His eyes had bulged, tongue swollen, face frozen in a rictus of warrior challenge as he’d thundered out the lines.

‘KA MATE! KA MATE! KA ORA! KA ORA!’ Will I die? Will I die? Will I live? Will I live?

Raff had proven equally relentless when standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the battlefield. The ultimate fellow warrior. Maori by birth and Royal Marines Commando by destiny, he had soldiered with Jaeger across the four corners of the earth, and he was one of his closest brothers.

Jaeger swivelled his eyes right, towards the source of the chanting.

Out of the corner of his vision he could just make out a figure standing on the far side of the cell’s bars. Massive. Dwarfing even his jailer. Smile like a shaft of pure sunlight breaking through after a dark storm seemingly without end.

‘Raff?’ The single word was rasped out, ringing with a barely suspended disbelief.

‘Yeah. It’s me.’ That smile. ‘Seen you looking worse, mate. Like that time I dragged you out of that Amsterdam bar. Still, best get you cleaned up. I’ve come to get you, mate. Get you out of here. We’re flying BA to London – first class.’

Jaeger didn’t respond. What words were there? How could Raff be here, in this place, seemingly so close at hand?

‘Best get going,’ Raff prompted. ‘Before Major Mojo your buddy here changes his mind.’

‘Yah, Bob Marley!’ Jaeger’s tormentor forced a mock joviality from behind evil slits of eyes. ‘Bob Marley – you the real joker man.’

Raff grinned from ear to ear.

He was the only man Jaeger had ever seen who could smile at someone with a look that could freeze the very blood. The Bob Marley reference had to refer to Raff’s hair – worn long, in braids, the traditional Maori way. As many had learned on the rugby field, Raff didn’t take well to anyone disrespecting his choice of head apparel.

‘Unlock the cell door,’ Raff grated. ‘Me and my friend Mr Jaeger – we’re leaving.’