Ghost Flight

20

Jaeger paused at the aircraft’s cockpit. A head poked out of the side window high above him.

‘Weather’s holding good over the DZ,’ the pilot called down. ‘Wheels up in fifteen. You good with that?’

Jaeger nodded. ‘Tell you the truth, I can’t wait. I hate the waiting.’

The aircrew was all American, and by their poise and bearing Jaeger figured they were ex-military. The Hercules C-130 had been chartered by Carson from some private air-freight company, and Jaeger had been assured that these guys were the best in the business. He had every confidence that they’d get him to the exact spot in the sky where he and his team needed to jump.

‘You got any tunes you want playin’?’ the pilot queried. ‘Like, for P-Hour?’

Jaeger smiled. P-Hour stood for Parachute Hour, the moment when Jaeger and his team would hurl themselves off the tail ramp into the howling void.

It was a long-standing tradition amongst airborne units that they’d blast out some music as they prepared for the go-go-go. It boosted the adrenalin and got the pulse hammering as they waited to freefall into war; or, as in this case, on a mystery journey into a modern-day Lost World.

‘Something classical,’ Jaeger suggested. ‘Wagner maybe? What’ve you got on the system?’

Jaeger’s chosen jump music had always been something of that nature. It was counter-culture, as far as his mates saw it, but the old stuff always served to centre him. And on this one he sure was going to need some centring.

He would be leading the jump, so as to guide those coming after. And he wasn’t going to be jumping alone.

Irina Narov had joined the team late – too late for Andy Smith to take her through the necessary HAHO refresher course. HAHO stood for High Altitude High Opening, a form of parachute insertion that enabled a force to drift for miles into their target. It was their chosen means of insertion for the expedition.

Jaeger was going to have to make a tandem HAHO jump, leaping into the void at 30,000 feet with another person – Irina Narov – strapped to his torso. He figured he needed a dose of calming music like never before.

‘I got AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell”,’ the pilot announced. ‘Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven”. ZZ Top and Motörhead. I got some Eminem, 50 Cent and Fatboy. Take your pick, buddy.’

Jaeger delved into his pocket, pulled out a CD and tossed it up to the pilot. ‘Try that. Track four.’

The pilot glanced at the CD. ‘“Ride of the Valkyries”.’ He snorted. ‘Sure you don’t want “Highway to Hell”?’

He broke into a burst of song, fingers drumming on the skin of the Hercules in time to AC/DC’s lyrics.

Jaeger smiled. ‘Let’s save it for the pick-up, eh?’

The pilot rolled his eyes. ‘You Brits – you need to let your hair down. We’ll get you guys enjoyin’ yourselves yet!’

Jaeger sensed that the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ – the theme tune to the iconic Vietnam War movie, Apocalypse Now – was going to prove uniquely fitting to the present mission. It was also a halfway house to the pilot’s chosen blast, and in Jaeger’s book it was always good to keep your aircrew happy.

The pilot and his crew had the difficult task of getting ten bodies kicked out of the aircraft’s hold at exactly the right point in the sky, one that would get them on to their target – a tiny patch of clear ground some ten kilometres straight down.

Right now, the pilot pretty much held Jaeger’s life – and those of his team – in his hands.

Jaeger moved around to the aircraft’s rear and climbed aboard. He let his eyes wander around the dark interior of the hold. It was lit here and there by the eerie red glow of low-level lighting. He counted nine jumpers, ten with himself included. In contrast to what he was accustomed to in the military, he knew none of them well. They’d had a few days’ preparation and that was all.

His team was fully geared up. Each was dressed in a thick and cumbersome Gore-Tex survival suit, one specially designed for HAHO jumps. It was a pain having to wear them, for as soon as they hit the steamy jungle they’d be roasting hot. But without such protection they’d freeze to death during the long drift under the parachutes through the thin and icy blue.

At their 30,000-foot jump altitude they’d be a thousand feet higher than the peak of Everest, in the permanently frozen death zone. The temperature would be minus fifty degrees centigrade and the winds at that altitude – the same as commercial airliners flew at – would be fearsome. Without their specialist survival suits, masks, gloves and helmets, they’d freeze to death in the blink of an eye, and they were going to be under their parachutes for far longer than that.

They couldn’t jump from a lower height for the simple reason that the complex glide map to get them on to their exact drop zone required them to drift beneath their chutes for forty-odd kilometres, and you could only achieve that kind of distance when dropped from 30,000 feet. Plus doing a HAHO had the added advantage of maxing out the drama for the TV cameras.

In the centre of the Hercules’ hold lay two giant toilet-roll-shaped containers. These para-tubes were so heavy that they were mounted on a set of rails that ran the length of the floor. Two of Jaeger’s most experienced jumpers – Hiro Kamishi and Peter Krakow – would strap on to the tubes just prior to the jump, so as to parachute them into the landing zone.

They were packed with the team’s inflatable canoes and ancillary equipment – stuff too bulky and heavy to carry in the rucksacks. Kamishi and Krakow would be ‘riding the tube’, as the saying went. The physical strain of doing so would be horrific, but Jaeger had a quiet confidence in the two of them.

His own task was even more challenging. But he told himself that he’d jumped tandem dozens of times before, and that he shouldn’t stress about getting Irina Narov down in one piece.

He took up a position facing his team. They were spread along the seats lining one side of the Hercules. On the opposite side sat the PDs – the parachute dispatchers, whose job it was to get them safely out of the aircraft.

With the various elements of the expedition spread halfway around the world, all would need to work to a standardised time. What Jaeger was about to do was exactly what he’d have done were this a military operation. He went down on one knee and rolled back his left sleeve.

‘Heads-up,’ he announced, having to yell above the noise of the aircraft’s turbines. ‘Confirming Zulu time.’

A row of figures fought with their bulky suits as they struggled to make their timepieces visible. Ensuring everyone had correctly synchronised their watches would be absolutely vital to what was coming.

Their team and the airship orbiting above them would at times be operating in the Bolivian time zone. The C-130 aircrew was flying out of Brazil, which was one hour ahead of Bolivia, while the Wild Dog Media production HQ in London was two hours ahead again.

It would be pointless Jaeger calling in an extraction aircraft at mission’s end if either they or it arrived at the rendezvous three hours late, due to time differences. Zulu time was the accepted global standard upon which all militaries operated – and the expedition would be doing the same from here on in.

‘In thirty seconds it’ll be 0500 Zulu,’ Jaeger announced.

Each of the figures had their eyes glued to the second hands on their watches.

‘Twenty-five seconds and counting,’ Jaeger warned. He glanced up at the team. ‘All good?’

There was a series of gestures in the positive. Eyes glowed with excitement from behind bulky oxygen masks. When doing a HAHO jump, you had to breathe a forced-air mixture, pressurised pure oxygen being pumped into your lungs. You had to start doing so before take-off, to reduce the danger of getting altitude sickness, which could rapidly disable or kill.

The masks prevented any chat, but still Jaeger felt heartened. His team looked more than ready to get down and dirty in the Cordillera de los Dios.

‘0500 Zulu in ten seconds…’ he counted. ‘Seven… four, three, two: mark!’

On his call, each of the team nodded their acknowledgement. They were good – synchronised to Zulu time.

No one was wearing anything other than a quality timepiece, but none had anything particularly flashy either. The golden rule was the fewer buttons and gizmos the better. The last thing you wanted was a watch with a million functions. Bulky knobs and dials had a habit of either breaking or getting snagged. ‘Keep it simple, stupid’ were words of advice ingrained in Jaeger from his SAS selection days.

He himself wore a bog-standard dull green British Army watch. It was low-luminosity, so it wouldn’t show up in the dark, and it had zero reflective or chromed metal – nothing to glint in the sunlight when you least wanted it to. During his time in the military he’d worn that watch for another reason too: it didn’t mark him out as anything other than a regular soldier.

If you were captured by the enemy, you didn’t want anything on your person that might distinguish you as being particularly special. In fact, he and his men used to sanitise themselves completely before any mission – cutting out all labels from clothing, and not carrying a single piece of ID or mark of unit or rank.

Like every soldier in his squadron, Jaeger had trained to be the grey man.

Well, almost.

Just as now, he’d made one exception to the rule. He’d always carried two photos, laminated and hidden in the sole of his left boot. The first was of his childhood dog, a mountain collie that had been a gift from his grandfather. She was immaculately trained, totally devoted, and she used to follow him everywhere. The other was of Ruth and Luke, and a big part of Jaeger refused to let their memory go now.

Carrying such photos was a big no-no on any mission, but some things mattered more than the rules.