Ghost Flight

29

They’d barely dropped a dozen feet when they were brought to a halt with a sickening jerk. A broken strap in Narov’s HAHO suit had got trapped in the belay device, jamming it.

Jaeger cursed.

He grabbed the material with his free hand and tried to rip it free. As he did so, he felt something soft and bony land in his hair with an angry, bubbling hiss.

A razor-sharp blade slashed just millimetres above his scalp.

Jaeger sensed the knife tip tear into the Phoneutria – the arachnid balling up in agony, losing its grip and tumbling off his head into thin air. Again and again Narov’s blade chopped through the shadows as she fought off the spiders and Jaeger struggled to free the stubborn strap.

Finally, he managed to pull it clear of the belay, and they jerked back into the abseil.

‘They don’t give up easily,’ he grunted, as he let the paracord zip through the belay system.

‘They do not,’ Narov confirmed.

She held up one arm in front of his face. It hadn’t escaped Jaeger’s notice that she was left-handed. There was a horrible-looking reddish-black welt spreading across the upper surface of her left hand, and he could see two distinct bite marks.

Her eyes were awash with pain. ‘If you cut one Phoneutria, they all attack,’ she reminded him. ‘Victims describe the pain of a bite as like having fire running through your veins. It is quite accurate.’

Jaeger was speechless.

Narov had been bitten by one of the spiders that had dropped on them, yet she hadn’t even cried out. More to the point, was he about to lose one of his expedition members, and before they’d even got started?

‘I’ve got the anti-venom.’ He glanced downwards. ‘But it’s in my backpack. We’ve got to get you down, and fast.’

Jaeger jerked his right hand upwards as far as it would go. The paracord rope hissed through the belay device faster than ever, and the two of them plummeted towards the ground at full speed. He was glad of his gloves, for the doubled-over paracord was still razor-thin to hold.

He made sure his boots hit first, taking the impact for the two of them. Normally he’d have used the rope and belay system to slow them to a halt before they touched down. But it had been a race against the Phoneutria, and they were out of time. He had to get his hands on the venom antidote.

They landed in the sullen gloom.

Very little of the sunlight that filters through the jungle canopy makes it to the forest floor. Some ninety per cent of the available illumination is sucked up by the mass of hungry vegetation layered above – making it semi-dark at ground level.

Until Jaeger’s eyes adjusted to the low light levels, it would be hard to spot any dangers – like spiders.

He was pretty certain no Phoneutria would be able to follow them the full length of the fall, but – once bitten, twice shy. He glanced upwards. In the odd shaft of sunlight that penetrated the forest depths, he could just make out a score of silken threads glinting ominously, each lowering a glistening bundle of venomous death.

Unbelievably, the Phoneutria were still coming, and by the looks of it, Narov was pretty much incapable of moving out of their way.

As the spiders zipped downwards, Jaeger dragged her a few yards away from the abseil line. Then he unstrapped his shotgun, levelled it in the general direction of the Phoneutria and opened fire. The repeated retorts of the blasts in quick succession were deafening: Kaboom! Kaboom! Kaboom! Kaboom!

The Benelli had a pump action and a seven-round magazine, each loaded with 9 mm lead shot. A tidal wave of pellets tore into the arachnids.

Kaboom! Kaboom! Kaboom!

The last rounds erupted with the horde of Phoneutria practically sitting on the end of Jaeger’s gun barrel, the shot turning them into instant spider purée. That was what Jaeger loved about the Benelli: you just pointed it in the general direction and let rip – although he’d never once envisaged using it against spiders.

The last echoes of the thunderous blasts reverberated around him, the sound thrown back from the massive tree trunks to either side. He could hear the panicked screams of what sounded like a troop of primates, high in the treetops. Very quickly the monkeys made themselves scarce, moving fast through the branches in the opposite direction.

The noise of the gunshots had been deafening and strangely ominous.

No doubt about it, Jaeger had just telegraphed their arrival to anyone or anything that might be listening… But to hell with it – he’d needed something with real firepower to deal with the tide of Phoneutria, and the combat shotgun was most definitely built for the job.

He threw the weapon across his back and cut Narov free from the abseil line. He dragged her out of the way, boots scuffing through rotten leaf matter and thin sandy soil, and laid her against the wall of a buttress – one of several inverted V-shaped roots that snaked out from the base of a massive tree.

The rainforest was a castle built upon sand – the soil below the jungle being wafer thin. In the intense humidity and heat, dead vegetation tended to rot swiftly, the nutrients released being rapidly recycled by both plants and animals. As a result, most of the forest giants sat on a web of buttresses, their root systems penetrating just inches into the poor soil.

Having propped Narov against one, Jaeger ran back to fetch his backpack. He was a qualified medic – one of his specialist skills learned in the military – and he was familiar with the effects of a neurotoxin such as this: it killed by attacking the nervous system, doing so in such a way that the nerve endings were permanently being fired, hence the horrific twitching and convulsing that Narov was starting to exhibit.

Death usually resulted from the inability of the muscles involved in breathing to keep functioning properly. Your body ended up literally suffocating itself to death.

The treatment required the nerve agent antidote ComboPen to be injected three times in quick succession. That would treat the symptoms of the poisoning, but Narov might also need pralidoxime and avizafone to help get the muscles that controlled her breathing functioning properly again.

Jaeger grabbed his medical pack and felt around for the syringes and phials. Luckily it was well padded, and most seemed to have survived the fall. He readied the first shot of ComboPen, raised it above his head and thumped the big needle of drugs into Narov’s system.