Ghost Flight

30

Five minutes later, the treatment was done. Narov was still conscious, but she was nauseated, her breathing shallow, and she was twitching and spasming badly. It had been only a matter of minutes from her receiving the bite to Jaeger getting the antidote into her, but even so, there was still a chance that the spider toxins could kill her.

Having helped her out of her bulky HAHO gear, Jaeger urged her to drink as much as she could from the water bottle that he placed at her side. She needed to keep herself hydrated, as the fluids would help flush the worst of the toxins from her system.

Jaeger himself stripped down until he was wearing just a pair of tough cotton combat trousers and a T-shirt. His clothes were soaked in sweat and still it was pouring off him. He figured the humidity here had to be plus-ninety per cent. Despite the intense tropical heat, very little perspiration would ever evaporate, for the air was already saturated with water vapour.

For as long as they were in the jungle they’d be soaked through, and it was best just to get used to it.

Jaeger paused to collect his thoughts.

It had been 0903 Zulu when they’d plunged into the canopy at the end of the monster freefall. They’d been a good hour getting down from the treetops. It was around 1030 Zulu by now, and by anyone’s reckoning they were in a whole world of hurt – one that he’d never even come close to envisaging when he’d sketched out the worst-case scenarios prior to departure.

One of his SAS instructors had once told him how ‘no plan survives first contact with the enemy’. Shit, that was true – and especially when it came to freefalling into the Amazon from 30,000 feet with a Russian ice queen strapped to your person.

He turned his attention to his rucksack. It was a seventy-five-litre green Alice Pack – a US-manufactured Bergen designed specifically for the jungle. Unlike many large packs it had a metal frame, which kept it a good two inches or more off the back, allowing for the worst of the sweat to run off – so reducing the risk of prickly heat, or hips and shoulders rubbing raw.

Most large packs tended to have a wide body and pouches sticking out the side. As a result, they were broader than a man’s shoulders, and would tear and snag on undergrowth. The Alice Pack was thinner at the top and wider at the bottom, with all pouches attached to the rear. That way, Jaeger knew that if he could squeeze through, then his pack would follow.

The pack was lined with a tough rubber ‘canoe bag’, which rendered it waterproof and gave it enough buoyancy to float. As an added bonus, it provided an extra layer’s cushioning to help deal with a hundred-foot drop like the one it had just suffered.

Jaeger rifled through the contents. As he’d feared, not everything had survived the fall. His Thuraya satellite phone had been stuffed into one of the rear pockets, for ease of access. It had a cracked screen, and when he tried to power up, nothing happened. He had a spare packed in one of the para-tubes that Krakow and Kamishi had jumped with, but that wasn’t a great deal of good to them right here and right now.

He pulled out his map. Fortunately, as maps tended to be, it was pretty much indestructible. He’d had it laminated, to semi-waterproof it, and it was already folded to the correct page. Or at least it would have been the correct page: trouble was, he and Narov had put down anywhere up to forty kilometres or more away from their intended landing point.

Using his rucksack as a seat, he propped himself against the buttress root, and rearranged his map to what he figured had to be the correct page. Folding your map was actually a big no-no in the military. It instantly let the enemy know what your focus was, if you were captured. But Jaeger wasn’t on operations here; this was meant to be a civilian jungle expedition, after all.

From his wrist GPS he retrieved the waypoint that he’d fed into it just moments before he’d plunged into the jungle canopy.

It furnished him with a six-figure grid: 837529.

He plotted the grid on the map – and immediately saw exactly where they were.

He took a moment to consider their predicament.

They were twenty-seven kilometres north-east of their intended landing point – the sandbar. Bad, but he guessed it could have been worse. Between them and it lay a wide bend of the Rio de los Dios. Presuming that the rest of the expedition team had made it to the sandbar as intended, the river lay between them and Jaeger and Narov’s present position.

There was no way around that river, and Jaeger knew it. Plus twenty-seven kilometres through dense jungle with a casualty wasn’t going to make for any holiday, that was for certain.

The agreed procedure if anyone failed to make the landing zone was for the rest of the team to wait there for forty-eight hours. If the missing person(s) wasn’t there by then, the next rendezvous point was a distinctive bend in the river, approximately a day’s journey downstream, with two more RV points each set a further day’s travel downriver.

The Rio de los Dios flowed in the direction they needed to go to reach the air wreck – another reason why they’d decided to make that sandbar their landing point. Travelling on from there by river should have proven a comparatively easy means to move through the jungle. But each successive RV was set further to the west, which put it further away from Jaeger and Narov’s present position.

The sandbar was nearest, which meant they had forty-eight hours in which to make it. If they failed, the main body of the expedition would move off more or less due west, and Jaeger and Narov would very likely never catch them.

With his Thuraya satphone kaput, Jaeger had no way of making contact with anyone to let them know what had happened. Even if he could somehow get it working, he doubted he could get a signal. The satphone required clear sky to see and acquire satellites, without which no message could be sent or received.

Presuming they made it over the Rio de los Dios, they would then face a further daunting trek through the heart of the jungle. Plus there was one other major problem that Jaeger was aware of – apart from the near-impossibility of Narov undertaking such a journey.

Colonel Evandro had treated the exact whereabouts of the air wreck with strictest confidence, to protect its location. He’d only been willing to pass the GPS coordinates to Jaeger in person, shortly before their departure on the C-130. Jaeger had in turn agreed to keep the location to himself, in large part because he harboured doubts about who exactly he could trust on his team.

He’d planned to brief the rest of the team on their exact route once they had boots on the ground at the sandbar – at which point they were pretty much all in this together. But when Jaeger had set the emergency RV procedure, he’d never imagined it would be him who failed to make the landing zone.

Right now, no one else knew the coordinates of the air wreck, which meant they could only proceed so far without him.

Jaeger glanced at Narov. Her condition seemed to be worsening. One arm was cradling the hand where she’d been bitten. Her face was slick with sweat, and her skin had taken on a sickly, deathly pallor.

He put his head back against the buttress root and took a few deep breaths. This wasn’t simply about the expedition any more: it was about life and death now.

It was a survival situation, and the decisions he made would doubtless dictate whether he and Narov got through this alive.