Ghost Flight

35

Jaeger hauled himself on to the riverbank.

He sank to his knees in a sodden, exhausted heap, his limbs burning, his lungs gasping for breath. To any watching eyes he would appear more like a mud-encrusted, semi-drowned rat than a human being – not that he expected many to be watching.

For hours on end he’d quartered the Rio de los Dios searching for Irina Narov. He’d scanned the river from bank to bank, searching everywhere and yelling out her name. But he’d been unable to find the slightest sign of her, or the raft. And then he’d discovered what he’d most feared to find: his pack and the canoe flotation bag, still lashed together, but torn and shredded by caiman tooth and claw marks.

The battered remains of the makeshift raft had drifted into the shallows a good distance downstream. On an adjacent mudbank Jaeger had discovered one unnerving sign of the woman he’d tried so desperately to safeguard: her sky-blue headband, now sodden and torn and stained with mud.

Still he’d continued to search the riverbanks as far as he could go, but even as he’d done so, he’d feared his efforts were futile. He figured Narov must have been thrown from the raft, even as the caiman’s dead body had thrust him deep into the river’s inky depths. The rapids and the caimans would have done the rest.

He’d fought for the best part of a minute to regain the surface, but it was still enough time for the raft to have been swept completely out of his sight. Had it still been intact and afloat, he’d have been able to see the makeshift craft. He’d have been able to catch it and draw it into land.

And had Irina Narov still been with it, he might have been able to save her.

As it was… Well, he didn’t like to contemplate Narov’s exact fate, yet he didn’t doubt for one moment that she was gone. Narov was dead – either drowned in the Rio de los Dios, or torn apart by ravening black caimans; and most likely a mixture of the two.

And he, Will Jaeger, had been unable to do anything to save her.

He struggled to his feet and stumbled further up the muddy riverbank. In the dark shock of the moment, his training began to kick in. He slipped into full-on survival mode; it was all he knew how to do. He’d lost Narov, but the rest of the expedition was still out there somewhere in the jungle. There were eight people presumably waiting at that distant sandbar; reliant upon him.

Right now they had no coordinates to make for; no way to head towards the air wreck. And without a way forward, there was no easy way out of this savage Lost World; no exit strategy. To withdraw from a place as remote and as seemingly damned as the Cordillera de los Dios took a great deal of planning and preparation, as Jaeger well knew.

If Narov’s loss were to mean anything, he had to get himself reunited with his team and get them on the move. He had to lead them to the site of that wreck, and to do that he had to get himself to the sandbar – although the odds of him doing so were rapidly turning against him.

He proceeded to empty out the contents of his pockets, plus those of his belt pouches. After the chaos of the river crossing, he had no idea what if any of his kit remained. The rucksack had been rendered useless – shredded by the caimans and voided of its contents – but as he scanned his meagre possessions, Jaeger began to count his blessings.

His single most vital piece of kit – his compass, stuffed deep in a trouser pocket and zipped tight – was still there. With that one piece of equipment alone he stood a chance of making it through to the distant sandbar. He dragged out the map from his trouser side pocket. It was sodden and battered, but just about usable.

He had both map and compass; it was a start.

He checked his chest-mounted knife. It was still there, clipped firmly into its sheath; the knife Raff had given him; the one he’d put to such good use during the epic fight on Fernao beach – the fight in which Little Mo had been killed.

So much death; and now one more to contend with.