Ghost Flight

39

‘So tell me – what the hell happened here?’ Jaeger prompted.

He was sitting in the makeshift camp that Alonzo and the rest had hacked out of the jungle, where the thick vegetation met the open sweep of the sandbar. Shaded by some overhanging trees, it was about as comfortable as you could get in such terrain.

He’d managed a quick wash in the river, which snaked past as sluggish and brooding as ever. He’d pulled a daysack out of one of the para-tubes, and grabbed the bare essentials to help him recover from his epic trans-jungle journey: food rations, bottled water, rehydration salts, plus some insect repellent. As a result, he was starting to feel vaguely human again.

The expedition team – or rather, those that remained – were gathered for a communal heads-up. But there was a weird, wired tension to the air, a sense that hostile forces were prowling the fringes of the camp and lurking just out of sight. Jaeger had retrieved a back-up combat shotgun from one of the para-tubes, and he wasn’t alone in keeping one eye on the jungle and one hand on his weapon.

‘Best I start at the beginning – when we lost you guys in the freefall.’ Alonzo’s reply was delivered in the deep, rumbling tones so typical of the big Afro-American.

As Jaeger had begun to realise, Alonzo was the kind of guy who tended to wear his heart very much on his sleeve. As he continued speaking, his words became thick with regret at what had happened.

‘We lost you guys pretty quickly after the jump, so I led the stick in. We made it down good. All here, no injuries, firm and clear underfoot. We set camp, sorted our gear, agreed a sentry roster, and figured no big deal: we’d wait for you and Narov to come to us, this being the first RV.

‘It was then we kind of broke into two camps,’ Alonzo continued. ‘There was my lot – let’s say the Warrior Brigade – who wanted to send out probing patrols in the direction we figured you guys must’ve put down. See if we could help bring you in – that was if you were still alive… And then there was the Tree-hugger Brigade…

‘So the Hugger Brigade – led by James and Santos – they wanted to go that way.’ Alonzo jerked a thumb westwards. ‘They figured they’d found a riverside path made by the Indians. Well, we all knew the tribe was out there somewhere. We could feel eyes in the jungle. The Hugger Brigade – they wanted to reach out and make peaceful contact.

‘Peaceful contact!’ Alonzo glanced at Jaeger. ‘You know, I just spent a year doing peacekeeping ops in Sudan; the Nuba mountains. About as remote as you can get. Some of those Nuba tribes, they still wander around pretty much butt-naked. But you know something – man, I grew to love those people. And one lesson I learned from the get-go: they wanted peaceful contact, they’d let you know about it.’

Alonzo shrugged. ‘Long story short, James and Santos set out around lunchtime on day one. Santos argued she knew what she was doing; she was Brazilian, and she’d spent years working with Amazonian tribes.’ He shook his head. ‘James: man, he’s stir-crazy; a total loon. He’d scrawled some note to the Indians; scribbled some pictures.’ He glanced at Dale. ‘You got the footage?’

Dale grabbed his camera, flipped open the side screen and scrolled through the digital files stored on the camera’s memory card. He pressed ‘play’. An image appeared on the screen – a close-up of a scribbled note. The thick, Kiwi-accented voice of Joe James could be heard reading out the words in the background.

‘Yo! Amazon dwellers! You like peace, we like peace. Let’s make peace!’ The shot panned out to reveal James’s massive Bin Laden beard and his craggy biker features. ‘We’re coming into your domain to say hello and to make peaceful contact.’

Dale shook his head in disbelief. ‘Can you believe this guy? “Yo! Amazon dwellers!” I mean – like the Indians read English! A genuine wacko – spent too long in his cabin in the woods. Perfect for the camera. Not perfect for the mission!’

Jaeger signalled that he’d seen enough. ‘He is a little unusual. But who isn’t? Anyone who’s a hundred per cent sane wouldn’t be here. A little crazy is okay.’

Alonzo scratched his stubble. ‘Yeah, but man, that one – James – he’s kinda off the scale. Anyhow, he and Santos set out. Twenty-four hours later there was no sign of them, but we’d had no sign of trouble either. So the second tier of the Hugger Brigade – the Frenchie, Clermont, and bizarrely, the German, Krakow; you’d never have him down as a natural-born hugger – they set out to link up with James and Santos.

‘I shouldn’t have let ’em go,’ Alonzo growled. ‘I had this bad feeling. But hell, with you and Narov gone, we had no expedition leader and no deputy. Around midday – an hour after Clermont and Krakow had left – we heard yelling and gunfire. Sounded like a two-way range; like an ambush, with return fire.’

Alonzo glanced at Jaeger. ‘That was it: hugging declared over. We set out as a hunter force, tracking Clermont and Krakow’s trail to a point maybe a half-mile out. There, we hit major disturbance of the undergrowth. Fresh blood. Plus there were several of these.’

He pulled something out of his pack and handed it to Jaeger. ‘Careful. Figure that’s some kind of poison.’

Jaeger studied what he’d been given. It was a thin piece of wood around six inches long. It was finely carved and sharpened at one end, the point being smeared in some kind of dark and viscous fluid.

‘We pushed on,’ Alonzo continued, ‘and we picked up James and Santos’s trail. We found their camp, but no sign of them. No sign of any struggle, either. No sign of a fight. No blood. No darts. Nothing. It was like they’d been teleported out of there by aliens.’

Alonzo paused. ‘And then there was this.’ He pulled a spent bullet casing from his pocket. ‘Found it on the way back. Kind of stumbled across it.’ He handed Jaeger the casing. ‘It’s a 7.62 mm. More than likely GPMG or AK-47. It ain’t one of ours, that’s for sure.’

Jaeger rolled the casing around in his hand for a couple of seconds.

Until a few decades back, 7.62 mm had been the calibre of round used by NATO forces. In the Vietnam War, the Americans had experimented with a smaller calibre: 5.56 mm. With lighter bullets a foot soldier could carry more rounds of ammo, which meant more sustained firepower – crucial when undertaking long missions on foot in the jungle. Since then, 5.56 mm had become a common NATO calibre, and none of those gathered on the sandbar were using a 7.62 mm weapon.

Jaeger eyed Alonzo. ‘There’s been no further sign of the four of them?’

Alonzo shook his head. ‘None.’

‘So what d’you make of it?’ he prompted.

Alonzo’s face darkened. ‘Man, I dunno… There’s a hostile force out there, that’s for sure, but right now that force remains a mystery. If it is the Indians, how come we’ve got a 7.62 mm weapon in the mix? Since when does a lost tribe pack a punch like that?’

‘Tell me,’ Jaeger asked, ‘what was the blood like?’

‘At the ambush? Pretty much what you’d expect. Pools of it. Congealed.’

‘Lot of blood?’ Jaeger queried.

Alonzo shrugged. ‘Enough.’

Jaeger held up the thin sliver of wood that he’d been given. ‘Blow-dart, obviously. We know the Indians are armed with them. Supposedly poison-tipped. You know what they use to arm their darts? Curare – made from the sap of a forest vine. Curare kills by stopping the muscles of the diaphragm from working. In other words, you suffocate to death. Not a nice way to go.

‘I learned a bit about it while out here training Colonel Evandro’s B-SOB teams. The Indians use them for hunting monkeys in the treetops. Dart hits; monkey falls down; tribe collects monkey and retrieves dart. Each is hand-carved and they don’t tend to leave them lying around. But most importantly, if you are shot by a curare-tipped dart, it sticks in you like a pin; you hardly bleed at all.

‘Plus there’s this.’ Jaeger took the dart and put it to his mouth, tasting the black goo on the pointed end. Several of his team flinched.

‘You can’t get poisoned by ingesting curare,’ Jaeger reassured them. ‘Has to go direct into the bloodstream. But the thing is, it has an unmistakably bitter taste. This? My guess is it’s a syrup made of burned sugar.’ He gave a bleak smile. ‘Put it all together and what’ve you got?’

He glanced around the faces of his remaining team members. Alonzo: square-jawed, open-faced, exuding a homely honesty – every inch a former Navy SEAL. Kamishi: quiet, expectant, body like a coiled spring. Dale and Kral: two rising stars in the media intent on shooting their slick, blockbuster movie.

‘No one was shot by blow-darts.’ Jaeger answered his own question. ‘They were ambushed by gunmen; the blood alone proves that. So unless this lost tribe has somehow managed to get seriously tooled up, we’ve got a mystery force out there. The fact that they left this,’ he held up the dart, ‘and did their best to clear away their bullet cases suggests they’re trying to fit up the Indians for the crime.’

He stared at the dart for a second. ‘No one is supposed to be here apart from us and this lost tribe. At present, we have no idea who this mystery force of gunmen is, how they got here or why they’re hostile.’ He glanced up, darkly. ‘But one thing is clear: the nature of this expedition has changed irreversibly.

‘Five have been taken,’ he announced slowly. There was a cold steeliness in his gaze now. ‘We’ve barely set foot in the forest and already we’ve lost half of our number. We need to consider our options – carefully.’

He paused. His eyes were etched with a hardness few had seen before. He hadn’t known any of the missing that well, yet still he felt personally responsible for their loss.

He’d been drawn to the openness and the lack of guile of the big crazy Kiwi, Joe James. And he was painfully aware that Leticia Santos was Colonel Evandro’s presence on his team.

Santos was striking-looking, like a more streetwise – or maybe jungle-wise – version of the Brazilian actress Tais Araujo. Dark-eyed, dark-haired, impetuous and dangerously good fun, she had been pretty much the polar opposite of Irina Narov.

For Jaeger, losing one – Narov – had been a tragic disaster. Losing five within the first forty-eight hours of his expedition – it was unthinkable.