Ghost Flight

47

Jaeger was busy stuffing kit into his backpack, talking fast and with a real edge of urgency. ‘One: how did they get ahead of us so fast and without using the river? Two: why did they want to show us Santos’s scarf? Three: why then simply disappear?’

‘To warn us that it’s only a matter of time before they take us all.’ It was Kral, and Jaeger noticed that his signature smile was etched with worry now. ‘This whole thing is turning bad fast.’

Jaeger ignored him. While he was all for a good dose of realism, Kral had a habit of being unrelentingly downbeat, and they had to keep positive and stay focused.

If they lost it here in the depths of the wilderness, they were finished.

They’d unloaded their canoes on to the riverbank to form a makeshift camp, and Jaeger continued repacking his gear as quickly as he could.

‘Means they have a fix on our location,’ he remarked. ‘A point from where they can track us. Makes it all the more important that we get going, and we move light and fast.’

He glanced at a heap of equipment lying on a tarpaulin – kit that they were planning to leave behind. It included all their extraneous gear – their parachutes; their boating equipment; spare weaponry. ‘Anything – I repeat anything – that you don’t need, you leave it in the cache. Any extra weight – if you’re in doubt, dump it.’

Jaeger eyed the kayaks, pulled up on the beach. ‘We’ll collapse the boats and cache those too. Where we’re going, it’s all going to be on foot from now on.’

Nods from the others.

Jaeger glanced at Dale. ‘You guys take one Thuraya between the two of you. That’s Wild Dog Media’s satphone. I’ll take another. Alonzo – you take a third. That’s three between us, and the rest we leave in the cache.’

There was a series of grunts in the affirmative.

‘And guys,’ he eyed Dale and Kral, ‘either of you know how to use a weapon?’

Dale shrugged. ‘Nothing more than doing a shoot-’em-up on Xbox.’

Kral rolled his eyes in Dale’s direction. ‘I tell you – everyone learns to shoot in Slovakia. Where I come from, we all learn to hunt, especially in the mountains.’

Jaeger gave a thumbs-up. ‘Go grab yourself an assault rifle, plus six full mags. That’s one weapon for the two of you. You’d best shift the load between you as you go, ’cause I know you’ve got the extra weight of the camera gear.’

For an instant Jaeger weighed Narov’s knife in his hand. It joined the pile of kit to be left behind. In theory, the cache was there to be picked up later – stored as best they could in a known location. In practice, he couldn’t imagine who was ever going to get back here to retrieve what had been discarded.

In truth, he figured once it was gone it was gone.

He changed his mind, adding Narov’s knife to the pile of kit that he was taking with him. He did the same with the C-130 pilot’s Night Stalkers coin. Both were decisions driven by emotion: neither knife nor coin was crucial for what was coming. But Jaeger was like that: he was superstitious, saw portents, and didn’t easily discard things that meant something to him personally.

‘At least now we know who the enemy are,’ he remarked, trying to buoy everyone’s spirits. ‘They couldn’t have left a more direct message – not if they’d spelled it out in the sand.’

‘What was that message, do you think?’ Kamishi asked, his voice suffused with its signature quiet, measured calm. ‘I think maybe it can be read in different ways.’

Jaeger glanced at Kamishi curiously. ‘Santos’s scarf, tied on a spear and planted in the sand? I’d say that’s pretty clear: come no further, or meet the same fate.’

‘There is perhaps another way to interpret it,’ Kamishi ventured. ‘It is not necessarily a direct threat.’

Alonzo snorted. ‘Like hell it’s not.’

Jaeger waved him into silence. ‘What’re you thinking?’

‘It may help to try to see from their perspective,’ Kamishi ventured. ‘I think perhaps the Indians are scared. We must appear to them like aliens from another world. We drop from the sky into their isolated world. We glide across the water on these magical craft. We carry thunder sticks that explode the very river. If you had never seen any of this, would you also not be scared? And the overriding human reaction to fear – it is anger; aggression.’

Jaeger nodded. ‘Keep going.’

Kamishi ran his eye around the others. They had stopped what they were doing to listen, or, in Dale’s case, to film.

‘We know this tribe have only ever suffered aggression from outsiders,’ Kamishi continued. ‘Their few contacts with the wider world have been with those who seek to do them harm: loggers, miners and others intent on stealing their lands. Why would they expect anything different from us?’

‘Where’s this going?’ Jaeger pressed.

‘I think perhaps we need a two-track approach,’ Kamishi announced quietly. ‘On the one hand, we put ourselves doubly on guard – especially once we are in the jungle, which is entirely their domain. On the other, we need to try to entice the Amahuaca in; we need to find ways to show them we have only friendly intentions.’

‘Hearts and minds?’ Jaeger queried.

‘Hearts and minds,’ Kamishi confirmed. ‘There is one other advantage we may gain by winning this tribe’s hearts and minds. We have a long and difficult journey still ahead of us. The Indians – no one knows the jungle better than they do.’

‘Come on, Kamishi, get real!’ Alonzo challenged. ‘They’ve taken one of our own, probably boiled and eaten her, and we’re just gonna go and cosy up to them? I dunno what planet you come from, but in my world we fight fire with fire.’

Kamishi bowed slightly. ‘Mr Alonzo, we should always be ready to fight fire with fire. Sometimes it is the only way. Yet we should also be ready to hold out the hand of friendship. Sometimes that is the better way.’

Alonzo scratched his head. ‘Man, I dunno… Jaeger?’

‘Let’s be ready on both counts,’ Jaeger announced. ‘Ready to hold out the hand of fire or the hand of friendship. But no one takes any unnecessary risks to draw the Indians in. No repeats of what went down before.’

He indicated the cache of gear. ‘Kamishi, choose some stuff from there you think they might like. Gifts. To take with us. To try to lure them in.’

Kamishi nodded. ‘I will make a selection. Waterproofs, machetes, cooking pots – a remote tribe will always have use for such things.’

Jaeger checked his watch. ‘Right, it’s 1400 Zulu. It’s a day and a half’s trek to the start of the path – the one that descends the escarpment – less if we really push it. We set off now, we should reach it by nightfall tomorrow.’

He pulled out his compass, then collected up a few counting pebbles similar to those he’d used before. ‘We’ll be moving under the canopy, by pacing and bearing only. I figure some of you,’ he eyed Kral and Dale, ‘are unfamiliar with the technique, so stick close. But not too close.’

Jaeger glanced at the others. ‘I don’t want us bunched up so we present too much of an easy target.’