Ghost Flight

62

The forest dripped and glistened.

All around there was the noise of trickling, dribbling, oozing water. With the clouds low and glowering above the canopy, and the rain falling thick and fast, even less light made it through to ground level.

The first belt of storms sweeping down from the mountains had put a real chill in the air; after several hours of torrential rain it was dark, damp and sodden underfoot, not to mention surprisingly cold.

Jaeger was soaked to the skin, but in truth he welcomed the conditions. As water oozed from the rim of his jungle hat, he said a few quiet words of thanks. Puruwehua had warned him that this was kyrapo’a – heavy rain that wouldn’t clear for days on end – as opposed to the many other types of rain they had here.

There was kyrahi’vi, a light rain that would pass quickly; ypyi, driving, wind-blown rain; kyma’e, rain that lasted no more than a day, after which it quickly became hot; kypokaguhu, drizzly, intermittent rain that was little more than mist; japa, rain and sun together, forming a permanent rainbow; and so many more.

Anyone who passed British special forces selection became a rain connoisseur. The southern Welsh mountains – the Brecon Beacons – were a bleak, glowering, windswept mass, where it seemed to rain 364 days of the year. In fact, from Jaeger’s experience those forbidding hills seemed to have as many types of rain as the Amazon jungle. It had made him glad that human skin was waterproof.

But this, Puruwehua had concluded, this was definitely kyrapo’a: rain without a break for days and days on end. And Jaeger was glad of it.

It wouldn’t do much for Dale, Alonzo and Kamishi’s piranha bites. Wet, dirty clothing rubbing against wet, dirty bandages didn’t tend to help wounds heal. But right now that was the least of Jaeger’s worries.

Prior to departing the piranha-infested pool at the base of the Devil’s Falls, Jaeger had risked taking receipt of a data-burst message from the Airlander. Raff had kept it short and sweet, and entirely to the point.

Confirm your grid: 964864. Moving into overwatch. Predator detected 10 klicks north of your location. Watch Kral; Narov. Listening watch. Out.

Decoded a little, the message meant that the Airlander was moving into orbit over their location. Sure enough, they had at least one Predator drone in the skies above them – although the fact that it was ten kilometres north suggested it was very likely tracking their decoy, the unoccupied kayak moving downriver.

‘Listening watch’ meant that Raff would maintain a 24/7 watch for any data-burst message from Jaeger. Plus he had alerted Jaeger to who was suspect amongst his team: Kral and Narov.

Before leaving the UK, Jaeger had had precious little opportunity to check out the team’s backgrounds. After Andy Smith’s death he’d figured he had every right to do so, but time had run out on him. He’d left it up to Raff to do some digging, and clearly those two – Kral and Narov – had come up suspect.

Over time, Jaeger had found himself warming to Dale, but there was also a part of him that had sympathised with the Slovakian cameraman, who was undeniably Wild Dog Media’s little guy. Yet clearly there was something in Kral’s background that had thrown up a red flag.

And in the back of Jaeger’s mind there was the niggling worry that Kral had failed to disable the GPS units on Dale’s cameras. Had he done so deliberately? Jaeger had no way of knowing, and Kral wasn’t exactly around to ask.

As to Narov, she was proving to be as much of a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma as that air wreck ever was. Jaeger figured she’d have stumped even Winston Churchill himself. He felt as if he knew her less now that when they’d first met. One way or another he was determined to crack her seemingly granite exterior, and get to the kernel of whatever truth lay within.

But back to the rain.

Rain was good because it needed clouds to fall from, and clouds blanketed the forest from whatever might be sitting high above. With hostile eyes watching from the skies, Jaeger felt that much more secure because of the rain clouds. As long as he and his team kept all use of communications and navigation kit to zero, they should remain unseen and undetected.

For a moment, Jaeger put himself into the mind of the enemy commander, whoever he might be. The last definite trace he had had of his prey – Jaeger and his team – would have been at the lip of the Devil’s Falls. There, he’d have picked up both the coin’s tracker trace and the video camera’s GPS signal.

After that, an hour’s silence, and then a tracker trace and maybe a cell phone roaming signal moving downriver on the Rio de los Dios.

The enemy commander would have to work on the assumption that Jaeger and his team were on the water; he would have no other intelligence to go on. And it was upon that deception – one that had been masterminded by Irina Narov – that Jaeger was gambling much of their future.

He figured that any smart commander – and Jaeger never liked to underestimate his enemy – would have a belt-and-braces approach. He’d track the kayak, waiting for a break in the cloud cover to verify who and what it might be carrying, in preparation for launching a final Hellfire strike.

But at the same time he’d get his ground force in to that air wreck double quick, to get boots on the ground at the target.

The race was on. And right now, by Puruwehua’s calculations, Jaeger and his team were a good day’s march or more in the lead. The air wreck lay less than eighteen hours away. All being well, they would reach it the following morning. But Jaeger wasn’t kidding himself that the journey from here on was going to be easy.

The rain brought out the worst of the jungle.

As they trekked ever onwards, Puruwehua pointed out the changes wrought by the downpour. Some were obvious: at times Jaeger and his team found themselves wading through patches of jungle that were flooded up to waist height. Unidentified creatures plopped, slopped and slithered through the shallows, and iridescent water snakes roped through the shadows.

Puruwehua indicated one particularly evil-looking serpent: it was striped black, blue and two shades of red. ‘This one – no need to worry so much,’ he explained. ‘Mbojovyuhua; it eats frogs and small fish. It bites, but the bite doesn’t kill.’

He turned to Jaeger. ‘It is the big mbojuhua you need to be wary of. That one is as long as five people laid end to end, and as thick as any caiman. It is black and white spotted, and it will grab you in its jaws, wrap you tight, then squeeze. The pressure will break every bone in your body, and it won’t stop squeezing until it cannot feel your heartbeat any more. Then it swallows you whole.’

‘Nice,’ Jaeger muttered. ‘A constrictor with a real bad attitude. My next favourite after piranhas.’

Puruwehua smiled. Jaeger could tell that the Indian got something of a kick out of putting the shits up the team.

‘Even worse is the tenhukikı˜uhu˜ a,’ Puruwehua warned. ‘You know this one? It is a grey lizard about the size of a forest pig, with black squares all down its back. It has feet like hands, with suckers. Its bite is very poisonous. We say it is worse than any snake.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ Jaeger snorted. ‘It comes out only when it rains?’

‘Worse: it lives only in the flooded forest. It is a fine swimmer; an excellent climber of trees. It has white eyes like a ghost, and if you try to grab it by the tail, the tail breaks free. That is the tenhukikı˜uhu˜ a’s means of escape.’

‘Why would you ever want to grab it?’ a voice interjected. It was Alonzo’s; the big American seemed about as disgusted at this lizard thing as Jaeger was.

‘To eat, of course,’ Puruwehua replied. ‘As long as you can avoid getting bitten, tenhukikı˜uhu˜ a tastes very good – like a cross between fish and chicken.’

Alonzo snorted. ‘Kentucky Fried! Somehow I don’t think so.’

It was something of a cliché to describe survival food as tasting like chicken. As both Jaeger and Alonzo knew, it rarely if ever did.

Other changes brought by the rain were less obvious, and known only to the Indians. Puruwehua showed them a narrow hole in the forest floor. Jaeger presumed it was a rodent’s burrow. In fact, Puruwehua explained, it was home to the tairyvuhua, a fish that lived underground, hibernating in the mud and only coming to life when it rained.

An hour before dusk, they stopped to eat. Jaeger had placed his team on ‘hard routine’: no fires or cooking allowed – meaning fewer traces for an enemy to track. But hard routine was never much fun. It meant boil-in-the-bag military rations eaten cold and cheerless from the pouch.

It might cure your hunger, but it did little for morale.