Ghost Flight

70

After the chattering of birdlife and the buzz of insects in the green and leafy jungle, their entry into the dead zone seemed eerily quiet. The steady patter of the rain against Jaeger’s hood beat out a regular rhythm to accompany the suck and rasp of his breathing, and all around, the terrain appeared devoid of life.

Rotten branches and bark squelched underfoot.

Where Jaeger’s over-boots kicked aside such debris, he could see that insects had started to recolonise the dead zone. Swarms of ants with iron-clad skin scuttled about angrily beneath his footfalls. Plus there were his old friends from Black Beach Prison – cockroaches.

Ants and roaches: if there were ever a cataclysmic world war using nuclear or chemical weapons, it would be insects that would very likely inherit the earth. They were largely immune to man-made toxic threats, very likely including whatever might be leaking from that warplane.

The three figures pressed onwards in silence.

Jaeger could feel the tension emanating from Narov at his side. A step or two behind came Dale, filming. But he was struggling to keep the picture properly framed, with his hands encumbered by the thick gloves, and the gas mask restricting his vision.

They came to a halt fifty feet short – from where they could try to take in the enormity of what lay before them. It remained half shielded by cadaverous tree trunks – denuded of leaves and bark, and dead to the core – but still there was no mistaking the sleek, elegant lines of the gigantic aircraft that had lain hidden in the jungle for seven decades or more.

After the epic journey to get here, they were left gazing at it in silent wonder.

Even Dale had stopped filming to stare.

Everything had been building to this moment: so much research; so much planning; so many briefings; so much speculation as to what the aircraft might actually be; and, after the last few days, so much death and suffering along the way, as well as the cold steel of betrayal.

As he gazed upon it in wonder, Jaeger marvelled at how intact the aircraft appeared to be. He almost felt as if it simply needed that vital refuelling it had missed all those years ago, and it could fire up the engines and be ready to take to the skies once more.

He could quite understand why Hitler had trumpeted this aircraft as his Amerika Bomber. As Jenkinson, the archivist, had declared, it looked custom-made for dropping sarin nerve gas on New York.

Jaeger stood entranced.

What in God’s name was it doing here? he wondered. What had its mission been? And if it was the last of four such flights, as the Amahuaca chief had told them, what was it – what were they all – carrying?

Jaeger had only ever seen one photo of a Junkers Ju 390.

It was an old black-and-white shot that Jenkinson had emailed to him – one of the very few images that existed of the warplane. It had shown a dark and sleek six-engined aircraft – one so massive that it dwarfed the soldiers and airmen who were busy all around it, like so many worker ants.

It had a nose cone shaped like a cruel eagle’s head in side profile, and a raked, streamlined cockpit, with a score of porthole-like windows running along its sides. The only major differences between the aircraft shown in that photo and the one now lying before them were the location and the markings.

That photo had shown a Ju 390 at its last known destination – a frozen, snowbound airstrip in Prague, in occupied Czechoslovakia, on a bitter February morning in 1945. Painted on each of the aircraft’s massive wings was the distinctive form of a black cross set against a white background – the insignia of the German Luftwaffe – with similar markings on the aft section of the fuselage.

By contrast, the aircraft now lying before Jaeger displayed an equally distinctive roundel – a five-pointed white star overlying red-and-white stripes – the unmistakable markings of the United States Air Force. Those roundels were sun-bleached and weathered almost to the point of having disappeared, but to Jaeger and his team they were still clearly recognisable.

The giant tyres on the warplane’s eight massive wheels had perished and part-deflated, but even so each reached to around Jaeger’s shoulder height. As to the cockpit, he figured it reared a good third of the way to what had once been the jungle canopy, but was now a web of dead branches high above them.

As Carson had promised, back in Wild Dog Media’s London office, the aircraft dwarfed a modern-day C-130 Hercules – the aircraft that Jaeger and his team had flown in on. And apart from the wilted vines and creepers that trailed around the fuselage, and the fallen dead wood lying on the 165-foot span of her wings, she seemed incredibly intact – proof indeed that she had landed here.

Sure, she showed the effects of seven decades secreted in the jungle. Jaeger could see that some of the rivets holding her skin together had corroded, and here and there a cowling or cover had fallen off an engine. The wings and fuselage were covered in a sodden carpet of mildew, and the remains of dead tree ferns and epiphytes littered the aircraft’s dorsal surfaces.

But the deterioration was mostly cosmetic.

Structurally the aircraft looked sound. A quick spruce-up and Jaeger figured she would be almost good enough to fly.

There was a loud squawking from above, as a flock of iridescent green parrots flitted through the skeleton forest. It served to break Jaeger’s trance-like state.

He turned to Narov. ‘Only one way in.’ His words were muffled by the gas mask, but via the inbuilt radio intercom they were audible. He traced a line with his gloved hand from the aircraft’s tail, along the length of her fuselage and onwards to the cockpit.

Narov eyed him through her mask. ‘I will go first.’