Ghost Flight

by Bear Grylls

  Jaeger had put a call through to the airship, getting a heads-up from Raff on all aspects of the expedition’s bigger picture. There was no further update on Andy Smith’s death, which didn’t exactly surprise him. But the one thing that was a shocker was the news about Simon Jenkinson.

  The archivist had had his London flat broken into. Three things had gone missing: his file on the Ju 390 ghost flight, the iPhone on which he’d taken the recent – surreptitious – photos of the Hans Kammler file, and his laptop. Jenkinson had been spooked by the robbery, and triply so once he’d checked with the National Archives.

  The reference number for the Hans Kammler file had been AVIA 54/1403. The National Archive claimed there was no record of any such file ever having existed. Jenkinson had seen it with his own eyes. He’d sneaked some photos of it on to his phone. But with his flat being burgled, and the file having been expunged from the archives, it was as if AVIA 54/1403 had never even existed.

  The ghost flight now had its own ghost file.

  42

  Jenkinson was scared, but he didn’t seem to be running, Raff had explained. Quite the reverse. He’d vowed that he’d retrieve those photos, come what may. Fortunately, he’d stored them on a number of online cloud systems. Just as soon as he managed to get a replacement computer, he’d go about downloading them.

  The news from Jenkinson could mean only one thing, Jaeger reasoned: whoever they were up against had the power and the influence to make an entire British government file disappear. The ramifications were deeply worrying, but there wasn’t a great deal he could do about it from the heart of the Amazon.

  Jaeger had urged Raff to keep a close watch, and to brief him whenever they could establish communications between the ground team and the Airlander.

  He packed away his wash kit, rolling it into a tight bundle. Early the following morning they would set off downriver, and space in the boats was limited. Dale had clearly filmed enough, for he powered down the camera. But Jaeger could sense him lingering, as if he wanted to have words.

  ‘Look, I know you’re not comfortable with much of this,’ he ventured. ‘The filming. And I’m sorry about the incident earlier. I was bang out of order. But my neck is on the line here if I don’t capture enough of this to make it work.’

  Jaeger didn’t reply. He didn’t particularly like the man, and even less so after the underhand filming episode.

  ‘You know, there’s a quote about my industry,’ Dale ventured. ‘The TV industry. Hunter S Thompson. Mind hearing it?’

  Jaeger shouldered his shotgun. ‘I’m all ears.’

  ‘“The TV business is a cruel and shallow money trench,”’ Dale began, ‘“a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs.” Probably not word for word, but . . . Good men die like dogs sums up the industry perfectly.’

  Jaeger eyed him. ‘There’s a similar saying in my business: “The pat on the back is only ever a recce for the knife going in.”’ He paused. ‘Look, I don’t have to like you to be able to work with you. But I’m not here to break your balls either. As long as we have some workable ground rules, we should be able to get through this without killing each other.’

  ‘What kind of rules?’

  ‘Reasonable ones. Ones that you guys adhere to. Like, one: you do not have to ask my permission to film. Film as you see fit. But if I ever tell you not to, you do as I say.’

  Dale nodded. ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘Two: if any other team member asks you not to film, you do as requested. You can come to me to query it, but in the first instance you respect their wishes.’

  ‘But that means everyone has a de facto right of veto,’ Dale objected.

  ‘It doesn’t: only I have. This is my expedition, and that means you and Kral – you’re on my team. If I think you should be allowed to film, I will come down on your side. You have a difficult and challenging job to do. I respect that, and I will be an honest arbitrator.’

  Dale shrugged. ‘Well, okay. I guess I don’t have much choice.’

  ‘You don’t,’ Jaeger confirmed. ‘Rule three: you ever try a repeat performance of this morning – filming when you’ve agreed not to – your camera ends up at the bottom of the river. I’m not joking. I have lost five people. Don’t push it.’

  Dale spread his hands in a gesture of contrition. ‘Like I said, I’m sorry.’

  ‘The fourth and final rule.’ Jaeger stared at Dale for a long second. ‘Don’t break the rules.’

  ‘Got it,’ Dale confirmed. He paused. ‘There is maybe one thing you could do, though – to make things easier from our side. If I could interview you, say here by the riverside, I could get you to recap on all of today – the stuff we weren’t allowed to film.’

  Jaeger thought about it for a moment. ‘If there are questions I don’t want to answer?’

  ‘You don’t have to. But you are the expedition leader. You’re the right and proper spokesperson for this thing.’

  Jaeger shrugged. ‘Okay. I’ll do it. But remember: the rules are the rules.’

  Dale smiled. ‘I got it. I got it.’

  Dale fetched Kral. They put the camera on a lightweight tripod, fixed Jaeger up with a throat microphone to get some decent sound, and with Kral behind camera framing the shot, Dale settled into interviewer mode. He sat himself beside the camera, asking Jaeger to speak to him direct and to try to ignore the lens that was staring him in the face, and to give a recap of the events of the last forty-eight hours.

  As the interview progressed, there was a part of Jaeger that had to admit that Dale was good at his job. He had a way of teasing out information that made you feel as if you were just having a chat with a mate down the local pub.

  Fifteen minutes into the interview, and Jaeger had almost forgotten the camera was there.

  Almost.

  ‘It was pretty obvious that you and Irina Narov prowled around each other like lions gearing up for a fight,’ Dale ventured. ‘So why risk everything for her at the river crossing?’

  ‘She was on my team,’ Jaeger answered. ‘Enough said.’

  ‘But you went into battle against a five-metre caiman,’ Dale pressed. ‘You almost lost your life. You went to war for someone who seemed to have it in for you. Why?’

  Jaeger stared at Dale. ‘It’s an old rule in my profession that you never speak ill of the dead. Now, moving on . . .’

  ‘Okay, moving on,’ Dale confirmed. ‘So, this mystery force of gunmen – any idea who they are or what they might be after?’

  ‘I’ve almost zero idea,’ Jaeger answered. ‘This far into the Serra de los Dios there shouldn’t be anyone else around other than us and the Indians. As to what they’re after? I figure maybe they’re trying to discover the location of that air wreck; maybe to stop us getting to it. Nothing else makes any sense. But it’s just a gut feeling, no more.’

  ‘That’s quite a proposition – that a rival force might be out there searching for the wreck,’ Dale pressed. ‘Your suspicions must be based upon something?’

  Before Jaeger could answer, Kral made an odd slurping sound. Jaeger had noticed that the Slovakian cameraman had an unfortunate habit of sucking his teeth.

  Dale turned and gave him the daggers. ‘Mate, I’m trying to interview here. Keep focused, and keep the bloody noise down.’

  Kral glared back. ‘I am focused. I’m behind the bloody camera pushing the bloody buttons, if you hadn’t noticed.’

  Great, thought Jaeger. They were just days in and already the camera crew were at each other’s throats. What were they going to be like after weeks in the jungle?

  Dale turned back to Jaeger. He rolled his eyes, as if to say, look what I have to deal with. ‘This rival force – I was asking you about your suspicions.’

  ‘Think about it,’ Jaeger answered. ‘Who knows the exact whereabouts of that warplane? Colonel Evandro. Myself. Alonzo. If there is another force out there trying to find it, they’d have to follow us. Or force someone on
our team to talk. We had an unidentified aircraft tailing us when we flew in here. So maybe – just maybe – we’ve been followed and menaced pretty much all of the way.’

  Dale smiled. ‘Perfect. I’m done.’ He gestured at Kral. ‘Power down. That was sweet,’ he remarked to Jaeger. ‘You did a great job.’

  Jaeger cradled his shotgun. ‘A little less dirt-digging would be appreciated. But either way it’s preferable to you guys sneaking about filming on the quiet.’

  ‘Agreed.’ Dale paused. ‘Say – would you be up for filming something like this every day, kind of like a video diary?’

  Jaeger set off across the sandbar towards camp. ‘Maybe, time permitting . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Let’s see how it goes.’

  43

  Night falls quickly in the jungle.

  With the approach of darkness, Jaeger slapped on insect repellent and tucked his combat trousers well into his boots to stop any creepy-crawlies from sneaking in during the night hours. He’d sleep like that – fully clothed, boots on, and with his combat shotgun cradled in his arms.

  That way, if they were attacked during the hours of darkness he’d be good to fight.

  But none of this could entirely defeat one diehard adversary here in the Serra de los Dios – the mosquitoes. Jaeger had never seen such monsters. He could hear their fierce whine as they circled his body like mini vampire bats, intent on wreaking blood-sucking, disease-ridden mayhem. And sure enough, they could chomp through his combats; Jaeger could feel the odd one driving its tiny insect jaws in.

  He climbed into his hammock, his limbs burning with exhaustion. After his fight to save Narov, and his solo trek across the jungle, he was utterly, utterly spent. He had barely rested at all the previous night. He didn’t doubt that he would sleep the sleep of the dead, especially as Alonzo had promised to keep guard all through the hours of darkness.

  The former SEAL had set a sentry routine, so that there would be eyes on the jungle all night long. If anyone needed to leave their sandbar camp for any reason – even to take a crap – they had to do so in pairs, buddy-buddy fashion. That way, everyone had back-up in case of trouble.

  A thick and velvety darkness enveloped the sandbar, and with it came a cacophony of night-time sounds: the mindless rhythmic beat of the cicadas – preeep-preeep-preeep-preeep – which would continue until sunrise; the bumbling, fizzy thud of massive beetles and other flying things cannoning about; the all but inaudible high-pitched shrieks of giant bats swooping across the water, hunting on the wing. The air above the Rio de los Dios was thick with them, wings beating the darkness. Jaeger could see their fleeting forms silhouetted against the faint glow of the stars that filtered through the feathery treetops. Their ghostly shapes contrasted markedly with the eerie, pulsating glow of the fireflies.

  Those fireflies peppered the silken night like bursts of falling stardust. All along the riverbank they formed a blur of fluorescent blue-green, dipping in and out of the trees. And every now and again one would disappear – phffutt; a light being snuffed out – as a bat swooped and plucked it from the air. Just as four of Jaeger’s team had been plucked from the shadows of the forest by a dark and ghostly force.

  Alone in the night hours, Jaeger found himself besieged by the doubts he’d kept hidden during the day. They were barely days into this and already he was five people down. Yet somehow he had to rescue his expedition’s fortunes, and in truth, he didn’t know how he was going to do that.

  But this wasn’t the first time he’d been so deeply in the shit, and he’d always managed to turn things around. He had an inner strength born of such situations, and a part of him thrived on the uncertainty and the overwhelming odds.

  Of one thing he was certain: the answers to everything – every misfortune that had befallen them – lay deeper in the jungle, at the site of that mystery air wreck. That was the one thing that kept driving him onwards.

  Jaeger kicked his feet higher in the hammock, and reached to unlace his left boot. He removed it, delved deep and pulled something out of the insole. He flashed a torch across it briefly, the light and his eyes lingering on the two faces that stared up at him – the green-eyed, raven-haired beauty of a mother, and the boy who was Jaeger’s spitting image standing protectively at her side.

  Some nights – many nights – he still said a prayer for them. He’d done so during the long and empty years in Bioko. He did so tonight, lying in a hammock slung between two trees on a sandbar on the Rio de los Dios. At that distant air wreck he knew there would be answers, and perhaps even the ones he most longed to learn – about what had happened to his wife and his boy.

  Jaeger rested, cradling that photo.

  As he drifted off to sleep, he sensed somehow that a truce had been declared in whatever war it was they were fighting here. For the first time since parachuting into the Serra de los Dios, he couldn’t detect any watchers – any hostile eyes in the jungle shadows.

  But he sensed also that this was a temporary lull. The first skirmishes had been fought. The first casualties suffered.

  The war proper was only just beginning.

  44

  They’d been three days on the Rio de los Dios – three days during which Jaeger had brooded over the next stage of their journey until it had driven him almost to distraction. Three days travelling due west on a river flowing at an average speed of six kilometres an hour: via the water, they’d covered a good 120 kilometres.

  Jaeger was pleased with their progress. That kind of distance would have taken many times as long and proven many times more exhausting – not to mention fraught with danger – had they attempted it overland.

  It was approaching mid-afternoon on the third day when he spotted what he was looking for: the Meeting of the Ways. Here the Rio de Los Dios was joined by a slightly smaller watercourse, the Rio Ouro – the Golden River. Whereas the Rio de los Dios was full of silty residues from the jungle, and dark brown – almost black – in colour, the Rio Ouro was golden-yellow, its waters being rich in sandy sediments swept down from the mountains.

  Where the two converged, the colder, denser waters of the Rio Ouro proved reluctant to intermingle with those of its warmer, less dense cousin, hence what Jaeger could see ahead of him – a striking section of river where black and white ran side by side for a good kilometre or more, almost without mixing.

  At the Meeting of the Ways, the smaller confluence – the Rio Ouro – would become subsumed into the Rio de los Dios. And at that moment, Jaeger and his team would be just three kilometres short of their must-stop position – for ahead lay an impassable barrier, the point where the river tumbled close to a thousand feet over the Devil’s Falls.

  The journey thus far had taken them across a high plateau cloaked in jungle. Where the Rio de los Dios thundered over the falls marked the point at which the plateau was torn in two by a jagged fault line. The land to the west of there lay a thousand feet lower, forming an endless carpet of lowland rainforest.

  Their end point – the mystery air wreck – lay some thirty kilometres onwards from the Devil’s Falls, in the midst of that lowland jungle.

  Jaeger nosed his canoe ahead, his paddle dipping into the waters noiselessly and causing barely a ripple. As a former Royal Marines Commando, he was well at home on the water. He’d led the river leg, helping those behind navigate through the more treacherous shallows. He reflected upon their next move. Decisions now would prove critical.

  The journey downriver had been relatively peaceful, at least compared to what had gone before. But he feared that with landfall approaching, this transitory period of stillness was about to come to an end.

  He could detect a new threat resonating in the air now: a deep, throaty roar filled his ears, as if a hundred thousand wildebeest were thundering over an African plain in a massive stampede.

  He glanced ahead.

  On the horizon he could see a tower of rising mist – the spray thrown up by the Rio de los Dios as it cascaded over the edge of the rift, forming
one of the world’s tallest and most dramatic waterfalls.

  There was no way over the Devil’s Falls – that much had been obvious from studying the aerial photos. The only possible route ahead appeared to be a pathway of sorts leading down the escarpment, but that lay a good day’s march north of here. Jaeger’s plan was to leave the river shortly and to undertake the last stage of the journey – including the steep descent – on foot.

  Skirting around the Devil’s Falls would take them a good distance out of their way, but there was no alternative as far as he could determine. He’d studied the terrain from every angle, and the path down the escarpment was the only way to proceed. As to who or what exactly had made that path – it remained a mystery.

  It could be wild animals.

  It could be Indians.

  Or it could be that mystery force that was out there somewhere – armed, hostile and dangerous.

  45

  The secondary problem that Jaeger was grappling with was the fact that they’d always envisaged making this final part of the journey as a ten-person team. Now they were reduced to five, and he was unsure what to do with the missing team members’ kit. They’d packed their personal effects into the canoes, but there was no way to carry them onwards from here.

  To leave such kit behind would be tantamount to telegraphing their acceptance that the missing team members were dead, but Jaeger couldn’t see any way around it.

  He glanced behind him.

  His canoe was leading, the others in line astern. There were five vessels in all, each an Advanced Elements convertible kayak – a fifteen-foot semi-foldable inflatable expedition craft. The kayaks had been parachuted in by Kamishi and Krakow, packed in the para-tubes. Each twenty-five-kilo craft folded down to form a cube measuring around two square feet, but opened out into a boat capable of carrying 249 kilos of kit.

  Back at the sandbar, they’d unpacked the kayaks, inflated them with stirrup pumps and launched them into the water loaded with gear. Each vessel boasted a triple-skin rip-stop hull, for extreme puncture resistance, built-in aluminium rods for added stability, plus adjustable padded seats, allowing for long-distance paddling without getting chafed raw.