Bear Grylls - Ghost Flight

To either side of him were more caimans, closing in on the corpse of the monster he had just killed. They were drawn by the smell of blood. As Jaeger had been driven down towards the riverbed he’d lost his combat shotgun, and he was pretty much defenceless now, but the caimans weren’t paying much attention to him.

Instead, they had one of their own to feast upon, and the taste of the blood thick in the water was driving them wild.

For a long moment Jaeger tried to orientate himself, and then he too was dragged into the rapids. He tried to protect his torso as he was swept against the rocks, keeping his feet downstream to push off any obstacles and his arms out to the sides to steady himself.

He pulled himself into the slower current at the edge of the white water and did a 360-degree sweep, scanning for the raft. But as he eyed the river all around him, he couldn’t seem to locate it in any direction. The lightweight craft had completely disappeared, and its loss made his blood run cold.

He kept searching, growing ever more frantic, but still there was no sight of the makeshift craft.

And as for Irina Narov – there wasn’t the slightest sign of her anywhere.

Jaeger hauled himself on to the riverbank.

He sank to his knees in a sodden, exhausted heap, his limbs burning, his lungs gasping for breath. To any watching eyes he would appear more like a mud-encrusted, semi-drowned rat than a human being – not that he expected many to be watching.

For hours on end he’d quartered the Rio de los Dios searching for Irina Narov. He’d scanned the river from bank to bank, searching everywhere and yelling out her name. But he’d been unable to find the slightest sign of her, or the raft. And then he’d discovered what he’d most feared to find: his pack and the canoe flotation bag, still lashed together, but torn and shredded by caiman tooth and claw marks.

The battered remains of the makeshift raft had drifted into the shallows a good distance downstream. On an adjacent mudbank Jaeger had discovered one unnerving sign of the woman he’d tried so desperately to safeguard: her sky-blue headband, now sodden and torn and stained with mud.

Still he’d continued to search the riverbanks as far as he could go, but even as he’d done so, he’d feared his efforts were futile. He figured Narov must have been thrown from the raft, even as the caiman’s dead body had thrust him deep into the river’s inky depths. The rapids and the caimans would have done the rest.

He’d fought for the best part of a minute to regain the surface, but it was still enough time for the raft to have been swept completely out of his sight. Had it still been intact and afloat, he’d have been able to see the makeshift craft. He’d have been able to catch it and draw it into land.

And had Irina Narov still been with it, he might have been able to save her.

As it was… Well, he didn’t like to contemplate Narov’s exact fate, yet he didn’t doubt for one moment that she was gone. Narov was dead – either drowned in the Rio de los Dios, or torn apart by ravening black caimans; and most likely a mixture of the two.

And he, Will Jaeger, had been unable to do anything to save her.

He struggled to his feet and stumbled further up the muddy riverbank. In the dark shock of the moment, his training began to kick in. He slipped into full-on survival mode; it was all he knew how to do. He’d lost Narov, but the rest of the expedition was still out there somewhere in the jungle. There were eight people presumably waiting at that distant sandbar; reliant upon him.

Right now they had no coordinates to make for; no way to head towards the air wreck. And without a way forward, there was no easy way out of this savage Lost World; no exit strategy. To withdraw from a place as remote and as seemingly damned as the Cordillera de los Dios took a great deal of planning and preparation, as Jaeger well knew.

If Narov’s loss were to mean anything, he had to get himself reunited with his team and get them on the move. He had to lead them to the site of that wreck, and to do that he had to get himself to the sandbar – although the odds of him doing so were rapidly turning against him.

He proceeded to empty out the contents of his pockets, plus those of his belt pouches. After the chaos of the river crossing, he had no idea what if any of his kit remained. The rucksack had been rendered useless – shredded by the caimans and voided of its contents – but as he scanned his meagre possessions, Jaeger began to count his blessings.

His single most vital piece of kit – his compass, stuffed deep in a trouser pocket and zipped tight – was still there. With that one piece of equipment alone he stood a chance of making it through to the distant sandbar. He dragged out the map from his trouser side pocket. It was sodden and battered, but just about usable.

He had both map and compass; it was a start.

He checked his chest-mounted knife. It was still there, clipped firmly into its sheath; the knife Raff had given him; the one he’d put to such good use during the epic fight on Fernao beach – the fight in which Little Mo had been killed.

So much death; and now one more to contend with.

What Jaeger wouldn’t have given to have Raff alongside him now. Had the big Maori been here, Narov might have lived. There were no guarantees, of course, but Raff would have helped him fight off the killer caiman, and one or other of them would have likely escaped unscathed from that first attack, and so been able to safeguard the raft and its precious cargo.

But Jaeger was alone, Irina Narov was gone, and he had to steel himself to the hard facts. He had no choice. He had to go on.

He continued with his kit check. He had two full bottles of water slung in his belt rig – although the Katadyn filter was gone. He had a little emergency food, the roll of paracord that he’d used to lower Narov and himself from the canopy, plus two dozen rounds for the shotgun.

He dumped the shotgun shells. They were a useless deadweight without the weapon.

Amongst the few other bits and pieces that the kit check revealed, his gaze came to rest upon the shiny form of the C-130 pilot’s coin. The Night Stalkers’ motto glistened in the sunlight: Death Waits in the Dark. No doubt about it – death red in tooth and claw had lurked in the dark waters of the Rio de los Dios.

And it had found them; or at least, it had found Narov.

But that wasn’t in any way the pilot’s fault, of course.

The pilot of that C-130 had got them out of his aircraft at exactly the right release point. That was no mean feat. The disaster that had followed – it was none of his doing. The coin went with the rest of Jaeger’s meagre possessions – deep into his pocket. Hope was what kept people alive, he reminded himself.

The last piece of equipment that he contemplated was also the most difficult: it was Irina Narov’s knife.

After he’d used it to cut them free from the abseil line, Jaeger had slung it on his own belt. Amidst all the chaos, and with Narov so incapacitated from the spider bite, it had seemed like the right thing to do. Now it was all he had that linked him to her.

He held it in his hands for a long moment. His eyes traced the knife’s name, stamped into the steel hilt. He knew all about the history of the blade, for he’d researched his grandfather’s.

In the months following Hitler’s spring 1940 blitzkrieg – his lightning war that had driven the Allied troops out of France – Winston Churchill had ordered the creation of a special force, to launch butcher-and-bolt terror raids against the enemy. Those special volunteers were taught to wage war in what was then a very un-British way – fast and dirty, with no holds barred.