Bear Grylls - Ghost Flight

Trouble was, there was no way that Jaeger could turn back. Back lay only one-hundred-plus kilometres of river, upstream and in the wrong direction; and forward lay only the plunge over the Devil’s Falls.

Either they made landfall here, or Jaeger and his team were in deep trouble.

It was hardly the most auspicious of ways to go about making first contact, but Jaeger didn’t figure he had much choice. A few more seconds of this and he’d be within range of the tribe’s arrows – and this time he didn’t doubt that they were tipped with poison.

He lifted the shotgun from its mount, pointed it at the river just in front of his canoe, and opened fire. Six warning shots were pumped out in quick succession, cutting a swathe through the water and throwing a great spout of spray high into the air.

The reaction from the Indians was instantaneous.

Arrows were strung and the warriors let fly, their shots arcing high through the air bang on target but falling a little short of the prow of Jaeger’s kayak. Cries of alarm echoed back and forth, and for a moment Jaeger was convinced that the tribe were determined to stand their ground and fight.

The last thing he had come here for was to do battle with this lost tribe. But if he had no choice, he would use all necessary means and defend his team to the last.

For a long moment he locked eyes with the tribe’s warrior leader, as if a battle of wills had been joined across the water. And then the figure gestured again, his arm jerking backwards towards the jungle. On either side of him figures melted into the trees. The moment they did so, they were rendered invisible.

Jaeger had seen such forest tribes do this instantaneous disappearing act many times over, yet it never ceased to amaze him. He’d never seen anyone, not even Raff, who could equal it.

But the leader held his ground, unmoving – his face like thunder.

He stood alone facing Jaeger.

The kayak continued to drift inwards towards the riverbank. Jaeger saw the Indian raise something in his right hand, then, with a cry of rage, drive it deep into the mudbank. It looked like a spear with a battle flag or a pennant fluttering from its back end.

With that, the figure turned and was gone.

Jaeger took no chances making the landing. He pushed on alone, but with Alonzo and Kamishi to either flank and set slightly behind him, assault rifles at the ready. At the very rear he stationed Dale and Kral with their camera, for they were intent on filming every last move.

Jaeger knew that he was well covered, and he was banking that his show of force – the rounds unleashed from the shotgun – would prove a powerful deterrent against the tribe. With some powerful thrusts from his paddle he got the kayak drifting in the last few yards. He took the shotgun in hand and brought it to his shoulder, its wide, gaping muzzle menacing the dark line of trees.

Not a sign of movement anywhere.

The front of the kayak ground against the mud as it came to a halt. Jaeger was out in a flash, crouched low in the water behind his heavily laden craft, his weapon scanning the jungle in front of him.

For a good five minutes he didn’t move.

He remained hunched over his shotgun, silently listening and watching.

He tuned his every sense to this new environment, filtering out any noises that he figured were entirely natural. If he could tune out all the normal pulses and rhythms of the forest – its heartbeat – he could tune in to anything that was abnormal, like a human footfall, or a warrior stringing an arrow to his bow.

But there was nothing of that nature that he could detect.

The tribe seemed to have melted away, just as swiftly as they had appeared. Yet Jaeger didn’t believe for one moment that they were gone for good.

Keeping his weapon at the ready, he signalled Alonzo and Kamishi closer. When their canoes were almost level with his own, he stepped up from the crouch and waded through the shallows, shotgun held at the ready and primed to unleash hell.

Partway up the mudbank, he sank to one knee, weapon sweeping the dark terrain ahead of him. He signalled Alonzo and Kamishi in. Once they were alongside, he moved up further on to the sand, until he was able to take hold of the Indian warrior’s spear and rip it out of the ground.

Leticia Santos, the missing Brazilian member of Jaeger’s team, had worn a striking multicoloured silk scarf emblazoned with the word ‘Carnivale!’ Jaeger spoke decent Portuguese, having learned it during his time training the B-SOB teams, and he’d remarked on how the scarf complemented her warm Latino spirit. She’d told him it had been a gift from her sister during the previous February’s Rio carnival, and that she wore it to bring her luck on the expedition.

It was Leticia Santos’s scarf that was hanging from the end of the Indian warrior’s spear.

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.