But time was not on his side.
Seconds later he plummeted past Alonzo. He’d lost well over a thousand feet by now. Every second brought him closer to a shattering impact with the ocean, which at this speed would feel like solid concrete. Water might seem soft and yielding when stepping into the bath. Slamming into it at several hundred feet per second would prove lethal.
The adrenalin was burning through Jaeger’s system now, like a forest fire doused in gasoline.
After a few frantic attempts to free his lines, Jaeger realised they were too badly tangled. He had no option but to cut away. He grabbed the reserve handle, attached to his chest rigging.
Time to give it everything you’ve got, he screamed at himself. Time to bloody rip that handle free.
76
Whatever the hell had happened during Jaeger’s exit, or in the free fall, only one course of action lay open to him now. He reached around and tore away the emergency release straps from his shoulders, jettisoning his main chute. It was ripped into the darkness above him and was gone.
That done he grabbed the reserve handle and yanked at it with all his strength, so triggering his emergency chute. Moments later there was a crack like a ship’s canvas filling with wind, and a wide expanse of silk blossomed above him.
Jaeger was left hanging in the silence and stillness, and saying his prayers of thanks. He yanked his head upwards to check the reserve canopy. All seemed good.
He’d gained three thousand feet on the others, which meant he had to massively slow his descent. He reached up for the handheld steering toggles, giving them a sharp tug, forcing air the full length of the chute and making small adjustments to reduce his speed.
Glancing beyond his feet, he searched for Raff, the stick leader. He flicked down his night-vision goggles, which were attached to his jump helmet, and switched them to infrared mode, scanning the night. He was looking for the faint strobing of an IR firefly, a flashing infrared light unit.
There was no sign of it anywhere. Jaeger must have gone from being number four to number one in the stick. He had a similar IR unit attached to the rear of his helmet, so hopefully the others would be able to home in on that.
He pressed the light button on his GPS unit. It displayed a dotted line stretching from his present position to the exact point where they intended to put down. He could afford to leave the GPS powered up: at this altitude – some 20,000 feet – no one could see it from the ground. He figured he was travelling at around thirty knots, and drifting westwards with the prevailing wind. Another eight minutes and they should be over Plague Island.
Below his Goretex HAPLSS suit, Jaeger was wearing full cold-weather gear, including a pair of warm silk gloves beneath his thick Goretex overmitts. But still his hands were cramping up with the cold as he adjusted his line of flight to try to help the others catch him.
In a matter of minutes, five IR fireflies appeared in the night sky above him: the stick was complete. He let Raff overtake, taking up pole position once more, and they drifted onwards, six figures alone on the dark roof of the world.
When Jaeger had studied the Airlander’s surveillance photos, there had seemed to be only one viable landing zone – the island’s dirt airstrip. It was likely to be heavily guarded, but it was the one significant patch of terrain devoid of any tree cover.
He hadn’t liked it. None of them had. Landing there would be like flying down the very throats of the enemy. But it had seemed like it was the airstrip or bust.
Then Kamishi had outlined their actions-on, which were vital upon landing. And it wasn’t pretty.
They would need to find a location where they could change from one set of survival kit – HAPLSS high-altitude jump gear – to another, their Bio Level 4 space suits. And all while potentially having dropped right into the hornets’ nest.
The thick HAPLSS suits provided life-saving warmth and oxygen, but they would offer little protection in a Level 4 hot zone. The team needed a safe environment in which to don their air-purifying respirators and space suits.
The kit included FM54 masks – the same as they’d worn when rescuing Leticia Santos – linked by a crushproof S-profile hose to a series of battery-operated filters, making up a space-age-looking pack on the operator’s back. That filter unit would pump clean air into their bulky space suits – olive-green Trellchem EVO 1Bs, made of a Nomex fabric with a chemically resistant Viton rubber topcoat, providing one hundred per cent protection.
Whilst transforming themselves from high-altitude parachutists to Hot Zone 4 operators, the team would be highly vulnerable, which ruled out the airstrip as a landing point. That had left only one other possibility: a narrow stretch of pristine white sand that lay to the western side of the island.
From the surveillance photos, ‘Copacabana Beach’, as they’d dubbed it appeared just about doable. At low tide there was maybe fifty feet of sand between where the jungle ended and the sea began. All being well, they would switch gear there, then move into the jungle and hit Kammler’s facility, striking with total surprise from out of the dark and empty night.
That, at least, was the plan.
But one person would have to remain at the beach. Their role was to establish a ‘wet decon line’ – consisting of a makeshift decontamination tent complete with scrub-down kits. Once the team re-emerged from the jungle, mission complete, they would need to douse their suits in buckets of seawater laced with EnviroChem – a potent chemical that killed viruses.
With the suits sanitised, they’d change out of them and scrub down a second time, this time decontaminating their bare skin. They’d then step over the clean/dirty line into the non-contaminated universe, leaving their CBRN kit behind.
On one side of that line would lie a Level 4 Hot Zone.
The other side – the open, wave-washed beach – would hopefully be safe and contamination-free. At least that was the theory. And Kamishi – their CBRN specialist – was the obvious candidate to oversee the wet decon line.
Jaeger glanced westwards, in the direction of Plague Island, but still he couldn’t make out a thing. His chute was buffeted by a gust of wind, and rain droplets pinged into his exposed skin, each like a tiny sharp blade.
Ominously, all he could see was a cold and impenetrable darkness.
77
As he followed the route that Raff was steering, Jaeger’s mind was full of images of Ruth and Luke. The next few hours would reveal everything. For better or for worse.
The question that had been dogging him for the last three years was about to be answered. Either he was going to pull off the seemingly impossible and rescue Ruth and Luke. Or he would discover the grisly truth – that one or both of them were dead.
And if the latter were the case, he knew to whom he would turn.
Their recent missions, and Narov’s confessions – her dark and traumatic family history; her link to Jaeger’s late grandfather; her autism; their growing attachment – had drawn him perilously close to her .
And if he flew too close to Narov’s sun, Jaeger knew for sure that he would get burnt.
Jaeger and his fellow jumpers were still at altitude, and they were completely untraceable by any known defence system. Radar bounces off solid, angular objects – an aircraft’s metal wings, or a helicopter’s rotor blades – but simply bends around human forms and carries on uninterrupted. They were pretty much silent as they flew, so there was little risk of them being heard. They were dressed all in black, suspended beneath black chutes, and practically invisible from the ground.