The mask bent lower, so the front of the respirator was pressing into Jaeger’s bloodied features. ‘Don’t ever forget – you failed to protect your wife and child. Wir sind die Zukunft!’
The eyes were wide behind the glass eyelets, pumped with adrenalin, and it struck Jaeger that he knew the face behind that manic gaze. He knew it, yet at the same time he didn’t know it, for he couldn’t put a name to those hate-twisted features. Moments later the horrific scene – the unspeakable memories – faded, but not before one image had lodged in Jaeger’s mind irrevocably…
When finally he came back to his senses in his hammock, Jaeger was feeling utterly drained. The most abiding image of the attack hadn’t exactly surprised him. In his heart he’d been expecting it; dreading it. He’d feared it was there, embedded in the darkness of that snow-washed Welsh hillside.
Etched into the hilt of the knife that had sliced through the tent was a dark iconic image: a Reichsadler.
66
Puruwehua kept a vigil besides Jaeger’s hammock all through the lonely night hours. He alone understood what Jaeger was going through. The drink he’d given him was laced with nyakwana, the key to unlocking so many powerful images buried deep in the mind. He knew the white man would be shaken to his very core.
At dawn, neither spoke about what had happened. Somehow it didn’t need words.
But the whole of that morning Jaeger was moody and withdrawn, trapped inside the shell of the memories that had resurfaced. Physically, he set one foot in front of the other as he trekked through the damp and dripping jungle, but mentally he was in an entirely different place, his mind entombed within a shredded tent on an icy Welsh mountainside.
His team couldn’t help but notice his change of mood, though few could fathom the reason. This close to the air wreck – its discovery now within their grasp – they had expected Jaeger to be utterly energised; to be leading the charge. But quite the contrary: he seemed locked in a dark and lonely place that excluded all others.
It was pushing four years ago now when his wife and child had disappeared. Jaeger had been training for the Pen y Fan Challenge – a twenty-four-kilometre race over the Welsh mountains. It was Christmas, and he, Ruth and Luke had decided to spend it in a novel way, camped out in the Welsh foothills. It had been the perfect excuse to be together in the mountains – something that little Luke loved – and for Jaeger to get in some extra training. It was their family adventure combo, as he’d jokingly told Ruth.
They’d set camp near the start of the race. The Pen y Fan Challenge was inspired by British special forces selection. In one of the toughest stages, candidates had to ascend the almost sheer face of the Fan, descend Jacob’s Ladder, then push onwards along the undulating old Roman road, at the end of which they’d hit the turnaround point and do it all again in reverse.
It had become known as ‘the Fan Dance’, and was a brutal test of speed, stamina and fitness – things that Jaeger found came naturally to him. Though retired from the military, he still liked to remind himself every now and then what he was capable of.
They’d gone to sleep that night with Jaeger’s body aching from a hard day’s training, and his wife and son likewise exhausted from mountain-biking across the snowy lowlands. Jaeger’s next conscious memory had been of coming to his senses a week later in intensive care – only to learn that Ruth and Luke were missing.
The gas used against them had been identified as Kolokol-1, a little-known Russian knockout agent that took effect in between one and three seconds. It was generally non-fatal – unless the victim suffered prolonged exposure in a closed environment – but even so it had taken Jaeger months to fully recover.
The police had discovered the boot of Jaeger’s car stuffed full of Christmas presents for his family – ones that would now never be opened. Apart from the 4x4’s tyre tracks, no trace of his missing wife and child had been found. It had appeared to be a motiveless abduction, not to mention possible murder.
While Jaeger wasn’t exactly the prime suspect, at times the line of questioning had left him wondering. The more any motive or leads had evaded the police, the more they had seemed to want to dig for reasons in Jaeger’s past as to why he might have wanted to make his wife and child disappear.
They’d trawled his military records, highlighting any history of extreme trauma that might have triggered post-traumatic stress disorder. Anything that might account for such apparently unaccountable behaviour. They’d questioned his closest friends. Plus they’d grilled his family relentlessly – his parents in particular – about whether there were any problems in his marriage.
That had in part precipitated his mother and father’s move to Bermuda – to escape the unwarranted intrusions. They’d stuck around to help him through the worst, but when he’d gone AWOL and fled to Bioko, they’d likewise seized the chance for a clean start. By then the trail had gone utterly cold anyway. Ruth and Luke had been missing almost a year, presumed dead, and in the relentless search Jaeger had come close to tearing himself apart.
It had taken days, months – and now years – for the hidden recollections of that dark night to start bleeding back to the surface. And now this: he’d reclaimed some of the very last of the memories, those most deeply buried, at the hands of an Amahuaca warrior and a good dose of a nyakwana-infused drink.
Of course, it wasn’t any old Reichsadler that he’d seen on that knife hilt. It was the same design that his great uncle Joe had found so utterly terrifying in a cabin deep in the Scottish hills. His words flashed into Jaeger’s mind now, as he trudged through the sodden jungle, along with the look of sheer terror that had flitted across his gaze.
And then this precious boy comes here with that. Ein Reichsadler! That damn cursed damnation! It seems as if the evil has returned…
According to the Amahuaca Indian chief, it was a similar Reichsadler that had been carved into the bodies of his two captured warriors – and by the same force with which Jaeger and his team were locked in a life-and-death struggle.
But what confounded Jaeger most was that he seemed to have recognised the voice spitting at him from behind the gas mask. Yet as much as he might rack his brains, no name or image came into his mind.
If he did somehow know his chief tormentor, the man’s identity remained utterly lost to him.
67
It was approaching midday on their tenth day in the jungle by the time Jaeger had started to shake free of his malaise. It was their impending arrival at the air wreck that had dragged him out of the dark and troubling past.
In spite of that morning’s disquiet, Jaeger still had his pebbles and compass gripped in hand. He figured they were maybe 3,000 yards short of the line at which the forest would start to die. Beyond that it would be only the bleached bones of toxic dead wood leading up to the wreck itself.
They entered a particularly sodden patch of jungle.
‘Yaporuamuhu˜ a,’ Puruwehua announced, as they began to wade deeper. ‘Flooded forest. When the water becomes this big, the piranhas tend to swim in from the rivers. They feed on anything they can find.’
The dark water was swirling around Jaeger’s waist. ‘Thanks for the warning,’ he muttered.
‘They are only aggressive when driven by hunger,’ Puruwehua tried to reassure him. ‘After such rains, there should be plenty for them to eat.’