‘And if they are feeling hungry?’ Jaeger queried.
Puruwehua glanced at the nearest tree. ‘You must get out of the water. Quickly.’
Jaeger spotted something sleek and silvery streaking through the shallows beside him. Another and another darted past, one or two brushing against his legs. The bodies looked silky-green on the dorsal surface, with large yellow eyes turned upwards, and two rows of massive teeth likes spines.
‘They’re all around us,’ Jaeger hissed.
‘Not to worry – this is good. This is very good. Andyrapepotiguhu˜ a. Vampire fish. It eats piranhas. It spears them with its long teeth.’
‘Right, let’s keep ’em close – at least until we reach that warplane.’
The water deepened. It was almost at chest height now. ‘Soon time to swim like the pirau’ndia,’ Puruwehua remarked. ‘It is a fish that holds itself vertical, with its head out of the water.’
Jaeger didn’t reply.
He’d had enough of fetid water, mosquitoes, leeches, caimans and fish jaws to last him a lifetime. He wanted to get hooked up to that aircraft, lift himself and his team out of there, and start searching for his missing family.
It was time to finish the expedition and start afresh. At the end of this crazed road he felt certain he’d know his wife and son’s fate one way or the other. Or if not, he’d have died in the attempt to discover it. Living in the half-light as he had been was not living at all. This was what his awakening had shown him.
Jaeger could feel Puruwehua’s eyes upon him as they walked onwards in silence.
‘You have a clearer mind now, my friend?’
Jaeger nodded. ‘Time to wrest back control from those who seek to destroy your world, Puruwehua, and mine.’
‘We call it hama,’ Puruwehua remarked knowingly. ‘Fate or destiny.’
For a while they waded on in companionable silence.
Jaeger felt a presence in the water beside him. It was Irina Narov. Like the rest of his team she was moving ahead holding her main weapon – a Dragunov sniper rifle – high out of the water, in an effort to keep it dirt free and dry. It was backbreaking work, but with the air wreck so close, she seemed driven by a relentless energy.
The Dragunov was an odd choice of weapon for the jungle, where combat was invariably at close quarters, but Narov had insisted it was the weapon for her. Sensibly, she’d opted for an SVDS – the compact, lightweight variant of the gun.
But it hadn’t escaped Jaeger’s notice that her two chosen weapons – the knife and the sniper rifle – were so often the tools of the assassin. The assassin; the loner. There was something about Narov that set her apart, that was for certain, but there was also a part of Jaeger that found those traits oddly familiar.
His son’s best friend at school, a boy called Daniel, had exhibited some of Narov’s characteristics: his speech had been oddly matter-of-fact and direct, sometimes seemingly bordering on the rude. He’d often failed to pick up on the social cues that came naturally to most kids. And he’d found it painfully difficult making and holding eye contact – not until he really knew and trusted someone.
It had taken Daniel a good while to learn to trust Luke, but once he’d done so, he’d proved the most loyal and constant of friends. They’d competed over everything: rugby, air hockey, even at the local paintball facility. But it had only ever been the healthy competition between best friends, and they’d stuck up for each other against all outsiders.
When Luke had disappeared, Daniel had been devastated. He’d lost his one true companion – his battle buddy. Just as Jaeger had.
Over time, Jaeger and Ruth had become friendly with Daniel’s parents. They’d confided in them that Daniel had been diagnosed with Asperger’s, or high-functioning autism – the experts didn’t appear sure which exactly. As with many such kids, Daniel proved to be obsessed by and brilliant at one thing: mathematics. That, plus he had a magical way with animals.
Jaeger cast his mind back to the close encounter they’d had with the Phoneutria. Something had struck him then, although he hadn’t quite realised what it was. Narov had acted almost as if she had a relationship with the venomous spiders – like she understood them. She’d been reluctant to kill even one of them, not until there was no other option.
And if there was one thing that Narov would obsess over and excel at, Jaeger had a good idea what it might be: the hunt and the kill.
‘How far?’ she demanded, her voice cutting through his thoughts.
‘How far to what?’
‘The air wreck. What else is there?’
Jaeger pointed ahead. ‘Around eight hundred metres. You see where the light breaks through the canopy – that’s where the forest starts to die.’
‘So close,’ she whispered.
‘Wir sind die Zukunft.’ Jaeger repeated the line that he’d heard in the closing stages of his nyakwana-induced vision. ‘You speak German. Wir sind die Zukunft. What does it mean?’
Narov stopped dead. She stared at him for a long second, her eyes frozen. ‘Where did you hear that?’
‘An echo from my past.’ Why did this woman always have to answer a question with a question? ‘So, what does it mean?’
‘Wir sind die Zukunft,’ Narov repeated, slowly and very deliberately. ‘We are the future. It was the rallying cry of the Herrenrasse – the Nazi master race. Whenever Hitler tired of Denn heute gehort uns Deutschland, und morgen die ganze Welt, he’d try a bit of Wir sind die Zukunft. The people lapped it up.’
‘How come you know so much about it?’ Jaeger demanded.
‘Know your enemy,’ Narov replied cryptically. ‘I make it my business to know.’ She threw Jaeger a look that struck him as being almost accusatory. ‘The question is – how do you know so little?’ She paused. ‘So little about your own past.’
68
Before Jaeger could answer, there was a terrified scream from behind. He turned to see a blaze of fear flash across Leticia Santos’s features as she was dragged beneath the water. She broke the surface, arms flailing desperately, her face a mask of terror, before she was ripped under once more.
Jaeger had caught the briefest glimpse of what had hold of her. It was one of the massive waterborne snakes that Puruwehua had warned him about: a constrictor. He charged through the shallows, diving for the deadly serpent and grappling with its tail as he frantically tried to wrest the coils free from her body.
He couldn’t use his shotgun. If he opened fire he’d blast Santos at the same time as hitting the snake. The water thrashed and boiled, Santos and the serpent entwined in a blur of snakeskin and limbs as she fought a battle that she could never win alone. The more that Jaeger fought it, the more the monster constrictor seemed to tighten its murderous grip around her.
Then from behind him Jaeger heard a sudden crack. It was the distinctive sound of a sniper rifle. At the same moment, somewhere in amongst the blur of snake and human, something erupted in a burst of blood and pulverised flesh as a high-velocity round hit home.
A second or so later the struggle was over, the snake’s head hanging limp and lifeless. Jaeger could see where most of its skull had been blown away, the high-velocity sniper round leaving a telltale exit wound. One by one Jaeger started to unwind the dead coils, and along with Alonzo and Kamishi he hauled Santos free.
As the three of them tried to pump the water out of her lungs, Jaeger glanced at Narov. She was standing in the swamp, the Dragunov still at her shoulder in case she needed to take a second shot.