0800 Zulu – called all satphones. One + 882 16 7865 4378 answered, then immediately killed call. Gave a call-sign (?) sounded like White Wolf (?). Voice Eastern European accent. KRAL?? Come up comms – urgent confirm locstat.
Jaeger read the message three times over as he tried to fathom its import. Clearly Raff was worried as to their location and status (military speak: ‘locstat’), or he wouldn’t have risked making a voice call. Jaeger would have to send a quick data-burst response to let him know all were present and correct at the site of the air wreck.
Or rather, all bar one – Stefan Kral.
And in light of the message, Jaeger sensed that a dark cloud had fallen over their absent Slovakian cameraman.
He scrolled through the numbers held in speed-dial on his Thuraya, checking those of the other members of his team. In theory, they only had three satphones with them – his own, Alonzo’s and Dale’s – the rest having been left in the cache above the Devil’s Falls.
Sure enough, number + 882 16 7865 4378 was a Thuraya that supposedly had been left behind.
Jaeger cast his mind back to 0800 Zulu that morning. They’d just broken camp and recommenced their trek. None of his team would have been able to receive Raff’s call. But if Kral had hidden a Thuraya in his kit, he was quite capable of taking a call at the Amahuaca village clearing.
Not to mention making calls as well.
The question was – why would he have hidden a satphone? And why the code name – if Raff had caught it right – White Wolf? And why had he immediately killed the call upon realising that it was from Raff in the Airlander?
Jaeger felt a horrible suspicion taking hold of him. Viewed in conjunction with Kral’s failure to disable the GPS units on Dale’s cameras, the only possible conclusion seemed to be that the Slovakian was the enemy within. If he was indeed a traitor, Jaeger felt doubly betrayed. He had been suckered right in by Kral’s hard-done-by family-man act.
He called Puruwehua over. As quickly as he could, he explained what had happened.
‘Can one of your men head back to the village and warn the chief? Tell him to hold Kral until we can get to him to question him. I’m not saying he’s definitely guilty – but all evidence points that way. And remove all but his bare essentials, to prevent him making a break for it.’
‘I will send one,’ Puruwehua confirmed. ‘One who can move fast. If he is an enemy to you, he is also an enemy to my people.’
Jaeger thanked the Indian. He sent Raff a brief update by data-burst, then returned to the task at hand.
He threw his shoulders forward, pulled apart the rear of the Avon gas mask and dragged the thing over his head, making sure that the rubber formed an airtight seal with the skin of his neck. He tightened the retaining straps, and felt it pull closer around the contours of his face.
He placed his hand over the respirator’s filter, his palm making an airtight seal. He breathed in hard, sucking the mask tighter on to his face, so making doubly sure the seal was good. That done, he dragged in a few gasps of air through the filter, hearing the rasp and suck of his own breathing roaring in his ears.
He pulled the hood of the suit over his head, the elastic sealing around the edge of the mask. He dragged the bulky rubber over-boots on so they encased his jungle boots completely, then laced them up tight around his ankles. Last but not least, he pulled on the thin white cotton under-gloves, plus the heavy rubber over-mitts.
His world was now reduced to whatever he could see through the eyepiece of the gas mask. The dual filter sat to the front and the left, in an effort to prevent it from impeding the view, but already Jaeger was feeling claustrophobic, and he could sense the heat and the stuffiness starting to build.
Suited up, the three figures stepped out of the living jungle and into the wasteland.
70
After the chattering of birdlife and the buzz of insects in the green and leafy jungle, their entry into the dead zone seemed eerily quiet. The steady patter of the rain against Jaeger’s hood beat out a regular rhythm to accompany the suck and rasp of his breathing, and all around, the terrain appeared devoid of life.
Rotten branches and bark squelched underfoot.
Where Jaeger’s over-boots kicked aside such debris, he could see that insects had started to recolonise the dead zone. Swarms of ants with iron-clad skin scuttled about angrily beneath his footfalls. Plus there were his old friends from Black Beach Prison – cockroaches.
Ants and roaches: if there were ever a cataclysmic world war using nuclear or chemical weapons, it would be insects that would very likely inherit the earth. They were largely immune to man-made toxic threats, very likely including whatever might be leaking from that warplane.
The three figures pressed onwards in silence.
Jaeger could feel the tension emanating from Narov at his side. A step or two behind came Dale, filming. But he was struggling to keep the picture properly framed, with his hands encumbered by the thick gloves, and the gas mask restricting his vision.
They came to a halt fifty feet short – from where they could try to take in the enormity of what lay before them. It remained half shielded by cadaverous tree trunks – denuded of leaves and bark, and dead to the core – but still there was no mistaking the sleek, elegant lines of the gigantic aircraft that had lain hidden in the jungle for seven decades or more.
After the epic journey to get here, they were left gazing at it in silent wonder.
Even Dale had stopped filming to stare.
Everything had been building to this moment: so much research; so much planning; so many briefings; so much speculation as to what the aircraft might actually be; and, after the last few days, so much death and suffering along the way, as well as the cold steel of betrayal.
As he gazed upon it in wonder, Jaeger marvelled at how intact the aircraft appeared to be. He almost felt as if it simply needed that vital refuelling it had missed all those years ago, and it could fire up the engines and be ready to take to the skies once more.
He could quite understand why Hitler had trumpeted this aircraft as his Amerika Bomber. As Jenkinson, the archivist, had declared, it looked custom-made for dropping sarin nerve gas on New York.
Jaeger stood entranced.
What in God’s name was it doing here? he wondered. What had its mission been? And if it was the last of four such flights, as the Amahuaca chief had told them, what was it – what were they all – carrying?
Jaeger had only ever seen one photo of a Junkers Ju 390.
It was an old black-and-white shot that Jenkinson had emailed to him – one of the very few images that existed of the warplane. It had shown a dark and sleek six-engined aircraft – one so massive that it dwarfed the soldiers and airmen who were busy all around it, like so many worker ants.
It had a nose cone shaped like a cruel eagle’s head in side profile, and a raked, streamlined cockpit, with a score of porthole-like windows running along its sides. The only major differences between the aircraft shown in that photo and the one now lying before them were the location and the markings.
That photo had shown a Ju 390 at its last known destination – a frozen, snowbound airstrip in Prague, in occupied Czechoslovakia, on a bitter February morning in 1945. Painted on each of the aircraft’s massive wings was the distinctive form of a black cross set against a white background – the insignia of the German Luftwaffe – with similar markings on the aft section of the fuselage.
By contrast, the aircraft now lying before Jaeger displayed an equally distinctive roundel – a five-pointed white star overlying red-and-white stripes – the unmistakable markings of the United States Air Force. Those roundels were sun-bleached and weathered almost to the point of having disappeared, but to Jaeger and his team they were still clearly recognisable.