Ghost Flight

by Bear Grylls

  Jenkinson had added an explanatory note to the effect that the LKW Junkers was an alternative Nazi designation for the Ju 390.

  Jaeger had googled the word ‘plenipotentiary’. As far as he could discern, it meant a special emissary granted extraordinary powers. In other words, Kammler had been Hitler’s right-hand man and go-getter, empowered to do whatever was necessary.

  Jenkinson’s email was tantalising. It seemed to suggest that Hans Kammler had been tasked to remove the Nazis’ key weaponry at the end of the war, putting it out of reach of the Allies. And if Jenkinson was right, the means to do so may well have been a squadron of giant Ju 390 warplanes.

  Jaeger had emailed Jenkinson asking for a sense of what the entire Kammler file might signify. But he’d received no reply, or at least not before he’d boarded the flight into the heart of the Amazon. He had had to reconcile himself to getting no further clarification – or at least not until the expedition was complete.

  ‘P-Hour minus twenty.’ The pilot’s announcement broke Jaeger’s reverie. ‘Weather reports good and clear; approach course unchanged.’

  There was a bitterly cold draught blowing through the aircraft’s hold. Jaeger bashed his frozen hands together to try to work some life into them. He’d kill for a steaming cup of coffee right now.

  The Super Hercules was some 200 kilometres east of their release point. Via a bunch of mind-boggling calculations – taking into account the wind speed and direction at 30,000 feet and all altitudes in between – they’d calculated the exact point in the sky from which they needed to jump.

  From there, it would be a forty-kilometre glide into the sandbar.

  ‘P minus ten,’ the pilot intoned.

  Jaeger got to his feet.

  To his right he saw a line of figures likewise levering themselves off their seats, stamping stiff legs to drive out the cold. He bent and clipped his heavy rucksack on to the front of his parachute harness, using a series of thick steel clips – carabiners – to do so. When he jumped, the pack would be left hanging from his chest, suspended on a pulley system.

  ‘P minus eight,’ the pilot announced.

  Jaeger’s pack weighed in at thirty-five kilograms. He had a similar weight of parachute gear strapped to his back. Plus he was carrying fifteen kilos of weaponry and ammo, and the oxygen-breathing system.

  Approaching ninety kilos in all.

  More than his own bodyweight.

  Jaeger was five foot nine and lithe with it, every inch honed and toned muscle. People tended to think of elite forces types as being monsters, true man mountains. Sure, there were some – like Raff – who were simply massive, but a greater proportion were like Jaeger: leopard-slim, fast and deadly.

  The lead PD stepped back so they could all see him. He flashed up five fingers: P minus five. Jaeger couldn’t hear the pilot any more; he’d unplugged from the intercom system. From now on the jump would all be done via hand signals.

  The PD held up his right fist and blew into it. His fingers opened as he did so, like a spreading flower. He held up five fingers, flashing them twice. It was the signal for wind speed at ground level: ten knots. Jaeger breathed a sigh of relief. Ten knots was doable for making the landing.

  He busied himself tightening straps one last time and double-checking his gear. The PD flashed three fingers in front of his goggled face: three minutes to the jump. It was time to link up with Irina Narov for the tandem.

  Jaeger turned to face the rear of the Hercules. He shuffled ahead, lifting his heavy rucksack with one hand and using the other to hold himself steady against the aircraft’s side. He needed to get as near to the ramp as possible before his fellow jumper was strapped on.

  From up ahead he heard a dull and hollow thunk. It was followed by a mechanical whine and an icy inrush of air. The ramp had cracked open and begun to lower, and with each foot a howling gale blew ever more powerfully into the hold.

  As he moved closer to the churning slipstream, Jaeger half expected to hear the first notes of Wagner blasting out of the aircraft’s speakers. It was around now that the pilot would normally start the music.

  Instead he caught a burst of wild and savage guitar riffs, followed an instant later by the thumping percussion of drums. Then the high-pitched manic voice of the lead singer of an iconic heavy rock band cut in . . .

  It was AC/DC’s ‘Highway to Hell’.

  The pilot was a Night Stalker all right: he’d clearly decided they were going to do this his way.

  The maniacal chorus struck up just as the lead PD manhandled a figure towards Jaeger: Irina Narov – ready for the strap-on.

  Highway to hell . . .

  The pilot – plus the song’s very title – seemed to be suggesting that Jaeger and his team were on a one-way trip to damnation.

  Were they? Jaeger wondered. Were they heading into hell?

  Was that where this mission was taking them?

  He hoped and prayed that a far better fate awaited them in the jungle.

  Yet a part of him feared they were jumping into the worst kind of torment amongst the Mountains of the Gods.

  24

  Jaeger did his best to blank the crazed, frenzied singing from his head. For a moment he locked eyes with the tall, finely muscled Russian woman standing before him. She looked to be in perfect shape: there didn’t appear to be an ounce of excess weight anywhere on her sparse frame.

  Jaeger didn’t know exactly what he expected to read in her gaze.

  Apprehension? Fear?

  Or maybe something approaching panic?

  Narov was ex-Spetsnaz, about the nearest the Russians had to the SAS. By rights, as a former Spetsnaz officer she should be shit hot. But Jaeger had known many a top soldier crap out when on the brink of diving off the ramp into the freezing, screaming blue.

  At this kind of height the curvature of the earth would be clearly visible, stretching away to the pencil-slim horizon. Jumping off a C-130’s ramp was daunting enough at the best of times. When doing so from the very outer reaches of earth’s atmosphere it was a total leap of faith, and it could be terrifying as hell.

  But as he looked into Narov’s ice-blue eyes, all Jaeger could detect was an unreadable, inscrutable calm. A surprising emptiness filled them; a resolute stillness – almost as if nothing, not even a 30,000-foot dive into the churning void, could reach her.

  She flicked her gaze away from his, turned her back on him and adopted the position.

  They shuffled closer.

  On a tandem, you jumped both facing the same direction. Jaeger’s parachute should be enough to stem their combined fall, giving them an expanse of shared silk to glide under all the way to the touchdown. The PDs standing to either side proceeded to strap the two of them together, vice-tight.

  Jaeger had tandemed up scores of times before. He knew he shouldn’t be feeling as he was – awkward and uncomfortable at having another human being in such close proximity to his person.

  Before now he’d always tandemed with a fellow elite operator; a brother warrior. Someone he knew well and would gladly fight back-to-back with, if ever the shit went down. He felt far from comfortable getting strapped skin-tight to a total stranger, and a woman.

  Narov was also the person in his team that he least trusted right now: his chief suspect for Andy Smith’s murder. Yet he couldn’t deny it – her striking good looks were getting under his skin. However much he might try to zone out such thoughts and tune into the jump, it just wasn’t happening.

  It wasn’t helped by the music – AC/DC’s wild lyrics pounding into his skull.

  Jaeger glanced behind him. It was all happening fast now.

  He could see the PDs rolling the two para-tubes forward on the rails that ran the length of the hold. Kamishi and Krakow shuffled ahead, and bent as if in prayer over the bulky containers. The PDs proceeded to strap the para-tubes to their chest harnesses. The two jumpers would roll the tubes ahead and leap out with them, just seconds after Jaeger and Narov were gone.
<
br />   Jaeger turned back to face the sun-whipped void.

  All of a sudden the screeching racket from the aircraft’s speakers seemed to stop dead. ‘Highway to Hell’ had been cut short. There was a few seconds’ wind-blasted silence, before Jaeger heard a new burst of sound. In the place of AC/DC’s hell track, a uniquely powerful and evocative piece of music began to pulsate through the C-130’s hold.

  It was unmistakable.

  Classical.

  Jaeger allowed himself a smile.

  The pilot had needled him for a while there, but he’d come good in the end. It was Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ after all – and for the final few seconds before jump time.

  Jaeger and the music went back a long way.

  Before joining the SAS, he had served as a commando in the Royal Marines. He’d got himself jump-trained, and it was the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ that had been played during the ceremony when he’d gained his parachute wings. Many a time he’d hurled himself out of a C-130 along with his fellow SAS blades, Wagner’s classic composition blaring out over the speaker system.

  It was the unofficial anthem of British airborne units.

  And it was as fine a track as any to be jumping to, on a mission such as this.

  As he steeled himself for the exit, Jaeger gave a moment’s thought to the aircraft that had been on their tail. The C-130 pilot had made no further mention of it. Jaeger guessed it had disappeared – maybe calling off the pursuit as the Hercules had crossed the border into Bolivian airspace.

  It certainly couldn’t be about to interfere with the jump, or the pilot wouldn’t be letting them go.

  He blanked it from his mind.

  He nudged Narov forward, shuffling as one towards the open ramp. To either side the PDs strapped themselves to the airframe to avoid being torn out by the howling gale.

  The secret to making a HAHO jump was to always keep a grasp on your spatial awareness; to know exactly where you were positioned within the stick of parachutists. As lead jumper, it was vital that Jaeger held them tight. If he lost someone he couldn’t exactly use his radio to call them back; the turbulence and wind noise made communications impossible during the freefall.

  Jaeger and Narov came to a halt at the very lip of the ramp.

  Figures lined up aft of them. Jaeger felt his heart beating like a machine gun, as the adrenalin surged and burned through his veins. They were on the very roof of the world up here, the realm of the starry heavens.

  The PDs did a final visual check on each of the jumpers, ensuring that no straps were snagged or tangled, or hanging free. With Jaeger it was a case of doing so by feel, making sure that all Narov’s points of contact with him were attached good and tight.

  The lead PD started yelling the final instructions. ‘Tail off equipment check!’

  ‘TEN GOOD!’ the rearmost figure cried.

  ‘NINE GOOD!’

  As each figure called out his ready status, he thumped the one in front. No thump on the shoulder and you knew the guy behind was in trouble.

  ‘THREE GOOD!’ Jaeger felt a whack from the jumper to his rear. It was Mike Dale, the young Aussie cameraman who’d be filming him and Narov as they piled off the aircraft’s open ramp, with a miniature camera strapped to his helmet.

  Before the words could freeze in his throat, Jaeger forced himself to yell: ‘ONE AND TWO GOOD!’

  The line shuffled more tightly together. Too much separation in the sky and they’d risk losing each other in the freefall.

  Jaeger glanced at the jump light.

  It began to flash red: get ready.

  He glanced ahead, peering over Narov’s shoulder. He felt a few strands of her loose hair whipping into his face, the stark oblong of the ramp silhouetted against the bright, snarling maw of the heavens.

  Outside was a whirlwind of pure, raging, blinding light.

  He felt the wind tearing at his helmet and trying to rip the goggles from his face. He got his head down and steeled himself to drive forward.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw the red light burn green.

  The PD stepped back: ‘GO! GO! GO!’

  Suddenly Jaeger was thrusting Narov forward, driving her ahead and then diving into thin air. As one they tumbled into the snarling emptiness. But as they left the open ramp, Jaeger felt something catch momentarily, the force of it snagging and then tearing loose, serving to throw them violently off balance.

  He knew instantly what had happened: they’d made an unstable exit.

  They’d been thrown off-kilter and they were going into a spin.

  This had the potential to be really bad.

  Jaeger and Narov were sucked through the churning maw of the aircraft’s slipstream, the violent turbulence throwing them over and over faster than ever. Spat out of the aircraft’s wake, they began to plummet towards earth, twisting round and round like some giant crazed spinning top.

  Jaeger tried to focus his mind on counting out the seconds before he could risk opening the chute.

  ‘Three thousand and three, three thousand and four . . .’

  But as the voice counted out the beats inside his head, he realised things were rapidly worsening. Rather than stabilising, the spin just seemed unstoppable. It was the nightmare of the centrifuge all over, only now it was happening at 30,000 feet and for real.

  He tried to gauge how fast they were rotating – to see if he could risk pulling the chute. The only way to do so was by counting how rapidly the air around them turned from blue to green to blue to green and back again. Blue meant facing the sky, green meant the jungle.

  Blue-green-blue-green-blue-green-bluuue-greeeeeen-blueeeennnnn . . . Aaarrgggh!

  Right now Jaeger was struggling to remain conscious, let alone get a grip on the view.

  25

  The jump plan called for them all to link up in the freefall, and to pull their chutes on Jaeger releasing his. That way they’d descend pretty much as one, gliding into the landing zone good and tight. But being in tandem and with the spin catapulting them across the heavens – already they were starting to lose the others.

  They plummeted towards earth, spinning faster and faster with the fall. As the air speed increased so did the G-forces, the wind tearing at Jaeger’s head like a raging hurricane. He felt as if he were strapped on to some giant out-of-control superbike, which was powering down a corkscrew-shaped tunnel at pushing four hundred kilometres an hour.

  With the wind-chill factor, the temperature had to be minus 100 degrees. And as the spin became ever more violent Jaeger could sense the grey-out creeping into the edges of his frozen eyeballs.

  His vision blurred and fuzzed. He felt himself gasping for breath; for oxygen. Burning lungs struggled to drag in enough gas from the bottle. His sensory awareness – the ability to judge where he was, or even who he was – was rapidly slipping away.

  Beside him his combat shotgun was slamming about like a baseball bat, the folding butt cracking blows into his helmeted head. It had been fastened tight to his side, but somehow it had been ripped loose in the freefall, and it was making them even more unstable.

  Jaeger was on the verge of losing consciousness now.

  And he didn’t want to imagine what state Narov was in.

  With his pulse juddering inside his skull and his mind reeling from the dizziness and disorientation, Jaeger forced his scrambled mind to focus. He had to stabilise their fall. Narov was relying on him, as was every jumper in the stick.

  There was only one way to stop the spin.

  Now to do it.

  He drew his arms in close to his chest, then flung both them and his legs into a rigid star shape, bracing his back against the unbearable forces that were threatening to tear him limb from limb. Muscles screamed against the pain and the pressure. He let out a piercing cry of agony as he held the pose and tried to anchor the two of them in the razor-thin air.

  ‘Aaaaaarrggghhhhhh!’

  At least no one would ever hear him scream, for they were
alone on the very roof of the world up here.

  With arms and legs thrust out rigid to make four anchors, his body arched through the hopelessly light atmosphere. The frozen air howled all around him as his limbs locked with the pain. If only he could hold the star shape for long enough to stabilise their crazed corkscrew descent, they might just get through this alive.

  Gradually, slowly, agonisingly, Jaeger began to sense the revolutions decreasing.

  Finally, he and Narov stopped spinning.

  He forced his frazzled mind to concentrate.

  He was facing the blinding blue.

  Blue meant sky.

  He let out a string of curses. Wrong way up.

  The two of them were dropping at a murderous speed with their backs to the earth. Every second brought them 300 feet nearer to a pulverising impact, as they plummeted towards the thick jungle. But if Jaeger pulled the chute in their present position, it would open below them. They would fall through it, tearing towards earth like a pair of corpses entombed in a shroud of tangled silk.

  They’d smash into the forest at pushing four hundred kilometres an hour.

  Dead men.

  Or rather one man and one woman, locked in a killer embrace.

  Jaeger changed position, forcing his right arm in close to his side. He threw his opposite shoulder over, trying to flip the two of them around. He needed to get them facing green. Urgently.

  Green meant earth.

  But for some reason all the manoeuvre seemed to achieve was the very worst result of all – the violent twist sending them back into the spin.

  For a moment he was on the very brink of panic. His arm reached involuntarily for the release cord of his chute, but he forced himself to stay his hand. He forced himself to remember how they’d tested this repeatedly with a specially made dummy, during trial jumps.

  If you opened the chute in the spin, you were asking for trouble. Big time.

  The lines would wrap themselves up tight, like a kid spooling up spaghetti on a fork. Not good news.

  As the spin intensified, Jaeger knew that the full grey-out was almost upon him. This was meltdown time. It was like the centrifuge on steroids, only at extreme high altitude and with no off button. His vision started to blur and fuzz, his mind drifting further and further away from him. He was on the verge of blacking out.