Figures ran to it, grabbing Bergens and emptying them of their contents.
Jaeger turned to Dale. ‘Your camera: it records date, time and location, right? It’s got an embedded GPS?’
‘Yeah, but I got Kral to disable it, on both units. No cameraman wants date and time burned across their film.’
Jaeger jerked a thumb towards the ledge where Dale’s camera had breathed its last. ‘Whatever the hell Kral was doing – that one wasn’t disabled.’
Dale’s eyes swivelled to his backpack. ‘I’ve got a second in there. Back-up.’
‘Then get beneath the canopy and make sure it’s turned off!’
Dale hurried to it.
Jaeger struggled to his feet. He felt like death – his head and forearms throbbing in agony – but he had bigger issues to deal with right now. He had his own pack to search and verify. He stumbled across to it and began turfing out the contents. He was certain everything had been switched off, but one mistake now could easily prove the death of all of them.
Five minutes later, the checking was complete.
No one had had a GPS unit running at the time of the Hellfire strikes, let alone a satphone. They’d been moving fast, following a route and a pace set by the Amahuaca Indians. No one on Jaeger’s team had needed to navigate, plus they’d been under deep canopy, where there was zero satellite signal.
Jaeger gathered his team. ‘Something triggered the Predator,’ he announced, through teeth gritted with pain. ‘We emerged from under the canopy at the edge of the falls, and bleep! A signal popped up on a Predator’s screen. It takes a satphone, GPS or similar to do that: something instantly trackable.’
‘It’s got infrared,’ Alonzo volunteered. ‘Predator. Via IR it’ll see us as heat sources.’
Jaeger shook his head. ‘Not beneath a hundred feet of jungle it won’t. And even if it could penetrate all of that – and trust me, it can’t – what would it see? A bunch of indistinct heat blobs. We could just as easily be a herd of forest pigs as a bunch of humans. No, it was tracking something; something that threw up an instant, traceable signal.’
Jaeger eyed Dale. ‘Were you filming when the first Hellfire hit? Was your camera powered up?’
Dale shook his head. ‘Are you kidding? On that bridge? I was bloody shitting myself.’
‘Okay, everyone: double-check your gear,’ Jaeger announced grimly. ‘Search the side pockets of your backpacks. Your trouser pockets. Shirt pockets. Hell, your underwear even. It was tracking something. We’ve got to find it.’
He proceeded to rifle through his own pack once more, before running his hands through his pockets. His fingers came to rest upon the smooth form of the Night Stalkers coin, stuffed deep into his trousers. Oddly, it seemed to have become bent – almost buckled – during the chaos and mayhem of the last few minutes.
He pulled it out. He figured the coin must have taken some serious punishment when the end of the broken bridge slammed him into the rock face. He studied it for a moment. There seemed to be a tiny crack running around the circumference. He forced a broken, bloodied nail into it and applied some pressure.
The coin pinged in two.
Inside, one half was hollow.
Jaeger couldn’t believe the evidence before his eyes.
The hollowed-out interior of the coin held a miniaturised electrical circuit board.
58
‘Death Waits in the Dark.’ Jaeger spat out the words of the Night Stalkers’ motto, stamped on one side of the so-called coin. ‘It sure does – when you’re carrying one of these.’
He placed it on a nearby rock, circuit board face up, then grabbed a second, smaller rock. He was going to smash the thing to smithereens, using the rocks like a hammer and anvil. He raised one fist, and was poised to bring the rock powering downwards – all his pent-up rage and his burning sense of betrayal focused into the blow – when a hand reached out to stop him.
‘Don’t. There is a better way.’ It was Irina Narov. ‘All tracking units have a battery. They also have an on–off button.’ She reached for the device and flicked a tiny switch. ‘It is now off. No more signal.’ She glanced at him. ‘The question is, where did you get it?’
Jaeger’s fingers curled around the coin, as if he could crush it in his grip. ‘The C-130 pilot. We got chatting. He said he was a SOAR veteran. A Night Stalker. I know the SOAR well. There’s no better unit. I told him as much.’ He paused, darkly. ‘He offered me his coin.’
‘Then let me posit a scenario,’ Narov suggested, her voice as cold and empty as a frozen Arctic wasteland. ‘The C-130 pilot slipped you a tracking device. That now is clear. We – you and I in tandem – were snagged when we made our jump. His crew – his PDs – deliberately did that to us, to send us into the spin. And they loosened your weapon, to destabilise us still further.’
Narov paused. ‘The C-130 crew was charged either to kill us or to enable someone to follow us. And whoever it was is now tracking us using that coin, they are also trying to kill us.’
Jaeger nodded, acknowledging that Narov’s scenario was the only one that seemed to make any sense.
‘So who is trying to kill us?’ Narov continued. ‘It is a rhetorical question. I do not expect you to answer. But right now it is the million-dollar question.’
There was something about Narov’s tone that set Jaeger’s teeth on edge. At times she was so cold and robotic, like an automaton. It was hugely disconcerting.
‘I’m glad you’re not expecting an answer,’ he rasped. ‘’Cause you know something? If the pilot of that C-130 could slip me a tracking device, I don’t have the slightest damn clue who is friend or foe any more.’
He jerked a thumb in the direction of the Indians. ‘About the only people I know I can trust right now is that lot – a supposedly uncontacted Amazon Indian tribe. As to who the enemy are, all I know is they’ve got some serious hardware to hand – like a Predator, tracking devices, and God only knows what else.’
‘Carson hired the C-130 and crew?’ Narov queried.
‘He did.’
‘Then Carson is a suspect. I never liked him anyway. He is an arrogant Schwachkopf.’ She glanced at Jaeger. ‘There are two kinds. The nice Schwachkopfs, and those I utterly despise. You – you are one of the nicer ones.’
Jaeger glared. He couldn’t get his head around Narov. Was she flirting with him now, or playing with him like a cat did a mouse? Either way, he figured he might as well take the backhanded compliment.
Alonzo appeared beside them. ‘I figure you gotta call the HAV,’ the big Afro-American suggested. ‘The Airlander. They’re doing P-WAS, right? Persistent wide-area surveillance – they should have it up and running by now. Ask them what they’ve seen.’
‘You’re forgetting something,’ Jaeger objected. ‘I make a call, we get a Hellfire up our ass.’
‘Send data,’ Alonzo suggested. ‘Data-burst mode. Predator takes a good ninety seconds to trace, track and acquire a target. Data-burst – it’s gone in the blink of an eyelid.’
Jaeger thought about it for a second. ‘Yeah. I guess it should work.’ He glanced at the edge of the chasm. ‘But I do this out there. Myself. Alone.’
Jaeger powered up his Thuraya. He typed a quick message, secure in the knowledge that he’d only acquire the satellites to send it when out in the open.
The message read: Grid 964864. Comms being intercepted. Team targeted: Hellfire. Query drone? Comms now only encrypted data-burst. What has Airlander seen? Out.
Jaeger stepped to the brink of the river gorge.
He emerged from under the canopy and held the Thuraya at arm’s length, watching as the satellite icons bleeped on to the screen. The instant he had a usable signal, the message was gone, and he powered down, hurrying back beneath the jungle.