Ghost Flight Read online

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to my late grandfather, Brigadier William Edward Harvey 1, OBE, 15/19th King’s Royal Hussars and Commanding Officer of Target Force.

  Gone but not forgotten.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Chapter Eighty

  Chapter Eighty-One

  Chapter Eighty-Two

  Chapter Eighty-Three

  Chapter Eighty-Four

  Chapter Eighty-Five

  Chapter Eighty-Six

  Chapter Eighty-Seven

  Chapter Eighty-Eight

  Chapter Eighty-Nine

  Chapter Ninety

  Chapter Ninety-One

  Chapter Ninety-Two

  Chapter Ninety-Three

  Chapter Ninety-Four

  Also by Bear Grylls

  Acknowledgements

  Author's Note

  Copyright

  Harper’s Magazine, October 1946

  SECRETS BY THE THOUSANDS

  By C. Lester Walker

  Someone wrote to Wright Field Airbase recently, saying he understood this country had got together quite a collection of enemy war secrets . . . and could he, please, be sent everything on German jet engines. The Air Documents Division of the Army Air Forces answered:

  ‘Sorry – but that would be fifty tons.’

  Moreover, that fifty tons was just a small portion of what is today undoubtedly the biggest collection of captured enemy war secrets ever assembled. If you always thought of war secrets – and who hasn’t? – as coming in sixes and sevens . . . it may interest you to learn that the war secrets in this collection run into the thousands, that the mass of documents is mountainous, and that there has never before been anything quite comparable to it.

  Daily Mail, March 1988

  THE PAPERCLIP CONSPIRACY

  By Tom Bower

  The Paperclip Conspiracy was the climax of an astonishing battle between the Allies in the aftermath of the war to seize the spoils of Nazi Germany. Just weeks after Hitler’s defeat, men classified as ‘ardent Nazis’ were chosen by senior officers in the Pentagon to become respectable American citizens.

  While in Britain political controversy inhibited plans to hire incriminated Germans in the drive for economic recovery, the French and Russians took on anyone regardless of their crimes, and the Americans, through a web of deceit, sanitised the murderous record of their Nazi scientists.

  The proof of German technical prowess is overwhelmingly established in the hundreds of reports written by Allied investigators, who do not shy away from describing the Germans’ ‘astonishing achievements’ and ‘superb invention’.

  Hitler does indeed have the last laugh on his enemies.

  The Sunday Times, December 2014

  VAST SECRET NAZI ‘TERROR WEAPONS’ SITE UNCOVERED IN AUSTRIA

  By Bojan Pancevski

  A secret underground complex built by the Nazis towards the end of the Second World War that may have been used for the development of weapons of mass destruction, including a nuclear bomb, has been uncovered in Austria.

  The vast facility was discovered last week near the town of St Georgen an der Gusen. It is believed to be connected to the nearby B8 Bergkristall underground factory that produced the Messerschmitt Me 262, the first operational jet-powered fighter, which posed a brief threat to Allied air forces in the war’s closing stages. Declassified intelligence documents as well as testimony from witnesses helped excavators identify the concealed entrance.

  ‘This was a gigantic industrial complex and most likely the biggest secret weapons production facility of the Third Reich,’ said Andreas Sulzer, an Austrian documentary film-maker who is in charge of the excavations.

  Sulzer assembled a team of historians and found further evidence of scientists working on the secret project, which was managed by SS General Hans Kammler. Kammler was in charge of Hitler’s missile programmes, including the V-2 rocket used against London in the latter stages of the war.

  He was known as a brilliant but ruthless commander, who had signed off the blueprints for the gas chambers and crematoria at the Auschwitz concentration camp complex in southern Poland. Rumours persist that he was captured by the Americans and given a new identity after the war.

  Sulzer’s excavation was stopped last Wednesday by local authorities, who demanded a permit for research on historic sites. But he is confident that digging can resume next month. ‘Prisoners from concentration camps across Europe were hand-picked for their special skills – physicists, chemists or other experts – to work on this monstrous project, and we owe it to the victims to finally open the site and reveal the truth,’ said Sulzer.

  1

  His eyes opened.

  Slowly.

  Peeling apart eyelash by eyelash, straining against the thick crust of blood that fused one with the other. Cracks sprung a fraction at a time, like broken glass over bloodshot eyeballs. The brightness seemed to scorch into his retina, as if a laser was being focused on to his eyeballs. But who by? Who were the enemy . . . his tormentors? And where in God’s name were they?

  He couldn’t remember the sli
ghtest damn thing.

  What day was it? What year was it, even? How had he got here – wherever here might be?

  The sunlight hurt like hell, but at least his sight was returning to him, little by little.

  The first concrete object that Will Jaeger became aware of was the cockroach. It swam into focus, looking blurry, monstrous and alien as it filled his entire vision.

  As far as he could tell, his head seemed to be lying sideways on a floor. Concrete. Covered in a thick brownish scum of God only knows what. With his head at this angle, the cockroach appeared to be approaching as if it was about to crawl right inside his left eye socket.

  The beast flicked its feelers towards him, at the last moment drifting out of sight, scuttling past the tip of his nose. And then Jaeger felt it claw its way up the side of his head.

  The cockroach stopped somewhere around his right temple – the one that was lying furthest from the floor, fully exposed to the air.

  It started feeling around with its front legs and mandibles.

  As if it were searching for something. Tasting something.

  Jaeger felt it begin to chew; biting into flesh; insect jaws carving their way in. He sensed the hissy, hollow clacking of the roach’s serrated mandibles, as they ripped away shreds of rotten meat. And then – as the scream left his lips soundlessly – he sensed that there were dozens more swarming over him . . . as if he were long dead.

  Jaeger fought down the waves of nausea, one question crashing through his brain: why couldn’t he hear himself scream?

  With a superhuman effort he moved his right arm.

  It was just the barest fraction, but still he felt as if he were trying to lift the entire world. Each centimetre that he managed to raise it, his shoulder socket and elbow joint screamed out in agony, his muscles spasming with the puny effort he was forcing from them.

  He felt like a cripple.

  What in God’s name had happened to him?

  What had they done to him?

  Gritting his teeth, and focusing on the sheer force of will, he drew the arm towards his head, dragging his hand across his ear, scrabbling at it, desperately. The fingers made contact with . . . legs. Scaly, spiny, insect-savage legs, each twitching and pulsing as it tried to force the cockroach body deeper into his ear hole.

  Get them out of there! Get them out! Get them OUUUUTTT!

  He felt like vomiting, but there was nothing in his guts. Just a shitty dry film of near-death, which coated everything – his stomach lining, his throat, his mouth; even his nostrils.

  Oh shit! His nostrils. They were trying to crawl in there too!

  Jaeger cried out again. Longer. More despairing. This is not the way to die. Please God, not like this . . .

  Again and again his fingers scrabbled at his bodily orifices, the roaches kicking and hissing their insect anger as he prised them free.

  At long last the sound started to bleed back through to his senses. First, his own desperate cries echoed through his bloodied ears. And then he became aware of something mixed in – something more chilling even than the scores of insects that were intent on feasting on his brains.

  A human voice.

  Deep-throated. Cruel. A voice that revelled in pain.

  His jailer.

  The voice brought it all flooding back. Black Beach Prison. The jail at the end of the earth. A place where people were sent to be tortured horribly and to die. Jaeger had been thrown in here for a crime he’d never committed, on the orders of a crazed and murderous dictator – and that was when the real horrors had begun.

  Compared to waking to this hell, Jaeger preferred even the dark peace of unconsciousness; anything rather than the weeks he’d spent locked away in this place worse than damnation – his prison cell. His tomb.

  He willed his mind to slip away again, back towards the soft, formless, shifting shades of grey that had sheltered him before something – what was it? – had dragged him up to this unspeakable present.

  The movements of his right arm became weaker and weaker.

  It dropped to the floor again.

  Let the cockroaches feast on his brains.

  Even that was preferable.

  Then the thing that had woken him hit again – a rush of cold liquid to the face, like the slap of a wave at sea. Only the smell was so different. Not the ice-pure, bracing aroma of the ocean. This smell was fetid; the salt tang of a urinal that hadn’t seen a lick of disinfectant for years.

  His tormentor laughed again.

  This was real sport.

  Chucking the contents of the toilet bucket in the prisoner’s face – what could be better?

  Jaeger spat out the foul liquid. Blinked it away from his burning eyes. At least the blast of putrefying fluid had driven the roaches away. His mind searched for the right words – the choicest expletives that he could fling in his jailer’s face.

  Proof of life. A show of resistance.

  ‘Go and . . .’

  Jaeger began to speak, croaking out the kind of insult that would for sure secure him a beating with that same flex hose that he had learned to dread.

  But if he didn’t resist, he was done for. Resistance was all he knew.

  Yet he didn’t get to finish those words. They froze in his throat.

  Suddenly, another voice cut in, one so familiar – so brotherly – that for several long moments Jaeger felt certain he had to be dreaming. The incantation was soft at first, but growing both in power and in volume; a rhythmical chant replete somehow with the promise of the impossible . . .

  ‘Ka mate, ka mate. Ka ora, ka ora.

  Ka mate, ka mate! Ka ora, ka ora!’

  Jaeger would know that voice anywhere.

  Takavesi Raffara; how could he be here?

  When they’d been teammates playing the British Army at rugby, it had been Raff who’d led the haka – the traditional Maori pre-match war dance. Always. He’d rip off his shirt, ball his fists, and ripple forward to get eyeball-to-eyeball with the opposing team, hands thumping his massive chest, legs like pillared tree trunks, arms like battering rams, the rest of his team – Jaeger included – flanking him, fearless, unstoppable.

  His eyes had bulged, tongue swollen, face frozen in a rictus of warrior challenge as he’d thundered out the lines.

  ‘KA MATE! KA MATE! KA ORA! KA ORA!’ Will I die? Will I die? Will I live? Will I live?

  Raff had proven equally relentless when standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the battlefield. The ultimate fellow warrior. Maori by birth and Royal Marines Commando by destiny, he had soldiered with Jaeger across the four corners of the earth, and he was one of his closest brothers.

  Jaeger swivelled his eyes right, towards the source of the chanting.

  Out of the corner of his vision he could just make out a figure standing on the far side of the cell’s bars. Massive. Dwarfing even his jailer. Smile like a shaft of pure sunlight breaking through after a dark storm seemingly without end.

  ‘Raff?’ The single word was rasped out, ringing with a barely suspended disbelief.

  ‘Yeah. It’s me.’ That smile. ‘Seen you looking worse, mate. Like that time I dragged you out of that Amsterdam bar. Still, best get you cleaned up. I’ve come to get you, mate. Get you out of here. We’re flying BA to London – first class.’

  Jaeger didn’t respond. What words were there? How could Raff be here, in this place, seemingly so close at hand?

  ‘Best get going,’ Raff prompted. ‘Before Major Mojo your buddy here changes his mind.’

  ‘Yah, Bob Marley!’ Jaeger’s tormentor forced a mock joviality from behind evil slits of eyes. ‘Bob Marley – you the real joker man.’

  Raff grinned from ear to ear.

  He was the only man Jaeger had ever seen who could smile at someone with a look that could freeze the very blood. The Bob Marley reference had to refer to Raff’s hair – worn long, in braids, the traditional Maori way. As many had learned on the rugby field, Raff didn’t take well to anyone disrespecting his ch
oice of head apparel.

  ‘Unlock the cell door,’ Raff grated. ‘Me and my friend Mr Jaeger – we’re leaving.’

  2

  The jeep pulled away from Black Beach Prison, Raff hunched over the wheel. He handed Jaeger a water bottle.

  ‘Drink.’ He jerked a thumb at the back seat. ‘There’s more in the cooler. Get as much down you as you can. You need to rehydrate. We’ve got one hell of a day ahead of us . . .’

  Raff lapsed into silence, his mind on the journey that lay before them.

  Jaeger let the quiet hang in the air.

  After weeks in that prison, his body was a mass of burning. Every joint screamed with agony. It seemed like a lifetime had passed since he’d been thrown into that cell; since he’d travelled anywhere in a vehicle; since his body had been exposed to the full blast of Bioko’s tropical sunlight.

  He flinched in pain with every jolt of the vehicle. They were following the ocean road – a narrow stretch of blacktop that led into Malabo, Bioko’s one major town. There were precious few surfaced roads in the tiny African island nation. Mostly, the country’s oil wealth went into funding a new palace for the President, or another of his fleet of giant yachts, or to further inflating his Swiss bank accounts.

  Raff gestured at the vehicle’s dash. ‘Pair of shades in there, mate. You look like you’re struggling.’

  ‘Been a while since I’ve seen the sun.’

  Jaeger flicked open the glove compartment and pulled out what looked like a pair of Oakleys. He studied them for an instant. ‘Fakes? You always were a bloody cheapskate.’

  Raff laughed. ‘Who dares wins.’

  Jaeger let a smile creep across his battered features. It hurt like hell to do so. He felt as if he hadn’t smiled in a lifetime; as if the smile was cracking his face right in two.

  In recent weeks Jaeger had come to believe he was never getting out of that prison cell. No one who mattered had even known he was there. He’d become convinced that he would die in Black Beach, unseen and forgotten, and that, like countless corpses before, his would be thrown to the sharks.

  He couldn’t quite fathom it – that he was alive and free.

  His jailer had let them out via the shadowed basement – the place that housed the torture cubicles – sliding wordlessly past blood-spattered walls. The place where the trash was dumped, plus the bodies of those who’d died in their cells and were ready to be thrown into the sea.