Bear Grylls: The Hunt (Will Jaeger Book 3) Page 14

  No doubt about it: they had penetrated into the very heart of El Padre’s narco fortress. All around them were the sounds, sights and smells of the place.

  It had taken almost an hour to reach this point; it was approaching midnight, and Dodge was busy. Loud drunken laughter rang across the water. Crowds surged back and forth from bar to bar. Neon signs flashed their gaudy glare. Engines revved and horns blared as a pickup forced its way through.

  Jaeger and Narov kept up a whispered commentary to each other.

  ‘Warehouse, nine o’clock, one hundred yards,’ Narov noted. To her left lay one of the massive buildings they figured were the cocaine refineries. ‘I see a gun truck pulling up. Six guys in the rear.’

  ‘Weapons?’

  ‘Longs. All of them.’

  Jaeger swivelled his eyes around his 180-degree arc. Where the hell should he start? Narov had the easy bit: she was checking south, over the warehouse district and airstrip. He was gazing north, into Dodge’s chaotic drink- and drug-fuelled heart of darkness.

  The nearest bar was maybe thirty yards away. It was made of galvanised iron, and Jaeger could see where a set of speakers were bolted to the roof, belting out the party beat. The neon beer-bottle sign pulsed with the throb of a generator, the strength of the current matching the thud of the engine.

  Out front, a crowd swayed to the music. It was almost exclusively male, and all were clutching beer bottles; most also sported a sidearm. From the steps, a woman in a very short skirt yelled taunts at them. Jaeger figured she was trying to drum up custom.

  He was about to start relating all of this to Narov when a series of shots rang out. Jaeger forced his head into the dirt, his mind processing the sound: low-velocity rounds, 9mm for sure. Pistol shots. Which more than likely spelled trouble at the bar. Sure enough, a series of hollow thuds and angry yells rang out as the narcos started beating the crap out of each other.

  Jaeger raised his head again and eyed the scene. ‘Bar brawl. Four o’clock. I figured you got that. Plus I got a pickup incoming, with what look like enforcers. I got—’

  More gunshots. Jaeger hit the dirt again and froze, face scrunched into the mud. Those had been high-velocity rounds from an assault rifle. Most likely an AK-47. They’d sounded up close and personal. The only thing he could do now was keep utterly still, and use his sense of hearing to try to work out what the hell was going on.

  Yelled orders drifted across from the direction of the bar, punctuated by the crunch of rifle butts on human flesh. From the sound of things, the brawling had come to an abrupt halt.

  Jaeger raised his head a little, using the back of his hand to wipe the gunk from his eyes.

  Absence of the normal, he reminded himself. There was nothing he could see that wasn’t symptomatic of a normal night in Dodge, which was a huge relief. It meant that their presence here was unlikely to have been detected.

  He glanced at Narov. ‘Warning shots?’

  ‘Got to be.’

  Dodge’s enforcers had seemingly broken up the brawl. They’d been on it in record time. Jaeger figured El Padre wasn’t going to put up with any kind of serious ruckus, which maybe meant that there was important business being done tonight.

  Narov resumed her commentary, as the gunmen in the pickup dismounted at the warehouse and others took their place. Two took up position at the building’s massive sliding door, which was open just a crack, light bleeding out. The others dispersed inside. It was a change of sentries.

  Further to Narov’s left, figures were still busy on the airstrip. Dodge seemed to be split into two categories of activity. On one side, off-duty narco workers getting in some serious partying. On the other, on-duty workers engaged with the core business of refining and trafficking drugs.

  There was a businesslike feel to the warehouse side of town; a sense of dark purpose.

  As if to confirm this, the airstrip itself suddenly flared into life. Shadowy figures darted up and down its length, lighting a series of beacons, metal baskets stuffed with paraffin-soaked rags. Put a light to the rags, and hey presto, you had crude runway lighting.

  Moments after the flares had been lit, an aircraft put in an appearance. The Latino beat that washed over the ditch was so loud that Jaeger and Narov barely heard it, before the shadowy form swept across at low level and bumped down onto the dirt.

  The light aircraft – a Twin Otter by the looks of things – taxied to a standstill at the warehouse. Figures gathered at its cargo hatches, unloading sacks of what had to be raw coca paste, and loading up bales of white from the warehouse in turn.

  The entire operation took maybe ten minutes. It was smooth and well practised. But when they were almost done, one of the men dropped a bag of refined cocaine, which split open, spilling its contents across the dirt. As the hapless worker went to try to scoop it up, a voice started yelling maniacally and a figure strode out of the shadows, machete clutched in his hand, a small entourage of bodyguards with him. With barely a pause, he brought the cruel blade down hard. The man who’d dropped the cocaine let out a bloodcurdling scream and keeled over, wailing pitifully. The man who had struck him didn’t let up. Instead, he started to put the boot in.

  Jaeger watched with a growing sense of unease. ‘El Padre,’ he whispered to Narov. ‘Like the briefings said, he’s one evil fucker.’

  Moments later, the Twin Otter taxied to the end of the runway and took to the skies again, banking hard. Even as the shadowy silhouette disappeared over the jungle, the DIY runway lighting was being doused.

  Slick. This was the business side of Dodge.

  And here, cocaine was serious business.

  35

  One thing had surprised Jaeger. No one had seemed to bother to check either that the coca paste being unloaded from the aircraft was genuine coca, or that the cocaine being loaded aboard was genuine cocaine. But then why would they? If whoever supplied El Padre had tricked him, they wouldn’t get to live for long.

  That was how the system worked. Billionaire narco barons had a long reach. It was a system based not upon mutual trust, but upon mutual fear. If you messed up, you died. And probably most of your loved ones as well. Men like El Padre had been known to wipe out entire families – infants and babies included – to drive their message home.

  Dodge City was a Class A narco operation, that was for sure. But as to Kammler and his IND team being here? Jaeger hadn’t seen the slightest sign that this was the place where his arch-enemy was going to mastermind his dark machinations.

  There was only one way to know for sure, and that was to get closer. Jaeger’s eyes met Narov’s across the surface of the stinking water.

  ‘We need a close-up look at the warehouse,’ he whispered. ‘To be certain.’

  Narov nodded. ‘I will go.’

  Jaeger was about to object, but her look silenced him. They’d found themselves in a similar position a while ago in Africa. They’d needed to get inside an elephant poachers’ camp. Not easy. Narov had argued that she should go because she could move more stealthily. The same argument held true now.

  She handed him her assault rifle. ‘Cover me.’

  With that, she grabbed some of the stinking gunk from the edge of the ditch, smeared it over her face and hands as an extra layer of camouflage, wormed her way over the lip and was gone. Swallowed into the darkness.

  As best he could, Jaeger traced her movements with his weapon. She was far from easy to follow. Repeatedly he lost track of her as she flitted to and fro, silent as a wraith. Finally he glimpsed a darker patch of shadow flattened against the wall of the nearest warehouse, a hundred yards away.

  For the briefest of moments Narov’s head was silhouetted against the oblong of light that bled out of the building. Jaeger could envisage her eyes making a rapid sweep of the warehouse’s interior. Just as quickly, she ducked down again.

  He lost sight of her completely now. She was moving almost due west, sticking to the thick scrub that fringed the dirt airstrip. That would take her to the second warehouse, a couple of hundred yards away.

  For a moment he wondered what he would do if he saw her surrounded or captured.

  Go in solo, all guns blazing?

  What other choice was there?

  Either way, it would be a suicide mission.

  He kept his eyes glued to that distant building, squat and dark against the moonlit sky. He figured he saw movement: a silhouette working its way along the nearside wall. Narov – had to be. He saw the flash of a head at the window. Good girl: almost done.

  But then his grip on his weapon tightened. Narov had levered open the window, and moments later, she’d slipped inside. As Jaeger waited with bated breath for her to emerge, he spotted a figure heading around to her side of the building. The guy was moving with the bored gait of someone coming to the end of yet another long night’s watch.

  Jaeger tracked him with his gun sights. If he were forced to open fire, their cover would be blown. He had to hold off doing so until all other options were exhausted. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Narov slip back out through the window. Maybe the guard would fail to spot her.

  She melted into the shadows and Jaeger lost track of her.

  Suddenly a lithe form rose behind the sentry and an arm whipped around his neck, choking off all possibility of a cry. The other arm came around, driving a blade downwards behind the sentry’s clavicle and clean into his heart.

  Jaeger knew the move well. The victim would be dead within seconds. He watched as Narov lowered the body to the ground, before dragging it into the undergrowth.

  A couple of minutes later she was back, slipping into the ditch like a bloodied eel. The sentry had bled profusely, that much was clear.

  ‘We need to go,’ she mouthed.

  Jaeger nodded. Time was running out. Plus there was that dead sentry now to factor into the equation. If his body was discovered before Narov and Jaeger made the cover of the jungle, all hell would break loose.

  Narov eyed him for an instant, then reached into her backpack. ‘There was this,’ she volunteered, holding up a brown leather-backed ledger. On the front cover was scribbled in Spanish: Registro de Vuelo. It was Los Niños’s flight log.

  Jaeger shook his head in amazement. ‘Bloody brilliant. Right, let’s get the hell out of here.’

  He turned to go back the way they’d come, lowering his head down to the stinking water and pushing off, Diemaco held at the ready.

  Most CTRs went wrong when those executing them rushed the withdrawal.

  As he began his slow and steady crawl, Jaeger wondered for an instant if Narov felt anything for the man she’d just killed. There was little sign if she did. It was typical: when she had to kill, she did so seemingly without hesitation or remorse.

  Another thought struck him. He’d realised with a shock what all of them had perhaps been missing. The best way to bust Kammler’s network was staring them right in the face, here in Dodge.

  In a sense, it had been all along, but it had taken this crawl through this hellish shithole for him to realise it. He’d share his thoughts with Narov and the others, but only once they’d got the hell out of Dodge.

  And much as he hated it, they still had a good twenty minutes of crawling ahead of them.

  Shit happens, he thought to himself wryly. But he would have his moment.

  And this mission – it was only just beginning.

  36

  The trek out to the LZ had taken considerably less time than the journey in. They’d stopped at one of the first rivers they came across, so that Jaeger and Narov could scrub themselves clean of the blood and the stinking gunk from the ditch. But otherwise they’d moved relatively swiftly. They were carrying lighter loads and they were more attuned to the jungle.

  They were also buoyed by the success of the CTR. To have penetrated right into the heart of such an operation and got out again undetected and unscathed – that had taken some skill, and balls.

  If Narov’s handiwork with the knife had been discovered, there had been no sign of it while they were exfiltrating from Dodge.

  They’d arrived at the clearing with a good sixty minutes to spare before the chopper arrived to pluck them out. They settled in some cover, Narov pulling out the flight log from her pack. She flicked through the pages, stopping here and there at key entries. Much that Jaeger marvelled at her focus after such an exhausting mission, he was impatient to know what Los Niños’s flight log might reveal.

  ‘So, what’s it tell us?’ he pressed.

  Narov glanced up at him. ‘I need to go over it in more detail. But two things jump out. One, the Moldovan flight doesn’t end in Dodge. It’s a refuelling stopover, no more. Where it’s headed after that isn’t entirely clear.’

  ‘So the hunt for Kammler is far from over.’ It was obvious, but Jaeger felt it needed saying.

  ‘Exactly,’ Narov confirmed. ‘And second, it looks as if three previous flights have been routed via Dodge, all at the orders of Kammler. If they were loaded with uranium, Kammler is even further ahead of the game than we feared.’

  ‘Good work, you gettin’ that,’ Alonzo cut in. ‘Game changer. Freakin’ game changer. Worries me shitless, though . . .’

  In truth, the flight log had them all worried. The revelation of those three previous flights lent an added sense of urgency to their mission. It was a ticking time bomb. But it had triggered something else – building on the flash of inspiration Jaeger first had as they’d crawled out of Dodge. He had a growing sense as to how they might use all this against Kammler, to nail him. He set about explaining it to the others.

  ‘So, it’s a part of SAS folklore. Beirut, 1976. The SAS were on a covert mission. There’s a great book about it I read once. Figured we could use something similar now.’

  Narov looked askance at him. ‘You? Read a book?’

  ‘A book?’ Raff echoed.

  ‘Yeah, a book,’ Jaeger confirmed. ‘Don’t sound so surprised.’

  Raff shook his head in disgust. ‘Bloody Ruperts and their books.’

  Alonzo grinned. While he didn’t completely get the British sense of humour, he couldn’t help but find it funny. As long as it wasn’t directed at him.

  ‘So what did this book say?’ Narov challenged. ‘And what makes it relevant now?’

  ‘The book’s called Cobra Gold. SAS troop gets sent into Beirut to lift some sensitive documents from a bank vault. Lebanon’s one massive war zone – Beirut’s been shot to shreds. The SAS blow their way into the vault, but along with the documents, they discover a shedload of gold bullion.’

  Jaeger could tell he had their attention now. The SAS and an epic bank robbery – what was not to like?

  ‘They figured they’d nab the gold along with the documents. A bit of freelance larceny. We know that the robbery took place. Fact. It’s recorded in the Guinness Book of Records: British Bank of the Middle East; the world’s biggest ever bullion robbery – some $150 million at today’s value.’

  ‘So what?’ Raff challenged. ‘Every chancer and their dog has a story about the Regiment and its supposed dark arts. I just wish they were all true.’ He paused. ‘In fact, I wish I’d been in on the act.’

  Jaeger laughed. ‘During the exfil, they were forced to cache the gold. It was ten years until they came back to retrieve it. Trouble was, they knew that as soon as they set foot in Lebanon, the bad guys – the terrorists – would be onto them. They realised they needed a decoy. A Trojan horse.’

  ‘So where did they hide it – the gold?’ Raff queried.

  ‘Dumped at sea. Not that that’s crucial to the story.’ Jaeger couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice now. ‘Tungsten. You’ve all heard of it, right? One of the heaviest metals known to man. Used for tipping bunker-busting bombs and such like. It also happens to be more or less the same molecular weight as gold.’

  Raff kicked the bottom of Jaeger’s boot. ‘Get to it.’

  ‘They built a decoy. A pile of tungsten machined into bars and plated in gold. It looked like bullion. It weighed practically the same. It even smelled right. They allowed the terrorists to seize the decoy and take it right into the heart of their camp. That golden decoy contained a hidden charge of explosives. When it reached the bad guys’ base, someone pressed a button and . . . kaboom. The tungsten went up a like a massive nail bomb and flattened everything.’

  ‘Nice story,’ Narov grated icily. ‘But what’s its relevance now?’

  Jaeger eyed her. ‘Highly enriched uranium is the heaviest naturally occurring element. It has a very similar molecular weight to gold. Or tungsten, for that matter . . . So here’s the plan: we switch cargoes. We swap the uranium for a lookalike tungsten cargo. One with a massive charge set at its centre and primed to blow.’

  Narov shook her head despairingly. ‘This is your great idea? This is why you told us this bullshit story? Schwachkopf.’

  ‘And? What exactly is your problem?’

  ‘First, how do you switch the cargoes when the uranium is being flown here by the Moldovan mafia in an aircraft operated by Eastern European arms dealers?’

  ‘And second?’

  ‘What is the point? We don’t believe that Dodge is the final destination for the shipment, especially not after getting this.’ Narov brandished the flight log. ‘Dodge is a narco operation through and through. The CTR proved that. So how does destroying it help get us to Kammler? Yours’ is the plan of an idiot.’

  ‘Second answer first,’ Jaeger volunteered. He was used to Narov’s outbursts. Mostly they were neither personal nor meant with ill intent. ‘The decoy shipment is fitted with a tracking device. You don’t blow it upon arrival at Dodge. You follow it, and it leads us to Kammler.’