Bear Grylls: The Hunt (Will Jaeger Book 3) Read online

  ‘But the switch?’ Narov challenged. ‘How on earth is that possible?’

  By way of answer, Jaeger turned to Alonzo. ‘You ever served on any DEA missions?’

  Alonzo shook his head. ‘DEA? Bunch of cowboys. Generally we steered well clear of ’em.’

  ‘I guess we didn’t have that luxury.’ Jaeger paused. ‘A few years back, I was on a DEA sting. Texas. The boondocks. A bunch of narcos were bringing in a drugs flight to a tiny bush airstrip. That part of Texas, every farm seems to have one.’

  ‘You got it,’ Alonzo confirmed. ‘That, plus a Lone Star flag, and a barn stuffed full of baked beans and assault rifles.’

  ‘Pretty much. Anyhow, the DEA got wise to the shipment. The night of the flight, they jammed the narcos’ radio frequency, plus the beacons the aircraft was to home in on. They fired up their own radio on a slightly different frequency, on an airstrip not so far away. The incoming pilot lost contact with the narcos. He began scanning the airwaves. He found the DEA’s signal, and the DEA – posing as narcos – began to talk him in.’

  Jaeger eyed his audience. He wondered if they could see what was coming. ‘The pilot flew in to the DEA’s airstrip and landed. They seized him, his crew, the aircraft, plus several hundred million dollars’ worth of the purest cocaine. The op was code-named Angeldust. It went down in the annals of DEA history.’

  ‘And so?’ Narov challenged. ‘We don’t want to seize this shipment. You said so yourself – we want it to lead us to Kammler.’

  ‘Okay, so we think laterally,’ Jaeger suggested. ‘Imagine we do the same with the flight from Moldova. You saw Colonel Evandro’s strip at Station 15. At night, under floodlights, there’s nothing much to mark it out as military, or to distinguish it from Dodge. The colonel likes to keep it that way: low-profile, low-key.

  ‘We lure the flight in to Station 15,’ he continued. ‘It’s just across the border, so with guidance from a friendly radio operator, we reel the pilot in. Acting like narcos, Colonel Evandro’s men unload the cargo. They roll it into one of the hangars. Then they let the pilot know there must be some kind of mistake. They were expecting bales of raw coca paste. Instead, they’ve got a heap of insanely heavy metal.

  ‘They roll the shipment out to the aircraft again and load up – only they’ve made the switch. The pilot and his aircrew are a bunch of Russians who just want in and out without getting kidnapped and boiled alive. The Russian pilot believes he’s at the wrong strip. If El Padre finds out, he’s a dead man. The “narcos” advise him to take to the skies, and make hell-for-leather for Dodge.

  ‘Plane takes off. We’ve already unjammed El Padre’s radio frequency. Mr Very Scared Russian Pilot flies onwards to Dodge. He’s not going to breathe a word about what’s happened, for obvious reasons. He tells some bullshit story about losing their signal and flying a holding pattern – hence the delay. Switch done. No one any the wiser.’

  Jaeger gazed at the others, eyes burning with excitement. ‘Our version of Operation Angeldust – done ’n’ dusted.’

  37

  ‘GPS. What about his GPS?’ Narov ventured an objection. ‘The pilot would know he was being lured to the wrong strip.’

  ‘Easy,’ Alonzo interjected. ‘The US military has made sure that pretty much any civilian GPS system can be disabled. Reason being, if a rogue state or terrorist outfit fits a nuclear missile with such a guidance system, we need to be able to stop it. So we disable the aircraft’s GPS.’

  ‘Any other objections?’ Jaeger queried. ‘And quick, ’cause the helo’s inbound.’

  ‘What the fuck made you think of it?’ Raff queried. ‘I mean, Jesus – it’s genius.’

  ‘That’s a question, not a material objection to the plan.’ Jaeger grinned, his teeth shining white from his mud-splattered features.

  Raff snorted. ‘All right, what about this. You seem to know an awful lot about that Lebanon gold. If we ever get out of this shit storm, I want to hear how we can get our hands on some of it!’

  Jaeger laughed. ‘You got it.’

  ‘But will Colonel Evandro even agree to the plan?’ Alonzo queried. ‘I mean, that’s one out-there kind of an idea.’

  ‘Agree?’ Jaeger countered. ‘You don’t know the colonel. He’ll bite our arms off.’ He flashed another of his wolfish smiles. ‘He wants Kammler as badly as anyone. Plus his BSOB lads – they’re good. They’re as capable of pulling this off as anyone.’

  ‘Who builds the decoy? And gets it in country?’ It was Alonzo again. ‘Plus in the time available? That’s a pile of tungsten, machined into blocks and disguised as uranium, with a freakin’ great Semtex charge at its core . . .’

  ‘Daniel Brooks,’ Jaeger answered. ‘He’s the director of the world’s foremost intelligence agency. He’s got the ear of the US president. He sent us in here on the QT. Brooks sorts the decoy and its means of delivery. It’s well within his capabilities.’

  ‘I guess.’ Alonzo nodded. ‘If anyone can, he can.’ He paused. ‘But what if we’ve got it wrong? What if Kammler is in Dodge and gets wise to the switch?’

  ‘If Kammler’s in Dodge, I’m a bloody monkey,’ Raff growled. ‘That place is a hellhole. No way is he there building his INDs.’

  Everyone was quiet for a moment.

  It was Narov who broke the silence. ‘I am no expert, but as I understand it, refined tungsten ore and highly enriched uranium are both extremely heavy grey metals. I doubt if you can tell them apart, not unless you do some serious technical testing. Plus, it would need to be shielded with lead to stop radiation from leaking. Kammler’s people are hardly going to dismantle a lead shield to check on the shipment, and all in the midst of Dodge.’

  Silence. Jaeger could hear the faint beat of rotor blades cutting through the air.

  A Super Puma, inbound.

  ‘There’s one other reason no one will check the shipment,’ he volunteered. ‘Because that’s not how it works. No one checked the coca paste and cocaine handover. Why? Because if anyone pulls a fast one, they die. There’s no trust, but there’s bucketloads of fear. With the kind of reach El Padre has, if the uranium’s not uranium, the Moldovan mafiosa leader takes a bullet.’

  Nods all around.

  ‘Guys, trust me, it’s doable,’ he continued. ‘Imagine it: we get Kammler to embrace the engine of his own destruction—’

  ‘Helo inbound,’ Raff interjected.

  As one, the four figures shouldered their bergens and headed for their cab ride out of the jungle . . .

  And into the coming storm.

  38

  Professor Pak Won Kangjon picked up the chopsticks that lay next to his computer. A fly had buzzed past the screen. It was warm in the lab, and the professor needed to kill a few minutes before Mr Kammler arrived and the proverbial shit hit the fan.

  He snapped the chopsticks in midair as the fly zoomed past, trying to catch it and crush it. An old Chinese proverb said: Man who catch fly with chopsticks, he can do anything. Professor Pak Won Kangjon could do with that kind of a lucky break right now. He snapped the sticks again nervously.

  He wondered what malignant alignment of the stars had been in play the night he had been born. No one, surely, deserved the kind of luck he was having.

  A refugee from the utter horror and madness that was North Korea, he’d spent what felt like a lifetime serving one nuclear madman – North Korea’s Glorious Leader – only to end up working for another.

  Of course, the money had been the draw. Wasn’t it always? If the money was right, you could get people to do just about anything.

  Usually.

  At first he’d been showered with comparative riches, which had been like a miracle. Too good to turn down. And now, as the saying went, he was in too deep. Over his head and drowning, you might even say.

  Building an IND: at first it had been child’s play compared to what he had been tasked to achieve in North Korea’s nuclear programme. But then his boss had decided to change things; alter the plan in an act of self-proclaimed genius. Hubris, more like.

  It had made Professor Pak Won Kangjon’s job a whole lot more difficult.

  Kammler had added imponderables to the plan. The professor was an expert in nuclear weaponry, not nuclear power. He’d tried to explain the difference, but his boss wasn’t listening. No – it had to be his way or the highway, and Professor Kangjon had few illusions about what a dark and bloody end the highway might lead to.

  It was all very well in theory, of course: hit a nuclear power station to achieve meltdown. Fine on paper. The ratchet effect. Use the power station’s stocks of uranium to multiply the destructive power of the IND’s blast, not to mention the radiation poisoning. Ratchet up the fear and the death factor.

  Professor Kangjon had few reasons to lament the coming loss of life, incalculable though it would doubtless prove. So far as he knew, the populations being targeted were those that had mocked and emasculated his once great nation. His homeland. For at heart, the professor would always be a proud North Korean.

  They’d openly laughed at his country’s Glorious Leader, otherwise known as the Great Leader Comrade, the Sun of the Communist Future and the Father of the People. Tauntingly, they’d christened him ‘Little Rocket Man’, ‘Kim Fatty the Third’, or even ‘Kim Fat Fat Fat’.

  Well, it enraged Professor Kangjon. Those who belittled his homeland should be made to pay. They deserved to.

  Why should he lift a finger to save them?

  Yes, his boss’s idea was clever. Very clever. In theory. In practice, it hadn’t quite worked out that way, and mainly because he, Professor Kangjon, had screwed up the calculations – or at least he was pretty certain that he had.

  To cause meltdown at a first-world nuclear power station, he’d presumed you’d have to overcome the same kind of safeguards – shields – as at a standard North Korean nuclear plant.

  Wrong. You actually needed enough highly enriched uranium to punch through twice the level of protection, and that basically required twice the destructive power. So, not twenty kilos per device. Oh no. Forty kilos. Professor Kangjon now believed a forty-kilo charge was required to achieve meltdown at a nuclear power plant in Britain, France or the USA.

  The specific reasons why were immensely complicated. Too complicated to explain to his boss. You needed a lifetime’s devotion to nuclear physics just to begin to understand the kind of complex theorems that were involved. But any minute now, his boss, Mr Hank Kammler – he’d tried to use a different name, Mr Helmut Kraft, but Professor Kangjon was too smart; he’d long figured out his real identity – was going to pay a visit to his laboratory, demanding answers.

  The professor wasn’t looking forward to it, to put it mildly. He snapped in the air again with the chopsticks. Again he missed.

  Behind him, a bank of giant 3D printers whirred away. Their steady beat was somehow reassuring. They were working to exacting digital plans inputted by Professor Kangjon, building up layer by layer the components required to smash two ten-kilo lumps of HEU against each other.

  With his new calculations requiring a forty-kilo device, he’d need to alter the printer dimensions accordingly. No great drama. A little tweaking here and there, that was all.

  It wasn’t re-engineering the components that worried the professor. It was explaining it all to Kammler. After all, three of the twenty-kilo devices had already been dispatched, and he figured it would be next to impossible to call them back again.

  He’d suffered the full blast of his employer’s ire over the phone earlier, when he’d made the call to confess his mistake.

  What was it going to be like up close and personal? He dreaded to think.

  The door behind him opened. Professor Kangjon put down the chopsticks. He’d not caught his fly.

  From the sound of the footsteps, he could tell that it was Kammler.

  He spun around in his chair and got to his feet, a little unsteadily.

  Kammler grinned.

  Odd, that. The professor felt utterly thrown.

  ‘No need to get up.’ Kammler beamed his crocodile smile. It was taking a superhuman effort to mask his fury, but he was capable of it. Just. All necessary measures – whatever it took – to further the cause.

  ‘Please don’t unsettle yourself, Professor,’ he continued, through gritted teeth. ‘I need you calm and lucid to continue with your work. But just so we are clear: each device needs twice as much uranium? Am I right?’

  ‘Exactly, Mr . . . Kraft. I am so sorry for this recalculation . . .’

  Kammler waved a hand impatiently. ‘These things happen at the cutting edge of science. So, if it’s forty kilos per device, we will need to utilise more HEU from the stocks we’re amassing. We should still have enough for the sacred eight.’ He eyed the professor. ‘But of course, I will need you to redouble your efforts.’

  Professor Kangjon bowed stiffly – a bob of the head and shoulders. ‘Naturally, Mr Kraft. I would never give less than one hundred and one per cent. Perhaps if I might move my sleeping things into the laboratory?’

  Kammler nodded curtly. ‘That would certainly aid the cause. Time is pressing, as always.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘It is the fifth of April. Twenty-five days and counting. We must not miss the scheduled completion date. Do you understand?’

  Professor Kangjon bowed more deeply this time. ‘Nothing will delay us, Mr Kraft, of that you have my solemn word. I will work my fingers to the bone, and the machines will run day and night to achieve this great and illustrious . . .’

  But Kammler wasn’t listening any more. He’d already turned and stepped towards the door. His mind was crunching the numbers. With the amount of HEU they’d amassed already and the incoming flight from Colombia, they should have enough at a stretch. But the North Korean professor would have to pay, of course. This was unforgivable, and the bastard would have to be made to suffer. Probably a job for Steve Jones. Yes, Jones. But first, let Kangjon work his fingers to the bone: fear would make him doubly diligent.

  That was one of the major upsides of operating from a location such as this, Kammler reflected: scores of disaffected nuclear scientists on your doorstep. Most of them desperate for a way out and willing to work for peanuts. And most – like Professor Kangjon – nursing a bitter grudge against the world powers.

  A grudge that Kammler was more than happy to harness to his own ends.

  39

  As Kammler stepped out of the lab’s front entrance, he caught sight of an arresting scene. To one side of the building a diminutive figure had been lashed to a post. A giant of a man pivoted this way and that, administering a punishment beating.

  Even from a distance Kammler could hear the distinctive crunch as a blow from a massive fist shattered bone, though the victim was tightly gagged and thus unable to scream. Kammler smiled his approval. He didn’t want any cries of agony to unsettle the professor and his team. To disturb their vital work. But at the same time, he wanted the beatings carried out in public as a warning to any who might consider stepping out of line.

  The facility was basically a prison camp. No one got in or out without Kammler’s say-so. And for those local workers – Korean or Chinese – who did try to escape, there had to be consequences. A deterrent.

  There was none better than Steve Jones.

  Kammler watched as the tattooed bulk of the man danced on his feet and hammered home the blows. To Jones, violence was an art form. Brutality a religion. No beating was the same, or so it seemed to Kammler. Jones used each as a chance to experiment with another technique designed to deliver maximum pain and damage.

  He was breathing hard and pouring with sweat. But what struck Kammler most was the man’s obvious enjoyment of what he was doing. No doubt about it, Jones was an animal, which made him the ideal enforcer. He never seemed happier than when doing as he was now – beating the living daylights out of a woman.

  Amongst the Chinese they had enslaved here were several dozen women, kept for menial cooking and cleaning duties. One of them had clearly stepped out of line. A group of local workers was being forced to watch the savage punishment. That way, Kammler was confident that word would quickly spread.

  Jones came to a halt and wiped sweat from his forehead. The bound figure slumped from the post, more dead than alive. Kammler nodded his approval.

  No doubt about it, Steve Jones’s methods were crude but effective.

  He strolled past the scene. He didn’t feel the slightest sympathy for the victim or the watchers. Non-Aryans, they were subhumans as far as he was concerned. Racially and intellectually his inferiors. Fit only to be workers and slaves. The sheer audacity of any who might object or resist took his breath away.

  ‘Well done,’ he remarked, as Jones stepped back from his bloodied handiwork. ‘Nothing quite like it pour décourager les autres.’

  ‘What?’ Jones scowled. ‘That French? I don’t do French. As a rule. Bunch of cheese-eating surrender monkeys in my book.’

  ‘To discourage the others,’ Kammler translated. ‘I was commenting on what a fine example you’ve set.’ He nodded in the direction of the workers, dressed in stained and ragged overalls. His lip curled. ‘For them. The scum. The expendables.’

  Jones shrugged. ‘Plenty more where they came from. A billion of the fuckers, or so I’m told.’

  Kammler gave a thin smile. Though he heartily approved of the sentiments, Jones’s way of expressing himself was hardly refined. Yet what should he expect of an Englishman?

  ‘There will be a few billion less after we’re finished,’ Kammler remarked. He couldn’t resist the quip. ‘Something to look forward to other than your next punishment beating. I have a fancy Kangjon is going to need similar treatment fairly soon . . .’

  Jones nodded darkly. ‘Can’t wait.’