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

  He turned around and strode back to the aircraft. There was a certain menace to his step now.

  He eyed the pilot. ‘You just delivered a crateload of metal. This is not what was agreed. Where’s the coca paste, comrade?’

  The pilot did a double take. ‘What?’

  ‘Coca. Paste. From Ecuador. Like last time.’ Gonzales’s tone was level and calm, with just the right hint of menace. ‘Plus we got the refined product to onload. Just like always.’

  The pilot’s face darkened. ‘What is this bullshit?’

  Gonzales placed his hand on his weapon. ‘We do this a hundred times, comrade, no problem. A hundred times. Then tonight we get a crateload of useless fucking scrap. No bullshit, comrade; you got some explaining to do.’

  For a moment Jaeger wondered if Gonzales was laying it on a little too thick. This was the moment when the bad guys had to fall hook, line and sinker for the ruse.

  The pilot glanced around, the spotlights blinding him. His gaze came to rest on Gonzalez again. ‘Look, brother, I load up at Moldova. I bring cargo here as instructed. I land.’ The pilot paused. ‘So, like I say: what bullshit is this?’

  Gonzales unslung his weapon. ‘Mister, right now it’s me asking the questions and you giving the answers.’

  The pilot was a tough old bird, but Gonzales’s act was getting to him. ‘Look, I have never been to this Ecuador. I have never fly the drugs. I fly the weapons. And tonight, I follow instructions to letter.’

  Gonzales fixed him with a look. ‘Comrade, who exactly is your patron? Who is your customer for this pile of useless scrap?’

  The pilot stiffened. He clearly wasn’t inclined to answer.

  Gonzales ratcheted a round into the breech of his AK-47. ‘Mister, let me make this easy on you: you start talking and you start making some motherfucking sense, or things are gonna turn very ugly very fast.’

  The pilot blanched. ‘El Padre,’ he growled. ‘Los Niños. I fly in here for El Padre.’

  Gonzales scratched his head, his features displaying a certain incredulity. Then he let out a short bark of a laugh before glancing at the pilot again.

  ‘You’re on the wrong strip, comrade. I’m expecting a shipment of coca paste from Ecuador. End of.’

  The pilot’s mouth hung open. Speechless.

  Gonzalez shrugged. ‘Listen, we don’t mess with El Padre. No one does. Not if they want to live. So best you turn this crate around and get airborne again. Pronto.’

  The pilot seemed frozen, his face drained of all colour.

  ‘Comrade, you’re free to go. But I gotta tell you something. You’re not just at the wrong strip; you’re in the wrong goddam country. This is Brazil. You want the other side of the border. Colombia.’

  ‘So who are . . .’ the pilot stuttered. ‘Who are you guys?’

  Gonzalez shook his head. ‘Not your need-to-know.’ There was a steeliness to his gaze now. ‘Like I said, we’re done. Adios. You need to spin this crate around and get airborne.’

  The pilot turned and barked a few orders in Russian at his co-pilot and navigator, then reached for his instrument panel. The colour was starting to return to his features. Maybe he was going to get away with this. Maybe he wasn’t about to die.

  Gonzales yelled for his boys to load up the cargo once more. In the hangar, the dummy shipment was manhandled into the pickup, driven up the ramp of the AN-12 and deposited in the aircraft’s hold. With barely a second glance, the loadmaster got it strapped down and headed for the cockpit.

  Gonzales’s men exited the aircraft, switch done.

  ‘Word of advice, Igor,’ Gonzales volunteered to the pilot. ‘You get to El Padre’s place, you may want to keep quiet about your little fuck-up. He doesn’t take kindly to . . . fuck-ups.’ A beat. ‘Good luck, comrade. Safe flying to wherever it is you’re headed. This side of the border, we’re the only guys in town.’

  The pilot cracked a smile. He reached behind him and pulled out a bottle. ‘You like vodka? Khortytsa vodka. The best. All the way from Ukraine.’

  Captain Gonzales shook his head. ‘I’m a tequila kind of guy. Maybe you’ll need that where you’re heading. If El Padre finds out what really happened here tonight . . .’ He let the words tail off menacingly. ‘Adios, comrade, and say hello to Moldova for me, or wherever the hell it is you come from.’

  The pilot punched a button and there was the distinctive whine of the starter motors firing up the first of the aircraft’s engines. ‘Ukraine. I come from Ukraine. Oleksandr Savchenko, Ukraine’s finest pilot. But right now, we have cargo to deliver all the way to fucking China. If you ever come to Ukraine, please, you . . .’ The last of his words were drowned out by the howling of the engines.

  ‘Sure, I’ll look you up.’ Gonzales slapped the fuselage theatrically. ‘Safe trip! And next time, get a better navigator, Comrade Savchenko!’

  He stepped away from the aircraft, his part of the mission complete: so far, so good.

  43

  Jaeger and his team were gathered around Colonel Evandro’s computer, the military-encrypted internet link providing a secure video feed to their distant Falkenhagen headquarters. Peter Miles was speaking, and they were glued to his every word.

  ‘We agree with your analysis, plus all intelligence from our end suggests that the plane isn’t terminating at that jungle strip. It’s a stopover. Refuelling. Time for the crew to grab some shut-eye. But mostly it’s a ruse. A cut-off. A decoy destination.’

  The switch had gone like clockwork. The AN-12 had flown on to Los Niños’s base with its Trojan horse tungsten-bomb cargo, apparently with no further dramas. Which must have been as much of a relief to Oleksandr Savchenko, Ukraine’s finest pilot, as it was to Jaeger and his team.

  Right now, the tracking device revealed that the crate was sitting on that aircraft in Dodge, beaming out its signal as regular as clockwork.

  ‘So what d’you reckon to the China connection?’ Jaeger queried. ‘What the pilot mentioned. Is it credible?’

  ‘Yes, as it happens.’ Miles replied. ‘We figure they’ve flown to Colombia as a blind. It’s not unusual with these criminal-narco-mafioso networks. Colombia’s where the trail goes cold. Or at least it’s supposed to. Meanwhile, the HEU gets spirited to the other side of the world.’

  Miles searched out Narov. ‘Plus, there’s been an unexpected development . . . Irina, I have something of a personal question for you. You and Falk Konig – Kammler’s son – you made something of a special connection on your last mission, I understand?’

  ‘You can say that again,’ Jaeger cut in. ‘Became intimately acquainted. Sparks flew.’

  Raff practically choked on his coffee. Alonzo tried to kill an almighty great snigger. Narov gave the daggers. If looks could kill, Jaeger was dead and buried.

  ‘Falk and I shared a mutual interest, yes,’ she replied tightly. ‘For wildlife. For animals. So yes, by the time we left, I viewed him as a . . . close friend. That was all. Nothing more.’ She glared at Jaeger. ‘Nothing like what that Schwachkopf is implying.’

  With that, she stalked out the room.

  Her sudden departure was met with an uncomfortable silence. It was Raff who broke it. He eyed Jaeger despairingly. ‘That went well. Always had the touch. And still got it, by the looks of things.’

  Jaeger winced. ‘Well, it’s true. They were like a couple of lovebirds.’

  During their previous mission, Kammler’s son, Falk, had played a somewhat ambivalent role. While Narov had believed he was on the side of the angels, Jaeger hadn’t been convinced.

  Falk had changed his surname from Kammler to Konig, apparently in an effort to distance himself from the family’s Nazi legacy. But after Jaeger and his team had nailed Kammler’s dark plot to bring back the Reich, Falk had dropped off the radar. Completely.

  Jaeger’s last communication with him had been a text message, in which Falk had tried to exonerate himself: My father has taken refuge in his lair . . . I am innocent. He is a madman.

  After that, silence.

  In Jaeger’s book, that was suspicious. You didn’t do a disappearing act like that unless you had reason. Why run unless you were guilty?

  ‘Falk’s been calling Irina,’ Miles announced. ‘Repeatedly, over an eight-hour period. He’s been using a Chinese-made ETACTO TLX, a kind of poor man’s satphone. It’s got great connectivity over China and comes equipped with two SIM slots. He chose to use his regular SIM card, in spite of the fact that it’s at the top of our global watch list. Seems he set his phone to automatic call repeat. Of course, he got no answer, Irina being in the Brazilian jungle.’

  ‘So Falk’s surfaced. Where is he?’ Jaeger queried.

  ‘Well, there’s the thing. He’s in China. A remote border region in the depths of the Himalayas.’ Miles eyed Jaeger for a long moment. ‘Go fetch Irina. Say sorry, and get her back in here. You all need to hear this.’

  Jaeger headed outside. Finding Narov alone, he didn’t know quite what to say. He figured he’d keep it simple.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry. I was just messing with you. It didn’t mean anything.’

  Narov turned on him. ‘You know something? I’m sick of you and I am sick of your blind stupidity.’ A beat, fraught with emotion. Jaeger knew exactly what she was driving at: the bond – the electrifying attraction – between the two of them.

  He knew in his heart that he’d fallen for her. It was the love that wouldn’t speak its name. Guilt over Ruth made him try to bury it; deny it.

  ‘You want to know the truth?’ Narov continued. ‘You want to know why I went off hunting Kammler solo? Because I no longer trusted you. I needed to hide it from you, Kahuhara’ga.’

  Kahuhara’ga. The Hunter. Months back, Jaeger had been given that name by a tribe of isolated Amazonian Indians who had sacrificed themselves in order to aid his mission. Narov had started using the name teasingly. Yet now she seemed to have lost all faith in him.

  Jaeger ran a hand through his hair. He couldn’t find any words.

  ‘You think I would have shared what I was doing, knowing you would repeat it all to your wife?’ Narov demanded. ‘To her. As if you can still trust her!’

  ‘You think she’d betray us? You think she’d feed it to Kammler? But you’ve got no proof.’ Jaeger had found his voice at last. ‘Not one shred of evidence. There’s no way you can be certain . . . Anyway, the fact is, you never liked her.’

  Narov shook her head despairingly. ‘Tell me: prior to her disappearing act, did you speak to her? Tell her anything about Kammler that could have triggered her to leave? Did you?’

  Jaeger cast his mind back to the email he’d sent shortly after the St Georgen tunnel discoveries: I’ve stumbled upon something here. There’s a chance that Kammler might still be alive.

  Maybe it wasn’t an abduction. Maybe that email had caused his wife to run. But to run to Kammler? The more he tried to fathom it, the more he just couldn’t be certain. He didn’t know what to think any more.

  ‘She’s got PTSD,’ he objected mulishly. ‘She’s not thinking straight. She’s confused and damaged and acting irrationally. Plus there are any number of ways to explain her disappearance, starting with the obvious: Kammler’s people seized her . . .’

  His words tailed off to nothing.

  He needed to start being more honest with himself. Long ago he’d fallen for Narov’s elusive charms. At the time, he was married, with kids he adored and a wife he loved. Not any more. He knew he was losing Ruth; maybe he’d already lost her. At the same time he was still trying to push Narov away.

  But try as he might, his connection with this enigma of a woman was growing more powerful by the day. His heart was being torn away from the woman he’d once loved, and he feared that if he stepped closer to Narov’s fire and ice, he was going to burn.

  With a supreme effort of will, he forced all of that from his mind.

  There was only one way to settle this: find Kammler.

  44

  Jaeger and Narov stepped back into the ops room, an uncomfortable silence hanging between them. No one asked how things had gone outside. In a sense, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that time was running out, for all of them.

  As quickly as he could, Miles narrated to Narov the history of the calls from Falk Konig. ‘We traced his cell phone to a remote part of the Chinese Himalayas. There is some sensitivity over China, but we’ve managed to secure some high-resolution imagery. We think – we strongly suspect – that this may be Kammler’s new base of operations.’

  ‘Why there?’ Narov demanded. In an instant, she’d switched back to one hundred per cent focus.

  ‘It’s got everything. Remote. Inaccessible. Self-contained. But most importantly, it’s got perfect cover. You could raise an army in the place – or build a salvo of IND-tipped missiles – and no one would turn a hair. I’ll email you the images and you’ll see what I mean.’

  ‘One question,’ Jaeger cut in. ‘Why would Falk Konig make repeated calls on a mobile he’s got to know is red hot? If he is with his father, the world’s most wanted man, what would make him break his silence?’

  ‘That’s the point,’ Miles replied. ‘We don’t think he’s trying to hide. We think he wants to be found.’

  ‘You think he is being held against his will?’ Narov queried. ‘His father’s captive?’

  ‘We suspect as much. He blipped up for one night. We figure something happened that enabled him to make those calls, but just for that brief time window.’

  ‘The number’s specific to a SIM card that he knows is hot,’ Jaeger ventured. ‘Traceable. He uses it just that one night, when he has the chance. Come morning, he goes silent again.’

  ‘We figure something like that, yes,’ Miles confirmed. ‘But we can’t be certain. For all we know, he could be reconciled with his father. In league with him. Those calls could easily be some kind of decoy or ambush.’

  ‘Unlikely,’ Narov remarked. ‘From what I know of Falk. And from what I know of his father.’

  Jaeger shot her a look. ‘Expect the unexpected. Day one, lesson one.’

  ‘I do. But I also trust my instinct,’ Narov countered. ‘Trust me, this is a cry for help.’

  ‘We’ve triple-checked the location,’ Miles cut in. ‘The only way to be certain this is Kammler’s new base of operations is to deploy you guys. We’d like you to get eyes on as soon as possible. That way, when the decoy is delivered we can be certain it’s in the right place before we trigger the blast.’

  ‘So when do we deploy?’ Jaeger demanded. ‘And how? It’s a long way from here to Beijing.’

  ‘As soon as humanly possible. We have very little influence on when that flight leaves Dodge and recommences its journey. Brooks has got a C-5 Galaxy inbound. You RV with it at Afonsos Air Force Base, in Rio, deploying directly from there.’

  ‘Got it.’ Jaeger glanced briefly at the others. ‘Understood.’

  ‘One more thing,’ Miles added. ‘You’re going in trans-border to China, which is about as sensitive as it gets. We need a means to deliver you to your end destination that is utterly covert and untraceable. We’re talking China, remember, with their state-of-the-art tracking and surveillance systems. We’re in one hell of a hurry, but don’t go screwing this up China side of the border.’

  ‘Send us the surveillance photos,’ said Jaeger. ‘We’ll think of something.’

  ‘You’ll have them,’ Miles confirmed. ‘Finally, a warning. We’ve detected signs that Kammler and his people may know we’re onto them. Narov’s Dubai mission left a signature.’ He paused. ‘Take every possible precaution. Do not underestimate Kammler. His back’s to the wall, which makes him doubly dangerous. Make sure the hunters do not become the hunted.’

  As they gathered around Colonel Evandro’s laptop, Jaeger, Narov, Raff and Alonzo scrutinised the satellite photos that Miles had sent through. The thing that struck Jaeger most forcibly was the endless expanse of mountains, snow and ice. But chiefly, snowfields. Vast, rolling, freezing drifts of glittering white.

  To trek cross-border through that – it wasn’t possible, not in the time they had available. To parachute or make a helicopter insertion was also a non-starter, for this was the most monitored and watched airspace on earth. Then a thought struck him. It was risky – crazily so – but it might just be doable.

  He turned to Raff. ‘Mate, remember that insertion we trialled in Antarctica? Years back. There was a spike in tension between us and the Argentinians. HMG figured it might kick off between our Antarctic survey teams and theirs.’

  ‘Yeah. Break a leg. I almost bloody did.’

  Jaeger gestured at the surveillance photos. ‘Well?’

  ‘We trialled it. It was a trial. And we knew the depth of the snow, plus its density.’

  ‘Yeah, but feast your eyes upon those drifts. Brooks is bound to have some boffins who could take a closer look. Give us a steer.’

  ‘We’d need a discreet base somewhere near the border to do a stop-short,’ Raff mused. ‘We’d have to transfer to a low-key aircraft that can execute that kind of drop with little or no signature.’ He paused. ‘It’s one hell of a challenge, and we don’t have the time to screw up.’

  ‘Any better suggestions?’

  Raff stared at the images for a second. ‘Fuck it. It’s no crazier than your Angeldust sting.’

  Jaeger gave a thin smile. ‘Yeah, and beggars can’t be choosers.’

  45

  The massive US Air Force C-5M Super Galaxy – powered by four giant General Electric turbofan jet engines – was eating up the miles.

  Flying at some 35,000 feet, and with such a light load as she was presently carrying – four operators, plus their hastily assembled kit – she had a range of some 10,500 kilometres. It would get them to their refuelling stop at Camp Lemmonier, the US military base in Djibouti, on the east coast of Africa.