Bear Grylls: The Hunt (Will Jaeger Book 3) Page 18

  Upon take-off, Jaeger had done what he normally did when facing a long flight by military transport: he’d slung his hammock in the massive hold and zoned out. He’d awoken some eleven hours later as they approached Camp Lemmonier, based at Djibouti’s Ambouli International Airport, feeling remarkably refreshed.

  The stress and tension of the last few days had proved draining. Alonzo had cobbled together a makeshift bed on the Galaxy’s floor, and Narov and Raff had each taken a row of the giant aircraft’s seats. The three of them appeared to be comatose still.

  Before departing Brazil, Jaeger had had to sort some kind of arrangements for his boys. It was the Easter holidays, school was breaking up, and he needed someone to take care of them for as long as might be necessary.

  The obvious solution had presented itself when Uncle Joe had offered to have them to stay at his place. He lived in a beautiful wooden cabin set at the foot of Buccleuch Fell, in the Scottish Borders, a natural paradise in the heart of dense woodland, complete with a series of lakes.

  Uncle Joe’s Cabin, as they called it, was far more sumptuous than the name suggested. It had become something of a home-from-home for the Jaeger family. Luke loved it, and Jaeger felt certain Simon would too. They could go climbing in the woods, fish in the streams and cycle the forest tracks. Plus Great-Auntie Ethel’s cooking was an extra draw.

  A part of Jaeger had felt homesick, especially when he’d spoken to the boys. He’d told them as much as he could. They knew their dad would be doing everything possible to get back to them safely. He would have moved mountains to be there with them right now, running wild. But what would he tell them about Ruth? How would he explain her absence?

  Any way he looked at it, he was in the right place – hunting down Kammler. And very possibly his wife too, perish the thought.

  His parents had offered to have the boys, but Jaeger had been wary. His father had long since gone to the bottle. Though a good dad in his day – he’d nurtured Jaeger’s boyhood love of the wild – after leaving the army he’d drifted into drink.

  Whenever he’d been on the booze, he proved rude and abusive. At age sixteen, Jaeger had volunteered for Royal Marines selection as a ‘crow’ – a raw recruit. In a drunken fit, his father had told him he would fail the punishing selection course.

  Jaeger had been determined to prove him wrong.

  That was when he’d first met Raff. He’d been thrown into line alongside the big Maori, as they paraded in their underwear that first morning at Lympstone. They hailed from totally different backgrounds, but that meant sod all. Both were day-one crows and both were freezing their nuts off. They’d forged an unbreakable bond on the fearsome assault course and trekking over the Dartmoor fells.

  Jaeger knew that his father had tried to curtail his drinking in recent years, but he didn’t want either Luke or Simon exposed to that kind of crap.

  As he had become more distant from his father, so Jaeger had grown closer to his grandfather, whose example had inspired him to try for SAS selection. But when Brigadier Edward ‘Ted’ Jaeger had been murdered by Kammler’s people, he’d turned to Uncle Joe, the brigadier’s younger brother and his former comrade in the Secret Hunters.

  As the Galaxy took to the air once more, heading east out of Djibouti, Jaeger grabbed a ration pack from his bergen and wolfed down a cold, gloopy boil-in-the-bag meal. As in-flight food went, it wasn’t great, but lying in a gently swinging hammock eating lukewarm rations was luxury compared with the physical deprivations to come.

  Jaeger had few illusions: as soon as they crossed the border into China, they were going to be totally up against it, operating in some of the harshest, most unforgiving terrain the world had to offer.

  Where they were going, they’d be glad of all the high-altitude and Alpine gear they’d stuffed into their bergens, plus the cross-country skis and other survival kit they had packed into the steel-framed para-tubes lying in the hold.

  Then there was the risk of capture by the Chinese armed forces. Though they were heading into China for that nation’s benefit – indeed, for the benefit of all humankind – the Chinese weren’t to know that. As soon as they crossed the border, that threat would be very real.

  A part of Jaeger wondered if Brooks couldn’t have found a way to brief the Chinese, but he also understood the challenges involved. The CIA chief would have had to explain to his Chinese counterparts how his agency had supposedly verified that the world’s most wanted man was dead, whereas in truth he was still very much alive.

  Not only that, he would have to explain how Kammler had somehow wormed his way into China, with the help of a changed appearance and an assumed identity.

  In short, raising all this with the Chinese had the potential to backfire spectacularly. It was a recipe for dark conspiracy theories, not to mention international mistrust. US–Chinese relations were always delicate, and on balance Jaeger could appreciate why Brooks – and Miles – had opted for the present course of action.

  Still, he didn’t fancy being captured by the People’s Liberation Army, and having to talk his way out of this one.

  46

  With worrying thoughts of capture in mind, Jaeger decided to gen up on the mission. They had a 6,000-kilometre flight ahead of them before touchdown at the Takhli Air Force Base in central Thailand. They’d have precious little time thereafter for studying the target.

  He tapped his iPad’s screen, scrolling through Peter Miles’s hastily prepared briefing notes. It seemed that Kammler and his forebears in the Reich had a certain history in the area that they were jetting into. As with so many things from the war years, what had first led the Nazis to this remote part of China beggared belief.

  In May 1938, SS Hauptsturmführer Ernst Schafer, a German zoologist, had led an expedition into Tibet. Staffed entirely by SS officers, it was sponsored by the Deutsche Ahnenerbe – the SS Ancestral Heritage Society – a pseudo-scientific institution charged with proving that an Aryan master race had supposedly once ruled the earth.

  Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, was one of the Deutsche Ahnenerbe’s key backers, as was SS General Hans Kammler. They believed that centuries ago, a group of pure-blooded Aryans had emerged from Tibet, making it the cradle of Aryan civilisation. However crackpot that theory might seem, the SS Tibet expedition had set out to analyse the cranial dimensions and take plaster casts of the local people’s heads, to somehow prove it.

  Schafer had managed to persuade the British authorities to allow him to access Tibet via India, which was then still a British colony. Travelling via Sikkim, a region of north-eastern India, the German team had made their way into the ‘Land of Snows’ – the mountainous Tibetan plateau. On 9 January 1939, they had reached Lhasa, Tibet’s capital. There, Schafer had handed out Nazi swastikas, which ironically served to endear his team to the Tibetans.

  In the swastika the Nazis had appropriated an ancient religious symbol popular in Roman times and revered in Buddhism and Hinduism. The Tibetan leaders had taken the expedition’s swastikas to indicate a shared belief in the peaceful, tolerant tenets of Buddhism.

  Of course, nothing could have been further from the truth.

  Schafer and his people had headed to the famed Nyenchen Tanglha Mountains, overlooking Lake Namtso – the ‘Heavenly Lake’ – which lay sixty kilometres to the north of Lhasa. This area, they had concluded, was the epicentre of Aryan ancestry in Tibet – the long-forgotten Nazi homeland.

  They carried back to Germany scores of ancient religious artefacts, together with the cranial measurements and casts, which they claimed proved their theory. Himmler was ecstatic: he greeted Schafer with gifts of a special SS dagger and a silver death’s-head ring.

  Hitler himself read Schafer’s reports and was impressed. All the expedition team were promoted up the ranks of the SS, and the Nyenchen Tanglha Mountains went down in SS mythology as the legendary Aryan fatherland.

  And now it seemed that Hank Kammler – son of the SS general who had done so much to further such ideas – had headed for this region. There was a dark symbolism in Kammler’s hiding out in the Nyenchen Tanglha Mountains, of that Jaeger felt certain.

  Kammler was nothing if not smart. A man of wealth, thanks to his father’s post-war dealings, he’d sunk significant resources into projects in isolated parts of the world, including a remote private game reserve in Katavi, in East Africa – somewhere that had provided perfect cover for his germ warfare research.

  It was there that Jaeger and his team had nailed him, or so they had thought.

  Now, in the Nyenchen Tanglha Mountains, he had established a cover for his newest and darkest aspirations. According to the intelligence Jaeger was reading, if Kammler was breeding a clutch of INDs, he was very likely doing it from here. If Brooks and Miles were right, on the snowfields overlooking the Heavenly Lake, Kammler had set up a veritable devil’s sanctuary.

  A sanctuary from where he planned to unleash a new Armageddon.

  47

  ‘Truce?’ Jaeger suggested, as he offered Narov a steaming brew.

  She swung her legs off the seats. ‘I did not know we were at war.’

  Jaeger said nothing. Over the past seventy-two hours it had certainly felt that way.

  He broke out his steel flask and mixed her a hot chocolate from some sachets in his rations. Raff and Alonzo would sleep until the cows came home, just as they always did. It was only Jaeger and Narov who were awake.

  They were two hours out from Takhli, and once they touched down, they had to hit the ground running. They were poised to deploy on the most challenging mission they had ever faced, and they needed to gel as a team. Hence the mug of hot chocolate. Call it a peace offering.

  Jaeger nodded at Narov’s iPad. ‘You’ve read the reports?’

  ‘I have. Several times.’

  ‘What d’you reckon?’

  ‘From all the intel from St Georgen, we know that fissile material – uranium – has almost certainly been removed from those tunnels. Trouble is, no one knows how much was there in the first place. But we can make a good guess. There were how many in the gang who hit the film crew?’

  ‘Six.’

  ‘Six men can carry what, in terms of loads? Maybe thirty kilos each. So, presuming they made the one run, let’s say they retrieved a hundred and eighty kilos from the tunnels. Plus they have a hundred kilos incoming from Moldova, or at least they think they have. And there are the previous flights . . . So what are they doing with all this material?’

  ‘Multiple INDs.’

  ‘Multiple INDs. Nothing else makes sense.’ Narov paused, blowing on her hot chocolate pensively. ‘Which potentially means multiple targets. And right now we have no idea where or what those targets are. Or their timescale.’

  ‘What’re you thinking?’

  Narov glanced at him. ‘If I were Kammler – a crazed mass murderer with a delusional ego – I’d have started building my INDs just as soon as the first raw materials were to hand. And I would have started to filter those INDs out to their targets as soon as they were ready.’

  Narov was no Kammler. In truth, she was his arch-enemy. But Jaeger figured she was dead right. Kammler very likely had shipped out his first INDs.

  Right now, though, as she perched on her seat sipping her drink, Jaeger was struck by another thought entirely. Even with her fine blonde hair pulled back in a scrunchie and no make-up to speak of, Narov remained stunningly beautiful. He let the image linger in his thoughts. Longer than he had ever allowed himself to do before.

  ‘We have to presume Kammler has got his first INDs in position,’ Narov repeated, seemingly oblivious to Jaeger’s admiring gaze. ‘Which means we’ve got to trace them. Stop them.’ She paused. ‘Where would Kammler make his targets, do you think?’

  Jaeger took a sip of his own brew. Tea, laced with heaps of sugar. Raff had got him into it during their first week of commando selection. It was one bad habit that he’d never managed to shake. Ruth used to nag him about it incessantly. All that sugar would kill him. Jaeger knew many other things could kill him long before that.

  ‘Follow Kammler’s ego,’ he ventured. ‘Ego always has a pattern.’ He paused. ‘What will he aim for? Urban conurbations? City centres? Places where an IND’s lethality will cause maximum impact, but more importantly, mass panic and terror.’ He paused again. ‘Though if you think about it, he’s not going to blow one device until he can blow them all.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘’Cause if he blows one, the world is alerted. The search is on. Globally. City centres are shut down. All vehicles stopped; searched. The airspace cleared. You can’t detonate an IND unless you can deliver it to target. He’ll have to coordinate multiple strikes so that all go off at once. And that’s got to lend us a little time.’

  ‘Let’s hope so.’ Narov’s ice-blue gaze met his. For once Jaeger figured he could detect a certain emotion in it, and it surprised him. Her eyes cried out fear; fear of what Kammler was capable of, especially if he was ahead of them in this dark game.

  He felt an irresistible temptation to kiss her, to whisper words of reassurance. If he was honest with himself, he’d fallen hopelessly for this confounding woman. Yet at the same time, there was Ruth. Innocent until proven guilty.

  He took a gulp of his tea.

  He didn’t know what the hell to feel or think any more.

  48

  Narov grabbed her iPad, and pulled up one of Brooks’s documents. It was entitled: ‘The inevitability of ISIS achieving a nuclear terror strike’.

  ‘Did you see this? Background briefing.’

  Jaeger shook his head. He’d trawled through the key documents – the mission-specific ones – but had then started to tire.

  ‘You know how large your average IND is?’ Narov continued. ‘About the size of a small fridge. You know how much it weighs? As little as a hundred kilos. Basically, you could carry it in an SUV. So while it is not exactly Ryanair hand luggage, it’s incredibly easy to hide. Carry across borders. Conceal. Deliver.’

  She fixed Jaeger with a look, worry etched in her eyes. ‘We have to presume that Kammler has developed multiple delivery systems. Plus the links he’s forged with organised crime and drugs mean he’s got covert trafficking networks he can utilise.’

  ‘Yeah, but consider the upside,’ Jaeger countered. ‘It’s us.’

  He reached out to touch Narov’s arm in a gesture of reassurance. Typically, she seemed to recoil – to freeze – at the prospect of any physical contact other than for the practical reasons of soldiering.

  Jaeger shrugged it off. He glanced at his watch. ‘We’re one hour forty-five out from Takhli. When we touch down, there’ll be an AN-32 waiting on the apron. It’s two thousand klicks north to our target. That’s five hours’ flight time. We’ll be on the ground tonight, and at the target by the early hours of tomorrow morning. Miles has confirmed that Bear 12 is airborne and flying a similar route to the one we’ve taken. It’s got less range, so more fuelling stops, but it won’t be far behind.

  ‘I’d say seventy-two hours from now, the tungsten device gets delivered to Kammler’s headquarters,’ he continued. ‘We’ll be eyes on. We’ll see it taken into his IND lab. Then we detonate. That’s a very large part of the problem taken care of.’

  ‘And then?’ Narov challenged. ‘How do we finish it?’

  Jaeger shrugged. ‘That I can’t say. Not until we’re visual. The plan of attack will shake out of whatever we find on the ground. But either way, this time we finish it. Finish Kammler. For good.’

  Narov pulled up one of the satellite images on her iPad screen. ‘There appear to be three separate facilities: what they think is the laboratory; the generator hall and plant; plus the accommodation block.’

  ‘Yep. And they’re well spaced out. The tungsten blast will take out the lab, that’s for sure. But the rest of it: that’s for us. We’ll need some kind of diversion. And our usual calling cards: speed. Aggression. Surprise.’

  ‘You’ve seen the thickness of the walls?’ Narov queried. ‘We’ll need demolitions gear. Plus whatever kind of firepower Brooks can offer us, ’cause we’re bound to be seriously outnumbered.’

  ‘On that level at least we’re sorted,’ Jaeger confirmed. ‘I’ve been told there’s a real war-in-a-box waiting for us at Takhli. And I’ve made sure they included a Dragunov with your name on it.’

  As Jaeger knew only too well, the Dragunov – the iconic Russian sniper rifle, with a ten-round magazine – was Narov’s weapon of choice. He’d asked for a Dragunov SVD-S – the shortened lightweight version, with the folding stock – to be included in the weapons package that Brooks had prepared. As America’s key ally in the region, the Thai military had proved extremely accommodating.

  The ghost of a smile played across Narov’s features. ‘Thanks. You remembered. Uncharacteristically thoughtful.’

  Was there just a hint of playfulness in her tone? It said a lot about their relationship, Jaeger reflected, when the only opportunity the two of them had for flirting was discussing the best means to kill.

  ‘So, total weight?’ Narov added. ‘And how long do we need provisioning for?’

  ‘Seven days. At that kind of altitude, we’re constrained by how much we can carry. Assume twenty-five kilos per person, not including weapons. We’ll have a pulk, with a further hundred-kilo capacity. So that’s two hundred kilos between us. But with munitions, grenades, demolitions gear, batteries, comms kit, surveillance kit, and cold-weather and survival gear, we’re left with precious little room for rations. We need to get this done quickly, or we’ll be chewing on thin air.’