Bear Grylls: The Hunt (Will Jaeger Book 3) Page 19

  ‘What about the locals?’ Narov probed. ‘Brooks figures there are several dozen Chinese employed at the plant. Unsuspecting, of course, since the place has perfect cover.’

  ‘We try to minimise local casualties. But it’s going to be incredibly hard to ID friend from foe in the kind of fight that’s coming. We’ll do our best. Trust our instincts.’ Jaeger paused. ‘But Kammler and his people – no one gets out alive. The risks are too great.’

  ‘No one? What about Falk?’

  ‘Falk . . .’ Jaeger shrugged. ‘If he’s onside and no risk to the mission, then he lives. But you better be damned certain . . .’ He paused. ‘For that matter, we all better be damn certain he’s onside. Falk’s phone calls . . . if they’re designed to lure us into a trap, well, we’re buggered. And so, my dear, is the entire fucking world.’

  Narov nodded. ‘We cannot afford to fail. But trust me: Falk will not have betrayed us.’ She fixed Jaeger with a look. ‘As to your wife . . .’

  Jaeger flinched. ‘If she’s in that place, the same rules apply. We have to be certain. But leave it to me. It’s my call.’

  49

  As far as Jaeger was concerned, the Antonov AN-32 was the only aircraft with which to be attempting such a mission.

  With its twin Ivchenko turboprop engines set high on the wings, it had an almost unrivalled high-altitude landing and take-off capability, a 2,500-kilometre range, plus a stall speed of under 100 kilometres an hour – which for tonight’s operation was absolutely critical.

  It was also ubiquitous across Asia, being flown by the Indian, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan and several other armed forces, and scores of civilian operators, including any number of Chinese commercial airlines. A common workhorse of charities, it regularly flew missions of mercy into Asia’s uncharted regions.

  Hence the cover for tonight’s ultra-secret flight.

  The AN-32 was decked out in the markings of the International Committee of the Red Cross: the distinctive red and white livery, plus the iconic red-cross symbol splashed across the tailplane, wings and the underside of the fuselage.

  Routed via northern Thailand, Myanmar, north-west India and Bhutan, the Antonov would be straying one hundred kilometres into Chinese airspace from the border crossover point. That an ICRC flight could have blundered that far off course was unlikely, unless the navigator was seriously incompetent. But it wasn’t entirely impossible, especially amidst such wild and uncharted mountains, where detours due to bad weather would be common.

  The one-hundred-kilometre insertion would take the Antonov little more than ten minutes, and the aircraft wouldn’t pause long to deliver the team to target. It was unlikely to be detected on such a short run, especially as it would be weaving a path between towering peaks.

  The route back would take the same amount of time, and it was just possible that the Antonov might get intercepted or forced down. Should that happen, the pilot would claim to be a bona fide aid flight that had somehow strayed into Chinese airspace.

  The idea of using ICRC cover wasn’t without precedent. In 1997, the SAS had been tasked to snatch two prominent Serbian war criminals, Milan Kovacevic and Simo Drljaca, from Bosnia. Kovacevic was hiding out in a hospital. The five-man SAS team sent in to get him posed as Red Cross officials, gaining entry to the hospital with their 9mm pistols tucked beneath their clothing.

  Code-named Operation Tango, the SAS mission was a resounding success. Kovacevic was spirited away to a waiting ‘Red Cross’ helicopter, whisked out of the country and subsequently tried for war crimes. His partner, Drljaca, tried to put up a fight. He didn’t get to stand trial: he died in the firefight with the SAS.

  Jaeger hadn’t been on Op Tango; it was before his time. But he’d certainly heard about it. It had gone down in SAS legend, and it had inspired tonight’s little subterfuge.

  On one level, using the ICRC livery as cover wasn’t entirely morally justifiable. The Red Cross relied upon its reputation for strict neutrality and humanitarianism to gain access to war zones. But during his years in the SAS, Jaeger had learnt that sometimes, whoever broke the rules won.

  Who dares. And always for the greater good.

  Going up against Kammler and his ilk, he’d also learnt some of the darker arts of the enemy. As a consequence, he had few qualms about the nature of tonight’s deception.

  He, Narov, Raff and Alonzo were dressed in unmarked white Alpine warfare gear – state-of-the-art Goretex jackets and trousers. Under that, each sported a Helly Hansen thermal top, plus layers of silk, and they had thermal gloves and white Goretex overmitts to protect their hands from the intense cold.

  In the centre of the Antonov were piled their bergens, each sheeted over with a white Alpine camouflage covering, along with two steel cargo para-tubes. An expedition-spec pulk – a six-foot flat-bottomed fibreglass sled, which came complete with tow harness – completed the kit for tonight’s drop.

  The pulk was man-portable: you loaded it up, strapped yourself into the harness and hauled it across the snow. Once they were on the ground, the team would unload the para-tubes, load up the sled and be on their way. Their packs were stripped down to survival gear only, so they could exit the aircraft with the lightest possible loads.

  All the heavy kit was packed in the para-tubes.

  During the flight, Jaeger had been too wired to sleep. The groaning of the metal fuselage and the deafening howl of the Ivchenko engines made talk all but impossible. The AN-32 had been designed in the mid seventies, and Jaeger didn’t doubt that this one was several decades old. At every twist and turn he felt as if it was about to shake itself to pieces.

  But he knew the reputation of the aircraft. Like most Russian airframes, it was ruggedly built and engineered to last. He didn’t doubt it would get them to their target, Chinese vigilance permitting.

  He’d plugged himself into the aircraft’s intercom, so he could listen in on the chat from the cockpit. Mostly it had been navigational, as the pilot, co-pilot and navigator talked each other through what they could see of the terrain below, to keep a check on their route. They were heading across the easternmost extent of the Himalayas, circumventing the massive 7,500-metre peak of Kula Kangri, which straddled the border with China.

  Jaeger glanced out the nearest of the AN-32’s portholes. He could see jagged-edged snowfields rearing up to their right like the white fangs of some impossible sky god, the heights washed in a silvery-blue moonlight. Kula Kangri had long been disputed by both Bhutan and China. So remote was this region that neither country had been able to substantiate its territorial claim.

  ‘Border crossing in five,’ the pilot calmly announced.

  This was it: no turning back now.

  50

  Jaeger had had just a brief introduction to the Antonov’s aircrew, and that had been first names only. The pilot, Bill, was very clearly American. He spoke with a tough East Coast – New Jersey – accent. Jaeger didn’t doubt that he was ex-military. Dressed in the smart, iron-creased blacks, whites and reds of an ICRC pilot’s uniform, he sure looked the part.

  ‘Border crossing in five,’ he repeated. ‘Prepare for things to get a little interesting back there. We’ll be going in lower than a snake’s belly.’

  Jaeger flashed a finger-down at Narov, Raff and Alonzo: universal symbol for prepare to lose altitude.

  The Antonov’s intercom was one-way only. Any comms with the cockpit had to go via the loadie, Pete, another American. He was perched on one of the fold-down canvas seats where the bulkhead separated cockpit from cargo hold.

  The Antonov began to plummet towards the moon-washed snowfields. Jaeger felt his stomach contents lurch into his throat, and fought back the gag reflex as the pilot kept losing altitude.

  When it seemed as if they were about to plough into the snow and rock at some 300-plus kilometres an hour, he heard the twin turboprops emit a piercing howl. The pilot piled on the thrust, and the AN-32 pulled up, blasting the tops of the highest drifts, then sped onwards, thundering into the night.

  They were down so low that the aircraft’s moon shadow was almost indistinguishable from her fuselage. As he craned his neck to get a view out the rear, Jaeger spotted thick flurries of snow kicked up by the Antonov’s four-bladed propellers, swirling madly in the slipstream.

  Deep gullies opened up ahead, and the pilot slipped the Antonov into their icy embrace, throwing it from side to side to edge past dome-like outcrops blasted bare by the freezing wind. At the approach of a vast series of ridges, which rose like a snow-blasted giant’s staircase, Jaeger felt the aircraft going into a series of switchbacks, as if they were riding some runaway escalator.

  Whoever the pilot was, and whichever unit he’d trained with, Jaeger figured it was time to settle back and enjoy the ride.

  ‘Crossing border,’ the pilot’s voice confirmed. ‘Going dark.’

  Before now, theirs had been a non-covert flight, and they’d been flying through non-hostile airspace. Accordingly, the Antonov had been showing the normal lights that civilian aircraft used. Now, all had been extinguished, including any internal lighting.

  Jaeger glanced around the hold. It was washed in a faint ghostly glow: moonlight reflected back from the snow rushing past just a few dozen feet below.

  ‘Hook-shaped frozen lake at ten o’clock,’ the co-pilot announced.

  ‘Check,’ the navigator confirmed. Jaeger could just imagine the guy crouched over his charts. ‘That’s Lake Le-Wen-Pu. You follow its course and it leads into the Le-Wen-Pu valley. The valley extends twenty kilometres north, with a gentle curve east.’

  ‘Roger,’ the pilot confirmed.

  ‘Oh yeah, and watch out for yaks, yurts and prayer flags tugging at the undercarriage,’ the navigator added.

  Jaeger allowed himself a smile. He risked a peek out of the Antonov’s window. The navigator was right.

  Any lower, and they’d be kissing the snowfields.

  51

  Jaeger braced himself at the Antonov’s open ramp.

  Normally when preparing to jump from such an aircraft, you had the reassuring form of a bulky parachute strapped to your shoulders as the slipstream tore at your clothing and howled around your ears.

  Not tonight.

  All Jaeger had strapped to his back was his light-order bergen: even their weapons were packed into the para-tubes. The Antonov’s airspeed was incredibly slow – seventy knots, Jaeger figured – so it felt little worse than driving down a motorway with the window down.

  He reckoned the snowfield flashing past below was no more than forty feet away.

  It felt close enough almost to touch.

  The Nyenchen Tanglha Mountains were so remote that there was no official agreement as to how far the range extended. But what the maps could agree on was the highest peak – Mount Nyenchen Tanglha itself, at 7,162 metres. Plus there were some 7,080 glaciers, covering 10,700 square kilometres of terrain.

  In short, a lot of snow and ice.

  Snow and ice: there was a big difference between the two as far as this insertion was concerned. Tonight they needed to seek out just the right kind of snow.

  Jaeger had picked the spot off a satellite photo, with the help of some of Brooks’s finest meteorological experts. As he crouched at the open ramp, waiting for the loadie to give them the go-go-go, he prayed that he’d got it right.

  The risks in what they were about to attempt were legion. Only Raff and Jaeger had ever made such a drop before, and then only during a series of highly experimental SAS arctic warfare exercises.

  The loadie flicked two fingers in front of each of their faces. Two minutes to go. He was fastened to the Antonov’s side with a thick canvas strap, just in case anyone lost it at the last moment and tried to drag him with them.

  ‘One minute!’ he yelled.

  Jaeger bunched closer to the pulk and the steel drop containers, which were perched on the open ramp. He shook out the tension in his arms and shoulders, stamped his feet and beat his hands together. He needed maximum flexibility in his limbs for what was coming.

  ‘Thirty seconds!’ yelled the loadie.

  Jaeger’s eyes were glued to the jump light, which was set to one side of the ramp. Moments later it changed from red to green. This was it: show time.

  He dropped his shoulder and drove the pulk off the end of the ramp and into the open void, as to either side of him Alonzo and Raff shoved out the steel containers.

  For the briefest of instants he was aware of the objects silhouetted against the gleam of the snow, and then he followed in their wake, leaping off the ramp. As he tumbled into thin air, a part of his brain was yelling at him to pull his chute, even though he knew he didn’t have one.

  He felt himself buffeted by the slipstream as he fought to maintain a crouched position, legs pulled up beneath him and locked there with his arms. It was the kind of poise you’d adopt to bomb your mates in a swimming pool. By trial and error it had also proved to be the best kind of body stance for what was coming.

  Jaeger had just the briefest of instants to wonder what madness had possessed him to jump when his feet hit the snowdrift. The impact was surprisingly soft and silent, and moments later sixty-five kilos of Will Jaeger had ploughed deep into the spongy white mass, disappearing completely from view.

  He lay on his back in a foetal position and gazed at the heavens above him. It felt like something out of a Tom and Jerry cartoon: he could see the shape his falling body had cut through the snow’s surface, etched against the stars and the moon.

  Jumping into snowdrifts: only the Brits could have dreamt up such an insane means to deploy into hostile territory. Yet tonight, for Jaeger at least, it seemed to have worked just fine. He’d made a near perfect landing in soft snow and was unhurt.

  The boffins had assured him that on this flat, open, windswept plateau on the northern scarp of the mountains, the drifts would likely be a good eighteen feet thick.

  Jaeger figured he’d sunk ten feet into this one.

  The challenge now was to get out again.

  52

  Jaeger took a few seconds to calm his heartbeat, his breath pooling in the human-shaped snow hole like some ghostly mist. It was so cold he could feel his breath freezing in his nostrils.

  Above the echoing silence, he could hear the droning of the Antonov as it did an about-turn. Moments later, its ghostly form flashed past overhead. Had Jaeger imagined it, or had the pilot given them a momentary wing wobble to salute their insertion? No doubt about it, the crew of the Antonov had been a class act.

  Now to extricate himself from this snowy embrace. No time to delay, he reminded himself: the fate of the world was hanging in the balance here. Failure wasn’t an option, the price of screwing up an unthinkable one. They needed to get moving.

  He tore off his overmitts, placing his bergen beneath him to form a solid platform, and clambered to his feet. He pulled a length of paracord from his pocket and tied one end onto the pack’s top strap. Then he tied the other end around his waist and groped for the sky. He was just tall enough for his fingertips to emerge above the surface.

  He used his mitts to pat down the snow. He kept doing so until he figured he’d built up a firm enough platform. Then, using his hands to pull himself upwards and his boots to kick holes into the wall of snow, he wormed his way up and out, emerging like a caterpillar on his belly. That done, he turned and dragged his bergen out by its leash.

  He took a moment to survey the scene.

  Utterly breathtaking.

  The snowfields rolled away on all sides like some gently undulating frozen sea. There wasn’t so much as the blink of a light or any other sign of human habitation. Jaeger felt alone on the roof of the world.

  On one side the range of peaks reared into the heavens, ice-bound and severe. He was thankful they didn’t have to cross those. The Antonov had flown around them, saving the team the trouble. From their landing spot, it should be all downhill to the target.

  Just then he heard a sudden sharp, pinging crack, which echoed across the snow. A glacier was on the move, ancient ice breaking under impossible pressure.

  He glanced around, searching for the others.

  No sign of them anywhere.

  Likewise, the pulk and the drop containers had disappeared from view. On balance, he figured his team had a greater chance of extricating themselves from the snow’s clutches than did the sled or the heavy para-tubes. There was no telling how deep those had penetrated, though finding them should be fairly straightforward. He figured he’d jumped around three seconds after they’d been shoved out. At the speed the Antonov had been flying, they should be no more than fifty feet away.

  He retraced the aircraft’s path, moving due south. It was easy enough to do so: by turning to face the Nyenchen Tanglha Mountains, which rose before him like a giant frozen wall, he was by default heading south.

  The first hole he found was made by the pulk. Lighter than the containers, it had drifted further, being thrown forward by the Antonov’s momentum. It had dropped rear first, upending itself in the snow. After a few seconds’ tugging back and forth, Jaeger freed and righted it. Now to find the drop containers and load up the heavier cargo.

  As he searched, he heard a figure struggling through the snow. It was Raff. The big Maori was a good twenty kilos heavier than Jaeger, and as a result with each footstep he sank further into the soft drifts.

  Raff had been less than enamoured with Jaeger’s proposed insertion technique. He’d grown up on New Zealand’s North Island, which had a warmer climate than its southern neighbour. With its pristine white beaches, parts of it were semi-tropical. As a result, Raff hated snow, ice and everything associated with the cold.