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

  ‘How you doing?’ Jaeger asked.

  ‘I’m alive,’ Raff growled. ‘Nothing broken.’ He glanced around at the frozen moonscape. ‘Still freezing my bollocks off, though.’

  Jaeger had just found the first para-tube. Laden with ninety kilos of kit, it had sunk deep. He nodded at the hole. ‘This’ll warm you up, mate. Get digging!’

  Raff grunted and set his massive shoulders to the task. Soon he and Jaeger had dragged the first of the tubes out of the snowdrift’s icy embrace.

  To one side, Narov and Alonzo were likewise getting busy freeing the other tube. All four of them seemed to have made the jump pretty much in one piece.

  Four: it was the magic number of UKSF patrols, the smallest unit you would regularly deploy in. In SAS parlance, four was a fire team. Four fire teams made up a troop of sixteen. Four troops made up a squadron of sixty-odd SAS blades – ‘blades’ being the term for the fighting men of the Regiment.

  As four-person teams went, this was about as good as it got, Jaeger reflected. The fire team to die for. And right now, they had the fate of the world resting on their shoulders.

  They started emptying the para-tubes, making five piles of kit: one, the largest, to be loaded onto the pulk and four of equal size to be packed into their bergens. Once the pulk was loaded, they zipped closed the waterproof cover and unfastened the tow straps.

  Raff eyed the heavy sled, which was now piled with some hundred kilos of kit. ‘I’m good to go. I’ll set the pace. At least it’ll get me bloody warm.’

  The para-tubes had held four sets of skis. Raff took one, unclipped the toe binding and slid the front of his boot in, hearing the reassuring snap as it clicked home. They were langlauf – cross-country – skis, and only the toe would be held firm. That left you free to lift your heel as you thrust forward, powering ahead.

  Skis on, Raff grabbed the pulk’s harness – like a rucksack’s shoulder strap and hip belt, but without the pack attached – and strapped himself in. He fastened the D-ring clips to the harness, then grabbed his ski poles, slipping the straps around his wrists.

  He glanced at Jaeger and nodded.

  Jaeger fought to suppress a smile. Where Raff’s braids were poking out from under his thermal ski hat, he could see they were icing up, like the frozen tentacles of some bizarre ice beast. Surely the world’s coolest hairstyle, he reflected, but not right here and now!

  ‘Okay, thirty minutes’ march, then rest,’ he announced. ‘Pulk changeover time.’ He checked his watch. ‘We’ve got six hours’ skiing ahead of us, and it’s eight until first light. We’re at serious altitude, unacclimatised and with much less O2 than we’re used to. Take it easy. No rush. Conserve yourselves for what’s ahead.’

  Grunts of acknowledgement all round.

  ‘I’ll take point,’ he continued, ‘then Narov, followed by Raff with the pulk, with Alonzo bringing up the rear. All good?’

  Silent nods.

  ‘Right, let’s go.’

  53

  They say the weather is the single greatest danger you are ever likely to encounter in the Tibetan mountains. Sure enough, this storm had blown up out of nowhere, and with zero warning.

  One moment Jaeger had been leading the march, skis sliding across a hard-packed field of snow, the heavens bright and starlit. The next, a keen, biting wind had blown up out of the west and the sky had darkened ominously.

  Tibet being twice the size of France but as barren and sparsely populated as anywhere on earth, it had proved difficult to get accurate weather forecasts. Generally, during the drier spring and summer months, you were more likely to encounter dust storms than any significant precipitation.

  Yet by the feeling of the wind as it bit into Jaeger’s face, a blast of wet and cold weather was coming.

  Almost fifty per cent of the world’s population relied on fresh water originating from Tibet’s glaciers. Jaeger had read as much in Miles’s briefings. Meltwater from the Tibetan plateau fed the rivers that watered much of China and India. When a storm hit at the kind of altitude Jaeger and his team were traversing – some 5,000 metres – it fell as snow.

  Just as it was starting to do now.

  The wind stiffened. Soon it was driving hard needles of ice into Jaeger’s exposed features. He halted, peeled off his overmitts, and rolled his ski hat down, transforming it into a white balaclava, the better to shield his face from the knife-edge blasts. The others gathered close, doing likewise.

  With each passing second, visibility was worsening, gusts howling down from the northern scarp of the mountains. Jaeger reached into his smock pocket and pulled out a pair of snow goggles. He slid them on, shielding his eyes.

  Raff pressed his balaclava-clad face close. ‘Last thing we need – a fucking storm!’ he yelled. He glanced at the mountain range. It was barely visible any more.

  ‘Got to press on,’ Jaeger yelled back. ‘We stop too long in this shit, we’re dead. Got to get lower . . .’

  His last words were torn away by the wind.

  Pulling his compass out of his pocket, he took a bearing, then signalled them all to move out.

  They ploughed on, cutting into the teeth of the storm. To Jaeger’s rear, the driving snow obliterated his tracks in seconds.

  The weather closed around them. Soon he could barely see the hand in front of his face. It was horribly disorientating. Keeping track of time was as hard as maintaining direction. Forty-mile-an-hour gusts tore into him, threatening to blast him off his feet. He dreaded to think how Alonzo, who had just taken over pulk duty, was faring.

  They were skiing through a near whiteout. The four of them closed ranks as the wind howled and screamed. The temperature had dropped to ten below, and the storm felt all-consuming. They were trapped within the belly of a raging beast.

  Jaeger didn’t doubt any more what danger they were in. This had morphed from a seek-and-destroy mission into a survival epic. They needed to find shelter. Urgently. Without it, they would perish, swallowed up by the savagery of the storm and ending up as deep-frozen corpses.

  He thought back over a vital lesson he’d been given by his mountain and arctic warfare cadre instructor. You didn’t fight the mountains – not if you wanted to survive. You had to learn to bend and flex to the vagaries of the wild.

  He tried to scan the terrain before him, but in every direction it looked the same. He struggled to see through the churning mass of white. The air was dark with angry, violent snowflakes. It felt as if he were marooned in a world formed of snow and ice.

  And already he felt frozen to the core.

  The colder he got, the slower his body and mind seemed to work. In these kinds of conditions, hypothermia killed you by stealth. The more sluggish his brain became, the less likelihood there was of ever finding a way to safety.

  He tried to get a grip. He’d been steeling himself to deploy and fight a human enemy – Kammler and his people – not a natural one. But he needed to get his head around this life-or-death challenge and focus.

  As he pushed onwards, fighting against the savage whip of the ice-laden blasts, he noticed a bank of snow rising to their left.

  As Jaeger knew well, snow was actually one of the best insulators. In the Arctic, the Inuit lived in igloos, which were basically domes made of blocks of snow.

  He stopped. The others pulled to a halt beside him, their faces encrusted with a layer of wind-blasted snow and their breath condensing as thick icicles crusted to the exterior of their balaclavas.

  He jabbed a hand towards the bank of snow.

  ‘Time to get the hell out of this wind!’ he yelled. ‘We dig, or we die.’

  54

  Jaeger dropped his bergen, sank to his hands and knees and began to burrow into the snow bank. The others joined him, and gradually the space before them took shape. In a matter of minutes, they had excavated a basic snow cave large enough for all four of them.

  They crawled in, dragging their bergens after them, and began to ready the cave to last out the storm. First they closed off the exit, so that only a hole large enough for a human torso to wriggle through remained.

  Snow is a great insulator, as long as human body warmth doesn’t melt it. Then, it becomes a sodden, freezing mess . . . and a killer. The trick is to lay down a waterproof membrane, ideally with a thermal mat on top – just as they were doing now.

  That done, each of the four rolled out their goose-down sleeping bags, ready to crawl in and thaw their freezing limbs. But as Jaeger was about to do so, he remembered the pulk. There was no telling how long the storm might last, or what thickness of snow might fall.

  In short, the pulk could be swallowed by the tempest.

  Taking Raff with him, he ventured back outside. If anything, the blizzard was worse. The wind buffeted him one way and then the other as he groped in the thick darkness for the sled. Even as his gloved hand found it, a blast of incredible force plucked him off his feet and hurled him into the darkness.

  He struggled to his knees, but the storm threw him down again. He had to reach the pulk and secure it. Without it, they were dead.

  He groped for it again, practically worming his way across the snow on his belly. His hands made contact, and he started fitting together the first of the marker poles, made of sections of a tough but lightweight aluminium.

  Blanking the pain, he slotted together the second pole and handed it to Raff, who drove both poles into the snow, knotting the pulk’s tow straps securely around them. Some five feet of tubing emerged above the ground to mark the pulk’s position. No matter what depth of snow might fall, the two marker poles should remain visible. Plus they would anchor the sled to prevent it blowing away.

  The two men crawled back exhaustedly into the cave, where Alonzo and Narov were already trussed up tight in their sleeping bags.

  Outside, the storm howled and screamed. Inside, the four figures were ensconced in a cocoon of comparative warmth and safety.

  Jaeger flicked on his head torch and eyed the others. It was a testament to their utter professionalism that the building of the snow cave had been accomplished almost without a word needing to be said. Their training, and their subsequent operational experience, spoke volumes.

  ‘Right,’ he announced, ‘we sit tight until the storm blows out.’

  By way of response, Raff held up his Nalgene water bottle, which was almost empty. ‘Got me a pee bottle.’ He slipped it inside his sleeping bag. ‘You know what temperature urine comes out at? Ninety-six degrees Fahrenheit. Keep your pee bottle close – doubles as a hot-water bottle.’

  Jaeger grimaced. ‘Too much detail.’

  Narov shifted restlessly in her sleeping bag. ‘By staying here, we risk the shipment getting there before us. The tungsten.’

  ‘We do,’ Jaeger replied. ‘But one, we’re no good to anyone dead, and that storm will kill us. Two, no aircraft is landing anywhere near here in these conditions. Trust me, if the storm’s stopped us, it’ll stop any plane.’

  ‘Tell me,’ Alonzo ventured, ‘just how goddam cold is it?’

  ‘Breathe in,’ said Jaeger, by way of answer. ‘Feel your nose hairs freezing like needles? That’s what happens when you’re below minus ten. And right now I’d say it’s way colder.’

  Alonzo glanced around their shelter. ‘Thank Christ for the snow cave. No need to keep watch, I guess?’

  ‘No one but a dead man is moving out there. Get some sleep. Everyone.’

  Pausing only to remove his boots, Jaeger crawled into his own bag. He checked his watch: 0400 hours. He’d been so focused on getting them to their target – on stopping Kammler – that he’d lost all track of time.

  Much longer and that focus would have killed them. Seeking shelter had been the only call to make, and Jaeger knew it.

  But he also knew that time was not on their side.

  55

  There was nothing overly flashy or brash about Nordhavn trawler yachts. With their smooth, clean lines, they were built for serious ocean-going journeys, and for those who liked to travel the world in no-nonsense, businesslike style. They were low-key, functional and practically unsinkable, which was the main reason why Kammler had chosen to use them.

  Steve Jones didn’t much give a damn. No sailor, all he cared about was whether this floating bomb platform would do the job they needed it to. The Nordhavn had a fridge full of beer and a gym, so he could handle it for a few days. But he’d be out of here just as soon as the present task was done.

  He leant his massive, muscled, tattooed bulk on the rail and pressed a button on the bottom left panel of the hand-held console. On a flat stretch of deck aft, the four blades of a quadcopter drone began to rotate, spinning into a blur as they spooled up to speed.

  He glanced at the figure on the bridge. ‘All clear? Nothing on the radar?’

  ‘Niet. Nothing. All clear.’

  The Russian captain was a typically dour soul who kept himself to himself. There was one upside. He was pickled in vodka most evenings, which meant that he kept his hands off Jones’s stash of chilled beers.

  Jones swept his eyes around the stretch of ocean. Calm aquamarine water stretched as far as the eye could see, empty of any other shipping. That was just as he wanted it. This far out in the Pacific, if there wasn’t another ship in range, they were as safe as houses.

  He rested his thumb on the left joystick and pushed vertically forwards. The whine of the quadcopter’s engines rose to a screaming fever pitch, and seemingly effortlessly it rose into the air. Jones kept his thumb pressed forwards as the drone climbed, bringing it up to a good hundred feet above the surface of the waves.

  Its cargo was visible now. Beneath the SUV-sized craft and gripped by four powerful calipers sat a black box not a great deal smaller than the drone itself. It was a life-size replica of the devices these airborne-delivery systems would be dropping over their targets, if today’s little experiment went to plan.

  The black box was crammed full of bricks – enough to replicate the weight of one of the devices Professor Kangjon was building. Jones didn’t like the Korean. In fact, he didn’t like anyone foreign. Or rather, anyone who wasn’t a pure-blooded Aryan, which was how he viewed himself – a prime and perfect example of the breed.

  He scrolled his thumb across the right joystick, pushing it towards the right, and sure enough the drone banked in that direction. Once he had it on the desired bearing, he flew it straight and level a good 500 feet, at which point he put it into a steep climb.

  By the time it was some 800 feet away, it had clawed to over 1,000 feet in altitude – not a great deal lower than the kind of height at which the Fat Man bomb had been detonated over Nagasaki.

  If Kammler’s plan was to work, they needed to deliver a clutch of INDs to their targets simultaneously, for maximum destructive effect. And they couldn’t just sail right up to the shoreline. For one, they’d be spotted by the plant’s security. And second, as Professor Kangjon had indicated, only by detonating the IND as an airburst right above the nuclear power plant could they achieve meltdown. So what better way to do so than by drone?

  Jones allowed the joysticks to return to their central position and the drone went into a steady hover. Perfect.

  He scanned the horizon one more time: still blissfully empty. As he turned his gaze back to the drone, he could just imagine it hovering above a power station, poised to strike. With his thumb raised over the button on the bottom of the console, he pictured the cataclysmic detonation. The resulting devastation. The human cost. The terror. He couldn’t wait, especially as it was Jaeger who would suffer the most.

  Poetic justice, as Kammler had called it.

  He punched his finger onto the button. There was a microsecond’s delay as the message flashed across the air, and then the sharp crack of an explosion at altitude. In a puff of brown smoke the drone and its cargo disintegrated, shattered brick and aircraft parts cascading down into the sea.

  Jones smiled. They were good to go.

  He pulled out a satphone from his pocket and punched speed dial.

  ‘The eagle has landed,’ he announced, without bothering to introduce himself.

  ‘And what the hell does that mean?’ the speaker on the other end snapped.

  The Eagle Has Landed was one of Jones’s all-time favourite films. In it, a crack team of German operators were sent into Britain at the height of World War II to kidnap or assassinate Winston Churchill. Pity they hadn’t succeeded, Jones reflected. It would have saved him and Kammler a whole world of trouble.

  ‘All done and dusted,’ he explained. ‘It went like fucking clockwork.’

  Kammler laughed exultantly. ‘Excellent. I knew I could count on you.’ He paused. ‘Now, your next task is one I think you will relish. Professor Kangjon: I think he may be in need of your powers of . . . persuasion.’

  Jones smiled. ‘My fucking pleasure.’

  ‘Make your way back as quickly as you can.’

  Jones confirmed that he would. He went below and headed for the Nordhavn’s gym. It was a bit cramped for a man of his size, but better than nothing, and at least it had a full-size punchbag slung from the ceiling.

  As he began his workout, fists, knees, elbows and feet smashing away in a blur, he could see in his mind’s eye the pudgy features of the North Korean professor being beaten to a pulp. The image morphed into the chief figure of hate in Jones’s life: Will Jaeger. In his mind, he was kicking Jaeger into a cowed and bloodied heap . . .

  The last time they had met, Jaeger had left him for dead, ensnared within a wild tangle of sharks. Well, as Jaeger should have learnt on SAS selection, Steve Jones didn’t give up that easily.

  Or die that easily, for that matter.