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

  The lab had few windows and it was frighteningly dark. The professor had always been afraid of the dark, ever since he was nine years old and the North Korean security police had come for his father in the middle of the night, hustling him away, never to be seen again.

  He switched on his Maglite and tried to find his way to the exit. He had only one thought now: to get the hell out of the building and save his own skin.

  On the heels of the floodwater came the assaulters.

  Jaeger thundered downslope, trying to keep one desperate eye on his wife and Peter Miles. But as he flashed through the scrub and vaulted over boulders, they were lost from view. He broke through a patch of dense cover, and spied the shattered perimeter fence lying barely a few dozen feet before him. He raced for it, Narov hot on his heels. His eyes darted right again, and he realised that Kammler and his hostages had disappeared.

  Maybe Ruth and Miles had seized their chance to escape.

  Or had they been dragged away by their captors?

  Jaeger just didn’t know.

  Right now he had to concentrate on the job in hand, which was eliminating Kammler’s gunmen. He forced himself to blank all other thoughts from his mind.

  Speed, aggression, surprise.

  Speed, aggression, surprise . . .

  71

  As Jaeger and Narov charged through the gap in the wrecked perimeter fence, they were up to their knees in swirling water. It slowed them, making them easier targets. The roaring from the ruptured pipelines masked the sound of the gunshots, but Jaeger saw the kick and spurt where the first of the rounds tore into the floodwaters.

  Narov dropped to one knee in the cover of a boulder, bringing the Dragunov to the aim. ‘Engaging! Push for the accom block! Will cover you!’

  Jaeger knew how utterly critical it was that they seized the initiative. Hit by total surprise by the avalanche of floodwater, the enemy would be shocked and in disarray. Before they had time to regroup, Jaeger and his team had to finish this.

  He powered onwards, wild bursts of gunfire chasing his heels. Via his SELEX headpiece Narov provided a quiet, steely commentary as she went about her work with the Dragunov.

  ‘Enemy down, laboratory, ground-floor window far left . . . Enemy down, laboratory . . .’

  Sprinting like a man possessed, Jaeger gained the cover of the accommodation building, his momentum making him shoulder-barge into the prefabricated wall. He felt a jolt of pain from the impact, but blanked it completely.

  ‘In place, accom block, eastern wall,’ he panted into his SELEX.

  ‘Copy,’ a voice breathed back at him. It was Raff. ‘Turbine hall clear. Going into desalination plant . . . now.’

  ‘Copy,’ Jaeger confirmed.

  ‘Coming in to join you,’ Narov radioed Jaeger.

  ‘Move on my fire!’ he confirmed.

  In his present position, he was pressed against the eastern wall of the accommodation block. Like this, he was sheltered from the fire coming from the direction of the laboratory, set some four hundred feet up the valley.

  Four hundred feet was approaching the limit of the Diemaco’s effective range, but not so Jaeger’s grenade-launcher. As he’d learnt on ops in Afghanistan, the 40mm fragmentation grenade was a perfect anti-personnel weapon in such terrain. Basically, the hard valley floor would do little to soak up the blast, shrapnel scything out and ricocheting in all directions.

  The grenade had a lethal radius of over thirty feet: anything caught within that distance was dead. It had a danger radius of over four times that: if you were within 120 feet of the blast, you could suffer serious injury. As a result, you didn’t need pinpoint accuracy; you just needed to lob a round in the general direction of the bad guys.

  With practised hands, Jaeger flicked a lever to open the M203’s breech, slotted in the snub-nosed grenade and slid back the launch tube. He flicked up the M203’s sight, which sat atop the weapon like a tiny ladder and allowed grenades to be fired accurately over anything up to 500 feet.

  He was good to go.

  He braced himself, eased one foot and his shoulder around the wall of the accommodation block and took aim. As he did so, a burst of incoming fire kicked up the dirt just a little low and to his front. Kammler’s gunmen must have seen where he’d gone to ground and were waiting for him to show.

  As Jaeger sighted on their muzzle flashes – his weapon held at a twenty-degree angle to lob the grenade – the enemy gunmen walked their rounds ever closer to his position, using their bullet strikes to adjust and raise their aim.

  Just as they seemed poised to nail him, the incoming fire ceased abruptly. Narov’s voice crackled through the SELEX: ‘Enemy down, laboratory, central window . . .’

  That’s my girl, Jaeger told himself.

  He squeezed the M203’s trigger, feeling the reassuring kickback of the weapon firing. The half-kilo snub-nosed projectile left the muzzle at 250 feet per second. He counted out two seconds in his head, knowing that Narov would have treated the crump of his opening fire as her signal to move.

  The grenade struck, the dirty-white plume of its explosion spreading out low to the ground, then punching a fist of smoke into the air. Jaeger ducked back into cover, slotted in another round, reached around the corner and fired again.

  Within ten seconds, he’d peppered the eastern flank of Kammler’s laboratory with a scything wave of shrapnel. But even as he unleashed the fourth of his twelve 40mm rounds, he feared that his wife was very likely somewhere in that building.

  Jaeger forced such fears from his mind, otherwise they’d push him to the edge, which was just what Kammler wanted. He had to reason Kammler would try to keep her out of the line of fire. She was his main bargaining chip, and it would do him little good to get her killed.

  Narov dashed into the cover of the wall beside him. They paused for a few seconds to catch their breath. To gain entry into the accommodation block, they’d have to move around the southern wall where the deluge had hit, and go in through a broken doorway.

  And that was going to expose them to the full brunt of the enemy’s fire.

  72

  There was a burst of fire from barely fifty yards away: the distinctive crack-crack-crack of an assault rifle unleashing an aimed burst. Moments later, Jaeger heard Raff’s voice come up over the SELEX.

  ‘Desalination plant clear. Five enemy accounted for. Covering your move forward.’

  ‘Roger. Out.’

  Jaeger rested against the wall as he ratcheted a fresh 40mm grenade into the launcher’s breech. Beside him, Narov threw the Dragunov onto her back with its sling, and drew her pistol. Like Jaeger’s it was a Sig Sauer P228, only Narov had lucked out: she’d managed to get one with an extended twenty-round magazine.

  Somewhere on her person she’d have her diminutive Beretta 92FS tucked away. Narov always carried a backup to her backup weapon. Which reminded Jaeger: he still had Vladimir Ustanov’s QSZ-92 stuffed in the rear of his waistband.

  Narov’s P228 was as good a weapon as any for clearing the accommodation block, and she certainly wouldn’t be using her sniper rifle. It was far too long and unwieldy for the rapid-fire close-quarter-battle environment they were about to step into.

  Jaeger had a sneaking suspicion that Kammler had pulled most of his gunmen back to defend the laboratory. He’d counted two dozen earlier, during Kammler’s piece of theatre with the kneeling hostages. That number, added to the dozen skiers that Jaeger and his team had eliminated earlier, made thirty-six in all.

  He doubted whether Kammler’s original guard force would have numbered a great deal more. But presumption was the mother of all fuck-ups; they needed to clear every building to be absolutely certain, and quickly. Even now, desperate and under attack, Kammler could be about to trigger those bombs that had been delivered to target.

  He eyed Narov. ‘On my signal, join me at the doorway. We go in as one.’

  Narov nodded her silent assent. She stuffed the P228 barrel-first down the front of her combats and slid the Dragunov into her shoulder again. Then she leant out from behind the wall, sweeping the terrain around the laboratory for targets.

  As she unleashed her first round, Jaeger broke cover.

  ‘Moving now!’ he yelled into his SELEX.

  He sensed rather than heard the bursts of grenade fire, as Alonzo and Raff unleashed 40mm rounds from the cover of the desalination plant. He sprinted for all he was worth, knowing he was exposed to every gunman positioned at the laboratory. Sure enough, and despite the suppressing fire, rounds slammed into the masonry either side of him.

  Change of plan, Jaeger told himself as a caved-in window opened on his right shoulder. He dived through it, landing on his front in a pool of filthy water and rolling once to break his fall. Moments later, he was on his feet in a crouch, soaking wet, his Diemaco levelled and doing a rapid sweep of the room.

  It was empty.

  He had intended to wait for Narov at the building’s shattered doorway. It was standard operating procedure to clear a building in pairs, so you could watch each other’s back. But the fire had been too intense, and he needed to warn her.

  ‘Gone through first window on right,’ he radioed.

  ‘Seen.’

  As he crouched at the window to give covering fire for Narov, Jaeger noted that his assault rifle was spattered with grime from where he’d landed in the water and dirt. He’d need to clean it, for sand and grit could seize up a weapon’s working parts. But no time for that now.

  Seconds later, Narov dived through the shattered window. Jaeger turned away, and they both flicked on the flashlights attached to their weapons. It would only get darker the further into the building they went.

  Wordlessly they moved across to the doorway leading out of the room, gravel and debris crunching underfoot, water sloshing around their ankles. Everywhere there was sodden furniture turned on its side, or rammed against the walls by the sheer force of the flood.

  Jaeger clambered over a soaking mattress jammed up against the doorway. The door itself had been forced open and was lying drunkenly, half ripped from its hinges. He stepped around it into the corridor, pivoting left, his P228 swinging into the aim. At the same instant Narov took up a mirror position behind him, so they were back to back, covering either direction.

  They began to move down the eerie, echoing space, checking the rooms on either side. Doors had been ripped open by the floodwater, leaving the place littered with wreckage and seemingly deserted.

  They reached the far end of the corridor, where a flight of metal steps led up to a second floor. Jaeger paused, moving to one side of the final door before the stairs. This one was covered with steel sheeting, and despite the floodwaters, it remained intact. Narov flattened herself against the doorway’s other side.

  Reaching around, Jaeger tried the handle. Once. Twice. It didn’t budge. Firmly locked. There was no point trying to kick it in. This wasn’t the movies. He was more likely to break a leg or injure himself than bust through a steel door.

  ‘Blowing the lock,’ he mouthed at Narov.

  73

  Standing to one side, in case whoever was behind the door tried to open fire, Jaeger shrugged off his pack and readied a charge of PE4. Contrary to popular myth, trying to shoot open a lock was not a smart idea, especially when using a handgun or an assault rifle.

  As soon as you opened fire, those on the other side of the doorway would know you were coming. Nothing like advertising your intentions. And even if you did manage to shoot up the lock, more often than not you’d jam the working parts, fragments of shattered bullet lodging in the lock’s innards. Plus rounds hitting a steel lock at close quarters would spit out chunks of shrapnel, threatening to injure the shooter.

  Jaeger had learnt that much on day one of SAS room-clearance drills. A metal-reinforced door such as this would require a special ‘thread-cutter’ shotgun, which fired a solid twelve-bore slug. And right now, they didn’t have any such weapon to hand.

  It was just as easy to blow it using a shaped charge of PE4.

  Jaeger moulded the explosives to where the door’s hinges met the frame. The detonation would cut them in two, as well as blast the wood apart. The combined effect should tear the door outwards, its very weight ripping it free.

  Charges set, he triggered the thirty-second fuse, and he and Narov took cover in an adjacent room. There was a sharp explosion, followed by a thick cloud of smoke and debris billowing along the corridor. They emerged from cover to find the door hanging at a crazy angle, the lock struggling in vain to keep it in position.

  Even as they approached, weapons in the aim, the lock gave way and the door tumbled outwards with an almighty crash. Jaeger was the first through, Diemaco levelled and flashlight piercing the smoke-filled interior.

  The first thing that struck him was the faces: row upon row, eyes wide with terror. Desperate voices were crying out frantically in what Jaeger figured had to be Chinese. His flashlight flitted over the crouched figures, hands raised and panic etched across their features.

  It was instantly clear that this sad mass of humanity were workers, not soldiers.

  They were dressed in ragged, stained boiler suits, and looked underfed and in terrible condition. Jaeger was suddenly aware of the stench in the room. It reeked of unwashed bodies. Sickness. Fear. There were dirty mattresses lying against one wall, plus a battered toilet bucket.

  What the hell had Kammler been running here? Some kind of slave camp?

  ‘Any of you speak English?’ he barked. ‘English?’

  ‘Me,’ a nervous figure volunteered from the darkness.

  Jaeger’s eyes came to rest upon the man who had spoken. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘Chinese workers. Locked up. To stop escape.’ The speaker gestured at the others. ‘We all try escape. Boss catch us and lock us here. He make us work or we die. Underground. Many people die.’

  ‘What were you doing underground?’

  ‘Making chamber. Tunnel. On far side of laboratory.’

  Jaeger’s mind flashed back to the St Georgen tunnel complex. Hundreds of thousands had died constructing the Nazi-era labyrinth that honeycombed the Austrian mountains. It looked as if Kammler had been doing something similar here.

  The question was, why?

  Jaeger sank to his haunches, getting eye to eye with the speaker. The haunted look in the man’s eyes spoke volumes.

  ‘Why a chamber? What sort of tunnel?’ he pressed.

  ‘Is shelter. This place attacked, boss stays underground; boss stays safe. Is shelter. And – how you say? Headquarter.’ The speaker pointed to himself. ‘Hing made foreman. All shot if try to escape. Boss is a madman. Hing and his team prisoners. Those the rules.’

  Jaeger straightened up. ‘Well they’re not the rules any more. You’re free now. All of you. Go out to the right and down towards the river. Wait there until we’re done, okay.’

  Jaeger explained that once he and his team had cleared the entire plant, they’d come back and furnish whatever help they could. For now, though, the workers had to lie low at the riverside.

  He paused. ‘But not you, Hing. You’re coming with us.’

  74

  So far Jaeger and his team had been clearing lightly defended buildings; ones that Kammler could afford to let fall. But at the laboratory complex they would be assaulting a well-defended target. And there, Jaeger didn’t doubt that Kammler’s gunmen would have been ordered to make a last stand.

  He sank back into the cover provided by the thick stone walls of the turbine hall. He, Narov and Hing – the Chinese worker-slave – had joined Raff and Alonzo in preparation for the final assault, though who exactly it would prove final for, he dreaded to think.

  The accommodation block had been deserted apart from that roomful of workers. Anyone else with any sense had long fled. Jaeger and Narov had learnt from Hing several key things. One, that he had fired a weapon when he had served in the PLA, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. And two, that he hated Kammler almost as much as they did.

  Having been compelled by Jaeger to join them, Hing argued that because he hated Kammler so much and could operate a rifle, it made him useful. More to the point, he knew his way around the plant intimately. It made sense to Jaeger, and so Hing had been included as the fifth member of their team.

  Raff and Alonzo had scored six definite kills, plus however many of the enemy their grenade fire might have accounted for. But no one was kidding themselves that this was going to be easy. Time and experience had taught Jaeger the savagery of a cornered dog.

  Ahead of them lay an uphill dash across 250 feet of largely open terrain. All around the laboratory the vegetation and natural cover had been bulldozed clear. Any way you tried to approach it, you were an easy target.

  The plan was to keep it simple-stupid. One pair would rush the target, as the others lobbed 40mm grenades into it, in an effort to keep the enemy’s heads down. That pair would in turn provide cover for the others to follow, with Hing bringing up the rear.

  But they were running short of grenades, and Jaeger could sense the initiative turning in the enemy’s favour. If he’d been Kammler, he’d have done exactly as he had done: drawing his main force back to the lab and waiting for the enemy to come.

  To all sides it was a kill zone.

  He eyed the others. ‘You ready?’

  By way of answer, there was the double clatch-clatch of Raff and Alonzo ratcheting grenades into their launchers. The steely look in their eyes spoke volumes. If Jaeger had to attempt such a suicide run, there was no one better to watch his back. And Narov’s.

  He turned to her. ‘Toss for who goes first?’

  Narov flashed a thin smile. ‘I am the lady. You should allow me the honour.’