Bear Grylls: The Hunt (Will Jaeger Book 3) Page 5

  At which point Erich Isselhorst’s house – and the man himself – was no more.

  10

  Jaeger leant back with his feet up on the bed. The Zum Turken hotel was equipped with fine turn-of-the-century furniture. On the far side of the room was a polished oak coffin chest: literally where a coffin would lie in the family home prior to burial.

  He hoped it wasn’t some kind of prophecy for how the next few minutes might go as he called his wife.

  He knew it wasn’t Ruth’s fault. He knew that it was all due to the years of abuse she’d suffered. But Jaeger was no saint. Try as he might, he couldn’t keep taking the punishment; turning the other cheek. There would come a time when he would just want out.

  Either the past was the past and they could put it all behind them, or he was done. He had longed for his wife to come back to him; the woman he’d married. But maybe they were beyond that now.

  He remembered what had first drawn him to her. She was utterly arresting, with her raven hair and emerald-green eyes. She had the fiery temper bequeathed by her Irish ancestry, not to mention the typical wicked Irish sense of humour.

  In short, she had been beautiful, sexy, smart and invariably the centre of attention at any social gathering. Indeed, he’d met her at a friend’s party where she was holding court – not that he’d always warmed to the company she tended to keep.

  A diehard environmentalist, Ruth had surrounded herself with the kind of crusty Greenpeace crowd that didn’t always sit well with Jaeger and his friends. Elite soldiers and the tree-hugging brigade – they weren’t natural soulmates.

  Jaeger was a bit of an exception, of course. He’d always been drawn to the wilderness and nature. In fact, he shared some of Ruth’s fiercest passions. And he guessed that was what had pulled them together.

  At first, she’d hated him. Railed against his macho ways. Or at least she’d presumed he had to be the macho type, being a member of the SAS. Then fate had thrown them together. Ruth was paying a visit to a rural school in Devon to give them a talk about ‘going green’. Jaeger had offered to accompany her. His excuse was that he had to see some mates at the Commando Training Centre in Lympstone, and she was driving most of the way there. In truth, he’d just wanted to spend some time in her company, to see if he could break through her beautiful but frosty exterior.

  He’d worked hard over that long bank holiday weekend. Typically, he’d used his cheeky, teasing humour in an effort to breach her defences. And finally it had worked. On the way back to London, they’d stopped at her parents’ country home, and they’d ended up sharing the spare bedroom.

  Officially, Jaeger had slept on her parents’ fold-down sofa bed.

  In reality, their night of passion had been all-consuming.

  They say opposites attract. That night was the proof of it.

  But now – where had all of that gone? Where had the love gone? When exactly had the incredible passion and joy in each other withered and died?

  Jaeger just didn’t know. All he was sure of was that he was at the end of his tether. She was the mother of his son. He feared that was the only reason they were staying together these days, and it just wasn’t enough.

  He steeled himself, grabbed his cell phone and dialled. It was late in the evening and typically the call went to voicemail. She seemed to spend so much of her time sleeping. Maybe it was the drugs the clinic prescribed to help with the trauma.

  ‘Ruth, it’s me. Uncle Joe and I have decided to extend our stay. There’s a few things we’d like to see. I’ll be back a day or two later than scheduled – Thursday instead of Tuesday. If it’s an issue, maybe you can call Jennie and get her to pick you up. Either way, let me know.’

  He paused uncomfortably. ‘Cheers for now.’

  That pretty much summed things up. He couldn’t even bring himself to sign off with their signature ‘Love you.’ He felt plagued by guilt. And mostly because he knew in his heart that he was falling for another woman.

  Ruth suspected. Lord only knew how. Call it feminine instinct. Sixth sense.

  Jaeger placed the phone by his bed and went to wash. They had an early start and he would be doing all the driving. He needed a good night’s rest.

  From the bathroom he heard his phone trilling. He went and checked the caller ID. It was Ruth. Well, that was an improvement. At least she’d bothered to return his call. A rarity these days.

  ‘Ruthie, how are you?’ he answered.

  ‘Alive,’ she said. Not even a hello. Her tone distant, unreachable, as it always seemed to be these days.

  ‘I’ve been talking with Joe,’ Jaeger explained, ‘and we’ve decided to go visit some newly unearthed tunnels. Some kind of secret Nazi super-weapon facility.’

  There was a long-drawn-out silence that he sensed was fraught with emotion.

  ‘I could do with you here.’ Ruth’s voice sounded pained, as if she was in a really bad place. ‘Here with me now, not off on some crazy search . . .’

  Jaeger sighed guiltily. ‘It’s just two more days.’

  ‘I’m losing it, Will. Really losing it.’ A beat. ‘Like I said, I could really do with you here . . .’

  Jaeger fought against the temptation to give in. She could be like this – soft, distant, tantalising – then just as quickly flip into a violent mood swing and turn on him. No, he needed a few extra days’ break, and the call of the tunnels – Kammler’s secrets – was just too compelling.

  ‘It’s only two days,’ he remonstrated. ‘There’s been this new discovery. We’re so close – we might not get another chance like this.’

  ‘Off searching for a bunch of dusty Nazi memorabilia . . .’ There was an intake of breath, heavy with sadness and despair. ‘I guess that means you’ve got your priorities sorted.’ A pause. ‘Tell me, Will, when did everything between us . . . go so wrong?’

  Jaeger could hear her voice breaking. It tortured him. He ran a hand across his brow. ‘You know something, the first moment I laid eyes on you, I knew we’d fall in love. I’ve loved you ever since. But …’ He paused. ‘I just don’t know any longer.’

  ‘And you’re surprised? After all I went through. Waiting for the rescue that never came. For you.’ A beat. ‘When have you ever taken the time to really try to understand? To get to know the new me? What drives me. And what haunts me . . .’

  Her words tailed off to nothing and she started crying. Jaeger was used to the fits of chest-racking sobs. And if he were within reach, her mood turning so that her fists pounded on his chest until he was forced to physically restrain her.

  ‘People change.’ She spoke through her tears. ‘I’ve changed. You think I like the new me? I didn’t ask for this to happen.’ A beat. A surge of emotion. ‘But you, you’ve just stayed the same. The same old you.’

  It was true. Jaeger had always been constant, and in his book, constant was good. A strength. But seemingly not in hers. In Ruth’s mind, he should have changed in some indefinable way to keep in step with the new her.

  Well, where would that leave the boys? All at sea. Totally messed up.

  No. Jaeger had no doubts. He had to stay constant for Luke and Simon. He needed to. And if that meant losing Ruth … In truth, he feared he’d lost her already.

  ‘Look, we’ll talk when I get back,’ he told her. ‘Try to get some rest. It’s just two days.’

  ‘What you really mean is: take your pills,’ she sobbed. ‘Get some rest. As if that makes a blind bit of difference. I don’t need more pills.’

  ‘Look, I’ll be there Thursday,’ he told her. ‘It’s the best I can do.’

  ‘Well maybe I won’t be here by then. Maybe I’ll be gone. I get a sense that’s what you’d like me to do – disappear.’

  Jaeger was used to her outbursts by now. Her threats. Mostly they didn’t amount to anything. Mostly they were just cries for help, not that he felt he could help her much any more. She needed professional help, that much he understood.

  ‘I’ll see you Thursday,’ he repeated. ‘It’s a couple of days, that’s all.’ He ended the call.

  He was used to her unpredictability; her mood swings. But this sense of her slipping away from him still hurt. He didn’t know how to reach her any more. The woman he had once loved seemed lost to him completely, and the realisation hit him hard.

  He knew that this was Kammler’s ultimate revenge.

  11

  ‘Hello! Anyone here?’

  Jaeger’s voice echoed around the rocky hillside. No answer. If anything, the landscape here was even more rugged than that around the Berghof. He noted that he had zero mobile signal. To left and right, massive peaks towered into cloudless skies.

  He reached a roped-off area. Plastic warning tape fluttered in the breeze. There were the usual signs, in German: ‘ACHTUNG! Excavation in progress. Do not enter.’ He ducked beneath the tape and made his way towards the rock escarpment that loomed before him.

  Dense forest shielded what had to be the entrance to the caves. A path had been beaten through, kept clear by the passage of heavy boots: film people and excavators, moving in both directions.

  If he ran into a team at work, he figured he’d play the stupid Englishman: he hadn’t understood the warning signs. He doubted they’d believe him, but in his experience, Austrians tended to be endlessly polite and correct.

  Finding his way here had been easy enough: a sandy track snaked through the woodland. He’d been forced to leave his silver Range Rover Evoque several kilometres back, as a padlocked forest gate had barred the way, but the trek through the shade had proved a tonic to his soul. This was always where he was happiest. Alone, surrounded by the still quiet of spectacular wilderness. It brought back memories of his time in the Welsh mountains during SAS selection.

  The good parts, that was . . .

  He’d left Uncle Joe back in St Georgen, at the Tinschert Gasthof, a traditional establishment in the heart of town. It had turned out to be such a pleasant setting, they’d booked rooms for the night. They’d return to the Zum Turken tomorrow, and start the drive home the following morning.

  Jaeger had booked a table for two in the Tinschert’s restaurant. He’d promised to share everything with Uncle Joe over dinner, as well as to take a bunch of photographs on his smartphone.

  He pushed through the foliage and an entrance yawned before him. Correction: there were two entrances. One snaked left, the other right, and he could tell that there had been traffic through both of them.

  Jaeger paused, studying the alternatives for a good few seconds. He felt his pulse quicken. Which one to choose?

  The right-hand entrance had a heap of basic equipment piled up just inside it: shovels, pickaxes, wheelbarrows, wooden planking. The left-hand opening was clear, apart from a set of rails disappearing into the gloom. Jaeger figured the rails had to be for pushing handcarts laden with excavation debris.

  It looked as if the left-hand tunnel was the one to take.

  He removed a few items from his rucksack. He tore off hunks of Austrian sausage with his teeth, washing them down with glugs from his water bottle, and stuffing in some bread for good measure. Somehow he didn’t fancy lunching in the dark confines of the tunnel.

  Then he climbed down the crumbling earth-and-rubble bank and stepped into the shadows. He flicked on his head torch, a fine bluish light stabbing out from the Petzl’s pair of xenon bulbs, and glanced ahead, the twin beams piercing the gloom.

  What stretched before him was mind-blowing, and all the more so because he could make out a distant shaft of natural light penetrating the darkness. That slender pillar of sunlight was a good two hundred yards away, giving a sense of the awesome perspective.

  The tunnel’s profile was roughly semicircular, with the base forming the flat side. He figured the roof had to be a good fifteen metres above him, the width of similar dimensions. Gazing along the tunnel’s length, he reckoned that SS General Kammler could have driven an entire Panzer division in here with room to spare.

  What on earth had it been designed to safeguard and hide?

  Andrea had mentioned that there had been a concentration camp nearby; Mauthausen-Gusen. Some 320,000 of its inmates were said to have perished excavating this dark labyrinth, amongst other Nazi forced labour projects.

  That number had seemed inconceivable, but now Jaeger could understand why. Blasting out, digging, reinforcing, roofing and flooring this one tunnel alone would have been an utterly daunting undertaking. He could well understand how building a network of such tunnels beneath the mountain had caused so much death and suffering.

  He pushed further into the darkness, his footfalls echoing eerily in the silence and kicking up scuffs of dust. This place was oppressive. Airless. And it resonated with a dark evil.

  His sixth sense was crying out ‘danger’, but he put the feeling down to everything that had gone before; the dark legacy of this place. He had experienced this at various times in his life. Evil: hanging thick in the air like a funeral shroud.

  Here, it lingered in the dust at his feet.

  It cried out from the dank concrete walls to either side.

  It was impossible to rationalise, but it was here.

  He recognised the sensation. But all of that was in the past, he told himself. There could be no danger now.

  He stopped and listened for a moment. He was maybe fifty yards into the tunnel. He was struck by the deafening stillness of the place. Not a whisper of wind or a hint of birdsong disturbed the silence.

  From somewhere up ahead he detected the faintest noise of dripping water. Otherwise, utter deathly quiet.

  He pushed on. The floor of the tunnel was mostly clear of debris. The excavation team had done their work well. But the form of a tiny bundle drew Jaeger’s eye. It was lying at the very point where the curved side wall met the floor, lost in the shade.

  He bent to inspect it: a small heap of rags, no larger than a child’s shoe. He brushed aside the rock and dust. Something gleamed white amidst the musty grey. He recognised it instantly. A bone. A human bone. One of the metacarpals – those that formed the front of the fist; that would strike an opponent in hand-to-hand combat.

  What Jaeger was looking at here was the skeletal remains of a human hand.

  He told himself he shouldn’t be overly surprised. If 320,000 souls had died here, whoever had opened this place up would be bound to stumble upon human remains. There was something else, though: his twin xenon beams glinted upon a form half hidden, glowing in the light.

  He reached for it and brought it fully into his view. Unmistakable: a thick cloth badge displaying the distinctive silver SS runes against a plain background.

  Jaeger studied it for a second. What was an SS badge doing here, amongst the skeletal remains of those who had perished? Maybe the hand that lay here had ripped it off in a final act of defiance, before the SS soldier had killed him. Or her.

  He would never know. It was one of history’s lost moments. He got to his feet, stuffing the badge deep into his pocket.

  He pushed on for what seemed like an age. Finally, and for no discernible reason, the tunnel came to an abrupt stop. Jaeger faced a wall of concrete, which ballooned out in bulbous steps. He could climb it, but there was little point.

  As far as this tunnel went, he had reached the end of the road.

  12

  Narov had had no option but to fall back on her training.

  In a city like Dubai – a tightly packed, ultra-high-rise, high-tech 24/7 metropolis – there was pretty much nowhere to hide.

  But the Spetsnaz had a saying: Any mission, any time, any place: whatever it takes. She’d reminded herself of that as she’d steeled herself for what was coming. She had resolved to hide in plain sight, where everyone could see her.

  She’d also reminded herself of one of Will Jaeger’s maxims, one of the few sensible things he had had to say when they had operated together; when he hadn’t been teasing her or playing the fool: Fail to prepare; prepare to fail.

  She’d been scrupulous in her preparations – or at least as much as she could, given the time available. Getting hold of the fluorescent workman’s jacket and trousers hadn’t been so difficult, not for a woman of her means. It had involved a little partying, a smidgen of seduction, a dose of Rohypnol – a heavy sedation drug – and the subsequent theft of one set of workmen’s clothing.

  Routine.

  As a bonus, the high-vis clothing was emblazoned with the name of the service company – Brown, Smith & Hudson – that looked after the target building.

  The climbing gear she’d purchased in a local store. She had it slung around her person now, her high-vis suit sprouting harness and coiled ropes, plus some unusual extra pieces of kit that should come in very handy.

  To the lay observer it would all look like standard maintenance gear. With her hair bunched up under her fluorescent orange safety helmet, and her figure obscured by the bulky suit, she would appear gender-neutral; unrecognisable as female, at least from a distance.

  And she didn’t intend for anyone to get a closer look at her.

  Brown, Smith & Hudson held the contract for external maintenance for the Al Mohajir Tower. Not Dubai’s tallest by a long chalk, but still a seventy-seven-floor space-age monolith of strengthened glass and steel. Internal security was another company’s responsibility, but Narov didn’t plan to blag her way into the meeting that way.

  It was too obvious. Too many security personnel would be in place to stop her.

  Hence the pre-dawn start, and the journey she’d made in the tower’s external elevator – the one reserved for taking workmen to the higher reaches of the exterior. The code to access the elevator had been easy enough to extract from the drunken workman, especially as he’d believed that Narov was intent on getting down and dirty with him on the seventieth floor.