Bear Grylls: The Hunt (Will Jaeger Book 3) Page 9

  ‘Please do. It’s been bugging me. Feeling kind of guilty.’

  A steely look came into Miles’s eyes. ‘Well don’t. What we’re about here – trust me, it’s far bigger than whatever happened at St Georgen.’

  Silver-haired, blue-eyed and with a neatly trimmed beard, Miles had to be in his late seventies. His air of calm compassion masked an iron will and an unshakeable determination to do the right thing. A young Jewish boy during the war, he’d been saved from the Nazi death camps at the eleventh hour and brought to Britain, though his family had all perished in the camps. The experience of losing a family had been his bond with Jaeger. With his quietly spoken transatlantic accent, Miles was a citizen of the world and Jaeger trusted him absolutely.

  ‘We can hoover up whatever media coverage there is,’ the older man continued. ‘If Kammler is alive, we have to find him . . .’

  He left the rest unsaid. For a moment, a dark quiet settled over the room.

  They all knew what such a man was capable of.

  21

  Unexpectedly, unbidden, a voice shattered the silence of the bunker.

  ‘Trust me – Kammler is alive.’

  It had come from the entranceway, and to Jaeger it was immediately and powerfully familiar. It sent a shiver – and not an entirely unpleasant one – up his spine.

  He whipped around. There, framed in the doorway, was an unmistakable figure: Irina Narov. How long she’d been standing there, he wasn’t certain.

  ‘Narov!’ he exclaimed.

  By way of answer, she stalked over to where Miles was standing and tossed something onto the table. It looked to Jaeger like a memory card.

  ‘Play it.’

  Miles couldn’t suppress a smile. ‘Hello, Irina, nice to see you again, and welcome back.’

  Narov turned away without a word. She was limping slightly, dragging her right leg. As she went to take a seat, her gaze swept across Jaeger and Raff, her eyes blazing. ‘Pay attention, you two. This very nearly cost me my life.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Raff muttered, ‘talk about making an entrance.’

  Miles picked up the memory card. ‘Perhaps you wouldn’t mind giving us a little background. An idea maybe of where you’ve been and what you’ve been up to these past few weeks. Context – so we can better appreciate whatever may be on this.’

  ‘Just play it.’

  Miles rolled his eyes. Irina clearly was not in a talkative mood.

  He slotted the card into the laptop, clicked his mouse a few times, and the images began to play. The four men sat through the surveillance footage that Narov had filmed at the Al Mohajir Tower. As home movies went, there was none better.

  To top it all, when Narov had dragged the optical cord from the cubicle wall and fled, she’d left the camera running. The grand finale showed her diving through the window amidst a hail of bullets, and her subsequent freefall, followed by her pulling the chute and floating free over the Dubai skyline.

  At which stage she urged Miles to kill the video. ‘The rest is boring. Just my escape.’

  Miles did as she asked.

  Irina Narov, Jaeger reflected. What was there to say, other than: What in the name of God have you been up to these past few days? And how on earth did you get hold of that footage? But he’d leave it to Miles to do the cross-examination. He’d learnt the hard way how combative Narov could be.

  And as Jaeger was acutely aware, the two of them had a certain . . . history of recent months, which could make matters somewhat delicate. When it came to matters of the heart, Irina Narov could be particularly spiky.

  Miles probed gently. Bit by bit he got the basic story out of her. Her stalking Isselhorst. The interrogation. The revelations about Hitler’s royalties. Staking out the Dubai meeting. What she had discovered.

  A few details were glossed over: the gas-fuelled explosion at Isselhorst’s house being one. Occasionally Narov figured it was just better for her boss not to know. If he found out, she could always own up to it then. They were all volunteers. Freelancers. It was a question of seeking forgiveness, not permission.

  When she had finished, Jaeger couldn’t resist popping the one question. ‘What got you thinking about Hitler’s royalties? I mean, what kind of mind asks: I wonder who earns the revenues from Mein Kampf? Just came to you over your cornflakes?’

  Narov glared. Jaeger’s teasing was in part how he’d broken down her defences the first time. How he had melted her icy exterior. Well, she wasn’t about to fall for it again.

  ‘I was in Turkey. A holiday. I read a newspaper. Mein Kampf had topped the best-seller list. Again. A summer blockbuster. So naturally I wondered who was getting the revenues. As anyone would.’ She stared at Jaeger hard. ‘Anyone with half a brain, that is.’

  Jaeger smiled. ‘So in between ordering a double-choc Cornetto and lathering on the suncream, you thought you’d go find out?’

  Narov turned to Miles. ‘Do I really have to listen to this Schwachkopf?’

  Jaeger smiled. Schwachkopf. German for dimwit or knucklehead. Narov’s favourite insult, for him especially.

  It felt great to have her back.

  ‘I think we’re all a little curious,’ Miles ventured. ‘As Einstein once said: “Imagination is more important than knowledge, for knowledge is limited, while imagination embraces the entire world.” And I have to say, Irina, your mind – your imagination – is perhaps a little more all-encompassing than most. We’re just trying to understand, so we can better assess our next moves.’

  ‘Very well. I called the publisher.’ Narov turned on Jaeger. ‘And yes, before you ask, it was from my hotel, poolside. The man was very guarded. It turned out someone else had been making similar enquiries. An investigative journalist. A German. He had ended up very dead.

  ‘A certain figure had recently laid claim to Hitler’s entire literary estate,’ Narov continued, ‘including all the Führer’s back-earnings. Any idea how much money we are talking about? Millions of dollars. I found out who the lawyer was: Erich Isselhorst. The rest you know.’

  Miles rubbed his chin pensively. ‘Well, not exactly. I mean, how does someone claiming Hitler’s royalties lead you to suspect it was Hank Kammler? I for one don’t get it.’

  ‘Me too,’ Raff growled. ‘You lost me.’

  Narov sighed. ‘The journalist who was killed, he had also been tortured. Someone had carved an image into his living flesh. A Reichsadler . . .’

  Jaeger stiffened. Mention of the Reichsadler brought back dark memories of Andy Smith, who along with Raff had been Jaeger’s closest buddy in the SAS. Smith had been murdered by Kammler’s people. He’d been discovered with that stylised eagle symbol so resonant of the evil of the Reich carved into his back.

  Jaeger had vowed to avenge his death. He’d thought he’d done so. But if Kammler was still alive, not to mention Jones, then he hadn’t even got close.

  ‘I understand,’ Miles said quietly. He was silent for a moment. ‘One last question, and then I think perhaps we should try to determine what all of this might mean. Why didn’t you share this with us earlier? Weeks back. Why the need to go off radar? Solo?’

  Narov raised her chin defiantly. ‘I never believed Kammler was dead. You all did. All too easily. So the CIA had a DNA sample. So what? We have been misled before. People like Kammler do not die so easily.’ A pause. ‘You can’t deny it any more: Kammler is alive. Which means we need to go after him.’

  Jaeger snorted. ‘And you never thought to breathe a word about your suspicions?’

  ‘What would have been the point? You all wanted to believe he was dead. The threat extinguished.’ She eyed him dismissively. ‘Plus you had other things on your mind.’

  In a sense, Narov was right. For three long years Jaeger had been missing his wife and child. When he’d got them back, he’d focused on them to the exclusion of everything else, leaving it to others to hunt Kammler. After all, the entire CIA and the world’s militaries had been involved by then.

  When Jaeger had been told they’d got him, he’d believed them. It took a mind like Narov’s never to give credit to anything, not unless she’d seen it with her own eyes.

  ‘One more question.’ It was Raff. ‘That was Kammler’s voice all right. I’d never forget it. But he looks different. Like the face doesn’t fit the voice any more.’

  Miles pulled up an image from Narov’s surveillance footage and zoomed in on Kammler’s features. ‘Look closely. His face shows all the signs of having had plastic surgery. It’s something that wasn’t unknown during the war. Allied agents known to the Gestapo went under the knife, and they did the same on their side.’

  Jaeger stared at the image frozen on the screen. ‘One thing’s for sure: he’s learnt well from his Nazi forefathers.’

  22

  They’d eaten a rushed lunch huddled round a couple of laptops, digging up the basics on the St Georgen murder investigation. One point jumped out from all the press and police reports: the investigating team had penetrated far into the tunnels, but had eventually been forced to turn back.

  The deeper they had gone, the higher the level of radiation they’d detected.

  ‘Haigerloch,’ Uncle Joe ventured. ‘The missing uranium. It has to be.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Miles agreed.

  ‘Fancy enlightening us?’ Jaeger prompted.

  ‘Haigerloch, a pretty village in southern Germany,’ Miles explained. ‘Towards the end of the war, the Nazis moved their top nuclear scientists – the Uranverein; the Uranium Club – plus their technology, out of Berlin, and secreted it in caves beneath Haigerloch’s pretty baroque church.

  ‘They presumed, rightly, that Allied warplanes would never venture there,’ he continued, ‘and even if they did, all they’d see was a quaint church. As matters transpired, American forces overran Haigerloch before the reactor could breed enough raw material to build a bomb. Or so everyone thought.’

  ‘US forces dismantled the reactor. They recovered 664 cubes of uranium, forming the core. Each cube weighed roughly half a kilo, so 332 kilos all told. But Nazi records showed that one and a half tonnes of uranium had been trucked out of Berlin, which left over a tonne unaccounted for. The suspicion was that the Reich had established a second, ultra-secret reactor.’

  ‘So that’s why Jones and his gang went to St Georgen?’ Jaeger queried. ‘That’s what’s been hidden there all these years? A pile of uranium ore?’

  ‘It would make a certain degree of sense, yes.’

  ‘But what can they do with it?’ Jaeger probed. ‘Practically speaking?’

  ‘Yeah, like does it spell kaboom?’ Raff added.

  ‘Nuclear reactors can breed the raw material for an atomic bomb,’ Miles confirmed. ‘But it all depends how enriched the uranium is. To give you a sense of the amounts involved, Little Boy was packed with sixty-four kilos of highly enriched uranium when it was detonated over Hiroshima.’

  Jaeger’s face darkened. ‘So you’re saying they’ve got enough to build several bombs? Potentially.’

  Miles shrugged. ‘Not necessarily. To do that, you’d have to master hugely complex technology.’ He flashed a look at Jaeger. ‘But there is another possibility . . .’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘I’m no expert,’ Miles continued, ‘but constructing an IND is relatively easy. In fact the main challenge is getting your hands on enough highly enriched uranium. Once you’ve done that, it’s fairly straightforward.’

  ‘IND?’

  ‘Improvised nuclear device. Basically, a modern nuclear weapon achieves ninety per cent efficiency in terms of fission – so turning uranium into an unimaginably powerful explosion. It does so by firing a hollow tube of uranium onto an interlocking cylinder, at tremendous speed. When they impact, fission occurs . . . and kaboom, as Raff would say.’

  ‘And an IND?’

  ‘Far cruder. In essence, you clobber two lumps of uranium together, achieving around ten per cent efficiency. But it’s still a staggeringly powerful weapon. To give you a sense of it, an IND fitted with twenty kilos of highly enriched uranium would create a blast equal to one thousand tonnes of high explosives.’

  ‘Plus the radiation poisoning and contamination,’ Narov added.

  ‘Yes. Plus that.’

  ‘So practically speaking, what would a twenty-kilo IND achieve in terms of destruction?’

  Miles eyed Jaeger. ‘If you detonated it in the City of London, it would flatten the entire Square Mile.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Indeed. There’s one other advantage to an IND. Despite its name, Little Boy was a big device, weighing in at around 4,500 kilos. An IND is a fraction of that size and weight.’

  Jaeger’s face hardened. ‘Which makes it the perfect weapon for a terrorist outfit . . . or a madman like Kammler.’ It was stating the obvious, but it needed to be said.

  ‘It does.’ Miles paused for a second, massaging the bridge of his nose. ‘And that brings me to why I wanted to call you all here. How many of you have heard of Moldova?’

  ‘Moldova?’ Raff snorted. ‘Heard a joke about it once. Why do Moldovan football fans need two seats? One to sit on and one to throw when the fighting starts.’

  There was a ripple of laughter. It was one of the things that Jaeger loved about Raff: no matter how dire a situation, he could always find humour in it. It was so often humour that carried them through.

  Typically, Narov had failed to crack the barest hint of a smile. Humour was rarely her strong point.

  ‘Moldova’s an impoverished, chaotic, lawless mess of a former Soviet state,’ Miles continued, ‘not to mention the world’s foremost black market for uranium. There have been several attempts to flog former Soviet stocks. It culminated in an effort to sell forty kilos to ISIS. Note the amount: more than enough to build an IND.’

  ‘Who stopped it? I presume it was stopped?’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘As it happens, our old friend Daniel Brooks. The CIA infiltrated an agent into the network, and when the money was handed over, the bad guys were busted. But this year the Moldovan mafia moved on to a new deal, this one involving a mystery client. We know his code name only: Grey Wolf.’

  The room went silent. All eyes were on Miles.

  ‘Brooks, obviously, found that rather suspicious. Worrying. When he raised it with me, so did I. I don’t believe in coincidences.’

  ‘But surely Kammler wouldn’t be that stupid,’ Jaeger objected. ‘Grey Wolf is known. It’s blown. So why use it again?’

  ‘But he would be that arrogant,’ Narov interjected. ‘It is deeply symbolic. He will never drop it, bearing in mind who the original Grey Wolf was.’

  ‘You think he believes he’s Hitler?’ Jaeger queried.

  ‘Hitler’s modern incarnation, at the very least.’

  Raff nodded. ‘Ego. The big killer and the big banana skin.’

  ‘Kammler does see himself as the Hitler of today,’ Miles confirmed. ‘Plus he feels protected. Shielded. Invulnerable. Assuming the DNA sample that proved he was dead was doctored, then Kammler has friends in high places.’

  ‘Okay, so let’s presume Grey Wolf is Kammler,’ Jaeger mused. ‘What else do we know about this Moldovan deal?’

  ‘Dates, plus destination the goods are being shipped to. All the Moldovan mafia is waiting on is the final payment. And believe me, this stuff is obscenely expensive. Once they get their money, they’re flying it out to a particularly nasty narco gang based in Colombia.’

  ‘Kammler mentioned Moldova, in the Dubai meeting,’ Narov interjected. ‘It’s on the tapes. Something about the Columbians being on standby to take delivery.’

  ‘Did he?’ Miles gave an appreciative nod at Narov. ‘Good work. That pretty much confirms everything we’ve been hearing.’

  ‘You’re saying Kammler’s in bed with Colombian drug traffickers?’ Jaeger ventured. ‘How does that work?’

  ‘Arms dealers, drugs runners and terrorists – the nexus of evil draws ever closer,’ Miles explained. ‘You couple that with a hatred of the West – of America in particular – and the Moldovan mafia, Colombian narcos and Kammler can make common cause. Plus, a remote, lawless jungle base: in a sense, it offers the perfect place for a man like Kammler to hide.’

  ‘Then there’s Kammler’s former role at the CIA,’ Narov volunteered. ‘He was big into developing narcotics as tools of espionage and warfare. LSD. Heroin. And worse. You name it, he dabbled in it. He has to have contacts in that world. Maybe he called in some favours.’

  ‘Then why not roll it up?’ Raff queried. ‘Now. Kill the network before the shit has a chance to hit the fan.’

  ‘Because if it is Kammler, this is the means to track him,’ Miles answered. ‘We trace the cargo, we trace Kammler.’

  ‘Do we know the exact location the uranium’s being routed to?’ Jaeger asked.

  ‘We do,’ Miles confirmed. ‘Dirt airstrip hacked out of the Colombian jungle. One of the narco trafficker’s drugs-smuggling hubs, for onward shipment to the US.’

  Jaeger eyed Miles. ‘Okay, so the contention is that Kammler’s set up some kind of IND lab alongside the drugs-processing facilities? Am I right?’

  Miles nodded. ‘That’s what we’re thinking.’

  ‘Right, let’s do a pre-emptive strike. Before the flight leaves Moldova and has a chance to jet in, we hit Kammler’s jungle base and blow his labs to shreds, then get in there and kill or capture the man himself – that’s if he’s there.’

  Miles smiled. ‘My thoughts exactly.’

  Jaeger got to his feet. ‘Then what’re we waiting for?’

  23

  ‘This time, just who is the “we”?’ Raff queried. ‘Who exactly is going to be backing us? Where’s our top cover?’