Burning Angels (14 page)

He’d been tricked, beaten and taken to the edge, but he was alive, and he was one step closer to finding Ruth and Luke. And right now that was all he cared about.

‘Gentlemen, Irina, thank you for coming.’ Peter Miles’s words served to drag Jaeger’s mind back to the present. The elderly man glanced around at the concrete and steel edifice. ‘Much of what we are here for is rooted in this place. In its terrifying history. In these dark walls.’

He turned his attention fully on his audience. There was an intensity about the man’s gaze that Jaeger hadn’t seen before. It demanded attention.

‘Germany. Spring 1945,’ he announced. ‘The Fatherland had been overrun by the Allies, German resistance crumbling fast. Many of the key Nazis were already in Allied hands.

‘The top commanders were taken to an interrogation centre near Frankfurt, codenamed Dustbin. There, they tried to deny point blank that the Reich had ever possessed weapons of mass killing, or planned to use them to win the war. But, one of the captives eventually broke, and confessed to what at first seemed to be a series of incredible revelations.

‘Under intense questioning he revealed that the Nazis had developed three fearsome chemical agents: tabun and sarin nerve gases, and the fabled
Kampfsoffe
– poison gas – called
N-stoff
, or Substance N. He also confessed to the full extent of Hitler’s
Chemicplan
– his project to manufacture thousands of tonnes of chemical agents to crush the Allies. What was extraordinary is that this was utterly unknown to the Allies, and consequently we possessed no defence against such agents.

‘How could this have come to pass? First, as you’ll have noticed, the Falkenhagen complex is set deep underground. From the air, it is more or less invisible. And it was in places like this that the most fearsome agents were manufactured. Second, Hitler contracted out his chemical weapons programme to a civilian company: the massive industrial complex I. G. Farben.

‘They masterminded the building of these factories of death. It would have been an entirely daunting task were it not for the fact that the Nazis possessed a seemingly limitless supply of slave labour. Underground facilities like Falkenhagen were built by the millions of hapless souls sent to the Nazi concentration camps. Even better, the hazardous production lines were also staffed by concentration camp inmates – for of course, they were all destined for death anyway.’

Miles let his words hang in the air, portentously. Jaeger shifted about uncomfortably in his chair.

He felt as if a strange and ghostly presence had crept into the room, its icy fingers clutching at his fast-beating heart.

25

‘Massive stockpiles of weaponised agents were found by the Allies,’ Miles continued speaking, ‘including at this place, Falkenhagen. There was even talk of a long-range V weapon – the V-4, a sequel to the V-2 rocket – that could drop nerve agents on Washington and New York.

‘The general feeling was that we had won the war by the skin of our teeth. To some it made sense to harness the Nazi scientists’ expertise in preparation for the coming war with the Russians – the Cold War. Most of the Nazi V-weapon scientists were shipped off to the USA to design missiles to combat the Soviet threat.

‘But then the Russians dropped their bombshell. In the midst of the Nuremberg war crimes trials, they called a surprise witness: Brigadier General Walter Schreiber, of the Wehrmacht’s medical service. Schreiber stated that a little-known SS doctor named Kurt Blome had run a beyond-top-secret Nazi project whose focus had been biological –
germ
– warfare.’

Miles’s eyes narrowed. ‘Now, as you all know, germ weapons are the ultimate mass killers. A nuclear bomb dropped on New York might kill everyone in the city. A sarin warhead might do likewise. But a single missile carrying bubonic plague could kill everyone in America, for the simple reason that a germ agent is self-replicating. Once delivered, it breeds in the human host and spreads, so killing all.’

‘Hitler’s germ warfare project was codenamed
Blitzableiter
– lightning rod. It was disguised as a cancer-research programme, to hide it from the Allies. The agents so developed were to be used under the Führer’s direct orders to achieve the final victory. But perhaps the most shocking of Schreiber’s revelations was that at war’s end, Kurt Blome was recruited by the Americans to re-create his germ warfare programme – only this time for the West.

‘Certainly, during the war Blome had developed a fearsome array of agents:
plague, typhoid, cholera, anthrax and more. He had worked closely with the Japanese Unit 731, which had unleashed germ agents that killed half a million Chinese.’

‘Unit 731 is a dark stain upon our history,’ a quiet voice cut in. It was Hiro Kamishi, the Japanese member of Jaeger’s team. ‘Our government has never truly said sorry. It has been left to individuals to try to make their peace with the victims.’

From what Jaeger knew of Kamishi, it would be entirely in keeping with his nature to have reached out to the victims of Unit 731, to seek peace.

‘Blome was the undisputed grandmaster of germ warfare.’ Miles eyed his audience, his eyes gleaming. ‘But there were certain things he would
never
reveal, not even to the Americans. The
Blitzableiter
weapons weren’t used against the Allies for one simple reason: the Nazis were perfecting a super-agent, one to truly conquer the world. Hitler had ordered it to be made ready, but the sheer speed of the Allied advance had taken everyone by surprise. Blome and his team were defeated, but only by time.’

Miles glanced across at a seated figure clutching a slender walking cane. ‘Now I’d like to hand over to someone who was actually there. In 1945, I was but an eighteen-year-old youth. Joe Jaeger can better relate this darkest episode of history.’

As Miles went to help Uncle Joe to his feet, Jaeger felt his heart start to pound. Deep in his being he knew that fate had led him to this moment. He had a wife and child to save, but by the sound of what he was hearing, there was far more at stake than simply their lives alone.

Uncle Joe stepped forward, leaning heavily on his walking stick. ‘I will need to ask you all to bear with me, for I’d wager I am thrice the age of some of you in this room.’ He glanced around the bunker thoughtfully. ‘Now, where should I begin? I think perhaps with Operation Loyton.’

His eyes came to rest upon Jaeger. ‘For most of the war I served with this young man’s grandfather in the SAS. Perhaps it goes without saying, but that man, Ted Jaeger, was my brother. In late 1944 we were sent into north-eastern France on a mission codenamed Loyton. Its aim was simple. Hitler had ordered his forces to make a last stand, to halt the Allied advance. We were to frustrate them.

‘We parachuted in and caused a good deal of havoc and chaos behind enemy lines, blowing up railway tracks and killing the top Nazi commanders. But in return, the enemy hunted us relentlessly. At mission’s end, thirty-one of our force had been captured. We were determined to find out what had happened to them. Trouble was, the SAS was disbanded shortly after the war. No one thought we were needed any more. Well, we felt differently. Not for the first time, we disobeyed our orders.

‘We set up a totally off-the-books unit, charged to search for our missing men. It didn’t take us long to discover that they had been tortured and murdered horrifically by their Nazi captors. And so we set about hunting down the killers. We gave ourselves a grand-sounding title – the SAS War Crimes Investigation Team. Informally, we were known as the Secret Hunters.’

Joe Jaeger smiled wistfully. ‘It’s amazing what you can achieve with a little bluff. Because we were hiding in plain sight, everyone presumed we were a bona fide outfit. We were not. In truth, we were an unsanctioned, illegal unit doing what we believed was right, and sod the bloody consequences. Such were the times. And they were good times.’

The old man seemed choked with emotion, yet he steeled himself to go on. ‘Over the next few years we tracked down every single one of the Nazi killers. In the process of doing so, we discovered that several of our men had ended up in a place of utter horror – a Nazi concentration camp called Natzweiler.’

For a moment Uncle Joe’s eyes sought out Irina Narov. Jaeger knew already that they shared a special bond. It was one of the many things that he been meaning to get Narov to fully explain to him.

‘Natzweiler possessed a gas chamber,’ Uncle Joe continued. ‘Its foremost role was to test Nazi weapons on live humans – the inmates of the camp. A senior SS doctor oversaw such tests. His name was August Hirt. We decided we needed to talk to him.

‘Hirt had disappeared, but few could hide from the Secret Hunters. We discovered that he too was working secretly for the Americans. During the war he had tested nerve gas on innocent women and children. Torture, brutality and death were his hallmarks. But the Americans were more than happy to shield him, and we knew they would never let him stand trial. In the circumstances we took an executive decision: Hirt had to die. But when he realised what we intended, he offered an extraordinary trade: the Nazi’s greatest secret in exchange for his life.’

The old man braced his shoulders. ‘Hirt revealed to us the Nazis’ plan for
Weltplagverwustung
– world plague devastation. He claimed it
was to be achieved using a wholly new breed of germ agent. No one seemed to know where that agent had come from, but its lethality was off the scale. When Hirt tested it in Natzweiler, it proved to have a 99.999 per cent kill rate. No human seemed to have any natural resistance. It was almost as if the agent was not of this earth; or at least not of our time.

‘Before we killed him – because believe me, we would never have let him live – Hirt told us the name of the agent, a name given to it by Hitler himself.’

Uncle Joe’s haunted gaze came to rest upon Jaeger. ‘It was called the
Gottvirus
– the God virus.’

26

Uncle Joe asked for a glass of water. Peter Miles handed him one. No one else stirred. Everyone in that echoing bunker was gripped by his tale.

‘We reported our discovery up the chain of command, but there was little real interest. What did we have? We knew a name – the
Gottvirus
– but other than that . . .’ Uncle Joe lifted and lowered his shoulders resignedly. ‘The world was at peace. The public were tired of war. Gradually the whole thing was forgotten. For twenty years it was forgotten. And then . . . Marburg.’

He stared into the distance, his gaze lost in far-off memories. ‘In central Germany lies the small, pretty town of Marburg. In the spring of 1967, there was an unexplained outbreak of disease in the town’s
Behringwerke
laboratory. Thirty-one lab workers were infected. Seven died. Somehow, a new and unknown pathogen had broken out: it was named the Marburg virus, or
Filoviridae,
because its form was thread-like; like a filament. Nothing like it had ever been seen before.’

Uncle Joe drained his glass of water. ‘Apparently the virus had escaped into the laboratory from a shipment of monkeys from Africa. That, at least, was the official story. Teams of virus-hunters were sent to Africa to track down the source of the virus. They were searching for its natural reservoir – its home in the wild. They couldn’t find it. Not only that, they couldn’t find its natural host either – the animal that normally carries it. In short, there was no sign of the virus in the African rainforest from where the monkeys had come.

‘Now, monkeys are used widely in laboratory experiments,’ he continued. ‘Trialling new medicines, that kind of thing. But they are also used for testing biological and chemical weapons, for the simple reason that if an agent kills a monkey, it is also likely to kill a human.’

Uncle Joe sought out Jaeger again. ‘Your grandfather, Brigadier Ted Jaeger, began to investigate. As with so many of us, the work of the Secret Hunters was on-going. A chilling picture emerged. It turned out that during the war, the Behringwerke laboratory was an I. G. Farben factory. Not only that, but by 1967 the chief scientist at the lab
was none other than Kurt Blome, Hitler’s former grandmaster of germ warfare.’

Uncle Joe glanced at his audience, a fire burning in his eyes. ‘In the early 1960s, Blome had been contacted by a man we had long suspected dead: former SS General Hans Kammler. Kammler had been one of the most powerful men in the Reich, and one of Hitler’s closest confidantes. But at war’s end, he had disappeared off the face of the earth. For years Ted Jaeger hunted him. Eventually he discovered that Kammler had been recruited into a CIA-sponsored intelligence outfit, tasked to spy on the Russians.

‘Due to his notoriety, the CIA made Kammler operate under various assumed names: Harold Krauthammer, Hal Kramer and Horace Konig amongst others. By the 1960s, he had worked his way into a very senior post at the CIA and he went about recruiting Blome to his hidden cause.’

Uncle Joe paused, a shadow passing across his craggy features. ‘By certain means we broke into Kurt Blome’s Marburg apartment and found his private papers. His journal revealed an utterly extraordinary story. It would have been unbelievable in any other context. As it was, a lot of things started to make sense to us. Horrible, chilling sense.

‘In the summer of 1943, Blome had been ordered by the Führer to concentrate on one germ agent exclusively. That agent had already killed. Two men, both SS lieutenants
,
had died as a result of exposure to it. They perished in an utterly horrifying way. Their bodies had started to collapse from the inside. Their organs – liver, kidneys, lungs – had disintegrated, putrefying even as the outer being still lived. They died voiding streams of thick, black blood – the remains of their rotten, liquefied organs – and with a ghastly zombified expression on their features. Their brains had been transformed into mush by the time death took them.’

The old man raised his eyes to his audience. ‘What, you might wonder, were two SS lieutenants doing meddling with such an agent?
Each had served with an SS agency charged with dabbling in ancient history. Remember, Hitler’s twisted ideology was that the “true Germans” were a mythical northern race – tall, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryans. Bizarre, when you consider that Hitler was a short little man with black hair and brown eyes.’