Ghost Flight (47 page)

He glanced east just as a flash of white popped out of the base of the cloud.

Narov. It had to be.
Somehow she must have made it out of the Ju 390’s cockpit, and by the look of the body slung beneath the chute, she was still alive.

He fixed both positions in his head, then checked the ground below.

Dense jungle, with nowhere obvious to land.

Again.

As he drifted towards the canopy, Jaeger spared a momentary thought for the Ju 390. From 10,000 feet, the speeding warplane could glide for scores of kilometres, but he knew she was doomed. With every second after the Airlander had released her, she’d been gaining in airspeed but losing altitude.

Sooner or later she’d smash into the jungle at more than 300 kph. The upside was that she’d take with her those black-clad operators, for no way would the surviving Black Hawk be able to lift them off that careering warplane. And Jaeger, of course, had hurled all the spare chutes out the cockpit window.

The downside was that she’d be lost for ever, together with the secrets she’d been carrying – not to mention her toxic cargo being strewn across the rainforest.

But there was little Jaeger could do about that now.

The lone unmarked Black Hawk touched down on the isolated jungle airstrip.

The operator code-named Grey Wolf Six – real name Vladimir Ustanov – stepped down from the aircraft, satphone glued to his ear. His face was grey and drawn, the experiences of the last few hours sitting heavy upon him.

‘Sir, understand the situation.’ He spoke into the satphone, his voice tight with exhaustion. ‘I have myself and four others remaining from my airborne force. We are incapable of mounting any form of meaningful operation.’

‘And the warplane?’ Grey Wolf demanded incredulously.

‘A smoking ruin. Spread across several dozen miles of jungle. We overflew her until the moment she went down.’

‘And her cargo? The
documents
?’

‘Smashed into smoking wreckage, along with a dozen of my finest men.’

‘If we couldn’t get our hands on them, better they are destroyed.’ A beat. ‘So finally, Vladimir, you have achieved something.’

‘Sir, I’ve lost two Black Hawks, plus three dozen men—’

‘Worth the cost,’ Grey Wolf cut in, mercilessly. ‘They were paid to do a job, and paid well, so don’t expect any sympathy from me. Tell me, did anyone get out of that warplane alive?’

‘We saw three figures bale out. We lost them in the clouds. Whether any survived is doubtful. We don’t know if they had chutes, and even if they did, it’s uncharted jungle down there.’

‘But they might have?’ Grey Wolf hissed.

‘They might,’ Vladimir Ustanov conceded.

‘They might have survived, which means they might well have retrieved from that warplane some of the very things we were after?’

‘They might.’

‘I am turning my aircraft around,’ Grey Wolf snapped. ‘With no force remaining operational, there is no point my flying into theatre. I want you and your fellow survivors to take a holiday somewhere suitably remote and obscure. But don’t disappear. Keep in communication.’

‘Understood.’

‘Those who survived – if there are any – will need to be found. That which we sought – if they have it – will need to be returned to us.’

‘Understood, sir.’

‘I’ll be in touch in the normal way. In the meantime, Vladimir, you may want to recruit some new foot soldiers, to replace those you have so carelessly lost. Same terms; same mission.’

‘Understood.’

‘One final thing: you still have the Brazilian?’

Vladimir glanced at a figure lying on the floor of the Black Hawk. ‘We have her.’

‘Keep her. We may be able to use her. In the meantime, interrogate her in your own special way. Find out all she knows. With luck, she may lead us to the others.’

Vladimir smiled. ‘With pleasure, sir.’

From a Learjet 85 flying high over the Gulf of Mexico, the commander known as Grey Wolf made a second call. It was routed to an obscure grey office lying within a grey-walled complex of buildings, positioned deep within a swathe of grey forest in remote rural Virginia, on the eastern coast of the USA.

The call went through to a building stuffed full of the world’s most advanced signals intercept and tracking systems. Next to the entryway to that building was a small brass plaque. It read:
CIA – Division of Asymmetric Threat Analysis (DATA).

A figure dressed in smart–casual civilian clothes answered. ‘DATA. Harry Peterson.’

‘It’s me,’ Grey Wolf announced. ‘I’m inbound on the Learjet and I need you to find that individual I sent you the file on. Jaeger. William Jaeger. Use all possible means: internet, email, mobile phones, flight bookings, passport details –
anything
. Last known location, western Brazil, near the Bolivia–Peru border.’

‘Understood, sir.’

Grey Wolf killed the call.

He settled back into his seat. Things certainly hadn’t gone so well in the Amazon, but this was just a skirmish, he told himself. One of many such battles fought in a far longer war; a war that he and his forefathers had been fighting since the spring of 1945.

A setback, certainly, but a manageable one, and nothing compared to some they had suffered in the past.

He reached for a sleek-looking tablet computer lying on the table before him. He powered it up and opened a file, revealing a list of names in alphabetical order. He ran the cursor down the list and typed a few words beside one of them:
Missing in action. If alive, terminate. PRIORITY.

That done, he picked up an attaché case lying beside him, laid it on the table and slipped the tablet inside. He closed the lid with a resounding click, flicking the combination lock so it was securely fastened.

On the lid of the attaché case in small gold lettering were the words:
Hank Kammler, Deputy Director, CIA.

Hank Kammler – AKA Grey Wolf – ran his fingertips gently, reverentially, over the embossing. At the end of the war his father had been forced to change his name. SS Oberst-Gruppenführer Hans Kammler had become Horace Kramer – the better to ease his recruitment into the Office for Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA. As he’d worked his way up through the CIA into its highest ranks, Horace Kramer had never lost sight of his true mission: to hide in plain sight, to regroup and to rebuild the Reich.

By the time his father’s life was cut prematurely short, Hank Kammler had decided to take up the mantle and follow him into the CIA. Kammler smiled to himself thinly, an edge of mockery creeping into his eyes. As if he would ever have been content quietly serving as a CIA man, forgetting the glory of his Nazi forefathers.

Recently, he’d opted to recover what was rightfully his. Born Hank Kramer, he’d changed his surname formally to Kammler – thus reclaiming the legacy of his father, and what he saw as his birthright.

And as far as he was concerned, that reclamation was only just beginning.

85

Jaeger settled into his seat for the short connecting flight to Bioko airport.

The flight from London to Nigeria had been all that he’d expected – fast, direct and comfortable, although this time his budget hadn’t quite stretched to first class. At Lagos he’d boarded some clapped-out regional airliner for the short jump across the Gulf of Guinea to the island capital of Equatorial Guinea.

The contact that he’d had from Pieter Boerke had been as unexpected as it had been intriguing. Some two weeks after bailing out of that doomed warplane as it plunged towards the jungle, Jaeger had made it out to a place of relative safety – Cachimbo airbase. And it was at Cachimbo that Boerke had managed to get a call through to him.

‘I have your papers,’ the South African had announced. ‘The seventh page of the manifest, just like you asked for.’

Jaeger hadn’t had the heart to tell Boerke that the last thing on his mind right then was an obscure Second World War cargo ship that had docked in Bioko’s harbour towards the end of the war. He’d asked the coup leader to scan the papers and email them over. He hadn’t quite got the answer he’d been expecting.

‘No, man; no can do,’ Boerke had told him. ‘You have to come see, in person. Because, my friend, this isn’t just papers. There’s something physical. Something I can’t email or post. Trust me, man – you have to come see.’

‘You got a hint?’ Jaeger had asked. ‘It’s a long way to fly. Plus, after the last few weeks—’

‘Put it this way,’ Boerke had cut in. ‘I am not a Nazi. In fact, I hate bloody Nazis. I am not the grandson of one, either. But if I were, I’d go a very long way – in fact I’d go to the ends of the earth, and maybe even have a lot of people killed – to make sure this never saw the light of day. That’s all I am willing to say. Trust me, Jaeger, you need to be here.’

Jaeger had considered his options. He was working on the assumption that Alonzo, Kamishi and Joe James were still alive, and being guided by the surviving Indians to a place where they could rejoin the outside world. He felt pretty certain that Gwaihutiga was dead, thrown from the Black Hawk along with Stefan Kral, their seemingly traitorous cameraman.

As for Leticia Santos, she was still missing, fate unknown. Colonel Evandro had promised to do all he could to find her, and Jaeger reckoned he and his B-SOB teams would leave no stone unturned.

Jaeger’s ruse with getting the Airlander to jettison the Ju 390 had doubtless saved the lives of the airship’s crew, Raff included. The Black Hawk had been forced to chase after the warplane as it had accelerated into its gliding dive, leaving the Airlander to limp in to Cachimbo.

Dale had managed to injure himself when his parachute had ploughed into the jungle canopy, and Narov had taken a shrapnel wound to the arm as the Dark Force had blasted their way into the Ju 390 cockpit. But Jaeger had managed to link up with them both on the ground and help get them moving – although it had been touch and go whether they would make it out of there.

Typically, both Dale and Narov had claimed that they’d suffered only flesh wounds and were quite capable of surviving the onward journey. Jaeger had worried that in the hot and humid jungle, and with little chance of rest, proper nutrition or medical treatment, their injuries were at risk of turning septic.

Still, he’d realised there was little chance of either Narov or Dale listening to his concerns – and in any case, there was precious little he could do to help right now. Either they made it out of the jungle under their own steam, or they would die.

Jaeger had located a small stream, and they’d followed that for two days, moving only as fast as their condition allowed. Eventually the stream had led to a tributary, leading in turn to a larger river, one that turned out to be navigable. As luck would have it, Jaeger had managed to flag down a passing timber barge – one used to shunt tree trunks downriver towards the sawmills.

A three-day river trip had followed, during which the greatest danger seemed to be Narov falling out with the drunken Brazilian captain. But only for so long.

Once Narov and Dale were aboard ship, the infections that Jaeger had feared might take hold did, and with a vengeance. By the time their journey was over – Jaeger delivering them to Cachimbo airbase and its state-of-the-art high-security hospital via a local taxi cab – they both had raging fevers.

They were diagnosed with septicaemia: their wounds had become infected and turned the entire circulatory system septic. In Dale’s case at least, the situation was exacerbated by acute exhaustion. They’d been rushed into intensive care, and were now getting treatment under Colonel Evandro’s careful watch and guard.

Having got those he could out of the worst of the danger – and with little else he could do to help Leticia Santos – Jaeger had figured he could risk booking himself a flight from Brazil to Bioko. He’d made sure the colonel kept him briefed every step of the way.

He’d promised to be back in time to bring Dale and Narov home, once they were well enough to travel. He’d got Raff to sit permanent guard outside their hospital door, as an added layer of security.

Before leaving, Jaeger had grabbed a few moments with Narov, only recently released from the intensive care unit. He’d taken a look at the papers she’d retrieved from the Ju 390. The German was still mostly lost on him, and much of the
Aktion Feuerland
document proved to be written in a sequence of apparently random numbers, which Narov figured had to be code.

Without breaking that code, there wasn’t a great deal more that she – or Jaeger – could glean from the document.

At one point she had asked Jaeger to wheel her into the hospital garden, so she could feel the sun on her face and get some fresh air. Once they were positioned somewhere reasonably private, she had gone a little way to explaining some of what had happened over the past few days. Predictably, in order to do so she’d had to start with the Second World War.

‘You saw the kind of technology that was on that warplane,’ she had begun weakly. ‘By the spring of 1945, the Nazis had test-fired intercontinental ballistic missiles. They had fitted warheads with sarin nerve gas, not to mention plague and botulinum toxins. With just a handful of such weapons – one each to hit London, New York, Washington, Toronto and Moscow – the fortunes of the war might have turned completely.

‘Against that we had the atom bomb, but we hadn’t yet perfected that. And remember, it could only be delivered by a lumbering bomber, not by a guided missile travelling at many times the speed of sound. We had zero defence against their missiles.

‘The Nazis had the ultimate threat, and they offered the Allies a deal – one that would allow the Reich to relocate to chosen safe havens, complete with their highest-tech weaponry. But the Allies made a counter-offer. They said: “Okay, relocate. Take all your
Wunderwaffe
with you. But on one condition: you join us in the real struggle – the coming global fight against communism.”

‘The Allies cut a deal to sponsor the most secret relocations. They couldn’t of course have the top Nazis turning up in mainland Britain or the USA. The public wouldn’t have stood for it. They sent them instead into their own backyards – the Americans to South America; the British to the colonies – to India, Australia and South Africa, places where it was easy enough to hide them.