Ghost Flight (50 page)

Jaeger heard a voice from behind him. ‘Man, who in God’s name sent you that? And why?’ It was Boerke, and he was staring at the image on Jaeger’s phone.

His words served to break Jaeger’s trance, and with it a burning jolt of realisation seared through his mind. He raised his arm and hurled the smartphone through the open window, propelling it as far as it would go into the bush outside.

Then he grabbed his flight bag and took to his heels, yelling at Boerke to follow.

‘RUN! Get everyone out! NOW!’

They sprinted out of the office block, screaming at the guards. Barely had they reached the former torture cells in the basement when the Hellfire struck. It tore into the ground where Jaeger’s phone lay, ripping a massive hole in the perimeter wall of the prison and collapsing the adjacent office building – the place where Jaeger and Boerke had just been sitting.

Down in the basement, both men were uninjured, as were most of the guards. But Jaeger wasn’t kidding himself any more: in the prison that had once almost been the death of him, the Dark Force had nearly killed him again.

And once again he, William Jaeger, was very much the hunted.

89

Fortunately, Malabo had a handful of internet cafés. Under Boerke’s guidance, Jaeger chose one and managed to send the briefest of messages.

Close all open comms. Travel as arranged. Revert as agreed.

WJ

Even in civilian life, Jaeger tended to live by the old soldier’s adage: ‘Fail to plan, plan to fail.’

Before leaving Cachimbo, he’d set up alternative travel and communications arrangements, just in case of such an eventuality – the hunt being resumed. He figured the enemy would be working to a dual agenda now: either to have the documents returned, or to kill all those who knew of their existence. Ideally, they’d want to achieve both ends.

Via an address to which his core team – Narov, Raff and Dale – had access, he proceeded to post a draft email. They would know to read the draft without it ever having been sent – hence making it all but untraceable.

The email detailed the time of a proposed meeting a couple of days hence, at a prearranged location. If the draft box received no message saying otherwise, the meeting would be on. And under the ‘travel as arranged’ instruction, Narov, Raff and Dale would know to fly back to the UK using passports provided courtesy of Colonel Evandro’s partners in Brazilian intelligence.

If necessary, they’d move under Brazilian diplomatic cover, so determined was the colonel to get them home safely and get the riddle of the Ju 390 solved.

Jaeger caught his flights from Bioko to London as planned.

There had been zero point in changing them, especially as they had been booked under the ‘clean’ passport that Colonel Evandro had provided him with, one that should be untraceable.

Upon arrival in London, he caught the Heathrow Express to Paddington and jumped in a black cab. He got the cabbie to drop him a good half-mile distant from Springfield Marina, so he could walk the last leg to his London home. It was one more precaution to ensure he hadn’t been followed.

Living on a boat had several advantages, one of which was the lack of a traceable footprint. Jaeger paid no council tax, he wasn’t on the electoral roll or the property register, and he’d chosen not to have a mailing address at the marina.

The boat itself was registered to an anonymous offshore company, likewise the mooring. In short, his Thames barge was as good a place as any to schedule the meeting.

En route to the marina, he called in at a grotty-looking internet café. He ordered a black coffee, logged on and checked the draft box. There were two messages. One was from Raff, postponing the meeting by a few hours, just to give them time enough to get there.

The other message was blank, but it had a link embedded in it. Jaeger clicked through and it took him to Dropbox, an on-line data storage system.

The Dropbox file contained one image – a JPEG file.

Jaeger clicked on it.

The internet connection was slow, and as the image downloaded it hit him like a series of savage punches to the guts. It showed the figure of Leticia Santos – kneeling naked and with her hands and feet tied, her eyes staring wide into the camera and red with terror.

Behind her was what looked like a torn and bloodstained bed sheet, on which were scrawled the now familiar words:

Return to us what is ours.

Wir sind die Zukunft.

They were crudely written in what appeared to be human blood.

Jaeger didn’t bother to log off. He sprinted from the café, leaving his coffee untouched.

Somehow, even their draft email communications system had been penetrated. That being the case, who knew how quickly a drone unleashing a Hellfire might arrive overhead? Jaeger doubted the enemy had the wherewithal to deploy one over east London, but presumption was the mother of all screw-ups.

Instinctively he knew what the enemy was about here.

They were deliberately taunting him. It was a tried and tested means of waging battle, one that the Nazis had named
Nervenkrieg
– mind warfare. They were torturing him by careful design, in the hope that they could provoke him into remaining at a traceable location for long enough for them to find and kill him.

Or failing that, in the hope that he might be provoked into going hunting, solo.

And in truth, the
Nervenkrieg
was working.

Having watched that sickening image download, it was all Jaeger could do to resist the temptation to go seeking out Leticia Santos’s tormentors right here and now. And alone.

There were any number of leads he could follow. The C-130 pilot, for a start. Carson would have his details on file, and that would be enough for Jaeger to start tracking him down. Plus Colonel Evandro had promised a whole caseload of new leads from his own investigations.

But Jaeger needed to hold off.

He needed to regroup his forces, learn from whatever it was they had discovered, study the ground, the enemy and the threat, and strategise and act accordingly. Somehow he had to reclaim the initiative – to make proactive decisions, not reactive heat-of-the-moment ones.

It was the old adage again:
fail to plan, plan to fail.

90

First to arrive for that evening’s meeting was the archivist, Simon Jenkinson.

Jaeger had spent most of the day on his Triumph Explorer, paying a furtive visit to his Wardour Castle apartment. There, he’d retrieved his edition of the Voynich manuscript – the one that Grandfather Ted had bequeathed to him.

He’d laid the thick tome on his desk in the barge with some degree of reverence, awaiting Simon Jenkinson’s entry.

The archivist was a good half an hour early, and he looked only marginally less like a hibernating honey bear than when Jaeger had last seen him. At Jaeger’s request, he’d managed to track down a copy of the Voynich manuscript translation. He’d brought it with him, tucked firmly under his arm.

Jaeger was barely able to offer him a cup of tea before Jenkinson sat himself down with the Voynich manuscript and the Bioko file, placing the translation beside them. And that was it: thick glasses perched on the end of his nose, Jenkinson got to work on the
Duchessa
’s list of apparently random numbers – code-breaking, or so Jaeger presumed.

An hour later, the archivist raised his head from his task, his eyes burning with excitement.

‘Gotcha!’ he exclaimed. ‘At last! I’ve done two, just to make sure the first wasn’t a fluke. So . . . number one: Adolf Eichmann.’

‘I know the name,’ Jaeger confirmed. ‘But remind me of the details.’

Jenkinson already had his head bent over the books and papers once more. ‘Eichmann – truly a nasty piece of work. One of the chief architects of the Holocaust. He escaped Nazi Germany at war’s end, only to be tracked down to Argentina in the 1960s.

‘Next one: Ludolf von Alvensleben,’ Jenkinson declared.

Jaeger shook his head: the name wasn’t familiar at all.

‘
SS Gruppenführer
and mass murderer par excellence. Ran the Valley of Death in northern Poland, which became a grave for thousands.’ Jenkinson flashed Jaeger a look. ‘Also disappeared to Argentina, where he lived to a ripe old age.

Jenkinson bent over his books again, flipping back and forth through the pages, until the third was decoded.

‘Aribert Heim,’ the archivist announced. ‘Him you must have heard of. He’s been at the centre of one of the longest manhunts of all time. His nickname during the war was Dr Death. He earned it in the concentration camps, by experimenting on inmates.’ Jenkinson shuddered. ‘Also thought to be hiding out in Argentina, though rumour has it he may have died of old age.’

‘There seems to be a theme developing,’ Jaeger remarked. ‘A Latin American theme.’

Jenkinson smiled. ‘Indeed.’

Before he could reveal any more of the names, the rest of the party arrived. Raff led Irina Narov and Mike Dale into the barge, the latter two looking tired from their travels but also remarkably recovered, and noticeably better fed than when Jaeger had last seen them.

He greeted each in turn, and did the necessary introductions with Jenkinson. Raff, Narov and Dale had flown into London direct from Rio, with a connecting flight from Cachimbo prior to that. They’d been on the go for approaching eighteen hours, and it promised to be a long night.

Jaeger brewed some strong coffee, then gave them the good news: the book code seemed to be working – at least for the Bioko documents.

Five figures gathered around the Voynich manuscript and its translation, as Narov produced the satchel of papers retrieved from the Ju 390’s cockpit. The atmosphere aboard the barge was electric with anticipation. Would seventy years of a dark and secret history finally be brought to life?

Narov took out the first set of papers.

Dale produced his camera. He waved it at Jaeger. ‘You good with this? In here?’

‘What’s got into you?’ Jaeger needled him. ‘It’s film first, ask later, isn’t it?’

Dale shrugged. ‘This is your home. Makes it a bit different from filming out in the wilds.’

Jaeger sensed a change in the man – an air of maturity and genuine concern, as though the trials and tribulations of the last few weeks had somehow been the making of him.

‘Go ahead,’ he told him. ‘Let’s get it documented – all of it.’

Under Jenkinson’s initial tutelage, Narov set about the
Aktion Feuerland
document, while Dale framed up his shots, and Raff and Jaeger stood an informal guard. The archivist seemed remarkably talented at multi-tasking: it wasn’t long before he was able to thrust a list under Jaeger’s nose – the seventh page of the
Duchessa
’s manifest, fully decoded. He proceeded to point out some of the most notorious individuals.

‘Gustav Wagner, better known as “the Beast”. Wagner founded the T4 programme – to kill off the disabled – then went on to run one of the foremost extermination camps. Escaped to South America, where he lived to a grand old age.’

His finger stabbed at another name on the list. ‘Klaus Barbie – “the Butcher of Lyons”. A mass murderer who tortured and killed his way across France. At the end of the war—’

Jenkinson broke off as Jaeger’s boatie neighbour, Annie, ducked through the barge’s entranceway. Jaeger did the introductions.

‘Annie’s from the nextdoor barge. She’s a . . . good friend.’

Narov spoke from where she was bent over her documents. ‘Aren’t they all? Women and Will Jaeger – they seem drawn like the moth to the candle flame. Isn’t that how you say it in English?’

‘Anyone who can make carrot cake like Annie – they’ll win my heart, for sure,’ Jaeger answered, doing his best to rescue an awkward situation.

Realising that he and his friends were busy, and sensing the tension in the air, Annie handed Jaeger the cake she’d brought and backed out quickly. ‘Don’t work too hard, fellas,’ she called with a wave.

Narov hunched closer over her documents. Jaeger eyed her, irritated by what she’d just done. What right did she have to be rude to his friends?

‘Thanks for helping the neighbourly relations,’ he remarked, sarcastically.

Narov didn’t even raise her head from her task. ‘It is simple. No one outside of these four walls should be trusted with what these documents will reveal – that’s if we can crack them. No one, no matter how good a friend.’

‘So, Klaus Barbie,’ Jenkinson volunteered.

‘Yeah, tell me about the Butcher of Lyons.’

‘At war’s end Klaus Barbie was protected by British and American intelligence. He was posted to Argentina as a CIA agent, code-named Adler.’

Jaeger raised one eyebrow. ‘Adler: eagle?’

‘Eagle,’ Jenkinson confirmed. ‘Believe it or not, the Butcher of Lyon became a life-long CIA agent code-named The Eagle.’ He moved his finger down the list. ‘And this one. Heinrich Müller, former head of the Gestapo – the most senior Nazi whose fate remains an utter mystery. Believed by most to have fled to . . . well, you guessed it: Argentina.

‘Below him, Walter Rauff, a top SS commander. The inventor of the mobile vehicles in which the Nazis gassed people. Fled to South America. Lived to a grand old age, and his funeral was reportedly a major celebration of all things Nazi.

‘And finally,’ Jenkinson announced, ‘the Angel of Death himself, Joseph Mengele. Carried out unspeakable experiments on thousands in Auschwitz. At war’s end he fled to – need I say it? – Argentina, where he is reported to have continued his experiments. A true monster of a human – that’s if you can even call him human.

‘Oh, and lest we forget, Bormann’s also on the list. Martin Bormann – Hitler’s right-hand man—’

‘Hitler’s banker,’ Jaeger interjected.

‘Indeed.’ Jenkinson eyed him. ‘In short, it’s a Nazi rogues’ gallery if ever there was one. Though the foremost rogue of all is missing: Uncle Adolf. They say he died in his Berlin bunker. I’ve never really believed it myself.’