Burning Angels (7 page)

Screw searching for the key.

He placed both hands on the handle and a foot against the front, tensed his shoulder muscles and yanked with all his might. With a snapping of wood the lid came away from its hinges. Jaeger threw it to one side and flashed his torch inside.

In the depths of the chest lay a large formless bundle wrapped in an old sheet. He reached in and heaved it up, feeling the distinctive weight of a human body inside, then lowered it gently to the floor. When he peeled away the sheet, he found himself gazing into Leticia Santos’s face.

They’d found her
. She was unconscious, and by the looks of her ravaged features Vladimir and his crew had put her through hell these past few days. Jaeger didn’t even want to think what they had done to her. But at least she was alive.

Behind him, Narov was checking the second body, just to make sure he was dead to the world. Like many of Vladimir’s gunmen, this one was wearing body armour; no doubt about it, they had been a serious bunch of operators.

But as she rolled the cumbersome figure on to his back, her flashlight glinted on something that had been left lying beneath him on the floor. It was spherical and metallic, about the size of a man’s fist, its outer surface segmented into scores of tiny squares.

‘
GRENADE!
’

Jaeger whirled about, taking in the threat in a matter of instants. The gunman had set a trap. Believing himself to be dying, he’d pulled the pin on a grenade and lain himself on top of it, keeping the clip in place with his own body weight.

‘TAKE COVER!’ Jaeger yelled, scooping Leticia up and diving for the shelter of the alcove.

Ignoring him completely, Narov slammed the figure back down on to the grenade, throwing herself on top of him to shield herself from the explosion.

There was a massive, searing detonation. Narov was catapulted into the air by the blast, the force of which hurled Jaeger further into the alcove, his head smashing against the wall.

A bolt of agony shot through him . . . and seconds later his whole world went black.

10

Jaeger turned left, taking the exit leading into London’s Harley Street, one of the city’s most exclusive districts. Three weeks had passed since their Cuban mission, and he was still stiff and in pain from the injuries he’d suffered in the villa, but his blackout had been only momentary: his mask had saved his head from worse injury.

It was Narov who had taken the real pounding. In the enclosed environment of the cellar, she’d had no option but to dive on the grenade. She’d used the gunman’s bulk, plus his body armour, to shield them from the blast, allowing Jaeger an instant to get Leticia into some cover.

Jaeger came to a halt opposite the Biowell Clinic, tucking his Triumph Tiger Explorer into one of the free parking places reserved for motorcycles. The Explorer was fast through the traffic, and he rarely failed to find a vacant parking space. It was one of the joys of navigating the city on two wheels. He shrugged off his battered Belstaff jacket, stripping down to his shirtsleeves.

Spring was in the air, the leafy plane trees that lined London’s streets bursting into leaf. If he had to be in the city – as opposed to the open wild of the countryside – this was about his favourite time of year to be here.

He’d just got news that Narov was conscious again and had eaten her first solid meal. In fact the surgeon had even mentioned the possibility of releasing her from his care sometime soon.

No doubt about it, Narov was tough.

Getting off that Cuban island had proved something of a challenge. Having come to after the grenade blast, Jaeger had stumbled to his feet and hoisted both Narov and Leticia Santos out of the cellar. Then he and Raff had carried the two women out of the gas-choked building, making their getaway through the villa grounds.

The assault had turned very noisy very fast, and Jaeger didn’t know who else on that island might have heard the gunfire. The alarm had most likely been raised, and their priority was to get the hell out of there. Vladimir and his lot would be left to explain it all to the Cuban authorities.

They’d headed for the nearby dock, where the kidnappers kept an ocean-going rigid inflatable boat. They’d loaded Narov and Santos aboard, fired up the RIB’s powerful twin 350-horsepower engines and headed east towards the British territory of the Turks and Caicos Islands, a 180-kilometre ride across the intervening stretch of ocean. Jaeger knew the governor of the islands personally, and he’d be expecting them.

Once they hit the open sea, Jaeger and Raff had stabilised Narov, stemming her bleeding. They’d laid her in the recovery position, making her and Leticia comfortable at the back of the RIB, cushioned by a pile of lifejackets.

That done, they’d gone about ditching the bulk of their kit. Weapons, CBRN suits, respirators, explosives, Kolokol-1 canisters – anything that might link back to the mission – had all been dumped overboard.

By the time they’d made landfall, there was little left to associate them with any military action. They had the appearance of four civilian pleasure-boaters who had run into a little trouble at sea.

They’d made sure they’d left no trail to follow back on the island, gathering up the used Kolokol-1 canisters. All that was left behind was a few dozen untraceable 9mm casings. Even their footprints had been masked by their CBRN overboots. There had been CCTV cameras in the villa, but once Raff had fried the electric circuitry, there had been no power. In any case, Jaeger would challenge anyone to ID him and his team through their respirators.

All that remained was their three parachutes, and even they should drift out to sea with the prevailing tides.

Any way Jaeger looked at it, they were clean.

As they’d powered across the calm, night-dark ocean, he’d spared a thought for the fact that he was still alive; that all his team were. He’d felt that warm buzz – that incredible rush – of entering a deadly kill zone and surviving.

Life never seemed more real than in the moments after it had very nearly been taken away from you.

Perhaps because of that, an image had come unbidden into his mind. Of Ruth – dark-haired, green-eyed, with fine, almost delicate features, an air of Celtic mystery about her; of Luke – eight years of age and even then the spitting image of his father.

Luke would be eleven now, his twelfth birthday just a few months away. He was a July baby, and they’d always managed to celebrate his birthday somewhere magical, for it fell midway through the summer holidays.

Jaeger spooled through the birthday memories in his mind: carrying a two-year-old Luke across the Giant’s Causeway on Ireland’s wild west coast; surfing off the Portuguese beaches when Luke was six; trekking through the snowy wastes of Mont Blanc when he was eight.

But after that there was just a sudden, empty blackness . . . a chilling loss that had lasted for three long years. Each of those missing birthdays had been sheer hell, and doubly so since whoever had kidnapped his wife and son had started to torture Jaeger remotely with images of their captivity.

He had been emailed photos of Ruth and Luke in chains, kneeling at the feet of their captors, their faces gaunt and haunted, their gazes red-rimmed and plagued by nightmares.

To know that they were alive and being held somewhere in utter, abject misery and despair had driven Jaeger to the edge of madness. It was only the hunt – the promise of their rescue – that had brought him back from the brink.

With Raff manning the RIB’s engines, Jaeger had navigated across the night-dark ocean using a portable GPS unit. With his free hand he’d unlaced one boot and removed something from beneath the insole.

He’d flashed his head-torch across it briefly, his eyes lingering on the faces that stared back at him from the tiny, battered photo – one that he carried on every mission, no matter what or where it might be. It had been taken on their last family holiday – a safari trip to Africa – and showed Ruth wrapped in a bright Kenyan sarong, a suntanned Luke in shorts and a
SAVE THE RHINO
T-shirt standing proudly at her side.

As the RIB had cut through the night sea, Jaeger had said a short prayer for them, wherever they might be. In his heart he knew they were still alive, and that the Cuban mission had brought him one step closer to finding them. While searching the villa, Raff had grabbed an iPad and some computer drives, stuffing them into his backpack. Jaeger hoped they might yield vital clues.

When the RIB had made landfall at the Turks and Caicos capital, Cockburn Town, calls had been made from the governor’s residence; strings pulled. Leticia and Narov had been airlifted out of there direct to the UK, on a private jet equipped with state-of-the-art medical facilities.

The Biowell Clinic was an exclusive private hospital. Patients tended to have few questions asked of them, which was convenient when you had two young women suffering from Kolokol-1 poisoning, and one peppered with fragments of shrapnel.

When the grenade had exploded a scattering of steel splinters had struck Narov, piercing her suit, hence the Kolokol-1 poisoning. But the long ride in the RIB and the fresh sea air had helped to blow the worst of the toxins away.

Jaeger found Narov in her hospital room, propped against a pile of spotless pillows. Sunlight streamed in through the partially open window.

All things considered, she was looking remarkably well. A little pinched and pale, perhaps. Heavy rings around the eyes. She still sported the odd bandage where the shrapnel had hit her. But just three weeks after the attack, she was well on the road to recovery.

Jaeger took the seat beside her bed. Narov didn’t say anything.

‘How are you feeling?’ he prompted.

She didn’t so much as glance at him. ‘Alive.’

‘Gives a lot away,’ Jaeger grumbled.

‘Okay, how is this? My head hurts, I’m bored shitless, and I’m desperate to get out of here.’

In spite of himself, Jaeger had to smile. It never ceased to amaze him how exasperating this woman could be. Her flat, expressionless, overly formal tones lent her words just a hint of menace, yet there was no doubting her self-sacrifice or her bravery. By diving on that body and smothering the grenade, she had saved the lot of them. They owed Narov their lives,

And Jaeger didn’t like being so in debt to someone who was such an enigma.

11

‘The doctors say you’re not going anywhere fast,’ Jaeger volunteered., ‘Not until they’ve run some more tests.’

‘The doctors can go screw themselves. No one is keeping me here against my will.’

While Jaeger felt a driving sense of urgency to get on the case again, he needed Narov fit and capable.

‘Softly softly catchee monkey,’ he told her. She looked at him quizzically. More haste, less speed was his basic meaning. ‘Take the time to get well.’ He paused. ‘And
then
we get busy.’

Narov snorted. ‘But we do not have time. After our Amazon mission, those who came after us vowed to hunt us down. And now they will be triply determined. Yet still there is all the time in the world for me to lie here and get pampered?’

‘You’re no use to anyone half-dead.’

She glared. ‘I am very much alive. And time is running out, or have you forgotten? Those papers we discovered. In that warplane.
Aktion Werewolf
. Blueprint for the Fourth Reich.’

Jaeger hadn’t forgotten.

At the end of their epic Amazon expedition, they’d stumbled across a giant Second World War-era warplane secreted in the jungle, on an airstrip hewn out of the bush. It turned out that it had carried Hitler’s foremost scientists, plus the Reich’s
Wunderwaffe
– its top-secret, cutting-edge weaponry – to a place where such fearsome weapons could be developed long after the war was over.

Finding the aircraft had been a mind-blowing discovery. But for Jaeger and his team, the real shocker had been the revelation that it was the Allied powers – chiefly America and Britain – that had sponsored those ultra-secret Nazi relocation flights.

In the closing stages of the war, the Allies had cut deals with a raft of top Nazis to ensure they would escape justice. By that point, Germany was no longer the real enemy: Stalin’s Russia was. The West faced a new threat: the rise of communism, and the Cold War. Working to the old rule that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, the Allied powers had bent over backwards to safeguard the foremost architects of Hitler’s Reich.

In short, key Nazis and their technologies had been flown halfway around the world to secrecy and safety. The British and Americans had referred to this deep-black programme by various codenames: it was Operation Darwin to the British, and Project Safe Haven to the Americans. But the Nazis had had their own operational codename, and it beat all the others by a country mile:
Aktion Werewolf
– Operation Werewolf.

Aktion Werewolf
had a seventy-year timescale, and was designed to deliver the ultimate revenge against the Allies. It
was a blueprint to bring about the rise of a Fourth Reich by working top Nazis into positions of world power, while at the same time harnessing the most fearsome of the
Wunderwaffe
to their ends.

That much had been revealed in documents recovered from the aircraft in the Amazon. And in undertaking that expedition, Jaeger had realised that another, frighteningly powerful force was also searching for the warplane, intent on burying its secrets for ever.

Vladimir and his people had hunted Jaeger’s team across the Amazon. Of their captives, only Leticia Santos had been spared, and that so as to coerce and entrap Jaeger and his fellow operators. But then Narov had turned up trumps, discovering the location of Santos’s prison – hence the rescue mission they had just undertaken, a mission that had thrown up new and vital evidence.

‘There’s been a development,’ Jaeger announced. Over time, he’d learnt that it was best to ignore the worst of Narov’s crabbiness. ‘We broke the passwords. Got into their computer; their drives.’