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.’
He handed her a sheet of paper. It had a few words scrawled across it.
‘These are the keywords we’ve picked up from their email chatter,’ Jaeger explained. ‘Vladimir – if that’s his real name – was communicating with someone higher up. The guy who calls the shots. Those words came up repeatedly in their comms.’