A terrifying way to go.
Whoever had done this had also indulged in a frenzy of destruction, either before or after the executions, smashing the filming kit to smithereens.
But why? To what purpose? To what end?
It just didn’t make any sense.
Jaeger had to presume that they’d wanted to destroy all record of whatever the film crew had recorded. But surely nothing of any great significance had been found. Just a long and very ghostly set of tunnels.
He flicked his light back to the mound of earth at the far end. It was then that he spied it. Footprints ran up the near side. It wasn’t just one set of boots that had made that climb: scores had.
But why, if it was a dead end?
Jaeger moved closer. He followed the same path up the hillock of dirt. As he neared the top, he felt it. The pile beneath his feet began to shift. All of a sudden the wall of debris before him collapsed in a mini landslide.
The noise in this enclosed space was deafening.
He flicked off his light, and froze.
15
The sound of the landslide echoed along the length of the tunnel that had opened before him.
Unlike the first tunnel, this one certainly led somewhere. But just as the film crew and their team of excavators had made their discovery, somebody – some force of gunmen – had smashed apart their film kit and executed them all.
Jaeger figured he had his answer as to why they had been murdered: they had been snuffed out in an effort to hide whatever they had discovered. But surely someone would come to investigate? They’d find what Jaeger had found. They’d look deeper. And they’d discover whatever the film crew had stumbled across.
Unless…
He stepped back a few paces and flicked his light on again, running it back and forth over the path beaten across the pile of rubble and dirt. A lot of people had walked this way, and in both directions.
Which begged the question: had whatever the film crew discovered been removed?
It must have been secreted here for seventy-odd years. Presumably those who had hidden it had wanted it to remain utterly secret. So had a force of gunmen been sent in here to retrieve it and silence any who had borne witness to its existence?
It was the only thing that made any sense.
But what was so valuable that it could warrant seventy years’ dark secrecy and such a brutal mass slaying? A hoard of Nazi gold? Precious antiquities? Priceless artworks? What exactly was it that had cost these young people their lives?
And then another thought hit Jaeger: what if the killers were still here? What if they were deeper in the tunnel complex, and busy with their task of retrieval?
He ran his eye across the corpses. Eight dead. He figured there had to be several assailants; three at a minimum, and very likely more. Though he hated to admit it, they had been good at their work. Cold-blooded, efficient killers.
And he was alone and unarmed.
One of the basic skills of elite-forces soldiering was deciding when to fight and when to flee. In World War II, the SAS had made its name with ‘shoot-and-scoot’ tactics: striking an enemy by utter surprise, then melting away before they could respond with any significant force of arms.
Hit and run.
Jaeger might have the element of surprise, but he was heavily outnumbered and hopelessly outgunned. Not for the first time in his life, he decided that discretion was the better part of valour. He flicked off his torch and turned to leave, pausing for a few seconds to let his eyes adjust to the darkness. He’d move through it now, using it as his cloak and his protector.
Jaeger set off, skirting around the corpses, but something made him pause. A memory, tugging at his adrenalin-hyped senses. For the barest of instants he was in the depths of the Brazilian Amazon, on the trail of a lost warplane – a stupendous Luftwaffe Junkers JU 390, the largest aircraft ever to have flown during World War II.
That had been the start of the journey that had led to his ultimate showdown with Hank Kammler. Jaeger had had a film crew accompany the expedition. The cameraman had been in the habit of secretly filming the team when he’d been forbidden from doing so.
His favourite trick was to plonk the camera down as if it wasn’t running, but to leave the lens facing the direction of maximum interest and the machine on record. He’d taped over the red filming light, so no one could tell if the camera was live.
Jaeger bent to inspect the remains of the nearest camera. As he did so, his eyes flashed across the features of the corpse lying beside it. Somehow it looked familiar. He risked momentarily flicking on his torch. It was the Austrian film-maker; Jaeger recognised him from his photo in the newspaper.
The dead man’s camera had been seriously smashed up, but still he could see that the red record light had been covered over with a length of gaffer tape.
Jaeger hesitated for just an instant before feeling around in the camera’s innards for the memory card. He stepped across to the other camera – most crews carried two – but as he bent to retrieve the second card, a spear of light pierced the gloom.
It had come from the far end of the tunnel, and was accompanied by heavy footfalls. The sound of running. The gunmen, whoever they might be, were coming.
Jaeger figured they must have spotted the flash of illumination from his torch as he’d studied the dead cameraman’s features. His pulse pounding like a machine gun, he grabbed the second memory card and stuffed it into his pocket, then turned and ran.
As he pounded up the tunnel, he caught sight of a figure from the corner of his eye. Massive, muscle-bound, the man had clambered up the far side of the rock pile, torch dazzling Jaeger’s eyes.
Held before him he had his .22 pistol, sweeping the space ahead.
16
Narov made her way through the dense foliage of the Al Mohajir Tower’s roof garden as if she had every right to be there.
She knew exactly what she was looking for. The garden sat within a courtyard made up of the four sides of the skyscraper. Basically, she had scaled the glass exterior, only to abseil back down to where she was now.
Which was just as she’d intended.
Kammler’s meeting was scheduled to take place on Executive Level Platinum, the floor that lay directly below the roof garden. It had the benefit of natural light, which filtered through the foliage via a series of skylights.
She found the one that she was looking for.
With barely a pause to check whether she was being observed – a workman going about his everyday tasks at 6.30 a.m.; why would anyone pay any heed? – she dropped to her knees, unloading a set of tools from her chest pack.
She took hold of a simple glass-cutting tool and proceeded to score around the edge of one of the skylight’s panes. With a pair of suction handles attached, she lifted free the glass with a sharp snatch of the hands. She did a repeat performance with the second pane – the skylights were double-glazed – and suddenly she was gazing down into the building’s interior.
The skylights themselves were alarmed, but would trigger only if you opened one. Cutting the glass avoided that. She’d chosen to enter the seventy-second floor via one of the restrooms, and she was looking down at a row of sinks, with directly beneath her a line of cubicles. There was CCTV, but it would not cover the cubicles, for obvious reasons of privacy.
Before allowing herself to drop, Narov removed a small video camera from her rucksack. She held it rock-steady, braced against the side of the skylight, and filmed three minutes of the empty restroom. Then she stuffed the camera deep in her pocket, dropped her rucksack through the opening and lowered herself, landing cat-like on the bare floor of one of the cubicles.