Jaeger stiffened. Mention of the Reichsadler brought back dark memories of Andy Smith, who along with Raff had been Jaeger’s closest buddy in the SAS. Smith had been murdered by Kammler’s people. He’d been discovered with that stylised eagle symbol so resonant of the evil of the Reich carved into his back.
Jaeger had vowed to avenge his death. He’d thought he’d done so. But if Kammler was still alive, not to mention Jones, then he hadn’t even got close.
‘I understand,’ Miles said quietly. He was silent for a moment. ‘One last question, and then I think perhaps we should try to determine what all of this might mean. Why didn’t you share this with us earlier? Weeks back. Why the need to go off radar? Solo?’
Narov raised her chin defiantly. ‘I never believed Kammler was dead. You all did. All too easily. So the CIA had a DNA sample. So what? We have been misled before. People like Kammler do not die so easily.’ A pause. ‘You can’t deny it any more: Kammler is alive. Which means we need to go after him.’
Jaeger snorted. ‘And you never thought to breathe a word about your suspicions?’
‘What would have been the point? You all wanted to believe he was dead. The threat extinguished.’ She eyed him dismissively. ‘Plus you had other things on your mind.’
In a sense, Narov was right. For three long years Jaeger had been missing his wife and child. When he’d got them back, he’d focused on them to the exclusion of everything else, leaving it to others to hunt Kammler. After all, the entire CIA and the world’s militaries had been involved by then.
When Jaeger had been told they’d got him, he’d believed them. It took a mind like Narov’s never to give credit to anything, not unless she’d seen it with her own eyes.
‘One more question.’ It was Raff. ‘That was Kammler’s voice all right. I’d never forget it. But he looks different. Like the face doesn’t fit the voice any more.’
Miles pulled up an image from Narov’s surveillance footage and zoomed in on Kammler’s features. ‘Look closely. His face shows all the signs of having had plastic surgery. It’s something that wasn’t unknown during the war. Allied agents known to the Gestapo went under the knife, and they did the same on their side.’
Jaeger stared at the image frozen on the screen. ‘One thing’s for sure: he’s learnt well from his Nazi forefathers.’
22
They’d eaten a rushed lunch huddled round a couple of laptops, digging up the basics on the St Georgen murder investigation. One point jumped out from all the press and police reports: the investigating team had penetrated far into the tunnels, but had eventually been forced to turn back.
The deeper they had gone, the higher the level of radiation they’d detected.
‘Haigerloch,’ Uncle Joe ventured. ‘The missing uranium. It has to be.’
‘Exactly,’ Miles agreed.
‘Fancy enlightening us?’ Jaeger prompted.
‘Haigerloch, a pretty village in southern Germany,’ Miles explained. ‘Towards the end of the war, the Nazis moved their top nuclear scientists – the Uranverein; the Uranium Club – plus their technology, out of Berlin, and secreted it in caves beneath Haigerloch’s pretty baroque church.
‘They presumed, rightly, that Allied warplanes would never venture there,’ he continued, ‘and even if they did, all they’d see was a quaint church. As matters transpired, American forces overran Haigerloch before the reactor could breed enough raw material to build a bomb. Or so everyone thought.’
‘US forces dismantled the reactor. They recovered 664 cubes of uranium, forming the core. Each cube weighed roughly half a kilo, so 332 kilos all told. But Nazi records showed that one and a half tonnes of uranium had been trucked out of Berlin, which left over a tonne unaccounted for. The suspicion was that the Reich had established a second, ultra-secret reactor.’
‘So that’s why Jones and his gang went to St Georgen?’ Jaeger queried. ‘That’s what’s been hidden there all these years? A pile of uranium ore?’
‘It would make a certain degree of sense, yes.’
‘But what can they do with it?’ Jaeger probed. ‘Practically speaking?’
‘Yeah, like does it spell kaboom?’ Raff added.
‘Nuclear reactors can breed the raw material for an atomic bomb,’ Miles confirmed. ‘But it all depends how enriched the uranium is. To give you a sense of the amounts involved, Little Boy was packed with sixty-four kilos of highly enriched uranium when it was detonated over Hiroshima.’
Jaeger’s face darkened. ‘So you’re saying they’ve got enough to build several bombs? Potentially.’
Miles shrugged. ‘Not necessarily. To do that, you’d have to master hugely complex technology.’ He flashed a look at Jaeger. ‘But there is another possibility…’
‘Which is?’
‘I’m no expert,’ Miles continued, ‘but constructing an IND is relatively easy. In fact the main challenge is getting your hands on enough highly enriched uranium. Once you’ve done that, it’s fairly straightforward.’
‘IND?’
‘Improvised nuclear device. Basically, a modern nuclear weapon achieves ninety per cent efficiency in terms of fission – so turning uranium into an unimaginably powerful explosion. It does so by firing a hollow tube of uranium onto an interlocking cylinder, at tremendous speed. When they impact, fission occurs… and kaboom, as Raff would say.’
‘And an IND?’
‘Far cruder. In essence, you clobber two lumps of uranium together, achieving around ten per cent efficiency. But it’s still a staggeringly powerful weapon. To give you a sense of it, an IND fitted with twenty kilos of highly enriched uranium would create a blast equal to one thousand tonnes of high explosives.’
‘Plus the radiation poisoning and contamination,’ Narov added.
‘Yes. Plus that.’
‘So practically speaking, what would a twenty-kilo IND achieve in terms of destruction?’
Miles eyed Jaeger. ‘If you detonated it in the City of London, it would flatten the entire Square Mile.’
‘Shit.’
‘Indeed. There’s one other advantage to an IND. Despite its name, Little Boy was a big device, weighing in at around 4,500 kilos. An IND is a fraction of that size and weight.’
Jaeger’s face hardened. ‘Which makes it the perfect weapon for a terrorist outfit… or a madman like Kammler.’ It was stating the obvious, but it needed to be said.
‘It does.’ Miles paused for a second, massaging the bridge of his nose. ‘And that brings me to why I wanted to call you all here. How many of you have heard of Moldova?’
‘Moldova?’ Raff snorted. ‘Heard a joke about it once. Why do Moldovan football fans need two seats? One to sit on and one to throw when the fighting starts.’
There was a ripple of laughter. It was one of the things that Jaeger loved about Raff: no matter how dire a situation, he could always find humour in it. It was so often humour that carried them through.
Typically, Narov had failed to crack the barest hint of a smile. Humour was rarely her strong point.
‘Moldova’s an impoverished, chaotic, lawless mess of a former Soviet state,’ Miles continued, ‘not to mention the world’s foremost black market for uranium. There have been several attempts to flog former Soviet stocks. It culminated in an effort to sell forty kilos to ISIS. Note the amount: more than enough to build an IND.’
‘Who stopped it? I presume it was stopped?’
‘It was.’
‘Who by?’
‘As it happens, our old friend Daniel Brooks. The CIA infiltrated an agent into the network, and when the money was handed over, the bad guys were busted. But this year the Moldovan mafia moved on to a new deal, this one involving a mystery client. We know his code name only: Grey Wolf.’