Jaeger’s backside felt like a block of ice. His legs were on fire, his muscles on the verge of cramping up. He needed to shift about a bit in this freezing hole of an OP – little more than a shell scrape on the bare mountainside – or he was at risk of getting frostbite. But any sudden movement had to be avoided.
It was forty-eight hours since the blizzard had blown itself out. For four days they’d been trapped in that snow cave, riding out its blind rage. Four agonising days that had confirmed what Jaeger had felt on every mission he had ever been involved in: it was the waiting that was the hardest part.
It was six days since they’d leapt from the Antonov’s open ramp and landed on Chinese soil. Or snow. Time was running out, and still there was no sign of the tungsten shipment.
They’d dug themselves out of the snow cave only to discover that their surroundings had been transformed. Ghostly snow sculptures rose before them, as if a horde of primordial monsters had stormed down from the mountains, becoming frozen in time. In between those bizarre forms, pans of ice were wind-blasted and scoured clear.
The landscape had had a certain dreamlike quality to it. Everything was snow. Even the poles marking the pulk’s position had been transformed. Raff had had to knock the snow off them before they could credit that the pulk was actually there – just buried.
Thankfully, the weather had turned. In fact, it had reverted to what were more normal conditions for this time of year – spring on the high Tibetan plateau. Under a shockingly clear night sky – washed free of the storm – they’d harnessed up the sled and set forth.
A few uneventful hours later, they’d reached their end destination and established the OP. Roofed over with branches and chicken wire – into which they’d woven twigs and vegetation, piling on some earth and snow for extra authenticity – it was indistinguishable from the surrounding terrain.
You would have to stand right on top of it and gaze into the six inches or so separating the roof from the frontal slope of rocks and boulders to get any sense of what it was. And as the interior was bathed in permanent shadow, the watchers were all but invisible.
A few dozen paces back from the OP, at the crest of the ridge, the snow proper began. There they’d built a second, slightly larger snow cave, the entrance to which was concealed by Alpine camouflage netting. This was the rest and admin area.
They’d put in place a perfectly concealed position to spy on their target.
Now to nail him.
But they were running short on food. As was invariably the case when calculating rations, Jaeger had underestimated just how many calories the human body needed to stave off starvation and as fuel to keep warm. Or rather, in the trade-off between extra food and extra weaponry, it was weaponry that had won.
As Raff had noted sourly, shame you couldn’t eat bullets.
Jaeger could feel hunger gnawing at his guts. But one glance at the facility below them – the target – and he figured prioritising raw firepower over raw food was undoubtedly a good thing.
That facility was a well-secured natural fortress, and it would require a distinctly suicidal four-person squad to take it out.
They’d set the OP on the very fringes of the snowline, where the frozen whiteness petered out, to be replaced by bare rock and scrub. Below, a steep-sided gorge cut through the foothills of the Nyenchen Tanglha Mountains, and at the far end lay the vast expanse of the Namtso – ‘Beautiful’ – Lake.
Through the depths of the gorge ran the Boqi river, a twisting sliver of violent aquamarine blue, the striking colour caused by the salts carried by glacial meltwaters. And clinging to the side of the gorge, on a platform blasted out of the rock, lay the fortress that Jaeger and his team were keeping watch on.
It was the water that had drawn Kammler here, which had also been the means via which the Chinese government had allowed him in. Much of Tibet’s water sat in lakes like the Namtso, which, being brackish, carried a high degree of salt. Salt water was no good for human consumption, and offered little scope for irrigation either, since the salt quickly poisoned the land.
Knowing this, and recognising the growing demand for water amongst a one-billion-strong population, the Chinese had opened up to foreign investment in using water for energy and for its purification. In due course Kammler had offered them a double whammy of a promise, here on the banks of the Boqi.
First, by piping the water from the smaller, glacial lakes above, his plant could turn it into electricity – hence the giant turbine hall set into the mountainside. Three massive water pipelines – ‘penstocks’ to those in the trade – brought the water from the highland lakes down the nearside of the gorge to drive the turbines situated inside the building.
The electricity so generated – massive amounts of the stuff – went to serve the plant’s main purpose: desalination. Removing salt from brackish water to make it drinkable was hideously expensive. Normally. But here, the electricity came dirt cheap, and Kammler had promised groundbreaking technologies to render the water potable.
For the Chinese, this was the holy grail of such research. No wonder they had welcomed Kammler – plus his money and technology – with open arms.
China had recently overtaken America as the foremost country attracting foreign investors. Kammler had been just one amongst many thousands of such businessmen.
All of this Jaeger had learnt from Miles’s briefings. Now, as he gazed down into the Boqi river gorge, he was seeing it at first hand. The slab-sided desalination plant lay adjacent to the turbine house, and a short distance away was the accommodation block. It looked as if it must house a good two hundred people – workers and guards.
Tucked well to one side and clinging to the cover of the gorge’s knife-cut wall was their main target – the laboratory. The entire complex was encircled by a double layer of high-tensile fencing, crowned by rolls of razor wire. A guard force patrolled the perimeter. They were armed with pistols, as was a civilian establishment’s wont, but Jaeger didn’t doubt that there was a well-stocked armoury close at hand.
It was a heavy security presence for a civilian facility, but no more than many others that Jaeger had visited. Commercial research was expensive and sensitive, and espionage always a danger. Kammler would have argued that he had to safeguard his investment, which would supposedly chiefly benefit China after all.
He had every reason to seek to import sophisticated technology for his desalination plant and laboratory. A dirt track snaked east along the riverside, giving access to the outside world: it was via this route that Kammler would be awaiting his newest, Moldovan delivery.
Somewhere in the laboratory was a sealed-off high-security area, with very restricted access. There, pretty much hiding in plain sight, he was amassing his highly enriched uranium.
And, as they feared, building his clutch of deadly INDs.
57
Of course, a place as beautiful as Namtso Lake attracted a smattering of tourists. Snowy peaks plunged abruptly into the turquoise waters, wind-sculpted ice crusting the very shoreline. And along the northern fringes, herds of sheep grazed upon the seasonal grasses that thrived amidst the yellows, ochres and greys of the lakeside.
But the lake’s sheer remoteness kept the number of visitors down to a trickle, and few ever ventured to the far western fringes – into the Boqi gorge. Even if they did, all they would see would be a bona fide hydropower station, with all the usual associated facilities, security included.
Miles and Brooks had hit the nail on the head: this place was perfect for Kammler’s purposes. In fact, the entire set-up was so smart and accomplished that it made Jaeger marvel at the sheer waste of such intellect. So much creative intelligence and cunning channelled into death and mass destruction.