Burning Angels (17 page)

‘It does,’ Miles confirmed.

‘So you’re driving to the lodge and you spy this awesome peak. You’ve got time to spare and you figure, what the hell? It’s a steep scramble, but when you reach the summit you see a sheer rock face dropping to the crater below. You see the mouth of a cave: dark, mysterious, compelling. You won’t know its forbidden territory. Why would you? You decide to abseil down to explore. That’s our route into the caves, and at least there’s a good cover story.’

‘So what’s not to like?’ Narov demanded.

‘You’re not thinking straight, remember. That’s the key. What kind of people don’t think straight? Not a bunch of hardened operators like us.’ Jaeger shook his head. ‘Newly-weds, that’s who. A rich, wealthy newly-wed couple – the kind of people who honeymoon at five-star game ranches.’

Jaeger swung his gaze from Narov to James and back again. ‘That’s you two. Mr and Mrs Bert Groves, whose wallets are stuffed with cash and whose brains are addled with love.’

Narov stared at the hulking bearded form of Joe James. ‘Me and him? Why us?’

‘You, ’cause none of us is sharing a safari lodge with another guy,’ Jaeger answered. ‘And James, ’cause once he’s shaved his beard and cut his hair, he’ll be perfect.’

James shook his head and smiled. ‘And what’ll you be doing, while the lovely Irina and I head off into the African sunset?’

‘I’ll be right behind you,’ Jaeger answered, ‘with the guns and the backup.’

James scratched his massive beard. ‘One problem, aside from shaving this off . . . Can I be trusted to keep my hands off Irina? I mean, much as I—’

‘Zip it, Osama bin Liner,’ Narov cut in. ‘I can look after myself.’

James shrugged good-naturedly. ‘But seriously, there is a problem. Kamishi, Alonzo and me – we’re under the cosh, remember. We’ve got cutaneous leishmaniasis; we’re banned from any strenuous activity. And by anyone’s reckoning, this is going to be tough.’

James wasn’t bullshitting about the sickness. At the end of their Amazon expedition, he, Alonzo and Kamishi had been trapped in the jungle for several weeks. During their epic exfiltration they’d been eaten alive by sand flies – tiny tropical mites the size of a pinhead.

The flies had laid their larvae under the men’s skin, to feed off the living flesh. The bites had turned into open, weeping sores. The only treatment was a series of injections of Pentostam, a highly toxic drug. Each shot felt as if acid was burning through your veins. Pentostam was so noxious it could weaken your heart and respiratory systems – hence the ban on any strenuous physical activity.

‘There’s still Raff,’ Jaeger ventured.

James shook his head. ‘With all due respect, Raff just won’t cut it. Sorry, mate, but it’s the tattoos and the hair. No one would buy it. And that,’ he eyed Jaeger, ‘leaves only you.’

Jaeger glanced at Narov. She didn’t appear the slightest bit perturbed at what was being proposed here. He wasn’t entirely surprised. She seemed to possess few of the normal human sensitivities to how people should and shouldn’t interact, especially between the sexes.

‘What if Kammler’s people recognise us? We’ve got reason to believe they have photos of me, at the very least,’ Jaeger objected. It was the main reason he hadn’t suggested that he team up with Narov in the first place.

‘Two options,’ a voice cut in. It was Peter Miles. ‘And let me just say – I like this plan. You’ll be disguised. The extreme option is to have plastic surgery. The less extreme option is to change your appearance as much as we can without going under the knife. Either way, we have people who can do this.’

‘Plastic surgery?’ Jaeger queried, incredulous.

‘It is not so unusual. Ms Narov has already had it done twice. Each time we suspected that those she hunted knew of her appearance. In fact, the Secret Hunters have a long history of going under the knife.’

Jaeger threw up his hands. ‘Okay, look, can we just do this without a nip ’n’ tuck and nose job?’

‘We can, in which case you will be a blonde,’ Miles announced. ‘And for good measure, your wife will be a ravishing brunette.’

‘Or how about a fiery redhead?’ James suggested. ‘That’s far more suited to her temperament.’

‘Get a life, Osama,’ Narov hissed.

‘No, no. A blonde and a brunette.’ Peter Miles smiled. ‘Trust me, that will be perfect.’

With that agreed, the briefing broke up. All were tired. Being locked away deep underground made Jaeger feel strangely restless and irritable. He longed for a breath of wind and a touch of sunshine.

But there was one more thing he needed to do first. He loitered as the room thinned out, before approaching Miles, who was busy packing away his computer gear.

‘Any chance of a private word?’

‘Of course.’ The elderly Miles glanced around the bunker. ‘We’re pretty much alone, I think.’

‘So, I’m curious,’ Jaeger ventured. ‘Why the stress you keep placing on human testing? The relevance you seem to think it has to me personally?’

‘Ah, that . . . I’m not very good at hiding things, not when they trouble me . . .’ Miles powered up his laptop again. ‘Let me show you something.’

He clicked on a file and pulled up an image. It showed a shaven-headed man, in a black and white striped pyjama suit, slumped against a plain tiled wall. His eyes were screwed shut, his brow heavily furrowed and his mouth open in a silent scream.

Miles glanced at Jaeger. ‘The Natzweiler gas chamber. As with most things, the Nazis documented their poison gas experiments in great detail. There are four thousand such images. Some are far more disturbing, because they feature tests on women and children.’

Jaeger had a sickening sense of what Miles was driving at here. ‘Give it to me straight. I need to know.’

The elderly Miles blanched. ‘I do not relish having to say this. And remember, these are only my suspicions . . . But Hank Kammler has seized your wife and child. He holds them. He – or his people – sent you proof that they are still alive; or at least they were alive not so long ago.’

A few weeks back, Jaeger had been sent an email, with an attachment. When he’d opened it, the image had shown a kneeling Ruth and Luke holding up the front page of a newspaper: proof that they were alive as of its date. It was all part of the attempt to torment and break Jaeger. ‘He seized your family, and eventually he will need to test his
Gottvirus
on live humans, if he is to prove beyond all doubt . . .’

The elderly man’s words faded into nothing. His eyes were full of a dark pain. He left the rest unsaid. As for Jaeger, he didn’t need telling.

Miles stared at Jaeger, searchingly. ‘Again, I’m sorry we felt the need to test you. For the R2I.’

Jaeger didn’t respond. It was the last thing on his mind right now.

32

Jaeger kicked off with his boots, forcing his body outwards into space and letting gravity do the rest. The rope hissed through the belay plate as he plummeted downwards in an abseil, the floor of the crater coming closer with every second.

Some fifty feet below him, Narov was hanging on her climbing gear: a D-shaped carabiner clicked into a chock – a wedge-like piece of metal jammed into a convenient crack in the rock face, with a strong steel loop attached. She was well anchored as she waited for Jaeger to reach her, after which she’d begin the next leg of the descent.

The eight hundred metres of near-vertical rock that formed the interior face of Burning Angels crater made for some fourteen separate abseils, on a sixty metre climbing rope – which was about the maximum size that a man could carry.

It was proving to be quite an undertaking

Some seventy-two hours earlier Jaeger had sat in stunned silence. Peter Miles’ briefing had left little to the imagination. It wasn’t just about Ruth and Luke anymore. Quite possibly, the survival of the entire human species was at stake.

As honeymooners might, he and Narov had flown club class direct to the main international airport here, before hiring a 4x4 and heading west into the sun-baked African bush. After an eighteen-hour drive, they’d reached Burning Angels Peak, pulled over, locked their hire vehicle and begun their epic climb.

Jaeger’s boots made contact again, and he kicked hard, booting himself away from the cliff face. But as he did so, large chunks of rock broke off and plummeted downwards . . . towards where Narov was hanging on her climbing gear.

‘Rock fall!’ Jaeger yelled. ‘Watch out below!’

Narov didn’t so much as glance upwards. She didn’t have the time. Instead, Jaeger saw her grasp with her bare fingers at the rock face, as she scrabbled to flatten her torso to its surface, pressing her face into its sun-warmed hardness. Against the massive expanse of the crater she looked small and fragile somehow, and Jaeger held his breath as the mini-avalanche crashed down.

At the last instant, the boulders smashed into a narrow lip of rock just above where she was positioned, ricocheting outwards and missing her by bare inches.

That had been close. If just one rock had hit, it would have cracked her skull open, and Jaeger wouldn’t be able to rush her to a hospital any time soon out here.

He let the last of the rope whistle through his fingers, and pulled to a halt beside her.

She eyed him. ‘There are enough things here that want to kill us. I don’t need you as well.’ She seemed fine. Not even shaken.

Jaeger clicked himself on to the climbing gear, detached from the rope and handed it over. ‘Your turn. Oh, and be careful with the rocks. Some of them are a little loose.’

As he knew only too well, Narov wasn’t great with his teasing sense of humour. Generally she tried to ignore him, which just made it all the funnier.

She scowled. ‘
Schwachkopf
.’

As he’d learned in the Amazon, she was fond of that German curse word –
idiot
. He presumed it was something she’d picked up during her time with the Secret Hunters.

As Narov readied herself, Jaeger gazed westwards over the crater’s steaming interior. He could see where a massive archway sliced right through the crater wall. The opening allowed the lake due west of there to flood in during the height of the rains, so boosting the level of the floodwaters in the crater.

And that was what made this place so very dangerous.

Lake Tanganyika, the world’s longest freshwater lake, stretched north for several hundred kilometres from here. The lake’s isolation and its vast age – it was some twenty million years old – had enabled a unique ecosystem to evolve. Its waters harboured giant crocodiles, huge crabs and massive hippos. The lush forests that crowded the lake were home to herds of wild elephant. And with the coming of the rains, much of that life was washed outwards from the lake and into Burning Angels crater.

Between Jaeger and that imposing archway lay one of the caldera’s main waterholes. He could barely see it, due to the lush forest cover. But he sure could hear it. The blow and suck and bellowing of the hippos reached him clearly on the hot and humid air.

A one-hundred-strong ‘bloat’ was gathered there, mushing the waterhole into the mother of all mudbaths. And as the merciless African sun beat down and the waterhole began to shrink, so the massive animals were forced closer and closer, hippo tempers fraying.

No doubt about it, that kind of terrain was to be given as wide a berth as possible. The watercourses linking the mud holes were also to be avoided. They harboured crocodiles, and after Jaeger and Narov’s encounter with one of those murderously powerful reptiles in the Amazon, they didn’t fancy another.

They’d stick to dry land wherever possible.

But of course, even there was danger.

33

Twenty minutes after triggering the rock fall, Jaeger’s tough Salewa boots thumped into the rich black volcanic soil of the crater bottom, the rope bouncing him up and down a few times before it finally found its equilibrium.

Strictly speaking they’d have been better using a static line – a rope possessing zero elasticity – for the epic series of abseils. But you don’t want to climb on a static line, just in case you take a tumble. The elasticity of a climbing rope is what serves to break your fall, in a similar way to how a bungee-jumper decelerates at jump’s end.

But a fall is still a fall, and it hurts.

Jaeger unhooked himself, pulled the rope free from the final abseil point above and let it drop with a hiss at his feet. Then, starting from the middle, he coiled it and slung it over his shoulder. He took a brief moment to search out the way ahead. The terrain before him was quite simply out of this world, and so different from the climb in here.

When he and Narov had scaled the mountain’s outer slopes, the ground had proved remarkably friable and treacherous underfoot. It had been washed by the seasonal rains into a latticework of deep, plunging gulleys.

The climb to the high point had been a harsh, burning hot, disorienting slog. In many places they had laboured in the shadow of a ravine, blocked from all view and with no easy means to navigate. It had been next to impossible to get any

purchase on the dry, gravelly surface, and with each step they’d slipped a good distance back again.

But Jaeger had been driven on relentlessly by one thought: that of Ruth and Luke imprisoned within the caves below and threatened with the terrible fate that Peter Miles had intimated. That conversation was but days old, and that image – that terrible apparition – burned in Jaeger’s mind.

If there was a germ warfare laboratory secreted somewhere beneath this mountain – with Jaeger’s family very likely caged and ready for the final weapons testing – it would require an assault by Jaeger’s entire team to neutralise it. The present mission was an attempt to prove its existence, one way or the other.

For now they’d left the rest of the team – Raff, James, Kamishi, Alonzo and Dale – at the Falkenhagen bunker, busy with their preparations. They were scoping out options for the coming assault, plus gathering together the weaponry and kit that would be required.

Jaeger felt driven by a burning need to find his family and to stop Kammler, but at the same time he knew how vital it was to prepare properly for what was coming. If they didn’t, they’d fall at the first battle, and before they had any chance of winning the wider war.