Burning Angels

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.’

Narov read them over a few times. ‘Interesting.’ Her tone had softened slightly. ‘Kammler H. That is SS General Hans Kammler, presumably, though we all thought of him as long dead.

‘BV222,’ she continued. ‘The Blohm and Voss BV222 Wiking – has to be. A Second World War flying boat – a real beast of a machine that could land just about anywhere there was water.’

‘Wiking meaning Viking, presumably?’ Jaeger queried.

Narov snorted. ‘Well done.’

‘And the rest?’ he prompted, not rising to the provocation.

Narov shrugged. ‘Katavi. Choma Malaika. Sounds almost African.’

‘It does,’ Jaeger confirmed.

‘So, have you checked?’

‘I have.’

‘Well?’ she demanded irritably.

Jaeger smiled. ‘Want to know what I discovered?’

Narov scowled. She knew that Jaeger was playing with her now. ‘How do you say – does the bear shit in the woods?’

Jaeger smiled. ‘Choma Malaika is Swahili for “Burning Angels”, Swahili being the language of East Africa. I learned some while on operations there. Plus get this. Katavi translates into English as… “the Hunter”.’

Narov flashed him a look. The significance of that name certainly wasn’t lost on her.

Ever since childhood, Jaeger had believed in portents. He was superstitious, and especially when things seemed to signify something to him personally. ‘The Hunter’ was the nickname he’d been given during their expedition into the Amazon, and it wasn’t one he had adopted lightly.

An Amazon Indian tribe – the Amahuaca – had helped them in their quest for that hidden warplane. They had proved the most constant and loyal of companions. One of the tribal chief’s sons, Gwaihutiga, had coined that name – The Hunter – for Jaeger, after he had saved them from all-but-certain annihilation. And when Gwaihutiga had lost his life at the hands of Vladimir and his murderous crew, the name had become even more precious. Jaeger cherished it, lest he forget.

And now, another hunter on another ancient continent – Africa – seemed to be calling to him.