Burning Angels

26

Uncle Joe asked for a glass of water. Peter Miles handed him one. No one else stirred. Everyone in that echoing bunker was gripped by his tale.

‘We reported our discovery up the chain of command, but there was little real interest. What did we have? We knew a name – the Gottvirus – but other than that…’ Uncle Joe lifted and lowered his shoulders resignedly. ‘The world was at peace. The public were tired of war. Gradually the whole thing was forgotten. For twenty years it was forgotten. And then… Marburg.’

He stared into the distance, his gaze lost in far-off memories. ‘In central Germany lies the small, pretty town of Marburg. In the spring of 1967, there was an unexplained outbreak of disease in the town’s Behringwerke laboratory. Thirty-one lab workers were infected. Seven died. Somehow, a new and unknown pathogen had broken out: it was named the Marburg virus, or Filoviridae, because its form was thread-like; like a filament. Nothing like it had ever been seen before.’

Uncle Joe drained his glass of water. ‘Apparently the virus had escaped into the laboratory from a shipment of monkeys from Africa. That, at least, was the official story. Teams of virus-hunters were sent to Africa to track down the source of the virus. They were searching for its natural reservoir – its home in the wild. They couldn’t find it. Not only that, they couldn’t find its natural host either – the animal that normally carries it. In short, there was no sign of the virus in the African rainforest from where the monkeys had come.

‘Now, monkeys are used widely in laboratory experiments,’ he continued. ‘Trialling new medicines, that kind of thing. But they are also used for testing biological and chemical weapons, for the simple reason that if an agent kills a monkey, it is also likely to kill a human.’

Uncle Joe sought out Jaeger again. ‘Your grandfather, Brigadier Ted Jaeger, began to investigate. As with so many of us, the work of the Secret Hunters was on-going. A chilling picture emerged. It turned out that during the war, the Behringwerke laboratory was an I. G. Farben factory. Not only that, but by 1967 the chief scientist at the lab was none other than Kurt Blome, Hitler’s former grandmaster of germ warfare.’

Uncle Joe glanced at his audience, a fire burning in his eyes. ‘In the early 1960s, Blome had been contacted by a man we had long suspected dead: former SS General Hans Kammler. Kammler had been one of the most powerful men in the Reich, and one of Hitler’s closest confidantes. But at war’s end, he had disappeared off the face of the earth. For years Ted Jaeger hunted him. Eventually he discovered that Kammler had been recruited into a CIA-sponsored intelligence outfit, tasked to spy on the Russians.

‘Due to his notoriety, the CIA made Kammler operate under various assumed names: Harold Krauthammer, Hal Kramer and Horace Konig amongst others. By the 1960s, he had worked his way into a very senior post at the CIA and he went about recruiting Blome to his hidden cause.’

Uncle Joe paused, a shadow passing across his craggy features. ‘By certain means we broke into Kurt Blome’s Marburg apartment and found his private papers. His journal revealed an utterly extraordinary story. It would have been unbelievable in any other context. As it was, a lot of things started to make sense to us. Horrible, chilling sense.

‘In the summer of 1943, Blome had been ordered by the Führer to concentrate on one germ agent exclusively. That agent had already killed. Two men, both SS lieutenants, had died as a result of exposure to it. They perished in an utterly horrifying way. Their bodies had started to collapse from the inside. Their organs – liver, kidneys, lungs – had disintegrated, putrefying even as the outer being still lived. They died voiding streams of thick, black blood – the remains of their rotten, liquefied organs – and with a ghastly zombified expression on their features. Their brains had been transformed into mush by the time death took them.’

The old man raised his eyes to his audience. ‘What, you might wonder, were two SS lieutenants doing meddling with such an agent? Each had served with an SS agency charged with dabbling in ancient history. Remember, Hitler’s twisted ideology was that the “true Germans” were a mythical northern race – tall, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Aryans. Bizarre, when you consider that Hitler was a short little man with black hair and brown eyes.’

Uncle Joe shook his head, in vexation. ‘Those two SS Lieutenants – amateur archaeologists and myth hunters – had been tasked to “prove” that the so-called Aryan master race had ruled the earth since time immemorial. Needless to say, their mission was an impossible one, but in the process of their work they had somehow stumbled upon the Gottvirus.

‘Blome was ordered to isolate and culture this mystery pathogen. This he did, and it proved utterly devastating. It was perfect; a God-given germ agent. The ultimate Gottvirus. He wrote about it in his journal: “It is as if this pathogen has not originated on this planet; or at least has come from a time of ancient prehistory, long before modern man walked the earth”.’

Uncle Joe steadied himself. ‘There were two challenges to unleashing the Gottvirus. One, the Nazis needed a cure: an inoculation that could be mass-produced to safeguard the German population. Two, they needed to alter the virus’s means of infection, from fluid-to-fluid contact to airborne means. It needed to act like the flu virus: one sneeze, and it would burn through a population in a matter of days.

‘Blome worked feverishly. His was a race against time. Fortunately for us, it was one that he lost. His lab was overrun by the Allies before he could either perfect a vaccine or re-engineer the virus’s method of infection. The Gottvirus was categorised Kriegsentscheidend, the highest security classification ever assigned by the Nazis. At war’s end, SS General Hans Kammler was determined it would remain the Reich’s topmost secret.’

Uncle Joe braced himself against his walking stick; an old soldier coming to the end of a long tale. ‘That is where the story pretty much ends. Blome’s journal made it clear that he and Kammler had safeguarded the Gottvirus, which they began developing again in the late sixties. There is one final thing: in his journal, Blome repeated the same phrase over and over again. Jedem das Seine. Over and over he wrote: Jedem das Seine… It is German for “everyone gets what they deserve”.’

He ran his eyes around the room. There was a look in them that Jaeger had rarely if ever seen before: fear.