Burning Angels

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.

While serving in the military, one of his favourite maxims had been the five Ps: proper planning prevents piss-poor performance. Or put another way: fail to prepare, prepare to fail. The team at Falkenhagen were busy making sure that when they found Kammler’s germ lab, they would be totally prepared, and they wouldn’t fail.

For Jaeger, it had been a dual relief to reach the high point of the crater’s rim, the evening before. One step closer. One step nearer to the dark truth. To left and right the jagged ridge had stretched away from him, a switchback of what had once been red-hot volcanic fire and magma, but was now a harsh grey razor ’s edge, with a rocky, sun-blasted, windswept profile.

They’d made camp upon it – or rather on a rock ledge set a few dozen feet below the rim. That hard, cold, unwelcoming shelf had been accessible only by abseiling down to it, which meant it would render them immune to any attack by wild animals. And there were predators in abundance here in Hank Kammler’s lair. Apart from the obvious – lions, leopards and hyenas – there were the massive Cape buffalo, plus the hippos, which killed more people every year than any kind of carnivore.

Powerful, territorial, surprisingly fast for their bulk, and intensely protective of their young, the hippo was the single most dangerous animal in Africa. And Katavi’s dwindling water sources had brought them crowding together in their packed, irritable and stressed-out masses.

If you put too many rats in a cage, they’d end up eating each other. If you put too many hippos in a waterhole, you’d end up with the mother of all heavyweight fights.

And if you were a hapless human caught in the middle, you’d end up a squidge of bloody puree under a charging hippo’s feet.

Jaeger had awoken on the crater rim to a breathtaking sight: the entire floor of the caldera was a sea of fluffy white cloud. Illuminated a burning pink by the early-morning sun, it had looked almost firm enough that they could step out from their rocky ledge and walk across from one side of the crater to the other.

In truth it was an expanse of low-lying mist, thrown up by the lush forest that carpeted much of the caldera’s interior. And now that he was down amongst it, the view – plus the smells and sounds – took Jaeger’s breath away.

The rope coiled, Jaeger and Narov began to move. But their arrival here had set off alarm bells already. A flock of flamingoes rose from the nearby lake, taking to the air like a giant pink flying carpet, their high-pitched cackling squawks and cries echoing around the crater walls. The sight was awe-inspiring: there had to be thousands of the distinctive birds, drawn here by the rich minerals deposited in the volcanic waters of the lake.

Here and there Jaeger could see where a geyser – a hot spring – gushed a fountain of steaming water high into the air. He took a moment to check the way ahead, then signalled Narov to follow.

They flitted through the alien landscape, just the odd hand gesture pointing out the route to take. They understood instinctively each other’s quiet. There was a breathtaking otherworldliness to this place; a sense of a world lost in time; a sense almost that humans should never set foot here.

Hence their desire to slip through in utter silence, unnoticed by anything that would make of them its prey.