Ghost Flight

10

Jaeger padded across the living room to the far side, where double doors opened on to what they’d dubbed the music room. One wall was shelved high with racks of CDs. He chose one – Mozart’s Requiem. He slipped it into the CD deck, flicked the power switch and it started to play.

The lilting melodies brought everything flooding back; all the family memories. For the second time in as many minutes, Jaeger found himself having to fight back the tears. He couldn’t allow himself to break down; to properly grieve. Not yet.

There was something else – something deeply, deeply troubling – that he had come here for.

He dragged the battered steel trunk out from its place beneath the music stand. For a moment his eyes lingered on the initials stencilled on the lid: W. E. J. – William Edward ‘Ted’ Jaeger. His grandfather’s war chest, which he’d gifted to Jaeger shortly before he died.

As the Requiem swelled to a first crashing crescendo, Jaeger thought back over the times Grandpa Ted had sneaked him into his study, allowing Jaeger to share a pull on his tobacco pipe, and enjoy a few precious moments – grandfather with grandchild – rifling through this very trunk.

Grandpa Ted’s pipe, eternally clamped between his teeth. The smell: Player’s Navy Cut and whisky-steeped tobacco. Jaeger could almost see the scene now – the occasional smoke ring blown by his grandfather dancing soft and ethereal in the light of his desk lamp.

Jaeger flicked open the clasps and hinged back the trunk’s heavy lid. On top lay one of his favourite mementoes: a leather-bound file, stamped in faded red lettering: TOP SECRET. And below that: Officer Commanding No. 206 Liaison Unit.

It had always struck Jaeger as odd that the contents of the file had never quite lived up to the promise of the cover.

Inside were booklets of Second World War radio frequencies and codes, diagrams of main battle tanks, blueprints of turbines, compasses and engines. It had proven utterly fascinating to a child; but as an adult, Jaeger had realised that there was nothing in there with much relevance to the file’s cover, or warranting such excessive secrecy.

It was almost as if his grandpa had put together the file’s contents to fascinate and entertain an adolescent boy, but to give nothing of any sensitivity – of any real value – away.

After his grandpa’s death, Jaeger had tried to research the No. 206 Liaison Unit, to better trace its history. But there was nothing. The National Archives; the Imperial War Museum; the Admiralty: every archive that should have contained some form of record – if only a war diary – was devoid of any mention.

It was almost as if the No. 206 Liaison Unit had never existed; as if it were a ghost squadron.

And then he’d found something.

Or rather, Luke had.

His eight-year-old son had proven equally fascinated by the contents of the trunk – his great-grandpa’s heavy commando knife; his much-lived-in beret; his battered iron compass. And one day Jaeger’s son’s hands had dug deep, to the very bottom of the trunk, and found what had been for so long hidden.

Working feverishly, Jaeger did similarly now, emptying the contents on to the floor. There was so much Nazi memorabilia in there: an SS Death’s Head badge, skull fixed in an enigmatic smile; a Hitler Youth dagger, its hilt displaying a picture of the Führer; a necktie of the Werewolves – the diehard Nazi resistance set up to fight on after the war proper had been lost.

Occasionally Jaeger had wondered if his grandfather had grown too close to the Nazi regime, so much of its memorabilia had he seemingly hoarded. Whatever he had done during the war, had it somehow brought him perilously close to the evil and the darkness? Had it seeped into him, making him its own?

Jaeger didn’t believe so, but he’d never been able to have those kind of conversations before his grandfather had unexpectedly passed away.

He paused at a distinctive-looking book, one that he’d almost forgotten was in the trunk. It was a rare copy of the Voynich manuscript, a richly illustrated medieval text written entirely in a mystery language. Strangely, that book had permanently graced the desk in his grandfather’s study, and it had come to Jaeger along with the trunk’s contents.

It was another of the things that he had never got to raise with his grandfather: why this fascination with an obscure and unintelligible medieval manuscript?

Jaeger removed the heavy book, revealing the false wooden bottom built into the trunk. He’d never worked out if his grandfather had left the document in there by accident, or if he had done so deliberately, hoping that his grandson would one day find the concealed compartment.

Either way, it had been there, hidden amongst a bunch of war mementoes, waiting three decades or more to be discovered.

Jaeger’s fingers delved below the wooden boards, found the latch to the compartment and flicked it open. He felt around and pulled out the fat, yellowing envelope, holding it before him with hands that were visibly shaking. A part of him absolutely did not want to look inside, but a greater part knew that he had to.

He pulled out the document.

Typeset, stapled along one side, it was just as he had remembered it. Across the top of the cover in the thick gothic script synonymous with Hitler’s Nazi regime was one word, in capitals: KRIEGSENTSCHEIDEND

Jaeger’s German was practically non-existent, but via a German–English dictionary he’d managed to translate the few words on the document’s cover. Kriegsentscheidend was the highest security classification ever awarded by the Nazis. The nearest British equivalent would be ‘Beyond Top Secret – Ultra’.

Below that was typed: Aktion Werwolf – ‘Operation Werewolf’.

Below that again, a date, which needed no translation: 12 February 1945.

And finally, Nur fur Augen Sicherheitsdienst Standortwechsel Kommando – ‘For Sicherheitsdienst Standortwechsel Kommando eyes only’.

The Sicherheitsdienst was the security service of the SS and the Nazi party – the apex of evil. Standortwechsel Kommando translated as ‘the Relocation Commando’, which meant practically nothing to Jaeger. He’d googled both mystery references, ‘Operation Werewolf’ and ‘Relocation Commando’, in English and in German.

They had turned up nothing.

Not one single reference out there anywhere in the ether.

That was about as far as his investigatory efforts had got, for the darkness – and his flight to Bioko – had descended shortly thereafter. But it was clearly a document that had been of extremely high sensitivity at the time of the war, one that had somehow fallen into his grandfather’s hands.

Yet it was the page that followed which had triggered Jaeger’s memories, drawing him from London to Wiltshire, back to his – largely abandoned – family home.

He turned the cover with a heavy sense of foreboding.

Looking up at him from the title page was a stark image stamped in black. Jaeger stared at it, his mind reeling. Just as he’d feared, his memory hadn’t lied or played tricks on him.

The dark image was that of a stylised eagle standing on its tail, wings outstretched below a cruelly curved beak – its talons gripping a circular symbol etched with unreadable markings.