Ghost Flight

88

From Fernao, Boerke drove west, heading back towards Malabo. By the time he hit the coast road, Jaeger was fairly certain where they were going. Sure enough, they pulled into the compound of Black Beach Prison, through gates swung wide by a new and much more efficient and capable-looking guard force.

Boerke pulled up in the shadow of a high wall.

He turned to Jaeger. ‘A home from home, eh? It’s still used as a prison, but there’s a whole new bunch of inmates. Plus the torture cells are empty now, and the sharks are going crazy with hunger.’ He paused. ‘There’s one thing I want to show you, and a few things you need to have returned.’

They stepped down from the vehicle and into the prison’s dark interior. Jaeger couldn’t deny that he felt uneasy heading back into the place wherein the proverbial shit had been kicked out of him endlessly, and the cockroaches had all but feasted on his brains. But hell, maybe this was the way to slay the demons.

Almost immediately, he knew where Boerke was leading him: to his former cell. The South African rapped on the bars, calling a figure to some form of attention.

‘So, Mojo, time to meet your new jailer.’ He gestured at Jaeger. ‘My, how the tables have turned.’

The new inmate of Jaeger’s former cell stared at him, a look of horror spreading across his features.

‘Now, if you do not behave yourself very, very nicely,’ Boerke continued, ‘I am going to let Mr Jaeger here set up a new torture reserved for you exclusively.’ He flashed a look at Jaeger. ‘Are you good with that?’

Jaeger shrugged. ‘Sure. I figure I can remember some of the nastier ones, from when the boot was on the other foot.’

‘You hear that, Mojo?’ Boerke demanded. ‘And I tell you something else, man: the sharks – I am told they are very, very hungry right now. Be careful, my friend. Be very, very careful.’

They left Jaeger’s former jailer and headed for the prison office. En route, Boerke paused before a side corridor leading to the isolation block. He glanced at Jaeger.

‘You know who we have in there?’ He nodded towards the corridor. ‘Chambara. Caught him at the airport as he tried to flee. You want to go say hello? He’s the bastard who ordered your arrest in the first place, isn’t it?’

‘He is. But let’s leave him to his isolation. I’d take one of his yachts, though,’ Jaeger added with a smile.

Boerke laughed. ‘I’ll add you to the list. No, man. We are not here to loot and pillage. We are here to rebuild this country.’

They made their way upstairs to the prison office, the place where Jaeger had first been processed into Black Beach. Boerke said something to the guard on reception, who handed over a small bundle of possessions – mostly clothes – tied up in the belt that Jaeger had been wearing at the time.

Boerke passed it to Jaeger. ‘These I believe are yours. Mojo’s lot robbed all the valuables, but there are a few personal effects in there I think you’d want to have.’

He led the way into a side room, and then excused himself so Jaeger could go through his possessions in some kind of privacy.

Apart from the clothes, there was Jaeger’s old wallet. It had been stripped of all money and credit cards, but he was glad to have it back. It had been a gift from his wife. It was made of bottle-green leather and had the SAS motto – ‘Who Dares Wins’ – inscribed discreetly on the underside of the interior flap.

Jaeger flipped it open and checked the secret compartment lying deep inside the wallet’s lining. Thankfully, the Black Beach guards hadn’t thought to look in there. He pulled out a tiny photo. It showed a young and beautiful green-eyed woman cradling a fresh-faced baby: Ruth and Luke, shortly after Luke had been born.

There was a scrap of paper stuffed behind the photo. It was a record of the pin numbers for his credit cards, but written in such a way that no one should be able to work them out. Jaeger had employed a simple form of encoding: to each of the four numbers he’d added his date of birth – 1979.

In that way 2345 became 3.12.11.14.

Simple.

Coding.

For a moment Jaeger’s mind flashed back to the old war chest lying in his Wardour Castle apartment, and to the book lying therein – a rare copy of a richly illustrated medieval text written entirely in a long-forgotten language. From there his mind flipped to a conversation with Simon Jenkinson, the archivist, at Wild Dog Media’s Soho offices over stale and rubbery sushi.

There is something called the book code. The beauty is its absolute pure simplicity; that, and the fact that it’s totally unbreakable – unless, of course, you happen to know which book each person is referring to.

After which the archivist had scribbled down an apparently random sequence of numbers…

Jaeger reached for his flight bag, pulled out the Malabo Government House file, and opened the sheet of paper from the Duchessa’s manifest. He ran his eyes down the list of seemingly random numbers, feeling a surge of excitement kicking his guts as he did so.

Irina Narov had confirmed that Grandfather Ted had been a leading Nazi hunter. From the little that Great Uncle Joe had felt able to tell him, Jaeger knew that he had also played a role in Grandfather Ted’s work. Both men had kept copies of the same rare and ancient book – the Voynich manuscript – to hand.

Maybe there was method to the apparent madness.

Maybe the Voynich manuscript unlocked the code.

Maybe Grandpa Ted and Great Uncle Joe had got their hands on some of the Nazi’s end-of-war documents, and had been unravelling the coded language as part of the hunt.

In which case, Jaeger had the answer to breaking the codes in his possession. If he could get himself, Narov and maybe Jenkinson together with the relevant books and documents, it might all start to make some kind of sense.

Jaeger smiled to himself. Boerke had been right: it had been worth making this trip out to Bioko many times over.

The South African knocked and entered the room. ‘So, man, you’re looking pleased with yourself. I guess you’ve enjoyed coming here after all?’

Jaeger nodded. ‘I’m in your debt, Pieter, a thousand times over.’

‘Not a bit of it, man. It is a debt repaid, that’s all.’

Jaeger pulled his iPhone from his flight bag. ‘Two quick emails I need to send.’

‘Go right ahead – as long as you can get a signal,’ Boerke told him. ‘Cell coverage around Malabo – it can be pretty bad.’

Jaeger powered up the phone and pulled up his email account, typing in the first message:

The message sat in his outbox ‘awaiting signal’ while he set about typing the second.

He clicked ‘send’, and almost at the same time his phone beeped to indicate that it had acquired a signal, via some local network called Safaricom. The sending symbol twirled around and around for a few seconds, before the phone seemed to drop the connection.

He was about to power down, power up and try again when the iPhone appeared to fade to black of its own accord before coming back to life. A message seemed to type itself across the screen.

An instant later the screen went black again, before fading up on an image that had become sickeningly familiar: a Reichsadler.

But this Reichsadler was displayed on a Nazi-style flag pinned to a wall. Below it, Andy Smith, tied at the wrists and ankles, lay on his back on a tiled floor. By the looks of the cloth they threw over his face and the bucket of water being tipped over it, he was being waterboarded.

Jaeger stared at the horrifying image, transfixed.

He could only presume it had been taken in Smithy’s Loch Iver hotel room, before they had marched him up on to the storm-lashed hills, forced a bottle of whisky down his throat and hurled him into the dark abyss. Most likely Stefan Kral had been the one who’d tricked Smithy into opening his hotel door to his torturers.

There would have been precious little Smithy could have told his captors before he died, apart from the general location of the air wreck, for Colonel Evandro hadn’t yet released its exact coordinates.

More words typed themselves below the image:

Return to us what is ours. Jaeger could only imagine they meant the documents from the Ju 390 cockpit. But how did they know Narov had retrieved them, and that they hadn’t gone down with the warplane? Jaeger just didn’t know… And then something hit him: Leticia Santos.

They’d clearly forced their Brazilian captive to talk. Like everyone else on the team, Leticia had been aware that something of crucial importance had been discovered in that cockpit. No doubt about it – under duress she must have revealed what she knew.

Jaeger heard a voice from behind him. ‘Man, who in God’s name sent you that? And why?’ It was Boerke, and he was staring at the image on Jaeger’s phone.

His words served to break Jaeger’s trance, and with it a burning jolt of realisation seared through his mind. He raised his arm and hurled the smartphone through the open window, propelling it as far as it would go into the bush outside.

Then he grabbed his flight bag and took to his heels, yelling at Boerke to follow.

‘RUN! Get everyone out! NOW!’

They sprinted out of the office block, screaming at the guards. Barely had they reached the former torture cells in the basement when the Hellfire struck. It tore into the ground where Jaeger’s phone lay, ripping a massive hole in the perimeter wall of the prison and collapsing the adjacent office building – the place where Jaeger and Boerke had just been sitting.

Down in the basement, both men were uninjured, as were most of the guards. But Jaeger wasn’t kidding himself any more: in the prison that had once almost been the death of him, the Dark Force had nearly killed him again.

And once again he, William Jaeger, was very much the hunted.