The Hunt

22

They’d eaten a rushed lunch huddled round a couple of laptops, digging up the basics on the St Georgen murder investigation. One point jumped out from all the press and police reports: the investigating team had penetrated far into the tunnels, but had eventually been forced to turn back.

The deeper they had gone, the higher the level of radiation they’d detected.

‘Haigerloch,’ Uncle Joe ventured. ‘The missing uranium. It has to be.’

‘Exactly,’ Miles agreed.

‘Fancy enlightening us?’ Jaeger prompted.

‘Haigerloch, a pretty village in southern Germany,’ Miles explained. ‘Towards the end of the war, the Nazis moved their top nuclear scientists – the Uranverein; the Uranium Club – plus their technology, out of Berlin, and secreted it in caves beneath Haigerloch’s pretty baroque church.

‘They presumed, rightly, that Allied warplanes would never venture there,’ he continued, ‘and even if they did, all they’d see was a quaint church. As matters transpired, American forces overran Haigerloch before the reactor could breed enough raw material to build a bomb. Or so everyone thought.’

‘US forces dismantled the reactor. They recovered 664 cubes of uranium, forming the core. Each cube weighed roughly half a kilo, so 332 kilos all told. But Nazi records showed that one and a half tonnes of uranium had been trucked out of Berlin, which left over a tonne unaccounted for. The suspicion was that the Reich had established a second, ultra-secret reactor.’

‘So that’s why Jones and his gang went to St Georgen?’ Jaeger queried. ‘That’s what’s been hidden there all these years? A pile of uranium ore?’

‘It would make a certain degree of sense, yes.’

‘But what can they do with it?’ Jaeger probed. ‘Practically speaking?’

‘Yeah, like does it spell kaboom?’ Raff added.

‘Nuclear reactors can breed the raw material for an atomic bomb,’ Miles confirmed. ‘But it all depends how enriched the uranium is. To give you a sense of the amounts involved, Little Boy was packed with sixty-four kilos of highly enriched uranium when it was detonated over Hiroshima.’

Jaeger’s face darkened. ‘So you’re saying they’ve got enough to build several bombs? Potentially.’

Miles shrugged. ‘Not necessarily. To do that, you’d have to master hugely complex technology.’ He flashed a look at Jaeger. ‘But there is another possibility…’

‘Which is?’

‘I’m no expert,’ Miles continued, ‘but constructing an IND is relatively easy. In fact the main challenge is getting your hands on enough highly enriched uranium. Once you’ve done that, it’s fairly straightforward.’

‘IND?’

‘Improvised nuclear device. Basically, a modern nuclear weapon achieves ninety per cent efficiency in terms of fission – so turning uranium into an unimaginably powerful explosion. It does so by firing a hollow tube of uranium onto an interlocking cylinder, at tremendous speed. When they impact, fission occurs… and kaboom, as Raff would say.’

‘And an IND?’

‘Far cruder. In essence, you clobber two lumps of uranium together, achieving around ten per cent efficiency. But it’s still a staggeringly powerful weapon. To give you a sense of it, an IND fitted with twenty kilos of highly enriched uranium would create a blast equal to one thousand tonnes of high explosives.’

‘Plus the radiation poisoning and contamination,’ Narov added.

‘Yes. Plus that.’

‘So practically speaking, what would a twenty-kilo IND achieve in terms of destruction?’

Miles eyed Jaeger. ‘If you detonated it in the City of London, it would flatten the entire Square Mile.’

‘Shit.’

‘Indeed. There’s one other advantage to an IND. Despite its name, Little Boy was a big device, weighing in at around 4,500 kilos. An IND is a fraction of that size and weight.’

Jaeger’s face hardened. ‘Which makes it the perfect weapon for a terrorist outfit… or a madman like Kammler.’ It was stating the obvious, but it needed to be said.

‘It does.’ Miles paused for a second, massaging the bridge of his nose. ‘And that brings me to why I wanted to call you all here. How many of you have heard of Moldova?’

‘Moldova?’ Raff snorted. ‘Heard a joke about it once. Why do Moldovan football fans need two seats? One to sit on and one to throw when the fighting starts.’

There was a ripple of laughter. It was one of the things that Jaeger loved about Raff: no matter how dire a situation, he could always find humour in it. It was so often humour that carried them through.

Typically, Narov had failed to crack the barest hint of a smile. Humour was rarely her strong point.

‘Moldova’s an impoverished, chaotic, lawless mess of a former Soviet state,’ Miles continued, ‘not to mention the world’s foremost black market for uranium. There have been several attempts to flog former Soviet stocks. It culminated in an effort to sell forty kilos to ISIS. Note the amount: more than enough to build an IND.’

‘Who stopped it? I presume it was stopped?’

‘It was.’

‘Who by?’

‘As it happens, our old friend Daniel Brooks. The CIA infiltrated an agent into the network, and when the money was handed over, the bad guys were busted. But this year the Moldovan mafia moved on to a new deal, this one involving a mystery client. We know his code name only: Grey Wolf.’

The room went silent. All eyes were on Miles.

‘Brooks, obviously, found that rather suspicious. Worrying. When he raised it with me, so did I. I don’t believe in coincidences.’

‘But surely Kammler wouldn’t be that stupid,’ Jaeger objected. ‘Grey Wolf is known. It’s blown. So why use it again?’

‘But he would be that arrogant,’ Narov interjected. ‘It is deeply symbolic. He will never drop it, bearing in mind who the original Grey Wolf was.’

‘You think he believes he’s Hitler?’ Jaeger queried.

‘Hitler’s modern incarnation, at the very least.’

Raff nodded. ‘Ego. The big killer and the big banana skin.’

‘Kammler does see himself as the Hitler of today,’ Miles confirmed. ‘Plus he feels protected. Shielded. Invulnerable. Assuming the DNA sample that proved he was dead was doctored, then Kammler has friends in high places.’

‘Okay, so let’s presume Grey Wolf is Kammler,’ Jaeger mused. ‘What else do we know about this Moldovan deal?’

‘Dates, plus destination the goods are being shipped to. All the Moldovan mafia is waiting on is the final payment. And believe me, this stuff is obscenely expensive. Once they get their money, they’re flying it out to a particularly nasty narco gang based in Colombia.’

‘Kammler mentioned Moldova, in the Dubai meeting,’ Narov interjected. ‘It’s on the tapes. Something about the Columbians being on standby to take delivery.’

‘Did he?’ Miles gave an appreciative nod at Narov. ‘Good work. That pretty much confirms everything we’ve been hearing.’

‘You’re saying Kammler’s in bed with Colombian drug traffickers?’ Jaeger ventured. ‘How does that work?’

‘Arms dealers, drugs runners and terrorists – the nexus of evil draws ever closer,’ Miles explained. ‘You couple that with a hatred of the West – of America in particular – and the Moldovan mafia, Colombian narcos and Kammler can make common cause. Plus, a remote, lawless jungle base: in a sense, it offers the perfect place for a man like Kammler to hide.’

‘Then there’s Kammler’s former role at the CIA,’ Narov volunteered. ‘He was big into developing narcotics as tools of espionage and warfare. LSD. Heroin. And worse. You name it, he dabbled in it. He has to have contacts in that world. Maybe he called in some favours.’

‘Then why not roll it up?’ Raff queried. ‘Now. Kill the network before the shit has a chance to hit the fan.’

‘Because if it is Kammler, this is the means to track him,’ Miles answered. ‘We trace the cargo, we trace Kammler.’

‘Do we know the exact location the uranium’s being routed to?’ Jaeger asked.

‘We do,’ Miles confirmed. ‘Dirt airstrip hacked out of the Colombian jungle. One of the narco trafficker’s drugs-smuggling hubs, for onward shipment to the US.’

Jaeger eyed Miles. ‘Okay, so the contention is that Kammler’s set up some kind of IND lab alongside the drugs-processing facilities? Am I right?’

Miles nodded. ‘That’s what we’re thinking.’

‘Right, let’s do a pre-emptive strike. Before the flight leaves Moldova and has a chance to jet in, we hit Kammler’s jungle base and blow his labs to shreds, then get in there and kill or capture the man himself – that’s if he’s there.’

Miles smiled. ‘My thoughts exactly.’

Jaeger got to his feet. ‘Then what’re we waiting for?’