The Hunt

30

Several roads bisected Dodge, each a rust-red highway that terminated in a dark wall of trees. At the far end of one lay a rectangular expanse of flat ground, with a sagging set of football posts at either end. Like kids anywhere, El Padre’s child soldiers needed to boot a ball around after a hard day’s graft.

Jaeger could see 4x4s buzzing along the dirt roads. Stick-like figures were crammed into the vehicles. He didn’t doubt that most of them were armed. All in all, he reckoned the base was a good kilometre square. This was a serious operation; they had to be running industrial-scale quantities out of here.

But Hank Kammler here, in such a remote and lawless outpost? Or Ruth? To Jaeger that just didn’t add up. Plus what reason would El Padre possibly have for dabbling in uranium trafficking? That was a whole different level of bad than narcotics.

Smuggling cocaine was one thing. Smuggling the raw material for a nuclear weapon – that was inviting a world of unwanted attention and trouble. If El Padre was messing with highly enriched uranium, the powers-that-be would have every excuse to flatten this place.

With the amount of cash that was obviously being spun out of the drugs trade, why would anyone take the risk? It was tantamount to suicide. Any way Jaeger looked at it, it didn’t make sense.

They inched backwards into the tree cover.

‘Well, the nav’s been spot-on,’ Raff rumbled, ‘but buggered if the place isn’t massive.’

‘Yeah. A major facility, with several hundred men needed to run and guard it.’

‘Plus the wife and kids.’

Raff was right: Jaeger hadn’t missed the smaller figures dashing about the dirt streets. Many of the narco workers had brought their families. And as both men were well aware, that complicated matters: neither of them was keen to get into a fight that risked women and children getting caught in the crossfire.

Jaeger glanced around at their ridgetop location. ‘Positions? Defences?’

‘Keep two on permanent watch, looking west with eyes on. And the others in the rear, resting. The ridge’s northern wall falls away almost vertical, so no one’s about to take us from there. East is the slope we just climbed: no one’s coming up that without us knowing it. South the ridge rolls on for a good few kilometres. That’s the main threat.’

Jaeger nodded. ‘Agreed. Let’s go.’

As silently and swiftly as they could, they dropped down. The last of the light was fading to deep shadow by the time they reached the foot of the descent. Jaeger gave a quick heads-up before they all heaved up their bergens and began the climb.

It soon became clear that Narov was having real problems. She was moving slowly, and twice she took a fall, once collapsing against a tree and the next time plunging face forward, awkwardly catching her side on a rock.

Finally, wordlessly, Jaeger managed to prise away her assault rifle and pass it to Alonzo, whilst he and Raff each took one of her arms and more or less propelled her up the steep slope.

Narov hated accepting the help and didn’t offer the slightest word of thanks, despite the fact that it was almost dark by the time they reached the top. Another few minutes on the slope and she would have been trapped there in pitch darkness.

They crawled across to the point that Jaeger and Raff had selected as their base of operations – their observation post, or OP. Jaeger gave Narov and Alonzo a quick brief about their position, plus the orientation of the narco gang’s base.

‘I’m setting an ERV seven hundred metres due east, so at the base of the slope we just climbed,’ he explained. ‘If we’re hit, or split up, that’s where we regroup.’ ERV stood for emergency rendezvous point, which pretty much did what it said on the tin.

That decided, Jaeger went about making contact with their Falkenhagen headquarters. He pulled out a compact military-spec Thuraya satphone and punched in a short message: In position. Grid 183746. Nothing further. Out.

Using an inbuilt cipher programme, he encoded the message, sending it in data burst, which basically meant it was compressed to a tiny fraction of its size, taking barely a split second to bounce to the satellite orbiting high overhead, and from there to where Peter Miles would be listening.

Jaeger lived by the mantra that presumption was the mother of all screw-ups. If they presumed El Padre had no monitoring and direction-finding kit in place, they would likely die by that presumption. The gang’s boss was running a multi-billion-dollar narco business, and he could afford to hire the best. Hence the precautions.

Message sent, they set the first watch rota. Jaeger and Raff would take up position at the vantage point, while Narov and Alonzo got their heads down. Much as she tried to hide it, it was clear that Narov was beat. By contrast, the hard-as-nails African American still looked relatively fresh.

That was Alonzo: unbreakable. He would keep a watch over Narov while she rested.

As Jaeger crawled forward, he reflected upon Narov’s condition. He’d never known her anything other than indestructible. He was getting a sense now of what the Dubai mission, plus her subsequent escape, must have taken out of her.

There was no doubt she’d suffered to prove her conviction that Kammler was alive and plotting mayhem and mass murder. And it was her balls and brass that had brought them here to uncover the dark truth and put a stop to him.

Quite a woman, Jaeger thought.