The Hunt

36

The trek out to the LZ had taken considerably less time than the journey in. They’d stopped at one of the first rivers they came across, so that Jaeger and Narov could scrub themselves clean of the blood and the stinking gunk from the ditch. But otherwise they’d moved relatively swiftly. They were carrying lighter loads and they were more attuned to the jungle.

They were also buoyed by the success of the CTR. To have penetrated right into the heart of such an operation and got out again undetected and unscathed – that had taken some skill, and balls.

If Narov’s handiwork with the knife had been discovered, there had been no sign of it while they were exfiltrating from Dodge.

They’d arrived at the clearing with a good sixty minutes to spare before the chopper arrived to pluck them out. They settled in some cover, Narov pulling out the flight log from her pack. She flicked through the pages, stopping here and there at key entries. Much that Jaeger marvelled at her focus after such an exhausting mission, he was impatient to know what Los Niños’s flight log might reveal.

‘So, what’s it tell us?’ he pressed.

Narov glanced up at him. ‘I need to go over it in more detail. But two things jump out. One, the Moldovan flight doesn’t end in Dodge. It’s a refuelling stopover, no more. Where it’s headed after that isn’t entirely clear.’

‘So the hunt for Kammler is far from over.’ It was obvious, but Jaeger felt it needed saying.

‘Exactly,’ Narov confirmed. ‘And second, it looks as if three previous flights have been routed via Dodge, all at the orders of Kammler. If they were loaded with uranium, Kammler is even further ahead of the game than we feared.’

‘Good work, you gettin’ that,’ Alonzo cut in. ‘Game changer. Freakin’ game changer. Worries me shitless, though…’

In truth, the flight log had them all worried. The revelation of those three previous flights lent an added sense of urgency to their mission. It was a ticking time bomb. But it had triggered something else – building on the flash of inspiration Jaeger first had as they’d crawled out of Dodge. He had a growing sense as to how they might use all this against Kammler, to nail him. He set about explaining it to the others.

‘So, it’s a part of SAS folklore. Beirut, 1976. The SAS were on a covert mission. There’s a great book about it I read once. Figured we could use something similar now.’

Narov looked askance at him. ‘You? Read a book?’

‘A book?’ Raff echoed.

‘Yeah, a book,’ Jaeger confirmed. ‘Don’t sound so surprised.’

Raff shook his head in disgust. ‘Bloody Ruperts and their books.’

Alonzo grinned. While he didn’t completely get the British sense of humour, he couldn’t help but find it funny. As long as it wasn’t directed at him.

‘So what did this book say?’ Narov challenged. ‘And what makes it relevant now?’

‘The book’s called Cobra Gold. SAS troop gets sent into Beirut to lift some sensitive documents from a bank vault. Lebanon’s one massive war zone – Beirut’s been shot to shreds. The SAS blow their way into the vault, but along with the documents, they discover a shedload of gold bullion.’

Jaeger could tell he had their attention now. The SAS and an epic bank robbery – what was not to like?

‘They figured they’d nab the gold along with the documents. A bit of freelance larceny. We know that the robbery took place. Fact. It’s recorded in the Guinness Book of Records: British Bank of the Middle East; the world’s biggest ever bullion robbery – some $150 million at today’s value.’

‘So what?’ Raff challenged. ‘Every chancer and their dog has a story about the Regiment and its supposed dark arts. I just wish they were all true.’ He paused. ‘In fact, I wish I’d been in on the act.’

Jaeger laughed. ‘During the exfil, they were forced to cache the gold. It was ten years until they came back to retrieve it. Trouble was, they knew that as soon as they set foot in Lebanon, the bad guys – the terrorists – would be onto them. They realised they needed a decoy. A Trojan horse.’

‘So where did they hide it – the gold?’ Raff queried.

‘Dumped at sea. Not that that’s crucial to the story.’ Jaeger couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice now. ‘Tungsten. You’ve all heard of it, right? One of the heaviest metals known to man. Used for tipping bunker-busting bombs and such like. It also happens to be more or less the same molecular weight as gold.’

Raff kicked the bottom of Jaeger’s boot. ‘Get to it.’

‘They built a decoy. A pile of tungsten machined into bars and plated in gold. It looked like bullion. It weighed practically the same. It even smelled right. They allowed the terrorists to seize the decoy and take it right into the heart of their camp. That golden decoy contained a hidden charge of explosives. When it reached the bad guys’ base, someone pressed a button and… kaboom. The tungsten went up a like a massive nail bomb and flattened everything.’

‘Nice story,’ Narov grated icily. ‘But what’s its relevance now?’

Jaeger eyed her. ‘Highly enriched uranium is the heaviest naturally occurring element. It has a very similar molecular weight to gold. Or tungsten, for that matter… So here’s the plan: we switch cargoes. We swap the uranium for a lookalike tungsten cargo. One with a massive charge set at its centre and primed to blow.’

Narov shook her head despairingly. ‘This is your great idea? This is why you told us this bullshit story? Schwachkopf.’

‘And? What exactly is your problem?’

‘First, how do you switch the cargoes when the uranium is being flown here by the Moldovan mafia in an aircraft operated by Eastern European arms dealers?’

‘And second?’

‘What is the point? We don’t believe that Dodge is the final destination for the shipment, especially not after getting this.’ Narov brandished the flight log. ‘Dodge is a narco operation through and through. The CTR proved that. So how does destroying it help get us to Kammler? Yours’ is the plan of an idiot.’

‘Second answer first,’ Jaeger volunteered. He was used to Narov’s outbursts. Mostly they were neither personal nor meant with ill intent. ‘The decoy shipment is fitted with a tracking device. You don’t blow it upon arrival at Dodge. You follow it, and it leads us to Kammler.’

‘But the switch?’ Narov challenged. ‘How on earth is that possible?’

By way of answer, Jaeger turned to Alonzo. ‘You ever served on any DEA missions?’

Alonzo shook his head. ‘DEA? Bunch of cowboys. Generally we steered well clear of ’em.’

‘I guess we didn’t have that luxury.’ Jaeger paused. ‘A few years back, I was on a DEA sting. Texas. The boondocks. A bunch of narcos were bringing in a drugs flight to a tiny bush airstrip. That part of Texas, every farm seems to have one.’

‘You got it,’ Alonzo confirmed. ‘That, plus a Lone Star flag, and a barn stuffed full of baked beans and assault rifles.’

‘Pretty much. Anyhow, the DEA got wise to the shipment. The night of the flight, they jammed the narcos’ radio frequency, plus the beacons the aircraft was to home in on. They fired up their own radio on a slightly different frequency, on an airstrip not so far away. The incoming pilot lost contact with the narcos. He began scanning the airwaves. He found the DEA’s signal, and the DEA – posing as narcos – began to talk him in.’

Jaeger eyed his audience. He wondered if they could see what was coming. ‘The pilot flew in to the DEA’s airstrip and landed. They seized him, his crew, the aircraft, plus several hundred million dollars’ worth of the purest cocaine. The op was code-named Angeldust. It went down in the annals of DEA history.’

‘And so?’ Narov challenged. ‘We don’t want to seize this shipment. You said so yourself – we want it to lead us to Kammler.’

‘Okay, so we think laterally,’ Jaeger suggested. ‘Imagine we do the same with the flight from Moldova. You saw Colonel Evandro’s strip at Station 15. At night, under floodlights, there’s nothing much to mark it out as military, or to distinguish it from Dodge. The colonel likes to keep it that way: low-profile, low-key.

‘We lure the flight in to Station 15,’ he continued. ‘It’s just across the border, so with guidance from a friendly radio operator, we reel the pilot in. Acting like narcos, Colonel Evandro’s men unload the cargo. They roll it into one of the hangars. Then they let the pilot know there must be some kind of mistake. They were expecting bales of raw coca paste. Instead, they’ve got a heap of insanely heavy metal.

‘They roll the shipment out to the aircraft again and load up – only they’ve made the switch. The pilot and his aircrew are a bunch of Russians who just want in and out without getting kidnapped and boiled alive. The Russian pilot believes he’s at the wrong strip. If El Padre finds out, he’s a dead man. The “narcos” advise him to take to the skies, and make hell-for-leather for Dodge.

‘Plane takes off. We’ve already unjammed El Padre’s radio frequency. Mr Very Scared Russian Pilot flies onwards to Dodge. He’s not going to breathe a word about what’s happened, for obvious reasons. He tells some bullshit story about losing their signal and flying a holding pattern – hence the delay. Switch done. No one any the wiser.’

Jaeger gazed at the others, eyes burning with excitement. ‘Our version of Operation Angeldust – done ’n’ dusted.’