The Hunt

40

Colonel Evandro had been inundated with volunteers. Few had wanted to miss out on the sting. Unsurprisingly, as far as Jaeger was concerned, the colonel had been its single greatest advocate, once Jaeger had shared the proposition with him.

Station 15 had taken a little disguising. They’d run down the Brazilian flag and sloshed some paint over the few obvious military insignia, shoving the Super Pumas into a distant hangar. The colonel had also set up extra floodlights to illuminate the incoming aircraft when it taxied to a standstill on the runway. That way the pilot would be partially blinded, and less likely to notice any anomalies.

Not that Colonel Evandro figured there were any.

He’d even gone as far as getting his BSOB engineers to weld together some crude iron baskets on stakes, which had been planted along either side of the dirt strip. They were burning fiercely now: DIY landing lights – an added touch of authenticity.

Peter Miles had taken a little more persuading, but once he’d checked into the history – the Lebanon sting by the team of former SAS – he’d seemed happy. A few calls to Daniel Brooks, and some due diligence on the science and technology, and Miles had really started to come onside.

Apparently Narov was right. Refined tungsten ingots and highly enriched uranium appeared almost exactly the same: an insanely heavy silver-grey metal. It would take a metallurgist with some fancy equipment to tell the two apart, and then only once he’d dismantled the lead sarcophagus making up the radiation shield.

And no way was all that going to happen in Dodge.

But the clincher had been getting hold of the DEA’s files on Operation Angeldust. Angeldust was a little more complicated and technically accomplished than Jaeger had remembered it, but the basics were just as he’d described them. After reading the file, Miles had come fully on board.

Brooks had taken charge of building the fake shipment that Colonel Evandro’s men would switch with the incoming cargo of uranium. In the depths of some woodland in a small, unmarked hangar in rural Virginia – one of the CIA’s many black facilities – a specialist team had been ordered to drop everything else and concentrate on the task.

Brooks’s demolitions expert, Theo Wallis – something of a magician with anything that could be made to go bang – realised from the get-go that the device would have to be a trade-off between maximum destructive power and the amount of space the explosive charge would need.

His greatest challenge was the incredibly small volume that the tungsten ingots would occupy. His chosen explosive, RDX, had a density of 1.8 grams per cubic centimetre, as opposed to tungsten’s 19.25 grams. Volume for volume, it weighed less than a tenth of the tungsten ingots within which he would need to conceal the charge.

RDX was actually a World War II-era explosive, but it remained one of the most powerful available. It had had an interesting history. The story went that in the process of developing the explosive, Britain’s Research Department 11 blew itself to smithereens – hence the name RDX, short for ‘Research Department X’.

X – as, in the past. Dead and gone. An irony that Jaeger found amusing.

Wallis needed to cover six faces of the block of RDX with metal ingots, being careful that none of the explosive was visible, for then even a cursory inspection might give the game away. Plus he needed to insert the tiny Retrievor tracking device somewhere it wouldn’t be discovered.

The great upside of combining RDX with tungsten was the sheer destructive power that resulted. Tungsten was the material of choice for bunker-busting bombs, forming the tip of any such projectile. Its enormous weight and density, coupled with its stupendously high melting point, made it ideal for slicing through steel, concrete, earth or brickwork.

Its capacity for causing lethal harm was practically unlimited, especially when hurled at its target with the explosive velocity of RDX – some 8,750 metres per second. The biggest downside was what a surprisingly small block the right amount of tungsten made – not a great deal larger than your average computer printer.

Wallis figured he could afford to build the block of explosives-cum-tungsten somewhat larger than the equivalent weight of uranium ingots, for the simple reason that he could compensate in the thickness of the lead shield. Because his tungsten bomb wasn’t radioactive, he could thin the lead to allow for a larger charge of RDX.

That was the answer.

With the team working around the clock, the dummy-shipment-cum-bomb had been sealed in its lead sarcophagus, packed into a wooden crate and flown to the nearest military airbase, where Brooks had had it loaded aboard a non-stop flight to Brazil. Jetted direct into Cachimbo airport, it had been ferried out to Station 15 and hidden in the hangar where – all being well – the switch would occur.

Tonight was show time.

Jaeger, Narov, Raff and Alonzo had joined Colonel Evandro in a makeshift operations room, set a good way back from the airstrip.

The man chosen to front up the ruse was a Captain Ernesto Gonzales, a short, stocky, dark-skinned guy in his early thirties, who had the demeanour of a farmer rather than a special forces warrior. Indeed, that was exactly the kind of background he hailed from before being recruited into BSOB.

His face was scarred and pockmarked, his hair longish and greasy, and he looked as if he’d had a hard life, which in truth he had. Dressed as he now was, in scuffed cowboy boots and a mixed bag of ragged unmarked combats, topped off by a wide-brimmed Stetson, he looked every inch a narco.

As a bonus, he spoke decent English, which was the lingua franca of global smuggling operations. Equally as important, he had one of those classic poker-faced demeanours, his features rarely giving anything away. He was a consummate bluffer – which was why the colonel had used him for various undercover ops in the past.

In short, Gonzales was the obvious choice for tonight’s dark and dangerous charade.