The Hunt

45

The massive US Air Force C-5M Super Galaxy – powered by four giant General Electric turbofan jet engines – was eating up the miles.

Flying at some 35,000 feet, and with such a light load as she was presently carrying – four operators, plus their hastily assembled kit – she had a range of some 10,500 kilometres. It would get them to their refuelling stop at Camp Lemmonier, the US military base in Djibouti, on the east coast of Africa.

Upon take-off, Jaeger had done what he normally did when facing a long flight by military transport: he’d slung his hammock in the massive hold and zoned out. He’d awoken some eleven hours later as they approached Camp Lemmonier, based at Djibouti’s Ambouli International Airport, feeling remarkably refreshed.

The stress and tension of the last few days had proved draining. Alonzo had cobbled together a makeshift bed on the Galaxy’s floor, and Narov and Raff had each taken a row of the giant aircraft’s seats. The three of them appeared to be comatose still.

Before departing Brazil, Jaeger had had to sort some kind of arrangements for his boys. It was the Easter holidays, school was breaking up, and he needed someone to take care of them for as long as might be necessary.

The obvious solution had presented itself when Uncle Joe had offered to have them to stay at his place. He lived in a beautiful wooden cabin set at the foot of Buccleuch Fell, in the Scottish Borders, a natural paradise in the heart of dense woodland, complete with a series of lakes.

Uncle Joe’s Cabin, as they called it, was far more sumptuous than the name suggested. It had become something of a home-from-home for the Jaeger family. Luke loved it, and Jaeger felt certain Simon would too. They could go climbing in the woods, fish in the streams and cycle the forest tracks. Plus Great-Auntie Ethel’s cooking was an extra draw.

A part of Jaeger had felt homesick, especially when he’d spoken to the boys. He’d told them as much as he could. They knew their dad would be doing everything possible to get back to them safely. He would have moved mountains to be there with them right now, running wild. But what would he tell them about Ruth? How would he explain her absence?

Any way he looked at it, he was in the right place – hunting down Kammler. And very possibly his wife too, perish the thought.

His parents had offered to have the boys, but Jaeger had been wary. His father had long since gone to the bottle. Though a good dad in his day – he’d nurtured Jaeger’s boyhood love of the wild – after leaving the army he’d drifted into drink.

Whenever he’d been on the booze, he proved rude and abusive. At age sixteen, Jaeger had volunteered for Royal Marines selection as a ‘crow’ – a raw recruit. In a drunken fit, his father had told him he would fail the punishing selection course.

Jaeger had been determined to prove him wrong.

That was when he’d first met Raff. He’d been thrown into line alongside the big Maori, as they paraded in their underwear that first morning at Lympstone. They hailed from totally different backgrounds, but that meant sod all. Both were day-one crows and both were freezing their nuts off. They’d forged an unbreakable bond on the fearsome assault course and trekking over the Dartmoor fells.

Jaeger knew that his father had tried to curtail his drinking in recent years, but he didn’t want either Luke or Simon exposed to that kind of crap.

As he had become more distant from his father, so Jaeger had grown closer to his grandfather, whose example had inspired him to try for SAS selection. But when Brigadier Edward ‘Ted’ Jaeger had been murdered by Kammler’s people, he’d turned to Uncle Joe, the brigadier’s younger brother and his former comrade in the Secret Hunters.

As the Galaxy took to the air once more, heading east out of Djibouti, Jaeger grabbed a ration pack from his bergen and wolfed down a cold, gloopy boil-in-the-bag meal. As in-flight food went, it wasn’t great, but lying in a gently swinging hammock eating lukewarm rations was luxury compared with the physical deprivations to come.

Jaeger had few illusions: as soon as they crossed the border into China, they were going to be totally up against it, operating in some of the harshest, most unforgiving terrain the world had to offer.

Where they were going, they’d be glad of all the high-altitude and Alpine gear they’d stuffed into their bergens, plus the cross-country skis and other survival kit they had packed into the steel-framed para-tubes lying in the hold.

Then there was the risk of capture by the Chinese armed forces. Though they were heading into China for that nation’s benefit – indeed, for the benefit of all humankind – the Chinese weren’t to know that. As soon as they crossed the border, that threat would be very real.

A part of Jaeger wondered if Brooks couldn’t have found a way to brief the Chinese, but he also understood the challenges involved. The CIA chief would have had to explain to his Chinese counterparts how his agency had supposedly verified that the world’s most wanted man was dead, whereas in truth he was still very much alive.

Not only that, he would have to explain how Kammler had somehow wormed his way into China, with the help of a changed appearance and an assumed identity.

In short, raising all this with the Chinese had the potential to backfire spectacularly. It was a recipe for dark conspiracy theories, not to mention international mistrust. US–Chinese relations were always delicate, and on balance Jaeger could appreciate why Brooks – and Miles – had opted for the present course of action.

Still, he didn’t fancy being captured by the People’s Liberation Army, and having to talk his way out of this one.