The Hunt

46

With worrying thoughts of capture in mind, Jaeger decided to gen up on the mission. They had a 6,000-kilometre flight ahead of them before touchdown at the Takhli Air Force Base in central Thailand. They’d have precious little time thereafter for studying the target.

He tapped his iPad’s screen, scrolling through Peter Miles’s hastily prepared briefing notes. It seemed that Kammler and his forebears in the Reich had a certain history in the area that they were jetting into. As with so many things from the war years, what had first led the Nazis to this remote part of China beggared belief.

In May 1938, SS Hauptsturmführer Ernst Schafer, a German zoologist, had led an expedition into Tibet. Staffed entirely by SS officers, it was sponsored by the Deutsche Ahnenerbe – the SS Ancestral Heritage Society – a pseudo-scientific institution charged with proving that an Aryan master race had supposedly once ruled the earth.

Heinrich Himmler, chief of the SS, was one of the Deutsche Ahnenerbe’s key backers, as was SS General Hans Kammler. They believed that centuries ago, a group of pure-blooded Aryans had emerged from Tibet, making it the cradle of Aryan civilisation. However crackpot that theory might seem, the SS Tibet expedition had set out to analyse the cranial dimensions and take plaster casts of the local people’s heads, to somehow prove it.

Schafer had managed to persuade the British authorities to allow him to access Tibet via India, which was then still a British colony. Travelling via Sikkim, a region of north-eastern India, the German team had made their way into the ‘Land of Snows’ – the mountainous Tibetan plateau. On 9 January 1939, they had reached Lhasa, Tibet’s capital. There, Schafer had handed out Nazi swastikas, which ironically served to endear his team to the Tibetans.

In the swastika the Nazis had appropriated an ancient religious symbol popular in Roman times and revered in Buddhism and Hinduism. The Tibetan leaders had taken the expedition’s swastikas to indicate a shared belief in the peaceful, tolerant tenets of Buddhism.

Of course, nothing could have been further from the truth.

Schafer and his people had headed to the famed Nyenchen Tanglha Mountains, overlooking Lake Namtso – the ‘Heavenly Lake’ – which lay sixty kilometres to the north of Lhasa. This area, they had concluded, was the epicentre of Aryan ancestry in Tibet – the long-forgotten Nazi homeland.

They carried back to Germany scores of ancient religious artefacts, together with the cranial measurements and casts, which they claimed proved their theory. Himmler was ecstatic: he greeted Schafer with gifts of a special SS dagger and a silver death’s-head ring.

Hitler himself read Schafer’s reports and was impressed. All the expedition team were promoted up the ranks of the SS, and the Nyenchen Tanglha Mountains went down in SS mythology as the legendary Aryan fatherland.

And now it seemed that Hank Kammler – son of the SS general who had done so much to further such ideas – had headed for this region. There was a dark symbolism in Kammler’s hiding out in the Nyenchen Tanglha Mountains, of that Jaeger felt certain.

Kammler was nothing if not smart. A man of wealth, thanks to his father’s post-war dealings, he’d sunk significant resources into projects in isolated parts of the world, including a remote private game reserve in Katavi, in East Africa – somewhere that had provided perfect cover for his germ warfare research.

It was there that Jaeger and his team had nailed him, or so they had thought.

Now, in the Nyenchen Tanglha Mountains, he had established a cover for his newest and darkest aspirations. According to the intelligence Jaeger was reading, if Kammler was breeding a clutch of INDs, he was very likely doing it from here. If Brooks and Miles were right, on the snowfields overlooking the Heavenly Lake, Kammler had set up a veritable devil’s sanctuary.

A sanctuary from where he planned to unleash a new Armageddon.