The Hunt

6

Will Jaeger couldn’t deny that he was enjoying himself.

When his ninety-five-year-old great-uncle had first suggested the trip, Jaeger had been doubtful. But he had to admit that he needed the break, and where better to come than the place where it had all started.

The Hotel Zum Turken in Berchtesgaden was about as close as one could get these days to Hitler’s Berghof, the mountain lair from which he had ruled Nazi Germany. The hotel had stood cheek-by-jowl with the Berghof, being commandeered by Nazi officials during the war. In fact the two had been joined by a network of tunnels burrowed beneath the mountain, but while the Berghof had been destroyed by Allied air raids, the hotel had largely survived.

These days, powerful anti-Nazi sentiments pervaded the area. Andrea Munsch, the hotel’s owner, epitomised such feelings. When Jaeger had telephoned enquiring whether they might book rooms, she had warned him that the hotel was probably not going to be to their liking. For a moment he’d worried that the Zum Turken had been turned into some kind of a shrine to the twisted ideology of Nazism, but Andrea had quickly disabused him of that misapprehension.

In 1933, Martin Bormann – known then as ‘Hitler’s banker’ – had seized the Hotel Zum Turken, and its long-time owners – Andrea’s parents – had been kicked out by his jackbooted thugs. At the end of the war, they had returned to discover a bare and looted shell. They had decided to rebuild the hotel, but to keep it in the state it had been at war’s end as a memorial to those who had died at Hitler’s hand. Consequently there were few mod cons, certainly no Wi-Fi or internet, and the only sound system in the place was an old gramophone. Hence Andrea’s warning.

That morning, she had taken Jaeger and Uncle Joe into the tunnels, via the Zum Turken’s basement. From there they’d wound ever deeper into the bowels of the mountain, descending concrete steps and iron ladders bolted to walls, and stepping through puddles of yellowing water that lingered in the airless damp.

So extensive was the subterranean network that the Bavarian government was still excavating it, to create a permanent exhibit to the dark excesses of the Nazi regime.

At one point, Andrea had paused to allow Uncle Joe to catch his breath, and she’d used the time to relate a story. She spoke impeccable English, and was clearly passionate about keeping such wartime memories alive.

She waved a hand around the tunnel. ‘When Bormann seized the hotel, none of this existed. Over time it became the headquarters of the SS, and a key means of maintaining control. As a result, unspeakable things happened here. Perhaps you can feel it in the air? Many visitors say they can. A sense of lingering evil.’

Jaeger pondered this for a moment. He realised that he’d felt unsettled as soon as they’d entered the tunnels, a feeling that only grew the deeper they delved.

‘My parents witnessed one of the earliest horrors,’ Andrea continued. ‘Bormann seized the home of a local man for himself. The man was deeply distressed, so he waited for Hitler’s convoy to wend its way down from the Berghof, then placed himself in front of Hitler’s car where it slowed at a bend and spoke to him personally, begging that his family be allowed to keep their home.

‘Hitler lent an apparently sympathetic ear, and told the man it would be dealt with the very next day. The man returned to his family with the good news: the Führer himself would intercede. The next morning, the Gestapo came. They arrested him, took him into these tunnels and tortured him, then sent him to the concentration camps.

‘Just one example.’ Andrea paused. ‘One of thousands.’

The tour of the labyrinthine tunnel complex had occupied most of that morning, especially as they were proceeding at Uncle Joe’s pace. In the afternoon, Jaeger had gone for a run on one of the spectacular walking trails that criss-crossed the mountains, leaving Uncle Joe to his afternoon nap.

He had come here expecting to encounter an atmosphere of oppression and darkness, but what he had discovered was quite the opposite. The breathtaking beauty of the dramatic peaks and valleys had actually lifted his spirits.

And he certainly needed that right now.

The past few months had been anything but easy.

Four years ago, his wife, Ruth, and eight-year-old son Luke had been kidnapped. Jaeger had scoured the earth in his effort to find their abductors. The trail had led him to the son of a former Nazi general, one who had risen to serve in the highest echelons of America’s post-war intelligence apparatus. He’d been recruited to help combat the rise of Soviet Russia, the Germans being the only people who had any experience of going to war against the ‘Reds’.

That Nazi general was long dead, but his son, Hank Kammler, had good reasons to hate Jaeger, ones reaching deep into a shared family past. Kammler had kidnapped Jaeger’s wife and son as a way to exact revenge, and found the means to torture Jaeger remotely with their disappearance, emailing him videos of Ruth and Luke in captivity; bound, kneeling and pleading for help. Each taunting message had ended with the chilling words: Wir sind die Zukunft – ‘We are the future’.

Following a global hunt, Jaeger had rescued his family, but not before Kammler had infected them with a super-virus with which he had intended to wipe out most of humankind in order to forge a brave new world: a Fourth Reich. The chosen few had been inoculated so that they would survive what he’d named the Gottvirus.

At the eleventh hour, Jaeger and his team had foiled Kammler, and the world’s military and law-enforcement agencies had gone after him big-time. A scorched body – later confirmed as having Kammler’s DNA – had been retrieved from his subterranean command bunker. It appeared he had ‘done a Hitler’ and committed suicide, possibly by setting himself on fire.

But that had done little to relieve Jaeger’s suffering. While Luke had made a remarkable recovery, Ruth had not. She’d languished in the darkness that had gripped her mind, seemingly hopelessly mired within it.

Eventually Jaeger had checked her into a London clinic that specialised in dealing with the victims of trauma. But they were months into her treatment now and going nowhere fast. If anything, Ruth’s mood swings, her unpredictability and her violence – she was prone to lashing out – were worsening.

No doubt about it, Jaeger had needed this break big time.