The Hunt

80

Five thousand miles from St Katharine Docks, Hank Kammler settled back in his executive chair in his subterranean command bunker, smiling grimly. Three calls made: three devices primed to blow. He could hear the clock ticking in his head: the countdown had begun.

Whatever Jaeger and his people might try now, of one thing he was certain: they weren’t about to stop the carnage that was coming.

The fuse had been lit.

He was no expert, but he knew enough to envisage what was about to happen. When the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs had been dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they had been detonated several hundred feet above the cities. That had maximised the immediate destructive power of the blasts.

By contrast, the first of Kammler’s INDs would be detonated at ground level. The blast effect would be lessened, but conversely the radioactive contamination would be increased, because the radiation wouldn’t disperse in the air. Those parts of the cities that weren’t flattened would be rendered uninhabitable for decades.

Hundreds of thousands – maybe millions – would die: either an instant death from the blast, or a lingering one from radiation poisoning. That alone was some achievement.

It had taken seven decades to get to this point.

The humiliation of the Third Reich was about to be avenged.

And once Kammler’s gunmen had finished off Jaeger and his team, he would slip away to another place of hiding. He had many.

It was all coming together, despite the damage inflicted here by a few desperate individuals.

Such was war, Kammler reflected.

Plans evolved as necessity dictated.

And revenge truly was a dish best served cold.