by Bear Grylls
The bag with the file in it seemed to weigh so heavily in his hands. It was another clue to the puzzle, and doubtless one the Dark Force would kill for.
Jaeger rejoined Boerke with his luggage. The South African had offered him a tour of the island before he was scheduled to catch a return flight to London. He’d promised further extraordinary revelations, not that Jaeger could imagine what would possibly top the Government House file.
They drove east out of Malabo, heading into the thick tropical bush. By the time Boerke had turned on to the tiny dirt track threading towards the coast, Jaeger knew where they were going. They were making for Fernao, the place where he had spent three long years teaching English to the children of a fishing village.
Jaeger was trying desperately to think what he would say to the village chief, whose son, Little Mo, had died during the battle on the beach. It was less than two months back, but to Jaeger it felt like a whole lifetime and a world away.
Boerke must have noticed the worry etched on his features. He laughed. ‘Jaeger, man, I tell you – you look more scared now than when I ordered my guys to throw you into Black Beach. Relax. Next big surprise coming up.’
As they rounded the final bend in the road, Jaeger was surprised to see some kind of a reception party up ahead.
They drew closer, and it seemed as if most of the village had turned out . . . but for what? To welcome him? After what had happened, he really did not deserve that.
Jaeger noticed a home-made banner had been strung from one palm tree to another, stretching across the dirt road.
It read: WELCOME HOME WILLIAM JAEGER.
As Boerke pulled to a halt and Jaeger’s former pupils mobbed the vehicle, he could feel a lump forming in his throat. Boerke and his guards left him to it, as little hands dragged him out and propelled him towards the chief’s house. Jaeger steeled himself for what he knew was going to be a bittersweet reunion.
He stepped inside. After the harsh sunlight, the dark interior momentarily blinded him. The familiar sound of the surf from the nearby beach echoed through the thin mud walls of the hut. A hand was thrust forward in greeting, but the chief’s welcome turned rapidly into a powerful bear hug.
‘William Jaeger . . . William Jaeger, welcome. Fernao village – it will always be your home.’
The chief seemed close to tears. Jaeger fought back the emotion.
‘Insh’Allah, you have travelled well?’ the chief asked. ‘After your escape, we did not know if you had made it across the waters – you and your friend.’
‘Insh’Allah,’ Jaeger replied. ‘Raff and I – we made it through that and many more adventures.’
The chief smiled. He gestured into a dark corner of the hut. ‘Come,’ he commanded. ‘We have kept Mr Jaeger waiting long enough.’
A figure leapt out of the shadows, throwing himself into Jaeger’s arms. ‘Sir! Sir! Welcome back! Welcome home! And look!’ The small boy gestured at the sunglasses perched on his forehead. ‘I still have these! Your sunglasses! Your Oakleys!’
Jaeger laughed. He could barely believe it. Little Mo still had a thick bandage wrapped around his head, but he was very much alive!
Jaeger hugged him close, savouring the sweet miracle of the boy’s survival. But at the same moment he felt the pang of an irreplaceable loss deep inside his heart. His own son would be around Little Mo’s age now. That was if he was still alive . . .
With perfect timing, Boerke joined them, and the chief proceeded to relate the story of Little Mo’s miraculous survival.
‘We have God – and you, Mr Jaeger – to thank for this . . . this miracle. Plus Mr Boerke, of course. The bullet fired on the night of your escape hit my son a glancing blow. He was left for dead and we feared he would indeed die. And of course, there was no money to send him to the kind of hospital where they might save him.
‘Then came the coup, and this man turned up,’ the chief gestured at Boerke, ‘with a piece of paper and some numbers. And that gave access to a bank account, in which you had left . . . money. With that money and Mr Boerke’s help, I sent Little Mo to the best hospital in all of Africa, in Cape Town, and there they were able to save him.
‘But it was a very large amount of money, and much was left over.’ The chief smiled. ‘So first I bought some new boats, to replace the ones that were taken or shot up. And then we decided to build a new school. A proper one, so teaching does not have to be done under a palm tree any more. And finally – if Mrs Topeka can show herself – we hired a permanent teacher.’
A young, smartly dressed local woman stepped forward, giving Jaeger a shy smile. ‘All the children speak very fondly of you, Mr Jaeger. I am trying to carry on the good work that you began.’
‘Of course, there is still a place for a teacher of your talents,’ the chief added. ‘And Little Mo misses your skills at beach soccer very much! But I sense that maybe you have business that has taken you back into the wider world, and that maybe this is a good thing.’ He paused. ‘Insh’Allah, William, you have found your path.’
Had he? Had he found his path?
Jaeger thought about that dark warplane, the debris of which now lay scattered across the jungle; he thought of Irina Narov and her precious dagger; he thought of Ruth and Luke, his missing wife and child. There seemed to be many paths before him now, but maybe, somehow, they were all converging.
‘Insh’Allah,’ he agreed. He ruffled Little Mo’s hair. ‘But do one thing for me, will you – keep that teaching post open, just in case!’
The chief promised he would.
‘So, now the time has come,’ he announced. ‘You must come and see the site we have chosen for the school. It overlooks the beach where you made your escape, and we would like you to lay the foundation stone. We are thinking of calling it the William Jaeger and Pieter Boerke School, for without you there would not be one.’
Boerke shook his head in amazement. ‘I’m honoured. But no, just the William Jaeger School is enough. Me – I was simply the messenger.’
The visit to the school site was a special moment. Jaeger laid the first stone, upon which the walls would be built, and he and Boerke stayed for the obligatory feast. But eventually they had to say their goodbyes.
Boerke had one more destination scheduled on their island tour, and Jaeger had a flight to catch.
88
From Fernao, Boerke drove west, heading back towards Malabo. By the time he hit the coast road, Jaeger was fairly certain where they were going. Sure enough, they pulled into the compound of Black Beach Prison, through gates swung wide by a new and much more efficient and capable-looking guard force.
Boerke pulled up in the shadow of a high wall.
He turned to Jaeger. ‘A home from home, eh? It’s still used as a prison, but there’s a whole new bunch of inmates. Plus the torture cells are empty now, and the sharks are going crazy with hunger.’ He paused. ‘There’s one thing I want to show you, and a few things you need to have returned.’
They stepped down from the vehicle and into the prison’s dark interior. Jaeger couldn’t deny that he felt uneasy heading back into the place wherein the proverbial shit had been kicked out of him endlessly, and the cockroaches had all but feasted on his brains. But hell, maybe this was the way to slay the demons.
Almost immediately, he knew where Boerke was leading him: to his former cell. The South African rapped on the bars, calling a figure to some form of attention.
‘So, Mojo, time to meet your new jailer.’ He gestured at Jaeger. ‘My, how the tables have turned.’
The new inmate of Jaeger’s former cell stared at him, a look of horror spreading across his features.
‘Now, if you do not behave yourself very, very nicely,’ Boerke continued, ‘I am going to let Mr Jaeger here set up a new torture reserved for you exclusively.’ He flashed a look at Jaeger. ‘Are you good with that?’
Jaeger shrugged. ‘Sure. I figure I can remember some of the nastier ones, from when the boot was on the other fo
ot.’
‘You hear that, Mojo?’ Boerke demanded. ‘And I tell you something else, man: the sharks – I am told they are very, very hungry right now. Be careful, my friend. Be very, very careful.’
They left Jaeger’s former jailer and headed for the prison office. En route, Boerke paused before a side corridor leading to the isolation block. He glanced at Jaeger.
‘You know who we have in there?’ He nodded towards the corridor. ‘Chambara. Caught him at the airport as he tried to flee. You want to go say hello? He’s the bastard who ordered your arrest in the first place, isn’t it?’
‘He is. But let’s leave him to his isolation. I’d take one of his yachts, though,’ Jaeger added with a smile.
Boerke laughed. ‘I’ll add you to the list. No, man. We are not here to loot and pillage. We are here to rebuild this country.’
They made their way upstairs to the prison office, the place where Jaeger had first been processed into Black Beach. Boerke said something to the guard on reception, who handed over a small bundle of possessions – mostly clothes – tied up in the belt that Jaeger had been wearing at the time.
Boerke passed it to Jaeger. ‘These I believe are yours. Mojo’s lot robbed all the valuables, but there are a few personal effects in there I think you’d want to have.’
He led the way into a side room, and then excused himself so Jaeger could go through his possessions in some kind of privacy.
Apart from the clothes, there was Jaeger’s old wallet. It had been stripped of all money and credit cards, but he was glad to have it back. It had been a gift from his wife. It was made of bottle-green leather and had the SAS motto – ‘Who Dares Wins’ – inscribed discreetly on the underside of the interior flap.
Jaeger flipped it open and checked the secret compartment lying deep inside the wallet’s lining. Thankfully, the Black Beach guards hadn’t thought to look in there. He pulled out a tiny photo. It showed a young and beautiful green-eyed woman cradling a fresh-faced baby: Ruth and Luke, shortly after Luke had been born.
There was a scrap of paper stuffed behind the photo. It was a record of the pin numbers for his credit cards, but written in such a way that no one should be able to work them out. Jaeger had employed a simple form of encoding: to each of the four numbers he’d added his date of birth – 1979.
In that way 2345 became 3.12.11.14.
Simple.
Coding.
For a moment Jaeger’s mind flashed back to the old war chest lying in his Wardour Castle apartment, and to the book lying therein – a rare copy of a richly illustrated medieval text written entirely in a long-forgotten language. From there his mind flipped to a conversation with Simon Jenkinson, the archivist, at Wild Dog Media’s Soho offices over stale and rubbery sushi.
There is something called the book code. The beauty is its absolute pure simplicity; that, and the fact that it’s totally unbreakable – unless, of course, you happen to know which book each person is referring to.
After which the archivist had scribbled down an apparently random sequence of numbers . . .
Jaeger reached for his flight bag, pulled out the Malabo Government House file, and opened the sheet of paper from the Duchessa’s manifest. He ran his eyes down the list of seemingly random numbers, feeling a surge of excitement kicking his guts as he did so.
Irina Narov had confirmed that Grandfather Ted had been a leading Nazi hunter. From the little that Great Uncle Joe had felt able to tell him, Jaeger knew that he had also played a role in Grandfather Ted’s work. Both men had kept copies of the same rare and ancient book – the Voynich manuscript – to hand.
Maybe there was method to the apparent madness.
Maybe the Voynich manuscript unlocked the code.
Maybe Grandpa Ted and Great Uncle Joe had got their hands on some of the Nazi’s end-of-war documents, and had been unravelling the coded language as part of the hunt.
In which case, Jaeger had the answer to breaking the codes in his possession. If he could get himself, Narov and maybe Jenkinson together with the relevant books and documents, it might all start to make some kind of sense.
Jaeger smiled to himself. Boerke had been right: it had been worth making this trip out to Bioko many times over.
The South African knocked and entered the room. ‘So, man, you’re looking pleased with yourself. I guess you’ve enjoyed coming here after all?’
Jaeger nodded. ‘I’m in your debt, Pieter, a thousand times over.’
‘Not a bit of it, man. It is a debt repaid, that’s all.’
Jaeger pulled his iPhone from his flight bag. ‘Two quick emails I need to send.’
‘Go right ahead – as long as you can get a signal,’ Boerke told him. ‘Cell coverage around Malabo – it can be pretty bad.’
Jaeger powered up the phone and pulled up his email account, typing in the first message:
Simon,
I am transiting back through London, arriving tomorrow morning. Would you have the time for a meeting, just for an hour or so? I’ll come to you, wherever’s convenient. It’s urgent. I think you’ll like what we may have discovered. Let me know as soon as.
Jaeger
The message sat in his outbox ‘awaiting signal’ while he set about typing the second.
Irina (if I may),
I trust you are well and recovery is progressing. I’m en route back to Cachimbo shortly. Good news: I think I may have cracked the code. More when I see you.
Yours,
Will
He clicked ‘send’, and almost at the same time his phone beeped to indicate that it had acquired a signal, via some local network called Safaricom. The sending symbol twirled around and around for a few seconds, before the phone seemed to drop the connection.
He was about to power down, power up and try again when the iPhone appeared to fade to black of its own accord before coming back to life. A message seemed to type itself across the screen.
Question: how did we find you?
Answer: your friend told us where to look.
An instant later the screen went black again, before fading up on an image that had become sickeningly familiar: a Reichsadler.
But this Reichsadler was displayed on a Nazi-style flag pinned to a wall. Below it, Andy Smith, tied at the wrists and ankles, lay on his back on a tiled floor. By the looks of the cloth they threw over his face and the bucket of water being tipped over it, he was being waterboarded.
Jaeger stared at the horrifying image, transfixed.
He could only presume it had been taken in Smithy’s Loch Iver hotel room, before they had marched him up on to the storm-lashed hills, forced a bottle of whisky down his throat and hurled him into the dark abyss. Most likely Stefan Kral had been the one who’d tricked Smithy into opening his hotel door to his torturers.
There would have been precious little Smithy could have told his captors before he died, apart from the general location of the air wreck, for Colonel Evandro hadn’t yet released its exact coordinates.
More words typed themselves below the image:
Return to us what is ours.
Wir sind die Zukunft.
Return to us what is ours. Jaeger could only imagine they meant the documents from the Ju 390 cockpit. But how did they know Narov had retrieved them, and that they hadn’t gone down with the warplane? Jaeger just didn’t know . . . And then something hit him: Leticia Santos.
They’d clearly forced their Brazilian captive to talk. Like everyone else on the team, Leticia had been aware that something of crucial importance had been discovered in that cockpit. No doubt about it – under duress she must have revealed what she knew.
Jaeger heard a voice from behind him. ‘Man, who in God’s name sent you that? And why?’ It was Boerke, and he was staring at the image on Jaeger’s phone.
His words served to break Jaeger’s trance, and with it a burning jolt of realisation seared through his mind. He raised his arm and hurled the smartphone through the open window, propel
ling it as far as it would go into the bush outside.
Then he grabbed his flight bag and took to his heels, yelling at Boerke to follow.
‘RUN! Get everyone out! NOW!’
They sprinted out of the office block, screaming at the guards. Barely had they reached the former torture cells in the basement when the Hellfire struck. It tore into the ground where Jaeger’s phone lay, ripping a massive hole in the perimeter wall of the prison and collapsing the adjacent office building – the place where Jaeger and Boerke had just been sitting.
Down in the basement, both men were uninjured, as were most of the guards. But Jaeger wasn’t kidding himself any more: in the prison that had once almost been the death of him, the Dark Force had nearly killed him again.
And once again he, William Jaeger, was very much the hunted.
89
Fortunately, Malabo had a handful of internet cafés. Under Boerke’s guidance, Jaeger chose one and managed to send the briefest of messages.
Close all open comms. Travel as arranged. Revert as agreed.
WJ
Even in civilian life, Jaeger tended to live by the old soldier’s adage: ‘Fail to plan, plan to fail.’
Before leaving Cachimbo, he’d set up alternative travel and communications arrangements, just in case of such an eventuality – the hunt being resumed. He figured the enemy would be working to a dual agenda now: either to have the documents returned, or to kill all those who knew of their existence. Ideally, they’d want to achieve both ends.
Via an address to which his core team – Narov, Raff and Dale – had access, he proceeded to post a draft email. They would know to read the draft without it ever having been sent – hence making it all but untraceable.
The email detailed the time of a proposed meeting a couple of days hence, at a prearranged location. If the draft box received no message saying otherwise, the meeting would be on. And under the ‘travel as arranged’ instruction, Narov, Raff and Dale would know to fly back to the UK using passports provided courtesy of Colonel Evandro’s partners in Brazilian intelligence.