Ghost Flight

by Bear Grylls

  If necessary, they’d move under Brazilian diplomatic cover, so determined was the colonel to get them home safely and get the riddle of the Ju 390 solved.

  Jaeger caught his flights from Bioko to London as planned.

  There had been zero point in changing them, especially as they had been booked under the ‘clean’ passport that Colonel Evandro had provided him with, one that should be untraceable.

  Upon arrival in London, he caught the Heathrow Express to Paddington and jumped in a black cab. He got the cabbie to drop him a good half-mile distant from Springfield Marina, so he could walk the last leg to his London home. It was one more precaution to ensure he hadn’t been followed.

  Living on a boat had several advantages, one of which was the lack of a traceable footprint. Jaeger paid no council tax, he wasn’t on the electoral roll or the property register, and he’d chosen not to have a mailing address at the marina.

  The boat itself was registered to an anonymous offshore company, likewise the mooring. In short, his Thames barge was as good a place as any to schedule the meeting.

  En route to the marina, he called in at a grotty-looking internet café. He ordered a black coffee, logged on and checked the draft box. There were two messages. One was from Raff, postponing the meeting by a few hours, just to give them time enough to get there.

  The other message was blank, but it had a link embedded in it. Jaeger clicked through and it took him to Dropbox, an on-line data storage system.

  The Dropbox file contained one image – a JPEG file.

  Jaeger clicked on it.

  The internet connection was slow, and as the image downloaded it hit him like a series of savage punches to the guts. It showed the figure of Leticia Santos – kneeling naked and with her hands and feet tied, her eyes staring wide into the camera and red with terror.

  Behind her was what looked like a torn and bloodstained bed sheet, on which were scrawled the now familiar words:

  Return to us what is ours.

  Wir sind die Zukunft.

  They were crudely written in what appeared to be human blood.

  Jaeger didn’t bother to log off. He sprinted from the café, leaving his coffee untouched.

  Somehow, even their draft email communications system had been penetrated. That being the case, who knew how quickly a drone unleashing a Hellfire might arrive overhead? Jaeger doubted the enemy had the wherewithal to deploy one over east London, but presumption was the mother of all screw-ups.

  Instinctively he knew what the enemy was about here.

  They were deliberately taunting him. It was a tried and tested means of waging battle, one that the Nazis had named Nervenkrieg – mind warfare. They were torturing him by careful design, in the hope that they could provoke him into remaining at a traceable location for long enough for them to find and kill him.

  Or failing that, in the hope that he might be provoked into going hunting, solo.

  And in truth, the Nervenkrieg was working.

  Having watched that sickening image download, it was all Jaeger could do to resist the temptation to go seeking out Leticia Santos’s tormentors right here and now. And alone.

  There were any number of leads he could follow. The C-130 pilot, for a start. Carson would have his details on file, and that would be enough for Jaeger to start tracking him down. Plus Colonel Evandro had promised a whole caseload of new leads from his own investigations.

  But Jaeger needed to hold off.

  He needed to regroup his forces, learn from whatever it was they had discovered, study the ground, the enemy and the threat, and strategise and act accordingly. Somehow he had to reclaim the initiative – to make proactive decisions, not reactive heat-of-the-moment ones.

  It was the old adage again: fail to plan, plan to fail.

  90

  First to arrive for that evening’s meeting was the archivist, Simon Jenkinson.

  Jaeger had spent most of the day on his Triumph Explorer, paying a furtive visit to his Wardour Castle apartment. There, he’d retrieved his edition of the Voynich manuscript – the one that Grandfather Ted had bequeathed to him.

  He’d laid the thick tome on his desk in the barge with some degree of reverence, awaiting Simon Jenkinson’s entry.

  The archivist was a good half an hour early, and he looked only marginally less like a hibernating honey bear than when Jaeger had last seen him. At Jaeger’s request, he’d managed to track down a copy of the Voynich manuscript translation. He’d brought it with him, tucked firmly under his arm.

  Jaeger was barely able to offer him a cup of tea before Jenkinson sat himself down with the Voynich manuscript and the Bioko file, placing the translation beside them. And that was it: thick glasses perched on the end of his nose, Jenkinson got to work on the Duchessa’s list of apparently random numbers – code-breaking, or so Jaeger presumed.

  An hour later, the archivist raised his head from his task, his eyes burning with excitement.

  ‘Gotcha!’ he exclaimed. ‘At last! I’ve done two, just to make sure the first wasn’t a fluke. So . . . number one: Adolf Eichmann.’

  ‘I know the name,’ Jaeger confirmed. ‘But remind me of the details.’

  Jenkinson already had his head bent over the books and papers once more. ‘Eichmann – truly a nasty piece of work. One of the chief architects of the Holocaust. He escaped Nazi Germany at war’s end, only to be tracked down to Argentina in the 1960s.

  ‘Next one: Ludolf von Alvensleben,’ Jenkinson declared.

  Jaeger shook his head: the name wasn’t familiar at all.

  ‘SS Gruppenführer and mass murderer par excellence. Ran the Valley of Death in northern Poland, which became a grave for thousands.’ Jenkinson flashed Jaeger a look. ‘Also disappeared to Argentina, where he lived to a ripe old age.

  Jenkinson bent over his books again, flipping back and forth through the pages, until the third was decoded.

  ‘Aribert Heim,’ the archivist announced. ‘Him you must have heard of. He’s been at the centre of one of the longest manhunts of all time. His nickname during the war was Dr Death. He earned it in the concentration camps, by experimenting on inmates.’ Jenkinson shuddered. ‘Also thought to be hiding out in Argentina, though rumour has it he may have died of old age.’

  ‘There seems to be a theme developing,’ Jaeger remarked. ‘A Latin American theme.’

  Jenkinson smiled. ‘Indeed.’

  Before he could reveal any more of the names, the rest of the party arrived. Raff led Irina Narov and Mike Dale into the barge, the latter two looking tired from their travels but also remarkably recovered, and noticeably better fed than when Jaeger had last seen them.

  He greeted each in turn, and did the necessary introductions with Jenkinson. Raff, Narov and Dale had flown into London direct from Rio, with a connecting flight from Cachimbo prior to that. They’d been on the go for approaching eighteen hours, and it promised to be a long night.

  Jaeger brewed some strong coffee, then gave them the good news: the book code seemed to be working – at least for the Bioko documents.

  Five figures gathered around the Voynich manuscript and its translation, as Narov produced the satchel of papers retrieved from the Ju 390’s cockpit. The atmosphere aboard the barge was electric with anticipation. Would seventy years of a dark and secret history finally be brought to life?

  Narov took out the first set of papers.

  Dale produced his camera. He waved it at Jaeger. ‘You good with this? In here?’

  ‘What’s got into you?’ Jaeger needled him. ‘It’s film first, ask later, isn’t it?’

  Dale shrugged. ‘This is your home. Makes it a bit different from filming out in the wilds.’

  Jaeger sensed a change in the man – an air of maturity and genuine concern, as though the trials and tribulations of the last few weeks had somehow been the making of him.

  ‘Go ahead,’ he told him. ‘Let’s get it documented – all of it.’

  Under Jenkinson’s init
ial tutelage, Narov set about the Aktion Feuerland document, while Dale framed up his shots, and Raff and Jaeger stood an informal guard. The archivist seemed remarkably talented at multi-tasking: it wasn’t long before he was able to thrust a list under Jaeger’s nose – the seventh page of the Duchessa’s manifest, fully decoded. He proceeded to point out some of the most notorious individuals.

  ‘Gustav Wagner, better known as “the Beast”. Wagner founded the T4 programme – to kill off the disabled – then went on to run one of the foremost extermination camps. Escaped to South America, where he lived to a grand old age.’

  His finger stabbed at another name on the list. ‘Klaus Barbie – “the Butcher of Lyons”. A mass murderer who tortured and killed his way across France. At the end of the war—’

  Jenkinson broke off as Jaeger’s boatie neighbour, Annie, ducked through the barge’s entranceway. Jaeger did the introductions.

  ‘Annie’s from the nextdoor barge. She’s a . . . good friend.’

  Narov spoke from where she was bent over her documents. ‘Aren’t they all? Women and Will Jaeger – they seem drawn like the moth to the candle flame. Isn’t that how you say it in English?’

  ‘Anyone who can make carrot cake like Annie – they’ll win my heart, for sure,’ Jaeger answered, doing his best to rescue an awkward situation.

  Realising that he and his friends were busy, and sensing the tension in the air, Annie handed Jaeger the cake she’d brought and backed out quickly. ‘Don’t work too hard, fellas,’ she called with a wave.

  Narov hunched closer over her documents. Jaeger eyed her, irritated by what she’d just done. What right did she have to be rude to his friends?

  ‘Thanks for helping the neighbourly relations,’ he remarked, sarcastically.

  Narov didn’t even raise her head from her task. ‘It is simple. No one outside of these four walls should be trusted with what these documents will reveal – that’s if we can crack them. No one, no matter how good a friend.’

  ‘So, Klaus Barbie,’ Jenkinson volunteered.

  ‘Yeah, tell me about the Butcher of Lyons.’

  ‘At war’s end Klaus Barbie was protected by British and American intelligence. He was posted to Argentina as a CIA agent, code-named Adler.’

  Jaeger raised one eyebrow. ‘Adler: eagle?’

  ‘Eagle,’ Jenkinson confirmed. ‘Believe it or not, the Butcher of Lyon became a life-long CIA agent code-named The Eagle.’ He moved his finger down the list. ‘And this one. Heinrich Müller, former head of the Gestapo – the most senior Nazi whose fate remains an utter mystery. Believed by most to have fled to . . . well, you guessed it: Argentina.

  ‘Below him, Walter Rauff, a top SS commander. The inventor of the mobile vehicles in which the Nazis gassed people. Fled to South America. Lived to a grand old age, and his funeral was reportedly a major celebration of all things Nazi.

  ‘And finally,’ Jenkinson announced, ‘the Angel of Death himself, Joseph Mengele. Carried out unspeakable experiments on thousands in Auschwitz. At war’s end he fled to – need I say it? – Argentina, where he is reported to have continued his experiments. A true monster of a human – that’s if you can even call him human.

  ‘Oh, and lest we forget, Bormann’s also on the list. Martin Bormann – Hitler’s right-hand man—’

  ‘Hitler’s banker,’ Jaeger interjected.

  ‘Indeed.’ Jenkinson eyed him. ‘In short, it’s a Nazi rogues’ gallery if ever there was one. Though the foremost rogue of all is missing: Uncle Adolf. They say he died in his Berlin bunker. I’ve never really believed it myself.’

  Jenkinson shrugged. ‘I’ve spent most of my adult life in the archives researching the Second World War. You’d be amazed what an industry has grown up around it. But I’ve never come across anything that even remotely rivals all this.’ He waved a hand at the pile of documents on the table. ‘And I must say, I’m rather enjoying myself. Mind if I have a crack at another?’

  ‘Go right ahead,’ Jaeger confirmed. ‘There’s too much for Ms Narov to deal with in the one night. But I’m curious, what happened to that Hans Kammler file that you found in the National Archives? The one you emailed me a couple of pages from?’

  Jenkinson seemed to jump slightly, a hint of worry creeping into his eyes. ‘Gone. Vanished. Kaput. Even when I checked the online cloud storage systems – not a page remains anywhere. It’s the file that never was.’

  ‘Someone went to great lengths to make it disappear,’ Jaeger probed.

  ‘They did,’ Jenkinson confirmed uneasily.

  ‘One more thing,’ Jaeger added. ‘Why use something so basic as a book code? I mean, the Nazis had their state-of-the-art Enigma cipher machines, didn’t they?’

  Jenkinson nodded. ‘They did. But thanks to Bletchley Park, we broke Enigma, and by the end of the war, the Nazi leadership knew that.’ He smiled. ‘A book code may be simple, but it’s also utterly unbreakable, unless you have the exact same book – or, in this case, books plural – that the code is based upon.’

  With that he joined Narov, turning his fine mind to cracking another of the documents.

  91

  Number crunching wasn’t really Raff and Jaeger’s strength. They busied themselves making brews, and keeping vigil on the deck outside. Jaeger wasn’t exactly expecting any trouble here at the marina, but both he and Raff were still alive and in the game because they’d been trained to expect the unexpected – training they still lived by.

  After an hour or so Dale came and joined them. He took a long pull on his coffee. ‘Only so much reading documents a sane man can film.’

  ‘Talking of film, how’s it going?’ Jaeger asked. ‘Carson happy, or are you about to be shot at dawn?’

  Dale shrugged. ‘Oddly enough, he seems pretty sanguine about it all. We got to the aircraft and lifted it out of the jungle, just as we’d promised. Fact that we lost it along the way – it just means there won’t be any sequel. But once I’m done here, I’m supposed to head to an edit suite, so I can start cutting the series.’

  ‘How’re you going to make me look?’ Jaeger queried. ‘You editing out my ums and ahs?’

  ‘I’m going to make you look like an idiot,’ Dale replied, deadpan.

  ‘Do that and you will get shot at dawn.’

  ‘Do that and there’s no film.’

  They laughed.

  There was a certain camaraderie between them now – one that Jaeger would have never imagined possible upon their first meeting.

  It was pushing midnight by the time Narov had her first document cracked. Sure enough, the Voynich manuscript was proving the key to unlocking its meaning, but even so it was slow and painstaking work. She came and joined Raff, Dale and Jaeger on the barge’s open rear.

  ‘I am maybe fifty per cent done,’ she announced. ‘And already it is incredible.’ She glanced at Jaeger. ‘We now know exactly where the first three Ju 390s – Adlerflug I, II and III – were headed, as would our warplane, Adlerflug IV, have been, had she not run out of gas. Which means we know exactly where the Nazis had their safe havens.

  ‘Aktion Feuerland,’ she continued. ‘You know why they called it that? They named it after Tierra del Fuego – the land of fire. Where is that? It is the sliver of land where the extreme southern tip of Argentina slips into the Atlantic . . . For me, Argentina is no massive surprise. It always was the key suspect for sheltering the foremost Nazis.

  ‘But there are several other locations that the document reveals. Other safe havens. And they do come as a real shock.’ Narov paused, struggling to control her elation. ‘You know, we have never had the wherewithal – the intelligence or expertise – to finish this. To end it. But with breaking these codes, maybe we do now.’

  Before Narov could continue, there was a triumphant yell from inside. The voice was that of Jenkinson, and they figured it had to be something utterly extraordinary, for it wasn’t in the archivist’s nature to get needlessly overexcited.

  They hurried in
side.

  Jenkinson held up a sheet of paper. ‘This – is – it,’ he stammered, breathlessly. ‘This changes everything. It would have been so easy to overlook – one seemingly unremarkable sheet of numbers . . . But finally it all starts to make sense. Horrible, chilling sense.’

  He gazed at the four of them, his lower lip trembling with . . . what? Excitement; trepidation; or was it dread?

  ‘There is little point in shipping your loot, your top people and your Wunderwaffe – your wonder weapons – to the four corners of the earth, unless you have a reason. A schedule. A master plan.’

  ‘This,’ he waved the paper. ‘This is it. Aktion Werewolf. Operation Werewolf: blueprint for the Fourth Reich.’

  He glanced at them, fear etched in his eyes. ‘Note: Fourth Reich. Not Third Reich. Fourth Reich.’

  They gathered in stunned silence as Jenkinson began to read.

  ‘It begins: “At the orders of the Führer, from the ashes of the Third Reich the Ubermensch” – that’s the master race – “will work to ensure that we rise again . . .”’

  Jenkinson proceeded to read through the entirety of the document. It outlined a plan to use the Allies’ greatest weakness – their paranoia over the rise of the Eastern Bloc and Soviet communism – against them. Even at the Allies’ hour of victory, the Nazis would use that paranoia as their Trojan Horse – one through which they would survive, and rise again to conquer.

  ‘Using the stupendous wealth they had accumulated during the war years, they would infiltrate all sections of society with ‘true believers’. They would appear to harness their technology for the benefit of their new masters, while in truth subverting them. The most promising Wunderwaffe technologies would continue to be developed, but in absolute secret, and for the benefit of a Nazism reborn under the Fourth Reich.

  ‘“No one should underestimate the task now lying before us”,’ Jenkinson read from the last paragraph of the document. ‘“Operation Werewolf will not be accomplished overnight. We will need to be patient. We will need to rebuild our power and marshal our forces. The Führer, assisted by the greatest minds in the Reich, will work away in secret for this end. And when the Reich rises like a phoenix from the ashes, this time it will be global and unstoppable.