by Bear Grylls
‘“Many of us may not live to see this day”,’ he continued, ‘“but our children certainly will. They will seize their birthright. The destiny of the Ubermensch will be fulfilled. And revenge – revenge will be finally bestowed upon us.”’
Jenkinson flipped over the sheet of paper, turning to a second. ‘They mention getting their people installed in the Office of Strategic Services – the forerunner to the CIA – the American government, the British Secret Intelligence Service, top corporations . . . the list goes on and on. And they give themselves seventy years to do so – seventy years from the date of their ultimate ignominy: their May 1945 unconditional surrender to the Allies.’
Jenkinson glanced up, fearfully. ‘Which means that any time around about now, the new Reich is due to rise, Phoenix-like from the ashes.’
He turned the document around so that it faced Jaeger and the others. At the bottom of the second page was stamped a familiar form – a Reichsadler.
‘That,’ he indicated, ‘is their mark. It is the emblem of the Fourth Reich. That circular symbol below the eagle’s tail – the writing around it is also in code. In fact, it’s triply encoded, but I’ve managed to break it.
‘Decoded it reads: “Die Ubermensch des Reich – Wir sind die Zukunft. The master race of the Fourth Reich – we are the future.”’
92
Jaeger glanced across the warm aquamarine waters at Irina Narov. ‘Your wave,’ he challenged. ‘If you think you’re man enough.’
Behind them a massive swell was rolling towards the shimmering white sands, growing taller and more powerful as it neared the beach.
‘Schwachkopf ! Race you!’ Narov threw back the challenge.
They turned and began to paddle furiously in the direction of the shoreline. For an instant Jaeger felt the roar of the surf fill his ears and then the powerful thrust of it lifted up the rear of his board. He paddled faster, trying to catch the wave and become a part of it, as it thundered towards the thin sliver of silver that was the beach.
He accelerated, the surfboard tearing down the face of the water, and in one smooth move sprang to his feet, his legs bent at the knees to better cushion the ride. As his speed increased, Jaeger felt the familiar adrenalin rush, and he figured he’d execute a quick roller turn, just to ensure he beat Narov in style.
He swivelled his shoulders towards the wave, his board riding up the twelve-foot wall of water. He reached the foaming white crest and went to flip himself around so he could come tearing down again. But he’d underestimated just how much five weeks in Black Beach Prison followed by almost as long again in the Amazon had affected him.
As he tried to shift his weight to his front foot, Jaeger realised how stiff his legs still were. He lost his balance, and an instant later he wiped out. The big wave swallowed him, sucking him under and thrashing him around and around within its roaring, throaty depths.
He felt the raw power of the ocean take hold of him and surrendered himself to it. It was the only way to survive such a massive wipeout. As Jaeger had told his son when he’d first taken him surfing: ‘Take your time. Imagine you have ten seconds to save the world; always spend five of them having milk and cookies.’ It was his way of teaching Luke to stay calm in the storm.
When the wave was done with him, Jaeger knew it would spit him out the far side.
Sure enough, several seconds later he surfaced.
He took a massive gulp of air and felt around for the leash of his board. He found it, pulled the board towards him, climbed on and paddled towards land. Narov was waiting on the sands, victory blazing in her eyes.
It was a week since the epic code-breaking session on Jaeger’s barge, and the Operation Werewolf discovery. The idea of the Bermuda visit had been his. The intention: to spend a few days recharging batteries and making plans, courtesy of Jaeger’s parents.
A rest before the coming fight.
Being a tiny British overseas territory set smack bang in the midst of the Atlantic Ocean, Bermuda was about as far away from any prying eyes as it was possible to get. Jaeger’s parents didn’t even live in the largest settlement, Main Island. They’d made their home in Horseshoe Bay, on the breathtaking territory of Morgan’s Point.
Perfectly isolated. Perfectly beautiful.
And a long way from the hell of the Serra de los Dios . . .
Oddly enough for one so driven by the mission – by the hunt – Narov had seemed to jump at the chance of paying a visit to this tiny island paradise. Jaeger figured that once they were away from it all, she would be willing to talk at last about her hidden past, and not least her connection to his grandfather.
He’d tried to broach the subject a couple of times in London – but even there Narov had appeared to be stalked by demons.
The Bermuda trip also offered Jaeger the chance to talk to his parents about how Grandpa Ted had died, something that was long overdue. Sure enough, foul play had been suspected, though Jaeger had been too young to pick up on it at the time.
As the police had failed to uncover any evidence, the family had been forced to accept the suicide verdict pretty much at face value. But their suspicions had endured.
Predictably enough, his mother and father had interpreted Jaeger’s arrival with Narov as being something other than what it was. His father had even gone as far as taking Jaeger into his study for a private chat.
He’d remarked upon how Narov – though at times somewhat odd in her mannerisms – was quite beautiful, and how refreshing it was to see Jaeger taking up with a . . . lady friend once more. Jaeger had pointed out that his father was ignoring one seminal fact – he and Narov were sleeping in separate rooms.
His father had made it clear that he didn’t believe a bit of it. As far as he was concerned, the separate bedrooms act was just that – an act. It was all for show. And with Jaeger’s wife and child absent pushing four years now, his father had made it clear that he and his mother believed it was time.
Time for Jaeger to move on.
Jaeger loved his parents to death. His father in particular had bequeathed to him his joy of all things wild – the sea, mountains, forests. Jaeger hadn’t quite managed to tell him that he’d never felt more convinced that Ruth and Luke were alive. Most probably he’d held off doing so to save his parents any more uncertainty and anguish.
He didn’t really know how to explain his new-found conviction. How could he tell his father that a psychotropic cocktail administered by an Amazon Indian – a brother warrior – had given him back his memories, and with them, his hope?
93
Surfing done for the morning, he and Narov wandered back towards the house. His parents were out, and Narov went to take a shower, to wash the salt off her skin and hair. Jaeger headed for his bedroom and grabbed his iPad. He needed to check for news of the rest of his team.
Until they were all safely out of the Amazon, he felt uneasy planning the next steps. Of course, simply uncovering the master plan for the return of the Reich – a global Nazi power-grab – didn’t necessarily mean that plan was actually being put into action. But the evidence was all too compelling, and Jaeger feared the worst.
First Andy Smith had been killed, and then Jaeger and his team had been hunted across the Amazon. The Dark Force had done its damnedest to finish them and bury for ever the secrets of the Ju 390 ghost flight. They clearly had a global reach, and some serious technological and military prowess at their disposal. Plus, an official British government file had been snuffed out of existence, disappearing from the archives.
Any which way Jaeger looked at it, the sons of the Reich did indeed appear to be rising. And no one seemed to be aware of it or doing anything much to stop it – apart from him and his small, war-weary team.
When Jenkinson had cracked the Operation Werewolf papers, Jaeger had been tempted to reveal the presence in his grandfather’s war chest of a document with the same title. But something instinctive had held him back. That was a card he’d keep close to his chest
until the time was right to play it.
With Colonel Evandro’s help, he had managed to set up a system of secure encrypted email, so that all the surviving team members could communicate in some degree of safety. Or rather, all bar Leticia Santos. Colonel Evandro had his best men, supported by his kidnap, ransom and extortion specialists, out scouring the country, searching for her whereabouts, but so far all leads had come to naught.
Jaeger fired up the iPad and logged on to ProtonMail – the end-to-end email encryption system they were now using. He had one message waiting, from Raff, with good news. In the last twenty-four hours, Lewis Alonzo, Hiro Kamishi and Joe James had surfaced. They had made it out of the Serra de los Dios under the guidance of Puruwehua and some of the neighbouring tribe, the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau.
All three were as well as could be expected, and Raff was now working with Colonel Evandro to ensure they were brought home as quickly and safely as possible. Jaeger emailed him back, asking for an update on the search for Leticia Santos.
While he knew there was little he could do to help, a part of him wanted to return to Brazil forthwith to support Colonel Evandro in the hunt. Once he was done in Bermuda, that was what he intended to do, as long as Santos hadn’t been rescued in the interim. He’d vowed to himself that she would be found and brought home safely.
There was a second message waiting in his inbox, this one from Pieter Boerke. He was about to click on it when there was a knock at his door.
It was Narov. ‘I am going out for a run.’
‘Okay,’ Jaeger replied, keeping his eyes on the screen. ‘And when you’re back, maybe we can have that long-overdue chat about how you knew my grandfather. And why you resent me so much.’
Narov paused. ‘Resent you? Maybe not so much now. But yes, in this place, maybe we can talk.’
The door closed and Jaeger opened the message.
First off, download the attached photograph. It’s one I missed in the vaults. Once you’ve got it, dial me on my Skype link. It’ll go through to my cell phone even if I’m out on the move, so you’ll always get me. Do it immediately. Don’t speak to anyone else.
Jaeger did as instructed. The photo was a grainy black-and-white image taken with a long lens. Once again, it was clearly of the Duchessa, and it showed a group of senior Nazi commanders clustered along the ship’s rail. Nothing leaped out at him, so with the image on screen, he pulled up his Skype link and dialled Boerke.
The South African answered, his voice thick with tension. ‘Look at the guy fourth from the left, in the very centre of the photo. You got him? That guy. That scowl; the appalling hairstyle; the frown marks. Remind you of anyone? Now imagine that face with a small and very bloody stupid-looking Charlie Chaplin moustache . . .’
Suddenly it was as if Jaeger couldn’t breathe. ‘No way,’ he gasped. ‘Can’t be. We cracked the code, and he wasn’t on the list. The top Nazis were, but not him.’
‘Well double-check,’ Boerke countered. ‘’Cause if that’s not Adolf bloody Hitler, then I’m a bloody Chinaman! One more thing. The photo’s date-stamped on the reverse. The date: the seventh of May 1945. And I guess I don’t need to point out the significance of that.’
Once Boerke had signed off the call, Jaeger double-clicked his cursor, zooming closer on the image. He stared at the figure’s features, hardly daring to believe the evidence before his eyes. No doubt about it: the face was the spitting image of the Führer’s – suggesting that he had been standing on a ship’s deck in Santa Isabel harbour fully a week after he had supposedly shot himself in his Berlin bunker.
It was a good while before Jaeger felt able to return to the task in hand. Boerke’s revelation – presumably the last of the Duchessa’s dark secrets – had totally numbed him. It was one thing to discover that many of the Führer’s deputies – the chief architects of the evil – had survived the war’s end.
It was quite another to discover evidence that the Führer himself might have done so.
Using the ProtonMail search engine, Jaeger logged into their draft email account – the one that had been compromised. He couldn’t resist the urge to take a look, and he knew that via ProtonMail his location should be pretty much untraceable. ProtonMail boasted that even the US National Security Agency – the world’s most powerful electronic surveillance outfit – couldn’t crack traffic going via their servers, which were based in Switzerland.
There was one new message sitting in the draft folder.
It had been there for several days.
Jaeger’s unease deepened.
As before, it was blank, providing only a link to a Dropbox folder. Jaeger didn’t figure it would be from any of his team. With a growing sense of dread, he opened Dropbox and clicked on the first JPEG file, fully expecting it to be another horrific photo of Leticia Santos – part of the enemy’s ongoing Nervenkrieg.
He told himself that he had to look, for in one of those sickening images the enemy might inadvertently have left a clue as to their whereabouts – a lead from which Jaeger and the others could start to hunt them down.
The first image appeared: six lines of lettering only.
Holidaying in Paradise . . .
While your loved ones burn.
Question: how do we know so much?
Answer: little Lukie keeps telling us.
Supplementary question: where is little Lukie now?
Answer: Nacht und Nebel.
Nacht und Nebel – the night and fog.
With his heart pounding like a machine gun, Jaeger clicked on the second JPEG. The image that opened was of a once-beautiful green-eyed woman and an adolescent boy, their faces cadaverous, their gazes haunted, with dark rings around their sunken eyes.
Mother and child were kneeling in chains before some kind of Nazi flag dominated by a Reichsadler. They were clutching a copy of the International Herald Tribune. With shaking hands, he zoomed in on the newspaper’s banner: the date revealed it to be not yet a week old. It was proof positive that as of five days ago, they were both still very much alive
Two lines of lettering were typed below the image:
Return to us what is ours.
Wir sind die Zukunft.
94
Jaeger turned and dry-retched. He found himself shaking and hurting in a way he’d never experienced before, not even during the worst of the torture he’d endured at Black Beach. He dropped off the chair, his body folding in on itself, but even as he lay on the floor, he couldn’t drag his eyes away from that earth-shattering image.
Visions kept crashing through his head, ones so tormented and dark he felt as if his skull were about to explode. It was a long time that he lay there beside the desk, curled into a ball. Tears rolled silently down his cheeks, but they barely registered.
He lost track of time.
He felt spent. Totally void.
The noise that finally brought him back to his senses was that of the door to the bedroom opening.
Somehow he’d made it back into his chair, and was slumped before the desk and the screen.
He turned.
Irina Narov was standing behind him. She had a small towel wrapped around her midriff, the top of which was fastened just above her breasts. She must have been for a shower after her run, and beneath the towel Jaeger didn’t doubt that she was naked.
He didn’t care.
‘Once, when trapped in the jungle treetops, I explained the reasons why two people may get intimate,’ Narov remarked, in that odd, flat, matter-of-fact way of hers. ‘Such close proximity can be necessary for three reasons,’ she repeated. ‘One: practical necessity. Two: to share body warmth. Three: sex.’ She smiled. ‘Right now, I should like it to happen for reason number three.’
Jaeger didn’t reply. He wasn’t particularly surprised. He’d realised by now that Narov had a near-total lack of ability to read other people’s emotions. Even facial expressions and body language seemed strangely lost on her.
Jaeger moved the iPad to where she could
see the image on the screen.
Narov’s hand went to her mouth in shock. ‘Oh, sweet Jesus—’
‘The date on the newspaper,’ Jaeger cut in, his voice sounding as if it were coming from the end of a very long and very dark tunnel. ‘It’s five days old.’
‘Oh my God,’ Narov gasped. ‘They’re alive.’
Their eyes locked across the space between them.
‘I will get dressed,’ Narov continued, without the vaguest hint of any awkwardness or embarrassment. ‘There is work to be done.’
She turned towards the door, but paused, flicking a troubled glance back at Jaeger. ‘I confess – I did not just go for a run. I also had a rendezvous to make . . . I met with someone who believes he knows where Leticia Santos is being held.’
‘You did what?’ Jaeger asked, trying to shake the confusion out of his head. ‘Where? And with who, for Christ’s sake? And why didn’t you warn—’
‘You would not have wanted to meet with them,’ Narov cut in. ‘Not if you knew who they are.’
‘Bloody try me!’ Jaeger snarled. He jabbed a finger at the image on the screen. ‘A lead to Leticia – that could take me back to them!’
‘I know. I know that now,’ Narov protested. ‘But an hour ago – I had no idea they were alive.’
Jaeger rose to his feet. There was real menace in his stance now. ‘So tell me – who the hell was at your secret meeting, and what did they tell you?’
Narov took a step back. She was clearly on her guard, but for once she was bereft of her knife. ‘One of the nearest landfalls to Bermuda is Cuba. Cuba is still Russian territory, as far as the Kremlin is concerned. I met with one of my contacts—’