Burning Angels

by Bear Grylls

  If there was a germ warfare laboratory secreted somewhere beneath this mountain – with Jaeger’s family very likely caged and ready for the final weapons testing – it would require an assault by Jaeger’s entire team to neutralise it. The present mission was an attempt to prove its existence, one way or the other.

  For now they’d left the rest of the team – Raff, James, Kamishi, Alonzo and Dale – at the Falkenhagen bunker, busy with their preparations. They were scoping out options for the coming assault, plus gathering together the weaponry and kit that would be required.

  Jaeger felt driven by a burning need to find his family and to stop Kammler, but at the same time he knew how vital it was to prepare properly for what was coming. If they didn’t, they’d fall at the first battle, and before they had any chance of winning the wider war.

  While serving in the military, one of his favourite maxims had been the five Ps: proper planning prevents piss-poor performance. Or put another way: fail to prepare, prepare to fail. The team at Falkenhagen were busy making sure that when they found Kammler’s germ lab, they would be totally prepared, and they wouldn’t fail.

  For Jaeger, it had been a dual relief to reach the high point of the crater’s rim, the evening before. One step closer. One step nearer to the dark truth. To left and right the jagged ridge had stretched away from him, a switchback of what had once been red-hot volcanic fire and magma, but was now a harsh grey razor ’s edge, with a rocky, sun-blasted, windswept profile.

  They’d made camp upon it – or rather on a rock ledge set a few dozen feet below the rim. That hard, cold, unwelcoming shelf had been accessible only by abseiling down to it, which meant it would render them immune to any attack by wild animals. And there were predators in abundance here in Hank Kammler’s lair. Apart from the obvious – lions, leopards and hyenas – there were the massive Cape buffalo, plus the hippos, which killed more people every year than any kind of carnivore.

  Powerful, territorial, surprisingly fast for their bulk, and intensely protective of their young, the hippo was the single most dangerous animal in Africa. And Katavi’s dwindling water sources had brought them crowding together in their packed, irritable and stressed-out masses.

  If you put too many rats in a cage, they’d end up eating each other. If you put too many hippos in a waterhole, you’d end up with the mother of all heavyweight fights.

  And if you were a hapless human caught in the middle, you’d end up a squidge of bloody puree under a charging hippo’s feet.

  Jaeger had awoken on the crater rim to a breathtaking sight: the entire floor of the caldera was a sea of fluffy white cloud. Illuminated a burning pink by the early-morning sun, it had looked almost firm enough that they could step out from their rocky ledge and walk across from one side of the crater to the other.

  In truth it was an expanse of low-lying mist, thrown up by the lush forest that carpeted much of the caldera’s interior. And now that he was down amongst it, the view – plus the smells and sounds – took Jaeger’s breath away.

  The rope coiled, Jaeger and Narov began to move. But their arrival here had set off alarm bells already. A flock of flamingoes rose from the nearby lake, taking to the air like a giant pink flying carpet, their high-pitched cackling squawks and cries echoing around the crater walls. The sight was awe-inspiring: there had to be thousands of the distinctive birds, drawn here by the rich minerals deposited in the volcanic waters of the lake.

  Here and there Jaeger could see where a geyser – a hot spring – gushed a fountain of steaming water high into the air. He took a moment to check the way ahead, then signalled Narov to follow.

  They flitted through the alien landscape, just the odd hand gesture pointing out the route to take. They understood instinctively each other’s quiet. There was a breathtaking otherworldliness to this place; a sense of a world lost in time; a sense almost that humans should never set foot here.

  Hence their desire to slip through in utter silence, unnoticed by anything that would make of them its prey.

  34

  Jaeger’s boots broke through a crust of dried, sun-baked mud.

  He paused at the pool before him. It was shallow – too shallow for any crocs – and crystal clear. It looked as if it would be good to drink, and marching under the burning sun had left his throat as dry as sandpaper. But a quick dip of the fingers and a flick of the tongue confirmed what he had suspected. This water would kill you.

  Welling up from deep below ground and heated to near boiling point by the magma, it was still hot to the touch. More to the point, it was so salty it made him want to gag.

  The crater floor was peppered here and there with these steamy, volcanic springs, bubbling toxic gases. Where the sun had baked the saline waters dry, a thin layer of salt had crystallised around the edges, giving the bizarre impression that frost had somehow dusted the ground this close to the equator.

  He glanced at Narov. ‘Saline,’ he whispered. ‘Not good. But there should be water aplenty in the caves.’ It was blistering hot. They needed to keep drinking.

  She nodded. ‘Let’s get moving.’

  As Jaeger stepped into the hot, briny pool, the crisp white crust crunched under his mud-covered boots. Before them lay a grove of baobab trees – Jaeger’s favourites. Their massive squat trunks were silvery grey and smooth, reminding him of the flanks of a powerful bull elephant.

  He headed towards them, passing one that would require the full complement of his team just to link their arms around its swollen circumference. From that massive base the trunk rose statuesque and bulbous to a stubby crown of branches, each like a gnarled finger reaching out to grasp at the air.

  Jaeger had first had a close encounter with a baobab a few years back, and in the most memorable of ways. En route to the safari that he’d taken with Ruth and Luke, they’d paid a visit to South Africa’s Sunland Big Baobab, in Limpopo province, famous for its 150-foot girth and its vast age.

  Baobab trees start to hollow out naturally once they are a few hundred years old. So large was the Sunland Baobab’s interior that it had a bar built inside it. Jaeger, Ruth and Luke had sat in the cavernous heart of the tree, drinking chilled coconut milk through straws and feeling like a family of Hobbits.

  Jaeger had ended up chasing Luke around the knobbly, gnarly interior, rasping out Gollum’s favourite phrase: My precious. My precious. Ruth had even lent Luke her wedding ring to add a little authenticity to the scene. It had been magical and hilarious – and in retrospect, utterly heartbreaking.

  And now here was a grove of baobab trees standing sentinel before the dark and gaping maw of the entrance to Kammler’s lair; his kingdom beneath the mountain.

  Jaeger believed in portents. The baobabs were here for a reason. They spoke to him: you’re on the right path.

  He knelt before a dozen fallen fruit pods – each a delicate yellow in colour and looking like a dinosaur egg lying in the dirt.

  ‘The baobab is known here as the upside-down tree,’ he whispered to Narov. ‘It’s like it’s been uprooted by a giant’s fist and thrust into the earth the wrong way around.’ He knew as much from the time he’d spent soldiering in Africa, which was when he’d picked up some of the local language too. ‘The fruit is rich in antioxidants, vitamin C, potassium and calcium: it’s the most nourishing on earth. Nothing else comes close.’

  He scooped several of the pods into his rucksack, urging Narov to do likewise. They’d brought ration packs with them, but he’d learned in the military never to pass up the opportunity to gather a little fresh food, as opposed to the dried stuff they carried. Dry rations were great for longevity and weight. They weren’t great for keeping the bowels regular.

  A sharp cracking sound echoed through the grove of baobab trees. Jaeger scanned all around. Narov was equally alert, eyes searching the undergrowth, nose scenting the wind.

  The noise came again. Its source seemed to be a nearby grove of African stinkwood trees – so named because of the foul odour given off
when a trunk or branch was cut. Jaeger recognised the sound for what it was: a herd of elephants were on the move, snacking as they went – ripping off bark and tearing down the juiciest, leafiest branches.

  He had suspected they would encounter elephants here. The caves had been hugely enlarged by the actions of the herds over the years. No one knew for sure if it was the cool shade or the salt that had first drawn them in. Whichever, they had adopted the habit of spending days at a time underground, intermittently dozing on their feet and gouging at the cave walls, using their massive tusks as makeshift wrecking bars. With their trunks they’d whisk the broken rock into their mouths and grind it between their teeth, so releasing the salt bound up in the ancient sediment.

  Jaeger figured the elephant herd was heading for the cave entrance right now, which meant that he and Narov had to make it in there before them.

  They locked eyes. ‘Let’s go.’

  Boots flashing across the hot earth, they crossed a final patch of grassland that grew within the shade of the crater wall, and darted towards the darkest patch of shadow. The rock face loomed before them, the cave mouth a massive, jagged-edged slash cut into it, some seventy feet or more across. Moments later – with the elephant herd hot on their heels – they had darted inside.

  Jaeger took a moment to glance around. The best place to position any motion sensors was in the choke point of the cave entrance, but they’d be next to useless without cameras.

  There were numerous types of motion sensors, but the simplest were about the size and shape of a shotgun cartridge. British military sets came with eight sensors, plus one transmit/receive handset, which looked something like a small radio. The sensors would be buried just below ground level, and would detect any seismic activity within a twenty-metre radius, sending a message to the receiver.

  The cave entrance being seventy feet across, one pack of eight sensors would cover the entire expanse. But with the amount of wildlife that passed in and out of here, anyone guarding this place would require a video camera plus feed, in order to check whether the movement was caused by a hostile intruder, as opposed to a herd of salt-hungry tuskers.

  Buried, the motion sensors would be almost impossible to detect. It was the hidden cameras that Jaeger was alert for, plus any aerials or cabling. He could see nothing obvious, but that didn’t mean a thing. During his time in the military, he’d come across CCTV cameras disguised as rocks and dog turds, to name just a few permutations.

  He and Narov pressed ahead, the cave opening out before them to form an enormous cathedral-like edifice. They were in the twilight zone now – the last vestiges of grey before the darkness stretched unbroken into the bowels of the mountain. They fished out their Petzl head torches. There was no point in using night-vision goggles where they were going. The technology relied upon boosting ambient light – that thrown off by moon and stars – to enable a person to see in the dark.

  Where they were headed, there would be no light at all.

  Only darkness.

  They could have used thermal imaging kit (TI), but it was heavy and bulky and they needed to travel light and fast. And if caught, they didn’t want to be carrying anything that would distinguish them from a couple of over-zealous and adventurous tourists.

  Jaeger pulled his Petzl over his head and reached up with his gloved hand, twisting the glass of the lens. A blueish light stabbed out from the torch’s twin xenon bulbs, playing like a laser show across the cavernous interior, and catching on a layer of what resembled old, dry manure lying thick across the ground. He reached down to inspect it.

  The entire floor of the cave was thick with elephant droppings, peppered with chewed-up rock fragments. It was testament to the sheer brute strength of the animals. They had the power to rip apart the cave’s very walls and grind them to dust.

  The herd was thundering in behind them now.

  There would be no easy escape for Jaeger and Narov.

  35

  Jaeger reached around to the small of his back and patted his waistband, checking that the angular bulge was still there. They’d debated long and hard whether to go in armed, and if so, with what.

  On the one hand, carrying weapons didn’t exactly marry up with being a honeymooning couple. On the other, abseiling into a place such as this without some form of protection would be potential suicide.

  The longer they’d argued, the more it had become clear that to carry no weapons at all would just seem strange. This was wild Africa after all, red in tooth and claw. No one ventured into this kind of terrain without the means to protect themselves.

  In the end they’d each opted to bring a P228, plus a couple of magazines. No silencers, of course, for those were the preserve of professional killers and assassins.

  Reassured that his pistol hadn’t come loose during the long march in, Jaeger glanced at Narov. She too had been checking her weapon. Though they were supposed to be acting as newly-weds, old habits died hard. The drills had been hammered into them remorselessly over the years, and they couldn’t just stop functioning overnight as the elite warriors that they were.

  Jaeger was seven years out of the military. He’d left in part to set up an eco-expeditioning company called Enduro Adventures, a business he’d pretty much abandoned when Luke and Ruth were stolen from him. That had led in turn to the present mission: to get his family and his life back, and very possibly to prevent an incalculable evil.

  The light dimmed further and a series of deep, throaty snorts echoed around the enclosed space. The elephants were surging into the cave behind them. It was the prompt that Jaeger and Narov needed to move.

  Signalling Narov to do likewise, Jaeger reached down, grabbed a handful of dung and rubbed it up the legs of his plain combat-style trousers, doing the same to his T-shirt and the exposed skin of his arms, neck and legs, before lifting up his T-shirt to do his belly and back. As a final gesture, he rubbed the last of the elephant dung through his recently dyed blonde hair.

  The dung had a faint smell of stale urine and fermented leaves, but that was about all he could detect. Yet to an elephant – whose universe was defined first and foremost by its sense of smell – it might make Jaeger appear to be just another harmless pachyderm; a fellow tusker.

  That was his hope, anyway.

  Jaeger had first learned this trick on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest peak. He’d been on a training exercise with one of the Regiment’s legendary survivalists, who’d explained how it was possible to move through a herd of Cape buffalo if you first rolled yourself head to toe in fresh buffalo dung. He’d proved it to them most powerfully by making each man in the troop – Jaeger included – do exactly that.

  Like Cape buffalos, elephants had poor eyesight at anything other than close range. The light from Jaeger and Narov’s head torches was unlikely to bother them. They detected food, predators, sanctuary and danger via their sense of smell, which was second-to-none in the animal world. Their nostrils were positioned on the end of their trunk, and so sensitive was the elephant’s smell that it could detect a water source up to nineteen kilometres away.

  They also had an acute sense of hearing, which could detect sounds well outside of the normal human range. In short, if Jaeger and Narov could take on the smell of an elephant and keep largely silent, the herd shouldn’t even know they were here.

  They pushed onwards across a flat shelf thick with dry dung, boots kicking up puffs of detritus as they went. Here and there the heaps of old faeces were streaked with splashes of dark green, as if someone had been through flicking daubs of paint around the cave.

  Jaeger guessed it had to be guano.

  He flicked his head up, his twin beams sweeping the roof high above. Sure enough, clusters of skeletal black figures could be seen hanging upside down from the ceiling. Bats. Fruit bats, to be precise. Thousands and thousands of them. Green slime – their digested fruit droppings; guano – was smeared down the walls.

  Nice, Jaeger told himself. They
were pushing into a cave plastered from floor to ceiling in faeces.

  In the light of Jaeger’s head torch, a tiny pair of orange eyes flickered open. A bat that had been sleeping was suddenly awake. The flare of the Petzl woke more of them now, and a ripple of angry disturbance pulsed across the animals hanging from the roof of the cave.

  Unlike most bats, fruit bats – often called megabats – don’t use the echo-location navigation system, in which high-pitched squeaks and squeals are bounced off the walls. Instead, they possess large, bulbous eyes, which enable them to find their way in the twilight of cave systems. Hence they are drawn to the light.

  The first megabat broke from its perch – where its claws had been hooked into a cranny in the cave roof, bony wings wrapped around itself like a cloak – and took flight. It plunged earthwards, no doubt mistaking Jaeger’s torch for a beam of sunlight flooding through the cave entrance.

  And then a cloud of the things were upon him.

  36

  Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!

  Jaeger felt the first of the megabats cannon into his head, as the dark horde tried to fly down the beam of light. The ceiling was over one hundred feet high, and from that kind of distance the bats had appeared minuscule. Up close, though, they were monsters.

  They had a wingspan of up to two metres, and must weigh in at a good two kilos. That kind of weight going at great speed sure hurt, and with their bulging eyes shining an angry red and their gleaming rows of teeth set in long, narrow, bony skulls, they looked positively demonic.

  Jaeger was knocked to the floor, as more of the ghostly forms swooped from the heights. He reached up and killed the light with his cupped hands, which also served to shield his head from the blows.

  Just as soon as he had doused the light, the bats were gone, drawn instead to the sunlight seeping in through the cave entrance. As they swept out in a massive black-winged storm cloud, the big bull elephant leading the herd trumpeted and flapped his ears angrily. He clearly appreciated the megabats about as much as Jaeger had done.