Authors: Bear Grylls
Jaeger laughed. ‘All right. You got me.’ The kid was smart, as well as having attitude. ‘But are you good to come with us now we’ve got your
ghetto
brother sorted?’
‘Yeah. I guess. As long as Julius is okay with it.’
They made their way back towards the vehicle, Jaeger falling into step with Narov and Dale. ‘The kid’s testimony – in terms of nailing Kammler, it’s key. But where can we take him? Somewhere utterly away from it all where we can hide him?’
Dale shrugged. ‘He’s got no passport, no papers – not even a birth certificate. He doesn’t know how old he is or when he was born. So he’s not exactly travelling anywhere far any time soon.’
Jaeger cast his mind back to something Falk Konig had said in passing. He glanced at Narov. ‘Remember that place Konig mentioned? Amani. Remote, isolated beach retreat. Totally private.’ He turned to Dale. ‘Amani Beach Resort, set on the Indian Ocean way south of Nairobi. You think you can check it out? If it looks right, can you take him there, at least until we get his papers sorted?’
‘It’s got to be better than here, that’s for sure.’
They turned up an alleyway, heading for the dirt road. All of a sudden, Jaeger heard the wail of a siren. He sensed the figures to either side of him stiffen, their eyes going wide with fear. Seconds later, the sharp crack of a pistol shot rang out. One shot, close, and echoing along the twisting alleyway. Feet thundered in all directions – some running away from the trouble, but others – mainly youths – running towards it.
‘Cops,’ Simon Bello hissed.
He gestured for Jaeger and the others to join him, as he stole ahead and crouched at the far corner.
‘You doubt anything I told you; you doubt the cops could do what they did to me: watch.’ He jabbed a finger in the direction of the gathering crowd.
Jaeger spotted a Kenyan policeman, pistol in hand. Lying before him was a teenage kid. He’d been shot in the leg and was pleading for his life.
Simon explained what was going down, his voice a tense, tight whisper. He recognised the young guy on the ground. He’d tried to make it as a ghetto gangster, but he’d proved too soft to hack it. He was a layabout, but no big-time villain. As for the cop, he was notorious. The ghetto-dwellers knew him by his nickname: Scalp. It was Scalp who’d led the round-up in which Simon and the other orphans had been captured.
As the seconds ticked by, the ghetto crowd swelled in size, but everyone was fearful of Scalp. He brandished his pistol, screaming at the wounded boy to move. The kid staggered to his feet, swaying on his bloodied leg, his face a mask of pain and terror. Scalp shoved him along the nearby alleyway, towards the top of the hill where the cop cars were waiting, complete with more men with guns.
A spasm of wild rage swept through the crowd. Scalp could sense the threat pulsing all around him. As the cops well knew, the slum could spark into a paroxysm of violence if pushed to the edge.
Scalp started beating the wounded boy with his pistol and yelling at him to move faster. The ghetto crowd surged closer, and all of a sudden Scalp just seemed to lose it. He raised his pistol and shot the young guy in his good leg. Howling in agony, the boy collapsed to the ground.
Some of the crowd rushed forward now, but Scalp brandished his pistol in their faces.
The wounded boy had both his hands up, begging for his life. Jaeger could hear his pitiful pleas for mercy, but Scalp seemed lost in a crazed bloodlust, drunk with the power of the gun. He opened fire again, shooting the boy in the body. Then he bent forward and placed the muzzle of his pistol against his head.
‘He’s dead,’ Simon Bello announced, through gritted teeth. ‘Any second now, he’s dead.’
For an instant the ghetto seemed to hold its breath, and then a shot rang out through the press of bodies, echoing around the fury-filled alleyways.
The crowd lost all control now. Figures surged forward, howling with fury. Scalp raised his weapon and began firing in the air, driving them back. At the same time, he yelled into his radio for backup.
Police reinforcements pounded down the alleyway towards the confrontation. Jaeger could sense that the ghetto was about to explode. The last thing they needed right now was to get caught up in all that. Sometimes, as he’d learned, discretion
was
the better part of valour.
They needed to save Simon Bello. That was the priority.
He grabbed the kid and, yelling at the others to follow, took to his heels.
The big, powerful Audi barrelled along the Autobahn at breakneck speed. Raff had met them at the airport, and he was clearly in a hurry. In fact, they all were, and as Raff was as fine a driver as any, Jaeger wasn’t particularly worried.
‘So you found the kid?’ Raff asked, without taking his eyes from the dark road.
‘We did.’
‘Is he for real?’
‘The story he told us – no one could have made it up, and certainly not an orphaned kid from the slums.’
‘So what did you learn? What did he say?’
‘What Konig told us is pretty much the full story. The kid added a few minor details. Nothing significant. So, are we any closer to finding that island? Kammler’s island?
Raff smiled. ‘Yeah, we might be.’
‘Like how?’ Jaeger pushed.
‘Wait for the briefing. As soon as we get to Falkenhagen. Wait for that. So where is the kid now? Is he safe?’
‘Dale’s got him in his hotel. Adjoining rooms. The Serena. Remember it?’
Raff nodded. He and Jaeger had stayed there once or twice, when rotating through Nairobi with the British military. For a hotel in the centre of the city, it was a rare island of peace and tranquillity.
‘They can’t stay there,’ Raff remarked, stating the obvious. ‘They’ll get noticed.’
‘Yeah, so we figured. Dale’s taking him to a remote retreat. Amani Beach, several hours south of Nairobi. That’s the best we could come up with for now.’
Twenty minutes later, they pulled into the dark and deserted grounds of the Falkenhagen bunker. Oddly, considering the gruesome testing that Jaeger had been subjected to here, it felt somehow good to be back.
He woke Narov. She’d dozed through the journey curled up on the Audi’s rear seat. They’d hardly slept at all in the last twenty-four hours. Having extricated themselves and the kid from the knife-edge chaos of the slums, they’d been on a whirlwind journey ever since.
Raff checked his watch. ‘Briefing is at 0100 hours. You got twenty minutes. Show you to your rooms.’
Once in his bedroom Jaeger splashed some water on his face. No time for a shower. He’d left his few personal effects in Falkenhagen: his passport, phone and wallet. Since he’d travelled to Katavi under a pseudonym, he’d had to make sure he was one hundred per cent sterile in terms of being Will Jaeger.
But Peter Miles had furnished the room with a MacBook Air laptop, and he was keen to check email. Via ProtonMail – an ultra-secure email service – he knew he could check his messages with little risk of Kammler and his people being able to monitor it.
Before discovering ProtonMail, all their previous communication systems had been hacked. They’d used a draft email account from which messages were never actually sent; all you ever did was log on to the account using a shared password, and read the drafts.
With no messages being sent, it should have been secure.
It wasn’t.
Kammler’s people had hacked it. They’d used that account to torture Jaeger – first with photos of Leticia Santos in captivity; then with photos of his family.
Jaeger paused. He couldn’t resist the urge – the dark temptation – to check it now. He hoped that Kammler’s people would somehow mess up; that they’d email something – some image – from which he could extract a clue as to their whereabouts. Something via which to track them – and his family.
There was one message sitting in the draft folder. As always, it was blank. It simply had a link to a file in Dropbox – an online data storage system. No doubt it would be part of Kammler’s ongoing mind warfare.
Jaeger breathed deeply. A darkness descended upon him like a black cloud.
With shaking hands he clicked on the link, and an image began to download. Line by line it filled the screen.
The image showed a dark-haired, emaciated woman kneeling beside the figure of a boy, both dressed in nothing but their underclothes. She had one arm thrown around the child protectively.
The boy was Jaeger’s son, Luke. His shoulders were thin and hunched, as if he had the weight of the world piled upon them, and in spite of his mother’s protective stance. He was holding a strip of torn bedsheet before him, like a banner.
On it was written:
DADDY – HELP US.
The image faded out. A blank white screen replaced it, with a message typed in black across it:
Come find your family.
Wir sind die Zukunft.
Wir sind die Zukunft
: we are the future. It was Hank Kammler’s calling card.
Jaeger clenched his hands into fists to try to stop them shaking, then slammed them repeatedly into the wall.
He doubted if he could go on. He couldn’t do this any more.
Every man had his breaking point.
At Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta Airport, a Boeing 747 cargo aircraft was in the process of being loaded. A forklift raised crate after crate marked with the KRP logo and slotted them into the hold.
When fully loaded, this flight would be routed to the east coast of the USA, to Washington’s Dulles airport. America imported some 17,000 primates every year, for the purposes of medical testing. Over the years, KRP had grabbed a good chunk of that market.
Another KRP flight was scheduled to fly to Beijing, a third to Sydney, a fourth to Rio de Janeiro . . . Within a matter of forty-eight hours, all those flights should have landed and the evil would be complete.
And in that, Hank Kammler had just received an unexpected boost, although he wasn’t to know it.
After the British, Kammler hated the Russians almost as much. It was on the Eastern Front, mired in snowy wastes, that Hitler’s mighty
Wehrmacht
– his war machine – had finally ground to a halt. The Russian Red Army had played a pivotal role in its subsequent defeat.
Accordingly, Moscow was Kammler’s second key target, after London. A 747 cargo aircraft had recently touched down at the city’s Vnukovo airport. Even now, Sergei Kalenko, Vnukovo’s quarantine officer, was busy overseeing the transfer of the caged primates to the nearby pens.
But this was Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where everything was somewhat negotiable. Kalenko had directed that a few dozen cages – containing thirty-six vervet monkeys – should be stacked to one side.
Centrium – Russia’s largest pharmaceutical testing company – had run out of animals for an ongoing drugs trial. Each day’s delay was costing the company some $50,000. Money – bribes – talked in Russia, and accordingly Kalenko wasn’t about to object to a few dozen of his charges evading quarantine. He figured the risk was negligible. After all, KRP had never once sent an unhealthy shipment, and he didn’t expect them to have done so now.
Quickly the cages were loaded on to the rear of a flatbed truck and sheeted over with a dull green canvas. That done, Kalenko pocketed a large wad of cash and the vehicle sped away into the frost-kissed Moscow night.
He watched the truck’s red tail lights disappear before reaching into the voluminous pocket of his overcoat. Like many airport workers, Kalenko took the occasional nip of vodka to ward off the mind-numbing cold. He treated himself to an extra large gulp now, to celebrate his lucky windfall.
The heater in the Centrium truck cab was on the blink. All day, the man at the wheel had been likewise fighting off the icy chill, and mostly via the bottle. As he headed towards Centrium’s vast facility, he swung the vehicle into the first of a series of bleak suburbs that lay on the south-eastern fringes of the city.
The truck hit a patch of black ice. The driver’s reactions – numbed by the alcohol – were a fraction too slow. It took only an instant, but suddenly the vehicle had skidded off the highway and tumbled down a snowy bank, the canvas ripping open and throwing its load across the ground.
Primates screamed and cackled in fear and rage. The door of the cab had been thrown open at a crazed angle by the impact. The bloodied and dazed form of the driver stumbled out, collapsing in the snow.
The door to the first of the cages was pushed ajar by a terrified hand. Small but powerful fingers tested the strange coat of glistening cold – this alien whiteness. The confused animal sensed freedom – or a freedom of sorts – but could it really walk on this frozen surface?
Up above, vehicles drew to a halt. Faces peered over the incline. Seeing what had happened, some decided to film it on their mobile phones, but one or two actually made the effort to help. As they skidded down the icy bank, the monkeys heard them coming.
It was now or never.
The first broke free from its cage, scattering a cloud of powdery snow in its wake as it made a dash for the nearest shadows. Other cages had likewise burst open, and those animals followed the first monkey’s lead.
By the time the dazed driver had managed to do a body count, he was twelve primates down. A dozen vervet monkeys had escaped into the snowbound streets of this Moscow suburb – cold, hungry and frightened. There was no way the driver could raise the alarm. He’d broken strict quarantine laws. He, Kalenko and Centrium would be in the shit if the cops were alerted.
The monkeys would have to fend for themselves.
The truck happened to have deposited the primates on a road running along the Moskva river. Forming themselves into a makeshift troop, they gathered on the riverbank, huddling together for warmth.
An old woman was hurrying along the riverside. She spied the monkeys and, fearing she was seeing things, started to run. As she skidded on the icy surface and tumbled, the fresh bread stuffed in her shopping bag was strewn across the path. The famished monkeys were upon it in a flash. The woman – dazed and confused – tried to beat them off with her gloved hands.