Беар Гриллс - The Hunt [=The Devil's Sanctuary]

The younger man shrugged. ‘That’s the Americans for you: one moment they’re your best buddies, the next they slam you behind bars. No honour. No loyalty. Only money and power.’

‘And the big man? The English oaf? What news of him?’

‘Austria’s more or less sorted. Just a few loose ends to tie up, and then the ore will be on its way.’

‘Good. I don’t like him, you know that. He’s English, which is enough. But he can be… useful.’

‘He can.’

The older man glanced up, eyes searching his surroundings. ‘This room – it was checked? You have scanned it?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘When?’

‘Last night.’

‘But not this morning?’

‘No. Not this morning.’

‘Well do it. This “woman” development – I don’t like it. It’s making me doubly mistrustful.’

The younger man got to his feet. He pulled a bag from under the table and removed a small hand-held device: a scanner for checking for bugs or other suspicious electrical signals. He flicked it on and moved over to the nearest wall.

Behind it, Narov tensed. Her tiny camera used such a minuscule amount of power, she doubted the scanner would detect it. It was the hole she had drilled and the dust that worried her.

She watched as the scanner moved back and forth, sweeping across the wall, moving over the section where she’d embedded the camera. Ustanov was about to carry on, but paused. Something had caught his eye.

He glanced at the side table pushed against the wall. It was crammed full of bottles of mineral water and glasses, plus flasks of coffee. All seemed in order, but something had disturbed him.

He reached out a hand and ran it across the polished wooden surface of the table. It came away streaked with white: plaster dust. Fresh, by the looks of things. He picked up a glass and inspected it. Dust free. The plaster had fallen prior to the trays of drinks being delivered.

He ran his eye up the wall, searching.

On the far side, Narov barely dared to breathe. She was glued to his every move. She saw his gaze come to rest directly on the camera lens, seemingly staring at her. His expression changed. An arm reached out towards her.

In a flash, she yanked the optical cord free, stuffing the device deep into her pocket. Then she slammed back the bolt on the cubicle door and dashed into the open. From behind her she heard a guttural yell of alarm, followed by a deafening series of gunshots ripping through the wall where she had just been sitting.

She sprinted down the length of the restroom. Outside, boots thundered along the corridor. She reached the end of the cubicles, turned left and lunged for the window. As she did so, the door behind her was booted open, a stocky figure spraying an arc of fire in her general direction.

She threw herself forward.

Her crossed arms made contact with the window, and the pane gave way, popping free where she had scored it with the glass-cutter. Seconds later, she was tumbling through the screaming blue.

Narov had 1,100 feet to fall, and she was gaining momentum rapidly. She forced herself to calm her nerves and count out the seconds. She’d once made a parachute jump with Jaeger from 250 feet, a fraction of her present altitude. But still, she needed to get this just right.

She hit 800 feet and triggered the parachute that was strapped to her back. An expanse of fine silk shot out into the sky above, pulling her up short. She’d deployed a compact sports chute, one designed for a rapid but manoeuvrable descent: perfect for steering a path between Dubai’s high-rises.

Her first priority was to put space – and ideally the solid form of a skyscraper – between her and the gunmen now gathered at the window high above in the Al Mohajir Tower.

Her second priority was to fly.

She needed to cover enough distance to evade the security teams that even now would be racing from the tower to nail her. But she’d planned for this. She knew where she could put down in relative safety. She’d recced a clear spot where her touchdown should go relatively unobserved.

As Jaeger always said: Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.

It was now a race between her and Grey Wolf’s gunmen.

She steered left, dropping in a series of super-fast tight loops before using her accumulated speed to swoop around the side of the nearest high-rise. As she fell into its shadow, she knew she was out of her pursuers’ immediate line of fire.

She felt a tingling in her right calf muscle and glanced down. She was surprised to see that the fluorescent trousers had been torn apart, and her calf was dripping blood. She’d been injured. Either she’d caught herself on the glass as she’d dived free, or Vladimir had clipped her with a round.

She was so hyped on adrenalin that she hadn’t even felt it. Even now, she had little sense of pain. It was an odd fact, but Narov’s pain threshold was not normal. In fact little about her was particularly normal. Pain simply didn’t seem to bother her. She could never understand how it caused others such suffering.

She made a mental note to do something about the leg; stop the bleeding.

But first she had to fly like the wind and make safe landfall.

Jaeger probably should have left the memory cards for the Austrian police to recover. Probably. Plus there was a part of him that felt guilty at not having made himself available to help with the investigation. After all, he had been first at the scene of the crime.

But something told him it was better this way.

In any case, he’d made it out of those tunnels only by the skin of his teeth, and thanks to his alertness and his training. Expect the unexpected : it was a rule drilled into SAS operators. That and Never underestimate the enemy .

Jaeger had seen the imposing bulk of his adversary. He’d also seen and heard the other gunmen a few vital seconds before they had put in an appearance. And by that time, he was pretty much out of the range of their .22s.

They’d loosed off several shots down the tunnel, but Jaeger had proved a far faster runner. He figured he knew why. Each of the mystery gunmen had been laden down with a massive pack. Those, Jaeger suspected, contained whatever the men were removing from the tunnel.

Once back at St Georgen, he’d made it clear to Uncle Joe that they needed to get the hell out of town. They’d paid for their rooms, made their hurried excuses to the owner – a family emergency back in England – and hit the road.

There would be no returning to the Zum Turken hotel. Jaeger would phone and offer the same kind of explanation. Instead, they’d stop at some anonymous chain – a Holiday Inn maybe – and try and digest the full import of his discoveries.

He’d made the call to the Austrian cops from a phone booth on the A1. By then, he and Uncle Joe were well on their way, the Range Rover eating up the miles. He’d given a short report about the mass killing, but refused to provide his name. He’d taken basic precautions to disguise his voice, presuming all such calls were recorded.

Jaeger just had a feeling, a hunch, an instinctive sense that he was being pulled back towards a dark past that he’d been trying to put behind him. It was his soldier’s sixth sense, and as Uncle Joe had reminded him, he should never ignore it.

They’d pushed on across the German border. On the face of it they were heading home. But it would be just as easy to turn a little further north and east and make for the Falkenhagen Bunker, the makeshift headquarters of the Secret Hunters. But only if whatever they might discover on the memory cards from the tunnel seemed to warrant such a diversion.

As luck would have it, the first opportunity to stop proved to be at the Munich Park Hilton, on the outskirts of the city. Once they had checked into their room, Jaeger made sure that Uncle Joe was comfortable, settling him in an armchair, amply propped up with pillows. ‘You good? It may take some time. Each of the cards can hold several hours.’