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

By way of answer, Jaeger turned to Alonzo. ‘You ever served on any DEA missions?’

Alonzo shook his head. ‘DEA? Bunch of cowboys. Generally we steered well clear of ’em.’

‘I guess we didn’t have that luxury.’ Jaeger paused. ‘A few years back, I was on a DEA sting. Texas. The boondocks. A bunch of narcos were bringing in a drugs flight to a tiny bush airstrip. That part of Texas, every farm seems to have one.’

‘You got it,’ Alonzo confirmed. ‘That, plus a Lone Star flag, and a barn stuffed full of baked beans and assault rifles.’

‘Pretty much. Anyhow, the DEA got wise to the shipment. The night of the flight, they jammed the narcos’ radio frequency, plus the beacons the aircraft was to home in on. They fired up their own radio on a slightly different frequency, on an airstrip not so far away. The incoming pilot lost contact with the narcos. He began scanning the airwaves. He found the DEA’s signal, and the DEA – posing as narcos – began to talk him in.’

Jaeger eyed his audience. He wondered if they could see what was coming. ‘The pilot flew in to the DEA’s airstrip and landed. They seized him, his crew, the aircraft, plus several hundred million dollars’ worth of the purest cocaine. The op was code-named Angeldust. It went down in the annals of DEA history.’

‘And so?’ Narov challenged. ‘We don’t want to seize this shipment. You said so yourself – we want it to lead us to Kammler.’

‘Okay, so we think laterally,’ Jaeger suggested. ‘Imagine we do the same with the flight from Moldova. You saw Colonel Evandro’s strip at Station 15. At night, under floodlights, there’s nothing much to mark it out as military, or to distinguish it from Dodge. The colonel likes to keep it that way: low-profile, low-key.

‘We lure the flight in to Station 15,’ he continued. ‘It’s just across the border, so with guidance from a friendly radio operator, we reel the pilot in. Acting like narcos, Colonel Evandro’s men unload the cargo. They roll it into one of the hangars. Then they let the pilot know there must be some kind of mistake. They were expecting bales of raw coca paste. Instead, they’ve got a heap of insanely heavy metal.

‘They roll the shipment out to the aircraft again and load up – only they’ve made the switch. The pilot and his aircrew are a bunch of Russians who just want in and out without getting kidnapped and boiled alive. The Russian pilot believes he’s at the wrong strip. If El Padre finds out, he’s a dead man. The “narcos” advise him to take to the skies, and make hell-for-leather for Dodge.

‘Plane takes off. We’ve already unjammed El Padre’s radio frequency. Mr Very Scared Russian Pilot flies onwards to Dodge. He’s not going to breathe a word about what’s happened, for obvious reasons. He tells some bullshit story about losing their signal and flying a holding pattern – hence the delay. Switch done. No one any the wiser.’

Jaeger gazed at the others, eyes burning with excitement. ‘Our version of Operation Angeldust – done ’n’ dusted.’

‘GPS. What about his GPS?’ Narov ventured an objection. ‘The pilot would know he was being lured to the wrong strip.’

‘Easy,’ Alonzo interjected. ‘The US military has made sure that pretty much any civilian GPS system can be disabled. Reason being, if a rogue state or terrorist outfit fits a nuclear missile with such a guidance system, we need to be able to stop it. So we disable the aircraft’s GPS.’

‘Any other objections?’ Jaeger queried. ‘And quick, ’cause the helo’s inbound.’

‘What the fuck made you think of it?’ Raff queried. ‘I mean, Jesus – it’s genius.’

‘That’s a question, not a material objection to the plan.’ Jaeger grinned, his teeth shining white from his mud-splattered features.

Raff snorted. ‘All right, what about this. You seem to know an awful lot about that Lebanon gold. If we ever get out of this shit storm, I want to hear how we can get our hands on some of it!’

Jaeger laughed. ‘You got it.’

‘But will Colonel Evandro even agree to the plan?’ Alonzo queried. ‘I mean, that’s one out-there kind of an idea.’

‘Agree?’ Jaeger countered. ‘You don’t know the colonel. He’ll bite our arms off.’ He flashed another of his wolfish smiles. ‘He wants Kammler as badly as anyone. Plus his BSOB lads – they’re good. They’re as capable of pulling this off as anyone.’

‘Who builds the decoy? And gets it in country?’ It was Alonzo again. ‘Plus in the time available? That’s a pile of tungsten, machined into blocks and disguised as uranium, with a freakin’ great Semtex charge at its core…’

‘Daniel Brooks,’ Jaeger answered. ‘He’s the director of the world’s foremost intelligence agency. He’s got the ear of the US president. He sent us in here on the QT. Brooks sorts the decoy and its means of delivery. It’s well within his capabilities.’

‘I guess.’ Alonzo nodded. ‘If anyone can, he can.’ He paused. ‘But what if we’ve got it wrong? What if Kammler is in Dodge and gets wise to the switch?’

‘If Kammler’s in Dodge, I’m a bloody monkey,’ Raff growled. ‘That place is a hellhole. No way is he there building his INDs.’

Everyone was quiet for a moment.

It was Narov who broke the silence. ‘I am no expert, but as I understand it, refined tungsten ore and highly enriched uranium are both extremely heavy grey metals. I doubt if you can tell them apart, not unless you do some serious technical testing. Plus, it would need to be shielded with lead to stop radiation from leaking. Kammler’s people are hardly going to dismantle a lead shield to check on the shipment, and all in the midst of Dodge.’

Silence. Jaeger could hear the faint beat of rotor blades cutting through the air.

A Super Puma, inbound.

‘There’s one other reason no one will check the shipment,’ he volunteered. ‘Because that’s not how it works. No one checked the coca paste and cocaine handover. Why? Because if anyone pulls a fast one, they die. There’s no trust, but there’s bucketloads of fear. With the kind of reach El Padre has, if the uranium’s not uranium, the Moldovan mafiosa leader takes a bullet.’

Nods all around.

‘Guys, trust me, it’s doable,’ he continued. ‘Imagine it: we get Kammler to embrace the engine of his own destruction—’

‘Helo inbound,’ Raff interjected.

As one, the four figures shouldered their bergens and headed for their cab ride out of the jungle…

And into the coming storm.

Professor Pak Won Kangjon picked up the chopsticks that lay next to his computer. A fly had buzzed past the screen. It was warm in the lab, and the professor needed to kill a few minutes before Mr Kammler arrived and the proverbial shit hit the fan.

He snapped the chopsticks in midair as the fly zoomed past, trying to catch it and crush it. An old Chinese proverb said: Man who catch fly with chopsticks, he can do anything. Professor Pak Won Kangjon could do with that kind of a lucky break right now. He snapped the sticks again nervously.

He wondered what malignant alignment of the stars had been in play the night he had been born. No one, surely, deserved the kind of luck he was having.

A refugee from the utter horror and madness that was North Korea, he’d spent what felt like a lifetime serving one nuclear madman – North Korea’s Glorious Leader – only to end up working for another.

Of course, the money had been the draw. Wasn’t it always? If the money was right, you could get people to do just about anything.

Usually.

At first he’d been showered with comparative riches, which had been like a miracle. Too good to turn down. And now, as the saying went, he was in too deep. Over his head and drowning, you might even say.