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

He was breathing hard and pouring with sweat. But what struck Kammler most was the man’s obvious enjoyment of what he was doing. No doubt about it, Jones was an animal, which made him the ideal enforcer. He never seemed happier than when doing as he was now – beating the living daylights out of a woman.

Amongst the Chinese they had enslaved here were several dozen women, kept for menial cooking and cleaning duties. One of them had clearly stepped out of line. A group of local workers was being forced to watch the savage punishment. That way, Kammler was confident that word would quickly spread.

Jones came to a halt and wiped sweat from his forehead. The bound figure slumped from the post, more dead than alive. Kammler nodded his approval.

No doubt about it, Steve Jones’s methods were crude but effective.

He strolled past the scene. He didn’t feel the slightest sympathy for the victim or the watchers. Non-Aryans, they were subhumans as far as he was concerned. Racially and intellectually his inferiors. Fit only to be workers and slaves. The sheer audacity of any who might object or resist took his breath away.

‘Well done,’ he remarked, as Jones stepped back from his bloodied handiwork. ‘Nothing quite like it pour décourager les autres .’

‘What?’ Jones scowled. ‘That French? I don’t do French. As a rule. Bunch of cheese-eating surrender monkeys in my book.’

‘To discourage the others,’ Kammler translated. ‘I was commenting on what a fine example you’ve set.’ He nodded in the direction of the workers, dressed in stained and ragged overalls. His lip curled. ‘For them. The scum. The expendables.’

Jones shrugged. ‘Plenty more where they came from. A billion of the fuckers, or so I’m told.’

Kammler gave a thin smile. Though he heartily approved of the sentiments, Jones’s way of expressing himself was hardly refined. Yet what should he expect of an Englishman?

‘There will be a few billion less after we’re finished,’ Kammler remarked. He couldn’t resist the quip. ‘Something to look forward to other than your next punishment beating. I have a fancy Kangjon is going to need similar treatment fairly soon…’

Jones nodded darkly. ‘Can’t wait.’

Kammler walked on, making for his quarters. There he would have the benefit of an altogether different kind of companion from Steve Jones. One who was intellectual. Educated. Cultured. As convinced as he was that the world could only be saved if the vast majority of humankind were to be exterminated.

He strode into his study. ‘My dear, I have good and bad news. Which would you prefer first?’

‘The bad,’ a female voice answered from an adjoining room.

‘The power-station busters – they need to be forty-kilo devices to achieve our goal.’

‘And the good?’

‘I think we have enough raw material. In fact, I’m sure we do.’

‘So where does that leave us?’

‘In a nutshell, in pretty good shape. We’ll need a little luck on our side, but when did good fortune ever desert the faithful, the constant, the brave?’

‘So we cull the human population to something a little more sustainable?’

‘We do. We remove a plague from the earth. And not a moment too soon in my book.’

‘And my family? Or at least those I still care for. What about them?’

‘You’ll have plenty of warning, as will we all. We’ll get our loved ones – the chosen – to safety.’

‘I have your word on that?’

‘You have my word.’ Kammler paused. ‘Now, Falkenhagen. Tell me again what you learnt about its defences.’

Colonel Evandro had been inundated with volunteers. Few had wanted to miss out on the sting. Unsurprisingly, as far as Jaeger was concerned, the colonel had been its single greatest advocate, once Jaeger had shared the proposition with him.

Station 15 had taken a little disguising. They’d run down the Brazilian flag and sloshed some paint over the few obvious military insignia, shoving the Super Pumas into a distant hangar. The colonel had also set up extra floodlights to illuminate the incoming aircraft when it taxied to a standstill on the runway. That way the pilot would be partially blinded, and less likely to notice any anomalies.

Not that Colonel Evandro figured there were any.

He’d even gone as far as getting his BSOB engineers to weld together some crude iron baskets on stakes, which had been planted along either side of the dirt strip. They were burning fiercely now: DIY landing lights – an added touch of authenticity.

Peter Miles had taken a little more persuading, but once he’d checked into the history – the Lebanon sting by the team of former SAS – he’d seemed happy. A few calls to Daniel Brooks, and some due diligence on the science and technology, and Miles had really started to come onside.

Apparently Narov was right. Refined tungsten ingots and highly enriched uranium appeared almost exactly the same: an insanely heavy silver-grey metal. It would take a metallurgist with some fancy equipment to tell the two apart, and then only once he’d dismantled the lead sarcophagus making up the radiation shield.

And no way was all that going to happen in Dodge.

But the clincher had been getting hold of the DEA’s files on Operation Angeldust. Angeldust was a little more complicated and technically accomplished than Jaeger had remembered it, but the basics were just as he’d described them. After reading the file, Miles had come fully on board.

Brooks had taken charge of building the fake shipment that Colonel Evandro’s men would switch with the incoming cargo of uranium. In the depths of some woodland in a small, unmarked hangar in rural Virginia – one of the CIA’s many black facilities – a specialist team had been ordered to drop everything else and concentrate on the task.

Brooks’s demolitions expert, Theo Wallis – something of a magician with anything that could be made to go bang – realised from the get-go that the device would have to be a trade-off between maximum destructive power and the amount of space the explosive charge would need.

His greatest challenge was the incredibly small volume that the tungsten ingots would occupy. His chosen explosive, RDX, had a density of 1.8 grams per cubic centimetre, as opposed to tungsten’s 19.25 grams. Volume for volume, it weighed less than a tenth of the tungsten ingots within which he would need to conceal the charge.

RDX was actually a World War II-era explosive, but it remained one of the most powerful available. It had had an interesting history. The story went that in the process of developing the explosive, Britain’s Research Department 11 blew itself to smithereens – hence the name RDX, short for ‘Research Department X’.

X – as, in the past. Dead and gone. An irony that Jaeger found amusing.

Wallis needed to cover six faces of the block of RDX with metal ingots, being careful that none of the explosive was visible, for then even a cursory inspection might give the game away. Plus he needed to insert the tiny Retrievor tracking device somewhere it wouldn’t be discovered.

The great upside of combining RDX with tungsten was the sheer destructive power that resulted. Tungsten was the material of choice for bunker-busting bombs, forming the tip of any such projectile. Its enormous weight and density, coupled with its stupendously high melting point, made it ideal for slicing through steel, concrete, earth or brickwork.

Its capacity for causing lethal harm was practically unlimited, especially when hurled at its target with the explosive velocity of RDX – some 8,750 metres per second. The biggest downside was what a surprisingly small block the right amount of tungsten made – not a great deal larger than your average computer printer.