Bear Grylls - Burning Angels

Jaeger threw up his hands. ‘Okay, look, can we just do this without a nip ’n’ tuck and nose job?’

‘We can, in which case you will be a blonde,’ Miles announced. ‘And for good measure, your wife will be a ravishing brunette.’

‘Or how about a fiery redhead?’ James suggested. ‘That’s far more suited to her temperament.’

‘Get a life, Osama,’ Narov hissed.

‘No, no. A blonde and a brunette.’ Peter Miles smiled. ‘Trust me, that will be perfect.’

With that agreed, the briefing broke up. All were tired. Being locked away deep underground made Jaeger feel strangely restless and irritable. He longed for a breath of wind and a touch of sunshine.

But there was one more thing he needed to do first. He loitered as the room thinned out, before approaching Miles, who was busy packing away his computer gear.

‘Any chance of a private word?’

‘Of course.’ The elderly Miles glanced around the bunker. ‘We’re pretty much alone, I think.’

‘So, I’m curious,’ Jaeger ventured. ‘Why the stress you keep placing on human testing? The relevance you seem to think it has to me personally?’

‘Ah, that… I’m not very good at hiding things, not when they trouble me…’ Miles powered up his laptop again. ‘Let me show you something.’

He clicked on a file and pulled up an image. It showed a shaven-headed man, in a black and white striped pyjama suit, slumped against a plain tiled wall. His eyes were screwed shut, his brow heavily furrowed and his mouth open in a silent scream.

Miles glanced at Jaeger. ‘The Natzweiler gas chamber. As with most things, the Nazis documented their poison gas experiments in great detail. There are four thousand such images. Some are far more disturbing, because they feature tests on women and children.’

Jaeger had a sickening sense of what Miles was driving at here. ‘Give it to me straight. I need to know.’

The elderly Miles blanched. ‘I do not relish having to say this. And remember, these are only my suspicions… But Hank Kammler has seized your wife and child. He holds them. He – or his people – sent you proof that they are still alive; or at least they were alive not so long ago.’

A few weeks back, Jaeger had been sent an email, with an attachment. When he’d opened it, the image had shown a kneeling Ruth and Luke holding up the front page of a newspaper: proof that they were alive as of its date. It was all part of the attempt to torment and break Jaeger. ‘He seized your family, and eventually he will need to test his Gottvirus on live humans, if he is to prove beyond all doubt…’

The elderly man’s words faded into nothing. His eyes were full of a dark pain. He left the rest unsaid. As for Jaeger, he didn’t need telling.

Miles stared at Jaeger, searchingly. ‘Again, I’m sorry we felt the need to test you. For the R2I.’

Jaeger didn’t respond. It was the last thing on his mind right now.

Jaeger kicked off with his boots, forcing his body outwards into space and letting gravity do the rest. The rope hissed through the belay plate as he plummeted downwards in an abseil, the floor of the crater coming closer with every second.

Some fifty feet below him, Narov was hanging on her climbing gear: a D-shaped carabiner clicked into a chock – a wedge-like piece of metal jammed into a convenient crack in the rock face, with a strong steel loop attached. She was well anchored as she waited for Jaeger to reach her, after which she’d begin the next leg of the descent.

The eight hundred metres of near-vertical rock that formed the interior face of Burning Angels crater made for some fourteen separate abseils, on a sixty metre climbing rope – which was about the maximum size that a man could carry.

It was proving to be quite an undertaking

Some seventy-two hours earlier Jaeger had sat in stunned silence. Peter Miles’ briefing had left little to the imagination. It wasn’t just about Ruth and Luke anymore. Quite possibly, the survival of the entire human species was at stake.

As honeymooners might, he and Narov had flown club class direct to the main international airport here, before hiring a 4x4 and heading west into the sun-baked African bush. After an eighteen-hour drive, they’d reached Burning Angels Peak, pulled over, locked their hire vehicle and begun their epic climb.

Jaeger’s boots made contact again, and he kicked hard, booting himself away from the cliff face. But as he did so, large chunks of rock broke off and plummeted downwards… towards where Narov was hanging on her climbing gear.

‘Rock fall!’ Jaeger yelled. ‘Watch out below!’

Narov didn’t so much as glance upwards. She didn’t have the time. Instead, Jaeger saw her grasp with her bare fingers at the rock face, as she scrabbled to flatten her torso to its surface, pressing her face into its sun-warmed hardness. Against the massive expanse of the crater she looked small and fragile somehow, and Jaeger held his breath as the mini-avalanche crashed down.

At the last instant, the boulders smashed into a narrow lip of rock just above where she was positioned, ricocheting outwards and missing her by bare inches.

That had been close. If just one rock had hit, it would have cracked her skull open, and Jaeger wouldn’t be able to rush her to a hospital any time soon out here.

He let the last of the rope whistle through his fingers, and pulled to a halt beside her.

She eyed him. ‘There are enough things here that want to kill us. I don’t need you as well.’ She seemed fine. Not even shaken.

Jaeger clicked himself on to the climbing gear, detached from the rope and handed it over. ‘Your turn. Oh, and be careful with the rocks. Some of them are a little loose.’

As he knew only too well, Narov wasn’t great with his teasing sense of humour. Generally she tried to ignore him, which just made it all the funnier.

She scowled. ‘ Schwachkopf .’

As he’d learned in the Amazon, she was fond of that German curse word – idiot . He presumed it was something she’d picked up during her time with the Secret Hunters.

As Narov readied herself, Jaeger gazed westwards over the crater’s steaming interior. He could see where a massive archway sliced right through the crater wall. The opening allowed the lake due west of there to flood in during the height of the rains, so boosting the level of the floodwaters in the crater.

And that was what made this place so very dangerous.

Lake Tanganyika, the world’s longest freshwater lake, stretched north for several hundred kilometres from here. The lake’s isolation and its vast age – it was some twenty million years old – had enabled a unique ecosystem to evolve. Its waters harboured giant crocodiles, huge crabs and massive hippos. The lush forests that crowded the lake were home to herds of wild elephant. And with the coming of the rains, much of that life was washed outwards from the lake and into Burning Angels crater.

Between Jaeger and that imposing archway lay one of the caldera’s main waterholes. He could barely see it, due to the lush forest cover. But he sure could hear it. The blow and suck and bellowing of the hippos reached him clearly on the hot and humid air.

A one-hundred-strong ‘bloat’ was gathered there, mushing the waterhole into the mother of all mudbaths. And as the merciless African sun beat down and the waterhole began to shrink, so the massive animals were forced closer and closer, hippo tempers fraying.

No doubt about it, that kind of terrain was to be given as wide a berth as possible. The watercourses linking the mud holes were also to be avoided. They harboured crocodiles, and after Jaeger and Narov’s encounter with one of those murderously powerful reptiles in the Amazon, they didn’t fancy another.