Bear Grylls - Ghost Flight

The South African answered, his voice thick with tension. ‘Look at the guy fourth from the left, in the very centre of the photo. You got him? That guy. That scowl; the appalling hairstyle; the frown marks. Remind you of anyone? Now imagine that face with a small and very bloody stupid-looking Charlie Chaplin moustache…’

Suddenly it was as if Jaeger couldn’t breathe. ‘No way,’ he gasped. ‘Can’t be. We cracked the code, and he wasn’t on the list. The top Nazis were, but not him.’

‘Well double-check,’ Boerke countered. ‘’Cause if that’s not Adolf bloody Hitler, then I’m a bloody Chinaman! One more thing. The photo’s date-stamped on the reverse. The date: the seventh of May 1945. And I guess I don’t need to point out the significance of that.’

Once Boerke had signed off the call, Jaeger double-clicked his cursor, zooming closer on the image. He stared at the figure’s features, hardly daring to believe the evidence before his eyes. No doubt about it: the face was the spitting image of the Führer’s – suggesting that he had been standing on a ship’s deck in Santa Isabel harbour fully a week after he had supposedly shot himself in his Berlin bunker.

It was a good while before Jaeger felt able to return to the task in hand. Boerke’s revelation – presumably the last of the Duchessa ’s dark secrets – had totally numbed him. It was one thing to discover that many of the Führer’s deputies – the chief architects of the evil – had survived the war’s end.

It was quite another to discover evidence that the Führer himself might have done so.

Using the ProtonMail search engine, Jaeger logged into their draft email account – the one that had been compromised. He couldn’t resist the urge to take a look, and he knew that via ProtonMail his location should be pretty much untraceable. ProtonMail boasted that even the US National Security Agency – the world’s most powerful electronic surveillance outfit – couldn’t crack traffic going via their servers, which were based in Switzerland.

There was one new message sitting in the draft folder.

It had been there for several days.

Jaeger’s unease deepened.

As before, it was blank, providing only a link to a Dropbox folder. Jaeger didn’t figure it would be from any of his team. With a growing sense of dread, he opened Dropbox and clicked on the first JPEG file, fully expecting it to be another horrific photo of Leticia Santos – part of the enemy’s ongoing Nervenkrieg .

He told himself that he had to look, for in one of those sickening images the enemy might inadvertently have left a clue as to their whereabouts – a lead from which Jaeger and the others could start to hunt them down.

The first image appeared: six lines of lettering only.

Holidaying in Paradise…

While your loved ones burn.

Question: how do we know so much?

Answer: little Lukie keeps telling us.

Supplementary question: where is little Lukie now?

Answer: Nacht und Nebel .

Nacht und Nebel – the night and fog.

With his heart pounding like a machine gun, Jaeger clicked on the second JPEG. The image that opened was of a once-beautiful green-eyed woman and an adolescent boy, their faces cadaverous, their gazes haunted, with dark rings around their sunken eyes.

Mother and child were kneeling in chains before some kind of Nazi flag dominated by a Reichsadler . They were clutching a copy of the International Herald Tribune . With shaking hands, he zoomed in on the newspaper’s banner: the date revealed it to be not yet a week old. It was proof positive that as of five days ago, they were both still very much alive

Two lines of lettering were typed below the image:

Return to us what is ours.

Wir sind die Zukunft.

Jaeger turned and dry-retched. He found himself shaking and hurting in a way he’d never experienced before, not even during the worst of the torture he’d endured at Black Beach. He dropped off the chair, his body folding in on itself, but even as he lay on the floor, he couldn’t drag his eyes away from that earth-shattering image.

Visions kept crashing through his head, ones so tormented and dark he felt as if his skull were about to explode. It was a long time that he lay there beside the desk, curled into a ball. Tears rolled silently down his cheeks, but they barely registered.

He lost track of time.

He felt spent. Totally void.

The noise that finally brought him back to his senses was that of the door to the bedroom opening.

Somehow he’d made it back into his chair, and was slumped before the desk and the screen.

He turned.

Irina Narov was standing behind him. She had a small towel wrapped around her midriff, the top of which was fastened just above her breasts. She must have been for a shower after her run, and beneath the towel Jaeger didn’t doubt that she was naked.

He didn’t care.

‘Once, when trapped in the jungle treetops, I explained the reasons why two people may get intimate,’ Narov remarked, in that odd, flat, matter-of-fact way of hers. ‘Such close proximity can be necessary for three reasons,’ she repeated. ‘One: practical necessity. Two: to share body warmth. Three: sex.’ She smiled. ‘Right now, I should like it to happen for reason number three.’

Jaeger didn’t reply. He wasn’t particularly surprised. He’d realised by now that Narov had a near-total lack of ability to read other people’s emotions. Even facial expressions and body language seemed strangely lost on her.

Jaeger moved the iPad to where she could see the image on the screen.

Narov’s hand went to her mouth in shock. ‘Oh, sweet Jesus—’

‘The date on the newspaper,’ Jaeger cut in, his voice sounding as if it were coming from the end of a very long and very dark tunnel. ‘It’s five days old.’

‘Oh my God,’ Narov gasped. ‘ They’re alive .’

Their eyes locked across the space between them.

‘I will get dressed,’ Narov continued, without the vaguest hint of any awkwardness or embarrassment. ‘There is work to be done.’

She turned towards the door, but paused, flicking a troubled glance back at Jaeger. ‘I confess – I did not just go for a run. I also had a rendezvous to make… I met with someone who believes he knows where Leticia Santos is being held.’

‘You did what?’ Jaeger asked, trying to shake the confusion out of his head. ‘Where? And with who, for Christ’s sake? And why didn’t you warn—’

‘You would not have wanted to meet with them,’ Narov cut in. ‘Not if you knew who they are.’

‘Bloody try me!’ Jaeger snarled. He jabbed a finger at the image on the screen. ‘A lead to Leticia – that could take me back to them!’

‘I know. I know that now,’ Narov protested. ‘But an hour ago – I had no idea they were alive.’

Jaeger rose to his feet. There was real menace in his stance now. ‘So tell me – who the hell was at your secret meeting, and what did they tell you?’

Narov took a step back. She was clearly on her guard, but for once she was bereft of her knife. ‘One of the nearest landfalls to Bermuda is Cuba. Cuba is still Russian territory, as far as the Kremlin is concerned. I met with one of my contacts—’

‘You met with a bloody SVR agent? You shared news of what we’re doing with them ?’

Narov shook her head. ‘A Russian mafiosa. A drug-runner, or rather one of the drug-running kingpins. They have their network spread right across the Caribbean. They know everything and everybody. They have to, to be able to run their cocaine through these islands.’ She glared at Jaeger resentfully. ‘But if you wish to find a devil, sometimes you have to do a deal with the devil himself.’