Burning Angels

‘We watched Blome closely,’ Miles continued. ‘He had several collaborators — former Nazis who’d worked with him under the Führer. But after the Marburg outbreak, their cover was at risk of being blown. They needed somewhere remote to brew up their cocktails of death, somewhere they would never be found.

‘For a decade we lost track of them.’ Miles paused. ‘Then, in 1976, the world said hello to a new horror: Ebola. Ebola was the second of the Filoviridae. Like Marburg, it was said to be carried by monkeys and to have somehow jumped species, to humans. Like Marburg, it emerged in central Africa, near the Ebola River — hence its name.’

Miles’s eyes sought out Jaeger. They drilled into him. ‘To be certain of an agent’s potency, you have to test it on humans. We are not identical to primates. A pathogen that kills a monkey may have no effect on a human. We believe Ebola was a deliberate release by Blome, as a live human test. It proved to have a 90 per cent lethality. Nine out of ten of those infected died. This was deadly, but it still wasn’t the original Gottvirus. Clearly Blome and his team were getting close. We presumed they were working somewhere out of Africa, but it is a vast continent with many a wild and uncharted place.’ Miles spread his hands. ‘And that’s pretty much where the trail went cold.’

‘Why didn’t you question Kammler?’ Jaeger interjected. ‘Drag him into a place like this and find out what he knew.’

‘Two reasons. One, he’d attained a position of real power within the CIA, just as many former Nazis had in American military and intelligence circles. And two, your grandfather had no choice but to kill him. Kammler had learnt of his interest in the Gottvirus. The hunt was on. There was a fight to the death. Kammler lost, I’m glad to say.’

‘So that’s why they pursued my grandfather in turn?’ Jaeger pressed.

‘It is,’ Miles confirmed. ‘The official verdict was suicide, but we have always believed that Brigadier Ted Jaeger was killed by those loyal to Kammler.’

Jaeger nodded. ‘He’d never have taken his own life. He had far too much to live for.’

When Jaeger was still in his teens, his grandfather had been found dead in his vehicle, a hosepipe through the window. The verdict was that he’d gassed himself, due to the cumulative trauma of the war years. But few in the family had ever believed it.

‘When all seems lost, it often makes sense to follow the money,’ Miles continued. ‘We began to trace that trail, and one path did indeed lead us to Africa. Other than Nazism, former SS General Kammler claimed to have one major passion in life: wildlife conservation. At some stage he had purchased a massive private game ranch, using what we believe was money looted by the Nazis during the war.

‘After your grandfather killed General Kammler, his son, Hank Kammler, inherited that game ranch. We feared he was carrying on his father’s secret work there. For years we watched, monitoring the reserve for any sign of a hidden germ laboratory. We detected nothing. Nothing at all.’

Miles eyed his audience, his gaze coming to rest upon Irina Narov. ‘And then we heard about a lost Second World War plane lying in the Amazon. As soon as we learned of the type of aircraft, we knew this had to be one of the original Nazi Safe Haven flights. And so Ms Narov joined your Amazon team, in the hope that that warplane might reveal something — a clue to lead us to the Gottvirus

.

‘It did indeed yield clues. But almost of more importance, your search flushed out the enemy; it forced them to show their hand. We suspect that the force that hunted you — the force that still hunts you — is under the command of Hank Kammler, SS General Kammler’s son. He is presently the deputy director of the CIA, and we fear he has inherited his father’s mission — to resurrect the Gottvirus.’

Miles paused. ‘That was our state of knowledge as of a few weeks ago. Since then, you have rescued Leticia Santos, who was being held by Kammler’s people, and in rescuing her you seized her captor’s computers.’

Click. Flash. Miles threw up an image on to the bunker’s wall.

Kammler H.

BV222

Katavi

Choma Malaika

‘Keywords retrieved from the Cuban island kidnap gang’s emails,’ he continued. ‘We’ve analysed the chatter, and we believe the messages flow between the boss of the kidnap gang — Vladimir — and Hank Kammler himself.’

Miles waved a hand towards the image. ‘I’ll start with the third word on the list. Amongst the documents you discovered in that Amazon warplane, there was one that revealed a Nazi flight routed to a place called Katavi. Kammler’s game ranch is situated on the western fringes of the African nation of Tanzania, near a certain Lake Katavi.’