Burning Angels

‘Here’s the thing. Vladimir and his lot kidnapped one of my expedition team. Leticia Santos. Brazilian. Former military. Young divorcee mother with a daughter to care for. I liked her.’ A pause. ‘They’re holding her on a remote island off the Cuban mainland. You don’t need to know how we found her. You do need to know we’re flying in to rescue her.’

The pilot forced a laugh. ‘And who the hell are you? James freakin’ Bond? You’re three. A three-person team. And what? You think the likes of Vladimir won’t have company?’

Jaeger levelled his grey-blue eyes at the pilot. There was a calm but burning intensity about them. ‘Vladimir has thirty well-armed men under his command. We’re outnumbered ten-to-one. We’re still going in. And we need you to ensure that we hit that island with maximum stealth and surprise.’

With his dark hair worn longish, and his slightly gaunt, wolfish features, Jaeger seemed younger than his thirty-eight years. But he had the look of a man who had seen much, and who wasn’t to be messed with, especially when his hand was gripping a weapon, as now.

The look wasn’t lost on the C-130 pilot. ‘Assault force hitting a well-defended target: in US spec ops circles we always figured on three-to-one odds in our favour.’

Jaeger delved into his rucksack, pulling out an odd-looking object: it resembled a large baked bean tin with the label removed, and with a lever clipped to one end. He held it out in front of him.

‘Ah, but we have this.’ His fingers traced the lettering stamped around one side of the canister: Kolokol-1.

The pilot shrugged. ‘Never heard of it.’

‘You wouldn’t. Russian. Soviet-era. But put it this way: if I pull the pin and let fly, this aircraft gets pumped full of toxic gas, and it’s going down like a stone.’

The pilot eyed Jaeger, tension knotting his shoulders. ‘You do that, we’re all dead.’

Jaeger wanted to push this guy, but not too far. ‘I’m not about to pull the pin.’ He dropped the canister back into his rucksack. ‘But trust me, you don’t want to mess with Kolokol-1.’

‘Okay, I got it.’

Three years back, Jaeger himself had had a nightmarish encounter with the gas. He’d been camping with his wife and son in the Welsh mountains. The bad guys — the same group as were holding Leticia Santos now — had come in the depths of the night and struck using Kolokol-1, leaving Jaeger unconscious and fighting for his life.

That was the last he had seen of his wife and eight-year-old son — Ruth and Luke.

Whatever mystery force had taken them had proceeded to torment Jaeger with the fact of their abduction. In fact, he didn’t doubt any more that he’d been left alive just so they could torture him.

Every man has his breaking point. After scouring the earth for his missing family, Jaeger had finally been forced to accept the horrific truth: they were gone, seemingly without trace, and he had been powerless to protect them.

He had pretty much cracked up, seeking solace in drink and oblivion. It had taken a very special friend — and the re-emergence of evidence that his wife and son were still alive — to draw him back to life. To himself.

But he’d come back a very different person.

Darker. Wiser. More cynical. Less trusting.

Content with his own company: a loner, even.

Plus the new Will Jaeger had proved far more willing to break every rule in the book to hunt down those who had torn his life to pieces. Hence the present mission. And he wasn’t averse to learning a few dark arts from the enemy along the way.

Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese master of war, had had a saying: ‘Know your enemy’. It was the simplest message of all, yet during Jaeger’s time in the military he’d come to treat it like a mantra. Know your enemy: it was the first rule of any mission.

And these days he figured the second rule of any mission was learn from your enemy.

In the Royal Marines and the SAS — the two units in which Jaeger had served — they’d stressed the need to think laterally. To keep an open mind. To do the unexpected. Learning from the enemy was the zenith of all that.

Jaeger figured the last thing the force on that Cuban island would be expecting was to be hit in the depths of night by the same gas they themselves had used.

The enemy had done that to him.

He had learned the lesson.

It was payback time.

Kolokol-1 was an agent that the Russians kept swathed in secrecy. No one knew its exact make-up, but in 2002 it had taken a sudden leap into the public consciousness when a bunch of terrorists had taken control of a Moscow theatre, holding hundreds hostage.

The Russians hadn’t messed around. Their special forces — the Spetsnaz — had pumped the theatre full of Kolokol-1. Then they’d hit the place like a whirlwind, breaking the siege and killing all the terrorists. Unfortunately, by that time many of the hostages had also been affected by the gas.