His backup backup weapon.
As Jones began to charge, Jaeger whipped out the hidden handgun. There was a momentary look of disbelief in the big man’s eyes, before his kick to Jaeger’s head became a desperate attempt to boot the pistol from his hands.
Jaeger fired. The first round struck Jones high in the leg, two further shots following. By the time Jones’s body joined Jaeger’s on the cold concrete floor, he was splattered in blood and gore.
As for Jaeger, he was drifting into a dark unconsciousness.
88
Suxamethonium chloride – known as ‘sux’ for short by medical practitioners – is widely used in hospital procedures. It is also the perfect poison for those intent on murder.
It had taken three doses for Narov to break Kammler; three near-death experiences administered by her hand, before he had crumbled.
As he had begun to talk, the scenario that had unfolded had made Narov’s blood run cold: three INDs moored at three world capitals, set to detonate in thirty-eight minutes and counting.
Right now she was hunched over the Thuraya satphone speaking to Brooks, her voice tight with tension and fear.
‘Boat one is the Adler, a Nordhavn 64 yacht moored at New York’s Chelsea Piers Marina. Boat two is the Werwolf, a Nordhavn 52 moored at London’s St Katharine Docks. Boat number three is the Fireland, another Nordhavn 52, docked at the Tel Aviv Marina.’
Brooks repeated the details back to her. ‘Okay, I’m on it.’ He ordered Narov to stick by the Thuraya and not to move a muscle.
In addition to the three devices parked in those city marinas, Kammler had confessed to five other planned attacks, designed to hit nuclear power plants; five other Nordhavn yachts complete with their forty-kilo INDs, eight being the sacred number of the SS. Thanks to the sux, Narov had extracted the full details.
Target one was the Qinshan nuclear power plant, set on the East China Sea, on the very outskirts of Shanghai, a city of twenty-four million souls. Target two was America’s Calvert Cliffs plant, on the Chesapeake Bay, just to the south of Washington, a city of eight million. Target three was France’s Flamanville nuclear plant, west of Paris. There had also been a Canadian target and a second plant in China. Thankfully, due to the destruction of Kammler’s lab, none of those devices had been dispatched. Which made the priority dealing with the nukes that were in place and primed to blow.
Narov didn’t relish Brook’s position right now. He had to coordinate three seek-and-destroy missions, on three different continents, and with precious little time. There would be no chance to attempt to defuse the devices; the only option would be to blow the yachts out of the water.
Weapons-grade uranium wasn’t particularly radioactive, not unless you could smash together two heavy lumps with immense force. It was the collision of two such masses that led to fission, the self-sustaining chain reaction that would engender a nuclear explosion, which in turn would produce massive amounts of radioactivity.
If the devices were torn to pieces in the yacht’s holds and sent to the bottom, they would be rendered relatively harmless. It was all up to Brooks now.
Narov turned to Falk. ‘Go find Jaeger and Raff. Plus Alonzo. We need to regroup, in case there’s anything Brooks needs from this end.’
‘What about Peter Miles and Jaeger’s wife?’ Falk queried.
‘Search for them too. But I don’t hold out any great hope.’
Falk hobbled off to do as he’d been bidden. Narov knew him to be a brave and courageous individual, and she wasn’t surprised that he had done the right thing. But right at this very moment, she needed him out of the way for an entirely different reason.
Once he had gone, she reached for a freshly charged syringe of sux, which she inserted into the tube hanging out of Kammler’s forearm.
She brought her face close to his, so she was speaking barely above a whisper. ‘I guess you thought it was all over? I am afraid not.’ She paused. ‘You see, Mr Kammler, this is personal.
‘I am going to tell you a story,’ she continued. ‘It is 1943. Sonia Olchanevsky is a Russian Jewess of great beauty. For three years she has fought with the French Resistance. But she is captured and sent to the Natzweiler concentration camp. There, amongst other horrors, she is raped. One man basically makes her his slave and his mistress.’
She paused. ‘I am curious: have you ever heard this story?’
‘No,’ Kammler rasped. ‘Never. I swear.’
The repeated administrations of the drugs seemed to have broken him. Perhaps, having peered into the face of death, his dark soul had finally been revealed to him.
‘The man who raped Sonia Olchanevsky was SS General Hans Kammler,’ Narov continued. ‘Your father. And Sonia was my grandmother. Your father raped my grandmother, which makes us… almost family.’
She moved closer, until her mouth was next to Kammler’s ear. ‘That makes Falk my half-cousin and you… my half-uncle. Now, as I understand it, the term for killing your uncle is avunculicide. It is a bit of a mouthful, but it will do for now.’
With that, she drove the final shot of suxamethonium chloride into Kammler’s bloodstream.
‘Goodbye, dear uncle. Today is judgement day. For you, it is long overdue.’
Kammler’s gaze fixed itself on Narov for the briefest of instants, his lip curled in arrogance and hatred.
‘Tell Jaeger,’ he hissed, ‘now I am become death—’ His head slumped forward, cutting off the last words.
Narov leant over and checked his pulse. There was none. Hank Kammler was dead. But what a weird way to phrase his final words: he hadn’t become death. He was dead.
Weird. And chilling, in an odd, intangible way.
Why in his dying breath had he sounded so exultant?
And why the personal message for Jaeger?
89
The Super Lynx powered up the Thames, swooping over the river, pushing towards its 200 mph maximum speed. By the pilot’s calculations, they were one minute out.
‘Delta One, Stinger Three, sixty seconds out,’ he intoned, speaking into his helmet microphone. ‘Go live with LTD.’
‘Roger that,’ came the reply from Pete Iron, the SAS Counter-Terrorism troop sergeant, who was positioned with one of his corporals, Fred Gibson, at the London City marina.
Ever since 9/11, the SAS had maintained a counter-terrorism team based at the SAS’s ultra-secret London headquarters, just a stone’s throw from Whitehall. Ready and waiting for just such an alert as they had received today.
The call to action had come barely twenty minutes earlier. They were to destroy a Nordhavn yacht moored in St Katharine Docks, no matter what the risk of civilian casualties or collateral damage. The cut-off point was 0359 hours.
If they failed, the team had been warned, the proverbial sky would fall.
Iron and Gibson were crouched barely a hundred metres from the target. From their kneeling position adjacent to the dock’s Zizzi restaurant, they could see the vessel’s name clearly.
Werwolf was stencilled on her stern.
‘Stinger Three, Delta One, lasing target now,’ Iron radioed the pilot.
‘Delta One, Stinger Three, copied.’
The SAS sergeant fired his tripod-mounted Thales laser target designator – LTD for short – at the Werwolf, knowing that the hot point of the laser – where it bounced off the hull – would act as a guide for the coming strike.
The pilot put the Lynx into a howling right-hand turn, bringing its nose around to face the marker – the smoke grenade that Gibson had lobbed onto the target. The helo swept in low across the river just to the east of the century-old Tower Bridge.