22
‘F reeze. Down on the ground. Now! ’
Jack snarled the words as he aimed the Webley at the head of the nearer man, shifting his aim quickly to the other one and then back again, the hammer cocked and both hands tightly on the grip. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Rebecca and Jeremy, still standing where they had been talking to the men while Jack had crept up from behind the truck. He kept the pistol trained but glanced at Jeremy. ‘Get back to the house, now,’ he said. Jeremy and Rebecca stumbled and then ran. A figure in black appeared with a Glock pistol, the MI6 man John who was helping to provide protection for Rebecca. The two men from the truck remained immobile where they had been reeling out the propane hose. A voice called out from behind. ‘I’m here, Jack.’ He glanced over and saw Mikhail, his Lee-Enfield cocked and levelled.
Jack snarled again at the two men. ‘ Down. Hands on your heads.’ They both slowly dropped to their knees on the gravel, their hands raised. John came up behind them and expertly kicked both in the small of the back so they fell forward on the ground, gasping. He holstered his Glock, took out two plastic wrist ties and in seconds had the two men handcuffed. Jack saw it again, the smudged tattoo of the tiger on one man’s wrist, identical to the tattoo he had seen on Shang Yong’s man two years previously in Afghanistan. John body-searched both men and removed a small arsenal of handguns and knives from their overalls, and several cell phones. He unholstered his Glock and trained it again, glancing at Jack. ‘Ben and I only had one plan of action should this happen. He scouted out a ravine a few miles away where body disposal won’t be a problem. Do you want to question them first?’
Jack knelt down beside the nearer man, seeing his Chinese features for the first time. He thrust the Webley into the nape of the man’s neck, and leaned down so close he could smell the man’s breath. ‘If you make the slightest move,’ he said quietly, ‘this. 455 slug is going to empty your head of everything inside it.’
John approached from behind. ‘Let me do this, Jack.’
Jack put up his free hand to halt John, his other keeping the Webley pressed against the man’s neck. He had just seen these men inches from Rebecca. It had been his worst nightmare, and it had nearly happened again. He felt a rage well up inside him, the same rage he had felt six months ago after Rebecca’s kidnapping, when he had hacked one of her assailants to death in the mineshaft in Poland. With the hammer cocked, it would take the slightest nudge of the trigger to fire the pistol. He would be protecting Rebecca again. But then the rational side of him took over, the side that had planned what to do from the moment he had spotted that tattoo from the house. He was in control of this situation, and he must continue to be in control if they were to reach the endgame he had planned.
He spoke up so the other man could hear too. ‘Listen to me, and listen well. Two of our security men are going to put you in your truck and drive you out of here. They are going to release you, return your cell phones and give you back your truck. You will tell your master that I know the location he wants in the Caribbean. I will give you a piece of paper with the precise co-ordinates. My team are on their way there now. Listen very closely. You will tell him that we know the prize he wants is in that place. We are willing to let him have it if we have the Nazi gold we know is there too. We both go away happy. But we also want the phial he already has, from the bunker. I will meet Saumerre at the site at 1500 hours tomorrow afternoon. Do you understand me?’
The man said nothing. Jack pressed the pistol hard against his neck. He felt the temptation again, stronger than ever. ‘Do you understand me?’ he snarled.
‘Fifteen hundred hours tomorrow afternoon,’ the man mumbled into the ground. ‘The co-ordinates you will give us. He gets the prize. You want the gold. Bring the phial from the bunker or nothing happens.’
Jack kept the Webley pressed in hard, took a deep breath and then released it. He saw that Mikhail remained stock-still, his rifle still trained. He stood up, and nodded at John. ‘They’re all yours.’ He turned to the house, seeing Jeremy outside the door holding the Ruger and Rebecca with the shotgun. ‘Okay, you two. Get your things together. We’re out of here in ten minutes.’
Fourteen hours later, Jack sat strapped in the rear compartment of the Lynx helicopter, charting their progress on the digital flight map as they neared the Bahamas chain. Out of the door window on the port side, he could see the leading edge of the hurricane, an ominous billowing darkness forked with lightning, a creeping malevolence that seemed immobile at this distance yet which Jack knew was a whirling maelstrom of wind. Paul had kept doggedly on course, having calculated their fuel consumption and the helicopter’s turnaround schedule with military precision. They would be on site in eight minutes now, would have four minutes to egress and then Paul would be able to return to Seaquest II having used almost exactly his fuel capacity, relying on the headwind in front of the hurricane to give him the edge he needed to get back. The storm would pass south of Seaquest II while they were diving, clearing off west by the time they expected to be back on the surface using their waterproof radio to call Paul back to pick them up. That was, if their luck held out. And if they survived the showdown that lay ahead.
Jack had taken a huge gamble. He and Costas had given away enough to Schoenberg the day before to allow Saumerre to prepare himself for operations in the Caribbean. He had given the co-ordinates to the two men on the farm assuming that Saumerre would not be able to get to the site any faster than he could. The biggest gamble had been the bargain he had proposed. Saumerre knew that Jack had enough to discredit him, that Jack would never meet him without having a contingency to expose him if anything went wrong. If he could convince Saumerre that they could maintain a stand-off, as they had done for the past six months, then the agreement to share the spoils might work. The Nazi gold was no more than an educated guess. If Himmler had dispatched a U-boat on its final mission to take the deadly weapon to his hideaway, the chances were he would have filled the boat with the loot that top Nazis like him were hoarding at the end of the war. Gold was the favoured commodity. Himmler would have needed to buy himself a future if his plan to ransom the world with the threat of the biological weapon failed. He was too shrewd an operator not to have had a backup plan. Jack had no idea whether the virus phial was actually at the site, but he desperately hoped that Frau Hoffman had been right in her instinct that Ernst would have managed to destroy it. He remembered the account of the Liberator bomber, the rear-gunner’s insistence that they had hit the U-boat as it entered the blue hole. Even if Ernst had not already found a way of ditching the virus, the attack might have destroyed the submarine and prevented him from taking it into the underwater habitat that Heidi said had been installed at this site before the war.
And getting Saumerre to bring the other phial, the Alexander bacterium, was another gamble. Yet Saumerre would have known that the bacterium was not a proven killer in modern times, that the virus was far more terrifying. He was a wily operator, an intellectual, a politician, very probably a fundamentalist sympathizer, but above all a gangster at the head of a criminal empire. For people like that, the bargain Jack had offered would strike a chord that would make him forget who Jack was, forget that profit and greed were not the only motivations for engaging in a deadly duel like this. He had to believe that Jack – like most of those he dealt with – had been seduced by the lure of gold.
Jack shut his eyes tight for a moment. Somewhere in that blue hole, in a cavern that would have been accessible to Ahnenerbe divers, were the ancient symbols that Heidi had seen in the slide show at Wewelsburg Castle in 1944. Finding those – finding just one symbol that proved the truth of the exodus from Atlantis – would be worth all the gold in the world to him.
Paul’s voice crackled over the intercom. ‘Apologies for the reception. We’ve got some kind of radio interference, maybe a localized electromagnetic phenomenon. There’s activity on site. The radar’s just showing a boat speeding away in the direction of San Salvador Island.’
‘Anything from the drone?’
‘It’s had to turn back because of the weather. But Lanowski’s just sent a message. It’s what you want to hear, Jack. The drone showed a boat bang over the blue hole, with two divers getting in the water before it sped off.’
Jack tensed. ‘Good. If there’s any sign of it returning, Macalister has a hotline to the head of the Royal Bahamas Defence Force to order an intercept. I don’t want it done yet in case the boat captain has some way of contacting Saumerre and he realizes what we’re doing. But if needs be, you can say we suspect it’s a drug- runner.’
That much had gone according to plan. The MQ-1 Predator drone had been an inspirational idea of Lanowski’s, and a masterpiece of string-pulling involving Macalister, their MI6 contact, Ben and finally Mikhail, who had gone straight to his CIA handlers at Langley and explained enough of the situation with Saumerre and the potential terrorist threat to have a drone launched from a secret US installation in Florida, with the imagery
