Ghost Flight

by Bear Grylls

  At ninety-five years of age, Great Uncle Joe had need of the warmth, especially when the weather turned as bad as it had now.

  Jaeger parked up, crunched through the snowdrifts and hammered on the door. He had to knock a good few times before a voice could be heard from inside.

  ‘All right, all right!’ There was the sound of the door being unbolted and then it swung wide.

  A pair of eyes peered out from beneath a mop of snowy-white hair. Beady, shining, full of life, they seemed to have lost none of their sharpness over the intervening years.

  Jaeger held out the box of groceries. ‘I thought you might be needing these.’

  Great Uncle Joe stared at him from under craggy brows. Since Grandpa Ted’s death, Uncle Joe, as Jaeger called him, had taken on the role of honorary grandpa, and very good at it he’d proven too. The two of them were close.

  Uncle Joe’s eyes lit up as he recognised the unexpected visitor. ‘Will, my boy! Needless to say, we weren’t expecting you . . . But in. In. Come in. Get out of those wet things and I’ll put the tea on. Ethel’s out. Gone for a stroll in the snow. Eighty-three and still going on sixteen.’

  It was typical Uncle Joe.

  Jaeger hadn’t seen him for pushing four years. He’d sent the odd postcard from Bioko, but with precious little news; just to let them know that he was still alive. And now here he was, unannounced, on their doorstep, and Joe had taken it firmly in his stride.

  Just another day on Buccleuch Moor.

  For a while they did the necessary; exchanging respective news. Jaeger related the story of his time in Bioko, made short. Great Uncle Joe told of the last four years in Buccleuch – no great changes there. Then Joe asked about Ruth and Luke. He didn’t feel able not to, although he knew in his heart of hearts that if Jaeger had heard anything, he’d have been amongst the first to know.

  Jaeger confirmed that their disappearance was as much of a mystery now as ever it had been.

  The catching-up done, Joe fixed Jaeger with one of his looks – half steely inquisition, half light-hearted teasing. ‘So, don’t try telling me you rode all this way in the depths of winter just to bring an old man some groceries – much that they are appreciated. What’re you really here for?’

  In answer, Jaeger reached inside his Belstaff jacket and pulled out his phone. He flipped through to the photo of the eagle symbol – the one displayed on the Operation Werewolf document.

  He laid it in front of Joe on the kitchen table.

  ‘Forgive the new-fangled technology, but does that image mean anything to you?’

  Great Uncle Joe fiddled around in his cardigan pocket. ‘I’ll need my glasses.’

  He picked up the phone at arm’s length, and angled it this way and that. He was clearly unfamiliar with the technology, but as his eyes made out the image, a change came over him as dramatic as it was unexpected.

  In a matter of moments the colour had drained from his face completely. He’d turned as white as a ghost. His hand shaking, he slowly set the phone down on the table. When he glanced up, there was a look in his eyes that Jaeger had never seen before, and never expected to see, for that matter.

  Fear.

  13

  ‘I . . . I half expected . . . I always feared . . .’ Great Uncle Joe gasped, gesturing towards the sink for some water.

  Jaeger hurried to fetch some.

  The old man took it in a hand that was trembling, and drank, spilling half of it across the kitchen table. When his eyes met Jaeger’s again, all life seemed to have been sucked out of them. He glanced around the room, almost as if the place was haunted; as if he was trying to remember where he was, to anchor himself in the here and now, the present.

  ‘Where in the name of God did you get it?’ he whispered, gesturing at the image on the phone. ‘No, no – don’t answer! I dreaded that this day might come. But I’d never imagined it would come through you, my boy, and after all you have suffered . . .’

  His eyes drifted to some distant corner of the room.

  Jaeger didn’t know quite what to say. The last thing he’d ever wanted was to cause this dear old man any discomfort; any distress. What right did Jaeger have to do so in the twilight of Joe’s years?

  Great Uncle Joe shook himself out of his reverie. ‘My boy, you’d best come into the study. I’d not like Ethel to overhear any of . . . well, of this. In spite of her forays into the snow, she’s not as robust as she once was. We none of us are.’

  He levered himself to his feet, gesturing at the glass. ‘Can you manage my water?’

  He turned towards his study, and as he led the way, he appeared as Jaeger had never seen him before. He was stooped – almost bent double – as if he had all the world’s troubles piled upon his shoulders.

  Great Uncle Joe sighed deeply, the sound like a dry wind rustling through the mountains. ‘You know, we thought we could go with our secrets to the grave. Your grandfather. Me. The others. Honourable men; men who knew – who understood – the code. Soldiers all – who knew what was expected of us.’

  They’d locked themselves away in his study, whereupon Great Uncle Joe had asked to know everything – every minute detail; every happening – that had led up to the present moment. Once Jaeger had finished talking the old man had remained quiet, entombed in his thoughts.

  When finally he had broken his silence, it was almost as if he was holding a conversation with himself, or with others in the room – the ghosts of those who had long passed away.

  ‘We thought – we had hoped – the evil was gone,’ he whispered. ‘That we could each go to our final resting place with our souls at peace, our consciences clear. We imagined that we had done enough, all those years ago.’

  They were sitting in a pair of worn and comfy leather armchairs half facing each other, the walls around them hung with mementoes of the war. Black and white photos of Great Uncle Joe in uniform; tattered flags; iconic insignia; his commando fighting knife; his battered beige beret.

  There were only a few exceptions to the war theme. Joe and Ethel had never had any children. Jaeger, Ruth and Luke – they had been the adopted family. A few photos – mostly of Jaeger and his family holidaying at the cabin – cluttered the desk, along with a distinctive-looking book, one that seemed so out of place amongst the war memorabilia.

  It was a second copy of the Voynich manuscript, seemingly identical to the one that lay in Grandfather Ted’s war chest.

  ‘And then this boy comes here, this precious boy,’ Great Uncle Joe continued, ‘with . . . with that. Ein Reichsadler!’ The last words were spat out with vehemence, as the old man’s gaze fixed upon Jaeger’s phone. ‘That damn cursed damnation! From what the boy says, it seems as if the evil has returned . . . In which case, am I empowered to break the silence?’

  He let the question hang in the air. The thickly insulated walls of the cabin tended to deaden any sound, yet still the room seemed to resonate with a dark warning.

  ‘Uncle Joe, I haven’t come to pry—’ Jaeger began, but the old man held up a hand for silence.

  With a visible effort he seemed to drag his focus back to the present. ‘My boy, I don’t think I can tell you everything,’ he murmured. ‘Your grandfather, for one, would never have countenanced it. Not unless the circumstances were utterly desperate. But you deserve to know something. Ask me questions. You must have come here with questions. Ask, and I will see what I can tell.’

  Jaeger nodded. ‘What did you and Grandpa do during the war? I did ask when he was alive, but he never volunteered much. What did you do that meant he ended up with documents like that,’ he gestured at the phone, ‘in his possession?’

  ‘To understand what we did in the war you must first understand what we were up against,’ Great Uncle Joe began quietly. ‘Too many years have passed; too much has been forgotten. Hitler’s message was simple, and it was terrifying.

  ‘Remember Hitler’s slogan: Denn heute gehort uns Deutschland, und morgen die ganze Welt. Today Germany belon
gs to us: tomorrow, the entire world. The One Thousand Year Reich was to be truly a global empire. It was to follow the model of the Roman Empire, with Berlin renamed Germania and serving as the capital of the entire world.

  ‘Hitler argued that the Germans were the Aryan master race, the Übermensch. They would employ Rassenhygiene – racial hygiene – to cleanse Germany of the Untermensch – the subhumans – after which they would be invincible. The Untermensch were to be exploited, enslaved and killed off with impunity. Eight, ten, twelve million – no one knows for sure how many were exterminated.

  ‘We tend to think of it as the Jews only,’ Great Uncle Joe continued. ‘It was not: it was anyone who was not of the master race. Mischlings – half Jews or mixed race. Homosexuals; communists; intellectuals; non-whites – and that included Poles, Russians, southern Europeans, Asians . . . The Einsatzgruppen – the SS death squads – set about exterminating them all.

  ‘And then there were the Lebensunwertes Leben – the “life unworthy of life” – the disabled and the mentally ill. Under Aktion T4, the Nazis began to kill them, too. Imagine it! The disabled. Killing off the most vulnerable in society. And you know the means they employed to do so – they collected the Lebensunwertes Leben in a special bus upon some excuse or other, and drove them around the city pumping in exhaust fumes as they gazed out of the windows.’

  The old man glanced at Jaeger, a haunted look etched across his features. ‘Your grandfather and I, we saw so very much of it with our own eyes.’

  He took a sip of his water. Made a visible effort to collect himself. ‘But it wasn’t just about extermination. Above the gates of the concentration camps they displayed a slogan: Arbeit macht frei – work makes you free. Well, of course, nothing could have been further from the truth. Hitler’s Reich was a Zwangswirtschaft – a forced-labour economy. In the Untermensch he had a vast army of slave labourers, and they were worked to death in their millions.

  ‘And you know the worst of it?’ he whispered. ‘It worked. In Hitler’s terms at least, the plan worked. The results spoke for themselves. Extraordinary rocketry; cutting-edge guided missiles; cruise missiles; super-advanced aeronautics; jet-powered flying wings; stealth submarines; unheard-of chemical and biological weapons; night-vision equipment – in almost every field the Germans scored a string of firsts. They were light years ahead of us.

  ‘Hitler had an absolutely fanatical belief in technology,’ he continued. ‘Remember – with the V-2 they were the first to put a rocket into space; not the Russians, as is commonly believed today. Hitler truly thought that technology would win them the war. And trust me – bar the nuclear race, which we won more by dint of luck than design – by 1945 it almost had done.

  ‘Take the XXI stealth submarine. It was decades ahead of its time. By as late as the seventies we were still trying to copy and equal its design. With three hundred XXI U-boats, they could have thrown a stranglehold around Britain and forced us into surrender. By the end of the war, Hitler had a fleet of a hundred and sixty ready to prowl the seas.

  ‘Or take the V-7 rocket. It made the V-2 look like a child’s toy. It had a range of three thousand miles, and weaponised with one of their secret nerve agents – sarin or tabun – it could drop death from the skies on all our major cities.

  ‘Trust me, William, they came that close – if not to winning the war, to achieving their Tausendjahriges Reich, then at least to forcing the Allies to sue for peace. And if we had done, it would have meant that Hitler – Nazism; this ultimate evil – would have survived. For that was all he and his core group of fanatics cared about – safeguarding their Drittes Reich, to rule for a thousand years. They came that close . . .’

  The old man sighed wearily. ‘And in so many ways it was our job – your grandfather’s and mine – to try to put a stop to them.’

  14

  Great Uncle Joe reached into his desk drawer and rummaged around. He pulled something out, unwrapped the tissue paper and handed it to Jaeger. ‘The original badge of the SAS. A white dagger; WHO DARES WINS beneath it. It was worn with our parachutist’s wings, which together became the famous winged dagger of today’s unit.

  ‘As you’ve no doubt surmised, your grandfather and I served in the SAS. We soldiered in North Africa, the eastern Mediterranean and finally in southern Europe. There’s nothing so revelatory about that. But understand, my boy, that our generation just didn’t speak about such things. That’s why we kept our unit insignias – and our war stories – tucked away and hidden.

  ‘It was in the autumn of 1944, in northern Italy, that we were both injured,’ he continued. ‘A behind-enemy-lines operation; an ambush, a bloody firefight. We were evacuated to hospital, first in Egypt and then to London. You can imagine – neither of us was much inclined to take it easy recuperating. When the opportunity arose to volunteer for a top-secret unit – well, we jumped at the chance.’

  Great Uncle Joe glanced at Jaeger, uncertainty clouding his eyes. ‘Your grandfather and I were sworn to secrecy. But . . . well, in light of all this . . .’ He waved a hand at Jaeger, the phone. ‘Your grandfather was more senior in rank; by then he’d been promoted to colonel. In January 1945 he was appointed Commanding Officer, Target Force. I became one of his staff officers.

  ‘Make no mistake, my boy, I’ve never spoken about this before. Not even to Ethel.’ The old man took a moment to collect himself. ‘Target Force was one of the most secretive units ever formed. That’s why you’ve doubtless never heard of us. We had a very specific mission. We were charged to hunt down the Nazis’ foremost secrets: their war technology; their Wunderwaffe – their extraordinarily advanced war machines; plus their top scientists.’

  Now that the old man had started, he didn’t seem to want to stop. The words tumbled from his lips, as if he was desperate to unburden himself of the memories; the secrets.

  ‘We were to find the Wunderwaffe ahead of the Russians, who were – even then – seen as the new enemy. We were given a “black list” of key sites: factories, laboratories, testing grounds, wind tunnels, plus the scientists and foremost experts, that were not at any cost to fall into Russian hands. The Russians were advancing from the east; it was a race against time. One that we largely won.’

  ‘That’s how he came upon the document?’ Jaeger queried. He hadn’t been able to resist posing the question. ‘The Operation Werewolf report?’

  ‘It’s not a report,’ Great Uncle Joe murmured. ‘It’s an operational plan. And no, actually. A document of that level of secrecy – deniable; emanating from the deep black – that was way beyond even our remit; beyond even Target Force.’

  ‘So where—’ Jaeger began.

  The old man waved him into silence again. ‘Your grandfather was a fine soldier: fearless, intelligent, morally incorruptible. During his time with T Force he realised something so shocking, so utterly dark, that he rarely spoke of it. There was an operation beyond T Force: one formed in the deniable, black world. Its mission was to spirit away the most high-profile and undesirable Nazis – the absolute untouchables – to places where we could still profit from them.

  ‘Needless to say, your grandfather was appalled when he learned of it. Horrified.’ Great Uncle Joe paused. ‘Most of all, he knew how wrong it was. How it would corrupt us all if we brought the worst of the evil into our living rooms. He believed all the Nazi war criminals should stand trial at Nuremberg . . . But now we move into realms wherein he swore me to absolute secrecy.’ He cast a momentary glance at Jaeger. ‘Am I to break my word?’

  Jaeger placed a comforting hand on the old man’s arm. ‘Uncle Joe, what you’ve told me already – it’s far more than I ever knew, or hoped to know.’

  Great Uncle Joe patted his hand in return. ‘My boy, I appreciate your patience, your understanding. This . . . this is far from easy . . . At war’s end your grandfather re-joined the SAS. Or rather, there was no SAS by then. Officially it was disbanded immediately after the war. Unofficially, Winston Churchill – the greates
t leader a country could ever have wished for – kept the unit alive, and thank God that he did.

  ‘The SAS had always been Churchill’s baby,’ he continued. ‘After the war he ran the unit secretly, completely off the books and from a hotel in central London. They set up clandestine bases all across Europe. Their aim was to wipe out those Nazis who had escaped the dragnet; to hunt them down, especially those who were responsible for such terrible abuses during the war.

  ‘You’ll perhaps have heard of Hitler’s Sonderbehandlung – his Commando Order? It decreed that all captured Allied special forces should be handed over to the SS for special treatment – in other words, torture and execution. Hundreds disappeared into what the Nazis called the Nacht und Nebel – the night and fog.’

  Great Uncle Joe paused for a moment, the effort of reaching so far into the darkness proving an exhausting one.

  ‘Churchill’s secret SAS set about hunting down those Nazis still at large. All of them – no matter what their level of seniority. The Sonderbehandlung came direct from Hitler himself. The very top people in the Nazi regime were right in your grandfather’s sights, and that put him in direct conflict with the people tasked to spirit those selfsame men to safety.’

  ‘So we were fighting against ourselves?’ Jaeger queried. ‘One part trying to finish off the very worst of the evil, the other trying to safeguard them?’

  ‘Quite possibly,’ the old man confirmed. ‘Quite possibly we were.’

  ‘How long did this go on for?’ Jaeger queried. ‘Grandpa Ted’s – Churchill’s – secret war?’

  ‘With your grandfather, I don’t think it ever stopped. Not until the day he was . . . he died.’

  ‘So all that Nazi memorabilia,’ Jaeger ventured. ‘The SS Death’s Heads; the Werewolf insignia – he acquired it in the course of the hunt?’