More old hat
Together with their military, British boffins played a major role in defeating their Teutonic foes. Their whizz kids — scientists, academic — came up with radar and opened up the Enigma machine. (During World War I they invented the tank.) Hitler’s boast of winning the war with secret weapons was played down.
In fact, Berlin’s boffins had high IQs themselves. The drone plane was theirs after all. As were the V-1 and V-2 Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles. As was the jet aeroplane. Nor did London ever imagine that the presence of the wolfpack submarines was because the top secret Royal Navy code had been broken.
It was long thought that Nazi expertise hadn’t begun to enter into competition with America’s great neutron bomb. It was feared the Germans would again employ poison gas, which they introduced in World War I. (Allied soldiers and civilians needlessly carried gas-masks around during the second war.)
British author Bear Grylls purports to tell us in Ghost Flight that a half-century after the Wehrmachts’ surrender, a sizeable factory was found underground in Austria. According to the blueprints in its offices, its function was research and development of nuclear weapons. There are also coded papers.
This is a case for Will Jaeger, his name meaning the Hunter in German. Ten years in the military, now in a hush-hush Commando branch, he is nowhere to be found. He is locked up in the prison on an African isle being thought a hostile mercenary. Rescued from its torture chamber by a mate, there are further painful adventures.
Heading a team of experts in respective fields, Jaeger learns that few Nazis had been tried at Nuremburg. Those who hadn’t fled to South America had been taken to the safety of the US and USSR, to divulge the plans for Hitler’s new deadly weapons. (Mossad abducted Adolf Eichman from Argentina and spirited him away to Israel.)
Grylls goes too far when he uncovers a photo of the Fuhrer in disguise in New York, his suicide in the bunker a hoax. (Interestingly, Stalin took his death with a grain of salt.) The decoded papers have him planning a Fourth Reich, leading off with atomic bomb strikes.
The book ends on page 451, but the story doesn’t. A mother and daughter on his team have been kidnapped, to be returned in exchange for the coded documents. Jaeger is determined to rescue them with no ransom.
That the “werewolves” of Germany will launch a third world war is old hat. Ghost Flight is a thriller, but has nothing new to say.