Echo of War (22 page)

“Christ, how many times are you going to ask me that?” Root growled. He stood up and began pacing. “Why are you doing this? My wife's been taken, for god's sake!”

“I know that.”

“Then act like it!”

Tanner stared at him, said nothing. Thirty seconds passed … a minute. Finally Root plopped down on the edge of the bed. “What do you want from me?”

“Tell me how you know Svetic, why he took your wife, and what he wants from you.”

Briggs could see Root's lower lip quivering; the muscles of his jaw pulsed. “I've had enough of this. I'd like you to leave. Joe, get them out of here.”

“Jonathan—”

“Dammit, this isn't fair! I just want my wife back! Why can't anyone understand that?”

Tanner leaned forward in his chair and waited until Root met his gaze. “I do understand, Mr. Root. I know you don't believe that, but it's true. Here's what I think: You know who took your wife, why they did it, and why they made you come halfway around the world to get her back. The sooner you tell us what's really going on, the sooner we can get her back.”

Root squeezed his eyes shut; tears dripped from their corners. “Oh, Jesus …”

“Tell me,” Briggs whispered.

“I know Svetic—Risto Svetic—and I know what he wants.”

“What?”

“Kestrel. God help us, he wants Kestrel.”

“I assume you're not talking about the bird?” Tanner said.

“No,” Root replied with a humorless chuckle. I'm talking about the Root family secret—the secret we've been keeping for over eighty years. Kestrel consumed my grandfather's life, then my father's, and now mine. Kestrel is what Risto Svetic wants, and it's what I don't dare give him.”

“You've lost me. Please explain.”

And Root did.

“My grandfather's name was Simon Horatio Root, In 1917 he landed in France and was given command of a special unit that later became known as the Havocs. They were trained to fight behind enemy lines, conduct reconnaissance, gather intelligence—those sorts of things.

“In January, 1918, he and his team were in the Dinaric Alps in Bosnia. The Central Powers had mostly been driven out of the area, but there were reports of stay-behind units conducting guerrilla operations. Everyone assumed they were Bulgarians, since they'd done most of the fighting in the Balkans. At the time, the allies were considering opening a second front with landings along the Adriatic coast. My grandfather had been assigned to survey the area.

“He had sixteen men on his team: twelve soldiers, three squad leaders—Pappas, Villejohn, and Frenec—a Greek, a Frenchman, and a Hungarian. Their scout was a Herzegovinian boy named Anton. He was their unofficial mascot.

“On their ninth day in the mountains they came across a bunker. It shouldn't have been there. None of the Bulgarians they'd come across had been holed up. Most were hit-and-run teams—always moving, sleeping in whatever hole they could find, nipping at the enemy but never fully engaging them. To find an occupied bunker like this was unheard of. Even stranger was who they found guarding it: Germans.

“Simon ordered in his team. The guards were dispatched and my grandfather led his men inside. On the upper level it was just like any other bunker: sleeping quarters, mess rooms. There was another level, though. As was his style, Simon took the lead. He went down first, followed by Frenec, Pappas, and Villejohn. The rest of the team stayed on the main level.

“They reached the bottom of the ladder shaft and started looking around, expecting to find more soldiers, more supplies … more of what they'd found on the main level.

“There wasn't a soldier in sight. That section of the bunker was designed differently than any bunker they'd ever seen. It was laid out like three squares in a line, each square connected by a single passage. There were heavy, airtight doors, intricate plumbing, generators and backup generators, air pipes and hoses leading every which way …

“Eventually they found some men hiding in storage rooms—seven Germans and one Russian, all civilians, all unarmed. Simon rounded them up in the mess room, left Pappas and Villejohn to guard them, then took Frenec to have a better look around.

“The section they were in—the signs read
‘Der Bereich Eine
'
—Section One—was mostly sleeping quarters, latrines, and larders.
Der Bereich Zwei
contained more storage areas, but they were mostly medical supplies like drugs, bandages, and surgical equipment. They'd found a hospital, Simon thought.

“The last area—
Der Bereich Drei
—was altogether different. It was divided down the middle by another passageway, this one wider than the connecting tunnels. To the left they found what looked to be laboratories with Bunsen burners, distillers, microscopes.

“To the right, set into the wall, were three windows, each ten feet long. Beside each of these was a steel door. The windows were dark, so Simon hunted around until he found a junction box, then started flipping switches. One by one, the lights came on.

“Behind each window were ten hospital beds—thirty total. All of them were full. There were old men, women of all ages, children—all chained to their beds. Most appeared to be unconscious, but when the lights came on a few of them stirred and looked toward the windows. Some cried out in Bosnian. The windows were thick and Simon's Bosnian wasn't very good, but it was clear they were pleading with him.

“On the wall of each room was a sign that read,
‘Keimfrei Krankenzimmer.
'”
Root paused and looked at Tanner. “Do you know what that means?”

Briggs searched his memory, trying to piece together the words. When he did, he felt a chill on his scalp. “Sterile Sick Room.”

Root nodded. “That's right. All of those people had been quarantined. You know, by the time he'd found that bunker, my grandfather had seen the worst war can offer, but nothing had prepared him for what he found there.

“He was no doctor, of course, but it didn't take one to know those people were very sick. Some were as thin as skeletons; others horribly bloated. Others were covered in running sores, tumors, or rashes that left them looking like hamburger. A few were seizing so violently their bodies arched off the bed until only their feet and heads touched the mattress. There was vomit and blood and feces on the floors and walls. It was a nightmare.

“My grandfather's first instinct was to go in and try to help them, but he stopped himself. This was no ordinary hospital, and those were no ordinary patients. There was something very wrong with what was going on. He and Frenec returned to the mess room. Having realized the Germans and the Russian were doctors, he started asking questions. They refused to talk. He locked them in a storage room and went to find his own answers.

“The doctors had been meticulous in their documentation. The file rooms were filled with case histories, experiment notes, private journals—it was all there. Over the next day and a half they pieced together what the Germans had been up to.

“Eighteen months earlier a Bulgarian Army platoon came across a village in the foothills named Doljani. They found half the inhabitants dead, the other half deathly ill. Under questioning, the villagers claimed that a week earlier an illness had taken hold in the local elementary school. Two days after that it had spread to half the village: a day after that, everyone had it. The symptoms were routine—what we'd call a common cold—but none of the villagers had been able to fight it off. A week after the first case, the entire village was dead—nearly three hundred people, gone.

“The unit's intelligence officer was actually a major in the Austro-Hungarian Army. He sent word back to his commanders in Graz, who dispatched a team of German specialists. You see, at that point in the war the Central Powers knew the tide was against them. Germany had already used gas attacks on the allies—mustard, chlorine, phosgene—and had been experimenting with cholera, anthrax, and smallpox, so this outbreak at Doljani caught their attention.

“By the time the team arrived, half of the Bulgarian soldiers were sick. Assuming the rest would follow, the Germans knew they had to find a place to quarantine whatever the illness was. The Bulgarian commander offered them a solution.

“On their way to Doljani, they'd come across an abandoned hospital bunker built years earlier by the Austrians. It was nearby, it was already partially equipped, so the German doctors and surviving Bulgarian soldiers retreated to the bunker. The soldiers were quarantined. The doctors went to work trying to understand what was making them sick, a report was sent back to Graz. The German High Command dispatched yet another team—an engineering company. Over the next month, the bunker was converted into the complex my grandfather found.

“By the time work was finished, all but a few of the Bulgarian soldiers were dead, as were four of the original twenty German doctors. To a man, the entire engineering company was stricken.

“Good Germans that they were, the doctors stayed put and kept working, trying to isolate the illness. Aside from special troops sent by Graz to act as security, no one came to or left the bunker. The bodies piled up. One of the empty artillery magazines was converted into a crematorium.

“Two months after the project began, all of the original soldiers and engineers were long dead, as were half of the doctors. Only two ‘hosts' remained—both doctors from the original team. The security soldiers started snatching civilians from nearby villages to use as test subjects. The experiments went on.

“Six months later Graz sent a new doctor to oversee the project, a Russian microbiologist named Nikitin who'd emigrated to Germany in 1902. The rumor was that Nikitin had been a rising star under Dimitri Ivanovski, the scientist who discovered the virus. He and Nikitin were the world's first virologists.

“At that time, scientists didn't even have the equipment to see something as small as a virus, but using procedures he and Ivanovski had honed, Nikitin determined the cause of the illness was a virus—a particle so small that two hundred million of them can fit on the head of a pin.

“There was a bigger mystery, though. As Nikitin conducted his autopsies, he found multiple causes of death. Some had died from smallpox, others from influenza, a few from pulmonary edema, and even a few from cancer, which wasn't normally an acute disease.

“Even at his level, Nikitin realized he was out of his depth. He didn't understand the mechanism behind the virus. Somehow it either coopted the host's immune system or it bolstered whatever underlying disease already existed. It turned minor colds into fatal infections; it allowed cholera or cancer or tuberculosis to go unchecked in the body; if the patient had a fever, the brain virtually boiled; a minor case of ringworm swarmed the body and ate it away. Whatever the pathology—bacteria, virus, fungus, or parasite—the virus turned it voracious. What a normal immune system could easily fight off became fatal.

“Nikitin named the virus Kestrel. In the Ural Mountains, where he was from, a kestrel is not just a bird of prey, but according to Komi myth, it was also a shape-shifter. Nikitin thought the name fit.

“When Simon came across the bunker, Nikitin and his team had been working for eighteen months to incubate Kestrel. According to their notes, they'd succeeded. In fact, they were getting ready to return to Germany with six petri canisters filled with the virus.

“Simon and his squad leaders made a decision. Clearly they couldn't let Kestrel fall into German hands, but the question they found themselves facing was, should anyone have it? Though pretty certain they had the only samples of Kestrel, Simon couldn't be sure. What if the Germans already had some and decided to use it? Would these samples be the only hope for a vaccine? These were intelligent men, but they were lost. How Kestrel worked, what exactly it was, whether it could be stopped or destroyed—all questions they couldn't answer.

“They made a pact: The four of them would take Kestrel, hide it away, and keep it safe. The concepts of friend, enemy, ally—all of them were irrelevant compared to what Kestrel could do if it got loose. They'd seen atrocities on both sides. Words like honor and mercy had little meaning in modern war. Whom could they trust with Kestrel? Could they be sure the allies would destroy it and not try to keep it? All it would take was a single, shortsighted general or politician to decide a sample should be kept for study.

“There were two things they had to decide before they could leave the bunker: first, what to do with the infected patients and the doctors. The patients were beyond help; half of the thirty had died over the previous two days. Simon wanted to put the rest out of their misery, but he didn't dare go into the sterile rooms. He made a decision—the toughest one of his life.

“He rounded up Nikitin and his doctors, ordered them into the sterile ward with twenty-three lethal doses of potassium cyanide, then locked the door behind them.

“My grandfather, Pappas, Villejohn, and Frenec watched the end of it. Strangely, the doctors never once pleaded for their lives. They seemed resigned—as if they were glad it was over. Once they'd euthanized the surviving patients, they injected themselves, then sat down together and died.

“That left one final task: to make sure they themselves hadn't become infected. According to the doctor's logs, the longest incubation period they'd seen was six days. Simon and the others had been inside the complex for three days.

“So they stayed there, with the dead, watching and waiting for one of them to get sick.

“Frenec, the Hungarian, had a bleak sense of humor. I remember my grandfather telling the story—the four of them sitting around waiting for the barest hint of a sniffle or a cough, knowing it probably meant they were all dead. Frenec said, ‘We're standing quite the dark watch, aren't we?' The name stuck; from then on they referred to themselves as the Dark Watch.

“They waited until three more days had gone by, then another three just to be safe. None of them showed any signs of illness.

“A week after they'd entered the bunker, they gathered the six canisters of Kestrel, sealed the bunker entrance with explosives, and walked out.

“That was 1918,” Root finished. “My father was born three years later, in 1921; when he was twenty-five Simon passed Kestrel on to him. I was born two years later: In 1978, when I was thirty, my father passed it on to me.” Root looked up and studied each man in turn. His face was drawn and gray, as though he'd aged a decade telling the story. “That's it. That's what Kestrel is, and that's what Svetic wants.”

Tanner and the others stared at Root with expressions ranging from shock to skepticism. Finally Tanner leaned back in his chair and exhaled heavily. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I've got so many questions I don't know where to start,” he murmured. “First off, how does Svetic even know about Kestrel? Who is he?”

“You remember my grandfather's scout I told you about?”

Tanner nodded. “The Herzegovinian boy.”

“That was Anton Svetic—Risto Svetic's grandfather.”