Kill Switch (9780062135285) (27 page)

“So we won't be on a wild-goose chase,” Tucker said. “The waterfall is somewhere up there.”

It was little consolation, but in this desolate environment, that was the best he could hope for.

Tucker rolled up the maps.

“Let's go.”

35

March 21, 3:30
P.M.

Groot Karas Mountains, Namibia

Following Tucker's map they made slow and steady progress—­the operative word being
slow
.

Christopher steered the Rover eastward along the dirt road, slipping past the guerrillas' campsite where Tucker and Kane had encountered the African wild dogs. A ­couple of miles after that, the trail vanished under them, so gradually that they had traveled several hundred yards before realizing they were simply in the trackless wilderness now.

Their new pattern became one of faltering stops and starts.

Every half mile or so, Tucker and Kane would have to climb out, hike to the highest vantage point, and scout the terrain ahead for signs of hidden bandits or guerrillas. They also charted the best path for the Rover, using both their eyes and the topographical maps.

As Christopher bounced up a rocky ravine, testing the extremes of the Range Rover's off-­road capabilities, Tucker's GPS unit gave off a chime. He checked the screen.

“Getting close to De Klerk's coordinates. Another quarter mile or so.” He glanced from the screen to the path of the ravine, calculating in his head. “It should be at the top of this next pass.”

The Rover climbed the last of the approach as the ravine's walls narrowed to either side. It was a tight squeeze, but they finally reached the top of the pass and rode out onto a flat open plateau.

“Stop here,” Tucker said.

They all clambered from the Rover, exhausted but excited.

“We made it,” Anya said, sounding much too surprised.

Beyond that plateau, the landscape looked like a giant's shattered staircase. Flat-­topped mesas and fractured crooked-­top plateaus spread outward, climbing higher and higher. Brighter glints reflected the sunlight, marking countless waterfalls cascading from the heights, draped like so much silver tinsel across the landscape.

Closer at hand, confronting them, rose a thirty-­foot cliff. Two wide ravines cut into its face on either side, both large enough to drive the Rover into. Between them, they framed an unusual section of cliff, shaped like a triangular nose with a blunted tip. It stuck out toward them, but its slopes were still too steep to climb.

But it was the ravines that drew Tucker's attention. The canyons were twins of each other, angling away from each other, like a giant shadowy V, only the legs of the V were slightly curved, like the upraised tusks of a—­

“Boar's head,” Bukolov muttered, sounding disappointed.

Tucker now appreciated the protruding cliff itself somewhat resembled a pig's flattened snout—­with the twin canyons forming its tusks.

Still, Tucker understood the doctor's disenchantment. Somewhere buried in the back of his own head, he'd been picturing a magnificent granite boar's skull spewing a glittering stream of water between its tusks, spilling its bounty into a roiling pool surrounded by blooming desert flowers.

The reality was much more mundane.

Yet still just as dangerous.

Tucker urged them to grab their packs and get moving again. He pointed to the two canyons in the rock face. “While we still have daylight, we should check
both
sides. Doctor Bukolov with me. Anya with Christopher. Everyone stay on the radio. Questions?”

There were none.

With Kane at his heels, Tucker and Bukolov headed for the ravine on the right. The other pair aimed for the cleft on the left.

Tucker hiked into the gorge first, trailed by Bukolov. It was about eight or nine feet wide, filled with sand and loose rock.

“How are we going to find water in here?” Bukolov asked.

“Kane.”

The shepherd pushed to his side. Dropping to a knee, Tucker tipped his canteen over his cupped palm and brought the water to Kane's nose.

“S
EEK
.”

Kane turned away, his nose sniffing high.

You did it before, my friend. Do it again
.

As if reading his mind, Kane looked up at Tucker and sprinted away, deeper down the ravine.

“He's onto something. C'mon.”

The two men followed the shepherd, going slower, having to pick themselves over rubble and around boulders. They discovered Kane squatted before a section of rock wall on the left. When Tucker appeared, Kane let out a single bark. The dog jumped up, planting his front paws against the wall.

“Does that mean he's found something?” Bukolov asked.

“Let's find out.”

Tucker shrugged off his pack—­then pulled out and unfolded a small shovel. Crossing to the wall, he jammed in the spade's tip and gouged out a chunk of sandstone. He kept digging until he'd chipped a hole about six inches deep. It took some time and effort—­but he was rewarded when he noted the change in color of the stone. Reaching in, he fingered some of the darker reddish-­brown sand. The granules clung together a bit.

“It's damp back here.”

“What does that mean?” Bukolov asked.

He placed his hand on the wall. “There must be a source of water somewhere behind here.”

“Like a cave.”

“Maybe.”

Bukolov frowned. “But this wall is clearly not De Klerk's
waterfall
.”

“No. But there is a water source close by here.” He patted his dog's side. “Good boy, Kane.”

The shepherd resisted his praise. He sniffed at Tucker's sandy fingertips, barked three times rapidly, then jumped back on the wall.

“Shh!” Tucker said.

Kane obeyed, going silent, but he stayed with his forepaws braced on the rock face, his nose pointed up.

What are you trying to tell me?

Tucker backed away from the cliff face, shaded his eyes with a hand, and looked up.

From behind them, Christopher called, “What's happening?”

Anya was with him. “Our canyon came to a dead end. Then we heard the barking.”

As they closed the distance, Christopher clearly hobbled on his left leg. “Twisted my ankle on some loose shale,” he explained. “Hurts but I'm fine.”

Anya stared over at Kane. “What's he found?”

“I don't—­”

Then he understood.

Craning his neck, he continued down the ravine. He soon discovered what he was looking for: a jumble of boulders piled against the left side of the gorge.

“I should be able to climb that.”

“Why? What the devil is going on?” Bukolov asked, dragging everyone with him.

Tucker faced them. “I'm climbing up. Something on top of the plateau has Kane all hot and bothered.”

“Then I'm coming, too,” Anya said.

He eyed her cast.

“I can manage. If I could climb to the top of Klipkoppie fort, I can scale this.”

Christopher hung back, plainly compromised by his leg.

“Stay with Doctor Bukolov,” Tucker instructed him. “We'll scout it out first.”

Not knowing what was up there, Tucker wanted an extra set of eyes and ears. Bending down, he hauled Kane over his shoulders in a fireman's carry and started up the steps. It was a precarious climb in spots, but they reached the top.

Boulders littered the summit, a veritable broken maze. They had succeeded in mounting the section of cliff between the two tusk-­shaped canyons. To their right, the plateau ended at the pig's snout. To the left, a pair of higher plateaus abutted against this one, like the raised shoulders of a monstrous beast.

“We're standing atop the Boar's Head,” he realized aloud.

It had to be significant.

Tucker returned Kane to his feet with the instruction “S
EEK
.”

Without hesitation, the shepherd sprinted in the direction of the taller mesas, dodging around boulders. Tucker and Anya followed, and after a few twists and turns, they found Kane sitting beside a pool of water. On the far side, a sparkling cascade poured into it, flowing along a series of cataracts from the neighboring, higher lands.

His tail wagged happily, as if to say:
This is what I was talking about.

“What on earth . . .” Anya whispered and stared at the dancing flow of water over rock. “Is that De Klerk's waterfall? If so, where's the cave?”

“I don't know.”

Tucker took a moment to orient himself. Something was wrong with this picture. The pool next to Kane was kidney shaped, about twenty feet across. He stared at the stream flowing into it—­as it likely had all season long. The pool seemed too tiny to capture all that flow.

So why hasn't this pool overflowed by now?

Then he knew the answer.

36

March 21, 4:38
P.M.

Groot Karas Mountains, Namibia

Tucker knelt at the pool's edge with Kane. With his head cocked to the side, he stared across the surface, watching the gentle ruffle of ripples spread outward from the cascade on the far side.

“What are you looking for?” Anya asked.

“There!” He pointed near the center of the pond, where the flow of ripples slightly churned in on themselves. “See that swirl.”

“Yes, I see it, but what does it mean?”

“It means the pool is draining into something
beneath
it. That's why it's not overflowing its banks as the waterfall continues to pour into it. It drains below as quickly as it fills above.”

A lilt of excitement entered Anya's voice. “You're thinking it might be draining into a cave.”

“Maybe
the
cave. We're exactly at De Klerk's coordinates here.”

Tucker crossed back to the edge of the cliff and called down to Christopher. “I need the climbing rope from my pack. Can you toss it up?”

“Just a minute!”

“What did you find?” Bukolov yelled to them.

“That's what I'm about to find out!” he hollered down.

Christopher pulled out the nylon climbing rope, tied a monkey's fist in one end, and hurled the end up to Tucker. He caught it on the first try and reeled the rest of the length up. Before returning to the pond, he knotted the rope around one of the poolside boulders.

Pulling on gloves, he stepped back to the waterline and flung the other end of the rope—­the one with the monkey's fist still tied in it—­out toward the center of the pool.

The knotted end sank—­then after a few tense breaths, the remaining line between his fingers began uncoiling, snaking into the water. Slowly at first, then faster and faster. With a
twang,
the last of the line sprang taut in his fingertips, forming a straight line from the boulder to the whirlpool.

Tucker waded out a few feet, sliding his palm along the rope. When he was thigh deep, he felt a slight tidal pull of the drainage vortex. His fingers tightened on the line. He moved step by step. The tug on his legs became stronger. By the time he was waist-­deep, his boots began to slide on the slippery rocks underfoot.

For safety's sake, he straddled the rope, grasped it with both hands, and began backing toward the center.

Step by cautious step.

Then his left foot plunged into nothingness. Gasping in surprise, he dropped to his right knee. Water foamed and roiled around his upper chest.

“Tucker! Careful.” Anya stood on the bank, a worried hand at her throat.

Kane barked at him.

“I'm okay,” he told them both.

He pulled on the rope and yanked his left foot back from the hole. He gained a firmer stance against the tide. With his right hand clutching the rope, he bent down and reached back with his left. He probed the pool's bottom until his fingers touched the rim of the hole.

“Seems wide enough,” he called to Anya.

“Wide enough for what?”

“Me.”

“Tucker, no. You don't know what's down there. Don't—­”

He took a deep breath, sat down on his butt, slid both feet into the hole, and lowered himself downward.

The current of the vortex grabbed him hard and sucked him through the drain. His gloved fingers slid along the rope in fits and starts. Then he popped out of the flooded chute and found himself swinging in open air.

He dangled and twisted in the faucet of water pouring down from the ceiling of stone overhead. Watery light flowed down with it, but not enough to illuminate the cavernous space below him.

Spinning on the line, he lowered himself hand over hand.

Finally his boots touched solid ground. He found his footing, backed up a few steps out of the torrential stream, and let go of the rope. Bent double, gasping, he spit water, coughed, and wiped clear his eyes.

He finally straightened, expecting to see nothing but what little daylight filtered through the chute above, but as his eyes adjusted, he noted fiery slivers of sunlight shining around him—­some four or five of them, coming through fissures in the roof or sloping walls.

Still, they offered scant illumination.

He plucked his flashlight out of a buttoned pocket and panned it around the roughly oval-­shaped cavern. The waterfall, which marked the space's center point, flooded across the bottom of the cave, pooling in some places but mostly draining through fissures in the floor.

Turning slowly, he oriented himself with the outside landscape.
Above
his head was the boulder-­strewn plateau. To his
left
would be the pig's snout, the cliff that was framed by the shadowy boar tusks. To his
right
, he spotted a pair of tunnel entrances that looked like the twin barrels of a shotgun. He imagined they led deeper into the higher plateaus that extended behind the boar's head.

Shining his light across the floor, he also saw evidence of prior habitation, washed up along the walls' edges. He spotted broken furniture that could have once been tables or beds. His beam picked out a ­couple of bayonets oxidized to black.

As in the cave at Klipkoppie, Tucker pictured the ghosts of soldiers coming and going here, sitting around tables lit with oil lamps, polishing those bayonets, joking and exchanging war stories.

Eyeing the shotgun tunnels, he wanted to explore further, to see where they might lead, but now was not the time to go wandering by himself.

He stared at the rope whipping within the cascade of water and sighed.

He needed the others.

Going
up
proved a hundredfold harder than the descent. Hand over hand, he hauled himself through the pounding cascade, out the hole, and back to the surface of the pool. Exhausted, he waded back to the rim and threw himself flat on the bank. He rolled to his back and let the sun warm him.

“Tucker?” Anya dropped to her knees next to him. “Are you okay?”

Kane came up on his other side, nosing him fiercely, half greeting, half scolding.

“What's down there?” Anya asked.

He only grinned at her and said, “You'll see.”

5:23
P.M.

“Bless you, my boy!” Bukolov said by the bank of the pond. “And your dog!”

It took some effort to get the good doctor atop the plateau, but he proved fitter than he appeared. Even Christopher, after resting while Tucker took the plunge into the unknown, was walking more solidly on his left leg. He made it up the boulder staircase without any assistance.

Bukolov continued. “We stand at the entrance to De Klerk's cave! At the threshold of discovering the greatest boon known to mankind!”

Tucker allowed the doctor to wax purple and lay on the hyperbole.

For in fact, they
had
done it.

Christopher and Anya chuckled, standing next to the doctor.

Tucker stood off by the cliff's edge, inventorying the supplies they had shuttled up here by rope. There were still a few last items he wanted, but he could haul those by hand.

Straightening, he called to the others. “I'm going for another run to the Rover while we have daylight!”

He was acknowledged, but before he could step away, a buzzing rose from his pack. He fished out his satellite phone and answered.

“Tucker, I'm glad I could reach you.” The tension in Harper's voice was obvious.

“What's wrong?”

“Where were you?”

“Down a hole. At De Klerk's coordinates. We found it. We found the—­”

“
Who's
with you?”

“Everyone.”

“How close?” she pressed.

“Fifty feet.” Tucker withdrew farther from the others, sensing the need for privacy. He put a boulder between him and the others. “Now sixty feet. What's the matter?”

“We deconstructed that photo you sent—­the one of you sitting at the computer in the Internet café in Dimitrovgrad. It was
shopped
. It's a fake. Don't ask me to explain the technicalities, but there were pixel defects in the image—­something called integration artifacts.”

“Go on.”

“Integration artifacts are created when you extract part of one image and overlay it onto another. You follow?”

“Like replacing a horse's ass with your boss's face. I get it. Out with it.”

“The photo of you at the Internet café was created by merging
two
different images. An interior shot of the café. And a photo of you taken elsewhere. Someone shopped them together. Faked it.”

“What the hell?”

“Our techs were able to separate out the original photo of you, and through extrapolation and pixel capture, they were able to rebuild some of the old details that were erased, mostly details around your hands. In the faked photo, your hands are hovering over a computer keyboard. But when the techs were done, they showed your hands were really originally holding a
steering wheel
.”

“So the picture of me that was Photoshopped was actually taken while I was driving.”

“Exactly. It appears to have been taken by a cell-­phone camera. It was a side profile of you, as if someone in the passenger seat shot it.”

It took several pained seconds for Tucker's brain to register what Harper was telling him. He squeezed his eyes shut, her last words echoing in his mind.

. . . a side profile of you, as if someone in the passenger seat shot it . . .

“What was I wearing in the photo? I can't remember.”

“Uh . . . a military winter suit.”

That was the jacket he wore when he pulled Anya out of the Kazan Kremlin. After that, they fled the city. He pictured that ride.

Bukolov and Utkin had been sitting in the back.

Anya
had been up front with him—­in the passenger seat.

Tucker whispered, “It's Anya.”

He closed his eyes, despairing. She must have covertly taken the photo with her cell phone as he drove them out of Kazan, then e-­mailed it away before he ditched everyone's electronics.

He had to recalibrate his entire worldview of events—­and brace a hand against the boulder to keep his legs steady.

She had lied about
just getting tea
in Dimitrovgrad. While loose, she must have made contact with Kharzin's ­people, told them where to arrange the Spetsnaz ambush. She must have also covertly followed Tucker, noted he had used that Internet café. Kharzin's ­people took advantage of that information to create the doctored photo. It was insurance, a red herring. It had been
planted
on the Spetsnaz ­people in case their ambush failed. In that worst-­case scenario, Tucker was meant to find the photo, so he would believe the attackers had been tailing them or tracking them all along, so as to throw off suspicion from Anya.

But that was not the worst of it.

Utkin
.

He suddenly found it hard to breathe. He felt sucker punched in the gut. He pictured the man bleeding to death on the beach, sacrificing himself to save them, the same ­people who had falsely accused and condemned him.

Still, you saved us.

And it had never been Utkin. Anya had set him up. The signal generator was
hers
. The empty pack of cards in Utkin's bag was
hers
. She knew Utkin would have a set of cards. It was easy enough to plant that evidence in his duffel.

Harper's voice blared in his ear, drawing him back to his own skin. “Tucker!”

“I'm here.” He took a deep breath. “It's Anya. She's the one working with Kharzin. I should have seen it.”

“There's no way you could have.”

“Either way, we have to assume she's been in contact with Kharzin's ­people since we touched down in Africa. She was with me when I found Grietje's Well. She knew the GPS coordinates to this spot. Which means Kharzin has them, too.”

“Then that means you're likely to have company soon,” Harper said. “What're you going to do?”

“We've found the cave, but not the specimens of LUCA.”

“That doesn't leave you many options.”

“Just one. Get Bukolov into the cave and let him go to work. While he's doing that, I'll get ready for a siege and rig the cave with C-­4. If we can't hold off Felice and her team, I'll blow it all to hell.”

There was a long silence on her end. “Let's hope it doesn't come to that,” she finally said. “What about Anya? What are you going to do with her?”

“In the short term, I haven't decided yet.”

“And the long term?”

He pictured Utkin's face. “I don't see her having a
long
term.”

5:38
P.M.

Tucker knelt by his pack out of sight of the others, slicing two six-­foot sections of rope.

He considered how smoothly Anya had duped him. Then again, she had done the same with her superiors at the SVR. All along she'd been a GRU mole planted there or groomed there by Kharzin. It was for
that
reason she'd been falsifying reports to the SVR—­not to protect Bukolov, but to help Kharzin. Even her admission to Tucker that she was an SVR agent was clever: confess to a damning lie, throw yourself on your sword, and claim remorse. Then be a team player, struggling and suffering with everyone else. And then finally, when Utkin's treachery is revealed, come to his defense with sympathy and rationalization.

My God,
Tucker thought.

He stood, stuffed the rope sections into his back pockets, and picked up his AR-­15 rifle. He stalked back over to the group, all still gathered at the pond's edge.

Christopher greeted him with a wave. “I thought you were going back to the Rover to get more supplies.”