Kill Switch (9780062135285)

by Rollins, James; Blackwood, Grant

  “Could they be jackals instead?” De Klerk offered. “Or wild African dogs?”

  “No, Doctor. My father had bloodhounds when I was a child. I know well their sound. I do not know how they would—”

  “They captured three of our men,” Roosa explained, as if expecting this news. “Their scent is our scent. And concentrated as we are in this damned cave . . .” The general’s words trailed off. He looked down the length of the table at the faces of his concerned unit commanders. “Gentlemen, let us man the ramparts, such as they are. It appears the Engelse will be here for tea.”

  The first hidden entrance the British found was on the cave system’s southern side, a hole disguised by a jumble of boulders.

  And so it started.

  De Klerk found Roosa kneeling before a sandbag barrier with one of his unit commanders, a man named Vos. Beyond the sandbags the cavern’s ceiling descended to shoulder height; at the far end, some fifty feet away, was the horizontal shaft that led to the secret exit. A dozen soldiers were stationed across the cavern floor, each one kneeling with his rifle behind a stalagmite.

  As they waited, De Klerk glanced up. Finger-width fissures split the cavern’s ceiling, casting slivers of bright sunlight across the stone floor.

  Roosa turned, placed an index finger to his lips, then pointed to his ear.

  De Klerk nodded and said nothing. In the silence of the cavern, he strained his ears. In the distance, he could make out the faint baying of the British bloodhounds. After several minutes, the bawling fell silent.

  Everyone held his breath. A soldier behind one of the forwardmost stalagmites signaled back to the barrier.

  Roosa nodded. “He hears voices. Multiple men coming through the shaft. Vos, you know what to do.”

  “Yes, my general.”

  Vos scratched his bayonet along the rock floor, and the men stationed behind the stalagmites turned toward him. Using only hand signals, Vos gave them their orders. Though De Klerk knew what was coming, he dreaded it.

  Led by the faint glow of a lantern, the first British soldier appeared in the shaft. He crawled out of the entrance, then turned left and stopped, making room for the man behind him. One by one, the British scouts crawled out of the tunnel until there were six crouched at the far end of the cavern. Silently, the enemy played their lanterns across walls and ceiling and the stalagmites across the floor.

  De Klerk watched, continuing to hold his breath.

  Seeming to find only an empty cavern, the trespassers clipped the lanterns to their belts, then started moving forward, their rifles at the ready.

  Vos let them get within twenty feet—then, with a double tap of his bayonet on the rock floor, his men sprang the ambush and opened fire. The fusillade lasted but seconds, killing all but one of the British scouts instantly. Moaning, the surviving soldier began crawling back toward the shaft, trailing a slick of blood behind him.

  De Klerk grabbed his medical bag and stood up. Roosa grasped his forearm and shook his head.

  “But, General, he is—”

  “I said no, Doctor. The more terrifying we make this for the Engelse, the sooner they will leave. Vos, see to it.”

  At Roosa’s nod, Vos hopped over the sandbag wall, drew a knife, then walked across the cavern to the crawling soldier. He knelt down and slit the man’s throat.

  Roosa turned to him. “I am sorry, Doctor. I do not enjoy ordering such a thing, but if we are to survive this, we must be brutal.”

  Such butchery settled like a cold stone in De Klerk’s chest. He turned away, despairing, knowing one certainty.

  Nothing goes unpunished under the eyes of the Lord.

  Days passed, and still the British came. Soon the enemy had found all but one of Roosa’s secret entrances. Small but fierce battles raged at the ramparts, as Roosa had taken to calling them. It became clear the British colonel was not only willing to send his troops into Roosa’s meat grinder, but he was also willing to make terrible sacrifices—five, six, seven of his troops for one Boer wounded or killed.

  De Klerk did what he could to help the injured or dying, but as the days turned into weeks, the Boer death count continued to rise—at first from British bullets, then from illness. The first ailing soldier appeared in his surgery complaining of intense stomach cramps. The medical staff treated him with herbs, but within hours the man became feverish and writhed in agony. The next day, two more men appeared with the same symptoms; then four more the day after that.

  His surgery became a madhouse of incoherent screams and squirming patients. Roosa walked into the surgery on the twenty-fourth day to check on the wounded, like he did every morning. De Klerk gave the general a grim status report.

  Roosa frowned as he finished. “Show me.”

  Carrying a lantern, he led Roosa to a corner of the cavern where the sick men were quarantined. Together, they knelt beside the first patient who’d appeared with symptoms, a blond-haired boy named Linden. The boy flailed on the makeshift cot. His face was deathly pale. His arms had been secured to the sides of the cot with leather straps.

  “Are those necessary?” Roosa asked.

  “A new symptom,” De Klerk explained and reached down to show the general.

  He lifted the thin cotton tunic away from the man’s torso. The patient’s belly was covered in wartlike nodules, but instead of dotting the exterior skin of his stomach, the protrusions appeared to be coming from beneath the flesh.

  “My God. What is that?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know, General. Without these restraints, he would be clawing open his belly. Look here.”

  Together, they leaned over the boy’s body. Using the tip of a scalpel, he pointed to one of the larger nodules, about the size of a pea. “Do you see the milky green color, just beneath the skin?”

  “I see it. It’s as if something is growing inside him.”

  “Not as if, General. Something is growing inside him. All of them. And whatever it is, it is doing its best to break out. They are all showing signs of it. Look here!”

  Roosa brought a lantern closer. The pea-sized nodule seemed to be writhing, wormlike, beneath the skin. As they watched, a red blister grew at the edge of the nodule and quickly expanded to the size of ripe plum.

  “What in the world . . . ?” Roosa whispered.

  “Stand back.”

  The doctor grabbed a nearby rag and draped it over the nodule. The scrap of cloth bulged for a few seconds—then came a hollow pop. A yellow-tinged crimson stain spread across the rag. The patient began to buck wildly, banging the cot’s legs on the rock floor.

  One of the medical aides ran over to help them hold Linden down. Still, the boy’s back arched high under them, his head pressed against his pillow. Suddenly dozens of nodules appeared beneath the skin of Linden’s throat and belly, the blisters growing before their eyes.

  “Get back, get back!” De Klerk shouted, and the three of them backpedaled.

  They watched, horrified, as the blisters began bursting, one after another. In the flickering lantern light, a yellowish mist hung in the air before slowly settling back over the boy’s body.

  With a final convulsion, Linden arched off the bed until only his heels and the crown of his head were touching the bedroll. The boy’s eyes fluttered open, staring sightlessly, then his body collapsed and went still.

  De Klerk did not need to check, and Roosa did not need to ask. Linden was dead. The medical aide draped a blanket over his ravaged corpse.

  “How many are afflicted so far?” Roosa asked, his voice cracking.

  “Seven.”

  “And the prognosis for them?”

  “Unless I can discover the source and counteract it, I fear they will all die. Like this boy. But that’s not the worst news.”

  Roosa finally tore his eyes away from the boy’s draped body.

  “This is only the beginning. More will surely get sick.”

  “You suspect a contagion.”

  “I must. You saw the
airborne discharge from the blisters. We have to assume it is a mechanism of some sort—the disease’s way of spreading itself at the end.”

  “How many do you think are already infected?” Roosa asked.

  “You must understand. I have never seen or read of anything like this. And the incubation is short. The boy here was the picture of health three days ago. Now he is dead.”

  “How many?” Roosa pressed. “How many will become sick?”

  De Klerk kept his gaze fixed to the commander, so he could see his certainty. “Everyone. Everyone in this cave.” He reached and gripped Roosa’s wrist. “Whatever is killing these men, it is virulent. And it is in here with us.”

  1

  March 4, 7:42 A.M.

  Vladivostok, Russia

  His job was to protect the bad from the worst.

  Not exactly the noblest of ventures, but it paid the bills.

  Crouched at the edge of the Russian docks, Tucker Wayne let the weight of his duty fall over him. The icy wind and pelting sleet slowly faded from his attention, leaving him focused on a dark, quiet winterscape of cranes, haphazardly stacked shipping containers, and the hazy bulk of boats lining the pier. In the distance, a foghorn echoed once. Mooring lines creaked and groaned.

  Tucker’s training as a U.S. Army Ranger was always at the ready, but it was particularly necessary this morning. It allowed him to home in on two very important issues.

  First: The port city of Vladivostok, which was a vast improvement over the deserts of war-torn Afghanistan—though he’d never add this frigid place to his list of retirement locations.

  Second: The assessment of the threat risk—such as, who might try to assassinate his employer today, where would they be hiding, and how would they do it?

  Prior to his taking this job three weeks earlier, two attempts had already been made against the Russian industrialist’s life, and his gut told Tucker the third would happen very soon.

  He had to be ready—they both did.

  His hand reached down to offer a reassuring touch to his companion and partner. Through the snow-covered fur, he felt the tense muscles of the small Belgian shepherd. Kane was a military working dog, a Belgian Malinois, paired years ago with Tucker back in Afghanistan. After Tucker left the service, he took Kane with him. They were bound together tighter than any leash, each capable of reading the other, a communication that went beyond any spoken word or hand signal.

  Kane sat comfortably beside him, his ears erect and his dark eyes watchful, seemingly oblivious to the snow blanketing the exposed portions of his black-and-tan fur. Covering the remainder of his compact body and camouflaged to match his coat, he wore a K9 Storm tactical vest, waterproofed and Kevlar reinforced. Hidden in the webbing of Kane’s collar were a thumbnail-sized wireless transmitter and a night-vision camera, allowing the two to be in constant visual and audio contact with each other.

  Tucker returned his full attention to his surroundings.

  It was early in Vladivostok, not yet dawn, so the docks were quiet, with only the occasional laborer shuffling through the gloom. Still, he did his best to keep a low profile, trying to blend into the background: just another dockworker.

  At least, I hope I look the part.

  He was in his late twenties, taller than average, with slightly shaggy blond hair. He further masked his muscular physique under a thick woolen coat and hid the hardness of his eyes beneath the furred brim of a Russian ushanka, or trapper’s hat.

  He gave Kane a thumb stroke on the top of the head and got a single wag of his tail in response.

  A far cry from home, eh, Kane?

  Then again, if you took away the ocean, Vladivostok wasn’t much different from where he’d spent the first seventeen years of his life: the small town of Rolla, North Dakota, near the border with Canada. If anyplace in the United States could give Siberia a run for its money, it was there.

  As a kid, he had spent his summers canoeing Willow Lake and hiking the North Woods. In winter, it was cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, and ice fishing. But life wasn’t as perfect as that postcard image made it seem. His parents—two schoolteachers—had been killed by a drunk driver when he was three, leaving him in the care of his paternal grandfather, who had a heart attack while shoveling snow one hard winter. Afterward, with no other immediate surviving relatives, he’d been dumped into foster care at thirteen, where he stayed until he petitioned for early emancipation and joined the armed services at seventeen.

  He pushed those darker years away, down deep.

  No wonder I like dogs better than people.

  He brought his focus back to the business at hand.

  In this case: assassination.

  He studied the docks.

  From where would the threat come? And in what form?

  Against his advice, his principal—the Russian billionaire and industrialist Bogdan Fedoseev—had scheduled this early-morning visit to the port. For weeks there had been rumors of the dockworkers attempting to unionize, and Fedoseev had agreed to meet with the leaders, hoping to quash his employees into submission. If that tension wasn’t enough of a threat, Tucker suspected a fair number of the workers were also Vladikavkaz Separatists, political terrorists whose main victims were the prominent capitalists in the Russian Far East, making Bogdan Fedoseev a high-value target.

  Tucker cared little about politics, but he knew understanding the social landscape came with the job—as was knowing the physical landscape.

  He checked his watch. Fedoseev was due to arrive in three hours. By then, Tucker needed to know every nook and cranny of this place.

  He looked down at Kane. “What do you say, pal? Ready to work?”

  In answer, Kane stood and did a full-body shake. Snow billowed off his fur, and the wind whipped it away.

  Tucker started walking, with Kane trotting alongside him.

  9:54 A.M.

  By midmorning, Tucker had located six of the eight workers he suspected of being Vladikavkazists. The remaining two had called in sick that morning, something neither had done before.

  Standing in a warehouse doorway, he studied the docks. The port was fully alive now, with forklifts moving here and there, cranes swinging containers onto outbound ships, all accompanied by a cacophony of hammering, grinding, and shouted orders.

  Tucker pulled out his phone and scrolled through his list of PDF dossiers and found the two men who had called in sick. Both were former soldiers, petty officers in the Russian Naval Infantry. Worse still, they were both trained snipers.

  Two and two equals a credible threat.

  He set the men’s faces in his memory.

  His first instinct was to call Yuri, the head of Fedoseev’s protective detail, but it would do no good. I do not run, Fedoseev had proclaimed loudly and frequently. But most damning of all, Tucker was an interloper, the American none of the other security detail wanted here.

  Tucker’s mind shifted again, visualizing Fedoseev’s route through the docks. He judged the exposure windows, the angles of fire. He surveyed for any likely sniper perches. There were a half-dozen spots that would work.

  He glanced at the sky. The sun was up now, a dull white disk above the horizon. The wind had also died, and the sleet had turned to big fat snowflakes.

  Not good. Much easier to make a long-range shot now.

  Tucker looked down at Kane, knowing they couldn’t sit back and wait.

  “Let’s go find some bad guys.”

  10:07 A.M.

  The six potential sniper nests were spread across the dockyard, some twenty acres of warehouses, catwalks, narrow alleys, and crane towers. Tucker and Kane covered the ground as quickly as possible without appearing hurried, using shortcuts wherever possible, never staring too long at any one spot.

  As the pair passed a warehouse front, Kane let out a low growl. Tucker turned in a half crouch, going tense. Kane had stopped in his tracks and was staring down an alleyway between a pair of stacked containers.

  Tucker cau
ght the barest glimpse of a figure slipping out of view. Such a sighting would be easy to dismiss, but he knew his dog. Something in the stranger’s body language or scent must have piqued Kane’s interest: tension, posture, furtive movements. Kane’s instincts were razor honed after several dangerous years in Afghanistan.

  Tucker recalled his mental map of the dockyard, thought for a moment, then flipped Kane’s collar cam into its upright position.

  “GO SCOUT,” he ordered tersely.

  Kane had a vocabulary of a thousand words and understanding of a hundred hand gestures, making him an extension of Tucker’s own body.

  He pointed forward and motioned for Kane to circle around the bulk of containers to the far side.

  Without hesitation, his partner trotted off.

  Tucker watched him disappear into the gloom, then turned and jogged directly into the nest of giant container boxes where his target had vanished.

  Reaching the first intersection, he stopped short and glanced around the corner of the container.

  Another alley.

  Empty.

  He sprinted along it and arrived at the next intersection, this one branching left and right. It was a damned maze back here among the giant containers.

  Easy to get lost, he thought, and even easier to lose my target.

  He pictured Kane somewhere on the far side, hunkered down, watching this pile of containers. He needed his partner’s eyes out there, while he hunted within this maze.

  Tucker punched up Kane’s video feed on his modified satellite phone. A flickering, digital image appeared on the tiny screen, live from Kane’s camera.

  A figure suddenly sprinted out of the line of containers, heading east.

  Good enough.

  Tucker ran in that direction. He caught a glimpse on the screen of Kane doing the same, tracking the man, still scouting as ordered.

  Both were on the hunt now—which is what army rangers did. Aside from rare exceptions, rangers didn’t patrol or provide humanitarian relief. They were single-minded in purpose: find and destroy the enemy.

  Tucker had enjoyed the simplicity of that.

  Brutal, true enough, but pure in a strange way.