Echo of War

by Grant Blackwood

  “Either that or they manufactured the conference itself,” Dutcher said.

  “Right. And they decide to use it. They hire Litzman to lay the trail leading to Bosnia’s doorstep and arrange an incident.”

  “Which is?” asked George Coates.

  Oaken replied, “The delegates are all traveling home the same way: a ferry named the Aurasina. I’m guessing it’s meant as a show of unity—a week-long conference followed by a slow boat ride home with everyone standing arm-in-arm at the railing. From Trieste, the Aurasina will be heading down the Adriatic coast, making stops in Zadar, Sibenek, Split, Dubrovnik, and Durres.”

  “And this is Litzman’s target?” Sylvia asked.

  “Just a guess,” Oaken admitted. “Most of the pieces fit. And don’t forget: Litzman’s ex-Spetsnaz. Sinking ships is one of their specialties. The Aurasina goes down, dozens of diplomats die, hundreds of innocent citizens are killed, and a Bosnian pops up as the chief suspect.”

  “Would they do that?” Barber said. “Would the Serbians really—”

  “We’re talking about the SDB bosses and a few hardliners in the government. That’s all it would take. To answer your question: Hell yes they would. A chance to put the whole region back under Belgrade’s thumb? They wouldn’t hesitate.”

  Sylvia said, “Walt, if you’re right about this, we’ve got the worst damned coincidence in history. Svetic is trying to get his hands on the deadliest biological weapon the world has ever seen, Litzman is trying to pin a bloodbath on him, and neither one knows what the other is up to.”

  Oaken gave a shrug. “Timing is everything. There is good news, however.”

  “Please,” said Coates.

  “The Aurasina isn’t scheduled to leave until tomorrow morning. We’ve got time.”

  “Thank God for that,” Sylvia said, then turned to Coates. “Get the State Department on the phone. We need to alert the delegate countries—”

  “One last thing,” Oaken interrupted.

  “What?”

  “After I heard Root’s story about his grandfather’s patrol, the bunker, finding Kestrel … I got curious, so I did a little research. I wanted to find out what happened to the rest of the original Dark Watch members after they split up.

  “The Hungarian, Frenec, was killed in action during World War Two; Pappas, the Greek, died of cancer in Athens in 1955; the Frenchman, Villejohn, died of influenza in 1918 at Camp Funston in Kansas.”

  Barber said, “Walt, that’s interesting, but—”

  Dutcher held up a hand, silencing him. He leaned forward, his eyes narrowed. “Go on, Walt.”

  “Villejohn was the team’s medic. He’d been transferred to Funston to train U.S. Army medics heading over to France.” Oaken looked from Sylvia, to Coates, to Barber. “Funston was part of Fort Riley. Do those names ring a bell?”

  Sylvia shook her head. “No, should they?”

  “Maybe not. The influenza epidemic of 1918 killed anywhere between forty and sixty million people. Somewhere along the line it got named the ‘Spanish Flu.’ The name is misleading. It didn’t originate in Spain, but most likely came from a waterfowl virus in China. The second wave of the epidemic—the one that went back to Europe with American replacement troops then went on to kill another twenty million people—started here. Most historians agree about where exactly it started: the base hospital in Camp Funston.”

  “Good Christ,” said Coates.

  Sylvia said, “Say it Walt.”

  Oaken nodded. “I think there’s a good chance Villejohn got infected with Kestrel while he was in that bunker, then brought it to the U.S. with him. I think Kestrel may have been the cause for the second wave of the Spanish Flu.”

  Trieste

  Five thousand miles away, the weather was about to erase whatever extra time on which Oaken and the others were counting.

  On the Aurasina’s bridge, her captain, Ettore Bartoli, was sitting in his chair sifting through predeparture reports when his first officer trotted up the ladder well and walked over. “Captain, a bulletin from NAVTEX,” he said, referring to the primary weather reporting station for the Gulf of Venice and the Adriatic coast.

  Bartoli took the report and scanned it. He frowned. “The devil’s come to call,” he murmured.

  An old hand at Adriatic sailing, Bartoli knew well the vagaries of local weather. While generally predictable in spring and early summer, there were occasions when Mother Nature tried to fool you. This was one of those times.

  The bulletin warned of something Bartoli had seen only four times in his twenty-year career. In the Adriatic, cold and dry northeasterly winds known as bora sweep down from the Dinaric Alps, blow through Croatia and then out to sea, producing abrupt squalls. Conversely, the jugo is a warm, humid southeast wind that boils its way north up the Adriatic, producing dense clouds and heavy rains. If these were the only conditions, Bartoli wouldn’t have been concerned. The bora and jugo often cancel one another out, leaving the sea lanes clear, if slightly choppy. It was the last paragraph of the bulletin that worried him.

  The wind was called nevera. Born in the Apennine Mountains of Italy, the nevera sweeps with sudden and violent force down the foothills and over the coast, where it turns south into the heart of the Adriatic, trailing rain, vortex winds, and lightning in its wake.

  Alone or in pairs such conditions were common, Bartoli knew. Combined, they were treacherous enough to endanger the sea lanes from the Istrian Peninsula in the north to Dubrovnik in the south.

  The first officer said, “Shall we cancel tomorrow’s run?”

  Bartoli gave him a sharp glance. He’d been the Aurasina’s master for five years and had been making the Trieste to Durres run for eight. In that time he’d never missed a ran and had never been more than a few minutes off schedule. “Cancel? My god, son, where have you been?”

  Bartoli got up and walked over to the chart table. Using a grease pencil he plotted the patterns NAVTEX was predicting, then, using a compass and dividers, sketched in the Aurasina’s course. He grabbed a nearby calculator and began punching numbers, mumbling to himself and scribbling notes.

  Finally he straightened and squinted at the chart.

  “Well?” said the first officer.

  “We can make it safely if we leave early. We’ll get ahead of the nevera and be in Durres by the time it gets there. Call the harbormaster and inform him I’m pushing up our departure to midnight, then do the same for the radio and television stations, the tourist bureau, and the major hotels. We’ll begin boarding passengers at ten.”

  “We have the conference delegates, too.”

  “Yes, yes. I’ll contact their hotel myself. They’ll be angry I interrupted their drinking, but it’s better than being stuck in Trieste for another week.” Bartoli clapped his first officer on the shoulder. “Get moving, boy! We have a storm to beat!”

  42

  Neumvield See

  The beam from Tanner’s headlamp cut away only a few feet of blackness around him.

  Head down, he pulled himself hand-over-hand along the rope like an inverted climber. The water was surprisingly crystalline, with only the barest trace of debris swirling in his light. With each passing foot, the temperature seemed to drop a few degrees. The icy water seeped through the edge of his hood and into the cuffs around his wrists.

  The chill was only half his problem, he quickly realized. As he passed the twenty-foot mark he felt the first draw of the undertow. With each tug downward the sensation increased, a suction pulling him toward the center of the lake. He tightened his grip on the rope and kept going. He glanced at his depth gauge: 30 feet. Halfway there.

  And then he was tumbling. His legs were jerked downward by the suction. The line bowed under the strain. One of his hands slipped off the rope. As though caught in a wind tunnel, the rope was whipped into the current. The rush of water filled his ears. He could feel the slipstream tearing at his mask. He set his jaw against
the strain, dragged his arm up, latched onto the rope, and pulled himself to it.

  There’s your answer, Tanner thought. The skeptic in him had been wondering about Horgan’s story about Neumvield See’s deadly undertow, and how much was myth, an embroidery for the Geist Zug legend. None, it seemed. He’d assumed otherwise and it had almost gotten him killed. He idly wondered if that’s what had happened to the diving teams before him.

  He took a few calming breaths, then tightened his grip, drew his legs to his chest, and wrapped his ankles around the rope. Careful to keep both hands on the line, he started downward again. Eyes alternating between the blackness ahead and his depth gauge, he caterpillar crawled past the forty-foot mark, then the fifty. He strained his eyes, trying to pick out shapes. Where are you … ?

  In the beam of his headlamp Tanner saw the dull glint of glass. Then it was gone. He shimmied forward another foot. A window swam into view, it’s pane half-shattered, the remaining glass tarnished with algae. The rope disappeared through the opening.

  Drawing closer, Briggs noticed a shape behind the glass. Slim and white, it swayed with the current like a tendril of sea grass. He reached out, grabbed the window frame, and pulled himself closer. He froze, panic rising in his throat.

  It was a human arm. Shriveled and fish-belly white, it was otherwise intact, the flesh having been preserved by the icy water. The fingers were tightened into a claw, and Tanner found himself projecting his own fear onto the gesture, imagining it as the victim’s final and desperate grasp at the window as the train rolled in the lake.

  He poked his head through the window. Below him the aim trailed into darkness and was lost in a jumble of debris. Tanner wriggled through the window and slipped inside. Here the suction of the undertow was less, but still he could feel it sucking at him, surging through the car and rushing out the shattered windows.

  As Jurgen had described it, the train was sitting upright, with only a slight list, as though resting on unseen tracks. In contrast, the car’s interior was a shambles. Seats, torn from the moorings during the crash, lay strewn about. Warped from either age or from the rollover, wooden floorboards jutted into the compartment at all angles. Here and there he could see mummified legs or arms or torsos jutting from under the wreckage.

  Ahead, the rope trailed into the darkness. He began pulling himself along, until he reached the vestibule door, where he found the rope knotted around a support column. Here, too, he found another sign that someone had passed this way before: a smudged handprint on the vestibule’s glass door. Briggs felt his heart pounding. Getting close. He squeezed through into the next car.

  Here the scene was nearly identical to that of the first car: jumbled wreckage and mummified body parts, ghostly white in the darkness. Algae whorled in the beam from his headlamp. To his right, a piece of seat fabric, snagged on a shard of glass, fluttered in the window like a pennant.

  Tanner swam into the vestibule, which veered left, then right again into the next passageway. This one was a sleeper car, with individual staterooms running down the left side; opposite them lay the car’s outer wall—or what was left of it. It was as though a giant, clawed hand had ripped open the side of the train. Jurgen had said the train had grazed the hillside before plunging into the lake. Could this be where it happened?

  Tanner leaned into the surge, clutched the rope with both hands, and began pulling himself forward.

  The rope continued for another twenty feet then turned sharply through a cabin door. Briggs drew himself even with the threshold. On the wall beside it was a brass plaque. Tanner used his thumb to wipe away the grime until the cabin number, emerged: 7C. If Oaken’s research was correct, this was the cabin. Briggs braced his feet against the doorjamb and pushed through.

  To his right, against the wall, were a pair of tiered bunks. Lying faceup on the floor was a body. Like the rest of the remains he’d encountered, this one was mummified, its pasty flesh shriveled to the bones beneath. A gold watch chain and fob shimmered dully against the belly skin.

  Istvan, Tanner realized. My god. What had gone through the man’s mind in those final seconds? Had he regretted his decision to take Kestrel? Briggs felt sure of it. This must have felt like a curse, punishment for breaking the pact his grandfather had sworn so many years before.

  Tanner grabbed the bunk’s railing and pulled himself toward the body. Istvan’s right forearm and hand lay under the bunk. Briggs reached forward and gently slid the arm outward. Wrapped around Istvan’s wrist was black plastic cable; patches of it had been scraped away, revealing steel beneath. Briggs grasped the cable and gave it a gentle tug.

  From beneath the bunk something scraped against the floorboards.

  Briggs snaked his arm under the bunk, fingers groping along the cable until he touched something solid. Curved, plastic … A handle. Moving with exaggerated slowness, he grasped the handle and began pulling. After a few seconds, the edge of a stainless-steel case appeared.

  Heart in his throat, Tanner wriggled the case from side to side until it slid from under the bunk. It was slightly dented but looked otherwise undamaged. The latches were sprung. He opened the lid.

  Like Root’s case from the bank, this one was lined with what had once been foam, now black and fuzzy with mildew. Also like Root’s case, into the foam had been cut two cylindrically shaped notches. They were empty.

  With little Oxygen left, Tanner had no time for disappointment. Using the ropes, he finned back through the train out the window, and headed for the surface. Ten feet beneath the surface he felt the first hollow hiss from his regulator. He spit out the mouthpiece and broke into the air.

  How long? Briggs thought. How much of a headstart did Svetic have, and where was he? The truth was, it was probably already too late. Having won his prize, Svetic would go to ground. But where? Bosnia? Somewhere else? He could be anywhere.

  Tanner stroked to the platform, pulled himself up, then shrugged off his tank and removed his fins. It was fully dark now, the sky black and clear; stars glittered overhead. He checked his watch: almost eight o’clock.

  The red message light on his sat phone was blinking. He picked it up and scrolled through the display. There were two messages. The first one—simply “Urgent, call me” from Cahil—came in a few minutes after he went into the water. The second one was from Susanna:

  “Briggs, it’s me. Where are you? We’re leaving; he just told me. I don’t know what’s happened, but something’s changed. They’re in a hurry. I don’t know where we’re—”

  Suddenly in the background Tanner heard a male voice—graveled with a German accent: “What are you doing? Who are you talking to?” There were a series of thumps, followed by a sharp flesh-on-flesh crack. Susanna screamed.

  The phone went dead.

  43

  Tanner laid the phone aside, stared dumbly at it a moment, then leaned his head back and gulped air. Susanna ... What did it mean? Was Litzman on to her, or in his hurry to leave had he simply been rough with her? He prayed it was the latter. If not, Susanna was already dead.

  Dammit, dammit, dammit … He should have been there; should’ve pulled her out and sent her home. Kestrel was gone, Susanna was gone … Briggs felt things closing in around him. He felt trapped, powerless.

  Beside him, the phone was still blinking. He grabbed it and dialed Cahil, who answered immediately: “Where are you?”

  “Neumvield See. They’re gone.”

  “I figured as much. I think I know where they are.”

  “Explain.”

  Cahil recounted his movements after they parted ways in Innsbruck. Upon arriving in Trieste he went straight to the Piazetta dead drop. Inside was a note from Susanna: “Overheard L; Svetic here, staying Hotel Abbazia; L men watching, expecting Svetic departure.” Cahil penned a response, then left a chalk mark on the pillar along Rive Tralana.

  “From there I went straight to the Abbazia. She was right: Svetic’s there with two of his men.
Not for long, though.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s a storm brewing here, a bad one judging by the commotion. I trailed them a bit; they ate, did some shopping, then took a taxi to the harbor and booked three tickets on a ferry called the Aurasina. It was scheduled to leave tomorrow morning, but they’ve pushed the departure ahead to midnight.”

  “Trying to outrun the storm,” Tanner said. Svetic’s choice of transportation made sense, he decided. Svetic wouldn’t dare risk Kestrel at a border crossing or an airport checkpoint. Ports had always been and always would be the first choice of smugglers. “Where’s it headed?”

  “Zadar, Sibenek, Split—”

  “That’s how he’s getting home.” Any one of those ports would put Svetic within fifty miles of the Bosnian border and well within reach of whatever help he needed to make a covert crossing.

  “My thought exactly,” Cahil replied. “You remember the description of Svetic we pulled out of Grebo?”

  “Yes.”

  “He wasn’t lying; it was right on the money. Problem is, Risto Svetic isn’t Risto Svetic.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “Svetic may be his real name, but he goes by something different: Trpkova.”

  “That can’t be, Bear.”

  “I was standing five feet from him. It’s him.”

  In the early and mid-nineties Risto Trpkova was the commander of an ATU, or antiterrorist unit within the Kaznjenicka Bojna, or KB, a Bosnian paramilitary group known better by its later nickname, the Convict’s Battalion. Following the disintegration of Yugoslavia, waves of Serbian-backed anti-Muslim violence erupted in Bosnia. To combat this, the Bosnian government organized and dispatched the KB to protect heavily populated Muslim areas. Of all the parties involved, Bosnia alone wanted to maintain the diverse ethnicity of its country, so it recruited into the KB soldiers of all cultural and religious identities, from Eastern Orthodox, to Muslim, to Roman Catholic. Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats served alongside Kosovoans, Macedonians, and Montenegrins. For several years the KB was effective, protecting Muslim enclaves from Serbian attack, intercepting Serbian weapons convoys, and gathering evidence of mass murders and concentration camp atrocities.