Echo of War

52

Tanner’s aim had been true, and for that he was both grateful and saddened — grateful that Anton Svetic had not suffered; sad that he’d let it happen at all. Had he not let down his guard, he might have been able to reach Svetic in time.

Tanner found both canisters of Kestrel still in their case, sealed and undamaged.

Lining the walls of the cabin were thousands upon thousands of journal pages and newspaper clippings. Svetic, whom Tanner would later learn was ninety-eight years old, had meticulously documented his life following WWI, as well as the madness that had slowly enveloped him.

Exploited and betrayed and carved up like so much slaughterhouse beef by the allies in both world wars, abandoned by Russia when the wall came down, and left to the savagery of Serbs by an uncaring modern world, the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina were owed retribution, Svetic had decided.

How exactly he’d planned to use Kestrel, the journals never said. Tanner suspected the awful reality of what Kestrel was and the devastation it might cause had never occurred to Svetic’s shattered psyche. Kestrel had become his Holy Grail, the panacea that would make the world right again, and he’d charged his grandson, the last of the Svetic family, with finding it and brining it home.

After leaving the Aurasin, Cahil and Susanna were taken to Mali Losinj, where they were transferred to a helicopter and flown to Rijeka’s main hospital. Aside from shattering Cahil’s collarbone and rupturing the surrounding muscles, Trpkova’s bullet had done surprisingly little damage. Three days after entering the hospital, Cahil was released.

Susanna’s wound was grave. By the time she reached Rijeka she had lost over half her blood volume and slipped into a coma. The AK’s bullet had entered her lower abdomen and then tumbled, slicing into her bladder, stomach, and colon before blasting out her lower back. Four days after surgery, she regained consciousness. The first person she saw was her father, Gillman Vetsch, sitting at her bedside.

Of the 836 passengers and crew aboard the Aurasina, twenty-two lost their lives.

Surprising no one, Sylvia Albrecht kept her word about making sure Kestrel was destroyed, taking her case straight to the president, who signed the order as she stood beside his desk.

Led by an Army colonel, the head of the Infectious Disease Containment Area, Tanner, Cahil, Joe McBride, Collin Oliver, and Jonathan Root walked into the control booth. A lone technician sat at a horseshoe-shaped bank of controls before a triple-paned Plexiglas window. As the door closed behind them, Tanner heard a hiss as the room was sealed and negatively pressurized. Chilled air began blowing through stainless-steel grates set into the floors. The air was thick with the tang of chlorine and disinfectant.

On the other side of the window stood what the colonel had called a group 4 pathogen disposal system. Burning at three thousand degrees, he explained, the incinerator utterly destroyed whatever entered its doors. “No ash, no residue, no trace,” he’d said. “You put a Buick in there and even its tire tracks disappear.”

Through a porthole in the unit’s side Tanner could see flickering white flames.

A series of green lights blinked across the technician’s console. He turned and said, “We’re ready. Burners show hot, all outlets closed.”

The IDCA chief leaned down and pressed a button. In the incinerator’s antechamber a green light appeared over a door, the door slid open. Wheeling a cart before them, a pair of technicians in yellow biohazard suits entered the antechamber. On the cart sat a Plexiglas case containing the six original canisters of Kestrel. Moving with exaggerated slowness, the technicians lifted the case and placed it on the conveyor belt.

They gave a thumbs-up through the window, then backed out of the antechamber. The door slid shut. The light blinked red. The technician pushed a button on the console. The conveyor belt rolled forward a few feet and then stopped.

The colonel turned to Jonathan Root. “Care to do the honors, Mr. Root?”

“Pardon me?”

The colonel nodded at a white light on the console. “That button. The incinerator will do the rest.”

Root stared at the button for a moment, then looked at Tanner and the others. “Strange, isn’t it?” he said. “You’d think it would be easy. Now that the time’s here … it seems unreal.”

Briggs smiled. “Think of it as your retirement from the Dark Watch,” he said. “You’re the last one alive. It’s only fitting you see it through to the end.”

Root considered this, then nodded. “You’re right. Time to be done with it.”

He reached down and pressed the button.