Echo of War (35 page)
“You killed him, didn't you?” the man said. “You killed Risto.”
“Anton Svetic â¦,” Tanner whispered.
“What?”
“You're Anton Svetic.”
“Yes, dammit, I'm Anton. Who are you? Where's Risto? Risto!”
“I'm sorry,” Tanner said.
“You killed him.”
“I didn't have a choice. Iâ”
“Get out! Go away!” Anton Svetic began weeping. He dropped his head into his hands. His shoulders started shaking.
Tanner felt the room spinning around him. As though in a trance, he let his eyes wander. He remembered the briefcase, walked to it. As he touched the lid, Svetic's head snapped up.
“Don't touch that! That's not yours! It belongs to me.”
Tanner shook his head. “You should have left it alone.”
Tanner laid the M4 on the table. Using both thumbs, he slid open the case's latches.
“I told you to leave that alone!” Svetic roared.
In his peripheral vision Tanner saw the red blanket sliding from Svetic's legs. He glanced up. Draped across Svetic's lap was a sawed-off shotgun. He lifted it in his bony hands and began swiveling it toward Tanner.
“Damn you, leave that alone!”
Tanner measured the distance to Svetic and instantly knew he wouldn't be able to cross the gap in time. He looked left; the door was too far. He snatched the M4 off the table, jerked it to his shoulder. Svetic was moving surprisingly fast now, bringing the shotgun level with Tanner's chest.
“Don't!” Tanner shouted.
Hand trembling, Svetic reached up and jerked back the shotgun's hammers.
“Put it down, put it down!”
Svetic kept turning, the shotgun's black-mouthed barrels rising â¦
Tanner fired.
Four weeks later
Tanner's aim had been true, and for that he was both grateful and saddenedâgrateful 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.
U.S.
Army Special Weapons Agency,
Kalama Atoll,
Pacific Ocean
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.
Jonathon and his team at The Lazear Agency Tom Colgan and all the good people at Penguin. Rhon for his creative hard work Dr. David Waagner for his expertise The real Joe for being such a character.
To Pam Ahearn of the The Ahearn Agency and Dan Conaway and the team at Writers House Literary Agency. I wouldn't be here without you.
Tom Colgan, my editor at Penguin Putnam Inc./Berkley. You, too, were worth the wait. A finer editorial deity does not exist
To the gang at Diversion Books. New partners, new horizons.
To Asha of Asha Hossein Design for her fantastic cover art. You're a pro, Asha.
#1 New York Times bestselling author Grant Blackwood introduces Briggs Tanner in a trilogy that Clive Cussler raves is “Pure fun, pure adventure.”
One Man.
Covert agent Briggs Tanner doesn't like coincidences. In his business, they always mean trouble. So when a man is professionally assassinated right in front of him, Tanner wants answers.
One Mission.
Who pulled the trigger and why? And what is the mystery behind the key the man clutched in his dying handâthe key that Tanner now possesses?
One War Without End.
His search will lead him on an international trail, city to city, from the depths of the Pacific Ocean to the bullet-ridden back alleys of Beirut, all the way to a deadly secretâburied since the end of World War IIâthat only Tanner can keep from falling into the wrong hands.
The second installment in the adrenaline-fueled Briggs Tanner trilogy, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author.
Ghosts of the Past.
Twelve years ago, Agent Briggs Tanner snuck into China to help strategic mastermind General Han Soong defect to the West. The escape went perfectly, until, somehow, the secret police interrupted them at the final rendezvous. Tanner barely escaped, but Soong and his family were arrested, and soon thereafter they disappearedâ¦
Threats to the Future.
Now, Soong has resurfaced. He's contacted the CIA with the message that he needs once more to try and escapeâand the only person he trusts is Briggs Tanner. But even as Tanner prepares to confront the chaos of his own past and once again challenge the authority of China's brutal secret police, forces around the globe are watching him, waiting for the moment that will lead the world to the brink of war, and seal Tanner's fate once and for all.
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