God of War

by Jeff Rovin

  Raeburn took the sailor’s wrist and adjusted the flashlight so he could see inside. The acid had eaten through two of the six containers.

  The people who had been here would not have seen that. Obviously and illegally looking for evidence of gem deposits, they had hand-drilled three holes in the roof of the well. He could see, in the light—as they surely did—faint traces of what looked like diamond dust. The person or persons had used acid to eat away the rock below them simply so they could fit their tools to drill up. They did not realize what they were releasing as the acid continued to burn down.

  These were not careful geologists, Raeburn thought bitterly. They were poachers in a hurry.

  Tragically, the recent visitors had drilled here for the same reason Raeburn had buried the bug here. The rocks afforded footing and the environment made it unlikely that anyone would come nosing around.

  He did not know who was more reprehensible: himself or the pirates who had done this.

  Accessing the containers from here would be difficult, especially in the time they had before the tides returned. They were going to have to chop through the rock near the waterline.

  He indicated as much to the man standing beside him. The leader was watching and shook his head. He ordered the others back to the patrol boat. Raeburn hesitated as he looked up on deck, shielding his eyes from the bright spotlights. He saw two seamen on deck, each with a CQ 5.56 assault rifle.

  They were going to shoot the wall away.

  “No!” Raeburn shouted into his face mask. “You may damage one of the other containers, release more—”

  “Tíngzhǐ!”

  Raeburn heard the leader’s muted shout, saw his arm sweep angrily toward the patrol boat. He did not have to know the meaning to recognize he was being told to go back. To make the point, the leader withdrew his pistol.

  The lieutenant colonel steadied himself on the wall to turn around, and did as he had been ordered. The man with the hatchet followed and the leader came after. When they were all back on deck, the two armed men listened to shouted directions from the man who had looked into the opening with Raeburn. He pointed and they nodded.

  With the three men standing behind them, still tied, the sailors opened fire on the stone wall. Bullets and shards of stone pinged and ricocheted in all directions, sparks lighting the sky beyond the rocking cones of light. Raeburn watched carefully as the rock was picked apart, chewed up around the edges of the area with the container. As they continued firing, larger pieces of wall fell away. More and more of the concrete case was revealed; the way the lights were rolling with the flow of the ocean, the shifting shadows made the container seem to be breathing … alive.

  Suddenly, the fusillade came to an abrupt stop as one of the lights went out. In the moment of silence, a single shot broke from above and shattered the other light.

  The five men on deck stood very still in darkness that had suddenly become their enemy.

  * * *

  Commander Eugène van Tonder had not been able to reach anyone by radio for several hours. He did not expect to be able to talk to Simon but he had heard nothing from the outpost, either. Nor were they answering.

  Equally puzzling, what was apparently the helicopter from the mainland had flown directly over—then continued on to Marion, without stopping. There was no way they could have missed the downed helicopter. Despite the drain on the batteries, he had kept the navigation lights on so the AH-2 would be seen.

  It was perplexing and van Tonder wondered if Simon knew more than he did about the toxicity of whatever was out here. Perhaps Sisula had been evacuated. The commander would not necessarily have seen or heard the helicopter if it refueled and took off from the eastern side of Marion.

  There was nothing to do but sit there with the mask on as Lieutenant Mabuza slept. An explanation would come—eventually. One of the many things van Tonder had learned in the navy was that it took its own time doing things, a pace that left no seaman content.

  Van Tonder was forced to run the heater from time to time, and managed to sleep a little between. Waking up from the cold, he happened to notice the faintest glow from somewhere below the northern ledge. It was not long after midnight and the lights were only there a short while, but he had bundled himself as tight as possible against the wind—which included stuffing his gloves against his chest and shoving his hands in his deep pockets—and had gone out to investigate. He knew the terrain well enough from twice-daily patrols to know where the cliff ended.

  Reaching the ledge, he looked down and saw what resembled a ship anchored and sloshing nearby. The lights were off, and he couldn’t be sure. Nor did he study it for very long. Off to the east, maybe a mile and a half, he saw lights that seemed to describe a shape he had studied and knew well, the silhouette of Chinese corvette.

  Van Tonder was patriotically indignant and personally vengeful. These people had endangered the life of his comrade. The commander understood why the helicopter had not landed—and, most likely, why the outpost had gone silent.

  He went back to the helicopter to wait for daylight. There was nothing else to do, except to make sure his firearms were in good working order.

  When he heard the shots droning below, he got out again—this time with the clunky but powerful machine gun. That was the spot where he and Mabuza had been headed. He understood too, now, exactly what the Chinese were doing down there. They were trying to get at whatever this was.

  That wasn’t going to happen.

  The men were some two hundred feet below. He did not aim the M1919 Browning at the men but at their lights. The lamps exploded in turn and he dropped flat on his belly, his head back from the ledge. He expected the men to return fire.

  They did not.

  Either the Chinese Navy is suddenly afraid of the SAN or they are close to their goal and don’t want to be distracted, he thought. The latter, almost certainly.

  He edged forward and looked down.

  Working by flashlight now—which was protected by the back of one of the men so van Tonder could not shoot at it—three men were kneeling and huddled close around the gunned-out section of the wall of Ship Rock. One man appeared to be reaching into the wall while another was standing by the ladder of the rocking boat. He was handed what looked like a cooler, the kind used for organ transplants. Van Tonder could not be sure in the dull light.

  He considered the situation carefully.

  They are military trespassers. Are they invaders? What happens if I cut them down? Does the corvette open fire?

  Still lying flat on the cold rock, he trained his gun on the rear of the vessel, where the fuel tanks were located. If he could perforate those, the patrol boat would not be going anywhere.

  He fired again.

  He saw the distant sparks of the bullets as they met the hull. It was impossible to tell what damage he might have caused. He would only know by the reactions of the crew.

  This time the Chinese on deck fired—lower than the ledge, not at him. They drove him back, which was apparently all they wanted.

  He wished he could offload Mabuza and drive the damn helicopter over the cliff onto the stern to stop them from leaving.

  Van Tonder heard shouting from below. Something had happened but he could not be sure whether it was his doing or something at the wall. He edged ahead even slower than before.

  The shouts were from the wall. The light was playing every which way and it was like trying to see terrain by flashes of lightning. But what he saw—what he thought he saw—was a nightmare made real.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  East London, South Africa

  November 12, 5:05 A.M.

  Katinka Kettle overslept.

  She did not feel rested as the sun crawled over the sill and caused her to stir. It had not only been an exhausting night but a tiring week. She was not accustomed to such long sea voyages, nor the savagely cold, unwelcoming shores of Prince Edward.

  Unrested or not, it was time to get up, tim
e to get back to MEASE and figure out what they should do with her find. She turned on her fully charged phone and washed her face. She regretted that there wasn’t time to do her hair; it would take more than one washing to get the smell and fluff of seawater and the clinging odor of the burning Teri Wheel out of it.

  Returning to her nightstand, she ignored her phone inbox, noted that there were eleven calls from Foster, which she would look at as soon as she checked the news. She wanted to see if there was any mention of the explosion of the yacht. If not, she would dig a little deeper on the Web site of the South African Navy Maritime Forces—

  “What?”

  The headline grabbed her eyes and throat in equal measure. The news—the only news—was about a mysterious attack on Batting Bridge and the possible relationship it might have with the downing of the South African jetliner.

  It took a moment for her to find her voice again.

  “How could it have randomly showed up there?”

  That word did not sit well. It made no sense. Had the pathogen floated in from the Teri Wheel, made its way up the Nahoon, skipped all the homes and businesses on the riverbanks, and then happened to run into Batting Bridge?

  It was flatly not possible. Not as possible as—

  “Someone releasing it,” she said quietly. She tried to dismiss the thought with a shake of her head. “No. God Almighty and Jesus—tell me he’s not desperate enough.”

  But the idea clung.

  Breathing hard and wishing she had not given up smoking, Katinka braced herself as she read the full story on the South African news service. There had been an anonymous phone call placed with the East London police, warning of an attack. She jumped to News24 and then to the BBC. They all had the same information, the same call transcript along with a few fuzzy security camera photos of crashed cars, the descending helicopter, and then the destroyed bridge. There were also shots of teams in hazmat suits making their way through the ruins piled jaggedly, haphazardly on the water. A pool reporter had provided the latter images since access was restricted.

  Katinka’s mouth was dry and her eyes were damp.

  “Yes,” she said. She had been intending to find a way to monetize the bug.

  “But by selling it, not by releasing it!”

  She sat heavily on the bed, her hands limp on her lap, the phone plopping to the carpet. Katinka knew Foster to be greedy, and after all these years she knew, or thought she knew, his demons. He hated the diamond cartel. He hated the authorities who enabled the monopolies. But, God, he did not hate people. Did he put those two on a scale and have innocent South Africans come up short?

  “That has to be it. It has to.”

  She wept. She had not foreseen anything like this! She hoped there was another, a less personally horrendous explanation. Another player, someone who found the toxin in the wreckage of the plane.

  “Megalomaniacal,” she muttered, sensing the truth. Foster could be that. “God forgive me, what power did I hand to him?”

  She considered, for the briefest moment, that someone else at MEASE may have taken the sample and released it. Another employee, perhaps. Eavesdropping. A mistress, of which Foster had several, hiding when Katinka arrived unexpectedly.

  “What does that matter?” she asked. This was done and she’d made it possible. She had to figure out what to do next. Because Foster—or whoever—still had another sample.

  She wondered if she should go to the authorities with hers, give them a chance to study it?

  “No, they’ll have samples aplenty when they pull bodies from the river,” she said. “But if they ever figure out that I’m part of this, and I’m arrested—cooperation may save me.”

  Or doom her. How many times had she seen members of Foster’s wide circle of mercenaries and associates arrested on minor charges and given maximum sentences to serve as an object lesson.

  And then something terribly urgent occurred to her. He might send someone to keep her from doing just what she was thinking.

  “No,” she thought aloud. “It will take time. His most efficient mercenaries died on the Teri Wheel.”

  But there were other men and women, arms dealers who also hired those soldiers-for-hire. They would have more, especially Nicus Dumisa in Swaziland. He recruited from the African tribal death squads where there was an endless supply of killers.

  She might be able to get away, to think. She would take the sample. There was no choice: if Foster did come by at some point and find the canister, he would know she had her own scheme in mind. That was as good as a death warrant.

  Maybe she could disappear, find a way to sell it in a way that did not get back to Foster.

  “Go,” she told herself. “Now.”

  Katinka dressed quickly, in a sweatshirt and slacks. Then she grabbed a few items and threw them in a bag. Foster would know that she had run, but he would—no, might—presume it was out of fear of being attached to this monstrous act.

  As she stood at the foot of the bed amidst a riot of clothes, personal devices, and an empty canvas grip to put them in, the doorbell rang. Katinka shot from the bed and stood there. The woman did not socialize with many people and her neighbors not at all. They never came by.

  The bell was followed by a firm knock.

  She collected herself, looked around for her phone, saw it beside her old Adidas. She picked it up, unplugged it, and walked numbly, stupidly from the bedroom.

  “Coming!” she said.

  Katinka paused by a window that overlooked the front walk. She did not draw back the sheer polyester curtain but leaned near to the wall and peeked under it.

  She felt sick all over again.

  It was the police.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Prince Edward Island, South Africa

  November 12, 5:20 A.M.

  With the sea roaring in his head and the engine of the boat making strange, ripping sounds like metal on metal, Lieutenant Colonel Gray Raeburn worked on in the near-darkness. There was nothing else to do. The tone of the Chinese leader had been urgent, insistent. That, and the other man had redoubled his efforts to get through the lower section of wall.

  Raeburn had been helping to pull chunks of rock from the opening. He had just dropped a two-handed chunk into the sea, a greedy mass that seemed to anger the sea. Simultaneously, the wall beneath that slab crumbled inward and the sea rose up in seeming disapproval. There was a moment when the risen sea and the collapsing wall seemed frozen. Then the water smashed high and mighty and the wall collapsed and the hatchet seaman fell with it. The man fell forward and down, his mask smashing against the concrete. His lifeline pulled both the doctor and the other Chinese sailor forward. The two men slammed against the edges of the opening, both hoping the sides did not give way. Even as they struck and were pulled toward the gaping chasm, they were grasping for knobs of rock, for handholds. At least the weight of the man was not a drag: the lifeline went a little slack after the man hit the lid.

  Somehow, the leader had retained the flashlight as he skidded forward. Upon regaining his footing and pushing from the wall as far as the rope would allow him, he shined it into the opening.

  His comrade was in the process of dying. Raeburn knew it and the leader apparently did as well; he made no effort to pull the man up by the rope. The leader seemed afraid to move lest he disturb the wall and end up beside the other man.

  So they watched.

  It was a grotesque thing, this death. The man pushed up and then his back began to jerk. He remained in that position for a moment, his body quivering and finally giving out, dropping him back to his chest. His back continued to rattle.

  The coughing, Raeburn thought with awful certainty.

  Then the man’s left knee pulled up as though his bowels were in agony.

  They are. They’re coming apart.

  A few moments later and the seaman was flopping like a fish, his head jerking this way and that, his fingers digging frantically at the concrete below him. Then
there was blood, fat wedges of it pouring from the mask before mingling into a thick pool and spreading. Some of it oozed over the sides of the container, some found the acid-drilled holes and seeped down.

  The Exodus bug has its blood.

  There were twitches and jerks as the body surrendered the bulk of its liquefying organs. The scientist in Raeburn was fascinated even as the man himself was aghast. This bacterium had not only survived these many years but the action was inexplicably fast. As the father of these things, he wanted to know why.

  You need to know why if you’re going to find a way to stop them.

  When the seaman stopped moving, Raeburn was willing to bet there was more of his nonskeletal mass on the outside than there was in the deflated husk that remained.

  He was soon to find out. When the dead man was still, when pockets of organs were no longer erupting, the Chinese leader turned to the others and shouted something. The men were just dark shadows against the slowly reddening sky. They had been watching the cliff, guns raised, and could not see into the opening in any case. Now the crew left to do whatever the leader had bidden.

  Holding the flashlight in one hand, the Chinese sailor gingerly stepped away from the wall to the extent that the taut rope permitted. He jerked the flashlight to and fro, at the wall, away from the wall. Raeburn understood. He, too, stepped back to the length of the rope.

  The seaman gripped the brittle, half-frozen rope with his free hand, shined the light on himself, indicating for Raeburn to do the same.

  Of course, the doctor thought.

  The poor bastard below had made this easy.

  Flexing his knees allowed Raeburn to put more weight directly on his feet. That gave him some purchase on the slime below his rubber soles. The leader did the same, then nodded once. They did not pull the man up. Slowly, arduously, carefully, they stepped back. The rope scraped the lower lip of the opening precipitously but there was no way around that. Pieces fell off but the rope continued to be withdrawn. In a minute the body came into view.