“On their way to Doljani, they’d come across an abandoned hospital bunker built years earlier by the Austrians. It was nearby, it was already partially equipped, so the German doctors and surviving Bulgarian soldiers retreated to the bunker. The soldiers were quarantined. The doctors went to work trying to understand what was making them sick, a report was sent back to Graz. The German High Command dispatched yet another team — an engineering company. Over the next month, the bunker was converted into the complex my grandfather found.
“By the time work was finished, all but a few of the Bulgarian soldiers were dead, as were four of the original twenty German doctors. To a man, the entire engineering company was stricken.
“Good Germans that they were, the doctors stayed put and kept working, trying to isolate the illness. Aside from special troops sent by Graz to act as security, no one came to or left the bunker. The bodies piled up. One of the empty artillery magazines was converted into a crematorium.
“Two months after the project began, all of the original soldiers and engineers were long dead, as were half of the doctors. Only two ‘hosts’ remained — both doctors from the original team. The security soldiers started snatching civilians from nearby villages to use as test subjects. The experiments went on.
“Six months later Graz sent a new doctor to oversee the project, a Russian microbiologist named Nikitin who’d emigrated to Germany in 1902. The rumor was that Nikitin had been a rising star under Dimitri Ivanovski, the scientist who discovered the virus. He and Nikitin were the world’s first virologists.
“At that time, scientists didn’t even have the equipment to see something as small as a virus, but using procedures he and Ivanovski had honed, Nikitin determined the cause of the illness was a virus — a particle so small that two hundred million of them can fit on the head of a pin.
“There was a bigger mystery, though. As Nikitin conducted his autopsies, he found multiple causes of death. Some had died from smallpox, others from influenza, a few from pulmonary edema, and even a few from cancer, which wasn’t normally an acute disease.
“Even at his level, Nikitin realized he was out of his depth. He didn’t understand the mechanism behind the virus. Somehow it either coopted the host’s immune system or it bolstered whatever underlying disease already existed. It turned minor colds into fatal infections; it allowed cholera or cancer or tuberculosis to go unchecked in the body; if the patient had a fever, the brain virtually boiled; a minor case of ringworm swarmed the body and ate it away. Whatever the pathology — bacteria, virus, fungus, or parasite — the virus turned it voracious. What a normal immune system could easily fight off became fatal.
“Nikitin named the virus Kestrel. In the Ural Mountains, where he was from, a kestrel is not just a bird of prey, but according to Komi myth, it was also a shape-shifter. Nikitin thought the name fit.
“When Simon came across the bunker, Nikitin and his team had been working for eighteen months to incubate Kestrel. According to their notes, they’d succeeded. In fact, they were getting ready to return to Germany with six petri canisters filled with the virus.
“Simon and his squad leaders made a decision. Clearly they couldn’t let Kestrel fall into German hands, but the question they found themselves facing was, should anyone have it? Though pretty certain they had the only samples of Kestrel, Simon couldn’t be sure. What if the Germans already had some and decided to use it? Would these samples be the only hope for a vaccine? These were intelligent men, but they were lost. How Kestrel worked, what exactly it was, whether it could be stopped or destroyed — all questions they couldn’t answer.
“They made a pact: The four of them would take Kestrel, hide it away, and keep it safe. The concepts of friend, enemy, ally — all of them were irrelevant compared to what Kestrel could do if it got loose. They’d seen atrocities on both sides. Words like honor and mercy had little meaning in modern war. Whom could they trust with Kestrel? Could they be sure the allies would destroy it and not try to keep it? All it would take was a single, shortsighted general or politician to decide a sample should be kept for study.
“There were two things they had to decide before they could leave the bunker: first, what to do with the infected patients and the doctors. The patients were beyond help; half of the thirty had died over the previous two days. Simon wanted to put the rest out of their misery, but he didn’t dare go into the sterile rooms. He made a decision — the toughest one of his life.
“He rounded up Nikitin and his doctors, ordered them into the sterile ward with twenty-three lethal doses of potassium cyanide, then locked the door behind them.
“My grandfather, Pappas, Villejohn, and Frenec watched the end of it. Strangely, the doctors never once pleaded for their lives. They seemed resigned — as if they were glad it was over. Once they’d euthanized the surviving patients, they injected themselves, then sat down together and died.
“That left one final task: to make sure they themselves hadn’t become infected. According to the doctor’s logs, the longest incubation period they’d seen was six days. Simon and the others had been inside the complex for three days.
“So they stayed there, with the dead, watching and waiting for one of them to get sick.
“Frenec, the Hungarian, had a bleak sense of humor. I remember my grandfather telling the story — the four of them sitting around waiting for the barest hint of a sniffle or a cough, knowing it probably meant they were all dead. Frenec said, ‘We’re standing quite the dark watch, aren’t we?’ The name stuck; from then on they referred to themselves as the Dark Watch.
“They waited until three more days had gone by, then another three just to be safe. None of them showed any signs of illness.
“A week after they’d entered the bunker, they gathered the six canisters of Kestrel, sealed the bunker entrance with explosives, and walked out.
“That was 1918,” Root finished. “My father was born three years later, in 1921; when he was twenty-five Simon passed Kestrel on to him. I was born two years later: In 1978, when I was thirty, my father passed it on to me.” Root looked up and studied each man in turn. His face was drawn and gray, as though he’d aged a decade telling the story. “That’s it. That’s what Kestrel is, and that’s what Svetic wants.”
Tanner and the others stared at Root with expressions ranging from shock to skepticism. Finally Tanner leaned back in his chair and exhaled heavily. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I’ve got so many questions I don’t know where to start,” he murmured. “First off, how does Svetic even know about Kestrel? Who is he?”
“You remember my grandfather’s scout I told you about?”
Tanner nodded. “The Herzegovinian boy.”
“That was Anton Svetic — Risto Svetic’s grandfather.”
33
“Hold on,” Tanner replied. “You said the only ones who went down to the hospital level were Simon and his squad leaders.”
“You have to understand,” Root said “Anton adored my grandfather. The boy had lost his entire family to the war — his mother, father, and sisters. Until Simon came along, Anton had been wandering, only half-alive. My grandfather fed him, gave him some clothes and some kindness. From then on he followed Simon everywhere.
“When Simon first realized what they’d found, he called up the ladder and told the rest of the men it was a TB hospital and that they should stay topside until he and the others were sure they hadn’t been infected. That was good enough for the men, but not Anton.