Net Force--Kill Chain Read online

  Net Force: Kill Chain

  A Novella

  Series Created by Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik

  Written by Jerome Preisler

  Author’s Note

  These events occur between Net Force: Attack Protocol and Net Force: Threat Point (coming November 2021).

  For Alice Bean Andrenyak,

  Master Maine Guide

  and

  Alison Faye Johnson and

  Doug Grad, who helped make Bryan, Bryan.

  About the Author

  Jerome Preisler is the prolific author of almost forty books of fiction and narrative nonfiction, including all eight novels in the New York Times bestselling Tom Clancy’s Power Plays series.

  His latest book is Attack Protocol, the second novel in a relaunch of the New York Times bestselling Net Force series cocreated by Tom Clancy and Steve Pieczenik.

  Forthcoming November 2021 is his next Net Force novel, Threat Point.

  Jerome lives in New York City and coastal Maine.

  Colors are the deeds of light, the deeds and sufferings.

  —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  The object of all sciences is to coordinate our experiences and bring them into a logical system.

  —Albert Einstein

  Contents

  Part One: Hard Links

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part Two: Dem Bones

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Part One:

  Hard Links

  Prologue

  Siberian Federal District, Russia

  2007

  The black 4X4 Lada Niva rocked in a strong blast of wind as it labored through the eastern steppes above the Chernavka River. Hunched over the steering wheel, Krupin flipped on his high beams and squinted into the blowing snow. But the Lada’s brights were no match for the near-whiteout conditions. He could barely see the road; its shoulders were soft and indistinct where they existed at all.

  Swearing under his breath, Krupin flicked a glance up at the rearview mirror. Behind him, a slight girl of ten sat bracketed by her tensely paired guardians. With her white hair, pale skin—the palest he had ever seen—and equally pale blue eyes, she almost seemed like a fairy-tale character to him. But while far from on ordinary child, she was very much flesh and blood.

  Krupin frowned and peered back out the windshield. It was hazardous traveling these hills on the clearest of days and pure madness in a snowstorm. With luck this would be a fast-moving squall of the sort that often struck the Chernavka hills. But if it kept up for long, the road would become impassable. With the fir-clad mountain slopes crowding him on the left and a sheer drop into the valley to his right, he saw nowhere to pull over and wait things out.

  Still, orders were orders, and Krupin thought he could avoid that predicament by reaching his destination before sundown. His odometer told him he had already traveled fifty kilometers from Krasnoyarsk, which put him more than halfway to the secret city known only as Uzhur-95...assuming his route information proved accurate.

  He was being admittedly optimistic. Part of a large network of ZATO sites spread across the Russian Federation, the secret city did not appear on public maps and road signs or exist in unclassified records. To anyone sending mail to the isolated people within its walls, it was only a zip code attached to the nearest seat of government. In this case it was Uzhur, a farming town and rail hub to the east.

  A mailbox, many called it. And with good reason. Residents had no available addresses beyond the postal code, and even the numeral following its name was simply a rough distance in kilometers from Uzhur proper.

  Or so it is said, Krupin mused. In their glory days, the suspicious KGB apparatchiks had often randomly changed a ZATO’s numeric value—even its full name—on official maps to confound imagined spies and infiltrators. Things had stayed much the same after the Soviet tent collapsed. No less than their predecessors, the current administrators were conditioned to run in circles like downtrodden old circus bears. For them, paranoia was an inherited reflex.

  Thus, Uzhur-95 was once Uzhur-76, which was also the secret city known as Krasnoyarsk-30. The various alternating labels would confound anyone who tried to find it...including Krupin himself as he attempted to carry out orders and make his special delivery for the Lubyanka FSB.

  What was the punchline to the stale old barroom joke?

  In Russia, map reads you, he recalled.

  He downshifted into first gear as the road turned sharply left. Its cranky transmission knocking hard, the Lada kicked, jolted and lurched toward the snow-covered shoulder. Krupin cut back into his lane and spat more curses through his teeth, directing them at his vehicle, his government, and the weather, in order.

  “I’m sorry about the bumpy ride, kitten,” he said after the diatribe. With the wind blowing outside, he practically needed to shout. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  Natasha Mori squeezed the little Cheburashka doll in her coat pocket, her fingers digging into its soft, hand-sewn fabric. Neither his nervous driving nor the storm outside bothered her at all. She had been through many fierce Russian gales. Dreadful blizzards that tore the rooftops off village homes and brought avalanches rolling down from the hills in great, raging clouds of whiteness.

  No, she did not fear the weather.

  Her destination was another matter.

  She had been assured it was a far better place than the state-run orphanage where she had lived for over two years. A place of marvelous learning and experience, where a chosen few students would learn to be of special and honored service to the Motherland. But while she’d hated every moment at the detdom, she was mindful that it was only a short distance from the village of her birth. Where she had last seen Papa.

  She would never believe the whispers about him. He would not have abandoned her without a word of goodbye. Deep in her heart, she knew Papa would return someday. And she desperately wanted to be there to throw her arms around his neck and hug him close.

  She felt her hand trembling around the doll now and slowly relaxed her grip. Focused on the road ahead, Krupin probably wouldn’t sense her trepidation. But Natasha thought the old woman to her right would...unless she took great care to hide it from her. And even so, Anna was hard to fool. Almost nothing slipped past her watchful eyes.

  “We’re freezing back here, Krupin,” said the thin, dour man seated to her left. “Can’t you do anything about it?”

  Krupin nodded toward his dashboard vents. The woeful heater was clanking away. “It’s already on high,” he said. “This is the best I can manage, ser.”

  The man scowled and crossed his legs under the flaps of his dark, knee-length overcoat. His name was Urban, and Natasha didn’t like him at all. His aloof manner was part of it. But her feelings went deeper than that. The muddy brownish-red colors that clung to him smelled like burning tires. They stung her eyes and nose and left a strong, unpleasant taste in her mouth.

  Still, she would not have argued about the cold. Her lips were stiff, her cheeks almost numb.

  The plump old woman sitting to her right noticed her discomfort, frowned and pulled off her shawl. Thick wool with large tassels at the ends, it had been knitted with an expert hand.

  “You should wear this.” She spoke with a heavy foreign accent, wrapping the shawl around Natasha’s shoulders. “I have more meat on my bones than you.”

  “Danke schön,” Natasha said with genuine gratitude. “Ich fühle mich besser.”

  Anna blinked. She regarded the girl for a long, silent moment. “Ich wusste nicht sie Deutsch sprach?”

  “Deutsche? Ist das was Sie am Telefon sprechen.”

  Anna kept looking at her. Natasha thought she seemed mystified.

  In fact, she was utterly astonished. The child claimed not to know what language she had spoken. And had suggested she picked it up after hearing her talk on the phone.

  It was extraordinary...and a little unsettling. Moscow Center had conferenced with Anna a handful of times since her assignment to the detdom, insisting they speak in her native German to confound potential eavesdroppers. But she had said little within earshot of the girl. Certainly not enough for Natasha to hear more than a smattering of words and phrases.

  Yet she had spoken just now in functional, perfectly grammatical German sentences. Anna could only wonder what sort of left-temporal-lobe development she would need in order to extrapolate that level of fluency from overheard conversations.

  She caught Urban’s inquisitive glance and ignored it. She was neither his friend nor his confidant. It would do no good for Natasha to view them as a unit.

  The 4X4 wound through the mountains for another half mile and then nosed downhill. Anna’s stomach plunged, but the weather immediately began to improve with their descent. Although the vehicle continued to rock in the powerful gusts, the snow around it had lightened and ceased to blow horizontally against the windshield.

  “We’re entering the valley,” Krupin said up-front.
“It shouldn’t be long from here.”

  Bundled in the shawl, Natasha sensed Anna’s relief. She wished she could have felt the same.

  The sun sank below the craggy horizon as Krupin made his slow descent from the hills, taking a straight, narrow road across the valley floor. Outside, the wind snorted and thrashed against the windows like a raging bear. Its unabated ferocity made the Lada’s adult passengers grow tense.

  Natasha sat quietly, facing forward. She saw the countryside shimmering through a haze of fine, powdery snow. Saw the ice-sheathed pine boughs around them glow purple, blue, and gold. The auras flowed together in iridescent waves, shifting and merging and then separating again like fresh watercolors on paper. She had grown up surrounded by the forest and often felt the trees, especially old ones, spoke to each other in colors. Limb to limb, branch to branch, root to root.

  The Lada rumbled along the bottom of the valley. The snowflakes fell in spurts, dancing, swirling, and corkscrewing in the twilight. Their rainbow hues reminded Natasha of butterfly wings as they fluttered to the ground.

  She abruptly thought of her father again. When she first experienced the Glowing, it had confused and upset her. But Papa was always quick to ease her fears. Placing her on his lap, he would rock her and sing in a soft, gentle voice until she grew relaxed.

  Butterfly, butterfly, she flew into the flowers,

  On a white branch she quietly touched down,

  Our little boy, he caught her by the wings

  Then placed her in a glass jar, round...

  “Such a pretty tune.” Anna was smiling at her. “Where you did you learn it?”

  Natasha looked at her, confused. After a second, she realized she’d been humming to herself.

  She straightened up in the seat. The lullaby was all she had left of her father. The only thing that filled her emptiness. She dreaded sharing anything about it. To do that was to risk someone taking it from her.

  “It’s just a song,” she lied. “That’s all.”

  Anna nodded, her eyes on the girl’s face.

  “Songs are wonderful things,” she said. “I wonder what it is called.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh? And if you could give it a name, any name, what would it be? Can you tell me?”

  Natasha’s only response was a shrug. Most of the time, Anna’s kindness seemed real and her colors tasted of peaches. Back at the home, she had shown none of the other case workers’ outright cruelty toward the other boys and girls. But she was also mostly uninvolved with them, indifferent, reserving most of her attention for Natasha.

  She hadn’t quite known how to feel about that. It seemed people had many sides. So many, she thought, they acted like entirely different people in different situations. There had been occasions when Anna’s colors flashed ice blue and left a cold, metallic taste on the back of her tongue. When it seemed as if Anna was studying her, as if she was an animal in the zoo.

  Natasha felt that now. And it angered her.

  “I wouldn’t give it a name,” she said defensively. Because none could be finer than its real one.

  Anna sat regarding her for a long minute. Then she smiled.

  “It’s been a long ride, and I’ve bothered you with one too many questions,” she said. “You must be exhausted.”

  Natasha said nothing. In truth, she felt wide awake.

  The Lada went along at a good clip for a while, then slowed as it approached a fork in the road. Still distressed by Anna’s probing, Natasha turned to look out the windshield. A metal sign at the juncture showed a red circle with a horizontal dash in the middle. Below it on the same post, a separate sign read: Vkhod Ogranichen: 30 km.

  Krupin swung onto the side road.

  “We should see the city wall in minutes,” he said to his passengers.

  Natasha gazed out into the night. She’d already spotted it and guessed it was closer than the distance marked by the road sign. But judging by their silence, the others hadn’t yet discerned its dark shape up ahead.

  That hardly surprised her. She tended to catch sight of things long before anyone else. Especially in the dark, when her eyes were at their sharpest.

  As it turned out, Krupin’s vision was good enough for him to spot the train tracks to their left. But the high orange lights shining down over their metal rails made them difficult to miss. They cut through the snow cover on the ground, running from the valley’s ragged rim in a perpendicular line. A short distance before meeting the road, they swung east toward the wall.

  “The Uzhur Railway,” he said, and gestured. “The city’s main supply line. It can take you from here to Moscow...after six connections, four thousand kilometers, and two days of chugging through these mountains.”

  Natasha gazed out her window. The storm had lulled, and the air around her was suddenly alive with spectral hues. They arced over the treetops, flickered brightly under the hooded rail lights, and darted across the Lada’s front grill like tiny fish underwater.

  And then the wall was close enough for everyone in the vehicle to see it.

  Anna’s chin tilted upward. They were rapidly coming up to the gate. Ahead were sentry booths, warning lights, and boom barriers painted red like the sign back at the road juncture. Three rows of barbed wire were strung atop the wall.

  The sight of it constricted Natasha’s throat. The wall was black and solid and high and threatening. It curved off to the left and right, like part of a huge circle.

  Unwilling to look at it, she returned her gaze to the checkpoint. For the first time since the start of her trip, she felt truly lost and afraid.

  “Is that where they keep the butterflies?” She was surprised by her own words. She couldn’t quite have explained what they meant. It was like someone else had spoken them.

  The old woman gave her arm a gentle pat. There was an odd look in her eyes.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “Everything will be fine.”

  Natasha didn’t think so. Her hand shaking in her pocket, she clutched her hidden doll.

  Anna noted her reaction in silence. The girl was a living validation of Pinnacle. Her measures were singular, approached by those of only the teenager Grigor Malkira. But she showed a quick temper that hinted at roiling emotions within. It would all have to be monitored.

  Looking out at the wall, Anna remembered another seemingly impassable concrete barrier that once stood half a continent away in Berlin. She would never forget when it finally toppled. She was a young woman in those days, an official with the Ministry of State Security. But she could still picture the guard towers crashing to the ground. Her careful preparation had been all that spared her from imprisonment. Or, worse, from the people’s street justice.

  Several minutes passed. The 4X4 creaked and banged, rocked backward and forward, swayed left and right. Anna rode in silence, Natasha jostling against her side. Then Krupin stopped at the checkpoint and lowered his window, cold air blasting through as he presented his ID to the sentry.

  The guard’s eyes shot between his face and the photo on the card. Krupin waited in silence. The guard checked him out some more—longer, steadier looks. Krupin kept waiting. Finally, the man gave a satisfied nod and returned the card. The boom barrier began to rise.

  In the rear, Natasha’s eyes widened. Anna felt her shrink closer, her spine straight and rigid, her arm stiff as a plank. But for all her compassion for the girl, she said nothing to soothe her. Try as she would, she could not muster a word.

  Her guilt did not allow it. She felt paralyzed.

  Then the barricade was up. Krupin stepped lightly on the gas pedal and rolled forward, the shadow of the wall spreading over the 4X4 like an immense blanket.

  Within minutes, it was swallowed in darkness.

  Chapter One

  The HIVE

  April 4, 2024

  “Wow,” said Bryan Ferago. “Tasha, this is awesome.”

  Physically, he was in a huge, fortress-like brick building known as the Terminal in the Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan. Converted from a nineteenth-century warehouse, it now served as the New York–East Coast headquarters of the US Department of Internet Security and Law Enforcement.