Quantum. Tom Grace

I’ll be back in a minute.’

      The hallway echoed with his footsteps, the building nearly empty on this early-summer Friday afternoon. Kilkenny took the stairs and exited Nieuwland Science Hall around the corner from the loading dock. A semi filled the single bay, its trailer flush with the elevated concrete dock. The four-wheeled carts were nearly empty; the five-man crew had made quick work of this job.

      Kilkenny’s truck was parked at the far end of the loading area facing the dock. He fished the key fob out of his khaki shorts and pressed the button that unlocked the lift gate.

      As he placed the empty cooler into the back of the SUV, he observed one of the movers pull two canvas bags from the white Blazer parked near the semi. The man then carried the bags back to where the rest of the moving crew waited. Another of the movers crouched down, unzipped one of the bags, and extracted a pistol holster.

      ‘What the hell?’ Kilkenny cursed quietly as he watched the distribution of weapons and other equipment among the men.

      Using hand signals, the leader of the crew ordered the others into position. One remained on the loading dock while the others went back into Nieuwland Hall.

      With his SUV screening him from view, Kilkenny searched the cargo area for a weapon. In the row of bins where he kept his tools, he found a combat knife – a memento from his navy days. He strapped the sheathed blade to his right thigh and carefully closed the lift gate.

      As the mover paced along the elevated platform, Kilkenny surveyed the area between the loading dock and the rear of the semi trailer, timing the man’s movements. The short span of the platform meant that the trailer blocked the man’s view of the parking area for only a few seconds in each circuit.

      Realizing that he would have to move quickly, Kilkenny crouched behind his truck, tensed and ready. When the man turned at the far end of the platform and began walking back toward the semi, Kilkenny sprinted across the entire lot using the trailer as a shield. His heart pounded as he slipped under the truck, adrenaline coursing through his body and his senses charged. Loose gravel and chips of broken glass dug at his forearms and shins as he stealthily snaked his way beneath the trailer to the platform.

      When Kilkenny reached the space between the double axle at the rear of the trailer, he pulled himself back on his feet and again began timing the man’s movements. As the man turned away, Kilkenny shifted closer to the platform, hiding in the space between the right-side tires and the steel-frame bumper.

      Soon the man turned facing the driver’s side of the semi, walking back toward the open trailer doors.

      Kilkenny slipped out from beneath the vehicle and stood next to the rear tires. Carefully, he unfastened the door catch. As the sound of the man’s footsteps grew closer, Kilkenny timed it perfectly and thrust the heavy metal door forward. The sudden rush of the door caught the man broadside, striking hard against his shoulder.

      ‘Blat!’ Vanya cursed as he rolled from the force of the blow.

      Kilkenny followed the rotation of the door forward and leapt up on the platform behind it, releasing his grip on the handle and unsheathing his knife to press on with the attack.

      Despite the burning pain, Vanya reached for the Glock 9-mm pistol strapped to the left side of his chest. He snapped a glance over his battered shoulder in time to see Kilkenny emerge from behind the steel door.

      ‘Krasny adín!’ Vanya shouted as he twisted the holstered weapon up and fired from beneath his armpit.

      The first round drilled through the muscle of Kilkenny’s left thigh, a point-blank shot that struck at almost the same instant it left the Glock. After boring a bloody tunnel, the bullet erupted from Kilkenny’s leg and ricocheted off the concrete dock. A second shot flew just inches wide because of the recoil of the first.

      Momentum still carrying him forward, Kilkenny grabbed the holster strap and held tight as he drove his combat knife into the man’s back. The knife shuddered as its serrated back edge sawed through the cartilage that connected a rib and vertebrae.

      Vanya’s grasp on his pistol weakened as his heart spasmed, the blade puncturing the muscular walls of the organ. Kilkenny pushed the knife sideways as he extracted it, widening the gash in the man’s blood-soaked back. Vanya’s legs gave out, and Kilkenny let him fall to the dock.

      Kilkenny then rolled the body over onto its back; a blank, open-mouthed stare gaped back at him. Using his knife, he cut two strips of cloth from the man’s shirt and hastily wrapped a pressure bandage around his thigh.

      Kilkenny found a German-made military-grade radio transmitter clipped to the man’s hip, the kind of communications equipment favored by special forces. He flipped the SEND switch into the off position, then removed the earpiece/lip mike component from the man’s ear and slipped the gear on himself. His right ear filled with a faint hiss of static, then two sharp clicks crackled harshly in the ear-piece. The clicks repeated a few seconds later.

      These guys are operators, Kilkenny thought as he ignored the clicks – a request for the dead man to report in to his commanding officer.

      A quick pat search of the man revealed little. The mover carried a silenced 9-mm Glock and two spare clips of ammunition. Kilkenny found no identification of any kind. He pocketed the two ammo clips, chambered a round in the Glock, and carefully moved back into Nieuwland Hall.

      One shitbag down, he thought, four more to go.

       5

       JUNE 23

       South Bend, Indiana

      Krasny adín? Dmitri puzzled over Vanya’s urgent warning in his mind.

      Yuri, the radioman, sent two more rapid clicks and waited.

      No reply.

      Yuri looked over at Dmitri, the team leader, and shook his head.

      Dmitri knew that things went wrong on missions – it was a fact of life. The Americans had a name for this phenomenon: Murphy’s Law. He’d lost radio contact with men before; nine times out of ten it was an equipment failure. But Vanya had broken radio silence and called out Krasny adín – Red One – alerting them that his position was under attack. Now Vanya was off the air, and his brief warning had stopped Dmitri and the rest of the team just as they got off the freight elevator.

      Dmitri carefully moved to a window that overlooked the rear of Nieuwland Hall. Below, he saw the trailer extending from the loading dock and, in the far corner of the paved lot, a black Mercedes truck. The scene appeared just as they had left it moments ago. Other than a few people walking on the campus pathways, he saw nothing to indicate that their mission had been discovered, nothing that would cause Vanya to report that he was under attack.

      ‘I don’t see anything,’ Dmitri said quietly, wishing he could, ‘but Vanya’s position is almost beneath us.’

      His men were all professionals; each had served under him in the Spetsnaz, the Red Army’s elite special warfare unit. He’d handpicked them for this private operations force when paychecks in the Russian military became scarce. Today, they were well-paid and well-equipped mercenaries in the employ of Victor Orlov.

      Dmitri scratched at the stubble on his chin. A gritty film of dried sweat covered his muscled frame, the result of moving dozens of heavy boxes containing the equipment, books, and experimental documentation that he had been sent to retrieve.

      ‘You want me to go check on Vanya?’ Josef asked.

      Dmitri pondered the question, then shook his head at the swarthy, black-haired Georgian. ‘Nyet. We proceed as planned, but stay alert. It may be nothing more than garbled communications and equipment failure.’

      ‘If not?’

      ‘If