Blue Curse (Blue Wolf Book 1) Read online

  Blue Curse

  Blue Wolf Book 1

  Brad Magnarella

  © 2017

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved.

  Cover by Orina Kafe

  Table of Contents

  The Blue Wolf Series

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  What’s Next?

  Books in the Strangeverse

  The Blue Wolf Series

  BLUE CURSE

  *MORE TO COME*

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  http://bit.ly/blue_wolf

  1

  Waristan, 1985

  Commander Bortsov shivered in the blast of wind even as his head felt like it was on the verge of exploding into flames. He took a final swallow of tea from his canteen, forcing it down his burning throat, then resumed pacing, the gravel crunching beneath his boots like old bones.

  I’m going to die tonight.

  The thought came in a voice that sounded hollowed out, not his own. He wasn’t a fatalist. That wasn’t his nature, a man who had earned the nickname Kaban, “the Boar,” for his hard-charging style. In fact, when he had been ordered to this forgotten valley in a forgotten province—a spit in the face, if ever there was—he had rallied his men. “It is far from the fighting, yes,” he told them, “but it may become an important conduit for supplies.”

  It was bullshit, much like the entire Waristan war. But necessary bullshit if he ever hoped to climb the ranks in the Soviet Army, leaving these kinds of assignments to lesser men.

  The assignment had started off well enough. After being dropped, he and his men had located a well-positioned hill up the valley and built a stone outpost on top. It was a sound structure, something they had put their healthy backs into and could be proud of. The first night after its completion they had stayed up late inside, drinking, laughing, and playing cards.

  But barely three days later, the outpost now held the muffled moans of the dying. And the smells that leaked out? It was as though his men’s insides were rotting to liquid and spilling from each end. Grimacing, the Boar turned from the bunker’s horrid sounds and smells.

  “The boulders,” someone muttered. “The boulders are moving.”

  The Boar looked down to see Yugov, once his most capable marksman, sitting on the edge of the hilltop like a child, his rifle fallen between his splayed legs. Beside his left hip, a puddle of vomit soaked slowly into the rocky ground. The Boar followed Yugov’s sweating eyes down into the valley. The quarter moon had cast everything in a deep blue shadow that was not quite black, and a mist was drifting in. A distant wolf’s howl went up.

  “See there?” Yugov said, raising a shaky finger. “They moved again.”

  “The boulders are not moving,” the Boar replied sternly. “You are seeing things.”

  He was watching another of his men succumb to delirium. Soon Yugov would join the others inside the stone outpost, what the Boar had come to think of as “the Morgue.” They’d had to carry four men out already. Too weak to dig them graves, they had pitched their bodies into a ravine.

  “Here,” he said, handing Yugov a cigarette. Yugov took it between his shaky lips and crossed his eyes as the Boar lit it for him. But after one puff, the cigarette fell between Yugov’s legs in a splash of cinders, and he was back to shivering and babbling about moving boulders.

  The Boar turned and called across the hill through the cold wind. “How are you faring, tovarish?”

  “Freezing and burning,” Franko answered.

  The Boar arrived to find Franko’s Kalashnikov tucked under an arm, hands and chin thrust deep in his coat, forehead shining with sweat. He was shaking, but other than the Boar himself, he was the only one on the team still standing.

  “Some security perimeter, eh?” the Boar joked, which made Franko cough out a weak laugh.

  Then Franko’s mouth straightened. He turned to the Boar and looked at him gravely. The bruising that had begun under his eyes would soon consume his entire face. “We are all going to die, aren’t we?”

  “We will feel better in the morning.”

  “It’s a curse, isn’t it? For what we did to the boy?”

  The Boar swallowed around the ragged knot in his throat. “I don’t believe in curses.”

  “How else do you explain it? Right after we leave the village, the dysentery fell like an axe.”

  The Boar turned his face up the godforsaken valley and saw that morning’s patrol in wavering snapshots. The walk through the village and compound, the silence of the strange villagers, the absence of men of fighting age. He’d posed question after question through his interpreter, the lack of responses making his face turn red and spittle fly from his lips. It was a problem, his temper. The Boar knew this. If he wasn’t careful, his men would start to call him “the Butcher.”

  But what had really set him off was the crazy old woman without eyes. The twin sphincters of flesh had seemed to glare straight into his soul—stirring the anger he felt at being assigned out here, deepening his sense of impotence. It was as though she were stripping him bare, even as some evil power in her shrieking voice drove him from the compound.

  On their way back to the outpost, the Boar spied a young shepherd bringing a herd of sheep down into the fields outside the village. His scant beard was dyed blue. The boy looked back at him casually, without fear. That angered the Boar beyond all reason. He ordered his men to fire. The sight of the boy dropping amid his scattering sheep salved his frustration somewhat.

  But Franko was right, the illness had started that afternoon. Not only that, their batteries had died, rendering their communication and night-vision equipment inoperable. The Boar had not been able to radio out for a medevac, and when darkness fell, they had all become nearly as blind as the crazy old woman. Those who were still alive. Yes, it felt very much like a curse. But admitting that would mean assuming responsibility for his dead and dying men.

  “Those people must learn to respect our presence,” he told Franko.

  “The boulders,” Yugov wailed behind them. “They’re coming up the hill.”

  Franko fumbled for his Kalashnikov, but the Boar only shook his head. “He is not doing well.”

  Yugov unleashed a scream that could only come from pain. A wet rip of flesh sounded through the wind. Now the Boar wheeled too. He stared, but could see nothing through the shrouding darkness and mist.

  “Stay here,” he told Franko.

  He led with his Kalashnikov, the crunching beneath his boots reminding him of bones again. Though he tried to steel his nerves, his head pounded with sickness and fear. And now shapes were moving beyond the mist. Was he becoming delusional too? He blinked the cold sweat from his eyes and stared around.

  His right boot collided with something. He pitched over Yugov and into a small pond of blood. His marksman’s body had been dismembered, ragged sockets f
or arms and legs, eyes gaping skyward. Behind him, Franko’s Kalashnikov fired off a desperate burst, then went quiet.

  “Franko?” he called hoarsely.

  When the Boar stood, the wind made him stumble. Rubble scraped behind him. He spun and emptied his magazine into the night, the recoil driving him back on quavering legs until he landed against the Morgue.

  And now he saw them too.

  Yugov had been right, he decided dimly. The shapes did look vaguely like boulders. Three of them stalked toward him from the darkness, taking form as they broke through the mist.

  But such things did not exist, the Boar thought in a final fit of reason. Could not exist.

  A scream warbled from his mouth as he fumbled for his sheathed knife. The first wolfman struck, tearing into his throat with his teeth. The others followed, their savage weight and bloodied blue fur collapsing into him. Beneath the wet snarls, the Boar’s hand fell from his knife’s hilt.

  Yes, I’m going to die tonight…

  2

  Forty years later

  I watched the burqa-clad figure drift from one side of the dirt road to the other, coming nearer. She looked like a green specter through my night-vision goggles. A singing green specter. As she drew even with the compound two blocks from my position, I could hear the wavering notes rising above the clamor of the compound’s generator.

  “Nice pipes,” I muttered.

  Curling a finger over the trigger of my M4, I raised the rifle from the woman toward the rooftop of the cement building that stood above the compound’s high walls.

  A magnified guard appeared in my sight picture. He leaned over the north side of the rooftop, an AK-47 propped against his shoulder, then called to a second guard behind him. The two peered down on the woman, unescorted and apparently drunk, out in the middle of the night. In the suburb of the conservative Waristani city, that would draw anyone’s attention.

  Which was the whole point.

  I centered the crosshairs on the nearer guard’s head. “Mario in sight,” I whispered into my headset.

  “Roger that, Captain,” Segundo, my team sergeant and second-in-command, answered. “I have Luigi.”

  “On three, two, one…”

  Our M4’s coughed a single round apiece, Segundo’s from three blocks away. In sprays of glowing green mist, the guards we’d nicknamed Mario and Luigi dropped from sight.

  “Move,” I ordered, stepping from the corner of my building.

  Four men in desert camos and body armor followed me, weapons pressed to their shoulders. We crossed the road and jogged the next block at a crouch, then proceeded single file along the compound’s outer wall. The woman who had distracted the guards met us. She shed her burqa and became Sergeant Calvin Parker.

  The lankiest member of Team 5, Parker was the only one who could have passed for a female. I nodded at my cultural affairs officer to tell him good job. The young black man gave me a wry look as he ditched the burqa and readied his rifle and gear. He hadn’t been thrilled about the role.

  I gave the signal, and two of my men dropped off to establish perimeter security. On the other side of the compound two men from the split team were doing the same. Ten feet from the compound’s north gate, my senior engineer moved to the front, pulling out C-4 charges to place on the hinges.

  “Hot on the north,” he said over his radio.

  “Hot on the south,” an engineer on the split team answered.

  We crouched away, and both doors detonated. The hammering of the compound’s generator helped cover the dry bangs, but we still needed to move fast.

  I took the lead, rushing low through the smoky doorway, three men following. We were in the compound’s west outer courtyard. I spotted the two guards immediately. They were beside a small outbuilding, AK-47s fumbling into firing positions. We had interrupted their smoke break—one of many aerial surveillance had shown us. Our rifles coughed. Each guard was hit at least twice before he collapsed to the ground. At the same time, suppressed shots echoed from the east courtyard. Not a single burst of answering gunfire so far.

  I led my team to the southern end of the courtyard where Segundo’s team was mining the metal door to the inner courtyard. The engineers cleared the blast area. Another dry bang. Segundo and I shared the lead through the acrid smoke. We were eight strong now, two members remaining behind to secure the outer courtyard.

  The main building rose ahead. Light slivered around the seams of a covered window on the third floor. I was cycling through the building’s layout in my mind when the front door opened.

  Segundo and I greeted the armed guard with a single shot apiece to his chest.

  We stepped over his prone body and into the building’s first floor. The rooftop generator that shuddered through the concrete building encased us in a wall of pounding noise. We had cut power to the sector an hour earlier for just that purpose.

  I spotted the staircase to the second floor at the far end of a corridor, doorways opening off it. I circled a pair of fingers to remind my team of the two guards still on the floor. They appeared from a back room a moment later, armed but unaware the building had been breached. We dropped them and cleared the remaining rooms. One man remained behind while the rest of us filed up the stairs.

  Two guards spotted us coming onto the second floor. Our suppressed gunfire cut their alarmed cries short. A third guard poked his head from a doorway. I squeezed my trigger before he could duck back to safety. Through my night-vision, the corridor glowed green with spattered blood.

  All twelve guards were now accounted for. But had their shouts penetrated the din of the generator? Only one way to find out. I signaled for two of my men to stay behind to check the rest of the floor while I led Segundo and Parker to the top level.

  From the shadow of the stairwell we peered onto a narrow corridor with two closed doors. Light glowed beneath the one on the right. Beyond, I could hear the shouts of men arguing. Segundo grinned broadly. They had no idea an American Special Ops unit was at their doorstep.

  After clearing the other room, I signaled for Segundo and Parker to cover my breach. Flipping the night-vision goggles from my eyes, I seized the handle and threw the door open.

  For a moment, the six men sitting around the lamp-lit room on rugs didn’t notice me. Several were arguing, the sleeves of their loose shirts and gowns shaking as they pointed accusing fingers at one another, eyes blazing above their shouting mouths. I recognized all of the men, but at the moment, I only cared about the one I had singled out with my weapon’s barrel.

  Plump with a purple vest and trim gray goatee, Zarbat was trying to restore order. He glanced up at me distractedly, then away. I could almost see the image of a massive armed man registering in his brain. His eyes worked their way back to me. One by one, the other men followed the aim of his ashen face. The shouting fell to murmurs, then died.

  Zarbat peered past me, as though expecting his guards to come to his defense. Instead, he saw Segundo and Parker, the three of us holding enough firepower to liquefy the room. The men understood this. They cast nervous glances around, none of them moving or saying a word. Glass tea cups rattled on saucers and the plywood over the window shook as the generator hammered on.

  At last Zarbat licked his thick lips and tried to smile. “Jason Wolfe,” he called in his refined voice. “I didn’t realize you were coming. Have a seat. Here is the tea you like.” He reached for a pot in the middle of the gathering.

  “It’s not that kind of visit,” I grunted.

  “Oh?” He withdrew his hand and swallowed dryly. “Well, then. What brings you here?”

  Six months before, when my team had been assigned to work with him, Zarbat had been one man. No army, no weapons, and little to no credibility with the ethnic tribe of his birth. Now he had all three—in spades. The last because we’d credited him with the overthrow of the Mujahideen in southern Waristan when, in fact, he had been safe at our base in nearby Afghanistan. We’d flown him in at the tail end of the
battle to pose with an assault rifle and the militia we had trained. Zarbat never fired a shot nor was he ever shot at. His U.S. education and influence among a handful of Washington decision-makers had served him well. Until he got greedy.

  “The gentleman to your left brings us,” I said.

  I knew from our intelligence that Elam, one of the leaders of the Mujahideen insurgency, didn’t understand English.

  “Ah, yes,” Zarbat replied. “We were just discussing the terms of his surrender.”

  I shook my head. “You and the representatives of the other four tribes were to meet in the capital this weekend to elect a government. Instead, you and Elam have been plotting their assassinations so the country would descend into chaos and you could present yourself as the only stabilizing figure. With the grand council off the table, the U.S. would have no choice but to name you interim leader. Your first move would be to grant amnesty to the Mujahideen fighters, more than tripling the size of your armed forces. From there, you would assume complete power, all while assuring the U.S. you remained a loyal ally.”

  Some U.S. leaders would have been willing to live with that, if only to see a conclusion to the war. In the end, more hawkish voices had prevailed.

  Zarbat’s face flushed. “That’s preposterous.”

  “We’ve been monitoring your communications for the last month.”

  Zarbat peered past me, as though looking once more for his guards.

  “We also know you doubled your security for tonight’s meeting, instructing them to kill anyone who tried to enter. ‘Even the Americans?’ they asked. ‘Even the Americans,’ you answered.”

  “Jason,” he said, tilting his head companionably. “I do not doubt the power of your intelligence services, but you were my advisor. You know me. Does that sound at all like something I would do?”

  It did, in fact. I had never trusted Zarbat.

  But instead of saying that, I turned to Segundo. “Take Elam into custody.”

  “With pleasure,” he said, his Colombian-born machismo coming through.