Thomas was enjoying the flight. While the armed crewmember took him by surprise, it shouldn’t have. This was a damned Black Hawk, tricked out. This was thirty million at least flying here. They wouldn’t be in a rowboat, that was for sure.
He lost his composure when Wagner said, “Saints Preserve Us!” next to him. He stopped looking out the side of the bird and looked through the pilot’s windows in front and at the massive yacht they were approaching. He got a good look for just a minute before the pilot had to change direction and the boat was under them. That boat had to be at least 325 to 350 feet in length. Saints preserve us, indeed!
Paul Jameson had seen the boat as well. He smiled as he thought red was the right pill for him to swallow.
The landing on the boat was just as smooth as the landing at the airfield. Paul thought that this pilot was every bit as good as he was in a plane. This group was more and more interesting all of the time. He couldn’t imagine what they could pull off that would surprise him anymore.
He had to admit later, that he was woefully unprepared to have that answered at the time.
The Queen Bitch’s Ship Polarus in Nassau
“Damn, it’s easy to get fucking lost on this ship.” Bethany Anne was walking towards the helipad, she hoped. She had lost track of time working through some other details and John had commed her to let her know, ‘the Navy has landed.’
You realize I could tell you how to get there, right?
One of these days, she would learn to lean on all of her advantages. Even the transient alien inside of her.
Sorry, TOM. Just busy and got distracted. How the hell do I get back up to the landing area?
Turn around and go back to the last intersection. Take a right and then your first left. There is a set of steps that go up.
She stopped and turned around. Concerned she was going to miss the group she boosted her speed over to the stairs and slowed down to go through the door. If she didn’t have new recruits, she would just slip through the etheric and drop in on them. She hadn’t created any safe zones yet on the boat and had been a little concerned about what to do when the ship was underway. Would her slipping through the etheric work the same, or would she end up in the ocean? TOM had said she would have the ability to position correctly with the ship, but she was still a little hesitant. He explained that the earth itself was traveling through space at approximately 67,000 miles an hour, so what was the big deal?
She made the top as she heard the people getting off of Shelly. It was agreed that they would all wear their team ops uniforms. She wanted everyone to understand that they were military first, not super rich looking to play out of United States waters.
Well, they were that, too. They just wanted to play with guns and ammo and missiles and blow shit up. At least, that was how Scott described them.
Ecaterina had called. She was in Nassau interviewing companies now to modify some of the ship. Bethany Anne wanted the whole owner’s suite ripped out. She didn’t want to see anything in there that reminded her of Natalia and the others. She had stayed out of the suite. Her team had taken care of ripping out most of the bedroom already.
She pushed the final door open. Door, hatch? She couldn’t be bothered to learn it all right now regardless of the super-intelligent alien along for the ride.
She watched as the new recruits came off of the helipad. She knew that Bobcat would be back in the air to go and pick up Frank and Ecaterina. She saw Pete go up some stairs and enter the helipad area. It looked like he was going to be part of the protection for Shelly on this trip. Yup, Darryl handed him a P90 and he clipped it on and got onboard.
Everyone had left the helipad but one rather large guy from the group had caught Pete jumping on and noticed the weapon. The man turned around and went with the group down below. They would be going to the larger meeting room on the second deck. It already had finger food and beverages set up and waiting for the group.
She waved to Bobcat. He put two fingers to his lips like stupid fangs and she laughed out loud at his antics and then he put his hand down and the Black Hawk started to lift off. She just smiled and shook her head.
So far, he was the most comfortable around her as a vampire. Even John was occasionally careful and respectful. She wasn’t sure if Bobcat had a respectful bone in his body. William was back in Miami working with the armored SUVs and tooling up their engines so he couldn’t make the trip out.
Bobcat mentioned that he preferred the bunnies on the beach, not the ones who went boat hopping and had a date he had been working on for two weeks that night.
She turned and went up to the bridge to check on the captain. He was ever polite and just a bit…dumb. That was most likely due to her heavy-handed approach to wiping his memory and implanting her commands. If his brain shorted out after she replaced him she couldn’t be bothered to worry about it.
She left the bridge by going down the stairs and went to the conference room. She was wearing her twin .45’s but had left her sword in the cabin. There was no reason to go that far, it wasn’t like they were Forsaken that would shrug off bullets easily.
She entered from the back. The group had already gotten their food and the lights were just dimming to show them the over five-minute promo on the Forsaken that Dan and Frank had put together from operation footage. She hadn’t seen this yet, so she stopped and watched from the back. With the lights off it was hard to pick her out in the background. John had seen her enter, but hadn’t done anything to give her entry away.
Dan had started the overview before the video started and explained they were working to defeat a supernatural threat. The supernatural had been involved for the positive in America since before the country’s founding, but had been attacked by the ‘other side’ for the last few decades and a hard attack across the nation for the last year.
He started the presentation, which went through the pictures of every agent he lost in the last eighteen months. He gave every agent’s name, age and what city and state they died in. He even included Bill. It made an impression that went deep to everyone in the room. It brought home that as incredible as the whole supernatural seemed, people were fighting and dying to handle the threat.
He then started the video that had clips of different shots of operations over the last ten years. A couple included Bill and it was obvious that he was not only fighting the Nosferatu, but also that he was not human. Especially when a short clip showed his red eyes and fangs while holding a Nosferatu as his team was shooting it before dropping it to the ground. The final clip was a close up on his face.
The scene went dark, but the audio was still going. The voices were familiar to Bethany Anne. This was the recording from the ops van during the Everglades operation. It was pretty horrendous as the Forsaken were shaking the van and the men were yelling. Some yelling epithets and others trying to figure out how to get a defense set up. You could hear some pistol shots and something falling off the van, then it got quiet and the men quickly got to setting up the van again. The voices receded as the video faded back in and you could see the dead Forsaken Bethany Anne had taken care of, including the one with the tree pinning it to the ground and half its head blown off.
A female in the audience spoke softly, “Oh my god…”
That video faded as the audio started coming back online and you could hear a Black Hawk helicopter in the background as the video very slowly came up. You could see a Marine hanging on to the side. The operations area was a mess. You could see the medic working on an agent to the left and a van with the door pulled off. The camera focused on the landing helicopter.
The scene took Bethany Anne back to that night when she first fought with her team. They had been inseparable since then. She was proud of her group.
“Fuck me…” She pegged that whisper as coming from the marine.
John and Eric got off first, she was in the center and Darryl and Scott came up behind her. They all looked more dead than alive. Especially with the massi
ve amount of blood and mud all over them. The video stopped with the five of them in frame.
Dan spoke again. “This is the team that took out all of what we call Nosferatu out in the Everglades. This was their first op together. This is the same team that took out the terrorists the next day. The op downtown was more of a scrimmage for them. The enemies they normally fight are so much faster and more deadly that a room full of humans doesn’t really register as a challenge.” The screen faded from the five of them to the corporate logo and held it there for two seconds before it faded again to the image of their team patch.
The lights came up and John, Eric and Scott were at the door. Everyone there recognized them as the team members from the picture and placed Darryl back in the chopper as the fourth team member.
Her team stood ready for action. It wasn’t anything that they thought about consciously, but having a vampire as a boss that would attack you at all times of the day or night to keep you in practice caused you to stay ready 24/7.
Todd Jenkins approved. He wasn’t willing to say that a team of his marines would go down quickly against these guys, but whatever happened it wouldn’t be easy. What about the female? He had assumed that their lead was the big guy Grimes there, but he could see that the woman was the head of the outfit.
Not one of the Navy personnel thought they were the butt of a joke by this time. There wasn’t a practical reason to spend this much money. Everything was too professional to believe they had a bunch of actors trying to punk them. The final straw for Todd was the listing of the fallen. That was delivered by someone who knew those men and every death had hurt.
Dan looked at the group, “Questions?”
Dukes seemed to be the quickest to open her mouth, no shy butterfly her. “Was that a vampire there at the end in the close up? Whose side was it working on?”
Dan smiled, “Yes, his name was Bill. He died less than a year ago on an operation in Virginia. They blew up an entire warehouse to kill him. I worked with him for a long time before that event occurred.”
“The government works with vampires to kill what, other vampires?” Dukes was trying to figure out the boundaries of who she could aim guns at.
“Actually, we do go against vampires and yes, we work with vampires. There are two groups, or families, if you will. One would be called Michael’s family. The other are called Forsaken. The Forsaken want to eventually just take over the world and use humans as cattle. The problem is that Michael’s group has fought them in the shadows for almost eight hundred years and generally speaking it has been a stalemate. Partially because a lot of the big guns would sleep for years at a time and the Forsaken would use that time to attack until Michael would wake up and then the Forsaken would get a monumental beat down. He would go to sleep and the rest of us would keep the fight going.”
Captain Thomas spoke, “Is that why your team was so small, like you mentioned back on the plane?”
Dan considered that, “Did I say my team was small?”
Thomas smiled, “You claimed a clandestine agency that had a smaller budget than the military spends on toilets.”
“So I did. To be clear, I had three full-time members and the rest of the team was mostly stolen and borrowed from other agencies when we had a flare up. After it was handled, most everyone went back to their regular jobs.”
“What happened to change it?”
“Well, that’s a longer discussion. The short version is that the lead vampire on the good side selected another vampire to fix things and the fixer has a lot more energy and was rather incensed by attacks on American soil. A Forsaken vampire recently killed a government agent in Washington DC to try and find out more about her.”
“What happened to that vampire?” Maximilian Wagner wasn’t surprised at the paranormal at all. Germany had lots of stories about the supernatural. That it was real wasn’t a stretch to him.
Dan looked at Max, “He blew himself up when he delivered a message to his maker. That maker lives in Central America. Each continent and some major countries are under the control of certain powerful vampires. Unless we want to be attacked every day…”
Wagner spoke up, “You don’t travel overland, right?”
Rodriquez jumped in, “That’s why you need water capabilities?” Dan had barely focused on the chief engineer before the pilot jumped in.
“And you need to strike from the water or risk pissing off too many at a time?”
Dan just pointed to his nose.
All of the navy people were fascinated at learning why they were brought here. This wasn’t anything like what they thought they might be getting into. Awareness of another coming down the side aisle brought their attention to a female in a black ops outfit. Twin .45’s in her holsters. Her walk was a glide. Everyone’s hindbrain was trying to warn them to watch the fuck out. Here be death walking. But the package was so very attractive.
“Welcome to my ship. My name is Bethany Anne, that’s it. I have no last name. You’ve seen the presentation. Do you have any questions?”
Dukes went first again. She blurted the first thing on her mind that was a semi-coherent question. “No last name?” Her face went red in shame. Here was the leader, a woman no less, and the first question she had was ‘no last name?’ Really?
“No Gunnery Officer Dukes, the Nacht have no last names.”
This time, it was the Captain and Jenkins that got out the question, “Nacht?”
She looked at them. “Yes gentleman. Nacht. I am what you might call a vampire. Not the kind that hides from the sun, I assure you I loves me some sun.” Her smile was lighting up the room and everyone’s sense of fight or flight was decreasing. What evil vampire ever said that ‘she loves her some sun?’
She continued, “A short time back I was an agent in a semi-black agency in Washington. I tracked down cold cases and was as ignorant of the UnknownWorld as you were this morning. I’ve been changed and charged with destroying anything that threatens our world. Right now, the biggest threat are the Forsaken. When one killed my personal friend Martin Brennan, I became very focused. The Forsaken head of Central America attacked my family. The Forsaken will understand when I retaliate with deadly force.”
The team was still trying to guess where this would end up and how they would be involved. Rodriquez piped up, “You’re not planning on stopping with them, are you.”
It wasn’t really a question, but Bethany Anne answered it anyway. “John, I’m not able to take the fight to everyone everywhere right now. I don’t consider the United States the only country that I need to protect. The Forsaken have had centuries to dig in, while I’m still learning what port and starboard are.” She smiled at that and she got smiles in return. It was hard to believe this woman was death incarnate at the moment.
“But I’m about to share the rough stuff with you. This is the point that I let you know that the promised funds are in every one of your accounts. I’ll give you the same talk I gave your helicopter pilot, Bobcat. If you breathe a word of what you know right now, you’ll be signing your own death warrants. Not because anyone on my team would hurt you, but because you will not be under my protection and the Forsaken would track you down on the off chance you know something that could help them. If you talk, word will get around.”
Jenkins spoke this time, “But we don’t know anything!”
She turned to look at Todd. “Do you know what I look like? Do you know that I want Navy crew? You already know enough to give them reason to, literally, drain you dry.” She smiled. It was a pretty effective ‘no-talking’ policy.
“I’m not worried about it because I know that one day the truth must come out, so the hints won’t change those events at all. You would be hurting yourself. But, now is the time to decide if you want to stay and be a part of something that, quite literally, could be saving the world. Will your family and friends ever know? In the next few years, probably not. In decades probably and within the next two hundred years for certain.”
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br /> She walked over and stood in front of the whole team. Just three feet from Captain Thomas who was having trouble only staring at her face. When she knew she had everyone’s attention she spoke, “Dan, John, Eric and Scott are here to answer any questions. I’ll leave until John lets me know that you’ve all had your questions answered. I’ll be back.” With that, she disappeared.
All of them were staring at where Bethany Anne had just been. John got impatient after about ten seconds, “Anyone have any questions?” He had been through this before with Bobcat so he wasn’t surprised by most of what they wanted to know. It was a good talk and after another hour they retired to the boardroom and continued the discussion over dinner. Dan let them watch the video twice more and they politely moved to other conversations when the dishes were cleared and the desserts and coffee were brought in.
In time they finished their questions about the UnknownWorld that could be answered, and others regarding Bethany Anne. There were some questions the team would not answer, but otherwise everyone felt the group was very open. They asked about the ships and Dan felt the answers would be best handled by Bethany Anne. He reached over and clicked a button on his phone. About a minute later the door opened and Bethany Anne came in. She still wore her guns. She took the chair at the head of the table, “Questions?”
Thomas had been voted the spokesman. He began, “Yes. Our first concern. We are Navy and while we can run this ship, there isn’t a way we can fight this ship.”
She agreed, “True. One of your first tasks will be to inspect the ship and suggest all appropriate changes we can make, keeping the look but adding bite. You’re familiar with Q-ships?” Everyone agreed. “Good. Same idea, except submarines aren’t the only target and we aren’t a merchant ship. TQB Enterprises has a very eccentric owner who likes to boat all over the world into magical locations.”
Thomas continued, he liked that concept. “What about budget and crew?”
“The crew on this ship must change. I wouldn’t have had a single original crewmember here after yesterday if I could have done anything about it. You would work with Lt. Commander Wagner and Frank to crew this ship as fast as possible. Don’t hire anyone that you don’t believe can handle the challenge. I won’t kid you, this is a battle and the chance of dying is real. You’ll have to let me know what the right package is. So far, you have this ship and another to repurpose and make presentable.”
Kurtherian Gambit Boxed Set One: Books 1-7, Death Becomes Her, Queen Bitch, Love Lost, Bite This, Never Forsaken, Under My Heel, Kneel or Die (Kurtherian Gambit Boxed Sets) Page 56