Department 19, The Rising, and Battle Lines

by Will Hill

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he lied. “Something came up on the lower levels. It won’t happen again, sir.”

  “I find that difficult to believe,” replied Turner. “But I suppose I’ll have to take your word for it. Sit down, Carpenter.”

  Jamie walked sheepishly over to the table where Larissa and Kate were sitting, pulled a chair out and flopped into it between them. As Paul Turner set the pages of his briefing on the lectern, Jamie cast a glance at Angela, who favoured him with a sympathetic smile. He smiled back, then returned his attention to the front of the room, his blood boiling at the unfairness of it all.

  “Operators,” said Major Turner. “This is OPERATION: PROMISED LAND, a two-squad reconnaissance and elimination mission. It’s relatively straightforward, but please try and concentrate. I’d rather not have to keep stopping to answer stupid questions. Clear? Good.”

  Turner pressed a button on the portable console in his hand, and the wall screen above his head burst into life. It showed a satellite image of a large container ship; the tiny swells of white water at her aft showed the Operators that the ship was in motion.

  “This,” continued Turner, “is the Aristeia. She’s a Panamax-class freighter, two hundred and twenty-eight metres long, thirty-two metres wide, able to carry three thousand standard freight containers. She’s Greek-built, flying the Bahamian flag.”

  “If she can carry three thousand containers,” said Angela, “why does it look like she’s carrying about fifty?”

  Turner favoured her with what passed for a smile, and tapped his console. The image magnified until the ship filled the screen.

  “You’re correct,” he said. “She’s carrying sixty-eight containers on a deck built for forty-four times that many. She departed from Shanghai eighteen days ago; those containers would need to be filled with diamonds to cover the cost of the fuel it’s taken to get her where she is now.”

  “Where’s that?” asked Larissa.

  “About eighty miles off the north-east coast,” replied Turner. “Her heading puts her destination as the entrance to the River Tyne, where she’ll arrive in roughly seven hours.”

  “What does this have to do with us?” asked Shaun Turner.

  “There has been only a single radio contact with the Aristeia since she left port,” replied Major Turner. “When she passed through the Suez Canal. Before and since, nothing. She spent the last week making her way through the Mediterranean, and all attempts to contact her, by the Italians, the Spanish and the Portuguese, have failed.”

  “Pirates?” asked Kate.

  Angela snorted, and Larissa fired a stare full of razor blades in her direction.

  “No,” replied Major Turner. “Or at least, we don’t think so. There’s never been an instance of a pirated vessel being taken voluntarily through the Med, or through the Canal. If she’d been boarded, we’d expect the pirates to have taken her to the coast of Somalia, where they could moor her and make their demands. This ship had to go through Somali waters to get to Suez.”

  “Terrorists?” suggested Jack Williams. “Could it be carrying a bomb?”

  “Satellite spectro-analysis says not. Also, why would you use a ship like this to make an attack? They’d know we could sink her in the middle of the ocean. Cargo freighters are not renowned for their manoeuvrability.”

  “So what is it then?” asked Jamie, sharply. He was getting bored with playing guessing games.

  Paul Turner gave him a look full of warning, then continued.

  “The Surveillance Division monitored the attempts to contact her, and when she entered UK waters, we put a satellite over her. Here’s the infrared.”

  The image on the screen blurred out, then sharpened into a bright rainbow of colours. The frigid water surrounding the ship was a blue so dark it was almost black, the hull and deck of the Aristeia a pale shade of aquamarine. A thick bloom of red glowed at the rear of the ship, where the huge diesel engines were producing the power that pushed the enormous freighter through the water. The rectangular containers on the ship’s cargo deck glowed a pale orange, and were studded with small blobs of yellow which, the watching Operators realised, were moving around inside the boxes.

  “Jesus,” said Jack Williams. “There must be two hundred people in those containers.”

  “Two hundred and twenty-seven,” confirmed Major Turner. “Look at the bridge.”

  The huge crescent-shaped bridge, which towered almost four storeys above the surface of the deck, was pale yellow. The heat was emanating from seven points of light that were almost white, such was the heat they were giving out.

  “Vamps,” said Shaun Turner, matter-of-factly. “Seven vamps, and two hundred humans. What the hell is this ship?”

  “It’s not a ship,” said Angela. “It’s a prison. A floating prison.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Larissa, frowning. “What are they being imprisoned for?”

  “So they can be delivered to whoever paid for them,” said Angela. “I’ve seen it before, but never on this scale. It’s like the snakehead gangs bringing workers out of the Far East. They get them as far as the Med, then use trucks the rest of the way. Someone is waiting for this ship in the north, I can guarantee you. Someone waiting for the cargo they ordered.”

  Larissa looked at Paul Turner, who nodded.

  “Operator Darcy is correct,” he said. “Our understanding is that the men and women on this ship are to be delivered into vampire hands as soon as the ship docks. What is planned for them after that, we don’t know. But given that the oldest vampire in the world, who is currently unaccounted for, is most likely in a condition that requires a regular supply of blood, we thought it might be worth looking into. Don’t you agree?”

  “You think those people are being shipped to wherever Valeri and Dracula are hiding?” asked Kate.

  “We think it’s possible.”

  “What do you want us to do?” asked Jamie, his voice firm.

  Larissa looked over at him, saw the set of his jaw, the calm in his blue eyes, and felt her stomach flip. She was incredibly proud of him, and as attracted to him in that moment as she had ever been. A low growl emerged from her throat, barely audible to anyone except Jamie, who was sitting beside her. He turned to her, and a flicker of red spilled into the corners of her eyes, so quickly that only he could have possibly seen it. He grinned; he knew very well what it meant.

  Maybe we won’t have to leave right away, he thought, hopefully. Maybe we’ll get to wait until after dark.

  The thought of the long hours of remaining daylight, and what they might contain, widened his grin. He dragged his gaze away from Larissa, and tried to focus once more on Paul Turner’s briefing.

  “You leave immediately,” said the Major, and Jamie’s heart sank. “We surveyed the area, and the only place anyone could illegally dock a ship that size is the old Swan Hunter shipyard at Wallsend. We’re having the surrounding yards closed as we speak, and the coastguard has been given orders to allow the ship to enter the river. I want you to take up surveillance positions before nightfall, then intercept the ship when it docks. The first priority is to find out where these people were being taken, and why. The second is the captives themselves. The new SOP does not apply on this operation. Is that understood?”

  We don’t have to capture the vamps, realised Jamie, and felt a savage wave of pleasure flood through him. We can destroy them.

  “Yes, sir,” he answered, and a second later Jack Williams said the same.

  “Good,” said Major Turner. “Now. There are more than two hundred men and women on that ship, all of whom are going to be weak, and probably terrified. So you’re going to need to manage the situation; if they panic, which they probably will, if they start running across your lines of fire, make them get down. The collateral loss limit for this mission is nine. Is that clear?”

  “It’s not clear to me,” said Jamie, although he had a horrible idea that it was.

  I hope I’m wrong, he thought.
I really do.

  “It means we don’t want to see more than nine civilians die on this Operation. That’s the acceptable level of loss.”

  “My squad doesn’t deal in acceptable losses,” said Jack Williams, his voice low and steady.

  “Mine neither,” said Jamie, instantly.

  “Really?” asked Major Turner, his expression glacial. “Because I do. And so does Admiral Seward. And for this mission, yours is nine. Understood?”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Shut up!” shouted Major Turner, and the room immediately fell silent. He glared round at each of the six men and women in turn. “This is a Level 2 mission that Intelligence suggests may be directly related to this Department’s highest priority. You don’t like talking about collateral losses, fine, but you will bear them in mind when you’re out in the field. Because they can be the difference between a medal and six months on the inactive roster, especially on a mission like this, a mission that I expect you to be able to accomplish, even with only two squads.”

  “Why are you sending two squads?” asked Shaun Turner, mildly. “We normally work alone. Sir.”

  The young Operator’s words dripped with insolence, but his father favoured him with a look full of such icy threat that he quickly dropped his gaze. Unseen by anyone else in the room, Kate’s cheeks flushed momentarily as she watched Shaun buckle under his father’s stare.

  “If it was possible to do so,” said Major Turner, “we’d be sending four squads on this operation. If I had three at my disposal, I’d be sending three. But I don’t; I have two. You two. So that’s why you’re both going. Because we’re down to the bare bones here.”

  “Seven vamps, though?” said Jack Williams. “It doesn’t need six of us to handle seven of them.”

  “I don’t care if it’s one newly-turned vampire in the middle of an open field, Lieutenant Williams. You have your orders, you have your briefing, the surveillance data has been transferred to your consoles and your transport, and I am deeply bored of talking to all of you. Dismissed.”

  For a moment, no one moved, then Turner walked swiftly round the podium and took two long strides into the middle of the room.

  “I said, dismissed,” he said, and this time they all moved, quickly.

  Six and a half hours later Operational Squads F-7 and G-17 huddled together in the shadow of a grey factory building on the banks of the River Tyne.

  The towering cranes that had once been such a feature of the skyline of this part of the world were gone, dismantled and sold to an Indian shipyard two years earlier. The huge yard, where thousands of men had laboured to build the legendary RMS Mauretania in the first years of the twentieth century, where their grandsons had built the Royal Navy’s flagship, HMS Ark Royal, seven decades later, was silent. The floating dock, with its four wide berths, sat open to the lapping water of the Tyne; it was already becoming overgrown, and was slowly filling up with discarded bottles and cans, left by the teenagers who prowled its wide-open space after dark.

  The factories that had once manufactured engine parts and hull panels were empty, their heavy machines sold to shipyards around the world that were still enjoying better times. They were coated in graffiti, and beginning to rust at their corners. The roads that ran between them, which had once hummed with the accumulated sound of thousands of men’s voices when the evening whistle blew, were covered in a spider’s web of cracks and holes; tangles of weeds emerged from these gaps, as though the earth was already beginning to reclaim land that had once been home to the very best of human ingenuity and innovation.

  A thick fog was rolling down the Tyne from the North Sea; as Jamie looked out across the desolate, creaking yard, he could not see the far bank of the river. The grey tendrils were drifting up to the edges of the concrete dock below them, but were not, as yet, cresting them and moving on to the land.

  “This is going to be no fun at all if that fog breaks over the dock,” he said. “Seven vamps may as well be seventy if we can’t see them.”

  Jack Williams nodded. The six Operators had finished their reconnaissance of the old shipyard, and concluded it was sufficiently isolated for their purposes. It was far from secure, however; there was a main thoroughfare, Hadrian Road, less than two hundred metres to the north, and the fences that surrounded the yard were in significant disrepair. There was no time to plug the holes and tighten the net round the yard; instead, the plan was to never allow the vampires to get more than a few metres from their ship.

  “I’ll take Kate and Larissa down there,” Jamie continued, pointing to a series of rusting metal containers that stood at the edge of the concrete dock, fifteen metres from the river’s edge. “Jack, why don’t you take your squad over there, behind that wall? That way they’ll have to come between us, and we can ambush them from both sides. OK?”

  He turned away, ready to jog towards the position he had just described, when Larissa grabbed his arm, and he turned back. The three members of Squad F-7 were not moving, and Jack Williams was staring at him with a look of enormous apology on his open, friendly face.

  “What’s the problem?” asked Jamie.

  “I take my orders from Jack,” said Shaun Turner, a belligerent look on his face. “Not from you. Nothing personal.”

  Temper flared in Jamie’s chest.

  It bloody well sounds like it’s something personal, he thought. Does he just naturally hate me, like his dad does?

  “Really?” asked Kate, her voice fierce. “You really think now is the time for this petty crap?”

  Shaun’s face flushed, but he didn’t look away.

  “Jack outranks Jamie,” said Angela, who had the decency to sound embarrassed as she spoke. “In terms of experience. We think he should take point.”

  Larissa snarled, and her eyes flickered red. “This is complete bull—”

  “Angela’s right,” interrupted Jamie. “Tell us what you want us to do, Jack.”

  Larissa looked at him, her face pained on his behalf, but he shot her a tiny smile, pleading with her not to make a big deal out of what was happening. She returned it, and his heart swelled with fierce affection for the vampire girl.

  Jack Williams gave him a brief glance, full of gratitude. “Positions as Jamie described,” he said. “Remember that we need at least one vamp alive for questioning. At least one. The new SOP doesn’t apply, which I’m sure we’re all very happy about, but let’s not get carried away. Dead vampires aren’t going to tell us where Dracula is. Let’s move.”

  The six dark figures were crouched, ready to scuttle-run to their posts, when the air around them changed; it seemed thicker, as though something huge was altering the pressure. At the same moment, the six Operators realised they could hear something too: a steady thud-thud-thud, and the low rush of breaking water. They looked up the river, into the thick, swirling fog, as the vast, curved prow of the Aristeia burst into view, blinding them with its running lights, its enormous control tower looming far above them. The huge ship was slowing rapidly, slicing through the river parallel to the long concrete dock.

  “Move! Now!” hissed Jack, and the six Operators scattered, hunkering low to the ground as they sprinted to the positions that Jamie had suggested. Then Larissa’s head was up, turned to the north, her supernatural hearing picking something up in the dark, sodden night air.

  “What is it?” asked Jamie. He was standing with his back to the corner of the container nearest the dock, peering out at the incoming ship. Its size was boggling his mind; the deck was a football-field long, the hull a daunting, vertical wall of steel, the control tower the size of a large office building. It approached with eerie quiet; he could hear no voices, no sounds of any activity on the decks, or below them, just the steady thud of the engines.

  “Trucks,” replied Larissa, then turned to look at him. “Three trucks inside the gate, heading this way.”

  “Any idea what’s inside them?” asked Jamie.

  Larissa nodded.

  �
��Vampires,” she replied. “Lots and lots of vampires.”

  12

  INSIDE THE VOID

  JEREMY’S 24HR TRANSPORT CAFÉ, NORTH OF KÖLN, GERMANY SEVEN WEEKS EARLIER

  Frankenstein was jolted awake as the truck shuddered to a halt. He opened his eyes, and looked over at Andreas, the skinny, speed-addicted kid who had given him a lift out of Dortmund as the sun set on the previous day.

  “This is as far as I go,” said Andreas. He twitched constantly, gnawing at his fingernails until they bled, but he had shared a flask of soup and some black bread with Frankenstein when they had stopped for petrol, and for that, as well as the lift, the monster was grateful.

  “That’s fine,” said Frankenstein. “Thanks for bringing me this far.”

  He unwrapped a grey-green hand from the moth-eaten blanket the kind lady at the homeless shelter had given him, and extended it towards Andreas, who shook it. Then he wrapped the blanket tightly round himself, grabbed the plastic bag that contained everything he owned and stepped out into the freezing night.

  Frankenstein had woken up four weeks earlier, in the bowels of a fishing boat, without the slightest idea of who he was. When the ship’s captain, a weathered, salt-encrusted old man called Jens, had asked him his name, he had not been able to answer. Subsequent questions – where he lived, his family and friends, and how he had come to be floating adrift in the North Sea with the little finger of his left hand missing and a wound to his neck that should have killed him – were met with the same response: a panicked look of utter confusion. He had lain on the floor of the cabin, as he was too tall to fit into any of the bunks, and tried to remember something, anything, a place he had been, a conversation he had had, a person he had met, but there was a yawning void in the centre of his mind where his memory should have been.

  He was weak from the hypothermia that had nearly killed him, that would have killed him had the crew of the Furchtlos not found him tangled in their nets as they drew in the first catch of their trip. The net, studded with orange buoys at regular intervals, had kept him afloat, and was the reason he had not drowned. His Department 19 uniform, made of heat-regulating material that acted in the same way as a wetsuit, was the reason he had not succumbed to the punishing cold of the water; without it the fishermen would have hauled in a corpse with their catch.