She did.
“And again.”
Twice more, and then yet again for good measure.
“So what do you think?” she asked. “Who are they?”
“Can’t tell that much about them. Not enough detail. But they definitely look military.”
“Exactly. Since seeing the playback, that’s my thoughts exactly.”
“Helmets. Assault weapons. That looks like military-grade body armour they have on. Ballistic vests, elbow and knee pads. But also the fact that they’re going single file, evenly spaced. Smacks of training to me. Drilled-in discipline. And that’s not all. Can you wind it back? Freeze-frame on the clearest shot you’ve got, one where you can see the whole of one individual, head to toe.”
Tina obliged.
“See that?” Redlaw said, pointing to one of the silhouetted figures. “See how he walks? The way he’s putting his feet down?”
Tina frowned. “So what?”
“There’s something about it. It’s not how a man carries himself ordinarily. No, scratch that. It’s not how an ordinary man carries himself.”
“I don’t get.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to,” said Redlaw. “I could be imagining it, but... If you’ve been around Sunless as long as I have, you become familiar with certain aspects of their behaviour. The body language, for instance. Vampires may not look like much, but they’re surprisingly graceful when they want to be. They go on the balls of their feet, a bit like dancers. This fellow”—he tapped the screen—“has almost that exact same walk. All seven of them do. If only we could make out their features better...”
But the figures’ faces remained hidden throughout the duration of the clip, lost in impenetrable shadow.
“What are soldiers doing down in the New York subway? That’s what I’d like to know,” Tina said.
“Down in the subway where Sunless are reputed to be,” Redlaw added. “I need to go there and have a look for myself.” He stood. “Will you show me where it is?”
“Whoa there, hoss,” said Tina. “You mean right now? Do you have any idea what the time is?”
“No time like the present.”
“Yeah, but we’re talking the West Side. Trains have stopped running, and forget catching a cab. It’s twenty below and the snow’s not stopping. All the hacks with any sense have gone home. What say we leave it ’til morning, huh?”
Redlaw saw the logic in this. “Okay,” he said. “So I suppose I’m crashing here. Or are you going to turf me out onto the street?”
Tina indicated a couch in the corner. It was threadbare and holed, and looked as though it had been rescued from a skip. “That’s yours. I’ll grab you a couple of blankets.”
Redlaw made himself as comfortable as he could on the couch’s pancake-thin cushions. It irked him that he had paid for a hotel room he wasn’t using, but there was nothing to be done about that.
“Word of warning.” Tina pointed to her bedroom door. “I’ll be in there, and guess what? I sleep with my Taser and my Mace. Just saying. In case you should get any funny ideas.”
“Trust me, I won’t.”
“You betcha you won’t.”
“One thing, Tina,” Redlaw said, before she disappeared into her room. “Has anybody else seen that footage?”
She shook her head. “Just me, and now you.”
“So you haven’t put it on the web anywhere? Shown it to a friend?”
“Nuh-uh. Why?”
“Good.”
“Why?” she persisted.
“A feeling, that’s all.”
“So it’s important.”
“Conceivably. I just think, for your sake, that advertising that you’ve got it might not be a wise move. At least not until we’ve investigated further, and maybe not even then.”
“Fuck. Seriously?”
She didn’t seem concerned at all. If anything, she seemed thrilled.
Unusual girl, Redlaw thought, and he rolled over on the couch and surprised himself by falling instantly asleep.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
THE HUMMER H2—gunmetal-grey paintjob, blacked-out windows, licence plate number unknown to the DMV—pulled in at the dockyard gate. Dawn was breaking. The night’s clouds had dumped their freight of snow and moved on, and a weak sun was rising over Brooklyn.
Weak, thought Colonel Jacobsen, but enough. Any sun’ll do.
He and his team performed a quick equipment check. Face masks were clipped into position, UV-resistant goggles donned. Then they sounded off, codenames into throat mikes, all seven of them on the same frequency and fully communicado.
A night watchman waddled out his prefab hut, yawning blearily. He skirted the barrier and approached the Hummer, twirling a finger in midair: wind down your window. When the Hummer driver didn’t comply, the watchman leaned in close and tapped on the window, trying to peer through the heavily tinted glass but seeing only his own reflection.
The driver, Red Eye Three, rammed the door open, knocking the watchman off his feet. Before he could recover, Three sprang out and spritzed him in the face with a squirt of BZ gas from a small canister. The watchman spluttered and wheezed, his face went red, and then his eyes rolled up and he passed out. He would wake up in an hour’s time with a splitting headache and no recollection of what just happened.
Red Eye Three hurried into the hut and threw the switch that operated the gate barrier. Back in the Hummer, Three steered the car into the dockyard, pulling up alongside an aluminium-sided administrative building.
“Okay, we’re in, let’s roll,” said Colonel Jacobsen, and all four doors of the Hummer opened and Team Red Eye bundled out.
It was like stepping into a blast furnace. Jacobsen could feel the sun’s rays through his thick protective gear. Wintry and watery though it was, the sun was hot to him. It was trying to pierce his fatigues and body armour, get to his flesh. It wanted to consume him whole, and would if given a chance. Before joining Red Eye, Jacobsen had done tours of duty in the Iraqi desert at the height of summer, a hundred and twenty in the shade, heat that could fry a man alive and desiccate his brains. Here in subzero New York in January, now that he had become something other than a mere infantry officer, it was about as bad. The daylight glared through the goggles’ polarised lenses. Had any of his skin been exposed, blisters would have erupted in seconds. Longer than that, and there would be singeing, wisps of pale smoke, first degree burns, second degree, then rapidly third.
Team Red Eye moved with practised precision, each of them with a fixed role, a set of procedures to execute. CCTV cameras were disabled and the hard drive that stored their recordings was wiped. The perimeter was secured. All alarms were put out of action. In under five minutes, the team had control of the entire dockyard, nothing able to come between them and their target.
Four of them took up prearranged lookout positions. Jacobsen, meanwhile, headed for the waterfront with Red Eye Two and Red Eye Five in tow. Wharf cranes loomed against the sky, their long necks seemingly bowing under the weight of snow. The three men moved lightly, even Red Eye Five, for all that he was toting a large oxyacetylene cylinder set on his back. Five, also known as Gunnery Sergeant DuWayne Child, was the size of an ox and, thanks to the course of treatment the entire team were undergoing, as strong as one too.
Colonel Jacobsen consulted a download of the dockyard’s delivery manifest on his smartphone. He and the other two were almost at their objective. A mound of shipping containers rose before them, steel boxes the size of railway carriages arranged in a grid pattern. Serial numbers were visible on the sides. Jacobsen identified the one they wanted, the topmost of a stack of three.
“This is Red Eye One. I have visual. Target is acquired. Radio silence from here on in.”
The container had arrived yesterday afternoon, offloaded from the Star of Szczecin, a 10,000-ton Polsteam cargo vessel outbound from Gdansk. According to the bill of lading, there were rolls of carpet and assorted items of furniture in
side, and doubtless that was true. What mattered to Team Red Eye was what else might be inside. If their intel was correct—and the man who was funding the Red Eye initiative seemed to have access to rock solid intel—the container was home to a score of trafficked vampires. Some Russian hoods had charged the vamps a small fortune to cross the Atlantic, in accommodation that made steerage class look luxurious. Tonight, local contacts were due to come and release them from confinement. But not if Team Red Eye had any say in the matter.
Jacobsen leapt up the side of the container stack, scrambling easily from handhold to handhold until he reached the top. He undid his mask. Sunlight dug needles into his lips and cheeks. He inhaled through his nose several times, deeply, before re-covering his face.
He gestured to Two and Five below. A rapid flick of gloved fingers, beckoning them.
In no time, Jacobsen had been joined on top of the container by Child and the team’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Harvey Giacoia. Child unpacked the cylinder set and the blowtorch attached to it. Jacobsen and Giacoia, meanwhile, cleared the snow off the container, brushing it aside with sweeps of their feet. Child opened the gas flow regulator on the acetylene tank, sparked up the jet with a friction lighter, slowly brought in the oxygen until the mix was right, and got busy cutting.
Up to that moment, the vampires had been staying very quiet, keeping still, hoping that whoever had climbed onto their container was there to do nothing more than conduct an external inspection. As sparks began raining down inside, alarm swiftly turned to panic. The vampires scurried to find cover amid the packing crates and pallet loads.
Child worked methodically, slicing along the upper rim of the container. Steel glowed and dripped like lava. When he had cut through one end and two corners, he halted, nodding to Jacobsen and Giacoia. They grasped the edges of the container top and heaved backwards with all their might. The top curled upwards. It was like peeling the lid off a giant sardine tin. Metal screeched and groaned as it buckled and bent.
When they had created a large enough gap, the two men leapt down into the container’s interior, and Child joined them. They unshipped MP5 submachine guns.
Crimson eyes glittered furiously in the container’s dark recesses. Guttural Polish curses were flung at the intruders, but this was all the vampires could do. They couldn’t go near them, not as long as the three men stood in the protective aura of the sun’s slanting beams. They could only cower and snarl.
“Fire at will,” Jacobsen ordered, and he and Red Eye Two and Red Eye Five let rip, unleashing salvos of Fraxinus rounds in scything arcs. The vampires were pinned down by the gunfire. Bullets whittled through their flimsy shelters and makeshift barricades. Ricochets whined in all directions. One by one, shots found their mark. Vampires erupted into dust, shrieking horribly.
“I’m out,” Giacoia announced, and Jacobsen and Child soon emptied their magazines as well. With the echoes of their holocaust still ringing in their ears, the three of them advanced towards the other end of the container.
A number of vampires lay wounded, writhing in agony. All had been winged by a Fraxinus, and the bullet’s ash-wood content was slowly poisoning them, eating away their flesh. The Red Eyes drew sidearms and heart-shot the vampires at point blank range.
Jacobsen surveyed their handiwork. A vampire kill was a hell of a lot neater and cleaner than the ordinary kind of kill, you could at least say that for it. No gore, very little mess. It was almost like not killing at all.
And for that reason, vaguely dissatisfying.
“Good work, men,” Jacobsen said. “Let’s bail.”
BACK IN THE Hummer, trundling northward on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, Jacobsen got on the phone to the money man.
“You catch that, sir?”
“Every second of it,” came the reply in a thick, nasal Boston accent that stretched certain vowels almost to breaking point. “Another textbook takedown. I’m as proud as can be of you fellows.”
“Just doing what we’re paid for,” said Jacobsen. The connection was good, but there was an unusually long delay on it. The price of dense, secure signal encryption. “How many more before we’ve built up a persuasive argument?”
“That’s for me to decide, soldier, not you.”
Jacobsen hated the way the money man called him soldier. Only soldiers got to call other soldiers that. It was condescending and disrespectful.
He bit back his irritation, thinking of the $50,000 completion fee that was being wired to his checking account probably right this minute and the slightly smaller but still considerable sums that were making their way into his teammates’ accounts. You did not lose your temper with the person employing you. That was the golden rule of mercenary work. You took whatever shit the boss dished out, and you smiled and asked for more. So, not much different from the army, then.
“Understood,” he said. “Just eager to be getting on with the job.”
“And that’s a very healthy attitude to have,” drawled the Bostonian. “Now, you and your unit toddle off back to base, get some rest, have yourselves some of that tasty human claret I lay on for you, and leave the forward planning and the strategising to me. How about that?”
Jacobsen snapped the phone shut and stared out at the East River and the sumptuous rise-and-fall span of the Brooklyn Bridge towering against the pristine blue sky. His jaw clenched and unclenched.
“How much do you hate that bastard?” said Red Eye Three beside him as she drove. Her name was Jeanette Berger, she had been a chief warrant officer in the Marine Corps, and she was as competent in the field as she was pretty—and she was exceptionally pretty. Even the bright scarlet of her eyes couldn’t detract from that.
“I’d hate him if I cared about him, and I don’t,” said Jacobsen. “As long as his money’s good, I have no feelings about him whatsoever. He doesn’t annoy me in the least bit.”
Berger tipped her head in amusement. “So you say.” She glanced in the rearview. The five other members of Team Red Eye were lost in their own thoughts, the usual post-successful-op reveries. Even Red Eye Seven’s usually ever-flapping yap was, for the time being, at rest.
Berger slipped a surreptitious hand across to the passenger seat and Jacobsen’s thigh. She squeezed, fingertips brushing the bulge of his crotch.
“Yes,” sighed Jacobsen, with the slightest of sly smiles. “You can try to ride Jim Jacobsen, you can try to get a rise out of him, but you won’t get anywhere. No, sir.”
What Berger’s hand was feeling gave the lie to his words. Her touch could get a rise out of Colonel Jacobsen any time.
LATER, BACK AT base, Jacobsen came to her in her quarters.
They didn’t speak much. There wasn’t a lot that needed to be said. He stripped her, fell on her, plundered her.
“I have my period,” she told him breathlessly at one point, and Jacobsen grinned as if this was the best news ever, an invitation, not a prohibition, and shortly afterwards his head was between her legs, tongue lapping with gusto.
Etiquette and discipline dictated that teammates did not sleep together.
But Berger and Jacobsen paid no heed to that.
Appetite.
Appetite was all.
MEANWHILE, THE MONEY man was on the phone again, another secure line, this one connecting him to a private mobile number that an extraordinarily small number of people had access to. In fact, there were perhaps only a dozen individuals in all of America who had the privilege of knowing it and being able to use it.
The voice at the other end was measured and urbane, a voice that had seduced millions of voters, filled them with reassurance that their problems were shared, their complaints were listened to, their concerns were important and valid.
“Ah, my Boston Brahmin,” the voice said. “I can spare you five minutes.”
“Is that all? In that case, I don’t think I’m getting great value for my campaign contributions. Five million dollars a minute? Is that what your time’s really worth?”
<
br /> “I’d give you more,” said the other man unflappably, “but then I’d be late for my meeting with the Chinese premier, who’s somewhat slightly higher up the totem pole than you. Or maybe you can come and discuss trade quotas with him, and I’ll go catch a movie in the White House screening room instead. Believe me, the way my schedule is these days, a couple of hours to myself with a Blu-Ray of Citizen Kane would be a blessing.”
“Could be that one day I will be in your shoes,” the Bostonian said.
“Nah. That’d mean you’d have to learn to be nice to people, and I can’t see that happening. Besides, you couldn’t handle the pay cut.”
“You have me there. Well, while I have this brief window, then, I’ll take the opportunity to give you a heads-up on the status of the Porphyrian Project.”
“And where are we at with it right now?”
“You’ve watched the helmet-cam footage I’ve been sending you?”
“Of course.”
“Then you know for yourself that it’s all going swimmingly. Our operatives have exceeded expectation. Their efficiency and prowess are remarkable. Next to them, vampires are like children, quite defenceless.”
The President of the United States let out one of his warm, patrician chuckles. “That’s all very well, but you’re still in the field-testing phase, aren’t you? How long have your people been out there, doing what they do? Less than a month. You yourself warned me there could be potential side effects from the treatments. You haven’t allowed enough time for those to come to the forefront, if they’re going to. The FDA spends years trialling new drugs before letting the pharmaceutical companies sell them on the open market. Same should apply to you. What if something goes wrong? What if, tomorrow, one of your guys suddenly sprouts fangs and starts chowing down on some poor, unsuspecting lab tech? You’re asking a lot from me, so early in the game. You need to be a little more patient.”
It took all the patience the Bostonian possessed to keep from blowing his top. “Mr President, sir,” he said, “you told me last July that a government contract for the Porphyrian process was guaranteed, on condition that I could prove it could be made to work. With all due respect, I think I’ve done that.”
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