Area 51_Nosferatu

by Robert Doherty

  “What did they take?”

  “It appears a stock of old blood taken by the Russians from the Germans from Berlin at the end of the Great Patriotic War.”

  “World War II,” Colonel Kokol muttered. “Who did this?”

  “We have video from the entrance—they killed the guards on their way out, along with Pashenka, the SVD man who let them in. Police files indicate they are Mafia under the control of—”

  “Adrik,” Kokol completed the sentence. Everyone had heard whispers of the head of the Mafia in Moscow. Nothing happened at this level in the city without his blessings.

  “Yes.”

  “Would blood stored like that still be viable?” Kokol wondered. “Why would they steal it?”

  “I do not know, but twelve men are dead, so it must be important.”

  Colonel Kokol swung his feet to the side and tried to sit up. The attempt caused a hiss of pain to escape his lips but he managed to get upright. “Do the police have a line on where we can find Adrik?”

  “Yes. They’ve always known where his headquarters is. No one has ever had the power or the will to attack him.”

  “We’ll see about that,” Kokol said, pulling a SatPhone out of his pocket.

  Earth Orbit

  With a slight burst from a forward thruster, the X-Craft decelerated as it entered the large cargo bay of the mothership. Another burst brought it to a halt, floating just above the deck and among the battered Talon spacecraft that had been knocked out of commission by the nuclear blast combined with the power of the ruby sphere that Turcotte had brought there from the cavern in Ethiopia. A hatch on the side of the X-Craft opened with a puff of escaping air and both suited crew-members exited, carrying large plastic cases in the zero gravity.

  They split, going to different Talons. Each went inside, to the first Airlia body they saw, and opened the case, revealing syringes, blood bags, and the same type of battery-powered pump that Tai had used.

  They quickly got to work, poking each body in different places to draw the little remaining blood that hadn’t drained out into space.

  Moscow

  Vampyr’s reach was indeed long.

  Kokol’s SatPhone rang and he listened for a moment, then held it out for the captain. “It is the premier.”

  The captain stared in disbelief and took the phone. He listened for about a minute, his only replies “Yes, sir,” then closed the phone and handed it back to Colonel Kokol.

  “And?” the colonel asked.

  “We attack and destroy Adrik.” The captain spun on his heel and shouted orders. Soldiers jumped into vehicles and they raced into the city toward the modern office building that held the Mafia leader’s office.

  Colonel Kokol, having survived World War II, the Cold War, and the end of the Cold War and the bitter departmental infighting after it, along with being Vampyr’s spy in Russia on Adrik for over half a century, decided to watch the assault from the command truck three blocks away. It had direct video feeds from each of the assault units, from cameras mounted on the team leaders’ helmets.

  “Your optics are excellent,” Kokol observed, as they watched the teams surround the building.

  “A gift from the Americans,” the captain said. “They’re supposed to be used by counternuke teams to keep track of our nuclear material and weapons.”

  Kokol watched as the teams stealthily approached all the known entrances to the building, listening as the captain counted down to the breach.

  At zero all the ingress points were hit.

  Kokol was shaking his head within five seconds as no opposition was apparent on any of the screens. “It’s too easy. Something’s wrong.”

  The teams had breached the perimeter of the building and were working their way in. Still no shots fired. Nothing.

  Colonel Kokol turned to the captain. “I would pull the teams. Now.”

  Two of the teams were working their way up stairwells, the elevators out of order as they cut the power to them. Three other teams were doing room-by-room searches of lower-level offices.

  The captain leaned over Kokol’s shoulder. “I cannot pull them out. We must have revenge. Watch. We have other equipment from the Americans. Most efficient and useful.” He rattled something into his mike. One of the men with a camera stopped at a computer on a desk and pulled something out of his pack. It appeared to be a handheld organizer with a lead going to a floppy diskette, which he shoved into the A drive on the computer.

  “We can take everything off the hard drive in ten seconds,” the captain said proudly. “It is being transmitted right here.” He pointed at a computer next to the monitors.

  “I’m telling you that you’ve got a problem,” Kokol said. “The place is abandoned.”

  “What?”

  Kokol stood, looking across the monitors as the teams progressed deeper into the building. “Get your men out. Now!” He yelled the last word.

  “I don’t—”

  “Do it,” Kokol said. He turned to the captain. “Adrik is prepared for an attack. You’ve encountered no resistance, which means he’s letting you in. If he’s letting you in, then it can’t be good.” Even as he said the words, Kokol knew it was too late.

  This was confirmed as a flash filled one of the video monitors, immediately followed by the feed blacking out. In rapid succession the other four feeds did the same.

  The command and control van lifted off its right tires as the blast wave hit it, followed by the roar of the explosion. The van slammed back down, still upright, as debris from the explosion hit the side.

  Kokol knew the entire team was dead. He felt it run through his body as surely as the shock wave had hit the van.

  “The computer.” Kokol tapped the dazed captain on the shoulder. “What?”

  “Check the computer.” “For what?”

  “The download. What they tapped.”

  The captain slid the seat over to the nearby computer as chaos reigned inside the command van, everyone shouting into radios trying to figure out what had happened. He looked at the screen and saw the small emblem indicating the information that had been transmitted by the team member just before the explosion.

  Kokol doubted anything of value would have been picked up, but over two dozen men had just died, and he owed it to them to look. The hard drive data came up. He quickly scanned through it. Daily calendar. Interoffice . memos. Shipping. Time clocks. Phone logs.

  Kokol backed up. He scanned the shipping logs for the last two days carefully. Kokol smiled when he spotted a rush shipment to Hong Kong.

  He pulled out his phone and dialed a number, giving the address to the person on the other end.

  Dulce, New Mexico

  Nosferatu and the team of mercenaries he had hired had taken off in two Huey helicopters with US Army markings from an abandoned airstrip in southern Colorado, where they had been awaiting his arrival. They were flying due south, low to the ground to avoid radar.

  The town of Dulce was just south of the Colorado-New Mexico border, between the Carson National Forest and the Rio Grande National Forest. The terrain was full of mountains covered with pine trees. The town was on the forward slope of a large mountain. On the back slope was the entrance to the secret lab that Majestic-12 had established shortly after World War II.

  The experiments there had been as varied as the human imagination, according to what Nosferatu had been able to learn, although much of it was still shrouded in secrecy. The United States government had done work on mind control using memory-affecting drugs and electronic dissolution of memory. Some of the work came out of Airlia technology and some from German scientists captured at the end of World War II and impressed into US service under Operation Paperclip.

  This lab was also where Majestic had shipped the Guardian computer they discovered in Temiltepec in South America, the device that had corrupted the members of Majestic who had come in contact with it, giving them its programmed instructions to fly the mothership.

  T
he team leader called out a time warning, indicating they were less than five minutes from the target. With a slight smile Nosferatu watched the men in the cargo bay don night-vision goggles. Human technology had finally started to catch up with a capability he’d had for thousands of years.

  Nosferatu knew that the small security force posted at Dulce had no reason for concern. Their first indication of trouble came when the aircraft landed and the first thing off were flashbang grenades that stunned and blinded them.

  Nosferatu had insisted on taking down the security force without killing them, and the mercenaries had agreed, seeing no point in committing murder if it was avoidable. They seized the stunned guards and quickly secured them. Nosferatu then exited the helicopter and followed one team down into the dig site.

  The engineers who had worked on the site had dug a shaft straight down through the pancaked levels of the base, with an occasional side tunnel. A large crane holding a metal cage served as a makeshift elevator and Nosferatu climbed on board with four of the mercenaries as another took the controls of the crane.

  The basket was swung over the shaft and lowered all the way to the bottom. This was where General Hemstadt had been running highly classified biological experiments for Majestic-12 before being co-opted by the Mission. The higher levels had taken most of the force of the foo fighter’s power beam. This level was relatively intact, as the intelligence reports Nosferatu had purchased indicated.

  There was some debris, but they were able to move. They were in a hall that extended about sixty feet, ending in a dead end. There were several doors to the left and another corridor turning to the right. There were name plaques next to each door on the left indicating that those rooms were quarters for Sublevel 1 staff. Nosferatu passed right by all of them, taking the right turn at the end of the corridor.

  He was in a ten-foot-long corridor that ended in a double set of doors with biological warning signs posted on them. Nosferatu walked up to the doors and pushed them open. A rough concrete floor angled down to a large cavern carved out of the mountain. The ceiling was twenty feet high and the far wall a hundred meters away.

  There were several dozen large, vertical vats in the room. They were empty, but Nosferatu knew they had once held bodies. He looked to the right, where, according to his report, the Guardian computer had been stored. There was an empty space there now.

  Nosferatu walked forward, past the tubes. Set off to the left was a bank of machinery set on two carts. What he had come for. At his signal the mercenaries began wheeling out the blood machines.

  Hong Kong

  Vampyr’s absolute stillness caused Chon great anxiety. He felt the weight of his failure to locate Tian Dao Lin’s lair. And five minutes earlier his men had called to report—as he had feared—that they had lost the trail of Tai and the blood in the back streets of Hong Kong, where Tian Dao Lin’s power was absolute. Two of the trailers had been shot and killed, indicating the level of seriousness of whatever was happening.

  “Sir—”

  “Yes?” Vampyr waited.

  “Perhaps,” Chon began, but he stopped when Vampyr’s SatPhone rang. Vampyr listened for a few moments, then hung up without saying a word. He wrote an address on a piece of paper and slid it across to Chon. “What is there?”

  Chon read it. “An office building downtown. The Pacific Rim Bank Building.” Vampyr stood. “It is time to pay Mr. Lin a visit.”

  “Are you sure—”

  Vampyr’s glare caused Chon to bite off whatever he was about to say. He grabbed the phone and barked orders.

  The faint beat of helicopter blades echoed down from the roof. Vampyr turned for the door.

  “It will take a few minutes for—” Chon began, but he didn’t finish the sentence as the windows and steel shutters imploded, sending shrapnel flying through the room. A piece of metal caught Chon in the chest, ripping through, severing his spinal cord and killing him instantly.

  Vampyr reacted instinctively, diving to the floor unscathed. He rolled away from the windows as he caught a glimpse of figures rappelling in on ropes suspended from the roof. A half dozen figures dressed in black with black balaclavas covering their faces were in the room. They all ran toward Vampyr.

  Vampyr rolled under the first, at the same time pulling a short sword—his xithos from so long ago in Sparta—out of its sheath and getting to his feet, assuming a ready stance, the point of the ancient sword directed toward the intruders. One jumped at him and he swung, the blade slicing cleanly into the man’s shoulder, then diagonally through his body, coming out the opposite hip. The two pieces fell to the floor.

  Everyone in the room halted. The remaining five bracketed Vampyr, keeping their distance from the sword.

  “Where is Tian Dao Lin?” Vampyr asked.

  No one replied and no one moved. Vampyr had never been a big believer in standoffs. He jabbed at one of the intruders facing him, then spun, sword extended and lopped off the head of the other. He began to advance on the others when the door to the office crashed inward and four more figures dressed in black jumped through, taking up positions. They were followed by an old man wearing loose-fitting black silk with red dragons on each sleeve. He took in the situation and held up a hand.

  “Stop.” The old man took a step into the room. “Vampyr.”

  Vampyr shifted the point of the xithos toward the old man. “Tian Dao Lin.” The old man nodded. “You were foolish to come here. You should have taken Nosferatu’s offer.” His Quarters took up flanking positions, slightly to the front of he who had made them.

  “Nosferatu is weak and a fool who has been besotted by love all these years,” Vampyr said.

  “Perhaps,” Tian Dao Lin said.

  “Join with me,” Vampyr said.

  “At the moment I see no reason why I should,” Tian Dao Lin said. “I have some of the blood and Nosferatu will have the technology needed. You have nothing.”

  “I have Adrik on my side. With you, we will be able to get whatever we want from Nosferatu.” Vampyr backed up slightly, to a point where he was near the front of Chon’s desk, his backpack lying against the metal front.

  Tian Dao Lin shrugged. “So he has been spying for you. I assumed Adrik was hiding something. The last report I had was that he had recovered what he needed to also.”

  “He has. And he is with me, not Nosferatu.” Vampyr made a show of sliding the xithos into its scabbard, while, unnoticed, his other hand slid into his pocket. “You still have not made a proper proposition,” Tian Dao Lin said.

  “True,” Vampyr acknowledged.

  “Then I will have you killed.” Tian Dao Lin turned for the door.

  Vampyr leapt backward, clearing the desk, and falling to the floor on the far side. Vampyr squeezed the detonator in his pocket.

  The roar of the claymore mine secreted in his backpack was instantly followed by the sound of thousands of steel ball bearings ripping into the far side of the room, tearing through plaster, wood, and flesh and bone. Vampyr felt the air being sucked out of his lungs from the proximity of the blast on the other side of the desk and the shock wave moving away from him.

  He drew his xithos as he got to his knees and peered over the desk top, his ears ringing. Blood, viscera, and parts of bodies littered the room. Two of the Quarters were moving, moaning in agony. Vampyr got to his feet. Cautiously he walked around the desk, being careful where he stepped. He lopped off the heads of the wounded Quarters with two swift strokes. He spotted a blood trail leading out of the doorway and rushed forward.

  Vampyr’s lips split in an evil grin as he saw Tian Dao Lin trying to drag himself away along the floor of the hallway, his left leg almost completely severed from his body.

  Vampyr went up to his fellow Undead and placed his boot on the practically severed appendage, causing the Chinese to scream in agony.

  “You will survive this,” Vampyr said. “Indeed, the leg will grow whole again. But it will take many, many years. I know. But if you ally with me
now, and come with me to the Haven, it will go much more quickly.”

  Tian Dao Lin could only nod.

  “Where is the blood you recovered?” Vampyr asked, leaning forward, putting extra pressure on the wounded leg.

  Tian Dao Lin hissed. “In my helicopter.”

  Vampyr sheathed his xithos. With one hand he picked up the wounded Undead and slung him over his shoulder. “Let’s go then.”

  Earth Orbit

  The two astronauts made their way across the scorched deck of the mothership’s hold and climbed into the airlock on the X-Craft. They carried with them all the blood they had gathered from the Airlia bodies. As Nosferatu had predicted, there wasn’t much, but what they did have was pure Airlia blood. They placed it in the X-Craft’s hold.

  They sealed the airlock, secured the cases, and took their seats. With a few gentle puffs of power from the thrusters, they maneuvered the craft out of the hold and into space.

  CHAPTER 17

  The Skeleton Coast

  Nosferatu was joined at the round table by Adrik. In the center of the table were four flat-screen monitors, one facing each of the chairs. They displayed the blood lab, where the supply Adrik had brought from Moscow was currently being worked on.

  “Your headquarters was destroyed?” Nosferatu asked, his eyes on the screen. Adrik nodded. “Yes. The FSB assaulted it.”

  “Why?”

  There was a short silence, then Adrik shrugged. “I’m not certain.”

  Nosferatu shifted his gaze from the screen to his fellow Undead. “I know you think me a fool. But I am the Eldest. I know you’ve met Vampyr. You’ve communicated with him. Do you know it was he who tried to kill you in Moscow and got the FSB to assault your headquarters?”

  “I thought he might be behind it,” Adrik acknowledged.

  “Vampyr has no honor,” Nosferatu said. “He is just like you. When you were Genghis Khan you had no honor. You killed all who stood in your way, sparing none. Vampyr did the same in his various incarnations. What did you expect from him?”