Darkest Night

by Will Hill

  The teenager grunted.

  “Great,” said Julian. “You understand what I need you to do?”

  Another grunt.

  “You’re sure?”

  Ben rolled his eyes and nodded.

  “OK,” he said. He rolled up his sleeve, pulled the elastic band with the locator chip tied to it off his wrist, and held it out. Ben reached for it, and Julian gripped his hand tightly.

  “Eight hours,” he said. “At least. Stay in the countryside, away from anywhere there might be a CCTV camera. Got it?”

  Ben stared at him, his expression one of insolent boredom. “Got it.”

  “Good,” said Julian. He released the teenager’s hand and fished a fifty-pound note out of his pocket. “Here you go.”

  Ben took the money, snapped the elastic band on to his wrist, and turned away without a word. He strolled down the path, through the gate, and set off along the dirt road towards the fields, the same route that Julian ran every morning. He watched until the teenager was out of sight, then walked out of the garden, and turned towards the village, where the Ford he had bought the year before, the one that, unlike his mother’s old Mercedes, was not equipped with a tracking device, was waiting for him.

  Ten minutes later he was driving south, his past shrinking into the distance behind him.

  The sun was high overhead as Julian turned down a small road marked by a sign that showed the outline of a white aeroplane against a red background.

  The airfield appeared to be an airfield in name alone. There were no permanent buildings, just a row of mobile trailers facing a runway of heavily rolled grass and a large tarpaulin suspended over a line of light aeroplanes. A car was parked next to the trailers, a dirty red Peugeot, and a plane on the runway with its engine idling; both presumably belonged to the man he was here to meet, a man he had only spoken to once on a burner mobile phone.

  He parked next to the Peugeot and checked his watch. Four hours and thirteen minutes had passed since he had given his locator chip to Ben and, providing the teenager followed his instructions, it would be almost four more hours until he dropped the elastic band through the letterbox of Julian’s mother’s cottage. He was not wholly confident that Ben would walk for the eight hours that had been agreed; it had been pretty obvious that Julian was not coming back any time soon, and he would not be surprised if the teenager had got bored and quit, confident that he would not be made to answer for doing so. But if that was the case, there was nothing Julian could do about it now. He would have to rely on Blacklight having more important things to do right now than checking on his movements.

  If someone in the Surveillance Division decided to take a look, they would see – or think they were seeing – the only car they knew he owned sitting idle in the cottage’s drive while he walked the nearby countryside, where they would not be able to get visual confirmation. If they wanted to be absolutely sure of his whereabouts, they would have to send someone out to check in person, and even if they did so, and found Ben wearing his chip, the teenager had no idea where Julian had gone. He didn’t think there was any way they could find him, but he refused to be complacent: Blacklight’s resourcefulness was something he understood better than most.

  Julian got out of the car and pulled his bags from the boot as a man emerged from one of the trailers and strolled towards him; he was perhaps fifty, his face deeply tanned and lined, a blue cap perched atop his head.

  “Mr Frank?”

  “That’s me,” said Julian.

  “Pat Landon,” said the man, and extended his hand. “We spoke on the phone.”

  “We did,” said Julian, shaking the offered hand. “Are we all set?”

  “She’s fuelled up and ready to go,” said Landon.

  “All right,” said Julian. He put the green duffel bag on the Ford’s bonnet, unzipped it, and pulled out a brown envelope. “Here you go.”

  Landon took the envelope and peered inside.

  “You can count it,” said Julian.

  Landon appeared to consider this for a moment. “No need,” he said.

  Julian smiled at him. “We only just met,” he said. “Count it.”

  Landon shrugged, and pulled a thick sheaf of notes out of the envelope. He licked the tip of his finger and quickly counted them. “Ten thousand.”

  “So we’re good?” said Julian.

  “We’re good,” said Landon. “I can’t take you all the way to Carcassonne, but I guess you knew that?”

  “I knew,” he said. “The airspace is closed, right?”

  Landon nodded. “All the way out as far as Toulouse,” he said. “The closest I can get you is a place called Fumel-Montayral. It’s a local aerodrome about two hours’ drive to the north. I’ve arranged for someone to meet us there and take you into town. You should be able to get a car there.”

  “That’s fine,” said Julian.

  “Good,” said Landon. “All right. Let’s do it.”

  The two men walked across the grass towards the plane. It was a white and blue Cessna 172, which suited Julian perfectly; the little four-seater was one of the most common planes in the world, and could almost have been hand-selected to not attract attention.

  Landon unlocked the plane’s passenger door and held it open. Julian threw the duffel bag on to the seat, then unzipped the black holdall and checked that the letter was still where he had put it. He knew it was stupid – there was no possible way that it could have disappeared during his drive to the airfield – but he couldn’t help himself. Some things simply went beyond the rational.

  His fingers closed on the rectangular shape, and he pulled it out of the pocket far enough to see the five words he had written barely five hours earlier.

  Fingers tapped his shoulder, causing him to jump. Julian pushed the envelope back into the pocket, zipped the holdall, and turned to find Landon looking at him with a curious expression on his face.

  “Ten thousand in cash is a lot for this trip,” said the pilot, and nodded at the holdall. “I don’t make a habit of involving myself in other people’s business, but is there anything in that bag that’s going to get me into trouble?”

  Julian smiled. “Do you really want to know?”

  Landon stared at him for a long moment, then grunted with laughter and shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “Get in.”

  Paul Turner paced back and forth in his quarters.

  In less than five minutes he would brief his Department on their response to a situation that was nothing less than a threat to the entire world as they knew it, but his mind was somewhere else entirely; it was with a teenage girl lying unconscious five floors below him.

  A small part of him was furious with Kate. Greg Browning had been broken, sobbing and screaming with rage and disappointment, and she should have known better than to think he could be reasoned with and approach him unarmed. Turner had ordered her to step back, but she had ignored him, and now she was fighting for her life. They would never know for certain whether Matt’s father had meant to shoot her, but it didn’t matter; the gun had fired and the damage was done.

  The rest of him was churning with pain, his heart aching for the girl he had come to love like a daughter, and for whom he had more affection than anyone else in the Department. He could not imagine a world without her in it. He had lost his son, and that had almost destroyed him; to lose her as well was unthinkable.

  Turner took a deep breath and tried to clear his mind, to focus on the extremely pressing matter at hand; there was nothing he could do for Kate, and he would not be honouring her by allowing his pain to distract him from what he needed to do. He could clearly picture the Ops Room; by now, it would be full to bursting with every man and woman who called the Loop home, as they waited to be told what was happening. It would be his job to make them believe they were going to survive what was coming, that they would be in safe hands as he led them into battle.

  They deserved nothing less.

  And he would no
t let them down.

  Jamie sat in the middle of the fifth row of seats, his foot tapping with impatience.

  The Ops Room was packed; every seat was occupied, and people were standing two and three deep along the curving walls. Beside Jamie sat Larissa, her eyes fixed on the lectern behind which Paul Turner would shortly appear. The tight seating forced them into a proximity that his ex-girlfriend was clearly uncomfortable with, but thankfully not so uncomfortable that she had refused to sit next to him; such a rejection would have been extremely awkward for both of them.

  On her other side sat Matt, and beyond him Natalia. The Russian girl was staring at exactly the same spot as Larissa, her back straight, her hands resting on her thighs, but Jamie couldn’t help but notice, out of the corner of his supernaturally sharp eye, that every thirty seconds or so she stretched out the little finger of her left hand to touch Matt’s leg. The tiny gesture of affection made him smile inwardly, even though it drew into sharp focus exactly what he had lost.

  What he was increasingly sure he could not get back.

  The Ops Room door opened and Paul Turner walked through it. The low hum of conversation filling the wide space immediately gave way to silence as the Director stepped up on to the stage and looked out across the massed ranks of his Department. Jamie felt tension twist in his stomach as Turner cleared his throat, took a sip of water, and began to speak.

  “Men and women of Blacklight,” he said. “I stand before you now not only as your Director, but as a husband, a father, a colleague, and as a human being who will not stand by and let darkness overwhelm us. Because the moment of reckoning has arrived. We’ve known it was coming for many months, no matter how hard we may have tried to convince ourselves otherwise, and now it’s here. So make no mistake: this is the fight of our lives. Of all our lives.”

  The Director surveyed the room, as Jamie felt heat threaten to rise into his eyes.

  “If we, and our friends from around the globe, do not stop Dracula now, he will never be stopped,” continued Turner. “And Carcassonne will only have been the beginning. He has made his vision of the future perfectly clear: anyone who does not submit to him will be killed, and any force that tries to stand against him will be destroyed. Vampires are flocking to his side, and soon he will have an army capable of tearing through cities like a tornado, of unleashing chaos and violence on a scale that will make Château Dauncy look like a playground squabble. I do not want anyone to be under any illusions about the stakes of the battle that will soon be fought. We are the only people who can push him back. We are all that stands between the world and Armageddon.”

  The atmosphere in the Ops Room was so thick you could have cut it with a knife. Jamie felt like an electric current was being passed through him as a narrow smile rose onto the Director’s face.

  “But there is something I want you all to remember,” said Turner. “Despite the legends, despite the horror stories and tales of terror, and despite the power we have seen with our own eyes, Dracula is still just a vampire. He is flesh and blood, and a single, well-placed T-Bone shot will end him just as surely as the rest of his kind. He is not a demon, he is not the Devil, and we will not fear him. Is that clear?”

  A rumble of affirmation shook the Ops Room; it was as though the entire Department was speaking with one voice.

  “At this very moment, across the Channel,” said Turner, “the largest force in the long history of the supernatural Departments is being mobilised. More than three-quarters of all the Operators in the world are being brought together for a single purpose: to stop Dracula now, while there’s still time. And tomorrow evening, as the sun sets on Carcassonne, we will make our stand. Detailed briefings and orders will follow throughout today and tomorrow, but the bulk of our combined forces will engage Dracula’s followers in the ruins of Carcassonne, while a small strike team is sent into the medieval city to take out the first vampire himself. It won’t be easy, and we will suffer losses, but I do not have the slightest doubt that we will be victorious.”

  The Director stared out from behind the lectern, his face so pale and full of determination that it looked like it had been carved out of marble.

  “We will stand together and face the creatures that inhabit the darkness,” he said, his voice low. “We will stand together and kill vampire after vampire until they surrender or until none are left alive to do so. And when the dust settles, there will be no doubt as to who has dominion over this planet. We will show the world once and for all that the future is full of hope, not fear; of light, not darkness. We will stand together, and we will win.”

  Jamie looked around at his colleagues. Nobody clapped, and nobody cheered, but he saw faces full of resolve, full of calm.

  Celebrating can wait, he told himself. We can clap and cheer when we get back. When this is over.

  When we’ve won.

  Bob Allen watched the activity taking place around him with a small smile on his face and hope flickering faintly in his chest.

  The SPC had arrived forty minutes ago, descending out of the bright noon sky in a fleet of enormous helicopters, and hundreds of black-clad Russian Operators and staff had immediately got to work, unloading vehicles and case after case of weapons and equipment, erecting tents and canopies and field buildings. What had started out as a displaced persons camp filling three fields on the edge of Carcassonne was now beginning to resemble Camp Bastion in Afghanistan: a huge forward operating base covering more than three square miles of French countryside.

  And more than half of the Departments aren’t even here yet, he told himself. We’re going to need to expand the perimeter again. By a long way.

  The six fields of Red Cross and UNICEF tents that housed the men and women who had fled their homes were now surrounded by eight that were entirely military; the camp now contained a fully equipped field hospital with more than a hundred beds and three state-of-the-art surgical theatres, a long motor pool full of jeeps and mobile armour, a temporary hangar containing two dozen helicopters, a command centre comprising more than twenty rooms, dormitories for two thousand Operators, a mess hall and canteen the size of a small shopping mall, and mile after mile of barbed-wire fencing equipped with motion sensors and ultraviolet lights.

  Precisely controlled chaos had filled the camp since just before dawn, when Military Detachment Alpha had confirmed they were on their way from Toulouse airport. The South Africans had barely touched down, however, when Allen had received a call from Colonel Maroun, informing him that Egypt’s Section G were only fifteen minutes away themselves. Since then, it had been all hands to the pumps.

  Allen watched as Russian Operators swung the metal sides of a supply hut into place and began bolting it together, then turned and headed for his command centre. In the pit of his stomach, a knot of excitement and anticipation was already squirming, but alongside it was an unfamiliar sensation of camaraderie. He had no doubt that if they defeated Dracula, relations between the Departments would return to their usual state of slightly frosty distrust, but for the time being, for this short period of hours, everyone was resolutely on the same side.

  As he strode into Field 1, Allen saw Guérin making his way towards him. He had officially confirmed the French Captain as his NATO second-in-command, and was already pleased with his decision to do so; Guérin was smart and capable, and possessed local knowledge that had already proven valuable. He also provided access to the conversations taking place in Paris, which was absolutely vital; Allen was not remotely convinced the French government was thinking clearly, and was far from alone in that suspicion.

  “Captain,” he said. “Everything all right?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Guérin. “The Russians know what they are doing.”

  “Let them get on with it,” said Allen. “We’ll have the Chinese here before nightfall, so the more the SPC gets done before then, the better.”

  “I think they will be set up in an hour,” said Guérin. “Maybe two, at the most.”

 
“Fine,” said Allen. “Have you talked to Paris this morning?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What news?”

  “The nuclear option remains in play,” said Guérin. “I am sorry, General. I communicated your concerns, and NATO has made a formal objection, but the government is not prepared to rule it out. A fifty-mile exclusion zone has been drawn up around Carcassonne and an evacuation order has been prepared for those living inside it.”

  “Which will cause absolute panic if it’s given,” said Allen. “What the hell are they playing at, Guérin? What’s your take on this?”

  “I cannot say for certain, sir,” said Guérin. “But I can give you my personal opinion, if it is of interest?”

  “It is.”

  “This is a way for Paris to assert some control over the situation,” said Guérin. “The entire world is watching a crisis take place in France, while everyone apart from the French appears to be dealing with it. You have sent the news helicopters away, but everyone knows that an American is in charge, and everyone can see Germans and South Africans and Russians arriving. If we fail tomorrow, I do not think the government wants to be seen to have stood by and done nothing while Dracula started his war on their soil.”

  “I understand that,” said Allen. “I honestly do. What I don’t understand is why their fallback plan is to blow a big chunk of their own country off the map.”

  Guérin shrugged. “They are scared, sir,” he said. “Everyone is scared. I am scared, and I do not mind admitting it.”

  “There’s only one thing for us to do, then,” said Allen.

  “What is that, General?”

  “Make sure we don’t fail tomorrow.”

  Half a mile away, a Red Cross volunteer waved Julian Carpenter forward as he nosed his car through the gates at the entrance to the camp.

  A man wearing a French Army uniform stepped out from a guard post and motioned for him to stop. Julian braked, and took a deep breath. This was the moment he had been dreading; if the soldier searched the black holdall in the car’s boot, then his journey from the UK would all have been for nothing.