Department 19: Zero Hour
Page 1
For Jamie.
Thanks for changing my life. And sorry for everything
I’ve done to you.
About the Author
Before quitting his job in publishing to write Department 19, Will Hill worked as a bartender, a bookseller and a door-to-door charity worker. He grew up in the north-east of England, is scared of spiders, and is a big fan of cats. He lives in east London with his girlfriend, where he splits his time between staring out of the window and staring at a computer screen. The latter tends to be more productive.
READ ALL THE BOOKS IN THE THRILLING DEPARTMENT 19 SERIES:
DEPARTMENT 19
THE RISING
BATTLE LINES
ZERO HOUR
HUNGRY FOR MORE? DON’T MISS THE DEPARTMENT 19 FILES – AVAILABLE AS EBOOKS ONLY:
THE DEVIL IN NO-MAN’S LAND: 1917
UNDEAD IN THE ETERNAL CITY: 1918
THE NEW BLOOD: 1919
THE SECRET HISTORY OF A TEENAGE VAMPIRE
THE SECOND BIRTH OF FRANKENSTEIN
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
About the Author
Read all the Books in the Blood-Pounding Department 19 Series
Epigraph
Prologue
7 Days Till: Zero Hour
1. Safety Measures
2. Playing Rough
3. Questions and Answers
4. The Needs of the Many
5. Chewed up and Spat Out
6 Days Till: Zero Hour
6. Home Sweet Home
7. Positive Male Role Models
8. Eye in the Sky
9. Business as Usual
10. The Myth of Sisyphus, Part One
11. North of the Border
12. The Myth of Sisyphus, Part Two
13. The Grey Area
5 Days Till: Zero Hour
14. Which do you want First?
15. By a Thread
16. The Man you Want to Be
17. Retraced Steps
18. If at First …
19. No Regrets
4 Days Till: Zero Hour
20. The Chosen Few
21. Homeland Security
22. Your Dead Body
23. Broad Horizons
24. The Spirit of Cooperation
25. An Unlikely Source
26. Into the Wild
27. On the Trail
28. Deep Cover, Part One
29. Everything is a Choice
30. Deep Cover, Part Two
31. A Hundred Small Pieces of Bone
3 Days Till: Zero Hour
32. The Centre Cannot Hold
33. By Dawn’s Early Light
34. Let the Past Rest
35. A Hard Day’s Night
36. The Old and the Forgotten
37. Down the Rabbit Hole
38. Cold War Echoes
39. Stay Buried
40. Safeguard
41. The Prodigal Son
2 Days Till: Zero Hour
42. The Locked Room
43. Lying Down
44. The Wall
45. Journey’s End
46. Out of the Bag
47. Be Careful what you Wish For
48. Night Falls
49. Side Effects
50. No Time to Lose
51. Deadline
52. Perimeter Breach
1 Days Till: Zero Hour
53. The World of Common Day
54. Everything you have Left
55. Veterans’ Association
56. Why We Fight
57. The Calm Before
58. The Storm, Part One
59. The Storm, Part Two
60. The Storm, Part Three
61. The Storm, Part Four
62. Leave It All on the Field
63. Time Waits for No Man
Zero Hour
Epilogue: Happily Ever After
To Be Concluded…
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Publisher
It would be easy to be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie.
Robert Frost
Surely there is some horrible doom hanging over us that every possible accident should thwart us in all we try to do.
John Seward
Eight black-clad Operators made their way silently over the lip of the canyon, spacing themselves evenly out along the length of the ridge.
They bristled with weaponry, although not the kind they were used to carrying; they wore no stakes on their belts, no ultraviolet grenades or beam guns, no T-Bones. Instead, each Operator was carrying a suppressed SPAS-15 shotgun loaded with wireless taser cartridges that could immobilise a human being from four hundred and fifty metres.
Their target lay fifty metres below them: a wooden cabin built into the steep slope beside the dry riverbed that wound its way along the canyon floor. It was a small square building, with a white roof and a stone chimney emerging from its centre, and a wooden porch on its far side. The cabin was the last-known residence of an individual who was, as far as anyone was able to ascertain, unique: a vampire who had been cured of his condition and now went by the name of Adam.
The team had lifted off forty-five minutes earlier from Papoose Lake, the headquarters of National Security Division 9 that lay inside the military facility known throughout the world as Area 51. The flight time had been barely twenty minutes, but the team’s orders had been to set down more than ten miles from the cabin, drive to within two, and hike the rest on foot. Adam was apparently no longer a vampire, and it was assumed that his supernatural senses had disappeared when he was cured, but General Allen, the NS9 Director, had no intention of leaving anything to chance.
The eight Operators had made their way silently through the barren rock and sand of the desert as the sun pounded down from overhead, the climate-control systems inside their black jumpsuits working overtime to keep them cool, until they arrived at the perimeter of the target zone and the squad’s leader, Special Operator Tim Albertsson, had called in for final clearance to proceed. The response had arrived directly in his ear in the form of a single word.
“Go.”
Albertsson led them down the canyon, moving silently at the centre of the wide spread. As they approached the cabin, his team spread out as if by remote control. The three Operators to Tim’s right, and the three at the opposite end of the line, broke away and circled round the cabin. Two stopped on each side, facing the flat wooden walls with their shotguns raised, as the Operators who had been at the ends of the line met silently on the far side. Tim and the final member of the squad stopped five metres short of the rear of the cabin, forming the final edge of a perimeter of matt-black uniforms and steadily pointed weaponry.
Satellite reconnaissance had shown heat inside the cabin, but had been unable to positively identify its source. It was too diffuse: the product, it was suspected, of a wood-burning stove in the centre of the two rooms. Privately, Tim Albertsson believed they were going to find nothing in the cabin, and was highly sceptical of the intelligence that had been provided; a cured vampire, who had supposedly been cured in Nevada as part of a highly classified NS9 research project that nobody inside the Department was aware of, and whose existence and location had come from a source that General Allen would not discuss with anyone.
There’s so much wrong with this story, thought Albertsson, as he made a final check of his squad’s positions. I’m not sure I buy any of it.
Despite his reservations, Albertsson understood why his squad had been sent to
the desert. If Adam was real, and had been cured, then he was quite simply one of the most important people in the world – perhaps the most important. What had been done to him might offer clues that led not only to victory over Dracula, but to the complete eradication of the vampire threat. The Director could hardly ignore such a possibility.
“Ready One,” he said, speaking into the closed communications link that carried his voice directly into the ears of his squad. “Non-lethal only.”
Seven Operators chorused their agreement back to him. Albertsson moved, stepping lightly on the balls of his feet, and approached the window in the rear wall of the cabin. John Brady, a third-year Operator who had come to NS9 from the Marines, shadowed him, keeping the distance between them constant. Albertsson reached the wall of the cabin and set his back against it, his shotgun raised to his shoulder. He took a deep breath, then darted his head out beyond the window frame and looked inside the cabin.
The main room doubled as both kitchen and living room; below the window was a metal sink, with a battered sofa sitting in the centre of the floor beyond it. To the right stood an antique chest of drawers, the top of which was patterned with angular lines of dust. To the left, a wood-burning stove vibrated gently as it coughed smoke up the chimney and out into the clear desert sky.
There was no sign of their target.
As I expected, thought Tim, cursing silently. He’s gone, whoever he is.
“Bedroom,” he said.
“Clear,” came the immediate reply.
Tim stepped out and took a closer look through the window. There was nowhere the man could be hiding: no cupboards, no trapdoors. And as he scanned the small dwelling, he realised what the lines of dust on the dressing-table top were. They were the marks left by photo frames that hadn’t been moved for a long time; the kind you only moved if it was necessary, like when you were leaving a place with no intention of ever coming back.
“Jameson,” he said, addressing one of the Operators positioned along the cabin’s front wall. “Move in. I want the place swept in five minutes so we can get the hell out of here.”
“Roger,” said Chris Jameson. As Albertsson and Brady made their way round the cabin to join up with the rest of the squad, Jameson pushed open the unlocked door and stepped inside. The last thing he would ever hear was a tiny click from beneath one of the floorboards, as his boot stepped heavily on to it.
Tim Albertsson rounded the corner of the wooden structure, and had a brief moment to marvel at the remarkable beauty of the snaking canyon before the cabin exploded with a vast, shuddering roar.
The wooden walls and roof blew up and out, splintering into a deadly cloud of flying wood as a huge orange fireball with a black heart bloomed up out of the ground. The sound hammered into Albertsson’s ears as heat blasted across the front of his uniform and the shockwave hurled him into the air. He tumbled, the horizon rotating wildly before him – desert, sky, desert, sky, desert, sky – until he crashed down to earth, his back and shoulders slamming against the hard-baked ground, and all he saw was grey.
When his vision cleared, he was looking up at a vast column of black smoke. His eyes were watering, his ears ringing, and he wondered, for a terrible moment, whether the blast had struck him deaf. Then he pushed himself up on to his elbows, and the howl of pain that burst from his mouth as his battered shoulders ground together reached his ears, and he knew it had not.
Thank Christ, he thought. Oh Jesus, what the hell was that? It felt like a nuke going off.
Gritting his teeth against the pain, Tim pushed himself up on to unsteady feet and surveyed the chaos before him. Four of his squad were lying on the desert floor, their eyes closed; each had been thrown at least ten metres by the explosion. John Brady was nearer, his face pale, his eyes wide and staring, his hands beating the ground rhythmically as he visibly tried not to go into shock. Tim lurched towards him, and saw what had happened to his friend.
Brady’s legs were gone below the knees; all that remained were blackened stumps and shreds of uniform. Blood had splashed up his body and across the orange ground, but not in the quantities that Albertsson would have expected; the terrible wounds had been cauterised by the fire that had caused them.
Tim stared, his mind trying to come to terms with what he was seeing. Then he twisted the dial on his belt that controlled his helmet’s comms system, praying as he did so that the technology hadn’t been damaged in the blast. For several agonising seconds, there was only silence. Then a voice spoke into his ear.
“Code in.”
“Albertsson, SO413,” said Tim, his voice trembling.
“Go ahead.”
“Operators down, emergency medical evac required, my location. At least one critical injury, double amputation below the knee. Severity of other injuries unclear.”
“Despatching now. ETA thirteen minutes.”
Albertsson cut the connection and dropped to the ground beside John Brady, unbuckling his belt as he did so; it came free with a series of thuds as the weapons and kit attached to it fell to the ground. Working as quickly as he could, Tim slung the belt under and around his friend’s thigh then looped it round a splinter of the devastated cabin. He turned the piece of wood, tightening the belt round Brady’s leg until his friend let out a scream of pain.
Good sign, he told himself.
He grabbed his knife from where it had fallen, sliced off the left sleeve of his uniform, and quickly repeated the process on the ruined right leg. When it was done, he staggered to his feet. Brady had passed out as Albertsson tightened the second tourniquet, but his pulse was regular, if dangerously weak. Across the steep canyon side, the remainder of his squad were drifting towards consciousness, letting out low groans and grunts that made their way directly into his ears. He counted again, knowing with dreadful certainty what he was going to find.
Himself. Brady. Four others.
Six Operators.
Two of his squad were missing.
Albertsson turned and faced the burning remains of the cabin; the heat emanating from it was overwhelming, and he was only able to take a few stumbling steps towards it before being driven back. He stared into the inferno, searching for a way to dispute what his eyes and brain were telling him.
If I can’t see them, they’re gone.
A loud groan in his ear roused him from his thoughts, dragging him back from the edge of shock. He tore himself away from the blazing remnants of the cabin and began to attend to the members of his squad who had survived, patching wounds and splinting broken bones. He got Owen Meadows, the young Texan who had transferred from the Rangers only three months earlier, up on his feet, ordered him to keep an eye on John Brady, then redoubled his efforts, scrabbling back and forth across the steep, treacherous slope of the canyon.
Albertsson was pressing a square of gauze to a hole that had been gouged in Megan Irvin’s forearm when the steady thud of helicopter rotors began to shake the desert floor. Tim jumped to his feet and saw the Black Hawk above the distant eastern horizon, flying fast and low towards their position. He was about to tell what was left of his squad to prepare themselves for evac, when Meadows shouted that Brady’s heart had stopped.
“So what happened?” asked Julian Carpenter.
He was sitting on the narrow bed in his cell on Level H of the Loop, staring at an ashen Cal Holmwood. The Blacklight Interim Director had cut his connection with Bob Allen in Nevada only minutes earlier, and the shock of what his American counterpart had told him was written all over his face.
“Brady didn’t make it,” said Holmwood. “They got him on to the chopper back to Dreamland, but he arrested again and they couldn’t restart his heart a second time. He was pronounced in the hangar at Papoose Lake. NS9 scrubbed the cabin, and found traces of Jameson and Denham, barely enough to fill a Petri dish. They were all but vaporised by the blast.”
“What was it?” asked Julian. “What did Adam use?”
“Dynamite,” said Holmwood. “Under the floorbo
ards. God knows how much of it. They’re trying to trace it, but they’re not expecting much luck. You can buy dynamite in every builder’s merchant in Nevada.”
“And a pressure trigger by the door?”
Holmwood nodded. “You talked to him, Julian. Did he seem like the type of person who would do this?”
“No,” said Julian. “Not at all. But desperation makes people do strange things, Cal.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, he probably realised that once I knew he’d been cured, there were going to be people who would want to know how it happened. Maybe he didn’t feel like spending any more time as a lab rat.”
“But he talked to you,” said Holmwood. “Voluntarily. He told you what happened to him, admitted he was cured, and let you leave. Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know,” said Julian. “He told me that the cure wasn’t why I had come to see him, that I was there for some greater purpose. Maybe he thought that was more important.”
“Your vision,” said Cal. “What you saw in the cave.”
Julian shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe he knew there was no point in trying to pretend that he wasn’t who I thought he was. Maybe he just wanted me gone as quickly as possible so he could run.”
“We need to find him, Julian,” said Holmwood. “It was already urgent, and now three NS9 Operators are dead. I need everything you know about Adam, everything he said to you, anything that might give Dreamland even the slightest clue about where he is. How long do you need?”
Julian looked at his old friend and saw fiery determination flickering in his eyes; despite the burden of leadership that had been thrust upon him, and the seemingly endless setbacks that Blacklight and its international counterparts had suffered, it was still there.
God, he looks tired, he thought. How did it come to this? Henry gone, Cal in charge, and me in this cell, useless to everyone.
“Julian?” said Cal. “I asked you how long you need to prepare a report on everything you know about Adam.”
“I’m sorry, Cal,” said Julian, shaking his head. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Kate Randall put the folder down on the desk and closed her eyes.