Department 19: Zero Hour

by Will Hill

  The fleet of helicopters roared north-west, keeping their altitude low and their running lights extinguished.

  There were seven of them in formation: the two Apache gunships, which had been given the call signs Viper 1 and Viper 2, and five heavy transports, in the bellies of four of which sat just over four hundred Operators, their weapons checked and rechecked, their visors pushed back. Their faces were uniformly pale, but the vast majority were fixed with tight expressions of determination.

  Nobody spoke.

  There was nothing left to say.

  Jamie sat strapped to a bench at the rear of one of the helicopters, next to Larissa and opposite Patrick Williams. The atmosphere in the hold was thick with nervous tension; although nobody said so out loud, everyone was eager for the fighting to start. They trusted themselves, trusted each other, and were as ready as they could be.

  All that remained to be seen was whether they would succeed or fail.

  Dracula stood on the balcony that ran round the roof of Château Dauncy, his gaze fixed on the horizon.

  His eyes smouldered the colour of lava as the cool evening wind blew his long hair back from his head. For the first time in his unnaturally long life, he stood on the brink of battle without armour, without horses or archers, without any of the weapons he had once deployed with such viciousness. His one concession to the blood-soaked victories of the past hung from his belt, gleaming dully in the light of the full moon.

  “They are coming,” he said, softly. “I can hear them.”

  Valeri Rusmanov nodded; he estimated they had five minutes before the helicopters that were rumbling in the distance arrived.

  “It is still not too late for you to leave, my lord,” he said. “Your followers and I will take care of your enemies.”

  Dracula smiled at his oldest companion. “Your concern for me is as welcome as always, old friend,” he said. “But I will not leave. If I wished to avoid what is coming, I would have killed your brother when he stood before us yesterday. I let him leave because it is time to find out to whose will this world will bend. Ours, or theirs.”

  “Perhaps a different choice of where to fight, my lord,” said Valeri. “The courtyard and grounds do not play to our strengths.”

  “It matters not,” said Dracula. “If I am not all that I would be, then I will die. But if I am ready, as I believe I am, then we will send them to their deaths here as easily as anywhere else.”

  “Give me an order, my lord,” said Valeri. “Tell me what you would have me do.”

  “Kill them,” said Dracula, his smile widening. “Meet them where they land, and kill them all.”

  Ten miles from the château, the Apaches accelerated, their noses dipping as they dropped even lower over the forest canopy.

  Cal Holmwood watched them from the cockpit of the lead transport with Bob Allen sitting at his side and his heart thumping steadily in his chest. The gunships would circle the château at a distance of five hundred metres, ready to unleash their firepower on any vampire who tried to escape through the air, a prospect that Holmwood was sure would act as a compelling deterrent. He had been aboard an Apache above Kosovo fifteen years earlier, and had watched its pilot open up his helicopter’s 30mm chain gun on a barn where a number of turned Serbian soldiers had been hiding; there had been nothing left but smears of blood and splinters of wood.

  “Three minutes,” said the transport’s pilot.

  Holmwood nodded, his eyes fixed on the dark expanse of the forest. He told himself to stay calm; in many ways, despite the enormity of the stakes, the operation was one of the most strategically simple he had authorised in his short tenure as Interim Director. Dracula and Valeri had clearly decided to stand and fight, otherwise the château would already have been abandoned, meaning the battle would take place in an enclosed arena. He had organised the largest possible force in the time available, briefed them as fully as possible, and equipped them with every possible weapon and a cordon of heavily armed air support.

  It was going to be hand to hand, fast and brutal.

  It was going to come down to skill, and experience, and will.

  “Two minutes,” said the pilot.

  Beside him, General Allen lifted his radio to his ear. “SHOWSTOPPER is go,” he said. “Repeat, SHOWSTOPPER is go.”

  Holmwood frowned. “What was that, Bob?” he asked.

  “I said I had a surprise for you,” said Allen, and smiled widely at his old friend. “Just sit back and watch.”

  Valeri strode through the château, ordering the massed ranks of vampires to follow him. They did so immediately and without question, their eyes burning red, their faces full of the anticipation of violence.

  The eldest of the Rusmanov brothers, who had fought in countless battles over the centuries, felt a familiar calm settle over him as he rounded up his troops. They were not soldiers, not like the trained men that he had once sent into harm’s way without a second thought, but they were willing, and that was enough. He had put the word out after his brother’s appearance in the château’s courtyard, trusting it to spread through the supernatural underground like wildfire and blaze a trail for any vampires with grudges against the men in black to follow. And for the last twenty-four hours they had done so in their dozens, drifting down from Germany and Scandinavia, up from Spain and Italy and Greece. The new arrivals were uniformly awed to be merely standing in the presence of Valeri and his master, and desperate to do harm on their behalf.

  In the beautiful, wood-panelled lobby, Valeri turned and faced his army. “Not a single person leaves here alive,” he said. “Kill, and keep killing, until vampires are all that breathe. Do so and you will have my master’s gratitude.”

  The vampires hissed and twitched, their eyes blazing. Then the sound of helicopter engines rattled through the thick stone walls of the château, shaking the ground beneath their feet.

  “Give no quarter,” said Valeri, his eyes darkening until they were almost black. His body felt like a current was being passed through it, humming and sparking and full of power. “If you run, I will tear your heart out myself. Is that clear?”

  The vampires grunted and growled their understanding.

  Valeri smiled. “There will come a time,” he said, “when all of our kind pretend they were here, on this day. Only you will be able to say so honestly. Remember that as the blood begins to spill.”

  He turned towards the huge double doors of the château, took a deep breath, and threw them open. The thunder of the helicopters roared through them, and Valeri closed his eyes for a long moment, revelling in the imminent prospect of battle.

  He frowned. There was something else out there; a distant sound far beyond the helicopters, high-pitched and maddeningly familiar.

  Then Valeri’s eyes flew open, boiling with black-red fire.

  “Downstairs!” he roared. “Into the cellars, all of you!”

  The crowd of vampires did as they were told without question, flooding towards the doors that led down to the catacombs beneath the château. Valeri didn’t give them a second thought; he was already rocketing up the grand staircase, racing towards his master with all the speed he possessed.

  Forty thousand feet above the French coastline, the Spirit of Nebraska levelled out and opened her bomb-bay doors.

  The B-2 bomber had taken off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri eight hours and almost five thousand miles ago, and had crossed the Atlantic at six hundred and twenty miles an hour. In her cockpit, a wide bubble that rose from the flat surface of her fuselage, Commander Jeff Keller freed the weapons-release control that was set into a panel between him and Flight Lieutenant Will Murray, and nodded as his co-pilot armed their primary ordnance.

  “SHOWSTOPPER is go,” he said, speaking into the microphone that formed part of his moulded flight helmet. “Time to target fifteen seconds.”

  “Fifteen seconds,” repeated Murray.

  The night sky loomed over them, vast and purple-black. They could not s
ee the ground, or their target; the weapon would be guided down to it by the JDAM kit it had been fitted with, a lethally precise navigation system that used an array of live satellite readings to control its descent. At their altitude, they would not even hear the detonation; they would already be more than ten miles to the east, preparing to turn back for the long flight back home.

  “Target,” said Murray.

  “Target,” repeated Keller, and pressed a button that glowed green in the darkened cockpit. A shudder ran through the huge aircraft, and the numbers on the targeting computer began to run, showing speed of descent and time since release.

  “Weapon free,” said Keller. “SHOWSTOPPER is go.”

  “All stop,” shouted General Allen. “Hold station here.”

  The pilot of their transport hauled back on her stick, raising the helicopter’s nose and halting its forward progress. Through the wide windscreen, Cal Holmwood saw the other four transports do likewise, as the two Apaches broke sharply to the left and right, circling around and hovering either side of them.

  “What did you do, Bob?” he demanded. “What the hell is going on?”

  Allen opened his mouth to respond, but before he could form a single syllable, the night sky lit up as bright as day.

  The GBU-32 bunker buster spun down out of the sky at terminal velocity and sliced through the roof of Château Dauncy like a knife through butter.

  The bomb was over seven metres long, weighed two and a half tons, and carried more than a quarter of a ton of high explosives that was designed to detonate as soon as the bomb reached a complete halt. Which happened when it reached the beautiful, ornate marble floor of the château’s lobby.

  The explosion ripped through the heart of the old building, blasting up through the roof in a column of fire that was visible for miles in every direction. The east wall, made of heavy grey stone that had stood, unmoving, for centuries, disintegrated completely, blowing up and out in a cloud of dust and a rain of falling rock. The blast wave collapsed the floors of the building, bringing them down on top of each other like a collapsing house of cards, creating a pile of rubble two storeys high within the three remaining walls. The roof was thrown up into the air, and crashed down on the gravel courtyard that surrounded the burning, smoking remains.

  “Damn it, Bob!” screamed Holmwood. “Henry is in there, for God’s sake! Call it off!”

  General Allen rounded on him, his eyes flashing with anger. “Henry Seward is a Blacklight priority,” he said. “As far as we’re concerned, Dracula is all that matters. And I say that as Henry’s friend, because I know he would agree with me.”

  Holmwood stared at his American counterpart, searching for a way to refute the truth in his friend’s words, but coming up empty. Allen returned his gaze for several long seconds, then turned to their pilot.

  “Continue,” he said.

  In the sky to the west of the château, high above the flames rising from the old building, Valeri Rusmanov floated in the air beside his master, his stomach churning with bitter admiration.

  I didn’t think they’d bomb us while we had Seward, he thought. I obviously underestimated them.

  His master had been so obviously surprised, as he hurtled out on to the balcony, grabbed him by the waist, and launched them both off the roof, that Valeri had been able to carry him clear of the blast zone before his anger had manifested. The first vampire’s eyes had flooded black, and he had clearly been about to demand an explanation when the bomb exploded, rendering the question redundant.

  “Your followers,” said Dracula.

  “I sent them to the cellars,” said Valeri. “I would imagine the majority have survived.”

  “Well done, my old friend,” said Dracula, and favoured Valeri with a thin smile. “Well done.”

  “Thank you, my lord,” growled Valeri. His relief at having extracted his master was being steadily replaced by a deep, spreading anger. “May I be excused? The battle is upon us.”

  “You may,” said Dracula. “Do what you must.”

  Paul Turner was out of his seat as soon as the wheels of his helicopter touched down, his T-Bone in hand, his visor down over his face. As Operators from five countries unbuckled themselves around him, he twisted the wide door’s handle, and slid it open.

  Château Dauncy stood before him, its remaining stone sides surrounding an inferno of orange flame and black smoke that spiralled up into the dark night sky. The helicopters had landed at the edge of the treeline, providing the widest possible space around the building in which to engage the enemy: five hundred metres of gardens and gravel, now studded with broken, burning lumps of the blasted building. Enough room, Turner hoped, for them to make their slight numerical advantage tell, and negate at least part of the speed and agility of their enemy.

  He leapt down and surveyed the scene. White light blazed from the Apaches, rendering the courtyard and grounds as bright as day. The smell of the burning building was thick and acrid, and from somewhere inside the remains he could hear screams of pain and terror. There was no sign of movement, in the courtyard or what little of the old building was still standing.

  Black figures began to spill out of four of the transports, their boots crunching down on to the gravel, the night air full of the rattle of weapons being made ready to fire. The fifth helicopter, the one nobody was allowed to approach, stood in the centre of the tight line of vehicles, rocking steadily on its wheels.

  The howl of the Apache engines was deafening, but Cal Holmwood’s voice sounded directly in Turner’s earpiece, as clear as a bell.

  “As we drew it up, Paul,” said the Interim Director. “Good luck.”

  “What the hell just happened?” Turner asked. “Levelling the château wasn’t part of the plan, Cal.”

  “Ask the bloody Yanks,” spat Holmwood. “When this is all over. Go.”

  Turner allowed himself a brief smile before icy cold settled over him, narrowing his focus to nothing more than the operation and its objectives. He twisted the dial on his belt, then spoke into the ears of every assembled Operator.

  “Red Team!” he shouted. “With me.”

  He walked slowly forward, his mind clear and full of purpose. Almost a hundred and fifty Operators fell quickly into formation behind him, a long, two-deep line of black uniforms and gleaming weaponry. Five metres to his left, three pairs of red eyes glowed in the gloom, and Turner felt his heart swell with confidence at the sight of them.

  “Ready One,” he shouted. “Go go go!”

  The Security Officer ran towards the burning château, his T-Bone raised at his shoulder, a thunder of running footsteps following him across the gravel. The entire eastern wall of the building was gone, replaced by a towering pile of rubble; he could see parts of staircases and walls and floors, all piled together, all open to the night air.

  Red Team was still more than three hundred metres from the burning château when Valeri Rusmanov dropped out of the sky in front of them, a wide, angry smile on his face. He stared at them with glowing eyes as they approached, then bellowed something in a language Turner didn’t understand.

  For a long moment, the crunch of boots on gravel was the only sound. Then a howling, pulsing wave of blackened, smoke-smeared vampires flooded up from the cellars of the old building and raced across the courtyard.

  Turner skidded to a halt, twisted the dial on his belt and bellowed, “Now!”

  The pilots of the two NS9 Apaches flipped switches on the weapons-control panels in their cockpits.

  They were training the two spotlights that hung from their gunships’ sidepods on the shattered building, illuminating the crowded mass of vampires rising from the smoking rubble like rats fleeing a fire, their glowing eyes bright scarlet in the powerful beams. With rumbling thuds, ultraviolet filters slid into place over the powerful halogen bulbs, turning the wide beams of light from blinding white to deadly purple.

  A millisecond later the screaming started.

  The four ultraviolet
beams engulfed the vampires as they charged up from the cellars.

  There was no chance of avoiding them; the light covered the entire open front of the building, and the vampires burst into flames as soon as they emerged, filling the air with the smell of roasting meat and the high-pitched screams of men and women who were burning alive.

  Valeri, who was already advancing towards the black line of Operators, turned back, and howled with fury. A roaring pyre of at least thirty vampires was blazing where the marble lobby of the building had stood, blocking the way in to the cellars and trapping the majority of his followers inside. The burning vampires crawled and screamed and begged for help, as the ones who had been hungriest for violence and bloodshed, the ones who had made it out before the ultraviolet light blazed, stared at their fallen colleagues, their glowing eyes full of sudden panic.

  “Attack!” screamed Valeri. “Attack, damn you!”

  The vampires who weren’t on fire growled in response, then turned towards the advancing line of Operators, and hurled themselves forward. Behind them, the wide ultraviolet beams raked back and forth across the ruined château, engulfing burning vampires who were still trying to crawl away and picking off those who were staring blankly at the carnage that had erupted around them, frozen to the spot.

  Valeri looked up at the two Apaches, felt himself pushed back across the gravel by the downdraught of their rotors, and roared with uncontrollable rage; this was not how the battle was supposed to have begun, with his followers burning and trapped inside the shell of what had once been his favourite place in the world.

  His howl died away, as he forced himself to think clearly. Then he took a deep breath, and rocketed into the air, as fast and deadly as a cruise missile.

  Didn’t see that coming, did you? thought Cal Holmwood, allowing himself a vicious moment of satisfaction. That must have been quite a shock.

  The Interim Director of Blacklight was standing at the treeline, where a great cheer had gone up from the men and women of Blue Team as purple light filled the courtyard; the rank and file had been as surprised as the vampires who were now roasting on the château steps. Only he, Paul Turner, and Bob Allen had known; the element of surprise had been absolutely vital.