Department 19, The Rising, and Battle Lines

by Will Hill

  Pete Randall threw himself at the stern rail as The Lady Diana picked up speed and the dock disappeared into the darkness.

  “Kate!” he screamed. “Kate!”

  But there was no answer. His daughter was gone.

  Chapter 37

  AT THE ROOF OF THE WORLD

  SPC CENTRAL COMMAND BASE

  KOLA PENINSULA, RUSSIA

  THIRTY-FIVE MINUTES AGO

  Valeri Rusmanov thanked his brother, then closed his mobile phone.

  His heavy boots crunched snow beneath his feet as he crested the hill, and paused. The freezing night air was still. There was a gentle lapping from the Murmansk fjord to his left, the black water visible through a spider web of cracks in the thick, dirty-grey ice. An icebreaker slowly ground its way up the middle of the fjord, clearing a dark strip of open water, belching diesel smoke from its funnels.

  Directly ahead of him, perhaps five miles away, was the closed city of Polyarny. The grey industrial town was dominated by the tall cranes and sodium arc lights of Russian Shipyard Number 10, the top-secret submarine base. During the Cold War, Soviet Typhoons and Akulas had slipped out from Polyarny and disappeared under the Arctic ice, hidden from the watchful eyes of the American satellites.

  In the distance, to the southeast, Valeri could make out the dull yellow glow of Murmansk, the home port of the Russian Northern Fleet. The administrative centre of the Kola Peninsula was not officially a closed city, but the FSB station in the city was the third largest in Russia, and the whole region was littered with checkpoints and armed patrols.

  This huge, barren swathe of Arctic wilderness was the heartland of the classified Russian military community. But the horseshoe of white buildings that filled the small peninsula below him, and what lay beneath them, were worth the risk.

  The SPC base was arranged around a long runway that ran parallel to the ridge of cliffs to the north. The grey tarmac was clear, the snow that had covered it piled in long banks on either side. To the south, a long line of ancient firs hid the base entirely from the narrow road that wound towards Polyarny. A tall electrified fence ran through the trees, a small guard post and heavy metal gate at the centre the only clue to passing civilians that anything lay beyond the thick forest. A squat white building sat at the eastern end of the runway. Valeri knew that beneath the frozen ground the base was a single enormous bunker, guarded by the elite SPC soldiers, and home to the scientists, analysts and intelligence officers who served the Supernatural Protection Commissariat.

  Snow thudded against his black greatcoat, dampening the wool and settling around his ankles as he watched the silent base. He whispered two words and a large number of dark shapes dropped from the sky behind him, landing softly in the snow. “Do you all know what I require from you?” he asked, without turning round.

  There was a general murmur of assent, and then a single low voice said, “Yes, Master.”

  Valeri’s eyes flickered shut, and a grimace spread across his face.

  It was Talia’s voice. The beautiful young Ukrainian girl had been with him for a year, since he had turned her in a moment of lonely weakness, a moment that he had come to deeply regret. The girl followed him everywhere, her blank, pretty eyes staring at him with open devotion, her soft, pleading voice asking if there was anything he needed, anything she could do for him.

  He supposed she loved him, or believed that she did, but she was wasting her time. Valeri had only ever loved one woman, and she had been gone for more than half a century.

  “Very well,” he said. “It’s time.”

  He stepped lightly into the night air, his greatcoat billowing out behind him. Below him the base was quiet, the lights casting pale yellow semi-circles on the snow.

  Valeri swept down the hill towards it, his army of followers behind him, a wide, silent shadow of death.

  In the SPC control room a heat bloom appeared on the surveillance screen of Private Len Yurov. The signature was like nothing he had seen before, a wide band of dark red flowing across the blue-white topography of the tundra, so he called the Duty Officer, General Yuri Petrov, over to look at his screen. The General, a thick-set man in his early sixties, who had spent the majority of his illustrious career with the Spetsnaz, the elite special forces unit that had been controlled by the KGB, and later the FSB, strode over to Yurov’s console and looked at the monitor. His eyes widened, and he called instantly for the general alarm to be sounded.

  But it was already too late.

  At the perimeter of the SPC base, crunching through the drifts of snow that had gathered at the foot of the electrified fence that ran high above their heads, Sergeant Pavel Luzhny was engaged in a heated discussion with his partner, Private Vladimir Radchenko, about the result of the previous night’s basketball game. Luzhny, a die-hard CSKA Moscow supporter, was lamenting the performance of his team’s point guard, a young man who the Sergeant had wasted no time in pointing out had Chechen blood on his mother’s side. The hapless player had missed three of the final four free throws in the previous night’s game, and his team had slumped to a 112–110 loss against Triumph Lyubertsy. Luzhny, a native Muscovite, was not taking the defeat at all well. He had moved on to listing the tactical errors made by the team’s coach when the alarm wailed across the freezing night. He instantly grabbed his radio from its loop on his belt, keyed a series of numbers, and held it to his ear, looking down at the base as he did so. An automatic voice in his ear told him that the base had been moved to red alert, so he slid his other hand to his waist and freed the SIG Sauer pistol that hung there.

  “Training exercise,” he said, turning back to Radchenko. “I’ll bet my—”

  Radchenko wasn’t there.

  Luzhny turned in a full circle, looking for his partner. There was no sign of him. Radchenko’s footsteps were clearly visible in the deep snow, two lines marching in parallel to Luzhny’s own. Then they stopped. There were no tracks in any direction, just a final pair of footprints, then nothing.

  “What the hell?” muttered Luzhny.

  Then he was airborne, as something grabbed him beneath his armpits and jerked him violently upwards. His trigger finger convulsed, and he fired the pistol empty, the bullets thudding into the rapidly receding ground. Luzhny didn’t scream, until he felt fingers crawl across his throat and dig for purchase. Then the fingers, which were tipped with nails that felt like razor blades, pulled his throat out, and he could no longer have screamed, even if he had wanted to.

  *

  The external microphones in the control room picked up the pistol shots, and Petrov tapped a series of keys on the console in front of him. The huge wall-screen that dominated the room separated into eight sections, each one showing a silent black and white view from the perimeter cameras. As the men in the control room watched, a black shape flitted across one of the cameras, then its picture disappeared into a hissing mass of white noise. Moments later, a second screen fizzed out, then a third, then a fourth.

  “Send the general alert,” said Petrov, his eyes never leaving the screen. “Call for immediate assistance.”

  “But sir—”

  “That’s a direct order, Private. Do it right now. And summon the guard regiment. There isn’t much time.”

  As he spoke, the final camera screens disappeared into snow. At a console in the middle of the room, a deeply frightened radio operator punched in the emergency frequency that linked the supernatural Departments of the world together, and sent the distress call Petrov had ordered. He had just finished sending the message, which was only six words long, when there was an audible thud on the external microphones, and the communications went dead.

  “General,” he said, looking up from his screen, fear bright in his eyes.

  But Petrov was gone.

  The General ran through the bowels of the SPC base.

  Sirens shrilled in his ears and the UV light that flooded the corridors hurt his eyes, but he didn’t slow his pace. A lift stood open at the end of the corr
idor, and he sprinted towards it, his chest burning.

  Been behind a desk too long, he thought. Run, old man. Run.

  Inside the lift, Petrov pulled a triangular key from a chain around his neck and inserted it into a slot on the metal panel beside the door, below the numbered buttons. The doors closed immediately and the lift shot downwards, the sudden motion churning Petrov’s stomach. He fought it back, and watched as the buttons that marked the floors lit up and went out, one after the other.

  -2...

  -3...

  -4...

  -5...

  -6...

  -7...

  Level -7 was the bottom of the SPC base, seven stories beneath the frozen Arctic ground. It was home to the enormous generators that powered the complex, as well as accommodation for the maintenance crews and support personnel; as a result it was rarely visited by SPC soldiers or scientists, and it was not General Petrov’s destination now. There was only one thing in the base worth the risk of a frontal attack, and he was one of the few men on the planet who knew what it was.

  The -7 button lit up, and then blinked out, but the lift continued its descent, into the unmarked depths. When the doors slid open ten seconds later, Petrov ran out into a single corridor of gleaming metal, lined on both sides by huge, heavy-looking metal doors, doors that looked like they belonged on the airlock of a submarine, or a space station. Each was stamped with a single number, in black letters three feet high; there were sixty doors, but Petrov was already running towards the one stamped 31.

  In the control room, the men of the night shift looked at each other nervously. Static squealed from eight screens of white noise, and the external microphones were silent. The men, eight of them in all, had broken out the arms locker and were holding Daybreakers, the heavy SPC explosive launchers, as they waited for whatever was out there in the snow.

  The door to the main access corridor suddenly flew open, slamming against the concrete wall, and the men jumped in unison. The thirty-two men of the Base Protection Regiment flooded silently into the control room, taking up almost every inch of space. The duty staff did their best to contain cheers of relief; the BPR was made up of the finest SPC officers, the very best of the very best. They took up a wide semi-circular formation, facing the heavy air-locked door that led to the outside world, their grey uniforms bristling with weapons and webbing that was heavy with equipment. They trained their Kalashnikovs and Daybreakers on the door, and the duty staff withdrew, taking up positions behind the soldiers.

  Silence.

  Then, slowly, a terrible sound of rending, buckling metal filled the room. Private Yurov, who was holding a Daybreaker with two shaking hands, had just enough time to say a silent prayer, before the huge metal door was wrenched from its hinges and hurled out into the black and white Arctic night.

  Snow swirled into the room in thick flurries, driving the men of the SPC back. The air was so cold that it closed their throats, trapping the oxygen in their lungs, and the snow was thick and blinding. Dark shapes, impossibly fast, flooded in through the gaping door, and the soldiers began to fire their weapons, almost randomly, hands covering their streaming eyes, their chests burning. Bullets whined off the walls, shattering monitors and punching holes in consoles, and the fiery crunch of Daybreaker rounds rang through their ears. The dark shapes seemed to be everywhere; they slipped through the snow-filled room like shadows, rending flesh and spraying blood as they went. A jet of crimson spurted from within the cloud of snow and hit Yurov in the chest and face. He recoiled, and then suddenly there was a dark figure in front of him, no more than six feet away. He raised the Daybreaker and fired, the recoil jolting up his arms. The figure staggered as the round hit home, and then lurched forward out of the snow.

  It was Alex Titov, the young Siberian who shared his desk. He looked at Yurov, his eyes wide, his mouth moving silently. The projectile had stuck to the front of his chest, over his solar plexus. As Yurov watched, helpless, the pneumatic charge fired, driving the charge through his breastplate. Yurov heard bones break, then Titov’s scream cut through the wind that was howling through the control room. Blood spilled from his mouth, and he looked at his friend, a pleading expression on his face. Then the explosive charge fired, and Titov erupted, covering Yurov from head to toe. He stared blankly, his friend’s blood dripping down his face. When a vampire slid out of the blizzard, moments later, and tore his throat open, it was almost a kindness.

  Thirty-eight men died in the SPC control room in less than three minutes.

  The vampires struck with dizzying speed, emerging from the swirling snow, biting and clawing and tearing, and the men of the night watch and the BPR were slaughtered side by side. They never stood a chance; they were blinded by the snow and numbed by the freezing cold, and Valeri’s followers butchered them where they stood. Two BPR soldiers ran for the access corridor, and made it into a lift. They survived, huddling in the mess hall on the second subterranean level, with the scientists and doctors and general staff that kept the SPC running on a daily basis.

  When the control room was clear, the ancient vampire stepped out on to the frozen ground and hauled the door back into its frame. It no longer fit properly; it had been bent and twisted when he had pulled it free, but it stopped the worst of the wind. The snow dropped to the floor in drifts, piling up against desks and chairs, covering the bodies of the fallen SPC officers, turning pink where it settled over pools of blood. The horde of vampires, most of them streaked red, their eyes blazing, gathered quietly behind Valeri, and followed him into the base.

  General Petrov set his back against the door to vault 31, raised his Daybreaker, and pointed it at the lift doors. The radio on his belt periodically buzzed into life, issuing forth screams of pain and snarls of violence. He did his best to ignore the sounds, and concentrate solely on the metal doors that stood closed at the other end of the corridor. Eventually the radio fell silent, and he pulled an encrypted satellite phone from his belt. He typed a message on the glowing screen, nine short words, and sent it. Then he replaced the phone, and waited for them to come.

  Even though he was expecting it, the doors slid open so quietly that it took him by surprise. Vital milliseconds passed, and then he pulled the trigger of the Daybreaker, aiming into the confined space of the lift. A vampire roared out of the open doors and took the charge in the shoulder. A second later it exploded, spraying the walls, floor and ceiling crimson. Two more clambered through the spilt blood of their companion and suffered the same fate, before a fourth shot went wide, clanging off the wall and attaching itself harmlessly to the ceiling. Petrov’s fifth shot caught a vampire girl in the forehead, and destroyed her utterly down to her knees. Petrov fought down rising bile, and fired his final shot. For a fleeting second the grey-haired head of Valeri swam into view amidst the smoke of the explosives, but he was gone again before the charge had left the Daybreaker’s barrel. Instead, it thumped into the chest of a vampire woman, who cast an imploring look into the lift before the explosive annihilated her. Petrov threw the spent weapon to the floor, pulled his ancient AK47 from his shoulder harness, levelled it at the lift, and prepared to fire.

  There was a moment of calm, as if he had succeeded in discouraging the vampires, but then they swarmed out of the lift again, and Petrov knew he was lost. There were too many of them, far too many; they crawled up the walls and across the ceiling, and bounded along the floor, their mouths open, excitement and sadistic joy etched on their faces. He pulled the worn trigger of his rifle and the corridor was filled with acrid blue smoke. The heavy rounds blew off limbs, punched holes in heads and torsos, but still they came. He was screaming, although he couldn’t hear himself above the rattling din of the gun, and he fired and fired until the hammer clicked down on an empty chamber.

  General Yuri Petrov lay on the metal floor.

  Something wet was trickling down his back and pooling along the ridge of his belt, and he could see only red through his left eye. He realised with detached curio
sity that he couldn’t feel either his arms or his legs. There was no pain, which surprised him, because he was dying; of that he had no doubt.

  Vampires stood quietly all around him. He tried to raise his head to look at them, and found that he was unable to do so. Valeri stepped away from the door to vault 31, where he had been examining the fifteen-digit keypad set into the wall beside it, crouched down in front of the stricken officer, and smiled at him.

  Petrov forced a smile in return, and found that he could still speak. “It’s… no use,” he said, his breath whistling as it struggled to form the words. “I will… never give you… the combination.”

  Valeri’s smile widened, and one last clear thought rang through the General’s faltering mind.

  We are betrayed.

  Petrov’s smile faded as Valeri stood up. He watched the vampire in the black greatcoat step across the corridor and tap rapidly on the keypad next to the door of vault 31. There was a long beep, and then the locks released with a series of clicks and thuds, and the door hissed slowly open. For a brief moment, Petrov had a clear view into vault 31, and he laid his dying eyes on something that only a handful of human beings had ever seen.

  There were only two objects in the vault. In the middle of the metal floor stood a square steel cube, each edge a metre long, and on top of the cube stood a clear plastic tube with thick black metal lids at each end. The container was three-quarters full of a grey powder, and had a label that Petrov couldn’t read pasted on to its side. Then Valeri stepped into the vault, blocking the contents of vault 31 from view, waving a hand over his shoulder as he did so.

  With a chorus of snarls, the vampires fell on Petrov.

  He had enough time to scream, once.