Twenty-five vampires had already died on the slopes of Mount Scott. The vehicles heading his way almost certainly contained at least as many, and that was assuming there were Thralls in some of them.
“Quite possibly. What’s the plan for these guys?” Mason asked, gesturing toward the screen. Fourteen SUVs and ten sedans had joined together and were now turning onto the main approach road.
“That depends,” he noted. “Think they’re going to try and drive all the way up, or dismount somewhere and approach on foot?”
“If they’ve been in touch with their friends, they’ve got to realize that stealth isn’t going to work,” the other Commander replied. “I figure they floor it and head straight for the bunker.”
Ten seconds later, Mason was proven correct as the lead pair of SUVs, massive four-wheel-drive monstrosities, spun gravel off the rough road and charged up the hill.
“Lord Riley,” David greeted the Elfin Lord General over the radio, “you have incoming. Looks like our friends in the cars are coming in hell for leather.”
There was a pause on the radio.
“I see none of them went to Afghanistan,” Riley said quietly, his voice almost sad. “We’ll deal with it.”
The vehicles came barreling up the road, turning the final curve from the gravel road onto the maintained section that led into the old SAC compound—and then the lead two vehicles basically disappeared as the roadside anti-vehicle mines went off.
Four crisscrossed cones of fire and shrapnel disintegrated the front vehicles, and the second pair of cars had barely begun to slam on their brakes before they skidded into the debris field.
Surviving the wreckage of their companions, they bounced onto the still-intact road…and triggered the second set of mines. Another quartet of fireballs lit up the night, and two more vehicles disappeared.
The following vehicles managed to come to a halt in the middle of the half-wrecked road, spilling out men and women in body armor with an assortment of weapons.
“McCreery.”
David didn’t need to say more. As the vampires began to spread out, the Pendragons swept in. Ground-bombardment missiles lit up the sky with their engines and machine guns opened fire, explosions sweeping the ground around the road.
The attackers scattered like bowling pins, explosions smashing them to the ground—but not fast enough to stop them from opening fire with Stingers. The missiles exploding on the ground were matched by explosions in the air for several seconds, and then the remaining Pendragons pulled away.
“McCreery, report,” David snapped. They hadn’t anticipated antiaircraft missiles—and they should have.
There was no response for several moments and a sick feeling began to take over his stomach.
“Here,” she finally replied, her voice twisted with clearly forced calm. “We lost three helicopters and are down half our missiles. Orders?”
“Pull back to the depot and rearm,” David ordered. “Riley? You’ve still got incoming.”
“I see them,” the Elfin Lord replied. “It looks like they’ve stopped underestimating us.”
The survivors of the air strike were still moving forward. With the fires, it was hard for the thermal scanners to get a count, but they were now moving like real soldiers. A squad would advance while the others held covering positions, clearly sweeping for the resistance they knew had to be there.
They made it halfway to the main bunker before Riley’s people started shooting. The Lord had kept five of the Elfin Warriors with him, and now it proved he’d picked the best shots. Rifle shots rang out, silver bullets hammering into the lead squad and sending them scattering to what cover they could find.
Then Riley hit a button and that cover revealed itself to be a trap. Twenty claymore antipersonnel mines, placed with carefully vicious thought, detonated in a single instant. Over half of the remaining vampires simply disappeared.
Then the Elfin Lord charged down the hill with his Second. The cameras couldn’t quite process what they were seeing correctly, but David knew what the blue auras flaring to life around the two Mages were. When the remaining vampires opened fire on the charging defenders, their bullets deflected from the shields.
There was at least one Mage among the survivors, however, and fire tore through the night as they conjured power to try and take down the two Elfin. Riley, however, simply made a dismissive gesture with his sword as he approached the vampires, scattering the attack as he halted twenty feet from them.
“I see one of you has some talent,” the Lord said casually. “I challenge you, then. Fight me, with steel or fire or magic as you will. Defeat me, and your companions will be allowed to leave. Fall, and your companions will surrender.”
He gestured widely with the sword—but the response to his challenge was a lance of something that the camera only picked up as pure black light and a hail of gunfire.
The elf-blade flashed in the night, reflecting the black light back at its origin, and then both Elfin began to glow, the blue light of the shield fading into the stark white spells of Andúril, the Flame of the West—the magical martial art practiced by the Elfin Warrior-Mages.
A blur of motion followed as Young and Riley closed the distance, the vampire Mage attempting to stop them, and then the infrared cameras proved incapable of tracking the action. When the lights began to fade, the Elfin Lord and his apprentice stood alone, surrounded by wreckage and bodies.
“Secure,” Riley reported over the radio. “But this is only the beginning, White.”
“I know, Lord Riley.”
“SIR, YOU HAVE A PROBLEM,” Leitz reported as midnight turned over to one AM.
“I have several, potentially,” David replied. “What exactly is this one?”
“Echelon just flagged a California Army National Guard communication as a potential cause for concern,” she told him. Echelon was the artificially intelligent, magically enhanced, officially nonexistent-even-in-Omicron-documents, computer program that the Omicron branches swept all official communications in the United States with. It searched for certain keywords and flags, and occasionally its algorithms threw up something that didn’t match any of those keywords or flags…but usually turned out to be supremely important.
“They had a detachment of mechanized infantry doing maneuver exercises near Redding in Bradleys. Regular training, so they weren’t exactly checking in every minute or so.”
“But?” the Commander asked, a sinking feeling warning him where this was going.
“No one has heard from them since about six PM,” Leitz warned. “Echelon flagged it when CAL ARNG contacted them asking what had happened to their GPS transponders.”
“Where were their transponders when they went dark?” David asked.
“Crossing over into Oregon, about a hundred miles north of their AO on the I-97. I’m collating local police reports as we speak, seeing if anyone called in an armored column moving up the interstate.”
“If they were heading here, ETA?”
“Just after two AM,” she told him. “These aren’t race cars; they’re light armored vehicles. 25mm chain guns and anti-tank missiles in the default loadout. I’m checking the TOE for the platoons in question to see if there’s any unusual variants.”
David met Mason’s eyes and exhaled heavily.
“How many vehicles am I looking at, Leitz?”
“Three platoons,” she said. “Twelve BFVs. I don’t know how many ground troops, but…the company the APCs belong to had a hundred and twenty people.”
A hundred and twenty people who were almost certainly now dead. David felt sick.
“Find them on the overhead,” he ordered. “If I have an entire company of vampire mechanized infantry heading my way, I need to know that for certain.”
He was also going to need to wake up Major Wilbur. It appeared they might need the artillery tonight after all.
28
Leitz found the APC column on overhead roughly fifteen minutes before
they expected it to arrive. Twelve tracked vehicles trundling along the interstate at thirty-five miles per hour in a neat column, the sparse nighttime traffic swerving to pass them in surprise.
“Overhead can’t give us decent thermal,” she warned. “I have no idea how occupied they are.”
“Do we have anyone checking in on the company they belonged to?” It was possible, though certainly a worst-case scenario in many ways, that the BFVs on their way to attack the Mountain were still manned by their original crews.
“A local OSPI Inspector is on their way,” Leitz confirmed. “But we won’t have any real information for several more hours.”
“And in about ten minutes, these are going to come charging up the roads into the compound,” David noted. “All right. Thank you. Keep me updated on any other potential flags, but this is now our problem.”
He studied the targeting grid the artillery battery had given him, checking it against the map.
“Major Wilbur, I need you to dial in a strike,” he told the Army officer, reeling off the grid coordinates. “We’ve got what appears to be the commandeered vehicles of a mechanized infantry company heading our way, and I don’t care to discover how many vampires they’ve crammed into them.”
“Understood,” Wilbur replied. “What are we looking at, Commander?”
“Appears to be M2 Bradleys, according to the TOE we’ve pulled.”
“Okay,” the artillery commander sighed. “They’re pretty well armored against our shells, Commander. They’re not going to enjoy the barrage, but there’s a decent chance at least some will make it through.
“We have specialized anti-tank ammunition with a decent chance of one-shot kills, but I only have twelve of them.”
“Hold on to them for now,” David told him. “I have the feeling we’re going to need those later.”
There was silence on the channel for several seconds.
“That’s what I was afraid you were going to say, Commander White,” Wilbur told him. “We’re dialed in and I’ve brought the closest cameras on my screens. Any of them that reach your positions will do so through a wall of fire and steel, courtesy of the US Army.”
“I DON’T SUPPOSE you have any more of those anti-vehicle mines?” Riley asked over the radio as the lead Bradleys showed up on the Mountain’s camera systems. “I have one set left on the road and I’d love to put a few more in these guys’ way.”
“I was surprised we had a dozen of them,” David told him. “You’re going to have to settle for artillery support.”
“That’s going to be new and interesting,” the Elfin Lord General replied. “I haven’t been this close to an artillery barrage before.”
The ONSET Commander paused, considering the Elfin words.
“So, the anti-vehicle mines weren’t new and interesting?” he asked.
“…I take the Fifth,” Riley replied after a long pause. “Deputizing or no deputizing, there’s still some things I am not going to tell Omicron.”
“Targets approaching the zone,” Wilbur cut in. “Time-on-target barrage beginning…now.”
The Paladins were high enough up Mount Scott that David couldn’t hear or feel them firing. One of the surveillance network’s cameras was close enough for him to see the billowing blasts of flame as the big guns fired.
Fifteen seconds later, the barrels adjusted and fired again. And again. And again. The guns fired four times in a minute, then returned to rest position to cool. David wasn’t sure how long the howitzers could maintain the four rounds per minute, but he knew it wasn’t long.
Different angles and firing charges meant all twenty-four shells arrived in a ten-second span, smashing down onto the forested road moments after the last Bradley left sight of the main highway. The cameras trained on the incoming vehicles showed the entire column disappearing in a cloud of superheated smoke and debris they couldn’t penetrate.
“Do you see anything?” Riley demanded. “I need to know how many made it through.”
“We’re not getting anything useful from the cameras,” David told him. “Hold position and prep those anti-tank rockets.”
“Oh, believe me, they’re already prepped,” the Elfin replied. “I’d love for you to tell me the artillery took them all, though.”
“No such luck,” Mason told them. “Looks like we got most of them, but I have four BFVs still moving up. Ninety seconds to the last set of mines.”
“Let’s see how much attention they’re paying,” David murmured. The first eight mines had left a giant mess in the road. The tracked APCs could easily traverse it, but if they recognized just what they’d hit…
The BFVs slowed as they spotted the debris. They knew artillery was in play, which made that dangerous, but whoever was in command clearly recognized the aftereffect of anti-vehicle mines.
David wasn’t entirely surprised. If the Familias didn’t have any veterans of the war in Afghanistan on staff, he’d be shocked.
“They’re going off-road,” he warned Riley. “Moving around where they suspect the mines are.”
“If you can hold them up, we can drop another salvo on their heads,” Wilbur promised.
“Oh, I’m pretty sure we can do that,” the Elfin replied grimly. He reeled off a set of grid coordinates. “As soon as we engage, drop fire on that zone.”
“Can do.”
“I see the trees coming down,” Riley told them. “Let’s see just what the vampires brought to the party—and how well they play.”
David was realizing how much he hated being behind the lines, commanding via camera and radio as others took on the enemy and the risk. There was nothing he could do to help Riley and his half-dozen Warriors from there except watch.
The Bradleys emerged from the forest at high speed, smashing aside trees with their frontal armor as if speed was the only thing that could keep them alive. One of the lead vehicles took a pair of LAAWs from Riley’s men and went up in a massive fireball, but the other managed to swerve and throw off the targeting.
More explosions marked the ground, but the troops inside the APCs were dismounting at speed, jumping out of the back of the moving vehicles as the machine guns opened fire on the sandbagged position holding Riley’s people.
That action at least confirmed that the troops probably weren’t the National Guardsmen the vehicles had originally belonged to. Thralls, empowered by vampire blood, might be able to pull off that stunt…but it looked like this wave were vampires.
Then the shells started falling…only to detonate above the vampires as they ran into a defensive shield. In the center of the vampire charge was a tall, white-haired man with familiar-looking Slavic features and his hands held above his head.
“That’s…Romanov himself,” Mason murmured. “Holy shit.”
The curse was for the vampire’s power—as he contained the explosive force of half a dozen massive artillery shells and flung it at the Elfin position. David had fought the man’s daughters, powerful vampire Elders commanding dark magic.
Petrov Romanov showed where they’d learned it from.
The sandbags and concrete barriers the Elfin had assembled disintegrated and David cringed. Some of the Warriors were powerful enough to survive that—but not all of them. Pillars of black fire appeared around Romanov, sweeping toward the sniper positions with terrifying speed.
The 25mm chain guns on the Bradleys opened as well, walking their fire across the front of the bunker, clearly trying to drive the surviving Elfin into Romanov’s fire strike.
Then another LAAW fired, a glittering blue corona shielding it as it slashed through the shield and hammered into the closest APC. The explosion staggered the vampire Patriarch, and his shield flickered for a moment—a moment in which the Elfin marksmen took down the closest of the closing vampires.
Then the chain guns chattered to life again—only for their shells to impact on a glowing blue shield that rose to match Romanov’s flickering black one as Jamie Riley, Lord General of the El
fin Conclave, strode out of the wreckage of the defensive position.
White light flickered around the Elfin Lord, lighting up the whole parking lot in front of the SAC bunker with a stark, unnatural glow. Two vampires charged at him, only to disappear in flashes of blue light as Riley gestured at them.
“Petrov Romanov,” the Elfin Lord spoke, his own headset carrying his words back to the command net. “Turn back.”
“Stand aside, child,” Romanov snapped as their shields clashed, the two spheres pushing against each other even as they blocked the gunfire flashing across the field. “My quarrel is not with you!”
“You cannot pass,” Riley said calmly, magic projecting his voice across the concrete field. “I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass.”
“Burn!” the vampire screamed, new pillars of black flame conjuring into existence and charging at the Elfin Lord.
Riley continued his calm advance, his shield smashing the black flame aside.
“The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn,” he continued, and even David recognized the quote now. “Go back to the Shadow. You cannot pass!”
Romanov screamed, a wordless expression of rage, and charged the Elfin Lord. Wings of black fire swept him from the ground as a whip of pure darkness slashed out, smashing through Riley’s shield like tissue paper.
Riley met the whip with his sword, the elf-blade appearing in his hand without his seeming to draw it. The darkness met the blue glow of the weapon, wrapping around its blade and trying to pull it away or break it.
Then the whip shattered and the Elfin Lord took to the air to meet his enemy. No wings or visible magic surrounded him; he simply rose and met Romanov in the air. Their shields continued to press against each other, each trying to overwhelm the other and allow their allies to strike, and the two Mages met in the middle.
The cameras were barely able to track what followed. Only David’s own superhuman senses allowed him to make any sense of the distorted, skipping-frames mess the screens showed—and what he saw was terrifying.
ONSET: Blood of the Innocent Page 20