Department 19: Battle Lines

by Hill, Will

  “Proceed,” said the voice, after a short pause. She fought back the ridiculous urge to say thank you and walked through the door that had slid open in front of her.

  This led her into Groom Lake Central Control, a large round room full of radar monitoring equipment, seismic read-outs and screen after screen of satellite imagery. One of the Duty Officers looked up as she entered, and nodded; the staff of Central Control had become quite used to her arriving this way. She nodded back, and asked the woman where she might find Gold Squadron.

  “Building B12,” replied the Duty Officer. “Do you know where that is?”

  “I’ll find it,” she replied.

  B12 was a low, rectangular building near the centre of the complex and posed no access problems for Larissa; the route to its door was entirely covered by a wide central canopy, shielding her from the blazing late morning sun. Gold Squadron occupied a wide arrangement of open-plan desks and a row of offices that ran along the back wall of the building. There was a hum of activity as Larissa pushed open the door, a steady stream of radio chatter and the steady beeping of a number of radar screens. She walked up to the nearest desk and said hello to the woman sitting behind it.

  “Oh, hi,” replied the woman. For a second, she seemed startled, then extended her hand. “You’re Larissa, aren’t you? I’m Carla Monroe.”

  She shook the hand and nodded. “Larissa Kinley,” she said.

  “Good to meet you,” said Carla. “Can I help you with something? I don’t mean to be rude, but we’re pretty swamped right now. We’re live testing today.”

  “What are you flying?” asked Larissa.

  “F-71 prototypes,” replied Carla. “We’re opening them up to fifty per cent, so everyone’s a bit on edge.”

  “How fast is fifty per cent?”

  “About Mach 5.3.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah.”

  “In that case,” said Larissa, smiling broadly, “I won’t take up any more of your time. I’m looking for Senior Airman Ashworth.”

  “Second office on the left at the back,” said Monroe, pointing towards a wooden door near the far end of the room. “He’s our Air Force Test Centre liaison, so I wouldn’t disturb him unless it’s urgent. He gets a bit short-tempered when we’re live.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind,” said Larissa. She gave Carla Monroe a final smile and set off across the long room. When she reached the door, she knocked sharply on it and pushed it open; she didn’t want to give the Senior Airman the option of refusing to answer.

  “Who the hell are you?” demanded a loud voice before she had even closed the door behind her. Lee Ashworth was sitting behind his desk beneath a narrow window; he was a slender man in his mid-twenties with a shock of unruly black hair, a flushed face, and eyes that seemed full of instant dislike. He looked, in her opinion, like a man who was extremely stressed.

  “I’m Larissa Kinley,” she replied. “NS9.”

  “Is that supposed to impress me?” snorted Ashworth.

  “No,” said Larissa. “You asked, so I told you.”

  Ashworth eyed her for a second or two, then grunted. “What do you want, Kinley?” he asked. “We’re in the middle of a live flight test and my shift ends in exactly two hundred and four minutes, so you’ll forgive me if I’m not in the mood to chat.”

  “This won’t take long, I promise. I just wanted to ask you about the man that came through Gate 1 on January 22nd. As soon as you tell me who he was, I’ll be on my way.”

  Ashworth’s eyes widened, and the red in his cheeks deepened alarmingly. “How do you know about him?” he asked.

  “I don’t,” replied Larissa. “That’s why I want you to tell me.”

  “Is this some kind of joke? Do you know what they’ll do to me if they find out I talked about that?”

  “They won’t find out,” said Larissa. “I’m not trying to cause trouble, I just need to know who he is. I think he might be important.”

  “I don’t know who he is,” said Ashworth. “That’s the truth.”

  “I believe you,” said Larissa. “I just want you to tell me what you do know. I’ll find out the rest myself.”

  “Maybe you will,” said Ashworth. “But you won’t get any help from me. Now get the hell out of my office.”

  Larissa didn’t move; she merely stared at the Senior Airman, allowing an uncomfortable atmosphere to steadily build. Ashworth’s desk was neat, almost obsessively so; the files and folders and sheets of paper were equally spaced, their edges perfectly aligned. The only concession to anything personal was a photograph of a pretty blonde woman with her arms round two grinning children.

  “All right,” she said, eventually. “We’ll talk soon.”

  “Not if I have anything to say about it,” said Ashworth.

  She gave him her best smile, then turned and left the small office.

  Getting closer, she thought, as she left building B12. I’m on to you, whoever the hell you are.

  Larissa was so lost in thought that she didn’t hear the chorus of voices shouting her name from across the central plaza of the complex. She didn’t become aware that there was anyone near her until a hand dropped on to her shoulder and her vampire side reacted. Her eyes flooded red, her fangs burst in place, and she grabbed the hand and threw whoever it belonged to through the air. Before they had even hit the ground, she had spun round, eyes blazing, teeth bared, to find herself looking at three of her friends.

  “Jesus Christ, Larissa,” said Kara, her eyes wide with shock.

  Larissa looked at Kelly and Danny, who were standing beside their friend, and saw similar expressions on their faces. Then she heard a low groan from behind her; she felt the red disappear from her eyes and her fangs retract as she turned to see what she had done, to see who she had hurt this time.

  “That’s quite an arm you’ve got there,” said Tim Albertsson, a smile rising on his face. He was sitting on the tarmac, rotating one of his shoulders, checking the range of movement. His uniform was covered in dust, but he was looking at her with bemusement, rather than the anger she had been expecting.

  “Jesus,” she breathed, hot shame flooding through her. “Tim, I’m so sorry. I was in a world of my own and then you… I’m really, really sorry.”

  “It’s OK,” he said, getting slowly to his feet. “No harm done. My fault anyway, I shouldn’t have surprised you like that. I wasn’t thinking.”

  I’m like a wild animal, thought Larissa, through a dark fog of self-loathing. There are rules for handling me.

  Tim stepped forward, threw an arm round her shoulder, and faced the rest of her friends. Kara’s eyes had returned to normal, as Kelly and Danny began to smile, but there was still palpable unease in the air.

  “No harm done,” repeated Tim. “Don’t sneak up on her, that’s my advice to the three of you. You’ll be taking your lives in your hands.” He grinned, and Larissa felt a wave of gratitude crash through her. Kara laughed, Danny and Kelly’s smiles turned into grins and, just like that, everything was all right.

  Thank you, she thought, casting a glance at Tim. His arm was still round her shoulder, but she thought she could tolerate it, for a little while at least.

  “How was Colorado?” she asked.

  “Cold,” replied Kelly, shaking her head. “Full of vampires.”

  “San Diego was sunny and full of barely dressed Navy SEALs,” said Kara. “In case that makes you feel any better?”

  Kelly flipped her friend the finger and smiled.

  “So,” said Tim, his attention still focused on Larissa. “Now that we’ve found you, we need to get you back to Dreamland asap.”

  “Orders?” she asked.

  Kara shook her head. “We’ve been given a forty-eight-hour furlough.”

  “Furlough?”

  “Forty-eight hours off, Larissa,” said Tim, and checked his watch. “Which officially started seventy-three minutes ago. So we need to hurry. It’s almost a two-hour drive to Vegas.”<
br />
  “Vegas?” asked Larissa. “We’re going to Las Vegas?”

  “Well, we are,” said Kelly, looking round at her colleagues. “But we were hoping you might want to come with us. What do you say?”

  Larissa frowned. “Why would General Allen give us two days off? There are still Supermax escapees out there, we’re right in the middle of training the rookie intake, and—”

  “Who cares?” interrupted Kara. “Let’s just get the hell out of here before he changes his mind.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense, though,” persisted Larissa. “You don’t even work together. Why would the five of us get furlough at the same time?”

  “You know why,” said Tim, smiling gently at her. “You’re just not saying it.”

  Larissa thought it through. If Allen had given Tim and his Special Operations Squad time off after Nuevo Laredo, it would still have surprised her, but it would have at least made sense. But there was nothing that united the four people standing in front of her, apart from the fact that they were—

  “This is because we’re friends,” she said, slowly. “Isn’t it?”

  “Of course it is,” said Tim. “You know the Director adores you and you’re not going to be here for long. This is a gift, from him to you. We just get to come along. So, as you can imagine, we’re pretty keen for you to agree to our plan.”

  “But there are things that need doing,” said Larissa. “I don’t see how we can—”

  “Look, it’s really simple,” said Kelly, cutting across her. “If the Director didn’t think the Department could survive without us for two days, he wouldn’t be letting us go. So why don’t you trust him to know what he’s doing, come with us to Vegas, and thank him when we get back. What do you say?”

  A grin emerged on Larissa’s face, huge and happy. “I say yes.”

  34

  THE SUM OF OUR PARTS

  “Are you benching me?” asked John Morton. “You are, aren’t you?”

  Jamie shook his head, trying to buy time. He hadn’t expected the rookie to so quickly work out why his squad leader had come up to the Level A dormitory to see him. “No,” he said. “That’s not what’s happening. But you should know, because I wouldn’t want you to hear it from anyone else, that I asked the Interim Director to place you on the inactive roster. He refused.”

  Morton stared. “You don’t want me on your squad?”

  “That’s not true,” said Jamie. “What I want is you at your best, ready to face what’s out there. And I don’t think that’s where you are.”

  “I’m fine,” said the rookie. He pushed his chair back from his desk and turned it to face his squad leader. “Really, sir. I’m fine.”

  “I don’t think you are,” said Jamie, softly. “I think you’re scared.” He saw colour begin to rise in Morton’s cheeks and moved to defuse the situation. “It’s not a criticism, John. It takes people different amounts of time to adjust to being part of Blacklight, to come to terms with the reality you get shown. There’s no shame in it.”

  “I’ve been scared, Jamie,” said Morton. “I know scared. This is something else.”

  But you admit there is something, thought Jamie. That’s a start, at least.

  “What is it then?” he asked. “It will stay between us.”

  Morton looked down at his hands for a long moment. “Afghanistan,” he said, eventually. “Last summer I was attached to a Recon Marine battalion, working the mountains in Helmand. I saw everything you can imagine, and probably stuff you can’t. Dead kids, men who’d been tortured over hearsay, women who’d been gang-raped for teaching girls to read. We came into this village one morning, where three Taliban fighters were supposed to be holed up. We’d pounded the area all night, drone strikes from twenty miles away. I don’t know how many missiles, maybe fifty, maybe a hundred. I don’t know. We had air surveillance at both ends of the valley and they confirmed that no one had got out, in any direction.

  “So, when dawn came, they sent the six of us in. We came over the rise at the head of the valley, and where the village had been there was just rubble and dust. Nothing standing, nothing moving. We just walked right down the middle of the track, because there was no way anything could have lived through what the drones had done, and we found the first body about twenty metres outside the village. It was an old woman, gone below the waist, just a spray of blood. She was face down in the dust. There was a square in the middle of where the village had been, a little patch of dust not much bigger than this room. Two kids were lying on the ground, holding hands. Both dead. In the ruins of the buildings we found more bodies, bits of bodies really, almost all of them children, some women. Maybe two or three men, old and grey, beards down to their knees.

  “We finished our sweep on the other side of the village, where we found a dead teenage boy and the only thing that had survived, this mangy little dog. It was eating the dead boy, chewing at a hole in his stomach. One of the Marines, a guy called Brody, shot the dog and we headed back to our extraction point. Thirty-four dead was the final count. Thirteen women, four men, counting the teenager, and seventeen kids. No sign of the fighters, and when we got back to Bastion no one could show us the intelligence that had suggested they were there. So it got written up and the CIA redacted most of it and suppressed what was left, and two days later they gave me a medal and a week later I came home. That was seven months ago.”

  “Jesus,” said Jamie. “That’s awful.”

  “Right,” said Morton. “I saw other stuff that was almost as bad, but that was the worst. It was like they weren’t people any more, and I don’t just mean because they were dead. They weren’t whole, they were broken. Do you know what I’m trying to say?”

  Jamie thought of the terrorised, mutilated monks of the Lindisfarne Priory, the men and women who had been abused and tortured for the entertainment of the membership of La Fraternité de la Nuit, and nodded his head. “I know,” he said, softly. “Believe me.”

  Morton stared at him for a long moment, then smiled a thin, painful smile. “I do,” he said. “You can tell when people have seen things they can’t forget. It does something to their eyes. Yours have it. I was scared in Afghanistan, and in Iraq before that. If you weren’t scared, you were either an idiot or you were lying. But that wasn’t the problem yesterday. I can’t explain it.”

  “Try,” said Jamie.

  “The vampires,” said Morton, slowly. “They’re… wrong. That’s the best I can do. I’ve faced people who wanted to kill me, and I’ve been in situations where I could have died, more than I can count. I’m not afraid of dying. But with them… it’s like they’re not real. Or they shouldn’t be. But they are, and it doesn’t seem right. None of this feels right, sir.”

  “You just need more time,” said Jamie. “You’ll get your head round it, I know you will.”

  “Ellison already has,” said Morton. “She was born to do this, like you. Maybe I wasn’t. Maybe that’s just the truth of it.”

  “No one was born to do this,” said Jamie. “You’re being too hard on yourself, John. You missed a shot, you started beating yourself up about it and you overthought everything. It happens. It won’t be the last shot you miss, and that’s not what worries me. What worries me is what you said afterwards. I can’t have someone on my squad who is conflicted about whether destroying vampires is a good idea.”

  Morton nodded. “I get that,” he said, his voice low.

  The two Operators sat for a long moment. Eventually, Jamie broke the silence. “Do you think you should be on the active roster? Be honest with me.”

  Morton looked at him. “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  “You know what I think.”

  “I want to help,” said Morton. “I don’t want to be sat here while everyone else is out there fighting. That’s not me, sir.”

  “You’re not helping if I have to worry about you every second we’re out there,” said Jamie. “You can see that, can’t you?”

&
nbsp; “I can,” said Morton.

  Jamie stared at the rookie, then rubbed his eyes and sighed. “The Director says you stay active,” he said. “So you stay active. That doesn’t mean I won’t leave you in the van if I think it’s necessary.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “And I’m sending you down to the Science Division for a psych evaluation. Non-negotiable.”

  “When?”

  “Right now. As soon as we’re done here. They’re expecting you.”

  “OK,” said Morton. “Anything else?”

  “No,” said Jamie. “We’ll talk again when the psych results come back. As for right now, you’re still in my squad. Is that what you want?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Morton. “Thank you. Sir.”

  Jamie was waiting outside the Level A lift when his console vibrated in his pocket. He fished it out, grateful for the distraction from his own thoughts; he had been expecting Morton to get angry, to threaten him, possibly even try to attack him. The rookie’s quiet, uncertain demeanour had somehow been far more troubling.

  He saw the message icon glowing on the console’s screen and thumbed the screen into life.

  ALL/OPERATIONAL_SQUADS_REACTIVATED/SCHEDULES_TO_FOLLOW

  About time, thought Jamie. The lockdown already cost us a whole night.

  The console beeped again in his hand and a second message appeared. His squad’s updated schedule flashed up and he read through it quickly. The Surveillance Division had identified the second vampire on their list as a middle-aged escapee by the name of Alastair Dempsey, and pinpointed a probable location in Central London. Operational Squad M-3 were scheduled to depart at 1600 hours to continue their mission.

  Jamie checked his watch and saw that he had almost five hours to kill. He forwarded the schedule to his squad mates with a note telling them to meet him in the hangar at 1545, thought about reminding Morton that his involvement was conditional on the results of his psych evaluation, and decided against it. The rookie’s confidence was already shaken and he didn’t think any good would come of labouring the point. When the lift arrived, he pressed the button marked H, leant against the wall and closed his eyes.