This was confirmed as a flash filled one of the video monitors, immediately followed by the feed blacking out. In rapid succession the other four feeds did the same.
The command and control van lifted off its right tires as the blast wave hit it, followed by the roar of the explosion. The van slammed back down, still upright, as debris from the explosion hit the side.
Kokol knew the entire team was dead. He felt it run through his body as surely as the shock wave had hit the van.
“The computer.” Kokol tapped the dazed captain on the shoulder. “What?”
“Check the computer.” “For what?”
“The download. What they tapped.”
The captain slid the seat over to the nearby computer as chaos reigned inside the command van, everyone shouting into radios trying to figure out what had happened. He looked at the screen and saw the small emblem indicating the information that had been transmitted by the team member just before the explosion.
Kokol doubted anything of value would have been picked up, but over two dozen men had just died, and he owed it to them to look. The hard drive data came up. He quickly scanned through it. Daily calendar. Interoffice. memos. Shipping. Time clocks. Phone logs.
Kokol backed up. He scanned the shipping logs for the last two days carefully. Kokol smiled when he spotted a rush shipment to Hong Kong.
He pulled out his phone and dialed a number, giving the address to the person on the other end.
Nosferatu and the team of mercenaries he had hired had taken off in two Huey helicopters with US Army markings from an abandoned airstrip in southern Colorado, where they had been awaiting his arrival. They were flying due south, low to the ground to avoid radar.
The town of Dulce was just south of the Colorado-New Mexico border, between the Carson National Forest and the Rio Grande National Forest. The terrain was full of mountains covered with pine trees. The town was on the forward slope of a large mountain. On the back slope was the entrance to the secret lab that Majestic-12 had established shortly after World War II.
The experiments there had been as varied as the human imagination, according to what Nosferatu had been able to learn, although much of it was still shrouded in secrecy. The United States government had done work on mind control using memory-affecting drugs and electronic dissolution of memory. Some of the work came out of Airlia technology and some from German scientists captured at the end of World War II and impressed into US service under Operation Paperclip.
This lab was also where Majestic had shipped the Guardian computer they discovered in Temiltepec in South America, the device that had corrupted the members of Majestic who had come in contact with it, giving them its programmed instructions to fly the mothership.
The team leader called out a time warning, indicating they were less than five minutes from the target. With a slight smile Nosferatu watched the men in the cargo bay don night-vision goggles. Human technology had finally started to catch up with a capability he’d had for thousands of years.
Nosferatu knew that the small security force posted at Dulce had no reason for concern. Their first indication of trouble came when the aircraft landed and the first thing off were flashbang grenades that stunned and blinded them.
Nosferatu had insisted on taking down the security force without killing them, and the mercenaries had agreed, seeing no point in committing murder if it was avoidable. They seized the stunned guards and quickly secured them. Nosferatu then exited the helicopter and followed one team down into the dig site.
The engineers who had worked on the site had dug a shaft straight down through the pancaked levels of the base, with an occasional side tunnel. A large crane holding a metal cage served as a makeshift elevator and Nosferatu climbed on board with four of the mercenaries as another took the controls of the crane.
The basket was swung over the shaft and lowered all the way to the bottom. This was where General Hemstadt had been running highly classified biological experiments for Majestic-12 before being co-opted by the Mission. The higher levels had taken most of the force of the foo fighter’s power beam. This level was relatively intact, as the intelligence reports Nosferatu had purchased indicated.
There was some debris, but they were able to move. They were in a hall that extended about sixty feet, ending in a dead end. There were several doors to the left and another corridor turning to the right. There were name plaques next to each door on the left indicating that those rooms were quarters for Sublevel 1 staff. Nosferatu passed right by all of them, taking the right turn at the end of the corridor.
He was in a ten-foot-long corridor that ended in a double set of doors with biological warning signs posted on them. Nosferatu walked up to the doors and pushed them open. A rough concrete floor angled down to a large cavern carved out of the mountain. The ceiling was twenty feet high and the far wall a hundred meters away.
There were several dozen large, vertical vats in the room. They were empty, but Nosferatu knew they had once held bodies. He looked to the right, where, according to his report, the Guardian computer had been stored. There was an empty space there now.
Nosferatu walked forward, past the tubes. Set off to the left was a bank of machinery set on two carts. What he had come for. At his signal the mercenaries began wheeling out the blood machines.
Vampyr’s absolute stillness caused Chon great anxiety. He felt the weight of his failure to locate Tian Dao Lin’s lair. And five minutes earlier his men had called to report — as he had feared — that they had lost the trail of Tai and the blood in the back streets of Hong Kong, where Tian Dao Lin’s power was absolute. Two of the trailers had been shot and killed, indicating the level of seriousness of whatever was happening.
“Sir—”
“Yes?” Vampyr waited.
“Perhaps,” Chon began, but he stopped when Vampyr’s SatPhone rang. Vampyr listened for a few moments, then hung up without saying a word. He wrote an address on a piece of paper and slid it across to Chon. “What is there?”
Chon read it. “An office building downtown. The Pacific Rim Bank Building.” Vampyr stood. “It is time to pay Mr. Lin a visit.”
“Are you sure—”
Vampyr’s glare caused Chon to bite off whatever he was about to say. He grabbed the phone and barked orders.
The faint beat of helicopter blades echoed down from the roof. Vampyr turned for the door.
“It will take a few minutes for—” Chon began, but he didn’t finish the sentence as the windows and steel shutters imploded, sending shrapnel flying through the room. A piece of metal caught Chon in the chest, ripping through, severing his spinal cord and killing him instantly.
Vampyr reacted instinctively, diving to the floor unscathed. He rolled away from the windows as he caught a glimpse of figures rappelling in on ropes suspended from the roof. A half dozen figures dressed in black with black balaclavas covering their faces were in the room. They all ran toward Vampyr.
Vampyr rolled under the first, at the same time pulling a short sword — his xithos from so long ago in Sparta — out of its sheath and getting to his feet, assuming a ready stance, the point of the ancient sword directed toward the intruders. One jumped at him and he swung, the blade slicing cleanly into the man’s shoulder, then diagonally through his body, coming out the opposite hip. The two pieces fell to the floor.
Everyone in the room halted. The remaining five bracketed Vampyr, keeping their distance from the sword.
“Where is Tian Dao Lin?” Vampyr asked.
No one replied and no one moved. Vampyr had never been a big believer in standoffs. He jabbed at one of the intruders facing him, then spun, sword extended and lopped off the head of the other. He began to advance on the others when the door to the office crashed inward and four more figures dressed in black jumped through, taking up positions. They were followed by an old man wearing loose-fitting black silk with red dragons on each sleeve. He took in the situation and held up a hand.