Читать книгу Battle Lines - Will Hill, Will Hill - Страница 15

“So where do we start?” asked Patrick Williams.

“Intelligence is putting together probable location lists,” replied Holmwood. “We’ve had every available satellite working outwards from the hospital since early this morning, and we’ve tracked over a hundred heat blooms. They’re where we start.”

“OK,” said Dominique Saint-Jacques. “Let’s get going.”

Holmwood nodded. “I’m sending squads out with lists of five likely target locations. I’m authorising daylight operations, so destroy them before the sun goes down if you can. All usual containment protocols remain in place, and I want it made clear to all Operators that these targets are significantly more dangerous than the vampires they usually encounter. I’m putting in place a hard window of eight hours, after which you come home. I don’t care whether you’ve destroyed all five of your targets, or two of them, or none of them. Eight hours, then return to base. Having what’s left of this Department exhausted and careless is not an option. Clear?”

“Clear, sir,” replied Dominique.

“Excellent. I’m officially activating all Operational Squads that include rookies until this threat has been eliminated, then they go back to training. Look after them out there and bring them back safe. Clear?”

“Yes, sir,” chorused the Zero Hour Task Force.

“Good. Dismissed.”

Jamie stepped out of the lift and strode along the central corridor of Level B.

Search and destroy, he thought. Just like that. Search and destroy three hundred super-powerful vampires. No problem at all.

He had left the Ops Room with his stomach churning uneasily. There was no doubt in his mind that the mass escapes of the previous night had been orchestrated by Dracula, or at the very least by Valeri, and that they had the potential to cause widespread carnage. There was a positive aspect to the move: such a large action, designed so clearly to occupy Department 19 and its counterparts around the world for a significant amount of time, strongly suggested that Dracula was not far in advance of their Zero Hour timeline, if at all. But that was going to be of little comfort to the men and women who were by now already heading out to hunt down the escapee vampires.

Jamie pulled the console from his belt and typed as he walked.

M-3/OP_EXT_L1/LIVEBRIEFING/BR4/ASAP

He pressed SEND and knew that, far below him, in the circular confines of the Playground, the consoles belonging to John Morton and Lizzy Ellison would now be vibrating into life. He wondered how long it would take them to make their way up to Briefing Room 4 on Level 0, and guessed at ten minutes.

It’ll probably take them five minutes to find the right room, he thought, smiling to himself. It used to for me.

Jamie reached his quarters, pressed his ID against the keypad set into the wall, and pushed his door open when the red light turned green. He flopped down on his bed, grateful for a few minutes’ rest; given the situation that Cal Holmwood had described, he doubted there were going to be many similar opportunities in the next few days. Not that there ever really were; life inside Department 19 was physically and mentally exhausting, a result of the high stakes that were constantly in play. If Jamie and his colleagues failed to do their jobs well, people died; it was as simple as that. Every Operator understood this, found a way to process it and carry on, but it was not always easy.

Jamie felt his eyes begin to close, even though he had only woken up three hours earlier, to find a box in the middle of his console’s screen telling him that he had a message waiting from Larissa. He had pressed OPEN and read the lines of text that appeared.

Hey! Hope you’re OK? Will be awake for the next hour or so if you’re around and fancy giving me a call… x

Jamie had checked the time stamp on the message. It had arrived at 7:30am, when he had apparently been so soundly asleep that he hadn’t even heard it beep. He had quickly done the time-zone maths in his head.

Half past eleven in Nevada. Late.

He had considered calling her anyway – he didn’t think she would be too annoyed if he woke her up – but had decided to let her sleep. Now, as he contemplated the scale and horror of what he had just been told in the Ops Room, he wished he had made the call; it would have been good to hear a genuinely friendly voice. For a second, he considered walking round and knocking on the door to the quarters next to his own, the quarters occupied, technically at least, by one of his best friends, but knew it would be a waste of time.

Matt Browning was almost never in his room these days, unless he was asleep. Jamie knew he had turned down the chance to move into one of the larger quarters inside the Lazarus security perimeter, and while he admired the reasoning behind his friend’s refusal, a spirited attempt to avoid devoting his every waking moment to his work, he thought it had, in fact, been largely pointless. Matt’s life now revolved entirely around the Lazarus Project, and that was that. Jamie missed his friend, but wasn’t annoyed with him; how could he be, when what Matt had devoted himself to was arguably the most important project being carried out in the whole of Blacklight? However, he did think he should try to press Matt into having a drink in the officers’ mess, or at least into sharing a table at lunch; it had been a while since they had talked for longer than a minute or two in a corridor, when both were on their way somewhere else.

On the other hand, it had been barely seventy-two hours since he had talked to Larissa, but he still missed her terribly. They had spoken for almost an hour over a secure video connection, Jamie battered and bloodied by the operation he had just returned from, Larissa bright and smiling, eight hours behind him, her day just getting under way. The pleasure and excitement in her voice as she told him about Dreamland, the NS9 base, and the men and women who inhabited it, was bittersweet to his ears. He knew she had been furious with Holmwood for selecting her for the NS9 secondment, and he knew she missed him as much as he missed her, but she now had a levity about her that he both relished and feared.

He was happy that she was happy: God knows she deserved it after what had happened to her over the last few years, and what had been done to her during the attack on the Loop, when she had been burned down to little more than bones. But he was also jealous of her temporary new life, away from the darkness that surrounded Blacklight, that seemed to follow him wherever he went; jealous that she was meeting new people and experiencing new places, new things. And a tiny piece of him, the vicious, self-loathing part that had been birthed by his father’s death and nourished by years of bullying and loneliness, kept asking the same two questions, whispering them in the darkest recesses of his mind.

What if she forgets about me? What if she doesn’t want to come back?

He pushed such miserable thoughts aside and climbed off his bed. He pulled a bottle of water out of the small fridge beneath his desk and headed out into the corridor, pulling the door to his quarters closed behind him, trying to focus on nothing more than the task at hand.

Jamie logged in to the terminal at the front of Briefing Room 4 and found his squad’s target list waiting for him. He moved it up on to the wall screen behind him, and waited for the rest of his newly activated squad to arrive.

They kept him waiting for less than two minutes. Morton and Ellison burst through the door, clad in their dark blue training uniforms, red-faced from what Jamie knew would have been several minutes of running along the curving corridors of Level 0 in search of the right room. They were caked in sweat and drying blood, but their faces wore identical expressions of determined enthusiasm.

“Good to see you both,” said Jamie. “Get lost on the way up here?”

Morton looked about to deny it, but Ellison opened her mouth first. “Yes, sir,” she said. “The corridors all look the same, sir.”

“You’ll get used to it,” said Jamie, and smiled at his squad mates. “Trust me.”

The two rookies nodded, clearly relieved.

“Take a seat,” Jamie said, motioning towards the empty plastic chairs that surrounded the long table in the middle of the room. Morton and Ellison did as they were told as Jamie watched them, wondering if he had been so nervous and eager to please when he first arrived at the Loop.

I don’t think I was, he thought. I didn’t give a damn about anything apart from my mum. I acted like I owned the place.

He flushed at the memory, but only slightly. He had done what he needed to do to get his mother back, and that was all that had mattered. He knew he had annoyed plenty of Operators in the process, and that not all of them had forgiven him for what they had perceived as arrogance and a disrespectful attitude.

“Operators,” he said, his voice even. “This morning, Interim Director Holmwood authorised MOVING SHADOWS, a Priority Level 1 operation being carried out by the entire active roster of this Department. What you can see on the screen behind me is our little piece of it.” He tapped a series of keys on the console’s touch screen and the first name on the target list was replaced by a digital scan of a hospital admission record. “Last night,” he continued, “an unknown vampire force conducted a mass escape from Broadmoor Hospital in Berkshire. Surveillance footage and satellite thermal imaging suggest that all released patients have been intentionally turned, and Science Division analysis indicates that they are significantly more powerful than usual newly-turned vampires. All of which means we now have almost three hundred potentially highly dangerous vampires on the loose. MOVING SHADOWS is a search and destroy mission, intended to eliminate this new threat in as short a timeframe as possible. Any questions so far?”

Morton raised his hand and Jamie nodded. “Why are you telling us this, sir?” he asked.

“Your training has been suspended,” replied Jamie. “As of right now, you are active Operators in Department 19, until such time as this operation is concluded. When it is, you go back to the Playground. But not until then. Do you understand?”

Morton nodded, the colour draining from his face. Ellison looked at him with wide eyes as she raised her hand.

“Yes?” said Jamie.

“You said search and destroy, sir,” said Ellison. “Right?”

“That’s right.”

“How is that going to work?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, people are going to expect the patients to be found, sir. The media is going to go absolutely crazy, and the families of the escapees are going to demand to know what happened. We’re talking about vulnerable people here, sir, people with severe psychiatric issues.”

“Not any more,” said Morton. “Now we’re talking about vampires.”

Ellison shot her squad mate an extremely sharp glance, then returned her attention to Jamie.

“The media doesn’t know anything yet,” he said. “When it leaks, which we have to assume it will, we’ll make sure they don’t run it. Anyone who lives near the hospital is being handled, and when it becomes necessary to tell the public about what happened to the patients of Broadmoor, the Security Division will devise a cover story. I’ve no idea what that will be, before you ask, and it’s not something you need to worry about. What you do need to worry about are the five vampires we’ve been ordered to destroy.”

“OK, sir,” said Ellison, although unease had clearly settled over her. Morton gave her a furious look, then whispered something Jamie didn’t catch. Ellison turned on him, her eyes blazing with anger, and opened her mouth to reply.

“Operators!” barked Jamie, causing them both to jump in their seats. “This is not a training exercise. This is the real thing. You will give me your complete attention right now or I’ll assume that you aren’t ready for this and send you back downstairs. Is that what you want?”

“No, sir,” they chorused.

“Good,” replied Jamie. “That’s good. Because this is a Priority Level 1 operation, the kind that Operators die on. The footage demonstrating the power of these escaped vampires is extremely disconcerting, so let’s focus, shall we? I want us armed and triple-checked and ready to go in one hour, so it might be useful for us to know who the hell we’re looking for.”

Morton and Ellison leant forward, their attention fully focused on their squad leader. Jamie forced a tension-breaking smile and began to brief them on what was waiting for them beyond the walls of the Loop, knowing even as he did so that nothing he said could truly prepare them.

I’ll just be pleased if I bring them both back alive.