Red Eye - 02 (10 page)

Redlaw regarded her.

“I know!” she exclaimed. “Brave or crazy, take your pick. In the event, I didn’t find any vamps. This is what I found. Keep watching. Any second now...”

Sounds first: the tread of feet, shuffling, echoing. The camera swung. Tina’s voice, a whisper: “What the fuck...? Oh, God. Oh, shit. Someone’s coming. Who?”

The image veered about wildly, incomprehensibly.

“That’s me hiding,” she told Redlaw. “There was this place beside the track, like a room at the top of some steps, a refuge for people working down there, they could sit and have their lunch in it or something.”

The image stabilised again. On-camera, Tina whispered, “Oh, my God, I hope they aren’t vamps. Maybe they’ve heard me.”

“I thought the whole point was you were looking for vampires,” Redlaw said.

“Yeah, but on my terms. I didn’t want to get
caught
by them.”

“And for what it’s worth, they’re far more likely to have smelled you than heard you.”

“Thanks for that, Mister Expertise. I’ll have you know I wash regularly.”

“Makes no difference.”

Now figures came into view on the screen. They were moving in a line along the track. Six, no, seven of them. Silhouettes, only just discernible in the gloom. Chunky outlines. Bulky clothing. Guns.

Tina’s camera jumpily panned right to left, following them as they tramped by. The focus wavered in and out. On the soundtrack, above the marching of boots and soft clanking of equipment, frightened, shallow breaths were audible—hers.

The figures filed out of sight. The camera dipped, almost with relief. Tina’s voice said, “Jesus, that was a pretty—”

And there, abruptly, the clip ended.

“I can’t remember how I finished that sentence,” Tina said. “‘A pretty close call,’ maybe. Freaked the hell out of me, as you can tell. I mean, I suppose technically I was trespassing, and my first thought was those guys might be transport employees or something. I didn’t dare move for about another hour, in case they returned or there were any more of them further back along. Then I just sort of crept out. Didn’t much feel like doing any more vampire chasing after that. Oh, and apologies for all the God and Jesus stuff. It just comes out. I don’t mean anything by it.”

“That’s the trouble, no one does,” said Redlaw. “Run the clip again.”

She did.

“And again.”

Twice more, and then yet again for good measure.

“So what do you think?” she asked. “Who are they?”

“Can’t tell that much about them. Not enough detail. But they definitely look military.”

“Exactly. Since seeing the playback, that’s my thoughts exactly.”

“Helmets. Assault weapons. That looks like military-grade body armour they have on. Ballistic vests, elbow and knee pads. But also the fact that they’re going single file, evenly spaced. Smacks of training to me. Drilled-in discipline. And that’s not all. Can you wind it back? Freeze-frame on the clearest shot you’ve got, one where you can see the whole of one individual, head to toe.”

Tina obliged.

“See that?” Redlaw said, pointing to one of the silhouetted figures. “See how he walks? The way he’s putting his feet down?”

Tina frowned. “So what?”

“There’s something about it. It’s not how a man carries himself ordinarily. No, scratch that. It’s not how an ordinary man carries himself.”

“I don’t get.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to,” said Redlaw. “I could be imagining it, but... If you’ve been around Sunless as long as I have, you become familiar with certain aspects of their behaviour. The body language, for instance. Vampires may not look like much, but they’re surprisingly graceful when they want to be. They go on the balls of their feet, a bit like dancers. This fellow”—he tapped the screen—“has almost that exact same walk. All seven of them do. If only we could make out their features better...”

But the figures’ faces remained hidden throughout the duration of the clip, lost in impenetrable shadow.

“What are soldiers doing down in the New York subway? That’s what I’d like to know,” Tina said.

“Down in the subway where Sunless are reputed to be,” Redlaw added. “I need to go there and have a look for myself.” He stood. “Will you show me where it is?”

“Whoa there, hoss,” said Tina. “You mean right now? Do you have any idea what the time is?”

“No time like the present.”

“Yeah, but we’re talking the West Side. Trains have stopped running, and forget catching a cab. It’s twenty below and the snow’s not stopping. All the hacks with any sense have gone home. What say we leave it ’til morning, huh?”

Redlaw saw the logic in this. “Okay,” he said. “So I suppose I’m crashing here. Or are you going to turf me out onto the street?”

Tina indicated a couch in the corner. It was threadbare and holed, and looked as though it had been rescued from a skip. “That’s yours. I’ll grab you a couple of blankets.”

Redlaw made himself as comfortable as he could on the couch’s pancake-thin cushions. It irked him that he had paid for a hotel room he wasn’t using, but there was nothing to be done about that.

“Word of warning.” Tina pointed to her bedroom door. “I’ll be in there, and guess what? I sleep with my Taser and my Mace. Just saying. In case you should get any funny ideas.”

“Trust me, I won’t.”

“You betcha you won’t.”

“One thing, Tina,” Redlaw said, before she disappeared into her room. “Has anybody else seen that footage?”

She shook her head. “Just me, and now you.”

“So you haven’t put it on the web anywhere? Shown it to a friend?”

“Nuh-uh. Why?”

“Good.”

“Why?” she persisted.

“A feeling, that’s all.”

“So it’s important.”

“Conceivably. I just think, for your sake, that advertising that you’ve got it might not be a wise move. At least not until we’ve investigated further, and maybe not even then.”

“Fuck. Seriously?”

She didn’t seem concerned at all. If anything, she seemed thrilled.

Unusual girl
, Redlaw thought, and he rolled over on the couch and surprised himself by falling instantly asleep.

CHAPTER

EIGHT

T
HE
H
UMMER
H2—gunmetal-grey paintjob, blacked-out windows, licence plate number unknown to the DMV—pulled in at the dockyard gate. Dawn was breaking. The night’s clouds had dumped their freight of snow and moved on, and a weak sun was rising over Brooklyn.

Weak
, thought Colonel Jacobsen,
but enough. Any sun’ll do
.

He and his team performed a quick equipment check. Face masks were clipped into position, UV-resistant goggles donned. Then they sounded off, codenames into throat mikes, all seven of them on the same frequency and fully communicado.

A night watchman waddled out his prefab hut, yawning blearily. He skirted the barrier and approached the Hummer, twirling a finger in midair:
wind down your window
. When the Hummer driver didn’t comply, the watchman leaned in close and tapped on the window, trying to peer through the heavily tinted glass but seeing only his own reflection.

The driver, Red Eye Three, rammed the door open, knocking the watchman off his feet. Before he could recover, Three sprang out and spritzed him in the face with a squirt of BZ gas from a small canister. The watchman spluttered and wheezed, his face went red, and then his eyes rolled up and he passed out. He would wake up in an hour’s time with a splitting headache and no recollection of what just happened.

Red Eye Three hurried into the hut and threw the switch that operated the gate barrier. Back in the Hummer, Three steered the car into the dockyard, pulling up alongside an aluminium-sided administrative building.

“Okay, we’re in, let’s roll,” said Colonel Jacobsen, and all four doors of the Hummer opened and Team Red Eye bundled out.

It was like stepping into a blast furnace. Jacobsen could feel the sun’s rays through his thick protective gear. Wintry and watery though it was, the sun was hot to him. It was trying to pierce his fatigues and body armour, get to his flesh. It wanted to consume him whole, and would if given a chance. Before joining Red Eye, Jacobsen had done tours of duty in the Iraqi desert at the height of summer, a hundred and twenty in the shade, heat that could fry a man alive and desiccate his brains. Here in subzero New York in January, now that he had become something other than a mere infantry officer, it was about as bad. The daylight glared through the goggles’ polarised lenses. Had any of his skin been exposed, blisters would have erupted in seconds. Longer than that, and there would be singeing, wisps of pale smoke, first degree burns, second degree, then rapidly third.

Team Red Eye moved with practised precision, each of them with a fixed role, a set of procedures to execute. CCTV cameras were disabled and the hard drive that stored their recordings was wiped. The perimeter was secured. All alarms were put out of action. In under five minutes, the team had control of the entire dockyard, nothing able to come between them and their target.

Four of them took up prearranged lookout positions. Jacobsen, meanwhile, headed for the waterfront with Red Eye Two and Red Eye Five in tow. Wharf cranes loomed against the sky, their long necks seemingly bowing under the weight of snow. The three men moved lightly, even Red Eye Five, for all that he was toting a large oxyacetylene cylinder set on his back. Five, also known as Gunnery Sergeant DuWayne Child, was the size of an ox and, thanks to the course of treatment the entire team were undergoing, as strong as one too.

Colonel Jacobsen consulted a download of the dockyard’s delivery manifest on his smartphone. He and the other two were almost at their objective. A mound of shipping containers rose before them, steel boxes the size of railway carriages arranged in a grid pattern. Serial numbers were visible on the sides. Jacobsen identified the one they wanted, the topmost of a stack of three.

“This is Red Eye One. I have visual. Target is acquired. Radio silence from here on in.”

The container had arrived yesterday afternoon, offloaded from the
Star of Szczecin
, a 10,000-ton Polsteam cargo vessel outbound from Gdansk. According to the bill of lading, there were rolls of carpet and assorted items of furniture inside, and doubtless that was true. What mattered to Team Red Eye was what
else
might be inside. If their intel was correct—and the man who was funding the Red Eye initiative seemed to have access to rock solid intel—the container was home to a score of trafficked vampires. Some Russian hoods had charged the vamps a small fortune to cross the Atlantic, in accommodation that made steerage class look luxurious. Tonight, local contacts were due to come and release them from confinement. But not if Team Red Eye had any say in the matter.

Jacobsen leapt up the side of the container stack, scrambling easily from handhold to handhold until he reached the top. He undid his mask. Sunlight dug needles into his lips and cheeks. He inhaled through his nose several times, deeply, before re-covering his face.

He gestured to Two and Five below. A rapid flick of gloved fingers, beckoning them.

In no time, Jacobsen had been joined on top of the container by Child and the team’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Harvey Giacoia. Child unpacked the cylinder set and the blowtorch attached to it. Jacobsen and Giacoia, meanwhile, cleared the snow off the container, brushing it aside with sweeps of their feet. Child opened the gas flow regulator on the acetylene tank, sparked up the jet with a friction lighter, slowly brought in the oxygen until the mix was right, and got busy cutting.

Up to that moment, the vampires had been staying very quiet, keeping still, hoping that whoever had climbed onto their container was there to do nothing more than conduct an external inspection. As sparks began raining down inside, alarm swiftly turned to panic. The vampires scurried to find cover amid the packing crates and pallet loads.

Child worked methodically, slicing along the upper rim of the container. Steel glowed and dripped like lava. When he had cut through one end and two corners, he halted, nodding to Jacobsen and Giacoia. They grasped the edges of the container top and heaved backwards with all their might. The top curled upwards. It was like peeling the lid off a giant sardine tin. Metal screeched and groaned as it buckled and bent.