Insurgency (8 page)

“Come with me and you will live!” Krasnov bellowed.

Then Black saw it, another RPG aimed his way. His periphery vision became blurred, he moved quickly as the grenade spun towards him. Black looked down from the blast-wall, the grenade landed where his feet had been a moment before. He had no idea how he managed to mount the wall.

“Follow me!” Krasnov yelled as he stood next to a Toyota pick-up on the ground outside the base.

Black jumped down, rolling as he landed. “How?”

“Just get in; we need to escape the sun!”

Krasnov pulled away, tyres throwing loose stones and dirt into the air. High above there was a whining noise and milliseconds later a Hellfire missile exploded on the other side of the base. The unblinking eye of ISAF had for once blinked.

FOUR: Camp Bastion, Helmand Province, Afghanistan

On the other end of the secure line the two star US General gave his acceptance. “Declare a Critical Mission Status. You have my permission to send in a team. Immediately.”

“Thank you General.” As the SF liaison officer Matthers was glad the overall boss of ISAF operations in Afghanistan was on the same page as him. He ended the call. The firebase had as far as they could ascertain been overrun by insurgents. All contact with Rockbridge and his men had been lost. A drone had confirmed that Taliban fighters were indeed inside the base. The deployment of a Hellfire missile outside the front gates had done very little it seemed to make the unwelcomed guests leave. Matthers made another call to the QRF team; he would brief them in ten. In fifteen they would be airborne. First he had a few questions to ask the last person to see Rockbridge before the camp went dark, his fellow Brit Paige Turner.

As Turner crossed the base from the journos’ ‘holding area’ she felt a sense of urgency that she had not experienced before. She couldn’t put her finger on it but something was happening. She had told Raymond to take his camera and go mobile on the pretence of getting some candid footage that they could cut into. In reality he was attempting to find out what was going on. She had missed the biggest story of her life the last time she had been in ‘the Stan’. She had been re-called to London by the BBC on the pretence of assisting with the build-up for the Royal Wedding only days before the capture of bin-Laden. She had gotten too close; someone had ‘pulled strings’ and had her shipped home. She’d be buggered if she was going to miss another story. She arrived at Matthers’ office, a plywood affair topped with sandbags and partly hidden by a blast-wall. Even though she found him extremely dishy to look at, she disliked the man. Perhaps it was his hair that was too well groomed for a frontline command position? He reminded her of an old ‘Just For Men’ advert. She knocked and entered without awaiting a response.

“You wanted to see me Colonel?”

“Thank you Ms Turner.”

“What can I do for you?” This time she noted that he looked unusually stern.

“Please sit.” She did so and he stared at a legal pad on his desk. “I’m not going to beat around the bush or try to hide this. We simply do not have the time to waste. We have reason to believe that Firebase Python has been overrun by the Taliban.”

Her jaw dropped, she felt it.

He continued. “As of 19:25 we lost contact with the base. We have been unable to raise Major Rockbridge or anyone else.”

“But I was just there…”

“That is why I called you in here, Ms Turner. The helo you left on with your cameraman and a handful of other personnel was the last to leave the base. You left at, what was it, 18:00?”

“18:19.” She had a photographic memory; it served her well in the supermarket and during arguments. “The pilot made a remark that we’d get to see the sunset if we were lucky on our way here.” Suddenly she tried to hold back the tears. Did this mean that the men she had filmed, got to know and shared a joke with were now dead?

Matthers noticed she was shaken but ignored it. “Well just after sunset was when we lost all contact. Ms Turner, what I need from you is to tell me if there was anything you noticed when you left the base, anything strange or unusual at all?”

She reached into her pocket for a tissue and touched the corners of her eyes. “Nothing during the day but there was an unexpected helo departure the night before; I mean the same day – early hours of the morning. About two-ish.”

“I was unaware of that.”

“It was carrying a Russian from the GRU.”

“Your sources are obviously much better than mine. What Russian?”

“That’s all I could find out. The Russian got in to a helo and left. A few minutes later a Delta team followed him.”

Matthers folded his arms and sat back in his chair. He knew of no JSOC mission or why Russia, a non-member of ISAF would be involved in ISAF operations. “What the bloody hell is going on?”

Turner was surprised by his admission and the tone of it. “You don’t know?”

“No I do not. So apart from the ‘phantom mission’ was there anything else that struck you as strange?”

Turner told Matthers about the fight between Hakim and a Delta who had been in the medical centre a matter of hours before. Matthers jotted down a few notes before dismissing her and running to his briefing.

The enormity of what had just happened momentarily muted Black. As the Toyota continued to bounce away from the firebase, passing the wrecked Talib trucks and then the empty compounds, his brain tried to process what he had seen and what he had done. They skirted the desert plain and took a narrow road into the mountains. He finally looked at Krasnov and only then realised that the Ukrainian had been navigating in the complete darkness without the aid of either headlights or NVGs. Black managed to speak. “I shot you dead.”

“You did shoot me, but I have been dead since 1988.” Krasnov replied.

“I don’t understand. Who are you?

“You should ask me what I am. I am a vampire, as are you.”

“What?” Black asked the Ukrainian as he manoeuvred the Toyota in-between two giant boulders.

“We are mythical beings, blood sucking creatures of the night. But you are different, you are Ra-Hodok, you can walk in sunlight.”

As if on cue Black felt dizzy, his head fell back against the headrest.

“You need to feed. If you do not feed you shall fall into a coma. Here, take it.” Krasnov handed him a flask.

Black shakily accepted it. “Blood? Human blood?”

“Drink it, you know that you must.”

In the gloom, Black looked at the flask and for a moment hesitated but as he did so his vision blurred at the edges. Krasnov abruptly stopped the truck and grabbed the American’s wrists, pushing the flask to his lips. Black’s eyes rolled back in his head as the heavy red liquid cascaded down his throat. His eyes then snapped open and his vision cleared. Black locked eyes with Krasnov, both men’s eyes momentarily flashed red.

“You know that I am speaking the truth even though your rational mind does not want to believe it. You can feel it in your heart and in the blood that flows through it.”

“I’m meant to believe this? That Vampires are real? Come on, they don’t exist, they are made up to sell movies and books.”

The Ukrainian shrugged. “Where did these writers get their ideas from? From folk lore, myths and legends which in turn originated from encounters with vampires, from fact. I exist, you exist, we as vampires exist. Those things you fought at the base what were they, figments of your imagination?”

Something inside Black told him that as crazy as it seemed, this was the truth. He had been trying to deny it but no longer could. He had drunk the blood of two Talibs, had survived rounds entering his body and now after this new blood he felt unbeatable. Black shook his head, not sure what to feel, or who or what he had now become. “Shit.”

“As you Americans say, ‘shit happens’.” Krasnov put the Toyota back into gear and they continued up the path. “When we met I told you my name, what is yours?”

“Black, Brad Black.”

“And your call-sign?”

“Peter Pan.”

Krasnov grunted. “Very appropriate; the boy who never grows old.”

Black frowned. “The Russians from the cave, are they vampires?”

“They are ‘The Vampires’, they are what remains of a Soviet Special Operations unit.”

“Spetsnaz?”

“Correct. Our commanding officer was a General Vladimir Dratshev.”

“Ours? You were one of them?”

“I was their newest recruit; Dratshev turned me only months before we were deployed.”

“Are you seriously telling me that the Soviet Union deployed a Special Ops team of vampires to Afghanistan?”

“Yes.”

Black tried not to laugh. “The Soviet Union was using vampires to carry out their dirty work?”
“No. The Vampires were using the Soviet Union. As a war zone Afghanistan was the perfect place for Dratshev to continue with his research. No one misses young men in a war, both sides simply presume that the other has either killed or captured them. We had an unlimited supply of subjects to experiment upon and learn from.”

“Dratshev is a scientist?”

Krasnov grunted. “He is many things.”

“What was he researching, a cure?”

“No not a cure for vampirism, he did not want to give up his immortality. What he wanted was a cure for the other curse. Dratshev came to the conclusion that all humans carry the vampire gene; it is waiting dormant until it is activated. Dratshev wanted to control it so that the subject would retain the human tolerance for sunlight. Simply put he wanted to find a cure for sunlight.”

“But he succeeded; you said I was a Ra-Hodok?”

“The Ra-Hodoks, the ‘Sun-Walkers’, really are the stuff of legend, or are meant to be, but you are one. And it was not Dratshev but I who made you vampire.”

“Why?”

“To prevent you from being crushed to death in the cave and to prevent you from becoming lunch.”

A sudden anger tore through Black, the realisation of a life lost. “You bit me, so what am I now a member of the walking dead?”

“Is that how you feel, dead?”

“No. I feel alive.” In fact Black felt more alive than ever, he felt exhilarated. A thought struck him. “When I first stepped out of your hut I burnt.”

“That is because your first blood had not started to take effect on your system. When you left me, for dead after you shot me, I had no reason to believe that you would make it. I had no reason to believe that you were Ra-Hodok. Somehow your vampire gene has mutated to enable you to withstand sunlight like any mortal man.”

“So what are the rules, how can we die? I shot you, I saw you die, the bullets entered you.”

“We cannot be killed by normal bullets but silver ones slow us down.”

Black frowned. “How?”

“We are allergic to silver; to us it is highly toxic. When a standard bullet rips into us, our bodies immediately start to repair the damage. The silver in a silver bullet prevents our system from starting this repair process. Fill a vampire with enough silver and he will die from wounds sustained, like any other victim of a gunshot wound. I was using silver rounds at the base; that is how I prevented the Taliban from tearing you to pieces.”

“So we aren’t immortal?”

“We are until we are killed.” Krasnov laughed without humour.

“By silver?”

“By silver, a wooden stake through the heart, decapitation or fire. In addition to this I can be killed by sunlight. There is much truth in Hollywood movies.”

“What about lack of blood?”

“That cannot kill you; merely put you into a coma.”

“So how often must I drink blood?”

“That depends upon how active you are and how much your body needs to repair itself. I feed once every twenty-four hours but you may need to every twelve or more frequently if you have sustained injury or are in a very cold environment. You will soon feel if you need to feed and you will know when to stop.”

Black tried to think clearly. “Can I eat normal food?”

“Yes, but you must still drink blood. Human blood is the only blood that will sustain you long term but in an emergency any will do to slow the onset of a coma. To become strong and remain at your strongest you must feed upon human blood.”

“So if I drink blood I will never age and never die?”

“Yes, just like Peter Pan.” Krasnov almost smiled.

Again Black tried to understand what the Ukrainian had explained, it was the stuff of dreams, a thing of fiction yet it was real. He was immortal. His mind continued to whir as Krasnov led them higher into the mountains. An icy chill blew in through the open windows. Black realised that he was not cold, his skin registered the temperature yet he did not flinch from it nor did his skin form goose bumps. “I’m sorry I shot you.”

“You had good reason. Do not worry I will not hold it against you.”

Black fell silent, again not knowing what to think. The wind whistled around the pick-up as they continued to climb. “How old are you?”

“In human years I am fifty five, but I stopped aging when I was turned vampire at the age of thirty.”

“And Dratshev, how old is he?”

“I do not know for certain but he may well be one of the oldest men on earth.”

“One of the oldest? How many vampires are there creeping around?”

“I have no idea; I personally have not met any more since I was left here.”

Black felt his head beginning to spin. “Why are you here? Why stay in Afghanistan?”

“There was nothing for me at home in Mother Russia. I am an orphan; I have no family which is why Dratshev chose me. I stayed here because I wanted to repay my debt to this country, but I knew that one day someone would find my group and that when happened, Dratshev would appear to re-activate them. I would then be able to destroy them all.”

“But they are your team, your unit?”

“They were never really my team, I was the new boy. I was never trusted, I did not agree with the tests being carried out on innocent locals. This gave Dratshev reason enough to want to have me killed. I hated what I had become but I was the only one to feel this way. I managed to pass on our location to some of the local fighters - Mujahedeen, my enemy. My enemy’s enemy became my friend. There was a huge fighter, a giant of a man yet no more than a teenager. He had survived an attack by The Vampires that took away his family. Of course he wanted me dead, but realised that siding with me was the only way to stop Dratshev. We worked together and he attacked the cave from the outside whilst I attacked from within. I took the heads of two of The Vampires before I was stopped. The Mujahedeen managed to seal the entrance, but Dratshev got away via an escape tunnel. I followed him, but he managed to lose me. So that is why you found me waiting in a hut, waiting for the cave to be found and opened.”