Department 19: Zero Hour (68 page)

“Matt?” said Professor Karlsson.

He looked at the Lazarus Project Director, then got to his feet.

“I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “I’m afraid it’ll have to wait.”

Matt stepped round his desk, leant down, taking care not to move his neck as he did so, and pressed his lips against Natalia Lenski’s. There was an audible intake of breath from his colleagues, and he smiled as he broke the kiss; the Russian girl was looking up at him with eyes that were wide with surprise, but her smile had expanded into a grin that made him feel dizzy.

He had looked into her eyes for a long moment, pregnant with possibility. Then he pushed open the main doors of the lab and stepped out into the corridor, leaving a stunned silence behind him.

The door in front of him opened and Larissa appeared.

“Hey, you,” she said, and pulled the door wide. “Come in.”

Matt smiled, and stepped past her into her quarters.

“Matt!” exclaimed Jamie. “Good to see you, mate.”

“Jamie,” he said. “How are you?”

“A creature of the night, by all accounts,” said Jamie. “Yourself?”

“I’m fine,” said Matt, taking a seat on the edge of Larissa’s bed. “I’m already sick to death of this collar, but I’m fine. Have you guys seen Kate?”

Jamie shook his head. “Not since Cal’s speech,” he said. “You?”

“No,” said Matt. “She must be up in Security. You’ll see her in the hangar, I’m sure.” He paused. “You are going, right? I mean, I sort of assumed, given what Cal said.”

“We’re going,” said Larissa.

“Are you scared?” he asked.

“I am,” she replied. “I don’t know about him, but I definitely am.”

“I am too,” said Jamie. He pushed himself across Larissa’s bed until his back was against the wall, the smile gone from his face. “I feel like I’m supposed to say I’m not, but I am.”

“You’d be an idiot if you weren’t,” said Matt. “Being scared means you’ll be careful, which means you’ll come back.”

“Let’s hope so,” said Larissa.

A horrible silence filled the room.

This is insane,
thought Matt.
How can we be talking about them dying like it’s a genuine possibility? It’s ridiculous. They’re my age, for Christ’s sake, and we’re talking about death like it’s no big deal.

“Have you talked to your mum?” he said, eventually. “Does she know what’s going on?”

Jamie nodded. “She knows,” he said. “She doesn’t like it, not in the slightest, but she understands. I thought she was going to ask me not to go, to be honest with you. That’s what I was dreading. But she didn’t. I don’t think she wanted to make it any harder for me.”

“That was good of her,” said Larissa.

“It was,” said Jamie. “She’s like that.”

Matt stared at his friends, feeling like he was about to either explode or burst into tears. The last few months had been the happiest of his life, the first time he had felt like he truly belonged anywhere. Now it seemed as though it was on the verge of falling apart, and he was utterly furious about it.

“This can’t end like this,” he said, his voice low and so unlike his usual tone that frowns of surprise appeared on the faces of his friends. “This can’t be the last time we’re going to sit like this, the three of us together, alive and in one piece. It just can’t. Everything we’ve done, the lives we’ve saved, and this is what it comes down to? The two of you and everyone else flying off into the night to fight God knows what? It’s crazy.”

“Matt,” said Jamie, gently. “What else are we supposed to do?”

“I don’t know,” he said, his eyes shining fiercely under the fluorescent light. “OK? All I know is that everything changed for me when I met you. When I met all of you. So you have to promise me that you’ll come back. Promise me that you’ll make it through this, and that you’ll come home.”

Larissa winced. “Matt …”

“Just promise,” he said, his voice rising alarmingly. “Promise me, right now.”

Jamie looked him square in the eye. “I promise to try,” he said. “I promise I’ll do everything I can to get us home safe. That’s going to have to be good enough, mate.”

“I promise the same,” said Larissa. She was looking at him with obvious concern. “I really do.”

Matt breathed out a long, low rush of air, and felt the panic that had been climbing through him abate, ever so slightly. “OK,” he said. “I guess that will have to do. And thank you. It means a lot to me.”

“It’s all right,” said Jamie, smiling at him. “It just means that you don’t get to leave any details out when we ask you about Natalia.”

Matt groaned. “Honestly?” he said. “At a time like this?”

Larissa shrugged. “What better time could there be than right before the end of the world?” she said, and grinned wickedly. “Besides, what else are we supposed to do until we go to the hangar? Spill your guts, my friend, and take your time about it. We want to know
everything.
”

“I don’t know about you,” said Jamie Carpenter, “but I’m starting to feel a lot better about this.”

He was standing on the tarmac of the airport’s southern runway, looking towards a pair of huge hangars that stood open to the night air. They were the only centres of light for more than a mile in any direction; the French government had shut down the airport under the cover story of a mercury contamination of the facility’s water supply, allowing it to be used as the rallying post for what was now officially known as the Combined Operational Force. With the FTB and the SPC to the north and Blacklight to the west, there had never been a need for a supernatural Department in France, but Jamie was sure that Cal Holmwood and the other Directors were extremely grateful for the French government’s assistance; the airport was barely forty minutes’ flying time south-east of Château Dauncy.

The hangars that had caught Jamie’s attention were part of the complex of buildings that housed SkyBus, the vast aeroplane manufacturer which had been founded in this quiet suburb of southern France. The airport was owned by them, and they in turn were partly owned by the French government, which had made the temporary shutdown relatively straightforward. The buildings were vast, far larger than the maintenance hangars where Blacklight’s fleet of helicopters were stored and maintained, bigger even than the main hangar, beneath which the
Mina II
was housed and where Jamie and the rest of the Blacklight Operators had assembled barely an hour earlier. They had been designed to accommodate the most modern passenger planes, but one of them was now home to something even bigger: a Russian An-224 transport.

The plane, one of the largest ever to take to the skies, squatted in the middle of the huge space, its wings almost reaching the distant walls, its nose cone raised, revealing the cavernous space within. The plane had been accompanied on its slow flight down from Polyarny by two Mi-26 transport helicopters. The Russian choppers were parked outside the hangar beside four SA 330 Pumas provided by the French Air Force, surrounded by maintenance crew and security personnel.

The second hangar contained a C-130 Hercules that had lumbered its way up from South Africa, and four CH-53 Sea Stallions that had made the short journey down from the
Schwartzhaus
. In comparison to the huge array of military hardware, the sea of black figures swarming in front of the hangars seemed tiny. But to Jamie, who had been on his way back from Paris when the Loop was attacked by Valeri Rusmanov, it was by far the largest show of Departmental strength he had ever laid eyes on. Including the Blacklight contingent, who were rapidly disembarking from the helicopters that had carried them across the English Channel, there were more than three hundred Operators and support staff waiting to depart for their target location.

“I know what you mean,” said Larissa. “It looks like the cavalry has arrived.”

“Except for the Americans,” said Jamie, peering around at the darkened airport. “I guess they’re who we’re waiting for?”

As if on cue, a distant rumbling noise became audible to the north. It was too quiet for most of the assembled men and women to hear, but to Larissa and himself it was perfectly clear. They turned towards it, their supernaturally sharp eyes scanning the horizon.

After a minute or so, Larissa raised her arm and pointed with a pale, slender finger. “There,” she said.

Jamie followed the line of her outstretched digit and saw nothing. Then three pale yellow dots became visible, moving low over the French countryside, and he reminded himself how much more powerful Larissa was than him; they were both vampires, but there was still a world of difference between them.

The dots grew in size as they approached, until their outlines identified them as cargo planes; they were flying close together, stacked up behind each other like birds in formation. The thunder of their engines was now loud enough to be heard by everyone, and the crowd of Operators and technicians stopped to watch.

The black silhouettes roared towards the runway. When they were almost on top of the airport, three pairs of blinding landing lights burst into life, slicing through the gloom and making every watching Operator shield their eyes. The howl of engines became deafening, and Jamie, who was still adapting to his newly powerful senses, found himself physically vibrating as the scream of the engines poured through him, rooting him to the spot.

The first plane bore down on the runway, passing above the surrounding suburbs at a height that would never have been permitted by any civil aviation authority, then touched down with a screech of rubber and a high-pitched whine that cut through Jamie like a knife. It raced past the hangars, sending a huge wave of air into the watching Operators, causing most of them to take a staggering step back. Fifteen seconds later the second plane touched down, and twenty seconds after that, the third.

As the transports slowed at the distant end of the runway and began to taxi back towards him, Jamie wondered what on earth the men and women who lived in the houses beyond the airport’s fence were making of the night’s events. The mercury contamination cover story would not explain the deafening convoy of aircraft that had landed at the darkened airport, and anyone watching from their garden would have been treated to a remarkable display of military technology as it skimmed the roof of their house.

With synchronised precision, the pilots rolled the three huge C-17 Globemaster IIIs to a halt with their towering rear cargo doors pointing at the hangars. The deafening engine noise cut out, leaving a silence that was almost unnerving until a cacophony of warning alarms blared out as the ramps began to slowly lower towards the tarmac.

Jamie looked around as the doors yawned wider and wider. Cal Holmwood was standing with Paul Turner, their attention fixed on the new arrivals, and beyond them he could see familiar faces: Ellison, Qiang, Jack and Patrick Williams, Angela Darcy, Dominique Saint-Jacques, and many others he recognised from operations and briefings and the Loop’s canteen queue. Beyond the massed ranks of Blacklight stood their helicopters, three of which were now empty, the doors on their sides open. The fourth remained tightly sealed, surrounded by a cordon of Operators; as Jamie watched, it rocked slightly on its wheels, as though something heavy was moving inside it.

The Globemaster ramps thudded to the ground with a series of metallic clangs that echoed across the quiet airport. Jamie looked into the one nearest him and saw the dark, snub-nosed shapes of a pair of AH-64 Apache helicopters, their rotors folded at their sides, their stub wings bristling with weaponry. Out of the other two transports spilled dozens of men and women in black uniforms; they hustled down the ramps with bags over their shoulders and assembled on the tarmac. A tall, broad man walked through the middle of them and approached Cal Holmwood with a thin smile on his face.

“That’s General Allen,” said Larissa, softly. “The NS9 Director.”

Jamie nodded. He recognised the man from video conferences and reports, but had never seen him in the flesh. Allen stopped in front of Holmwood, and the two men shook hands.

“Cutting it fine, Bob,” said Holmwood, his voice audible to Jamie and Larissa. “I was starting to think you weren’t going to show.”

Allen shook his head, his smile widening slightly. “We had a little bit further to come than you,” he said, “in case you hadn’t noticed. Nine hours to brief a team, load up, and fly halfway round the world. I’d call that pretty good, Cal.”

“I suppose so,” said Holmwood, and smiled at his friend. “I see you brought me the presents I asked for.”

“The Apaches?” said Allen. “Least I could do. I’ve got another little surprise for you as well.”

“What’s that?”

“You’ll have to wait and see, won’t you?”

Holmwood’s smile became a grin. “It’s good to see you, Bob.”

“You too,” said Allen. “I’d say it was a pleasure if the circumstances were better, but they never are, are they?”

“No,” said Holmwood. “They never are.”

“Where do you want my guys?” asked Allen. “This is your show, so give me an order.”

“You separated them like I asked you to? Red and Blue Teams?”

The NS9 Director nodded. “I did.”

“OK,” said Holmwood. “Give them two minutes to shake off the flight, then ask them to form up out here with the others. I’ll address everyone at once, and then we can be on our way.”