Ghost Soldiers (6 page)

“Here's our guy. The bastard who killed our infiltrator and those civilians.” She pulled up an image—a picture of a man in an olive-drab Romanian military dress uniform from the Soviet era. Hair so dark it was nearly black. Viciously clean-shaven. A Roman nose, eyes a deep brown in a face that looked as if it'd been hacked out of wood by a hatchet.

“He's ex-military?”

“He served as an army colonel under Nicolae Ceau
şescu. Supposedly he went on some kind of deep life quest somewhere and returned to the Eastern Bloc with a huge chip on his shoulder and packing a whole bunch of nasty knowledge.”

Karl leaned back against the chest freezer and folded his arms, memorizing the man's face. Remembering the ravaged bodies on the road, and all the blood and horror staining the ground, defiling the air.

“As for our current status,” she continued, “I moved us into our final position and set everything up this afternoon. We're at about four thousand feet elevation.” She started typing, and though she wore fingerless black gloves, her fingertips blurred across the keys. A detailed topographical map appeared on the left screen, full of mountains and valleys. She pointed to one steep slope. “Bucegi Mountains, near this area. There's plenty of time for you to scout the location, select your firing position and dial in the rifle.”

Up until this point, the information blackout had been nearly total. The Thorn had shunted him around Eastern Europe like a piece on a gameboard, all to kill this sorcerer operating in a part of the world considered a paranormal badlands, a place where the Order had little influence and diminished ability to strike. He was nothing more than a tool—a gun pointed in the right direction.

That was going to change before he risked his neck again. “Those are the GPS coordinates your infiltrator gave?”

She brought up satellite photos on the third monitor. “Yeah. Petrescu's information puts the site in this valley.” She zoomed in on a green clearing between wide expanses of forest and mountain slopes. “Something major-league big is going down after midnight tomorrow. I marked a couple of places to shoot from. Here. Here and here. They have good line of sight down into the clearing.”

“Isolated.”

“Yeah. No hikers, no camping permits, so we should have minimal contact with civilians, but the rifle shots will carry, so…I don't know. We might have problems with the mountain police.”

“How likely?”

She shrugged, leaned back in her chair and ran a hand along the top of her erratically spiked blue hair. “Our truck's off the road, and I set up camouflage, but the
politia
have been crawling all over the place since those people were slaughtered. There aren't many of them for the amount of hard terrain to cover, but there's always a risk.”

“Will we have satellite access?” He'd always wondered if the Thorn had spy satellites in their arsenal. It seemed outlandish—James Bond stuff—considering what it took to launch things into space, but they'd surprised him before.

“We don't have real-time satellite coverage, but I have other toys. A camera drone for some look-down ability…” she gestured at a small joystick connected to one of the computers, “…but I can't launch it until the last minute. The propellers make too much noise, so I won't send it out until you're in place and shooting.” She turned in her chair and pointed to an open steel case near the back doors. “I need you to bring that camera along. I can control it remotely. It'll be my eyes until I launch the drone—far better than the little headset camera. And I'll still be able to look through the crosshairs of your scope.” She clicked through a cascade of windows on the third monitor and maximized one that showed an image of the gray, rust-flecked interior of the van from the scope's perspective on the sniper rifle. “I also loaded up the Barrett's clips. The list has the load order and ammo types. First round should do the trick, though.”

He glanced at the sheet covered with Bailey's slashing script.
1st round silver, iron core, Null spell. 2nd round silver, lead core. 3rd round, solid silver, sanctified.
4th round
… He turned back to the screens and studied the places she'd marked as possible sites for his sniper nest. “Where's our location on the map?”

“Here.” With the cursor she circled a narrow, twisting section of road on the east slope of a mountain, a good four or five kilometers or so from the clearing, but isolated from everything else and far to the northwest of the town of Sinaia. He had a bit of a hike no matter which site he chose, but it would give him a chance to spy out the land and make certain he wasn't strolling into an ambush.

He mulled over each potential shooting location and pointed to a ridge around four hundred meters from the clearing. “This one. It's closest and has the most direct path back to the truck with good cover.”

“Okay.” She clicked and dragged a line to it from their coordinates. “About four-point-three klicks off. How fast can a vampire cover that distance?”

He glanced at the rifle and then at the steel case with the camera and tripod she wanted him to carry. The rifle weighed over thirty pounds. The case weighed perhaps another twenty-five. “Maybe ten minutes on rough terrain with this gear and still keep undetected. Faster and I might attract attention.”

“Then keep it tight and careful,” Bailey said. “Especially in light of the shit we found on the road.”

So she felt uneasy about the chances their mission had been exposed, just like he did, despite her willingness to press on. Of course her unease meant little since she wasn't the one fronting all the risk. He'd be out there alone. Operations like this seldom came off perfectly, and the fact that the Thorn wanted to press ahead, despite the possibility the mission had been compromised, told him exactly how much value they put on his safety. If he weren't so desperate to keep Maria safe from the Thorn, he'd walk away right now.

“Vampires aren't supposed to look grim,” Bailey chided, but he could tell her words were forced. “The manual says you can look evil or sexy, but that's it.”

“Why does the Thorn want Cojocaru dead?”

“You having second thoughts?”

“No.”

“Isn't it enough he had those innocent people slaughtered? They meant nothing to him. He crushed them like bugs.”

“I deserve to know everything—especially since it's my finger on the trigger.”

“A hit man with reservations?” She set her hand against her chest where the silver crucifix hid beneath her clothing. Her face grew serious, her eyes intent. “Don't flake on me now, Karl. We need you.”

“Don't make it sound as if there's a choice involved. The man might be a priest, and you could still force me to do this…and to protect the people I love, I'd still pull the trigger.”

“He's no priest,” she said. “Our motives are noble.”

“The way I've been treated makes me wonder.”

“You're respected.”

“You lie. I'm hated and loathed. It doesn't matter, but don't lie to me.” He reached over and touched the top of the riflescope. The surface was cool, like his skin.

“I don't feel that way.”

He cocked his head and considered her. “Why not?”

“What, my clothes don't tell the tale?” She wriggled her fingers at him and showed her teeth in a brief snarl. “I'm a rebel without any claws.” She threw back her head and howled like a wolf. When he didn't laugh, she slowly swiveled back and forth in her chair, her gloved hands now steepled in front of her mouth as she watched him with bright green eyes.

“Tough crowd,” she said. “Fine. I'll tell you about Cojocaru…if you'll tell me something about you.”

He'd suspected there might be something like this. “What do you want to know?”

“The first time you fed—”

“No.”

She flinched a little. Perhaps he'd reacted more forcefully than needed. It didn't matter. Not all wounds healed, even over hundreds of years, and he wasn't about to bleed his pain out while she watched.

“Tell me about your Turning then. What was it like to become a vampire?”

“Why would you want to hear of that?”

“Because you're different from everything I expected. I'm not one of those sword-slinging Conan the Barbarian wannabes.” She shrugged and glanced at her blade sitting neatly in its sheath against one corner of the truck. “Some of my people hate everything that's not human. Me, I'm a free thinker.”

“Dangerous.”

“Low impulse control coupled with high intelligence. Add nitroglycerin and shake well.”

“Tell me about Cojocaru first,” he said. “Tell me how he earned his death sentence. Then…we'll see.”

She hesitated for so long he believed she wouldn't agree. Then she took a deep breath and began to rapidly fire words at him. “Sorin Cojocaru's building an army of slave-paranormal creatures, any and all breeds. Keeps them in line with slave collars he designed—they feed energy back to him for his magic, at the expense of the slave's life force. We think the collars let him keep his slaves in check, and by feeding off their energy, he can cast powerful spells long past the point where a regular human mage would've succumbed to mindlock.” She waved a hand over her hair and wiggled her fingers. “AKA frying his brain. But wait, there's more. He's been sending out…recruiters, I guess you'd call them. They move into cities, try to establish a foothold and recruit the local paranormal underworld population into syndicates loyal to Cojocaru. Crimes go up. Murders go up. Money flows back to Eastern Europe.”

“And the Thorn can't kill him? I have a hard time believing that.”

She looked away. “We could, but this area—Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, parts of the Ukraine…they're considered paranormal badlands. Wild West shit. We couldn't get much traction in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War, and afterwards…well, we've been through here twice already in force, but it's constantly spewing out new threats.”

“You're here now. You managed to bring all this equipment in.”

“Yeah, I've been here for the last seven months setting all this up. It's a bitch, let me tell you.” She waved a hand at her computers. “I
built
this stuff here, on my own, piece by piece. Your gun—that was an
uber
bitch to smuggle inside, again done piece by piece. It was going to be Thornheads only in this operation—a full Painter-Mage tactical strike team—but there was a high-priority problem that flared up in Lisbon, and Cojocaru's growing more powerful faster than anybody expected. So they're sending you and me. A finger in the dam kind of thing.”

“And using me gives the Thorn deniability, since I have that certain aroma of the expendable.”

She didn't answer, but she didn't look away either.

“What's Cojocaru's endgame?” he asked. “Another would-be world conqueror? A Napoleon of the underworld?”

“I don't know.”

“And I don't believe that.”

She frowned. “I don't know what he wants. I don't think anyone does. Or at least none of the Lords and Ladies have bothered to feed it down the line to the grunts. We know he's making slaves. At the very least, he's a threat to the Silence—he could do something and end up splashed all over newspaper headlines across the world. Something like that could destabilize this region, hell, destabilize the world. People aren't ready to know about magicslingers, shapeshifters and vampires. Blood will shoot out of their ears.”

“Someday you won't be able to contain it.”

“Yeah, and that's not today,” Bailey said. “Okay, I told mine. Now you tell yours.”

“A vampire named Cade Turned me.”

“Details.”

“It happened in London.”

“Come on, Karl. Give it some storyteller flair.”

“I'm not here for your amusement,” he warned. “It's not something I find exciting or titillating or goddamn
entertaining
.”

“All right. I'm sorry. I'm being a bitch. It's just…I don't know. I'm curious.”

He was quiet. She looked away and wouldn't meet his gaze, instead toying with the wireless computer mouse.

“There's little to tell,” he said. “I was engaged to a woman named Elizabeth Alvey. I'd finished dinner with my fiancée and her family, but it had grown late. I had trouble finding a carriage to take me from the Borough, so I had to walk back to the rooms I'd rented—some dingy place north of the bridge that reeked of fish guts if I threw open the windows. The water on the Thames was a sheet of onyx, and it stank of sewage. No moon. Streets full of shadows in the darkness between the oil lamps, but I carried my saber and the confidence of a dragoon. On one of the avenues—Lombard Street or Cheapside…I don't remember—I paused to let a carriage rush past, with my thoughts still full of Elizabeth's face, the candlelight, how she smiled and her eyes shone.

“A shadow rushed out of nowhere, moving so fast I'd only just started to spin toward it. I managed to touch the hilt of my saber, but that was all. The shadow slammed into me, threw me into an alley and sent me sprawling along the cobblestones. I heard laughter. Cold, flat, inhuman laughter. A huge man stood a few feet away, impeccably dressed, his head hairless, and his eyes glowed like a demon's.

“I warned him, pulled my saber free, and he knocked me down again. I got up. Cursed him. He laughed and hit me so hard I thought the world would break. I got up again. Spat blood at him. He threw me into a building and told me how the blood of brave men reminded him of fine wine. I pulled myself up once more. The blade of my saber had broken in half, but I still leveled it at him. I remember how his eyes burned with amusement, a hellfire that drained my will to resist him. He came at me again, and I slashed at where I thought he'd be. The jagged end of my saber sliced into his arm. He laughed again, knocked my sword away and pinned me to the bricks with one hand.”