Target Rich Environment

  Vampires were spread across the world. Most of them could blend in, and in fact, millions of them were living and feeding off of the humans around them now with no one being the wiser. On their own, they were nothing. Vampires were pests, vermin, just murderers and cannibals with super powers. They were lone wolves that would be hunted down and eliminated, just like last time.

  But if all vampires had direction, motivation, and coordination, the only way man could stop them was if they had to guts to kill everyone they suspected might be a threat. The minute mankind faltered and lost their nerve, when they lacked the balls to get the job done, then the competition would be decided.

  To fight this war, he would need an army.

  It was a good thing the Russians had already done so much recruiting for him.

  “Status?” Kovac asked as he walked into the secret prison’s command center. Bodies were strewn everywhere. Very few of them were in one piece. Shell casings rolled underfoot. His own AK was still smoking from the heat. He’d just shot a lot of people. Basco and Gregor, who’d both had extensive military experience during their mortal lives, were waiting for him.

  “We’re secure,” Basco reported. “Most of the humans are dead.”

  “Prisoners?”

  “Ours or theirs?” Gregor shrugged. “We beat the shit out of the surviving humans and crammed them all in a few cells. We’re freeing the vampire prisoners and loading them in the trucks now. Some of them are pretty fucked in the head. I’m talking psycho crazy, Boss, like they’ve gone feral.”

  His best intel had estimated that there were a hundred vampire prisoners being experimented on here. It turned out there was nearly twice that. They didn’t have enough room on the trucks to get all of them out. “Anyone who doesn’t cooperate, leave them. We don’t have time to fuck around with drama queens . . .” Kovac checked his watch. Seven minutes had passed since the first shots had been fired at the checkpoint, and two minutes since the alarm had been sounded. They’d have a good head start. This place was so isolated that it would take time for reinforcements to arrive by helicopter, but if there were a bunch of savage vampires running loose in the facility, it would take time for the Russians to get the place secured enough to realize it had actually been a prison break. “Last thing we do before we leave is unlock all the cells. They’re on their own.”

  “We should kill the rest of the humans,” Gregor spat. “I cleared the medical wing. They were dissecting us. The vampires in there were still alive, but they were being peeled like fruit.”

  Basco nodded. “The cells aren’t much better. They were penned in their own filth. It looks like most of them were being fed pig blood through hoses.”

  “On second thought, toss the surviving humans in with the vampires we leave behind. Maybe a good meal will cheer them up. Good work, men.” They’d only taken one casualty, with Clark getting his brains blown out by an alert guard, and Meeker was missing, but it could be assumed that psychopath was off somewhere playing with his food. They’d killed at least a hundred Russian soldiers and an unknown number of support staff. He noticed that there was a human lying under a desk. He couldn’t see her, but he knew she was trying to control her breathing so as to not make much noise. He could even smell that there were salty tears streaming down her cheeks. “Who is that?”

  “One of their doctors, I believe,” Basco answered.

  She certainly didn’t smell like cabbage. “Leave her to me.”

  There was a muffled squeak from beneath the desk.

  “Tell Lily to take off. We need the cameras to work. Take video of the worst-looking captives, those shitty cells, and that medical wing. We’ll stick it on the internet. That’s propaganda gold. Get moving. We’re out of here in five.”

  “Do you still want to leave your message, Boss?” Gregor asked as he removed a small video recorder from a pouch on his vest.

  “Of course. The more scared they are, the harder they push, the better we recruit.” Kovac went to the desk, grabbed the doctor by the hair, and pulled the now screaming woman from her hiding place. “That’s half the fun.”

  Langley, Virginia

  The man in charge of America’s vampire response shook hands with a CIA operative whose job didn’t officially exist.

  “Thank you for coming on such short notice, General.”

  “You know my time is valuable, so this had better be good.” General May glanced around the situation room. Considering the level of spooky mischief that was decided in this place, it was remarkably humble. It looked like a conference room you’d find in any corporate office building. There were three CIA men shifting nervously in their seats, clutching folders sealed with literal red tape. He only knew one of them by name and the others hadn’t made an effort to introduce themselves. “I’ve got a global crisis to avert, so let’s make this quick.”

  “I’m really sorry.” The CIA pukes seemed more squirrelly than usual, and that was saying something. “How is the containment going?”

  “Get to the point, Stuart. V-8 is on an op right now. A couple vamps kidnapped a school bus and took a bunch of kids hostage. Nasty business. We’re going in soon, so I’d much rather be watching that live than listening to your bullshit.”

  That just made Stuart’s minions even more jittery, but they didn’t realize that Director Stuart and the General went way back. He had been at Special Operations Command before his current posting at Red Storm, so he’d been giving Stuart—head of the National Clandestine Services branch of the CIA—grief for years.

  “I’m afraid we’ve got a complicated situation on our hands.”

  Terrorists, vampires—for General May, it didn’t really matter who the bad guy was. Men like Stuart would feed him the intel, men above them both would give the order, and then it was his job to figure out how to get his boys in place to pull the trigger.

  “The situation is only as complicated as you make it out to be, which knowing you fuckers are involved, means it’s probably bad,” the General snapped. Director Stuart had always reminded him of Mr. Rogers. He even wore a sweater at work. How the hell could a self-respecting spymaster wear a fuzzy sweater? But General May knew that looks could be deceiving, and Stuart was a fellow merciless badass who knew how to get the job done. “So what’s the deal?”

  It was one of the unnamed minions who asked him the question. “Are you familiar with a Lieutenant Colonel Marko Kovac, US Army Special Forces?”

  “Yeah, from Seventh Group. We first met at SOCSouth in Panama, only it was Captain Kovac back then, but I’m sure you already knew that.”

  “What do you know about his record?” asked the other.

  This was a rather suspicious line of questioning. “Enlisted man, 82nd if I remember right. Then Rangers. Went OCS, made it through Selection, got his long tab. Went to the War College. In between that, he volunteered for every deployment in every war we’ve had since Panama.” The general pointed at the man’s folder. “I’ve got a feeling that’s all in there. Somalia, both Iraq wars, a couple trips through scenic Afghanistan, and every other shitty FID mission the Army could find, and that’s just the official part . . . And I know that you know about Libya when he wasn’t supposed to be there, and you probably know of some deployments that I’m not even cleared for. When he died in that helicopter crash, it was a sad day for the Army.”

  “How would you assess Kovac’s leadership capabilities?”

  “Superb.”

  “And his loyalty?” added the other.

  That hung in the air like a poisonous cloud.

  He slammed his hand on the table. “Loyalty? Are you fucking kidding me?” General May had a terrible poker face, and the minions unconsciously pulled back from the table as a result of his angry glare. “I’d say that he was one of the best soldiers I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing. Who is talking shit? Is that what the CIA brought me in here for? Somebody is accusing Marko Kovac of selling state secrets or something? Bullshit. There’s no way.”

/>   “And you’re certain of that?” Stuart asked.

  “Let me put it this way, if he was still alive when all of this I1V1 vampire virus crisis started, Kovac would have been the very first man that I requested for Operation Red Storm. The man was a tactical genius. He was like a Green Beret poster child. You can always tell the real quality of an officer by his men’s loyalty, and anyone who served under Kovac in combat would gladly follow him into hell. Whatever turncoat son of a bitch you rolled up selling classified intel is trying to cover his ass by implicating a dead officer who isn’t around to defend his name. We’ve seen it before.”

  “You have no idea how much I wish that was all this was about . . .” Stuart took a deep breath and held it for a moment. He exhaled, then shoved one of the folders across the table toward May. “Okay. Here’s the deal. Lieutenant Colonel Kovac wasn’t killed in a helicopter crash three years ago. That cover story came out of my office. He was MIA on an op in Syria.”

  “I didn’t know we’d lost anyone in that aborted clusterfuck of a mission.” That was terrible news, but not unheard of in his old line of work.

  “We had Kovac checking out possible allies, but some of the rebels turned on us.”

  “There was a meeting with the rebel leaders, but it was a trap. It turned into a firefight,” said one of the minions. He was younger than the other two, and he was in extremely good shape, which suggested he was a field agent rather than an analyst. “I had to pull us out.”

  “We don’t leave men behind.”

  The man looked him square in the eye. “We were outnumbered a hundred to one and hanging in the wind with no backup, deniable and expendable. I saw Marko get shot. I had six other guys who were still alive and half of them were injured. I made the call and we ran . . . I did what I had to do . . . I thought he was dead.”

  General May stared back at him. He sensed no lies, distortion, or bullshit. It was the simple truth, one warrior to another. The General nodded. Explanation accepted.

  “Turns out I was wrong,” the field agent muttered.

  “Play it.” Stuart gestured at the other minion, who promptly began pushing buttons on a remote control. A giant TV on the far wall came on. “This video was made a little while after the Syria incident, but only recently discovered.”

  When the CIA was that fuzzy on dates, it meant that they had something to hide, but General May held his tongue and watched.

  The picture was a closeup of a man with his face wrapped in cloth, concealing all of his features, except for a fanatic’s eyes. He was speaking in Arabic. The camera pulled back, revealing that two more masked thugs, and a third man down on his knees between them, shirtless, filthy with dried blood and scabs, wrists zip-tied together. They jerked his head back, and through the swelling, bruises, and lacerations of repeated beatings, General May could barely recognize the face of Marko Kovac. He struggled, but one of the rebels slugged him in the mouth.

  The original speaker held up a rusty old butcher knife for the camera.

  The office minion began to translate. “He will demonstrate to the Great Satan what happens when we meddle in their affairs—”

  Stuart shushed him. They had all seen this sort of thing before.

  The thugs shoved Kovac facedown on the floor. They’d laid down a tarp. He struggled. Kovac was an excellent fighter and extremely fit for his age, but he was severely injured, his hands were tied, and he was being held down by two giant slabs of meat. There wasn’t much he could do. One of them pulled back on his jaw, exposing his neck, while the other knelt on his back. The speaker went to them, placed the edge of the knife against the side of Kovac’s neck and began to saw.

  “Jesus . . .” General May had to look away. This was a friend.

  “You’re going to want to keep watching,” Stuart suggested.

  There was blood all over the tarp. The knife was dull. Kovac was thrashing. The speaker was still shouting propaganda as he worked. There was blood up to his elbows.

  It was hard to tell what happened next. Kovac’s hands had gotten free somehow. He placed them on the tarp and lifted himself off the floor. The speaker stepped back, confused. The two thugs tried to push him back down. One started kicking him, putting the boot to Kovac’s ribs. Blood was still pumping from his neck as he struggled upward. Kovac stood. One hand flashed out, hitting a terrorist so hard that the thug flew off the screen in a blur. More blood splattered the tarp, the walls, even the ceiling.

  “What the hell . . .”

  The camera jerked wildly as the cameraman stumbled backwards, revealing that they were in the living room of an apartment, with average furniture and decorations on the wall, then back to Kovac and the terrorists. The other big man had wrapped Kovac up and was lifting him off the floor while the speaker slammed the knife into his chest. Kovac moved and it was almost too fast for the camera to track. He broke free of the thug and sent the speaker crashing away. Kovac grabbed the thug by the arm and . . . ripped it off.

  He’d just pulled it right off the man’s body. “Holy shit!”

  The cameraman must have been too startled to run, as his friend thrashed and screamed, blood spraying out of his torso, because he kept it focused on the action as Kovac walked toward the speaker and clubbed him with the severed arm. Kovac reached down, hoisted the speaker into the air, and dragged the screaming man next to his body. For the briefest instant, the camera picked up a flash of long white teeth, and then Kovac was biting down on the speaker’s neck.

  But he didn’t just bite that son of a bitch; oh no, he shook him like a terrier with a rat. The speaker screamed and screamed as Kovac ripped him from side to side, flinging him about with impossible strength. Kovac drove one of his hands through the terrorist’s flesh and into his guts. The cameraman came to his senses, dropped the camera, and probably ran for his life. They could hear him crying for help. The camera landed on the ground, but they could still see Kovac’s legs, planted solid, and the lower half of the speaker’s body thrashing about. Droplets of blood splattered against the lens as Kovac tore him apart.

  There was one last, wet gurgle, and the speaker’s mangled corpse was tossed aside to crash against the wall. Kovac’s bloody bare feet came toward the camera. He got down on his hands and knees. The hilt of the butcher knife was still sticking out of his chest. Kovac’s blood-soaked face filled the screen. The laceration in the side of his neck was still drizzling. His eyes had turned solid red, like the orbs had filled with blood. His canines were far too long. When he spoke, his voice was far too deep.

  “You wanted to send a message to the Great Satan? Well . . . I’m listening.”

  Kovac looked up and let out an animal growl. There was a noise off screen. It was the clack of a Kalashnikov’s safety. He launched himself upward and was gone. There was gunfire. Then crashing and a sound like the ripping of wet cloth, more gun shots, and so much screaming.

  The minion hit stop. “The sounds go on like that for a long time.”

  General May put his hands on the table. They were shaking.

  Marko Kovac was a vampire.

  Stuart was studying him. “We tracked this video back to a village outside of Damascus. Thirty-seven men, women, and children were killed there in one night. The rebels blamed the regime and the regime blamed the rebels. Now we know what really happened. Lieutenant Colonel Kovac had been infected with the I1V1 virus, and was one of the unlucky ones. He underwent a mutation while being held prisoner by the rebels and we just saw the results.”

  “Please tell me they found Kovac’s body in that village?”

  “No.”

  It had been too much to hope that the terrorists would actually do them a favor for once. The General leaned back in his chair and rubbed his face in his hands. It was all a genetic crap shoot who ended up getting their junk DNA activated by I1V1. Talk about shitty luck. If Kovac was still out there . . . “Gentlemen, this is bad.”

  “We were hoping you could help us assess the situation. You’re the e
xpert on vampires.”

  “No, Stuart . . . There’s no such thing as an expert with these things. It’s all too new. We’ve documented almost a hundred types of vampire now, and they’re all over the board, abilities and psychology. Some go bug nuts murder crazy. Others hide it. Some are supposedly playing nice and trying to be good, not that I buy that for a second, but they can at least be semirational. Some vampires have wild personality changes. Who knows? I’ll need a copy of this for my tech guys. They at least might be able to guess what genetic type he is . . . Damn it all to hell, I can’t think of a worse person to end up infected.”

  “Lieutenant Colonel Kovac was cleared on many of our top secret operations,” the analyst minion said.

  The General snorted. “Cleared? That’s nothing. I don’t think you realize the magnitude of the situation. The US Army has spent the better part of the last thirty years teaching that man how to overthrow countries and wage guerilla wars. He knows all our dirty tricks and came up with a bunch of new ones. He knows our responses, our defenses, our plans, and how we think, because he is us. At this point, I’m just hoping that Kovac does fall into the bat-shit crazy, blood-lust category, because I can deal with that. That’s just another animal looking for its next meal. But if he retains all his knowledge and reason? Holy shit. There are smart vamps out there forming terror cells, but I can deal with amateurs. The last thing we want is somebody like Kovac on the other side capable of plotting and molding those cells into a real fighting force . . . That would be a nightmare.”