Area 51: Nosferatu-8 (31 page)

There was no mistaking the device's purpose: to forcibly draw blood from a victim.

So where was the blood?

"Get in here," Petrov ordered. His remaining commandos entered, all with night-vision goggles on. It was a tribute to their training that not a word was said.

"We need to find a cache of blood," Petrov said. "Search the room."

The men spread out.

Are we there yet?" Colonel Kokol hissed. His forearms were aching and the last halt had taken all his energy to compress the pads against the pole.

The captain glanced down at the tracking device hung around his neck, craning to be able to see the display. "Close."

Kokol glanced at the small grate between the two poles. They'd passed one about every thirty feet on the way down. Each had a small six-inch-wide ledge in front of it. "Should we exit?"

Kokol waited for the captain's answer as the junior officer tried to angle his head to get a better read on the screen. The colonel's old forearms supplied the answer in

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the absence of anything from the captain. Kokol swung his feet over onto the ledge, then completely released his hold on the poles. His arms swung free and he used his teeth to release the wrist straps on the jumars.

"We are exiting, then?" the captain asked.

"Da" Kokol muttered as he tried to see through the grate. He saw the ramp, but nothing else.

The captain joined him. Together they pushed out on the grate and it popped loose. Kokol stuck his head out and saw nothing either way, so he slid through.

However, when it was the captain's turn, the weight lifter's shoulders wouldn't make it through, no matter how hard he tried. As the captain strained and twisted, Kokol cocked his head to catch a sound floating up the ramp. Voices.

"I've got contact just below," Kokol hissed to the captain.

"I can't get through," the captain muttered, stating the obvious.

"There must be a maintenance entrance at the bottom," Kokol whispered. "It's not that much farther down. Get there, then come up the ramp. I'll hold from above."

The captain pulled back and looked up. "My strike team is on its way down.

Wait for reinforcements before you do anything."

"Certainly," Kokol said.

The captain clamped onto the pole and began heading down. Kokol turned back to the ramp and waited, AK-74 at the ready.

This had to be it—sixteen crates loaded on four-wheeled carts. There were faded swastikas stenciled on the outside and writing in German. Petrov used his 275

knife to pry up one of the lids. Nestled in straw inside were rows of bottles similar to the ones on the lower level of the cart. Inside each was a dried, coagulated reddish mass that Petrov assumed had once been blood. He ordered his men to wheel the carts out.

Kokol heard the squeal of unoiled machinery coming his way. Then he spun to his right as he heard a muffled curse. A soldier was struggling to get through the air vent and join him.

Kokol put his finger to his lips, then turned to face , back down the ramp, the butt of his AK-74 tucked tight into his shoulder. The sound was getting closer and he couldn't figure out what was making it. Having fought in many wars, from World War II to the present, he decided to make himself a smaller target and went down to one knee.

The soldier managed to make it through and joined him as a second one appeared in the grate. Kokol sighted in as the muzzle of a weapon appeared, followed by the man wielding it, dressed in black. He saw Kokol just as the soldier yelled out for the man to drop his weapon.

The man did neither, bringing the weapon to bear instead, and Kokol squeezed the trigger of the AK-74 twice in rapid succession. The first bullet hit the man in the cheek, ripping a gash along the side of his face while the second hit right between the eyes, sending him flopping back down the ramp.

The reply was instant and fierce as automatic weapons let loose and high-velocity rounds tore up the ramp, bouncing off the walls and ricocheting all about. A round hit the soldier coming out the grate in the back of his head, killing him instantly and leaving his body jammed

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in the hole. Kokol dived to the ground and fired several rounds even though he could see no targets, figuring the ricocheting would work just as well the other way.

He heard a strange grunt, a sound he had heard before—a last breath of air being expelled as a bullet tore through lungs—and glanced to his left to see the other soldier sink to his knees, then fall face forward, blood seeping out of a wound just under his armpit where his vest didn't cover.

Kokol rolled twice, putting himself behind the man's body and resting his submachine gun on top of him. Several more rounds hit the body and Colonel Kokol emptied the rest of his clip, silently counting to himself, so that when he fired the last round, his finger hit the release, the magazine fell and he slammed another home without making the mistake of firing on an empty chamber and wasting precious seconds.

Where the hell was the captain? The firing from below suddenly ceased and Kokol heard voices, someone issuing muffled orders. Were they retreating?

Regrouping?

The answer came swiftly as three hand grenades came flying through the air.

Colonel Kokol rolled, pulling the dead body on top of him as the first one went off less than ten feet away. The concussion hit him, followed by two more, like body blows from a mule, but the dead SVD man absorbed the shrapnel. The last wave slammed Kokol's head against the inner wall, knocking him out.

Petrov jumped in the van with the blood, as his mercenaries fired back at the security forces on the outskirts of the Kremlin wall. He pressed a detonator, and two of his own people's cars exploded, behind his van, taking out several police cars with them, blocking the

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way, and allowing enough of a diversion for his van to disappear into the warren of alleys.

He had the blood. The issue he had now was what exactly to do with it. He was not sure any longer that turning it over to Adrik was the most prudent course of action—at least not without a substantial finder's fee.

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Namche rubbed the frost off the eyepieces of his oxygen mask and checked his global positioning receiver. According to the data he'd been given, they were close to the other two bodies.

"Not far," he shouted, the words muffled by his mask. He wasn't certain whether Tai heard him or not. The other man was leaning against the side of the mountain, obviously exhausted. Namche wondered if he would still be paid the remainder of his fee if Tai died and had to be left on the mountain.

They were approximately two thousand meters from the top of Everest. To the right was the Kanshung Face, a practically vertical mile-long stretch of rock on the north side of Everest. From the display he had seen in Hong Kong, it appeared to Namche that the two bodies they were after had been on top of the Kanshung Face and fallen. Instead of plummeting all the way to the bottom, it appeared as if the rope connecting them had caught on a spur of rock jutting out from the face and they were frozen in place, an adornment to Everest's deadliness. He looked in the direction, trying to see through the blowing snow.

"There," he yelled, pointing. The wind had shifted direction briefly, exposing the Face. The bodies looked like white lumps on the rock wall about fifteen meters away.

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This time Tai acknowledged he'd heard by nodding.

Namche climbed up, checking over his shoulder to make sure Tai was following.

They gained another thirty meters in altitude, then Namche halted. He pulled four pitons off his climbing rack and used a small hammer to pound them into the mountain, making sure they were in place. Then he secured a fifty-meter length of doubled rope to all four.

"You stay here," he yelled to Tai.

Tai nodded once more.

Namche tied himself off to the fifty-meter doubled rope, gathering the slack.

Holding the loose rope in one hand and his ice axe in the other, he edged over a meter, arriving at the left side of the Kanshung Face. Reaching as far as he could, he slammed the point of his axe into the ice that covered the Face. Then, using that as his leverage point, he scrambled out onto the Face. He dug the toes of 'his crampons into the ice and began making his way across. It was precarious climbing and Namche didn't allow his mind to dwell on the numerous lethal possibilities.

He moved quickly, staying in no position for more than a few seconds, afraid the thin sheet of ice would give way. He glanced down and saw he was now above the bodies. It was clear that their rope had caught on a small spur, less than eight inches long, that poked out from the mountain. Namche knew he'd have one shot at this.

Namche let go of the mountain and fell. As he went down he slammed the point of the ice axe into the mountain to slow his descent and to be ready for when he reached the bodies, which occurred in less than two seconds. His axe caught on the dead climbers' rope and slid along until he reached one of the bodies, where it jammed against the attachment point of the rope on the body. Namche came to a jarring halt, breathing hard.

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Using short nylon slings, he made sure both the dead men were attached to the rope he had brought. Then he leveraged the ice axe underneath one of the bodies, trying to break it free from the mountain. It detached with a last crack of ice, sliding down until it reached the end of the rope, where it jerked to a halt, then swung to the left, coming to a halt just below where Tai was.

Namche did the same with the second, except this time he made sure he was attached to the body. Once more he fell free for a couple of seconds, then he and the body swung over and came to a halt.

Namche put in more pitons, securing the bodies in place as Tai climbed down.

"What now?" Namche asked. He assumed Tai was there to collect something from the bodies. Perhaps a family heirloom? Or to perform some burial rite? Namche was surprised when Tai began lashing the two bodies tightly together.

"We cannot carry them down," Namche said.

Tai ignored him. He opened his pack and took out what appeared to be a very thin blanket, which he wrapped around both bodies. Namche had seen that kind of blanket before—it was an emergency heater, designed to be used to rapidly raise someone's core body temperature. Numerous thin wire conductors were woven into the material and attached to a power source, in this case a pair of lithium batteries Tai had in his pack. Once the blanket was tight around the bodies, Tai turned it on.

This confused Namche even more. What was the purpose of thawing out dead men?

As the blanket poured heat into the frozen flesh, Tai pulled something else out of his pack. A syringe and several plastic blood bags.

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"What are you going to do?" Namche demanded, although he was beginning to get the idea. But the reason behind these apparently insane acts escaped him.

Tai continued to ignore him. He reached under the blanket and checked the exposed flesh of one of the bodies by the expedient method of poking it with the syringe. Apparently the body wasn't quite ready yet as Tai turned his attention to what was left in and on his pack. He removed the two pieces of PVC pipe and unscrewed the ends. He pulled out a complicated mass of extendable titanium poles and Kevlar cloth from each. They connected together at an anchor point.

Tai turned back to the body and poked it with the syringe. The point punctured the skin and he searched, trying to find a vein. When he located one, he attached a small battery-powered pump to the line and began draining the blood from the body. Namche watched in horrified fascination. Tai drained the first body into four bags. Then he did the same to the second.

Namche watched, confused as to the purpose of Tai's actions and what would happen next. As soon as Tai had the second body drained, he packed the blood bags into his rucksack. Then he unhooked his harness from the safety line.

"What are you doing?" Namche reached forward to grab him.

Tai connected a snap link on the back of his harness into the anchor point of the strange tube-and-cloth contraption, looked at Namche, smiled, and then jumped out into the clear air in front of the Kanshung Face.

Namche stared in shock as Tai free-fell. Then the poles on his back snapped out, spreading, deploying the high-strength cloth. A half mile below Namche's position, the hang glider locked into place and Tai grabbed the 282

controls, banking to the north and west, disappearing from view in the blowing snow.

Kouros

Final checks were made, no glitches were found, and the countdown now moved into its final phase. A night launch was a bit unusual for Kouros; but Nosferatu had insisted, and since he was paying top dollar, the officials at the facility had been only too happy to agree. He was in launch control, in the VIP lounge, watching the procedures. He had been forced to pay a considerable amount of extra money to keep the launch information from being released, a particularly difficult task given this was the first manned launch ever performed outside of the American or Russian programs.

The overly attentive lackeys of the ESA were beginning to bother Nosferatu.

Waiters hovered at his elbow, offering him champagne, and the luxurious buffet laid out at the rear of the room bustled with activity. He brusquely ordered everyone out of the suite.

The Ariane 5 booster, the X-Craft on top, was fixed in spotlights. A beautiful sight to Nosferatu, who had been at the forefront of spaceflight for many years, ever since the beginning. It was another of his objections to the Airlia—how they had hamstrung the human attempts to get into space. It was amazing that man had managed to make it to the moon and walk on it, an effort that had been rewarded with an intense push by the Ones Who Wait to make sure the space program went backward rather than forward. While science fiction writers had predicted that man would be much further ahead by the

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turn of the millennium, the reality had been a great disappointment.