Blood Oath

Table of Contents

 

 

 

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

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Copyright© 2010 by Christopher Farnsworth

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Published simultaneously in Canada

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Farnsworth, Christopher

Blood oath / Christopher Farnsworth.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-18773-9

1. Vampires—Fiction. 2. United States President—Fiction. 1. Title. PS3606 A726B’.6—dc22

 

 

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Some time in the year 1867, a fishing smack sailed from Boston. One of the sailors was [NAME REDACTED]. Two of the crew were missing, and were searched for. The captain went into the hold. He held up his lantern, and saw the body of one of these men, in the clutches of [NAME REDACTED] who was sucking blood from it. Near by was the body of the other sailor. It was bloodless.

[NAME REDACTED] was tried, convicted, and sentenced to be hanged, but President Andrew Johnson commuted the sentence to life imprisonment.

 

—CHARLES HOY FORT,
Wild Talents

 

 

 

A
fter two extended tours in Iraq, Army Specialist Wayne Denton thought he’d never be cold again.
A
That was before he was sent to Kosovo. He stepped off the plane and realized it was, in fact, possible for Hell to freeze over. The war in Kosovo, supposedly over for ten years, seemed to have been preserved under a thick layer of ice.

There were still bomb craters and rubble in the streets where the U.N. peacekeepers patrolled. Armed bandits still hijacked cars at night. The Russian Mafiya smuggled guns and drugs. All the while, the Serbian army waited at the border, pacing like an angry dog behind a fence.

Wayne had been at a window in an abandoned building behind his M24 sniper rifle for six hours now. The boredom he could handle—but the cold was killing him. He wasn’t even allowed to use chemical hand warmers; his sergeant said the bad guys had thermal imaging capability.

They didn’t look that sharp, Wayne thought. He checked them again through his scope, careful not to touch his skin to the freezing metal.

They waited in the courtyard of the bombed-out apartments, sixteen stories down from his position. Bunch of big, unibrow, Cro-Magnon SOBs, their hairlines almost meeting their beards. All wearing trench coats. The cold didn’t seem to bother them at all.

They were called the Vukodlak, which was supposed to be Serbian for the Wolf Pack, or something. He hadn’t been paying attention to that part of the briefing.

They looked as bored as Wayne felt. He wondered, not for the first time, why his Army Ranger unit was babysitting a bunch of former death-squad thugs. Surely the locals could handle this.

Hell, Wayne could end it right now, all by himself. The Wolf Pack was a little over a hundred yards away-point-blank range for any sniper. He could kill each man on the ground before they knew what was happening. He’d done it before.

Back home in Casper, Wyoming, Wayne was the quiet kid in the back of the class. He wasn’t unpopular, he was just there. Sort of taking up space, drifting along in life.

Then 9/11 hit, and everyone in his family assumed he’d put off college and enlist, because they were at war now, and that’s what kids do in a war, right? They join the army. He put his community college application away, unfinished, and signed up at a recruiting station in a mini-mall.

He was surprised to find his talent for fading into the background becoming useful for the first time. He was selected for Sniper School, then joined the Rangers.

He never thought he’d get used to the blood and death—much less delivering it. He found he could simply focus on the quiet place in himself. That was where he pulled the trigger, and that was where he stacked the bodies. Sometimes he worried about what would happen when he got home—if the bodies would all spill out into the rest of him, or if the quiet place would just sit there, untouched, and he’d go on as normal as ever, for the rest of his life.

He wasn’t sure which was worse, actually. He tried not to think about it too much.

He kept his shit together. He survived. By the end of his first tour, the other guys in his unit looked at him like a veteran. They depended on him.

He was no longer just a placeholder. In fact, he was kind of a badass. After three years, he thought he’d seen it all.

Which is why he was annoyed, but not surprised, when his unit was pulled off the active hunt for an al-Qaeda cell and sent to this winter wonderland. The army had its own way of doing things. Orders were orders.

Wayne’s CO had been more tight-lipped than usual, but the rumors made their way down.

When Kosovo declared independence, that didn’t go over too well with the Serb neighbors. A bunch of Serbian nationals walked past the shack that served as a border checkpoint, and immediately began rioting in front of the U.S. Embassy. Some buildings got torched, and in the confusion, someone lost something important. Something big. It turned up with the Wolf Pack, who offered it to the highest bidder. The U.S. wanted it back.

Above all, the whole thing had to be kept quiet. The Rangers were good at quiet.

After they got to Kosovo, they spent a day and a half tracking the Serbs. But when they found the Wolf Pack, they were told to stay back and wait.

All the sergeant said was, move in, set up a ring, and make sure none of the Serbs left it. Questions were met with the kind of silence that implied a court-martial in the near future.

The CO got a message from way up the chain of command. A flight came in from Ansbach in Germany, and he sent a couple of Rangers to the airfield. They came back with a duffel full of cash.

Wayne figured it out then. The U.S. might not negotiate with terrorists, but it would sure as hell bribe them. He had seen plenty of it first-hand in Iraq, with CIA spooks giving away stacks of hundred-dollar bills stuffed in the aptly named Halliburton briefcases. Just one of those stacks could have bought his parents a new house. But the funds were ear-marked for the people busy shooting at their son.

The only other thing they brought back from the plane was what the army called a “transfer case.” But everyone knew what it was: a casket, used to take the bodies of dead soldiers home.

It gave Wayne the creeps. He was glad to take his sniper position and get away from it.

Wayne decided he hated this James Bond crap.

But orders were orders.

The sun dipped behind the empty buildings. It would be full dark in a matter of minutes. Wayne began to worry about his toes falling off, like loose ice cubes inside his boots.