Chapter 1
April, 2000
The man in the dust mask and goggles stood on Parliament Hill, and watched the ruins of London.
The Hill had long been know for it's views of the London skyline, and was a popular destination for residents and tourists alike. On a clear day you got one of the best views you were going to get in the Thames valley – One Canada Square (more popularly known as Canary Wharf), St Paul's Cathedral, the BT Tower and many other famous landmarks easily visible, islands in the concrete, glass and steel sea that was central London.
That, however, was the London of old. This new London, ruined and broken, slumped under a pall of ash that blotted out the sun and that was still fed by a number of small fires on the south bank, looked like a vision out of some medieval painting of hell designed to scare the unbeliever into the arms of the clergy.
The man reached up and touched a small slider mounted in the left arm of his goggles. With a quiet whine of servos, the goggle lenses re-focused, zooming in on the devastation that lay before him. Canary Wharf was no longer there, the place where it should have been marked by a scar in the urban landscape caused by the tower's collapse. The BT Tower had been cut in two, shorn off halfway up its length, buckled spars and girders protruding upwards like the frayed edge of a broken bone. The dome of St Paul's had a great chunk taken out of it, as if some monstrous and hungry creature had bent down and taken a bite from it. Zooming in further, not a single building between where the man stood and the Thames seemed to be intact. Whole swathes of housing had been gutted by the fires that had raged throughout the night. Skyscrapers had collapsed onto their neighbours. Apartment blocks crumbled even as he watched them, and a steady rain of fine dust and ash fell from the sky.
How could this happen?
That was the overriding thought in his head as he gazed upon the ruined city. What the hell did this? In just one night! Armies have done less in a year...He broke off as a block of flats crumpled to the ground about a quarter of a mile from the hill, the groaning crash reverberating around him for a second before the eerie quiet returned.
The sudden noise seemed to make him come to his senses.
What did this? Let's see if we can't find out.
He returned his goggles to normal zoom, turned and began to walk up the hill, to where three other people dressed very similarly to him – goggles, respirators, thick overcoats – were huddled in a circle around a laptop connected to what looked like a tiny satellite dish. One was typing furiously on the laptop, pausing occasionally to wipe the screen clear of dust. Another was leaning on a pile of four rucksacks and peering over the shoulder of the typing man, while the third was sitting slightly to one side, cradling an assault rifle and looking around the hill as if he were guarding it. Which, in a way, he was.
The man walking back up the hill paused for a second, watching them work. Together, the four of them made up Echo cell, an ultra-secret covert ops group whose job was, ultimately, do do whatever it was they were damn well told to by their paymasters, be it putting a bullet between the eyes of a suspected terrorist, blowing up military bases or, as in this case, stealing secrets from the people who were meant to be their closest allies.
The man on the hill was Echo-Three-Eight, the commander of the cell. The one typing at the laptop was Echo-Four-Oh, the squad's technical specialist. It was his job to know every last piece of circuity and line of code under the sun – and be able to subvert every last one of them, if need be. He was also the closest the team had to a medic, although his detailed knowledge of human biology was more likely to be used in an assassination than to heal a teammate, for the simple reason that Echo cell members very rarely got shot. The man watching Four-Oh work was Echo-Six-Two, whose job description was half demolitions expert and half mechanic. Finally, the man sitting off to one side was Echo-Oh-Seven. He had no speciality other than combat, but as with all Echo cell members, he was very good at what he did.
Three-Eight rejoined his fellows. "Comms working yet?" he asked of Four-Oh. The filter mask he wore changed his voice into a largely emotionless, monotonal drone. It was an effect he found annoying, but it was better than Echo cell members giving themselves away by any accents they had. This was one job, after all, where they would be hard-pressed to pose as tourists.
"Getting there, Boss, getting there," muttered Four-Oh.
Although it was officially discouraged, the members of Echo cell had taken to giving each other nicknames. Four-Oh was Arc, Six-Two went by the name of Mech and Oh-Seven was Psycho. Three-Eight was, of course, Boss.
"I don't know why this is taking so long," murmured Mech.
Arc gave an exasperated sigh, turned by his filter mask into a mournful buzz.
"It's simple. Well, no, actually, it's anything but. But this..." here Arc waved an arm to encompass the laptop and the small dish. "This all works by hiding its signal inside local traffic. It works best by piggybacking on civilian communication networks. Unfortunately, thanks to whatever the hell has happened here, there isn't much of a network left, and what there is is being swamped by survivors still trying to call 911 for help."
"They'd have more luck dialling 999," remarked Boss.
"They might as well call the local pizza place for all it's worth. Comms are jammed solid, which makes my job a lot harder."
"But you can still get us in touch with command, right?"
"Give me ten minutes, and we'll see."
Ten minutes later, Arc declared that it was as good as they were going to get, and the call went through. After a minute of back-and-forth codewords to make sure both parties were talking to who they were supposed to, command got down to business.
"Your fundamental mission objectives haven't changed," came the voice though their earpieces. As with the masks of Echo cell, this voice was electronically altered to make the speaker unrecognisable. "We still want ground recon of the London area. However, we now want you to focus your efforts on one spot."
The laptop screen flickered and changed, showing a grainy image of what looked like a red-and-black deflated balloon, next to a smaller grey square.
"This image was taken a short while ago by a KH-12 satellite. Apologies for quality, but it's hard to see anything through the smog layer. The square feature you can see to the right is Trafalgar Square. As for the other object...well, that, gentlemen, is what we want you to investigate."
"What the hell is it?" asked Arc.
"We believe it to be some sort of airship," came the reply.
Boss just stared at the picture. No. That is not an airship. It must be three or four hundred metres long. Airships aren't that big...
"Based on what limited intel we have at the moment, we believe it to be the enemy's command-and-control headquarters. Your objective now is to get inside it and recover every last scrap of information you can from it. We want pictures, video, papers if you can carry them and copies if you can't. We'll want tissue samples, which is why we provided you with a refrigerated storage container..."
Boss could feel his grip on the situation starting to slip ever so slightly.
"Hold on command," he interjected. "Enemies? What kind of hostiles are we looking at here?"
"Look at London, and you'll see the answer. But don't worry. We're pretty certain that none of them are still active."
"Only pretty sure?" grunted Psycho, the first time Boss had heard him speak since he came back.
"We have good reason to believe that all hostiles in the London area have been terminated. That's why you have been sent in. We want as much intel as you can possibly gather. You have three hours before an extraction team will touch down at Trafalgar Square to get you out. Challenge is 'thunder', codeword 'flash'. Confirm."
"Thunder, flash," said Boss.
"Good. The team will be disguised as an SAS team searching for survivors. And one last thing. Once you've got everything you can, your orders are to destroy everything. Burn it, use C4, use whatever methods necessary, but what you discover there must fall into no-one's hands but ours. Understood?"
"Perfectly," replied Boss. "What if we meet a genuine SAS team?"
"Hopefully, you won't. We have agents in Fortress Dover stalling the British high command for everything they're worth. But three hours is the limit. If you do meet anyone, your orders stand. Use your discretion. Over and out."
A quite bleep signified the connection had been cut. The four members of Echo cell looked at one another.
"Well, orders are orders. Time to move out," said Boss.
"Copy that," said Mech, as if his mind were on other things. "And...tissue samples?"
It was, indeed, an airship.
Boss stared at the enormous chequered flank of the thing, his slack jaw thankfully concealed behind his mask. He didn't think he'd ever seen anything that big in his life before, save for skyscrapers. And to think that it must have flown...
He motioned his team to fall in and moved closer to the crumpled leviathan. Most of its superstructure had collapsed in upon itself, but large amounts of the skin remained, tattered and torn as the wind whipped it against the bare metal ribs. From it, Boss could see that the craft had indeed been painted a slightly incongruous red-and-black, as the satellite image showed. Half-buried under the wreckage was a large gondola, bristling with antennae, the front section honeycombed with windows.
"Interesting colour scheme," piped up Mech, echoing Boss' thoughts exactly.
"We're not here to discuss décor, Six-Two," growled Arc. "Let's see if we can't find a way in."
Mech rolled his eyes behind his tinted goggles, and all four of them began scanning the side of the gondola for an entry point. Eventually, Psycho pointed out a scar in the mid-section that afforded the only way in that wasn't blocked by debris. Boss ordered him to proceed and check it out.
"Looks clear," said Psycho when he came back. The rest of the team had busied themselves taking pictures of the zeppelin from every angle they could, while keeping one eye out for command's mysterious hostiles. "No-one inside that I could see, although it's a mess in there. I think it leads to a cargo bay. Large space, lots of boxes." Having said all he had to say, Psycho started scanning the ruins of nearby buildings. "Anyone see any hostiles?" he asked, almost conversationally.
"No. And I'd rather not get into a firefight if I don't have to," replied Boss. "Not this time. Certainly not if they could do this."
No-one needed to ask what 'this' was.
Inside what Psycho had identified as a cargo bay, the only sound was the groan of tortured metal as the zeppelin slowly folded further in on itself. Each member of Echo cell had now brought out a weapon and was holding it alertly. There was an unspoken feeling that they were deep in enemy territory. Hundreds of wooden crates lay tossed around, as if a tornado had blown through the cargo bay.
"Anyone see anything interesting?" asked Arc quietly.
Mech peered inside an open crate as Arc said this. "Negative. Actually, wait. This box...it's full of teeth."
There was a long pause.
"Teeth?" asked Boss.
"Yeah. Fake ones, I think. Like gold, and a few silver ones."
Arc moved over to the crate.
"Jesus," he muttered. "Looks like something you'd see on display at Auschwitz."
It was about five minutes later that they found their first body. A man, stripped to the waist, wearing nothing but military-issue trousers and combat boots, lay on his back in a pool of his own blood. The wall behind him was covered in bullet holes, but it didn't look like a bullet had killed him. There was a horrific gouge in his torso, running from his navel to the top of his chest. Boss, who had seen far worse injuries than that in his life, wasn't particularly fazed. But he was unnerved by the man's expression. He was grinning hugely, as if he'd just been told the best joke of his life.
Arc bent over the body and, after taking some photos, began rummaging around inside the man's wound with a knife and a pair of tweezers. After a few seconds work he grunted and held up something for the rest of the team to see, glistening wetly in his tweezers.
"Found this in his heart. Looks like it was put there with some force."
Boss leaned forward to get a better look. Under the red blood, a silver glimmer could be seen.
"Another tooth?" he asked.
"Yup. And I'll tell you something strange. The flesh around the tooth – but nowhere else, mind you – was melted. All deformed and bubbled, as if the tooth was white-hot when it went in. But you can't heat silver that much and have it keep its shape."
"Maybe it's not silver?" ventured Mech.
"Sure looks like silver. Anyway, why would you bother killing someone with a white-hot tooth made of anything when you've clearly got a lot of bullets to spare?" asked Arc, gesturing at the pock-marked wall.
With no answer forthcoming, Arc busied himself with obtaining the tissue samples that command had specified. This had been something of a sore point earlier, when he had been forced to admit that during the preliminary briefing the people at command had given him a refrigerated sample unit but ordered him only to reveal its existence if mentioned by command in the field briefing. His teammates hadn't been angry with him – as Boss had said, orders were orders – but none of them liked the way command was asking them to keep secrets from one another. Clearly, the higher-ups were playing this even closer to the chest than was normal.
They moved away from the corpse, down a corridor that seemed to run parallel with the ship's spine. Eventually, they reached a T-junction. Two signs were printed on the wall. One, pointing left, read 'Hauptquartier'. The other directed those headed to 'Chirurgie' to take the right-hand corridor.
"So, which way, Boss?" asked Mech.
Boss glanced at his watch. The walk down from Parliament Hill had taken longer than he'd liked, and time was beginning to bleed away. Extraction would be in about an hour. He looked at the signs again, and came to a decision.
"We split up," he said. "Arc and I will take the left, while you and Psycho head right and see what you can find. Don't forget to plant C4 when you're done. We'll meet back here in 45 minutes."
To murmurs of assent from his squad, Boss and Arc headed down the left corridor.
If the body of the man in cargo had been troubling, these were much, much worse.
They lay spread around the corridor like discarded dolls, with so much blood on the walls that it was impossible to tell what colour the corridor had originally been. But again, it wasn't the gore that was the problem.
"I...I don't know what to think here, Boss," said Arc in an unsteady voice. He was knelt over the closest body, looking into the man's mouth and reminding Boss for all the world of a dentist. Boss was about to laugh at that – the world's first combat dentist – when he noticed that what little of Arc's skin that was visible around the goggles and mask was quite pale.
"These teeth...I've never...I mean, take a look..." Arc tilted the man's head so that Boss could see, and for the second time that day Boss felt his mouth fall open in shock. It was like gazing down the throat of a shark. Instead of the incisors, canines, molars that every person he'd ever met sported, that he still vaguely remembered being taught about in school, there was merely two rows of viciously sharp fangs. Some didn't even look like teeth at all, just jagged extensions of the jawbone. He recoiled instinctively.
"That's, ah...that's not normal, is it?" Boss croaked, trying desperately to keep his voice steady. "I mean, there's no disease or genetic condition..." He left the sentence hanging in the air.
"No. Nothing." Arc's voice sounded flat, even with the voice-altering mask. He paused. "There's something else, Boss." He held the collar of the man's coat, which had been hidden from Boss by his sleeve, up to the light. There, on the lapel, was a symbol that might have been two lightning bolts, or might have been...
"S.S." whispered Boss. "What the fuck?"
"I think," said Arc, with visible effort, "that I should take a tissue sample, you should take some pictures, we should wire this corridor to blow and then carry on to the headquarters or whatever the sign said."
Boss had to agree.
An hour later, sat inside an RAF-liveried Chinook helicopter speeding north, the four members of Echo cell sat in an uncharacteristic silence.
As they'd waited for extraction, Mech had done his best to describe what he and Psycho had found in what looked like an operating theatre-cum-laboratory. He talked of a 'motherlode' of paperwork, all of it in German, which both he and Psycho had a passable understanding of. Most of it, he said, looked like it was detailing surgical procedures, although neither of them could be certain. They'd found two more bodies – three if you counted an antique skeleton. One of the bodies was dressed in a lab coat and was presumed to be that of the owner of the laboratory. The other, bizarrely, was dressed as a butler. Mech also mentioned that the lab had been strewn with monofilament wires.
Arc, for his part, had told the other two of the ruined command centre he and Boss had found, and the body of the man – if you could call it a man, with that much clockwork sticking out of him – found within.
Boss, however, wasn't thinking of any of that. Something else was worrying him more. Something Mech had said, just before the evac chopper had touched down.
"Anyone know what midian translates as?" Mech had asked. "It was written all over the papers we recovered, but I've no idea what it means."
Boss thought he had heard the word, once. It was a very archaic term, he knew that, but as for what it meant...
A scrap of paper on the command room floor, the charred remains of what looked like an official report. The only line visible saying that something called Schrödinger was the only hope of killing something called Alucard.
Psycho mentioning the skeleton they had found having a small plaque with the name 'Mina Harker' attached to its skull.
A man who shrugged off a hundred bullets, but was killed by a tiny piece of silver.
Midians.
Harker.
Alucard.
The inhuman teeth of the SS men – and might not inhuman be just the right word?
Boss didn't like any of this, not at all.
The helicopter soared away, northwards. Behind it, the now-blazing ruins of the zeppelin poured another column of smoke into the grey sky.