“Brother,” he said, when the call was answered. “You may proceed.”
In the village streets below, panic gripped the surviving islanders. They ran for their lives along the narrow roads, heading for the small dock that served the island’s fishing fleet, stumbling in the gathering dark, staring wildly in every direction, screaming the names of husbands and wives, parents and children.
Pete Randall sprinted down the hill towards the concrete dock, hurdling the bodies that were lying in the narrow road, forcing himself not to look at them. Every one of the island’s one hundred and sixty inhabitants knew each other, and he knew that he was running around, and over, the lifeless corpses of his friends and neighbours. Kate ran beside him. Her face was pale, but her eyes were bright, and Pete felt a rush of love for his daughter.
How did she get so strong? he marvelled. I won the bloody lottery with her.
Men and women were streaming out of the houses, some screaming, others weeping and sobbing, running and stumbling down the hill. Dark shapes moved among them, floating across the cobbles, lifting them shrieking off their feet as they ran. Blood pattered to the ground in a soft crimson rain.
On the dock John Tremain, the island’s biggest fisherman, had reached his boat. The Lady Diana occupied the largest berth at the end of the horseshoe-shaped dock, and acrid blue smoke was pluming out of her weather-beaten funnel as the big diesel engines roared into life.
“Hurry!” Tremain yelled from the deck. He was holding the mooring ropes in his gnarled hands, ready to cast off. “I’m not waiting! Move!”
The desperate, panicked group of islanders ran towards him.
Pete and Kate were the first on to the slippery concrete of the dock. On the ground in front of them lay the twisted body of a teenage girl, and Kate slowed as they approached the corpse. Pete grabbed her wrist and hauled her forward.
“Keep moving!” he yelled. “Get to the boat!”
“It’s Julie!” Kate cried. “We can’t leave her here.”
Kate’s best friend, realised Pete. Oh God.
Kate yanked her hand out of his and skidded to a halt next to the girl’s body. Pete swore, turned back to grab his daughter, but was forced backwards as the fleeing, terrified survivors cannoned into him, blindly running for the boat. He screamed and punched and kicked as hands gripped him, but the flow of people was relentless, and he was driven back along the dock.
Through the crowd he saw his daughter kneel down next to the corpse, reach out and gently touch the girl’s face. He screamed her name, helplessly, as he was dragged over the boat’s rail, but Kate didn’t even seem to hear him.
There was a thud and a dark shape landed on the dock, between Kate and the running crowd. She leapt to her feet, the paralysing shock of seeing her friend’s body broken. She looked for her father, and saw him being hauled on to The Lady Diana, kicking and screaming her name. In front of her was the terrible thing from her bedroom, its skeletal body drenched in blood. It flashed her a hideous lustful smile, and without hesitation she turned and ran back towards the village.
Pete saw Kate sprint away up the dock and disappear into the darkness, and he threw his head back and howled, a scream of utter desperation. He fought with renewed strength against the hands that held him, but it was too late.
John Tremain threw the mooring ropes into the water and ran up the steps to the small cabin above the deck. He threw The Lady Diana into gear and the big propellers churned water as the boat slowly, terribly slowly, began to move away from the island.
Pete Randall threw himself at the stern rail as The Lady Diana picked up speed and the dock disappeared into the darkness.
“Kate!” he screamed. “Kate!”
But there was no answer. His daughter was gone.
Chapter 37
AT THE ROOF OF THE WORLD
SPC CENTRAL COMMAND BASE KOLA PENINSULA, RUSSIA THIRTY-FIVE MINUTES AGO
Valeri Rusmanov thanked his brother, then closed his mobile phone.
His heavy boots crunched snow beneath his feet as he crested the hill, and paused. The freezing night air was still. There was a gentle lapping from the Murmansk fjord to his left, the black water visible through a spider web of cracks in the thick, dirty-grey ice. An icebreaker slowly ground its way up the middle of the fjord, clearing a dark strip of open water, belching diesel smoke from its funnels.
Directly ahead of him, perhaps five miles away, was the closed city of Polyarny. The grey industrial town was dominated by the tall cranes and sodium arc lights of Russian Shipyard Number 10, the top-secret submarine base. During the Cold War, Soviet Typhoons and Akulas had slipped out from Polyarny and disappeared under the Arctic ice, hidden from the watchful eyes of the American satellites.
In the distance, to the southeast, Valeri could make out the dull yellow glow of Murmansk, the home port of the Russian Northern Fleet. The administrative centre of the Kola Peninsula was not officially a closed city, but the FSB station in the city was the third largest in Russia, and the whole region was littered with checkpoints and armed patrols.
This huge, barren swathe of Arctic wilderness was the heartland of the classified Russian military community. But the horseshoe of white buildings that filled the small peninsula below him, and what lay beneath them, were worth the risk.
The SPC base was arranged around a long runway that ran parallel to the ridge of cliffs to the north. The grey tarmac was clear, the snow that had covered it piled in long banks on either side. To the south, a long line of ancient firs hid the base entirely from the narrow road that wound towards Polyarny. A tall electrified fence ran through the trees, a small guard post and heavy metal gate at the centre the only clue to passing civilians that anything lay beyond the thick forest. A squat white building sat at the eastern end of the runway. Valeri knew that beneath the frozen ground the base was a single enormous bunker, guarded by the elite SPC soldiers, and home to the scientists, analysts and intelligence officers who served the Supernatural Protection Commissariat.
Snow thudded against his black greatcoat, dampening the wool and settling around his ankles as he watched the silent base. He whispered two words and a large number of dark shapes dropped from the sky behind him, landing softly in the snow. “Do you all know what I require from you?” he asked, without turning round.
There was a general murmur of assent, and then a single low voice said, “Yes, Master.”
Valeri’s eyes flickered shut, and a grimace spread across his face.
It was Talia’s voice. The beautiful young Ukrainian girl had been with him for a year, since he had turned her in a moment of lonely weakness, a moment that he had come to deeply regret. The girl followed him everywhere, her blank, pretty eyes staring at him with open devotion, her soft, pleading voice asking if there was anything he needed, anything she could do for him.
He supposed she loved him, or believed that she did, but she was wasting her time. Valeri had only ever loved one woman, and she had been gone for more than half a century.
“Very well,” he said. “It’s time.”
He stepped lightly into the night air, his greatcoat billowing out behind him. Below him the base was quiet, the lights casting pale yellow semi-circles on the snow.
Valeri swept down the hill towards it, his army of followers behind him, a wide, silent shadow of death.
In the SPC control room a heat bloom appeared on the surveillance screen of Private Len Yurov. The signature was like nothing he had seen before, a wide band of dark red flowing across the blue-white topography of the tundra, so he called the Duty Officer, General