whistle me down. I mean, you know how to whistle, don't you? Good luck, guys!'
Dark figures were running up the beach as the chopper came down, and a faint waft of garlic tainted the night air…
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO The Storming
Situated one hundred and sixty yards from where the coastguard vessel had beached, and set well back from the high-water mark behind massively thick, fortress-like rock walls in four acres of landscaped rockeries and gardens watered from a small desalination unit, Jethro Manchester's two-storey villa was a luxurious, custom-built dwelling.
Standing central on a jutting promontory, the house was of timber and natural stone, mainly fossilized coral. It had been built from imported teak and dynamited rubble from a channel blasted through to a rocky inlet on the other side of the promontory. In style it was part sprawling Roman villa, part Austrian chalet. Manchester's yacht — by his standards a 'modest' thirty-five footer — was moored in a roofed-over lock in the artificial channel, midway between the villa and the sea.
These features were visible from the air, where at five hundred feet Chopper Two's pilot stood his machine off like a hawk and viewed them through its eyes, sensitive night-vision scanners. Every few seconds he would flip a switch to convert his screen to infrared and thermal imaging. All of the men on the ground were wearing headsets; the pilot was able to talk to them individually or as a group.
All subterfuge had been thrown to the wind now; the airborne party was safely down, and the boat had landed its
crew without hindrance. Now the task force would deploy into a semicircle to isolate the promontory, and move in on the house. If the target group had seen the boat's 'fire' or emergency flare — or if they had heard the chopper's low, prowler-mode throb and came out of the house to see what was happening or perhaps to take defensive action — then the men on the ground would be able to answer the threat without fear of firing on each other.
With his machine on autopilot, the pilot's attention was rapt on his viewers. For now, in addition to the central, gently fluctuating orange glow of the house, the dark-green terrain of his screen was lit by smaller blobs of human heat.
He saw two figures, fast-moving and crouching low, about to leave the narrow strip of beach and enter an area of landscaped rocks and foliage east of the villa. They were heading for one of the regular breaks in the wall. And the pilot knew that the four-man boat party had split into two two-man teams. This was one of them; they would be equipped with their usual weapons, and one of them would be carrying a flamethrower.
But as the pilot scanned ahead of them, suddenly, as if from nowhere, he picked up two more figures. They were in the shrubbery or under cover of the trees, but they were making a lot of heat! The writhing, blob-like shapes on the screen merged, drew apart, melted together again… a repetitious, oddly sexual-looking activity. The men from the boat were heading directly towards it and at some speed, and the pilot was almost too late to advise them:
'Boat party east of the house. There's some fucking thing directly ahead of you!' He couldn't know it but he was absolutely right.
On the ground, the NCOs spied sudden, apparently startled movement. It was dark, but not that dark, and the almost luminous tangle of flesh on a blanket under the bower-like branches of a tall, flowering shrub was unmistakable: the naked figures of a couple making love. Or they had been but now sprang apart.
'What the… P'The man sat upright, and the girl tried to cover herself and gave a small, warbling cry. The scene was so authentic and natural, and the couple seemed so vulnerable, it was the SAS men who were taken by surprise.
'Bloody hell… I' said one of them, his jaw falling open. And his companion actually turned aside the barrel of his weapon a little, deflecting it from the pair and easing his finger off the trigger. Surprise, yes — momentary disorientation and confusion — the only advantage a vampire could ever ask for or require. And:
'Oh, thank God!' cried the girl, as she threw herself forward and sprawled at the feet of one of the soldiers. 'Help me! Please help me! He was raping me!' A lie, which of course fell naturally from her lips.
But at the same time the naked man's arm swept up, to aim and fire a short-barrelled, compressed-air speargun. The spearhead was a trident with four-inch tines; all three of them took the off-guard soldier in his throat. And gurgling, clawing one-handed at the short spear in his crimson-spurting neck, he fell over backward and let loose a burst of automatic fire uselessly into the sky.
The other soldier had reached down almost instinctively to lift the girl to her feet. But even in the act of gathering her up he saw his colleague shot, and simultaneously the feral yellow fire in the naked man's eyes as he flowed sinuously upright and drew back his arm to use the speargun as a club.
No further reminder was necessary. The soldier cursed and put the naked girl aside, then opened up with a burst of explosive shells that lifted the vampire from his feet, ripped into him in mid-air, and threw him backward into the shrub. There he hung in a tangle of crushed foliage, until branches snapped and he fell to the ground. And as he sat there — groping among his own intestines and mewling his undead agony — so the gibbering NCO cursed again and put a single shell right between his eyes.
The contents of the vampire's head went every which way as the shrub collapsed on him.
Meanwhile the downed man had stopped writhing and tugging at the spear in his throat; he lay dead still, dead of shock or from choking on his own blood.
And the girl had disappeared into the night…
Fleeing, sobbing, gasping for air — with her sliced feet leaving a trail of blood on the often jagged stones — Julie Lennox somehow managed to avoid the second pair of men from the coastguard vessel, and came across Jake and Lardis instead. With her night eyes, the eyes of a vampire, she saw them before they saw her: an old man and his younger colleague, in the garden, keeping low and making their way silently toward the house. And she remembered some advice that she'd been given:
'When they come, and they will come,' (Martin Trennier had told Jethro Manchester and his small family group just an hour or so ago), 'there won't be any mercy. They'll come to kill you. And while you might not believe it now, you won't want them to! For you have a Great Vampire's blood in you, and in its own way it is alive, too. It wants to live, and it won't let you commit suicide — which means that you can't simply give yourselves up to these men. Ergo, you'll fight. And the more of them that you kill, the longer you'll stay alive.'
With which he had rammed a handful of shells deep into the magazine of an ugly pump-action shotgun, and jerked once on its heavy wooden stock to arm it, before continuing:
'Now, while I know that some of you are still fighting the good fight, the fact is we can grow strong on our enemies — on the blood of our enemies — and the stronger we grow, the better our chances of survival. So that's it, now you know what to do. I have nothing more to say, except that I for one intend to survive. So go on, get busy. Prepare yourselves with whatever grit or cunning your vampire blood has bestowed, arm yourselves with whatever weapons you can find, and wait. It's just as simple as that.'
But in fact it wasn't simple at all. Simple, perhaps, for Martin Trennier, one of the first taken by Aristotle Milan and utterly in thrall to him, but not for Julie; not now that Alan Manchester, Jethro's son, was dead. Julie and Alan… how they had loved each other, and how desperately hard they had fought to cling to their humanity. But all in vain.
Alan had turned first, and now he was dead and gone, taken from her, and these merciless invaders were responsible — weren't they? Deep in her heart, she knew they weren't; and yet, as moment by moment Trennier's words made more sense, so the vampire essence in Julie's system worked on her, turning her, too.
Trennier had done it to her, done it to them all: a simple bite was all it took — and time. For Trennier was barely a lieutenant himself, and a weak one at that. Made by Milan, he had been given a minimum of essence, and so he'd been a thrall for long and long. But as the evil had grown in him, so he'd taken on stature, guile, strength. And thus he'd become Milan's lieutenant, to watch over the Manchesters on their island retreat. Or as it was now,
