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 center 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 gray 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 toward Polyarny. A tall electrified fence ran through the trees, a small guard post and heavy metal gate at the center 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 toward it, his army of followers behind him, a wide, silent shadow full 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 Yuri Petrov, over to look at his screen. The General, a thick-set man in his early sixties, who had spent the majority of his illustrious career with the Spetsnaz, the elite special forces unit that had been controlled by the KGB, and later the FSB, strode over to Yurov’s console and looked at the monitor. His eyes widened, and he called instantly for the general alarm to be sounded.
But it was already too late.
At the perimeter of the SPC base, crunching through the drifts of snow that had gathered at the foot of the electrified fence that ran high above their heads, Sergeant Pavel Luzhny was engaged in a heated discussion with his partner, Private Vladimir Radchenko, about the result of the previous night’s basketball game. Luzhny, a die- hard CSKA Moscow supporter, was lamenting the performance of his team’s point guard, a young man who the Sergeant had wasted no time in pointing out had Chechen blood on his mother’s side. The hapless player had missed three of the final four free throws in the previous night’s game, and his team had slumped to a 112-110 loss against Triumph Lyubertsy. Luzhny, a native Muscovite, was not taking the defeat at all well. He had moved on to listing the tactical errors made by the team’s coach when the alarm wailed across the freezing night. He instantly grabbed his radio from its loop on his belt, keyed a series of numbers, and held it to his ear, looking down at the base as he did so. An automatic voice in his ear told him that the base had been moved to red alert, so he slid his other hand to his waist and freed the SIG Sauer pistol that hung there.
“Training exercise,” he said, turning back to Radchenko. “I’ll bet my-”
Radchenko wasn’t there.
Luzhny turned in a full circle, looking for his partner. There was no sign of him. Radchenko’s footsteps were clearly visible in the deep snow, two lines marching in parallel to Luzhny’s own. Then they stopped. There were no tracks in any direction, just a final pair of footprints, then nothing.
“What the hell?” muttered Luzhny.
Then he was airborne, as something grabbed him beneath his armpits and jerked him violently upwards. His trigger finger convulsed, and he fired the pistol empty, the bullets thudding into the rapidly receding ground. Luzhny didn’t scream, until he felt fingers crawl across his throat and dig for purchase. Then the fingers, which were tipped with nails that felt like razor blades, pulled his throat out, and he could no longer have screamed, even if he had wanted to.
The external microphones in the control room picked up the pistol shots, and Petrov tapped a series of keys on the console in front of him. The huge wall-screen that dominated the room separated into eight sections, each one showing a silent black and white view from the perimeter cameras. As the men in the control room watched, a black shape flitted across one of the cameras, then its picture disappeared into a hissing mass of white noise. Moments later, a second screen fizzed out, then a third, then a fourth.
“Send the general alert,” said Petrov, his eyes never leaving the screen. “Call for immediate assistance.”
“But sir-”
“That’s a direct order, Private. Do it right now. And summon the guard regiment. There isn’t much time.”
As he spoke, the final camera screens disappeared into snow. At a console in the middle of the room, a deeply frightened radio operator punched in the emergency frequency that linked the supernatural Departments of the world together, and sent the distress call Petrov had ordered. He had just finished sending the message, which was only six words long, when there was an audible thud on the external microphones, and the communications went dead.
“General,” he said, looking up from his screen, fear bright in his eyes.
But Petrov was gone.
The General ran through the bowels of the SPC base.
Sirens shrilled in his ears and the light that flooded the corridors hurt his eyes, but he didn’t slow his pace. An elevator stood open at the end of the corridor, and he sprinted toward it, his chest burning.
Been behind a desk too long, he thought. Run, old man. Run.
Inside the elevator, Petrov pulled a triangular key from a chain around his neck and inserted it into a slot on the metal panel beside the door, below the numbered buttons. The doors closed immediately and the elevator shot downwards, the sudden motion churning Petrov’s stomach. He fought it back, and watched as the buttons that marked the floors lit up and went out, one after the other. -2… -3… -4… -5… -6… -7…
Level -7 was the bottom of the SPC base, seven stories beneath the frozen Arctic ground. It was home to the enormous generators that powered the complex, as well as accommodation for the maintenance crews and support personnel; as a result it was rarely visited by SPC soldiers or scientists, and it was not General Petrov’s destination now. There was only one thing in the base worth the risk of a frontal attack, and he was one of the few men on the planet who knew what it was.
The -7 button lit up, and then blinked out, but the elevator continued its descent, into the unmarked depths. When the doors slid open ten seconds later, Petrov ran out into a single corridor of gleaming metal, lined on both sides by huge, heavy-looking metal doors, doors that looked like they belonged on the airlock of a submarine, or a space station. Each was stamped with a single number, in black letters three feet high; there were sixty doors, but Petrov was already running toward the one stamped 31.
In the control room, the men of the night shift looked at each other nervously. Static squealed from eight screens of white noise, and the external microphones were silent. The men, eight of them in all, had broken out the arms locker and were holding Daybreakers, the heavy SPC explosive launchers, as they waited for whatever was out there in the snow.
