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  Pollard stared back and the audible, threatening hiss that his words and breath had held subsided as Alpha faced him. The wounded man kept silent and only nodded his response.

  Alpha nodded back, “I have to commend you, and Dimitri, for being able to place yourself so effectively within a United States Government agency. How long have you been in place? Since the Cold War, perhaps? Pollard just stared angrily as Alpha spoke to him, “I’d imagine that has made you a very valuable asset to Dimitri?”

  Pollard decided to respond to that, “Yes, and you should know that Dimitri will declare war on you and all your people for what you have done.”

  Alpha shrugged his shoulders, “He can try.”

  Pollard let out a slight laugh between teeth still clenched in pain, “We have the numbers, the resources and the influence at our disposal. What do you and your kind have? Your people are either living underground like cowards, or trying to live like humans. Like sheep. Dimitri and my people live like the predators of man that we are. We live above humanity as their superiors. Aside from the couple of dozen Hunters that you have trained, your people are no better than the livestock with whom you choose to coexist.”

  William started to move, but Alpha held up a hand and the giant froze in place.

  Alpha removed his sunglasses and moved his face even closer to Pollard until their noses were only inches apart. Pollard tried to maintain the stare, but the sight of Alpha’s black eyes so unnerved him that he began to tremble.

  “You can think that if you wish, but,” Alpha shifted to point toward William, “the next words out of your mouth better tell me where that man’s daughter is, and,” Alpha’s arm twisted back in toward his face with his finger now pointed at himself, as his voice became resounding in its ferocity, “where MY daughter is, or I will take you from this place and slowly feed you, feet first, into a meat grinder.”

  The shock of what I had just heard made my eyes slowly drift away from Pollard and fall onto Alpha. I had always known that Lei had considered herself Alpha’s daughter in much the same way I had always considered Alpha like a father to me. Now it was the emotion in Alpha’s voice that made those words convey much more than I had known.

  Pollard’s eyes went wide and his voice was shaky and uncertain as he said, “N-Nazran.”

  “What?” I looked to Chris in confusion, “Where?”

  Pollard turned to me and in a quick panic said, “It’s a small city in Russia near the Mongolian border. Dimitri has taken your people there while he prepares for the Romanov.”

  Alpha turned to me, confused, “The Romanov?”

  I shook my head, “I don’t know who he’s talking about exactly, but when Dimitri came to Lei and me in our office to set us on this little Bangkok adventure, he said something about ‘The Romanov’ making a claim for the lands in Siberia that Dimitri currently controls. I can’t be sure but I think it goes beyond a simple power play. I think Dimitri is afraid of him.”

  Pollard chuckled, “Dimitri is beyond such things. He only wants to make sure that since you did not deliver what you were supposed to,” he looked at William, “then at least you won’t fight against him.”

  Alpha spoke up, “The city of Nazran may not be New York City, but isn’t exactly a pinpoint location. Be more specific?”

  I noticed that Pollard started to look sleepy and wasn’t noticing the pain as much as he should be anymore.

  Chris noticed it as well, “He’s going into shock.”

  Pollard’s words started to slur, but he managed to answer me. “Don’t know exactly where, but Dimitri controls the city. It’s a safe place for him and our people. Someplace where they can operate in the open.”

  Pollard’s body began to slowly slide over to the side and, perhaps purely by reflex, Alpha reached out to keep him from falling and turned to Chris, “What do we need to do for him?”

  Chris was going to answer when his eyes went wide and he opened his mouth to cry out a warning, but before any sound could come out, Pollard’s face twisted into a mask of pure hatred and rage as he opened his mouth wide and his head shot forward to strike at Alpha’s throat.

  Caught unaware Alpha felt the attack coming and tried to shift his weight to keep Pollard at a distance, but his body was not in a position to allow him the proper leverage. Helplessly, I watched as the whole world seemed to slow down while Pollard’s white teeth moved closer and closer to the vulnerable spot on Alpha’s neck where his carotid artery lay. I could see Alpha trying to move out of striking range, but he couldn’t get the leverage needed to avoid the oncoming attack.

  Then, even as the rest of the world slowed, something large drove past Alpha’s head and crashed into Pollard’s oncoming face. In an instant the whole world sped up again to a normal speed, as the bottom of William’s heavy boot crunched through Pollard’s broken nose and then carried the man’s head backward into the floor. There was a sickening crunch as William continued to lean into his strike and Pollard’s face collapsed into his own skull cavity under the force. Skin, bone and brain were pulped under the pressure and burst from both of Pollard’s ears in a quick and grotesque fountain of gore, as his body went into a spasmodic seizure. Alpha covered his face as the foamy ichor splattered the area, and he quickly rose to keep any additional brain or blood from covering him.

  When it was over there was just the nauseating wet, sucking sound as William slowly pulled his foot from the depression it had made in Pollard’s head. Everyone was silent for an instant, and in that moment we could hear the sound of sirens in the background. They had probably been on their way since the first gunshot, as Pollard had indicated earlier, but this was the first we heard of their imminent arrival.

  Of course, it was Chris who broke the silence first.

  “Wow!” He had a strange look of disgust combined with amazement as he noted, “that was without a doubt the gross-est thing I have ever seen… and I’m a Medical Examiner!”

  Alpha was less enthusiastic, as he turned to William, “We needed him alive.”

  William was scraping the bottom of his boot on the carpet to rid it of any residual Pollard detritus and growled hoarsely, “Couldn’t risk you.”

  Alpha sighed at that, and turned away to head toward the stairs. As the rest of us followed, Alpha asked me, “So how do you suggest that we proceed, Detective.”

  Alpha still called me that whenever he wanted me to use the skills I had developed when I served my ten years as a member of the LAPD.

  “I’ve never heard of Nazran. I think we need to talk to someone who might have spent some time there already.”

  Alpha’s face screwed up in surprise, “You’ve never heard of it, but you know someone who spent time there?”

  I smiled, “It’s just a suspicion, but I think we need to talk to our babysitter.”

  Chapter 3

  It may be the sex clubs, the wild and crazy night life, or the beautiful beaches and luxury resorts that come to mind when people think about Bangkok, but most don’t know that the country of Thailand does a great deal of exporting. This bustling industry has resulted in several major shipping ports, regulated by the Port Authority of Thailand in conjunction with several private corporations, including Hutchison Ports Thailand and PSA International. The Port Authority itself is located in Bangkok, and on the left side of the Chao Phraya River in Khlong Toei District, is the Port of Bangkok. The port occupies over 900 acres and has a population of support personnel substantial enough to make it a one and a half square mile city in its own right.

  Dry docks are common throughout the area for boat storage and repair, so when Alpha, William, Chris and I all walked to a boat storage unit favored by expatriated Westerners, or “Farang” as the Thai people called foreigners, none of the locals gave us a second thought, despite our rather unusual appearances. The interior of the large boat house had all of the basics needed for dry boat storage including “fresh” running water that had a brown haze and fishy stink to it, electricity, and an
area sectioned off for the tools and chemicals normally needed for marine-vehicle maintenance.

  The four of us walked in and set the duffle bags we carried onto a folding plastic table, before flopping down into the plastic lawn furniture we had procured. The boat house was our temporary base of operations, which we had established weeks earlier after recovering from our assault on Dr. Whelan’s compound.

  From the back of the unit there was the sound of a door closing and our “babysitter,” Major Robert Larson, Navy Seal and SRT Commander, walked over to greet us. Larson took one look at my ragged disposition, grimaced and asked, “It went that badly?”

  Chris was pouring himself a cup of coffee from a carafe that had been set on a warming burner for who knew how long, and said, “Actually, it went pretty much exactly as I had thought it would.”

  There was a slight pause before Larson turned away from Chris and looked at me with sympathy written all over his face, “So, it went that badly.”

  I chuffed out with a laugh that I was trying to stifle, as William silently shuffled over to the refrigerator. It was a basic unit that stood barely six feet high, but next to William it seemed little more in size than something akin to a minibar. Sifting through miscellaneous juices, bottles of water and beer he found what he was looking for, a plastic pint-sized bag of raw blood.

  My people, or at least the vampire collective I grew up in, don’t take our blood raw, but instead use a blood derivative that we consume in either pill or liquid form. We also carry around the liquid form of this “serum” in a delivery system called an EpiPen. The EpiPen, developed as a fast-dose delivery system for injecting Epinephrine into the body of someone going into anaphylactic shock, made for a wonderful emergency method of “dosing” our kind whenever the need for blood was starting to take a physical effect upon our physical person.

  The reasons my people separated themselves from the raw blood product was as a result of the dangers and difficulties that pure blood represented to my kind. First, there was, of course, the danger we would represent to the outside “normal” human world. After all, every person out there could be degraded down to walking bags of blood, which was how the Russian collective, led by Dimitri Lagos, viewed humanity.

  There was also the problem of how my kind reacted when we partook of raw blood. For some, the effect came off as a kind of euphoria, in others it triggered intense erotic impulses and in a very few, the consumption of raw blood caused an uncontrollable, mindless rage. Thus far William had never exhibited any of those particular reactions, but if he were one who became enraged, I don’t think that any of us would survive it.

  We all glanced over nervously at William when he removed the bag from the refrigerator as Alpha asked, “Are you all right?”

  William had been working at the spigot on the bottom of the bag where an IV tube would normally be fastened and looked up. William noticed the concern in our expressions and said, “I’ll be fine.”

  Having been unable to loosen the spigot properly, William simply pinched the thick plastic spout and tore it away as if it were made from a substance that had only a little more resistance than tissue paper. He raised the bag, opened his mouth wide and squeezed, in order to release the blood within, which then oozed out of the bag and into his mouth. The lack of an anti-coagulant in the blood made it extremely viscous, and William had to pinch and refold the bag a few times in order to force some of the congealed solids through the small opening left by the missing spout.

  I walked over to Alpha, “That’s his second bag in as many days.” Alpha didn’t respond, and simply continued to watch William as he consumed the blood, “None of us need to dose more than once weekly. Do you really think he is all right?”

  Alpha turned his head to me as I had finished asking the question and his face was filled with sorrow. “William is as ancient as I am and he knows his limits as well as any of us, but as you can see,” Alpha said while pointing to his completely black obsidian eyes, “our individual progression isn’t exactly written in stone.”

  “So the simple answer would be that you don’t know?”

  Alpha nodded, “That would be the simple answer.”

  Chris had walked over to Larson and was in the process of shaking hands, “How’s the baby?”

  Larson screwed up his face and looked in the general direction of the rear of the boathouse, “Cranky.”

  Chris smiled and spoke with a voice dripping with sarcasm, “He’s uncomfortable? Gosh, that wounds me so.”

  “You want to talk to him?”

  Chris frowned as he thought before saying, “In a bit. I need a shower and a handful of ibuprofen for my knee first.” Chris turned to William, “Hey big guy! Since you’re already over there, could you throw me a gel pack from the freezer?”

  William had finished the blood bag and was breathing hard. It was a strange sight to see, since he never appeared to have expended enough effort to break a sweat when we assaulted the CIA safe house. Now the big man was panting as if out of breath and he turned to scowl at Chris.

  Chris rolled his eyes at the giant, and turned away from him while extending a hand to catch the presumably forthcoming ice pack.

  Chris had turned back to Larson, “Did any packages arrive for me?”

  Larson had trouble removing his cautious gaze from William, but managed to look at Chris when he replied, “Just a small one. I set it on the table by…”

  FWAP!

  Larson’s words were instantly cut off as an almost frozen gel pack smacked Chris squarely in the cheek. It made a wet sounding slap as it wrapped around the rest of his face. The soft chemical gel in its plastic bag was covered in a small amount of dry frost from the freezer that was helping it to adhere to Chris’ face, which was moist with perspiration. The result, although Chris had staggered momentarily from the impact, was Chris standing with his arm held out, and a gel pack stuck to, and wrapped around, his face.

  Indignantly Chris lowered his arm slowly, refusing to remove the gel pack from where it stuck, and he turned to face William.

  Alpha, Larson and I all froze in silent, but highly amused, disbelief.

  Chris made a show of removing the pack from his face, and then began stroking the bag like a puppy in his hands.

  “Ah, so refreshing,” Chris smiled warmly at William, “thank you, Billy.”

  William’s face was expressionless, in such a way that made him appear far more frightening than any look of anger or rage ever could, but a muffled, choking sound came from him, which sounded almost like he was clearing his throat.

  The look, the sound and the danger were all lost on Chris, “Can I call you Billy?”

  The giant now went silent, seemed to consider and then shrugged indifferently.

  “Okay, then,” Chris moved to where Larson had indicated his package had been placed and dropped bodily into a piece of lawn furniture, before placing the gel pack on his knee and inspecting the package, completely ignoring William.

  Alpha, Larson and I all turned to watch William, who started making that strange sound again. I turned to Alpha, who was frowning at William as if he were studying the giant, who was also his oldest and dearest friend.

  Where Alpha’s eyes were completely black orbs, William’s eyes had a tendency to turn blood red whenever he felt angry, or when his adrenaline was pumping. Whether this was an effect of his having lived for so long, as was the case for Alpha’s condition, or it was a side effect of the tortuous experiments that had been done to him, we didn’t completely understand, but when William finally turned away from Chris and looked in our direction his eyes were completely clear of any redness, and Alpha immediately broke into a smile.

  “My God,” Alpha’s accented voice came out rich with relief, “he’s laughing.” I looked from Alpha to William and then back again, as Alpha said quietly to me, “Perhaps that fool is worth having around.”

  Chris’ head shot up from the small box he was studying, “Hey!”

  Chapte
r 4

  Nazran, Russia.

  In all the ways that mattered, Nazran was the city that never was. The city had less than 100,000 residents and had been originally founded as a military fortress in 1817. After the fall of the Soviet Union the town, which was officially became part of the Republic of Ingushetia, it was separated from the Chechen Republic and the city became the Republic of Ingushetia’s Capital city in 1991. That temporary title ended because of its poor location and high rate of violence and the town of Magas replaced Nazran as Ingushetia’s capital city in 2000. After that, Nazran began the more rapid decline into what it is today.

  The first signs of trouble came in 2004, when a raid on Nazran, led by 200 to 300 rebels, reportedly of Chechen and ethnic Ingush descent, attacked the fifteen official government buildings, killing over 67 members of Nazran’s security forces, government officials, including their top prosecutors and many United Nations workers. Although the raid only lasted around five hours the witness’ reports included stories of raiders being little more than madmen, attacking with a ferocity that seemed far too savage for normal men.

  The government reeled from the attacks, and General Tikhomirov, Commander of Russia’s Interior Ministry forces, promptly resigned after the incident when the blame appeared to fall directly upon his shoulders. It was never clear who stepped into the vacant command position, but the ‘new’ government’s Federal Security Services that were sent in to maintain order seemed more interested in the total subjugation of the population, as opposed to keeping the peace. Para-military activity included the mass abduction of civilians through illegal arrests, to outright murder/executions that were perpetrated in public, without any hint of concern by law enforcement. Eventually the brazen lawlessness led to a mass protest by the remaining citizens in 2008. The clash between the protestors and the Federal Security Service had the protestors hurling stones, bottles and petrol bombs at the security officers, who responded with tear gas, bullets and batons. The protestors who were arrested were severely beaten and dragged away to waiting vans and most of those arrested were never heard from again. In the aftermath, with the Federal Security Service and Police never revealing how many had actually been taken into custody during the violent clash, Interior Minister Musa Medov told the Associated Press, “Everyone even indirectly involved in organizing or participating, in this protest will be severely punished.” More people began to go missing in the night, groups of civilians were escorted into waiting vehicles at gunpoint during the day with some individuals just being randomly grabbed while walking in the city’s streets. Throughout all of this no governmental agency was ever identified or held responsible for the acts.