'More like I was deceiving myself,' said Trask. 'This is a covert operation, but it didn't feel like one. Especially after that incident with Liz's watcher.' He glanced at her - a guilty look, she thought - and said, 'I should have paid more attention to you.'

'But I wasn'

t that sur e myself,' Liz said. 'And anyway, I'm the new kid on the block; I could have been wrong.' 'That's what I mean/ said Trask. 'We all have our talents, and I should have listened to yours. If we had turned back and I had seen that fellow, I would have known at once. But we didn't, and I didn't. I blame myself.'

At which the Major, looking more than a little concerned, came in with: 'Miss, gentlemen, I have some difficulty following you - these skills of yours, you understand - but are you saying the operation is in jeopardy?'

Trask shook his head, then changed his mind and said: 'Any operation concerning these creatures is hazardous. But we have to go in, no matter what. It's all set up, and we mightn't get 491.

49.

I.

a better chance. But with our weapons, and providing everyone remembers the drills, I can't see what can go wrong.'

Liz glanced at her watch. 'Five minutes/ she said. And as at a signal the intercom began buzzing.

The pilot was on the earphones saying: 'Message from Callsign One. The mindsmog has been "awake" but more or less static for some time. Now it's on the move, but only locally. Callsign One is also mobile. His ETA the target area is five minutes.'

Trask answered, 'Tell him roger that. We'll see him there, and not to forget his nose-plugs.' Then, turning to the bulk of the helicopter party, 'And you mustn't forget yours.'

They hadn't forgotten. Aerosol sprays were hissing; a fine garlic mist filled the air, settling on everyone's clothing; it was almost a pleasure to insert filter plugs like fat cigarette tips deep into their nostrils ...

In Xanadu, from a position some two hundred feet up the almost sheer rock wall of the mountainside, Lord Malinari of the Wamphyri looked down on the sprawling dark cobweb of the deserted resort, and at the single road that wound its serpentine route up the steep mountain contours to Xanadu's gates.

Malinari's vantage point was a roughly-hewn 'room' carved from the solid rock at the head of a natural chimney. When Xanadu was being built, it had been Jethro Manchester's intention to create a special entertainment here. There was to have been a ski-lift or cable-car from the gardens up to this point, and a series of aquachutes back down to the pools. The chimney had been fitted with a spiralling service- and/or emergency-staircase behind a facade constructed to match the flanking cliffs , so disguising the chimney's vertical fault, and work ha d commenced on this room or landing stage. At which point technical difficulties had caused the project to be abandoned.

Now the chimney was Lord Malinari's bolthole from Xanadu. From this window he would fly out on the night wind, and glide down to a place in which he had long since secreted a cache of clothing, money and other necessaries to speed him on his way to his next venture.

But not before he ensured that the chase ended here, and that this E-Branch had suffered such losses as to finish it forever, or at least slow it down until his, Vavara's, and Szwart's greater scheme was brought into play ...

Malinari looked down on Xanadu and smiled a hideous smile. If only he could be down there to see the mayhem. But that way he might find himself caught up in all of the destruction, and that was out of the question. As for Xanadu itself: Oh, he might bemoan a very little the waste of this place ...

but not for very long. For the world was a wider place far, and his plans of conquest of far greater scope.

A shame that his 'garden' with its special 'crop' must be discovered - especially now that it had been nourish ed so recently. O r then again, perhaps it would not be found; for it was after all hidden away, in the subterranean darkness that suited it so very well. In which case it would lie there, all unattended and dormant for now, only to flourish later in its own good time.

For what Malinari had seeded would not die unless it were put down, deliberately and utterly destroyed. Ah, the tenacity of the Great Vampire, and of his works!

As for the last of Malinari's human watchdogs: the spiderlik e, ganglin g Garth Santeson was by now no more. He had served his purpose the moment he warned of E-Branch's arrival here, an intrusion that Malinari had been expecting ever since his lieutenant Bruce Trennier died the true death some few days ago far in the western des ert, and of which he'd had warning apart from and since Trennier's demise, not alone from Garth Santeson.

A warning, aye, and delivered by a seeming idiot! But even an idiot may have his uses. Malinari had certainly found a good use for that one ...

But poor Trennier, the manner of his pa.s.sing. Malinari remembered it well, those last few moments of the man's 492 493.

miserable life: the faithful servant crying his agonies, and Malinari the Mind, the master, feeling something of those agonies even here, in Xanadu: The/ire! That awesome, all-consuming, withering fire that melted even metamorphic flesh, exploded bone, liquefied sinew, and reduced all to ashes! It had lasted a while - the pain, too, Trennier's pain - until Malinari had been obliged to shut it out of his mind. But through the jet of blistering heat that stripped Trennier's flesh from his body and finally blinded and destroyed him, Malinari had recognized some of the faces of his lieutenant's tormentors. Th e face of Ben Trask, remembered from the mind ofZek Foe ner, and that of lan Goodly, yet another man of weird talents ...

But if only Malinari had had longer with the Foener woman.

There had been so much more that he might have learned (such as the nature of their skills, these men of esoteric talents), and so very much more that he would have enjoyed ... of that beautiful woman herself, perhaps, and not only her mind.

Well, too late for that now - too late from the moment he hurled her down that shaft into oblivion - but at least he had fathomed something of the dangers of this world. Especially the greatest danger of all, which was E-Branch.

And now they had found him ... as he had known they would, against which inevitability he'd long since taken ingenious and even marvellous precautions.

On a board bolted to the wall close to Malinari's 'window' (which was simply a la rge hole in the moulded concrete facade), a master switch stood in the 'off position beside a series of smaller electrical switches set in a roughly oblong array. The array was a precise match for Xanadu itself, its con centric pattern of switches duplicating the cobweb design of the resort in the gloom of the mountain saddle.

Now, waiting there in his secret bolthole, Malinari threw the master switch. There was a low, answering hum of power, but nothing more. And his slender fingers were impatient where they fluttered over the smaller switches - those electrical messengers of instantaneous death - as he gloatingly rehea.r.s.ed a certain sequence: 'First the outer chalets, to close them in. Then the inner structures, to catch them where they run. And when finally they think they have me "trapped" in my night-dark dome ...' His hand trembled with pent antic.i.p.ation over the central switch.

'A pleasure dome, aye. But for my pleasure, not theirs!'

He laughed a coughing laugh, long and low ... then paused abruptly. Down there, coming into view along the approach road toward Xanadu's gates: a vehicle. The night was dark now - but night and darkness were Malinari's greatest allies - and that vehicle with its lowered, carefully probing lights; the coiled-spring tension in its vengeful pa.s.sengers! Malinari sensed it, their human bloodl.u.s.t - or what pa.s.sed for bloodl.u.s.t in men - an d laughed again. Bloodl.u.s.t? Why, Nephran Malinari had p.i.s.sed thicker blood than coursed through the veins of whelps such as these!

And with his telepathic probes concentrating on the vehicle, he felt what its occupants felt: Fear, of the Great Unknown that was Malinari. Oh, he recognized and relished it! Primal fear of the night and what the night might bring, its roots burrowing like worms in every human fibre, revenant of cavern-dwelling ancestors. Fear in the face of an alien threat, the menace of the blood-beast!

But tempering the fear, holding it at bay, there was also a wall of grim determination. And bolstering that blind determination, the sure knowledge of vastly superiorfirepower.

Oh, really ... ?

And again Malinari laughed, but a second later hissed and grimaced, and clasped his handsomely alien head in wildly trembling hands. It was the pain - those lightning-flashes of terrible pain which ever accompanied any excessive use of his mentalism - the pain that came from searching out or listening to the thoughts of so many others, and of suffering the tumult of their ma.s.sed emotions, their thronging dreams and fancies. For weirdly mutated minds were gathering here 494.

495 now, and the greater their talents the more piercing the pain in his head.

Cursing vividly, in the tongue of Starside, Malinari swiftly withdrew his probes. And as the pain receded, so he relaxed a little and gave vent once more to strained, broken laughter.

But strained? And broken?

He had thought often enough about that before - even Malinari - finding cause to wonder: The laughter of a madman? Well, perhaps it was at that, though he preferred to think of himself as merely ... eccentric? And anyway, what of it? When a man is unique, surely he has a right to such small idiosyncrasies ...

Drawing him back from his musing, the fading pounding in Malinari's temples was suddenly matched by a stuttering in the sky: the mechanical throbbing of jets, as their power diverted to whirling, fanlike vanes. And though momentarily startled - sufficiently so that he lifted his crimson gaze to the dragonfly shape that blurred the stars - still he felt no real concern or threat. His plans were laid, and every eventuality had been antic.i.p.ated. Even this one.

Down in the gardens, in front of the casino, that was the most obvious of the few places where the jet-copter could land. But it was also one of the many places that Malinari had mined.

And: Hah! So be it! he thought. Now let this game commence.

The car at the gate issued a single man; equipped with a heavy, deadly automatic weapon, he crouched low and ran to the small, open-fronted chalet that housed reception. A rearguard, of course; also a guard against anyone trying to escape. These guileless fools! No one would be trying to 'escape' from Xanadu - well, except for these ridiculous invaders themselves! As for Malinari quitting the place ... but that was the plan! And in any case, what would it serve to stay? When this was all over, there would be nothing left to stay for.

And now the flying machine was settling towards the garden, its searchlight beams flickering over the dark casino, the chalets, the pools. And suddenly the car's lights were blazing bright, lighting the way as it sped to its rendezvous.

Its rendezvous with certain death ... but n ot just ye t.

First let Trask and these E-Branch people taste something of what they had brought down on themselves when, of their own free will, they had chosen to pursue Nephran Malinari.

Lord Malinari, aye, of the Wamphyyrrriiii!

The coastguard vessel made smoke where she lolled port-side on to the narrow strip of sandy beach that fronted Jethro Manchester's island. Apparently crippled, she rocked this way and that in the gentle wavelets of the night surf. On her starboard side, hidden by the cabin, an SAS man aimed his flame-thrower at the sky and fired short-lived bursts of flame above the cabin's roof. As viewed from the island, it would seem for certain that the ruddily lit boat was on fire; even as her keel bit into the sand, so a signal flare made a starburst high in the sky.

Also in the sky, but not so very high now - indeed, wheeling in low over the ocean's horizon - Chopper Two's pilot saw the starburst and told his crew: 'We're over the island. I can see the boat "burning" down there, and the lights of the villa in the trees. So this is it. Jump to it as soon as we touch down. I'll be airborne and waiting for you when you get done. You can 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 ...

496.

497.

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 ma.s.sively 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 flame-thrower.

But as the pilot scanned ahead of them, suddenly, as if from nowhere, he picked up two more figu res. 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 repet.i.tious, oddly s.e.xual-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 f.u.c.king 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.

498.

499.

'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.

'b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l ... 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 G.o.d!' 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.l 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 fo r 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. I t 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 k now 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.'

501.

500.

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, their prison.

When they had known their end was near, Julie and Alan had come out into the night, into the garden, to make love just one last time. They hadn't reckoned on being found so quickly, that was all. Not in their own secret place, in the garden, on their prison island. Their prison, yes ... indeed, their death cell.

Or perhaps not. For as the blood is the life, so there was plenty of hot blood in these two men. And without warning, suddenly Julie caught herself licking her lips in antic.i.p.ation. At which she knew that it was too late for her, and that it always had been. But strangely - and as swiftly as that - she no longer cared, for she was now awake! As for what had awakened her: Perhaps it had been the sight and salty smell of Alan Manchester's blood, or that of the soldier whom he'd shot with his speargun, or both. Which-, or what-ever, it had acted on Julie as a catalyst, and now the 'good fight' was over. She was wh at she was and would do what she must do. She moved like a wraith towards the two men, got behind them where they crept carefully forward, making for the villa's lights.

She got closer and closer to them, her hands raised, with nails like poisonous claws - indeed, they were poisonous claws - poised and ready to strike ...

... But in that same moment Julie found herself betrayed, and by three things: One, the full moon, emerging from behind fleeting clouds, to sweep a silver swath over the sea and the land. Two, by the sharp stutter of automatic gunfire, sounding from a short distance to the west. And three, by a watchful, dragonfly spy- in-the-sky, hovering on high as it sent an urgent message to Julie's would-be victims: 'Central team. Why are there three of you? Do you have a tail?'

Fading in and out, the pilot's words were hard to read.

Lardis didn't understand the message, but Jake, startled b y the gunfire and the near-distant cries that accompanied it, turned and saw...

... A girl? A distraught, naked girl?

For seeing him beginning his turn, Julie had drawn back, shrunk down into herself, begun to sob and scream. 'I was in the house,' she sobbed, trying to cover herself as if ashamed of her nakedness. 'They kept me prisoner there. But when they heard your helicopter they stopped watching me, and I ...

and ... I... oh!'

She feigned a swoon, and Jake - forgetting all that he'd seen, all that he'd been told - put up his weapon and stepped forward.

She clung to him for a moment, this beautiful girl, who was naked and frightened and so pale in the flooding light of the moon ... so pale and so cold. This girl whose grip on his combat suit was like iron, and whose nose was suddenly wrinkling suspiciously as she smelled garlic, and whose eyes were a reflective yellow, sulphurous in the night!

502.

53.

Julie held the front of his jacket bunched in one hand, drew back the other hand until Jake saw its nails, sharpened and bevelled to gouges that would cut b.l.o.o.d.y channels in his face as easily as a routing machine! And her awful smile: the way her lips curled back from gleaming teeth.

Jake tried to bring his machine-pistol to b ear, to centre its muzzle on Julie's body. But she was faster; she knocked it away, out of his grasp.

And now her 'smile' was a fixed, nightmarish grimace - but whether of horror or of pleasure in her own terrible strength, Jake couldn't say. Nor could he do anything about it.

But Lardis could.

An 'old man,' Lardis Lidesci had been ignored and almost forgotten by the girl. A mistake, for he was an old man with a difference. He was the Old Lidesci, and not nearly as naive as Jake. Not in the ways of vampires.