Nosferatu

CHAPTER 13

The Highest point above the surface of the Earth is the peak of Mount Everest. At 29,028 feet high, it is the highest and most inaccessible place on the surface of the planet. The perfect place to hide the key to the Master Guardian, which controlled all of the Airlia computers — the legendary sword of Arthur: Excalibur.

The race to recover it had been brutal. On one side had been Mike Turcotte and Professor Mualama. On another, two Navy SEALs turned into Guides by a Guardian computer and questing for the key in order to bring it to Aspasia’s Shadow. On the third front, Chinese military forces led by three Ones Who Wait, human-Airlia clones who served Artad. Even on Turcotte’s end all had not been as it appeared, as it turned out that Mualama had been corrupted by a Swarm tentacle and had tried to destroy the sword, only to be thwarted by Turcotte at the last moment.

In the end, Turcotte had emerged victorious, literally the last man standing on the mountain, Excalibur in his hand, and that had allowed Yakov, inside the last mothership hidden in Mount Ararat, to gain control of the Master Guardian, and thus all other guardians, allowing the world to win World War III and compel the alien forces to leave.

Littered on the slopes of Everest were the bodies of those who had failed in this quest: SEALs, Chinese, Mualama, and — last but not least — the three Ones Who Wait. They mingled with the bodies of 160 climbers who had died in their attempt at summiting over the years. Most of those bodies lay in the “death zone” above 25,000 feet.

Everest was not considered a particularly difficult climb in terms of technique, but the collection of avalanches, crevasses, winds up to 125 miles an hour, storms, temperatures that went down to forty degrees below zero and oxygen depletion make it the deadliest place on the planet. In the death zone the air holds only one-third the oxygen present at sea level. As a result high-altitude pulmonary edema (when the lungs fatally fill with fluid) and high-altitude cerebral edema (when the brain, starved for oxygen, swells) are common, often causing death unless the person is quickly brought down the mountain, something that is practically impossible as the death zone is above the reach of even the best helicopter’s altitude ceiling.

High overhead was a spy satellite launched by the Russians. Its mission was to monitor southwest China. Within its zone of observation was Everest. Under orders relayed covertly from Moscow, the high-resolution camera turned its attention to the slopes of Everest and began quartering the snow-covered terrain. Since Turcotte had been the only one to come off the mountain alive, no one knew exactly who had fallen where.

It took over four hours, but a complete image of the mountain had been accomplished. The data was digitized, then transmitted to Moscow military headquarters, where it was forwarded — with a healthy kickback of cash going the opposite direction — until it ended up in the hands of the one who had requested it.

Adrik sat behind his desk and stared at the file marker on his computer screen. It had cost him one phone call and over 1.6 million US dollars to get this imagery. He didn’t even bother to open the file and look at what his money had bought. Instead, he had it electronically transferred to Hong Kong. Then he sent the file to a second destination.

It was the largest object in Earth orbit, far eclipsing the collection of pods that made up the International Space Station. The mothership was over a mile long and a quarter mile wide at the center, coming evenly to points at both ends. In the forward portion there was a huge gash in the black metal where Mike Turcotte had set off a nuclear charge supplemented by an Airlia fuel pod inside a cargo bay. Floating inside the bay were also mangled Talon spacecraft — Aspasia’s fleet from Mars, which had come to recover the mothership. In one fell swoop Turcotte had managed to destroy most of one side of the millennia-old Atlantean Civil War.

Now the mothership floated dead, a symbol of mankind’s victory over alien forces. Inside the Talons were dozens of Airlia bodies, preserved in the cold vacuum of space. And inside their frozen veins were the scant remnants of the virus that Nosferatu and his comrades sought.

Nima Namche wasn’t used to the ill-fitting suit he was wearing or the low altitude. Even though the anteroom he was waiting in was on the forty-fourth and top floor of a skyscraper in the center of Hong Kong, it was still at least three miles lower than where he lived, in the Khumbu Region of the Himalayas. He was a Sherpa, one of the mountain people, and his motivation for coming to Hong Kong was a simple and ancient one: money.

A Sherpa, Tenzig Norgay, had been at Sir Edmund Hillary’s side when he became the first to summit Everest and they had been part of every expedition ever since, or at least the ones that were known about. Namche knew that others had climbed Everest for reasons other than summiting, but among the Sherpas those climbs were not spoken about openly.

He’d been approached by a well-known Sherpa whose job it was to coordinate guides for expeditions — except this proposal had been very different. Namche was given one hundred thousand US dollars simply to fly to Hong Kong, an unheard of sum, with the promise of another nine hundred thousand US upon acceptance of the climb. Who he was to guide and when he was to do it were two questions he hoped to have answered soon.

So far, answers had been in short supply. He’d been met in the airport by two very pale men wearing expensive suits and sporting dark sunglasses who had simply taken his one, rather decrepit piece of luggage and escorted him to a waiting limousine. He’d sat in the back with the two men, who had not offered a single word of greeting or even acknowledged his presence, their attention focused on the exterior as if they were concerned about being attacked.

They’d led him into the lobby of the building, past the security guards, and to a private elevator. When the door had opened, one of the two had indicated he should exit and upon his doing so, the door had shut, leaving Namche alone in this room.

There was a large stainless-steel door directly ahead that Namche had approached, but decided against knocking on. He doubted any sound would carry. So he sat and waited, something that did not overly bother him considering the strange reception.

He started at a slight hiss. He was amazed as the steel door slid to the right without making another noise. Namche got to his feet and tentatively approached the doorway.

“Come in.” The voice was Chinese, the words English.

The interior of the room from which the voice had come was dark, and Namche paused in the entryway, trying to get his eyes to adjust. All he could see at the moment was a wooden chair with a single beam of light oriented on it.

“Sit there,” the voice ordered.

Namche walked to the chair and sat down on the edge, trying to peer ahead to see who owned the voice. His seat in the beam of light, however, defeated any possibility of his eyes adjusting to the darkness or penetrating the room’s interior beyond the cone of light he was in.

“You have summited Everest six times.”

Namche did not think it was a question but he nodded anyway. “Yes, sir.” “Each time you guided another to the top.”

“Yes.”

“I do not need you to summit. But I do need you to climb within forty-eight hours and take someone with you.”

Namche immediately began shaking his head. “It is the off-season. The weather will not allow climbing for at least another month, and that is only to base camp. And then—”

“Silence.”

Namche fidgeted on the edge of the chair, fearing he was in the presence of a rich madman. He’d seen some of those who hired Sherpas to help them get to the top — men and women who had money to spare but could barely climb off their cots, never mind up the great mountain. They expected literally to be carried up there. And Namche had friends who had died trying to do just that. No amount of money was worth that. He had always picked carefully those he’d guided.

“The party consists of only one person. You must get him to these spots.” Namche turned in surprise to his right as a three-dimensional image of Mount Everest suddenly appeared, hovering in the air. There were three red dots flashing. Namche immediately recognized the locations. The first was along the northeast ridge approach, a most difficult route. The other two were close together on the Kanshung Face, a place where no one went because it was not on either of the two approaches to the summit. It was hard to tell because of the flickering image, but Namche had to wonder what the dots represented, as he knew the Face was almost sheer for over a vertical mile. Among Sherpas, the top of the Kanshung Face was a place of legend where none he knew dared approach.

“Forty-eight hours is impossible,” Namche said, still marveling over the holographic image. He had been to the summit and lived in the shadow of the mountain all his life, but he’d never seen it presented like this. “Acclimatization takes at the very minimum two weeks at base camp or else—”

“There is no need for acclimatization,” the voice said. “My man is ready to climb. And you will get as high as you can using the most advanced helicopter in the world. This helicopter will drop you off at 17,000 feet right here.” A dot glowed on the image. “My man just needs you to lead him the last bit to these places.”

“Why?” Namche hadn’t meant for it to be so blunt, but it was all coming so quickly and the situation was so strange. He had no idea who he was speaking with.

“Because we are paying you one million dollars to do so.”

Namche wasn’t sure what to say to that. It was more than he could ever hope to make in a lifetime. And he knew he didn’t have many more climbs left. He had already cheated the fates too many times. He glanced at the image. The legends said there had been strangers who’d climbed Everest in the distant past and put something on the mountain at the top of the Kanshung Face. Something special. Namche’s curiosity was warring with his fear.

“And because my name is Tian Dao Lin and I am telling you to do it.”

Namche almost leapt off the chair in fright. It was a name mothers used to frighten their children to stay safe in their beds at night. A name that brought fear even as far away as Nepal and Tibet. The light level in the room increased, a dim glow coming from recessed strips around the top edge, and the bright light above his chair began to dim. Namche blinked, as his eyes slowly adjusted. Finally, he could see a large teak desk. The surface was covered with papers and scrolls. And behind the desk a tall chair. And in the chair what appeared to be a man, with liver spots on his bald head, but the face and eyes were unnatural.

It was the eyes that riveted Namche. He had been in the Himalayas all his life. He had met the old wise men who followed the path of Buddha, men who could do remarkable things. But he’d never seen eyes like these. They glowed with a red fire and fixed him to the seat with their stare. “Do you understand?”

Namche could only nod.

A door to Tian Dao Lin’s left rear opened and a man walked in. He was thin, his face like the edge of a knife. His skin was pale white. He went to the side of the desk and stood rigidly at attention.

“This is Tai,” Lin said. “He is the man you will guide to those three bodies.”

The last word barely registered on Namche for a moment, then it hit home.

“You may wait outside,” Tian Dao Lin said.

Namche got to his feet numbly and walked out of the door. Tai remained standing, still as a statue.

Tian Dao Lin turned his seat toward Tai. “You understand what you are to do?” “Yes, Father.”

Tian Dao Lin reached into a drawer and pulled out a small wooden flask. The exterior surface was intricately carved with many Chinese symbols, the interior lined with animal gut to make it waterproof. “I give you the gift of my own blood. It will allow you to survive the climb, but you must be swift.”

“Yes, Father.”

Tian Dao Lin handed Tai the flask. “Do not drink until you are ready to begin the climb.”

With the decimation of the American shuttle fleet, the most active spaceport on the planet’s surface was no longer Cape Canaveral in the United States, but Kouros in French Guiana. Set on the coastline of the South American country, Kouros was originally the launch site picked by the European Space Consortium.

The reasons the European Space Consortium chose to locate their launch facility on a different continent were several and practical. Europe’s population density was too great to safely put a launch site there. Also, the politics of which country would get the site was a problem none had wanted to wrestle with. From the engineer’s point of view, there was also the question of latitude, as all of the participating European countries were rather high up on the planet, making a launch less advantageous.

Kouros was on the ocean, which meant a launch took place mostly over water. It was near the equator, making possible the use of centrifugal acceleration of the planet’s rotation, the so-called catapult effect, to help launch payloads. The ESA ran Kouros more as a business than a nationalistic endeavor like NASA and the American space program. As such, one of its goals was to try to make money; because of this, anyone who anted up enough cash had access to both the facilities and launchpads and even rockets if they paid enough. The Russians had even gotten in on the deal, providing Soyuz rockets as platforms for commercial satellite launches.

A state-of-the-art satellite preparation complex had been financed by Arianespace, the ESA, and GoStar, a private company that, unknown to most, was financed by Vampyr. The EPCU, Ensemble de Preparation des Charges Utiles, was a massive complex, covering over ten square kilometers, with buildings occupying four square kilometers of that area. It held three twenty-meter-high “clean” rooms connected by corridors eight meters wide by twelve high. Components moved along the corridors on hovercraft, ensuring smooth and efficient transportation.

For the first time in its short history, the EPCU was being used for only one task. In three of the four buildings were specially designed components that had just finished their final testing. They were part of a revolutionary concept from GoStar that had been in development for over eight years and finally neared completion.

From Building 4, a maneuvering-and-thruster assembly was loaded onto a hovercraft and floated down the corridor to Building 1, where it was set on the center platform. From Building 3, an environmental-and-shield assembly was finished and also moved to Building 1 and fitted to the M&T assembly. And most important, in Building 2, the crew compartment had just been finished. It had been hovered to Building 1 where, like the last piece of a puzzle, it was connected to the other two assemblies.

The X–Craft was ready.

Technically the first flight was scheduled to be launched in two days and was labeled simply a test flight to make sure the craft was functional. It was to be anything but that.

At the knock on his office door, Adrik looked up from his computer screen. “Enter,” he called out.

The man who entered was short, wiry, and impeccably dressed. Petrov had traded his military uniform and the blue beret of the Spetsnatz, the Russian Special Forces, for tailored suits over six years earlier and had never looked back.

“Sir.” Petrov may have traded camouflage for suits, but his manner was all military as he stood ramrod straight in front of Adrik’s desk.

The office was dark, lit only by recessed lighting above rows of bookcases that lined all the walls. They were on the first level of the most modern office building in Moscow. The books on the shelves would have made a collector weep with envy. First editions dating back hundreds of years, they were an eclectic gathering for a mind that had grown bored with the world around him many centuries earlier.

Other than the recessed computer screen, the desktop was clear. Adrik sat in a high-backed, black leather chair. There were two halogen lights behind the desk that pointed forward, fixing Petrov in their glow, while Adrik was hidden in shadow.

“Have you ever been in Lubyanka?” Adrik asked. “Yes, sir.”

Usually Adrik liked Petrov’s lack of verbosity. He detested those who spoke and said nothing. At the moment, though, he needed a little bit more from his subordinate. “When?”

“Several times in my career, sir. During my time in Spetsnatz we worked closely with the KGB and SVD’s paramilitary people.”

“Have you ever been in the tunnels underneath Lubyanka that connect with the Kremlin?” “No, sir.”

“You will be. There’s something down there I need you to get for me.” “Yes, sir. And that is?”

“Blood.”

Vampyr’s jet was taking the shortest route from Seattle to Moscow, flying over the top of the world. He sat in the rear, with only the glow from a large flat-screen display illuminating the cabin. Through one of his defense contractor companies, he had access to the United States military’s secure Interlink system. He also had the proper code words to bring up data from just about anywhere in the system.

Vampyr accessed Space Command, headquartered underneath Cheyenne Mountain outside Colorado Springs. That was the unit responsible for tracking all objects, man-made and otherwise, in orbit around the planet. He brought up the data on the derelict mothership. He projected its orbit and was pleased to see that it was stable.

He stared at the image of the Earth floating on the screen with the mothership’s orbit projected in red for a few seconds. Then he accessed the Space Command database and checked to see if the mothership’s orbit would intersect at any time in the near future with the orbit of any other object.

On the screen the paths of anything that would come close to the mothership flashed, then disappeared as the computer determined that there would be no collision until the screen froze showing a green track intersecting with the red one of the mothership. Green indicated a future orbit for something not yet launched.

Vampyr ran the code for the orbit.

It was as he had expected. GoStar was a company that was under Nosferatu’s control through various other holdings. When he tried to find out more about the specific payload, he discovered that Space Command didn’t have that information. As Kouros was a privately run launch site, it had no obligation to provide it. Vampyr could guess well enough without it, having tracked Nosferatu’s development of the X–Craft for years. He’d even covertly steered a few scientists in his fellow Undead’s direction to aid in the research and development.

Satisfied that all was going as he’d projected in that area, Vampyr shifted his attention elsewhere. A contact in the Hong Kong police department who kept tabs on Tian Dao Lin for him had reported the arrival of the Sherpa and his departure on Tian Dao Lin’s personal jet with one of the Chinese Quarters. Destination: a staging area close to Mount Everest. Again, as expected.

Last, he decrypted the latest message from Adrik. The youngest Undead had only gone to the meeting at the Haven because Vampyr had told him to. Vampyr smiled coldly when he thought of the Russian. Another fool who fancied himself quite cunning. Adrik owed his very existence to Vampyr. After all, it was Vampyr who had rescued him from his stone coffin underneath the Kremlin so many years ago, less than a week after the palace guard had dumped him into the shaft.

What had apparently never occurred to Adrik was how Vampyr had been able to find him. The Russian had accepted Vampyr’s explanation, that he had heard of Adrik’s rule and wanted to join forces with him. The Russian had never entertained the idea that it had been Vampyr who had enticed the palace guard to revolt — not that they had needed much enticement — so that Vampyr could be lurking in the shadows to rescue him, and thus have him in his service.

Vampyr had let Adrik suffer in the stone coffin stuck in the shaft for a week, stopping by occasionally to hear his screams — enough time to make the gratitude for rescue that much stronger. Certain of Adrik’s secret loyalty, Vampyr had gone his own way, traveling to the West, first to England, then on to the New World to make his fortune, while Adrik had reincarnated himself once more in Moscow, now heeding Vampyr’s advice not to seek obvious power, but rather to gain it in the shadowy world of the criminal.

Vampyr read Adrik’s report. He was disappointed but not surprised that Adrik had delegated the mission into the tunnels under Moscow to recover the blood. After Adrik’s experience, not even the lure of eternal life could bring him to enter those tunnels again.

Vampyr sent a message back to Adrik with further instructions. Satisfied, he leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes.

Nosferatu walked into observation room and looked through the one-way glass at the sterile blood lab. It was getting more and more difficult to obtain clean blood from the continent. The AIDS rate in South Africa was closing on 50 percent of the adult population, a number the rest of the Western world had yet to comprehend in its horrific totality. Elsewhere in Africa it fluctuated between 25 and 40 percent. The best scientists were projecting that at the current rate the continent would be close to being depopulated in two generations.

Nosferatu had to admit that Adrik did have a point. Left to their own devices, humans could be extremely destructive and horrific in their treatment of their fellow men.

Drug companies in America and Europe had the medicine needed to keep most of the infected people in Africa alive, but they made the cost so prohibitive that few could afford it. Profit over life. It was an equation that Nosferatu had seen many times before. On the other hand, though, he had also seen human behavior that defied such cold logic and showed the best of the species.

Inside the lab, the specialist that Nosferatu had hired at an extravagant wage was checking each bag of fresh blood flown in from Cape Town. Each pint cost Nosferatu over five thousand dollars and though it was supposed to have been screened at a hospital in South Africa, almost a third had to be discarded either because of the HIV virus or other infectious problems.

The equipment in the lab was the best available on the current medical market for screening blood, but Nosferatu knew from the data that it wasn’t good enough for what he needed to achieve once he acquired the Airlia virus.

There was one place where such equipment had been designed, based on Airlia machinery in the mothership: Dulce, New Mexico, where Majestic-12 had sent part of its classified programs, the ones having to do with biological and chemical operations. Dulce had also been pulverized by foo fighters. The Americans had begun excavating the rubble, but that effort had been sidetracked by World War III. Nosferatu’s informants had reported that excavation had been put on hold, while America focused on rebuilding and helping other countries devastated by the recent war, particularly South Korea.

Nosferatu stirred uneasily. When the other two fulfilled their parts and brought the blood to him, he needed to be ready. He was concerned about Vampyr. The second Eldest was angry — he had been angry as long as Nosferatu had known him. His actions throughout the ages had been horrific at times. Nosferatu still remembered the forest of impaled Turkish prisoners. That was the last time he had encountered his comrade from the cells along the Roads of Rostau. He had heard rumors of the others’ actions over the years; but Vampyr had faded into the shadows, becoming a legend among the humans, especially after one of the humans penned a book about their kind. Nosferatu had always suspected that some of the information about vampires was leaked by the Watchers, as within the myth there was quite a bit that was accurate.

Nosferatu picked up the secure satellite telephone and made two calls. One to Kouros, confirming the time and date of the launch. The second was to the United States to a contact he had used there before.

Nosferatu desperately needed the plan to succeed. Because it was the only way to bring back Nekhbet.