Red Eye - 02 by James Lovegrove

It wanted to consume him whole, and would if given a chance. Before joining Red Eye, Jacobsen had done tours of duty in the Iraqi desert at the height of summer, a hundred and twenty in the shade, heat that could fry a man alive and desiccate his brains. Here in subzero New York in January, now that he had become something other than a mere infantry officer, it was about as bad. The daylight glared through the goggles’ polarised lenses. Had any of his skin been exposed, blisters would have erupted in seconds. Longer than that, and there would be singeing, wisps of pale smoke, first degree burns, second degree, then rapidly third.
    Team Red Eye moved with practised precision, each of them with a fixed role, a set of procedures to execute. CCTV cameras were disabled and the hard drive that stored their recordings was wiped. The perimeter was secured. All alarms were put out of action. In under five minutes, the team had control of the entire dockyard, nothing able to come between them and their target.
    Four of them took up prearranged lookout positions. Jacobsen, meanwhile, headed for the waterfront with Red Eye Two and Red Eye Five in tow. Wharf cranes loomed against the sky, their long necks seemingly bowing under the weight of snow. The three men moved lightly, even Red Eye Five, for all that he was toting a large oxyacetylene cylinder set on his back. Five, also known as Gunnery Sergeant DuWayne Child, was the size of an ox and, thanks to the course of treatment the entire team were undergoing, as strong as one too.
    Colonel Jacobsen consulted a download of the dockyard’s delivery manifest on his smartphone. He and the other two were almost at their objective. A mound of shipping containers rose before them, steel boxes the size of railway carriages arranged in a grid pattern. Serial numbers were visible on the sides. Jacobsen identified the one they wanted, the topmost of a stack of three.
    “This is Red Eye One. I have visual. Target is acquired. Radio silence from here on in.”
    The container had arrived yesterday afternoon, offloaded from the Star of Szczecin , a 10,000-ton Polsteam cargo vessel outbound from Gdansk. According to the bill of lading, there were rolls of carpet and assorted items of furniture inside, and doubtless that was true. What mattered to Team Red Eye was what else might be inside. If their intel was correct—and the man who was funding the Red Eye initiative seemed to have access to rock solid intel—the container was home to a score of trafficked vampires. Some Russian hoods had charged the vamps a small fortune to cross the Atlantic, in accommodation that made steerage class look luxurious. Tonight, local contacts were due to come and release them from confinement. But not if Team Red Eye had any say in the matter.
    Jacobsen leapt up the side of the container stack, scrambling easily from handhold to handhold until he reached the top. He undid his mask. Sunlight dug needles into his lips and cheeks. He inhaled through his nose several times, deeply, before re-covering his face.
    He gestured to Two and Five below. A rapid flick of gloved fingers, beckoning them.
    In no time, Jacobsen had been joined on top of the container by Child and the team’s second-in-command, Lieutenant Harvey Giacoia. Child unpacked the cylinder set and the blowtorch attached to it. Jacobsen and Giacoia, meanwhile, cleared the snow off the container, brushing it aside with sweeps of their feet. Child opened the gas flow regulator on the acetylene tank, sparked up the jet with a friction lighter, slowly brought in the oxygen until the mix was right, and got busy cutting.
    Up to that moment, the vampires had been staying very quiet, keeping still, hoping that whoever had climbed onto their container was there to do nothing more than conduct an external inspection. As sparks began raining down inside, alarm swiftly turned to panic. The vampires scurried to find cover amid the packing crates and pallet loads.
    Child