Red Eye - 02 by James Lovegrove Page A

worked methodically, slicing along the upper rim of the container. Steel glowed and dripped like lava. When he had cut through one end and two corners, he halted, nodding to Jacobsen and Giacoia. They grasped the edges of the container top and heaved backwards with all their might. The top curled upwards. It was like peeling the lid off a giant sardine tin. Metal screeched and groaned as it buckled and bent.
    When they had created a large enough gap, the two men leapt down into the container’s interior, and Child joined them. They unshipped MP5 submachine guns.
    Crimson eyes glittered furiously in the container’s dark recesses. Guttural Polish curses were flung at the intruders, but this was all the vampires could do. They couldn’t go near them, not as long as the three men stood in the protective aura of the sun’s slanting beams. They could only cower and snarl.
    “Fire at will,” Jacobsen ordered, and he and Red Eye Two and Red Eye Five let rip, unleashing salvos of Fraxinus rounds in scything arcs. The vampires were pinned down by the gunfire. Bullets whittled through their flimsy shelters and makeshift barricades. Ricochets whined in all directions. One by one, shots found their mark. Vampires erupted into dust, shrieking horribly.
    “I’m out,” Giacoia announced, and Jacobsen and Child soon emptied their magazines as well. With the echoes of their holocaust still ringing in their ears, the three of them advanced towards the other end of the container.
    A number of vampires lay wounded, writhing in agony. All had been winged by a Fraxinus, and the bullet’s ash-wood content was slowly poisoning them, eating away their flesh. The Red Eyes drew sidearms and heart-shot the vampires at point blank range.
    Jacobsen surveyed their handiwork. A vampire kill was a hell of a lot neater and cleaner than the ordinary kind of kill, you could at least say that for it. No gore, very little mess. It was almost like not killing at all.
    And for that reason, vaguely dissatisfying.
    “Good work, men,” Jacobsen said. “Let’s bail.”
     
     
    B ACK IN THE Hummer, trundling northward on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, Jacobsen got on the phone to the money man.
    “You catch that, sir?”
    “Every second of it,” came the reply in a thick, nasal Boston accent that stretched certain vowels almost to breaking point. “Another textbook takedown. I’m as proud as can be of you fellows.”
    “Just doing what we’re paid for,” said Jacobsen. The connection was good, but there was an unusually long delay on it. The price of dense, secure signal encryption. “How many more before we’ve built up a persuasive argument?”
    “That’s for me to decide, soldier, not you.”
    Jacobsen hated the way the money man called him soldier . Only soldiers got to call other soldiers that. It was condescending and disrespectful.
    He bit back his irritation, thinking of the $50,000 completion fee that was being wired to his checking account probably right this minute and the slightly smaller but still considerable sums that were making their way into his teammates’ accounts. You did not lose your temper with the person employing you. That was the golden rule of mercenary work. You took whatever shit the boss dished out, and you smiled and asked for more. So, not much different from the army, then.
    “Understood,” he said. “Just eager to be getting on with the job.”
    “And that’s a very healthy attitude to have,” drawled the Bostonian. “Now, you and your unit toddle off back to base, get some rest, have yourselves some of that tasty human claret I lay on for you, and leave the forward planning and the strategising to me. How about that?”
    Jacobsen snapped the phone shut and stared out at the East River and the sumptuous rise-and-fall span of the Brooklyn Bridge towering against the pristine blue sky. His jaw clenched and unclenched.
    “How much do you hate that bastard?” said Red Eye Three beside him as she drove.