Blood Oath Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  FORTY-SEVEN

  FORTY-EIGHT

  FORTY-NINE

  FIFTY

  FIFTY-ONE

  FIFTY-TWO

  FIFTY-THREE

  FIFTY-FOUR

  FIFTY-FIVE

  FIFTY-SIX

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  FIFTY-NINE

  SIXTY

  SIXTY-ONE

  SIXTY-TWO

  SIXTY-THREE

  SIXTY-FOUR

  SIXTY-FIVE

  SIXTY-SIX

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  SIXTY-NINE

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London

  WC2R ORL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland

  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell,

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  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  Copyright© 2010 by Christopher Farnsworth

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any

  printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy

  of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Farnsworth, Christopher

  Blood oath / Christopher Farnsworth.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-18773-9

  1. Vampires—Fiction. 2. United States President—Fiction. 1. Title. PS3606 A726B’.6—dc22

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To my mother and my brother, and to Jean, who believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself

  Some time in the year 1867, a fishing smack sailed from Boston. One of the sailors was [NAME REDACTED]. Two of the crew were missing, and were searched for. The captain went into the hold. He held up his lantern, and saw the body of one of these men, in the clutches of [NAME REDACTED] who was sucking blood from it. Near by was the body of the other sailor. It was bloodless.

  [NAME REDACTED] was tried, convicted, and sentenced to be hanged, but President Andrew Johnson commuted the sentence to life imprisonment.

  —CHARLES HOY FORT, Wild Talents

  ONE

  REPUBLIC OF KOSOVO

  After two extended tours in Iraq, Army Specialist Wayne Denton thought he’d never be cold again. A That was before he was sent to Kosovo. He stepped off the plane and realized it was, in fact, possible for Hell to freeze over. The war in Kosovo, supposedly over for ten years, seemed to have been preserved under a thick layer of ice.

  There were still bomb craters and rubble in the streets where the U.N. peacekeepers patrolled. Armed bandits still hijacked cars at night. The Russian Mafiya smuggled guns and drugs. All the while, the Serbian army waited at the border, pacing like an angry dog behind a fence.

  Wayne had been at a window in an abandoned building behind his M24 sniper rifle for six hours now. The boredom he could handle—but the cold was killing him. He wasn’t even allowed to use chemical hand warmers; his sergeant said the bad guys had thermal imaging capability.

  They didn’t look that sharp, Wayne thought. He checked them again through his scope, careful not to touch his skin to the freezing metal.

  They waited in the courtyard of the bombed-out apartments, sixteen stories down from his position. Bunch of big, unibrow, Cro-Magnon SOBs, their hairlines almost meeting their beards. All wearing trench coats. The cold didn’t seem to bother them at all.

  They were called the Vukodlak, which was supposed to be Serbian for the Wolf Pack, or something. He hadn’t been paying attention to that part of the briefing.

  They looked as bored as Wayne felt. He wondered, not for the first time, why his Army Ranger unit was babysitting a bunch of former death-squad thugs. Surely the locals could handle this.

  Hell, Wayne could end it right now, all by himself. The Wolf Pack was a little over a hundred yards away-point-blank range for any sniper. He could kill each man on the ground before they knew what was happening. He’d done it before.

  Back home in Casper, Wyoming, Wayne was the quiet kid in the back of the class. He wasn’t unpopular, he was just there. Sort of taking up space, drifting along in life.

  Then 9/11 hit, and everyone in his family assumed he’d put off college and enlist, because they were at war now, and that’s what kids do in a war, right? They join the army. He put his community college application away, unfinished, and signed up at a recruiting station in a mini-mall.

  He was surprised to find his talent for fading into the background becoming useful for the first time. He was selected for Sniper School, then joined the Rangers.

  He never thought he’d get used to the blood and death—much less delivering it. He found he could simply focus on the quiet place in himself. That was where he pulled the trigger, and that was where he stacked the bodies. Sometimes he worried about what would happen when he got home�
��if the bodies would all spill out into the rest of him, or if the quiet place would just sit there, untouched, and he’d go on as normal as ever, for the rest of his life.

  He wasn’t sure which was worse, actually. He tried not to think about it too much.

  He kept his shit together. He survived. By the end of his first tour, the other guys in his unit looked at him like a veteran. They depended on him.

  He was no longer just a placeholder. In fact, he was kind of a badass. After three years, he thought he’d seen it all.

  Which is why he was annoyed, but not surprised, when his unit was pulled off the active hunt for an al-Qaeda cell and sent to this winter wonderland. The army had its own way of doing things. Orders were orders.

  Wayne’s CO had been more tight-lipped than usual, but the rumors made their way down.

  When Kosovo declared independence, that didn’t go over too well with the Serb neighbors. A bunch of Serbian nationals walked past the shack that served as a border checkpoint, and immediately began rioting in front of the U.S. Embassy. Some buildings got torched, and in the confusion, someone lost something important. Something big. It turned up with the Wolf Pack, who offered it to the highest bidder. The U.S. wanted it back.

  Above all, the whole thing had to be kept quiet. The Rangers were good at quiet.

  After they got to Kosovo, they spent a day and a half tracking the Serbs. But when they found the Wolf Pack, they were told to stay back and wait.

  All the sergeant said was, move in, set up a ring, and make sure none of the Serbs left it. Questions were met with the kind of silence that implied a court-martial in the near future.

  The CO got a message from way up the chain of command. A flight came in from Ansbach in Germany, and he sent a couple of Rangers to the airfield. They came back with a duffel full of cash.

  Wayne figured it out then. The U.S. might not negotiate with terrorists, but it would sure as hell bribe them. He had seen plenty of it first-hand in Iraq, with CIA spooks giving away stacks of hundred-dollar bills stuffed in the aptly named Halliburton briefcases. Just one of those stacks could have bought his parents a new house. But the funds were ear-marked for the people busy shooting at their son.

  The only other thing they brought back from the plane was what the army called a “transfer case.” But everyone knew what it was: a casket, used to take the bodies of dead soldiers home.

  It gave Wayne the creeps. He was glad to take his sniper position and get away from it.

  Wayne decided he hated this James Bond crap.

  But orders were orders.

  The sun dipped behind the empty buildings. It would be full dark in a matter of minutes. Wayne began to worry about his toes falling off, like loose ice cubes inside his boots.

  Then his radio crackled to life. “Stand ready,” the CO told the unit. “We’re going to open the package.”

  The sun vanished completely behind the horizon. The dark came down like a sudden rain.

  Wayne switched his scope to night-vision and checked on the Wolf Pack again—and nearly jumped back. One of the Serbs was staring right up into the window. As if he could see him there.

  Impossible. He was totally concealed. The Serb would have to be able to see in the dark. He looked back through the scope.

  The Serb was still staring. Had to be a coincidence. People stare at things, look around aimlessly, when they’re bored. It didn’t mean anything.

  Then the man made a gun with his thumb and forefinger, and pointed it directly at Wayne. And winked.

  Wayne’s finger twitched involuntarily on the trigger, because every instinct he had screamed to kill the man.

  Despite the cold, Wayne started to sweat.

  The man moved out of the range of the scope. Wayne dialed back the magnification quickly, to get a view of the whole courtyard.

  Another man was being dragged by two of the Serbs. He was dressed in all-black Special Forces fatigues, without insignia—the kind the spooks loved to wear, even in broad daylight in the desert, when the temperature got above 120 degrees. Then they bitched about how the dust and sand got all over the neat creases in their clothes.

  Some covert ops cowboy, and they’d have to bail his ass out. Still, Wayne wondered—where did he come from? They had the area staked out a mile in every direction, and he’d never seen the guy arrive. Sure, he could have missed it ... but there would have been some radio chatter. Something.

  He shoved the thoughts away, along with the cold and the fear that had seized him a moment before. It all vanished as he went through his pre-shoot rituals. The world narrowed to the field of focus through his scope. It was comforting.

  The Serbs kicked the operative to the ground. Wayne winced—that looked like it hurt—but the man didn’t. He didn’t even seem bothered. Or scared.

  He was dragged up, and then kicked down again—made to kneel before the leader of the Wolf Pack. The Alpha Male, Wayne guessed. The biggest guy in the group, a wildly bearded man at least six-five, packed with muscle. He looked like he could eat everyone else in the courtyard for lunch.

  Wayne heard a burst of Serbian through his earpiece. The spook was wired with his own radio, broadcasting on the Rangers’ channel.

  The operative’s mike picked up the sound of the Alpha’s laughter, and Wayne felt cold again.

  “Please don’t attempt to speak in my language,” the Alpha Male said. “It’s insulting.” Crisp, clear English.

  The man shrugged. “Fine,” he said. Wayne was impressed. This guy didn’t sound the least bit scared. “You’re the Vukodlak, then?”

  “We are. But you do not appear to have what I want.”

  “I need to confirm that you have the object.”

  “Why don’t you ask your soldiers? They’ve been here all day.”

  That’s when the Alpha pointed up into the air—directly at Wayne, then at the positions of his fellow Rangers, all around the apartments.

  Impossible, Wayne thought. Totally frigging impossible ...

  He clicked his radio on. “Sarge, we’re made—” Panic in his voice, despite his best effort.

  “Shut up,” the sergeant snapped back. “Maintain radio silence.”

  Because of this exchange, Wayne only caught the tail end of what the Alpha Male said.

  “—your big plan? They would come running to your rescue? We will be chewing on their hearts before they pull their triggers.”

  The Serb turned back toward Wayne. This time there was no doubt. The Serb stared right at him. And smiled, with perfect teeth that glowed in the night-vision scope.

  It took everything Wayne had not to get up and run.

  More laughter. All the Serbs were practically howling now.

  The operative spoke after the tumult died down.

  “You’ll get the cash, as we agreed, once I have the item.” He sounded bored.

  Brass balls, Wayne thought.

  The Alpha considered this for a moment. Apparently he wanted the cash. He nodded, and two of his thugs went into a tent.

  They emerged a second later with a metal box, marked with U.S. Army stencils. Wayne couldn’t read them with the scope, but it looked like the sort of thing you didn’t want to open.

  The Alpha opened it.

  For a moment, a light bloomed in Wayne’s scope. It played hell with the optics, like the night-vision didn’t know how to adjust for it. Then it cast an eerie glow around the courtyard.

  Oh, Christ, Wayne thought. They have a nuke. The secrecy all made sense now. The army would do anything to keep a nuke out of the hands of terrorists. Even send a whole Ranger unit into an ambush.

  He could see the weird glow reflect on the operative. He looked too young to be out in the field alone. His features were perfectly calm—way too calm. Maybe they had doped him up, so he didn’t know he was going to be a sacrificial lamb.

  Wayne peered intently inside the box. It seemed too small to hold a nuclear weapon, but he heard they could fit those things inside suitcases
now. Maybe this was just the next generation. The glow made it hard to see, but he could have sworn the eerie light was coming from something shaped like a human hand....

  Whatever it was, the operative nodded, and the Serbs closed the lid. The glow switched off like a lamp, and the scope’s optics went back to normal.

  The operative looked at the Alpha Male. “Some things shouldn’t be touched,” he said.

  The scorn in the Alpha’s voice came through Wayne’s earpiece. “Then you should have been more careful with it.”

  “You’re right.” The operative stood. “Drop it,” he said into his radio.

  Across the courtyard from Wayne, about ten stories down, there was movement in one of the blown-out windows. He saw a guy from his unit toss the black duffel bag.

  It landed a few feet from the Serbs. One went over to it, pawed it open, and examined the contents.

  He displayed the open bag to the Alpha, showing the stacks of cash.

  The Alpha frowned. “We really prefer euros,” he said.

  “You get what I have.”

  The operative picked up the box by its handle, and turned to go.

  Wayne couldn’t believe it. It couldn’t be that simple.

  Of course it couldn’t. The Serbs closed ranks, blocking the man’s path out of the courtyard.

  “I don’t think so,” the Alpha said, with his perfect enunciation.

  The operative didn’t turn around to face him. His shoulders sagged for a moment, as if he was very tired. Then he straightened up again.

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “I promised my boys some sport. American soldiers ought to be able to hold out longer than our usual game.”

  The Serbs were closer to the man now. Moving in. Wayne didn’t know why he was so close to panic again. This made no sense. None of them had pulled a weapon. They didn’t seem to have any guns. They were covered by an armed force in a superior position. They should be the ones who were afraid.

  And yet, they seemed ready to tear the operative apart with their bare hands.

  “Walk away now,” the operative said. His voice was stern, like he was being firm with an unruly child.

  The Alpha snarled. “You don’t order me around,” he said. “Your teeth aren’t sharp enough.”