United Nations Disengagement Observer Force Zone (UNDOF),
Golan Heights, Israel.
30 miles south of Anjar.
Field Agent Robert Hall leaned back in his chair and kicked his feet up against his desk, reading over the police reports collected from the Lebanese Law Enforcement concerning their probe into the charter ship. One attempted date rape, one missing Italian fugitive, and one head sized crater in the wall of one of the ship’s compartments. Hall skipped reading and just looked at the pictures. The first was a picture of a blond haired, blue eyed bombshell from Uppsala, Sweden. Olga Sundvik.
The next picture showed the head sized crater that had a spider web of impact cracks in the drywall. The next three pictures showed the actual metrics of the crater. An off camera hand was holding a barely readable ruler up to the hole in an assortment of angles. About six inches wide, four and a half inches deep. Faceplant.
The next picture was a pencil drawn police sketch of the would-be rapist, Nico Coscarelli.
Lt. Colding and Agent Eric Fichtner walked into the office.
“That was a bust,” Colding said, sitting down on a sofa and burying his head in his hands.
“Is that the dossier from the charter ship?” Agent Fichtner asked.
“Yeah,” Hall said, handing the folder to still standing Fichtner.
“Oh! Hello, damsel in distress,” Agent Fichtner said, looking at the pictures. He said nothing as he flipped through the pictures of the hole in the wall.
“This must be the story’s bad guy,” Fichtner said as he saw Nico’s picture, then flipped to the next police sketch.
“And this must be Prince Charm-…” Fichtner cut himself off, stunned by the pencil drawn sketch he was looking at. Fair hair, fair skin, the angular face.
“Hey, Ice,” Fichtner said to Colding who still had his head in his hands, staring at the coffee table.
“Isn’t this the guy we saw in the back of that hearse?” Fichtner asked as he placed the police sketch on the coffee table.
Dead as Latin.
* * *
Ansel awoke from his sleep. Having been awake the entire day prior in addition to the two nights, he was due for a full day’s rest. With a stinging stiff arm, he pushed open the coffin’s lid. It didn’t open all the way due to the fact that he was still in the back of the hearse, but it was open just enough for him to slide out. He grabbed his trench coat and shemagh from the foot of the coffin, where he’d stored them.
Ansel stooped inside the hearse, his head occasionally hit the ceiling, and the rest of his body either brushed the coffin or else the interior walls of the vehicle. It was more cramped outside of the coffin than it was inside of it.
The vampire inched his way to the back of the hearse, popped the hatch and crawled out of the vehicle. Ansel donned his black trench coat and threw the shemagh loosely about his neck. He took a deep breath of the clean, night air as he shook off the rigor mortis.
It was a short climb up the nearby mountain range, only two miles to the Syrian border. Then another twenty miles to Damascus, and, hopefully, Cabal.
Ansel rewrapped the rosary around his hand as he looked up at the night sky full of stars. The night was young. He would walk, he would pray, and he would hunt.
* * *
Lt. Grant Colding and the five SEALs assigned to him quickly donned their combat gear. Slipping black tactical hoods over their heads, the operators looked reminiscent of ninjas- ninjas that also wore desert Battle Dress Uniforms and tactical helmets.
Grant cinched his black helmet to his head, then checked his microphone.
“Check, check, am I coming in clear?” Colding said into his throat mike.
An assortment of ‘Hooyah’s and ‘Roger that, sir’ came from his team.
Lt. Colding inserted a full magazine into his Sig Saur 9mm pistol, racked the slide, then holstered it on his thigh. He then grabbed the pump action 8 gauge shotgun from the weapons locker and checked the chamber to make sure it was clear, then inserted a single beanbag round and cocked the weapon, then inserted four more flechette rounds. Most shotgun shells were filled with a small handful shot, or slightly larger balls of lead that would spread out in a widening cone when fired. Flechette rounds were basically filled with small nails. If the beanbag round didn’t stun (or kill) their target, Grant would be playing for keeps.
The SEALs jogged out of the building into the night, and then ran full on for the black hawk helicopter out on the helipad, its rotors already spinning up.
* * *
The Anti-Lebanon mountain range separates Lebanon from Syria, and Ansel had only a little more than a mile to reach the top of the peak. Syria was just beyond that peak. Another seventeen miles to Damascus, and hopefully Cabal. The view of the stars was obstructed in large part due to the mountain and its steep rise. Ansel could have run the distance with great ease and made it to Damascus in a matter of minutes, but he seized opportunities like this to clear his mind and meditate. He was damned, and he considered the slow walk up the mountain a minor penance.
Ansel paused briefly and stared up at the heavens. It was a wonder to think of man’s history of looking at the stars- the more he knew, the further they were. Men of the 12th century couldn’t fathom distances in terms of light years, let alone billions of light years. Back then, through the eyes of simpler men in simpler times, the stars were closer. Seen through modern eyes, the heavens were impossibly far. Heaven had itself become impossible.
Ansel looked away from the stars and the mountain’s peak, casting his gaze briefly on his feet, and the dirt he tread. Heaven and earth, seen through Damnation’s eyes.
Ansel perished the thought and continued his ascent.
* * *
Everything was green and fuzzy.
Lt. Colding adjusted his night vision, double checking to make sure the equipment was working properly. His team mates, as well as the rest of the world, were awash with green and yellow and black in the infrared goggles. Grant toggled the infrared night vision off while toggling the thermal imaging function.
Everything warm was a pale gray, everything hot was white. The rest of the world was black. The general form of the inside of the helicopter was gray, punctuated by white bodies of humans inhabiting the cabin and cockpit. Grant turned his equipment on standby and lifted his goggles, letting his eyes readjust to the night.
The helicopter was cruising low to the ground at an easy 160 miles per hour. Patches of white snow reflecting pale moonlight raced by the open bay doors on the helo’s port side. The mountain air was crisp and clean, and Grant relished the relative calm of the moment.
Grant steadied himself as he got up and approached the cockpit. Standing between the pilot and copilot, Grant surveyed the helo’s dash as well as the upcoming terrain. For a moment, the brightly lit grid panel of instruments reminded him of seeing a city at night. He tried to not let that distract him.
“There, set us down there,” Grant said pointing a cluster of rubble on the mountain side.
“You sure about that sir?” The pilot asked, thinking this slap-dash mission was hair-brained at best.
“Positive,” Colding said. He wasn’t.
“Roger that, setting us down in 5…” the pilot said.
Grant turned around and instead of going back to his seat, stood at the starboard bay door and grabbed onto the hand hold in the ceiling.
“Go North ten clicks after you drop us, then circle back to get us when activate the I.R. beacon!” Colding said.
“Roger that,” the pilot said again, agitation building in his voice.
The helo slowed and came to a still hover over the landing zone, then descended to a few feet above level ground. Shotgun at the ready, Grant and the rest of his six man team jumped out onto the rocky terrain and jogged to the rubble pile while the helicopter thundered off into oblivion.
Grant used hand signals to spread his team out into ambush positions. While from the air the location looked to have been merely a pile of rocks, on the ground the pile more closely resembled Roman ruins. In the green and yellow fog of night vision, Grant could easily make out the repeating structural arches, broken columns and half destroyed stone block walls.
Lt. Colding and Petty Officers Kyer and Gosling took up positions near the western perimeter of the ruins. Petty Officers Hernandez, Gosling and Wasnick spread out just beyond the ruins, taking cover behind boulders. They knew their target was moving West to East and would be coming down the nearby summit. If he comes up over an unexpected path, they may need to relocate in order to intercept him.
Grant Colding and his fireteam waited in their ambush positions, breathing in the cool night air with calm anticipation.
* * *
Ansel had reached summit, and the sky had opened into a wide expanse of brilliant diamonds twinkling in the tar of black night. Before him, far below, was the country of Syria. At the foot of the mountain was a quilted patchwork of farms and fields, and beyond them was city of Damascus, almost as brilliant as the night sky.
* * *
There. Through his night vision goggles, Grant spotted a figure of a man at the mountain’s peak. Due to the distance and his goggles’ poor resolution, the figure was almost rendered as a shrub or a small tree. Grant activated the InfraRed beacon to signal for the helicopter’s approach. While the beacon could not normally be seen by the unaided eye, the whole world seen through the green and yellow of night vision pulsed with the IR beacon’s seemingly yellow !FLASH!-!FLASH!-!FLASH!
Squinting, and also distracted by the beacon’s flashing, Lt. Colding lost track of the figure at the top of the mountain. He switched to thermal imaging and was no longer distracted by the beacon’s flashing. In the blackness he saw the hot white silhouettes of his team mates staked out in the ruins and behind boulders. Looking up the mountain side, however, there were no heat signatures. Nothing. What the hell? The low, dull sound of *whump*whump*whump* could be heard as the Black Hawk helicopter came in on a fast approach.
Frustrated, Colding switched back to infra-red, rendering the world once again into a hazy green mire. His target was nowhere to be seen on the mountain. He simply disappeared. No way he could’ve closed that distance.
Grant didn’t dare say a word. Instead, he clicked his throat mike on and off three times in quick succession, causing everybody’s ear pieces to cut in and out of static. It was a signal for a pre-arranged plan to spread out and quietly hunt down the target.
The helicopter was much closer and much louder now, the *whump*sounded more like thud-thud-thud-thud. Were it daylight, the chopper would probably be clearly visible.
Lt. Colding watched as his fireteam had begun to spread out. As he tried to take a step forward he felt an arm reach from behind and hook around his throat, yanking him back. He couldn’t yell, he couldn’t breathe.
Though slung to his body, Grant’s shotgun fell to his side as he threw his body backwards into his unseen assailant and slammed his right elbow into his chest. The helicopter was over head now, its rotors generating a perpetual thunder in the night. The pilot turned on the nose mounted spot light and pointed at Lt. Colding and the dark figure that he was fighting.
“Goddammit!!!” Grant shouted as the helicopter’s blindingly bright white spotlight overloaded his night vision equipment. In under a second, Grant ripped his night vision equipment off, tossed it aside and shouldered his shotgun, pointing the barrel at Ansel’s face.
The pupils of Ansel’s eyes didn’t contract like a human’s would. They narrowed into slim, black vertical slits, like a cat. His blond hair was being whipped about by the wind of the helicopter’s rotors.
The rest of the team surrounded Grant and Ansel, training their rifles on the vampire. Over the thunderous din of the helicopter, a single BOOM was heard, as Grant shot Ansel in the face.
30 miles south of Anjar.
Field Agent Robert Hall leaned back in his chair and kicked his feet up against his desk, reading over the police reports collected from the Lebanese Law Enforcement concerning their probe into the charter ship. One attempted date rape, one missing Italian fugitive, and one head sized crater in the wall of one of the ship’s compartments. Hall skipped reading and just looked at the pictures. The first was a picture of a blond haired, blue eyed bombshell from Uppsala, Sweden. Olga Sundvik.
The next picture showed the head sized crater that had a spider web of impact cracks in the drywall. The next three pictures showed the actual metrics of the crater. An off camera hand was holding a barely readable ruler up to the hole in an assortment of angles. About six inches wide, four and a half inches deep. Faceplant.
The next picture was a pencil drawn police sketch of the would-be rapist, Nico Coscarelli.
Lt. Colding and Agent Eric Fichtner walked into the office.
“That was a bust,” Colding said, sitting down on a sofa and burying his head in his hands.
“Is that the dossier from the charter ship?” Agent Fichtner asked.
“Yeah,” Hall said, handing the folder to still standing Fichtner.
“Oh! Hello, damsel in distress,” Agent Fichtner said, looking at the pictures. He said nothing as he flipped through the pictures of the hole in the wall.
“This must be the story’s bad guy,” Fichtner said as he saw Nico’s picture, then flipped to the next police sketch.
“And this must be Prince Charm-…” Fichtner cut himself off, stunned by the pencil drawn sketch he was looking at. Fair hair, fair skin, the angular face.
“Hey, Ice,” Fichtner said to Colding who still had his head in his hands, staring at the coffee table.
“Isn’t this the guy we saw in the back of that hearse?” Fichtner asked as he placed the police sketch on the coffee table.
Dead as Latin.
* * *
Ansel awoke from his sleep. Having been awake the entire day prior in addition to the two nights, he was due for a full day’s rest. With a stinging stiff arm, he pushed open the coffin’s lid. It didn’t open all the way due to the fact that he was still in the back of the hearse, but it was open just enough for him to slide out. He grabbed his trench coat and shemagh from the foot of the coffin, where he’d stored them.
Ansel stooped inside the hearse, his head occasionally hit the ceiling, and the rest of his body either brushed the coffin or else the interior walls of the vehicle. It was more cramped outside of the coffin than it was inside of it.
The vampire inched his way to the back of the hearse, popped the hatch and crawled out of the vehicle. Ansel donned his black trench coat and threw the shemagh loosely about his neck. He took a deep breath of the clean, night air as he shook off the rigor mortis.
It was a short climb up the nearby mountain range, only two miles to the Syrian border. Then another twenty miles to Damascus, and, hopefully, Cabal.
Ansel rewrapped the rosary around his hand as he looked up at the night sky full of stars. The night was young. He would walk, he would pray, and he would hunt.
* * *
Lt. Grant Colding and the five SEALs assigned to him quickly donned their combat gear. Slipping black tactical hoods over their heads, the operators looked reminiscent of ninjas- ninjas that also wore desert Battle Dress Uniforms and tactical helmets.
Grant cinched his black helmet to his head, then checked his microphone.
“Check, check, am I coming in clear?” Colding said into his throat mike.
An assortment of ‘Hooyah’s and ‘Roger that, sir’ came from his team.
Lt. Colding inserted a full magazine into his Sig Saur 9mm pistol, racked the slide, then holstered it on his thigh. He then grabbed the pump action 8 gauge shotgun from the weapons locker and checked the chamber to make sure it was clear, then inserted a single beanbag round and cocked the weapon, then inserted four more flechette rounds. Most shotgun shells were filled with a small handful shot, or slightly larger balls of lead that would spread out in a widening cone when fired. Flechette rounds were basically filled with small nails. If the beanbag round didn’t stun (or kill) their target, Grant would be playing for keeps.
The SEALs jogged out of the building into the night, and then ran full on for the black hawk helicopter out on the helipad, its rotors already spinning up.
* * *
The Anti-Lebanon mountain range separates Lebanon from Syria, and Ansel had only a little more than a mile to reach the top of the peak. Syria was just beyond that peak. Another seventeen miles to Damascus, and hopefully Cabal. The view of the stars was obstructed in large part due to the mountain and its steep rise. Ansel could have run the distance with great ease and made it to Damascus in a matter of minutes, but he seized opportunities like this to clear his mind and meditate. He was damned, and he considered the slow walk up the mountain a minor penance.
Ansel paused briefly and stared up at the heavens. It was a wonder to think of man’s history of looking at the stars- the more he knew, the further they were. Men of the 12th century couldn’t fathom distances in terms of light years, let alone billions of light years. Back then, through the eyes of simpler men in simpler times, the stars were closer. Seen through modern eyes, the heavens were impossibly far. Heaven had itself become impossible.
Ansel looked away from the stars and the mountain’s peak, casting his gaze briefly on his feet, and the dirt he tread. Heaven and earth, seen through Damnation’s eyes.
Ansel perished the thought and continued his ascent.
* * *
Everything was green and fuzzy.
Lt. Colding adjusted his night vision, double checking to make sure the equipment was working properly. His team mates, as well as the rest of the world, were awash with green and yellow and black in the infrared goggles. Grant toggled the infrared night vision off while toggling the thermal imaging function.
Everything warm was a pale gray, everything hot was white. The rest of the world was black. The general form of the inside of the helicopter was gray, punctuated by white bodies of humans inhabiting the cabin and cockpit. Grant turned his equipment on standby and lifted his goggles, letting his eyes readjust to the night.
The helicopter was cruising low to the ground at an easy 160 miles per hour. Patches of white snow reflecting pale moonlight raced by the open bay doors on the helo’s port side. The mountain air was crisp and clean, and Grant relished the relative calm of the moment.
Grant steadied himself as he got up and approached the cockpit. Standing between the pilot and copilot, Grant surveyed the helo’s dash as well as the upcoming terrain. For a moment, the brightly lit grid panel of instruments reminded him of seeing a city at night. He tried to not let that distract him.
“There, set us down there,” Grant said pointing a cluster of rubble on the mountain side.
“You sure about that sir?” The pilot asked, thinking this slap-dash mission was hair-brained at best.
“Positive,” Colding said. He wasn’t.
“Roger that, setting us down in 5…” the pilot said.
Grant turned around and instead of going back to his seat, stood at the starboard bay door and grabbed onto the hand hold in the ceiling.
“Go North ten clicks after you drop us, then circle back to get us when activate the I.R. beacon!” Colding said.
“Roger that,” the pilot said again, agitation building in his voice.
The helo slowed and came to a still hover over the landing zone, then descended to a few feet above level ground. Shotgun at the ready, Grant and the rest of his six man team jumped out onto the rocky terrain and jogged to the rubble pile while the helicopter thundered off into oblivion.
Grant used hand signals to spread his team out into ambush positions. While from the air the location looked to have been merely a pile of rocks, on the ground the pile more closely resembled Roman ruins. In the green and yellow fog of night vision, Grant could easily make out the repeating structural arches, broken columns and half destroyed stone block walls.
Lt. Colding and Petty Officers Kyer and Gosling took up positions near the western perimeter of the ruins. Petty Officers Hernandez, Gosling and Wasnick spread out just beyond the ruins, taking cover behind boulders. They knew their target was moving West to East and would be coming down the nearby summit. If he comes up over an unexpected path, they may need to relocate in order to intercept him.
Grant Colding and his fireteam waited in their ambush positions, breathing in the cool night air with calm anticipation.
* * *
Ansel had reached summit, and the sky had opened into a wide expanse of brilliant diamonds twinkling in the tar of black night. Before him, far below, was the country of Syria. At the foot of the mountain was a quilted patchwork of farms and fields, and beyond them was city of Damascus, almost as brilliant as the night sky.
* * *
There. Through his night vision goggles, Grant spotted a figure of a man at the mountain’s peak. Due to the distance and his goggles’ poor resolution, the figure was almost rendered as a shrub or a small tree. Grant activated the InfraRed beacon to signal for the helicopter’s approach. While the beacon could not normally be seen by the unaided eye, the whole world seen through the green and yellow of night vision pulsed with the IR beacon’s seemingly yellow !FLASH!-!FLASH!-!FLASH!
Squinting, and also distracted by the beacon’s flashing, Lt. Colding lost track of the figure at the top of the mountain. He switched to thermal imaging and was no longer distracted by the beacon’s flashing. In the blackness he saw the hot white silhouettes of his team mates staked out in the ruins and behind boulders. Looking up the mountain side, however, there were no heat signatures. Nothing. What the hell? The low, dull sound of *whump*whump*whump* could be heard as the Black Hawk helicopter came in on a fast approach.
Frustrated, Colding switched back to infra-red, rendering the world once again into a hazy green mire. His target was nowhere to be seen on the mountain. He simply disappeared. No way he could’ve closed that distance.
Grant didn’t dare say a word. Instead, he clicked his throat mike on and off three times in quick succession, causing everybody’s ear pieces to cut in and out of static. It was a signal for a pre-arranged plan to spread out and quietly hunt down the target.
The helicopter was much closer and much louder now, the *whump*sounded more like thud-thud-thud-thud. Were it daylight, the chopper would probably be clearly visible.
Lt. Colding watched as his fireteam had begun to spread out. As he tried to take a step forward he felt an arm reach from behind and hook around his throat, yanking him back. He couldn’t yell, he couldn’t breathe.
Though slung to his body, Grant’s shotgun fell to his side as he threw his body backwards into his unseen assailant and slammed his right elbow into his chest. The helicopter was over head now, its rotors generating a perpetual thunder in the night. The pilot turned on the nose mounted spot light and pointed at Lt. Colding and the dark figure that he was fighting.
“Goddammit!!!” Grant shouted as the helicopter’s blindingly bright white spotlight overloaded his night vision equipment. In under a second, Grant ripped his night vision equipment off, tossed it aside and shouldered his shotgun, pointing the barrel at Ansel’s face.
The pupils of Ansel’s eyes didn’t contract like a human’s would. They narrowed into slim, black vertical slits, like a cat. His blond hair was being whipped about by the wind of the helicopter’s rotors.
The rest of the team surrounded Grant and Ansel, training their rifles on the vampire. Over the thunderous din of the helicopter, a single BOOM was heard, as Grant shot Ansel in the face.
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