Free Adrift 2: Sundown by K.R. Griffiths Page A

be. Rennick was heading back to England, apparently following some ill-considered notion of blowing the whistle and letting the world know that vampires existed. He was, Pruitt said, determined to rally the world to fight them.
    The boy was a fool. Killing vampires had already ensured that—at a minimum—the remainder of the English nest would rise to retaliate. England was one of the most heavily-surveilled countries on the planet. The secret was out, all right. The world just hadn’t noticed it yet . But it would, and there would be fighting. For survival.
    It was only a matter of time.
    According to Pruitt, the remaining vampires in England had expected their kin to be returned to them before dawn; the deadline had long since passed. The vampires would not act in daylight, of course, which meant that Jennifer had around seven or eight hours to play with—and it would take at least six of those to actually get a team across the Atlantic. There was every chance that—even with a Gulfstream jet to make the journey—she would not be able to get a team to the UK before darkness began to fall.
    She had to act fast.
    She nodded to herself and picked up the phone, dialling a four-digit internal number.
    Her call was answered immediately.
    “Get a team together, Mr Mancini,” Jennifer said. “The best we have.”
    “Elimination or extraction?”
    “A little of each, I think.”
    Mancini grunted.
    “Where are we going?”
    “ You are going to the UK. To England.”
    “You’re not coming with us?”
    He sounded surprised. Jennifer had always enjoyed what Mancini sardonically labelled field trips before.
    “Not this time. The world is about to catch fire, Mr Mancini. I’ll be putting the ranch into lockdown as soon as you leave.”
    Another grunt. He sounded pissed off at her insistence on addressing him so formally. Given their history, that wasn’t so surprising. Pissing him off was, after all, the reason that she did it in the first place.
    “How long?” he snapped.
    Jennifer checked her watch.
    “I want your wheels up in thirty minutes, tops, and, Mr Mancini?”
    He sighed heavily.
    “Yeah?”
    “I want you to understand this up front: there’s a very good chance you’ll be…uh, going in hot , okay?”
    Mancini paused just long enough for Jennifer to hear the vague concern that lurked behind his silence. She knew full well that Mancini wasn’t a true believer in the existence of vampires, and it hadn’t ever mattered before: he was a hired gun who had no problem following orders which might lead to morally dubious outcomes, and he knew how to keep his mouth shut. That was more than enough to help with keeping the clerics and initiates at the ranch in line.
    Yet this was different; belief mattered now. She trusted in Mancini and his combat expertise implicitly, but she knew that no amount of battlefield experience could have prepared either him or his men for what they might be faced with if they were still on English soil when night fell.
    Bravado and training wouldn’t save him, not then. Belief might—if it helped Mancini to understand that there were some situations in which fleeing wasn’t just the best option; it was the only option.
    “Going in hot,” Mancini repeated, sounding dubious.
    “There is a very strong possibility that England will suffer a full-scale vampire rising in around seven hours. I need you to find and extract a man before that happens, and I don’t expect it will be easy. I know what you believe, but you need to believe this: if you engage the vampires, you will die. Trust me. Stay in the light.”
    Mancini coughed.
    “Yeah, all right. Understood. Who’s the target?”

 
8
     
    Bad things happened to homeless people all the time.
    Sam Thompson understood that depressingly obvious fact only too well, but even from a distance, when he looked at the bridge, some dark instinct tugged at him and he felt a twinge of alarm.
    The place looked completely deserted.
    The bridge,