C1 Chapter One

“You have got to be kidding me!” Sergeant Sean Duncan stared in disgusted disbelief at the hand-held cosmetic mirror that his commanding officer, Knight Commander Cade Williams, had just given to him. “What the heck am I supposed to do with this?” he asked.

His question was greeted with several raucous calls from the other men in the ranks, suggestions that he check to be sure his hair was in place or that he ask it who was the fairest of them all, which only caused the newest member of the Echo Team to scowl.

“Just secure it away,” Cade told him, and the others as well, as he finished handing out the mirrors that his executive officer, Master Sergeant Matthew Riley, had managed to procure. “It’s for backup purposes only. Pray you won’t need it.”

Heaven only knew where Riley appropriated them from, here in the midst of the Longfort Containment Facility, the Order’s most remote prison complex. Cade was just happy he had. If the night vision goggles didn’t work, the mirrors were going to be their best, and only, hope.

When he was done, he shot his exec a glance and the big black master sergeant called the rest of the team to order.

“All right, that’s enough. Pipe down and pay attention!”

The men were all members of the Holy Order of the Poor Knights of Christ of the Temple of Solomon, or the Knights Templar, as they were once more commonly known. Long thought to have been destroyed in the fourteenth century, the Templars had emerged from hiding during the desperate days of World War II and had joined with the very entity that had excommunicated them en-masse so many centuries before, the Catholic Church. Reborn as a secret military arm of the Vatican, the Templars were now charged with defending mankind from the supernatural in all its many forms.

Williams was in command of the Echo Team, the most prestigious of the elite strike units fielded by the Templars, and was as known for his ruthless efficiency as he was for his unorthodox methods. His command squad was made up of four men; himself, Lieutenant Sean Duncan, Master Sergeant Matthew Riley, and Sergeant Patrick Flynn. Riley and Flynn had been with him a long time; they had seen and heard things that would make the average Templar soldier sick with fear, but Cade had won them over with his leadership and his dedication to the cause. They would follow him anywhere, no question.

Duncan had only been with Echo for a just a few weeks, having spent several years before that on the Preceptor’s security detail, but in that time the unit’s strange and often enigmatic leader had become important to him. Cade had helped him begin to recognize that his unique gift was just that, a gift, rather than a temptation or a curse. And though he often had difficulty with Cade’s disregard for the Rule, the code of behavior that every knight was sworn to live by, he had come to quickly understand that he could learn a lot from the other man.

Cade waited until he had their undivided attention and then turned to the smaller man standing rather uneasily off to one side of the group and said, “Warden, if you wouldn’t mind?”

“Very good, Knight Commander.” The warden was a short, stout, balding individual who looked more like a banker from the Midwest than the man in charge of two hundred of the Order’s most dangerous prisoners. “As you know, Longfort prides itself in the fact that we’ve never had a major riot or a successful escape. Since the facility’s construction in 1957, we have done our utmost to keep the beings you bring to us safely locked away from the rest of humanity in a place where they can do no further harm. I say that simply to let you know how unusual and dangerous our current situation is.”

The warden cleared his throat and then continued. “I’m afraid our illustrious history caught up with us last night. Somewhere around 11 p.m. there was an incident in Cell Block D. We don’t know what caused it or even exactly what happened. What we do know is that while a guard was escorting another prisoner back to cell 26, the door to cell 28 came open instead and the Eretiku confined there was released into the main corridor.”

The men were completely silent now, their attention fixed firmly on the warden.

“Things rapidly went downhill. We lost the guard and all of the prisoners along that section of the walk before we even knew we had a problem. When we realized that we had a breach, we responded the way we are trained to respond. We locked down the wing and sent in a squad to try and secure the prisoners that had escaped.”

The warden looked out at them and every single knight in the room could see the regret plainly on his face. “It was exactly the wrong thing to do. We lost the entire squad, never mind a good portion of the prisoners, before we understood just what it was we were dealing with. When we did, we pulled out, sealed off that section of the complex, and called for help.”

Cade took over from there. “We’ve been ordered to secure the cell block and have authorization to put down the Eretiku and any of the other prisoners that we feel necessary in order to carry out that order. I don’t need to remind any of you just how difficult this is going to be; Delta lost five men during the initial capture. But we don’t dare delay any longer while waiting for reinforcements to be flown in because if that thing in there finds a way out of the complex we’ll have a much bigger problem on our hands.”

He picked up two stacks of photographs from the table beside him and handed one of them to Riley, who in turn made certain each member of the team received a copy.

“This is what you will be facing,” said Cade.

The photo showed an elderly woman in dark clothes and a shawl, her face turned mostly away from the camera.

Several of the men looked up at Cade, to see if he was joking. He most assuredly was not.

“And here is a picture of a guard who was unlucky enough to meet her gaze during the incident last night.”

Riley passed the second stack of photos around. This one showed a man in a hospital bed who appeared to be at the end of a long illness. His cheeks were sunken and hollow, his skin ghostly pale. Large, red weeping sores could be seen across the exposed skin of his face, neck, and hands and it was clear that they extended beneath his clothing as well. His hair had mostly fallen out; what was left was thin and lifeless.

“You’re looking at Private Jason Polnick, age 28. Yesterday he was perfectly healthy.” Cade paused, and then said, “They don’t expect him to live through the night.”

He looked them over, making certain that they understood the implications of what he was suggesting. “Some of you might not be familiar with the Eretiku. The name’s Russian and it refers to a woman who has sold her soul to the Devil and returns after death from the grave to prey on the life-force of the living. Don’t let the old crone appearance fool you. She’s incredibly fast, incredibly strong, and meeting her gaze infects you with a wasting sickness that makes Ebola look like a common cold. She also has the unique ability to fool your eyes into thinking she isn’t there. We’re going to be going in wearing night vision googles. NVGs refract the various wavelengths of light that they pick up and convert it to electrons; the image you see while wearing the googles is not the actual object, but a recreated image of that object. That should be enough to protect you.”

Cade paused and held up one of the mirrors. “If you have a problem with your NVGs, if they are damaged during the mission, you can use these to see as you make your way to the extraction point.”

Cade moved over to a wall where a map of the complex was tacked up. It resembled nothing more than six-pointed starfish, with each cell block arcing out like arms from the central hub. “We’ll station half of you here,” Cade said, pointing to the thick set of blast doors that cut the cell block off from the central hub. “A second group will be here.” The blast doors he pointed to this time were deeper down the block corridor and cut the cells off from the guard’s section.

“Flynn and Callavecchio, you’re with me. You’re the best I’ve got shot-wise, and we’re going to need everything we can bring to the table in that department because we’ll be shooting at a target we can only see in a three-inch mirror.”

The two men nodded, but didn’t say anything.

Cade looked over at Riley. “Once we’re inside the doors, the first thing we’ll do is plant some demo charges along the walls, rigged to a set of controls that we’ll leave with you. If things go badly for us, and you suspect that thing will find a way out, don’t hesitate to blow the place. We can always rebuild, but we can’t afford to let that thing loose.”

“Roger that,” said Riley, but it was clear that he wasn’t exactly thrilled with the order.

Cade turned back to the others. “We do this by the numbers, people, by the numbers. Watch your backs, keep your eyes open, and make absolutely certain you don’t look this thing in the eyes. Any questions?”

There weren’t any.

“All right then, let’s suit up.”