The path into battle, crucial in ensuring their plan worked, was one of the many hidden escape tunnels leading out of the compound, similar to the one Lash and Ingrid had used to escape the safe house in Frankfurt. A quick journey down a dimly-lit concrete corridor that put them nearly half a kilometer behind the enemy's position then they were easing their way through snow-covered trees, weapons ready.
As they slipped through the trees, Lash couldn't help but smile ferally. It felt good to be on the hunt again, garbed in familiar gear and with a high-powered weapon in his hand. And there was no greater prey to be hunted than vampires themselves! As they eased through the trees in the darkness, he could feel his blood fairly sing through his veins at the anticipation of hunting down those Hand agents and their allies that were currently threatening Van Tallert's holdings and soaking the ground with their blood!
His senses already tuned to pick up the slightest variations in the environment thanks to him being in full hunter mode, the first thing he noticed was a whiff of diesel and lubricant from the machines the Hand agents were using. On the heels of that, the scent of vampires and a handful of human familiars, each of them confident and at ease. And why wouldn't they be? They had successfully laid siege to one of the most powerful Ventru in Western Europe and they were nearing their goal of breaching the compound without retaliation from a Ventru-led force.
That thought tightened Lash's smile. No retaliation until today! There was no denying it: he was fiercely looking forward to turning the tables on their erstwhile pursuers and showing them the wrath of the Ventru. Their blood would be spilled in a tidal wave of fury, their bodies left to rot, so swore Ingamon Lash!
Night vision caught the rear elements of the nearest assault, enhancing the natural vampire ability to see in the dark until it was as bright as noonday. With curt hand gestures, Truk sent elements of his team to the left and right to target the flanking enemy units. Then he, Lash and two other assets were stealthily working their way towards the heavy, half-track trucks occupying the rear that were carrying the munitions for the tanks.
Taking the right, Lash kept his sights on the three Hand agents in front of him, easing closer as they spoke in low voices, their postures loose and easy, unconcerned about any threat from their rear. Only at the last moment did he sling his weapon and draw the karambit he had sheathed on his thigh. With a curved blade and a fitted grip, it made the perfect knife for a hunting vampire with its ability to both slice and tear open an exposed throat.
Which, with a hand over the mouth to prevent the agent from calling out, he did, opening the man's throat with a quick press against the carotid and pull across the windpipe. The man tensed when he was grabbed, grunting against Lash's hand and greater strength. Then he was dropping soundlessly to the snow-covered ground, blood rhythmically pumping from his severed carotids. He was quickly joined by his two comrades, the remaining agents completely unaware of the first's stealthy death and so were unprepared for Lash's continuing attack.
A punch to the throat silenced one while he cut the throat of the other. Then he was catching the first in strong hands and snapping his neck. A quick glance at the three bodies to make sure they were truly dead then a look up at the truck they had been guarding followed by remotely-detonated explosives going under the vehicles before they were moving again.
Next on their list of targets were the tanks themselves, modified American M-1A Abrams and British Challenger III's built for short-field combat operations. Lash could only assume that the compact nature of the battlefield, necessarily restricted to keep the humans from discovering what they were doing, was responsible for the Hand choosing to use short-field units, with their shorter guns and heavier armor, normally reserved for tank vs tank warfare.
It was a strangely savvy move for a group usually tasked with safeguarding members of the Council of the Night. Too savvy, in fact. It was a move worthy of a great House's master tactician, or high commander. Or ... the Lord Commander of the Qos Viran.
Again the evidence pointed back at Liam Magnar. Either somebody was going through a great deal of trouble to implicate the Lord Commander. Or he was hip-deep in the conspiracy to destroy the Ventru. One way or another, the need Lash had to speak with his commander and former mentor had just become that much more urgent.
A light tap on Lash's shoulder to gain his attention then Truk was pointing towards the nearest tank, an M-1A that had just fired, a tendril of smoke oozing from the end of its barrel. Nodding, Lash moved forward, his weapon held high and ready. In a utility pouch, he held a shaped charge made out of C-4, its remote detonator connected to a wireless trigger that Truk had.
Truk's simple but effective attack plan was to wire up all the armor with the C-4 then standoff and detonate just as the Hand made its final push towards the walls. They would eviscerate the enemy just as they were about to taste victory. It was both delightfully decisive and deliciously vampiric. Lash was almost salivating at the thought of gutting the Hand so thoroughly and so ironically unexpectedly.
Again the pair of guards that were watching the tank's flank fell victim to Lash's expert work with the karambit. Then, after a scan to make sure he was still undiscovered, he darted in close to slip the charge under the tank's rear end, home to its engine and fuel tanks.
Truk was just returning from his own charge-placing run when Lash rendezvoused with him in a grove of snow-covered trees to assess the effectiveness of their stealth attack through the scopes on their rifles. It wasn't long before the other two vampires in Truk's team also returned, their charges placed.
The other two vampires on the team were just finishing their brief reports when a muted light on Truk's radio flashed once, then again. It was the signal from the other teams that they too had successfully placed their explosives.
Truk slung his rifle and brought out a pair of night vision binoculars. Lash, already scanning the tanks that were leading the advance on the wall, didn't move as the Van Tallert nestari joined him on the edge of the copse.
"They're well within firing range of the wall," Truk pointed out in a hoarse whisper. "Why aren't they firing?"
"Likely because whoever is directing this attack wants to see for themselves the final assault," Lash grimly indicated in a low voice of his own. He abruptly dropped the binoculars from his eyes, folded and stowed them on his utility vest.
"Which means they might actually be in that column!" he said, beginning to rise to his feet. If that bastard was in the column, then he was going to kill him right here and now!
He was halfway up when Truk's hand caught him.
"I like your instincts, Lash, but consider this," the nestari officer began without pulling Lash back down. "The leader of the conspiracy to promote this purge against our clan has operated exclusively in the shadows. While you and I would see something like this to the end with our own eyes, a coward like that would prefer to hide. He or she will watch but from afar." He made a gesture towards the column. "Likely one of the Hand's agents, or a familiar is out in the column's vanguard, miked and cammed up, ready to transmit when they're ready to attack."
"If they aren't already dead," one of the other vampires said in a low voice, earning himself a quiet chuckle from the other three.
"A valid point. However, I'd think that if it's truly the shadow master's witness, they'll be heavily protected." He paused to quickly look from one vampire to the next. "I didn't see such protection in the squads I attacked. Did any of you? No? Then we haven't seen them yet."
Abruptly he snapped his fingers, the sound muted by his tactical gloves.
"More importantly, if there's a cam in there transmitting..." Tusk began.
"We might be able to hack the signal and do a trace," Lash interjected to finish for him, a smile touching his lips beneath his tactical balaclava and facial armor. Satisfied with the direction they were going in if only for the moment, he eased back into a ready crouch.
"Do we have the gear for that?"
"Kren does," Truk replied before looking at one of the other two vampires. "Kren?"
Nodding, the addressed nestari quickly fished a communication jammer out of a utility pouch, a rectangular box that looked like an old school police scanner but with a built-in GPS and touch-screen interface to help locate nearby signals. A moment to set it up then he was scanning across the signals emanating from the attacking column.
"Lots of idle chatter," he reported, eyes focused on the jammer's readout. "Mostly local, a couple of spotters in helicopters nearby... Wait! I've got something. An encrypted video signal coming from somewhere close to the front of the column."
"That's our cameraman," Truk said with a confident nod. "Can you break the encryption?"
"Working on it," Kren replied even as his hands darted over the device's touch-screen interface. "I'm also piping the signal back to Narcist in the comms shack. She'll have better equipment to do the crack and trace there if I can't do it with this handheld."
"Watch for a spike in the bandwidth," Lash directed. "That'll indicate the camera is ready to transmit, which will likely signal the beginning of the final push."
"Right," Truk said with an agreeing nod. "Nice catch, Wolf." He turned back to the other two vampires. "We'll give the watcher a couple of minutes of video then blow the column and let them watch their assets burn!"
The hunter's surge in Lash's veins was almost too much to bear as they hunkered back down to wait for the bandwidth spike to happen. It was like he was an actual wolf watching a herd of deer, not twenty paces from where he hid in the trees. He could anticipate the taste of blood in his mouth so vividly, he was salivating.
Then a soft 'beep' was sending adrenalin flooding through him like a tidal wave of cold fire.
"The camera is transmitting," Kren quietly reported, confirming that battle was about to commence.
That was more than enough to get Lash up out of his crouch, his weapon slung behind him as he readied his karambit. Then he was slipping out of cover and heading directly for the nearest Hand position.
"Wolf!" Truk hissed into his ear via his comms. "What are you doing?"
"Hunting," Lash tersely replied before pulling his earpiece free and sliding into the darkness.
In full stealth mode as soon as he was out of his crouch, it didn't take the big vampire long to close the distance between their hiding spot in the trees and the Hand position. He was around the squat bulk of the tank and on its handful of guards before they could even react.
The first got his neck snapped, a quick grab of the head with powerful hands before twisting enough to break bones then dropping the abruptly limp body to the ground. The next got the karambit in the neck as she began to turn in response to hearing her comrade's body hit the ground. A quick slice and warm blood was spurting out of not only her severed carotid but her mouth as well, choking her cry of alarm before she could even make it.
Not pausing to watch either fall, Lash was on the remaining three in a pair of steps. Going low, he hamstrung the first, crabbing sideways to stab the next in the groin with his knife before snapping straight up to hammer the curved blade into the man's neck just beneath his chin, cutting off his scream of pain. The last he spun to slap the man's hastily-lifted rifle to the side before he jammed his knife into his left eye, punching through the soldier's tactical goggles to do so.
Hearing a sound from the tank, he paused just long enough to drop to a knee and cover his ears. And his instincts were right: a heartbeat later the tank fired a round at the beleaguered fortress, the shell blasting from the tank's muzzle with enough percussive force, it temporarily gelled the air around the kneeling vampire.
Knowing the tank would take a few seconds to reload, Lash explosively burst out of his kneeling position, sprinting for the front of the column. He had to reach the unknown cameraman so he could send a message to the unseen watcher. That message? Ventru was coming for him or her!
He darted between two more tanks, slicing his way through the Hand soldiers there with barely a pause, all of their eyes on the fortress ahead in anticipation of the wall falling to the upcoming barrage. Then he spotted him: a Hand operative just in front of the last pair of forward-positioned tanks wearing protective, but non-combat armor, a small smartphone raised horizontally in his hand and pointed at the fortress. Now, if he could only reach him before ...
The first explosion was almost right beside him, the planted charge ripping apart the modified Abrams M-1A and sending pieces in every direction. The concussive wave also tossed the big vampire as if he were nothing but tissue paper, throwing him up and over the other tank in the row before hitting hard and rolling several meters.
Lash was no sooner down than that tank was exploding, pelting the prone vampire with even more metallic debris and body parts as a second concussive wave washed over him. Thankfully none of the larger pieces dropped onto him where he lay, or this war of retribution would've been over far too quickly for Ingamon Lash. Still, there were big enough pieces raining down out of the sky and soundly drubbing him that he knew he'd be feeling every one of the bruises they made even after another shot of Ingrid's werewolf blood.
As the rest of the column joined the lead tanks in destruction, he fumbled for his earpiece and stuffed it back into his right ear.
" ... can you hear me, Lash? Wolf! Come in, Wolf!" came Truk's urgent plea.
"I read you, Truk," he managed to rasp loud enough for the earpiece's mike to pick up.
"Thank the Dark Father! Were you among the tanks when we triggered the explosives?"
"Aye." Wincing, Lash curled into a ball and focused on willing his various aches and pains to disappear.
"Are you still in one piece??"
"Aye," he repeated, grimacing as the ringing in his ears slowly faded.
"Did you ... see the cameraman?"
Ah, so the Ventru nestari commander had reasoned out what he had gone hunting for. He should've guessed; the vampire was a fairly clever fellow. He would do well in the Qos Viran.
"Aye. And before you ask, no, I didn't get to him before the C-4 started going off. But I did see that it was a Hand operative, not an actual highborn vampire lord or lady, as I had hoped." His expression tightened under his battered tactical mask for a moment. "I could've ended the purge right then and there if it had been him!"
"A worthy reason to go hunting," Truk replied. "If you are able, search for that phone. It might still be intact enough to pull some information out of, back at the compound. And while you're at it, do you mind executing any surviving Hand filth that you come across?"
Lash pushed the last of his lingering pain into the back of his awareness and leveraged himself up onto his feet to look back at the armored column, now burning merrily thanks to flammable fuel and propellant.
"That, Commander Truk, would be my genuine pleasure!" Then he was sliding forward, the karambit ready once more.
As expected, most of the Hand operatives were down, torn apart by the explosions that also destroyed their armor. Any that were still breathing got their throats unceremoniously slit. There would be no drinking tonight; this filth wasn't worthy of that honor. They would bleed out here, on the battlefield christened by their failure to defeat Ventru.
Any other vampire would've gotten lost in the ruthless execution, satiating their bloodlust on the bodies of their enemy. But Lash was also a trained Qos Viran operator, a veteran of dozens of conflicts where he was required by both duty and honor to rein in his instincts and work towards a goal or complete a mission. And the mission here was to locate that smartphone the unarmed operative was using as a camera.
With his knowledge of explosives and splash patterns, as well as knowing where the operative was when the C-4 started going off, it was relatively easy to determine the most logical landing point for the phone or its pieces. After executing enemy soldiers until Truk and the rest of his team could arrive and take up the grisly task, he turned his attention fully to searching for that phone.
Thinking he'd be cursed with hours of searching with an aching body, Lash was pleasantly surprised when, after only about five minutes worth of looking, he spotted a familiar rectangular shape on the debris-littered snow a few centimeters from what appeared to be a severed hand. 'Dark Father's own luck!' he silently swore as he ignored the hand for the moment and knelt to scoop up the remarkably-intact device.
Of course, flipping it over revealed the actual damage the phone had suffered, its touch screen not only cracked but shattered enough that pieces were missing as well. He could even see the phone's logic board through one of the holes and it didn't look like it was in great shape either. Still, if this Narcist was as good as Kren said she was, she might be able to salvage something from the phone's memory card.
Dropping the phone into a utility pouch, Lash then paused to look at the hand. With body parts all over the debris field, it didn't necessarily belong to the operative that had the phone, although its proximity to the phone suggested it most likely did. And while it was fairly certain that the hand didn't belong to somebody important, in following Truk's logic about the purge's master operating from the shadows, Lash's guts were telling him that it might. So he scooped that up too and dropped it into a separate utility pouch, one lined with plastic, so he wouldn't get any residual blood anywhere. Then, with a final look around the scene of their enemy's defeat, he began looking for Truk and his nestari.