'Only the loyal in blood can be loyal in spirit.'
- HEINRICH HIMMLER

Egypt beckoned.

A scything rumble - the roar of the Bristol Bombay's engines - tore through the thin metal of the aircraft's hold and cut through the night that surrounded it. High above moon-lit desert sand the plane banked, turning towards the lights of Cairo which lay sprawled ahead like tiny pinpricks of white in the darkness.

Onboard, Lieutenant-General Gott stretched his legs, rubbing at his taut hamstrings as he did so. One hand kept a tight grip on the stack of manila folders next to him on the metal bench. It ran the length of the plane's hold, and a second was bolted opposite him, against the other bulkhead. There was no comfort in them, as Gott had found out, having sat on one or the other for the last couple of hours. However, there was never pain without some form of elation, and it was certainly that which he felt through the twinges in his legs.

Today was the day that history would be rewritten. As soon as he landed, the entirety of the Eighth Army would be turned over to him so as to push the Axis out of Egypt and all the way back to Tunis.

From the front of the aeroplane, past the wall of cargo netting that separated him from the radio operator and the cockpit, there was a squeal of radio chatter and he felt the plane tilt once again, pulling up slightly. The folders began to slide away from him, the bottom one slipping out of his grasp to land with a slap against the cargo-deck. It shot off and underneath the other bench, catching against one of the struts that kept it to the floor. Gott cursed silently and wrestled with the remaining folders. The plane began to level off, followed by another burst of communication and then just the thunder of the craft's massive propeller engines.

With a sigh, he took off his peaked-cap and sat it on top of the remaining papers, pinning them beneath it. He wondered whether he should bother to rescue the missing one, but after a moment decided that it would be unnecessary to start moving about the plane. The Bombay was built like a matriarch elephant, and just like such a creature it was old and sometimes finicky if subject to things it wasn't used to. He wasn't too sure whether moving over to the other side of the craft would change the weight disproportionately. In any case, it didn't much matter. He would have more than enough time to get it once they landed.

He looked up at the rustle of fabric to see the netting pushed aside by the plane's navigator. The rolled-up shorts and shirt-sleeves of his sand-coloured uniform gave the impression that he'd suddenly stepped out of a sand-storm; as if the front of the aircraft was more open to the elements than back here. It was strange, thought Gott, when he compared it to the single-breasted tunic and tie he himself was wearing, his usual outfit against the cold of the desert nights. However tonight was surprisingly muggy. Likely as not there would be a sand-storm sometime before tomorrow afternoon.
'Skipper says we're fifty miles from landing, Sir,' said the flight officer, still holding the netting back with one hand. His eyes drifted across the hold, finally stopping on the folder that had lost itself under the troop bench. He looked at Gott. 'Do you want me to get that for you, Sir?'
Gott ran a hand through his hair and nodded. 'Yes, thank you.' He took one of the folders out from under his cap and opened it, resting it on his knee. He'd been over them a good few times already, but it didn't do well to have the men thinking he was doing nothing.

The crewman walked over to the bench and knelt down, reaching out for the brown-paper folder. Gott leant forward, hand outstretched. And then the navigator's head exploded.

The body squatted there, fingers still tensed, as a mass of viscera sprayed across the metal interior of the cargo-hold. Then, almost as if in slow-motion, it fell over backwards, sprawled so that its shoulders touched Gott's boots and the torn, ragged neck was pouring blood across the deck between Gott's knees. For a moment Gott thought that it was anti-aircraft fire, but it was impossible; they were behind the lines weren't they?

Enemy fighters!

He jumped up. His front was covered with blood, and something white and treacle-soft was splashed on his hand and sleeve. Grey lumps and dripping red coated the walls and ceiling. There was shouting coming from the cockpit, and past the netting he could see the radioman standing up also. Something shot across the breadth of the ship between Gott and the thin net mesh. It was past in a split-second, a snap of grey with a flash like tracer. A flying gobstopper. A banshee shriek. Wind whistled through the two neatly drilled holes in the fuselage where the object had entered and exited.

The ceiling imploded, one of the struts that ran along the plane's spine punching downwards through the thin skin of the plane. A line of instantaneous tracer followed through and then the craft porpoised, tipping forwards and backwards on its axis and throwing everything about in a wave of air-currents. The folders billowed about the deck, splaying papers to the wind. Gott, his footing lost, stumbled backwards. Another wail and a crash and he could see the stars above him, laid out on a sea of black. The radioman was trying to untangle himself from the netting which he had fallen into when he jerked sideways. Hot red splashed across what remained of the walls. Outside, there was a bang and the right engine stopped making any noise.

Everything listed starboard.

The fore-machinegun opened up, spraying tracer into the darkness. Yet there was nothing out there to shoot. There was no sound of enemy aircraft. No other sound of gunfire. Simply the half-roar of the remaining engine, and the sudden shrieking of that something which punched another pair of neat holes through the plane's surfaces like a pen through wet tissue-paper. Gott turned to look at the rear of the plane. Somebody was screaming something about idiot AA gunners, but Gott knew for a fact that this wasn't anti-aircraft fire; and then the screaming stopped and Gott was thrown backwards, to crash against the rear loading-door, as the plane shook like a wild-thing.

He had just enough time to turn, to look at the cockpit and see the glass front-windscreen shatter and the gout of blood that splashed about and that terrible whining shriek and then the dulled dot that punched through the co-pilot's seat and grew larger in his vision as it headed straight for him...

For the two soldiers staring up from the desert, the Bristol Bombay - barely a speck of glittering metal low on the horizon - suddenly listed and lost height, a burning trail and a contour of smoke, almost invisible in the darkness, showing its path. It dropped further and further, the mammoth engine still roaring like a daemon, before finally disappearing behind a dune. Flame billowed into the sky. A whoosh of light and heat and then sound; a thunder noise that was rarely heard near Cairo these days.

The pair of Royal Engineers continued to watch even as the horizon began to glow. Their necks smiled wetly in the moonlight as their own weeping slowed. Then, heads lolling, they waited as the spade filled in their cubby-hole, and their glazed eyes stuck with sand. Eventually their unmarked grave vanished into the landscape and their jeep started up and drove westward toward the waiting sun.

* * * * *

'There are a number of common misconceptions about vampires. However, many of them have at least some small basis in truth. Sunlight, although not lethal to Category-5's, does weaken and lower their powers. A vampire caught in generally over-cast weather will find its super-human strength lowered by perhaps half or two-thirds, depending on its age and general skill; it will also find its more obvious paranormal abilities removed or limited. He will find telepathic and preternatural controls hard and painful, if not unavailable. His regenerative powers will take longer and require exertion. He will be slow and unwieldy, likely nauseated and tired, and more often than not paranoid. He will be surrounded by prey, but unable to act upon his instincts. The same effect can be done with water. A vampire cannot pass over any body of water wider than three to four feet if it's 'tide' is in.'

There was a scratch of chalk on the blackboard.

'In extremely strong sunlight, either by amplification or geographic location, the vampire will burn. Do not expect him to burst into flame at the slightest touch, however. The effect is largely psychological. A vampire trapped without cover in bright, strong sunlight will fly into a panic; but even in the hottest weather it will take an hour or two before it would be comparable to live flame. Which leads us on to that exactly; flame will kill a vampire far more readily than anything else available at this moment in time. I'm afraid flamethrowers have been removed from our itinerary after the Dungeness incident, so you'll have to rely on the standard lead or silver based ammunition made in-house. Explosive ammunition and tracer can be used at a pinch, although H.E. has a tendency to cause blow-through, so it's recommended that it's only used when everything else has been expended.
'Religious iconography should be left alone - and by that I mean crosses and crucifixes, gents. Vampires are seldom affected by such niceties. One entire section was wiped out back in '81 when the section-leader decided to run in with nothing but a wing and a prayer. Only strong faith on both parties, or pure, unadulterated belief on the part of one will get the result you're hoping for. Somehow I doubt you lot will be of that standard.'

The Lieutenant raised his eyes to the class and some long-forgotten time just beyond them.

'There has never been, as far as is known, a vampire manipulated into acting as an agent for a nation - other than our own and Germany, of course. Two from the former Soviet Union did land - one in 1967 and another in 1981 - although neither were actually controlled by the Politburo. They were pure Communists - rabidly so. And obviously enough, weren't bothered in the slightest by religious emblems. The same can be said of the Orthodox Jewish vampire that terrorised Folkstone from 1952 to 1961. The Star of David proved more efficient in that regard. Considering the current atheistic tendencies, we can only imagine either a greater influx of unaffected Category-5's or, if they are little too well versed in pop-culture for their own good, a greater tendency of vampires who think that they should be affected... and therefore will be affected.'

He wrote a few more lines on the board; still writing as he turned to look over his shoulder at the class. There was a sharp crack as the chalk snapped in his fingers, the top-most part dropping to the floor.
At the back of the room, standing next to the door, was Officer Seras, bedecked in her usual outfit. She was watching the lesson readily, as if it would somehow give her benefit. The Lieutenant checked to make sure the rest of his troopers hadn't seen her. It wasn't good for the new men to have to know what Sir Integra kept as 'pets'. If he was lucky, perhaps they didn't know who - or what - she was. He coughed. 'All right, lads. Take a five minute break.'

There was a babble of noise and the scratch of chair-legs on tile as the men rose and turned and then froze. The man closest to the door took a few steps in reverse - trying to give himself as wide a berth of the young women as possible. He crashed into the desk next to his. A few sheets of paper and a cartridge-pen hit the floor. Nobody moved.
'Seras. Get away from the door, would you?' called the Lieutenant, visibly discontented.

The girl looked across at him and then, as if realising it was her fault, took in the ashen faces of the other soldiers. She stared at the floor and sidled away. After a moment or two the men filed out, only beginning to talk mutedly when they'd managed to escape to the relative safety of the corridor outside. The door closed behind them.

Seras bit her lip and raised her eyes to the Lieutenant, who glared at her quite openly. 'I'm sorry, Sir,' she started, 'It's just-'
'I'm going to have to ask you to stop turning up here.' He picked up the silver letter-opener on his desk and toyed with it. 'It's not suitable for you to hang around the new recruits. You know the rumours that get spread around.'
'They're not true, though. I didn't do that to Private Horn.'
'I know. It was rather what Private Horn was trying to do to you.' He put the knife back down. 'I don't think you should fraternise with the company any more. I know that Captain Bernadotte doesn't mind you socialising with his men, but-'
There was a pause. He rubbed at his eyes tiredly.
'Just go, please. Don't break up my lectures again.'

The door creaked open and closed just as quietly.

* * * * *

Walter found Seras perched on the low wall that ran next to the garage. She was swinging her legs girlishly, scraping at the gravel driveway with the toes of her boots. Dust and grit rose with the rhythmic scuffing.
He walked straight past her, taking the garage-door key out of his pocket as he did so, and unlocked one of the heavy iron flaps set into the car-hold. There were three, in fact; each separate from the other but under the same roof. One held a few old motorcycles and cars that had been bought over the years. Another contained a pair of government licensed trucks - for special duties. The one he was opening held the Silver Cloud. He knelt and gripped the door's handle in a gloved hand, the sheet-metal drifting upwards easily on its rollers.
'Going somewhere nice, Walter?'

He turned around. Seras was watching him with blue eyes that seemed too bright and too lively for anything like what she was. With a soft thud she dropped off her rest, kicking up another plume of dirt.
'I have an errand to run,' he said simply. Then, recalling his place; 'But how are you, Miss Victoria?'
'I've been told not to talk to the soldiers.'
'Well, that is the officer's prerogative.' He returned to the garage and switched on the inside light. The Rolls-Royce that lurked within flickered for a moment as the light-bulb that hung above it fizzed and popped, and then took a definite shape. 'I can't say I agree with it, however.'
'Thank you, Walter.'

With a half-grin Walter licked his thumb and cleaned a mark off the Silver Lady on the car's bonnet. 'That's perfectly all right, Miss Victoria.' He looked at her. 'You must realise though, that you're very lucky even to be allowed about the mansion. Alucard wasn't allowed to wander around at will until Sir Integra became his master.'
Seras sighed. 'That's history, isn't it.'
'I'm sorry?'
'That's history.' She smiled a little sadly. 'Every time I look at this place there's some sort of history. Hellsing Organisation - 1898. The mansion finished in 1900. Vampire communists in... in...'
'1967,' said Walter. He nodded wistfully. 'Yes, that was a year and a half, I can agree.'

He saw her frown and bowed. 'I'm sorry.'
'That's okay. It's just... I'm going to be here a very long time.' She looked at the sky. The sun was high, but it wasn't hot enough for any sort of protection - at least not yet. 'And they talk about things that happened before I was born, but in a few years time... well, more, really... I'm going to remember them and no one else will. It's just...' She searched for a word. 'Strange. That's all.'

Walter nodded. 'There's some Hellsing history you might not know about, Miss Victoria. It's only established among a handful of people now. I don't know if it'll help you understand, but it might prove interesting.'
'Is it in the library?'
'No. The Natural History Museum.'
Seras' brow knitted. 'Really?'
'I'm going there now. I can give you lift, if you want.'

She laughed. 'In the Roller?' She stared at the car, in all its gleaming splendour.
'Yes.' Walter's monocle flashed in the sunlight. 'Would you care for it?'
She stopped laughing.

'Would I!'

* * * * *

Y RHUTHR DIWE THAF AM EU GILYDD DRAIG GOCH OFNADWY
(THE LAST CHARGE OF THEIR FEARSOME, RED DRAGON)

(COMPLETE AND UNABRIDGED)

Order I :
Klingen Von Großbritannien

'Blu'ee awful it is, Guv,' the cab driver said as he circumvented another pothole in the road. 'Two years an' they 'aven't fill'd these in. Blu'ee awful it is.' He stuck his hand out of the window and indicated right, pulling across the road as he did so and into one of the many side-streets that branched off from the main trunk of Vauxhall Road. 'The 'Ellsing Estate, didja say, Guv?'
'That's right,' said the other; his passenger, who leant back in his seat and watched out of the window at the passing of the street.
'Nottalot of business these days,' replied the cab driver after a while. The vehicle paused behind a butcher's van momentarily, before passing a row of twisted, burnt-out struts that had been a row of shops the day before. A policeman was surveying the wreckage, his bicycle propped up against what had once been a front door-frame. He checked the handiwork of his placing of a sign in a top window of one of the least damaged of the constructs. It gave the penalty for looting: Life imprisonment or hanging.
'Not since they starta' rationin' peh'rul, anyway.'

The cab continued out through the City and Greater London, past the shards of bombed out shops and houses; around the ornamental parks and gardens; through the West End's row of theatres and cinemas and the ever-present khaki uniforms queuing for the theatre or a show and as they drove - the daily progress of life went on. Postmen were cycling their rounds. A policeman stopped traffic at a cross-roads, shrill blasts of the whistle and arms wheeling like a windmill as he did so. Much to the cab passenger's surprise, he saw a quartet of men in totally unfamiliar uniforms stumbling and lost outside a clothes-shop. It was only after a moments contemplation, and their having disappeared from sight, that he realised that they must have been Americans and not, as the two MPs marching towards them had probably thought, misplaced Germans.

Then, finally, as if the city just suddenly stopped they were out into the country proper. Concrete was replaced by grass and trees as they made a slow but steady path out of London itself and turned off onto the recently partially-paved road and few hundred acres of land and stately homes that separated the outer fringes of the city from the quaint home-county villages and true rural area.

Bleddyn Moore, the taxi's passenger, was heading out here on business. Officially he was a linguistics agent for MI5's double-cross system. Unofficially he had once worked for an organisation within Great Britain that's name was a by-word amongst those of the government for the unsettling and, in some cases, down-right obscene. A separate entity, unrelated to the rest of the military; a private militia that was -in the eyes of the armed forces- a terrible waste of budget and manpower. The Hellsing Organisation - an idiotic off-shoot of Ramsey's 'Delphi Project' back in the 1890s. Or so it was said.

Before he had joined Hellsing in 1931, and had still been working for MI5 for his first tenure, Bleddyn had been frightened almost all the time. He was an intellectual, a lettered man, something which set him apart from most of his fellow men. Also, he was Welsh, and more than that a nonconformist to the natural religious creeds. A curiosity in all regards, that had as time went on been noticed. Noticed and rewarded it seemed - to a certain fashion.

Before he had joined Hellsing he had been frightened almost all of the time. O now, how he missed those innocent days! Since he was inducted into that group within a group Bleddyn had been in a constant state of paranoia and fear. The things he had seen! The way his world had changed! He had a skill you see, a talent with languages which was necessary for the group to achieve its goals. He was travelled - his father being an ambassadorial aide, and his mother (God rest her soul) a lecturer of languages at Oxford. If only he was not so clever! And so, through tender years - dragged from country to country and school to school - he had learnt to speak fluently in a number of tongues other than his own; more importantly, had learnt the ways of his own people - his own masters and ringleaders - so, that once he had left education and was at the mercy of the post-Great War depression, he had been inducted into the Security Service, in order that he might prove to understand those ciphers and cryptograms and transmissions that had been decoded by other departments and, then, he would pass them up through the chain so that the Empire might understand its enemies' movements more fully.
But not all enemies are foreigners in foreign lands.

Halfway down the right hand side of the road flanked Hellsing manor's wall. Its top was set with ground-glass, as it had always, but now also with something that had not been there before; coils of twisted, asperous barbed-wire. To the left was Rumwell Common. During Bleddyn's time working for the Organisation, schoolchildren had come down on the weekends to use the wide grassy spread for impromptu football matches and games of 'He'. It was unlikely they would be doing that anytime soon. The cabbie slowed the car as they passed so that both men could get a good look at the dark furrow that stretched the field's length. It ran at right-angles to the road, a deep trench, two yards across and at least a hundred yards in length. A Messerschmitt Bf109 lingered at the closest end, the plane tilted to the side so that its starboard wing touched the ground. Bits and pieces of the fighter's frame were scattered across the field and about the scar of dirt it had left. There had apparently been a fire at some point, as the entire nose was blackened and stripped of paint. Its propeller blades had bent themselves into a contorted triskele when the plane hit the ground.
Two home-guard - one a fresh faced youth barely out of school, the other an older man wearing his Great War medals - stood nearby with rifles at their sides, watching for looters and novelty-seekers.

When one leaves such a group as Hellsing, the fear does not leave with it. It lingers, like a cloud over the leaver's head. No one can sleep soundly in their bed at night when they know what terrors lurk and gibber outside their door with full clarity as to what they are and their implications in the greater scheme. And it takes more than double-bolting the front door and investing in lead-striped windows or hanging garlic garlands from the ceiling to remove the terror from within one's heart.

Further down the road some warning tape had been set up around a hole in the tarmac. A bomb-disposal truck was parked nearby, but the crew were sitting on the pavement by the manor wall, drinking cups of tea they had boiled on a camp-fire stove.

Who else knew that such secrets existed? And what else was waiting out there? Even now Bleddyn rolled towards Hellsing's headquarters in a civilian car, towards more secrets, maybe even the one which would finally consume him. Or the world.

The cab turned in through the wall's arched and open gates, continuing up the drive to the little knoll of the roundabout that sat in front of the house itself. Bleddyn leant forward in his seat. Outside the front door of the manor were a pair of parked removal vans along with a British army lorry. Flat-capped removal men were attempting to heft a pine-dresser into the back of one of the vans, while others propped a small assembly of paintings against the vehicle's back tyre.
'A bit o' sumthin' happ'nin', ain't there?' said the cabbie. He turned in his seat. 'Allwite if I drop you off here, Guv?'
'Yes, that's fine thanks,' replied Bleddyn.
Having finished with the dresser, the removal men disappeared back into the house through its open front door.
'How much is that?'
'Two an' six, please, mate.'
Bleddyn fished in his pocket for coins and gave the driver three shillings and then got out, the driver touching his cap in thanks for keeping the change before pulling away. Belddyn continued to make his way up the tarmac. One of the removal men came out carrying an oriental looking vase that Bleddyn remembered used to stand on a corner table on the first floor landing.
The corner table appeared through the door being carried by a second man.

That familiar fear was returning; a gnawing, groping itch at the back of his head and in his gut. With each step up the drive and past the parked vans, Bleddyn felt another heavy claw burrow its way under his flesh. Three very long arduous years it had been since he had set foot on the consecrated and holy-water specked porch-step of the Hellsing family's manor. Two years since he'd heard the name Hellsing spoken. It was a very long time. The soldier leaning against the army truck looked up at him with a cigarette clenched between his teeth, then sensing the newcomer was not a threat looked away again.
Bleddyn was just about to enter, feeling the coolness of the old house on his face and hearing the sounds from inside; shoes on floorboards and tiles and the faint strains of music, when Bones stepped out from behind the door to block his path.
His name was not really Bones; it was Algenon Blue Smith. A name that just to hear it rang of a bygone era, but everybody knew him as Bones - although not to his face. He was old, immensely old, the skin grown sallow and drawn and hair nothing but a thin grey wisp so his entire body looked like a tall, leery skeleton. The high fore-brow and long, gangly arms attested to the idea that in his earlier years he must have seemed almost Neanderthal in appearance. A phrenologists nightmare, someone had remarked once. He was dressed in clothes that would probably have seemed out of date even to his Victorian upbringing; a jerkin-like thing that Bleddyn had never had the courage to bring up in conversation and an old army-officer's tie, the knot so small that it was barely the size of one's fingernail. Right now he drifted like an addition of the hall's shadows, arms by his sides and face set in tight ennui, to look Bleddyn up and down. If the body decayed, however, then the voice did not show it. 'Welcome back, Mr. Moore. Sir Geoffrey is in the drawing-room, partaking a spot of late-breakfast. He's been expecting you.' The retainer stepped aside, allowing the younger man to pass. 'Can I take your coat, sir?'
Bleddyn shrugged it off and the elderly butler took it to the cloakroom under the staircase.

The old place had not changed a bit. Chequered tiles still remained and the mahogany finishing on the banister and skirting board were polished and shined to Bone's perfection. Underneath the curved prongs of the stairs, which swept down on either side of the hall, was the painting of Baronet Abraham Van Helsing in all his unceremonial splendour. His rounded, lined face stared down at all who entered. Bones led the way, brushing past two men who were attempting to carry a cleaned out crockery cabinet from the direction of the kitchens, to stroll through one of the doors at the right of the hall.

The drawing-room: walls still lined with book-shelves and the gramophone immobile where it had always been; sitting on top of the drink's cabinet. The faint, tinny strains of Vivaldi's 'Sinfonia in C' crackled through its ornate horn. One whole wall was taken up by the large bay-window that looked out over the front lawn and the bustle of the removal men. Its black-out curtains were folded neatly underneath the sill. Resting on one of the deep, leather sofas was Lord Hellsing himself, eating a meagre assortment of boiled potatoes, carrots and two thin slices of corned beef from the plate on the coffee table in front of him.
He was a tall, rectangular man in his mid-forties, but still with the good graces of youth that came about from a Public School upbringing - born for such, it seemed. What his face lacked in clear strength however, he made up for with a carefully cultivated beard - as one might expect from a rugged, but sharp, Artic explorer - and an expensive Saville Row suit. With a smile he looked at the pair in the doorway, picking up the napkin by his plate and dabbing it to his lips as he did so. 'Bleddyn! How jolly good to see you!' he cried, 'come in and sit down!'
Bleddyn did so, sinking into the sofa opposite. Algenon shuffled off and back into the hall, closing the door behind him.
'Please excuse the elevenses,' the Lord said. 'There is some luncheon meat and cold potatoes left over from last night if you're feeling a tad peckish; Algenon can bring it in.'
The other held up his hands. 'No - thank you, that's perfectly all right.'
Hellsing nodded, placing the napkin back on the table, then looked Bleddyn up and down with a cool, calculated eye. Swiftly the face split into a wide, cheerful grin. 'It's wonderful to see you again, Bleddyn. How are the Security Services treating you?'
O, thought Bleddyn. The Security Services -MI5- was Britain's counter-intelligence organisation. The spy-catchers, as the papers frequently called them with an air of mystery and wonderment that hinted at some kind of dark magic that lurked behind their closed doors. If they were looking for magic, however, then Bleddyn knew they were looking in entirely the wrong place. Nevertheless it was certainly, as Lord Hellsing knew, another twist of the knife in Bleddyn's back. 'As well as a civil servant can be expected to be treated,' he said offhand.
'Ah,' concurred Hellsing, and he recollected his cutlery. 'That's understandable really. There is a war on, after all. I take it that you are back to doing linguistics?' His brown eyes flashed with interest.
'Linguistics,' answered Bleddyn. Yes; Lord Hellsing was still good at his games. On and off the pitch - at Eton and in the brass and wood offices of the elite, he was always playing the field. It was one of those reasons Bleddyn had left in the end. Better to get the upper hand now, he decided. 'Sir Geoffrey, what is all this about?'
The cutlery clinked on china. 'We live in fretful times, Mr. Moore, where heavy worries linger on the Empire's brow.' He paused. 'My father's favourite quote.' A quick glance at the other man and then at his own glass. 'A drink?'
'Scotch?'
'A bit early for that, isn't it?' He frowned lightly, but even so he got up and walked over to the drink's cabinet that the gramophone was perched on.
Bleddyn grinned. 'It's a bit early for your sherry. How are Edith and Arthur?'
The record jumped half-way through the first bar of Larghetto as Hellsing slammed the drink's cabinet shut. He turned, glass in hand. 'O no. I suppose you haven't heard, have you? Edith and I had another son last August: Richard. But to answer your question, Edith's fine and Arthur's just started getting assertive. The last time you saw him he was only...' He thought for moment. 'My goodness, only still in his perambulator. You'd be amazed to see him now - toddling about all over the place. Can't stop him really.' He handed the drink over, before sitting back down. 'Your scotch.'
'Thank you. Well, congratulations on that front.' The whisky was straight - not how Bleddyn usually liked it, but it warmed his head. 'What're all the removal-men for?' A wry smile. 'A recruitment drive?'
'Ah. Yes, I'm sorry about that. When I sent for you we weren't planning for them. I only called them this morning. I suppose you saw the... 'visitor' on the common and that bomb out on the road?'
'I couldn't miss them.'
Lord Hellsing's face darkened and he took a sip of his sherry. 'Yes, well. Last night there was the most terrific bang. I thought they'd finally managed to get us.' He motioned skywards with the glass. 'Nearly did as well; though not deliberately. One of Gerry's bombers must have got lost and mistaken us for the city centre; dropped that bomb outside in the road. And then, while Algy and I were out there looking at the bugger, a bloody Messerschmitt came down in the field.'
Bleddyn's eyes widened. 'Was everyone okay?'
'Yes. The pilot got jumped by a couple of our night-fighters and bailed out about twelve miles south of here.' He sighed and shook his head. 'But what if he'd bailed out five seconds later, eh? I swear to you, I wouldn't be sitting here right now talking. And God forbid anything should have happened to Edith and the children. I shouldn't have listened to her, really. I should have packed them off to her sister's when the war started, but she wouldn't have any of it. You know women. Always doing their damndest to make our lives a jolly mess. So, I'm packing up shop and sending them off to Kilmaur Manor; the one in the Highlands that father bought.' He looked at the glass in his hand. 'We need your expertise, Bleddyn.'
There was a impenetrable pause and Bleddwyn waited for the senior to say something. Nothing came.
'I'm sorry, Sir Geoffrey, but you're mistaken. I work for MI5 now. It's not my job any more.'
Hellsing didn't seem to notice. Instead he nodded in silent understanding. 'I have fifty men in my entire organisation, Bleddyn. Most of them are occultists, librarians, alienists, parapsychologists. I can't recruit new soldiers because they're all being signed up for military service. Can you imagine it? We've requisitioned so much silver from the populace that we have enough ammunition to last us fifteen years at the current rate of activity. I've a budget with four noughts at the end. By Jove, I even have the blessings of the War Department. But I don't have the men to do anything with it.'

He rose, still holding the glass and walked around the sofas, past Bleddyn, to the window. 'Those I do have are really quite inexperienced. I could hardly expect to send them out there without the necessary training.'
'You must have someone,' said Bleddyn finally. He pondered the idea of Britain going undefended, and then shivered uncomfortably.
'Yes.' Lord Hellsing acquiesced. 'He's twelve.'
Vivaldi stopped. There was a hiccup of noise subsequently Larghetto finished, replaced with the soft, crackle and click of the needle. The two men turned to look at it.
'Damn,' said Lord Hellsing. He started towards it.
'What do you mean twelve?' asked Bleddyn. He stood up. 'I hope you don't mean 'years old'.' His host ignored him, ostensibly engrossed in turning the record over. He lay the needle on the first groove and the next piece began.
'What do you think I mean? 'Shillings short of a pound'?' He didn't turn around as he said it. 'Does it matter?'
'You can't send a twelve year-old out after those things.'
'Of course.' Hellsing let out a grunt which could have been a cough or a laugh. 'But it's a fair bit late for that. He has six to his name so far.'

A wave of nausea passed over Bleddyn and he stepped back and sat down roughly, a hitching sob coming from so deep within him he shook like a rag doll, and then it was gone again as quickly as it had risen. He looked up incredulously. 'How can you send a boy of twelve out there?'
'I don't see why you're getting so worked up.' The other man looked around at him subsequently. 'We've got fourteen year-old flight-sergeants piloting Spitfires out there. And a damn sight better than most pilots your age.'

Your age...

Suddenly Bleddyn felt very old.

'They fight people,' he said after a long while. 'They don't fight them.'
'I suppose that is true.'
Suddenly Bleddyn was struck by the thought that had earlier gripped him upon his arrival. He looked about the walls. 'Is it still here?' he asked.
'It?' The Lord frowned lightly, as if trying to solve a troublesome crossword and then straightened - understanding, and also registering a lesser, but still potent, form of the other man's fear. 'O yes. It's still here.'

Bleddyn nodded slowly. 'It's not here, right now... is it?'
'He's confined to the West Wing.' Hellsing said. Then, recognising his mistake; 'It... it is confined to the West Wing. It has no business here.'
'Everything is its business,' stated Bleddyn. 'What other business can there be here that doesn't involve it?'

Hellsing held out his hands and as if to answer: 'Some.' For a moment he stood there, then he walked over to the window for a second time. He watched the exterior of the house with its clean-cut lawns and the bustle of removal men, his glass in hand. 'There's a folder on the coffee-table. I can understand if you don't want to look at it.'
There was indeed a folder on the coffee-table. A brown manila folder with 'Most Secret' stamped across it in bold, red, type. A single piece of thread was wrapped around two pegs on the folder's twin halves, keeping it from being opened unduly. Bleddyn held it carefully, as if it were a child. Then with shaky fingers he unwound the twine. The two topmost papers slipped out from within it to slide onto his knees. One was a photograph. The other a police-report written in Arabic on the upper half and English at the bottom. His eyes, however, fixed upon the photograph.

'His name was Colonel Michael Yardley-Smythe, Deputy Director of Military Intelligence (Intelligence) - DDMI(I)- for Egypt.' Hellsing motioned as he spoke, the sherry in his glass sloshing. 'One of the, er, right hand men for the Brigadier in charge of Intelligence. You probably know of him.
'He was carved up like a Sunday roast in his own apartment a couple of days ago - By the look of things, if such first-impressions are to be gone by anyway. The eyes were removed; missing. You might be able to see that in the photograph. They still haven't been found. Fortunately for us, he'd just been relieved of his command. Replaced with a Colonel Jameson earlier that day. A rather futile attempt on the assassin.'
'It was assassination?'
Bleddyn turned the photograph over and put it face down on the table. There were other photographs and papers in the folder. He flicked through the photographs, putting each in turn face down on the table as he went.
'Of a sort. There was ritualism to the killing. Sigils. Glyphs, evidently. Our man in Cairo thinks it might have an occult meaning.'
'A vampire?'
'Maybe. Maybe not. There wasn't any of the usual signs.' He paused for a moment. 'Egypt is a hot-bed. René Guénon has set himself up in Cairo as some kind of glorious magician; there's a secret order of hermitic wizards working out of Algiers, though for what reason no one seems to know; and I dread to think whether half the stuff that's crossed my desk about a flesh-eating panther is true. My father always felt there were too many oddities in North Africa to bother getting involved with. But you know how it is. A lot of people out there with strange leanings. If it's not a vampire, then we will need to find and dispose of those who did it. If it is a vampire, it's not so much an assassination as a simple feeding rite. You should know the means to 'process' the abomination if such is the case.'
'You say you have a man in Egypt. Why not have him handle it?' Bleddyn took another paper out of the folder. It was a break-down of the murder scene and stamped August 13th - three days ago. The Military Provosts had done their job well by the look of things. The detail it went into was very impressive.
'He's not an operative. He's a researcher.' The Lord walked back over to the cabinet and there was the sound of the sherry being refilled. 'This sort of thing is jolly bad, Bleddyn. A dashed nuisance to be quite honest. We've managed to get it covered over as a simple murder - Arab breaks in, the Colonel comes home, gets stabbed when the filcher attempts to escape - his body's found a bit later. A problem for the Egyptian police; with perhaps a bit of chaperoning from the Provost Marshal so that an Arab gets done over for it. But if somebody else gets bumped off - woe betide it be someone important, questions are going to start being asked in high places. And questions are not good for me, or for us, Lt. Moore.'
'I see I've been promoted.' Bleddyn said as he put the photographs back into the folder and closed it over. He looked at Lord Hellsing's back piquantly. 'What makes you so sure I've still got it in me? It's been a very long time.'
The lengthy sigh that Hellsing released seemed to come from the very depths of his soul. He took a swig from his topped up drink, turned and smiled. 'Your sword's in the library.'

* * * * *

Oak book-cabinets and hanging tapestries lined the walls, each available space covered in books. Books, books, books. The cabinets were full and still more remained. Hundreds of old mismatched and dusty books, stacked like cordwood in corners and on the floor, biggest to smallest. Scattered here and there on tables and chairs and rests and pedestals - overflowing and leaning precariously so that they seemed almost to shift in a non-existent breeze. Books!
This was the library. Two floors of paper-bound history, woven into some curious paper textile that seemed to creep and extend inked feelers into every available space over a short a time as possible. Heavy tables had been bolted to the floor about the centre of the room, with writing implements and desk-lamps sitting atop them. A bowl of fruit had been left on the one closest to the entrance, along with a pair of bound manuscripts. While Hellsing locked the doors behind him, cutting out the noises of the removal men, Bleddyn walked over to the closest shelf and traced his finger along the hardbacks: Praxis Magica Fausti, The Golden Bough, Malleus Maledicarum and its German reprinting Der Hexenhammer, Monstres And Their Kynde, Massa Di Requiem Per Shuggay... more and more titles, some rubbed to near invisibility, others as clean and clear as if they had been bought yesterday.
He knelt and lifted the first book off the bottom shelf. It was a heavy leather bound volume from the late seventeenth century. He opened it carefully to a random page, anticipating a cracked binding or brittle pages, but the book was intact. Dust spilled out as the leather cover let out a ravaged groan. The worm eaten monograph was written, printed really, in English. Bleddyn's eyes played randomly on the text and fell upon the following words first as if drawn there:

The Affare that shambleth abovt in the Night, the Euil thats defieth the Elder Sine, the Herd that stand wach at the secret portyll each tomb is nowne to haue, lest that-

He closed it and put it back in its place. So many books in so small a place. Bleddyn knew of men (and certainly a good few women) who would gladly surrender their limbs to be allowed an hour inside this room. Except-
'Where's the rest?' he asked suddenly. He looked over at Hellsing, who was slipping the key into his back pocket.
'Kilmaur.' The older man pointed at one of the other book shelves further away. 'Your sword's over on the wall.'

The great wood crest which hung from the plaster was polished and shiny - nearly as shiny, in fact, as the sabre that was attached to its ochre plinth. The weapon was large - a cavalry sword - rather a Pattern 1796 Heavy Cavalry Sword, to be exact. There was a moment of contemplation before Bleddyn took it down. He hefted it one hand, tensing as he felt the weight - remembered the feeling. It was a strong implement, made for swinging about from the back of the horse - not something that one would use in hand-to-hand combat unless properly versed. With a deft flick of the wrist Bleddyn swung it up and stared into its smooth finish. The reinforced metal reflected his eyes.
'I thought you might want it back,' said Hellsing from behind him, 'So I had it kept clean for you.'
A second tentative sweep of the blade, this time backhand - like a cricket swing. There was the swish of air bisected and the sword returned to its eye-level point.
'I'm rusty,' said Bleddyn. He twisted his wrist slightly, Lord Hellsing now reflected in the steel - standing and watching, munching on an apple he'd taken from the collection by the door.
'Aren't we all a little?'
'Three years since I've used it.'
'But only two since you've been in combat.' The mirror-image shrugged, and took another bite of the apple. 'Anyway, it's like riding a bike, isn't it?'

A flash of movement and Bleddyn span around - sword outstretched, to whip it about in an arc. There was a soft wet noise. Hellsing, his hand still lingering in the after-moments of a perfect bowl, smiled. The apple had imbedded itself on the sword's tip, its momentum carrying itself along the blade's length even now. It slowed, but did not stop. Its core juices sticking to the strip of metal it had slid down, the apple finally came to rest against the hand-guard.
Hellsing returned to a standing position and smiled glibly. 'What did I tell you?'

'It's not that impressive,' Bleddyn replied. He looked at the weapon and its new addendum. 'I was meaning to cut it in half.'

* * * * *

There were three parts to the Hellsing mansion, such that over time they gained their own names and meanings and grew to accommodate their own nuances and feelings and styles. The first wing, the original wing, was the South Wing. It was old, almost grandiose and sweeping - a Victorian and turn-of-the-century article, all glossed and cultured and verbose, exactly as its original owner had left it thirteen years prior. The wing that had been built last was the East Wing - the Home, the House - the place where the Hellsings lived. It was bright and airy and Edwardian, with all the modern-conveniences one could expect from our new and electric age. The main servant's quarters were here, in the cellar beneath.
Then, finally, there was the West Wing.

It was not so much joined to the rest of the House as much as it had seemed to grow over the years, like a stone and concrete weed. It was separate, an entity unrelated but entwined to the other building as moss accumulates to trees - like a vine that grips the limb of an oak so fiercely and suckles upon it, tight but not yet tight enough to rent the wood asunder. Thus far there was still that dark undercurrent that hinted at malevolent powers.
There were only three doors into the West Wing - one on the ground floor, another on the first, and the finishing on the second - all of which were joined to the South Wing. They were as far removed from the Home as was possible.
The two maids and the handful of other servants who helped maintain the house were paid well; but not always well enough to stop them mentioning the strange incidents that sometimes happened in the corridors and rooms that led to that triumvirate of doors. Furniture that seemed to move when one was not looking. The uncomfortable chill of air that lingered and dissipated as if by unseen will. Sometimes the feeling that someone was watching, even when one was totally alone.

'Aye, so it was,' said the gardener to a couple of friends over a pint of malt ale one evening, 'that once, I heard a scratching from behind the door on the first floor. Well, I didn't have a key, see? But I pressed my ear to the metal and I tell you... it was cold. Very cold. Far colder than it should have been. And that scratching it grew louder... and louder, until it became a knocking. But not a normal knocking; this was the knocking of something trying to get out!'

At one time, the doors were simply locked, open to the maids and servants in the house's employ. That was for a while anyway. After the accident, however, that changed. Poor young lass from the nearby village. So young and so pretty she was, the people said. To die in her prime, with her whole life stretched ahead of her. Such a crime.
From then on the doors were locked tightly and only Sir Hellsing and Bones had keys, and above each door-frame a strange star shaped pictogram was scratched deep into the stone. From then on there were no more problems.

At least, not for the servants.

As the two men left the library on the first floor of the South Wing and started to the stairs leading back to where they had come from, they stopped and turned to look at the metal door that was set into the stone and concrete of the beginning of the second-built annex - that door to the West.
'It obeys the rules now, Bleddyn. It's safe,' Lord Hellsing said. 'It can't get out.'
'It shouldn't have been let out of its box,' replied Bleddyn. He looked at his superior. 'Now someone's going to have to put it back in sometime. I'm glad I won't be the poor sod who has to do it.'

When they left, there was no one to hear the skittering echo that rolled down the corridors behind the door.

* * * * *

It was August and a hot dusty wind was blowing in from the south.

Bleddyn was not prepared for it and, as he stepped off the gangplank of the transport-ship and onto the hard concrete of Alexandria's port, he wondered whether the coolness of sweat he felt on his back would be the coldest he would feel all of to-day. His body ached from the cramped conditions he'd been in earlier, packed in with tens of dozens of other soldiers like sardines in a tin-can. It had only been a week and a day since they'd set off from Southampton, but it had felt like an age since he'd set foot on land. First there had been the laborious movement through the Channel, the convoy of destroyers and transporters picking their way through the wolf-pack filled waves; then they had travelled downwards around Spain, beneath it between Gibraltar and North Africa - at which point, the men on deck had seen Spanish Morocco as a thin strip of golden haze on the southern horizon - and into the Mediterranean itself; then, finally to Egypt. No losses on the way, although there had been word of a preceding convoy coming under attack only a few miles from them out in the Atlantic.
The sun was blinding and he shaded his eyes.
Other soldiers were filing past, dressed in basic uniform, coaxed onwards by officers and NCOs who were forming them into lines on the dockside. There were a lot of ships. There were a lot of soldiers. An anti-aircraft gun sat like a toad only a few yards away, ringed by sandbags.

Sunday, August the 23rd, 1942.

Before he'd disembarked he had got dressed into everyday desert uniform: sandals, socks, a khaki bush-shirt and shorts; the latter with flaps that could be unbuttoned and hung below the knee for protection against mosquitoes. None of the other officers on the dock seemed to have them down. A few didn't seem to have them at all - just a neatly cut line from where a pair of scissors or knife had run. He fanned his cap about his face, dissuading a nuisance fly. Under his arm was a long, thin bundle of brown-paper and twine.
Moored to the quayside, a ship's horn went off with a great wheeze of steam and there was the clamour of sailors dislodging themselves from idleness.

Bleddyn set off through the mixed throng of nervous, elated, chatting, silent soldiers and onwards towards the buildings he could see past the concrete wharf.

Lieutenant Sandy Cambwell had apparently been waiting in the squat little shack that was nestled between a part's store and a mercantile-stock office for some hours. There were only two men in there when Bleddyn entered; Cambwell himself and a grubby Sergeant who sat behind the wooden counter that separated the outer- and inner-docksides. A collection of sweat-stained chairs lined the wall, a ceiling fan above them beating lazily in an attempt to circulate stagnant air.
Cambwell was up and standing even as Bleddyn stepped in from the dockside-facing door. He had a thick, plummy accent and it took Bleddyn a moment to grasp what he was saying; 'Leftenant Bled-win Moore?'
'Bleth-in,' replied Bleddyn. He held out his hand.
The other man shook it firmly. 'Very sorry, Sir.'
'That's perfectly fine.'

Cambwell was a stout man. Probably a fat man before the desert had got to him, yet he still had the heavy chin of one who had bled dry the excess pounds through sweat and exertion over a short period of time. His uniform was nearly exactly the same as Bleddyn's (he noticed that they were lacking those inane leg-flaps), apart from the rank badge which denoted he was a Second Lieutenant, as compared to Bleddyn's own First. The thin material of the shirt was perhaps a little too small, and it bunched and clung in a manner and way that Bleddyn found almost unmilitary - but he noticed also that the Sergeant at the back of the room looked in similar shape. It was the heat and mugginess, he decided.
'My name's Cambwell, Sir. Sandy Cambwell. I'm the North Africa specialist.'
'You know of the situation?' asked Bleddyn.
Cambwell nodded. 'I was the one who alerted London. If we leave now, Sir, we should make it to Cairo within the next hour or so. Shouldn't be a lot of traffic.'
He led the way outside with a decidedly pronounced limp.

A Singer Nine Sports, painted in dusty racing-green, was lurking at the back of the building on the side opposite the entrance Bleddyn had come through. A pair of Daimler armoured cars were parked next to it, one of which's crew was sun-bathing on top of the turret. Bleddyn was rather surprised when Cambwell stalked over to the sharp, little sports car and threw open the driver's door. He caught the other's eye.
'Bought it off one of the French Ambassadorial staff back when they started evacuating,' he stated, sitting down on the driver's seat. He grabbed his right leg in two sweaty hands and hefted it over the running-board and onto the pedals. Bleddyn got in also, putting his papered package down by his lap.
Cambwell handled the car like an expert, pulling out swiftly from his parking spot and - with a sharp toot of the horn that displaced a group of soldiers who were walking in front of him - set off through the dock and out towards Alexandria itself.
'Got a rather nice price for it,' he said, and they span out and past a collection of gargantuan vessels that were unloading gleaming tankettes and trucks with sturdy cranes. 'But then again, he could hardly take it with him. I doubt Jerry would have liked having a British car tootling around Vichy."

It transpired the dock where Bleddyn had landed were half-a-mile from the city, and so they did not pass through the sprawl of Alexandria itself. Rather they turned south, once beyond the tall wall and checkpoint, and raced down the main desert-road that wound its way to Cairo.

Egypt was a horrible place, Bleddyn decided as they sped down that dirt-track; passing lorries and a smattering of armoured cars that were parked at the side of the road. It was hot and it smelt. He had been to many countries in his life, but of them Egypt was not one he found himself particularly enjoying. For another time in that long week he found himself wondering what he was doing here - both in a very real and very philosophical sense. He didn't have a reason to be here; no reason at all. There was Yardley-Smythe, of course, that dead officer - whose ashes now salted the wilderness, for whom Bleddyn knew some sense of closure to his death might - Might what?
He wasn't too sure.
He'd promised himself that he'd never go back to Hellsing again, not after the outbreak of war. That had been his ticket out - just like the war had been the ticket out of so many terrible, horrible jobs for other people. Somehow, though, it had crept back to him again. Or he had crept back to it. He wasn't particularly confident which, but in either case the result was the same: he was here and he didn't want to be.

The Singer was a powerful car and it belted along the barren tract like a dervish. After a while Cambwell spoke.
'First time in Egypt, Lieutenant?'
'Yes. It is.' Bleddyn looked over the door and out across the desert. He had read T.E. Lawrence's 'The Seven Pillars of Wisdom' and it was to that all he could relate it to. He realised, quite succinctly, that this was a world quite alien to anything any man could imagine - to have it described, to see it in photographs or drawings was no way to express the shape and lay of this beautiful, but somehow dreary landscape. Sand stretched to the horizon like smoothed waves on the ocean. Sand-dunes seemed to bleed into the shimmering strip that joined sky to aridity. There were no shrubs or gorse, like that flora which he had presumed to grow here - cactuses and coarse undergrowth - simply sand. Vast tracts of hot, unblemished sand. He dragged his eyes from that mesmerising terrain. 'You can call me Bleddyn. We're all equal in this job.'
'People call me Sandy.' The other man looked across at his passenger and grinned. 'Quite the irony; my mother's maiden name was Shaw.'
Bleddyn laughed. The car skimmed over a rise in the track, slamming down with jolting force. A tank, a couple of minutes earlier nothing but a shimmering black spot, drove past them on their right, going in the opposite direction. It was followed by a pair of jeeps and a lorry.
'I hear-tell you're a linguist, Bleddyn,' continued Cambwell. 'Mind if I ask what do you speak?'
'German. French.' He paused. ' Russian. Welsh. A bit of Belgian and Flemish.'
'That's very impressive.'
'Thank you.'
They hit another bump. 'Arabic?' asked Cambwell after they landed.
'No.'
'Damn.'

Then, from off towards the west there was a noise that made Bleddyn snap his head in its direction. It was a noise he'd heard before, one he had never wanted to again. A faded echoing roar.
Cambwell snorted. 'Blooming artillery. Spoils the atmosphere.'
Bleddyn knew perfectly what Cambwell meant. It seemed somehow out of place, the encroaching roll of war across this near untouched landscape. He knew the background, of course; when Rommel, perhaps Germany's greatest general, had arrived in Tunisia to bolster the faltering Italian forces last Spring, he had swept into Egypt to destroy all the gains that the Allies had made in nearly a year of combat - all in less than six months. Now the campaign was in stalemate. Britain and the Commonwealth, bolstered and equipped with American manufactured weapons but still undermanned and gunned; Germans and Italians holding a thin line at El-Alamein barely forty-miles from Alexandria itself. Too well-defended to be pushed back, but too weak and with too little fuel, at the moment anyway, to push ahead.
A matter of time before one side either over-stretched itself... or out-thought the other.

It was then that Bleddyn noticed Cambwell's leg. The knee high socks that covered the sweaty flesh had rolled down partially. The right one, however; the one that seemed to be limped on, was a curious colour that looked to start an inch or so below the knee. A vague, muddy brown. Like bad sunburn. Except it was wood. Sanded, varnished wood.
'I take it, with a name like that, you're Welsh?' asked Cambwell, and Bleddyn looked up at him and away from the prosthesis.
'I was born in Ynys Môn,' replied Bleddyn. He saw the other man's uncomprehending look, and realised that he had not been understood. He repeated it again, this time in English. 'Anglesey. In Holyhead, to be exact.'
'Ah.' It was a non-committal noise. 'Grew up in Palestine. Father took up with the Iraqis for a time. Became a Mohammedan.' Then, as if the conversation had suddenly grown stale, Cambwell coughed. 'I was told I should help you in the investigation. Where would you like to start?'
'With a drink.'
'That case we should stop at the office.'

They drove on.

Cairo was a curious place. A melting-pot before the war, once hostilities had begun it had become an even more patch-work mosaic of social and ethnic strata as each country fell or new piece of the world-stage became a battleground. Its roads were jam-packed with trucks and taxis and mules (not to mention goats and donkeys and camels which were banned from Cairo's city centre by the most unenforceable law in the books) , a near perpetual state of stoppage that wasn't helped by drivers cursing and throwing insults at each even though there was no end in sight to the obstructions. Tram bells rang like church carillon. The shops blared Arab music on cheap wireless radios - all turned to full volume. Street vendors touted their wares loudly, and pedestrians told them equally loudly to go away. There were a lot of soldiers on the street - not just in British uniform, but Australians, Ghurkas, Free French and South Africans, Poles, Belgians and Palestinians.
And the pavements! To see the pavements and what walked upon them was to see the world under a microscope! There were still a good number of classically dressed Arabs, with their galabiya and turbans, but there were more - many more - dressed like westerners. But unlike them, true westerners - most naive, others not so - were besieged on all sides: blind beggars, orphans, women with fly-encrusted babies, men selling anything from black-market razor-blades to saucy photographs. Slim, brown-skinned Arab girls peddled themselves alongside red-faced European counterparts.

It was a while before they got to the office. Cambwell drove the speedster down the various rat-ways and warrens of the old quarter's streets - past the Nile and the tall masts of the rich men's yachts, past the old German school and the convent on the banks of the river, and towards M.E.H.Q.

The Hellsing North Africa office was at Grey Pillars, one of a group of buildings surrounded by barbed-wire fencing and sentries that made up Middle East Headquarters. It wasn't a full office to itself, barely even half that - a couple of rooms on the second-floor of the Internal Security Department. A staff of four part-time typists and three 'officers'. Only Cambwell seemed to have been available since June.
His personal office (to a certain extent his personal office, at least since the two other members had left) was a little room with a map-desk that took up half the floor space and dulled filing-cabinets. A large map of North Africa was pinned to one wall with collections of multi-coloured drawing pins clustered about certain patches.
Cambwell collected a cup of water from the water-tank out in the corridor for Bleddyn, while the other man made himself comfortable in one of the desk-chairs.

The heat was astonishing and Bleddyn was forced yet again to fan himself with his cap. When they had entered Cambwell had turned on the Italian-made electric fan on the desk - now it sputtered for a moment and gave a dying, choking death rattle before finally expiring. Sensing it was beyond use Bleddyn put it on the floor and then placed the twined package where it had sat. He undid the bow swiftly and pulled aside the paper. The sabre rested in its scabbard, a belt clip wrapped around the thick case.
'That's a nice sword,' said Cambwell. He put two cups of water on the table. 'Damascus?'
'No. Sheffield steel.' Bleddyn unwrapped the belt-clip from the scabbard and give it a few testing tugs for strength. 'My great-great-grandfather bought it before he set off for Waterloo. My great-grandfather used it when he charged the Russian lines at Balaclava, and my grandfather used it against the Bantus in the Zulu War.'
He attached the clip to his belt.
'It hasn't seen much use for a few years now.'

'Did a bit of fencing for a while,' said Cambwell, matter-of-factly. He took a sip of his water. 'Can't say I particularly enjoyed it.'
'It's an acquired taste.' There was another sharp click as the strip of material popped into the scabbard's frame. A thin trickle of sweat crept into Bledyn's eyes. 'Good grief, it's hot.'
'We're in Egypt. It's meant to be.'

Bleddyn took a sip of his own drink. He hadn't realised how parched his throat was until the water touched it and he choked. Across the table, Cambwell was digging through a stack of brittle old folders. He finally pulled one out and tossed it on the table.
'Colonel Yardley-Smythe. One very dead individual. Egyptian police are already cracking skulls, but I doubt they have much interest. One Englishman is much the same as any other Englishman to the wogs.'
'Can I see his apartment?' asked Bleddyn. He took another mouthful of water, trying to wash away the sting.
'Of course. Out in Rue De Olives.' Cambwell leant back in his seat. 'Interested in a meal tonight?'
Taken aback by the sudden question, Bleddyn put his mug back down. 'I'm sorry?'
'I know a man who can get good seats at the Cha-Cha Club.' Cambwell saw the other man's perplexed expression. 'Open-air place by the river. Nice food.' Then, as an afterthought; 'Good martinis.'
'That would be... nice. Yes. Thank you.'

Two years of ration-induced hunger growled in Bleddyn's stomach. The Cha-Cha club? It sounded positively American! However, the prospect of a meal and drinks (he would chip in for drinks, he knew. It was only right) was not something Bleddyn would turn down readily. He reached out and took the folder that Cambwell had dropped. It was the same one that he had read back in England, although suitably more decrepit. The parched air seemed to make everything more brittle.
'Do you mind if we go now?' asked Bleddyn.
'You sure?' The other man scratched his chin thoughtfully. 'Usually safer to get acclimatised. Exert yourself too much too soon you'll get sunstroke.'
'The sooner we start, the sooner it'll be finished.'
Cambwell shrugged. 'As you say, Lieutenant. But I'd leave the sword if I were you. Not common officer apparel, you see.'

* * * * *

The walk to Yardley-Smythe's apartment was slow and not entirely relaxing. They couldn't take the car, Cambwell had said. It was nearing midday and wogs driving taxis and buses would be out in force. It would be slower to drive.

So it was about half-past one in the afternoon before they arrived. The flat was part of an old hotel that had been shut down back in the early twenties and then converted into a series of relatively expensive apartments. The one they wanted was on the third-floor, and Bleddyn had to wait outside while Cambwell collected the key from the reception. It wasn't half as hot in the corridor as outside and he took the time to relish the atmosphere. No Arabs lived here - only foreigners. A few of the doors he'd passed had pairs of British army boots waiting outside.
It reminded him of the hotel he'd stayed at in Ireland. How long was ago was it, he pondered? It must have been about six - seven years ago? That had been a wild-goose chase, technically. No vampires had been involved - although that is not to say something downright unnatural was going on. So they'd put a stop to that.
With a bullet. Or bullets, rather.

From the floor above there was a heated exchange in Dutch - a sudden female shout of anger, and then a door slamming shut. A pause, then at the end of the hall a woman ran its length and down the stairs, closely followed by a man in a dressing gown that flapped about him like a shawl. He shouted something after her. Accepting defeat, he stalked back upstairs.

Yardley-Smythe's flat door was made out of a thin balsawood; it would only have taken half a minute for someone to kick it open. However, when Bleddyn looked closer he noticed the thick putty seal around the door and between its frame. Someone had closed it up tight.
'Here's the key,' called Cambwell. Bleddyn had not seen him come up the stairs, but even so the other man was clumping down the hall toward him at a fair rate, right-leg stiff. One hand held the key, the other the folder.
'Sorry about the wait,' he said when he reached the door. 'The wog didn't want to part with it.'
'I should think not,' said Bleddyn as he ran his hand down the door's sealant. 'It'd ruin his wax job.'
Cambwell sighed. 'So that's what he meant, the dozy old b-----d.' He glanced at the other officer. 'Said it was haunted. Wanted to keep the ghosts in.'
Bleddyn thought; He obviously wasn't as dozy as he seemed.

The door swung open with a quiet squeak and the dull patter of wax hitting floorboards. The blinds were down and only the vague shape of an oriental rug atop smoothed and varnished flooring could be seen at the lip of the shadow-darkened room. A heavy smell of blood and sickness rolled outwards. Bleddyn leant in and ran his hand along the wall next to the door. It was unfathomable that a room paid for by brass wouldn't have electricity. His hand hit something cold and metal. He flicked it.
There was a sharp crackle, like that made by an untuned radio, and the large room beyond swam into clarity.

'Blimey,' said Cambwell as both he and Bleddyn stepped in. 'What a mess.'

The paraphernalia of a gentleman was heaped about the floor and walls. A bureau and a mirror sat on the wall next to the draped window. The mirror's glass was splintered into a crazy-paving reflection. Photographs lay scattered on the desk. A sofa, a neat ragged tear running diagonally across the cushions, rested in one corner. Two other doors led off from the room. All the same it was the floor that drew the two men's attention.
The human body contains just over twelve and a half pints of blood - more than enough to paint a relatively large apartment.

It had.

The provost's report said that the first movement had been a stroke with a large, straight-edged blade - such as a butcher's knife. It had removed Smythe's eyes and left a deep laceration across his face from ear to ear. The second movement had been to the throat. The jugular vein and arteries severed in a strikingly deep incision. Whether he was dead before he hit the ground was open to opinion.
In Bleddyn's it was unlikely.
A large, ragged circle had been drawn out on the floor in blood, hardening in places to a thick brown crust. Smythe had stood (probably knelt, thought Bleddyn) in the centre and had turned (been turned) so that the carotid spray convexed into an obscene ring. Then he had collapsed, prostate to the floorboards.
Cambwell flipped open the folder and looked at the first photograph. He held it out to Bleddyn.
'That's how they found him.'

Bleddyn looked at it and then passed it back. Blood-spattered, aggressive motifs were scrawled on the walls in sharp, scratchy outlines. Circles and lines and sigils dipped and rust-red angled here and there about the walls. In places the thin trickles had seeped together so that they looked like some hideous modernist, art-deco piece. The floor about where Smythe had lain was brown where the blood had seeped into the wood. An unhealthy colour had spread like a blossom across the once pristine ochre. A British Army boot-print was visible from where one of the military-provosts had misstepped.
'What do you think the patterns are?' asked Bleddyn. He stepped over to it, trying to miss the larger arterial spots.
Cambwell shrugged. 'I don't know. I only saw it from the photographs. But I think they're Gothic.'
'Gothic,' said Bleddyn to himself. He had seen this sort of thing before, but never so blatantly. Then aloud; 'There's something wrong here.'
He got the impression that beyond the obvious, there was something far deeper and more unconsciously wrong with the situation than he could put his finger on. Something that needed further probing.
'Some thing wrong? Apart from the blood that's everywhere?' asked Cambwell.
'I think,' replied Bleddyn taciturnly, 'that may be what's wrong.'

There was a nod of affirmation from Cambwell, who had paled slightly. Bleddyn wondered whether this was the first time he'd seen such a sight, but then thought better of it. He seemed relatively at ease amidst the carnage.
While Cambwell went through the bureau, Bleddyn checked the two doors off from the room. One was a little cupboard, the other a bedroom. The former was filled with garments hanging from coat-hangers. A large tin bath was propped up against the wall at the back. He rifled through the coat's and evening wear's pockets. Apart from half a shilling in loose-change there was nothing. He knelt and ran his hands across the cupboard's floor. There was no secret cubby-holes or removable floorboards.
Compared to the living space, the bedroom seemed untouched. The metal-framed bed was made, a suit and tie laid out on its blanket. Bleddyn could see it now; the Colonel had come home, prepared his clothes for the evening and had then returned to the living room... for what, he was not sure. There he had been killed.
The wash-bowl sat on the bedroom chiffonier, a pitcher of torpid water still ready for a wash that was not to come. Two brightly bound books sat next to it. He picked up the first. Agatha Christie's One, Two, Buckle My Shoe - a leather bookmark slid between pages 96 and 97. Bleddyn had disliked that one immensely. The other book was a dog-eared printing of Dennis Wheatley's Strange Conflict. He turned it over;

"When the bombs fall on London the elderly Duke de Richleau considers a problem of the utmost urgency. What methods are the Germans using to discover–with sinister effect–the secret routes of the Atlantic convoys? His answer is bizarre and fantastic. The enemy are in touch with supernatural powers which can be overcome only by those who have the knowledge and courage to join battle with them on the Astral Plane. The Duke and his supporters face the terrifying challenge from the Powers of Darkness."

He put it back on its stand. Wheatley was a good author, and a good occultist, but even his stuff stepped a tad too far towards melodrama sometimes. The dresser's drawers elicited more clothes; underwear, socks and ties. He checked under the bed and felt along the underside of the metal-struts of the frame. Nothing.
In some way Bleddyn got the impression that the Colonel must have been hiding something. It was a dull, uneasy hunch - the sort that gets picked up over time and from experience. He opened the cabinet's bottom drawer and rummaged through the garb. He was just about to give up when his hand hit something hard and cylindrical at the back.

It was a glass narghile, the piping tied beside it with a piece of frayed string. He took it out and held it up to the light. The faint residue of opium smoke still clung to the interior glass like a smog. So there was Smythe's little vice. He put it on top of the dresser and lifted the rest of the clothes out carefully, heaping them on the floor. There was a small brown packet of dark brown chunks lodged at the back of the drawer. He opened it and sniffed: Opium cut with tar - probably about £3 worth.

Cambwell was sitting on the sofa, sifting through an assortment of bills and old letters he'd found from somewhere. He looked at Bleddyn when he entered and then looked at the narghile.
'Found a couple of dirty books in the bottom drawer,' he said, motioning at an untidy stack on the floor next to him. 'And some receipts for champagne and caviar.'
'You think he was seeing someone?'
Cambwell rolled his eyes theatrically. 'He was an officer, Bleddyn. It's practically mandatory.'

'I think he was doped,' said Bleddyn. He put the opium-pipe on the cabinet. 'There's a washbowl full of water in the bedroom. I don't think he was using it to have a wash.'
'Blowing bubbles was he?' The other man sat up more fully. 'So they did him in while he was chasing the dragon and all this mess is from where his doer-over sacked the place for intelligence.'
'The provosts checked for that?'
'He'd locked it all in his safe back at GHQ.' Cambwell chuckled. 'He might have been a drug-addict, but he had good security protocol.'
'Was anything stolen?'
'You read the file.'
'Enlighten me.'
Cambwell pointed at a spot on the floor next to the blood. 'His wallet was left next to his body. Empty. Plus I found a chit in his notebook,' - he motioned at a black ledger next to him on the sofa - 'apparently he'd got quite a bit of money saved up. All gone.' There was a squeak as the sofa settled under Cambwell's weight. 'I don't think it was a vampire,' he said finally.

However Bleddyn was too busy examining a scattered assortment of knick-knacks to comment any further. He picked up a candlestick, trapped under a Dandy 'monster comic' (what was a man doing with a children's annual?) and a mess of opened envelopes, then looked at it. The candle-stick was a three-tiered thing, the end two candles snapped and broken, the middle-one perfectly fine. The wicks were half-burnt, their cords blackened. Bleddyn turned it over in his hands, checking it in the harsh artificial light.
It was silver plated, the artisan's mark on the bottom said.

'What do you think it was then?' asked Bleddyn. He walked over to the window, candlestick in hand, and pulled open the blinds. Thick streams of sunlight pierced the window's frame. Dust swirled in the cascade. Out across the flat tops of the roofs that stretched off towards the horizon, and the towers of the Mosques, the sun burnt a vivid hole into a cloudless sky.
'A lot of strange stuff out here, Lieutenant Moore. There was a group of Persian cultists calling themselves Subhan Tulzallah back in '37. Started sacrificing people to some 'Angel of Allah' and all that. I dare say that seemed vampiric when we got our first whiff of it - tearing people's throats out with their bare teeth. But this... the poor sod had his throat slit - not bitten.'
Bleddyn raised his eyes to the dark dot of an aeroplane that tore across the azure, dipping low towards the city. It swept over the hazy roofs of the buildings - a fighter plane; a Spitfire, its sand-coloured paint-scheme dulled against the sharpness all about it.

'It's a vampire,' said Bleddyn. He looked over his shoulder at Cambwell, holding up the candlestick as he did so. 'What other sort of person burns his fingerprints into silver?'
He tossed it to the other, who caught it and looked at it also.
'Well I'll be damned,' said Cambwell, a wan smile playing on his lips. 'You're right.' He put it on the arm of the sofa. 'So our vampire-friend was going to steal it, you think?'
'Maybe that's why it's the only worthwhile thing in here that hasn't been stolen. How do you thieve what you cannot hold?'

Cambwell shrugged at the rhetorical question. Bleddyn knelt down again and picked up the Dandy. It was a thick-bound selection of comics. For a moment he remembered the 'Boy's Own Annual' and the 'Union Jack' comic he used to read as a boy. But unlike those, on this one the lower corner was sticky with blood and the last few pages clung together. The front-cover was emblazed with Desperate Dan pulling HMS Dandy out to sea, while the other cartoon characters sat on the ship's bow. He opened to the first page, read the hand-written annotation in its neat blue ink copper-plate handwriting:

"Happy 6th Birthday, Paul!
Lots of love, from Dad."

Then he dropped it back to the floor.

* * * * *

He lit a cigarette, coughed, and then began to shave. He always smoked whilst shaving, as a way to disengage himself from the boredom of that monotonous daily task. It was really the only time he bothered to light up. Doggedly he felt the razor-blade scratch across two day's stubble and then swished it around the bowl of water under the mirror. Tonight he would go to the Cha-Cha Club and he would drink some cold martinis and would eat liver and he would think about the next step forwards.
His nose was beginning to peel from the sun.
With another shake of the razor, he ran the warm steel under his chin. Why would a vampire kill someone so blatantly? he asked himself. Usually they were quite meticulous. It intrigued him, against his better judgement. Why also would a vampire be advertising its kills using a language from AD 300? Once again, he could not help but feel a slight thrill.
He towelled himself off and walked to his bed. Cambwell had been billetted in a house on the banks of the river, giving a presiding view over the great watercourse and the vessels that were anchored or travelled its length and breadth. As the sun began to set, the greater majesty of Egypt finally made itself known; liquid fire coursed along the vein of water and turned it to gold. On the opposite bank the reflection of sunlight and thousands of naked, gas and electric illumination stood like a beacon.
First Lieutenant Bleddyn Cadfael Moore, previously a Sergeant of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, pulled on his under-shirt and his khaki over-shirt and did them up, making sure the epaulettes were visible and their double-stars were shined. With that done he stubbed his cigarette out in the metal ashtray on his chest of drawers and left.
Cambwell was in the sitting room, his suffragi; a thin, clean-cut Arab with predilections to being a quintessential English butler, doing up his master's tie. Bleddyn sat down and waited. When it was done, they left the house and walked the bustling streets to the Cha-Cha Club.

The city was as alive now as it had ever been during the day. The lights etched into Bleddyn's mind, and for the first time since arriving he really thought of London. The black-out that covered Britain smothered everything in perpetual darkness, in order to keep the Germans from finding targets to strike - but Egypt was different. The Germans had no need to bomb Cairo. Why should they drive the Egyptians to seek the British for protection and lose the much embittered seething towards their 'oppression'?
There were a lot of soldiers on the streets, many of whom were very drunk. They were hardened men who had been out in the desert for months at a time, beneath the shelling and the bombings and the heat and the bullets - and here they came to recuperate and live like there was no to-morrow. Yet they seemed to find the wogs less grateful than they should have been. When a shop-keeper short-changed them or became less than scrupulous, or a barman refused to serve drunks, or a restaurant's manager tried to over-charge them, the soldiers would remember their friends who were blown up, their comrades killed, in the defence of Egypt and then they would get violent and smash windows and shops; and sometimes people.
Bleddyn could understand why the Egyptians did what they did - they did not care for the not so subtle yoke leashed over them, neither British nor, if Britain lost, the Germans - but still he could not find much sympathy for the shop-keepers who were making a fortune off the conflict.
The pair of officers walked in the cool night air, and as they walked they surveyed the small glass windows of the shops, and turned down cheap trousers, and purses for thee laydee bake hom, and pornographic magazines that hung from clothes-pegs inside a purveyor's jacket.
They watched a group of British and ANZAC soldiers fall into tears of laughter at the sight of two Egyptian policeman walking hand-in-hand down the road in the opposite direction.
Certain roads and alleys were blocked off, and it became apparent to Bleddyn that their signs ('No Admittance To Troops - by order of the Provost Marshal') warned not of dangers to those who entered, but rather the vices that were offered.
'Where do you think Smythe got his opium from?' asked Cambwell simply, when Bleddyn pointed out what appeared to be a short-cut to the river-front. 'If we go through there we could be arrested.' Even so, a couple of British officers were lingering outside a door further down the alley, talking to the women therein, and illuminated in the light cast through its doors and windows.

Then the streets ended, and the river-bank began. Piers of every shape and size jutted out into the shimmering darkness of the Nile and house-boats lined the walls of the harbours. Cambwell took a cigarette from his case and lit it with a match. He tossed the stump out into the inky waters.
At the end of a great string of multi-coloured lights that ran the length of this part of the shore, was the Cha-Cha Club - a great semi-circular building, roofless and bright-lit, that backed onto the river proper. A queue had formed and was trailing like a snake between a vast chain of red-rope and metal-bollards. As well as suited business-men and officers of various armies, there were women - all of whom were dressed in exquisitely effete outfits.
It did not take Bleddyn and Cambwell long to enter, however. The pair walked up to one of the doormen who was waiting by a fire-exit, and Cambwell flashed him a cheerful smile and the name of his 'good friend'. The doormen vanished, and returned a minute later with a second man.
'Ah, Mr. Cambwell. It is good of us to see you again!' the man cried, as he grasped Cambwell's hand. He was short and wore an off-white galabiya and fez. His breath smelt faintly of cloves. 'Ah, and I see you have brought an associate.' He turned on Bleddyn and held up his hands. 'Mister?'
'Moore,' said Bleddyn.
'Ah! Mr. Moore! I am Abdullah Fahmy, assistant to the Cha-Cha Club's management. Please allow me to be your humble servant for the night.'
He clapped his hands twice, and then spoke to the doorman for a moment, before ushering the two Hellsing men into the club. He led them around the tables already laid out and seated, past the stage at the centre of the grounds where a group of Arabs were playing cultural music, and to a table next to the bar and the door to the kitchens. As they sat down, Abdullah grabbed a menu from the table next to theirs and gave it to them.
'I will be back in five minutes. Please, take your time. Mr. Moore, Mr. Cambwell,' he said with a smile, and then sloped off to another table.

Bleddyn watched him go with some interest. Finally he turned to Cambwell. 'What was that all about?'
'Ah,' replied the subaltern. He lit another cigarette, this time dropping the match to the grass at his feet and stamping it out, then put the cigarette case on the table next to him. 'He was being tried for murder a few years ago - we worked out he didn't do it. Some sort of Egyptian undead-thing causing all the trouble. We put it down and got him off without charges. He's been grateful ever since.'
'You do realise that the rules expressly state we're not supposed to do any of this for personal gain,' said Bleddyn.
Cambwell grunted something unintelligible.
Ignoring him, Bleddyn picked up the menu. It was a single sheet of hardened cardboard - in English. Liver was third down on the list - along with greens and 'English potatoes'. He wasn't too sure what they meant by that, but he decided it was safer than some of the other objects d'nourishment.
A British officer rose from a table and swaggered over to the bar. 'Ezma!' he said, 'Scotch. No water.'
There was a moment's pause, and then suddenly Cambwell burst out laughing.
'What's so funny?' asked Bleddyn, his eyebrows shooting upwards. The officer at the bar turned to look at them, and then turned back for his drink.
'Ezma.' Cambwell grinned. 'It means 'look', but everybody seems to think it means 'waiter'.'
Bleddyn glanced at the barman. He looked bored and a little unhappy. 'That's quite sad,' he said finally. 'I take it therefore that you speak more Arabic than most?'
'I already said, Mr. Moore - I was raised in Palestine. My father turned to Islam.' He took a great puff of his cigarette, exhaling it slowly. 'We left England during the war, you see. My father was a captain in the army and he thought it better that my mother and I traipse as baggage behind the lines. When we cut our swathe through the Ottoman Empire my family continued with it slap-bang into Jerusalem. Stayed there ever since.
'After the war, my father served in a security detachment in Basra. After the revolt he took up with a tribe of Sunni Muslims. Came back. Made me read from the Koran each day in a bid to make me a better person.'
'So you're a Muslim,' said Bleddyn.
Cambwell leant forward. 'Good God, no! I don't hold with any of that rot! I'm like you and yours, Bleddyn. Church of England.'
'Then that's what separates us,' said Bleddyn. He rose and walked over to the bar. 'Excuse me,' he said to the barman. The Arab turned to look at him. 'A martini, please, shaken, with an olive.' It was served with a brusque smile, and Bleddyn was surprised that it tasted as good as it did. He took the drink back to his table.
'Not a Christian?' asked Cambwell. He cocked an eyebrow. 'I'm surprised Hellsing allows you in.' He sat back in his chair, cigarette clenched between his fingers. 'What's your story?'
Bleddyn sipped his drink coolly and thought for a moment. 'I had an uncle who was a vicar. I only met him once. I can only remember the vaguest impression of him - a very tall, very funny man. In 1916, when we started conscription, he decided that it wasn't good enough for the average man to have to go and fight. The men of God needed to do so as well. So he volunteered. And he was shipped to the Somme.'
Cambwell nodded slowly, his lips pursed.
'He was hit by an illumination-shell the moment he went up - Over The Top - for the big push. One of our own artillery pieces fired short and dropped a phosphorous flare on him. He burnt to a cinder before they could even pull him back down into the trench.'
'I'm sorry for you.' Cambwell said. He tapped his cigarette case on the table in a dour rhythm. 'And you don't believe in God because of that?'
'I don't believe in God because of many things - even with all I've seen. I'm a pragmatist. I go with cold hard facts. Facts never lie.'
'I bet you read a lot of Sherlock Holmes when you were a boy,' smiled Cambwell. He put the cigarette case back down on the table. 'I lost my leg at Tobruk - before Rommel surrounded it anyway. We were moving to a forward HQ in order to make room for some sort of special-operations unit that wanted my, well, our, office. Jumped off the back of the lorry, and the QM said 'watch out lads' - he was a master of understatement, that Quarter Master - 'there might be a few mines around here'. Well, I turned around to look at him, didn't I? walking backwards as you do, and I shouted, 'don't worry, we're not blind' - except I didn't get to finish it, because I trod on one of Gerry's anti-personnel mines.' He grinned in the half-lighting cast by the stage. 'Took my leg off. It was an old mine, thankfully. Sand had got into it. Exploded sideways instead of upwards, by my luck and the grace of God. QM and his adjutant weren't as jammy. Took the top of the poor sod's head clean off above the eyebrows - SLICE!' He whipped his finger across his forehead. 'Dead. Adjutant was peppered with shrapnel - looked like my Aunt Sally's pin-cushion. He died quickly. Took the ambulance an hour and a half to get me to a field hospital.
'That,' he finished, 'is when I knew God was in the affair.'
'It's a pity we couldn't ask the Quarter Master for his opinion on the matter,' said Bleddyn. He picked up Cambwell's cigarette case and took one of his tightly-packed roll-ups. The other watched him, fascinated.

Abdullah came back just as Bleddyn lit the cigarette. He took the two officers' orders with jovial Arabic hand-clapping and motions, nodding feverishly when they finished, and then slipped off towards the kitchen door.
The pair smoked their cigarettes in silence for a while, watching the stage and its native musicians. When the group finished their last song, the assistant master of ceremonies staggered up the steps to the podium and said something in faltering, broken English that only those at the front row might have understood. The master of ceremonies shouted at him to get off the stage. Some of the crowd laughed.
'Have you seen combat?' asked Cambwell after a while.
'Yes.' Bleddyn drank the last of his martini, and wondered whether he should get another. The cigarette was down to the last quarter of an inch - the heat warming his fingers nicely. 'Do you know anything about catching vampires?'
Cambwell shook his head. 'No. I'm just a consultant.'
'You must know something otherwise you wouldn't be here.'
'I can read and write Arabic. Speak a smidge of it too,' Cambwell said. He raised his hand and snapped his fingers at the barman. 'EZMA! EZMA!' The man looked at him. 'One gin and tonic, with ice.' He returned his gaze to Bleddyn and smiled glibly.
The MC was on stage now, his assistant relegated to the sidelines. 'Up next,' said the MC into the microphone, 'is the delectable Miss El-Aram, the jewel of the desert.' An American major, alone at his table, stood up and roared his approval. A few other men did so too, their women for the night looking despondent by their companions' behaviour.
'We need bait,' Bleddyn whispered, just loud enough for his compatriot to hear. 'Something tasty.'
'A woman?' asked Cambwell, without looking round. A waiter delivered the gin and tonic, then left again. Cambwell did not notice however. His eyes, much like the eyes of every other man in the club, were fixed on the lithe form of the woman who paced out onto the stage. The thin veils of cloth did nothing to hide her body.
'An officer.'

The music started, and Miss El-Aram began to dance.

'You're willing to risk an officer?' Cambwell finally turned to look at Bleddyn. 'That's -' He stopped as two waiters arrived carrying plates. 'That's dangerous,' he continued when they'd left. 'What if he buys it?'
'Our leech-friend only goes after top-ranking officers, do you suppose?'
'What?'
Bleddyn frowned, thinking. 'Never mind. We're going to need a colonel at least. Somebody from intelligence. Can you get someone?'
Cambwell's mouth fluttered for a moment, then he cut a piece of lamb's liver and chewed on it morosely. 'I don't think so.' He shook his head. 'No. It's not possible. I'd need to get written confirmation from Sir Hellsing.'
'You're joking.' Bleddyn cut a slice of his liver. It was pink in the middle and a thin trickle of watery blood stained the china. He chased the meat around his plate for a moment and then looked up again. 'I doubt you get permission for anything out here.'
Cambwell glanced back at him once and then returned his gaze to the stage. Bleddyn picked at his liver and then, swallowing his pride, decided to have a taste. For something so under-cooked, it wasn't that bad. He followed the gawps of the rest of the club.

The belly-dancer shook herself across the stage, an ever-moving, ever sensuous creature. In tune to the piping of the musicians who knelt at the shadows before the scaffold, she slowly began slipping the scarves from about her neck and shoulders. Her foot slapped against the wooden floor, the bangle and bells on her ankle jangling an incessant rhythm.
However, on the other side of the rostrum, sitting with a bottle of wine, was something that caught Bleddyn's eye suddenly. There was an Army Colonel - laughing and smoking with a female companion - and on his shoulders were his rank epaulettes: Two stars with a single crown above them.
Bleddyn leant across and tapped Cambwell's arm.

'Where could you get an epaulette crown from?'

* * * * *
It had taken time to win him over, but eventually Cambwell had agreed to get the epaulette crowns. There were risks, of course, and he was quite adamant in explaining to Bleddyn exactly what the punishment was for impersonating a superior officer of His Majesty's armed forces. He was not too sure what it was exactly - but it was bad, whatever the case. That was not just a warning offence. That was a lengthy stay in a 'glass-house' - one of the military prisons.
Nevertheless he'd found one; a lieutenant at the MEHQ Dental Corp happened to know a private who sometimes let slip about a friend in communications who had a brother, whose best friend was a Regimental QM's adjutant that helped count the rank-badges off the boat that arrived every three days - for a price, of course.
By ten O'clock in the morning, on the second day of his being in Egypt, Bleddyn was sewing two shiny crowns onto his epaulettes while Cambwell's suffragi ironed the red-and-blue striped and coronet dotted tie of the Intelligence Corp.

Some hours later Bleddyn hired a room in a block of flats in the west of the city that Cambwell pointed out. It was small, and barely furnished, with only two rooms; but he knew it would likely serve his purpose. Meanwhile Cambwell spent until the first few hours of the afternoon haggling in the manner of the wogs for assorted objects and furnishings that would lend Bleddyn's new apartment an air of being lived in. It wasn't a complete success, but in the process he did manage to garner the interests of a couple of street-peddlers - whose ears perked up quite readily at the knowledge that a new colonel for intelligence at MEHQ was billetting at one of the apartments nearby.
When Cambwell returned to the apartment and told him, Bleddyn thought for a while whether that would be enough of a sniff for the vampire to catch an incentive. He decided it probably was. Egypt was split between two different sorts of Arab: those who disliked British rule, yet saw it as an unwelcome but ultimately constant evil - and those who plotted to overthrow, or take part in the overthrow, of the so-called Imperialist shackles.
There were enough Egyptians slipping tid-bits of information to the Germans, or the highest bidder, or each-other (they were rumour-mongers, the wogs) that the vampire would know the location, date-of-birth and supposed food preferences of Colonel 'Neville Wire' before the British ever realised that there was no Colonel Neville Wire.

As far as Bleddyn was concerned the vampire was menacing them. That's why he had killed a British officer. That was why he had made it so obvious - had written the murals out on the walls. He had an axe to grind, deliberated Bleddyn. Maybe he's an Arab. Or an Arab sympathiser. He mused on it while he set up his new abode, throwing a pair of hand-sewn cushions onto the cheap sofa that had come with the room.
There was a single window in the living space which opened onto a steep drop to the adjoining building - perhaps ten feet, perhaps a little more. There were no hand-grips or holds and Bleddyn leant over the sill and made sure. The flat rooftops stretched outwards, every so often with block outcroppings and metal chimneys and washing-lines.

'Is this how you catch them usually?' asked Cambwell when they were finished. He was standing by the rough-hewn cabinet opposite the entrance-door, turning a picture-frame of a woman over in his hands. The picture had come with the frame, but it looked almost real - like it was a part of the place.
Bleddyn sat on the settee, his cap on his knee, his sword propped against his leg. One hand gripped the pommel roughly. 'Not usually,' he said. 'Only once or twice. When we know they only go for a certain type.' He stood up, taking the sword with him and putting his cap on his head. The scabbard's clip and harness tightened to his belt and he gave it one sharp tug. Nothing moved. He smiled.
'I've never been the bait before,' he said. He turned to the window and looked at the pink of the horizon. 'Well. There was one time. Or two.'
He looked at Cambwell.
'I'm going to go for a walk,' he said, 'and then I'm going to come back and see if he shows himself.'
'Do you want me to wait?'
'You go to bed.' The shadows from the candles and the window grew longer and darker. 'I'll call you if I get him.'
Cambwell looked at him sternly. 'And if you don't?'
'Then I won't call you.'

Cambwell was no't a part of Hellsing, decided Bleddyn. He was like a contractor. A sub-contractor. O, there was no doubt that he was useful within his own field of expertise. He knew Egypt, for instance, and it was undoubted he understood the nature of what was taking place. But he was not of Hellsing. He never would be. For a while Bleddyn stood in the room. After the door had closed to signal Cambwell's departure he went and closed window's shutters. Then he waited.
The floor was varnished, like Yardley-Smythe's, and it had the fresh, newly-cleaned smell of wood that has been soaked in soap-suds and water. A thin brightly coloured carpet had been laid out across it. A rectangle of Persian cloth. It looked like one of the flying carpets from a story book. Bleddyn took off his shoes and socks and then stood in the middle of it carefully, feeling the softness of the blue and white and purple between his toes, exhaling.
The sword hung on his left, the bladed edge - it was a straight-edged sabre - pointing forwards. He placed his hands by his side, at ease. Then with one fluid motion he swept his right hand across to the sabre's hilt. The blade flicked up and diagonally to the right, a blur, like a fly's wing - so that the tip of the blade pointed to two O'clock and his arm was raised straight out above his head. Without a pause it dropped again, Bleddyn rolling the hilt in his hand as he did, gripping it with his left hand also, so that the blade was turned to face the direction of this new hack. It slammed downwards with a great whoosh of air and he fell into a half crouch - the blade nearly touching the carpet.
He flexed his muscles and then rose taking the weapon with him. It was still as heavy as he remembered when he had first picked it up - it was not a weapon for thrusting and parrying, even with the conversion that had been made with whet-stones over the years. The hatchet shape had been worked into a sharpened tip, like that of a common 'curved' sword. It was beautiful, the way it moved in the flickering candle-light. With the correct weight behind it, the correct angle of deflection - the movement, a heavy swing, with a good amount of whack behind it; much like an American baseball player winding up for a punt - you could sever a limb. Sever a head. Sever anything. That beautiful movement could.
Bleddyn squinted and replayed the images in his head again, trying to remember and trying to feel how the endless scenes coalesced and formed within his mind and then he took the sword off and put it on the cabinet and then snuffed out the candles and left.

There was a bar a few streets away that was still serving alcohol. Cambwell had explained that at ten O'clock at night the bars shut - at the behest of the Muslim Egyptian parliament and the killjoy Provost Marshal. He had been told to stay clear of the gin outside of the British bars, but there were a smattering of soldiers about, so he decided to risk it. He downed it quickly and then bought a second. For an encore he had a martini, stirred this time for the novelty of it.
The desert grew cold at night, the chill rolling in thick and fast as the sun slipped behind the sand-dunes. It was not the right sort of cold, however. It wasn't a real cold. It was a false coolness; a coarse liar that made you shiver, with the promise as it were of pure, unadulterated frost. But there would be no frost. No matter how cold the night got, it was not real cold - the heat of the day, the sticky sweltering heat, just made it feel all that more biting. Lying cold, that was what it was.
Bleddyn knew real cold though. Real cold. So cold that your eyebrows froze and creaked when you waggled them and the hair of your nose was clogged with so much ice that it became hard to breathe. That was proper cold - cold that didn't lie. Cold with snow.
In the real cold there were only four colours. White, like the desert but more pure - truly pure, because it renewed itself, replenished itself every few days - whereas the desert simply shifted with the breeze. Then there was blue, the sky, which was always the same except when it was; grey, when the weather was shifting and a time of change was brewing - when things grew to a closure and rebirth. And then there was red; the brightest colour in the world; the colour of blood. The most important colour because it told you everything that was important, everything that was necessary.

By the time Bleddyn left the bar his eyesight was blurring and he was sure he could hear the coming of winter off in the distance. It was, however, just a taxi with its mule clopping along the road. Bleddyn flagged it down and rode it back home, barely five minutes walk. The cabbie beat the mule with his whip until its back was lacerated and the grey fur matted black, but he never said a word - not even when Bleddyn handed him a shilling and bid him goodnight.

He unlocked his door and walked into his room, kicking it shut behind him. He took a box of matches from the top of the little cabinet next to the door and lit one and then walked about the room, lighting each candle-rack as he went. There were five of - three on the walls, another on the little cabinet he had got the matches from and the fifth on the larger cabinet his sword and the photograph rested upon. That one was Yardley-Smythe's candle. The wicks were still tapered to a blunted, ugly lump of wax and ash but he lit them anyway. They gave off a dark glow.
When that was done he shook the match out with a flick of the wrist and tossed it out of the open window onto the neighbouring building's roof. The moon shone a thick pall through the opening, over the sofa and patch of Persian rug that remained in its view and lit the shadows of the room that the candles couldn't touch in silvery luminosity.
Bleddyn took off his cap and flung it onto the arm of the settee. It bounced off and hit the floor. With a groaning sigh he knelt and picked it up again, trapped in that rectangle of lunar haze that swam at him. The stars were clear, untroubled by clouds.
Then Bleddyn stopped, still bent double, his eyes fixed upon that grey horizon - the bright lights of Cairo spread beneath it. He had closed the window before he'd left, he was sure. He distinctly remembered pulling the shutters back before practising with the sword.
His head, though throbbing from the alcohol, was positive he had done so. From the room above, the tinny sound of a gramophone or wireless began playing a soft dirge - the thin walls doing nothing to hide it, but everything to lower it to a nuisance buzzing.

He stood up, grabbing the black peak of his officer's cap - and as he did so he took a step backwards. There was a sudden swish, and he was reminded of a tennis-match, the sound of a racket being swung and his cap fell in half. The part he was not clinging to drifted downwards in an almost leisurely fashion - and Bleddyn had turned to face the direction of the blow before it even touched the ground.
The other man stared at him with impenetrable eyes from behind the hooded cowl of his galabiya - the heavy covering wrapped about his face and hair was swathed so tightly that only the eyes glowered out, boring deeply into the other's skull. Bleddyn had expected him to be dressed in black, but he wasn't - it was dressed in grey. A light grey, like gunboat hoary. In one hand he held a blade - and at first Bleddyn thought it was a bread knife, but it was too long. Perhaps half as long again as a normal knife and it glinted as evilly as anything else Bleddyn had seen for some time. The two men stared at each other for a lingering moment, the cleaved and still falling half of the cap fluttering downwards as they did so, and then from deep within the other's eyes there was a bitter, crimson flash where the light caught. Something feral lingered there and Bleddyn knew now that it was not a man at all. The cap finally hit the floor.

Bleddyn jerked his hand back as the knife whipped upwards for another blow, the vampire's other hand reaching out for Bleddyn's shoulder. Yet even as quick as it was, Bleddyn reacted quicker still; he tossed the half of the hat that still remained as hard as he could at the assailant's face. The sharp peak collided with some force, not enough to damage (and Bleddyn was not expecting it to anyway), but certainly enough to throw the vampire off balance. When it did, Bleddyn ducked back again, turning for the cabinet.
His sword was still sitting on it, caught in the strobe of the candles. He took two fleeting, running footsteps towards it and had just placed his hand upon the scabbard when a cold limb reached about him and took hold of his chin. It was immensely strong, a vice-like grip that snapped his head backwards, his Adam's apple jutting outwards, neck arched forwards. He felt a knee, padded beneath the layers of Arab cloth, but still sharp and painful force itself into the small of his back.
The killing blow would come now. The blade would arc across his throat like it had done to Yardley-Smythe and he would spray his life all over the cabinet like a great ruby geyser.
However the vampire hesitated for a moment - a fraction of a second, barely - and Bleddyn did not bother to wonder as to why he did it. He grabbed for the closest thing at hand and half span about, swinging blindly as he went.
It was a glancing blow - little more than a scratch across the lip of the vampire's hood, but it was enough. It arced downwards, tracing the skin with a great blurring flash - and that flesh it touched turned instantly to fire. The galabiya's hood caught with sparks and burning ash, flaring up briefly like a log on a fire.
The vampire screamed like a daemon, reeling back as it did so with its hands pounding at the smoke coiling from its face and clothing.

Yardley-Smythe's candle-stick had burnt itself out in its use, but Bleddyn kept a hold of it - seeing the steam and the black line etched into its silver, and then with his other hand he grabbed behind him for the hilt of his sword. He drew it. There was the scratching of metal on metal and the blade swung across his waist height - lashing out at the vampiric intruder. The creature flicked out his knife, catching the long sabre as he did so and carrying the strike with it - deflecting the blow. Bleddyn had expected him to attempt to parry; and with such a little sliver of metal, the vampire's blade would surely have shattered. Instead, the two weapons slid off each other and the combatants closed in concert.
The vampire snapped off two short, sharp thrusts; daring little movements that plucked the air at Bleddyn's throat, and he in turn swept his sword upwards and about. It missed the knife and managed to swing wide, crashing against the wall and running across it to tear a candelabra from its rest. The metal holder flew across the room and banged off the other wall with a noise like a bomb. Sparks flew into the air like so many fireflies.
With another blow, Bleddyn swung out with Smythe's candle-stick. It missed, forcing the vampire to jump backwards and to the sofa, and there Bleddyn decided it was better to just throw the object in his clutch. The silver stick bounced off the other's cloak and then hit a cheap mirror on a nearby wall, which shattered.
Glass fragments and white-hot ash fluttered about the room, and the vampire lunged forward - using the settee as a spring-board - to slash at Bleddyn's neck. Bleddyn stepped aside, trying to bring the unwieldy sabre up to bear. Carried forward in his blow, the vampire continued past his combatant and stopped at the cabinet; the sabre's scabbard still resting atop it. With a grunt the creature grabbed the metal sword's cover and span, managing to parry the downward chop that Bleddyn followed through.
From the floor above, the music became louder - a throbbing Arab beat, and Bleddyn knew how it was that nobody realised Yardley-Smythe had been murdered in his own apartment.
The vampire ducked backwards as the sabre cut across at head height, and then the daemon darted behind the cabinet. It was a heavy, teak thing; that cabinet - at least enough for a man to need help to move and get two men to break a sweat while doing so. Yet, the vampire grabbed the edge of the wood and lifted it like it weighed nothing. The drawers crashed out to the floor, shattering empty on the now smoking rug.
Bleddyn flung himself sideways as the vampire hefted its wedge of wood like a great bowls ball and then lobbed it at where the Hellsing man had been standing. The cabinet's base skimmed the floor, clipping Bleddyn's shin as it did so, to slam into the sofa. The two fittings continued into the far wall. Splinters and half-planks of wood blew outwards and littered the carpet.
The music on the floor above grew louder and a deep hammering was suddenly audible from the apartment's door. Bleddyn rolled to the side and rose, his sabre aimed at the vampire which was now moving towards him, its knife at the ready, and he questioned how long the banging had been going on.
'Effendi! Effendi!' cried a voice from outside, 'You are drunk, Effendi! I have called the police! You disrespect my property!'
The knife and sabre cast sparks when they clashed. The ash on the floor was dying down but the smell of singed carpet hung heavy. Bleddyn danced sideways as another stab darted past his ear. The vampire liked its blade, it seemed. It did not use its hands or teeth, except when in conjunction with some movement of its weapon.
'O! You start fires! I knew I should not have English soldier! You drunkards! You disrespect me!'
From outside there was a sudden loud banging of feet and the clatter of a heavy boots.
'You hear that? Police! Open the door, Effendi! I don't want them breaking my door! Open! Open!'

The vampire jerked his head at the noise, and then with one last slash to discourage, it tossed the scabbard it was holding to the floor and set for the window. Bleddyn jumped for him, his hand nearing to get a hold of the coarse fabric - yet it slipped through his fingers as he snatched them closed. The vampire's shape, enveloped within its stole, hopped onto the window-sill and then with one last look back, launched itself into the chill night's air.
Bleddyn grabbed his scabbard from the floor and ran over to the window also. From behind him there was the hammering of feet on the door and the incessant cries of the Arab landlord. For a wretched moment Bleddyn was torn between opening the door and enlisting the police's help, however, when he looked out of the window he could see running across the night-struck roofs was the vampire. It was already a fair distance away, and far too extreme to leave unhindered. With a grunt, Bleddyn hitched his legs over the sill and dropped to the hard, flat roof of the neighbouring building. He fell into a crouch as he hit, feeling the sharp pang in his legs (and a smarting of his debilitated shin) as he did so, and hearing the sharp clatter of a door finally being taken off its hinges.
The vampire was perhaps a hundred yards away and running. Bleddyn slid the sabre neatly into its scabbard and pursued.

Bleddyn ran, breathing through his nose and exhaling through his mouth. The flat-topped roofs of Cairo were like a sea of concrete and brick, sometimes fragmented by a slightly taller building or an outcropping - such as a stair-well or green-house. It was perhaps only this that kept the vampire within sight - but it was enough to slow a man down as well: and slow Bleddyn down it did.
He clambered over a wall that had been built to separate the tops of two buildings and kept running. It must have been then that the vampire saw him, as it turned sharply to the right towards the street and then, with a great lunge, leapt to the row of buildings opposite. Bleddyn watched it, not slowing - making sure to know where it was heading. Off in the distance, from the Nile, there was the sound of a fog-horn.
The vampire was making gains now. It felt no burn or ache in its muscles, like Bleddyn did, and it could keep the pace as it wished. Suddenly struck by this, Bleddyn wondered as to whether he had been too brash in his actions. How could he hope to come close to the monstrosity's own activities? Then the street narrowed to barely six or seven feet - tapering into a needled alley. With two long steps and a jump, Bleddyn breached the gap, faltering and skidding as he did so.
The vampire stopped for a moment and turned, looking at him. It seemed to ponder whether to finish its original job, but then thought better of it and returned to its flight. The damage, however, had been done. The gap between the two was barely fifty yards now and closing. To his left Bleddyn saw that the street was widening again, breaking to its original width. He hoped that the vampire didn't get any ideas towards hopping across to the other side.
Apparently it did not, and there was no need for it to do so now either. With a sudden blinding glare of electric lights, the buildings unexpectedly ended and the vampire slewed to a sudden and vicious halt. From behind it, Bleddyn saw immediately what had caused it to stop: there was no way to go but down; down onto the electric illumination of the street. It could jump forwards - leap into the abyss, as it were, but that would lead it nowhere. The rooftops at the edge of the city were spattered with guards and anti-aircraft guns. To go over would prove suicidal - if not physically then at least for future operations.
The beast glanced over its shoulder, coke-burnt eyes glittering from within the hood, and then it took a single step forward and vanished from view.

Bleddyn was a man's length from the beast when it dropped, and he too slid to a halt at the precipice. Beneath him was one of Cairo's many twisted streets - perhaps twenty feet wide at its most thick, but dotted with awnings and parasols that jutted from every shop-front that could possibly sustain them.
It was a twenty-five foot drop. Bleddyn looked first to his right - nothing - and then to his left. Flitting between the halcyon beams of light that sprouted from shop door-ways and windows was the vampire. It ran down the middle of the road - completely unopposed. The pavements were too bustled to allow anyone to run on them anyway, and the only vehicles were a pair of donkey-carts which clapped about the fleeing figure with soft, sad motions.
There was no way down. Bleddyn looked across to the continuation of the building he was standing on - but no, there was no way he could follow via the rooftops. The building next to his rose another two storeys with no means of climbing it.
If only he had a gun - at any of the distances they'd been at Bleddyn could have winged him at the very least. Intelligence officers did not carry pistols though. Then again, it would not have seemed any more strange than the heavy cavalry sabre he was currently clenching.
He watched as the figure of the vampire grew more distant and it was then that he heard it. He darted his eyes to the right.
Moving down the road was an armoured car - a Daimler one, like a small, wheeled tank. It was surprisingly tall when the turret was taken into account.
Bleddyn took a deep breath and waited until it was just a few feet from being underneath him before stepping off the brink.

A sharp pain shot up his legs, grinding his knees with jarring force, and he felt his pelvis jolt. There was the heavy clang of metal as his boots hit the back of the turret, and he fell into a crouch, one hand scrambling for and finally gripping one of the entrance-ladder's braces. Some people on the pavements turned to look at him. Others did not bother. In the Egyptian world, normality seemed to overlap all too readily with abnormality. Taking another deep breath, Bleddyn raised his head to the slowly increasing shape of the daemon - its galabiya flapping behind it.
There was a series of bangs from inside the vehicle, and then the turret's cupola opened.
For a moment there was only a hole in the machine's turret, and then the armoured car's commander, a sharp-shaven officer with a black Royal Tank Regiment beret and a pair of ear-phones on his head, poked his head out and looked at Bleddyn as if he were a ghost. His eyes roamed across the Hellsing soldier's front, up then down then back again.
'What the bloody hell do you think you're playing at?' he said, a look of disbelief written across his face. He turned and looked at the road and the pavements, as if trying to understand where the other had come from. 'Who are you?'
Bleddyn pointed at his epaulette. 'Colonel Moore... Wire...' He mentally slapped himself. 'Colonel Wire. Counter-intelligence.' He pointed at the vampire down the road. 'Follow that man.'
The vehicle's commander swivelled and stared at the shape. Then he looked at Bleddyn again - saw the bedraggled look, the nicks and tears on his uniform and, more importantly, the insignia of rank - and nodded. Pressing the earphones more tightly to his head, he ducked back down into the machine's innards. The armoured car made a grinding noise and sped up.

Closer than ever now was the vampire and coming closer more quickly too. It looked over its shoulder at the hulking army vehicle, nothing visible within the cowl of its hood. Up ahead there was the blink of headlights and the outline of a horse or donkey coming toward them. Bleddyn waited. Would the vampire be willing to go right through them? To plough right through? Make so much mess and fuss?
God, Bleddyn hoped so. That'd slow the damn down down a bit. He wondered whether he should order the Daimler to fire its cannon through the fleeing thing's chest. He wasn't too sure if it'd work, or even if he was really authorised to do something like that - he was wearing a false uniform, after all. The vampire was only ten feet away, and he could see the trepidation on the vehicle's officer's face out of the corner of his eye.
Run the vampire down? No, he thought. Better to shoot it and put paid to it. He turned to the commander and opened his mouth, just to catch the fleeting movement as the vampire ducked left into one of the many alleys that budded off from the road.
He stood up, watching the alley disappear from view as they passed it, too fast to stop. There was the vague impression of the vampire disappearing into a thick, almost solid, wall of darkness. As the commander turned also to look at the diminishing shape, he said something - lips flapping - but Bleddyn ignored it. Quickly, he stepped across the foot-wells around the turret and dropped off the roof of the vehicle onto the dirt track of the road. Then he ran, turning into the passageway and into the unknown.

Good grief, this was a chase, Bleddyn thought. It wasn't often they went to such stupid lengths to get away; more often than not they'd just turn and attack, grow angry - fickle as they were. But this was getting obtuse. He clattered down the alley, knocking the wicker baskets and old orange crates that were stacked against the walls aside as he did so. Of the vampire there was no sign. The alley was not particularly long, but the creature had not been running fast enough to have reached the end and escaped before Bleddyn entered. Yet there was no where else it could have gone.
Bleddyn turned slowly on the spot, watching for the slightest twitch of movement amongst the boxes and packing crates. He wondered whether it might have hidden itself inside one of the wicker baskets, but concluded just as quickly that was being silly. He stopped turning and licked his lips, listening carefully. There was the noise of the streets - the sounds of cars and people and radios - but nothing else.
Something made a tiny noise at his feet. His gaze snapped down. There on the floor, an inch from his toe, was a concrete chipping - pale gold in the twilight. Bleddyn craned his head back, his hand sliding his sword from its sheath as he did so.
Three-quarters of the way up the building, crawling like some great and monstrous bat, was the vampire. Its clothing hung loosely about it, giving the impression of massive, flapping wings where it draped from the outstretched arms.
Bleddyn sagged, and cocked his head - the exertion and alcohol finally hitting him. He stared at it. Then it span its head and stared at him.

He was sure the two crimson eyes took in his face and consigned it to some distant part of memory, before the monster's hands gripped the edge of the roof and it lifted itself over like its weight was nothing. Bleddyn bent over, his chest heaving, taking one great lungful of air after another. His arms and legs ached and burned. After a moment's pause he looked up again. There was a rusty old fire-escape ladder screwed to the wall, between a stack of banana cartons and a side-door to the shop. Struck with a dulled and icy fear, he ran over to it and began to climb.

The vampire continued to run, and Bleddyn followed - not through necessity any more, but through will. At first, he had wanted to simply kill it and be done with it. Now, however, there was antagonism. There was an anger at having nearly been slain by the thing - the spur of the moment having quashed any earlier personal feelings about that, - then there was the anger about being forced to chase it, and now there was just a general feeling that the thing was toying with him. It knew now that he was not a conventional British officer, but something disparate. He hoped it was something disparate and dangerous - disparate and terrifying - but he knew that by all regards his incapacity to cause any convincing damage hadn't made him particularly awe-inspiring.
That was what made him most angry and it was that which drove him to run faster.

Yet you cannot run forever. Very soon you come to an end of places to run and, as Bleddyn knew, the roofs of Cairo were too few in places to go. Ahead of them, instead of the glow of the lights from more buildings, there was a abrupt darkness - the view of the desert. They had reached the edge of Cairo. They had come to an end.
The vampire seemed to realise this and it began to slow. Not greatly, and certainly not enough for Bleddyn to catch him readily, but it was obvious that the creature was thinking. The next building was the penultimate one, by Bleddyn's eye. An old house, decrepit and likely deserted, with a ramshackle wooden hut atop - a pigeon coop or outhouse. The vampire darted around that, and a second or so later so did Bleddyn.
The two soldiers on the final building turned to look at the Arab and the British officer who were careening towards them. They had a machine-gun nest perched atop the corner-stone of the construction, and had been watching the westward horizon for any signs of enemy approach. There had not been any, of course. At least, not from that direction.

The first soldier stepped forward, rifle down - bayonet fixed - and pushed back his helmet. He held out his hand. 'Halt!' he shouted. He continued walking forwards, rifle butt slung under one arm. 'You're not meant to be up here.'
He was a big man, the first soldier - if a little young, perhaps twenty-two or -three at most - yet a grizzled veteran of some months in the fields at Wadi Al'kahzi and El Erishi'im. When he saw that the two men were not going to stop, he hefted the gun. It was an Lee-Enfield; a bolt-action rifle with a good heavy bullet, and a foot-long bayonet. He was still raising it to his shoulder when the vampire hit him.
The creature did not slow down, not by any measure, but continued forward, trampling the unfortunate underfoot. The second private, who had been standing and waiting for the challenge to stop the turban adorned Arab, brought his rifle up also and worked the action. A good soldier can get off five rounds in four seconds. If a half a platoon where to fire together, the fusillade of shots might well be (and frequently is) mistaken for machine-gun fire. Of course, that means little in such a field as this. BANG! - the rolling, ebbing detonation of a shot. It was not aimed, but at that close a range it didn't really need to be. Almost instantly there was a sharp CRACK and the vampire's arm jerked sideways. Yet still it did not slow down. It grabbed the second private's (who stood there, staring wild-eyed) still aimed rifle, with its fixed-bayonet, and then pushed the soldier holding it aside like he was a card-board cut-out. The man hit the floor and slid into a box of machine-gun ammunition with a terrific noise.
The vampire span on its heel, and then with an almighty throw it tossed the gun like a javelin. It went so fast it was silent, and there was just the sharp metallic sound of the bayonet imbedding itself up to the hilt.
Bleddyn stood stock-still for a moment, stooped slightly forward, the breath caught in the back of his throat. Slowly he looked at the rifle - its form still quivering - which jutted from one of the wooden props of the pigeon-shack he was still next to.
The vampire stared for a moment, then loped towards the sandbag nest and, using the topmost defence as a launch, sprung out into the waiting darkness. To Bleddyn it seemed as though it flew, the 'wings' of the shawl spread outwards and flapping. The creature, for a moment silhouetted against the pale cusp of the moon seemed to drop incredibly slowly. It reminded Bleddyn of the way science-fiction writers talked about other planets and astral bodies, that their mass and size meant a different gravity - a different speed in objects falling and the length of their travel above the soil.
In slow-motion it disappeared from sight.

Bleddyn walked over to the edge and looked down. There was no ring of steel around Cairo - no real trench system or fixed defence - it was the end of the line. Apart from a couple of old buildings strewn here and there about the road, there was simply the desert stretching on towards Algeria - off towards the west. The vampire had disappeared.
The soldier who had been knocked over was blowing his whistle, and from the buildings to the north and south there were returned whistle-blows and the sudden illumination of lights. Bleddyn shielded his eyes as a great search-light, like that used to point out high flying bombers, was turned to the roof from the direction of a a taller parapet nearby.
He turned away from the desert. The two soldiers were up now, the trampled one holding a broken arm - the other helping him to stand. Then the second man saw his weapon. He walked over to it, and stared wide-eyed, hands on hips. The bayonet and rifle were jammed so deeply into the wood that the grain had split about it. The shack creaked in the wind. 'Well,' the soldier muttered. He looked at his companion and Bleddyn. 'How the hell am I supposed to explain that one to my Sergeant?'

* * * * *

It was some hours before the entire affair was straightened out and quite a few hours of Bleddyn sitting in a cell at a Military Provost gaol before a dusty Singer Sports Nine in racing-green arrived. He had been stripped of his over-shirt and weapons soon after what was being variously declared as a repelled commando raid upon Cairo itself or a despicable blunder on the part of drunken or otherwise unrestrained partakers towards some tumultuous fracas. In order to prove he was not a spy or scout it had taken all Bleddyn's conviction and charm, both of which were rather lacking considering his brisk and strained run through the city - along with his wearing a truly illegal uniform. The interrogation that followed was, without a doubt, a harsh cross-examination that made Bleddyn wonder whether the Gestapo might truly be as bad as the Allies said. His wrists were rubbed red and chafed from the handcuffs that had been taut against him flesh.
Nevertheless, here he now sat in the cell of a British Army gaol. There was a single barred nick of a window cut into the wall through which a tiny letterbox shaft of pre-dawn light stirred, and apart from that there was nothing bar a bed-pan and a dirt-encrusted crib.
He was still waiting when, with creaking trepidation, the door to his cell opened and he looked up at the two men halted in its frame.
Cambwell and a Military Provost stared back at him, tight-lipped and unamused. For a moment of almost religious deliberation they waited, until Cambwell stepped inside the squat chamber and gazed down at the Military Police's charge.
'I sincerely hope you're grateful for this,' he said. 'You're dashed lucky you're on the Security Service lists.'
'I'm grateful,' replied Bleddyn. He got up from the thin mattress that was propped on a series of wooden-slats angled from the wall. 'Honestly.'

He had to collect his cap and shirt, sans crowns, from the desk. Thick sunlight was already beginning to stream through the slats across the front of the glass-house's windows. A large black clock on the wall above the desk conveyed that it was five minutes to seven.
'One bladed weapon,' the Duty Provost said loudly, slapping the sword on the desk. Bleddyn retrieved it and drew the first inch of the cutting edge. It sparkled for the moment and he slid it back in with the slight hiss of metal.
Cambwell signed the release-chit and there was a pause for reflection as the two MPs opened the entrance doors.
'Lt. Moore,' the Duty Military Provost said as they made to leave, 'please could you inform your superiors before engaging in counter-espionage. I don't want to have to ring the Embassy and MEHQ again this week where you're concerned.'
They left without much more.

* * * * *

'I can't believe you did that!' Cambwell exclaimed intensely once they were outside. He leaned against the door of the Sports Nine, his uniform crumpled and face a great mottled red.
Moore, nonetheless, took to brushing the gaol cell's dust from his shorts. 'How did you find me?' he asked. With a careful judgment he looked about at the compound of the prison. A garrison of soldiers marched in formation across the courtyard, boots clicking in unison as they went. A little further away, by the checkpoint of the main gate, two MP dispatch riders - motorbikes throbbing like demons of metal and mechanics - peeled out towards the city that reared up in every direction behind the barbed-wire topped walls.
'How did I find you!' reiterated Cambwell. 'By pure bloody luck, I'll tell you that! You're just blessed I happened to come back to your apartment!'
'You did what?' Bleddyn looked up from his survey. 'I thought I told you to leave well alone!'
'I did! Next thing I know I'm woken by a telephone-call from the Egyptian Police liaison telling me that some sort of fire's broken out at your address and I should get down there straight away. It looked like someone had tried to gut the place.'
Bleddyn balked. 'I didn't do that,' he said. 'The fires were going out when I left it.'
'The Egyptian police were guarding the place! I doubt anyone could have fanned it while they were there!' shouted Cambwell. Then he stopped dead. 'Oh,' he said quietly. 'They were on the scene rather quickly, I hear. You don't think-?'
'What a mess,' muttered Bleddyn.
'At least you got the abominable thing.'
There was a moment and then Bleddyn sighed. 'No,' said he. 'It got away.'
'Away? Where? How could it?'
Carefully Bleddyn related the incidents preceding and leading to his arrest.

When the other was finished Cambwell ran a sweaty hand through his hair. 'Dear God.' His pasty face flushed. 'Lucky for that, eh?'
Bleddyn gawked at him as if he were mad. Indeed, for a moment he thought perhaps that the other was. 'It escaped,' he said slowly, in case the subaltern had failed to comprehend on first hearing. 'It got away.'
'Into the desert,' - and Cambwell laughed - 'you said so yourself.'

From over, out across the city, the muezzins' cry of prayer was raised from the towers; 'ALLAH AKBAR! ALLAH AKBAR!' like some alien battery, and from behind the jutting monuments the sun crawled heavily upwards.
'Do you think it will survive long out there?' asked Cambwell.
'I didn't force it to go there. It went there,' Bleddyn said. He tossed the sword onto the car's seat. 'It came from the desert, Cambwell. It's got a lair out there; and a good one if it's there willingly.'
'What gives you that impression?' The subaltern leant forward. 'Did it speak to you?'
'No. No, it didn't. But it ran. They don't run - not without a reason.' He wet his lips. 'You were right. This isn't a vampire. This is something else.' He opened the car door. 'Do you keep Incident Records?'

The Incident Reports were a new thing, only recently implemented by Lord Hellsing within the last five years - give or take the months it bears for bureaucracy to seep down through the lower echelons of order. It worked like so:
At such a time as an occurrence; be that as it may a strikingly peculiar police or military statement, an untoward newspaper clipping or other article carrying the subtle aroma of the inexplicable, or even - as was sometimes the case - a brutal or blatant slaying in some manner parallel to the normal manners, or sighting, or episode that carried not simply the whiff, but the cloying stench of extranormality, then a report would be lodged. Such a report was not always to be kept - and in most cases it was really not necessary. The amount of manpower and time needed to sift and strain the vast acreages of paper would need an army. Yet, on casual glance one could usually surmise a case for action - especially if a number of Reports related to similar instances or happenings within the same locale. Once finished with those files deemed unnecessary or unrelated or otherwise outside of the boundaries of obligatory exploit a systematic removal of the catalogue could be made.
Before this coordination Hellsing had been run on a singularly ad hoc arrangement, whereby something perverse (or purportedly perverse) occurred and, within a period necessary to reason a suitable strategy, somebody would take the initiative to engage. On the British Islands this would fall upon the orders of the Commander in Chief himself - Lord Hellsing, while beyond the boundaries of Britain but still within the borders of the Empire, a chosen man would handle the day-to-day operations of the department.
This method of extemporised action had worked well during the original Abraham Van Helsing's day, whereby the sole occupation had been the hunting and subsequent eradication of the wamphyrie and other ghouls that lurked within the more populated areas of Britain - and very rarely beyond that. Most of the time, when a group of officially sanctioned Hellsing specialists (of which there were only a few) arrived there would be nothing left bar the charcoaled embers of a farmstead or other decrepit domicile and the soot-stained and strangely silent faces of a group of 'concerned locals'; or, as sometimes was the case, talk of a small company of out-of-towners who had blown in like leaves on the wind and then left just as suddenly. More problems were solved by the actions of attentive citizens than by the Hellsing Organisation - and that is how it remained until the beginning of the Great War.
Now finding itself crossed over into a far darker, more dangerous and more international line of work, the King's Royal Protestant Knights of the Order of Hellsing found themselves clutching with more than the inhuman creatures that skulked beneath the darkness, nor even to worry about the grotesquery that lay bound and chained within their own subterranean vault, but also with things that before had remained simply the staple of 'what the eye fails to see, the mind fails to envisage'.

Not before too long - earlier even than the flashes of artillery and the shrill whistles of the British Expeditionary Force at Passchendale and Gaza had rung for the last time - Hellsing found itself taking on things that stepped further and further beyond the margins of its own creation, simply for the reason that the Government could scarcely contemplate allowing another odd-ball sort of service to sprout within an already bloated administration. The newly minted Royal Flying Corp had been seen as an unnecessary burden. What too, of even more curios?
Those few, small units that finally were created; the Special Reconnaissance Section for one, found themselves swallowed into the great Polypheme of the Imperial army almost as soon as their objectives were completed or their personnel's numbers and sanities dwindled beneath capability.
So Hellsing remained, growing fatter yet more lean - its budget and manpower enough to scrape through the provisions of its prepared work, yet with not enough replenishments and experience to allow for all but the situations of greatest import to warrant action. Now charged with bigger responsibilities, Hellsing found itself being nibbled to death - piece by piece - by its own orders.

That was why there had been the change. Now they were prepared and, for the most part, Hellsing found itself arriving only an hour or such behind the official investigative arms.
The only problem with the new method was working out which reports were unnecessary, especially if the department handling it proved too small to siphon through the multitudes accurately. It was apparent that the North Africa Office was a text-book case for the inadequacies of the system.

Between them the two men managed to pull the mass of map-pins from the great plan of North Africa that was hung from the Hellsing Office wall, and once finished Cambwell collected the stacks of Reports that remained within the filing cabinets. There were hundreds of them. Wizened, crumpled paper - twisted and knotty from the parched air within the lockers, and Cambwell stacked them on the floor nearby. Then they separated that batch until there was only those remaining that stayed within a time-period of the last year or so.
Four-hundred and seventy-six sheaves of paper remained, restrained beneath the effervescent weight of a piece of Mediterranean coral.
Then they began.

'Report 345-12A,' read Cambwell from the topmost sheet. '16th of September 1941. Disappearance of two sections from A Company, 3 Platoon of Royal Fusiliers near Ikinju Maryut;' and he gave the reference for the corresponding square on the line hatched drawing. Bleddyn stood by the map and pressed a pin into the location recited to him.
'Report 346-12A,' Cambwell continued, taking the next sheet of paper from the stack. '21st of November 1941. Destroyed Australian repair vehicles found - crews decapitated by unknown means...' Another pin slid into the hard cork of the display.
'Report 362-13A. 21st of December. Reconnaissance flight of three (3) RAF Hurricanes take off from airfield near Dirin. Single (1) plane found near Al Qasabah ash Sharqiya - crew missing - nomads report several 'flying, multi-coloured lights' harassing the aircraft pre-crash.'
'Report 346-14B. 1st January, 1942. Three man team of Signals officers found mauled to death four miles west of Alexandria by large - unknown - animal.'
So it continued, on and on until the board was filled with tiny, fluorescent pins of myriad hued tops. Yet not filled entirely - in fact, not filled at all - and when Bleddyn stood back to look at his handiwork the two men of the office looked at each other in silent wonderment.

There was a distinct band, a tapering belt, stretching from the middle of Egypt across to a few miles to the east of Cairo. A tapering belt indeed, for it was thinner at the west than it was at the east - almost like a triangle. It was as if an equilateral triangle had been lain on the map and pins had been placed within it and running generally along its edge - although with some beyond and outside its boundaries but so rarely as to be abnormal.

Cambwell stepped over to the board and traced his fingers across from point to point, looking first at the pins and then at the annotations that Bleddyn had pinned beneath them at some points. 'Earliest ones are to the east,' he said quietly - 'and the later ones are everywhere.'
He turned to Bleddyn, who was taking a steel-rule and a sharp-pointed pencil from the desk. 'I never realised -' he started. Then, 'if only we'd bothered to look.'
The rule touched the lowest, most easterly pin on the map and then was turned to run the average of the column that proceeded up towards the Western Desert. It etched a faint line. Then the rule moved upwards to touch the topmost easterly pin and a line drawn to intersect the first line via the average of that track of pins.
He circled the point where the two lines met.

'That's twenty-five square miles,' said Bleddyn. He looked at Cambwell, who was sitting heavily in his chair, staring at the board. 'Do you have a relief map? One with towns and things on it?'
Cambwell's eyes turned from the board and Bleddyn saw that they were gripped in a dark fever. 'There's no need for that. There's only one place there - al-Khalasa.'
'You know of it?' asked Bleddyn.
There was a brief chuckle. 'O yes. It's a supply depot, Bleddyn. One of ours - until last September.' He reached out to press a finger to the circle drawn about it and suddenly Bleddyn understood.

'And it's about fifty miles behind Gerry's front-line!'

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In our next exciting periodical we unfold the consequent chapter in this narrative and survey
the deserts of North Africa, with help from Great Britain's Special Air Service! What death-defying
insights into the undue terrors of the fiendish Hun's most insidious plans can be reaped from this?
Next Chapter on sale fourteenth of November, 1943, priced at -/3d and available from all good stockists

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"'Titan Periodicals' never lived long enough to get the recognition 'DC Comics' or 'Marvel Entertainment' ever did. Nor did it even manage to build up a successful base amongst its most avid buyers. For two short and painful years, 'Titan Periodicals' slaved away releasing one slightly clichéd detective novel, 'Three Men In A Boat' (re-released in the 1980s by 'Penguin Books' with the rather over-informative title: 'The Dead Book-Maker') and a short series of chap-books; 'The Last Charge Of Their Fearsome Red Dragon' (or, as the original Welsh title says: 'Y Rhuthr Diwe Thaf Am Eu Gilydd Draig Goch Ofnadwy').
"Comic books fielded their first break-out hit in May, 1938 - and like all break-out hits, it spawned imitations. By the time it hit the UK, however, the fad had been superseded by global events. While America continued making Superman comics and keeping up to date with the exploits of Captain America, Britain was trying to keep afloat with rationing and continuous bombing-raids on its major cities. Although children's strips, with amusing talking animals and school-based hijinks had been going on in the now well-established The Beano and The Dandy comics since 1938, classic pulp-machismo in the manner of Batman had been sorely lacking.
"In May 1942, Douglas Kemp resigned from his job as a cartoonist for The Times newspaper and set up 'Titan Periodicals' above a fish and chip shop in Swansea, Wales. It was a bid to start a serious British based comic company in the vein of the American ones that were arriving with U.S. servicemen. Within six weeks he had two artists and a full-time writer, along with a number of subsidiary authors ranging from a handful of young recruits of the city's home-guard, a teacher who worked in Bawdsey and two British officers who were serving with the East Indian Division in Egypt.
The 'tec (or Detective) novel, 'Three Men In A Boat' was published in December 1942 - written by the Bawdsey teacher, and it was almost another year before the now cult periodical 'The Last Charge...' was published. Still failing to hold onto suitable inks and running short on time, the story was printed in full literary form with one carefully inked graphic per 1 to 2 pages. In effect, the story was by no means a comic, but written in narrative prose; yet this didn't seem to matter to its publishers.
"From the outset, the series was plagued by problems. The original run - written by the still mysterious Albert Spencer, a man (or woman) who seems to have never existed in the first place - was completed and left in storage for six months before being printed in one batch. A 'chap' was doled out to distributors each month thereafter. Only one-thousand of this original run were printed (although whether this was due to paper supply shortage or something else is unknown) and when the second chapter was released, the Ministry of Information (at the time, Britain's Government controlled propaganda organisation) ordered that the entire series be edited of 'national secrets'. What is surprising is that unlike other pieces taken off sellers' racks for minor mentions or 'lack of bolster to public morale', those national secrets of 'The Last Charge...' were exactly that - many now famous people, who at that time were under great secrecy in their actions, are detailed and described along with operations and historical information of the preceding year of combat. The series was re-printed - but the originals were not destroyed, resulting in newsagents receiving two different comics in each batch; one the unedited original version, the other an excised edition with various scenes extracted or altered and names changed.
"Even so, the end of the books came just as easily as any other war-time fabrication. Conscientious families, knowing the necessity for paper, returned their comics to be re-pulped. Those comics that remained with newsagents suffered the same fate. 'Titan Periodicals' closed in July 1944, after a painful decline that many saw as the death-knell for a unified British comic industry. They were wrong. After the war, The Eagle comic, the first true comic in the vein of the pre-war American variety - but with a decided stiff-upper-lip - surfaced and began a new era of British comics that still hasn't died out.
'For some time, that remained the end of the 'Titan Periodicals' situation - no editions had ever seeped outside the British Isles (although acclaimed DC Comic writer and artist Winchester Stevens made mention of it numerous times in letters to his wife before his death in the Ardennes Offensive of 1944 [See 'Stevens, Winchester']) and, although a handful of fragmentary copies of the edited version had turned up in lofts and book-dealers, no complete sets of the unedited version were known to exist. The entire affair practically vanished into the ether of history - much like the origin of the ever-wholesome Archie comics.
"Then, in mid-1973, The Eagle began a fully comic based story called 'The Vampire Swordsman'. After three episodes, a sudden flurry of legal action was taken against The Eagle by a solicitor claiming to be standing for none other than the elusive Albert Spencer. A case was laid that the story and characters were based upon Titan's own 'The Last Charge...'. In fact, The Eagle admitted their indiscretions before the trial even started and cancelled 'their' story, replacing it with a suitably trite apology from the 'writer'. Just when authors and literary-historians were getting interested in the reappearance of Albert Spencer it turned out that the solicitor was in fact standing for Gregory Moondike; the artist of the original series. Moondike had felt it would go down better in the eyes of the law if the case was put forward by the creator rather than himself. In any case, after a rather passive interest by the media, the novelty died down.
"The next, and greatest, reminder of Titan's former life came in 1986. Alan Moore had redesigned comics as 'Graphic Novels' and what was originally kiddie-fair was becoming a new mass-media. Comic, as they say, was cool. In March of that year, Christie's auction house suddenly had a complete set of 'The Last Charge...' chap-books thrust into their hands for sale. The seller was simply known as 'Bobkiss', an obvious nom de plume. Before too long, every comic-store geek and his dog (and historians, fans and the media-types who get attracted to such things) were crawling out of the woodwork all over the place. But things were not as expected.
"Instead of being individual chaps, it was a single portfolio - missing the original covers and advertisements. Each book had been taken from its spine and sewn into a larger ad hoc collection. Purists were appalled. Historians were disgusted. People who simply wanted it for the story were offended by the shoddiness of the wear. Experts who would have bought it decided not to at the realisation it had mingled both the edited and unedited versions of the story. It was a disaster; but it proved one thing: There were original collections out there somewhere. 'Bobkiss' Bundle' as it came to be known failed to be sold and returned to its owner. The mundane buyers of comics and old books soon petered out in their excitement.
"The flurry of exhilaration amongst the more extreme strata of comic-geekdom that was risen by the failed sale did not die down, though. After some wide-scale searches and the finding of edited Issues 2 and 3 in a tea-chest in an attic in London (followed by a private sale believed to be between £13 and £14,000), a full and unedited set was handed anonymously to the British Library in August of that year. In December of 1987 the set vanished - widely attributed to a break-in, as alarms were tripped, although nothing else was stolen. Every few years now, a couple of issues or extracts from the edited version crop up, along with extortionate exchanges of money.
"As far as anyone knows, there are no full sets of the unedited version still around. But then again, no one believed there were versions of any sort up until 1986. In 2001, talks were held with Warner Bros. about a possible film. Although it lingers open, the probability remains unlikely seeing as a court case is still proceeding in Japan over a series of comics (and a sloppily produced television series) that is believed to use copyrighted characters from the original 'The Last Charge...' source. Seeing as Gregory Moondike died in 1987, it is unlikely that it is him filing this repeat of the 1973 incident.
"Whatever the case, in last year's encyclopaedia 'Titan Periodicals' took up one paragraph. Five years before that, it wasn't even included at all. Quite impressive for a dead company. Or would it be too cliché to say... undead company?"
- The Encyclopaedia Of Comic Books (2002 Edition) : Iain Rush and Bill Hockley