That touch of eagerness came innately in this situation, unable to be helped. Everyone reacted differently to the anticipation of action ahead. Boots were usually terrified when taking their first ride to confront the enemy, though some were all swagger, an action star ready to unleash a one-man symphony of death that rarely ran past the overture. Senior men were usually poised and quiet on the chopper; their thoughts impossible to read and nobody’s business but their own.
But the elite warriors, the true professionals? They went in businesslike and impassive like Irish and Coach; pissed off like LT; nervous yet determined like Diaz; even laughing their asses off like Sugar and Gable, who didn’t seem to give a shit whether they drank their next whiskey on the Vegas Strip or in Valhalla with Red.
Max felt only contentment as he pulled on his goggles and crossed the tarmac through the thunderous windstorm kicked up by the rotor. He boarded the chopper via the loading ramp at the rear of the aircraft, taking the foremost position on the starboard side, alpha team falling in behind him. LT and bravo team took the seats to port. The teams took up very little space in the cavernous cargo hold, spacious enough for three-dozen Marines in full combat gear. The fast rope was already clipped to the winch on the ceiling, coiled up on the floor atop the closed deployment hatch.
Max conducted the unnecessary yet customary headcount. Old habits die hard. All was in order. Everything checked out to his satisfaction, despite the vague factors inherent in the mission. As he sat across from his men, their faces streaked with face paint like Viking warriors with high-tech combat gear, he felt a sense of calmness flood over him. These were his brothers and this was his true home, his calling, and, for better or worse, the only place where he even remotely belonged.
* * *
Max stood in the cockpit doorway and watched as they approached the DZ, the pilots flying fast and low. On the satellite images, the clearing had seemed wider. Now it appeared to be only a hundred feet across and three hundred feet long. Max had his radio tuned to the same frequency as the pilot and copilot. Though he already knew the answer, eternal optimism demanded he ask, “You think you can touch down?”
“No,” the pilot immediately responded, accompanied by a chuckle from the copilot.
Max didn’t blame them. He wasn’t sure what model of CH-53 they were on, but he knew the rotor diameter would fill three-quarters of the zone. No sane pilot would risk trying to land in a clearing with so little room for error.
“Very well. Put us in position,” Max ordered.
He turned from the cockpit to the team, pointing toward the fast rope. Gable smiled; the old paratrooper loved this sort of shit. The rest of the team looked impassive, making their final preparations and gear checks in their flimsy canvas seats. A faint hydraulic whine accompanied the opening of the deployment hatch–a rectangular hole in the floor. The nylon fast rope dropped through the floor and uncoiled. Below, the rope whipped wildly in the maelstrom of the bird’s rotor wash, the far end barely brushing the snowy ground.
Not gonna work. “We need another ten feet,” Max informed the pilot.
The pilot paused. “Five is the best I can do. I’m damn near playing lumberjack as it is.”
“Copy that.” Five would have to do. But there was a definite element of danger involved.
Fast roping was a simple concept: don a thick pair of leather gloves, preferably with a pair of lighter gloves beneath for extra protection against friction burn, then grab the rope and slide down. His men would also clamp the rope between their boots to provide extra braking—a necessity for the amount of gear. In training, where the distance was never more than fifty feet and someone was steadying the rope, fast roping was as easy as it sounded. Eighty feet up with the rope swinging all over the place and barely contacting the ground made for a risky descent.
“Deploy when ready,” the pilot conveyed.
“Deploying now.” Max grabbed the rope, while his team stood nuts to butts, ready to follow. He believed in leading from the front, something that had been drilled into him since his earliest days as an officer in the Marines. Clamped on with his boots, he started to drop.
“Stand in the door. GO!” Gable called as Max dropped through the floor.
The first half of his journey went textbook smooth. For the last forty feet of the drop, he dangled from a rope in an epic tornado. With an especially violent whip, the rope freed itself from between Max’s boot soles. His speed doubled under the weight of his gear, and even through the two layers of gloves, his palms seared. After near-freefall for the final ten feet, he landed hard despite the cushion of eight inches of melting snow with a wallow of mud beneath.
Nothing popped; nothing broke.
Not that Max had time to think about it. He rolled and sprang to his feet, found the dangling rope through the swirl of snow kicked up by the bird, and ran to secure it. He reached the end just as Gable touched down.
Crouched in the open and holding the rope, Max was a sitting duck for any decent sniper. Gable hit the ground running and took up a prone shooting position along the trail toward the camp. The others did similarly, filling in like points on a compass. About twenty-five feet apart, they scanned the tree line for any signs of the unknown enemy.
No bullets came before LT, the last man, hit the ground.
“All clear,” Max radioed to the pilot.
“Acknowledged. Catch you in forty-eight. Good luck,” the pilot replied through a garble of static. The winch began to reel in the rope. The rotor changed pitch as the pilot gunned the Sea Stallion straight upward, clearing the retracting rope over the treetops before he started back to the airfield. The team’s last lifeline to the civilized world thumped away into the gray sky.
Max ran and dove into the snow, taking his place in the perimeter. “Report in,” he ordered.
“Clear,” each man reported in turn, no signs of anything moving.
Max pulled his binoculars and scanned the trees running the length of the clearing’s northwest side, taking his time and lingering on areas of potential concealment. A whole lot of green tree boughs sagged beneath burdens of melting snow, but nothing appeared out of the ordinary.
Max secured his binoculars and grabbed his HK416 carbine rifle. “Let’s move out,” he ordered. “Double wedge to the tree line, two columns when we hit the woods.”
The men fell into formation, still twenty-five feet apart. They jogged toward the tree line, weapons raised and ready. Radio silence ruled as the team awaited orders from Max and LT.
Max reported, “Nothing over here.”
“Same here,” LT responded.
The static wasn’t enough to garble his words, but comm was definitely worse here than at the airport. Just as no one reported running across signs of recent activity or habitation in the clearing, the story remained the same at the tree line. Scattered animal tracks offered the only signs of life. A steady breeze kicked up, heralding the arrival of the weather front. For all its halfhearted bluster, the front wasn’t pushing much in the way of cold weather. The temperature here hovered about ten degrees lower than at the airport; nevertheless, Max doubted it was cold enough to snow, at least not at the moment.
The two teams formed columns and headed into the woods toward their first waypoint. Max took the lead for alpha team while Gable did the honors for bravo, Gable’s experience as a point man ever invaluable. They maintained about sixty feet between columns, the teams barely able to make each other out through the blanket of gloom cast by the towering evergreens. The men well accustomed to the outdoors moved silently through the dense brush, like big jungle cats stalking their prey. About thirty feet separated the men within their columns; those in the rear on the alert for hand signals from up front. Radio silence wasn’t to be broken unless absolutely necessary. They stopped periodically to listen for any sound of movement in the forest. Moving carefully in this fashion, it took the team nearly two hours to make the first waypoint.
“I have visual on the cleari
ng,” Max announced.
After a pause of several seconds, Gable responded, “I have visual.”
“Circle and secure the perimeter.”
“Copy that.”
Max reached the clearing, which he estimated to be roughly five acres in size, consisting of scrub and grass, perhaps created by a long-ago forest fire. A man in full battle dress lay near the center of the clearing in a mess of bloody snow with his neck ripped open and head turned at an impossible angle. “Visual on a body.” Max waved Red forward and signaled him to set up with his machine gun at the clearing’s edge.
“See it,” LT responded. The static in their comm grew worse all the time.
Gable reported, “We got two dead on the ground, maybe more.”
Red motioned to Max, then pointed across the clearing at something hanging in a tree. Max pulled his binoculars for a better view. The fir tree appeared sloppily bedecked in old silver tinsel that had faded to an unmistakable flat gray that Max knew all too well. All the boughs on one side of the tree had been snapped off to the level where the strands were hung.
“LT, you see that mess in the tree across the clearing?”
“Affirmative.”
“Circle to the left. We’ll take the right flank and meet over there. Leave Sugar to cover.”
“Copy.”
Though eager to confirm what he thought hung in the tree, Max took his time leading alpha team around the clearing. The ubiquitous animal tracks that had dotted the snow on their walk were conspicuously absent around the clearing, which was odd considering all the easy pickings for scavengers. The area fell eerily quiet. There was no ambient noise save for the occasional susurrus of the wind as the front moved in.
As he led his team through to the clearing, Max had an uneasy feeling, as if he could feel eyes upon him. He held the thought to himself, as he kept his head on a swivel, scanning the surroundings as they pressed forward.
Even having an inkling of what they would find in the tree did not prepare the team for the reality of it. The carnage began in the clearing. Spatters of blood and a trail of disrupted snow led to the tree, at the base of which Max made out the impressions of boots and some kind of animal tracks—perhaps a massive bear. Broken tree branches littered the ground, snapped like so many matchsticks from the tree trunk. Deep crimson smears, punctuated with the occasional scrap of viscera, stained the snow. A wild slash of claw marks led up the tree where a human torso lay wedged in a crotch at the trunk. No, more like half a torso, the entrails ripped from the gut and looped crazily over and around tree branches. The man’s legs were nowhere to be seen.
Max followed the gory path up the tree and noticed that some of the claw marks were human as he saw the remnants of the man’s fingernails wedged into the bark.
Gable arrived on scene and stared up into the tree. “What the fuck happened here?”
LT replied, “Fuck if I know. Looks like a bear attack.”
“I ain’t never heard of no bear with feet that big.”
“They’re called paws, Gable,” LT corrected. “And now you have.”
Max shook his head. Do bears deliberately mutilate their prey? Make a spectacle of their killing? Not a naturalist, he had no answers.
By this time, the rest of the team had arrived, minus Red and Sugar. All stared in disbelief at the remnants of the Greytech security man. Veterans of dozens of engagements the world over, killers in their own right who had seen bodies in every state of decay, murdered in just about every way—had ever seen anything this gruesome. The huge bear tracks, the extent of the carnage—it was all too unbelievable.
Diaz shook his head, first at the bear tracks and then at the headless half-man up the tree. “No en talla,” was his only comment.
LT sniped, “Denying it won’t make him disappear.”
“Not what I meant,” Diaz said. “I lived in the Rockies for a bit. I worked on a victim of a bear mauling once, and the guy didn’t look anything like this.”
“You’re the bear expert.” LT took on the brusque tone he used far too often.
Diaz turned incredulous. “They don’t make bears this big. Look at the size of those fucking tracks. The thing would be over twenty feet tall.”
Irish added, “I’ve heard tales of grizzlies that big. Wouldn’t surprise me up here.”
“They don’t do shit like this!” Diaz protested. “I’m telling you, bears don’t decorate a tree with intestines and take off with the legs.”
Max stepped in. “Keep it down. Maybe it didn’t take off with his legs. Fan out, let’s see if we can find any more of that guy.” He peered up at the remains. Poor son of a bitch. Any form of death seemed preferable to what this guy had endured in his last moments.
Despite his opinions on the scene, Max held his tongue. A bear might be that big, but he knew Diaz spoke the truth. Scavenging animals on a battlefield invariably feasted on the entrails first, the most tender and nourishing flesh on a corpse. No animal would waste good guts decorating a tree. A hungry bear wouldn’t chase down a man and then pass over entrails for leg muscle. It didn’t add up.
Max transmitted over his headset. “Sugar, Red, move into the clearing and investigate those bodies. Try to preserve what you can around them.”
Both men acknowledged the order.
“Let’s fan out, boys, fifty-foot radius. Stay in visual contact and report anything you find.”
Coach reported in first: “I got the bear’s trail. Headed due north.”
“Don’t follow past fifty feet,” Max repeated.
“Found a rifle here,” Gable said. “HK G36.”
About a minute later, Coach responded, “His lower body’s here, just off the trail.”
“Roger that,” Max answered. “Check it out and then return to the tree. Sugar, Red? What do you have out there?”
Red snorted. “Got a guy with his heart ripped out and his head ripped off, otherwise he’s just peachy.”
“Five-five-six brass everywhere, Chief,” Sugar reported. “Four men down out here, all stiffs and all mangled. All with G36 rifles.”
Red added, “All their gear’s top of the line. Fuckers were well equipped.”
“Tracks,” Diaz announced. “They lead to a pile of blood and tissue but no sign of a body.”
“Ditto over here, tracks and gore but no body. Heading back,” LT replied.
Back under the tree, Max asked Coach, “Anything special about his legs?”
“Not really. Ammo pouches still on him. I found these.” He held up two thirty-round mags for the G36. “No ID.”
“Rifle’s empty.” Gable proffered the G36 to Max. There appeared to be nothing unusual about the weapon.
“Pretty sure a grenade went off out here,” Sugar added. “One of these guys has three, unused, still clipped to his vest.”
“Dibs,” Red called.
“Man, fuck you,” Sugar replied.
“Cut the chatter. We’re coming out to sweep the clearing.” Max turned to Diaz. “Give me quick postmortems on each body.”
“On it.”
Into his microphone, Max said, “We need to do this quickly, fifteen minutes. Daylight’s burning.”
Diaz’s verdict for the men in the clearing: death by rending and evisceration. “Never seen shit like this before.” Max could hear the quaver in his voice.
“Not your worry, Diaz. Stay sharp.”
All the rifles were empty, save one that belonged to a man down at the edge of the clearing who had apparently been the first to die. One of his arms had been ripped from his shoulder. Irish found the appendage about thirty feet from the body.
“Well, loo—” Static cut off the rest of Red’s transmission.
Max turned his attention to where Red stood waving for him, then double-timed it over there. LT met him at the scene.
“Sat phone,” Red informed Max and LT. “Found it right here.” He stood about ten feet from the nearest body. The screen on the phone—a Greytech model, of course—
was shattered, and the missing battery cover revealed an empty compartment.
“Let’s find that battery,” Max said. “Red, check his body. We’ll check the snow, LT.”
Red came up empty, save for more magazines; one loaded and two empty. Max found the battery cover lying atop the snow and then noticed a tiny depression in the snow several feet away. He carefully dug around it with his hands, revealing the battery. It appeared none the worse for wear. Max wiped all moisture off the contacts and snapped it into the phone. He powered it on, and to his surprise, the cracked screen illuminated.
According to the phone’s log, it had dialed a number listed as Greytech Alpha two days ago at sixteen fifty-six and been connected for a duration of sixteen seconds. Just because the call connected didn’t necessarily mean clear communication, however, given the magnetic disturbance. Max shook his head. He’d been informed that this security team’s final call had been garbled in some fashion, but given the fantastic carnage visible about the clearing, he now had his doubts. Maybe they didn’t want us to know what they heard during those sixteen seconds. The final call was the only one made on the sat phone in the last two days. Max found no voicemails or text messages to provide any further clues.
LT apparently harbored similar thoughts. “I’ll bet you they have that recording.”
“Probably so,” Max answered. “It’s my bust. I shouldn’t have taken their word for it.”
“We’d be here, regardless.”
“True. But we might have been a little better prepared.”
LT didn’t respond. There was no reason to ponder the miscue any further. Max felt certain the nature of the final phone call was only the first of many prevarications he would discover in the next couple of days.
“What now?” Red asked. “We’ve found about all we’re likely to around here.”
Max replied, “On to waypoint two.”
“We’re not gonna investigate that bear’s trail?”
Max shook his head. “We’re not here to track a bear.”
“You think this has anything to do with Base Camp and the dig?” LT asked. “Because I’m thinking this is a separate incident.”
Existential Page 9
