Flynn whistled. “Man, this place is something else. Wonder if it’s for sale.”
Scott ordered the men to spread out and search, then led a team, which included Marcus, Flynn, Lau, Ishfaq and three other soldiers, across the courtyard and up a set of stone steps to the main entrance of the house.
As with the doors to the stronghold, the main door of the house was standing open, and light blazed from within, spilling onto the front porch and down the steps. Before entering, Scott glanced up and around, marveling at how completely the high, thick walls of Moreno’s little kingdom contained the light within them. Relaying quick instructions, he moved swiftly up to the front door of the house in a half-crouch and entered the building, sweeping his rifle left and right. His men, just a step or two behind him, did the same, spreading out in all directions, quickly covering all areas and angles.
The entrance hall was high-ceilinged and ostentatious, all white marble and gold trim. What struck Scott immediately, however, was not the splendor of the place, but the fact that it was awash with blood, bullet holes pockmarking the walls and floor, and various artifacts lying around in shattered pieces, including a crystal chandelier, which had crashed onto the floor and now resembled a smashed, bloodstained ice sculpture.
Over on the far side of the ravaged hall was a wide staircase, its bottom step flanked by a pair of gaudy gold statues depicting the naked female form. At the top of the stairs the landing ran the width of the house, and all the way along both side walls to a pair of large picture windows, which stood either side of the front door and no doubt provided stunning views of the courtyard.
Although there were no signs of life from within the house, Scott felt nervous surrounded by the closed doors on the back walls of the viewing gallery above. There were maybe a dozen in all, and theoretically they could burst open at any moment and armed men could leap from them and engulf them in a rain of bullets.
However, judging by the state of the entrance hall, an ambush from above seemed unlikely. But unlikely was not good enough for Scott; he needed to be sure. He dispatched six men to the landing, three to check out the rooms on the right, three to cover the left.
As the two teams swiftly ascended the stairs, he, Marcus and Ishfaq concentrated on the ground floor rooms. There were two doors to the left and a pair of large double doors on the right, with more doors stretching away toward the back of the house on either side of the staircase – though the guys who had been sent to the rear of the house would be covering those.
Starting with the doors on their left, the first room Scott, Marcus and Ishfaq entered was a dining room, dominated by a huge table with place settings for eighteen people. This room was empty and untouched. Clearly dinner had long been cleared away, and the table was now set for breakfast the following morning – a breakfast it was doubtful anyone would eat.
The second room was a library, the floor-to-ceiling bookcases full of leather-bound volumes so pristine that Scott suspected they had been purchased simply to fill the shelves. The main focus of the room was a pair of expensive-looking sofas upholstered in an emerald green fabric, which faced each other across a low, glass-topped wooden table strewn with newspapers and magazines. Above a gray stone fireplace was a huge portrait of a man with curly black hair, a wide forehead and a thick black moustache. He was dressed in a dark suit and stared haughtily down at them.
“Our charming host,” Marcus murmured.
“Where’s the real one, I wonder,” said Scott.
That question was answered moments later when the three of them entered the room across the hall, shoving open the double doors and bursting in, rifles swinging in a wide arc, alert and ready to put down any resistance.
Scott was reminded of the school gymnasium in the wilds of Scotland a year earlier. There, the bodies had been laid out in a neat row. Here they were stacked in a haphazard pile like abattoir leftovers.
Bad men these may have been, but there was something shocking, even horrifying, about the way they had been butchered and casually discarded like so much human trash. There was such an overlapping sprawl of limbs, and so much blood soaking into the floor and furniture and spattered up the walls, that it was hard to tell exactly how many corpses had been dumped here. Scott guessed that the space contained somewhere between thirty and fifty bodies. It was not only the sheer number of victims that set his mind reeling, however. It was the fact he had seen it all before.
Echoing his thoughts, Marcus said, “This is the third time we’ve come across something like this. Bodies skinned, heads gone, spines ripped out.”
“Must be a cartel thing,” said Ishfaq. “To prevent identification.”
“Scotland wasn’t a cartel thing,” said Scott.
“With respect, sir, none of those bodies had had their heads removed.”
“But they’d been skinned,” said Marcus, “and laid out in a row like the bodies in the jungle that time.”
“You know what’s weird?” Scott said.
“Aside from the fact that whoever did this appeared and disappeared like a ghost, and killed forty, fifty guys in, like, an hour?” said Marcus.
“Not to mention skinning, beheading and de-spining them,” said Ishfaq. “I mean, that would take a while, right?”
“And a crazy amount of strength,” Marcus said, nodding.
Scott listened to all this, then nodded. “Yes,” he said, “aside from all of that.”
Marcus smiled. “No, sir,” he said. “What’s weird?”
“The first time we encountered something like this – how many years ago, Marcus? Seven?”
“Something like,” Marcus confirmed.
“That first time, the bodies we found were skinned, beheaded, they’d had their spines ripped out, and they were laid out all in a row. Correct?”
“Correct.”
“Then the second time, in Scotland, the bodies were skinned and laid out in a row – but not beheaded or—” he glanced at Ishfaq “—de-spined.”
“Right,” Marcus said.
“And this time the bodies are skinned, beheaded, de-spined, but they’re not laid out in a row, they’re just dumped in here like garbage.”
“Right,” Marcus said again.
“So what does that tell us?”
Ishfaq shrugged. “That the MO is similar in each case, but not the same?”
“Which means what?” Marcus asked, looking at Scott.
Scott hesitated, then sighed. “Honestly? I don’t know. Maybe that whoever’s doing this has certain methods and procedures, but they don’t stick to them rigidly. I mean, it’s got to be a group, right? Got to be. And yet…”
Marcus raised his eyebrows. “And yet?”
“If it’s a group, there must have been a whole bunch of them to wipe out this many guys – I mean, dozens. So where did they come from? And where did they go to? And how come we never saw a soul?”
“And how did they get away with so many heads and spines?” said Ishfaq. “I mean… forty heads? That’s gotta be a pretty heavy load, right?”
“Not to mention the skins,” said Scott. “There are none here, so they must have taken them too.”
Marcus shook his head. “Whichever way you look at it, this is a total mind-fuck.”
Scott was struck by a sudden thought. “You remember that green stuff we found in Scotland?”
“You mean that green stuff that defied analysis?” said Marcus.
“That’s the one.”
“What of it?”
“You seen any of it around here?”
Ishfaq shook his head. Marcus said, “No, but I haven’t been looking for it.”
“Let’s look for it now,” Scott said. “And call the other units. Tell them to look too.”
Marcus did so, and three minutes later received a call from the team at the back of the house. They made their way there, following a blood trail along the ground-floor corridor at the right of the stairs to a stone-floored breakfast room whose rear wall was al
l glass, and which looked out over a swimming pool onto an immaculately landscaped back garden. Downlighters on tall poles, set in regimented rows between the mature palm trees that edged the lawn like sentinels, gave the individual grass blades the appearance of glittering shards of green crystal. The flower beds that broke up the lawn, contained within precisely manicured box hedges, were packed full of succulents. The lights inset into the blue tiles of the swimming pool made the water shimmer with white-gold ripples. It would have been a restful and idyllic scene if not for the mangled and bloodstained recliners, one of which floated in the pool, the copious spatters of blood, some of which were trickling into the water, the numerous spent shell casings which littered the area, and the substantial damage to plants, trees and property caused by the discharge of dozens of bullets.
The reinforced glass wall that overlooked the pool and garden was pocked and crazed with bullet holes. The central two panes formed sliding double doors, which had been pulled open. Scott, Marcus and Ishfaq stepped out to find Flynn, Lau and another guy called Collins waiting for them. The only elements missing from this most unlikely of battlefields were the bodies of the casualties – but Scott knew precisely where they were.
“So what have we got?” he said.
Flynn led him along the edge of the pool to the deep end, both men stepping around the larger areas of blood, but unable to avoid scuffing the smaller streaks and spatters.
“There’s some there,” Flynn said, pointing at a green spatter about the size of a saucer on the ground, the edge of which had been smudged as if someone had walked through it. “A few spots on the wall behind, and some on the fabric of this recliner here.” He gestured with his rifle at an overturned, broken-backed recliner, spattered with blood but also stained with maybe a dozen flecks of the mysterious green substance.
Scott stared hard at the ground, the wall and the recliner, then stood back thoughtfully. He looked around at the blood and devastation. Then he turned to Flynn, who was standing beside him, and to Marcus, who had followed the two of them over and was now frowning down at the small pool of almost luminous green liquid as though it offended him.
“What’s your assessment?” Scott said.
Flynn looked at him blankly. “What do you mean?”
“If that was blood,” Scott said, nodding down at the green stain, “what would you say had happened here?”
Flynn shrugged, but Marcus said, “I’d say that someone had been shot but not badly. That the bullet had probably grazed an arm or a leg. I’d also say that they’d patched up the wound right here, otherwise there’d be more ‘blood’ spattered around.”
“There is more blood spattered around,” Flynn said. Marcus gave him a pitying look. “It’s not green, though, is it? It’s not from the same source.”
“Oh. I guess not.”
Scott said. “So what about the rest of it? The blood, the damage?”
“It’s pretty wild,” Ishfaq said, scanning the area from over by the glass doors. “Pretty uncontrolled.”
“Like the shooters were panicking,” contributed Lau.
“And why would they panic?” said Scott.
“Because they were scared?” suggested Flynn.
“But why would they be scared?” Marcus said. “These are fucking cartel badasses. They ain’t scared of anything.”
The six of them fell silent for a moment as they tried to make sense of what they were seeing.
Then Collins, an Irish American from Pittsburgh who had shaved his red hair back to stubble, said, “They were scared because their opponent was faster than they were, more organized. They were firing blindly.”
Firing blindly. The phrase resonated with Scott. So much so that he would have written it down in his little red book if it was still in his possession.
He looked again at the green substance. Thought again of the gauntleted arm he had seen all those years ago in LA. Marcus had said that the stuff they had taken a sample of in Scotland had defied analysis, but that wasn’t strictly true. It had been identified as organic rather than chemical, but before further investigation could be carried out, a mysterious third party had muscled in on the analysis and the findings, cutting Scott out of the picture.
When he had protested, he hadn’t exactly been reprimanded, but he had been told in no uncertain terms that he’d gone beyond his remit. He had shrugged and moved on because he’d had no choice, but that hadn’t stopped that old bugbear, curiosity, from burning inside him.
“What if…” he said, then paused, wondering whether to continue.
His men looked at him expectantly. It was Marcus who provided the prompt. “What if?”
Scott sighed. “I was just going to say… what if whoever or whatever killed Moreno’s guys was working alone, but was moving so fast that its enemies couldn’t keep up with it? That to them it appeared invisible?”
He was aware of Collins and Lau looking at him uneasily – because the idea unsettled them? Or because they thought he might be losing it?
Again it was Marcus who spoke, his voice soft. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. Something that leaks green ‘blood.’ Something created in a lab, maybe, and used as a weapon.”
“Like a cyborg?” said Flynn, who watched a lot of science fiction movies.
Scott barked a humorless laugh. “I know it sounds crazy…”
“It does. But this whole situation is crazy,” said Marcus. He frowned, seriously considering Scott’s words. “But would a… a machine tear off men’s heads and spines? Skin them? Wouldn’t it just dispatch them… clinically? I mean, the heads, man. That’s like…”
“Like a serial killer taking trophies,” said Lau quietly.
With almost reverential awe, Flynn said, “A cyborg serial killer. Wow.”
The idea was so ridiculous that Scott decided to draw a line under it – for now. “I need to call this in,” he said. “Let’s gather evidence and catalogue the bodies while we wait for the cleanup team to arrive, see what we can find out.”
They spent the next hour scouring the house room by room, earmarking whatever evidence they felt might prove useful. Paperwork and computer records would be scrutinized by the support team back at HQ; the bodies of the dead and any other forensic evidence would be sent to the med labs for examination and, if possible, identification.
Scott noted that Moreno had CCTV cameras positioned around the house, and wondered what they would show of the battle. There was a part of him that was aching to find out. Could he justify scanning the footage? Claim that due to the unusually high levels of violence that had been perpetrated here, he felt that a delay in assessing the available information might prove detrimental to their ongoing mission?
No, that would never wash. He was head of a thirty-plus-strong team of highly trained, heavily armed soldiers, whose job it was to quell hostile activity against the state and thus maintain national security. The fact that someone had done their job for them – albeit in an extreme and brutal manner – did not give them the authority to exceed their purview.
But what if Scott could argue that he had grounds to believe their enemy’s enemy was also their enemy? Or even an enemy of the US? Would that justify satisfying his curiosity?
He was still pondering the variables when the stillness of the desert was disturbed by the sound of chopper blades hacking at the air.
Leaving most of the men inside the house, sifting the evidence, he led his six-strong team across the courtyard with its bubbling fountain and came to a halt just outside the main gates. Looking up, he was surprised and a little disconcerted to see that the chopper, a medium-sized utility helicopter known as a Super Huey, was somewhat smaller than the one he’d been expecting, considering the amount of material that needed transporting back to base. Well maybe, he thought, this was merely the advance guard, and there were more choppers on the way. He and his men watched the Super Huey land on the flat ground a hundred meters away, kicking up a maelstrom of sand tha
t had them shielding their eyes.
By the time the billowing clouds of sand had cleared, ten men in combat armor were marching across the desert toward them. Scott didn’t know whether to feel relieved or dismayed to see that at their head was the familiar figure of Major Dutch Schaefer.
He saluted. “Major,” he said, “good to see you again.”
Schaefer grinned back, returning his salute. “Sergeant Devlin. I understand you’ve got a situation here?”
“Not one we can’t handle,” Scott said.
If anything, Schaefer’s grin grew wider. “I don’t doubt it. But regardless of that fact, my men will be taking over from here.”
“May I ask why?”
“You may. But I’m not required to give you an answer.”
The response was no more than Scott had expected. Without missing a beat, he said, “There’s an awful lot of evidence within these walls.”
“And it will be examined thoroughly, you can count on that. Transportation has already been arranged.”
“There’s also the matter of fifty or sixty hostages who fled into the desert.”
“They are being rounded up as we speak. Don’t worry, Sergeant, they will be taken care of.”
Scott raised his eyebrows. “With respect, sir, you make that sound sinister.”
Schaefer laughed. “Perhaps I should have said that they’ll be cared for. Naturally we’ll want to speak to them, but they’ll be handled with kid gloves. And afterwards they’ll be returned to their families.” He tilted his head toward the stronghold, as if intimating that Scott should invite him in. “Now, if you’ll tell your men to transfer authority to me and my team, we’ll get started.”
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