Ruiz pulled a line of detonation cord that had been salted with Semtex from his satchel. He attached it to the wall, creating the outline of a four-foot-high doorway. The rest of the SEALs stacked against the same wall, but several feet away. Ruiz attached an electrical lead, backed up to where the other SEALs were waiting, then depressed the contact button. Halfway between a zipping sound and a muted explosion, the cord went off, explosively sawing through the wall, but not completely obliterating it.
The SEALs moved quickly to the spot.
Ruiz pushed against the wall and the new doorway fell free to the floor on the other side.
Hoover was through first, followed by Fratty, Holmes, Walker, Laws, and then Ruiz.
The room was little more than a large landing for the set of descending stairs. From below, an unbelievable stench was joined by the sounds of clicking like the claws of a thousand crabs and the susurrations of Chinese voices. But all eyes were on the set of shackles bolted to the middle of the floor on the landing. Illuminated by a single dangling bulb, blood and claw marks surrounded the shackles. A broken piece of fingernail lay absurdly next to the metal bolt.
The SEALs looked at each other. In their eyes was the recognition that they’d just entered the Land of Fucked-Up.
Holmes grabbed Laws and pointed down the stairs. “You first. Translate.”
Laws moved down the stairs in a crouch. When he’d gotten halfway down, he paused and listened. After a moment, he said softly through his MBITR, “Mostly from Fujian Province from the sound of it. The noise is sewing machines, I think. Sweatshop.”
“And this is the center of the illegal tech transfer?” Fratty asked.
“We’ll see what we’ll see.” Holmes glanced at the dog. “Hoover?”
The dog looked up.
Fratty shrugged. “Dog doesn’t care about the state of illegal shirtmaking.”
“Laws, take a look.”
Laws crept down several more stairs. He pulled a thin metal cable from his side pocket and snaked it around the corner.
Fratty dialed it in on his tablet and they all watched as a dark and cluttered space sprang into a fish-eye view. Women of all ages sat in front of aged machines, spindles of thread twisting in the art of creation. Here and there, flames from candles in the background lit the women in a strange orange light, casting shadows that moved along the walls.
“What’s that?” Walker asked, pointing toward the screen.
Fratty and Holmes peered at it.
It was Holmes who spoke first. “Looks like a pentagram.”
“Or it could be a pentacle,” Laws offered.
“What’s the difference?” Walker asked.
“One is used as a religious symbol and the other is used in magic rituals,” Ruiz said from where he was guarding their six.
“Which one is that last one?” Walker asked.
“A pentacle.”
“Then I don’t want it to be a pentacle.”
“Laws, sweep the fish-eye around,” Holmes ordered softly.
They watched as the monocular vision of the room moved from left to right.
“Don’t see any beegees,” Fratty said, meaning bad guys.
“Me neither,” said Holmes. “Let’s move in, but stay danger close. Hoover, to me.”
While Laws wrapped the sniffer back into his pocket, the others stacked down the stairs with Ruiz bringing up the rear. Since Walker was in the middle, he shouldered the Stoner across his back and pulled out his 9mm pistol. There wouldn’t be room to fire the rifle.
It was a blind landing at the bottom of the stairs, requiring a ninety-degree turn to the right. The sniffer had told them that the room extended to both the left and the right, but they couldn’t discern how far without actual eyes on.
Laws was the first down.
“Left dead-ends at an office about ten meters. Right extends beyond LOS,” he said, meaning line of sight. “Room is about twenty meters wide. Uh…”
“What is it?” Holmes asked.
They were only a few meters from the bottom of the stairs, and if there was danger looming, they all needed to be able to prepare for it.
Laws’s voice broke through the static of the headsets. “No beegees. Just strange is all. Like a satanic taxidermist lives here. The room is smoky from candles and something that smells like hell’s own ass.”
Walker and Fratty exchanged looks with Holmes in between them.
“So it’s clear?” their leader asked.
Walker saw the knuckles of Holmes’s left hand tightening on the grip of the MP5.
“Clear, boss,” Laws said.
“Then move out. Danger close. Alternate.”
They moved like a centipede, each SEAL a part of the whole. Each was close enough to touch the SEAL in front of him. Laws held his MP5 at shoulder level and crouched forward. Fratty came next with a Super 90, then Holmes with an MP5, then Walker with a 9mm, and then Ruiz with a Super 90 covering the team’s six.
Walker felt a tingle, as if the room’s energy were wired directly into his skin.
He searched for evidence of weapons on the women hunched over their machines. What was becoming increasingly strange was that not a single one of them looked up from their work. He and the other SEALs had to be registering in their peripheral vision, but not a single curious look made it their way, as if their glances couldn’t be spared, or perhaps they’d been convinced that distractions weren’t part of the program.
Each was manacled to her chair by thick bracelets connected by lengths of rusted chain. Several of the women were also chained by the neck, heavy links holding them inches from the dancing needles of their sewing machines. Most were nude below the waist. Some were completely naked, their bodies covered in filth and excrement.
Then Walker saw them even more clearly.
“Oh my God,” he said. “Their lips are stitched shut!”
Their SEAL machine paused while everyone assessed the stitched-lip seamstresses. Then it was Holmes who, in a voice raw with emotion, whispered, “Keep moving.”
They began edging forward again.
Pentacles with arcane symbols in English and Chinese adorned virtually every surface. Many of these had been applied with glow-in-the-dark paint and shone brilliantly in the gloom.
Here and there, rats, small dogs, and cats had been tacked to the walls. They’d all been cut from head to tail. Many had flesh peeled back and held in place by threads that crisscrossed the room, stretching from spindles atop machines to hooks on the ceiling, like a web or a net. If these interlocking threads had been any lower, it would have been impossible to cross the room. As it was, they intersected and ran about a head taller than Laws, the tallest of the SEALs.
“Watch your feet,” Laws said.
Piles of excrement, half-eaten food, the intestines of small animals, and scraps of cloth had been pushed against the walls. Closer examination showed the marks where the floor was stained from the continual pushing and sweeping of the offal.
The ravaged animals, the taxidermy threads, the host of hunched, naked, and chained workers had sent Walker to the edge of what he could handle. He felt his eyeballs spasm as they tried to unfocus in order to relieve his mind of the horror of his vision.
Hoover growled about the same time Walker saw something sweep past. It was just a blur, but it seemed to have hands. The only problem was that it couldn’t have been any larger than a doll, or maybe a Stretch Armstrong. Walker remembered fighting over the toy in the orphanage, he and little Henry Jimmison pulling at each arm. Any other doll would have burst in half with the efforts of the two kids, but not Stretch Armstrong. As good as its name, it had stretched and stretched and stretched, until the arms were twice the length of its body.