“Can it,” Naylor ordered.
He crept over to where Lowe was still piloting the drone. Its night vision camera clearly showed the main house. There was no sign of the other Delta squads, but staccato flashes of light strobed in the windows in time to the clatter of gunfire on the night air.
More gunfire now, mixed with screams. Animal sounds ripped from human throats. The night was alive now with movement and noise. The old dance — predators and prey.
Something wasn’t right.
A voice came on the secure Delta short-range network, breaking radio silence with a garbled scream.
“Holy shit! Get back, get back, get b—”
The fast, pneumatic flutter of suppressed gunfire swamped the panicked voice: not a controlled burst, but a full-auto spray that emptied the clip in seconds. Then the screams cut short with a wet, ripping sound that reminded Naylor of his mother de-boning a chicken.
A growl. Naylor tried to imagine what could be done to a human throat to make such a noise, but failed.
The screaming carried on the still jungle night. Naylor stared at the drone’s screen, willing it to show him what was going on. But whatever it was, it was happening inside the main house.
He listened closely. He had heard his share of gunfire and screaming, but this was different. The screams had a panicked edge, not cries of pain, but animal yells of terror. The gunfire was wild and sporadic. He expected that from the cartel guards, but he could hear the familiar crack of Delta-issued Berettas. The two squads that had stormed the house had ditched their rifles and were using their sidearms. That was bad.
The comms was alive with voices now: radio silence forgotten. Naylor heard desperate pleas for help and snatched fragments from open microphones.
“What the fuck was that?”
“Oh, God… Oh, God…”
“Where d’it go? Where d’it go?”
“What the fu—”
“Fall back! Fall back!”
The roar that echoed across the compound was as loud as thunder.
“Boat’s ready, Sarge,” Garcia said.
“Okay.” Naylor broke radio silence to send the coded signal that their way out was ready. He didn’t know what was going on at the main house, but now they could complete the mission and exfiltrate down the river as planned.
His call was answered by another chorus of shouts and curses over the radio, punctuated by gunfire.
“Get ready, people,” Naylor said. “Whatever’s happening in there, they’ll be coming in hot.”
“Copy that,” they said in unison. They had all heard the pandemonium over the radio. They knew that whatever clusterfuck the mission had turned into over at the main house was about to descend on them.
They waited: trying not to listen to the cries on the radio; trying not to picture the fire fight, the dark, confined corridors of the house lit by the deadly strobe of muzzle flashes, the bullets, ricocheted fragments and splinters ripping into flesh. And definitely trying not to picture whatever it was that was making that fucking roar!
The noise grew even more chaotic, if that was possible. The gunfire had almost completely stopped and the shouts had turned to sobbing screams. But throughout it all, unchanged, was the deep-throated roar and that other noise: the chicken-bone sound of tearing flesh.
Finally, even the screams died away until there was only one voice, breathless and pleading.
“Please… please…”
Silence.
“Sarge?” Mac asked. He was still scanning the path back to the house through the holographic sight of the MG4.
“I know, I know,” Naylor replied. If anyone was coming back to the boat, they’d be there by now. Instead there was only silence. Even the radio was quiet.
“Boat’s ready, Sarge,” Garcia reminded him.
Naylor knew what he should do. He should pack up and leave, get his men out of there. Those were his orders. But just as he knew what he should do, he also knew that he couldn’t do it.
“Mac, you stay here with the SAW. Guard that boat. The rest of you, on me.”
Naylor led the way up the path to the house. If anything, the silence was worse than the screaming they had heard just moments before. Lowe had placed his drone into a hover. It would keep station there without any human control, giving them an overview of the battlefield. But it wasn’t telling them anything. The house still looked quiet. There was no sign of movement, not even from the cartel’s guards.
“I got a body,” Garcia said. “Not one of ours.”
Naylor looked at the corpse as they passed. It was indeed one of Ramirez’s men; he was still clutching his rifle, but didn’t look like he’d got a shot off before his throat had been cut. Naylor appraised the work with a professional eye. He was starting to put together a picture of what had happened. The approach had been good, the guards taken out swiftly and silently. Whatever had gone wrong had happened inside the house.
They reached the main door. The black cavity stood like an entrance to another world.
“Hey, Lowe,” Naylor said. “How good are you with that drone?”
“You want to go inside?”
“You got it?”
Lowe broke out his controller again and the three men took cover behind the stone carvings that flanked the main entrance as Lowe flew the little craft inside.
He was good; the drone flew steadily along at about head height, giving them a real picture of what it would be like to walk down the corridor. At first there were no signs of trouble, the house looked just like Naylor expected from their briefing: an opulent villa with broad corridors lined with paintings and statuary that reflected its owners love of the local, Olmec culture. Small versions of the stone heads they had seen in the jungle sat on mahogany tables; tapestries and jade masks hung from the walls. Everything was painted in a palette of jungle greens and deep black from the drone’s night vision camera.
“Back up,” Naylor said. “There, just there.”
“We got a casualty,” Lowe said. A broad staircase led down to a basement level. At the top of the staircase a soldier lay slumped in a puddle of his own blood.
“Gunshot to the throat,” Lowe said. “He never stood a chance.”
So far, so bad, Naylor thought. But casualties were to be expected. What else had happened? What else could make two fire teams of hardened soldiers descend into panic?
“More bodies,” Lowe said. “Bad guys mostly. Looks like quite the fire fight.”
Naylor nodded. Delta had come in, taken out at the guards at the cost of one of their own and pushed on into the house. But that was about as good as it had gotten. Lowe stopped calling out casualties after the first half-dozen. They lay where they had fallen, cartel guards and the Delta operators. The walls were daubed with blood, and doors and doorframes shattered by automatic gunfire. Instead of an expensive villa, the lower level looked like a war zone. The expensive tapestries and artwork was smashed, fragments on the floor amid the brass of discarded shell casings. Here and there grenade damage had started fires amongst the wreckage. The flames glittered green in the night vision giving the place an otherworldly, eldritch air.
“What the hell happened here?” Lowe asked.
Naylor looked at the bodies. They had been torn apart.
“Grenade do that?” Lowe asked.
“Don’t think so,” Naylor replied. “I’m not seeing any blast damage. Looks like they were cut.”
“What the fuck?” Lowe said. “Who the hell were Ramirez’s bodyguards? Ninjas?”
“I heard one time, this guy in Columbia, he kept a whole zoo. He had lions and all kinds of shit,” said Garcia.
“You think animals did this?” Naylor said. “Think maybe Ramirez let them out?”