There were no signs of life in or around the building – no vehicles parked in the grounds; no sounds apart from the rustling of wind in the trees; no lights burning in any of the windows. This did not surprise Scott. If there were a terrorist cell here, the last thing they would do would be to advertise their presence.
What did surprise him was his team’s discovery, at the back of the building, that a pair of glass-paneled double doors, which were to have been their intended point of ingress, had been utterly destroyed and were now lying in a twisted, blackened heap on the ground. Because the doors were not smoking, it was clear the damage had been done some time ago – at least twenty-four hours, if not days, or even weeks, earlier.
Scott stared at the mangled doors in astonishment. Who could be responsible for this? If this had been part of a police or military operation, he would have been informed. On the other hand, judging by the state of the doors, this couldn’t have been anything but military. It could feasibly have been the work of a private organization, but if so they were touting some seriously scary hardware. Those doors had been blown off by an explosive device, or a rocket fired by a missile launcher. All of which indicated that their bird had almost certainly flown. If there had been a terrorist cell here, then any survivors of an attack like this would not have hung around afterward.
All the same they had to be sure, had to be professional. This was a hell of a long way to have come for no result, but that was something they were all used to. Their quarry was so elusive that the majority of their missions invariably ended in failure. But even a failed mission could be useful – firstly by narrowing the field, giving the enemy one less place to hide; and secondly by keeping the enemy on the run, and therefore occupied.
Scott glanced at Marcus and Ishfaq and, using hand signals, indicated that despite the shattered doors, they should still employ the utmost caution in entering the building. Although unlikely, it was always possible the doors had been deliberately destroyed to lull them into a state of complacency, or even that the building, abandoned or not, had been booby-trapped in some way.
The two of them nodded in response, and then with Scott leading the way, weapon poised, they entered the building. Scott knew from their study of the floorplan that the school hall and gymnasium lay to his left. To his right were a stairwell and several administrative offices. Ishfaq, at the rear of the group, kept his eyes on the closed doors as Scott inched forward. The walls glowed greenly through their night-vision goggles, as if with some inner light, and were punctuated by the darker rectangles of the doors. Scott counted them off, knowing there were four on the left in an equidistant row, two on the right either side of an alcove. After the second door on the right was a pair of double doors leading into the gymnasium. But before he reached those – before he had reached the alcove even – Marcus was stepping up beside him, nodding toward a patch of wall between two of the doors on their left.
Scott had already seen what Marcus was indicating. A sizeable patch of liquid pooled on the floor and spattered up the wall, which was such a dark green through their night goggles that it was virtually black. Although there was no way to be certain short of getting up close and sniffing it, Scott was pretty sure from its pattern and consistency that it was blood. A lot of blood.
Whoever’s veins it had once filled appeared to have been stopped in their tracks right here, most likely by a bullet or some equally devastating weapon. There were scuffs and streaks in the patch of liquid consistent with feet sliding, with hands grabbing vainly for balance. And when Scott took another couple of steps forward, he saw there were drag marks leading away from the pool of liquid and stopping at the double doors to the gymnasium, farther up on the right.
Again Marcus nudged him, and when Scott looked at his friend, Marcus drew the stock of his gun closer to his face and tapped the end of his nose with it. Scott nodded. He had smelt it too. It was faint, an odor he was all too familiar with, but would never get used to.
Decaying flesh.
The three men crept toward the gymnasium doors, their movements so measured, so economical, they barely even stirred the thick, hot, summer air. They positioned themselves in such a way that Marcus could push open the left-hand door at the same time as Ishfaq pushed open the right, with Scott entering through the widening gap in the middle. Once they were in place, Scott nodded and they moved in, barely pausing as the doors swung open and the stench of rotting flesh hit them like a wave.
The recent heat meant there were far more flies around than usual. They appeared as a swarm of darting black flecks in the green glow of the men’s night-vision goggles. Through this the fifteen or sixteen bodies, laid out in a line on the wooden floor, flared with a sickly green luminosity. Some of them seemed to be twitching with life, as if the three men had partially roused them. But when Scott, Marcus and Ishfaq drew nearer, breathing the rancid air as shallowly as they could, they saw that what they had mistaken for movement was simply the busy work of maggots.
The sight might haunt him later, but for now Scott was focused, businesslike. The sight of the bodies immediately propelled him back six years.
Beside him Marcus said, “You thinking what I’m thinking?”
Scott glanced at him. “Mexico, 1998?”
Marcus nodded.
Scott walked slowly along the line of corpses. “None of these are headless, though. Or spineless.”
“The skinning, though. That’s some weird coincidence, right?”
“I take it you guys have seen something like this before?” Ishfaq said.
Scott nodded and told him briefly about the corpse they had discovered hanging from a tree like a grisly marker buoy, and the rest laid out in the clearing.
Marcus’s words from all those years ago suddenly came back to him: like pretty maids all in a row.
“But that was a completely different situation,” Marcus said. “Mexico, Scotland, cartel, terrorists… it doesn’t make sense.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Scott sighed.
“Did you ever find out who killed those cartel guys?” Ishfaq asked.
Scott shook his head. “No, we never did.”
“We assumed it was another cartel,” said Marcus.
“But who killed these guys?” Ishfaq asked. “And why skin them?”
Scott shrugged. Why indeed? Back in ’98, their best guess had been that the skinning and beheading was some kind of ritual humiliation, or had maybe been done to strike fear into the hearts of their rivals. But these strangely similar killings did not fit with that theory at all. Terrorist cells did not wipe out other terrorist cells. And vigilantes did not go to this kind of trouble, particularly when there was no guarantee that their “statement,” if this was what it was, would ever be discovered. Another week or so’s decomposition and it would not have been apparent that these victims had ever been skinned at all. Which left what? The possibility that these people had been killed by sadists? Psychopaths? But again, how did that link to the Mexico killings?
For the first time in the four years since it had been stolen, Scott found himself wishing that he had his little red book in which to record his churning, troubled thoughts.
For now, all they could do was continue the task they had been sent here to do – or rather, to adapt it, because this was no longer the rooting out and smashing of a terrorist cell, but the examination of a murder site and the cataloguing of bodies.
It turned out there were sixteen corpses in the gymnasium, all male, all estimated to be approximately between the ages of twenty and fifty. There were no weapons found, either close to the bodies or elsewhere, and no women or children, either dead or alive. In the school hall they found three-dozen camp beds, scattered on and around which were enough private belongings to suggest there had been women and children here recently, but that they had either been abducted or had fled in a hurry. In the large school kitchen they found enough equipment and chemicals to confirm their suspicions that the building had been
used as a bombmaking facility.
Their weirdest discovery, though, was not inside the building, but outside it, in a large open area of cracked concrete overgrown with weeds that must once have been the school playground. Scott had just radioed his UK contact for a cleanup crew when Flynn’s voice crackled through on his intercom.
“Uh… Sarge?”
“Go ahead, Flynn.”
“We got something weird out here.”
“Where are you?”
“Uh… west side, exterior. Quadrant… uh, 4C.”
“What you got?”
“Signs of a gunfight. Bullet casings, blood, scorch marks… but also some kind of… substance. No idea what. A chemical maybe?”
“How much?”
“Couple of spatters. Some drops.”
“Has anyone touched it?”
Scott was pleased to hear a touch of Flynn’s normal ebullience as he said, “What do you think we are, Sarge? Amateurs?”
Scott chuckled. “Okay. We’re almost finished up here. I’ll be right out.”
When he got there a few minutes later, he found Flynn, Lau and another soldier called Novelli waiting for him. Despite the fact that all four teams had now reported in, confirming the building was empty, he was pleased to see the trio were still on the alert, looking around constantly and ready to engage their weapons at a moment’s notice.
While Lau and Novelli remained on guard, Flynn showed Scott what they had found. Indicating the largest spatter of the unknown chemical, which was no bigger than your average coffee spatter, Flynn said, “Take a look at it without your goggles.”
Puzzled, Scott complied, pushing his goggles up onto his forehead. Through the goggles the spatter of liquid had appeared as a glowing green stain on the darker surface. Without them he was astonished to see that the liquid looked exactly the same – green and luminescent.
“What the fuck?” he muttered.
“Crazy, huh?” said Flynn.
The skinned bodies had transported Scott six years back in time, to that Mexican jungle clearing. But this new sight sent him back even farther, to his first mission in LA as part of Captain Parker’s black ops team. In his mind’s eye he could still vividly see the huge gauntleted hand attached to the severed forearm, and the green fluorescent substance which had been leaking from it.
Could this be the same stuff? And if so, what did that mean? That the terrorists who’d been holed up here had been wiped out by some sort of cybernetic warrior, sent or controlled by… whom? The US government? A foreign state? His mind whirled. This was like some crazy sci-fi story. He became aware that Flynn was still looking at him, his expression inscrutable behind his night goggles.
“What should we do, Sarge?” he asked.
Scott peered more closely at the green substance. He cleared his throat and tried to order his thoughts. “Take a sample,” he said. “Bottle some of it. But don’t touch it. We don’t know what it is.”
Flynn nodded. “You reckon it’s some sort of synthetic?”
“Let’s not speculate at this stage,” Scott said.
Secretly, though, he had his doubts. His initial thought, even back in ’97, had been that the substance was some kind of chemical. But examining it more closely now, he couldn’t help thinking that it might well be organic in nature.
Most synthetics didn’t coagulate like blood.
No sooner had Flynn coated a twig in the green goop and sealed it inside a zip-up plastic baggie taken from his first aid kit, than a voice from the darkness on the far side of the playground barked, “Lower your weapons and raise your hands where we can see them! We have you surrounded!”
Instead of obeying, Scott’s men did what they had been trained to do. Quick as rabbits they scattered, crouching low to reduce their target area and darting for the nearest cover.
Two shots rang out. One hit a wall a few feet to Flynn’s right, causing him to jump back with a cry of, “Holy shit!” The other ricocheted off the ground so close to Scott that he saw concrete splinters fly into the air.
“Stay exactly where you are or the next bullets will not miss.”
Scott imagined the eyes of his men turning toward him, looking for guidance. “Comply!” he barked, placing his rifle on the ground, then rising slowly to his feet and raising his hands. He was facing the school building and so turned deliberately to face the new arrivals.
He saw them through his night-vision goggles, a number of shapes, like glowing green phantoms, flowing from the blackness of the trees and across the concrete toward them, converging from all directions.
His immediate thought was that the terrorists had outwitted them somehow, that the bodies in the gymnasium were local innocents, skinned to reduce the possibility of a swift identification. Then, as the leader of the new arrivals came fully into view, submachine gun trained on him, Scott felt a jolt of recognition.
Even with the night goggles obscuring the man’s eyes, his angular features and graying crew-cut, not to mention his muscular build, were unmistakable. Taking a chance, Scott shouted out, “We’re US Army. Counterterrorism. Code number 4729. My name is Sergeant Scott Devlin.” He hesitated. “And you’re Havana. Right?”
The big man paused. He kept his gun trained on Scott for a few seconds more, then slowly he lowered it on its strap and raised a hand. Behind him his men froze so completely that without the benefit of night vision, you wouldn’t have known they were there. Unexpectedly, the big man grinned.
“Scott Devlin,” he said, as though recalling a name from the dim and distant past. “Good to see you again.”
For a moment Scott felt disoriented. He’d seen the man before, of course, but that wasn’t why he was suddenly gripped by a strange sense of déjà vu. No, it was something else; something unrelated to H12. Although he was sure he and the big man had never spoken, Scott was sure he had heard his voice somewhere before…
And then it clicked, and Scott felt as though the rug had been well and truly yanked from beneath his feet. He had heard this man’s voice before, but it was long before he’d spotted him at H12.
Los Angeles, 1997. The night he’d seen the severed arm and the glowing green stuff leaking out of it.
This was the guy in the alleyway, the one who had overpowered him, half-choked him and left him trussed up like a Christmas turkey!
Scott didn’t know whether to feel indignant or grateful that at least he’d been overpowered by an expert. In the end, diplomacy won the day. Smiling ruefully, he said, “I’ve just realized where we first met. LA, 1997, right?”
The big man chuckled and nodded. “Right. Sorry about that.”
Scott waved away the apology. “You taught me a lesson that night. Made me a better soldier in the long run.”
“Glad to hear it.”
The two men regarded one another for a moment, Scott so full of questions that he didn’t know where to start. In the end he said, “So am I allowed to know your full name?”
“Major Dutch Schaefer. And yes, we are Havana.” He swept his arm to indicate the still-motionless men behind him.
“Which means what?” asked Scott.
“Which means we’re on your side, Sergeant. And that’s all you need to know right now.”
Scott let that one slide. “So how come your team are here, Major? Some wires get crossed along the way?”
Dutch Schaefer shook his head. “We have different priorities, Sergeant. You’re hunting terrorists, we’re hunting more dangerous prey.”
“More dangerous than terrorists?” Scott said, trying not to scoff.
“Potentially.”
As he was speaking, Dutch was looking around. Scott couldn’t see his eyes, but he had no doubt the big man was taking in the scorch marks, the bullet casings, the spatters of blood and green goop.
“So what have we got here?” he said.
Just for a second Scott considered throwing up a barrier, telling the big man that his team had prior jurisdiction here, and that he was full
y authorized to withhold information from all but approved personnel, yada, yada, yada.
Instead, he sighed and said, “Why don’t you come see for yourself?”
Schaefer turned and told his men to stand down – an indication he was fully prepared to place his trust in Scott – and then he followed Scott into the building.
* * *
Dutch looked down at the corpses in the gymnasium, mouth set in a grim line. He looked bothered neither by the flies nor the stench. Finally, he muttered, “Looks like we’ve had a wasted journey.”
“Do you know who killed these men?” Scott asked.
Dutch turned to regard him. Scott wished he could see the man’s eyes. “I do, but I can’t tell you. I’m sorry.”
He sounded as though he genuinely meant it.
“Was it…” Scott hesitated, then plunged in. “Was it one of ours? I mean… sent by our side?”
Dutch snorted. “What did this isn’t on anyone’s side but its own.”
Scott noted Dutch’s use of the words “what” and “its” rather than “who” and “their,” which suggested the killer was both working alone and was not human. But if this was a robot, or some kind of cybernetic warrior, how could it be autonomous? It didn’t make sense. It would have to be… programmed, wouldn’t it? Before realizing what Dutch was doing, the big man had placed an almost fatherly hand on his shoulder.
“I know you’re confused. I know you have questions. But you have to be patient for now.”
For now. At least that suggested it wouldn’t be forever. Scott nodded. “I understand.”
“You called a cleanup team in for this?”
“I have. Is that a problem?”
Dutch shook his head. “I doubt there’s much here that’s of use to us. Mind if my men do a quick sweep of the building just to be sure?”
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