They moved ahead slowly, silently, scanning for trip wires and pressure plates, searching for any trace of human activity. It took five minutes to traverse a distance of less than a hundred meters. That was where they encountered a four-way junction.
Hood peered down each of the passages, looking for any sign, any hint to indicate which direction the others had gone, but the passages were virtually identical. He turned to Mad Dog, shrugging—a gesture that asked, What’s your gut tell you?
Mad Dog gave each of the adjoining tunnels a long hard look, then shook his head. He leaned in close to Hood as if to whisper something, then drew back, probably realizing that it would be all but impossible with the mask on.
Hood switched on his MBITR—he’d left it off until they were inside, just in case Phantom was somehow able to monitor them using the radios—and tried to transmit a whispered message, but after a few seconds with no response, Mad Dog shook his head again. Even though they were only a few steps apart, the signal wasn’t getting through. Something in the cave was interfering with the radio.
Hood swore quietly into his mask, frustrated. They would have to rely on hand signals to communicate. He pointed to the right passage, then to Bender, signaling him to post and provide rear security, but even as he was doing so, Mad Dog removed his helmet, along with the NVGs mounted to it, then ripped off his pro-mask.
“Shit!” Hood whispered, raising his hands in a frantic but tardy protest.
Mad Dog’s face was sheened with perspiration. His naked eyes were spots of bright green staring blindly into the darkness, but he was grinning.
“What the hell, Dale?” Hood rasped in a stage whisper.
Mad Dog ignored him for a moment, turning away to face each of the passages in turn, alternately sniffing the air and listening with a hand cupped to his ear. When he was done, he turned back to Hood, leaning in close.
“Trust me on this,” Mad Dog whispered, his voice now easily heard. “We need to use all our senses in here.”
“It’s not safe,” Hood said, fighting the urge to shout it. “Put your mask back on.”
“If I get a whiff of anything hinky, I’ll mask up right away. And if I start doing the kicking chicken, you can always stick me.”
In addition to pro-masks, each man carried a nerve agent antidote kit, with two autoinjectors containing atropine and pralidoxime chloride. The two drugs, used in concert, had proven effective against most nerve agents, but as with everything else in military operations, there were no guarantees.
But Mad Dog was also correct about the need to use all their senses in this benighted environment. He gave a resigned sigh. “All right, but at least wear your fucking headgear.”
Mad Dog stuffed his mask back into its carrier, then donned his helmet again though he left his GPNVG-18s tilted up, away from his face. Hood watched as he sniffed the air again.
Well?”
“It reeks,” Mad Dog said, and then, noting Hood’s immediate response, added, “Like rotting vegetables or sewage. A hint of sulfur. But it’s tolerable.”
Hood glanced back over at Rollie, gesturing for him to perform another test, just to be sure.
“There’s something else, too, but it’s kind of faint. A sweet smell. Pine maybe? Yeah, it smells like a pine-scented candle in a shithouse.”
“You hear anything?”
Mad Dog cocked his ear toward the tunnels again then shook his head. “Just you guys breathing. You sound like fucking Darth Vader.”
Hood laughed despite himself and was about to tell the other men to take their masks off, but Mad Dog wasn’t finished. “There’s some kind of luminescent lichen on the floor. Big patches of it. I didn’t notice it with the NVGs on. It’s faint, but now that my eyes are adjusting, I can see it pretty well...” He knelt suddenly, lowering his face until it was just above the cave floor and then began crawling forward, into the center passage. After a moment, he glanced back and was grinning again. “Footprints. They definitely went this way.”
Hood looked over at Rollie again. “Anything?”
The other man shook his head.
“All right, Bender, take off your mask. You and Mad Dog will be our bloodhounds.”
“More like canaries in a coal mine,” Bender said, but nevertheless eagerly removed his mask. “Not that I’m complaining.” He took a deep breath, and then his face wrinkled in disgust. “Ugh, maybe I am. It really reeks.”
“Canaries or bloodhounds, take your pick. Rollie and I will keep masks on so that we can treat you if we run into something. You let us know the second you start feeling weird, okay?”
“Roger that.”
“Take a minute or two to let your eyes adjust.”
Mad Dog was back on his feet and looking around. “Wild,” he said. “It’s almost bright enough to see where I’m going.”
He took a step forward, but Hood clapped a hand down on his shoulder, restraining him. “Rollie’s gonna take point. We’re relying on visuals first, and our NVGs still give us an advantage.”
Rollie nodded and, with the sample-detector registering nothing, started down the center passage, moving with painstaking slowness. Mad Dog was right behind him, weapon at the high ready and aimed at a point just to Rollie’s right. Hood directed Bender to go next and fell into step behind him, bringing up the rear. Hood’s view of what lay ahead was mostly obstructed by the other men, but he watched them all intently—especially Mad Dog and Bender—for any signs of trouble.
Mad Dog, in true bloodhound fashion, stayed low to the ground, bent over to get a better look at the stone floor of the cave, and presumably, the patches of lichen that preserved the footprints of whomever had passed this way before them. Every few seconds, he would raise his head and sniff the air, but then resume following the trail.
Then, without any warning, Mad Dog whirled to his right, training his rifle on the wall beside him. The abruptness of the move immediately put Hood on an alert footing, and he too shifted his aimpoint to the same spot, triggering his PEQ-2 as he did. The normally invisible laser stabbed through the air like the shaft of a spear to splash against the wall of the tunnel, lighting up the surrounding stone like a spotlight, illuminating... Nothing. The wall was completely bare.
Mad Dog seemed to have realized it as well. He shifted the rifle right, then left, then brought it up in a slow arc, but seeing nothing, lowered the weapon again.
“What?” Hood whispered. “What did you see?’
“There was something there. Moving.”
Hood probed the surrounding area with his laser but saw nothing out of the ordinary. “I don’t see anything.”
Mad Dog’s rifle shifted again as he searched, but then he shook his head. “I don’t know where it went. Might have been a bug or something. You didn’t see it?”
Hood hadn’t seen anything and hadn’t seen any insects since entering the cave. That didn’t mean there wasn’t something there, but it seemed unlikely. “You jumping at shadows now, brother?”
“What the hell do you know?” Mad Dog shot back, sounding uncharacteristically irritable. “With all that crap you’re wearing, no wonder you can’t see anything.”
“All right, simmer—”
Beside him, Bender stiffened and swung his weapon around toward a spot on the opposite wall. Hood reacted as before, transfixing the wall with his targeting laser, but once again there was nothing there.
“You saw, it right?” Mad Dog asked.
“I don’t know what I saw,” Bender said. “But there was definitely something there. Just for a second. It was moving, then it just disappeared.”
“Like it melted into the wall or something.”
Bender seized on Mad Dog’s suggestion. “Yeah.”
Rollie glanced back, looking at both men and then at Hood. He shook his head slowly, the silent message easily understood. Hood shared the other man’s concern. Hallucinations might be indicative of some kind of toxic exposure. “Maybe you guys should mask up.”
Mad Dog turned toward the sound of his voice, his expression slightly manic. “Not a chance. There’s something here. Something you can’t see with NVGs.”
Hood debated making it an order but decided that would be overreacting. Mad Dog was probably just having a rare case of nerves. Even seasoned operators weren’t immune to the kind of primitive reptile brain response that could happen deep underground. “All right, Dale. It’s cool. Just make sure you have PID before you pull that trigger.”
“Always.” Mad Dog seemed somewhat mollified by the concession, and as they continued forward, there were no further sightings of the ephemeral “bugs,” but Mad Dog and Bender remained hyper-alert, their heads not merely on a swivel but practically spinning.
A few minutes later, Mad Dog paused to sniff the air again. In the NVGs, Hood could clearly see the look of alarm on the other man’s face. Mad Dog raised a fist—the signal to “freeze”— and then waved in Hood’s general direction, beckoning him forward.
Hood approached cautiously, rolling heel to toe to avoid even the slap of boot soles on stone, and leaned in close. Mad Dog seemed to sense his presence in the darkness. “Caught a whiff of burnt propellant.”
Hood knew what that meant. “A firefight?”
“I think so. It’s faint, but I think we’re getting close to where it happened.”
Where what happened? Hood wondered. What he said aloud was, “Good job. Let’s hold up here for a few, look and listen.” He conveyed the message to Rollie with a hand signal, then moved up to whisper it in Bender’s ear.
For three full minutes they remained still as statues—Hood and Rollie watching the darkness with their NVGs, Mad Dog and Bender listening for any sounds that might indicate an enemy lying in wait—but they neither saw nor heard anything at all. Satisfied that there was no immediate threat, Hood gave the signal to begin inching forward.
After moving a mere ten meters, he spotted something glinting on the ground, a shiny surface reflecting the invisible light back at him. Another three steps revealed more gleams, a scattering of metallic objects that shone like pinpoints of sunlight on a wind-tossed sea.
Rollie eased closer to the large patch and knelt down to pick something up. Hood could easily distinguish the object pinched between the other man’s gloved thumb and forefinger—a brass shell casing.
Mad Dog’s nose had not deceived. There had been shooting here, a lot of it judging by the amount of brass that littered the floor of the passage. Hood kept advancing until he reached Rollie’s position. The brass was a 7.62-millimeter round, which meant it could have come from an insurgent’s Kalashnikov or from any of the FN SCAR battle rifles carried by the Monster Squad, but given the sheer quantity in that one spot, Hood guessed they had come from Imhotep’s 240B machine gun.
Hood scanned the surrounding area, spotting more spent shells scattered along the passage continuing forward. Hundreds of rounds had been fired, and it was difficult to imagine that any enemy force could have withstood such an intense barrage.
Conspicuously absent were any indications that the enemy had returned fire. There were no bullet holes or graze marks on the walls of the passage, and no glistening pools of blood drying on the ground. He should have been gratified by the absence of the latter, but Phantom’s insistence that the Monster Squad had been killed made it seem only ominous.
“Everyone hold up here,” Hood said. He had to speak louder than a whisper in order to project his voice from the mask, and was sorely tempted to remove it, but with this first sign of combat and the knowledge that something terrible had subsequently happened, he knew it was even more important to take precautions.
Careful to avoid stepping on any of the brass, he resumed moving forward, his rifle at the high ready. A few more steps brought him within sight of a rightward bend in the passage. The left wall had been savaged by bullets and the floor beneath was covered with chips of stone and twisted bits of copper and steel—fragments from dozens of M80A1 penetrator rounds. He moved cautiously, inching around the bend, and then froze in his tracks as his light revealed a black puddle on the rubble-strewn floor, and in it, an outstretched hand.
The appendage was barely recognizable. The flesh had been shredded, presumably by bullets, and two fingers were missing entirely, torn away to reveal ragged tissue and splintered bone.
Another cautious step revealed the arm, likewise savaged by the relentless fusillade. The limb protruded from a ragged garment that definitely wasn’t one of the Monster Squad’s coveralls.
One more step brought the rest of the body into full view.
It looked as if the man had been turned inside out. The clothing, saturated with blood, lay in shreds around ragged chunks of flesh and bone fragments. Hood did not doubt that this had been one of the IS fighters, but short of a DNA test, there wasn’t enough left of the man to make any kind of positive identification. The wall beyond was stained with splatter patterns, but not enough to account for the level of damage done to the body.
They kept shooting after he was down, Hood realized. He could understand taking a confirmation shot to make sure a downed enemy was really dead—not strictly legal under the laws of war, but easily justified—but this level of savagery was inexplicable.
There was another body, similarly destroyed, right behind the first, and as Hood took another careful step toward it, he saw two more just a little further down the passage.
None of them held weapons, which Hood found a little unusual. It was unlikely that any of the enemy weapons would have survived the full-on cyclic assault, and he couldn’t imagine Wolfman taking the time to have his team collect non-functional weapons, but then again, he couldn’t imagine any elite operations team doing what he now beheld. Never mind the carnage, it was poor fire discipline. You might blow through a few mags in response to an ambush, but you didn’t waste ammunition turning already dead enemies into hamburger. But the Monster Squad had apparently done exactly that, and then taken the enemy weapons and any remaining ammunition with them.
Hood looked past the bodies and could distinctly make out a trail of dark spots—bloody footprints—leading further into the passage. The Monster Squad had walked through the blood of the fallen enemy and continued on their way, heading toward whatever it was that had killed them. The passage widened and then diverged at a Y-intersection, but strangely, the bloody footprints went both directions.
Hood backed out of the passage and signaled for the others to join him. He noted that Mad Dog and Bender began moving before Rollie could pass on the silent command, and easily avoided stepping on any of the brass as they came forward. Evidently, the lichen was providing more than enough light for them to see by.
As the three men approached, Hood warned them about the bodies. “Four EKIA in here. It’s pretty messy, so watch where you step.”
“What killed them?” asked Mad Dog, no longer whispering.
Hood looked back at his friend. Mad Dog was looking at the bodies, the green dots that were his eyes darting this way and that as he surveyed them. There was real, unguarded anxiety in his expression. “Don’t you mean who?”
“You think bullets did this?” Mad Dog spoke rapidly, sounding faintly breathless. To anyone else, his apprehension would probably have seemed appropriate under the circumstances, but Hood had seen his friend stay cool under far more intense conditions.
“I know it. They shot the shit out of them.”
Mad Dog shook his head. “There’s something else in here with us. Something inhuman.”
“He’s right,” said Bender. “I think whatever it was got to them.” He pointed down at the bodies. “Turned them into...”
He shook his head, unable to articulate what he was thinking, but Mad Dog picked up the thread. “Monsters,” he said, nodding. “That’s what happened. That bitch figured out how to do it, how to turn people into actual monsters. She used it on her friends and set them loose in here.”
Hood frowned behind his mask but gave the bodies anothe
r look. There wasn’t enough left of the insurgent fighters to confirm whether they had undergone some kind of physical transformation, but the hypothesis accounted for the seemingly excessive use of firepower. It also provided an explanation for why there were no weapons near the bodies and no indication of return fire.
But monsters? Hood thought. It didn’t seem possible.
“Four,” Rollie said. “We saw eight hostiles come in here. If they were all turned, then there could be four more.”
“At least four,” Mad Dog said. “For all we know, Doctor Tox has herself a regular monster factory in here.”
“At least we know they can be killed,” Bender said.
“Yeah,” Mad Dog replied. “With a shit ton of rounds. The Monster Squad burned through their ammo fighting these four. One of the others must have gotten them.”
“All of them?” countered Bender.
“If they were black on ammo,” said Rollie, “they should have gotten the hell out.”
“Maybe they couldn’t. Maybe those things—”
“At ease,” snapped Hood, silencing the discussion. “Enough. We don’t know what happened here. We don’t know that there are monsters running around in here, so knock it off with bogeyman stories.”
He thought the rebuke would end the discussion, but after just a few seconds, Rollie said, “If you’re right, then it wasn’t gas that killed them. We can take the masks off.”
“We don’t know—” was all Hood managed to say before Rollie had his helmet and pro-mask off and was inhaling the unfiltered air.
“Ugh, you’re right. That’s putrid.”
“It’s worse here,” Mad Dog agreed, “but only because of them.” He jerked a thumb at the remains on the cavern floor.
Rollie blinked several times and squinted into the darkness. “You don’t think those things can smell us, do you?”
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