SNAFU: Wolves at the Door

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.