SNAFU: Wolves at the Door

“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?”

“Well I’ve never seen a bullet open a guy up like that.”

The drone pushed on down the corridor.

“Signal’s getting weaker, Sarge. I don’t know how much farther I can go without losing the drone.”

“Copy that,” Naylor said. “Keep going.”

The little quad-rotor flew down another short flight of stairs; the only sound in the house was the whine of its tiny electric motors. The stairs opened into a large room – the biggest they had seen – but instead of Garcia’s zoo this place looked more like a museum. Glass cases lined the walls, most of them shattered and cracked, their contents indistinguishable from the shards of broken glass and debris that littered the cabinets.

There was movement at the edge of the screen. A black shape that Naylor had thought was a shadow suddenly slipped away out of the frame.

A figure moved behind it, a soldier, lying against the wall, one leg stretched out in front of him, the other folded beneath him, broken or dislocated or both.

Naylor watched the man’s eyes as he tracked the departing shadow with a look of barely contained horror. He was alive.

“Shit! It’s Miller,” Lowe said.

Miller saw the drone. With a quick, desperate look back at the departing shadow he mouthed, Help me!

Miller’s eyes darted to the left. A split second later a black shape moved in front of the camera and the drone was swatted from the air. It tumbled into the wall and the screen went dead.

“What now, Sarge?” Garcia asked.

Naylor didn’t answer. He had seen something. “Lowe, give me a playback of the last few frames.”

Corporal Lowe rewound the last few seconds of the tumbling drone until the image stabilised.

“There!” Naylor jabbed at the screen. An instant before the drone was hit it had caught an image, a pattern of blotchy black rings.”

“What is that?” Garcia asked.

“Jaguar,” Naylor replied. “It’s a jaguar.”

“So what do we do now?”

“What do you think?” Naylor asked. “We go in.”

* * *

They followed the route the drone had taken, the scene looking eerily familiar through the green night goggles clipped to Naylor’s helmet. They descended the stairs, checking the vital signs of the bodies they passed, but there were no more survivors. Perhaps there were more inside. Perhaps it was just Miller. Either way, Naylor was going to find out.

“Holy crap! Just look at this place,” Garcia said as they descended the second flight of stairs.

It was the room they had seen with the drone. Ramirez had created his own museum inside his house. Naylor had seen this kind of thing before. Some of these guys had collections that rivalled anything in the Smithsonian.

Ramirez’s taste ran to Olmec artefacts and guns. Stone heads of various sizes lined one wall of the room along with fragments of frescoes and larger carvings. Each was lit with tasteful up-lights and labelled with a small plaque. The other side of the room looked like a cross between a jeweller’s front window and an armoury. Naylor had never seen so much gold. There were gold plated rifles and matched pairs of jewelled pistols. There were older weapons, lovingly restored and, just like the Olmec masonry, each item was labelled with obsessive care.

Garcia whistled. He picked up a gold-plated 1911 semi-automatic with mother of pearl grips.

“Stay focussed, Garcia,” Naylor said. “We don’t have time for rubbernecking.”

“I know, I know. But man... just one of these things could set a guy up for life. And two... Well I’d—”

It hit Garcia high, springing from the shadows four-footed like a cat, although Naylor had never seen any cat that big. It was bigger than a jaguar. It was more like a bear, although slimmer and sleeker and faster.

It sprung on Garcia, knocking him sprawling with its speed and sheer weight and riding him to the ground, crushing the breath out of him. Garcia didn’t even get a chance to scream before it bit down with its huge jaws. There was that noise again: the wet, crunch of snapping bone. Naylor squeezed the trigger on his MP5, more out of instinct than conscious thought and the muzzle flash lit up the green-black flank of something squatting on Garcia. It ignored Naylor’s shots. He saw the muscles bunch under its sleek pelt as it worked its massive jaws, twisting and pulling and then it was gone, leaping away through a doorway leading to another wing of the museum.

“Holy shit! Garcia!”

Naylor was at his side in a second while Lowe covered the doorway with his MP5. But Garcia was already dead. His head lolled at an unnatural angle, his neck half torn away by a terrible wound that had opened him up from chin to collar bone.

“What the fuck was that?” Lowe shouted.