SEAL Team 666: A Novel

Once they reached the landing, there wasn’t much choice about which way to go. The hall doglegged right, showing a single door on the wall and a window at the front. Holmes edged forward, careful of booby traps, looking for displaced dust, lines in the floorboards, and tripwire signs, but there was nothing. He made it to the window without harm. He stared at the buildings across the way for a full minute to ensure that he and his men weren’t about to enter a killing hallway. When he was certain that it was safe, he waved the others over.

Ruiz stayed at the head of the stairs to ensure that no one snuck up behind them.

Laws checked the doorjamb and the lock.

Walker moved in a crouch near the window and took up the vigil with the aid of the Stoner’s scope. He fought the exhilaration and concentrated on his assignment.

Fratty pulled out his tablet and showed the others what he expected the room to look like. It was basically a large rectangle. It had another window like the one Walker was staring through, but other than that and the door, there were no avenues of egress.

Hoover padded over and gave the door a sniff. She seemed to be interested in something.

Everyone went silent as Holmes and Fratty checked out the schematics one more time. When he was finally ready, Holmes ordered Ruiz and Walker to stay put, then stacked the remaining three SEALs at the door. He held up a hand and silently counted down to five.

Ruiz fired his Super 90 into the lock, and then Holmes kicked it open. The three of them crashed into the room, weapons aimed left, right, and center.

“Clear.”

“Clear.”

“Clear.”

“What the hell, Fratty?” came Laws’s voice. “There’s nothing here.”

“Ruiz, deploy a wire and get in here. Walker, you follow.”

Each of the men squelched the radio to let him know they heard.

Behind Walker, Ruiz deployed an electronic tripwire at the top of the stairs and tuned to the same frequency they were using for a command channel on their MBITRs. Consisting of an infrared actuator and a transmitter, it would tell them if anyone was moving in behind them.

Ruiz finished with his setup, signaled Walker, then moved into the room.

Walker took one last look through his scope; then he too followed.

The room was empty. Not even a piece of trash littered the floor. The far wall and the outside wall were made of brick, while the back and side walls were made of wood. The floor was a sickly green linoleum, peeling in places.

Laws shook his head. “I’ll say it again. What the hell, Fratty?”

“I don’t know what to say. We’re at the right address. We’re in the right room. It has to be the intel.”

“Won’t be the first time intel didn’t pan,” Ruiz said.

Hoover got tired of standing in the middle of the room and began to sniff the baseboards.

Ruiz and Laws checked the brick wall.

Walker again posted near the window and scanned the buildings across the street. For a moment, he thought he saw someone looking at them, but it was just a guy in his underwear, leaning over his balcony railing smoking a cigarette. Soon, he went back inside.

Fratty and Holmes checked the wooden walls. When they got to the back wall, they began to tap lightly. Finally, Holmes called Hoover over.

Hoover suddenly became animated. She didn’t bark and she didn’t howl, but she began to breathe deeply and paw at the floor.

“Okay. We got something over here.” Holmes knelt and faced the wall. “There’s something I don’t like about it.”

Walker glanced outside and tracked back to where the man in the underwear had been standing. He was gone now.

“What is it? An itch?” Laws asked.

Holmes shook his head. “Not quite. Walker, get over here.”

Walker backed across the room to where the others were kneeling. “Sir?”

“Apply the TWR.”

Walker slung his Stoner across his back and pulled the paperback-sized through-wall radar from a cargo pocket. Looking at the wall, he was relieved it wasn’t composed of brick. The radar was still a new technology and wasn’t powerful enough to penetrate anything other than standard drywall or wood.

He switched it on, let it cycle through its start-up protocols, then pressed the ready button. He moved to the wall and held it against it. While he waited for it to read and translate the three-dimensional line drawing on the tablet-sized screen, he noticed a tingling sensation begin to course throughout his body. The tingling increased until it felt like an electrical current was running through him.

Then it all went crazy.

His vision went supernova, then suddenly cut to black, like a galaxy imploding on itself. Not merely the dark of night, but the dark of an absolute lack of light, life, and anything good. A feeling of doom slammed into him as he realized that there was something on the other side of the dark. Something that wanted him. Something that had been inside him before.