SEAL Team 666: A Novel

It took a moment, but finally everyone figured it out. Screams went up from six mouths, then howls, grunts, shrieks of pain and fear, as if they were being eaten alive by the homunculi. The clamor lasted for twenty seconds, then died to nothing.

All they heard was their own breathing as they stood and waited for their next command.

When it came, they were ready.

“Fucking charge,” Laws whispered.

Yaya went through the hole in the wall first. Moving in a combat crouch, he sped toward the back of the cave, double-tapping until his magazine was empty.

Behind him came Laws, then Ruiz.

Laws did the same and didn’t spare any ammo.

Ruiz posted between the first and second caverns.

Walker came in with a bead on the first cavern.

On three, Laws and Ruiz took the middle; Yaya fired through the cot-built barricade and took the first.

Six enforcers were already in heaps along the floor. A single Hispanic woman, her mouth stitched, tears pouring from her eyes, stood in the far corner. Beside her, stretched on a bone-made frame, was a fully finished tattoo skin.

Walker put his hand on the back of her head and pulled her down gently but firmly. “Tranquilo. Silencio. Shhh,” he whispered as he scoped the rest of the cavern. It only went back about thirty feet. The walls glistened with dampness. Green moss carpeted them in differing layers. The woman stared at Walker, the red ChemLights reflected in her eyes. He smelled the sea, urine, and the unmistakable coppery scent of blood.

He dragged the woman behind him and met Surrey at the entrance to the cave. He passed the woman off, then turned to help Yaya, who took two in the chest as he was running toward Walker. The first one punched him back, the second one knocked him down.

Walker had no time to check the other SEAL. He scrambled back to the cot barricade in time to see daylight from the end of the cavern. Even as he watched, a man was sliding into a circular hole in the floor. Walker fired. He caught the figure in the back, but the man kept going.

With the light streaming from the opening, his NVGs were no good. He slung them away and began to pull the cots down as fast as he could. He finally got enough of them out of the way to rush in. Four more enforcers lay dead, as was a woman. He checked the hole and found it was an access to a culvert that drained into the ocean. There was no sign of the man.

Walker jerked his head out of the hole and checked the woman. He could tell without touching her that she was dead. He slammed his back against the wall and held in place. Her eyes stared at him accusingly and seemed to ask, Why me? She’d been ripped open from chin to pelvis in a ragged cut. Her insides had all but slid free. Next to her lay the same bone-made rack, but in this case, the suit was missing. If only she’d been in the first cavern, she’d still be alive. Whatever fate put her here had something else in mind for her.

Within moments, Laws was calling the all-clear. Three more enforcers had been killed in the middle cavern, but the woman who was with them was unharmed except for the stitches in her lips.

Yaya rejoined them, grinning sheepishly as he knocked on his body armor. He’d be bruised, but he was alive.

There were two enforcers left alive. Both had been shot, one through the gut, the other through the chest. Neither would survive long without medical attention and they both knew it. So when Laws began to talk to both of them where they lay against a cavern wall, it was interesting to see their reactions. While the one on the left, a scar beneath his left eye, seemed relieved at the opportunity, the one on the right, who had a snake tattooed on his bald head, wanted nothing to do with answering questions. And when he realized that his fellow enforcer was going to answer, he tried to reach his hand into the other man’s stomach and hurry the man’s death along.

Ruiz grabbed him and pressed him to the floor with a boot on top of his wounded chest. “You should just leave that other bad Chinese man alone and let him talk,” Ruiz said, with all the aplomb of one man talking to another as if they were on a main street waiting on a bus.

Walker paused to watch Laws in action, but soon tired of it. Unlike the previous interrogation, Laws wasn’t taking the time to translate into English, so Walker had no idea what was going on. He moved on to the surviving women. Surrey had checked them and reported that they were unharmed, except for the stitching.

The ICE agent and Surrey helped the women out, then returned with reinforcements from outside, now that Laws had cleared the scene. Men came in disguised as a hazardous-materials team dressed in orange rubber suits with square enclosed headgear. They first disposed of the homunculi, cutting them into pieces and slipping them into double-thick black bags. Once they took those away, they returned with stretchers.

By then Laws had finished his interrogation.