Cannibal Read online

  Maybe it had to do with what else had been lost in Africa.

  When Knight was still fifty yards away, King spoke again. “Rook, take point. Queen, you’re behind him. Head on a swivel.”

  Rook knelt to retrieve an M240B medium machine gun, which rested on bipod legs nearby. The thing weighed damn near thirty pounds loaded, and it was pretty much useless for the kind of surgical strike they were hoping to pull off tonight, but machine guns were like motorcycle helmets—better to have them and never use them, than need one and not have it. The 240B was his primary, but not his only weapon. Like the rest of the team, he also carried a compact H&K MP5 SD machine pistol, equipped with sound suppressor. Rounding out his personal arsenal were ‘the Girls’—a pair of IMI Desert Eagle Mark XIX Magnum .50 caliber semi-automatic pistols, one on each hip. He slung the machine gun across his back, out of the way, and led with the MP5. In the event that they made contact, the whisper-quiet machine pistol might be able to neutralize a threat without waking up everyone for twenty miles. If the shit really hit the fan, the need for subtlety would have already gone out the window, and then he could make as much noise and fling as much lead downrange as he liked.

  He started forward, covering the right side of the path while Queen watched the left. The glasses had low light capabilities that were far superior to even the best 4G night vision devices currently available to elite military units. The glasses also acted like a miniature heads-up display, showing a top down GPS map of the compound. Unfortunately, the one thing the glasses could not do was tell them where to find their objective, a senior member of El Sol known only as Mano—literally, the Hand. Their mission was to retrieve Mano, preferably alive, but if alive meant taking an unnecessary risk, then in a body bag was an acceptable alternative. Mano’s true identity was unknown, but reliable intel placed him inside the gates of this remote property. If he was the important leader everyone believed him to be, then odds were good that they would find him in the largest building, which in the satellite photos, appeared to be a colonial-style hacienda at the center of the compound.

  During their approach, they had reconnoitered the guard posts and tagged each of the El Sol gunmen in the virtual environment. Their locations appeared as red dots on the map, all distributed around the perimeter. There were no guards or patrols inside the compound but Rook remained vigilant as he made his way up the path to the cluster of dark buildings at the center of the perimeter.

  “Stack on the front door,” King said, his low whisper perfectly audible through the bone-induction speakers that transmitted sound vibrations from the glasses’ earpieces and into the skulls of the team members. “Two to a room. Slow and quiet. Rook, Queen, you’re up first.”

  Rook crept onto the porch and waited for the others to line up behind him. At a signal from King, Knight moved up and with a light touch, tried the door knob. It turned without resistance. He nodded to Rook, initiating a silent three-count, and then pushed the door open.

  Rook moved inside and turned to the right, getting clear of the doorway and scanning for a target. Queen was directly behind him, moving left. Room clearing was something they rehearsed almost obsessively under a variety of conditions and threat configurations. As soon as he and Queen cleared the first room, Knight and Bishop would leapfrog through and clear the next room, repeating this procedure until the house was completely secure. King would watch their six o’clock, making sure that no one wandered in from outside. Staying focused, prioritizing threats and remembering which way to turn could be a matter of life and death, so it took a second for Rook to realize that what lay beyond the doorway was nothing like what he had expected.

  “What the hell?”

  3

  “Rook, talk to me,” King said. “What’s happening? Is the room clear?”

  “Uh, I’m not really sure.” He straightened out of his slightly hunched over stance and took in the panoramic view that lay before him.

  The hacienda exterior was a façade, an empty shell. Instead of a house of rooms, the interior was a vast open space at least two hundred feet across, the floor about ten feet below the balcony where they now stood.

  “What is this place?” Queen asked. “A warehouse?”

  Rook caught a whiff of the air and wrinkled his nose. “More like a barn.”

  “You would know, farmboy.”

  Rook ignored the jibe. Even if he hadn’t grown up on a New England farm, the smells of livestock—musk and manure—would have been unmistakable. “I don’t think we’re going to find our guy in here.”

  “You’re probably right,” King said. “But do a quick walkthrough. Look for hidden storerooms, tunnels, secret passages. There’s already more going on here than meets the eye.”

  “Copy that, Optimus.” Rook’s gaze was drawn to the center of the open space, where someone had partitioned a twenty-foot square with eight-foot high sections of chain-link fence, topped with a coil of razor wire. The structure looked like an animal pen or a dog run, but its conspicuous central location suggested another purpose.

  “I think they’ve been using this place for cage matches.”

  No one asked him to elaborate. Of all the brutal and inhuman crimes attributed to the Mexican drug lords, one of the most heinous was forcing kidnap victims and captured enemies to participate in brutal gladiatorial fights. Here it seemed was proof that the El Sol cartel was doing just that.

  Rook tore his gaze away from the cage and headed down a flight of wooden stairs to the floor of the open room. From there, he and Queen moved out to search the perimeter of the room. About halfway around, he found another section of chain-link fence that appeared to be a gate blocking access to a recessed alcove about twenty feet deep. The floor was strewn with what looked like hay bale-sized lumps of fur. Rook zoomed in on the nearest of them. “What the hell are those—”

  The lump he was inspecting erupted into motion, crossing the intervening distance and slamming into the chain link right in front of him. Startled, he stumbled back with a yelp. The movement had been so sudden that it took him a moment to process what had just happened, and in that brief instant, the rest of the furry shapes were roused.

  Rook got his MP5 up and thrust it in the direction of the snarling, snorting mass that seemed about to burst through the bulging chain link gate. His first thought was that this was a pack of dogs, but one look at the hideous snouts that lashed back and forth against the diamond-patterned barrier, raking the links with gleaming tusks, told him that these were a different animal entirely.

  “Goddamned pigs,” he said, his voice still a little shaky from the adrenaline spike.

  “Wild boars, to be precise.” The voice sounded like it was coming from right beside him, but the person speaking was actually two thousand miles away in the team’s headquarters in New Hampshire.

  “There are thousands of them roaming Mexico and the Southwest,” Deep Blue went on, “Wild boars and feral hogs. Distant cousins to Porky and Wilbur.”

  Rook grunted a vague acknowledgement. ‘Distant’ was putting it mildly. About the only thing these creatures had in common with the pigs Rook had grown up with, was a distinctive flat nose. Aside from that, the boars were just plain ugly, with bulbous rat-like bodies about five feet long from snout to stubby tail, covered in coarse brown bristles, and supported on short, spindly legs that evidently were a lot faster than they looked. Razor-sharp canine teeth—nearly three-inches long—protruded from the pig-faces, and Rook had no doubt that those tusks could rip a person wide open with a single slash.

  The fence continued to bulge and buckle under the combined assault of the boars. Rook guessed that each of them was probably in the neighborhood of two hundred pounds, and it seemed prudent not to test whether the so-called ‘cyclone’ fence material could stand up to the relentless battering, so he backed away slowly, keeping his MP5 trained on the creatures.

  “Well, that explains the smell,” he muttered. “Hey, Knight. You got any good family barbecue recipes?”r />
  “Oh, I get it.” Knight replied in a dour voice. “It’s funny because I’m Korean. Really, Rook?”

  Rook grinned. It wasn’t much of a reaction, but it was a hopeful sign that there was a little bit of the old Knight still trying to break through.

  “Something tells me they aren’t raising these things for the bacon,” Deep Blue went on. “They’re a lot bigger than the boars found in the wild, and judging by their aggressive reaction, I’d say they’re probably feeding them a cocktail of anabolic steroids and growth hormones, along with a lot of fresh meat.”

  “Why grow ‘em big if not to slaughter them?”

  Queen, who had come over to join Rook, jerked a thumb in the direction of the cage in the center of the open room.

  “What? They’re fighting them?”

  “No,” she said. “I think they’re making their hostages fight them. Man against beast. And pigs are omnivores, so no clean-up required afterward.”

  Rook winced. There was only so much that light banter and dark humor could do to cushion the impact of such inhuman brutality. “These bastards need to go down.”

  “I’m glad you feel that way,” King interjected. “So if you kids could hurry up and finish checking out the petting zoo, we’ve got work to do.”

  Rook continued backing away from the boars until their weird barking grunts were no longer audible, and then he turned and resumed searching the perimeter of the enclosure. Further along the wall, they found another gated alcove, which Rook gave only the most cursory inspection. At the far end of the room, they found a wide doorway blocked by a metal roll-up door.

  Rook frowned. This was something they had not anticipated. “What’s the call, boss?”

  There was a long pause and Rook knew King was working through all the possible outcomes. That was King’s gift; he was a highly analytical strategic thinker. It was no coincidence that they had chosen the appellation ‘Chess Team.’ King could manage the battlefield like a grandmaster moving pieces on a game board.

  “We’ve got to know what’s on the other side of that door,” he said finally. “Stand by. We’ll come to you.”

  Rook felt a strange sense of relief at King’s decision, and he was about to say as much when, with a harsh metallic rasp, the door was thrown open.

  The glasses instantly adjusted to the sudden brightness of incandescent light bulbs, saving Rook’s eyes from flash blindness. Nevertheless, the suddenness with which the door had opened left him momentarily stunned. Fortunately, the man standing just beyond, a mere arm’s length away, was even less prepared for the encounter. His eyebrows creased together in surprise and consternation, but not alarm.

  He can’t see us, Rook thought. He sees something, but doesn’t know what it is. His eyes haven’t adjusted to the darkness, and with the chameleon suits, we blend in.

  Rook knew the illusion wouldn’t last, but before he could bring the MP5 up, lines of text began scrolling across his heads-up display. A familiar name—Juan Beltran, one of the prime suspects believed to be the mysterious Mano—and a long list of criminal offenses.

  This is the guy.

  Rook shifted his weapon ever so slightly, and a red targeting dot appeared on Beltran’s chest. The drug lord did not appear to be armed, and they had instructions to take him alive if possible.

  Was it possible?

  Beltran’s eyes suddenly went wide.

  He sees me.

  In the instant it took for Rook to make his decision, Beltran overcame his panic and darted to the side. Rook pounced after him, swinging the machine pistol like a club, and he felt the resounding crunch of metal against bone, but as Beltran slumped to the floor, Rook saw the man’s hand fall away from a bright red button mounted on the wall.

  “What was that?” Queen asked, stepping forward to inspect the button. “An alarm?”

  “Whatever it was, I don’t think he got to it,” Rook said, bending over to check Beltran’s pulse. Still alive.

  Great, now I have to carry him, too.

  Queen placed a hand on the button, as if testing it, then she hooked her fingers around it and pulled. The button popped out with an audible click. She faced Rook with a grim expression. “I hate to rain on your parade, but I think he did get to it.”

  “A silent alarm?” Rook tilted his head, listening for the claxons of a security system, but he heard something else instead, a clicking noise, like teeth biting together, and with it, a sound that was somewhere between a dog’s bark and a pig’s snort.

  He glanced back through the doorway. The gates to the alcoves on both sides of the big room stood wide open, and charging across the floor, like bristly guided missiles, were two dozen amped-up slavering boars.

  4

  King was just starting down the stairs when a flash of artificial light at the far end of the room warned him that something was wrong.

  “Bishop, watch the door. Knight, you’re with me.” He didn’t ask Rook or Queen for an explanation. The fact that they had not immediately updated him could mean only trouble. Yet, despite the premonition of danger, the metallic rasp of the gated pens sliding open sent a chill down his spine.

  The floor was alive with movement. Furry shapes, each about two feet high, spilled out of the alcoves. These were the boars Deep Blue had identified, and yet their appearance still came as a shock. The wild pigs looked like enormous bloated ticks, and they moved like lightning. Most of them charged toward the distant light, but four of the porcine heads turned in the opposite direction and shot toward the stairs.

  King trained his MP5 on the nearest one but it was moving so fast he couldn’t keep the aiming dot centered. To make matters worse, the virtual display wasn’t marking the boars as targets; the software could easily distinguish human features and tag them accordingly, but it wasn’t configured to do the same with animals.

  Low tech it is, then. He squeezed the trigger. The machine pistol made a mechanical clicking sound as it started hurling 9mm rounds in the direction of the advancing boars, but the suppressed report was so soft that he could hear the creatures grunting and squealing as some of the bullets found flesh. Blood and fur erupted into the air all around the creatures, but none of them fell. They didn’t even slow down.

  Shit. It’s like throwing pebbles at them.

  The pigs were so close now that he did not need to bother with the aiming dot. He pointed the barrel at the closest beast and held the trigger. Bullets raked into the thing’s head, gouging long bloody furrows, but the boar’s skull was like an armor plate.

  There was a whoosh of air from beside him, and then the boar popped like an over-inflated balloon. The thick hide and dense bone was evidently no match for a .408 round from Knight’s sniper rifle.

  King took a step back, switching to another target. The MP5 chattered a few more times then went silent. “Reloading!”

  There was another hiss of displaced air, and a second boar went down just twenty feet away. Its momentum carried it forward, a tumbling fountain of gore that came to rest at King’s feet. He slotted a full magazine into the machine-pistol and dropped down behind the carcass, aiming his weapon lower, at the spindly legs of the remaining boars. Then he let lead fly.

  The bullets skipped off the concrete floor, filling the open space with a noise like a jackhammer, but the new tactic bore immediate fruit. One of the beasts stumbled, veering directly into the path of the other, and the two lumbering shapes collided in a flurry of limbs and slashing tusks that ended when they slammed into the dead animal King hid behind. They hit with such force that the carcass slid back and knocked King down.

  He scrambled up, ready to engage again, but the entangled boars were already in their death throes, felled by two more close-range shots from Knight’s rifle.

  King let out the breath he had been holding and gave Knight a grateful nod. He knew that the team’s sniper was dealing with a lot of self-doubt stemming from his injury, but there was no question in King’s mind that Knight was one hundred perce
nt ready-for-action.

  Two more of the boars broke off from the main stampede and were lumbering toward them, but King looked past them to the square of incandescent light and the overlapping blue icons that marked the location of the rest of his team.

  Rook’s voice suddenly filled his head. “Get out of the fucking way!”

  King immediately grasped Rook’s intent and sprang into motion, running for the right side of the room. He had taken only a few steps when the chainsaw report of Rook’s 240B thundered in his ears.

  “There’s too many of them,” Queen yelled, barely audible over the din of the machine gun. “Fall back!”

  There was another burst from the big gun, and then with the abruptness of a guillotine blade, the noise ceased and the distant light blinked out.

  5

  When she realized that her MP5 was going to be about as effective at stopping the boars as a BB gun, Queen started looking for a better alternative than making a desperate last stand.

  She had been a few steps behind Rook when Beltran had thrown open the roll-up door, and in the pregnant pause that had followed, she had gotten a good look at what lay beyond it. The door opened into a long tunnel, big enough to drive a truck through it. If there was any doubt about that, the idling Ford F-150 right behind Beltran erased it.

  When Rook had taken Beltran down, Queen’s attention had turned to the matter of the red button on the wall, and then to the stampede of boars charging toward them. Her machine-pistol was next to useless, and she didn’t think she would fare much better with her back-up—a SIG Sauer P226 chambered for .357 ammo—which meant it was up to Rook to hold back the charge with his machine gun.