SNAFU: Wolves at the Door: An Anthology of Military Horror Read online

  Table of Contents

  Taking down the Top Cat

  R.P.L. Johnson

  Skadi’s Wolves

  Kirsten Cross

  Semper Gumby

  Steve Coate

  Ancient Ruins

  John W. Dennehy

  The Fenrir Project

  David W. Amendola

  Project Lupine

  Brian W. Taylor

  Werwolf!

  W.D. Gagliani & David Benton

  Jester

  Jennifer R. Povey

  The Wild Hunt

  James A. Moore

  Editors’ Note

  SNAFU: An Anthology of Military Horror

  SNAFU: Heroes

  SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest

  SNAFU: Wolves at the Door

  An Anthology of Lycanthrope Military Horror

  Cohesion Press

  2015

  SNAFU: Wolves at the Door

  Cohesion Press 2015

  An Anthology of Military Horror

  Geoff Brown and Amanda J Spedding (eds)

  Anthology © 2015 Cohesion Press

  Stories © 2015 Individual Authors

  Cover Art © Dean Samed/Conzpiracy Digital Arts

  Internal Layout by Cohesion Editing and Proofreading

  Editorial Team:

  Adem Besim

  Jen Bourke

  Shannon Carter

  Cathy Curtain

  Bryce Gordon

  Jaime McDougall

  Luke Poulter

  Phoebe Ward

  Set in Palatino Linotype

  All rights reserved.

  Cohesion Press

  Bendigo

  Australia

  www.cohesionpress.com

  Also From Cohesion Press

  Horror:

  SNAFU: An Anthology of Military Horror

  – eds Geoff Brown & Amanda J Spedding

  SNAFU: Heroes

  – eds Geoff Brown & Amanda J Spedding

  The Gate Theory – Kaaron Warren

  Carnies – Martin Livings

  Sci-Fi/Thriller:

  Valkeryn 2 – Greig Beck

  Crime:

  Dark Waters/Ronnie and Rita – Deborah Sheldon

  Family:

  Magoo Who? – Anne Carmichael

  May I Be Frank? – Anne Carmichael

  Guardian of the Sky Realms – Gerry Huntman

  Coming Soon

  SNAFU II: Survival of the Fittest

  Blurring the Line – ed. Marty Young

  Taking down the Top Cat

  R.P.L. Johnson

  Night fell in the jungle: greens sinking into blacks, shadows growing up from the valley floor like a dark liquid pooling in the deep places of the world.

  Sergeant Jared Naylor scanned the compound through his binoculars as he waited for the rest of the team to make their way up the narrow game trail. From above it looked like a holiday resort. The main house nestled into the wooded hillside, its sprawling size artfully hidden by sculpted gardens that led down to the river. A helipad and boathouse on the river completed the picture. It looked more like an eco-retreat for detoxing celebrities than a drug lord’s stronghold.

  “Man, I am in the wrong business,” said Garcia. He gave out a low whistle as he stared down at the luxurious compound.

  “Well today’s your lucky day, Private,” Naylor said. “I hear there are going to be a few vacancies opening up in his operation pretty soon.”

  Germaine McDowell lumbered past, toting the heavy MG4 as if it was a kid’s BB gun. “Of course that would mean you’d have the mighty fightin’ Delta Force bearing down on your ass right now,” he said.

  Garcia shrugged. “I heard they ain’t so tough.”

  Mac gave him a friendly shoulder check as he walked past. “Some of them ain’t,” he said.

  “Zip it,” Naylor said. “Save the bull session for the ride home. I want it tight and quiet from here on in.”

  He checked his watch; they were right on time. Not bad after a ten-mile hike through dense jungle. This hadn’t been a usual infiltration. Their target was Hernando Ramirez, head of the infamous Cascajal drug cartel. Ramirez was notoriously paranoid, and his compound was miles away from any road and well off any commercial flight path. They couldn’t afford to give him any warning, so they had been dropped two valleys away with the rest of the journey being made on foot. Other squads were hiking in from the south, and under Emcon Alpha, full radio silence, timing was everything.

  “There’s the boathouse,” Jim Lowe said, the last man in their four-man fire team.

  “I see it,” Naylor replied.

  The boathouse was their way out. Getting away from the compound had to be as fast as their approach was stealthy. This operation was strictly off the books. The chain of command went from Naylor to his Captain straight to the commander of Delta and then to a D.C. suit. Naylor had been working operations like this for years but still got nervous when he thought about who was ultimately in charge. A Mexican drug lord might kill you, might even torture you first. But those Beltway cats would sign your death warrant with no more thought than swatting a fly if they thought it was in their interests. They couldn’t afford to get caught in Mexico. If they did, the unofficial war on drugs could become an international incident.

  Fortunately Ramirez’s lavish lifestyle extended to a collection of motorboats in his private boathouse. That was Naylor’s objective: hold and secure their way out while the other squads took out Ramirez and his key lieutenants.

  They made their way down the hill. If anything the undergrowth was even thicker on the south-facing slope and they were forced to hack their way through the bush.

  Naylor swung his machete against a particularly tangled knot of vines when the blade struck something hard. He pulled the vines and they came away like a living tapestry, an interwoven blanket of tough, woody tendrils. Behind was a huge boulder of yellowish green rock just like the outcroppings they had seen during their hike. But this wasn’t just some slab of bedrock protruding through the topsoil, it was a huge stone head.

  “Well, would you look at that,” Garcia said. “Olmec, I reckon.”

  “Listen to him,” Mac said. “Just ‘cus his gran’pappy swam the Rio Grande forty years ago, he thinks he’s some kind of expert on Mexican history.”

  Naylor examined the huge artefact. The features had been smoothed by time but Naylor could still make out the broad, fang-filled mouth of the Olmec jaguar God.

  “Well in this case, I think he’s right,” he said. “This is Olmec country, and they liked their carvings sure enough. I even saw one like this in a museum in Guadalajara one time.”

  “You know, I heard Ramirez was into all this shit,” Lowe said. “Collects artefacts, even makes out like he’s some kind of champion for the native Olmec Indians.”

  “Yeah, I heard something similar,” Naylor said. “Seems like being a drug lord with more money than God isn’t enough for him. Ramirez likes to pretend he’s some kind of mystical badass, Lucifer and Sante Muerta combined. I guess it helps to keep the locals in line: stops the coca farmers from selling the crop to the other cartels. It’s all bullshit designed to keep the locals away from his pleasure palace.”

  “Pleasure palace,” Garcia repeated. “I like the sound of that. Like I said, I’m in the wrong business.” He patted the giant stone head as they walked past. “I’m going to tell Ramirez about this, he might want to add it to his collection.”


  * * *

  They hit the boathouse at the stroke of 2:00am. There were two guards on patrol, both were chatting and smoking on a small jetty that jutted out where the river widened in front of the house. Both caught three rounds each from the suppressed MP5s carried by Lowe and Garcia. They collapsed in unison, hearts shredded, blood pressure crashing and pitching them into a deadly faint while the rest of their body caught up to the fact that they were dead.

  Naylor ghosted forward to secure the bodies, afraid one of them would pitch over into the lake, raising an attention-getting splash. But they both crumpled into their own footprints, empty eyes staring up at the sky.

  Naylor crouched over the bodies, scanning the boathouse through night vision goggles. There was no sign of movement, and no sign either of the simultaneous attack Naylor knew would be happening right at that instant on the main house.

  That was good. Silence meant things were going to plan.

  “Mac, get that SAW up here. Garcia, start prepping the boat.”

  The two men moved with smooth, practised efficiency. Mac heaved a crate onto the jetty and set the big machine gun up on its bipod while Garcia started to check over the motor launch Naylor had picked.

  “Lowe, give me an overview,” Naylor said.

  “On it.”

  Lowe took out a small drone, a quad-rotor hardly bigger than his outstretched palm, and pitched it into the air like a softball. At about twenty feet its four tiny propellers spun to life with no more noise than a family of mosquitos and Lowe flew it towards the house, controlling the tiny drone with what looked like a wireless game controller with a built-in screen.

  Naylor know what to expect, but he asked anyway.

  “How’s it looking?”

  He could see Lowe’s smile as his teeth flashed green in the night vision.

  “Sergeant, when this is over we can sell the video to the Stockade to train new Operators.”

  “That good?”

  “Textbook.”

  “Hey Garcia,” Mac hissed, “you still want to join the cartel?”

  “I’ve changed my mind,” Garcia replied. “I hear the retirement plan’s kinda rough.”

  Gunfire, coming from the main house. Naylor recognised the distinctive agricultural clatter of AK47s and in reply, the faster buzz of a Delta machine gun. Sounded like the cartel had finally woken up. Well, that was to be expected eventually.

  “Stay tight,” Naylor said. “Garcia, how are we going with that boat?”

  “Two minutes, Sergeant.”

  “Damn,” Mac said. “I could throw a rock in downtown Jersey and hit three guys who could jack a boat faster than you.”

  “Can it,” Naylor ordered.

  He crept over to where Lowe was still piloting the drone. Its night vision camera clearly showed the main house. There was no sign of the other Delta squads, but staccato flashes of light strobed in the windows in time to the clatter of gunfire on the night air.

  More gunfire now, mixed with screams. Animal sounds ripped from human throats. The night was alive now with movement and noise. The old dance – predators and prey.

  Something wasn’t right.

  A voice came on the secure Delta short-range network, breaking radio silence with a garbled scream.

  “Holy shit! Get back, get back, get b—”

  The fast, pneumatic flutter of suppressed gunfire swamped the panicked voice: not a controlled burst, but a full-auto spray that emptied the clip in seconds. Then the screams cut short with a wet, ripping sound that reminded Naylor of his mother de-boning a chicken.

  A growl. Naylor tried to imagine what could be done to a human throat to make such a noise, but failed.

  The screaming carried on the still jungle night. Naylor stared at the drone’s screen, willing it to show him what was going on. But whatever it was, it was happening inside the main house.

  He listened closely. He had heard his share of gunfire and screaming, but this was different. The screams had a panicked edge, not cries of pain, but animal yells of terror. The gunfire was wild and sporadic. He expected that from the cartel guards, but he could hear the familiar crack of Delta-issued Berettas. The two squads that had stormed the house had ditched their rifles and were using their sidearms. That was bad.

  The comms was alive with voices now: radio silence forgotten. Naylor heard desperate pleas for help and snatched fragments from open microphones.

  “What the fuck was that?”

  “Oh, God... Oh, God...”

  “Where d’it go? Where d’it go?”

  “What the fu—”

  “Fall back! Fall back!”

  The roar that echoed across the compound was as loud as thunder.

  “Boat’s ready, Sarge,” Garcia said.

  “Okay.” Naylor broke radio silence to send the coded signal that their way out was ready. He didn’t know what was going on at the main house, but now they could complete the mission and exfiltrate down the river as planned.

  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 cr
aft 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.