Commission: Reconnaissance
“Operation time 1303. We commence reconnaissance from Entrance Number One, advancing for thirty minutes. Recon ends at 1333. Objective is return to the starting point by 1410.”
All three worked the watches strapped to their left wrists, palms turned outward so the faces showed. They were digital, but none of them so much as beeped.
Carlos carried a shortened assault rifle. Cole had stripped the stock from the designated marksman rifle he normally used and mounted a laser designator instead. Hartwell likewise kept the stock of her assault rifle folded. Every one of them wore plate carriers stuffed full of magazines, medical kits the only things left in otherwise empty packs lashed tight to their backs.
“I’ll signal with the flashlight, old man.”
Click… click. Click. Click.
One long flash. One short. He shone the pattern onto the floor; the old man nodded.
“I’ll be waiting. Don’t worry about us—just go.”
The remaining three nodded to Curtis, who had the security detail.
“Rangers, huh… It was Rangers who smashed those coastal guns for us.”
Unlike his granddaughter, who deliberately kept her distance from the newcomers out of personal feeling, the father and son of the Omen family had welcomed their new comrades without reservation. In the Second World War the Rangers had opened the way at the very tip of every landing; in the Gulf they had torn through Iraq as a versatile, do-anything force. Two soldiers who remembered men who took the point for their own could hardly help thinking well of them.
Even so, of the seven at least three had accepted the Rangers willingly. Sarah still resented the forced rescue; Angela still carried guilt for it. Between the two of them they had managed to kill whatever excitement the new guests’ first operation might have generated.
Cole took hold of the door blocking the passage. Carlos and Hartwell slipped through in a rush. The moment Cole stepped in after them and pulled the door shut, absolute black settled over the tunnel.
…
Click, click.
They dropped the four-tube night-vision goggles mounted on their helmets and scanned a corridor that admitted not a single photon. The goggles themselves confirmed what the darkness already said: the far end of the passage was invisible.
…
Tongues that had never stopped moving through dinner now pressed flat to the roofs of their mouths. Teeth and lips clamped shut, the three hugged the right-hand wall.
Tap-tap.
Hartwell rapped twice on Carlos’s back, then laid her right hand lightly on his left shoulder so her left could take the weight of the rifle. Cole, rearmost, pressed himself to the left wall and locked his left hand on the grip.
The reconnaissance finally began.
Scuff. Soft scrape.
While the three moved, their footfalls were almost nonexistent—only the occasional whisper of a sole brushing concrete dust. No thudding boots. No rattle of gear.
Carlos raised a clenched left fist; the other two froze. His thumb extended and jerked right twice: the corridor turned that way. Carlos and Hartwell both switched their rifles from right hand to left and waited for Cole.
…
Cole eased his left foot forward, leaning until the angle just—barely—opened on the right-hand bend.
…
Carlos and Hartwell flowed around the corner the same instant Cole pressed forward. They re-shouldered their weapons; Carlos and Cole activated the infrared lasers and painted the darkness ahead.
Nod.
They punched through the black at speed until the next dog-leg forced them to slow, shave the angle again, and push on.
…
A straight corridor. Two branches left. Three right. The moment the maze of passages opened in front of them the three Rangers exchanged silent looks.
Hand signals pointed to the nearest left-hand spur. Cole unfolded his stock, took the rearmost position, and covered the main corridor. Carlos and Hartwell hugged the left wall and steadied their breathing.
“…Two, three.”
They stepped into the spur almost together. Another hallway stretched away; a single door waited at its end.
“Fuck. This is why I hate CQB.”
“Quiet.”
Leaving Cole alone in the hallway, the two of them moved straight to the door. It was locked.
Carlos opened a magazine pouch and drew out a length of wire twisted into a crude pick. He eyed it with mild skepticism, then slipped it into the keyhole and turned. The door opened as if it had never been locked at all.
Creak.
The instant the door swung, Carlos and Hartwell burst into the room. Unused bunks lined the walls. A few still-sealed supply crates sat neatly on the floor. They searched every corner before nodding to each other, then stepped back into the corridor. Cole returned the nod.
They were just about to shift positions and clear a right-hand spur when—
Soft scuttle.
“Movement. Far end of the main corridor.”
Cole dropped to a knee. Carlos flicked a glance at the still-uncleared right-hand passage, then tapped Hartwell forward, settled into position, and put his muzzle on Cole’s infrared pointer.
“What was it?”
“Dunno. Legs looked wrong. Whatever it was, it wasn’t human.”
Hartwell came back and stacked behind Carlos.
“Door’s locked.”
“Hold. Movement at the end of the hall.”
All three froze in place, eyes locked on the far end. No further sound. No further motion.
“Cole, you sure you saw something?”
“It was fast. Whatever the fuck it was, it was fast.”
“Maybe it just moved somewhere else—”
“Hold up.”
Hartwell pointed.
“End of the corridor. Left side.”
Cole cranked the magnification on his optic.
…Glittering white eyes. Not set in a face—round eyes dangling from the tips of tentacles.
“Fuck, what the hell is that?”
“I didn’t mis-see that, right?”
“Hyunwoo ever describe a creature that looked like this?”
“No… Ah, shit. Right side—another eye just popped out.”
Now two tentacle-mounted eyes filled Cole’s reticle.
“We’re pulling out.”
“Wait—didn’t he tell us to at least bring back the characteristics?”
“‘Tentacle eyeballs’ covers it. Move.”
Carlos came off his sights and eased back behind Cole. Hartwell followed at once; Cole kept his muzzle up, covering their withdrawal. When they looked down the corridor again—
“Huh.”
The three of them saw what had crawled out into the open.
Something the size of a large dog, vaguely cat-shaped. Flattened against the floor, blinking a single eye—
Sluuuurp.
With a wet, mucous sound the thing stirred in the darkness, tentacles waving.
“…Those are some ugly-ass fuckers.”
“Maybe they freeze when we’re looking?”
“How would they know we’re looking in a place with zero light?”
“Cats already have night-vision eyes.”
“Nothing showed until we hit them with IR. You’re saying these things have better eyes than four-tube NVGs? And they only get one each?”
Kegegegek.
The grotesque cry cut every mouth silent; three muzzles snapped forward. The “cat” opened its jaws—then kept opening them, the mandible splitting wide. The bifurcated mouth displayed a long tongue and four needle-sharp fangs.
Scuttle. Scuttle.
More of them boiled out of the corridor, packing the space, tentacle eyes retracting. Hips wagged in a crouching bounce; Hartwell’s finger took the slack out of the trigger.
“Shoot. Shoot!”
Pfft. Pfft. Pfft.
Thwack. Thwuck. Thwup-thwup.
Rounds smashed the lead cat’s face in half before it could leap. The second and third, however, drove hard with their hind legs and launched.
“Shiiiit!”
Mouths gaped wide enough to swallow a head whole, filling the entire field of view. The tongues lashing out from those throats were enough to stun anyone seeing them for the first time.
Bang. Ba-bang.
Heavy bullets from the designated marksman rifle punched clean through the oversized cats. That did not magically arrest the flying mass mid-air.
“Guh!”
Carlos, farthest forward, took a massive black body square in the chest and went down hard. Hartwell ducked under another, but the next sleek shape was already on her before she could get a clean sight picture.
Click—tututututu…
She flipped the selector to full auto. The stockless assault rifle dumped its magazine. The cat rode the wall, dodging the stream—
Thud. Thud-thud.
—until the bullets finally caught it, shredded it, and dropped the ruin to the floor.
“Damn it!”
Carlos heaved free of the heavy carcass and put two more of the fleeing things on the ground.
Tap-tap-tap…
The retreating footfalls of the remaining “cats” dwindled and vanished.
“You good?”
“Just startled. Nothing broken.”
Carlos irritably brushed blood and meat from his plate carrier and let out a long breath. The empty corridor was now littered with one-eyed cat corpses. One by one they reloaded.
Pfft.
Pssht. Pssht.
Carlos put two insurance rounds into each body. The other two held position, covering the three left-hand and two right-hand spurs rather than the distant main forks.
Five minutes after the last shot, Hartwell laid her palm flat on Carlos’s back.
“Talk.”
“Carlos—what’s the call? We abort?”
“…Time?”
“1328.”
“Fuck. At this rate we can’t make any real progress.”
Hartwell flipped open her notebook and sketched the route they had already covered.
“If we’re marking what we’ve cleared… about this much.”
Carlos looked at the drawing and shook his head.
“Not enough. Even if we leave the main forks alone, we at least need to know whether these five spurs all lead into living quarters.”
Cole checked his watch, muttered, then shook his own head.
“Then the one-hour window we set goes out the window. That’s not what the client asked for. We’ve still got three more entrances after this—you okay with that?”
Carlos thought it over, then nodded.
“We need to know which space each entrance feeds into or we’ll have zero idea where to start looking for the items they want. And there’s no guarantee these things won’t come right back the second we leave. Could be worse shit waiting next time.”
“If that’s the decision, no complaints.”
“Same.”
Consensus reached, Carlos stood, put his selector on safe, and slung the rifle. He began dragging the cat carcasses into a corner where they would not impede movement. Hartwell and Cole held security the entire time. Once the four intact bodies—discounting the two that had collapsed while fleeing—were clear, Hartwell crouched and began a fresh sketch on a clean page of the notebook: earless, short black fur, single-eyed oversized cats. She finished and returned to her position.
“Four spaces left. Resuming search.”
Cole reset. Hartwell tapped Carlos’s back twice; the two of them moved out at once. Silence settled over the corridor again—broken only by the busy footfalls of two Rangers hustling from spur to spur, throwing open every door they found.