SNAFU: Wolves at the Door

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 craft 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.

Naylor looked at the bodies. They had been torn apart.

“Grenade do that?” Lowe asked.

“Don’t think so,” Naylor replied. “I’m not seeing any blast damage. Looks like they were cut.”

“What the fuck?” Lowe said. “Who the hell were Ramirez’s bodyguards? Ninjas?”

“I heard one time, this guy in Columbia, he kept a whole zoo. He had lions and all kinds of shit,” said Garcia.

“You think animals did this?” Naylor said. “Think maybe Ramirez let them out?”

“Well I’ve never seen a bullet open a guy up like that.”

The drone pushed on down the corridor.

“Signal’s getting weaker, Sarge. I don’t know how much farther I can go without losing the drone.”

“Copy that,” Naylor said. “Keep going.”

The little quad-rotor flew down another short flight of stairs; the only sound in the house was the whine of its tiny electric motors. The stairs opened into a large room — the biggest they had seen — but instead of Garcia’s zoo this place looked more like a museum. Glass cases lined the walls, most of them shattered and cracked, their contents indistinguishable from the shards of broken glass and debris that littered the cabinets.

There was movement at the edge of the screen. A black shape that Naylor had thought was a shadow suddenly slipped away out of the frame.

A figure moved behind it, a soldier, lying against the wall, one leg stretched out in front of him, the other folded beneath him, broken or dislocated or both.

Naylor watched the man’s eyes as he tracked the departing shadow with a look of barely contained horror. He was alive.

“Shit! It’s Miller,” Lowe said.

Miller saw the drone. With a quick, desperate look back at the departing shadow he mouthed, Help me!

Miller’s eyes darted to the left. A split second later a black shape moved in front of the camera and the drone was swatted from the air. It tumbled into the wall and the screen went dead.

“What now, Sarge?” Garcia asked.

Naylor didn’t answer. He had seen something. “Lowe, give me a playback of the last few frames.”

Corporal Lowe rewound the last few seconds of the tumbling drone until the image stabilised.

“There!” Naylor jabbed at the screen. An instant before the drone was hit it had caught an image, a pattern of blotchy black rings.”

“What is that?” Garcia asked.

“Jaguar,” Naylor replied. “It’s a jaguar.”

“So what do we do now?”

“What do you think?” Naylor asked. “We go in.”

They followed the route the drone had taken, the scene looking eerily familiar through the green night goggles clipped to Naylor’s helmet. They descended the stairs, checking the vital signs of the bodies they passed, but there were no more survivors. Perhaps there were more inside. Perhaps it was just Miller. Either way, Naylor was going to find out.

“Holy crap! Just look at this place,” Garcia said as they descended the second flight of stairs.

It was the room they had seen with the drone. Ramirez had created his own museum inside his house. Naylor had seen this kind of thing before. Some of these guys had collections that rivalled anything in the Smithsonian.

Ramirez’s taste ran to Olmec artefacts and guns. Stone heads of various sizes lined one wall of the room along with fragments of frescoes and larger carvings. Each was lit with tasteful up-lights and labelled with a small plaque. The other side of the room looked like a cross between a jeweller’s front window and an armoury. Naylor had never seen so much gold. There were gold plated rifles and matched pairs of jewelled pistols. There were older weapons, lovingly restored and, just like the Olmec masonry, each item was labelled with obsessive care.

Garcia whistled. He picked up a gold-plated 1911 semi-automatic with mother of pearl grips.

“Stay focussed, Garcia,” Naylor said. “We don’t have time for rubbernecking.”

“I know, I know. But man… just one of these things could set a guy up for life. And two… Well I’d—”

It hit Garcia high, springing from the shadows four-footed like a cat, although Naylor had never seen any cat that big. It was bigger than a jaguar. It was more like a bear, although slimmer and sleeker and faster.

It sprung on Garcia, knocking him sprawling with its speed and sheer weight and riding him to the ground, crushing the breath out of him. Garcia didn’t even get a chance to scream before it bit down with its huge jaws. There was that noise again: the wet, crunch of snapping bone. Naylor squeezed the trigger on his MP5, more out of instinct than conscious thought and the muzzle flash lit up the green-black flank of something squatting on Garcia. It ignored Naylor’s shots. He saw the muscles bunch under its sleek pelt as it worked its massive jaws, twisting and pulling and then it was gone, leaping away through a doorway leading to another wing of the museum.

“Holy shit! Garcia!”

Naylor was at his side in a second while Lowe covered the doorway with his MP5. But Garcia was already dead. His head lolled at an unnatural angle, his neck half torn away by a terrible wound that had opened him up from chin to collar bone.

“What the fuck was that?” Lowe shouted.

Naylor didn’t know. Some kind of animal, Garcia had been right about that much. A tiger maybe? He could think of nothing else with that combination and size and speed and predatory savagery.

“Just watch that fucking doorway,” Naylor said. “You see any movement, you light that fucker up, you hear me?”

“Copy that,” Lowe said through clenched teeth.

Naylor quickly padded the last few metres to where Miller still lay slumped against the wall. He was unconscious. As well as his broken leg he was bleeding from four parallel slashes across his chest. Naylor slapped him, hard. It barely roused him. He stared past Naylor with unfocussed eyes.

“Wake up, Miller, dammit,” Naylor said and slapped him again.

That seemed to work.

“Out! We’ve got to get out,” Miller said.

“No shit,” Naylor replied. “How many of those things are there?”

Miller grimaced as Naylor helped him onto his good leg. “Just one.”

“One!” Naylor thought of the bodies littering the upper levels. “You’re wrong. Ramirez must have had a goddamn zoo full of those things. No way one animal could do all this.”

Naylor hefted Miller onto his shoulders in a fireman’s carry, ignoring the man’s cries of pain.

“You don’t get it,” Miller said. “That’s no animal. We took out Ramirez’s guards, followed him down here when he ran. I… I saw him change. That thing is Ramirez.”

Delirious, Naylor thought. Stress and blood loss. They would have to get him back to the boat and stabilise him. Get some saline into him to get his pressure back up before they could get any real answers out of him.

“Jesus Christ, I saw him change!”

Naylor started back towards the stairwell feeling naked without the comforting weight of his MP5 in his hands.

“Contact!” Lowe shouted and fired a short burst down the corridor.

“Just keep it off our backs. We’re outta here,” Naylor replied, grunting with the effort of carrying Miller.

Suddenly Lowe was firing. The room lit up green from the light of the muzzle flash on full auto. Naylor saw movement: he caught a glimpse of something tall filling the doorway, walking on two legs like a man but the head and thick, powerful neck were anything but human. A second later something hit him from behind. It felt like he’d been hit by a truck. He fell into one of the shattered cabinets, felt an immense weight crushing the wind from him and grinding his face into the glass shards. He could feel its claws ripping, snagging in the tough webbing and pulling him left and right with immense, animal strength. Then suddenly the weight was gone and Miller’s screams were echoing down the hallway.

Naylor rose shakily to his feet. Miller was gone.

“It just took him,” Lowe said. “I emptied a full clip at it and it didn’t even slow.”

“Which way did it go?”

He didn’t need an answer. The creature’s deep, rattling roar rang out from somewhere behind them, chilling Naylor to the marrow.

He raised his weapon and stood back to back with Lowe. Let’s see you sneak up on us this time.

“We’re leaving,” Naylor said. “Stay together, keep it tight, all the way back to the boat and we’re gone.”

“Copy that.”

The roar sounded again, closer now.

“It’s picking us off, one by one,” Lowe said.

“So stay together. Don’t give it that chance.”

They stumbled through the debris-strewn room towards the stairwell. Naylor nearly tripped a couple of times but didn’t dare take his eyes from the holographic sight of his rifle and the arc he was scanning back down the hall.

He saw movement, a subtle shifting of the shadows. Whatever this thing was, it had a jaguar’s stealth. The shadows embraced it, pooling around it like a liquid cloak. He saw the gleam of yellow eyes and loosed a few rounds at it, drawing out another roar, a deep animal noise that plucked a bass note in his guts. Suddenly he became very aware of his place on the food chain and knew that it was not the top.

The old dance, predator and prey, but this time they were on the wrong side.

“We need to go faster,” Naylor said.

The creature rose onto its hind legs. This was no jaguar; this was like no animal Naylor had ever seen before. It had the head of a big cat complete with yellow eyes and snarling lips pulled back to reveal long, interlocking fangs. But the head and powerful, sinuous neck rested atop human shoulders and long, muscular arms. Naylor could see the muscles on the thing’s chest. It was built like a power lifter, but under the sleek, black fur the musculature was human. Only below the hips did the cat-like form reassert itself with long, seemingly double-jointed legs ending in huge paws.

It roared, jaws opening impossibly wide, fangs glistening.

Naylor fired; he flicked his MP5 onto full auto and mashed the trigger. The creature hardly seemed to notice. Lowe turned around and opened up; Naylor could see the creatures flesh rippling where the rounds struck it, but they were as ineffective as a handful of thrown pebbles.

It kept coming.

Naylor’s gun ran dry; he quickly popped the magazine and slammed a new one home, knowing as he did so that it would do no good. Eleven men had tried to kill this thing and eleven men had failed.

The creature swiped at them with one clawed arm. Naylor heard Lowe scream, felt blood splash hot against his skin and then the creature’s follow through picked him up and hurled him into a broken display cabinet. Splinters of wood and glass stabbed into him and his desperate, outstretched fingers stubbed painfully into something heavy lying in the shards.

The creature stepped over the moaning form of Lowe as he writhed on the floor and reared up before Naylor. He could smell it now: a warm, animal smell, like the steam off the jungle floor after rain. He could see the rosettes of its mottled fur, black against the deep purple of its pelt. He saw its yellow eyes on him and its paw raised, claws extended for the killing blow.

“Get down!”

It was McDowell. He was standing at the base of the stairs, cradling the big MG4. The muzzle flash stabbed out into the darkness and tracer rounds hammered into the creature. It screeched in rage and covered its face with one huge arm. Naylor could smell burning hair where the hot tracer rounds hit it, but just like the nine-millimetre slugs from the MP5, McDowell’s barrage didn’t seem to be penetrating at all.

Naylor had to get out from under the thing. He clutched the weight under his hand, not caring what it was, and swung upwards. Gold glittered and the thing in his hand carved a bright arc upwards through the green-tinged darkness and bit into the creature.

It screamed with rage and clutched at the bloody stump where its right arm had been. It looked at Naylor with an expression of pure hatred and then it was gone.

“What the fuck was that thing?” McDowell asked.

“That was Ramirez,” Naylor replied. Crazy as that sounded, he was certain it was true. Naylor had seen some weird shit in his time. He knew the world wasn’t quite the way most people thought it was, but the differences could only be seen around the edges, in extreme situations in off-the-grid locales. The kind of places he found himself in more often than he liked.

Miller had not been delirious; Ramirez had changed. Somehow after his guards had been defeated the cartel boss had become that creature. He had killed the rest of the squad and now he was after them.

McDowell helped Lowe to his feet. His uniform was shredded from hip to shoulder, the ragged torn edges were soaked in blood. The creature’s claws had bit deep into the muscle of his chest and stomach, but he was still alive.

“Good job,” Lowe said nodding towards the thing Naylor still clutched, white-knuckled in his hand. It was a knife, a golden knife. Blood flecked the ornate curved blade, as rich and as red and the rubies that studded its hilt.

“Looks like you hurt it,” McDowell said. He was right; the creature’s severed arm lay where it had fallen among the splintered remains of the display cabinet. Only it wasn’t really the creature’s arm. Naylor looked at it closely: the fur was patchy and dry, flaky leather showed though the many bald patches. It was smaller, too; a dry, desiccated thing, quite unlike the powerful, vital creature that had nearly killed him.

Naylor picked it up. The skin came away in a roll and a human arm fell out onto the floor, leaving him holding the paw and tanned hide of a jaguar’s forelimb. The skin tingled in his hand. Naylor could feel the power in it just waiting to be set free again.

“What the fuck!”

Naylor quickly searched the shattered display cabinet. So far the golden knife had been the only weapon able to injure the creature. Maybe there were more. He found nothing but torn velvet cushions and broken glass.

He searched the floor until he found what he was looking for: a laminated card about eight inches by six, the label from the display case. It showed a picture of the knife and what looked like a full jaguar pelt, complete with fanged skull and paws.

“It’s an Olmec artefact,” he said, reading from the card. “Olmec shamans worshipped the jaguar and wore its skin during their religious rituals. It was said that some shamans could use the pelts to become skinwalkers, manifestations of the Olmec jaguar god.”

“Are you saying we’re fighting a god?”

“You saw that thing. Bullets just bounced off it. So far the only thing able to hurt it has been a three-thousand-year-old ritual skinning knife. That thing is Ramirez!”

“God or not, we’ve hurt it. We need to get the fuck out of here before it comes back.”

Naylor flexed his fist around the golden knife. He thought of all the good men lying dead on the villa’s upper floors. He thought of all the evil Ramirez and his network of drug dealers had done. Yes, he had hurt it and it had felt good. He wanted to hurt it again. He wanted to go back and report mission accomplished. He wanted Ramirez’s head on a plate. The jaguar pelt tingled in his hand. Maybe now they had the chance to do it.

They hurried out of the museum. There was no sign of the creature, but that didn’t mean it had given up. The jaguar was a stealth predator. It hunted in silence, pouncing on its prey.

The night seemed lighter now. Naylor flipped up the night vision goggles and found he could see pretty well without them. They were getting close to the exit: he could smell the scent of the jungle wafting in through the shattered front door. It smelled like… like everything. He could smell the moisture in the air and tell you how long it had been since the rains. He could tell the season from the type of pollen on the breeze, he could smell the myriad creatures of the jungle night. If he listened closely, he thought he could hear them, hear their nocturnal burrowings and scurryings. He could almost taste them. The old dance again, but this time he was the hunter.

They made it outside. Naylor could see the path to the boathouse as clear as day. He could smell the sweat on his companions and hear the pulse of their beating hearts as McDowell helped the injured Lowe towards the boat.

And he could hear something else.

Something was stalking them. Ramirez had got out. He was here.

Naylor pulled the pin on an incendiary grenade and tossed it into the house. It exploded inside the building. Soon it would be engulfed in flame. Ramirez’s millions in stashed cash, his priceless artefacts, Garcia and the bodies of Naylor’s fallen squad mates would soon all be nothing but ash. The only trophies were the golden knife Naylor still clutched in his left hand and—

“Contact!” McDowell shouted.

Naylor saw it; saw the bulk of the skinwalker silhouetted against the sky as it slunk along the roof of the covered boathouse walkway.

“He’s mine!” Naylor shouted and the words came out funny: deeper, with a rattle along the edge that was just short of a growl.

He flung off his helmet and MP5, tossing them into the burning house along with the rest of his grenades. He sprinted towards Ramirez, covering the ground with easy speed. He was aware of everything: the sounds of the night, the route to the boat and how long it would take his friends to get there. He felt like he could close his eyes and find Ramirez by scent alone. He had never felt so alive.

The Ramirez creature dropped in front of him but Naylor was ready for it. He swung the golden dagger up towards the creature’s throat. His hand thudded into Ramirez’s leathery paw as the creature blocked the knife with contemptuous ease. Its claws extended, slicing into Naylor’s captured hand like five switchblades.

Naylor roared — a brutal animal roar of pain and rage ripped out from between his fangs and only then did the Ramirez creature notice the change.

Naylor swiped upward with his right hand, the hand bound in the fragment of the skinwalker pelt. Only it wasn’t his hand now; it was a sleek, black javelin of sinew and claws. The one-armed Ramirez had no defence. Naylor’s claws raked up his chest and tore out his throat.

Naylor tasted blood as the last beats of his prey’s heart sprayed its lifeblood over him as it fell.

He lifted his head to the night sky and roared.

The motor launch chugged away down the river. Behind them, the compound blazed in a red and gold mirror of the sunrise that was just beginning to creep over the hills behind the house.

Naylor closed his left eye, the human one, and marvelled at the rich colours.

He looked over at Lowe who lay against the gunwale, swathed in bandages from the boat’s first aid kit. “You look like hell,” Naylor said.

Lowe looked back at him. “You can talk,” he said.

Naylor smiled, feeling the unfamiliar length of the incisors on the right side of his mouth. He looked down at his paw: the black jaguar fur reached halfway up his bicep before giving way to human skin. But the changes didn’t stop there. His right eye was bright yellow with a slitted pupil, his right ear was pointed and wouldn’t keep still. It kept moving, searching out sounds on the riverbank.

“That was some mission,” McDowell called back from the wheelhouse.

“Yep,” Naylor replied. He hefted the rest of the skinwalker pelt he had taken from Ramirez’s body. “But I reckon they’re going to get a lot easier from now on.”