Predator: Stalking Shadows E-Book

James A. Moore

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

An action-packed prequel to the new IllFonic video game PREDATOR: HUNTING GROUNDS – revealing deeply buried secrets in the battle between the ultimate hunters and their human prey.This official prequel novel leads into the new PlayStation®4 video game from IllFonic. PREDATOR: STALKING SHADOWS is the bridge between Predator 2 and the current day continuity. U.S. Marine Scott Devlin takes on a new assignment that begins with the clean-up of a Los Angeles combat scene revealing what appears to be alien weapons and tech. His next mission, to an equatorial jungle, seems like an assault on a drug cartel until his team finds human bodies, skinned and suspended from the trees. Justifiably freaked out, Devlin digs deeper and discovers hidden truths, clandestine agencies, savage opponents… and an unexpected ally.Predator TM & © 2019 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

The Complete Predator™ Library from Titan Books

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue: Los Angeles 1997

Chapter One: 1997

Chapter Two: 1998

Chapter Three: 2000

Chapter Four: 2000

Chapter Five: 2002

Chapter Six: 2004

Chapter Seven: 2005

Chapter Eight: 2006

Chapter Nine: 2007

Chapter Ten: 2011

Chapter Eleven: 2013

Chapter Twelve: 2013

Epilogue: Ten Years Later

Acknowledgements

About the Authors

THE COMPLETE PREDATORTM LIBRARYFROM TITAN BOOKS

THE PREDATOR: HUNTERS AND HUNTED

by James A. Moore

THE PREDATOR: THE OFFICIAL MOVIE NOVELIZATION

by Christopher Golden and Mark Morris

THE ART AND MAKING OF THE PREDATOR

by Dominic Nolan

THE COMPLETE PREDATOR OMNIBUS

by Nathan Archer and Sandy Schofield

THE COMPLETE ALIENS VS. PREDATOR OMNIBUS

by David Bischoff, S. D. Perry, and Steve Perry

PREDATOR: IF IT BLEEDS

edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

THE RAGE WAR

by Tim Lebbon

PredatorTM: Incursion

Alien: Invasion

Alien vs. PredatorTM: Armageddon

THE OFFICIAL PREQUELTO THE ACTION VIDEO GAME FROM ILLFONIC

AN ORIGINAL NOVEL BYJAMES A. MOORE AND MARK MORRIS

TITAN BOOKS

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PREDATOR: STALKING SHADOWS

Print edition ISBN: 9781789094411

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789094428

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London

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www.titanbooks.com

First edition: May 2020

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

TM & © 2020 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.All rights reserved.

Cover art created by IllFonic LLC.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

James A. MooreThis one is for Mark Morris and Cliff Biggers. They both know why.

Mark MorrisFor Chris Golden and Tim Lebbon. A right pair of monsters.

PROLOGUE

LOS ANGELES 1997

The mission was a failure. Most of the OWLF team sent in to capture the creature that was stalking and killing members of LA’s heavily armed drug gangs were dead, including their leader Peter Keyes. The last that Garber, Keyes’ second in command, had seen of the City Hunter, it was being pursued not by the CIA’s highly trained task force, but by a middle-aged street cop.

Garber knew he would be in deep shit for what had transpired here today, having assumed responsibility for the mission after his boss’s death. He refused to believe any of it was his fault, refused to believe the consensus among his superiors that he had no real aptitude for leadership. What he couldn’t deny was that under his (admittedly hastily assumed) jurisdiction, the entire operation had quickly descended into what could only be described as a clusterfuck.

In an effort to track down the City Hunter, Garber had requisitioned the OWLF helicopter that had brought them here. The chopper had landed on the rooftop of a government-owned building in the city, where Garber, after stepping out of the elevator and ascending the final staircase leading to the landing platform, found he wasn’t alone. A big guy in combat fatigues, his face blackened with camouflage paint and a cap pulled down low over his forehead, was swinging a large rucksack into the cockpit of the chopper and then climbing in after it as Garber was assailed by a swirl of hot summer air.

“Hey!” Garber shouted, and the big guy turned around. Garber rolled his eyes. Could this day really get any worse? “Oh,” he said, recognizing the face beneath the camouflage paint, “it’s you.”

Major Alan “Dutch” Schaefer, US Special Operations Forces veteran, was a man with a checkered past and an even more checkered present. The only member of an elite mercenary rescue team to survive what was thought to be the first official encounter with an alien hunter, reports of him (or at least someone matching his description and military prowess) had been cropping up with increasing regularity in recent years, often associated with PMC groups, and in the midst of some of the most dangerous firefights in the world. The last time he had come into direct contact with OWLF had been in a pissant little village in the butthole of South America during a bug hunt which had turned up precisely nada. Dutch and Keyes had not exactly been buddies, and at first the atmosphere had been fraught, but the night had passed amiably enough, the two men drinking together, swapping war stories, and subtly trying to probe one another for information.

“If only that guy would fully come over to our side,” Keyes had said afterward. “Doesn’t he realize we share a common fucking enemy?”

Garber knew what Dutch’s problem was – they all did. He didn’t trust Keyes after the way he’d handled the aftermath of the Val Verde incident. In what had become the first officially recorded encounter with an alien hunter, Dutch had lost his team, been poisoned by radiation, and afterward had been treated like a criminal by the CIA.

Keyes’ only answer, when Garber had pointed all this out to him, had been, “Hasn’t he heard of fucking bygones? Jeez!”

But Garber suspected Dutch Schaefer was not the sort of man to forgive and forget.

Right now Schaefer, who did not look even remotely fazed to have been caught attempting to make off with a piece of ridiculously expensive CIA-owned hardware, was scowling at him. “Can you fly this thing?” he asked.

“Probably better than you can,” Garber responded.

“Then get in,” Dutch ordered, and swung himself into the passenger side of the cockpit.

Garber strode forward. “Now just hold on a minute. I ought to fucking arrest—” But Dutch cut him off.

“We don’t have time to discuss this right now. Either get in or stay there, I don’t care.”

Garber considered calling for backup, but knew Dutch would be well away before he even got a chance to explain the situation. So he got in on the pilot’s side, and thirty seconds later they were airborne. A minute after that they were circling the area where the alien hunter had last been seen – parts of which now resembled a war zone, with fires burning here and there – when the ground below them heaved, and a vast subterranean behemoth rose screaming from the bowels of the city and swatted the helicopter as though it was nothing more than a troublesome dragonfly.

As the chopper was thrown into a violent spin and Garber fought to regain control, he caught glimpses of the mayhem below, and realized what was really happening. An alien ship was launching itself out of the sewers, tearing the ground apart and causing a massive updraft of air, which had caught the helicopter in a vortex of dust and debris.

Dutch gripped the closest available anchors and clenched his jaw as Garber attempted to ride out the wave. His experiences in Vietnam and elsewhere had made him highly resistant to pain and almost impervious to the debilitating effects of fear, but he cursed as he watched the alien ship tear out of the Earth’s atmosphere at an incredible speed and disappear into the night sky.

He was dedicated to hunting down and killing as many of these goddamn Predators as he could, and salvaging what he could of their weapons and technology, and he wondered how many more chances he’d get. After his first encounter with one of the hunters a decade earlier he’d undergone intense physical therapy, and he still took plenty of medication to ward off the effects of radiation and keep him fully functional. If he ever screwed up on those meds, it would be goodnight Vienna. And after surviving God knows how many brushes with violent death over the years, radiation sickness would be a really dumb way to die.

As the air settled in the wake of the alien ship’s ascent and Garber wrestled back control of the helicopter, Dutch looked down through the transparent bubble of the cockpit and was amazed to see a figure squirming on the ground below. It was lying on the very edge of the crater caused by the emergence of the alien hunter’s craft, and even as he watched he saw it sit up and tilt back its head to stare into the night sky.

“Holy shit, that’s Harrigan!” Garber exclaimed. “How the hell did he survive?”

He sounded affronted. Dutch only cared that he’d gotten here too late and his mission had been reduced to little more than a salvage operation – and with cops and regular army grunts about to descend on the scene like ants onto a picnic, even that was in jeopardy.

Picking up the headphones that had been ripped from his head during their impromptu roller-coaster ride, he barked into the mouthpiece, “Set it down, Garber. This is where I get off.”

Garber glanced across at him. “What? I don’t know if you should—”

“You’re not my boss. And if whatever got left behind falls into the wrong hands, you’ll be in even deeper shit than you are already. Now put us down.”

Garber wanted to argue. But everything had gone wrong. Harrigan had slowed them down, and if any of the OWLF team got out of this alive, aside from Garber himself, it would be a miracle. He didn’t want Dutch to get hold of whatever alien tech might have been left down there, but in some ways he was the best available option – and with a cordon around the area there was no way he’d be able to sneak through their lines, which meant they could always pick him up later.

Garber landed the chopper as close as he could to Ground Zero, intending to gather together any surviving members of OWLF he could find and head off in search of Harrigan. Cutting off the engine, he turned to Dutch, only to find that the ex-mercenary had already thrown open the door of the chopper and jumped to the ground.

“Hey, don’t I even get a thank you?” Garber called as Dutch set off at a run. Moments later the big man had melted into the shadows.

“Guess not,” Garber murmured, stepping down from the chopper as the approaching whirr of army helicopters and the wail of police sirens increased in volume. Walking briskly toward the crater he was comforted by the thought that, clusterfuck or not, tearing Detective Harrigan a new asshole would give him at least a modicum of job satisfaction before the ax fell.

CHAPTER ONE

1997

Scott Devlin had taken a leap into the dark. He had agreed to accept the out-of-the-blue offer to join a new team despite knowing virtually nothing about it. All he had been told was that he would no longer be part of the US Marine Corps, but would instead be doing “covert work” with a branch of the army that his new commanding officer had described as being “off the books.” Such uncertainty may not have appealed to most of the guys Scott had trained with, but he had always been a fan of mysteries, and was thrilled by the prospect of becoming part of one.

He had hoped he might find out more once he was officially installed in his new role, but despite keeping his eyes and ears open, he had nothing much to go on. His uniform bore no insignia but his rank and name, which clearly indicated this was no regular army unit (though that much he already knew), and the black body armor he had been ordered to wear over his uniform on this, their first mission, was an obvious indicator that he and his new colleagues were about to be propelled into a potentially hostile environment. His weapons looked to be standard issue (aside from the Taser, of course, which definitely wasn’t), but the ammunition that went with it was specifically designed to blast holes big enough to toss a basketball through. The helmet he had been given was snug – lightweight but strong, state of the art – and its tiny side camera was state of the art too, barely visible but capable of recording excellent video footage regardless of the light quality or the atmospheric conditions.

Glancing around, Scott wondered whether he looked as hard and mean to the rest of the guys as the majority of them looked to him. Presumably, like him, they had excelled within whichever units they had been recruited from. There hadn’t been much talking on the chopper, but that was understandable. They’d only just been thrown together, and hadn’t had a chance to become friends yet. But that would change. The more they went through together, the closer they would become. It was inevitable.

The Chinook suddenly dropped hard and then pulled up to land softly. It was like an unexpected plunge on a roller coaster, and even though Scott felt as if his stomach had dropped into his shoes before bouncing back up into the base of his throat, he did what all the other guys did and simply grunted and shifted slightly in his seat, unwilling to show weakness. His stomach was still settling when the engine cut out, the rotors slowed, and the order came to disembark. Scott rose from his seat and followed the rest of the guys outside, taking in his surroundings as he stepped onto the ground below.

They had landed on what appeared to be a school football field in a heavily built-up urban area. Multiple police sirens were blaring in the neighborhood, and not too far away someone was giving orders through a loudhailer, but the voice was too distorted to make out any words.

“Welcome to downtown LA, gentlemen,” Captain Parker said, his voice deep and steady. “A serious incident occurred here tonight, involving an unspecified number of as yet unidentified explosive devices and other assorted weaponry, resulting in multiple casualties. Although the perpetrators are no longer believed to be in the area, and a program of evacuation is underway, there still remains the possibility that you may encounter hostile forces, and as such I urge you to remain on high alert at all times. There is a high concentration of police, military and medical emergency personnel in the area, and our mission here tonight is one of retrieval and containment. We are not here to ask questions, but simply to follow orders and employ ourselves as usefully and efficiently as possible. Do your jobs, gentlemen. Do not disappoint me.”

It was a good speech, but as the team followed Parker across the playing field and headed toward the center of activity, where the glow of several fires could be seen above the buildings that currently hid the worst of the devastation from view, that part about not asking questions stuck in Scott’s craw. He loved asking questions. He had been born with a natural and insatiable curiosity, and from ever since he had been able to walk and talk he had wanted to know the what, when, who, how and why of everything.

That had been because his mom, who never had the advantage of a good education, but who had read books to him from when he was in his crib up until he got old enough to read them for himself, had instilled in him the need to become as good a version of himself as he could possibly be.

“Information is power, Scotty,” she would say to him. “With knowledge and knowhow you can be anything you want.” Another of her favorites was: “Always ask questions. Find out as much as you can.”

His mom, who had come from a tough, working-class background where girls were expected to do little more than get married, have children, cook and clean, had spent her life berating herself for being “dumb,” for being “nothing but a waitress,” but Scott still regarded her as the smartest person he had ever known. And not just street-smart, but smart-smart. Trouble was, she never recognized it in herself. Maybe if she had lived longer she might have realized her full potential, but she had died at thirty-six years old. Damn bowel cancer, that had come on so suddenly, and showed itself so late, there wasn’t anything any doctor, with all their accumulated medical knowledge, could do about it.

So at the age of fourteen Scott had been palmed off onto his Uncle Tommy, his mom’s younger brother, and had started a whole new phase of his life. Tommy was a hopeless drunk, who pissed away most of his money on booze, and if it hadn’t been for Scott’s determination to honor his mom by fulfilling her hopes for him, the careering, out-of-control train wreck that was his uncle’s life might well have dragged him off the rails too.

Scott had turned the negative of living with his uncle into a plus. Oh, it had been the most miserable of fucking nightmares at times – he and his uncle had fought, sometimes viciously; Scott had struggled constantly to keep himself clothed and clean and fed, never mind educated – but on the other hand, Tommy’s failings forced Scott to become mentally and physically tough, resourceful, independent, determined. As well as loving books (the school and public libraries became his twin refuges during his teenage years), he had also been good at sport, which meant that, despite the hand-me-downs and thrift-store clothes he often wore, he had respect on both sides of the school divide. Everything he pursued, he pursued with single-minded purpose and dedication. Everything he did, he did to honor his mom – to become the best version of himself he could possibly be.

Right now, Scott’s eyes were everywhere, absorbing as many details as possible, as he and his new team, led by Captain Parker and Sergeant Wilson, entered the main area of devastation. What the hell had happened here? A terrorist attack? A major war between gangs armed with bazookas and grenades? Whatever it was, it had resulted in a lot of damage to vehicles and property, not to mention the human toll. As they moved through the streets, Scott saw cops and ambulances everywhere, overturned cars, buildings reduced to rubble, fire crews putting out fires both big and small. Helicopters whirred overhead – whether police or army, it was too dark to tell – and the evacuation, which Captain Parker had mentioned, was still underway, rubbernecking, protesting bystanders being herded into whatever vehicles were available and shipped out of the area.

For a while Scott’s team helped with that, the protesting locals cowed not by the weapons that he and his new buddies were brandishing, but by the presence of Sergeant Wilson – known simply as Sarge to the men – who was three hundred pounds of walking mountain, with forearms bigger than most men’s thighs and a neck as thick as the average human male’s waistline. A tough but fair-minded guy, he could be a seriously scary motherfucker when he wanted to be, and right now he was laying it on so thick that even the LA cops wanted exactly jack and shit to do with him.

With the evacuation complete – or as complete as it could be in a neighborhood of this size and complexity – Scott’s team were distributed more widely throughout the area to aid in the continuing mission of containment and retrieval. Scott was assigned, with three other guys, to stand guard over a crater so big it looked as though it might have been caused by the impact of a burning meteorite the size of a house. The area around the crater was bristling with activity, guys in hazmat suits sifting through the rubble, and using rappelling ropes to descend into, and ascend out of, the crater, many of them carrying metal secure boxes with “hazardous material” symbols emblazoned on the side.

“Holy shit, Sarge! What happened here?” Scott asked, the spectacle chasing Captain Parker’s earlier order not to ask questions clean out of his head.

Sarge scowled at him. “The answer to that question is way beyond your clearance parameters, Private.”

Scott’s instinct was to test Sarge by offering his own theories, but a look at his superior’s face was enough to convince him this was not a good idea. Instead he nodded and apologized, and listened as Sarge told the four of them that their task was to keep the area locked down and to warn off any potential intruders who might try to impede the work going on here.

“What kind of work is it?” Scott wanted to ask. “Who are these guys in the suits?”

But he kept his mouth shut. It was only when Sarge had gone that one of the other guys, Suarez, sidled over to him and voiced a thought that was in Scott’s own mind: “So those suits and all that ‘hazardous material’ shit? You think what’s in that hole is radioactive, or full of chemicals, or germs, or whatever?”

“Let’s hope not,” Scott replied. “I’m only twenty-seven, I’m too young to die.”

Suarez snorted a laugh and moved away. But Scott immediately found himself reflecting on what he’d said, and was sobered by it. Twenty-seven. Jeez. His mom had been three-quarters of the way through her life when she was his age. And he’d been eighteen when his Uncle Tommy had called his bluff and dropped him off at the Marines Recruitment Center, which meant he’d now been in the military for exactly one-third of his life.

What a day that had been, the day he’d signed up. Weird to think, looking back, that it had happened by accident. It had only come about because he and Tommy had had yet another blazing row, which had culminated in Scott yelling, “I’d even join the fucking army to get away from you!”

Immediately his uncle had retorted, “Well, why don’t you? There’s a Marine Recruitment Center less than three miles from here. I’ll drive you there right now!”

“Fine!” Scott had yelled. “Let’s do it!”

And that had been that. Scott had woken up that morning thinking of college, and girls, and whatever else eighteen-year-old guys thought about, and less than six hours later he had enlisted in the US Marines. True, it had got him away from his hot turd of an uncle – so much so that once his basic training began, he had never seen the old bastard again. Indeed, to this day he had no clue if the drunken fucker was even still alive.

Almost a decade ago. Hard to believe. These past nine years had been the scariest, toughest, most exhilarating of his life. Scott sometimes wondered what his mom would think if she could see him now. Would she be shocked, disappointed, proud? Would she think he had become the best version of himself he could possibly be? After his initial doubts – in fact, after an initial period of: Holy shit, what the hell have I done? – he had taken to his new career as though he’d been born for it. Mentally and physically, he found he had just the right stuff to excel in the military. The only real problem was his curiosity, his propensity to question everything. A soldier’s main job, after all, was to do the opposite, to follow orders without question. But Scott had never been able to forget his mom’s words – Question everything – and that had caused him problems at times. Not major ones, but maybe just enough to hold him back a little, despite his obvious prowess.

Although he and his colleagues had been tasked with keeping undesirables away from the crater, which meant facing out into the rubble-strewn streets and ignoring, for the most part, what was happening behind them, Scott was unable to resist taking sneaky peeks over his shoulder whenever he got the chance.

One thing that intrigued him was the shape and consistency of the crater. He’d assumed something had fallen from above with enough of an impact to smash its way deep into the ground, but on closer inspection he realized that the edges of the crater were angled upwards, like the lip of a volcano, which suggested that something had burst up from underneath rather than the other way round. Additionally, the inside walls of the crater, which he glimpsed now and then, illuminated as they were by the headlamps of the guys clambering in and out, were smooth and shiny like glass, as though whatever had emerged had been hot enough to melt rock.

He saw body bags, some of which clearly contained only partial corpses, carried out of the crater and stacked in the back of an army ambulance that was idling at the edge of the area. He wondered how many were dead down there, and what it was that had killed them.

He was still pondering the variables when a skinny guy in his early twenties turned up and tried to march right past him, as though he had business here. Wearing a baggy T-shirt, filthy jeans, and sneakers that appeared to be held together by nothing other than willpower, the guy looked as though he hadn’t eaten a decent meal or taken a bath in weeks. Ugly track marks on the insides of his scrawny elbows and forearms made it clear that any money he had went straight into his veins. Scott stepped in front of him, blocking his way, rifle held across his chest like a makeshift barrier.

“Not allowed here, sir. Please head back the way you came.” He was precisely as civil as Sarge had told them to be. Sarge had also told them to issue no more than a single warning before getting tough.

The guy looked him over and moved to step past him. “I live here,” he said.

Scott again blocked his way, this time raising the rifle and using it to push the man back with enough force to stagger him.

“If you did, then you don’t now. As you can see, there’s nothing left here but a hole in the ground. Now move on. You are not allowed here.” All politeness was gone from his voice now. Most times that extra firmness took care of the problem. Most times there’d be raised hands, a mumbled apology or a half-hearted whine of protest, rapidly followed by a shuffling retreat.

Most times, but not always.

The guy screwed up his face like a fist and tried to push back. He reached out, grabbed Scott’s rifle and pulled, hoping to yank the weapon out of his hands. Scott immediately locked his muscles and the man grunted, surprised to find his opponent as immobile as a statue.

With the man caught off-guard, Scott abruptly stepped forward, hooked his boot around the back of the guy’s ankle, and yanked him off his feet. The guy went down like a loose bag of bones, landing on his ass.

“Fuck you!” the guy squawked up at him. “I got rights!”

He tried to jump up, still spoiling for a fight. “I wouldn’t advise that,” Scott murmured, and shouldering his rifle he knelt, flipped the guy over, dropped one knee into the small of his back, and had his restraints on the guy’s wrists in less than five seconds. Before the guy knew what was happening his ankles too were bound together by a thick zip-tie.

Stepping away from his squawking, wriggling victim, Scott spoke calmly into the radio mic attached to his helmet. “Sarge?”

“What is it, Devlin?”

“Got an evacuee here who wouldn’t play ball. You got anyone who can do me a cleanup?”

“I’ll get someone to swing by presently.”

“Thanks, Sarge.”

Once the guy had been collected and hauled away, things settled down again. Scott saw more body bags and more secure boxes containing God knows what lifted from the crater. Gradually, work in and around the area slowed, and people and vehicles began to drift away. Eventually only he and his three colleagues were left, guarding a hole in the ground.

With no one to stop him, Scott moved closer to the hole, stepped right up to the edge and peered down into the darkness below. What had been down there that had attracted so much interest? His guess was that it had been technology or weaponry of some sort, highly advanced, and no doubt shrouded in secrecy. But whose technology? Had this been a US Army test gone wrong or an attack by a foreign power?

He was about to raise the matter with his colleagues, both of whom were gazing blankly ahead, embroiled in their own thoughts, when a military jeep whipped around the corner and screeched to a halt. Scott wondered whether they were about to be relieved of duty, but the two guys who got out of the front of the jeep were not soldiers but government types in black suits.

One of the guys was white and skinny, the other black and stocky. Both had bulletproof vests on over their shirts and ties, and both looked grimy and sweaty from the heat and smoke.

A couple of seconds after the two men had got out, the back door on the driver’s side of the jeep opened and another man stepped out. He was tall, at least 6’3, but unlike the stone-faced government types, he looked as if he was wrestling with some pretty complex emotions. With his mussed-up blond hair and pale-rimmed spectacles, behind which his eyes looked red and bloodshot, as if he’d been crying, he had the look of a high school science teacher. And indeed, beneath his heavy-duty camouflage jacket, Scott caught a glimpse of a white lab coat.

The tall man huffed out a breath, as if gathering himself together, and opened his mouth as if to say something. But before he could speak, the stocky agent pointed at Scott and snapped, “You! Come with us!”

Scott looked over at Suarez, who shrugged.

Scott said, “With all due respect, sir, my orders are to remain on guard here. I would need to consult—”

“You don’t need to consult no one, soldier,” the skinny agent said, flashing a pass, on which Scott saw the letters CIA. “We’re in charge of this shit show. And these are very special circumstances.”

Scott took a breath. “That’s as may be, sir. But I can only accept direct orders from my superior officer. If you will just allow me to contact him—”

The stocky agent scowled. “We don’t have time for this shit.” Then he took a step forward, as if he intended to grab Scott and drag him in his wake like a misbehaving child.

But before things could turn ugly, the tall man scuttled forward and placed a hand on the stocky agent’s shoulder, effectively stopping him in his tracks. Approaching Scott with a wavering smile, he said, “Forgive my colleague’s brusqueness, Private…”

“Devlin, sir.”

“…Devlin. Thing is, this is a matter of some urgency. I’m Special Agent Sean Keyes, Regional Director of the OWLF task force.” As he spoke, enunciating each individual letter of the acronym, he opened a plastic wallet which he had taken from his jacket and showed Scott a pass. Scott stared at it, though he had no idea what the letters OWLF stood for. “We’re in need of someone with your… ah… firepower. We have a situation just two blocks from here.”

“Understood, sir. But I can’t just leave my post without permission. I do need to speak to my sergeant. It’ll only take a moment.”

As Sean Keyes nodded his understanding, the skinny agent growled, “Just get on with it.”

Scott made the call and two minutes later he was sitting in the back of the jeep next to Special Agent Keyes, who was staring into space, clearly troubled by something. The two agents in the front were also agitated, though theirs was a nervous energy, whereas Keyes seemed to have had some kind of upset. Scott watched sweat trickle down the side of the stocky man’s shaved head as he drove.

As the jeep came to a halt on a nondescript street comprised mostly of dark and shuttered businesses – including several bars and restaurants, which would ordinarily have been bustling – and the two agents at the front got out, Scott turned to Keyes and said, “Can I ask what the situation is here, sir?”

Keyes snapped out of his introspection and regarded him, eyes blinking rapidly. He paused just long enough for Scott to wonder whether he was going to answer at all, and then he said quietly, “Get out of the jeep, Private Devlin. I want to show you something.”

Scott complied. Keyes raised an arm and flipped his hand forward, a long forefinger pointing toward a black vertical crack between two buildings across the street. It was an almost schoolboyish gesture to indicate that Scott should follow him, and despite the unease he was feeling about the situation, Scott found it oddly endearing. He trailed Keyes across the street, and was aware of the other two agents, who had been leaning against the side of the jeep, falling into step behind him. A few feet from the black throat of the alleyway, Keyes halted and nodded down at the pavement. In a hushed voice he said, “Take a little looksee.”

Scott had been so intent on the alleyway that it hadn’t occurred to him to examine the ground. He did now, though, and was surprised to see spots and spatters of a green, fluorescent substance on the road and sidewalk. He bent forward to examine them more closely, even sniffed the air above them, though he could only smell the acrid tang of smoke that hung in the atmosphere like morning mist.

“What is this stuff?” he asked. “Some kind of chemical?” He glanced up at Keyes and realized that both of the agents behind him had drawn their handguns and were eyeing the dark entrance of the alleyway with trepidation.

Keyes laughed, though it was a hard, bitter sound, without humor. Scott even had the feeling there might be pain behind it. “Some kind,” he said.

“Where is it from?” Scott asked. He was thinking furiously. Although the glowing stuff was like toxic slime from some cheap horror movie, the kind that invariably ended up leaking into a river and causing the local marine life to mutate into giant, man-eating monsters, what was more likely was that it was some kind of fuel or lubricant. Something that had leaked from a machine, maybe, or a weapon.

His curiosity was not satisfied by Keyes, though. Instead, the tall man merely muttered, “I’m afraid that information is classified.”

Scott considered how to respond. Keyes had told him he’d been requisitioned because of his firepower, which presumably meant he was required to take point following the trail into the alleyway. Wasn’t it reasonable, therefore, to expect a little more information about what he might be about to face? Because classified or not, this was his life at risk here. Sarge had told him to obey Keyes’ orders, but Scott knew that Sarge and Captain Parker would never place him in a potentially dangerous situation without first giving him as much information as they were permitted to divulge.

“Okay,” Scott said slowly, and indicated the alleyway with a jerk of his head. “I take it, though, that whatever leaked this fluid is down there?”

“We don’t know for certain, but it’s a possibility,” Keyes replied.

“And you want me to… what? Destroy it? Put it out of action?”

“If it is there,” Keyes said, and suddenly there was a feverish edge to his words and to his manner, “then yeah. We want you to destroy it.”

“But you still won’t give me any clue as to what I’ll be facing?”

Keyes sighed, but said nothing.

“But if it is there, I’ll find out anyway, won’t I?” said Scott.

He left the question hanging. He wanted to say more, but was unsure how far he could push this. He didn’t want to face a charge of insubordination, but at the same time he wasn’t prepared to lose his life just because a bunch of suits saw him as nothing but cannon fodder. He stared at Keyes, inviting him to take the initiative, to cut him some slack, but Keyes just stared back at him. Finally, Scott reached for the comms switch on his helmet.

“Sorry, sir, but I really need some guidance here. I’m going to call this in, speak to my sergeant.”

“The hell you are, soldier!”

The response came from the stocky agent behind him. Scott turned to see that the man’s eyes were bulging as the sweat streamed down his face, though whether that was from anger at Scott or stress caused by the general situation was impossible to tell.

The stocky man barked, “You already called your sergeant, and we all heard what he said. You’re to put yourself in our hands, follow our orders, for the duration of the time that we need you. This is a sensitive situation here, and we don’t need no jumped-up rookie asking questions. Now, unless you want to get yourself in deep shit, you do exactly what we tell you.”

Scott regarded the apoplectic man calmly. He was terrified, which suggested that whatever was waiting for them in the alleyway was highly dangerous. Which further suggested that it was both strategically and morally wrong of the suits to withhold information that might prove crucial to Scott’s survival.

But even that was not the full issue here. What was the issue was that he was being asked to destroy, or otherwise incapacitate, a target he knew nothing about. Given the circumstances, Scott was pretty sure – or at least he hoped – that if he did find himself on a charge, his superior officers would support the stance he was about to take.

Shaking his head, he said, “I think you’ll find, sir, that I’m not obligated to follow orders that I consider morally objectionable.”

The stocky man gaped at him. “Morally objectionable?”

“Yes, sir.”

Just behind the stocky agent, the skinny guy sniggered. “Trust us to get a smart one.”

The stocky agent was not amused, though. Taking a lurching step forward, he said, “Why, you little—”

He was interrupted by Keyes, who wearily held up a hand. “Do you object to engaging an enemy of the United States in conflict, Private Devlin?” the tall man asked quietly.

Scott shook his head. “Of course not, sir.”

“Good. Because that’s exactly the situation we’re facing here. I can’t give you full details, and I apologize for that, but what I can tell you is that there may be a… an individual in this alleyway who is not only highly adept in the art of combat, but who employs highly advanced weaponry – I’m talking highly advanced. You get me?”

Scott wasn’t sure that he did, though rumors were forever circulating in the military that the Russians were developing not only an army of genetically modified warriors, but also the weaponry to go with them. “You mean like a… a super soldier?” he ventured.