The Last Operation (The Remnants of War Series, Book 1) (3 page)

As the boat drifted closer, Bobby-Ray saw long, blue-gray ropes of intestine looped in the mouth of the largest reptile. Engaged in this harrowing feeding frenzy, the big gators ignored the airboat slowly drifting into their midst. Now he saw several smaller alligators on the outskirts of the action, waiting for morsels to drift out and for their larger relatives to be sated. Next to the biggest one, most of a human head, neck and part of one shoulder bobbed slowly in the roiling brown and pink water. Of course, they would go for the softer tissues first.

Bobby-Ray kicked open a side compartment with his foot. A slat came down, weighted with an assortment of a half dozen grenades held in plastic ties. Next to the explosives rested an Israeli-made Uzi. Everything he needed for the occasional work he did for Richard Daniels.

He picked a non-lethal flash-banger grenade. This type of weapon was normally used in hostage situations. The grenade emitted an intolerably loud explosion and blinding flash. It was meant to stun without killing.

With the notable exception of certain deserving humans, Bobby-Ray never killed anything he wasn't going to eat. As for the alligators, well, they just did what alligators do.

The flash-bang immediately ended the feeding frenzy. The big reptiles swam away with amazing speed. A ten-foot bruiser ran on the slight embankment and disappeared in the tall saw grass.

The temperature climbed rapidly. Drops of sweat beaded on Bobby-Ray's face and dripped off his nose. He reached into the murky water. Wisps of fast-dissipating tendrils of blood dripped away as he pulled the head by what was left of the hair. Great chunks of flesh had been torn from the face exposing skull bones and upper teeth. The lower jaw was gone. As he turned the revolting bloody remains, he saw the back of the head was intact. A half-dollar size entry wound clearly told him how the man had died.

Bobby-Ray felt a wave of sadness wash over him like a forlorn spirit. He'd seen plenty of violent death in four years of Special Forces covert operations. Much of it he had inflicted himself. But the end of this stranger, dumped as so much refuse to be devoured by reptiles, gripped him to the quick. He just hoped the poor bastard had been dead when White Hawk dropped him among the alligators.

Sometimes, the sudden and surprising depths of his emotions, rising like Leviathans out of the abyss of his psyche, amazed Bobby-Ray. Yet he understood their power and essential rightness in ways he would deny and could never try to explain.

Bobby-Ray thought briefly about bringing the remains back, but for what? How would he explain it? There were already some law enforcement agencies looking to question him about some incidents with Richard Daniels and that Mexican psycho associate of his, Carlos. No my friend, thought Bobby-Ray. I can't risk the problems just to bring a couple of pounds of your poor dead ass to some coroner so they can write down you're officially dead.

He noticed an amulet on a chain around what was left of the neck. Somehow it had clung to its owner's neck with a life of its own. He reached with his commando knife, cut the chain and placed the amulet in his pocket. He gently lowered the grisly remains back in the water. Maybe he could track this guy's family, if he had any, and let them know it was over.

It was then, just at that moment, thin minutes away from the sunrise, that Bobby-Ray felt it. It'd been there all along but he had been so occupied by the corpse that he had been unaware of it. He stood and looked around. His head moved slowly as his eyes darted in trained movements. He saw nothing unusual or out of sorts with the environment he knew so well.

Something lurked out there—alien and strange to the swamp. The feeling swarmed in the marrow of his bones, in the deepest pit of his gut and the pounding of his heart. He pulled the Uzi from its rack and armed it. The metallic click was loud, incongruous in the thick silence.

Suddenly Bobby-Ray knew that's what disturbed him: the sudden quiet. All the chirpings, splashing, croaking and countless noises of the swamp were gone. It was like a jungle when the big predator cats are hunting, waiting, anticipating, holding its collective breath. He remembered his Grandmother's words the old woman's world was populated by the spirits and legends of her tribe.

Like the shadow of a ghost, dancing on my grave.

A flaming corner of sun peered above the horizon with surprising swiftness. Darting rays blew a hot breath on Bobby-Ray's face as he looked around one last time. He shuddered as if an icy blast rolled over him and the spell broke. He put down the Uzi, shook his head and started the engine.

As the noise of his airboat engine faded away, small crabs emerged from the mud and began nibbling on the tattered remains of flesh. Clouds of buzzing insects began to form above the fresh carrion smell.

But the alligators would not return.

* * *

It was still there, in the blackness of the thick mangroves, shadow upon shadow. Moving shades of black pitch distinguishable only by the eyes of nocturnal creatures. It had moved to the edge of the tangle of roots dipping in the brackish water. Silent, fluid movements rendered the great armored bulk of its body like quicksilver in the night. A dagger-like horned claw, mute-ivory in the burgeoning light, lay camouflaged by the white Mandrake root it rested upon.

It had sensed the noise of the first airboat long before it became a throbbing roar that reverberated among the lush vegetation and still waters. It heard the sound of something dropped in the shallow water and its heightened perceptions sensed it was a human body. It was puzzled, but not concerned by this event. As the airboat left in waves of dissipating thunder, it knew that whoever had been dumped was no longer alive and would serve to bring out his prey.

Beneath the trunk-like bulk of its limb overhanging the black water, an alligator hole yawned open. The entrance was large and the alligator inhabiting it had to be a ten-footer, weighing over two hundred pounds.

The alligator's brain may have been primitive from a human sense, but it was superbly adapted to its environment. A few molecules of blood drifted in the dark water entering the alligator's snout where it was picked up by its sensory receptors. Stirrings of hunger awakened in its brain, galvanizing its movements. The beast swam out of the hole.

No caution restrained the alligator's movements. It's speed and power placed it at the top of the food chain. It was always the hunter, the killer and feeder.

Until now.

The big reptile swam out of the hole, unaware of the hulking presence in the mangroves overhanging its lair.

A sophisticated night camera would have been hard pressed to capture the dizzying speed of the huge limb as it arced into the water below. The great claw instantly penetrated the tough hide as if it was made of flimsy tissue. It impaled through the skull bone of the reptile, destroying its brain. Another great limb reached under the alligator and over two hundred pounds of flaying, dying reptile was hurled into the mangroves. It slashed repeatedly until most of the hide was cut away. Another claw, curved and sharp as an old time barber's razor, slashed the meat into long thick strips.

It finally stopped and began to feed on the butchered alligator. Suddenly it stopped. Something alerted it. Wide eyes overhung by great ridges of armored brows picked up whatever dim light was available, scanning, watching. Scaly, armored earflaps turned in the direction of another airboat rapidly approaching. It hunkered down among the dark roots and black mud, covering the remains of the alligator. Its scaly dark hide was excellent camouflage, impossible to see in the pre-dawn murk.

It watched as the new arrival drifted among the feeding alligators and set off the flash-bang. It saw the man reach in among the remains and pick something from a body part. Suddenly the man stood, alert. The metallic click of the Uzi being armed echoed through the swamp and it recognized the sound.

The man was aware. Somehow he had sensed its presence. It held its very breath, willing its huge bulk to become part of the landscape, the mud, black clay and mangrove roots. At last, the man started his airboat and accelerated out of the little watery clearing, leaving a misty plume behind.

That had been too close.

It did not want to be forced to kill humans again.

Chapter 3

Ten years earlier...

New York City

It was a time when Richard Daniels couldn't pass up a free meal. Things had not gone well in Zaire. He should have returned with three hundred thousand dollars in fees from the Republic of Zaire, payment assured by Mobutu, the Minister of Defense. Daniels' job had been to train a battalion from the best men Mobutu would cull from the Army of Zaire. He was to form an elite group of commandos along the lines of the US Special Forces.

It hadn't quite worked out that way. Mobutu and General Kanga had ideas that differed from what they had told Daniels. It didn't take him too long to figure out this elite force was to become the private army of Mobutu led by his bulldog henchman; General Kanga.

Personally, Daniels' didn't give a rat's ass what they wanted to do. His goal was to take the twenty-five grand a month for six months, the hundred and thirty bonus at the end, and split when it was over.

It didn't happen that way.

Daniels had run a number of Special Forces operations in South America, and as the nineties passed into the millennia, Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan. One of the things that had often saved his ass was to build a network of informers and allies. In Columbia and Peru, it had been Campesinos and Zapatistas. In Kuwait it was the underground opposition and later, in Iraq itself, he carried out covert special operations under the nose of Sadam Husseins' Republican Guards. There, his network had been the Kurdish opposition.

In Zaire, his ears were a handful of civilian employees and soldiers working out of a base sprawled a hundred Kilometers from Brazzaville, in the dense steaming jungle of Equatorial Africa that comprised half of Zaire. During his own little covert operation, Daniels had managed to bug General Kanga's telephone, his Jeep and his office.

By the third month, Daniels' battalion was coming along pretty nicely. Discipline was tight and the rigorous training he was putting them through was beginning to show results. Then Daniels' listening devices picked up the details of his "retirement plan" being arranged. He'd prepared accordingly.

It was three AM when Kanga and his elite squad surrounded the three room house Daniels occupied. "Elite," in this case, simply meant a bunch of murdering thugs.

Daniels' only regret had been that he couldn't film the event. He would have liked watching the scene when Kanga and his soldiers burst through the door, probably firing hundreds of rounds into his cot and the sleeping figure under the thin blankets. He could only imagine Kanga's face when they pulled the blankets back. Instead of Daniels' bullet riddled corpse, they would have found his artistic rendering of a happy face flipping them the middle finger.

Or perhaps not.

Maybe they would have been so scared of his reputation, they might have fired so many rounds they would have shredded his artwork. One thing Daniels knew for sure: The two Claymores had worked.

Nothing inside the house survived the hailstorm of thousands of steel pellets and jagged shrapnel exploding from the Claymore mines at the rate of twenty-thousand feet per second, much faster then the average bullet from a pistol.

Daniels' dear friend and architect of his retirement plan, General Kanga, had been in the room. The exploding Claymores activated a timer for Daniels' last statement. Ten seconds later four shaped Semtex charges exploded, shredding the little house and setting off a drum of jellied gasoline, Napalm. The explosion could be seen and heard for miles.

That really pissed off Mobutu. Not only did Daniels evade his goon squad, but now he would have to find replacements, including his number one henchman, General Kanga.

Not one had survived.

It took Daniels six weeks to make his way through the bush into neighboring Zimbabwe. He'd lost forty pounds from dysentery and malnutrition. Even worse, most of his funds had been blocked and it would take almost a year to free them up.

By the time Daniels returned to the States and landed in New York, he was down to less then fifteen thousand. He was tearing through that, faster then a convict on the run.