I wondered how they were doing with the hunt for Valen Oruraka and Gadyuka. I hoped like hell there would be a clear scent to follow once we got back from Russia. Shooting the guards hadn’t resolved my anger management issues.
The room with the two dead guys held nothing of interest, so I moved down the right-hand side of the T-junction. I switched the BAMS to my left hand and drew my gun with my right. The other room was a large lab with rows of computers, workstations, locked file cabinets, and a massive glass-enclosed hot room in the center fitted with a revolving-door airlock complete with steam and disinfectant spray jets. There was a medium-sized vault inside the hot room, but I was not wearing a hazmat suit. There were plenty on hooks by the entrance, but that was going to take more time than I had.
Ghost came up beside me. Dogs react mostly to smell and hearing; slightly less so to sight. There was no sound or odor, but he came to point and stared at what lay on the table. I glanced down and saw that once more all the hair stood up on his neck. His low growl of anger and defiance was laced with fear. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, too. Any thoughts I might have entertained about the rest of the day making more sense died right there. I touched my bodycam to make sure it was on.
There, against the far wall, was a second secure chamber, also glass-fronted. It was forty feet long and ten feet high, and inside there were stainless steel dissecting tables and heavy-duty shelves above them on which were huge clear specimen jars.
The world seemed to dwindle down to that chamber and what it held. My mouth went dry, but I tapped my earbud to get the TOC and managed to croak out a few words.
“Tell me you’re seeing this.”
I heard Doc Holliday say, “What the hell is that?”
“Kind of hoping you’d be able to tell me.”
At a glance, from across the room and on the other side of the glassed-in hot room, it looked like a tentacle. Now, standing five feet away, with a crystal-clear wall between me and it, I was positive no marine biologist would hang that label on it. It was at least fifteen feet long, and had been torn off at the thick end. Torn, not cut. The flesh looked… chewed. A shark, maybe? If so, it had a hell of a big bite.
The thing was enormous. Easily four feet thick at the tear, tapering only a little to about two-thirds that thickness at the undamaged end. There were rows of huge suckers on it. But, unlike an octopus, the suckers were not all on one side. They covered the entire thing. A little bit of high school biology crept back to me, telling me that this was actually an arm, not a tentacle, because tentacles have suckers only near the end, while a cephalopod’s arms have suckers the whole length. But not on all sides. I was sure of that.
And the suckers themselves were… wrong. Octopus, squid, and cuttlefish suckers are round, with an outer rim and a hollow cavity inside. These are all made of muscle and covered with something like a cuticle to protect the flesh. It’s the flexing of powerful muscles in the suckers that crushes prey and tears it apart.
That’s not what I was seeing here. The suckers were round, yes, but the inner cavities were not hollow. Fuck no. They were lined all around with row upon row upon row of small, sharp teeth. Actual teeth. Or, maybe fangs was the right word.
The end of the tentacle was worse, though. It did not end in blunt flesh like an octopus’s or even a paddle like a squid’s. Instead it terminated with a clutch of bony, hooked things that looked like claws. I stood there and stared at it. And I’m sure everyone back at the TOC was staring, too. No one said a word.
I glanced up at the specimen jars. There were parts of the thing that corresponded with surgical gouges in the flesh. But there were other things, too. Creatures that looked like deformed crabs or lobsters. They floated — dead, I hoped — in liquid.
The crustaceans and the cephalopod — if those words even applied — were similar in one regard, though. They were mottled and armored like the back of a Louisiana alligator; and they were colored in a hundred different shades of green. And not merely green… buried between the knobs and bumps on the strange skin I saw tiny glints of something else. I risked a closer look, bending toward the glass, peering to see what I did not want to see. Light was sparkling off the sharp tips and edges of pieces of green crystal. Without going inside the tank I couldn’t tell if the pieces had been forced into place or whether they were in some way a part of this thing. Maybe they were like barnacles. But they looked so orderly in their placement that it was almost as if they had grown out through the mottled flesh.
When I could speak I said, “Doc? What. The fuck. Am I looking at?”
“God almighty,” was her only coherent reply.
Then there was another voice on the line. Junie. “Don’t touch it, for God’s sake, Joe. I mean Cowboy. Don’t go near it.”
“There is not one chance in hell,” I said, backing away. “I wouldn’t go in there at gunpoint.”
Before anyone could gather herself to say anything more, a situation alert bell bing-bonged in my ear and then Duffy broke into the call.
“Spartan to Cowboy,” he said in a fierce whisper, “be advised, we got company. Three big SUVs just pulled into the parking lot and a whole team has deployed. Count eighteen hostiles. Civilian clothes, but they’re all locked and loaded. Automatic weapons. Six heading for the front door, six each heading to the side door and the rear loading bay. Looks like a raid. We must have tripped an alarm somewhere.”
“Copy that,” I said, then cycled over to the full team channel and repeated what Duffy had said. “Echo Team, abort mission. Retrieve all gear that you can. Burn what you can’t take with you. Do it now.”
I stood for a long moment looking at the thing on the table, at the specimens in the jars. Something about this triggered a memory that was either too deep to grab, or one that did not want me to pull it into the light. Things from dreams, from nightmares. Images from the fevered hallucinations I’d had while the Spanish flu was burning me alive. Ghost stood up and placed his front paws on the glass and snarled with unfiltered hate. He was so upset, so angry, so scared, that his whole body trembled with it and he was panting.
“Ghost…,” I said gently, and he turned his head and gave me a werewolf growl. I patted my thigh and he looked at me without a trace of recognition, still wrapped up in whatever complex emotions were tearing at him. I called his name again, but his eyes were glassy and strange.
So, I tried it another way. I straightened and snapped my fingers, loud as a gunshot. “Ghost. Come .” I put all of my voice of command into it. He flinched and blinked and the feral look in his eyes flickered. All those thousands of hours of training him ever since he was young; the combat simulations and then the missions. All of the hell we’d run through together. All of the blood and smoke and gunfire. All of the times we limped off the field when damn near everyone else was dead. All of that was hardwired into him on a deep, deep level. It went deeper than his fear, the way it does with all good soldiers.
He dropped to all fours and trotted over to me, turned, and sat down by my side. Ready. In position. With me. We both took a lingering look at the horrors and mysteries behind the glass. Then we looked at each other.
Then we got the hell out of there.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED ELEVEN
Doc Holliday pointed to the picture of the tentacle that still filled one of the big viewscreens in the TOC. Her finger trembled visibly.