He’d never seen real action in the jungles before. It couldn’t be that much different than the flat, sandy, deserts or house to house urban combat he’d cut his teeth on in the Middle East. Sight lines only went as far as the foliage allowed, and it didn’t allow much. The heat was the same he supposed, though the weather was always insufferable in his line of work. The state of Ohio never really required his skill set.
Caesar was succinct with their orders: they were to go into the scientist's camp, secure the premises, round up the civilians and their find, and escort them back to the helicopter that would by then be there with their supplies. These helicopters would them bring them back to the boat awaiting their return.
A short path lead through the imposing forest to the middle of the out clearing. The camp and the LZ was set up in a shape like a three leaf clover. On one “leaf’ there was the LZ where their helicopter still sat with it’s rotors spinning slowly. On another leaf was an outcropping of buildings and equipment that only could have been the scientist’s living quarters and labs. On the final leaf of the clover was a small squat step pyramid in the style of the Incas. The recon team was nowhere in sight. The rest of the area was equally devoid of the expected group of scientists. The researchers were probably either in the quarters, the temple, or out in the jungle, he wasn't particularly worried about them. However the absence of the marine team was highly irregular.
Colonel Towson gave the order for the squad to lower their rifles but to keep them at ready. Virgil agreed with the order, it’d be dumb to walk in here and intimidate the hell out of some academics. They proceeded in an swift orderly fashion to the largest of the buildings, where it was most likely that they would find inhabitants. The colonel rapped smartly on the door of the building and stared anxiously at the face of it, awaiting an answer. The scene probably would've looked rediculous to any onlookers; a group of heavily armed troopers knocking on the front door of a research facility and then shifting uncomfortable.
After a span of about a half a minute, Caesar stepped back and simply said, "Sledge." There were several ways of opening knocked doors that weren't answered. More heavily armed areas often required some sort of explosive, but in times like this it only took a team of two or three and some blunt objects. Because they were lacking the tool the maneuver implied, three of the soldiers grabbed their short field shovels and placed the tips of the digging tools approximately where the doors two hinges and the latch would be. Their eyes looked towards Caesar. He raised his hand and the shovel heads moved back about two feet. His hand dropped and the tools slammed into the three weakest structural parts of the door. The wood audibly weakened and splintered under the force. The three quickly brought the shovel's back and threw the blades exactly where the had the first time. The cracking noise was sickening this time and the door bent noticeably inward. The three now stood up and flipped the shovel's around so the handles faced the battered door. They rammed the ends of the implements, and then their shoulders, into the door crushing it to the floor of the room. The three then spun away from the now exposed doorway and their place was filled by several armed Marines who moved almost daintily through the space and swept the room carefully.
Normally, such a move would've been first supplemented by a fragmentation or flash grenade. The first explosive was nixed for the reason that civilians could easily be inside. The disorienting flash grenade was in shorter supply, and though the ghost town setting was fishy, Caesar had decided on a dry, or without grenade, entry.
Gun muzzles and the frantically darting pairs of eyes behind them scanned the room, searching for anything that could be perceived as a threat. They found no threats. They found no hostages. They found no civilians. They found no people whatsoever. And this was highly disturbing. Training had prepared them for every instance except the one that never showed up.
The performed similar maneuvers in a few adjourning houses with the same outcome. If a research team was ever living in these buildings, they weren't here now. The thought crossed Virgil's mind that maybe the team was just in the temple or the surrounding jungles and they'd smashed down doors for no reason other than to earn the ire of soon to be returning scientists.
One of the younger men on the team didn't share his sentiments. "This is such bullshit man, these people got ghosted. We didn't they send a transmission or something?"
There were typically a couple reasons why such transmissions didn't get sent out. Either there were negligence problems, technical problems, or as the trooper had just stated, existence problems. Specifically lack of existence problems. Virgil doubted that was the case but was still a little antsy over the missing persons.
It would take quite a supernatural force to remove a squad of marines with no sign of struggle. Had they been dropped off on the wrong island, or had to turn back because of helicopter problems? But again, why no radio signal? This whole situation was getting weirder and weirder.
It was then that the team heard a muffled stomp from upstairs. Eleven rifles were drawn up into a firing position. In a series of quick hand motions, four troops peeled off from the group and headed up a thin metal staircase. Their boots clicked quickly as they ascended, Virgil was the second man in the column. There were two rooms at the top of the stairs, one right across from the end of the staircase, the other on a direct 90 degree angle to the right. Protocol dictated that two of them rounded the corner first and took out the room on the angle, (as that move exposed them to the least crossfire) while the other two remained trained on the other door to suppress a flanking movement.
Virgil and his squad mate Odysseus, made a few mouthed words and signals to one another as to tactics before starting a slow countdown from three.
Three. Steven Han, callsign 'Odysseus' was a Okinawa Army brat, the product of a armed forces mother and a Okinawan business man father, in an interesting twist on the typical army base formula. He'd needed little push into the armed forces, and signed up after he'd graduated high school. He'd served a tour on a Germany airbase before seeing action in Afghanistan. His work in the tunnels there had earned him several medals as well as the eye of special forces units, and Delta tapped him for their reconnaissance unit. He was an excellent shot and a tireless athlete, but as the familiar rant went, “I don't know karate! I know the same CQB stuff everyone else learned. Just because an Asian man gets a place in a special military unit, everyone thinks I'm Bruce Lee or something, well you know what...” Virgil was glad to have him in front of this incursion.
Two. The other two were sergeants, of varying ages. One was Adam “Cicero” Jenks, the teams specialist in foreign languages, particularly excelling in Portuguese and Spanish, as well as a few near extinct native languages that might prove useful on the mission. He'd discovered his proclivity in high school, when after acing his language tests, he would regularly go home and watch Spanish soap operas. The next day he'd enter class tossing around a half dozen words for 'love', 'whore' and 'betrayal'. By the end of high school career he was fluent in both French and Spanish. In college he spent summers in language immersion schools and camps. After he graduated college he shocked his parents by signing up for navy intelligence during the War on Terror. After a year staring at a computer screen. Troop shortages found him out on the battlefield, where he preformed well enough to get a call from the Delta guys.
One. The other was an older man, with gray hairs running through his exposed sideburns. He'd toured in Desert Storm as a Delta operative operating on the Iraqi-Turkish border and had been a recent addition to the team. He'd only been called back to duty a few months earlier, having been under the illusion that at 36 he would no longer be eligible for duty. He was wrong. Thus Kurt Smith, callsign 'Cato' found himself leaving his post at a construction store and kissing his wife and three kids goodbye to serve once again.
Go.
Kyle swept out from behind Steven and spun up to the other wall hugging his back to it and checking his field of vision for enemies. Steven then dove through the door way and came up in a crouch, his gun prepared to lay down fire on the area of the room that had previously been invisible. Virgil watched Odysseus sweep the area several times and stepped into the room.
“I think it's clear lieutenant.” Odysseus said.
Just then, a shape moved out from behind a bookshelf in a flutter of motion. Virgil having seen it first turned and trained his rifle, Steven quickly following. Flap. Flapflapflap. Chir-chirp. A largish bird with brilliant green and yellow plumage hopped around nervously, before flying to the other side of the room in a panic. On the ground rested a large scientific textbook, its spine facing up, and its pages folded awkwardly against the cheap flooring. Virgil stared at the bird. It cocked its head questioning at him. Well, that explained that.
He pointed the muzzle of his weapon at the bird and uttered a “Bang-bang. Shoo bird.” The creature complied, clumsily squeezing through the open window it had used to enter the room.
The other two men walked into the room confirming the lack of any living organisms. Odysseus simply said “bird.” and the four begin to exit the room when they heard another thump. This time from the closet.
Virgil looked back over his shoulder, the other three looked at him. He dropped his rifle by the door and withdrew his Ka-Bar knife from its leg sheaf, the seven inch blade given off no shine due to the non reflective paint that had been applied to it. The three men behind him followed his lead.
The sliding closet door was thrown open and the closet was empty except for some hangers and a chest. This was like some bad horror film. Then the knocking came again. From the chest. A really bad horror film. Cato stepped forward and flipped the latch to the chest raising the lid.
A pair of eyes squinted from the suddenly intrusive blast of light. The overstuffed body wriggled and rolled its way out of the chest, first freeing its arms, then its legs, until the man managed to scramble to the floor. His was breathing wildly from a lack of oxygen, his hair was slick and frayed with sweat. The man's glasses fell off and skittered across the floor coming to a rest by the textbook.
“Oh god,” he moaned, “Oh, no, I don't wanna die...” He blinked furiously before gazing up at the four men wielding large knives. The blood drained from his face. “You-You came back!” He promptly fainted, his head impacting the floor with a jarring crack. Virgil supposed he couldn't blame him. But what was he doing jammed in a chest like some bad magic act? And where were the other scientists? And how had the jungle swallowed up a whole marine reconnaissance team? You came back? Just what happened here?
