The desk man at Aguilar’s main surveillance was named Beto RamĂrez and he had been a desk man at Aguilar’s main surveillance for eleven months and was, by the small private accounting of his life so far, extremely tired of it.
The job had been sold to him by his cousin Tomás as a clean job. The job paid in cash. The shifts were eight hours. The chairs were soft. The screens were many. There was a thermos of coffee on the side table that the kitchen kept full. There was, on the bookshelf opposite the bank of monitors, a Spanish edition of The Complete Crossword Puzzles of Spain. Beto had been working through the book at the rate of four crosswords a shift and had reached, three days ago, the section called crucigramas para expertos.
He was on a clue at 22-down when the screens went black.
Two of them, simultaneously, on the outer perimeter, both blank. He blinked. He set the pencil in the spine of the book.
A narco-guard leaned over his shoulder.
“Qué pasó.”
“Acabamos de perder el imagen.”
“VĂste algo.”
“Creo que vi un legarto.”
“Un legarto.”
Beto spread his arms to indicate size.
“Un legarto grandote.”
The narco-guard was named Hector Rivera. Hector had a nephew Jorge in his sister’s house in Pereira who, when he had been seven, had received a gift from a tourist of a small plastic Tyrannosaurus rex that had sat on Jorge’s bedside table for the next decade. Hector had, until this moment, regarded the world’s dinosaurs as a thing one bought one’s nephew at age seven and forgot about by age eight. The world, he understood, was about to revise his understanding.
The radio in his hand crackled.
“Bunker dos. Bunker dos.”
Static.
“Bunker dos.”
Static.
He looked at Beto. Beto looked back.
“Me bajaré,” Hector said.
He went out the door of the surveillance room and down the central corridor toward the courtyard. He never reached the courtyard. He reached, instead, a fork in the corridor where a door to a side room had been left open, and through the door he saw, very briefly, a thing the size of a beagle with a spiny mantle around its neck hawk a plug of black mucus directly into the face of an off-duty cartel guard who was standing at the basin shaving.
Hector turned around. He went back.
He locked the door of the surveillance room from inside.
In the barracks, which had the comfortable disorder of a long-term college dormitory for men who had decided not to grow up, twelve cartel soldiers were lounging on their bunks watching a Gamera movie on a wall-mounted flat-screen. Two were eating instant noodles. One was repairing the strap of his shoulder rig with a piece of dental floss. Three were sleeping. A poster of a girl in a Cartagena Vallenato Festival T-shirt hung above one bunk. Another bunk had, taped to the wall above the pillow, a child’s drawing in crayon of a dog.
Wham. Orestes burst in the front entrance.
Wham. Achilles burst in the rear entrance.
For three seconds the men on the bunks did not move, because the brain of a man on a bunk watching a Gamera movie at three in the afternoon does not, on first contact, accept that there are two eight-foot bio-engineered raptors in the room with him. Then the brain accepted. Then the brain ran.
Bedlam.
The screaming was the screaming a man does when he has been wrong about every assumption his life has been based on. The slashing was a workmanlike slashing. The chomping was a clean side-to-side motion of two heavy jaws working as a unit. The men in their underwear went up and went down and went out the windows that did not have screens and got partway out the windows that did, and the Gamera movie kept playing on the screen until a bunk rolled over the screen and crushed it.
The man with the dental floss took a sickle-claw through the chest in the position he had been sitting in. The dental floss went on past the wound a quarter inch and stopped.
The man whose son had drawn the dog took it in the back at the door. He had reached the door, had had his hand on the knob.
The barracks went, in under a minute, from twelve men to none.
Outside, in the courtyard, the main guard tower was being scaled by Hector. The deinonychus, that is — the raptor, with the same name as the narco-guard who was, at this moment, locked in the surveillance room. Hector the raptor came up the side of the tower hand-over-hand on the bracing struts and reached the crow’s nest in nine seconds. The sentry in the nest, who had a Russian sniper rifle and three magazines and an uncharged radio, did not have time to bring the rifle up.
Chomp.
The sentry was a brief item.
In the long rectangular drug lab, six narcos with weapons spilled out the door at a run. Spartacus took the door first. Rounds smacked into the body armor across his chest and shoulder and ricocheted off the laminate plates Sherman had specced. Spartacus did not slow. Behind him, off the roof, Orestes leapt down onto the running men, crushing two underfoot and ripping into the others.
Inside the lab, Hector — the raptor — moved through the long rows of stainless tables at speed, chasing the lab technicians before him. Beakers smashed. Centrifuges came down off their stands. White powder went up into the air in long slow clouds. A sterno burner caught on the corner of a packing table and the fire began to climb the wall.
In the headquarters at the village, on the monitors, the head narco who had hired Grendel was on his feet.
“This wasn’t our deal!” he shouted. “What is it doing?”
“What’s his problem,” Nick said, in the panel truck — having heard, through Maya’s open earpiece that Maya had shared with him in the dim of the truck — half the headquarters audio.
“They were hoping,” Maya said, dryly, “to be able to. Recycle most of the drugs and equipment in there.”
Maya caught Nick’s eye in the dim of the panel truck. The look she gave him was an I told you so look only she could deliver, the kind a wolf-trainer delivers a man who has misjudged a wolf.
In the head narco’s office on the monitor, the head narco picked up a phone.
The phone went unanswered.
In the jacuzzi room of the hacienda, Pepe Aguilar had his Uzi in his hand and an expression on his face that was, briefly, the expression of a man whose evening had been a very pleasant evening up until five minutes ago.
The wall to the corridor was being battered, in slow heavy strokes, by something that was not a man.
The ankylosaur had arrived.
Pepe stood in the middle of the churning jacuzzi with the Uzi pointed at the door.
“Bueno,” he said, to the smoke that was beginning to billow under the door. “Quieres jugar.”
The wall came down.
A great armored shoulder pushed through the gap. The smoke parted. The wall fell in pieces around the bowed back of an ankylosaur the size of a small car, and the ankylosaur, with the casual disregard of an animal that was, by his nature, an opening of doors, stepped past Pepe entirely and put his head down at the brass planters along the back wall and began to graze on the tropical foliage.
Pepe Aguilar, who had not paid a great deal of money for this elaborate jacuzzi room only to be ignored at the moment of his confrontation with whatever this was, opened his mouth to say something about it.
He never said it.
Through the smoke, behind the ankylosaur, came the two spitters.
Casper and Pollux leapt through the gap with their mantles fully ratcheted out, shrieking, and they hit the jacuzzi water at a flat-out leap, splash and splash, on either side of Pepe.
It was not a long fight.
The screams were not long screams. The blood went up onto the fluffy white towels hanging on the back wall in patterns that, for the rest of his short life, the ankylosaur would not, while grazing, look at.
In the headquarters at the village, the buyers were quiet.
The Russian observer, who had remarked on the size of the deal, stood frozen with one hand in the pocket of his coat. The Saudi was sitting down. The U.S. Special Forces Colonel had, at some point in the last sixty seconds, ducked out the side door and walked, briskly, to his SUV.
In the prisoner corral at the south end of the compound, Spartacus tore the gate off its hinges in a single clean motion. The two dozen kidnapped prisoners, men and women in soiled clothes that had been clean ten weeks ago when they had been business clothes, flinched against the back fence as the eight-foot raptor stepped into the enclosure, lowered his head, and sniffed.
He sniffed in a slow careful pattern, in the manner he had been taught to sniff Isabel Chartiers’s violet sweater.
He found, in the breath of one prisoner — a woman in her thirties who, if Maya had been there, Maya would have recognized as the President’s favorite niece — a particular small note he had, in his short life, learned. The note was the note of the chemistry he had been bound to.
He straightened. He roared, an announcing roar.
He stepped out.
The prisoners, several of them on their knees, did not move.
A woman in the back of the corral whispered, in a voice Beto RamĂrez at his crosswords would have found very strange:
Se acabĂł. Se acabĂł el mundo.
In the courtyard, the squad regrouped.
Achilles was badly wounded, blood covering his throat and staining his body armor. He was breathing in long shallow draws. His shoulder camera was slung half off its mount.
Spartacus approached him slowly.
He raised a clawed hand.
The blow never came.
He swung the claw past Achilles’s head and brought it down, with a clean controlled motion, on his own shoulder camera. CRACK. The camera went off in a spray of plastic. He did the same to his second camera. He reached up, with the wrong-long, wrong-articulated fingers Sherman had bred into him, and grasped the regulator implant on the side of his head.
He pulled.
The wires came out with the box. The wires came out wet, with bits of meat on them. The blood ran down the side of his face. He flicked the box into the dirt.
He did the same for Achilles. Then for Hector. Then, on Orestes and Perseus, the same. They worked it out among themselves in calls below human hearing.
In the control wagon, half a kilometer down the logging road, every monitor on the dashboard went black at once.
“What are they doing,” Sherman said.
Joyce, beside him, took half a second to assess. Then he keyed the radio.
“Deactivate. I want them out of commission when we get there.”
“They are still moving,” Sherman said.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Joyce looked at the tracking screen. The blinking dots had begun, in unison, to move.
“Where are they going,” Joyce said.
Sherman looked at the screen for two long seconds.
He looked at Joyce.
“Toward us,” he said.
In the courtyard of the cartel compound, the squad finished their cleanup. They were not, at this point, on any chemistry the men in the wagon had given them. They were on whatever chemistry they were generating themselves, and the chemistry, for the first time in any of their short lives, was theirs.
Spartacus took a long head-up look at the smoking buildings of the compound. He took a count. He found the count satisfactory. He gave the same low call he had given at the perimeter, and the others, with their boxes off, flicked an ear. They had heard the call before. They knew, this time, what the call meant.
It meant follow.
He set off through the front gate of the compound at a long easy lope. The other four fell into a flying-V behind him. The two spitters, smaller and lower to the ground, ran wide on either flank. The ankylosaur, the slowest and the largest, did not follow. He stayed in the lobby of Pepe’s mansion grazing on the potted ferns, peaceably, like a lawn ornament that had decided to come into the foyer.
The squad went down the logging road at a speed that, in two kilometers, was going to put them at the rear of the Grendel convoy.
In the dim of the panel truck, Maya touched Nick’s sleeve. She did not speak. He nodded.
Outside, in the canopy on either side of the logging road, the leaves moved.
It was, again, not wind.