Chapter 32

Return Of the Phoenix: A Monster Squad Novel By Heath Stallcup

“OPCOM, this is Team Leader. We are approaching now. One click to target,” the disembodied voice whispered across the overhead speakers. “Zero tangos.”

Colonel Matt Mitchell was bent over the operations console observing an overhead view of the heat signatures of his assault team as they approached an abandoned farmhouse outside of Brownsville, Texas. The command center had switched to red light and all non-essential personnel had vacated the center. Communications techs, logistics personnel, weapons and tactics specialists and OPCOM’s lone civilian government representative, Laura Youngblood, sat anxiously near their respective stations waiting for the fecal matter to hit the atmospheric oscillator. “Keep your head about you, chief,” he answered back. “Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they can’t see you.”

“Copy that,” came the whispered reply.

“Be safe out there Phoenix,” Mitchell whispered to himself, a creepy feeling crawling up his back and settling in the base of his neck.

Mitchell turned to peer at a countdown clock over the shoulder of one of his communications techs. The mission team had only been “feet down” in Texas for forty-three minutes, but it felt like this mission was already taking too long. The heat in this piss-ant border town was so intense during the day that it played hell with their satellite infra-red observation. Reading heat signatures in this type of heat, you actually watched for cold spots for your men. The colonel had practically begged for a bird with microwave visual capability, hoping that he could at least borrow one that had true-eye visibility, but none of the alphabet soup groups would loan him one regardless of the risk involved. He was stuck with the only bird he had, and tracking body heat was all he could do.

Mitchell cursed again as his men faded in and out of view. “Fuckers promised me everything I needed to make this unit work, and I have to send my men into the meat grinder with antiquated equipment.” Mitchell glanced up at Youngblood. “Any chance those assholes you used to work with would return your calls?”

“Colonel, I tried to call in every marker I had,” Laura replied, her eyes not leaving her monitor.

“What did those limp-wristed spooks say?”

Laura sighed and finally made eye contact with him. “They laughed at me, sir.”

Although Laura was still technically a civilian and didn’t have to refer to Colonel Mitchell as ‘sir’, she did so out of respect. Mitchell was a tough SOB, but he treated her as one of the guys rather than a ‘piece of ass’, and after all the grief she met climbing her way through the ranks at the CIA, she knew the caliber of man he was simply in the way he treated his people and the way he treated her. When she was assigned to him, he didn’t piss and moan about her being a woman or her being weak, he simply reviewed her file, accepted the accolades of her superiors and her mental, physical, and shooting scores for what they were and assessed her as he would any other member of his team. He placed her based on her merits. And she was now his second-in-command. Nobody ordered him to do it, nobody suggested he do it. Nobody pulled any strings and nobody coerced him because of who her family was. Hell, nobody knew who her family was, she had seen to that. And over the years, Mitchell had become much like a father figure for her. A brother in arms, but one she could go to if she felt she needed to air a personal problem that she didn’t feel comfortable sharing with anyone else.

“I all but begged them, sir. I tried to express the importance of this particular mission without going in to details, of course, but it was like butting heads with a brick wall.” Half-Irish and half-Native American, Laura Youngblood stood a solid 5’ 11’’ with long mahogany hair. She looked to have a permanent tan, and her dark eyes gleamed with intelligent mischief. She was her father’s only daughter, the youngest of six kids. With five older brothers, she knew how to roughhouse with the best of them. She could definitely give as good as she could take.

“Bastards. Let them hope they never need us to come clean up a mess for them or they’ll wish they had played a helluva lot nicer with us,” Mitchell swore out loud. “And yes, lieutenant, you can record that comment into the hard copy. Maybe when the powers-that-be sees that we aren’t getting the support we were promised, maybe…just maybe…somebody’s head will roll over this shit!”

The communications officer cut a shit-eating grin at the colonel and simply uttered a “Yes, sir.”

“Approaching the outer perimeter,” the disembodied voice whispered again.

Mitchell returned to his post. Laura couldn’t help but notice that every time he assumed his duties in the command center, his stature seemed to grow. A Green Beret, Mitchell was an Army Special Forces soldier and a large man by nature. He kept himself in shape despite his age, but when his troops were ‘in-the-muck’ as Mitchell would say, he seemed to grow larger. Almost as a defensive move, like a mother hen fluffing her feathers to appear larger to a predator when her chicks are threatened.

“Go easy, Phoenix. It’s daylight, so it should be like shooting fish in a barrel. But we know they’ll be somewhere deep and shadowed, and hopefully asleep. If they wake, cornered rats tend to bite.”

“Copy that, OPCOM. Slow and easy until bingo,” the speakers responded.

“Colonel, they still have four hours until dusk. No discernible weather noted. Blackhawk dispatched to LZ for pickup,” the logistics officer stated.

“Noted and marked,” Mitchell responded. “Team Leader, you are minus four hours until bug-out.”

“No problem, skipper. We should be mopped up long before that. We’re almost to the farmhouse. We’ll soon be going radio sile—” static came across the secured channel and was amplified through the command center.

Mitchell stood instantly. “Sitrep! Now!” he commanded.

The command center was suddenly abuzz with activity. Techs were adjusting the contrast on their screens trying to discern their operators from the heat of the day. Unfortunately, it was nearly impossible in the scorching Texas heat. Communications techs were trying every frequency, adjusting their equipment, going for every band available for any kind of signal. Suddenly one of them cried out, “I got them!”

“Big screen!” Mitchell ordered, and the operator switched his monitor to the overhead screen so that all could observe the team’s heat signatures in the dry Texas scabland. But rather than seeing the seven special operators, they saw dozens of higher heat signatures running rampant at high speed, three and four attacking individual heat sources at a time, literally tearing it to shreds, then moving to assist another group that was tearing up another target.

Through the overhead static that nobody had thought to turn off, a gurgling voice tried to yell ‘trap’ but it sounded as if the owner of the voice had gargled with broken glass. Automatic gunfire could be heard, but the static made it sound as if it was just a bad connection and it didn’t last long. The heat signature picture indicated why.

The attack didn’t last long; the heat signatures all scattered in different directions and left the scene. Quickly.

“Good lord…what was that?” somebody asked quietly.

“Get me that Blackhawk. Redirect them to a half click from that site. I want my boys picked up. Tell them to look for survivors,” Mitchell said in a calm and even voice through clenched teeth. He knew there were no survivors. He could tell from the quickly cooling pieces of what once was his team on the screen above. “Tell those chopper boys to look for any kind of evidence of what might have done this. No matter how crazy it might appear. I want it. All of it. Every hair, scrap of clothes, everything.”

“I’ll scramble the clean-up team as well, sir,” Laura didn’t sound well as she said it.

“Make it so,” Mitchell said as he turned to leave the command center.

“Sir?” Laura asked as he turned to go.

“What is it?”

“Where will you be, sir?”

“I’ll be in my office. I have some calls to make. There are some answers I need and some fucking heads I want. And I won’t rest until I have them.”

“He said what?” Laura asked, shooting up from her chair in Colonel Mitchell’s office.

Mitchell poured her a short glass of single malt scotch. His brow furrowed in deep thought. “Yeah, that was my reaction, too.” Mitchell said, reclining behind his desk. His eyes probed her, reading her reaction and wondering if she would have beaten the shit out of the congressman, then choked the very life out of him had he been here in person. That was the colonel’s first instinct. “When he placed the blame on our training and lack of preparedness, I was pissed. When he said that I was inept and shouldn’t be in command, I went past pissed and straight to livid. But when he said that my biggest mistake was making you my second…I told him that if he ever darkened our door again, I’d personally gut him and mail his balls back to his kid.”

Laura paled. “God, you didn’t really say that, did you? He’s on our appropriations committee, Matt.” Though she was glad that Mitchell had stood up for her. She knew that Senator Franklin had never liked her and often doubted her ability to lead. She just didn’t know if it stemmed from her record with The Company or because she was a woman.

“The man’s a liberal turd. He’s hated us from the git-go. The only reason he’s on the committee is so that the others will have somebody to keep them in check and so that the president has somebody he knows will go whining to him with everything that is decided when they’re in session. Besides, I had already called the other three congressmen and they assured me that heads will roll for us not having had the support from NSA and CIA that we were supposed to have. We also got heartfelt condolences for the men and their families. But the honorable Senator Franklin was the only one to go off the deep end, so fuck him.” There was obvious venom when he said ‘honorable’ and that was one thing that Franklin would never be.

Mitchell had dealt with enough politicians over his career to know that there are bad ones, there are mediocre ones and there are damn few good ones. The one in question here was a certifiable nutcase; laughed at by his colleagues, ridiculed in the press, and somehow re-elected by his constituents. Franklin had been rumored to have gone off the deep end a long time ago, but that didn’t stop someone from putting the dumbass on their Oversight Committee and making him a permanent pain in their ass.

The ‘Monster Squad’ as they were known, had a congressional oversight committee of four politicians who could either make them or break them at a whim. They approved their budget, appropriated the equipment, manpower, support personnel, and made everything possible for their entire operation to exist. Their operation was, for all intent and purpose, a ‘black op’, meaning that nobody outside the four man congressional oversight committee and the president himself even knew that they existed. Oh, their records reflected that they were military or government employees, but they ‘officially’ existed as clerks or cooks or field officers, not here in the center of the United States working out of an old defunct hangar at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City protecting this end of the world from things that go bump in the night and that mommies and daddies tell their little kiddies don’t really exist.

Placing the command center here at Tinker was JC Watts’ idea. It was, pretty much, the center of the continental U.S., and it did provide a pretty good cover. The team could deploy from there and traverse the country easily and in equal time from this location. Nobody would expect a group of monster hunters to operate out of an unassuming hangar that used to be used for overhauling old aircraft.

The hangar itself, to the odd passerby, was still just an old hangar, but underground, it was a state-of-the-art command center. Not huge, by any stretch of the imagination, but efficient and equipped well. Three of the four congress-critters, as Mitchell often referred to them, saw to it that the men stationed there had their creature comforts. Tinker was well equipped for recreational activities as well, and Oklahoma City, though not known as a Mecca for the arts or being a thriving metropolis, still had a down home quality of goodness to it. Good food, good people, and good clean fun. Just don’t expect more than triple A baseball if you’re a fan. At least they finally got an NBA team to settle there. Still, Laura often thought, it would have been nice to settle someplace a bit more lively.

At least it’s not Montana.

Laura sighed with relief. “Thank God. You had me scared we were shut down for good.”

“Nope,” Mitchell answered. “In fact”, he continued as he refilled his scotch, “you and I are to start recruiting for a new monster squad right away.” Mitchell leaned back in his chair again and held the scotch glass to his forehead. “How in the hell are we going to replace a team like that on such short notice?”

Laura shook her head as she thought of the many months of training the team had put in; the physical augmentation, the boosters…everything that made up being a member of the squad. She thought of each member and how ‘alive’ they had been as they packed their gear just hours before in preparation for this op.

“Any word from the Blackhawk or the clean-up team on what attacked them?” Mitchell asked.

“Not yet, sir. Preliminary reports just indicate a lot of tracks coming in and out from multiple directions. But the area is soft sand, so they can’t get impressions or even pour castings,” Laura said, glancing at her notes. “But whatever it was, some of them had a running gait of over twenty-five feet. So they were covering some serious terrain at a very high rate of speed.”

Mitchell wished again he could have gotten the technical support he had requested. Even an unmanned drone with video capability could have given his squad enough fair warning to prepare for the onslaught. Imagining the last moments of his team’s lives was not something he wanted to do, but he knew it was a nightmare he wouldn’t soon be rid of.

Mitchell reclined in his chair and held the scotch to his chest. “How soon before Squad One returns from England?”

“They’re supposed to be training for the next three weeks, but I can have them on the next flight home,” Laura said.

Mitchell rubbed his eyes, debating what to do.

“I know this is probably going to go over like a lead balloon…but I do have an idea,” Laura offered.

“Right now I’m open to anything,” Mitchell said without opening his eyes, letting the iced scotch ease his ache.

“Maybe we could contact the other squads? See if they could each offer up one member. We could mold them into what we need them to be?”

Laura watched the colonel carefully for any movement. If she didn’t know any better, she’d think he had fallen asleep, but she knew him well enough to know his mind was carefully weighing all the pros and cons of this possibility. His gears were turning and she could almost tell when the light came on over his head.

Mitchell commanded Team Four which covered the U.S., Canada, and most of Mexico. The team was made of two small squads of seven men each. Team Five covered South America and was based out of Brazil. Teams One, Two and Three covered Europe and Africa. The teams were really a modern solution to a very old problem: Monsters.

Monsters are, by the simplest definition, things that go bump in the night. If it is a threat, then the Monster Squads take them out. Period. So far, the most common monsters that the squads had really encountered were vampires and very rarely the occasional zombie uprising. But considering that the monsters have had centuries to hone their hiding skills and the squads have only been around for a few generations, it wasn’t hard to understand why, IF there were other kinds of monsters out there, the squads weren’t running into them.

Teams of experts scoured the papers, internet blogs, news reports, any source of information looking for key words that might indicate a monster or group of monsters in an area. If something is triggered, a scout is sent out to verify the findings. If the scout sends back positive intelligence, then the squad is mobilized and the monster is taken out. Once the threat or threats (plural) are taken out, a clean-up team is sent in to remove any evidence of the monster ever being there, or the squad having entered. The world goes on its merry way never knowing that what goes bump in the night might eat you and pick its teeth with your bones.

“Make it so. Call who you have to and get who we can. We’ll probably get their bottom of the barrel squad members…if anybody is even willing to part with some…but it beats the shit out of going out in the field and recruiting from raw recruits.”

“You got it, boss.” She got up to leave but stopped and turned back around. Mitchell opened his eyes and gave her a questioning look. Laura picked up the rest of her scotch and downed it. Setting the glass back on his desk she said, “Never leave a good scotch behind.” Mitchell gave her a rare smile.

“I couldn’t agree more.” He followed suit. “You know, he’s right about one thing.”

Laura paused. “Sir?”

“Franklin. That little cocksucker is right about one thing.”

“What’s that?” Laura asked, not really sure she wanted to know.

“In the end, I’m still the one responsible for their lives.” And Mitchell knew that they would haunt him for the rest of his.

Jack Thompson moaned as his body screamed at him in pain. Everything was dark, but his body was on fire and every movement made him painfully aware of every nerve ending firing double-time. He was being jostled, bounced uncaringly and with the sounds surrounding him, it sounded as though somebody was carrying him. Quickly.

Slowly he became more aware and current memories began to return to him. His team was approaching the old mud-brick farm house when suddenly dark, hairy creatures attacked them from every direction. They were blindingly fast. And strong. Good heavens they were strong. And they were vicious as hell, too. Teeth! He remembered teeth as long as his fingers, and claws at the end of paws that looked a lot like a man’s hand. They looked a lot like dogs…good, Lord! Wolves! They were attacked by some kind of mutated wolves.

Jack’s mind was spinning and he could feel himself beginning to lose consciousness.

Could it be? Could they have been attacked by werewolves? During the day? A sudden jarring sent a pain so intense through his body that Jack passed out, but the last thing to go through his mind was an image of a black wolf face snarling at him wanting to tear out his throat.