The Dragon’s Lair

The Casa Marina Hotel, Key West

June 9

As we stepped out of the cars in front of the hotel, one thing in particular shook me. It wasn’t the broken windows, or the gold-inlaid gate that had been torn free from its track, or even the weird blood stains on the sides of the building. What nagged at me? Where were the chickens? The chickens pecking for insects in the grass, letting you know that you were in the Caribbean? Despite the approaching dawn, I hadn’t heard a rooster crow—in fact, this had been true for nearly a week. I wondered if they’d all been eaten, or just got smart and stopped crowing. They’d always been clever little bastards. Maybe they’d gone into hiding and formed a chicken underground while they waited for us humans to get our act together.

I knew the Casa Marina very well. My mother had stayed there during her only visit, and Elizabeth’s parents joked about renewing their vows at the end of the pier. My personal experiences there had formed with a badge on my chest, and I’d been at this hotel a hundred times. Most were minor calls, slip and fall injuries, or maybe a drunk and disorderly, but no one came here to cause trouble. Some folks just let the demons out a bit when they got a few drinks in them. Most calmed down when we showed up, and we usually left without taking anyone in.

This time, prepped for an assault, we were all jumpy. We rode light, one plain white van and two sedans—no lights and no PD logos on the side, just a trio of vehicles slipping through back alleys and side streets until we reached the corner of Seminole and Reynolds. The final approach meant breaching the gate and covering the fifty yards of the front parking lot to reach the lobby of the hotel. We’d reinforced the front bumper of the van, giving us the option of punching a hole in the front glass, while the others provided cover from the cars.

When we rounded the corner, the most popular hotel in Key West sat deserted. Only abandoned cars occupied the front lot. We jumped the curb in the van and stopped about ten feet shy of the front door.

Wisdom, riding shotgun in one of the sedans, leaped out of the car before it came to a stop. I lost sight of him in the predawn darkness, but figured the shadows would be a lot safer with him in them.

Koz came second, his pistol still holstered, carrying an aluminum baseball bat in his hand. He’d worked this beat for years, and had enough tactical training for me to trust him in combat.

Bremer followed, his shotgun ready as soon as he cleared the van.

I exited the van last, my hand hovering over my radio.

Wisdom’s voice crackled on the radio. “Nothing out front. Looks deserted.”

We approached the front door, or at least the frame once filled with glass, which now crunched beneath our boots.

As we ducked under the broken glass of the shattered front of the building, Wisdom caught up. I stopped to let him in, because I wanted his gun and experience up front where it could do the most good. More importantly, he’d designed this op, so I wanted to let him play with his own toys.

“Walk heel-to-toe,” Wisdom whispered. “Keep your steps even and smooth. Watch for wires and things that could trip you or catch you.”

“Wires?” asked Bremer. “Who the hell would wire up the inside of a hotel?”

“I would,” answered Wisdom. “If I knew the government was coming after me, and especially if I didn’t want someone to do what we’re about to do.”

“If he’s infected, he won’t be thinking straight.”

“If....”

That was the hang-up. How did they determine he was infected just from an aerial photo? Everybody wanted to know. I’d only asked Tisdale if he was sure, but didn’t nail him down on how he was sure.

“So you saw him kill three people out in the open,” I’d said. “So far, the healthy have done even more damage here than the sick.”

He’d shrugged and said, “Captain, I need you to trust me on this. Locate him. Contact us.”

I even went back to the hospital with their guys when they made a pickup, so I could talk it over with Dr. Morenz. He said if this guy hadn’t communicated with his people since the start, then he was probably an early case. He could be as much as eight or nine weeks in, and Doc Morenz had become more convinced by the day that they never lasted much longer than that. The good news was that our guy’s brain had probably devolved down to the base instincts. Probably.

The bad news? He was probably delirious by now—probably—and if he still possessed even a little of his old training or instincts, then running into this guy would be like running face-first into a table saw.

Bremer, third in our line behind Wisdom and Koz, brought up the shotgun in case we needed something with a bit more “oomph” on the front row.

I followed him, forth in line, letting me see things while the others worked. I put Plunkett last, just to cover our rear.

Behind me, Plunkett actually waved at Santiago, whom I’d left in the car just to monitor the radio. At least Plunkett wasn’t nervous. Or maybe he was saying goodbye. The social cues seemed to change every day now.

I grabbed Bremer by the vest, slowing him up so I could step past him to Wisdom.

“Hurry up and get us out of the lobby,” I said. “We need to get into the halls.”

Wisdom leaped over the check-in counter and tapped at the computer to find the registry. Central had turned on the electricity for us, but we still had to wait while the system booted.

I grew anxious. “What room is he in?”

“No juice.”

“Breakers maybe... external lines... unless....” The rest of that thought—unless he doesn’t want the power on—was not something I wanted to consider at that moment. “Key box?” I pointed to the metal box just beneath the desk.

“Does it matter?”

“I got a feeling we’ll find him holed up. It’s his home base.”

Wisdom tilted his head toward me. “Meaning?”

“Meaning keep your head on a God-damned swivel. Look for anything that’s been moved. We take our position near the long hall that leads to the elevator and the individual rooms.”

Nothing had prepared us for what we found—not Tisdale, not Morenz, not even the smell that intensified as we closed on the halls. It was like the last night of the riots all over again, but this time pressed into a hotel hallway and smeared all over the floors. We had nowhere to run. I won’t tell you what we said or what I was thinking, but we all started breathing through our mouths—no one wanted to smell that, at least not more than once.

I knew right then that something was wrong. Seriously wrong.

The halls, once featureless tubes of endless doors, were now littered with blood stains and bodies that had been decomposing in the warm spring afternoons for at least a few days. It may sound callous, but despite the smell, a clinical detachment came over me. I didn’t see dead bodies; I saw a collection of evidence, strewn across the hotel rooms like a broken puzzle.

As we moved down the hallway, we found some of the doors open, revealing their own stark horrors, like an endless stream of haunted houses, each with a different theme, color, and smell—bodies in the doorways, in the beds, one on the toilet. Something had hit fast and hard and never cleaned up. The empty rooms appeared untouched. Almost all the ones that had signs of occupation had bodies—lots with headshots—but a few of the rooms didn’t fit the mold. Past one that seemed like something from a 1930’s horror movie, just black and white and unsettling, came one that looked like a campsite, with cooking utensils and fire ashes in a large steel salad bowl in the middle of the living room. The bodies in that one were fresher.

We found Navlin in a room on the second floor, in front of the bed. He was hog-tied with the straps off a luggage rack and dressed in all black—one of the porter’s uniforms, minus the hat. He had sandy brown hair, slicked over, was just on the tall side, about my age, with eyes that I’ll never forget, full of gratitude mixed with crazed laughter.

We freed him and got him seated with his back against the wall, and got him talking.

“He’s not like the others,” Navlin said.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“He’s not like the others,” he repeated. He spoke with a precise English accent, with just a hint of Eastern European. Each word seemed like it should be etched into the parchment of some Shakespearean play.

“Is he on this floor?” I felt ready to grab his collar and shake an answer out of him. “Is he close? Do you know if anyone else is alive?”

“He’s not like the others.”

“How,” Wisdom cut in. “How is he not like the others?”

The man would later introduce himself as Alistair Navlin, when he was far enough away from the place for introductions. He finally gave us the full story this afternoon, but that morning, he was just creepy as hell. It wasn’t the fear. We all got that.

That morning, when we finally got him to tell us about the SEAL, his voice changed. His whole posture changed. Suddenly, as if in church, he whispered, because that’s how you talk in the Lord’s house. Pious. The Dragon—that’s what he called the SEAL—was not like the others because he could see things the others couldn’t.

“What kind of things?” I asked.

“He knows what’s happening. He knows what this really is. None of this is a surprise for him. He knows you’re here.” He started nodding and grinning like a maniac. “Just like he knew about all the others that came. And he knew how long to let them stay and when to come for them.”

“Who tied you up? Did someone tie you up before he came for them?”

“He did. He tied me up. He made me do things.”

That was the last useful thing we got out of him, as he spent the next few minutes on a “he’s not like the others” loop.

We took him out and secured him in the van, and he almost shouted when we started back to the hotel, but I slapped a hand over his mouth.

“He made me do things.”

Just what we needed—a lunatic back at base—but I couldn’t leave him, and he spilled plenty when we got him out. The problem was that we didn’t get anything on scene. He didn’t even tell us what The Dragon looked like.

We had to find that out the hard way, which.... I’ll get to it.

When we got back up the second floor, the power came on, and every one of us froze in place. We talked about re-scouting the first floor. We actually talked about just calling it in without seeing him, and running. We were that freaked out. In the end, we decided to finish the initial clearance, and then do it all again backwards, out to the cars.

We found him on the third floor. We were maybe halfway down when Plunkett fired. We turned, and I saw the shadow but nothing more. It had a rifle, and knew how to move, but this one wasn’t making the amateur mistake of hugging the corner of the wall—he backed away from it.

He appeared just for an instant, kneeling, and got off a shot that took Plunkett in the vest. Plunkett’s trauma plate saved him, but he crashed back into me, and I hit Bremer, and Bremer fired into the ceiling, and I couldn’t hear a damn thing after that.

We were right next to a room with its door wide open. Maybe I should have thought about how strange that was, but when you’re catching fire, sometimes all you can think about is not getting shot. We ducked into the room.

Thank God Wisdom was first.

The rest of us nearly stepped over him because he took one step in, caught himself against the bathroom entry wall, and just posted up right there, one arm out like a kid playing London Bridge to the rest of us while we crashed inside.

I could see him yell at me, but I couldn’t hear it. Inside the room, I yelled back at Koz to get some fire pointed down that hallway.

Wisdom waved and I could see his mouth moving, but I couldn’t hear what I was saying, let alone what he was saying.

Koz leaned his gun out the door and fired blindly down the hall, right next to where Wisdom stood, and where the rest of us tried to catch our bearings.

Plunkett checked his chest as I pulled out the phone and pressed it.

I just kept yelling into it, “Third floor, main building! Third floor, main building!”

Bremer grabbed me and pointed to Wisdom as Koz was reloading.

I either heard the words, or my mind just finally connected the dots and figured out that he was yelling, “Pressure plate!” I gazed down where Wisdom’s feet were frozen in contact right in front of the door.

I yelled to Koz if he could still see the SEAL, but already knew he was gone. He didn’t want to be inside for the explosion.

When my hearing returned, I heard Wisdom yelling, “Tell him false alarm! Tell him it’s not the guy!” He pointed frantically at the phone.

I listened to it. The line was dead. I started to press it again.

“You have to tell him it’s not him. Don’t say he left. Don’t say we’re stuck. Say it wasn’t him. You have to say it wasn’t him!”

Everyone else was confused, but I caught his meaning. They didn’t care about us. If they thought he might be inside, they would blow this place sky high no matter where we were. I hoped he was wrong, but two seconds later, it didn’t matter. It was too late. We could hear the rotors.

They’d already been in the air, waiting for us. Third floor. Main building.

I yelled at the others to leave, over and over, and we found the brick of C4 wired under the sink, inside a drawer. Nothing fancy, just a single circuit device running to an explosive, all juiced up with a 9-volt battery. I’d seen the training bulletins and talked to some Army folks fresh from Afghanistan, but none of us was EOD. Not that it would have made a difference. We had seconds left. We pulled the drawer out and over to the door, and set it, gingerly, on the carpet next to Wisdom. Every one of us flinched, and when it didn’t explode, Koz and Bremer took off. Plunkett kept staring at us, eyes all panicky, so I got him to leave too.

The rotors were getting closer and the two of us were alone now.

Wisdom moved his foot. He might have left it in place and just died right there, except that I wouldn’t leave him. When he came off the plate, we had no time left—the choppers now boomed right overhead.

I looked at him, he looked at me, and we bolted for the windows letting in the morning light. The Casa Marina was old-timey, with lots of rooms that didn’t have balconies. This one didn’t, but it was right over a broad balcony-patio area on the second floor.  Wisdom threw a chair through the window, and I cleared the rest of the glass with the metal frame of my pistol.

We jumped. Both of us rolled to our feet, ran to the edge of the balcony, and jumped down to the poolside grass.

Two choppers moved away from us, flying out over the shore, setting up to turn around and take their shots.

I’d twisted my ankle with that last jump, and had to hobble like a wounded duck to the edge of the pool.

The sound of rockets sizzled the air.

I put my finger in my ears and fell forward into the water. I disappeared in an ugly splash and tried to get to the bottom. The water shook and pieces of the hotel slapped the pool’s surface. Chunks of debris started to settle all around us. The top of the water looked like it was on fire, and it took a moment to realize that it was just the burning fragments of building. The third-floor awning splashed down above us, covering us in shadow.

Wisdom took my arm, and made hand signals to say, ‘Watch me. Do what I do.’ Then he floated gently to the surface beneath the awning, pressed against it, raised his mouth out of the water, took a breath, and came back down.

I mimicked the move. The air was hot, but it was air.

We kept doing it, over and over, until it got quiet.

When we made it back to the gate, still dripping water out of our boots, we had to convince the guys that we weren’t ghosts or infected. Our Glocks still worked. Freaking Glocks! You could bake a Glock into an Apple pie, then pull it out in the middle of the jail and shoot everybody in the cell block. The phone was dead, and I was fine with that. The only injuries we’d sustained were my twisted ankle, and Plunkett had caught some shrapnel running from the lobby to the van.

After we got back, Wisdom plucked them out for him with a Leatherman tool, and Plunkett saved any tears for later. The group said one of the choppers hovered over our vehicles, and for a moment everybody thought they might shoot.

Thus ended our search and rescue.

We spent the last three hours taking a statement from the porter. This guy is seriously screwy about our killer SEAL. According to him, we’re all slow-cooking here, just waiting to die. He said we might as well dig our own graves right now. I asked him for a physical description, and he said we’ll know him if we ever get a good look, because this guy has been writing stuff all over his skin with a tattoo gun—even his face.

June 10

When we went back to the gates at the base, I got another package, but didn’t even open it. If Tisdale thought I would put the apple back on my head and go looking for his boy, he’d lost his damn mind.

Let him row ashore and do it.

I left it on the stand next my mattress And that’s where it sat, still in the package, when it began to ring.

I couldn’t resist. I tore it open and answered.

“Captain, don’t hang up. This is not Admiral Tisdale. I’m not going to tell you my name. It wouldn’t do you any good if you knew it.”

He sounded younger than Tisdale, his voice strong and confident—the kind you wanted to believe—but I still had my doubts.

“I was hoping you guys thought I was dead.”

“We saw you and your friend walking back to your compound.”

I shook my head in disgust. “Damn drones. All right, what do you want? What the hell time is it, anyway?”

“Just past 0300. I’m sorry about the hour, but I do think you’ll be interested in what I have to say.”

“Thrill me.”

“Gene Cauthron.”

“The SEAL.”

“Lieutenant Gene Cauthron, and he is simply the most dangerous man I ever met.”

“I saw a bit of that earlier. He’s kind of gone off of the reservation.”

“He has Bontrager’s, Captain.”

“I promise you, he does not. Nobody with his brain getting liquefied could have done what that guy did. He set us up, walked us right into a trap, and got us to take cover in a room where he’d rigged a pressure plate to a brick of C4 stuck up under the sink. He cut the carpet so carefully, you could barely see the seams. When we tripped it, he ran. Does that sound like a guy who can’t remember the day of the week to you?”

“I’m not a doctor, but I’m telling you I knew Gene Cauthron—knew him well. The man I knew would never kill an American citizen. He’d never kill anyone unless need or duty arose.”

“How about three floors full of hotel guests?”

He took a deep breath. “That’s why I’m calling. Whatever has happened to him has done nothing to diminish his abilities. I know you may not accept this, but you need to find him for us. You need to find him and tell us where he is, so that we... can neutralize him. I can’t say that it won’t be like today, or that you won’t find yourself in the line of fire again. If you locate him, you want to call it in and get far away. The upper brass wants him gone in the worst way. You would simply be collateral damage.”

“Yeah, I kind of got that impression. Well, Mr. Voice-In-The-Middle-Of-The-Night, I have some pretty spiffy ex-military guys of my own, so if you don’t mind, we may just handle this one ourselves.”

“That would be a mistake, Captain.”

“Oh, I figure two good, highly decorated ex soldier-boys, plus a few highly trained tactical guys, should equal one war hero.”

“We’re not talking about a war hero, Captain. Alvin York was a war hero. Chris Kyle was a war hero. Gene Cauthron is a god,” he said, and just breathed into the phone for the longest damn time. Finally, he said, “And as long as he’s still active, you and everyone on your island are in extreme danger.”

“Hey, wait... how do I get in touch with you?”

“You don’t. I’ll try to get back in touch with you if I have something that might help. Sleep light.” He clicked off.

Then I just lay there, thinking, and never went back to sleep.

I kept wondering if maybe his training, his discipline, and all that stuff he was writing all over his body, had made this Cauthron guy into something different.

Not just a psycho.

Something truly deadly.