Border Dogs--A SEAL Team 666 Adventure Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  Mexican Border. Near Naco, Arizona. Past Midnight.

  Pablo and Rebecca Cruz had lived in Ciudad, Chihuahua, their entire lives. But after twelve years of marriage, they wanted to have a child. They wanted to pull themselves out of the abject living they’d endured, where even getting enough food to eat was a challenge. Pablo had finally earned his electrician’s rating and Rebecca was certified in nails and hair. They had jobs lined up in Phoenix with a friend of a cousin. Everything was set for a new life. All they had to do was get across the border.

  And they would have made it, too; the US Border Patrol was busy that evening, interdicting a suspected drug transport in Coronado Canyon. Everything should have been in place for a successful crossing and meet up with los coyotes at the Walmart in Sierra Vista.

  But instead, they were running for their lives, a dozen wounds in their legs, breathing ragged, terrified screams bursting from raw throats. Pablo had lost one of his boots and his foot was terribly lacerated, but he didn’t dare slow down. A beast was following them, playing with them. It could have killed them already. It could have done it in seconds. But it had been a long while since the beast had been allowed to hunt free. Too much time in a cage. Too much time with a human master. Now it was time to play.

  Finally the woman fell, tripping over a mesquite root on the edge of a natural clearing.

  The man could have kept running, but he stopped and placed himself between her and their pursuer.

  Now was the moment.

  The beast entered the clearing.

  When they saw it in full form, they screamed.

  The beast howled, then charged, then fed.

  Pablo and Rebecca Cruz never had a chance.

  Douglas, Arizona. Mexican-American Border Town. Morning.

  Laws sat at the long bar just off the lobby of the Gadsden Hotel. He kept his head down as he sipped his añejo tequila. His eyes occasionally drifted to the old school Budweiser and Negra Modelo signs, or the ancient bartender with the gold-rimmed teeth, but it wasn’t his sight he was using. He was listening, just like he’d been listening for five days now.

  A couple who’d crossed the border from Agua Prieta was arguing about money, the man content to drink what they’d saved instead of shopping in distant Tucson as planned.

  Another man complained about the ten years of drought to anyone who came along, but Laws had heard the tale enough to know that the man hadn’t farmed in twenty-five years.

  A forty-something woman squatted near the jukebox, trying desperately to make rent, usually giving charity sex to some forlorn spirit just so she’d have a night’s sleep in a hotel bed.

  Hundreds had passed through the bar in the last five days, but other than the American Patriot vigilante on the first day, not a single one interested him. Still, he waited and listened, sitting in a backwater bar, in a forgotten hotel, on the edge of a Mexican-American town that Oscar Wilde and Pancho Villa had once called home.

  The American Patriots had been extremely active in the southeastern corner of Cochise County. Not only had they placed static checkpoints along the border to interdict immigrants, but they were also promoting several members in local elections. While many saw them in operation, read newspaper reports, or saw them in brief television news clips and believed them to be patriots, Laws had seen enough classified briefings detailing their many foreign holdings and illegal activities to know that their real love was for money—any country’s money—and in this area, money came from smuggling.

  “Another?” mumbled the bartender.

  Senior Chief Tim Laws nodded and slid his empty shot glass to be refilled. He had enough tequila flowing through his veins that they could be set on fire. He knew that when this was all over, he’d have to run to hell and back to get it out of his system. Lieutenant Commander Holmes would make sure of that. When the bartender refilled his drink, Laws asked for an order of Lorenzo Beans. He had to repeat it three times, intentionally mangling his Spanish to pull off his lost-gringo routine. Consisting of sliced jalapeños, refried beans, and lard, the food kept his blood pumping and the alcohol flowing through his system. The old Mexican cure for a hangover worked better than twenty-first-century medicine.

  A Chinese couple paused at the entrance to the bar. They leaned in, taking in the sights and smells of something authentically desperate. The man said the place looked right out of a movie. The woman said that she didn’t like those sorts of movies and urged him to take her to the stairs where Pancho Villa once rode his horse so they could get a picture by the stuffed mountain lion. He assented nobly and they moved on.

  Laws surmised that a bar like this was a little too authentic for tourists keen on experiencing the Wild West. Tombstone, which was a mere thirty miles distant, with its reenactors, was more their style. They’d find it eventually, if they hadn’t already.

  Laws once again tuned his ears to Spanish, glad for the linguistic break. Last time he’d heard Chinese in any place other than a restaurant was back on mission with Team 1. Back before he’d joined DEVGRU and ultimately Triple Six, he’d found himself steeped in Southwest Asian missions. From counterdrug partnerships with the Thais, to taking down al-Qaida wannabes on Mindanao, they’d kept him busy. Of course, he didn’t know what busy was until he joined Triple Six. Since then, he’d been to every continent and seen more crazy shit than any platoon of men would experience in their entire lives. Like now. Here he was sitting in a piss-stinking border bar, attempting to arrange an accidental meeting with a nice group of Americans who had gotten their hands on something they weren’t supposed to.

  His cell buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out slowly, aware that other eyes were upon him. He read the warning message from the Team 666 leader telling him his targets were on their way. He read it once more, then shoved it violently back into his pocket.

  “Damn wife wants me to come home,” he said in English. “Can you believe that?” he asked, switching to Spanish. “Woman should know to keep to her business of making babies and cleaning house.”

  The bartender snorted.

  The prostitute by the jukebox rolled her eyes.

  Laws laughed drunkenly, his attention now on the door, waiting for his targets to finally arrive. They were right down the street, according to the message, and were due any second. When the steaming mass of beans arrived, he dove into them. He needed to sober up if he was going to get into some action. He was on his last bite when the door to the outside opened and three gringos wearing dark green American Patriot paramilitary uniforms and red, white, and blue cowboy hats strode in, like lawmen from the Old West.

  They plunked down at the bar next to him and ordered Budweisers with Jack Daniel’s chasers. When their drinks arrived, they tilted their cowboy hats, downed the shots, and drank back half their beers. They ordered another round before turning their attention on him.

  “What the hell you eating, boy?”

  “Lorenzo Beans,” Laws mumbled, his mouth a raging maelstrom of fire fro
m the jalapeños.

  “You American, boy?” one of them asked.

  Laws nodded, giving them the fish-eyed look he hoped would make him seem drunk. He chuckled, realizing that he didn’t necessarily need to pretend.

  “Then why the hell you eating and drinking this wetback shit?”

  Laws shrugged like an idiot. “Got no McDonald’s in this town, else I’d get a Happy Meal,” he slurred.

  The Patriot stared at him a moment, then broke in to raucous laughter. His friends joined him.

  After a few more shots, they asked Laws where he was from. He gave them his rehearsed story about a harried husband recently separated from the military and in need of a job. He opined about how all the good jobs, all the jobs he was qualified for, were held by immigrants. An hour later, after he’d switched to Coors, they offered him a ride back to their place, where they were going to have a “Great American Barbeque.”

  He accepted and as he left the bar and climbed into their king cab pickup truck, he saw the unmanned aerial vehicle circling high, like it was a real bird and not an RQ-11 Raven, monitored by the rest of SEAL Team 666, who’d been sitting on their hands and waiting for him to infiltrate the American Patriot compound for the past week.

  Border Patrol Substation. Douglas. Noon.

  The pictures weren’t pretty. Holmes had seen the human form destroyed in every fashion and there was no way worse than being eaten alive … which must have been what had happened to these seven men and one woman. He flipped through the photos once more, keying on the eight-by-ten high-resolution glossy of the woman. The autopsy said she was between twenty-five and forty, but that was indiscernible to him. Some pieces of skull were left. Muscle was attached to her spine in places. Her entire face, including the bone structure, had been removed by impossibly strong jaws. Her ribs were gone, as were her legs below her knees. Flesh still clung to her pelvis, but in ragged chunks. But he was looking at none of this as he pulled over the magnifier.

  “See this?” he said to Ruiz, who was standing next to him. “What kind of animal tracks do those look like to you?”

  “I’d say they’re panther tracks, only we don’t have panthers this far north.” Ruiz’s deep West Virginian drawl was juxtaposed with his Mexican ancestry to the point that when he spoke, some people thought he was messing with them. “Could be a black cougar. We have them in Kentucky and West Virginia, but I never seen them this far south.”

  A Border Patrol agent shook his head. “Look at the pads. These are five-toe pads. A panther, cougar, and mountain lion have four-toe pads. This isn’t them.”

  “You know what this is, right?” Fratolilio, Fratty to his friends, stepped between Ruiz and Holmes. He snatched a picture, glanced at it, then quickly put it down. “Nasty.” He shuddered as he put a few feet of distance between himself and the pictures. “I mean, come on, boss, aren’t you going to tell them?”

  “Tell us what?” A senior Border Patrol agent had come into the room in time to ask.

  Besides the SEALs Holmes, Ruiz, and Fratty, three Border Patrol agents waited in the Border Patrol substation in Douglas. The agents were eager to sit, while the SEALs kept on their feet. Holmes didn’t begrudge them a bit of rest. They’d just come from humping ground surveillance radar near the border, called in because each one had found a mutilated body. But when the senior agent strolled into the room, the dynamics instantly changed and the other three leaped to their feet, tucking brown shirts into brown pants. Holmes smiled, knowing that he and the other SEALs would have done the same had a senior officer strolled in when they were soaking up ass time.

  “Tell us what? That we got some fucking monster eating illegals on the border?” the senior agent asked, his Spanish accent heaviest when he said an ing word.

  Holmes let the pictures slide to the table and eyed the other agents. He shared a frown with Fratty for putting him on the spot. Not that he wasn’t allowed to release the information, he just wanted to do it on his own terms.

  “Bet you see some strange shit in the desert, Agent Garza.” Holmes edged his butt onto the desk and put his hands in his lap, opening his face and widening his eyes.

  Garza grinned, knowing what was being done, but couldn’t help himself. He found the edge of another desk and perched his own prodigious butt on it. He wiped his forehead, then wiped the sweat onto his pants, leaving a long dark streak. Cold air ticking from a window air conditioner broke the silence.

  “With you and your agents out here at night, there’s no telling the sort of things you’ve run in to.” Holmes watched as Ruiz and Fratty leaned against a wall.

  “It’s true. We see plenty of strange things in this desert. We see illegal aliens in places they shouldn’t be. We see strange lights in the sky that the government promises aren’t there. And we see big blond assholes filled with so much bullshit it comes out of their ears.” Garza had been grinning the entire time, but let it slip as he finished; the result was a hard stare at Holmes.

  Holmes recognized something in the senior agent he’d seen in every navy master chief. There was only so much wool one could pull over their eyes. There were only so many lies they’d take before their bullshit meter hit full. He allowed himself a chuckle.

  “You’re right, Garza. You got a fucking monster eating illegals. We can handle it. You’ve just got to make sure you keep these agents under wraps. It’s one thing that a few of Homeland Security’s best know about these things, but if the locals were to find out, all hell would break loose.”

  Garza waved a hand. “Don’t worry about my agents. They do what they’re told. If not, they find themselves pulling border duty in Alaska.” He turned to the agents. “Know what’s in Alaska?”

  “Polar bears,” one said.

  “Igloos,” another said.

  “Sarah Palin,” said the last one.

  Garza clapped his hands. “Exactly, and I don’t know which one scares me the most.” He turned to Holmes. “My men are okay. So, please, what do you have?”

  Holmes gestured for Garza and the others to come to the desk and look at the pictures. Ruiz held back, studying a map on the wall. Fratty made a phone call. “I know what you have by the damage done to the face. Nothing short of a wolverine or a bear could exert enough force to crush a face like this. The former is too small and there isn’t one of the latter large enough to do it unless we go to Alaska. Yeah, we know what it is. My concern is, why is it here?”

  “And what is it?”

  “Chupacabra.”

  The agents gave the SEAL an incredulous look.

  “Fratty, show them what we’re up against,” Holmes said, stepping back.

  Fratty took his place. He presented an iPad and pressed a button. A picture of a creature the size of a large dog appeared on the screen. It had massive front shoulders sloping back to rear legs. Dewclaws the size of dinner knives jutted from the back of its front legs. Its snout was shorter than a dog’s, more like a baboon’s, with more razor teeth than seemed possible. Its eyes were overly large, like a marsupial’s. Its ears shot straight to a point. A mound of fur encircled its neck. Its skin was loose, like a shar-pei’s. Holmes knew from seeing a pack of feral pit bulls attack a ’cabra that whatever supernatural evolutionary quirk had caused the animals to be created had provided the elastic skin as a defense mechanism.

  Fratty slid the next picture into place and it showed the same beast on its side, two SEALs in ballistic masks kneeling before it. The beast’s length was the height of a man. Seeing this, Garza let out a whistle. “Maybe Alaska isn’t so bad after all.”

  Lone Pine Trailer Park. Naco, Arizona. Dusk.

  Rosa hated the desert. Her husband had brought her out here from New Jersey thirty-four years ago. The first ten years, he’d promised her they’d return once he got his financial feet back on the ground. When he’d died of a heart attack eating pancakes at the local Denny’s, it had been the death of that dream. With no insurance and no savings, she was still paying for the doctor’s and
cemetery’s bills. If it wasn’t for her cats, she would have gone insane. In fact, it was her cats that gave her reason to go on living … all fifty-two of them.

  She’d never planned on having fifty-two cats. She’d started with two. But the thing about the desert is that the wind blew the most unexpected things into her life. First there were the cats, then for fifteen years a revolving door of handymen, who she often let stay until she became tired of them. Now, at seventy-three, she had little need for the men to stay over. In fact, other than an occasional repair of her swamp cooler or roof tiles, she hardly saw men at all, if you discounted the television.

  She pulled herself out of her overstuffed chair and snapped off the TV. The end of the day’s lineup of soaps meant it was time to feed her cats. It took almost an hour and was her only exercise. When a nice young woman from the Baptist church had come around to bring some food and commented that there were “too many felines,” Rosa had pointed out that it was these same felines who were probably keeping her alive. After all, her satellite dish was the center of her universe and she’d gladly while away the whole day in her chair, if it wasn’t for the fact she had other lives to consider.

  Outside, the heat hit her like a slap to the face. She glanced at the ugly border wall across the street and not forty feet from her front door, then turned toward the shed where she kept the cat food. She looked at the faded blue-and-white siding on her trailer and once again realized it was a race to see who died first. She desperately hoped the home would outlive her, because if it was the other way around, she didn’t know where she’d go.

  Rosa unlocked the shed, poured food in more than a dozen metal bowls, then stood back as the cats ran from all directions and attacked their meal. She leaned against the side of the shed, shaded by the overhang of the roof. As she watched and counted her cats, she lit a joint. She smoked it luxuriously, the one vice she still kept even after all these years.

  As she counted, she noticed a few cats were missing. She gave the border wall a cold stare, then began to trudge around the outside of her trailer. She didn’t bother trying to call to them. They were cats. Calling them was an exercise in futility. She ignored as best she could the trash that had blown against the back side of her home, noting that her neighbor was creating quite the prodigious stack of empty beer boxes.