Excerpt from The Devil's Caldera

Passe-du-Diable
The Pyrrennee Mountains near the French-Spanish Border
Captain Bernard LaChasse never expected his patrol to be caught in this storm. After all, it wasn't one of those trial and error fishing expeditions. There was supposed to be solid intelligence. The terrorists crossing into France were to be met just outside Passe-Du-Diable by their French counterparts. Bernard had orders to intercept, capture or kill, and not necessarily in that order. Superbly trained and handpicked from the ranks of Special Operations Commandos, his men were veterans skilled in mountain warfare.
Howling gales drove horizontal sheets of snow and ice droplets that hissed ferociously as they pinned the chemically heated suit against every fold of Bernard's body, sandblasting the H&K-P19 light machine pistol slung around his shoulders. It felt as if he struggled in a field of gray fog, the barrel of his weapon deflected slightly down, ready to traverse upward to killing fields. NVG's (Night Vision Goggles) were useless in this storm, and the infrared heat sensor marginally better. Red and purple blobs danced in the UV window of his goggles, representing Corporal Ladron and Private Benoit on either side of him. They advanced in V formation spread one hundred meters wide at the opening of the V and moving forward like a deadly maw to ensnare the terrorist killers that intelligence declared would be there. A French Air Force surveillance plane packed with electronic gear monitored the operation. Each soldier wore a locator transmitting a constant signal to the aircraft circling unseen above.
"Moulon one," the voice in his earplug said, clear and low, riding the bone structure of his skull so no sound wave leaked, "you're about a hundred and fifty meters from the Joffre Precipice. You're starting to get strung out. Wheel to your left twenty two degree West to the ambush site,"
"Copy that, Eagleye. Ladron, did you hear that? Twenty Two degrees west, one hundred and ten meters."
"That's close enough for me Lieutenant. Make sure I don't fall off that cliff, can't see shit here."
"Don't worry mon vieux, I'll keep you as safe as walking the vignes back home," replied Bernard.
Ladron hailed from a village near Bernard's hometown of Libourne in the heart of the Bordeaux wine region.
"Hey Lieutenant," came the voice of Private Benois to his immediate left, "if he does fall off the cliff, that means I become point and I get the beefsteak-frites dinner you offered, right?"
Before Bernard could reply, another voice came on the net.
"Attention. There's something out there. Directly to my twelve o'clock." Sergeant Berthon, point guide on the opposite side of the V, cut in.
Immediately the seven men squad hit the ground, weapons deployed. No command had been given as training took over like primitive war instincts. Each man became an invisible mound, white on white in the howling subzero gale. They held a deadly array of force, the most effective infantry weapons devised in that year of 2016.
"There... there, it's in front of me now... what the hell is it... Lieutenant..." The radio voice of the soldier directly below Sergeant Berthon immediately cut off by a deep sustained rumble, the tearing growl of an automatic weapon firing a storm of inch-long explosive flechettes.
"What the fuck is that?" Sergeant Berthon's voice exploded in Bernard's earphone, "It can't move that fast... it's changing, look... look..."
Muffled, thumping explosions sounded to Bernard's right, followed by more to his left as the men detonated the "Perimeter Sweepers," modernized versions of the old American Claymore mines. More automatic weapons growled, this time on either sides and forward of Bernard as the men on both flanks of the V opened fire.
Warnings, screams and curses poured into the headset followed by howls of pain, every note tinged with bloody primitive fear. Still Bernard saw nothing. He stood, weapon at ready, advancing into whatever attacked his men.
"Eagleye, Eagleye, Moulon One, we're under attack, I have nothing visible and no heat signatures..."
Bernard's voice was cut off by another scream, choked by the gurgling noise of death.
"No... No..." it was Benoit to his left now, screaming as two more explosions came, fast and heavy, intermingled with hundreds of rounds of automatic weapon fire. The violence of the storm absorbed the noise as the concussion waves of the explosives rode the terrible wind. The sound of his men dying around him drove Bernard out as he ran toward Benoit, the closest to his left.
"Moulon one," came the voice from the surveillance aircraft four thousand feet overhead, "there's nothing, repeat nothing. We're picking up some movement from the sensors but no heat signatures and no laser sightings, nothing but your weapons firing. Repeat; We see nothing there. What do you have?"
Bernard didn't reply as he ran toward Benoit's dying scream. A shape loomed in front of him, shifting, imprecise and vacuous as blowing smoke clouds. Suddenly a crumpled mass came into view on the ground in front of him: Benoit, facemask and goggles torn away along with the bottom half of his face. Eyes open wide in unspeakable terror, intestines red and gray spilled in the driving snow, already partly covered in white like a morgue sheet, satiny red spreading, wisps of steam from the claw mark that had torn him from gullet to groin, swept away in the artic gale.
The voice from the aircraft continued, "Nothing, we pick up nothing... what's going on down there..." the voice droned on as Bernard ran to his left, toward Ladron. He fired at shapes that shifted and swirled like phantoms but never came close as he heard Ladron scream.
"Lieutenant, the Garridon, oh God, no, the Garridon..." The voice ended in a high pitched scream, unspeakable pain and terror rising until it seemed beyond any human vocal chords.
Bernard continued to run toward Ladron to his left, unheeding the voice from the aircraft droning in his ear set.
"Moulon One. Stop. You're the only one moving now. Stop, you're near the Jouffre precipice. What's happening down there... we have nothing, repeat, nothing..."
He ran farther, screaming to his men as if the throat mike and radio didn't exist, as if he could save them all by sheer volume. He tasted bile and ashes as he inhaled the chemical coated smell of the suit fabric, adrenaline and fear pouring out through his sweat. The calm droning voice of the operator in the aircraft continued like a counterpoint to the death screams of his squad.
"Shut up, shut the fuck up," he screamed at the unseen operator. He scanned the few feet of terrain in front of him before it vanished in swirling frozen white clouds. Left to right, center, right to left. Nothing. He thumbed a lever on the machine pistol and a three round magazine popped into the small grenade launcher barrel beneath the weapon. He slowed to a fast walk, scanning over the gun-barrel.
Something darker then the driving snow turned and moved, formed and reshaped. He fired, the small popping noise, torn away by the wind. A second later came the red flash of the exploding grenade as white-hot shards expanded in a lethal thirty-yard circle. He fired bursts of flechettes from the machine pistol as shapes danced around him and nothing showed in the heat sensors. Whatever was out there was so ethereal it emitted no heat signature.
Yet it disemboweled men – well-trained, armed and deadly men.
Bernard sensed movement from the corner of his eye. He whirled, running backward as he fired. The grenade exploded, barely out of reach. He ran back when the figure came into full view.
He felt his bowels heave as mindless terror overcame him. He was no longer the fearless warrior, the macho commando squad leader. He suddenly became the little boy sitting on his grandmother's knee beside the flowing Gironde River as night fell and she spun the folk tales of the Garridon, tales born from primeval terrors of ancient times when magic, death and sorcery ruled the world.
His finger tightened on the trigger and the weapon sent a long burst of deadly flechettes into the screaming wind. It was more a reflex then a defense as he stumbled back against the figure approaching at impossible speed.
The ground gave way under his feet and the world turned into a quilt of swirling white as the ledge he stood on broke away, and fell into the Jouffre Precipice.
* * *
Four months later
Somewhere off Highway 4
Everglades, Florida, USA.
The fourth man had to die. It was simple as that. The first and second didn't have to, although they did, but the fourth man, he had to die.
It'd been a day hot as the breath of Hades, under a sky blue like English porcelain, the sun an incandescent cinder near the horizon, trying to singe the dark vegetation outlined on the horizon, just at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico. The air smelled late-summer rank, bringing the particular stink of drying mud flats and effluvial streams, and the carcass of a deer rotting at the edge of the road.
An eighteen-wheeler geared down as it approached the solitary curve just a mile before Alligator Alley, the road that ran straight as a longitude line, bisecting the state of Florida all the way to Interstate 95 on the East Coast. The truck passed the curve, picked up again and vanished, trailed by a few cars that had missed their chance at passing, except for one car, a vintage seventies Dodge Charger, blue, the paint dotted with oxidized spots, the kind of stuff that didn't happen anymore on modern, sterile and bug-like autos dotting today's highways. An air scoop stuck out of the hood, hooked up to a big Hemi engine from the era of sixty-five cents a gallon gas. The Charger looked like a throwback, something that'd lost its way from another time, oversize, ravenous and worn. It gave you that impression... at first glance.
But first impressions aren't always correct. A closer look revealed a well-tuned engine refitted to NASCAR standards and a chassis where corrosion appeared as infrequently as larceny in a Jesuit. Equally deceiving, the interior held some quirks of its own, front seat upholstered to exact standards, digital state of the art gauges and controls, but the rear passenger area told a special tale, one that reflected on the sometimes violent occupation of its owner, a vocation that he and his partner performed with consummate skills.
The Charger coasted into an area that had once been a parking lot. The place wasn't visible from the road, wedged like a toothache in the encroaching vegetation. A sign that looked homemade hung at a nearly ninety degree angle, one of its posts having been torn out of the ground when a drunk slammed into it a few years back. Weather beaten to a bleached white, you had to get close to read the faded letters: Gator's Place.
The parking lot itself was an odd mixture of crushed oyster shells, dirt, gravel, broken beer bottles, cans, and paper debris, all covered with a patina of dried mud and salt when the vast waters of the Everglades had overrun the area during the last hurricane. The building itself wasn't much more than some extended shack, as if it'd been cobbled out of leftover construction materials from a looted site, thrown together best as possible and opened for business too quickly. It'd been the kind of place where patrons fought outside with knives and broken bottles, a refuge of men and the occasional women steeped in alcohol, sprinkled with drugs easily found in South Florida, a place for those who'd missed a rung on the ladder, not quite making the twelve-steps and rarely staying on the wagon. In most cases, such establishments didn't last too long and Gator's Place was no exception. Boarded up, penetrated uncountable times by squatters, set on fire once and defecated on often, its remains stood like a rotted tooth that didn't quite hurt enough to yank out.
Long shadows darkened the area as the sun passed below the horizon. Thick mangrove lined the edges, belying the presence of nearby water linked to the great swamp. It was nearly dark, but the driver of the Charger didn't turn on the lights as he rounded the building. The kind of business he needed to conduct was best done in darkness.
The Charger glided around the building, its engine muffled to a nearly inaudible growl, the tires susurrating against the ground with only the occasional pop from a crushed oyster shell. It didn't have far to go as the driver pulled behind a silver Mercedes Benz.
The driver stopped the Charger and got out of the car smooth as quicksilver. Standing a shade over six feet tall, he wore a dark tee shirt hanging a few inches past the waist, over jeans that held particular items at the belt. The body was lean with muscles hard as steel cables, the kind of built not developed for shows, but the result of a lifetime devotion to martial arts. His blonde hair, and fair, pleasant features, clean-shaven except for a geometrically trimmed soul patch, indicated some sort of Viking ancestry - Another case of wrong impressions, for he was actually Jewish and from Brooklyn. His name was Israel Iskewitz, but only his partner and girlfriend knew that, to everyone he was just Ike.
As he got out of the car, he saw four men. Two stood on either side of him, the one on the right wearing a tank top, arms heavy with muscles and gang tattoos like red strings burned into brown skin. A long scar ran across his face, past a nose that had once been broken and never properly reset. His face was pockmarked and the eyes brutish and feral. The other man was whip-thin, with slicked back oily hair, short and wiry. His eyes burned, the light in them fierce and electric. Two small teardrop tattoos ran from the corner of one eye, the mark of EME, a Mexican Mafia symbol of jailhouse murders. An aura of violence hung about those two like dirty ground fog. The third man stood well behind the first two. He wore a sharkskin suit, jewelry flashed under an open silk shirt. He looked at the driver who'd just got out of the Charger, his eyes hooded and dark in the murky light, and when he spoke his voice carried inflections of the distant Urals and the mountains of Chenchnya.
"You are Ike, da?" He said to the man from the Charger, the tone neutral, bored.
Ike said nothing. The big guy to his right grinned at him, and pulled heavy brass knuckles from his pocket and slipped them over his right hand.
"You still got a chance to get out of this," the man in the sharkskin suit said. "It's because of your partner Francois I give you this chance."
"Not without him," Ike said, nodding toward the fourth man.
The man in the sharkskin suit shrugged, nodded at the thin man to Ike's left. The man pulled a gravity knife, flicked it down and it opened with a muted click. He moved on Ike, his stride easy, center of gravity low, knife held to the side, the mark of an experienced knife fighter, one who played for keeps. To Ike's right the big man with the brass knuckles also moved in.
Although instincts may tend to belie it, geometry is paramount in personal combat against multiple opponents. Ike whirled to the knife man's right who crouched, blade ready. But with that one simple maneuver, the battle scene had changed. Whereas Ike had been between the two men, vulnerable, he now stood directly to the knife wielder's right with mister Brass Knuckles aligned directly behind him. For maybe an entire second or two it was one on one, and that's all Ike needed.
In a movement so fast it rendered the knife man to slow motion status, Ike whipped the blackjack from its quick release place on his belt. Eight inches of rubber hose, thin for flexibility, stuffed full of steel ball bearings for bone crunching hardness, Ike brought it smashing into the forearm that held the knife, shattering the bone as the knife flew away. One blazing sweep kick sent him horizontal to crash down into a fetal position as blood pumped around jagged splinters of bone protruding through the shattered forearm.
Brass knuckles stumbled over his fallen partner's leg, recovered and started a swing at Ike's head.
Ike dodged, whirled and caught the man with a snapping sidekick that could have shattered a brick wall. Both of the big man's feet came off the ground as his body flew back a couple of feet to land, collapsed like dead meat.
That was the only diversion the man in the sharkskin suit needed. If he'd expected a different outcome he didn't show it. He pulled a black automatic from his pocket and fired three shots into the fourth man who was tied to a skinny Royal Palm tree with bailing wire.
The fourth man had to die.
Now sharkskin suit whirled and fired two more shots at Ike.
Ike dove to the side, pulled out his own Glock Nine. By that time the man had jumped in the Mercedes and slammed the door shut. The engine had been left running. He jammed the gearshift in drive and floored the accelerator.
Ike stood and fired four shots at the car. Hollow point bullets ricochet off the windshield, kicking off sparks, pinging and whining, but not even leaving a single star in the glass. Bulletproof, obviously a special kind of vehicle.
Ike rolled off to the side as the Mercedes leaped at him, then corrected. Two soggy plunks sounded over the whine of the engine as the big German sedan ran over the bodies of the men Ike had taken down. So much for the hired help, Ike thought, a unique retirement plan, one that he'd seen before.
Ike looked at the fourth man, not recognizing him. Three steel-jacketed large caliber rounds directly in the face from less than three feet away will do that to you.
Now Ike muttered a curse, leaped into his car and went after the Mercedes. Wide tires bit into the hardscrabble, throwing a spray of sand and debris over the three corpses, whipped around the defunct building on two wheels and hit Highway 4.
But Ike had a problem: Gator's Place sat on the apex of a curve on Highway 4 and Ike hadn't been able to follow closely enough to determine if the Mercedes headed north, toward Fort Meyers and Naples, or toward the more desolate south, more roads running through empty swamps and sparsely populated Everglades City. He didn't pause, slammed the wheel to the right, south. No time to debate, one choice was as good as another.
Dodge Charger, 450 turbo charged horsepower against Mercedes Benz's finest, no doubt also tricked out. Ike knew he'd take it, but it would be close and he couldn't narrow the gap fast enough. By the time he reached the intersection of Highway One he hadn't even caught a wink of taillight. Right, left, straight ahead, the odds rocketed down. He chose right.
Twenty-two miles later he gave up. The dices hadn't rolled his way. The fourth man had died and he didn't even get to find out why.