camp with their night-vision goggles, ready for anything, working their way through the stink and fog.
But they could see no movement at all. No one was trying to run. No one was throwing up from the putrid cloud. No one was shooting or resisting them in any way.
Nolan gave out a loud, short whistle—the signal that the team should be wary of booby traps or an ambush. But as they moved cautiously into the camp, their weapons pointing in every direction at once, it was soon obvious there was no opposition.
They found the first pirate in the middle of the camp. He was lying face down near the huge bonfire, not far from where the stink bomb had hit.
But he hadn’t been shot, or burned or “stunk to death.”
His throat had been cut. Even stranger, his right ear had been cut off.
“We sure as hell didn’t do that.…” Twitch said through his gas mask.
They came upon four more pirates in front of a shack nearby. They, too, had had their throats slit, and one ear removed. Behind the shack were two more. Both had their necks sliced open, both were missing an ear.
It went on like this for the next five minutes. The team found groups of pirates in the shacks and in the jungle nearby. None had been shot or hit by ordnance. All of them had died from getting their throats slit. Each one had had an ear cut off.
This was totally baffling and bizarre. The Whiskey guys were all veterans of some of the heaviest missions of Delta Force. They rightly thought they’d seen it all.
But they’d never seen anything like this.
They moved down near the river that ran past the camp, and here they found the six men who’d run back to the encampment from the beach at the beginning of the attack. Their throats, too, had been slashed, and one ear had been removed from each of them. The blood from their hideous wounds was turning the river bright red.
The team finally stopped and had a muffled conversation through their gas masks.
“They’re all fucking dead?” Crash was yelling. “All of them?”
“Every one, so far,” Batman said. “And none of them went pretty.”
“But how?” Crash asked.
No one knew.…
“Are we going to get blamed for this?” Twitch wondered loudly.
Nolan just shook his aching head. Blamed? An odd choice of words, he thought.
They stayed together, checking each hut and finding many more bodies, all of them with their necks cut open, each with an ear sliced off.
Finally they reached the last shack—the one occupied by Captain Black himself. There were four pirates piled up near the entrance. All were dead from knife wounds to the throat, all missing one ear.
But one pirate inside was still alive. It was Black himself.
Crumpled in the far corner of the rickety structure, his throat was severely cut and his right ear was missing. He was bleeding heavily all over his white clothes, but somehow he was still breathing. They gathered around him. Medic kit in hand, Crash desperately tried to stem the flow of blood from his wounds, but couldn’t. He looked up at the others and just shook his head.
Black could barely speak, his words coming out in a bloody gurgle. Still, he tried.
“Are you blokes the cops?” he asked them weakly.
Still talking through his gas mask, Nolan yelled that they were part of the OAS.
“Never heard of you,” Black gurgled back.
Nolan knelt down beside the dying pirate. He had to know what transpired between the time the team first dropped the stink bomb and when they started the aborted attack on the camp, five minutes at the most.
“What happened here?” Nolan asked him. “Why is everyone dead?”
The pirate could only shake his head. “I don’t know, mon,” he replied with great difficulty. “We was drunk and high. Asleep. Passed out. Then, a stink bomb comes in. Weird screaming. I woke up, but I couldn’t see anything. And I couldn’t breathe because my fingers are on my nose.”
He coughed once, ejecting a small river of blood.
“Next thing I know, all my men around me are dead—and my own throat is cut, and my ear is gone. I didn’t see nobody. I didn’t hear nobody.”
Another cough, more blood.
“Ghosts,” Black struggled to say. “We were killed by ghosts.”
But Nolan didn’t believe him. He couldn’t. It didn’t make any sense. He believed Whiskey had actually stumbled upon some weird mass murder-suicide. It was the only rational explanation.