“You got a bad feeling about this, Captain?” he asked.

“Don’t you?”

“Shit… I’ve had an itch between my shoulder blades since I got up this morning.”

“Keep one eye on the sky, too,” said Top. “We didn’t see any vehicles that don’t belong here. These jokers may have come by chopper.”

“I got me some SAMs if I need ’em,” Brick said. I really wished he had two good legs.

I said, “If you send anyone down after us, give ’em today’s recognition code.”

The day code was “bluebird” for challenge and “canary” for response. Anyone in DMS tactical who logged in after 2:00 A.M. would know it. Anyone we met down there who didn’t know it was likely to have a worse day than we were having.

We synched our watches and checked our gear. I gave them the nod.

Even with all the unknown waiting for us, it felt good to stop running and start hunting.

BUNNY TOOK POINT and he ran low and fast from the corner of the truck to the corner of the building while we covered him. Except for the whisper of his gum-rubber soles on the asphalt of the parking lot there was no sound. There was no wind at all, and the sun was behind us. Bunny hit the wall and crouched to cover Top as he ran in, and they covered front and back as I joined them. We couldn’t see Brick, but knowing that the cold black eye of the minigun was following us was a great comfort. Brick had the look of the kind of soldier who generally hit what he aimed at, and I doubt anyone ever caught him napping.

The door to the office stood ajar and we crouched down on either side and fed a fiber-optic camera in for a snoop. Nothing. Bunny checked for trip wires and booby traps and found nothing. We moved inside.

According to the intel Bug had provided there were four guards on each shift, two two-man teams made up of ex-military or ex-police. We found them right away, and right away we knew we’d just stepped into something bizarre and unbearably ugly.

The four guards had been killed, and there was a fifth man in a business suit. Sloane, the sales manager. Each had been shot repeatedly, but their bodies were in an indescribable condition. Legs and arms were broken and jerked out of their sockets, the victims’ heads were smashed, their faces brutally disfigured.

I couldn’t stop and stare; there was too much to do. We rushed deeper into the building and worked as a three-man team to clear each room, taking it in turns to be the one to open a door and step inside while the others provided high and low cross-fire cover. There were six rooms in the building. Mostly offices and a bathroom. Nothing else, and no one else.

We returned to the guardroom.

“Holy mother of God,” whispered Bunny.

Top and I moved into the room and checked the bodies. “Multiple gunshots, Cap’n,” he said. “Heavy-caliber hits.”

“How long?”

“These guys aren’t even cold. Maybe two hours, not more.”

I tapped his arm and pointed to the blood spatter on the floor and walls. There are three major categories for blood spatter: passive, projected, and transfer. In the first case the bloodstains are caused by gravity with blood dripping from wounds. Projected stains come from blood under pressure-say from a torn artery-or rapid movement, as with someone shaking blood off their fingers. Then there are transfer spatters where something covered in blood comes into contact with a surface. Footprints, fingerprints, that sort of thing.

We were seeing a little of everything, but it didn’t look right. There were spatter marks on the walls, but they didn’t have the tight grouping you see with arterial sprays. These were random, erratic.

Top watched me and then went through the process himself, calculating the amount and distribution of blood. Then he looked down at the broken bodies.

“This is some voodoo shit right here.”

“Talk to me.”

He kept his voice low. “Those patterns only make sense if someone shook blood off these boys. Like whipping water off a towel. Or threw these boys around. But… that’s wrong, ain’t it?”

I didn’t want to answer. “Top… look at the pools of blood under the bodies. Corpses don’t bleed unless there’s a wound under the body, in which case gravity will pull the blood down to the lowest point and then out through a wound. Not all of the blood, just whatever’s in that part of the body. You with me?”

He was right with me. “I think someone messed with these boys after they were dead.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Tore ’em up, threw ’em around.”

“Wait-what are you saying?” asked Bunny, who had come up behind us.

Top shook his head. “I don’t know… this looks like rage. Someone went apeshit here. Whoever did it was a strong motherfucker. I couldn’t do it. I doubt Farmboy here could.”

Bunny squatted down and picked up several shell casings. “Well, well, well… check this out.”

He showed us a steel-cased 7.62 × 39mm FMJ shell casing.

Top looked at it and then at me. “That’s a Russian short, Cap’n. Same thing we saw in Wilmington.”

Bunny turned to look at the bodies and then back to the casing. “Now, how the hell’s this stuff connected to Wilmington? And how the hell are the Russians involved?”

I was just reaching for my commlink when a bing-bing in my ear signaled a call from DMS command. It was Grace.

“This is a secure line, Joe. I have a situational update.”

“So do I, but let’s make it fast. We’re in the woods with the bears.”

“We’ve ID’d two of the four Russians who ambushed Echo Team in Wilmington. They’re ex-Spetsnaz.”

“Okay,” I said, “I’ll see your dead Spetsnaz and raise you a full hit team.” I told her about the shell casing and the dead guards. I described the blood spatter and the postmortem mutilations.

“Bloody hell.”

“What the hell are we into here, Grace?”

“I… don’t know.”

“Is there any whiff of official Russian involvement? Could this be something political?” Spetsnaz was a catchall label for Russian Special Forces and included operatives of the Federal Security Service, the Internal Troops of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, and units controlled by the GRU-their military intelligence service. After the USSR crumbled and the Russian economy collapsed, a lot of these soldiers were either discharged or they went AWOL. The Russia Mafia employed a lot of them worldwide, but they’ve also been recruited by private security companies for dirty work everywhere mercs were useful. Which is a lot of places in these times.

“I don’t think so, and in our current position we can’t call the State Department and ask. Mr. Church thinks the team in Wilmington were mercenaries. These may be part of one large team… but we have no idea who they’d be working for,” she said. “Any sign of Hack or Jigsaw?”

“No, but we’re still topside. We’re heading down now. We could use some backup.”

“I’ve none to give. We’re locked up tighter than a nun’s chastity.” She paused, then said, “Joe, if you wanted to abort the mission I’d back you.”

I did, but I wasn’t going to. She probably knew that.

“Jigsaw,” was all I had to say.

“Look, Joe… at the moment I care bugger all about protocol. If you run into anyone down there who isn’t DMS…” She let the rest hang.

“Roger that, Major.” I almost called her “Major Babe” but luckily my presence of mind hadn’t totally fled.

I clicked off and told the others about the Spetsnaz connection. I saw the information register, but it didn’t take the heart out of either of them. Even so, Bunny looked rattled by the condition of the corpses. His eyes kept straying to them and then darting away, then straying back. I knew what was going through his head. He understood killing, but the rest… that wasn’t soldiering. It had a primitive viciousness about it that was inhuman.

“Cap’n,” said Top from across the room. “Looks like the power’s still on in here. The elevator lights are green.”