The Socotra Incident by Richard Fox Page B

the brass casings; it was for a 7.62mm bullet, larger than the 5.56mm rounds the SCARs fired. The casing held the faint smell of cordite; it had been fired in the past few hours. A smear of stained blood ran against the side of a door guarded by a SEAL who pointed the way for Ritter.
    The smell hit him first: the heavy iron of spilled blood and the unmistakable smell of human feces.
    Devereux was inside the hold, his hands on his hips, as he stared at two bodies chained to the ceiling. The SEAL commander stepped aside and held out a hand to present the corpses to Ritter.
    Both the dead were Somalis; emaciated bodies dangled from the chains wrapped around their wrists. Strips of skin, as wide as a knuckle, cut from their collarbones to their waists dangled in the air, bloody ribbons swaying above the pools of blood beneath each body. Ribs, lungs, and raw muscle glistened from the open results of the vivisection.
    They’d been slowly tortured with no intention of letting them survive the experience.
    “That’s…unexpected,” Ritter said.
    “‘Unexpected’? Lots of that going around. I thought we were here to get some shit head, not wander around a Rob Zombie movie set.” Devereux nudged one of the hanging bodies with the butt of his rifle. It swung with a clatter of chain links, chin wobbling against its chest.
    “Any sign of the package?” Ritter asked.
    Fitz rapped his fingers against the double-wide hatch in the center of the hold. “Only place we haven’t checked is right here.” The handle was chained shut; a dead bolt lock, the size of Ritter’s palm, was in the center of the links.
    Fitz hefted a bolt cutter and maneuvered the blades onto the lock.
    “You have an explanation for this?” Devereux asked.
    “Someone beat us here,” Ritter said.
    “And who is that ‘someone’?”
    “Someone who shouldn’t have had a problem getting past that door,” Ritter said.
    The shorn lock fell to the deck with a clang, and another SEAL pulled the chains from the door. They opened it to expose a liver of darkness into the room; and Fitz, the bomb tech, slid a camera lens, the width of a straw, into the opening.
    A green-scale night vision picture of the interior flashed onto a handheld screen; a bulky object lay inside, indistinct. Fitz took a device that looked like a laser pointer and ran the tip along the opening; a green light on the device remained lit.
    “No trip wires,” Fitz said and opened the door, the hinges creaking until it thumbed against the wall.
    They’d found a bomb, but not the nuke that was supposed to be onboard.
    Stacks of rods wrapped in wax paper filled the room; brightly colored wires led into blasting caps sticking from the gray putty in the rods and from bricks labeled wabox .
    Wires led into a green plastic box in the center of the explosives; three green lights on the box were lit, and a forth light lay dormant.
    “Well, ain’t this some shit?” Fitz said. He lifted a hard case, the size of his forearm, and pulled a metal probe from it.
    “Fitz,” Devereux growled.
    “Let’s see what we’re dealing with, sir,” Fitz said as he pierced the wax paper around one of the tubes.
    “Recall the birds. I’m aborting the mission,” Devereux said into the mike over his lips. “You got a problem with that?” he asked Ritter.
    Ritter shook his head. If the nuke wasn’t here, then where was it?
    “Ahura detector says it’s pure TNT. These are commercial-grade explosives, not the homemade stuff we normally see, sir,” Fitz said as he consulted the readout on the device.
    “Can you disarm it?” Ritter asked.
    “I’m not going to touch the control box without an x-ray, and we left that on the Reagan . Who knows what kind of anti-tamper triggers they’ve got in there,” Fitz said.
    “Spook One, Two needs you on the bridge,” said a voice on his radio.
    “Ten minutes until extraction,” Devereaux said.
    Ritter nodded and left the hold.
    He found Mike in the galley, sitting