The interior of the transport smelled like ozone and old sweat—warm metal and the faint, tinny tang of fear. Fluorescent strips hummed overhead as the four squads of Team Red Line sat strapped into their webbing, faces lit by tablet maps and the harsh noon light that leaked from the blast doors. The plane thrummed beneath them, a living thing waiting to be unleashed. Somewhere below, the island glinted like a cut in the blue skin of the ocean.
A gray-suited officer paced between rows, his silhouette small against the cavernous belly of the aircraft. He carried the quiet authority of people who issued death sentences and called it logistics. When he stopped, every eye in the cabin found him.
"Red Line," he said, voice flat, clipped. "You know what's happened. First team is gone. You're going in to recover survivors, secure the site, and neutralize—kill or contain—Jack. We're authorizing lethal force." He clicked a remote; the tablet screens flared, displaying a schematic: a roughly circular island, four landing vectors marked in red. "You'll approach from four quadrants. Alpha: North cliffs—breach and burn. Bravo: East groves—stealth insertion. Cinder: Central plateau—tech and containment. Reef: South inlet—amphibious sweep. Extract point is coordinates preloaded. You have three hours to secure a forward perimeter. If things escalate, you fall back to extraction grid Kilo-7."
He walked a slow semicircle, letting the words sink in. "Rules are simple: locate Jack. If he's viable for capture, take him. If he is not, remove the threat. Minimize collateral—if there are locals, your priority is containment and evacuation. This island is compromised. Expect environmental manipulation and adaptive threats. Trust your training. Trust your team."
Alpha's leader, a broad man nicknamed Hammer for the way he moved through obstacles, flexed gloved hands and checked the seals on his flamethrower pack. Across the aisle, Bravo's point, Shade, thumbed the edge of a compact black hood, eyes like a wolf's—calm, cold. Cinder's drone operator, Patch, stared at the schematics with a twitch of a hand that never stopped moving; his gear glowed with firmware updates and overconfidence. Reef's medic, Tide, pressed a palm to the window and swallowed the roll of ocean below, lips thin.
The officer stepped back to the cockpit hatch and threw one last look at them. "Comm silence until insertion. Earpieces open on my mark. Get in, do your job, get out."
The rear ramp dropped with a whining roar. Wind tore through the plane like a mouth. The island rushed up to meet them, a tapestry of green and shadow and the pale roofs clustered like teeth along the shore.
Alpha moved first. They clipped onto comm-harnesses, slammed their boots into stirrups, and listened to the wind narrate every second. Hammer gave a short, almost private nod, and then they pushed off the ramp. The cliff approach was violent—rock chewed at the air, the northern face unspooled under their descent. They cut the distance with practiced brutality, ropes uncoiling, anchors biting into stony dirt. Flames were taped and strapped, the smell of fuel a promise of clean endings. Hammer's voice was a calm metronome in the shared channel. "Breach on drop. Heavy. Keep eyes forward."
Bravo's insertion was theater in miniature. A narrow cable snaked from the aircraft, a whisper-line into the plantation canopy. Shade and his four moved like silhouettes stepping off a stage into midnight. They zipped in low, boots skimming leaves, a dark procession into a world that listened. Shade's earpiece, the smallest of radios, passed a single order: "Silent entry. Track. Report. No fireworks." He had the lightest pack but the heaviest hands—hands that could hold a man's life like a coin, toss it, and never look back.
Cinder's team disembarked from the belly in a staggered drop—magnetic boots clapping onto the plateau's metal scaffold. Patch's drone bay folded out like a living thing; drones whirred to life and lifted in obedient flocks, scanning, beaming raw feeds back to a helmet that glowed green. Cinder's role was control—containment fields, sonic dampers—and Patch's jaw worked a nervous index as the first interference rippled through the feed. "We'll pick it up," he murmured, and tried to make the screen a promise.
Reef came in last, engines puffing, a low-slung dinghy swinging under the plane. Tide and the amphibious unit hit the water first—the southern inlet was a slick of tar and morning mist. Their boots whispered on wet wood and mud; nets and floodlights were stowed like prayers. "Sweep the inlet. Hold the shoreline," Tide said, voice a thread of firmness over the hum. He checked his medkit like a man counting his pulse.
All four teams separated into the vector like a set of knives sheathing into flesh. For a moment, the island was a paused breath: green folds, silent houses, the far-off haze of surf. Then their feet met the world.
Alpha's ropes struck cold stone. A cliff gust barged at them, and Hammer anchored his men with the kind of rough hands that could straighten a broken spine. They ran the goat pens first—an ugly tangle of broken fences and silent pens. Tracks sank in mud like little accusations.
Bravo slipped through a banana grove where fruit hung like pale moons. Shade's eyes pulled out a pattern—a timeline of thefts, a map of nights. He found a gap in the leaves, a place where the earth had been turned like a page. He crouched and listened to everything—wind, insect, the faint tremor of unused power.
Patch's drones hummed and tripped across the plateau, bouncing signals that returned warped and whispering. One feed flickered—the camera showed a narrow street, a cluster of low houses with shutters drooping like eyelids. There was a smell on the feed that wouldn't translate to audio: something sweet and rotten.
Reef's boots sank into swamp mud and came away with dark strings of residue that clung to fabric. Near the inlet, something had dragged across the sand in a wide, slick arc. Tide knelt to examine it—there were tiny cuts, clusters of feathers, broken shells. The sound of his breath seemed loud in the close air.
Every team began to move inward, toward the island's heart and toward the town clustered like a bruise at the center. Their channels were trimmed: only necessary chatter, clipped updates. Each man carried weight he did not speak about—the knowledge of orders, the faces of the first team, the impossible words that had come from the station: kill or contain.
As they closed on the town, the sun sank a fraction. Shadows lengthened into fingers across shuttered windows. Somewhere, a chicken flapped and went still. A dog howled and stopped. The island's silence was not emptiness; it was a waiting thing, thick and patient as a mouth.
Alpha's lead checked his line one last time and reached for the door of the largest building—brick shoulder blackened by vines. Bravo's Shade moved to a window, seeing-sight like a blade. Patch's drone tilted, feeding a narrow, dust-choked corridor into their goggles. Tide set a hand on the boardwalk, feeling the damp give beneath his boots like a warning.
On the radio, a single voice—flat, mechanical—cut through: "Teams inserted. Proceed to sweep. Locate survivors. Locate Jack. Contain."
They moved as four, separate and converging, into a town that wore its rot like a crown. None of them knew yet how quickly the floor would break from beneath them, how fast silence would turn to blood, or what they would find behind the eyes of their fallen. None of them knew, either, that where they were walking was already alive with something that thought like a mouth and breathed like roots.
They stepped into the building.