Operation: Loch Ness

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The remains — a mélange of blood, guts, shattered bone, and fur — were strewn over a 10-yard circle on the rocks above the diving pool, but it was clear that other parts were noticeable by their absence. The head lay with an astonished expression on its face, looking up from where it was wedged in a rocky hollow, but there was no sign of one foreleg, one rear leg, and many of the internal organs.

“Where’s the rest of it?” Captain John Banks asked.

The man at his side didn’t look up from the carnage, and when he spoke it was dully, as if all emotion had been drained from him.

“What you see is what we found this morning. As for the other half… I have no idea.”

Banks was also at a loss to explain it. Outside of a battle zone, he hadn’t seen such bloody destruction of a body, man nor animal. It wasn’t something you ever expected to come across in a quiet spot in the Scottish Highlands.

“A pack of dogs, maybe?” he said, mostly to himself.

“Give over, Cap,” Wiggins said behind him. “What kind of mad dog could do a thing like that? We’re no’ in Siberia now.”

Banks stood over the torn mess of strewn body parts that was all that remained of a male polar bear, trying not to think of the size, or savagery, of the beast that had killed the poor, zoo-tamed thing. Wiggins was right though, they weren’t in Siberia, although this particular Highland Wildlife Park in Inverness-shire had several animals that wouldn’t have been too far out of place back there in that strange, cursed zoo. The Kincraig facility prided itself on housing a collection of Scottish animals, both those that still roamed the countryside, and those that had in times past.

At least it had had the animals, until the events of the previous night.

“The local coppers are at a loss, and asked if we could shed any light on a problem they are having,” the colonel had said when he called Banks in that morning back at base in Lossiemouth. “You S-squad chaps are the nearest thing we have to experts in this kind of weird shite. So head on down, have a reccy, and see if anything makes any sense to you. You have no jurisdiction of course, and I don’t expect you to do anything but see what’s what and offer any guidance you think it requires. Just don’t go tooled up, and try to play nice with the locals. This is a PR exercise as much as anything.”

“So what kind of weird shite are we talking about this time, exactly?” Banks had asked.

“The dead and mutilated animal kind,” the colonel had said, “down at Kincraig in the Wildlife Park. Something got in among the exhibits. It’s a bit of a bloody mess by all accounts.”

Banks had had a sinking feeling in his gut even before he left his superior’s office, and it had persisted while he got the team together, and was still troubling him all the way down the road in the SUV.

The four of them, the regular squad of Banks, Hynd, McCally, and Wiggins, had spent the hour-long drive down mostly in silence, it being still early, without a chance of any coffee or breakfast, and none of them yet fully awake. Wiggins had even fallen asleep in the back, his snores louder than the roll of tires on roadway, and he only woke as they turned off the road and into the park.

They went through a gate that was opened for them by a surly chap with no manners and fewer words, then went up a rough track across some rugged moorland. Even here, it was obvious something was far wrong. Small groups of park workers stood around areas where the boggy grassland, dry and browning this late in the year, was smeared red across large swathes.

The park manager, a wiry middle-aged man who looked as if he might blow away in a strong wind, white-faced and red around the eyes where he’d been crying, met them in the car park and led them north up a rocky track to the main animal enclosures.

“The worst of it is up here,” he said.

Banks looked to their left, where a tall fenced-off area enclosed what had been a lynx cage. The animal itself lay in half a dozen different parts, all strewn across the tall sleeping platform that overlooked the caged area. One whole side of the cage had been torn off and thrown aside, a mangled rectangle of metal, mesh, and cabling, as much destroyed as the animal it had failed to protect. Some of the beast’s guts hung like rows of drying sausages from a branch of a pine tree some 15 feet off the ground.

“Bloody hell,” Wiggins muttered. “If that’s no’ the worst of it, I don’t think I want to see what is.”

“Trust me, you don’t,” the park manager said, and the sinking feeling in Banks’ gut got noticeably worse.

Now they were here, looking down at the gutted and partially skinned shell of what had been left of the bear, and Banks’ gut was rolling on double time.

This is going to be a bad one.

The park manager, he’d introduced himself as David Lang, had hardly spoken since their arrival, and now seemed close to tears again, having to turn away from the corpse of the bear. Banks went to his side.

“Okay, there’s this, and the lynx that we saw, and whatever else was out on the hill on the way in,” he said. “What was the total damage?”

“We lost the bear, the lynx, eight red deer, three bison, and six caribou,” Lang said dully, as if it was something he had set to memory in the hope of never having to think about it if asked to repeat it.

“Anything else?”

Lang sobbed.

“Is that not enough?”

“What else do you have here?”

“A shitload more deer and bison, some horses, a pair of brown bears, four Siberian tigers, a pack of a dozen wolves, boar, otters, beavers, and a whole load of small animals and birds, waterfowl, and raptors.”

“And they’re all okay?”

“The whole place is as jittery as a groom at a shotgun wedding,” Lang said. “But the ones that didn’t escape are alive. What the fuck happened to these here though?”

“I was hoping you would tell me,” Banks replied. “Did anybody see or hear anything?”

“The night watchman was in his wee hut at the gates. He heard the wolves first, in the early hours, howling and barking, but that’s not unusual when one of them’s in heat. Then he heard the polar bear. He said it sounded like it had got a red-hot poker up its arse — his words, not mine. He took maybe 30 seconds getting his shotgun and loading it, and legged it up here, but by the time he arrived, it was like you see it now. If you look closely among the parts, you’ll see where he lost his supper.”

“He didn’t see anything else? Any intruders?”

“You think people did this? What kind of people could do such a thing?”

Banks didn’t reply. He knew exactly what kind of people would be capable; he’d faced many of them down the barrel of a gun in years gone by. But this didn’t have the feel of fanaticism. This definitely looked like the work of another animal but he didn’t have enough info yet to make a guess as to what.

“Any idea how whatever did it got in?” he asked.

“That’s the easy bit. Come away over here and I’ll show you.”

They followed Lang down a slope. The wolf pen on their left intersected with a taller barrier out into a more open part of the park beyond. A long stretch of the wire-mesh fence was flattened, and several of the iron uprights were bent in bow-shaped curves.

“Bloody hell, Cap,” Wiggins said at Banks’ side. “I don’t want to be messing with whatever did that.”

Bank didn’t reply. He crouched on his haunches, studying the ground, looking for tracks, but the whole area was so wet and churned it was hard to tell what might have destroyed the fence.

Banks waved over the open ground.

“All of this ground in front of us is part of the park?”

“Aye,” Lang said. “Or it was. There’s another fence over to the north with a hole in it as big as this. And all the rest of the bloody deer and bison that were in this enclosure have fucked off and away through it. It’s going to take days to round all the buggers up — if it’s even possible.”

“Did any of your predators escape?”

“Thankfully, no. The last thing the people of Kingussie need is to pop out for a fag and meet a Siberian tiger on their driveway or a pack of wolves at the chippie.”

“Just another Saturday night in town,” Wiggins said, then went quiet when Banks gave him a look to remind him they were on the clock.

“This other hole? How far is it?”

“Almost a mile away across the moor,” Lang said. “There’s nothing to see you haven’t seen here. But if you need to see it, you can get your van along the track, just turn left up the hill outside the car park. It’s usually open for the public to drive ‘round. We’re lucky this happened late in the season; we’re going to be shut for weeks dealing with this shite.”

“Okay, lads,” Banks said. “Back to the van. Let’s see what there is to see over there.”

Lang didn’t want to go with them; Banks saw it in his eyes. He guessed that it would be because there were more dead beasts to be found in the open area, and that guess was proved right five minutes later as Wiggins drove the four of them along the rutted track that circumnavigated the open area of the park.

The hole in the fence to the north was immediately obvious, as were the corpses of more slaughtered beasts scattered around the new opening. They were unidentifiable until Banks got out of the SUV and stepped up close. What had once been deer were identifiable only by antlers or ears and the distinctive red hair. Similarly, a huge hairy head and wide horns told him there had been a bison killed here. But the meat had been stripped, almost surgically, from the bones and there was little left but bloody skeletons and heads.

“Fuck me, Cap,” Hynd said. “Something was hungry. What are we into this time?”

“I don’t know, Sarge,” Banks replied. “But whatever it was, it went this way. Let’s take a wee shufti through the fence and see if there’s anything else to see.”

The colonel had told them not to go out in public tooled up, and Banks had obeyed him that far. But heading across rough ground wasn’t public, and he’d feel a lot safer with a gun in his hand, especially if there was still a hungry beastie in the area.

“Cally, get the boot open and let’s get at the pistols. If we’re going hunting, we need something to shoot with.”

Corporal McCally handed them each a service pistol and two magazines each; regs said that any higher-caliber weaponry needed top-level authorization, and thus far, they didn’t have that on this jaunt. The pistol felt too light in Banks’ hand, not enough if they had to try to take down something capable of so easily bending iron and taking down a polar bear.

It was obvious that the men felt the same way.

“Maybe we should go back to the watchman and get a lend of yon shotgun?” Wiggins said.

“Nope. We’ve spent enough time fannying about already,” Banks replied. “We’re going to have a quick shufti through the gap in the fence, and if we find nowt, then it’s back to the squad room for a pie and a pint.”

“I vote we find nowt,” Wiggins said, then went quiet as Banks led them off the road and across the wet ground to the torn and tumbled remnants of the fence.

“Can we have a fag, Cap?” Wiggins asked as they walked up to the mangled fencing. “I’m gasping here.”

Technically, they were on the clock, but Banks nodded, and took one when the private shared his pack around. He’d started the habit up again on the Amazon trip, and despite several tries hadn’t managed to shake it off in the intervening months. Now it had him gripped again, as strong as it had ever been, and he gave in to it with barely a regret, lighting up with a Zippo he’d kept in a drawer at his desk. The click-rasp-clack as it opened, fired, and closed was another part of the almost comforting ritual. He sucked a long draw, enjoying the hit on an empty stomach, and only then turned his attention to the damaged perimeter fence.

It was as equally torn asunder as the one up at the main park had been, with bent stanchions and flattened mesh. This time, there was something else besides the streaks of gore on the trampled ground. There were definite tracks, several of them, but Banks was at a loss to explain them. His sergeant crouched down beside him for a look.

“What in Hell’s name have we got here, Cap? Could another big bear have escaped that they’re not telling us about?” Hynd asked.

The tracks certainly looked something like bear, but they were huge, each the size of two large hands outstretched while touching thumb to thumb, and almost circular, a large pad with four distinct toe-marks at the front, with a hint of a fifth. Each toe mark was topped with a sharply delineated line where long claws had dug into the muck.

“Have you ever seen a bear that big?” Banks asked.

“Well,” Wiggins replied at his back, “there was that time when the sarge’s wife had on a bikini.”

Hynd gave Wiggins a two-fingered salute and turned back to Banks.

“Seriously, Cap, what are we looking at here?”

“All we can say for sure right now is that it looks to be a large, a very large, mammal of some sort. It’s got four legs if I’m reading the tracks right, and it’s a predator,” Banks replied.

“Thank fuck for that,” Wiggins said with a grin. “I was worried we were going after a giant fucking kangaroo. They’re bloody lethal.”

One look from Banks was enough to silence the private. Banks led the squad forward, stepping over the wrecked fencing and looking over the rough moorland beyond.

They stood at a high spot, looking over a mile-wide basin dotted with black peaty pools. Clouds of midges swarmed lazily, but nothing else moved. The tracks they’d seen led down into the basin then were lost again in churned mud at a low wet point. Banks gauged his position from the sun.

“It’s heading almost directly northwest. There’s nowt over there but rough ground until the hills and the Ness.”

“And even after you get through yon bog, there are plenty of copses and areas of thin woodland where a beastie could be hiding,” Hynd replied. “We’re not equipped for a yomp or a hunt, Cap.”

“Don’t fash yourself bout that, Sarge,” Banks replied. “Our orders were just to do a reccy and not upset the locals. Job done on both fronts. We go back, tell the colonel we don’t have a Scooby, and then get that pie and pint I mentioned.”

Banks knew in his heart it wasn’t going to be that easy — in this job it never was — but there was nothing to be gained by tramping over a wet bog in the wrong gear chasing after what might be a dangerous animal.

“Back to the van, lads,” he said. “We’ll check in with the park manager and see if anything’s changed, then head back up the road for our dinner.”