Then he made sense of the tangle that covered it: Those were blood vessels. So the pulsating, pink material was raw muscle from which the skin had been removed so skillfully that the body had remained intact. The naked eyes darted as the figure came closer.

This was Knotty, flayed with such extraordinary skill that he had been left alive. The whistling was his breath sucking in and out past his exposed teeth. His eyes flickered here and there, the muscles around them tightening and loosening. He took a huge breath, threw back his head, and screamed like a desperate child.

Mark was too shocked to move—and then it got worse. Scattered in the woods were his whole team. Burke and Louis had been surgically attacked the same way Massy had, gutted, their eyes taken. No doubt their skin would be harvested later.

Mark found a new intensity of hate. Or, no, it was an emotion beyond hate, a fire in him that would only be quenched by revenge.

Knotty tried to speak, and Mark heard a rasping attempt to apologize for his failure. Then he fell, thankfully unconscious.

Had he lost them all? “Linda! Linda!”

There was no response from her, but he became aware of the sound of a jet engine, the intensity of it telling him that this was a fighter on afterburners.

With a wet thud, Louis threw his skin to the ground. Mark could hardly look at the goggling eyes and gaping mouth, or at the poor man’s pulsating body.

This was the most profoundly cruel thing he had ever known. Normally, he did not feel any emotion about his missions except the desire to succeed. His mind concentrated on the professional problems.

But seeing good family men such as Massy and Louis just devastated like this—this was more than just a mission-critical issue, it was personal and it hurt his heart as much, he thought, as his heart could be hurt, and he vowed in the depths of that heart that he would live from now on to destroy hybrids and die willingly doing it, if that became necessary.

Linda came out of the woods.

“You—you’re okay! Oh, Jesus, what—”

She was stark naked and shivering. Her skin was intact, but oddly flushed.

At that moment, the jet screamed directly overhead. He recognized not only the afterburner this time, but the distinctive shriek of an F-22 Raptor’s Pratt & Whitney turbofans being slammed into a new thrust vector.

The pilot was setting up an attack.

The woods—Gina was burning them out. He calculated—the target area was three quarters of a mile away from this farm, and the jet had been slowing down to deliver a superaccurate strike, so—

To be certain that they wouldn’t suffer more if the fire reached here, he shot Louis and the others in the back of the head, moving fast, making sure they were dead.