The Blackhawk dropped into Soto Cano, bumpy from the turbulence. Lightning cracked across the sky as the bird touched down. It kicked up a whirl of grit and old diesel. A half dozen figures in olive drab and rubber ponchos emerged from the shadows, hunched against the gale. That was the fuel crew.

  Sawyer stepped out first. His boots splashed in the pools of rainwater. The air was thick with jungle rot. He pulled his hood over his ears as Duncan killed the rotors which churned and slowed. Across the air strip, a squared concrete building flickered with a single working bulb.

  A Honduran officer broke from a trio of soldiers who smoked cigarettes by the edge of the tarmac. He was tall and stocky. A hand-polished AK-47 slung across his chest.

  The man stopped in front of him and stiffened.

  “?Quiénes son ustedes?” he barked.

  Sawyer shook his head, no.

  The man barked. “No manifest. No clearance.”

  Cormac smirked beside him. He chewed on the end of a protein bar.

  Sawyer stepped up. He flipped out a laminated badge that read “State Department—Diplomatic Security Service.” It wasn’t fake. It just wasn’t accurate to what they really were.

  “Este documento es oficial,” Sawyer said, tapping the badge. “Call your Colonel if you don’t believe us.”

  The officer blinked, confused. His eyes flicked between the badge and Sawyer’s dead stare. He sucked on his teeth and his eyes widened. He spelled out the letters slowly. “C.I.A?”

  Sawyer acknowledged him by raising his eyebrow.

  Cormac sniffed.

  The officer spat into the mud, visibly less interested now. “Fantasmas,” he muttered in disgust. The officer waved his men away and trudged back to the shadows.

  Cormac clapped Sawyer’s shoulder. “Your old stone-face charm always sells.”

  They fueled fast.

  Ten minutes later, the Blackhawk lifted into the black soup of rolling clouds.

  Duncan’s voice crackled over comms. “Next stop: Colón. ETA: four hours. Strap in. Night’s just gettin’ started.”

  The coast of Panama stretched like a jagged snake.

  Lightning illuminated Colón’s distant urban sprawl of rusted rooftops, skeletal cranes, and crumbling colonial buildings. The French Cemetery forest lay just outside it, an overgrown tangle of banyans and strangler figs that looked less like a burial ground and more like a witch’s garden.

  Duncan descended the Blackhawk down to a hover above the cemetery. They were only one click out from Colón. Trees whipped from the rotor wash. Mist spread away and unveiled the graveyard.

  Hovering into place, Duncan flashed them a thumb’s up. “The drop zone is clear! Go! Go! Go!”

  Sawyer gripped the line.

  Cormac slid down, boots first, and vanished into the darkness.

  Sawyer followed a beat later, boots kicking out for balance as he rappelled in fast, controlled bursts. Hands gloved, knees bent, he kept his body angled slightly away from the hull, descending clean down into the mist-slick canopy below.

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  He landed boots on the moss.

  Above them, the rope jerked once, then ascended with the Blackhawk which banked west and vanished into the night.

  Within seconds, the sound of the helicopter was swallowed by the jungle. Thick and black earth stretched around them. The trees groaned in the wind. Vines slithered across cracked marble statues where French names were etched, half-swallowed by decay. The only light came from the full moon.

  The cold sat in.

  It should have been a ripe seventy two degrees with a coat of humidity, but in the cemetery it felt like winter in Kabul. His breath fogged. So did Cormac’s.

  They both froze.

  “You feeling that?” Cormac asked.

  Sawyer nodded. “Yeah.”

  A shadow moved between the crypts.

  They snapped their rifles up instantly.

  A woman’s voice whispered in Sawyer’s ear. It was clear, feminine, and entirely too close. “Leave…Kestrel…You have no place here…”

  He spun.

  There was nothing there.

  Something flickered behind Cormac, who looked back at Sawyer cock-eyed with confusion. But then, Cormac must have seen the fear in Sawyer’s eyes because he spun around, held his rifle up, and prepared to fire.

  A jaw-clenching scream pierced the night.

  It rose in every direction, dissonant and desperate. Spectral figures emerged from the trees and rose from the stone slabs and from the crypts. They were pale. Their bodies were vapor-thin. They had hollow eyes that sagged and mouths that stretched in silent agony. They whispered to themselves, messages of pain. One of them hovered inches off the ground. Its head spun in a circle and its dead eyes scanned its surroundings. Then its eyes stopped on Sawyer and widened with terror.

  “Contact front!” Sawyer hissed.

  Cormac opened fire, a three round burst. The bullets passed through the specter and distorted it like a car smashing through fog. The ghost reformed, shrieked, and lunged toward them, arms out like a zombie wanting to strangle them.

  Sawyer activated his flashlight—UV mode. It was a trick he learned from his father. The beam of light seared across the ghost’s form like a flame. It recoiled and burst alight in blue and purple flame. Its face shrunk and then contorted in agony.

  “Use your flashlight!” Sawyer shouted.

  Cormac clicked on his shoulder light. Two more ghosts screamed, then dissipated into nothingness.

  Another specter appeared beside Cormac, a black-eyed child who clawed into Cormac’s arm. The ghost boy’s touch blistered his skin instantly and his veins blackened. “Get it off!” he roared.

  Sawyer shone the UV light at the boy.

  His ghostly scream erupted and he evaporated.

  Cormac dropped to his knees, gasping. Blood trickled from the wound and smoke filtered off of it.

  “We’re leaving,” Sawyer growled.

  They limped out of the cemetery forest under the cover of darkness and followed a crumbled rail line, guns raised, their nerves fraying at the realization of their supernatural circumstances. The jungle offered no comfort or answers to Ashley’s disappearance. It only watched them like a prowling wolf.

  They stopped beneath a derelict overpass, half a klick from Colón, to dress Cormac’s wound. Cormac winced as Sawyer applied a poultice and wrapped his arm.

  “Ghosts?” Cormac rasped.

  Sawyer nodded.

  Cormac grunted. “Next time, let’s drop off behind a resort.”

  They traveled the remaining distance in the darkness and on foot. By the time they reached Colón, it was a little after three in the morning.

  They slipped through the industrial decay of abandoned warehouses and manufacturing plants as shadows. They skirted trash fires, sleeping addicts, and finally climbed up the rusted fire escape of a near-crumbling five story apartment overlooking the abandoned port. The top floor was empty.

  Inside, the apartment was bare and its walls were cracked. There was a single mattress inside and two lawn chairs. There was a water filter on the sink faucet. The windows faced the ocean and let in the salty air. Specks of black mold speckled the wall by the window. Through the window, the moonlight bled through cloud cover and casted its bone-colored light onto the ocean’s crashing waves.

  Cormac collapsed against the wall, sweating and pale. Sawyer dropped his gear, set the UV lamp against the window, and sat on the floor. They tossed their bags into the corner.

  Neither of them spoke for a while. They took in the sounds of their creaking abandoned apartment and the collapsing ocean waves.

  Then Cormac asked, “Do you still believe Ashley is alive? In a place like this?”

  Sawyer didn’t look away from the ocean.

  “I think,” he said quietly, “Ashley knows more than we thought.”

  They sat in silence, lit only by the lamp’s glow and the distant flash of lightning over the sea. Tomorrow, they would meet with their contact, Colonel Bradford. Tonight, they would sleep like the dead and rise in the morning to find her.