The Guadalupe Asset: The Extraction of the Unspoken

My name is Marcus. I spent twelve years in the Teams—Navy SEALs, Tier-1 status. I’ve operated in every climate the planet can throw at a human being, from the humid jungles of the Darien Gap to the frozen tundras of the High Baltics. I am trained to be the wolf, the silent professional who enters a space and neutralizes threats before they realize the air in the room has changed.

But I haven’t carried a weapon in three years. I don’t hike, and I certainly don’t go near the mountains of West Texas. People think I’m just another “broken bird” with a case of combat-related PTSD. They think I saw too much in the Middle East.

They are wrong. My ghost doesn’t speak Arabic. It speaks in a low-frequency hum that vibrates the marrow of your bones, and it lives in a place the U.S. government has officially scrubbed from the map.

I. The Shadow Deployment

The orders didn’t come through the SOCOM pipeline. There was no paper trail, no digital footprint. My Commanding Officer met me in a secure SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) and handed me a folder bound in red tape.

“High-Altitude Cold Weather (HACW) Survival Exercise,” he said, but his eyes told a different story. “Guadalupe Mountains, West Texas. Six-man team. You’re evaluating a new thermal imaging array. If you encounter anything… unauthorized… you follow the Emergency Frequency protocols. No questions.”

We were flown in on a sterile Blackhawk—no markings, no transponder. We jumped into a high plateau under a moonless sky. For the first three days, we played the part of ghosts. We moved through the limestone ridges, testing a sensor array that could pick up a field mouse’s heartbeat from two miles away.

The silence was the first anomaly. In West Texas, you expect the wind to howl, the coyotes to yip, the insects to buzz. Here, the air was dead. It felt as if the entire ecosystem was in a state of permanent freeze, a biological “hold breath” command issued by something we couldn’t see.

II. Code Red: The Primary Asset

On the fourth day, the radio hissed. It wasn’t the base camp. It was a burst transmission on the “Black” frequency—the one reserved for existential threats.

“PRIMARY ASSET IDENTIFIED. PROCEED TO CODE RED. ELIMINATE THE PROBLEM.”

We moved to the edge of a massive, unnamed canyon. I keyed in the new thermal array. The screen flickered to life, showing the deep purple and blue of the cooling rocks. Then, a white-hot bloom appeared.

It stood well over eight feet tall. On the screen, the heat signature was staggering—it was burning at a higher metabolic rate than any human. It was bipedal, moving with a fluid, predatory grace along a cliff face that should have required a four-point climb.

“That’s not a bear,” whispered Miller, my lead sniper. “And that sure as hell isn’t a hiker.”

Through the high-powered optics, we saw the truth. It was covered in coarse, dark hair that seemed to absorb the starlight. Its shoulders were twice the width of Dale’s, our strongest operator. It wasn’t just big; it was intelligent. It paused, sniffed the air, and looked directly toward our concealed position two miles away. It knew the air had changed.

III. The Ambush at the Mouth

We descended into the canyon using fast-ropes—silent, lightless, descending 800 feet into the throat of the mountain. We established a kill zone outside a massive cave system where the thermal array had tracked three distinct signatures.

“We flush them,” I ordered.

We used thermal suppressants—specialized gas canisters that drop the ambient temperature to sub-zero in seconds. It’s a non-lethal way to force a warm-blooded target out of cover. The canisters hissed, spewing a freezing white mist into the cave mouth.

A sound came out of that darkness that I still hear when the room is too quiet. It wasn’t a roar. It was a rumbling, guttural vocalization that vibrated the rocks beneath our boots. It was a sound of alarm, followed by a high-pitched, frantic shriek.

Then, the “Asset” burst out.

It was nine feet tall. Up close, the “folklore” vanished, replaced by the terrifying reality of biology. It was a hominid—primitive, powerful, and fast. Its eyes reflected our infrared strobes with a calculating, human-like fury. It didn’t charge blindly; it used a boulder the size of a Jeep for cover, flanking us with tactical precision.

“Engage!”

We opened fire with specialized “stopping” rounds—magnum-grade ammunition designed to drop an engine block. The creature took hits that would have shredded a grizzly. It staggered, shrieked in a voice that sounded like a distorted human scream, and kept coming.

Miller took the shot. A point-blank round to the cranial vault. The Asset collapsed with a weight that shook the ground.

IV. The Grief of the Mountain

The silence that followed was broken by a second sound from the cave. It was a low, mournful wail.

Two more heat signatures emerged. They didn’t charge. They stayed in the shadows, their eyes glowing in the periphery of our tactical lights. They were larger than the first. Between them, a smaller figure—a juvenile—shrieked in terror.

We stood over the body of the one we had killed. It was a female. The realization hit us like a physical blow. We hadn’t neutralized a threat. We had assassinated a mother in front of her family.

The two males didn’t attack. They watched us with an intelligence that was haunting—a look of profound betrayal and loss. They knew we were the interlopers. They knew we were the monsters.

One of the males stepped forward, not in a charge, but to shield the juvenile. He looked at me, and for a second, the “Asset” classification dissolved. I saw a sentient being. I saw a community.

“Fall back,” I rasped into the comms. “Extraction now. Mission accomplished.”

V. The Clean-Up

The debriefing lasted three weeks. Men in dark suits—not military, not CIA, something else—made us sign NDAs that would forfeit our lives if we spoke. They showed us the official report: Success. Zero collateral damage. Documented indigenous wildlife removed.

They paid us millions. Hush money.

I used my network to dig. I found reports from the Appalachians, from the Cascades, from the Alaskan interior. These creatures are called “The Problem” in the deep-black files. The government isn’t just monitoring them; they are managing a culling program to maintain a reality where we are the only “people” on Earth.

I live in a small house in the plains now. No trees, no shadows, no mountains. I send encrypted data to researchers, fragments of what I saw, hoping someone will find a way to protect them from us.

Because the darkness in the woods isn’t the shaggy giant in the cave. It’s the men in the helicopters who decide that anything they don’t understand has to die.

I know the secret of the Guadalupe Mountains. It’s not that there are monsters in the caves. It’s that the monsters wear uniforms, and they’ve already won.