Scott Devlin: Marine Who Ran The OWLF Hub
Scott Devlin is the main character in James A. Moore and Mark Morris's Predator: Stalking Shadows. He enlisted at eighteen after a fight with his uncle Tommy, joined an off-the-books unit for the 1997 clean-up in Los Angeles, and spent the next years hunting with Dutch Schaefer. A blast in Venezuela in 2013 wrecked his left leg. About ten years later he ran an OWLF communications hub, married to Angie, with a son named Marcus.
Biography
Enlisting After A Fight With His Uncle Tommy
In 1997 Scott Devlin was twenty-seven and had been a Marine for nine years. The enlistment itself was a flashback to when he was eighteen. That morning he had been thinking about college and girls. A row with his uncle Tommy ended with Scott shouting that he would join the army to get away from him, and Tommy drove him to a recruitment center less than three miles from home. He signed the same day. Basic training took him away from Tommy for good, and he never learned whether his uncle was alive after that. His mother was dead by 1997. She had told him to question everything, and that habit caused friction once he was in uniform, even after he found he was suited to the work.
Los Angeles Retrieval
Scott had just left regular Marine duty for an off-the-books unit under Captain Parker when the City Hunter hunt ended in Los Angeles. Peter Keyes and most of the capture team were dead. Parker's men landed on a school football field to hold the streets while body bags came out of a crater whose walls looked melted. Sean Keyes, OWLF regional director and Peter's son, pulled Scott off that cordon for firepower two blocks away. In an alley Scott found Dutch holding a severed forearm in a combat gauntlet. Sean knew him and wanted the arm for the agency. Dutch refused, ordered the helicopter to land on his terms, and walked off with it. Scott's unit collected the hunter's mask and spear from the wreckage.
Hangar 12 And The Early Hunts
Scott's circle at Hangar 12 was Marcus Thorne from Jacksonville, Louisiana-born Jason Flynn, and quiet Daniel Lau. On a cartel assignment in Mexico in 1998 they freed about thirty hostages from a metal shed, then found a wrecked vehicle, an impact crater, and a body tied in the trees with the weapons left on the ground. Dutch was working with OWLF by then and warned his men that a rival group of suits and mercenaries wanted the same salvage.
In 2004 Sergeant Devlin took a counterterror team into the Highlands near Dornoch. They used fake Highland Tours minibuses and an outdoor-pursuits center as a base, and the target was an old schoolhouse that intel called an Al-Qaeda bomb factory. Inside, the men found skinned bodies laid in a row and green residue from hunter blood, the same pattern Scott remembered from Mexico. Dutch's separate unit walked in next. Around base that unit was only a rumor, under the name Havana. Scott recognized Dutch from Los Angeles and said his name. Dutch confirmed both the name and the rank.
In 2005 three teams, about forty men under Captain Jack Graham, laid siege to a cartel castle south of Arizona. Intelligence said the boss, Moreno, was selling border crossings to Al-Qaeda. The castle answered with armor-piercing shells and a rocket launcher. Graham was torn open in the medical tent, and the assault fell apart. That night a craft came in toward the stronghold. By morning Moreno's men were stacked like slaughterhouse waste, some missing heads and spines, and the green residue was back. Dutch arrived, looked at the cameras, and treated the site as another hunt.
Dutch's Offer
About nine months later Captain Starkey sat Scott down for a visit from Major Alan Schaefer. From the Los Angeles night onward Scott had been writing his own notes, trying to line up crashes, skinned bodies, and green residue that his orders never explained. The red notebook vanished from Hangar 12. Dutch brought it back and put it on the desk. Dutch asked what Scott meant to do with those links. Scott had been sorting the questions for himself, not building a case to sell. Dutch took the book, told him the wrong hands would have ended his career, and started handing him photographs and crash intel instead of cutting him off.
That was the turn from counterterror work to hunter work. Dutch said OWLF liked to think he worked for them, while he used their labs and gear. He also warned Scott about a looser rival faction with money, mercenaries, and no paper trail on the salvage it took. Hunter landings were rising faster than Havana could cover, so Dutch wanted Scott's team as extra men on top of their existing assignments. Scott would not answer for the unit alone. He told Dutch to put the offer to all of them.
New Mexico And The Quiet Years
In 2007 Dutch took the team to the Zuni-Bandera volcanic fields after a hunter shuttle came down. The wreck held a crushed hunter, torn sleep-pods, and bones with meat on them. Jaguar-sized hunting dogs with mandibles and green blood were loose in the caves. One killed Flynn. Another tore Dorantes's left arm off before the team put that hound down. Ellison and a dozen mercenaries faced Dutch over the salvage, then backed off. Dutch sent Scott's people home and promised to bring Flynn's body back. For more than three years Scott heard nothing from Dutch or from Havana, the rumor-name for Dutch's field unit. In February 2011 a note sent him to a basement bar in Viner Hill, South Carolina, where Dutch, thinner and marked with a grid of scars, described the Laos hunt that had wiped that unit and let him live.
Venezuela
Captain Devlin, then forty-three, walked his team seven kilometers through wet Venezuelan rainforest in 2013 after radio contact with Team Indigo failed. The assignment on paper was drug and people trafficking. A skinned body hung above a wrecked camp, and Scott told the men they were in an active hunting ground. A blast tore the clearing. Collins was yanked into the canopy and thrown back headless. Six of Scott's twenty-four were dead before Dutch arrived. Ellison and several of his mercenaries were corpses at the treeline.
Scott's team and Dutch's men brought down a hunter under a cloak, in a rain of green blood. It was almost three meters tall. Dutch wanted the body whole and judged it dead after a hundred or so hits. A spinning disc then took the top of Marcus Thorne's head off as he walked toward Scott. Minutes later a net settled over Daniel Lau and cut him to pieces. Another blast wrecked Scott's left leg below the knee. Ishfaq Bukhari lived. At Marcus Thorne's funeral Scott sat in a wheelchair and told Devon Thorne that his army career looked finished. A man in a dark suit, Adam Garber, shook his hand and said he had a proposition.
The Communications Hub
About ten years later Scott led a Communications Hub of more than forty people, up from eight when Adam Garber asked him to take it. Doctors had said he would walk only with a cane. Stolen alien medical tech let him drop the cane, and the limp was slight, though the leg ached in cold weather. The hub watched satellite feeds for hunter landings and passed them to fire teams. Funding rose even after Project Stargazer appeared in 2016, pulled in old OWLF people and the rival suits, and collapsed after a failed live capture in 2018. OWLF was reinstated. Scott knew pieces of Stargazer were funded outside the government after that. Rachel, Angie's friend from high school, had introduced them at a birthday party seven years before the epilogue. They were on their fifth wedding anniversary, with a four-year-old son named Marcus. Dutch called from China with a field team to wish them well, then signed off to keep hunting.
Personality And Traits
Scott was a steady soldier who did the work in front of him, and he was curious in a way that regular orders did not like. His mother had told him to question everything, and he kept notes when a scene did not match the briefing. He was loyal to Marcus Thorne in particular, and he would not speak for his unit when Dutch asked them to take on hunter work. He put that choice to the men. He was not a soft man at ceremonies, but he stayed close to the people he had left. After the leg injury he built a home with Angie, named their son for Marcus, and answered Devon's letter about her boy going into the military by refusing to talk the boy out of it. He treated the risks as something he and his friends had accepted, and he did not regret the years.
Behind The Scenes
Titan Books published Predator: Stalking Shadows in May 2020 as the prose prequel to IllFonic's Predator: Hunting Grounds. Moore and Morris thank Jared Gerritzen and the IllFonic team in the acknowledgements. The 1987 film Predator and the 1990 film Predator 2 do not mention Scott. Blackstone Publishing issued an unabridged reading by James Patrick Cronin the same year. Later game material names the Laos hunter and gives Dutch a sister. This novel does neither.
Conclusion
Scott Devlin was the Marine who went from a recruitment-center dare to the Los Angeles retrieval, then to field hunts beside Dutch Schaefer through Venezuela. He lost Marcus Thorne there and came out with a wrecked leg. Adam Garber put him in charge of an OWLF communications hub, and about ten years later he was married to Angie, raising a son named for Marcus, while Dutch was in China.
Appearances
- Predator: Stalking Shadows (novel, Titan Books, 2020)
Tag Categories: Predator Universe Characters | Predator Lore | Predator Hunt Survivors
