Final Target

by John Gilstrap

  There was another burst of gunfire from the boat, and more sand danced in the same spot as before. Jonathan was halfway there when he saw the man. He lay on his back, ignoring a ten-inch loop of excised bowel as he struggled to seat a new magazine into an MP5. Jonathan approached him with sights on, ready to kill the man the instant he muzzled him, but the suffering man was oblivious. When he was close enough, Jonathan kicked the machine pistol out of the guy’s hands. There was no resistance. Then he picked the weapon up, worked the action to make sure it was empty, and found that the mag was mostly full. The guy was too far out of it to know the difference. Jonathan flung the weapon by its muzzle toward the ocean.

  “Are the others dead?” Jonathan asked.

  The man looked at him with desperate eyes. The light behind his pupils was clearly fading.

  “You are a son of a whore,” the man said in Spanish.

  Jonathan responded in kind. “I have been called worse by better people. Where are the others?”

  “Go to hell.”

  “By all indications, you’ll beat me there. Have your friends all left you?”

  “Those who aren’t dead.”

  Jonathan considered that. This was a bloodbath. It hadn’t been his choice, and it was infinitely better than dying, but his heart did go out to this guy. He considered shooting him to relieve him of his suffering but dismissed the idea. When God wanted him to die, He’d take him.

  “Please don’t leave me like this,” the man said.

  “Eat shit,” Jonathan replied.

  “Please!” the man shouted.

  Jonathan turned his back on the man. He was, after all, a drug dealer and a torturer of civilians. He was the very man who, only ninety seconds before, had tried to kill Jonathan and his team. He had tried to kill children.

  Screw him. Let him die. The longer it took, and the more he suffered, the better for the world. Let these assholes learn a little from their own tactics.

  “Please, damn you! Kill me!”

  What the hell? Jonathan one-handed a shot through the man’s forehead.

  “We’re clear here,” he said. He looked out toward the boat and smiled when he saw that the last of the kids was reaching the end of the dock.

  “It’s okay, Tomás, you can get up now,” he shouted to the boy who remained pressed into the sand. He hadn’t moved.

  Jonathan’s heart skipped a beat. “Tomás!” He started to run to the boy, and as he did, Boxers started to run from the opposite direction, as if to intervene. “Tomás!”

  Intuitively, instinctively, Jonathan knew what he was going to find. But it might be a mistake. It might be a sick practical joke.

  As he closed to within a few yards, he saw the blood. It had soaked into the sand, turning it bright red, the way that the incoming tide turned the sand dark beige. A good bit of that blood flowed from an inch-and-a-half exit wound in the boy’s back.

  “Oh, God,” Jonathan moaned. He dropped to his knees in the sand and rolled Tomás onto his back.

  When the boy moaned, Jonathan felt relieved.

  “I’ll do it,” Boxers said, and he pushed his boss out of the way. While all Unit operators had reasonable combat medic skills, Boxers had always been better than most. “Get the trauma kit from my ruck.”

  As Jonathan tore the trauma patch away from Boxers’ MOLLE gear, Big Guy made quick use of his KA-BAR knife to make Tomás naked from the waist up. Like most entry wounds, the one in his belly looked like a big mosquito bite, about the diameter of a pencil, and it was spilling blood at a frightening rate.

  “Get the QuikClot,” Boxers said. “All four packs.” As he spoke, he jammed his forefinger deeply into the bullet wound.

  Tomás howled.

  “You’re hurting him!” a voice yelled. It was Angela. Behind her, the others on the boat were yelling at everyone to hurry the hell up. She tried to pull Boxers away from Tomás, then tumbled backward from the shove she received.

  “Stay away from me!” Boxers yelled. “I’m saving his life, you idiot.”

  Jonathan tore open the first pack of QuikClot gauze and handed it to Boxers, who began stuffing the gauze directly into the wound.

  Tomás yelled like a tortured animal. These were the sounds of agony that are hardwired into all of us.

  Angela sobbed as she looked on, and Jonathan did his best to ignore her.

  QuikClot was a product that had saved countless lives over the past decades of war. Impregnated with an inert substance known as kaolin, it vastly increased the rate at which blood clotted. And with a bullet wound, the biggest killer by a huge margin was internal bleeding. By stuffing the wound cavity with QuikClot gauze, they had bought the kid more time on the earth.

  Whether or not that would be enough had yet to be seen.

  “Open a second pack,” Boxers said. “Start stuffing the wound from the other side. He’s skinny enough that I don’t think we’ll need the other two. Yet.”

  Jonathan kneeled on the boy’s left side and raised the kid’s right arm out of the way so he could roll him onto his right side and expose the exit wound. If Jonathan remembered his anatomy and physiology correctly, this was a kidney shot. Maybe it was a little low. He hoped so for the kid’s sake. At least it had missed his spine.

  Jonathan opened the pack and started stuffing. He cringed at the spongy, wet warmth as his fingers sank past his second knuckle into the boy’s guts. The trick to making QuikClot work in this kind of circumstance was to make sure that the gauze contacted as many of the walls of the wound channel as possible. With the bleeding stopped, the most urgent issues associated with gut wounds were handled. Structural repair, return of function, and infection control were all concerns for surgeons in Tomás’s future. For now, he was alive.

  Jonathan jumped a little when his fingers hit something solid. “Is that you, Big Guy?”

  “Yep. We met in the middle. Hold both sides while I bandage him up, and we’ll be out of here.”

  Boxers retrieved two trauma dressings from the kit, along with a fat roll of Kling wrap. A minute later, Tomás’s belly was surrounded by a bright white bandage.

  “Grab my ruck,” Boxers said. “I’ll carry the kid.”

  In reality, the ruck probably weighed more, but Big Guy was better suited to the gentle infant carry that Tomás required. Jonathan heaved Boxers’ ruck onto his shoulder and locked eyes with Angela.

  “It’s time to get on the boat,” he said. As if the urgent screams from the boat crew and the other children weren’t communicating that message already.

  “Is he dead?” she asked.

  “No,” Jonathan said. “He’s still alive.”

  “Is he going to die?” Her voice quavered as she spoke.

  “We’re all going to die one day,” Jonathan said. “Now, let’s get on the boat and improve all of our odds for seeing tomorrow.”

  Angela approached Jonathan deliberately and struck like a snake, firing off a slap that Jonathan never saw coming. It did no damage, but it did startle him.

  “You promised!” she yelled. “Tomás was brave, and he never doubted that he would win, and he’s going to die, anyway!”

  Jonathan saw the second slap coming and could have stopped it, but he let it happen. He sensed she needed it.

  “You lied to us!” Angela shouted. “You lied, and we believed you, and now two of us are dead!”

  “He’s not dead,” Jonathan said. He kept his tone soft. He fought the urge to apologize. He knew that was what she wanted to hear, but words had meaning, and he owed an apology to no one. Angela couldn’t see it yet—and maybe she never would—but he had just saved her life. Every one of the deaths that had occurred here this morning—even the ones caused by Jonathan—was the sole responsibility of the Jungle Tigers.

  “You need to get on the boat now, Angela,” Jonathan said. “We’ve run out of time.” He reached out for her arm to guide her, but she pulled away.

  “Don’t touch me!”

  Jonathan softene
d his features and drooped his shoulders some. In a soft voice, he said, “Tomás is a fine young man. He fought like a warrior, and now he’s wounded. You need to honor him by giving him a chance. If we stay here, he won’t have one. I don’t know if more of Azul’s men are on the way, and I have all the others to think about.”

  Angela stared past Jonathan to the boat, where Boxers was climbing aboard with the boy in his arms. She fought the tears but lost the battle. “I love him,” she said.

  “I know you do,” Jonathan said. “Now, go be with him. However this ends, he’ll want you at his side.”

  She brought her hands to her lips and nodded. She blinked tears onto her cheeks as she cut her eyes to him. “You like him, don’t you?”

  “There’s always a special place in my heart for a valiant warrior.” He touched her arm again, and she moved. Jonathan gave her space as she walked toward the dock. At the end of the dock, Torpedo and Bomber were gesticulating wildly for them to hurry.

  Jonathan was the last to board the boat.

  CHAPTER 38

  Jonathan had never gone this fast on the water. The speed made for a hellaciously rough ride, but time was of the essence as they hauled ass twenty-four miles out to sea, where they would enter international waters. On the flip side, given the habits of drug traffickers, nothing attracted quite so much attention quite so quickly as a fast-moving boat, specifically because said traffickers had reason to haul ass out to international waters.

  They made it past the invisible safety line without incident, and as they did, Bomber throttled back to a speed that was still fast but short of holy-shit fast.

  Four hours into the trip, the kids sat in clusters on and around the deck. While the breeze kept them cool enough, Jonathan worried that the unrelenting sun was going to burn blisters into them—a problem exacerbated by the fact that they had shed as many clothes as possible while still remaining decent. He was not their mother, and their sunburns were not his problem. Leo’s neck wound had finally stopped bleeding. His blood-soaked bandage looked disgusting, but Boxers wouldn’t let him change it for fear of disturbing the clot.

  The younger of their rescuers, Torpedo, had already turned red—not quite tomato red yet, but he was on his way. He kept moving around the deck, seeking shade as it moved around the boat. Dawkins, for his part, seemed to have checked out. Maybe exhaustion had caught up to him. Either way, he seemed to be sleeping peacefully on the deck, despite the occasionally wild ride.

  Tomás drifted in and out of consciousness. Jonathan worried about the amount of bouncing he’d endured in the early parts of the voyage out to sea, but his bandages remained white, which meant that the QuikClot was doing its job. He’d pissed blood in his pants and down his leg, though, and that was never a good sign. He needed a surgeon. His color wasn’t as bad as Jonathan thought it might be, so that was a good sign.

  “Hey, Scorpion.”

  Jonathan turned to see the driver waving him over. The guy looked familiar in a distant sort of way—in the way that most men with that operator bearing looked familiar—but Jonathan had been bluffing when he acknowledged memory of an ammo gift during Operation Angry Hornet. Even more to the point, Jonathan didn’t remember having an ammo problem in that op. But the fact that this guy, whatever his real name was, had connected those dots must mean something. At the very least, the guy had just saved his life today. No small debt there.

  “Whatcha got, Bomber?” Jonathan said as he approached. Boxers approached with him.

  “The name is Davey. Or, if you’d prefer, Chief will do, too.”

  “Okay, whatcha got, Chief? You can call me Scorpion.”

  “Take a look at our seven o’clock,” Davey said.

  Jonathan turned to peer across the back of the boat, just a few points to the port side of aft. “What am I looking for?”

  “Don’t you see the other boat?”

  Jonathan squinted and shaded his eyes with his hand. Way in the distance, he saw a speck on the horizon. “That’s a boat?”

  Davey nodded. “Yep. I put it about six miles away. It’s been following us for the past hour or so.”

  “We’re in international waters, right?” Boxers asked.

  “Right as rain. And even though we’ve slowed to half our original speed, they’re not getting any closer.”

  “Got any thoughts?” Jonathan asked.

  Davey rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m gonna guess that it’s a military vessel. If it was civilian—drug dealers or pirates—they’d want a race. They’d want to board us. If it’s a navy vessel, they can do from that range just about anything they’d want to do from up close.”

  Jonathan considered the options. “What are our options if they open fire?”

  Davey chuckled. “We could zig and zag, but in the end we’d just die with less fuel in the tanks.”

  “This is why I never liked the Navy,” Jonathan said. “Not enough cover.”

  “I hear you’re quite the puker, too,” Davey said, drawing a laugh. “Hey, how’s the kid doing?”

  “Don’t know,” Boxers said. “He’s hanging in there, and I think we’ve slowed the bleeding, but he needs care. How much longer is this trip?”

  Davey inhaled noisily and groaned. “Oh, easily another seven, eight hours.”

  Jonathan looked back at Tomás. He lay on his back in the middle of the deck as Angela supported his shoulders. “Well, shit,” he said.

  “I was thinking that same thing,” Davey said. “But probably for different reasons.”

  Jonathan waited for it.

  “There’s no way we’re going to have enough gas to get to the U.S. Another thing about the Navy is the fact that there aren’t any fueling stations.”

  “How long do we have?”

  Davey shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe four, five hours.”

  “Any ideas on a solution?”

  “Not a one.”

  “Big Guy?”

  “Nothing that doesn’t involve a lot of swimming.”

  Jonathan smiled. “Well, at least we’ve got time,” he said.

  “To do what?”

  Jonathan shaded his eyes and stared back out at the distant boat. “I’ll think of something.” He reached into a pocket and pulled out his satellite phone. “Time to call home,” he said.

  * * *

  The fuel lasted for only three and a half hours. It started with a few engine coughs, and then they just stopped. Almost immediately, the heat became unbearable. The children asked questions, and they complained that they were hot, but Jonathan saw no signs of early panic. That could change on a dime, of course, but for now things seemed stable.

  “How far are we from the coast now?” Jonathan asked Davey.

  “About a hundred fifty miles,” Davey replied. “Almost close enough to smell the trees.”

  The kid—no longer Torpedo and now Jesse, because he said he felt stupid having a code name—stood next to his father. While a head taller and fifty pounds lighter, he looked a lot like Davey. He pointed back across the port beam. “And here come our friends,” he said. “Want me to radio a Mayday?”

  Jonathan shook his head. “No, that would turn us into bait.” The boat that had been trailing them grew more quickly in size than Jonathan had anticipated. He fished a monocular from his vest and brought it to his eye. “Definitely a warship of some sort,” he said. “I see guns.”

  “I don’t know the Mexican fleet,” Davey said as he peered through a set of binoculars. “But if it was ours, we’d call it a cutter.”

  Dawkins said, “There’s no way I can be taken back to Mexico.”

  “That won’t happen,” Jonathan said.

  “Time to arm up,” Boxers said.

  “No,” Jonathan replied. “That’s not a fight we can win.” He looked to Davey. “How much do you know about maritime law? Can they legally board us while we’re in international waters?”

  “In my experience,” Davey said, “everything is legal when no one ca
n see you do it.”

  “What’s happening?” asked one of the older kids. Santiago.

  “We’re going to have some visitors,” Jonathan explained. Then he turned to face all of them. They were already standing and watching—all but Angela and Tomás. “All right, kids, listen. It appears that we’re going to be visited by a naval vessel. When they come, I want you all to remain silent. If they ask you questions, do not answer. Say nothing, do you understand? I’ll do all the talking.”

  “Are you going to shoot at them?” Leo asked. The bandage on his neck made him look like he had a giant disgusting goiter.

  “Absolutely not,” Jonathan said. “And neither are you. Do not go anywhere near the weapons. In fact, open those storage chests along the sides and put all the weapons inside. I don’t want any of them to be visible. We don’t want to give them reason to board this vessel.” He looked to Boxers. “In fact, can you take care of ours, Big Guy?”

  “We’re going to disarm completely?” His tone made it clear that he did not agree.

  Jonathan shrugged. “I say again, we cannot win that fight.”

  “So, what’s your plan?” Davey asked.

  “We’re going to play a bluff. Stall for time until reinforcements get here.”

  “Which reinforcements?” Jesse asked.

  “You’ve met Mother Hen, right?” Jonathan asked.

  “The lady on the radio.”

  “Yep. I put her on the case. She’s never let me down yet.”

  When the weapons were all stashed, Big Guy lowered his voice to a conspiratorial mumble and said, “You know, that ship will probably have a doctor on board.”

  “No!” That came loud and clear, though a bit raspy, from Tomás. “I’m going to America.”

  “How did he hear me from all the way over there?” Boxers said.

  “Your whispers suck,” Tomás said. “Scorpion, you promised.”

  Jonathan said nothing.

  “I’d rather be dead in America than alive in Mexico,” Tomás said. The effort of speaking seemed to exhaust him.

  “I hear you, kid,” Jonathan said. That was a statement of fact, not an implied renewal of his promise.