Scorpion Strike

by John Gilstrap

  “Read the tea leaves, Tyler,” Gail said. “We need to make a phone call, and we want it to be private.”

  The two youngsters looked at each other and split.

  “I didn’t want to hurt their feelings,” Jonathan said.

  Gail laughed. “Yeah, right.”

  Jonathan pulled his phone from its pocket and powered it up. When it was fully booted, he called the office on speakerphone. Venice answered on the first ring.

  “Thank God,” she said. “I was going to explode soon if I didn’t get to tell somebody what I found out.”

  She and Jonathan had known each other a long time. He understood that there was more fact than hyperbole in her words. “Sounds exciting.”

  “You’re vacationing on the storage location for Soviet nuclear weapons,” Venice said.

  CHAPTER 15

  “COME AGAIN?” JONATHAN SAID.

  “You heard correctly,” Venice said. “A storage place for Soviet nukes.”

  “The Soviet Union no longer exists,” Gail said.

  Jonathan made a rocking motion with his hand. “Well . . . a rose by any other name, right?”

  “I don’t mean that it stores nukes now,” Venice said. “That’s what it used to be.”

  “How did you find this out?” Jonathan asked.

  “I can’t tell you. But I can give you some background if you’d like.”

  Jonathan stifled a laugh. As if there was a way to stop her. Venice loved her dramatic reveals, and because they were so frequently earth-shattering, he loved them, too. Okay, he tolerated them. And for the first time, he was grateful that Boxers was not there with him. Because Big Guy hated the dramatic reveals.

  “Remember you told me that Crystal Sands Island is privately owned, and it has no real allegiance to any nation?”

  “I told you that it is a protectorate of Costa Rica,” Jonathan corrected.

  “Which is almost the same thing,” Venice said, “but even that was not the case until a relatively few years ago. Certainly, not until after the fall of the Soviet Union.”

  Jonathan placed the phone down onto the fallen tree that served as his seat, and shifted his position until he was sidesaddle. “Okay, what allegiance did it have before that?”

  “It didn’t have any! It literally was privately held, without any claim by any nation. The world thought it was part of Mexico—I mean, why not, right? Given its location.”

  “I’m not following,” Jonathan admitted. “What does this have to do with storing nuclear weapons?” He looked to Gail, and she didn’t seem to get it, either. Obviously expecting a long phone call, she was lowering herself to the ground at the base of a tree.

  “It turns out that the Soviets were smarter than the rest of the world. They reached out to the previous owner of the island—a Russian name I couldn’t begin to pronounce, so we’ll call him Boris—and they worked out a deal. For an amount of money nobody’s been able to figure out, he allowed the Russians to build storage facilities there.”

  “For nukes?” Jonathan had never heard of this, and he was better dialed into such things than most.

  “That’s what my source tells me, and he’s in a position to know. As I understand it, the Soviets wanted to have a cache in their back pocket within range of the United States. This way, when things went bad, they’d have supplies that we never knew about.”

  Gail had lain back against the tree and pulled her cap over her eyes. She could have been sleeping, or she could have been listening passively.

  “Did they have launch mechanisms, too, or just the storage?” Jonathan asked.

  “I didn’t have that vocabulary in my head to ask the question,” Venice confessed.

  “Can you find out?”

  “I suppose, but you need to understand that this particular source is one of my least cooperative ones. If it’s a data point you need to know, then I can press. But if it’s just curiosity, I’d prefer to leave it alone.”

  “Nah, leave it,” Jonathan said. The significance of such a cache—and the fact that Uncle Sam didn’t know about it—could have been catastrophic if there’d been a war with the Soviets. While Uncle was focused on all the known targets, the vast majority of which were in the Northern Hemisphere, Ivan could have been quietly planning a hit from the south. He questioned whether such a thing was possible without the cooperation of the Mexican government, but those were questions for diplomats, not retired soldiers.

  “So, how did Costa Rica get control of the place?”

  Venice chuckled on the other end of the connection. “That’s pure politics. I don’t know who found out about the island first, but it happened when someone was rummaging through Kremlin records after the fall.”

  “Somebody must have shit pickles,” Jonathan said. The comment elicited a smile from Gail, so he knew she was still on board with the conversation.

  “I imagine they did,” Venice said. “But ultimately our guys found out about it, and the United States made claim to it all.”

  Jonathan’s turn to laugh. “How’d that work for them?”

  “Less well than they’d probably hoped,” Venice said. “Central and South America all accused the U.S. of a landgrab, and the Organization of American States got involved. Lots of discussions and dealings, and finally, specifically because Costa Rica has no real military, all parties agreed that the island should go under their control. The gringos were kept out of the backyard, but no other country got a leg up militarily.”

  Jonathan thought it was a pretty fair compromise, actually. Much better than much of the quirky shit the OAS had tried to pull off over the years. “How did it become a resort?”

  “That’s less clear,” Venice confessed. “My guy’s interests in all this are fairly narrow. What we do know is that the Costa Ricans sold the property for a great deal of money about twenty years ago.”

  “To Baker Sinise?”

  “To Crystal Sands Properties, LLC,” Venice said. “Which is owned by Baker Sinise.”

  Jonathan fell silent as he weighed what he’d just learned. It was all very interesting, but it fell a mile short of explaining why the island would be invaded.

  “Wait a second,” Jonathan said. “The nukes aren’t still here, are they?”

  “Oh, God no,” Venice said. “They were returned to Russia as part of the deal. Now ask me where Crystal Sands Properties, LLC, got the money to buy the island. The price tag was eighteen million and change.”

  “Where?” He knew she wanted nothing more than for him to ask the entire question just as she’d presented it, but there was no way.

  “He didn’t,” she said.

  Jonathan scowled. “Wait. What?”

  “From what I can tell—and remember I’ve only been at this research since we last spoke—I don’t see how he could afford to buy the island or where the money came from.”

  Jonathan felt his fatigue showing through. “I’m fuzzy here, Mother Hen. Are you suggesting something?”

  “Didn’t you tell me that there are nighttime shipments and that some of the magazines are locked?”

  Then he got it. “Running a resort isn’t his only business, is it?”

  Gail lifted the hat off her face and sat up. “Gunrunning?”

  “There’s a new voice!” Venice declared. “I was wondering where you’d gone, Gunslinger.”

  “It doesn’t have to be just gunrunning,” Jonathan said. He sat taller on his log, totally engaged.

  “I’m not the expert in these things,” Venice said, “but it seems to me, that which can hold megatons of explosives can hold a lot of other stuff, too.”

  Jonathan refused the urge to explain that nuclear yield and explosive weight had precious little to do with each other because he agreed with her larger point.

  “This makes perfect sense,” he thought aloud. “The late-night shipments, the enforced secrecy, the obsessive cleanup after the fact.”

  “But why tonight?” Gail asked. “Okay, last night? What
was different?”

  “And why the hostages?” Jonathan added. “You want to steal munitions, you steal them. In and out. The only reason you’d have to kill is if someone fought back, and they weren’t anticipating a fight.”

  “I’m not there,” Venice said, “but from what you’ve told me so far, it sure sounds like they were expecting a fight.”

  Jonathan shook his head. “Fighting and intimidation are different skill sets requiring different weapons. These guys brought no body armor, I haven’t seen any night vision, and they didn’t set up defensive positions. At least not at first. Bet you bucks to buttons they have by now. Theirs was not a tactical takedown of the island. It was just thuggery.”

  “Sounds to me like you’ve figured something out, Scorpion,” Venice said.

  “Nothing definitive,” he replied. “We don’t know enough about squat to be definitive on anything. But there are only three reasons to take hostages. You’ve got pure terror—just kill people and break things—you’ve got ransom for money, and you’ve got bargaining, whether for policy or something else.”

  Jonathan stood tall and shielded his eyes to look at the horizon. The ship was much closer now, and it clearly was the Express.

  “Hey, Slinger,” Jonathan said to Gail. She, likewise, rose to her feet. “Do you suppose they made a phone call of their own and are coming out here with a boatload of money? Literally?”

  “It’s possible,” she allowed.

  “But?”

  “But we’ll see soon enough. This just seems like a lot of effort for a kidnapping.”

  “Hey, guys,” Venice said from the phone. “Can you talk a little closer to the phone? I can’t hear you.”

  They wandered back closer to the phone. “Mother Hen, I’m still paranoid about battery life. Thanks for this information. Press on, please, and find out what you can about the shipments that come in and out of here. And take a look at the identity papers we sent to you. Just find me some answers, please. And if you can’t find answers, find some more relevant questions.”

  “Talk in another two hours?” Venice asked. She clearly was peeved that she was being shut out, but there you go. “Oh, and so you know, you should have cavalry at your side sometime tonight.”

  Then she was gone.

  Jonathan was still dialed into his ongoing speculation with Gail. “There’s no such thing as coincidence,” he said. It was a long-standing adage in Jonathan’s world that when two bad events occurred in close proximity, they were always related.

  “The magazines,” she said.

  “Exactly. They are the key. Something’s in there, or something’s coming that’s worth a whole lot of effort and violence.”

  “And it’s not coming on the Express, is it?”

  “I guess we’ll see,” Jonathan said. “Hey, Jaime! Tyler!”

  They both reappeared. “Lead me to a place where I get a better view of what comes on or off that Express boat.”

  CHAPTER 16

  AS THE SUN ROSE, AND THE VARIOUS SCENES AROUND THE POOL RESOLVED into better focus, Zach Turner’s sense of dread deepened. The terrorists—the alphabet men, as he’d come to think of them—had employed the aid of hostages to fish the one body out of the pool, and then to hoist the bodies of the husband and wife by their necks to decorate the fancy carved archway that marked the entry to the pool deck. They’d chosen their helpers, it seemed, by their inability—their perceived disinclination—to refuse or to fight back.

  Zach’s dustup with the lead bad guy early on had led to continual scrutiny, both by the terrorists and by Becky, who still seemed angered by his initial showdown. He’d hoped to inspire others around the pool deck to push back, to at least show a little resistance, but he realized now that he’d misplayed his hand. They hadn’t yet been miserable enough to rally to his side, and now they were too frightened.

  They’d talked themselves into believing that there was mercy to be found in these animals if only they just cooperated. The hanging corpses, notwithstanding.

  The assembled hostages feared for their children, and they feared for themselves. They were palsied by fear. And that was exactly where the terrorists wanted them.

  Now they’d lost any advantage they might have had, at least until darkness fell again, and that would be a long, long time. As the sun climbed higher in the crystal sky, the thermometer rose along with it. The stench of sweat had only begun to bloom, and along with it—inexplicably, he thought, given that they were all adults—the stench of excrement. They were permitted to use the facilities, for God’s sake. How would grown men or women have so little self-respect that they would soil themselves?

  Zach was not going to allow himself to die this way, and he wasn’t going to allow it for Becky, either. He didn’t yet have even the beginning of a plan, but the only way these assholes would get a chance to display his corpse would be if there were three or four corpses from their team to display next to it.

  He surveyed his fellow hostages in search of faces or physiques that might indicate a familiarity with fighting, and perhaps the willingness to do so now. It was the nature of hostages to underestimate their ability to conquer their captors. In terms of sheer numbers, Zach’s team had at least a three-to-one advantage. Yes, the bad guys had guns, and that meant that some good guys would die, but with enough manpower behind the attack, the majority would prevail. Then the good guys would have guns, too, and the bad guys’ advantage would soon evaporate.

  With the recent spike in active shooter situations around the world, Zach had given this a lot of thought. One guy walks into a bar or into a school with a gun and starts blasting away. Everyone runs, most often to exactly the wrong place—to the emergency exits, which are choke points and therefore killing fields, or to some restroom or far corner from which there is no escape. Then they await their turn to die.

  This made no sense to Zach. Why weren’t leaders training people to fight back? The most powerful rifle in the world was useless to the shooter whose arms were broken and whose head was smashed.

  When he thought about the violence that high schoolers brought to the football field on a Friday night, why not train those massive athletes to employ the same violence against bad guys? Sure, some would likely die in the process, but think about how many lives might be saved.

  “How’d you lose the leg?”

  The voice startled him. It belonged to a man in his sixties who’d spent enough time in the sun over the years to convert his skin to parchment. A shock of white hair adorned his head, and a matching porn-stache framed his mouth. He offered his hand. “Dan Crawley. From Des Moines.”

  Zach accepted the offer. “Zach Turner. Virginia Beach.”

  Dan’s eyebrows arched up. “There’s some interesting work goes on in Virginia Beach,” he said. “Your shoulder-to-waist ratio tells me that you might have something to do with that.”

  Zach smiled. “Not so much anymore,” he said. “A Hadji with a shovel and an artillery round sort of limited my usefulness.” Zach saw no need to tell this stranger that in his current civilian billet, he was the lead firearms instructor for the Naval Special Warfare Development Group—DEVGRU—known to most of the world as SEAL Team Six.

  “I was with Team One,” Dan said. “A long time ago.”

  “Vietnam?”

  “And others,” he said. “So, what are we going to do about these shit eaters?”

  “Stop it,” Becky whispered. “You don’t have to be the hero all the time.”

  An older woman leaned forward to make herself visible from behind Dan. “Millie,” she said. “I’m with him. And, honey, save your breath. It’s a waste of time to try to keep a sheepdog from protecting his flock. I’ve tried for years, and it’s the road to frustration.”

  Zach suppressed his smirk. “I think we have to wait for an opening,” he said.

  “What do you think of the crowd?”

  Zach surveyed them again. Lots of cowering and sweating. Some crying. But some eye contac
t, too. One couple in particular, on the far side of the pool—a man and a woman—looked like they might have been cops or firefighters. They seemed to be dialed into the burgeoning conspiracy. Zach nodded to them, and they nodded back.

  “I think we can probably pick up some help,” Zach said. “But I worry that the others might have tipped to the other side.”

  “I don’t follow,” Dan said.

  Zach explained, “In my experience, if you push hostages far enough, not only does Stockholm syndrome kick in, but they’ll be so frightened of dying that they’ll get into the way of rescuers.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you this,” Dan said. “I spent way too many years keeping Russian asshats from hurting my family. I sure as shit am not rolling over now.”

  * * *

  Anatoly had put off the terrible chore for as long as he could. These men had died in service to his team, and if for no other reason than that, they deserved a respectful viewing. Two hours ago, he’d ordered that the seven corpses be arranged in the freezer that served the restaurants of the Crystal Sands Resort. As much as he hated the hint that these noble soldiers should be treated as slabs of meat, the realities of biology and chemistry could not be denied. There was no honor in putrefaction, the single most reliable force of nature in this part of the world.

  They’d been stripped naked and draped as modesty required, arranged shoulder-to-shoulder on the tile floor. Anatoly recognized every face, and felt shame that he did not remember every name. While not a religious man, he felt a moment of silence was appropriate under the circumstances. As he toured the bodies, he paused at the feet of each corpse and bowed his head, as if in prayer. The sentiment was less important, after all, than the display.

  As he finished with the sixth body in the line, he looked up to engage the eyes of Viktor Smirnov and Gerasim Kuznetsov (Delta and India), his closest lieutenants. “How could this happen?” he asked. He kept his voice calm, even as his guts churned a toxic stew of bile and adrenaline.

  “The couple in Bungalow Ten,” Viktor said. “After they killed the initial invader force, they had guns and from there—”