Scorpion Strike

by John Gilstrap

  “I know what happened,” Anatoly snapped. “We all know what happened. These guests—these sheep—killed seven highly trained operators. What I want to know is how that was able to happen.”

  “We didn’t adequately anticipate,” Gerasim said.

  Anatoly glared at him. “More obvious words were never spoken,” he said. “What do we know about Stephen Terrell and Alicia Crosby?”

  “Very little,” Viktor said.

  “Except we have reason to suspect that those are not their real names,” Gerasim said.

  “And what reason is that?”

  Gerasim shifted his stance, grasping his hands behind his back, and looking to the floor. “The names and passport numbers seem to trace back to a couple who has been dead for the last three years.”

  Anatoly felt his ears growing hot. “I see,” he said. “Do we have any idea who these people truly are?”

  “No, sir,” Gerasim said.

  Viktor made a slashing motion in the air. “I disagree,” he said. “Look at the bodies. Deep, expertly delivered knife wounds, precision gunshots. While we might not know their names or their passport numbers, we can conclude that they are part of the Community that trains its members in the art of killing.”

  “This does not make me feel better,” Anatoly said.

  “I did not understand that to be my mission,” Viktor replied. “To feel better in this line of work is to be unemployed, Anatoly. You know this. What is important is that we know the capabilities of our enemy. Any information beyond that is an unearned gift.”

  Anatoly knew that Viktor was right. The fact that the existence of these talented killers had escaped their detection, and that they had been able to inflict such penalties on Anatoly’s team, was entirely irrelevant. What was, was. What existed, existed.

  “The job now,” Anatoly said, “is to neutralize the threat.”

  “Absolutely,” Gerasim agreed.

  Again, Viktor held up his hand. “Why?”

  Anatoly scowled. How could this not be obvious? “I don’t understand.”

  “Why is neutralization important?”

  Surely, Viktor was just playing the role of devil’s advocate. “They killed our teammates, Viktor. That cannot go unpunished.”

  “Because punishment will bring our teammates back to life?”

  “Whose side are you on?” Gerasim asked.

  “I am exclusively on the side of victory,” Viktor replied. “These covert killers have gotten the upper hand at least twice now, and we have paid a heavy price. Nothing can change that. We have to think strategically, and revenge is a luxury that we cannot afford. To focus on capturing that couple or on wreaking vengeance weakens every aspect of what we’re here to do. As it is, we have barely enough people to guard the prisoners while the others of us are sleeping or eating. If we send out patrols to find these two killers, that will draw against our strategic forces. It will string them out and tire them. We simply do not have the manpower.”

  Anatoly used both hands to make a sweeping gesture at the dead men on the floor. “These men were your colleagues, Viktor.”

  “And they will live on forever as such in my memory,” Viktor said. “But that doesn’t change the larger point. They are already dead. If we resist our urge to chase after the killers, perhaps we can limit the number of other colleagues who join them in the Great Beyond.”

  “What will the rest of our team think if we let this atrocity go unavenged?” Gerasim asked. He seemed equally aghast. “Soldiers in harm’s way need to know that their commanders are behind them.”

  “These are not soldiers,” Viktor said with a dismissive grimace. “None of us are soldiers. Not anymore. We are mercenaries, and we all fight for the same thing—the money. Do not try to raise this to the level of a cause for the Motherland.”

  “We still must maintain an effective command structure,” Anatoly said. “Which means we must demonstrate strong leadership. Teamwork is still important, and we need our team to be prepared to follow where we lead them.”

  “Then we need to lessen the guard on the hostages,” Viktor said. “Let the children rejoin their parents. That alone will give us back six people. Use them to patrol for the shooters.”

  “No,” Anatoly said. “I understand your point, Viktor, but the children are the leverage we need to keep the adults from rebelling against us.”

  “And to keep them from getting away,” Gerasim said.

  “Why do we care so much if a few get away?” Viktor said. His voice rose an octave with his frustration. “We have their cell phones and there no longer is any Internet connection. They can’t get off the island, and even if they tried, they would drown. I do not see—”

  “They will conspire,” Anatoly said. “Stephen Terrell and Alicia Crosby, or whoever they are, will find them and arm them, and now we have a guerilla force in the jungle. The last thing we need is an armed, organized enemy.” How could this not be clear to everyone?

  “To do what?” Viktor asked.

  “To shoot their captors,” Gerasim answered.

  “You yourself, Anatoly, said that keeping the children separate would prevent that from happening.”

  “Suppose they want to rescue their children?” Anatoly asked.

  “They wouldn’t be that foolish,” Viktor said, though his shifting eyes told Anatoly that his resolve was weakening.

  “But if they were that foolish,” Anatoly explained, “we would have to respond by killing them all, and then this entire episode would make us all the target of a worldwide manhunt that we could not possibly survive.”

  “As if the world community will forget what we do here with the current plan,” Viktor said. His mood had soured. “Remember Leon Klinghoffer?”

  Anatoly felt the first flash of anger at the mention of that name.

  “Who?” Gerasim asked.

  “An American Jew,” Anatoly explained. “In the mid-eighties, the Palestinian Liberation Front—something like that—hijacked a cruise ship. When their terms were refused—”

  “The man in the wheelchair,” Gerasim remembered.

  “Exactly. Those terrorists shot him and threw his body overboard, wheelchair and all.”

  “They told his wife that he was in the ship’s infirmary,” Viktor said. “Ultimately the United States captured the terrorists by forcing their plane down in Italy.”

  “Where the Italians let them go,” Anatoly said.

  “The Americans recaptured the leader,” Viktor said. “I believe he died in prison.”

  “They recaptured him, what, thirty years after the fact?” Anatoly made a noise that sounded like piff. He didn’t see the relevance.

  “The point,” Viktor pressed, “is that the Americans never forget. We have killed at least three of them. I don’t know the nationality of the first man you killed, but I suspect he was American, too. We’re all fools if we believe that America will rest until we are . . . What do they like to say? Until we are brought to justice.”

  “That was previous governments,” Anatoly said, hoping to shut the argument down. “The Darmond administration only makes noise. They deliver ultimatums, and then they walk away from them. They will stay focused on us only until something else attracts the news cycle.”

  “Until a man is kept out of a ladies’ room,” Gerasim said with a laugh. “That will be their crisis.”

  “While the rest of the world starves,” Anatoly said.

  The discussion had run its course.

  “Gerasim,” Anatoly said, “I would like you to take charge of finding the murderers. Kill them if you must, but I would rather you bring them to me. The others should see.”

  Viktor looked as if he wanted to say something, but after opening his mouth to speak, he closed it again.

  Anatoly worried that he might become a problem.

  * * *

  Fourteen-year-old Erin Talley wanted to cry. She wanted to run, she wanted to scream. But she sensed—no, she knew—that if she
did, everything here in the overcrowded cabin—they called it a bungalow—would fall apart. With no parents around to protect them, the other children, the younger ones in particular, looked to her to be strong.

  And by staying strong, she allowed them to be weak. Allowed them to be the children that they were. That she was, too, but she’d been through more shit in her decade-and-a-half than most adults went through in a lifetime.

  Erin’s thoughts wandered to her sister. Mandy would have been twelve this week if the brain cancer hadn’t stolen her, and this trip was all about celebrating her life and wishing her a blissful, pain-free afterlife. She would have torn these guys a new one if she’d been around and having a good day. Mandy didn’t take crap from anyone, and with a terminal disease eating her from the inside out for over half her life, even the guns wouldn’t have scared her.

  Erin couldn’t pretend to be anywhere near that strong—either physically or mentally—but being the healthy sister in a family of four had taught her a lot about the intricacies of personal interaction in the midst of a crisis.

  She’d lost track of time, but in her mind it couldn’t have been more than six, maybe eight hours since they’d all been pulled from their beds and dragged to this place. She’d been sleeping in her own room in their suite in the main building when the terrorists hit, and she’d never gotten a chance to see her parents before she was hustled to this place. She’d been one of the first eight or ten kids who’d been brought here. She now counted thirty-four, and it was crowded. Kids who were lucky enough to snag furniture to sit on were paranoid about leaving their spot for even an instant—even to go to the bathroom—and that turned out to be Erin’s first negotiation of the night.

  A bigger kid—a boy named Nicholas, probably her age—had not only claimed the sofa in the bungalow’s living room, but he’d reserved all three cushions, allowing him to lie flat. When another boy—Ahmed, eight years old—hopped into Nicholas’s place when the older one got up to pee, Nicholas, upon his return, lifted the little boy by an arm and a leg and deposited him on the floor, on top of two other children who’d fallen asleep. The result was a lot of wailing and crying, which put their guards on edge. The men with the guns didn’t seem to like children in the first place. There was no doubt in Erin’s mind that they didn’t like children who made noise.

  Erin stepped in as peacemaker. With a little flirting and by standing in a way that might have emphasized a certain anatomical outline beneath the T-shirt she’d worn to bed, she convinced Nicholas not to be an asshole, and to share his space with others. Being the biggest didn’t equate to special privileges, especially in the presence of others who were so small. She wasn’t sure that Nicholas understood the larger altruistic point, but he pulled in his landing gear and made room for other kids. Ultimately he’d abandoned the sofa altogether and claimed a patch of real estate on the floor under the dining-room table.

  Now that the sun was back up, Erin had been trying to meet as many of the other kids as she could—even the ones who spoke no English, and whose origins she didn’t know because she spoke no other languages. She’d determined that the youngest among them was five—a little girl from who-knows-where—and was thankful that the girl’s older brother, eight, was there to help her. He didn’t speak English, either, but he seemed to be a good big brother, and that kept his sister calm.

  Erin had also determined that she and Nicholas were the oldest at fourteen. The sixteen-year-olds and older, she figured, were being kept with the adults. None of them had any idea what was going on, and the guards refused to say anything that did not deal directly with staying inside and keeping quiet.

  Erin had chosen a spot against the dining-room wall, at the base of an elaborate breakfront hutch. She’d tried to sleep, and thought she’d been able to grab an hour or two, cumulatively, since they’d been captured, but real sleep—the kind that left you feeling rested—was well out of reach. She assumed it would remain that way till this was over.

  As she sat, her knees pulled up to her chest, she tried to ignore the way the one guard looked at her. She figured if they were going to assault her, they would have done it under the anonymity of darkness, just as her uncle had done during his Christmastime visit. She’d never shared that incident with anyone. Telling your mom that her brother was a pedophile seemed too big a bomb to drop while she was nursing a dying child.

  As Erin sat, she recounted the number of kids who were crowded into the space. Yet again, it came up at thirty-four. Her attention was drawn to a boy, eleven-year-old Isaac, if she recalled properly, who was winding his way over and around sleeping and chatting kids. Clearly, he was on his way to speak to Erin. He wore only a pair of briefs, and while clearly embarrassed to be nearly naked among others last night, he seemed not to care anymore. His face was dirty, a dark smear under his eye, and Erin wondered how that was possible.

  “Boys piss outside now,” a guard said.

  “I don’t have to piss,” Isaac said. This was a new development in the captors’ crowd control strategy. With so many kids and only two bathrooms, the boys were told they had to pee outdoors to relieve some of the pressure on the plumbing.

  Isaac approached and sat on the floor next to her.

  Erin said, “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “You’re Isaac, right?”

  “Yeah.” His posture mimicked hers, his legs drawn up to his chest, arms hugging his knees. He stared at his feet as he wiggled his toes.

  Erin wanted to ask if she could help him somehow, but decided that maybe he just wanted some company. If he wanted to talk, he’d figure out a way.

  “You’re Erin, right?”

  That was her in. “That’s right. Do you need something?”

  “Are they going to kill us?” He asked the question still without eye contact, and with surprisingly little emotion.

  “I don’t think so,” Erin said. If nothing else, those were the right words. “I certainly hope not.”

  “What about our parents?”

  Erin was about to repeat her previous answer, but couldn’t bring herself to do it.

  The silence drew Isaac’s eyes to hers. They were red. “There was a lot of shooting last night,” he said.

  Erin felt pressure behind her own eyes. “Yes,” she said.

  “Doesn’t that mean that they were shooting people?” His voice caught on the question, and he used his palm to wipe snot from his nose.

  “You need to be careful about drawing conclusions like that,” Erin warned. “When you don’t know something, that’s all there is to know. Just that you don’t know.”

  Isaac’s features twisted into a scowl.

  “Okay, maybe that didn’t make a lot of sense.”

  Isaac smiled. “No, it didn’t.”

  “What I meant to say is that you can’t jump to conclusions. We don’t know what that shooting was. Guessing what it might have been doesn’t help anybody.”

  “I don’t want to be an orphan,” Isaac said. He used both palms to wipe his eyes.

  “None of us do,” she said. But I bet some of us are going to be.

  CHAPTER 17

  IT WAS THE PHONE CALL THAT JOLAINE CAGE NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS thought that she would receive, and from a man she thought she’d never hear from again.

  To hear Boxers’ voice on the other end of the line at such a punishing hour was beyond startling. Now, nearly four hours later, as she sat in a little coffee shop on the grounds of the Manassas Regional Airport in Manassas, Virginia, she replayed the conversation in her head.

  “I guess you thought you’d never hear this voice again,” Boxers said. Small talk had never been his strong suit.

  “Because that’s what you told me,” she replied. “After you called me a psycho.”

  “Yeah, well, you took pleasure in seeing people burn alive, so . . .”

  “Why are you calling me?”

  “I need your help.”

  “No.”

  “Digger�
��s in trouble. We need to get him out of it.”

  “Unless there’s another Digger Grave, then I change my answer to hell no. To the twelfth power.”

  “He saved your life, Jolaine.”

  “He fired me.”

  “That circles back to the whole thing about people burning alive.”

  “He said I didn’t belong on a team.”

  “No, he said that you didn’t belong on our team. And he was right. What we do requires nuance and balance. You demonstrate neither.”

  “So, why are you calling me?”

  “Because the last thing I want in the team I’m assembling is nuance and balance. I want violence and fortitude.”

  From there, she listened to the story about terrorists who had taken over a vacation resort and killed a bunch of innocents. “Digger and his friend Gail—a team member before you came aboard—”

  “She was injured,” Jolaine remembered. “I heard the story from Mother Hen.”

  “Yeah, well, they’re back as an item, and they’ve both been taken hostage.”

  Jolaine’s bullshit bell rang. “Jonathan Grave allowed himself to be taken hostage? I don’t see that happening.”

  “Okay, not him exactly, and not Gail, but everybody else, and they need help.”

  “There are no police?”

  Boxers told her about the lack of an army or police force because something, something, Costa Rica.

  Jolaine tried to make the equation work. “You want me to become part of a two-person rescue crew?”

  “There’ll be more than two,” Boxers said. “I don’t know how many, exactly, but there’ll be more than two.”

  “You’re cashing in on favors,” Jolaine deduced.

  “Everyone I can.”

  In the end, she couldn’t say no to Big Guy. They’d tried the girlfriend-boyfriend thing for a while, back in the day, and while it never really took, there was really a very sweet side to Boxers that he didn’t want anyone to know about. It wasn’t till after she hung up that she realized she hadn’t asked how much this gig paid. Given the fact that the precious cargo was a billionaire, she imagined it would fatten her bank account at least a little.