Scorpion Strike

by John Gilstrap

  Big Guy had thought the load-out through pretty carefully. In addition to an M4 for everybody and enough 5.56-millimeter ammunition to start an army, he’d brought an array of handguns, grenades, and carrying gear. And because Big Guy was Big Guy, he’d brought sixteen pounds of C4 explosives and a smorgasbord of detonator options.

  “I know you’re intending to float all this shit ashore,” Henry said, “but what the hell are we going to do with it all from there?”

  “We’re gonna hump it,” Boxers said. “We’ll work that office-boy slump outta your shoulders and get you to standing tall again.” The comment drew approving laughter from Madman and Boomer, the other D-boys of the team.

  Henry locked the M4’s bolt back, inserted a full mag, double-checked the safety and snapped the dust flap closed. Time to move on to his pistol. He’d chosen a nine-millimeter Glock 19, in part because he liked the Glock platform, but mostly because he liked the fifteen-round magazine. There was a reason why the gun world revolved around Glocks, and it had everything to do with the fact that they virtually never failed. Back in his snake-eating days, he’d played with many different platforms. Maybe if Big Guy had packed a Sig, he’d have loaded up with that, but woulda, coulda, shoulda.

  “You said we hook up with the boat boys at sixteen hundred?” Madman asked.

  “That’s the plan,” Boxers said.

  “It’s fourteen-thirty now. How long is the transit?”

  “We’ll depart at fifteen-fifteen,” Boxers said.

  Jolaine offered, “That’s still a lot of daylight to kill.”

  “Torpedo and the Chief haven’t heard word one about the plan,” Boxers said. “I’m hoping that Mother Hen will have some improved sat intel by then, and that Digger will have some hard intel about the island.”

  “It would be nice to know where the bad guys are warehousing the good guys,” Conan said.

  A few seconds passed in silence, and then Boxers cleared his throat. “I think we need to get a couple of things straight from the beginning. We touched on it before, and I don’t want to pick that scab, but our precious cargo on this op number exactly two. Scorpion and Gunslinger. They come home, period. The only way they stay on that island is if we all go cruising for Haji’s virgins. Are we clear on that?”

  Henry noted how uncomfortable Boxers looked in the role of commander. It’s not that he didn’t have the chops, and God knew he had the skills, but he was clearly out of his comfort zone.

  “I asked if we were clear.”

  “Clear,” they answered in a ragged, imperfect unison.

  Big Guy continued, “When we’re feet-dry and we make contact, Scorpion will no doubt assume command.”

  “Try to stop him,” Madman said, sparking a laugh.

  “And he’s gonna go all altruistic and shit,” Boxers continued. “He’s gonna put every one of those damn hostages ahead of him, and I’m fine with that . . . till I’m not.”

  Dylan cocked his head. “What are you saying, Box?”

  “I’m saying that this is my party and we play by my rules. The fact that Dig proclaims himself to be in command will not put him in command.”

  “Oh, Christ,” Madman said. “You’re gonna knock dicks with Digger? What the hell?”

  “It’s not dick-knocking,” Boxers snapped. He was losing patience, so his voice dropped an octave. “It’s saving his goddamn life. And Gunslinger’s. If I give the order, I don’t care what you have to do—zip-tie him or just lead him by his ear—you’re going to get him the hell to safety.”

  “I can’t do that,” Dylan said.

  “Then get the hell out,” Boxers said.

  “You’re serious.”

  “Damn straight I’m serious. There’ll be other saves, and I’m not expecting any of you to be a human shield for Scorpion. He’s gonna shoot the shit outta bad guys just because he’s pissed, and I don’t care about any of that. But if things go to shit and he goes all Nathan Hale about regretting only but one life, I’m gonna cut that shit off. He gets home, period. So does Gunslinger. I want your word.”

  Henry watched as the others stewed over what they’d just heard. He feared that some saw it as a power play, but Henry knew exactly what Big Guy was up to. Digger was yin to Boxers’ yang. As such, it was more important to Big Guy that Digger live than Big Guy did.

  “You have my word,” Henry said. “But here’s the rest: As long as I am breathing, none of us gets left behind on the battlefield. Not one.”

  Boxers smiled. “Not one,” he said. “I can live with that.” He looked out to the rest.

  This time, the unison chorus was perfect. “Not one.”

  CHAPTER 24

  SCORPION HAD JUST DELIVERED A GIFT TO TYLER. HE DIDN’T HAVE TO risk his life to find information he didn’t know how to collect. Why did he feel so . . . guilty?

  “Will you give it a rest?” Jaime said. They were crossing back across the golf course. Moving slowly and naturally, just as Scorpion had instructed them. “I, for one, am a devoted coward, and I don’t see how dying for a bunch of—”

  Dirt erupted from the ground in front of their feet as gunshot pounded the air from behind them. “You!” a voice shouted. “Stop!”

  “Shit.” They said it together.

  “Get down on your knees!” the voice yelled. “Get down or I will shoot you.”

  It took no further convincing. Tyler raised his hands and slowly lowered himself to his knees.

  “What are you doing out here?” the voice asked. “How did you escape?” The soldier who owned the voice emerged into his field of view. He held a rifle, but it was pointed more around Tyler than at him. He sensed, but could not see to confirm, that another soldier stood behind them.

  “W-we didn’t escape,” Tyler said. He never thought he’d have to practice their lie so soon. “We were never captured.”

  “We were smoking weed,” Jaime added. “Out in the woods. We heard the shooting, and then we panicked and stayed away. Until now.”

  The soldier said, “Take off your clothes and toss them to me.”

  “Excuse me?” Tyler said.

  “Do what you are told,” said a second voice, this one from behind.

  “They want to search our pockets,” Jaime said. “Can we stand?”

  “Shirts first.”

  This was more than a little weird. Tyler stripped his polo shirt over his head and held it. “There?” he asked, pointing to a spot on the ground in front of the guard he could see.

  “Right there.”

  Tyler underhanded the shirt, and then Jaime’s landed on top of it.

  “You may now stand,” said the guard from behind. “Now the rest.”

  “All of it?”

  “Shoes, pants, underwears, all of it.”

  Tyler noted the odd plural for underwear. Why not? he supposed. They were Russian, after all. As soon as the thought crossed his mind, he tried to force it out. He wasn’t supposed to know that detail. He wasn’t supposed to know anything.

  As he stood naked in the fairway, he tried reminding himself that if the night had gone the way he’d wanted, he’d have been naked, anyway. But under much better circumstances. The thought of sex with Annie caused a stirring down there even now, and he panicked a little. The last thing he needed was to pop an erection in front of his kidnappers.

  The front guard swung his rifle on its sling until the muzzle was pointed at the ground and the stock rested behind his back. He picked up the articles of clothing, one at a time, sifted them through his fingers, and turned the pockets inside out. The pockets were all empty. He tossed the garments back on the ground between the boys. Neither moved to pick them up.

  “They have nothing,” the guard said. “No phones, no identification, nothing.”

  “I work here,” Jaime said. “Jaime Bonilla. I run a maintenance crew. I don’t need identification. Everyone knows me.”

  “And what about you?” Tyler felt a poke between his shoulder blades. In his mind, it was th
e muzzle of the man’s rifle. “Where is yours?”

  “I-I’m Jaime’s friend,” Tyler said. “I come here a lot. He lets me visit when I want. I don’t need identification, either.”

  “Are you American?”

  “Yes,” Tyler said. “Sir.”

  “Then where is your identification? You need a passport to board the boat to come to the island.”

  The truthful answer, of course, was that the terrorists already had all of his stuff. They just didn’t know it yet.

  “What’s your name?” Another poke between the shoulder blades.

  “Ben,” Tyler said. It was the first name that popped into his head. “Ben Jackson.”

  “Where do you live in America?”

  “Springfield, Virginia.” That bit of truth popped out before he could stop it. He couldn’t think of a fictional town fast enough.

  “That is a long way to travel just to visit a friend.”

  “Can I put my clothes back on, please?”

  “Not yet. When we are done talking. It is, what? Six thousand miles from this place to your home? Please explain that to me.”

  “I spend summers with my uncle in Los Angeles,” Tyler said. He was beginning to feel a little as if he were drowning. Shit, what did I say my name was again?

  “Only one thousand five hundred miles, then,” the guard said.

  “His uncle was a guest here a few weeks ago,” Jaime explained. His voice was utterly calm. “He left Ben behind to hang with me. He’ll be going back in a couple of weeks.”

  Tyler intentionally did not look at Jaime for fear that his face would give something away.

  “And where were you last night?” the guard pressed.

  Jaime pointed up the hill, and the guard snapped, “Not you. I want to hear it from your friend.”

  Tyler raced his options through his head, and again came up only with the truth. He pointed ahead toward the hill. “There are old staff structures up there,” he said. “Most of them are falling apart, but Jaime and I fixed one of them up as kind of a hangout.”

  “Where you can smoke drugs,” the guard said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And sometimes take the ladies?” This from the guard in front, complete with a lecherous tone.

  “Um, no, sir,” Tyler said. “It’s not the kind of place you’d take a lady to. It’s . . . rustic.” He wasn’t 100 percent sure that was the word he was looking for, but rustic seemed to work.

  “How old are you?”

  “Nineteen,” Tyler said.

  “Twenty-two,” Jaime said.

  “Young men your age live on your phones,” the rear guard said. “Where are yours?”

  Jaime said, “I don’t have one. I have no one to call, and I couldn’t afford one, anyway.”

  “How do you communicate for your job?”

  “Two-way radios. I keep mine in my room in the staff dormitories.”

  “And what about you, Mr. Jackson?”

  “Mine’s in his room, too,” he lied. “That’s where I sleep when I visit.” A fly landed on his dick and he shooed it away.

  “When you heard the shooting last night, what did you think?”

  “I thought we were under attack,” Jaime said. “We both did.”

  “So, what did you do?”

  “We hid. Stayed out of the way, trying to be invisible.”

  “Why did you come out?”

  “We were hungry,” Jaime said.

  “Not you,” the guard snapped.

  “We were hungry,” Tyler said. “We went searching for food.” As soon as he heard his words, he knew he’d tripped a trap.

  “Where, exactly, did you expect to find it? Ben Jackson, that is for you to answer.”

  Shit. Shitshitshit. “We, um, thought we could maybe take something from the bungalows. Jaime has all the keys, so we thought—” He stopped short, but there was no taking anything back.

  “And did you find what you were looking for?”

  “No, sir,” Jaime said. He spoke quickly, as if to steal the conversation away from Tyler. “We found a bloated dead body and lost our appetites.”

  For a long time, the front guard looked past them, presumably waiting for direction from the guard behind them.

  Finally the front guard nodded and said, “All right, then. Put your clothes back on. We’ll take you back to see what will be done with you.”

  Tyler went for his boxer briefs first. “What does that mean, what will be done with us?”

  “The order is to shoot you,” the rear guard said.

  Tyler turned at those words and saw the man for the first time. He was short and stocky and looked mean as hell. He needed a shave, and not in the way of the cool GQ dudes who can pull off the perpetual five-o’clock shadow. This guy’s beard grew in splotches that gave the impression of a hairy rash.

  “Perhaps, given the circumstances, you will be given a reprieve because you did not have a chance to be warned. That is not my decision to make.”

  “But you’re not going to shoot us now, right?” Tyler asked.

  The soldier smiled. “The day is still young,” he said.

  Tyler looked to Jaime, whose jaw muscles had begun to twitch. He seemed intent on not making eye contact. Tyler had seen the look before, but rarely. The pursed lips and locked jaw meant that Jaime had been pushed beyond his limits.

  Tyler picked up his pants next. As he stuffed his foot into the first pant leg, the guard said, “A lot of my colleagues have been killed since last night. What do you know about that?”

  Tyler didn’t say anything. He didn’t know if he could trust his voice.

  Jaime said, “What a shame. Who on earth would want to kill a bunch of asshole—”

  The bullet blew out his face and his legs folded. His body hit the ground butt-first and then pitched over onto its side.

  Blood splashed Tyler’s face and he screamed. “Jesus! Jaime! Oh, Christ!” He dropped to his knees to help and fell over as something hard hit the top of his head. Blood flowed immediately from a gash in his scalp beneath his hair. “What the hell!”

  The guard grabbed Tyler by his hair and pulled him up. He almost fell when his feet got tangled in his flopping pant leg. When he was standing, the guard yanked his head back until he was looking at the sky.

  “Killing is easy, Mr. Jackson,” he said. “I don’t know who your friend thought he was talking to, but he’ll never talk to anyone again. Do you have to learn the same lesson?”

  “No, sir,” Tyler said. He thought he might cry and he thought he might vomit.

  The guard let go of his hair and launched him forward with a shove that sent him face-first into the grass. Three feet to his right, blood poured from the ragged hole that used to be Jaime’s mouth and nose. He looked away.

  “Get dressed,” the guard said, and Tyler scrambled to finish pulling on his clothes.

  “And Papa,” the guard said.

  The other guard perked up, and Tyler was reminded again of the phonetic alphabet, in which papa doubled for the letter P.

  “While our friend Ben Jackson gets dressed, do me a favor and grab those keys from Jaime Bonilla’s pockets. We might need those.”

  As he spoke those words, his eyes never left Tyler. And he smiled.

  “There were no keys,” Papa said. “The pockets were empty. They had nothing in them at all.”

  Tyler’s hands trembled as he fumbled with the button and zipper to his pants.

  “What a surprise,” Short Man said.

  Tyler froze in midaction, his shirt in his hand, unsure what to do next.

  “I said to get dressed,” Short Man said. “We have to get you up to the boss and see what he wants to do with you. Unless, of course, you want to change any of your story before we get there.”

  Tyler knew this was a trap. Everything about this encounter was a trap. A deadly one, at that. His mind wasn’t even racing anymore. It was as if it had seized and was no longer capable of meaningful thought. T
here was only fear.

  “Put your shirt on,” Short Man said. Something changed behind his eyes. This man wanted nothing more than to kill him.

  “I won’t tell you again,” the guard said.

  The thing about putting on a polo shirt is that there is a moment of blindness when the fabric passes over your eyes. That was the precise instant when the full-on kick took him in the balls. The next blow was somewhere near his ear.

  And then the beating started.

  * * *

  Jonathan despised tight spaces like this, and he knew that Gail’s back must be killing her. He thought about suggesting that she take a break and that he’d get back to her, but he knew that there was no way that she would go along with that. She’d be pissed that he suggested it.

  They’d been in here for nearly fifteen minutes, and he was becoming less convinced that the exploration was going to yield anything useful. He told himself that if nothing else, he’d make himself familiar with the space in the hope that maybe they could utilize it somehow when Boxers arrived after dark with the reinforcements.

  “What, exactly, are we looking for?” Gail asked.

  Jonathan was about to answer when he heard something. He held up his hand. “Did you get that?”

  “Get what?”

  Jonathan slowed his painfully slow pace even more, hoping to reacquire—

  “I heard it that time,” Gail said. “Children’s voices?”

  “That’s what I got,” Jonathan agreed. “And to answer your question, this is exactly what we were looking for.” He smiled. “We just didn’t know it yet.”

  The darkness down here was pretty absolute, but once his eyes adjusted, Jonathan could be guided by the dim circles of light that filtered in through the ornament-covered stacks. Best he could tell, the tunnels ran in straight lines down here, as opposed to what looked like randomness from ground level, thanks to the gardens and landscaping. So far, the floor had been fairly free of tripping hazards, but you had to be pretty close to the circles of light before you could even begin to see your feet.