Scorpion Strike

by John Gilstrap

  Five minutes into his mission to keep order, he gave up. The reunions were going to happen.

  The reunions should happen.

  Instead of blocking the tide, he decided to go with it. He walked instead of running, keeping an eye out for stragglers.

  Fifty yards into the journey, the flood of terrified parents met the flood of terrified children head-on in a massive roiling scrum of reunions. It was heartbreaking. And heartwarming.

  Tyler watched for a minute or two, but then it felt like voyeurism, an invasion into private moments where he wasn’t welcome.

  Also, he didn’t want to be present when the inevitable happened and there was an odd child out, a little one who didn’t have a parent to reunite with anymore. He wasn’t ready for that. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

  And that’s when the full force of reality hit him. He was that odd child out, even if childhood seemed so very far away. As he wandered back toward the pool, toward the rancid odor of sweat and death and smoke, it was hard to remember how beautiful such an awful place had once been.

  As he walked past the bodies of the dead soldiers, and the bodies of the dead guests, he wished that he could muster some element of the detachment that Scorpion and Gunslinger and Big Guy and the others seemed to access so easily, but it was not there. All he felt was a hollow sadness.

  At the decorative archway to the pool, only frayed ropes dangled from the places where the Edwards bodies had hung, but the bodies lay close by. Someone had thought to cover them with towels, but they were still naked and still dead.

  Dead forever.

  There was happiness in the sadness, too. A palpable sense of relief that the worst part of the nightmare was over, free from the realization that the literal nightmares of this ordeal would never end. Future descendants of these terrorized vacationers would speak of the horrors their grandparents endured twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now.

  And Tyler was truly heir to it all. To the property, to the misery that Baker inflicted. Even if Baker was still alive—and for now, Tyler hoped that he wasn’t—and shouldered all the responsibility for what had transpired here, his indelible stain of inhumanity would color the world’s opinions of Tyler and any future progeny for all time. The fact of a different last name might cushion the blow, but the shame and the horror would still endure.

  Tyler stood to the side, apart from the grieving and the happiness and relief. He’d never really been one of them, and now he truly was alone. In the outdoor dining area, under the dark pergola with its invisible lights and flowers, Tyler chose a table by himself, as far away from the living and the dead as he could find. The metal chair scraped against the concrete as he pulled it out. As he sat, the exhaustion struck. He crossed his arms on the table and laid his head on his wrists, wishing that he could cry.

  Wishing that he were among the dead.

  “Tyler?”

  The voice came out of nowhere, perhaps out of a dream. Was it possible he’d fallen asleep?

  “Is that you?”

  He looked up and squinted at the slender silhouette against the slats of the pergola. It was Annie Banks. “Oh, my God,” he said, jumping to his feet. His knees knocked the chair over backward. “You’re still here! You’re alive. Oh, thank God.”

  He spread his arms wide and moved to embrace her.

  He never saw the blow coming. She threw a roundhouse punch, closed-fist, he imagined, and it landed precisely on the spot that had closed his eye before.

  “Asshole!” she yelled. And she hit him again.

  He saw that one coming from the other side, but let it land. He turned his head a little to present an unbruised spot. The attack was vicious enough—loud enough—to silence nearby conversations.

  “You left me!” she screamed. “Those people were animals, and you left me with them while you saved yourself!” She tried to knee him in the balls, but he got his hip shifted in time.

  He had nothing to say.

  Annie spun around and stormed off into the now-attentive crowd, no doubt to out him and ruin him forever.

  As he stood there, now the focus of so many eyes, so much hate, he wanted simply to disappear. He wanted to . . . not be.

  “You’re the one who went to get help,” said another voice from the darkness. A short, round woman of a certain age stepped closer. “Tyler, right?” she said. “The owner’s stepson.”

  Oh, shit, he thought.

  “It’s me,” she said. “Muriel Hartwig. I created the diversion that let you escape. Did you bring the rescuers?”

  The question made him feel off balance. “No,” he said. “Well, sort of. Maybe. I helped them. But they saved everybody. They saved me too.” It was as if his mouth were answering questions on its own, without influence from his brain.

  “Did you kill any of those sons of bitches?” a man asked from the crowd.

  Tyler nodded, even though he doubted that people could see the gesture in the dark. Even though it wasn’t like that. They kind of killed themselves. But that wasn’t what the crowd wanted to hear.

  “Where are they?” someone asked. “Where are the people who rescued us?”

  “They’re gone,” Tyler said.

  That wasn’t what they wanted to hear, either.

  CHAPTER 38

  JONATHAN WAS GRATEFUL FOR THE WEATHER. IT WAS NICE TO BE stranded in the country as snowflakes pelted the glass and the wind howled. It was the perfect end to a painful day. It had been nearly two weeks since Jolaine’s cremation, and he’d decided that his 225-acre getaway in the Blue Ridge Mountains, near Charlottesville, would be the perfect spot for her to rest. As the weather rolled in, and the snow accumulated, they’d jointly decided to fill the guest rooms of Jonathan’s hunting lodge. With dinner done, they gathered around the massive stone hearth in the great room.

  “Thanks again for those kind words, Padre,” Boxers said as he took a long swig of twenty-five-year-old Lagavulin. “Though I can’t say I agree with all of them. There’s a lot of evil in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, but God’s rod and staff aren’t why I don’t fear it.”

  “Not to put too fine a point on it,” Dom D’Angelo said, swirling his Maker’s Mark. “But they really weren’t my words. Gotta give credit to David, and I think he was being a bit less literal than you.”

  “I think it’s sad,” Gail said. She sat on the sofa in a bulky cable-knit sweater, her legs pulled under her. “She really had nobody? No relatives?”

  “None that we could find,” Venice said. “And I’m pretty good at rooting out such things. But I’ll keep looking.”

  “If there’s a relative, I’ll find a way to see that they’re taken care of,” Jonathan said. He swirled his own Lagavulin. “I don’t know what else I can do. I’ve never lost a team member before. Not since the Army, anyway, and they had a VA to take care of their kin.”

  “I think she knew this was her time,” Boxers said. “Just the way she held back. I’m gonna tell myself that she’s happier now. I don’t know that I believe that, either, but I know she wasn’t a happy camper in this life. I thought there was something beautiful in the way the wind took her ashes this afternoon. I think maybe that’s how I want it to go for me when the time comes.”

  Jonathan said nothing. Those words were more poetic than he was used to hearing from Boxers, and he didn’t want to ruin the moment. He sipped his scotch and let the smokiness settle on the back of his tongue before swallowing.

  “Are you okay, Dig?” Dom asked.

  Jonathan didn’t know there was a way to answer that question. Given what he’d devoted his life to, the word okay was a difficult one to grasp. The answer was always some variation of both yes and no. “As well as I ever am, I suppose. I’ve never expected fairness out of life, but it bugs the hell out of me that one of my operators died while a guy like Baker Sinise got away.”

  “We don’t know that,” Gail corrected. “All we know is that nobody found his body. I like to think he was killed when the ship blew up
.”

  “I like to think the Agency pukes got their hands on him and gave him their special breed of love,” Boxers said.

  Venice took a sip of her pinot grigio and cleared her throat, clearly ready to change the subject and make an announcement. “Do you all remember David Kirk?” she asked.

  “The reporter,” Jonathan said. “We gave him a hell of an exclusive on the Canadian thing.”

  Venice smiled. “Exactly. Well, I have a confession to make. I spoke to him on deep background today.”

  Jonathan felt a sense of dread. “What did you do?”

  “I gave him the name and address and job title of the CIA guy who decided to ship nerve agent to the Ukrainian rebels. Pretty much everything he needs to build the whole story.”

  Boxers gave a low, rumbling laugh. “Oh, that’s gonna piss some people off.”

  “Where did you get that information?” Gail asked through a smile.

  “I have my own sources on deep background,” Venice said.

  Jonathan narrowed his eyes. “These new sources you keep mentioning—are they reliable?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “Well, who are they?” Jonathan pressed. “Given what’s at stake, at least give me a clue.”

  Venice tipped her glass and winked. “Have another scotch,” she said. “You’re not nearly oiled enough yet to hear that.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Like every day, every book begins and ends with my lovely bride, Joy. She is the consistent, ever-reliable source of everything that makes life wonderful. I love you.

  One of the coolest parts of doing what I do for a living is meeting wonderful people who do (or have done) in real life much of what Jonathan Grave and his team do on the page. I am forever grateful to U.S. Navy SEAL Jeff Gonzales, president of Trident Concepts, LLC (www.tridentconcepts.com) and director of training at The Range Austin, for his help with tactical considerations and his hands-on lessons in night vision. I am equally grateful to Special Agent Chris Shaw of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team for the behind-the-scenes tour and capabilities demonstrations. As always, when I need help in the technical or practical elements of deploying edged weapons, there is no better expert or nicer guy than Steve Tarani (www.SteveTarani.com), the managing member at Global Resource Services, LLC. It’s an honor to have friends like these in my Rolodex.

  There’s a reason why Jonathan and Boxers (and so many of their real-life counterparts) prefer Heckler & Koch weapons, and it has everything to do with superior engineering design, quality, and performance. H&K’s Robert Reidsma has been enormously (and repeatedly) helpful to me in my efforts to get the details right, and I am very grateful.

  On the issue of firearms, I make it a point never to give Jonathan and his team a weapon that I have not shot personally, and that requires the space to do so. I am especially grateful to C.R. Newlin and his very special Echo Valley Training Center for providing an exceptional range and training experience.

  Thanks also to Lori Edwards, whose generous donation to Trinity Lutheran School earned a character to be named after her husband, Hunter. I’m very up front with the organizers of these charity events that the story rarely ends well for the characters named in such auctions, but rarely do things go as badly as they did for the fictional Lori and Hunter Edwards. If an apology is in order, I hope this suffices.

  Many thanks yet again to my buddy Claude Berube, who is my go-to source for any information I need on the subject of ships.

  When it comes to critique groups, you know you’re involved in something special when writers’ conferences build panels around them. Such is the case with the Rumpus Writers, the group of friends and fabulous writers with whom I gather every month to share our work and our real-life triumphs, tragedies, and frustrations. Over the course of seven years, we’ve never once missed a meeting, and that’s pretty special. So, thank you, Donna Andrews, Ellen Crosby, Alan Orloff, and Art Taylor, for your help and friendship.

  In the grand scheme of bringing a novel to the marketplace, mine is in many ways the simplest job. All I have to do is sit in a quiet room and make stuff up. The real heroes of every book are the ones whose names never make it to the cover. No one on the team works harder than Michaela Hamilton, my editor at Kensington, whose eye and ear are perfectly tuned to what my books need to make them many times better than I can make them on my own. Lou Malcangi is the art director who designed this book’s kick-ass cover. Steve Zacharius runs the show and Lynn Cully is my publisher. Publicist extraordinaire Claire Hill took over the reins from Morgan Elwell, and together with Vida Engstrand and the rest of the marketing department, they work wonders in spreading the word about my books. Alexandra Nicolajsen is my Internet and social media sensei at Kensington, and a continuing resource for cool new ideas. A thousand thanks to all of you!

  Finally, there’s my one career constant, my dear friend and agent, Anne Hawkins, of John Hawkins and Associates in New York. We continue to share this ride together.

  Photo by Amy Cesal

  About the Author

  John Gilstrap is the New York Times bestselling author of the Jonathan Grave thriller series and other fiction and nonfiction. His novel Against All Enemies won the award for best paperback original of 2015 given by the International Thriller Writers. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. An explosives safety expert and a former firefighter, he holds a master’s degree from the University of Southern California and a bachelor’s degree from the College of William & Mary in Virginia. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia. Please visit him on Facebook or at www.johngilstrap.com.