"Is that really the only way to do this, or did you just get tired of thinking about it?"
"Probably a little of both. I haven't been able to come up with a better plan, and we can't sit around forever waiting for one to pop into our heads."
He kissed her again and walked to the door.
"Lock it behind me and don't open up for anyone, not even Jose."
"Got it."
He opened the door and stood for a moment to allow his eyes to adjust to the low level of light, and then closed the door behind him and moved stealthily through a vast lobby. After getting his bearings, he walked down the steps, around the corner, and into the alley that would lead him to the back of the hotel the gang members occupied.
Stryker moved soundless through the early morning air and felt a slight chill from the humidity that is ever present in coastal cities. After passing the backs of several hotels, he continued his journey through the dead city, straining to hear the slightest noise, but detected nothing.
He felt as though he were some sort of spectral phantom that moved through the stillness without even disturbing the molecules that he brushed aside with each step.
His eyes were now fully adjusted to the light and, with a bright moon, he was able to move quickly through the alley, cross a major street, and enter another alley.
The naval vessel was visible when he crossed the next street, and it loomed over the pier like some giant dark shadow, seeming somehow menacing due to the massive monolithic hull.
He reached his objective and stood at the northern fire escape to the hotel. The gang members were on the fourth floor of the same building.
"Things are about to get interesting," he whispered to himself.
He stepped onto the low platform at the base of the stairs and tested his weight on the first tread. Made of metal, there was no give from his weight. He took the next step and then the next. By the first floor, he was confident he could get to the fourth floor without alerting anyone.
Stryker climbed more rapidly and soon was standing in front of the door. It was made of metal with wood molding covering the edges. He gently pried the molding lose and pulled a thin screwdriver from his vest and inserted it to see if the dead bolt was locked.
It wasn't.
He then removed the screwdriver from the crack in the doorway and inserted it again below the lower strike plate. Lifting up gently from the bottom, he forced the lock up. Then he inserted a second screwdriver against the face of the locking mechanism and slowly pried it open. Pulling toward his chest, he opened the door a crack and peered into the hallway.
After placing the screwdrivers back in his vest, he took his M-4 off his shoulder and started down the length of the hotel, moving deliberately, placing a foot down, and then slowly transferring his weight to it. He repeated the process for close to ten minutes before he stood in front of the room that the gang members occupied.
He waited another ten minutes before he heard a barely discernible whisper from the other side of the closed door. It was too faint for him to tell where the men behind the door were in the room, but he was fairly certain one would be on the balcony watching the vessel, and the other would be facing the door, perhaps with a ready weapon.
He waited an additional ten minutes and heard the sliding door to the balcony move. Someone must be entering or exiting the room. He leaned back on one leg and put every ounce of force in his body into kicking the door.
It splintered at the strike plate and the door flew open.
Both men faced him.
"Drop it," he ordered in Spanish.
They glanced at each other and both weapons came up simultaneously. But Stryker's was already up and on full auto.
He pulled and held the trigger down as he traversed the barrel twice across the front of the men. The slugs hit the men in the chest, and knocked them backward.
Stryker put another round in each forehead as he passed their prone bodies and then turned to examine the room.
A radio sat on the desk against one wall, with two boxes of energy bars beside it, together with spare mags for the two scoped .308s they carried. A set of NVGs rested on the desk next to the balcony door, and two cases of bottled water lay on the floor. A few empty liquor bottles dotted the floor next to the bed, and wrappers from the energy bars lay next to them.
“Not exactly the neatest people I ever met, but I guess it doesn’t really matter now,” he murmured.
He walked past the bodies, sat in an overstuffed chair, and swept his eyes across the room. He studied the two corpses, noting a strong resemblance between the two men.
Stryker again glanced around the room, sighed, and stood.
He had hoped to take someone alive to get to the bottom of what these men wanted from his group or, for that matter, the sailors.
That was not going to happen and the contents of the room would not yield a clue either. It was a dead end from that perspective.
He walked into the bathroom, snuffed the candle that emitted enough light to see faint outlines of objects, and lowered his monocular and looked around briefly. Then he returned the way he had entered the building and stopped at the platform on the fourth floor.
Two men stood at the bow of the ship. They crouched behind the deck gun and peered around the corners. They obviously had heard the shots and knew the general direction, but they clearly had not located his position. They continued to look around, occasionally stopping to whisper to each other and then scanned the area around them again.
Stryker walked down the stairs and started back toward the hotel, vigilant and soundless, but already planning his introduction to the ship’s company.
He hoped they weren't trigger happy.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
"Why can't I go along with you?"
Jose was clearly not liking the plan.
"Because, I don't want them seeing a Mexican face when we introduce ourselves. We are talking about men armed with automatic weapons who have a good reason to be suspicious, given their experience at the hotel. They might just shoot first and not bother to ask questions later."
"I still don't like it," he complained.
"It's for your own good," Stryker pointed out.
"Come on Jose," Erin coaxed. "It's only for a few minutes, and then we can introduce you."
"So," Stryker said, about to review the plan for the third time. "We park behind the container, and Erin and I introduce ourselves. Then, when we call, you drive the Humvee up, we pass out whatever weapons are needed, put the rest in the trailer and get the hell out of here."
"Okay, I get it." Jose sighed.
"Good." Stryker looked at Erin. "You ready?"
"Lead on."
They left the hotel, and Erin got into the driver's seat with Stryker riding shotgun and Jose pouting in the back seat like a child being taken home after acting up in a restaurant. Stryker couldn't help but stifle a chuckle, and Erin glanced at him with a rueful smile.
The cluster of hotels by the main road soon turned into an industrial park that sat next to the pier, and they drove by welding shops, nautical outlets, and a smattering of working class taco stands. Erin pulled onto the pier and continued moving toward the ship.
She parked behind the container and got out, patting Jose's arm before joining Stryker. They walked toward the vessel.
"Are you sure we should be armed?"
"I don't leave home without it," Stryker murmured.
They stopped below the hatch that, when opened, was the exit point for the vessel.
"Hello up there," Stryker bellowed between cupped hands.
"Who are you?" A fainter voice answered.
"Captain Thomas sent me to find you guys. My name is Stryker."
"That a first or last name?"
Stryker looked at Erin with an expression of mild disgust.
"It's the only name," he bellowed back. “Now will you send somebody down here so I can stop shouting? We need to get a move on. I'm supposed to get
you back to San Diego."
"I don't know anything about that."
"Get your captain. He knows."
"He ain't here."
"Where is he?" Stryker voice was filling with frustration.
"We don't know."
"Oh, for Christ sake. Either get somebody down here in the next five minutes or I'll leave you to the gang."
"What gang?"
"I'll go into that when I don't need a foghorn to have this conversation.”
They moved closer to the ship to take advantage of the shadow cast by the large vessel. A few minutes later, the hatch opened, a gangplank extended out, and a man descended it with an M-16 aimed directly at them.
Stryker glanced down at him. He was a squat fireplug, with massive shoulders and arms. He stared at Stryker through eyes that were almost black and wore a grim expression. Stryker again examined him and noted he wore a globe and anchor tattoo on one thick forearm.
"Former marine?"
The man nodded.
"Me too."
"What's your story?" he asked without changing expression.
"I was sent here by Captain Thomas of the Nimitz. It's berthed in San Diego, and he's bringing in crews of the ships that survived the plague."
"Why don't I know about this?"
"How would I know? Didn't your captain tell you about it?"
"No."
"Where is he now?"
"We don't know," the man replied. "We were attacked at the hotel by the Mexican Army and were separated during the fight. Only nine of us made it back here."
"You were supposed to be nineteen and I only found two bodies at the hotel."
"Eight left a week ago." The man's expression was starting to soften, and Stryker realized that he understood the only way Stryker could have known their number was if he was telling the truth.
"Look, if you guys want to go to San Diego, you need to get down here now, and we need to get going. The men you thought were Mexican Army are really a drug gang in BDUs. They killed one of your guys and tortured the other to death and nailed him to a wall after they cut his balls off and gouged his eyes out. I don't want to be here when they show up."
"The guy they tortured."
"Yes."
"Describe him." His expression grew beyond grim into menacing.
"Tall, thin, balding, and I would give you the eye color but..."
"That's Captain Towers," he said softly, looking away for the first time. "Motherfuckers."
"I'm sorry," Stryker said.
"We're not going anywhere until we bury our dead and kill those murdering bastards."
"Fine by me, but can we do it sometime today?"
"Get your asses down here," the man bellowed. "And bring every damn weapon we can carry.
"Thanks," Stryker said with irony in his voice.
"Tom." He extended his right hand.
"Stryker."
"I know. I heard you yelling at us."
They loaded the men from the ship onto the trailer, and Stryker asked Erin to sit in the back of the Humvee so he could talk to Tom.
“Fine,” she replied.
Stryker pulled out of the parking lot next to the pier and slowly accelerated as they moved on to the main road that lead back to the hotel where the attack took place.
“Can any of them shoot?”
“Not really,” Tom replied. “The captain asked me to train them up when we realized we were going to have to dock the ship and abandon it, but we didn’t have enough ammo to really get them up to speed.”
Stryker gave him a confused expression.
“The navy is not big on small weapons training, and our armory had a total of 14 M-16s that we could use.”
“So, we have lots of ammo now.” Stryker jerked his head toward the trailer. “But, we can’t afford to fire off rounds to train people. It would attract too much attention.”
Both men feel silent, and finally Tom asked, “Where did you get the Chinese grenades?”
“How did you know they were Chinese?”
“I saw the markings on the case. We saw them in a terrorist weapons cache in Afghanistan, and I remember being confused at how small they were.”
Stryker glanced at the man again, and decided there was more to the man that he initially recognized.
“After we bury your men, we need to head north and try to ambush the bad guys.”
“Or we could let them come to us,” Tom replied with a casual tone.
“You got something in mind?”
“Not really, but we know the town, and I’m not sure they do. We might just use the hotel where they surveilled us as an ambush point. It could save us from accidently running into them and ending up in a running firefight with a superior force.”
Stryker mulled it over for a few minutes and recognized the soundness of Tom’s thinking.
“If you can come up with a plan that works, I am fine with letting them come to us. But if you can’t, we move forward with getting north and setting up where they won’t be expecting us.”
“Let’s get our guys in the ground first, and then we can talk about what we do.”
They drove on in a brittle silence until Stryker said, “I am sorry about your casualties. I know it hurts.”
“He was a smart man.” Tom kept his eyes roving over the landscape as they drove down the highway.
Stryker could not help but be impressed by the man. He was obviously a tough customer who handled himself with a quiet self-assurance that seemed based in competence and experience.
Another long silence ensued, with Erin and Jose remaining silent. They sensed a pending conflict between the two men, and Erin understood that two alpha dogs were sniffing at each other.
“We are going to do this my way,” Tom said. “No way these bastards are getting away with what they did.”
“We will until it makes no sense to me.” Stryker’s voice grew lower and contained a hard edge.
“Tom.” Erin leaned forward from the backseat.
“Yes.”
“My M-4 is leveled at the back of your head and my best advice is to play nice. My man could stomp you into dust, but I am back here to make sure it doesn’t come to that. Are you feeling me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied slowly.
“Good, I hate to waste ammo.”
Tom understood the terse reply.
“She’s really a pretty nice person,” Stryker said.
“Good to know.”
Stryker drove on for a few minutes. “How did you end up in the Navy?”
“I was two years short of getting my retirement twenty and knew I couldn’t make it through the physical so I transferred into the navy.”
“You could have taken medical retirement.”
“I didn’t want to. I still had some good miles on me and wanted to finish it out doing something useful.”
“What were you going to wash out on?”
“Knees. Too many years of humping up and down hills.”
“Same thing was going to happen to me, but the die-off happened two weeks before I would have failed the physical.” Stryker looked away with an expression of regret.
They pulled into the parking lot in front of the hotel and watched as the sailors dismounted the trailer and formed a protective circle around them.
“Not bad,” Stryker said.
Tom picked up his M-16 and walked toward the hotel lobby but stopped and turned around. He pointed at the men to make them increase their spacing and then turned back to Stryker.
“Stryker rings a bell. Were you Force Recon?”
“Yes.”
“So, you were the crazy fucker who called the bomb strike on your own position.”
“First of all, I am not crazy. It seems that way when you don’t know the whole story.” Stryker paused, reluctant to continue, but plowed forward. “We were all dead anyway, so what did it matter? The air strike simply got some of us a chance to live.”
“Did you really turn
down the Silver Star?”
“No, I just didn’t show up for it.”
“I heard about that. They were going to court martial your ass for not showing up.”
“I don’t know about any of that,” Stryker replied. “It was, to me, just more media bullshit that I didn’t want to hear.”
“What happened to the medal?”
“They sent it through the mail. I threw it in the dumpster. I don’t take rewards for getting half my men killed or wounded.”
Tom nodded.
Both men moved forward, walked up the steps, and into the lobby. Erin and Jose followed.
“They seem to be doing better,” Jose whispered to Erin.
“He has a way of really pissing people off,” Erin answered. She held her weapon at the low ready but was prepared to bring it up at the least hint of a problem.
“You can lower the weapon,” Tom said over his shoulder. “I’m good with him.”
Erin wondered how he knew she was still prepared to kill him and reluctantly let the muzzle point downward.
“Jesus,” she muttered, “this guy is another Stryker.”
They walked by the first corpse, and Tom glanced at the man. "Where is the captain?"
"Bar." Stryker nodded his head toward the next room, and then walked into the bar area and over to where the captain lay still covered with the table cloth Stryker took from the restaurant next door when he discovered the body.
Tom leaned over, pulled the cover off the corpse and examined the captain intently, then placed it back over the body.
"The mutilation was post mortem," he whispered.
"Yes, they wanted to send a clear message to somebody, and my guess was that the burn marks are from a blow torch."
"Sounds right."
"The gang knew we were coming and tried to ambush us up the road."
"Then why are you here?"
"They botched the job and we got away. But, the point is they didn't try to capture us. They wanted us dead, and I have no idea why. What's pretty clear to me is that the captain told them we were coming, and he did so under extreme duress."
"It fits."
"Then the next question becomes, why didn't he tell you we were coming?" Stryker studied Tom as he waited for a reply.
STRYKER - OMNIBUS: BOOKS 3-5: A Post Apocalyptic Tale Page 44