Soft Targets

by John Gilstrap

  The fear in Thomas’s eyes peaked when he saw Jonathan’s masked face. The rescuer tried hard to make his eyes look friendly. “I’m going to cut you loose,” Jonathan explained. “That means I have to use a knife. Don’t freak out when you see it.”

  The eight-inch tempered steel blade of the K-Bar was honed to a razor’s edge, and looked scary as hell. It was every bit as deadly as it was utilitarian, and Jonathan didn’t relish the thought of the kid wriggling his way into a knife wound. He took care as he slipped the blade between the boy’s ankles first, to free his feet, then his knees, and finally between his wrists.

  “I’ll let you get the tape on your mouth yourself,” Jonathan said. He imagined that it was pretty much welded to the kid’s skin by now.

  Thomas Hughes seemed to have a hard time finding the margins of the tape. Jonathan left him to work it out himself, turning to the task of picking up his spent shell casings. All five had landed within feet of each other over in the corner nearest the splintered steps. He slipped the shells into a pouch pocket in his trousers.

  Thomas found the handle for the tape on his mouth, and he peeled it away with a moan.

  “Are you hurt?” Jonathan asked.

  “They were gonna cut my balls off,” Thomas said. He seemed at once terrified and amazed. “Are you a cop?” He whipped his head around trying to find the other party in the room. “Who were you just talking to?”

  Jonathan ignored the questions. He found a roll of paper towels near a slop sink in the corner farthest from the blasted doors and pulled off a healthy length, wrapping them around his fist. Then he soaked the wad with water from the spigot and handed the dripping mess to Thomas.

  The boy eyed him suspiciously. Jonathan nodded toward Thomas’s befouled thighs and nether regions. “Thought you might like to clean yourself up.”

  Self-conscious, Thomas took the towels as Jonathan looked away to grant him some measure of dignity. Jonathan stooped to Lionel’s body and sifted through his pockets. “When you’re finished wiping down, I need you to strip this guy and get into his clothes as quickly as possible. There’s one more of these assholes out there somewhere, and I don’t want to be here when he comes back.”

  “No,” Thomas said. “There’s only these two.”

  “Nope, trust me. There’s one more. Come on now, move.” Finding only a wallet, Jonathan moved on to Barry’s corpse, which yielded the same. He put both billfolds into a zippered pocket on the side of his ruck. Thomas still hadn’t moved. “Come on, kid. Unless you want to go naked.”

  Thomas squatted and started fumbling with the laces on Lionel’s boot.

  “Hurry,” Jonathan urged. “We’ve got zero time to dawdle.”

  “If you’re not a cop, then who are you?”

  Jonathan had had enough. “I’m going upstairs and look around. When I get back, I want you dressed, understand? Naked or dressed, we’re out of here in three minutes.”

  He held the boy’s gaze, then turned on his heel. “Two minutes and fifty seconds,” he said.

  Chapter 2

  The main floor smelled only slightly less awful than the cellar. The Patrone brothers had decided to keep the windows closed despite the warmth of the day, and with the one tiny air conditioner in the living room silenced when Jonathan cut the power, the odor had physical weight. The place reeked of sickness and old age, a legacy, Jonathan figured, of the grandmother who’d only recently passed the property on to the next generation. Every upholstered seat back and arm cushion sported a doily. Gingham and lace were the fabrics of choice for window coverings.

  Jonathan used a fist-long Maglite to illuminate his search for any documents or notes that might reveal Thomas Hughes’s identity. Sooner or later, the brothers’ bodies would be found, and he didn’t want to leave a trail.

  The Formica-topped kitchen table was covered with coffee cups and soda cans and newspapers from Muncie, Bloomington, and Chicago. Jonathan guessed that their paranoia had driven the Patrones to check for a story that might have been leaked by the Hughes family. Stacked in the corner by the stove, he also found the copies of the New York Times they’d used as background in photos to prove that Thomas was still alive.

  None of this was of any use to Jonathan.

  What was of use, though, was the spiral notebook he found under the newspapers, in which one of the brothers had noted everything that had transpired over the past days. There were times and dates and talking points for their demands. The handwriting had a juvenile quality, as if the characters had been more drawn than jotted.

  Jonathan stuffed it all into the big pocket of his rucksack. Even the newspapers, on the off chance that the kidnappers might have made notations in the margins.

  Reasonably satisfied, he headed back to the basement.

  Five minutes had passed, yet Thomas had made no progress. He was just as naked as before, but he’d moved from Lionel’s body to Barry’s. When the kid heard Jonathan’s footsteps, he jumped like a child who’d been caught in the act of being naughty. “This one has less blood on him,” Thomas said.

  Jonathan sighed. “Good thinking,” he said. As always, the victim proved to be the weakest link in the operation. “When was the last time you had anything to eat?” he asked. Thomas looked thin to the point of malnourishment.

  “How long have I been here? I haven’t had anything since they took me.”

  “You’ve had nothing to eat for four days?”

  “A little water, but no food.”

  Not a surprise, but not at all what Jonathan wanted to hear. Hungry people moved slowly and tired easily. He reached into yet another pocket of his ruck and withdrew a package of Pop-Tarts. Cherry. “Have these,” he said. “Enough carbs to keep you going for a while.”

  Thomas eyed the package, but didn’t reach for it.

  “They’re not poison,” Jonathan said. “If I wanted to hurt you, you’d be hurt.” To emphasize the point, he tossed a glance to the bodies on the floor.

  Thomas accepted the pastries and pulled open the wrapper. “Thanks.”

  While the boy ate, Jonathan went about the business of stripping Barry’s corpse. He understood Thomas’s hesitancy to handle death. Jonathan hated it, too, and this was hardly his first time.

  “Is Tiffany okay?” Thomas asked. He seemed to need conversation.

  “Who’s Tiffany?”

  “Tiffany Barnes. My girlfriend. I was with her when they came to get me. They hit her pretty hard.”

  With Barry’s shoes removed, Jonathan moved north, to the waistband of his jeans. He unbuttoned, unzipped, and pulled. “I don’t know. I haven’t heard anything about a Tiffany Barnes.”

  “So you’re not a cop.”

  The comment drew a look.

  “If you were a cop, then you would have known about Tiffany.”

  Jonathan paused and rested his forearm on his knee. “Sometimes the police are not the best option,” he said. “Once they’re informed, you might as well fax an announcement to the press.” As he pulled the trousers free, Barry’s heels thumped against the concrete. He handed the pants to Thomas. “Here.”

  Hesitantly, he took them. “I don’t want the shirt. It’s bloody.”

  “You need to wear it.”

  “I won’t.” The point was not negotiable.

  Jonathan sighed. “Fine. Put the pants on. And the shoes. I’ll be right back.” He stood.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Get dressed, Tom.”

  Jonathan took the steps two-at-a-time into the kitchen, again using his Maglite to lead the way, this time to the bedroom. There, he found a T-shirt on the floor. He snatched it up and headed back. In the thirty seconds he’d been gone, Thomas had pulled himself into Barry’s pants. They were three sizes too big, but that was better than three sizes too small.

  “Hey,” Jonathan said, getting his attention. He tossed him the T-shirt. “No blood.”

  Thomas smelled the shirt and winced, then put it on anyway. “I’m rea
dy,” he said.

  “What about the shoes?”

  Thomas shook his head. “Way too big. I’m better off barefoot.”

  “Jesus, Thomas, will you please quit resisting me? Barefoot is not an option, and that will make sense to you in a while. I don’t care what size they are. This is not a fashion show.”

  Finally he did as he was told. “What about them?” Thomas said, glancing at the Patrones.

  “They’re dead,” Jonathan said. He started for the ravaged doors to the backyard.

  “But we can’t just—”

  Jonathan grabbed the boy by his upper arm and pulled hard enough to let the kid know that he really had no vote in this. “Before you start feeling sorry for them, remember what they were planning to do to you.”

  Thomas pulled back. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Home.” His smile showed in his eyes, and the kid relaxed. People didn’t realize how beautiful a word “home” was until they’d been ripped away from it.

  In his earpiece, Jonathan heard, “Abort, abort, abort. You got visitors.”

  “Shit. Tell me.”

  “What’s wrong?” Thomas asked. “Tell you what?”

  “Not you.”

  Boxers said, “You’ve got a vehicle approaching down the drive. Headlights are on, they’re going normal speed. I don’t think you’ve been made.”

  “That must be Chris, our third guy,” Jonathan said into his radio. “Stay high and away. I don’t want to spook him.” To Thomas, he added, “You stay here. We’ve got one more to take care of.”

  “But I’m telling you there were only two,” Thomas protested.

  Jonathan made a growling sound. “Now I know why they taped your mouth shut. Stay put and keep low.” He turned away and climbed back out onto the grass with fluid grace. No night vision this time; the headlights would blind him.

  For nearly a minute, he saw nothing but darkness. Then, through the trees that surrounded these acres of farmland, he saw the first flash of light, and with it the whine of an out-of-tune engine and the groan of an equally out-of-tune suspension.

  His plan was to wait here on the lawn outside the root cellar until he could tell whether Chris would get spooked by the darkness of the house and try to bolt. When the vehicle—it turned out to be a paneled van—stopped abruptly ten yards short of the driveway apron and extinguished its headlights, he had his answer.

  He snapped the night vision goggles back over his eyes and pressed his transmit button. “We’re made.”

  As if the driver had heard his words, the van pulled hard to the left. The engine raced as the driver tried a 180-degree turn to make a run for it. Jonathan couldn’t let that happen. The last thing he needed was a bad guy on the loose. Operating by instinct, Jonathan brought the slung M4 rifle to his shoulder, aimed, and fired six quick rounds at the van’s front left fender. The muzzle blast ripped like thunder through the humid night. He’d loaded every third round in this clip as armor-piercing, and he wanted to make sure to blast two holes in the engine block. He was rewarded with the infrared flash of two heat plumes as the vehicle stopped dead on the pavement.

  With his rifle still up and ready, Jonathan moved toward the crippled vehicle.

  His earpiece crackled, “I’m on infrared, and I’ve got visual on you and the vehicle. There’s movement on the far side. He’s out of the car, moving north toward the woods. He’s using the vehicle to cover his retreat.”

  Jonathan didn’t take time to acknowledge, but he liked knowing that Boxers was watching from the air. In his gut, he wanted to ignore the vehicle and chase the bad guy, but doctrine wouldn’t allow it. There might be a second guy in the van, and he couldn’t afford having someone sneak up behind him while he was trying to sneak up behind someone else.

  The passenger side window—the one closest to him—was up and unbroken. Keeping the rifle tucked against his shoulder with his right hand, he used his left to pull his collapsible baton from its pouch on his web gear. He approached in a wide arc to come in from the rear. The back cargo doors of the van were closed, and their windows were intact.

  “Careful there, cowboy,” Boxers said in his ear. “There’s only one of you.”

  Jonathan stooped low to the ground near the back doors, let his rifle fall against its sling, and lifted a tear gas grenade from the right side of his web gear. He pulled the pin, and with the safety handle squeezed, he rose, shattered the glass in the back door with one enormous punch from the baton, and tossed the grenade into the van. As the cloud of noxious gas bloomed, he moved forward and shattered the glass on the passenger door. He confirmed in a single glance that it was empty. The fleeing driver had come alone.

  “Vehicle’s clear. Where’s my target?”

  After a pause, the voice in his ear said, “Sorry boss, I was watching you. I lost him. Can’t have gone far.”

  Terrific. “No exfil till we find him.”

  “Understood. Gauges say lots of time.” Translation: he had enough fuel to hover for as long as it took.

  Something popped inside the van, and Jonathan whirled on it, rifle at the ready. Heavy black smoke was pouring from the broken window in the back. He must have lobbed his CS grenade onto something combustible.

  “Your van is burning, boss.”

  Jonathan started moving away from it, closer to the farmhouse, giving the vehicle a wide berth. You never knew what people carried in vehicles with them. He’d seen portable drug labs in Colombia—perfectly harmless looking trucks or vans—go high order because of the bizarre mixture of chemicals they needed to make the shit they sold. He snapped his NVGs out of the way again, turning the night from iridescent green back to shades of black, silver, and gray.

  His earpiece popped again. “You got company coming in from behind you. Blind side. From the house.”

  Shit. Jonathan dropped to his knee and tried to become small as the fire grew behind him, creating an ever more perfect silhouette for a shooter. The NVGs came back down, and there was his target: Thomas Hughes. Goddamn kid. These were the times when he hated working alone with Boxers. If this had been a Unit operation, somebody would have been sitting on this kid’s back keeping him from being stupid. “Get down!” Jonathan called.

  Thomas froze in his tracks. “Don’t shoot! It’s me!”

  “Get down!”

  “It’s me!” The kid was terrified.

  Jonathan rushed him, closing the thirty yards that separated them in five seconds. He slung his arm across Thomas’s chest, pivoted his hip, and flipped the precious cargo onto the wet grass. When he was down, he covered the kid with his own body. “I didn’t ask who you were,” Jonathan hissed. “I told you to get down. I swear to God, if you don’t start listening, I’m gonna shoot you myself.”

  “I heard shooting,” Thomas said, grunting against the weight on his back. “Then I saw the fire and I got scared.”

  “So you wandered toward the guns and the fire?”

  Thomas wriggled to get rid of the weight. “Get off of me.”

  Jonathan unpinned him, and scanned the horizon again for Chris.

  “I came out because I thought you might be hurt.”

  The comment drew a look. “Thanks, then,” Jonathan said. “I need you to stay down because the driver of that van is no friend, and he’s still out there.”

  They had to move away from the van. The light made them too good a target, and it rendered his night vision gear useless. Into his radio: “Do you see anything?”

  “A big-ass hot fire, but not much . . . wait. I’ve got movement—”

  Jonathan saw it, too, at exactly the same instant he heard the crack of a bullet passing disturbingly close to his head. A second bullet tore into the ground near his elbow.

  Thomas yelled something that Jonathan didn’t care to hear. He was busy. “Stay flat!” He nestled the M4 back into his shoulder.

  The gunman kept shooting, his muzzle flashes providing all the visual input Jonathan needed. Twenty yards past the bu
rning van, the posture said pistol shooter; the range and accuracy said good one. Jonathan squeezed his trigger, three quick rounds. He went for center-of-mass. He knew that his first shot found its mark because he saw the target stumble backward. He was pretty sure about the second shot, but the third was anybody’s guess. When he thought he saw additional movement, he fired two more.

  Then the silence returned, except for the sound of Thomas screaming. He had his hands over his ears, shouting for it to stop. It was the sound of raw terror.

  “Hey!” Jonathan barked.

  Thomas jumped, his arms up to ward off an attack.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “What’s happening?” Thomas yelled.

  “Are you hurt?”

  The kid shook his head and stammered, “N-no. I d-don’t think so.”

  “Then shut up. Stay down.”

  A kill wasn’t a kill until it was confirmed. He pushed himself to his feet and headed for the tree line. Keeping low, he skirted the light-wash from the van and charged the spot where he’d seen the shooter fall. “Talk to me,” he said to Boxers.

  “Not much to tell. I saw the muzzle flashes, and I think I saw him fall, but nothing confirmable. I don’t see any movement.”

  The movement part was all he needed. Jonathan knew that the target was hit hard. Speed now trumped surprise. Jonathan sprinted through the underbrush with the speed of the Olympic contender that he once was, his rifle at the ready. A heartbeat later, he had the gunman’s sprawled, supine form in his sights. The wounds looked fatal, but the shooter was still breathing. “Don’t move,” Jonathan said, and he stepped closer.

  What he saw next surprised the hell out of him.

  Photo by Amy Cesal

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JOHN GILSTRAP is the acclaimed author of ten thrillers: High Treason, Damage Control, Threat Warning, Hostage Zero, No Mercy, Six Minutes to Freedom, Scott Free, Even Steven, At All Costs, and Nathan’s Run. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. A safety and environmental expert and former firefighter, he holds a master’s degree from the University of Southern California and a bachelor’s degree from the College of William and Mary in Virginia. John has also adapted four books for the big screen, including Red Dragon (uncredited), from the Thomas Harris novel, Word of Honor, from the Nelson DeMille novel; and Young Men and Fire, from the Norman Maclean book. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia (near Washington, D.C.). Please visit www.johngilstrap.com.