Final Target

by John Gilstrap

  The boy shook his head. “I don’t think so. Today is Sunday. The Sabbath. Alejandro Azul is very Catholic.” He leaned on the word with a snarl.

  “You don’t approve?”

  “He’s a murderer. God doesn’t want murderers in His house.”

  “How long ago did he murder your parents?” Jonathan almost didn’t ask the question.

  “I don’t want to talk about that,” Tomás said. “And it wasn’t just my parents. It was my sister and my older brother, too.” He turned off his light and spun on his heel. “Excuse me,” he said to Jonathan. “I’m going back upstairs.”

  “Why were you spared?” Jonathan asked.

  The kid ignored him and started up. Jonathan watched from below as he cleared the doorway and disappeared onto the main level. He considered closing the panel back up but decided to leave it as it was for now. Boxers would want to see the mother lode anyway.

  CHAPTER 6

  Jonathan took his turn monitoring the activities on the main level while Boxers checked out the contents of the basement armory. Slowly but steadily, the main room was filling with sleep-addled young people. All were dressed, but few had taken the time to find a comb. The younger ones in particular looked like walking coma victims. They eyed Jonathan with suspicion, but he didn’t sense much fear, leading him to wonder what Gloria had told them as she was rousting them from their beds.

  Not a man who enjoyed tight spaces, Big Guy didn’t stay in the basement very long. When he returned to the main floor, his eyes flashed on the gathering crowd and he beckoned Jonathan to a corner where they could be as far out of earshot as possible.

  “Holy crap. How many of them are there?” Boxers wondered aloud.

  “Apparently, quite a few,” Jonathan replied. “For all I know, they’re importing them from other villages.”

  “That’s a shitload of bang-bang down there,” Boxers said, nodding at the door from which he’d just emerged.

  “Enough to make a mark for sure,” Jonathan agreed. “What do you think we should do with it?”

  Boxers scoffed, “What are you asking me for? You’re the idea guy. Left to me, I’d probably just shoot it in place.”

  Jonathan winced and looked around to see who might be listening. “Jesus, Big Guy, this is their home.”

  “Better they lose their home than the cartels expand their arsenal.” Boxers saw the look on Jonathan’s face and held up his hands. “You asked.”

  “Well, we’re not doing that,” Jonathan said.

  “What do you suggest, then? We can’t take it with us. That’s, like, a thousand pounds of munitions.”

  Gloria approached from the other side of the room and clearly had no compunction against interrupting them. “The children are ready to go,” she said.

  Jonathan and Boxers exchanged glances. “Ready to go where?”

  “With you,” she said.

  Boxers growled.

  “And where are we going?” Jonathan asked. He was marking time here.

  She shrugged, as if to imply the answer was obvious. “To America.”

  “Oh, good Lord,” Boxers said in English.

  If Gloria didn’t understand the words, she certainly understood the emotion. “You brought this danger to us,” she said. “To the children. You cannot just leave us to be killed.”

  “We’re going to be killed?” one of the children said. That ignited a buzz of panic among all of them.

  “Stop!” Jonathan yelled in Spanish. “Everyone, be quiet. No one’s going to be killed.”

  “Don’t let your mouth write checks our asses can’t cash,” Boxers mumbled in English.

  Jonathan ignored him. “Just everyone calm down, and we’ll think this through.”

  “The Jungle Tigers are coming,” Nando said. “We can be certain of that. The longer we stay, the greater the danger we’re in.”

  Jonathan beckoned for Dawkins to join them. “What’s your assessment?” he asked sotto voce, in English. “Will Alejandro Azul kill these people?”

  “Without mercy,” Dawkins said without hesitation.

  “Listen to me, Boss,” Boxers said, his voice increasingly urgent. “Remember the mission. We have one PC to worry about. Period. Just one.”

  “Oh, stop,” Jonathan scoffed. “You can’t leave these kids behind any more than I can. All that’s left is the logistics of getting from here to wherever the hell we’re going.” He turned, and with his hands on his hips, he surveyed the assembled crowd. “Oh, we are so screwed,” he groaned.

  “And they say Henry the Fifth gave inspiring speeches,” Boxers teased.

  Jonathan chuckled in spite of himself. But he’d stated fact. The clock was ticking, and they needed to do something. When all else failed, motion could masquerade as leadership, at least for a while.

  “Okay,” Jonathan announced. “Nando, here’s what I want you to do. Organize your people to bring all those guns upstairs.”

  “For what reason?”

  “Bad time for questions,” Jonathan said. “I think either you or Tomás should supervise the movement. Bring up the ammunition, as well.”

  “What guns?” one of the children asked.

  Jonathan pretended not to hear. “Tomás!” he beckoned. “You go downstairs and make sure that no one puts bullets into any weapons, and that no one gets hurt. Can you do that?”

  The boy seemed to swell with pride. He liked being recognized as having authority. “Yes, I can,” he said.

  “Good,” Jonathan said. “Get to it.” He turned to Gloria. “I want you to put together supplies. We’ll need food, water, first-aid supplies, whatever. Enough to take care of your crowd for, say, three days.”

  “Three days?” she gasped. “It will be that long?”

  Jonathan didn’t want to tell her that it might well be longer. Truly, he was winging this. “And make sure they all have clothes and shoes.” Looking around, he saw lots of bare feet.

  “Not all of them have shoes,” Nando said.

  “Then they won’t wear them, will they?” Jonathan snapped. God, he missed the days of military discipline. “Now,” he said with an abrupt clap of his hands. “If you’re correct and the cartel goons are on their way, we don’t know how much time we have.”

  “What do you want from me?” Nando asked.

  “What vehicles do you have?”

  “We have a van.”

  “Are there enough spots to seat everyone?”

  Nando shook his head. “No, not all at once. There’s never been a need.”

  Well, there’s a hell of a need now, Jonathan didn’t say. But it was what it was. “How many can you seat if everyone’s a little uncomfortable?”

  “The van is designed for seven people, plus the driver, for a total of eight.”

  Jonathan worked the math. Fifteen from the school plus Jonathan, Boxers, and his PC was eighteen people. Their purloined SUV was designed to hold eight people, as well, including the driver.

  “We’ll take five and you’ll take the rest,” Jonathan instructed.

  “What about all the supplies that you just asked Gloria to gather?” Nando asked.

  “We can lash them to the top of the vehicles,” Jonathan said. “You do have some rope?”

  “Yes, but if it rains—”

  “Then it rains,” Jonathan snapped. “And your shit will get wet. It’s what rain does. Is your vehicle gassed up and ready to go?”

  “It has some gas, but I do not know how much.”

  “Pull it around front,” Jonathan ordered.

  As Nando set off on his mission and the rest of the residents scurried about doing whatever they needed to do, Jonathan felt a tug on his sleeve. It was Big Guy pulling him off to the side again.

  “This is a bad idea, Boss,” he said.

  “I know that,” Jonathan agreed. “But we can’t leave them. We’ve got to fix what we broke.”

  “They’re not our responsibility.”

  “They are now.”

&n
bsp; “But the little ones—”

  Jonathan iced him with a glare. “Exactly,” he said. “Those kids get a shot at a life. If they stay here, they won’t see next week.”

  “What the hell are we going to do with a couple of ten-year-olds?” Boxers snapped. “Kids in general are bad enough, but holy shit.”

  “We will get them to safety,” Jonathan said.

  “How?”

  Jonathan allowed himself a smile. “Ask me again in an hour or so. In the meantime, all suggestions are welcome.”

  “I’ve got enough money in the bank to retire now, you know,” Boxers grumped. “That’s looking more attractive to me every day.”

  Jonathan smacked Big Guy on the arm. “Retirees don’t get to shoot people and blow shit up.”

  “No, but they live longer.”

  Jonathan teased, “What’s the point of living longer if you don’t get to shoot people and blow shit up?” Big Guy wasn’t homicidal, but he was most definitely lethal. And he loved to wreak havoc.

  “Yeah, okay, fine. You got me. Speaking of which, what are you going to do with the arsenal once the kids bring it up? And, parenthetically, what could possibly go wrong with that plan?”

  The kids worked their asses off for the better part of fifteen minutes, and were able to transfer a significant portion of the arsenal from the basement to the main room. Jonathan was impressed that they seemed to work pretty well as a team.

  Jonathan chuckled. He could only imagine what the anti-gun lobby back home would say if they saw a picture of what he was watching. Children from ten to mid-teens were hauling instruments of death—instruments of survival, actually, depending on which way the round holes were pointing—and stacking them in a haphazard pile in the center of the floor of the main room. He saw more AR-15s than any other platforms, but there were a few AKs in the pile, as well, along with a dozen or more logs of C4 explosive.

  Boxers winked at Jonathan as he took two of the logs and transferred them to his ruck. “You know, you never answered my question. What do you plan to do with all this stuff?”

  “Take as much of it with us as we can. Better we have it than the bad guys.”

  The way the kids—particularly the older ones—carried the rifles led Jonathan to believe that they had some experience with them. While muzzle discipline was the stuff of a range safety officer’s nightmares, the kids seemed to be trying their best not to point the weapons at one another. It helped a little that all the magazine wells were empty.

  Which reminded Jonathan of something. He waded through the kids to lean into the void at the top of the basement steps. “Tomás!” he yelled.

  Sounds of movement preceded the appearance of the kid’s face at the bottom of the stairs. “Yes, sir?”

  “Open the crates of ammunition and bring up all the boxes you can carry that are marked ‘seven-point-six-two by thirty-nine’ and also everything marked ‘five-point-five-six-millimeter. ’”

  Tomás flashed a thumbs-up. “Okay,” he said.

  Jonathan felt Boxers’ presence over his shoulder. “What’s that kid’s angle?” Boxers asked.

  “The best there is,” Jonathan said. “Revenge.”

  * * *

  Across the room Tomás saw Angela helping one of the younger kids put some clothes in a plastic bag. He crossed over to her and pulled her aside by her arm. She objected until she saw it was him.

  “This is it, Angela,” he said. “This is the opportunity we’ve been waiting for. We’re getting away.”

  “We are running away, Tomás,” Angela said. “While people are coming to kill us. This is not the way I imagined it.”

  “But it’s the way it is happening. This is our chance.” He leaned in and kissed her on the lips. It was done before he even thought about what he was doing.

  Angela looked shocked. She brought her fingers to the spot on her mouth where their lips had touched. She turned away without a word and went back to helping the little one.

  But she didn’t smack him or yell at him. That had to be a good sign.

  * * *

  “They’re coming!”

  Jonathan heard the exclamation through the windows from outside before he saw who was doing the exclaiming, but he recognized Nando’s voice. The words ignited panic among the children, who gasped in unison and started milling about the room in random patterns.

  “Gloria!” Jonathan said sharply. “Get them under control. And kill the lights.”

  “Children, hush!” she said. “Everyone, be quiet.” To Jonathan, she added, “I will take them to the basement.”

  “No,” Jonathan said. There was no escape from the basement. It was a killing room. He scanned his surroundings and focused on a door in the back of the room. “Is that an exit?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there a lock on the door?”

  Gloria nodded.

  “Gather the children there,” Jonathan said. “Don’t go outside yet, but be ready to when I tell you. And do your best to keep them quiet. And turn the lights off. I want it dark in here.”

  “The children will be scared.”

  “They’re already scared,” Jonathan countered. “Please. I know what I’m doing.”

  He turned his back on Gloria to let her do what needed to be done. Less than ten seconds later, all the lights went out at once.

  “I count three vehicles,” Boxers said in English from his position against a front window. All the windows were casement style, and they were already opened outward. Only a fine nylon mesh screen separated him from the outside. “I put them about a half a klick out.” As he tipped his NVGs back into place and moved his rifle to low ready, he added, “First thing they’re going to see is our truck.”

  “Shit,” Jonathan spat. He should have thought of that. This was all developing faster than he’d anticipated.

  Nando’s face appeared in the window. “You stay down and out of the way. I will talk to them.”

  “You said they’re going to kill you,” Jonathan reminded.

  “I’ve known these men for years,” Nando said. “Maybe I can talk them down.”

  “Or maybe you can give us up.” Boxers used his most menacing tone.

  “Either is better than letting the children suffer, no?” Nando said.

  “We’re not giving ourselves up to the cartel,” Jonathan said.

  “Even if it saves lives?”

  “I have exactly one life to protect,” Jonathan reminded. He nodded toward Harry Dawkins. “He is my mission. I will do what I can for the rest of you, but never think that you share the same priority.” As he spoke the words, he wondered if he was telling the truth or bluffing. Fact was, he couldn’t imagine himself letting harm come to the children. There had to be a way to have it all.

  He just didn’t know what it was.

  “Come on inside,” Jonathan said. “I want everybody together.”

  Nando hesitated, then checked over his shoulder, clearly calculating where the better offer lay.

  “Don’t make me shoot you,” Boxers said.

  A beat passed as Nando gave it one last thought. “You’re going to have to,” he said, and he started walking away.

  Boxers shouldered his 417.

  “Let it ride,” Jonathan whispered. “What happens, happens, but we’re not picking a gunfight. Not here, not now.” Boxers didn’t like it, and Jonathan could see the disdain all the way through his NVGs. “And I pray to God that was the right decision,” he added with a smile. “You stay here, and I’m gonna move toward the green side.” The left side of the building.

  “And then what?”

  Jonathan’s smile broadened. “Then we see what happens.” He turned to find Dawkins. “Hey, Harry.”

  Dawkins stepped forward.

  “Go to the black side—the rear—and keep an eye out. If I give the order, I want you to lead Gloria and the kids out that back door to safety.”

  “How am I going to do that?”

  “As best you can,
I suppose.”

  CHAPTER 7

  It all unfolded slowly. Nando walked purposefully away from the school and toward the road out front. He didn’t hold his hands up, exactly—not in the sense of a surrendering soldier—but he kept them visible and away from his body. He positioned himself near the Blazer that had delivered Jonathan and his team, but off to the side. That struck Jonathan as a wise move, as it gave the man more options in case the arriving crew decided to try to run him over.

  Jonathan switched his radio back to VOX to make communication easier between himself and Boxers. And if Venice was still awake, she could listen in, too. “Don’t shoot unless they make a threat,” Jonathan whispered in English.

  “Rog.”

  The caravan approached swiftly. The first vehicle in the line seemed to be heading directly for Nando, then veered in the last second to move to his left, effectively blocking Jonathan’s view. Jonathan cursed. “Can you see anything?”

  “Nope. Was that planned or just dumb luck?”

  It had to be luck, Jonathan thought. There hadn’t been enough time to plan. He ran Nando’s options through his head. What was the best strategy for him to preserve his own life? The answer bloomed whole and fully formed.

  “We need to get out of here,” he said. “Nando’s going to give us up.”

  “Told you.”

  “We’ll be an easy target. Keep an eye on the bad guys. I’ll get the kids out the back, and then you follow.”

  The clock was spinning. Jonathan let his rifle fall back against its sling. “Harry!” he shouted at a whisper.

  Dawkins turned.

  “Get the kids out of here. Take them about a hundred yards into the jungle and keep them there until Big Guy and I come and get you.”

  Dawkins hesitated, apparently uncomfortable about asking the obvious.

  “I’ll be there,” Jonathan said. “Don’t worry about me, and try not to engage any bad guys. And here. Take this.” He bent to the assembled pile of weaponry and picked up a five-hundred-round Spam can of 5.56-millimeter ammunition. Probably ten pounds. “Tomás! Where are you?”

  The familiar figure emerged from the cowering group of children. “Here.”

  Jonathan scooped up three AR-15 clones by their slings and handed them to the boy. “Can you carry these?”