Final Target

by John Gilstrap

  Because their bungalow was last in line, he assumed they had some time, but it would be measured in seconds, not minutes. With every bungalow situated for maximum privacy, it was impossible to tell precisely what was going on beyond the row of trees that separated them from their nearest neighbors.

  But the gunfire provided an important clue.

  During his years of service for Uncle Sam, Jonathan had become an expert at dressing quickly in the dark. Leaning his back against the closet wall, he pulled on a pair of black athletic socks and then slipped his legs into his pants and his feet into a pair of Merrill hiking shoes. He anticipated a long night, and if there was a single important lesson to be learned about emergencies, it was that shoes are your most important assets. Other clothing was important, too, but you could run naked if you had to, so long as you had something on your feet.

  He buttoned and zipped his pants and—

  “Digger, they’re here.”

  Jonathan swung back into the bedroom in time to see Gail backing away from the glass doors as two men dressed all in black glided through the moonlight. If they’d seen Gail, they made no indication of it.

  “They move like they know what they’re doing,” Gail said. A former member of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, she knew what she was talking about. The two-man team moved with their weapons at low ready—they looked like M4s from this distance, but they were certainly AR15 clones—one facing forward and the other facing the rear. They wore tactical vests festooned with spare magazines.

  “I don’t see night vision,” Jonathan observed. And why would they? Whatever they were up to, they had little reason to expect much resistance from a bunch of off-season beach vacationers. That complacency on their part might provide Jonathan’s best chance for victory.

  The bad guys were still fifteen, twenty yards out when Jonathan’s plan came together in his head. “Stay back and get behind something in case they get a shot off,” he said.

  “What are you doing?” Gail seemed simultaneously horrified and insulted. She’d never been much of a hider, and had always been a hell of a fighter.

  Jonathan didn’t have time to explain. Hell, he barely had time to get into position. As he moved to the short wall where the sliding glass door met the lock, he wrapped his hand around the Benchmade Presidio Ultra that was always clipped to his pocket and opened the blade with a flourish. He pressed his back against the wall perpendicular to the door and brought his hands up into a fighting stance.

  Gail hadn’t moved. “Digger, what the hell—”

  “We won’t be taken,” Jonathan said. “If I’m gonna die, it’s gonna be on my—”

  A brilliant white light split the darkness of the bedroom, catching Gail full-on.

  “Don’t move!” a voice yelled from beyond the door. Two seconds later, something struck the glass of the door and the panel disintegrated. “Get on the ground!” the attacker shouted. “Get on the ground or I will shoot you!”

  The tactical light from the lead attacker’s rifle flared against the drapes as the muzzle crossed the threshold.

  Jonathan struck like a scorpion. Grabbing the muzzle of the rifle just behind the brake, he lurched the weapon up to point at the ceiling. As the weapon shifted, the attacker’s finger found the trigger and fired a round into the plaster. In the instant that the shooter’s inner wrist was exposed, Jonathan slashed it with the razor edge of the blade, severing tendons and blood vessels, rendering the hand useless.

  Continuing with the momentum he’d built, Jonathan pivoted to the shooter’s other side, and while forcing the attacker’s arm even higher, he drove the point of his blade fist-deep into the attacker’s armpit, severing the subclavian artery. The guy was dead, but he didn’t know it yet. He was done.

  But Jonathan wasn’t.

  The fight wasn’t yet five seconds old, and fifty percent of the threat was neutralized. But as was always the case, the surprise kill was always the easiest. Now the attacker’s partner was fully aware of the danger, as Jonathan was fully aware that he had literally brought a knife to a gunfight.

  Jonathan used the dying attacker as a human battering ram, driving his limp body forward and then shoving him into his partner to knock him off-balance.

  Now the fight had moved to the patio, into the moonlight, and in about two seconds, the bad guy with the gun would have all the advantage.

  Jonathan slapped at the muzzle of that second rifle, too, pushing it out just the degree or two he needed to not be hit, and with a fast and vicious horizontal swing of his blade, he slashed the attacker’s eyes. The man had just begun to scream when Jonathan thrust the point of his blade through the soft tissue under the attacker’s jaw and on into his brainstem.

  The guy collapsed like an unstrung marionette.

  His heart hammered in his chest as he let the guy drop and he returned to his fighter’s stance, ready for the next threat.

  But the night had turned peaceful again. Sounds of distress continued to roll toward him from the direction of the clubhouse—some crying and an occasional gunshot—but the part of the world he could see was all moonlight and luminescent surf.

  “Gail, are you all right?” When she didn’t answer right away, he pivoted back around toward the shattered glass and the bedroom beyond. Gail had not moved. She stood in the middle of the room, her hands at her mouth. “Gail?”

  * * *

  She was still trying to process what she had just seen. She understood that she’d fallen in love with a crusader whose combat skills had been honed over nearly two decades of training and experience with the most respected elite Special Forces unit in the world, and she’d seen him kill before. Indeed, she’d killed right alongside him. But those incidents had all involved firearms and extraordinary marksmanship.

  Killing with a knife seemed so personal, and Jonathan had wielded the blade with such expert precision that it took her breath away. Frightened her. The look in his face as he sliced and slashed the life out of those men was feral and furious. Some of it remained even now as he looked at her and asked if she’d been hurt. He seemed oblivious to the blood spatter on his naked chest and arms and even his face. He seemed . . . focused.

  “Are you hurt?” he said.

  Suddenly aware that she’d been frozen in place, she dropped her hands and straightened her posture. “I’m fine,” she said. It was time for her to become part of the solution. “What the hell just happened?”

  She’d meant her question to be rhetorical, but he answered it anyway. “Beyond the obvious, I have no idea,” he said. “It would appear that the resort is under attack.” As he spoke, he stooped to the body closest to the door and wrapped his left fist around the reinforced tab that existed on most tactical vests for the very purpose of dragging wounded comrades, and started pulling him back into the room.

  “They’re sure to realize that they’re missing a couple of operators,” he said. “Makes no sense to leave them out there where people can trip over them.” As he dragged his guy across the tile floor of the bedroom toward the big bathroom, Gail slid past him and went for the other one.

  By the time she’d made it to the patio and taken a grip on her chosen corpse, she tossed a glance back inside and saw that Jonathan was depositing his guy at the base of the ornate clawfoot tub, probably with the intent of closing the door and turning on a light. That’s what she’d do.

  “You okay with that?” he called back to her.

  She found the tab between his shoulder blades and grunted as she hefted his shoulders. In the moonlight, the massive wound under the attacker’s jaw disgusted her and she looked away. “I’m fine,” she said. “I can drag so long as I don’t have to carry.” Things had gone terribly wrong for her during an op several years ago, and she’d spent altogether too long feeling sorry for herself. Under these circumstances it felt good to know that the strength she’d been working so hard to rebuild had finally returned. She sure as hell had come a long way since throwing away her cane for the
last time just a little while ago.

  “Next time you suggest a romantic getaway,” she said, “I believe I’ll think twice.” She looked up and hoped that Jonathan could see that she’d tried to manage a smile.

  He stood over the man he’d killed, straddling him and staring down, his knife still gripped in his fist. “Hey Dig?” she asked as she pulled.

  He snapped out of wherever he’d been. “Oh, shit Gail, I’m sorry. Let me help.” He started toward her.

  “I’ve got this,” she said. For some reason, it was important to her to finish this business of dragging the body. She wasn’t rejecting Digger’s help. She was rejecting anyone’s help. “I just wanted to know if you’re okay.”

  “Not a scratch,” he said.

  “You’re still holding your knife.”

  “It’s the only weapon I’ve got at the moment. These assholes tried to kill us.”

  She was crossing the foot of the bed now. “Technically, I think they were trying to take us hostage.”

  “They pointed a rifle at you.”

  Something in his tone struck an odd chord and she let the dead guy drop as she stood. From here, separated only by inches, she saw something else in his expression that she’d never seen before. Fear.

  “They were going to shoot you, Gail,” he said. “I had to kill them.”

  “I know,” she said.

  * * *

  “But you’re still holding your knife.”

  Truth was, Jonathan knew that the blade and release mechanisms were fouled with gore, and he didn’t want to put that nastiness into his pocket. But he did it anyway. He thumbed the release button on the locking blade, folded it and slid the clip back into its designated place.

  When both corpses were in the bathroom, Jonathan closed the door and turned on the shower light. It was the dimmest of the options on the five-switch panel, but it allowed enough light to see what they were doing.

  The dead guys were both nominally white—one might have had some Hispanic blood—and both were in pretty good shape. Too thin and soft to be SEALs or D-Boys, but toned enough to show that they were fit. They wore identical kit, all black, all 5.11 Tactical gear, but that didn’t mean anything. These days, every other young man of their age wore tactical pants and shirts as a fashion statement. And let’s be honest. They looked cool and the many pockets came in handy.

  In fact, the pants Jonathan wore at that very moment were the same SKU, but in a different color.

  He also noted that the chest rigs they wore were constructed of a mesh material instead of Kevlar, and he took that as yet more evidence that they did not expect to meet much resistance. They each carried identical M4s and both packed four spare thirty-round magazines of 5.56 millimeter ammo. Their Glock 19 nine-millimeter pistols resided in cross-draw holsters on their chest rigs, a configuration that Jonathan had never liked. He was particularly intrigued by the two-way radios they’d strapped behind their shoulders. He didn’t relish inserting a dead guy’s ear piece into his own ear, but that was a concern for later. You could learn a lot by eavesdropping on radio traffic.

  “Who would do something like this?” Gail asked. “What could they possibly want?”

  Jonathan didn’t answer because he had no idea. “Here’s what I need you to do,” he said. “Gather up what you need to live in the jungle for a while. Be sure to grab your meds, and pull together anything that can identify us directly.”

  “We’re not here under our real names,” she said.

  “Doesn’t matter. These guys’ friends are going to find them sooner or later, and we don’t need to make it any easier than necessary to find us.”

  “We’re in the computer from when we registered.”

  “Please, Gail. Please.” As he spoke, he worked the Velcro tabs that would release the dead guys from their kit. “I’m going to relieve these guys of everything they’ve got, and I want to be clear of here in no more than five minutes. Three is even better.”

  “Where are we going?”

  Jonathan stayed focused on what he was doing. “The first stop is anywhere but here. We’ll refine it later.”

  Four minutes later, he’d transferred every phone, wallet, bit of paper and lint from the bad guys’ pockets into his own for later examination. With that done, he started to shrug into the first victim’s vest—it had the most blood on it, so he took it as a gesture of chivalry toward Gail—but she stopped him.

  “Wait,” she said.

  “We don’t have time to wait.”

  “We have time for this,” she said. She handed him a wet towel and a dry one. “You’re disgusting. And there’s a golf shirt on the sink for you, too.”

  He looked down at himself, at the blood that had spattered and smeared his skin. Then he looked at himself in the mirror. He looked like a serial killer. Yeah, they had time for him to towel away some of the foulness.

  As he did, Gail donned the other vest. “I put socks and underwear for both of us into my carry-on backpack. Ditto toothpaste and tooth brushes, meds for me and toilet paper. Phones and tablets, too. Can you think of anything else?” Their clothes and assorted sundries would have to stay behind.

  “The toilet paper is an especially good touch,” Jonathan said. He pulled the forest green golf shirt on over his head and reached for the other chest rig.

  “Time to go,” he said. They just didn’t know where or why or for how long.

  Details.

  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 books have been translated into more than twenty languages. An explosives safety 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. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia. Please visit him on Facebook or at www.johngilstrap.com.