Then there was the vilest atrocity of all, the bodies dangling at the entrance to the pool deck. That gasp could not be suppressed, and as he’d predicted, the soldiers who guarded him smiled at the sound.
These men were animals. Brutes. Bullies. And for reasons known only to them, it was important that they be perceived as such. Perhaps that was to maintain order, or perhaps they were a troupe of serial killers. Whatever justification they could find for themselves, he wanted them all to die.
And somewhere out there, Tyler was toiling amid all the misery and cruelty. If, in fact, he was alive at all.
No, Baker thought, don’t think such things. Karma was a very real thing, and it was important—it was essential—that he keep his thoughts as positive as he could for as long as possible.
Baker knew that this was the end for him. If not his life, then certainly his future. He’d invested everything in the Crystal Sands Resort—everything, and then some. He’d built a reputation of obsequious service and dream fulfillment. Even if these animals didn’t burn the place down, no one would ever come here again. The reputation he’d worked so hard to build, one customer at a time over the course of two decades, would be trumped in the minds of the world by the lurid, vile events of a single day.
The door to the dining room opened, and a soldier entered. Within a few years of fifty and less than six feet tall, the man was on the soft side of fit. The ring of salt-and-pepper hair around his bald pate needed a trim, and the heat and humidity had imparted it with a Bozo the Clown unruliness. He was alone, but he kept the door open. The only weapon Baker saw was a pistol clipped to the vest he wore over a camouflage-patterned T-shirt.
The soldier helped himself to the chair on the opposite side of the table from Baker, his back to the door. He leaned heavily on folded arms propped on the granite tabletop and stared at his prisoner. Baker wished that he had the fortitude to stare back, but he knew he didn’t have it in him. He concentrated on a shiny spot in the granite, about halfway across.
“Are you afraid of me, Mr. Sinise?” The man had a subtle Eastern European accent.
“You killed my guests.”
“They did not obey orders. They left me with no choice.”
Baker switched back to silence. What was there to say?
“You never answered my question,” the man pressed. “Are you afraid of me?”
“Of course I am,” Baker said.
“That’s good, because you should be afraid of me. You should be afraid of all of us.”
This conversation, such as it was, had a schoolyard-bully feel to it. It was as if the soldier wanted to get a rise from Baker, who would be happy to give the guy what he wanted, but he felt that there likely was no right answer, but only wrong ones.
“What is this all about?” Baker asked. He kept his eyes focused on the shiny spot. “And what have you done with my staff, my workers? All I see outside are tortured guests.”
“Your workers are taken care of,” the man said. “Like the guests, some are safe and some are dead. We are keeping them in their dormitory building. As for why we are here and you are there, I think you can guess,” the man said. “I’ll give you a hint. It has nothing to do with the side of your business that is advertised in your brochures.”
Baker’s racing heart jumped into a higher gear. “I see,” he said. “Who are you?” His first thought was that perhaps he was dealing with an unhappy customer. In that line of work—the illicit trade of weapons—even the smallest slights could be blown far out of proportion. “I’m sure we could just talk and work through—”
“I am quite sure that we could not,” the man said.
“Surely, this isn’t just a robbery,” Baker said. In his fear, he’d been able to tap into his voice. “This much violence. This much death.”
“You trivialize events by calling them a ‘robbery,’” the soldier said. “Corner stores are robbed. Banks are robbed. This is retribution.”
Wait. This wasn’t right at all. “For what? No one is more politically agnostic than I,” Baker proclaimed. Not only was it a statement of pure fact, but it was the key element that allowed him to operate as he did. He did not take sides. He was a businessman, pure and simple. “If I sold to someone you disagree with, that is not my—”
The soldier pounded the table with the flat of his palm, making a noise that was loud enough to summon another soldier to the door. That young man peeked in and immediately retreated. “You will not trivialize!”
Baker yelled, “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“Tonight’s shipment!” the soldier yelled.
Baker’s world stopped. No one knew about that shipment. No one could know about it. He’d been assured of it. For half an instant, he considered denying knowledge of what the man was talking about, but he knew that would be a mistake.
“Yes, you do know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”
Baker tried to form a response, but defaulted to a nod.
“You tell me that you are—what was your phrase?—politically agnostic, yet you do business with the American Central Intelligence Agency.”
“I do business with everybody’s intelligence agency,” Baker said. “And cartel leaders and revolutionary groups. This is not a sporting-goods store. And why are you terrorizing my guests? If you wanted to kill me, you could have killed me in the hotel you snatched me from.”
“I need you alive,” the soldier said.
And then he explained why.
CHAPTER 23
THE FAIRWAY BUNKER JONATHAN HAD SELECTED AS HIS OBSERVATION point looked like an asymmetrical bomb crater, a giant U with raised sides, ten feet wide and forty feet across at its widest dimensions. It provided perfect defilade from the direction of the bungalows. He and Gail lay on their bellies with their rifles perched on the top edge, scanning for anything that might look like a threat. So far, all he saw were a regiment of flamingos. He wondered if they did to golf courses here what geese did to golf courses in America.
Peripherally he saw Tyler and Jaime walking like a normal day toward the far woods line and the residential part of the resort that lay beyond.
“Should we have gone with them?” Gail asked.
“I would have liked to go instead of them,” Jonathan said. “But as the guy who actually killed their friends, that couldn’t possibly end well. By staying out here, maybe we can take out a few more of their friends. Make it easier on Boxers and company when they finally arrive.”
The boys made it across the wide-open expanse without incident. When they were gone from view, Jonathan said, “Let’s go explore the magazines.”
“Let’s wait a few more minutes,” Gail said. Her eyes never stopped scanning left to right, right to left.
“What for?”
“In case.”
“Of what?”
Finally she drilled him with a glare. “I said I want to stay for a few more minutes.”
Jonathan didn’t try to argue. They were staying for a few more minutes.
* * *
Not running was hands down the hardest part. It’s not until you’re trying your hardest to look natural that you realize you have no idea what “natural” looks like. At that moment, everything, from the length of your stride to the swing of your arm, feels entirely false. Tyler and Jaime said nothing as they walked, the jingle of the keys in Jaime’s pocket providing their own personal sound track.
“Do you think you can muffle those things?” Tyler asked.
“I’ve already got my hand in my pocket,” Jaime said. “There’s a lot of them.”
A thought flirted through Tyler’s mind. “They are labeled, right?”
“Nope.”
“But the locks to the grates in the stacks are all keyed the same.”
“Nope.”
“You’ve got, like, forty keys.”
“Yep. Still feeling like a good idea?”
“Look, Jaime, if you still want to—”
�
�Careful, Ty. Don’t say it if you don’t mean it. I’m scared shitless. I’m here because I told you I’d do it. I’m not sure I’d release me from that if I was you.”
Tyler assumed that he was kidding, but he couldn’t be sure. He cast a glance back over his shoulder. “Scorpion and Gunslinger can’t see us anymore.”
“Then let’s move a little faster, okay?” Jaime didn’t wait for an answer before he picked up speed by half. They weren’t running yet, but they were walking fast.
It felt good, Tyler had to admit. It felt less like they were posing for target practice. They were among manicured gardens again, where the grass was meticulously cut, still wet from the automatic sprinklers.
Jaime pointed ahead. “There’s the stack we’re using.”
To Tyler’s untrained eye, the stack was a four-foot-tall green-red-and-white cottage that might have been part of the movie set for a Mother Goose story. The cottage’s chimney rose high above the charming structure, culminating in a similar-colored birdhouse. To get to it, they crossed behind and between two bungalows. It occurred to him just how easy it would be for the terrorists to be hiding behind any one of those windows, watching them from obscurity.
“You’re creeping yourself out, Tyler,” he said aloud.
“Talking to yourself kinda creeps me out, too,” Jaime said.
The stack cottage was surrounded with three-foot hedges behind three ranks of red and yellow flowers. “Be careful not to crush the flowers,” Jaime said.
“Really? That’s what you’re worried about?”
Jaime gave him a hard look. “Because if we leave tracks, the terrorists can follow us.”
Tyler let Jaime lead the way. Clearly, this was not his first time. He contorted his body just the right way to place his foot parallel to the ranks of flowers, and then he twisted his whole body sideways to create his own passageway between the flush edges of adjoining bushes. Tyler started to follow.
“No,” Jaime said. “Not yet. I need a little room to maneuver. Keep an eye out for trouble.”
Tyler felt an inexplicable jab of jealousy. Why should Jaime be able to be under cover while he had to stand out here in the open? As if a waist-high barrier of greenery could save anyone’s life. He watched as Jaime squatted low and hugged the circumference of the cottage and pressed up with his legs. As it rose, the house made a scraping sound, which was probably nowhere near as loud as it sounded. It rose on rails, exposing a three-foot-high opening between the bottom edge of the house and the sidewalk. Jaime twisted the house a few degrees, and it stayed in place.
“How could I not have seen this before?” Tyler asked.
“If you’re watching me, you can’t be watching for terrorists,” Jaime said.
Tyler wanted to argue, but he’d made too good a point. Still, that tingling sense of exposure was almost crippling, as if every sound was a threat, every movement of foliage an impending disaster. Every smell—
What the hell was that smell? Equal parts floral and rancid, the stench was carried on the breeze. Instinctively, Tyler knew what it was. He moved ten feet forward of the gnome house, where he could see more of the surrounding area, and he was confronted with the bodies. Two of them, a man and a woman, lay perpendicular to each other in the grass. He was naked, and she was nearly so. Each had bloated up in the heat, their legs stiff and suspended above the ground as if to mimic the posture of dead deer along the side of the road.
“Take a good look,” a voice said from close behind.
Tyler yipped and spun around to see Scorpion and Gunslinger not fifteen feet away. “Jesus, you scared me!”
“Those are the stakes,” Scorpion said.
“What are you doing here?” Jaime asked.
“You guys head to the hills,” Scorpion said. “On further consultation with my team, I can’t in good conscience send you in to do the job that we’re better suited to.”
“How do you figure that?” Tyler asked.
“Shut up,” Jaime snapped. “Don’t talk him out of it.” He left the gnome house shell suspended in the air and slid out through the hedges to step across the flowers onto the grass.
“I need the phone back,” Scorpion said. He held his palm up and wiggled his fingers.
“We’ll have no way to contact you,” Tyler objected.
“There’ll be no need to. You guys need to head back up into the hills and stay out of sight.”
As Tyler handed back the phone, he couldn’t put his finger on why he felt so slighted.
Scorpion continued, “Stay predictable, and I’ll find you when it’s time. Remember the plan if you get caught. You’re relieved from your intelligence-gathering job, so if you get nabbed, all you have to do is talk your way out and stay alive. If you want my suggestion, I’d tell the bad guys that you were up at your den in the woods, smoking pot, when the balloon went up. You didn’t know about anything but the shooting.”
Scorpion shifted his attention to Jaime. “Make me smart about this tunnel system.”
“Let me see your map,” Jaime said.
They kneeled on the ground. Scorpion removed the tourist map from his pocket and spread it out across the grass.
“Let me see your pen,” Jaime said. He clicked it open and started drawing on the map. “These are the stacks,” he said, drawing little circles. “And this is how the tunnels connect them.” He drew lines. “When you get to the bottom of this stack, from where you’re facing the ladder, turn left to head this way toward the Plantation House. There are two branching places. Here and here.” He drew X’s. “As long as you’re headed toward the Plantation House, you should never take a branch to the left. The branches to the right will take you closer to the bungalows.”
“Where do the branches to the left take you?” Gunslinger asked.
“To staff dormitory and lower-priced bungalows, but mostly to some of the maintenance areas. Feel free to go there if you want, but I don’t think you’ll find anything there you want to see.”
Scorpion gathered the map and returned it to his pocket. He held out his hand. “Can I have your keys?”
Jaime hesitated.
“That, or you come with us. I think we’re past the time where you have to worry about me stealing from you.” He gave him a smirk.
“Take care of them,” Jaime said. He handed the ring to Scorpion. “Lose those, and I’m fired.”
“I’ll guard them with my life,” Scorpion said. “Now you guys take off for the hills. Stay out of sight.”
Tyler didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what to do. He’d amped himself on the whole idea of doing the right thing, and now this. “I want to go with you,” he said.
Gunslinger answered forcefully, “No. This one’s on us. Head back. Collect your weapons and gear and get out of sight. We’ll see you when it’s over.”
“I at least want to be in the fight,” Tyler said.
Her tone softened. “Who knows?” she said. “Maybe there doesn’t need to be a fight. Let’s take it a step at a time.”
Scorpion had already made his way to the gnome stack and was disappearing into the ground. No good-bye, no good luck. He just climbed down.
“Do me a favor and put the house back down for us?” Gunslinger asked. “Scorpion tends to break things when he doesn’t know how they work.”
Tyler waited for her to finish her climb down into the darkness, and then, with Jaime’s help, the house slid into place above them.
Then they were alone.
“Let’s get out of here,” Jaime said.
* * *
Gail knew that Jonathan was angry, and she knew that he had every right to be. Boxers and his team were coming here for the specific purpose of liberating them and the other hostages, and-whatever battle plan he’d put together depended on aid and support from both of them. If they got caught, then the entire mission could turn out to be a disaster.
But this was necessary intel, too, and she didn’t think it was right for those inexperienced
young men—those boys—to take on that kind of responsibility. The way she’d sold it to Digger was that both he and she knew what to look for, what was important and what was not. When the intel was finally put into use, it would be 100 percent reliable. There was no way they could depend on that kind of reliability from the boys. Everything would have to be second-guessed.
The top priorities would have everything to do with numbers and locations. How many hostages were located where? How many guards? If possible, where were the off-duty guards when they rested? They needed to know as much as they could about as many details as they could determine.
It was a job the boys were simply not up to.
The tunnel was as claustrophobic a setting as Gail had ever encountered. Maybe five feet tall and as many wide, the low ceiling made it impossible to walk upright, so she moved with her waist bent and her chin tucked into her chest.
“Big Guy would not have been a happy camper in here,” she said.
Jonathan chuckled, a sound she was happy to hear. “Give him a fuse and three minutes. He’d just make the hole bigger.”
* * *
With little else to do as they waited for the next go order, Henry West stripped and cleaned the weapons he intended to carry on the Team Yankee mission. He’d taken his M4 down to its component parts, cleaned every part down to the trigger spring, and oiled the shit out of it. Big Guy walked by as he slid the bolt carrier back into place.
“Jesus, Conan. We’ll be able to follow you by your oil trail.”
“The only good rifle is a wet rifle,” Henry said.
He’d seen countless failures in the field over the years from under-oiled firearms. He got that they were messy, but that’s what rags were for. Blood was messy, too, and in his experience, spilled blood was the inevitable result of a weapon malfunction in the middle of a firefight.
He closed the receiver, slid the pin into place, and cycled the action a few times. Perfect. The M4 got a fair amount of hate among the gun porn crowd—not enough stopping power was the biggest hit—but Henry had always liked it. Never once had he shot someone in the face and witnessed him not fall down dead.
Scorpion Strike Page 23
