Scorpion Strike

by John Gilstrap

  They were approaching the fifth stack since entering the tunnels. By Jonathan’s calculation, they were approaching what the tourist map referred to as Bungalow Cluster D, which would make it the fourth cluster up from the swimming-pool complex. And the closer they got, the clearer became the sound of chattering children. Conversations, it sounded like. Some laughter, but not much.

  Jonathan stooped down on his knee to get a better view of the map, moving as close to the dim circle of light as he could get without actually entering it. He couldn’t imagine the circumstance where someone would peel off the gnome house to peer directly down at him, but on days like this, anything that was not impossible needed to be considered likely. Gail stooped next to him.

  “How’re you holding up?” he asked.

  “Nothing wrong yet that another couple of rounds with the physical therapist can’t take care of.”

  Jonathan gave the map some serious study. “I’ve been making marks as we go along,” he whispered. He pointed to a spot on the map. “I know that this is where we came in. That would put us right here.” He moved his pen to the first unmarked space.

  “So, this is where they’re holding the children,” Gail concluded.

  “That’s what I think, too,” Jonathan said.

  Gail hedged, “Or at least one of the places.”

  “Maybe,” Jonathan said, marking the map with a big circle, “but I don’t think they’d want to split their forces like that, especially given the dwindling numbers we’ve handed them. Guarding a lot of kids in one place is hard enough. Splitting them between two locations would be a real drain on manpower.”

  An adult male voice yelled, “Playtime is over for you.” It startled the crap out of them both. “Get inside and make room for the next group.”

  It was a data point, but Jonathan didn’t know what to make of it. There were enough kids that they could not be allowed outside all at once, but so what? It wasn’t possible to extrapolate a whole number from that.

  There were some words of objection from the kids, but not a lot. Mostly, they just became silent among sounds of rustling and footsteps.

  “Wait!” a little voice yelled. “I dropped my flip-flop.”

  “Someone else can get it for you,” the adult said. “Get back in line.”

  “It’ll just take a—”

  The sound of a slap silenced the voice, and then the sound of a wail replaced it.

  Another voice—an older girl, it sounded like—protested, “Hey! You didn’t have to do that. He’s only nine years old.”

  “That’s old enough to follow instructions,” the adult said. “You get in line now, too, unless you want the same.”

  “You guys are so stupid,” the girl pressed. She didn’t sound the least bit intimidated. “You treat these kids like shit, and they’ll—”

  Another slap. “I warned you,” the adult said.

  “It didn’t even hurt,” the girl replied.

  Jonathan glanced back at Gail. “Oh, I like her,” he said.

  CHAPTER 25

  TYLER COULD BARELY SEE THROUGH HIS LEFT EYE, AND HIS RIGHT was blurry. He hurt everywhere. He knew that his guts weren’t right, but he couldn’t articulate why. They’d bound his hands in front of him, probably because of the way he howled when they tried to bend his arms behind him. He feared they’d done something to his shoulders. When he touched his face, everything felt out of order. Not rearranged so much as asymmetrical.

  He had only a dim memory of his walk back to the Plantation House. He knew that he did it under his own power—that no one had carried him—but large chunks of that walk just weren’t there. The memories weren’t blurry, mind you, they did not exist.

  He remembered a focused awareness blooming somewhere about the time they crossed through the maintenance trench behind the swimming pool. He remembered forcing himself to concentrate on what he saw, and to inventory it all with as much precision as possible. Scorpion would want to know. He was depending on him to gather important information. No, intelligence. Intel. That’s what he wanted. Intel.

  So, what had he seen? Lots and lots of people clustered tightly around the pool, all of them stressed, but the terror had subsided. Maybe they had just accepted a certain inevitability. Maybe they were all prepared to die.

  In that crystal-clear moment, Tyler realized that he was not ready to die. He was, however, ready to kill. At the first opening. In fact, for the first time in his life, he wanted to kill, and his fantasy target had a face, but no name. He was the man who had turned Jaime’s face into ground beef.

  The Plantation House had clearly been transformed into their command center. They’d planted Tyler in one of the upholstered, yet still impossibly uncomfortable, visitor chairs that lined the wall opposite the desk that used to belong to Peggy Nelson, the pruney old lady who was Baker’s secretary. In every meaningful way, it was she who ran the resort, not Baker. His name was on the corporation and on the paychecks, but Peggy was the one whose wrath people feared.

  Now that he was seated, Tyler found himself drifting in and out of awareness. He was more aware of activity than of purpose. Whatever was happening, it seemed to be very important to the players. They moved with efficiency and focus, mostly oblivious to the fact that he was even there.

  He didn’t know how long he’d been sitting in that chair when a soldier materialized in front of him. “You still alive?”

  Tyler rocked his head up and looked at the soldier with his good eye. He said nothing, in part because he wasn’t sure that his tongue and lips worked anymore. There was a numbness about the pain in his face that made him think that his smile would be less charming to the ladies than it used to be.

  “Can you stand?”

  Interesting question. Without hesitation, and keeping his eye on the soldier, lest he reported back to his friends that he’d looked away, Tyler stood to his full height, all six-one of him. He ignored the fact that he weighed only 175 pounds. It felt good to tower over his captor.

  “Follow me,” the soldier said. He led the way into what once was Baker’s office. The surroundings were so familiar—so locked into his brain as a pleasant place to be—that the presence of these murderous assholes felt even more awful.

  Tyler took pleasure in knowing what these assholes did not: that many, if not all, of them would die before morning. Even if they did not die at Tyler’s hand, they would die at the hands of people he knew. At an intuitive level, he knew that these thoughts were wrong, but at an emotional level, he didn’t care. People who talked of peaceful negotiation had never been on the hard end of an ass-kicking.

  The soldier led Tyler to the conference table and said, “Sit.” It was identical to the tone that they’d use for an errant pet.

  Tyler continued to stand, his nod to defiance. His nod to Jaime.

  “If I break your legs, you’ll sit,” the soldier said. The calmness of his delivery made the ugliness of the words even more terrifying.

  Tyler sat.

  “Alpha will be here in a minute.”

  There was something deeply unsettling—something deeply wrong—about the faux normalcy of this office environment juxtaposed against the murders these men had committed. He found himself imagining his captors with their faces blown out, their brains spilling out onto the grass. He hated them.

  “I said, Mr. Jackson,” a voice said. He seemed annoyed, and from the tone alone, Tyler could tell that this had not been the first time he’d been addressed.

  It took a couple of seconds for Tyler to remember that he was Ben Jackson. “Oh,” he said. “Yeah?” His voice was clearer than he’d feared, and his lips and cheeks still appeared to be in working order.

  The man who addressed him wore the same uniform as the other soldiers, without any extra stripes or regalia, but he clearly was the man in charge. There literally was nothing about him to distinguish him from any other fortysomething guy in a uniform. Average everything, even down to the brown eyes.

  “I’m
sorry that my colleagues lost their temper with you. Are you in a lot of pain?”

  “I’m fine,” Tyler said. He wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction.

  The soldier grabbed another one of the visitor chairs and pulled it across from Tyler. He spun it so he could hug the padded back. “X-ray is a problem to me sometimes. He is very good at his job, but sometimes he enjoys violence too much. I am sorry about your friend.”

  Tyler eyed him, but otherwise did not acknowledge the comment. This guy wasn’t sorry about shit.

  “Are you thirsty? Can I get you anything? X-ray mentioned that you were hungry.”

  Fully aware that conversation is what got Jaime killed, Tyler said, “Is X-ray a person?”

  “Yes, he is,” the soldier replied. “You may call me Alpha. These aren’t real names, of course, but you probably understand.” He took a deep breath and shifted in his seat. “Young man, I confess that you pose a problem to me, and I am not one to get stumped very often.”

  This didn’t sound like an introduction to anything good.

  “When X-ray and Papa brought you up here to the Plantation House, did you by chance see the bodies hanging by the pool?”

  Something dissolved in Tyler’s gut. Whether it was a stab of fear or merely lingering damage from his ass-kicking, he wasn’t sure.

  “Those are the bodies of a husband and wife who escaped after I announced that anyone who escaped would be killed. They challenged me and they paid the promised price. Perhaps you knew them, the Edwardses, Hunter and Lori?”

  Tyler tried to look Alpha squarely in the eye. “Never heard of them.”

  “That’s interesting,” Alpha said. “Because Lori told me that she had run into two young men, and that they had been hiding together.”

  The pain in Tyler’s gut was now undeniably fear. He fought to control his breathing, to show no fear, whatever that meant. Did fear have a look?

  “That seems like an outrageous coincidence, don’t you think?” Alpha pressed. “Answer me.”

  “That was not me,” Tyler said. The S slurred a little.

  “Ah, but that’s what you would say if it was you,” Alpha said.

  “Can you see my dilemma? And the people that Hunter and Lori were wandering with killed a number of my men. What do you know about that?”

  “I heard a lot of shooting. All through the night.”

  “I bet. Being as close to it as you were, it would be hard not to hear it, wouldn’t it?”

  Tyler tried to look confused.

  “You told X-ray that your little hideout was up on the other side of the mountain. Wouldn’t you know, that’s exactly where the bulk of my men were shot.”

  “I-I had nothing to do with that,” Tyler stammered.

  “To tell you the truth, I never thought that you did.” Alpha leaned in closer. “But I bet you have information you can share.” He arose from his chair and disappeared into Baker’s office for a few seconds before returning to view with a hammer in his hands. Nothing exotic, just the same kind of nail pounder that a carpenter would use.

  As he reapproached, he spun the hammer playfully in his hand, along the axis of the handle. “What does the number two-oh-six mean to you, Ben?”

  Focused as he was on the spinning head of the hammer, and on the damage that could do to him, Tyler wasn’t hearing words anymore. Just hollow sounds. It took a second or two to decipher their meaning.

  “That’s a rhetorical question,” Alpha said. “It’s the number of bones in the human body. Every one of them hurts when it is broken. And then, when the broken ends are moved around, it gets excruciating.” He approached the conference table again. This time, instead of resuming his seat on the other side, he dragged one of the chairs from the end over to Tyler’s side, to where they were nearly touching.

  He laid the head of the hammer gently on his captive’s knee, and Tyler jumped.

  Alpha smiled. “Here,” he said, offering the hammer. “Hold it. Feel the weight of it.”

  When Tyler hesitated, Alpha moved the hammer closer. “I said hold it.”

  Tyler was embarrassed that his cuffed hands trembled as he reached out for the tool. He’d held hammers just like this dozens if not hundreds of times in his life, but this one felt twice—no, three times as heavy as any he’d felt before.

  “I wish I could tell you that I have never seen a man tortured with a hammer, Mr. Jackson, but that simply would not be the truth. And if torture were an art form, let me tell you that your friend X-ray would be a modern-day Michelangelo. I’ve heard men scream their vocal cords bloody over the course of three, four, five days. Alas, we don’t have time for that, do we? My needs are more urgent.”

  Alpha slouched in his chair and extended his legs, crossing his ankles and arms. “Another trivia question for you, and I bet you can answer this one, if only by extrapolation. It’s another significant number. Thirty-two. Can you guess?”

  Tyler stared at the hammer, his stomach churning. He couldn’t make his voice work.

  “Answering is not optional, it’s required,” Alpha said. “Guess, if you don’t know. What is the significance of the number thirty-two? Especially today, especially for you?” He gave a hideous artificial smile and clacked his teeth together.

  Tears flowed and his battered lip trembled as Tyler guessed, “That’s the number of teeth,” he said.

  Alpha reached out and gave Tyler’s knee a playful slap. “You’re exactly right. Have you ever broken a tooth, Ben?”

  Tyler shook his head.

  “Oh, I have,” Alpha said. “A couple of times. Once on an unpopped bit of popcorn. Split the tooth all the way down to the gum line. Exposed the nerve. Oh, my goodness that hurt. Tooth pain—man, it’s the worst, isn’t it?”

  Tyler couldn’t control it anymore. He turned in his seat and vomited onto the Oriental carpet.

  “Oh, my,” Alpha said. “What a mess. I must be upsetting you. Tell you what. Let’s change the subject.” He snatched the hammer from Tyler’s hands and the boy yelled.

  Alpha laughed. “You are a loud one, aren’t you? We haven’t even touched you yet. But since you have such a nice smile—I bet you wore braces on your teeth when you were younger. Since you have such a nice smile, when the time comes—if it comes, because there’s always a better way to share information than to scream it—I’ll give you control of one of the very important decisions. Do you prefer to have your teeth broken off one at a time, or would you prefer to have them driven back into your jaw? Truthfully, I’ve seen it done both ways, and from my perspective, they are equally effective.”

  Alpha stood, and beckoned for Tyler to do the same. “I think you need a few minutes to think,” he said. “You have so much to gain from being reasonable, and so much to lose by being difficult. You have your whole life ahead of you at nineteen. And such a handsome young man. Please don’t make me cripple you and turn that fine face into something ugly. I lose a little bit of myself every time I am forced to do such a thing.”

  Tyler tried to stand once, but the balance wasn’t there. His ribs and his gut really hurt, and his scrotum felt swollen. Alpha placed an arm on his biceps to help him up. The gentleness of his touch surprised Tyler.

  “As I said,” Alpha continued, “you will have some time to consider your options. Come with me.”

  Alpha led the way across the lobby to a closed door, which Tyler knew led to Baker’s private dining room. “You can have a seat in here while you consider your options.”

  As the mahogany door swung open, Tyler saw that another prisoner had already been stashed here. This one sat at the dining table, slouched in the chair, as if he were sleeping—or, God forbid—

  The sound of the door seemed to startle the other hostage. As he turned around, Tyler instantly recognized that it was Baker Sinise. As the flash of recognition crossed his face, Tyler did his best to project an urgent Say nothing. Baker registered a flash of confusion, and then he got it.

  “You two know eac
h other?” Alpha asked.

  Tyler advanced a lie before Baker could say anything. “He yelled at me the other day,” he said. “Ben Jackson. You didn’t like the fact that I was crashing with Jaime Bonilla.”

  Without dropping a beat, Baker said, “I thought I told you to get off the island.”

  “Now I wish I had,” Tyler said. Finally a refreshing taste of the truth.

  * * *

  Getting out of the tunnels required a careful, choreographed pivot that put Gail in the lead. The strain of the hunched-over walk was beginning to light up Jonathan’s back. Too many parachute jumps and hard landings over too many years. These had been among the most uncomfortable thirty-five minutes of that entire career.

  “Nice ass, Ms. Bonneville,” Jonathan whispered.

  “Oh, yeah,” she replied. “Perfect time to dazzle me with romance.”

  “Just stating a fact. Raising the mood with a little chauvinistic objectification.”

  “Ever the charmer.”

  Jonathan could hear the smile in her voice. And he was happy with the intel they’d been able to pick up on the location of the kids. When Boxers arrived in a couple of hours and this op went hot, Jonathan would consider it a nonfailure just if they got the kids to safety. Parents were important, too, but if someone had to die, he’d made his choice who it would not be.

  “We’re gonna need to hit that bungalow first,” he thought aloud.

  “No argument from me,” Gail agreed.

  They decided to exit the tunnel via the same stack through which they’d entered, if only because it was a known quantity. When they reached the ladder that led to the grate, Jonathan said, “I’ll go first and check for hazards.”

  “The hell you will,” Gail said. “I’m happy to engage any ten bad guys if it gets me out of this hellhole thirty seconds faster.”

  Jonathan couldn’t argue with a word of that. He watched from below as Gail ascended the short ladder and then used a kind of modified military press to lift the gnome house out of the way. She scanned for targets, and then beckoned for him to come up and join her.

  Once clear of the stack, Jonathan lowered it back into place. With their rifles at low ready, they made their way back through the trees and bushes to the near edge of the golf course, where they stopped together and dropped to a knee.