Scorpion Strike

by John Gilstrap

  And that was all he could do. There was still a lot of mission left to complete.

  Jonathan led Yankee Three cautiously and slowly toward the Plantation House. This war was now eleven minutes old—plenty of time for the soldiers inside the building to build a strategy to keep Jonathan and company out. They’d still be blind, but their eyes had had plenty of time to adjust. Shadows and silhouettes that would have been invisible a few minutes ago would now be discernible.

  The sheer size of the building was their first problem. Venice had sent them a fairly detailed floor plan, but that mostly validated Jonathan’s concern that there were so many rooms, doorways, nooks and crannies that they could never be entirely sure that they got everybody.

  “You sure you’re up to this, Chief?” Jonathan asked.

  Davey moved like a man in a lot of pain. “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’ll get the kinks worked out.”

  They kneeled among the decorative ferns off to the side of the five steps that led to the grand veranda.

  “Okay, Big Guy,” Jonathan said. “If you were them, and you knew we were coming to get you, what would you do?”

  “I’d surrender,” Boxers said. “I’d be really friggin’ afraid of me. But, assuming they’re not as smart, I think they’d try to find a way to bring the fight to us.”

  “You talking booby traps?” Davey asked.

  “Sure, why not? They haven’t had time to put anything elaborate together, but that’s for sure the direction I would go.”

  Jonathan’s radio popped. “Scorpion, Gunslinger. The kids are secure. Three tangos are sleeping. Need help?”

  “That’s affirmative,” Jonathan said. “And good timing. I’ll use whatever I can get.” He told her where they were.

  Three minutes later, Dylan and Gail joined Yankee Three. And they’d granted their opposition force three extra minutes to plan.

  “Choke points are going to be the issue,” Jonathan said. “If they’re tactically aware—and I think we have to assume that they are—then they know that their best chance to stop us is to slow us down or force us into a position with limited movement.”

  Gail said, “That means our best chance is to go strictly by the book. Room by room, floor by floor.”

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” Jonathan said. “Chief, I’m promoting you and your busted ribs to Yankee Two, and, Gunslinger, you’re coming back with us. We’ll split our forces. Chief, you and Dylan take the first floor, and Slinger, Big Guy, and I will take the second floor. I want us out of here in five minutes or less. It’s taking too long as it is.”

  “Copy that,” Dylan said.

  “Fast and hard,” Jonathan said. “On my count. Three . . . two . . . one . . .”

  * * *

  She Devil had been hit in the gut—one of those impossibly lucky shots that slipped under her ballistic plate—and the wound was pumping blood at an alarming rate.

  “The fireman’s carry was killing her,” Rollins said.

  “I get it,” Henry said. “No problem.” He grabbed Jolaine’s legs so that they straddled him like the handles of a wheelbarrow. Still loaded with her weapons and ammo, she wasn’t a light burden.

  “When we get her evacuated to the boat, we can go back and take care of the VX.”

  “You’re not evacuating me anywhere,” Jolaine said. Her NVGs had slid sideways on her face, and her voice was weak and raspy.

  “We left trauma gear at the rally point, I hope,” Henry said. “We’ve got to get her leaker plugged. Look at the blood trail.”

  In their night vision, the stream of blood registered as a shiny intermittent stripe along the ground.

  “Yankee One, this is Torpedo. I think I’m in the right place. Where are you?”

  To respond would require one of them to let go of Jolaine, so they said nothing. They did pick up their pace, though. If Henry calculated correctly, the distance back to the rally point was about half a mile, and he reckoned that they’d traversed better than half that distance.

  “Yankee One, Yankee One, can you hear me? This is Torpedo.”

  With what appeared to be considerable effort, Jolaine brought her hand to her chest and keyed her mic. “Cool your jets, Torpedo. We’re on our way. Get in as close as you can.”

  “I’m afraid of running aground.”

  “If that happens, we’ll un-run you,” Jolaine said. “Look for the light. It’ll be a few minutes still.”

  When she was done talking, she folded her arms across her vest and M4 with its M203 grenade launcher under the barrel.

  “How ya doin’, She Devil?” Henry asked.

  “It’s beginning to sting,” she said through gritted teeth.

  “We’re almost to the exfil site,” Rollins said. “Then we’ll be able to put you down. And evaluate you.”

  “Sounds like Scorpion and the gang are giving somebody hell,” Jolaine said. “Sorry I kept you from the action.”

  “Yeah, I don’t get shot at nearly often enough,” Henry said.

  “I think I’m officially too old for this shit,” Rollins added.

  Jolaine tried to laugh, but the effort created a coughing spasm that launched blood from her nose and mouth. “Oh, that can’t be good,” she said. A spasm wracked her at that instant, causing her to yank her knees up and pull Henry off-balance. “Oh, God, that hurts,” she said.

  “We’re almost there,” Henry said. In the near distance, he could hear the sound of the boat idling close to shore.

  “We’re going to put you down now,” Rollins said.

  Together, they laid her as gently as they could onto the rocky sand. While Rollins went for the stack of staged equipment and the med kit, Henry pointed his IR flashlight toward the water and flashed it three times. He got three flashes in return and then heard the engines throttling up.

  “Let’s see what we’ve got here,” Henry said. “I’ll take your weapon.” He reached for her M4 and tried to lift it away.

  “I’ll keep it,” Jolaine said. “I don’t want to be the only one without a gun.”

  Henry wasn’t going to argue. “Then pull it up out of the way. I need to open your vest and see how big a hole they made.”

  He ripped open the Velcro closure on her vest. As it clamshelled open, he lifted her shirt to expose the wound. Not an inch above her belt line, the bullet hole was the diameter of a pencil, and it pumped blood at an alarming rate.

  “I need QuikClot, Madman!” he yelled to Rollins.

  He checked for an exit wound, but didn’t find one. Night vision was not the optimal choice when evaluating traumatic injuries, where the nuances of skin color and the shades of blood were important diagnostic tools.

  Madman kneeled at his side, tore open a package of QuikClot, and handed it to Henry. “Gonna need two?” he asked.

  “I’ll let you know in a second.” QuikClot gauze was one of the world’s most lifesaving inventions. It contributed to the plummeting battlefield mortality rate. Impregnated with kaolin, an inert substance that increased the rate at which blood clotted, it bought hours of survivability for soldiers in the battlefield, for whom trauma surgeons were often hours away.

  “Okay, She Devil,” Henry said. “This is going to be uncomfortable.” In order for QuikClot to be effective, the surface of the gauze needed to touch as much of the surface of the wound channel as possible. That meant stuffing the gauze deeply into the bullet hole.

  Henry used his forefinger. Jolaine howled like a wounded animal.

  “Oh, goddammit, that friggin’ hurts!”

  “I’m sorry,” Henry said, but he continued to jam his finger and the gauze as deeply as he could into the hot wetness of the wound cavity. “Open another package,” he said.

  “Oh, God . . . no,” Jolaine said. “Please.”

  “Better in pain and alive than bled out and dead,” Henry said. To Rollins, he said, “Get me a trauma dressing and a roll of Kling, please.”

  Madman dug through the med bag and produced a t
welve-by-twelve-inch package, which was about half an inch thick. He tore it open, and when Henry was ready, he handed it to him.

  Henry folded the dressing over itself twice, then pressed it against the stuffed bullet wound. “We’re almost done,” he said.

  Madman handed him a fat roll of Kling, a kind of gauze bandage that was designed to adhere to itself, allowing for an effective pressure dressing.

  Holding the pad against the entrance wound, Henry lifted Jolaine’s shirt out of the way, and with Rollins’s help, they rolled the Kling around her torso six or seven times, until the entire roll was expended.

  “It’s too tight,” Jolaine grunted. “It hurts.”

  “It’s gotta be tight,” Henry said. “And pain makes you tough.”

  “Stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Jolaine grunted.

  Before Henry could ask for tape, Madman had already presented it to him. He secured the running end of the Kling, and they were ready to go.

  “Hey, She Devil,” Henry said. “Any chance at all that you can walk with assistance?”

  “Oh, Christ,” she moaned. “I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?”

  “There’s the spirit,” Henry said.

  He positioned himself on her right arm while Rollins took the left. “Lift by the armpits,” he said. “Ready, set . . .”

  Jolaine yelled a grunt as they lifted her to her feet. For a second, her legs buckled, but then she seemed to find them again. “I don’t have to do this for long, do I?”

  “Just to the boat,” Henry said. He keyed his mic. “Do you have eyeballs on us, Torpedo?”

  The response came instantly. “Yes, sir. How bad is she?”

  Jolaine keyed her own mic. “You know I’m right here.”

  For the next sixty seconds or so, Henry’s greatest concern was to keep Jolaine’s dressing dry. The introduction of seawater into open wounds spiked the possibility of infection. Until she saw a surgeon, they’d have no real idea of how badly wounded she was. Henry, would take whatever advantage they could get to keep her chances of survival and recovery as high as possible.

  When they were maybe ten yards from the boat, the sea bottom fell away. As they waded to their waists, Madman and Conan locked their wrists under She Devil’s butt and half carried, half floated her out the rest of the way.

  Finally they were at the boat. “Hey, Torp,” Henry said. “Grab her by the shoulders of her vest and pull. She’s gonna yell, but it’s better than drowning.”

  And yell she did as Jesse pulled while Henry pushed. She landed on the deck with a satisfying thud. And another yelp of pain.

  Henry smiled. He didn’t wish pain on anyone, but he’d learned a long time ago that trauma victims who had enough strength to yell were a hell of a lot healthier than those who did not.

  “I’m going back for the rest of the med bag,” Henry said.

  “I’ve got it,” said Madman. “You take care of She Devil. Your medic skills are better than mine.”

  With Torpedo’s help, Henry hauled himself aboard and wrestled Jolaine into a comfortable, partially reclined position against the boat’s cockpit wall.

  “Where are the others?” Jesse asked.

  “They’re still working,” Henry said. “This injury kind of knocked my corner of the plan out of kilter. When Madman gets back with the med bag, I want you to take us out to sea far enough that we’re out of range so I can deploy white light and see how bad She Devil really is.”

  The boat rocked severely, and the med bag tumbled onto the deck. “I could use a hand,” Madman said.

  Jesse and Henry each grabbed a shoulder of his vest and heaved Rollins up and in.

  “Okay, Torpedo,” Henry said. “Take us out to sea. About a mile should do it. That way, if Yankees Two and Three need exfil, we’ll only be a few minutes—”

  “Look!” Jesse said, pointing back toward the darkened docks. “The ships are getting away.”

  * * *

  Jonathan and Boxers led the way, shoulder-to-shoulder, up the grand staircase, while Gail covered their six o’clock. It was good to be back with the team he’d worked with so well for so long.

  The top of the stairs opened up on a lavish lobby that led to the formal dining room and the second-floor veranda that lay beyond. Gail held the hallway while Jonathan and Boxers did a cursory search of the dining room. It made no sense for anyone to hunker down in there, but by the book meant by the book, and they couldn’t afford to cut any corners.

  Closed double doors blocked the archway to the normally open hallway that led to the business and executive offices.

  “Those door aren’t normally closed,” Gail said, voicing Jonathan’s thoughts. And they were locked.

  “I believe that’s a tell,” Boxers said. “Shall we make some noise?” Even as he asked the question, he’d pulled a Slap charge from its quiver on his MOLLE gear, peeled off the Stickum, and pasted it to the latch on the right-hand double door. Next he attached his Skin-Pack detonator and ran the line out about fifteen feet, allowing them to back off into the dining room.

  “Fire in the hole,” he said with a grin. He pulled the pin, and the second floor bounced with the detonation that tore the door apart.

  They moved as before, with Jonathan checking the offices on the left, while Boxers cleared the offices on the right. Gail kept her eye out for stragglers and ambushes.

  From downstairs, they heard the sounds of forcible entry, but no gunfire. Three minutes after Jonathan and his team had exploded into the executive offices, they realized that the spaces were empty.

  “Maybe we got them all,” Big Guy said. His disappointment was palpable.

  “There has to be a command post somewhere,” Jonathan thought aloud.

  He heard movement. Nothing overt or obvious. More like a creaking floorboard.

  “Did you hear that?” Gail whispered.

  “Sounded like it was from overhead,” Boxers whispered.

  “Did we miss a stairway?” Jonathan asked.

  “Tyler said something about a back stairway,” Gail said. “That’s how he got away. It led to the basement.”

  “Where there’s a back stairway, doesn’t there have to be a front stairway?” Boxers asked. “Kind of by definition.”

  “We’ve missed something,” Jonathan said.

  They needed to retrace their steps.

  How do you hide a stairway? Well, you’d put it behind a wall, wouldn’t you? But for it to be truly hidden, there could be no knob.

  “We need to look for some kind of hidden latch in the wall,” Jonathan whispered.

  From downstairs, Chief yelled, “Hey, Boss, we’re all clear down here. The sons-a-bitches all took off.”

  “We’re clear, too!” Jonathan yelled. Then he whispered to his team, “Why let the bad guys hear they’ve been made.” Into his radio, he whispered, “Yankee Three, come to the top of the grand staircase and stack up at the end of the hallway. We might have something.”

  As he felt along the wall for irregularities—a place for a latch to be hidden—he discovered a hinge.

  “I’ve got it,” he whispered. On a hunch, he leaned on that section of wall and it flexed. With an audible snick, the latch unseated. “Bingo.”

  “What’s our play?” Boxers asked.

  Stairways, like narrow hallways, represented a “cone of death” for assault forces. They were the one mandatory choke point where bad guys knew that good guys had to go to get from point A to point B. They were ready-made ambush zones.

  “We don’t know the layout and we don’t know their strength,” Jonathan said.

  “We could always burn them out,” Boxers said. He smiled, but Jonathan understood that he spoke only in jest. Okay, mostly in jest.

  “We don’t know if there are good guys up there,” Jonathan said. “Scorched earth won’t work.”

  “We still have the advantage of darkness.”

  “And they’ve had time to plan,” Boxers observed. “If I were them, I’d
wait for the guys with the NVGs to show up and then hit them with a ton of white light. Turn it into a shooting gallery.”

  “How about bangers and strobes?” Jonathan said. Combined with flashbang grenades, strobing muzzle lights were disorienting as hell.

  “Works for me,” Boxers said. “Slinger?”

  “God, I hate strobes,” she said. “They make me feel like I’m falling up.”

  “Oh, and I brought some new toys,” Boxers said. He reached into his flashbang pouch and handed two grenades to each of them. “Nine-bangers,” he said with a grin.

  Literally, they were flashbangs with nine individual charges in them, and the nine bangs were not symmetrical.

  Jonathan slid them into the pouch on his vest, which held his other flashbang.

  “Okay, stand back. Here we go.” With his back pressed to the wall, and with the rest of the team clear of the doorway, he pulled on the panel and let it swing open.

  If there was a shooter at the top of the stairs, he was a disciplined one, because no one fired a shot.

  Rocking his NVGs out of the way, he pulled the pin on the nine-banger and heaved it up the stairs without looking. After the first bang, someone returned fire from upstairs. The fight was on.

  Jonathan activated the strobe on his M27 and swung into the stairwell. A soldier at the top of the stairs winced against the bright light and fired a wild shot. Jonathan shot him in the forehead.

  “Moving up!” he announced, and he climbed up the narrow stairs as quickly as he could, with Boxers right on his heels. At the top step, Jonathan dipped to a knee and swept the hallway to his left. No targets.

  Boxers dropped somebody on the right with a double tap.

  Up here, everything looked far more opulent. This was more of a ceremonial office, Jonathan figured, a place to entertain investors. It consisted of a reception area and another closed door. With fewer places to hide, they cleared it in just a few seconds.

  Which left them with the closed door.

  “Slap it,” Jonathan said, calling for another explosive breach.

  Before Boxers could respond, the door and the wall around it erupted to the sound of automatic-weapons fire.

  Two unseen sledgehammers nailed Jonathan in the shoulder blade and the kidney, dropping him face-first into the carpet.