Scorpion Strike Read online

  He didn’t wait for an answer from Annie. Rather, he guided her past the pool’s wheelchair ramp and toward the rank of chairs that nobody wanted during the day because they offered nearly full shade—the very opposite of why most people came to a resort like the Crystal Sands. The chaises he selected were constructed of the same canvas and heavy wood as all the hundreds of others, but theirs lay against one of the elaborate white ceramic planters that defined the outer perimeter of the pool area. Immediately beyond, toward the rear, lay the descending pathway that ultimately led to the garbage Dumpsters and the maintenance sheds for the golf carts, which toted guests from one end of the compound to another.

  The flood of guest hostages continued to swell as sleep-deprived rich people arrived in their clusters of various sizes, each of them guarded by a team of riflemen.

  “There are so many of them,” Annie whispered. Her tone sounded like equal parts fear and awe.

  Tyler assumed she was talking about the terrorists, not the guests, and he had to agree. These were some badass dudes. He had a horrible feeling in his stomach that people weren’t going to take them seriously enough, and that more of the resort’s guests were going to die before this ended—whatever the hell this was.

  CHAPTER 2

  WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?

  Jonathan Grave’s eyes snapped open. He thought he’d heard gunshots, a quick burst of automatic-weapons fire, distant but distinctive. Perhaps he’d been dreaming, but—

  There it was again, and it was definitely gunfire. A sustained burst this time, and accompanied by screams.

  “Gail,” he said. “Wake up. Something’s wrong.”

  She lay with her head on his chest and was slow to respond.

  “Come on, Gail. Wake up. Somebody’s shooting.” As he spoke, he slid out from under her, and she stirred.

  At the third ripple of gunfire, she was wide-awake. As she sat up, the covers fell away from her breasts and she moved quickly to cover them. Jonathan shot to his feet and darted naked to the sliding glass door that served as their window onto the beach. Out beyond the glass and the low hedge that surrounded their patio, everything looked normal in the silver light of the moon. It cut a brilliant slice across the calm waters, only to be lost in the rolling luminescence of the waves breaking against the white sand.

  “What do you see?” Gail asked. He could hear her rising and dressing behind him.

  “Nothing, yet,” he said. “But that was definitely gunfire.” He unlocked the slider and pulled it open.

  “Whatever it is, I think pants and shoes would be a good idea,” Gail said. She’d pulled herself into the cream-colored shorts and pink blouse she’d worn to dinner.

  Jonathan looked down at himself. She had a point. He locked the door again. “Come over here and keep an eye out,” he said. As she moved into his place, he padded quickly across the bedroom into the massive walk-in closet, where he’d hung his khaki 5.11 pants and golf shirt. He wasn’t much for shorts.

  “Talk to me,” Jonathan said as he felt his way along the hanging clothes in the dark. Under the circumstances, turning on a light was a nonstarter. He heard more gunfire in the distance. Single shots this time, but they sounded closer than before.

  “I don’t see anything,” Gail said. “But it sounds like they’re working up this way, one bungalow at a time.”

  The Crystal Sands Resort was as high-end as a beach getaway could be, and Jonathan had chosen the bungalow farthest from the noise and the light of the clubhouse. The surf rolled two hundred yards from their patio at low tide and about a hundred yards closer when the moon pulled it nearer to shore. On the opposite side of the building—officially the front, he supposed—their ornate wood and etched glass door was separated from the steep sloping jungle by only an access road and another twenty yards of well-groomed undergrowth.

  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 Merrell 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. “And they have hostages.” A former member of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, she knew training when she saw it. The leader of the two-man team moved with his weapon at low ready, while the other one guarded a young couple that they’d spent some time with at the pool. The second guy looked tough, but from the way he was holding his rifle—they both carried some form of AR 15 clone—he didn’t look frightened. Both attackers wore tactical vests festooned with spare magazines.

  “I don’t see night vision,” Jonathan observed. And why would they have it? Whatever they were up to, they had little reason to expect much resistance from a bunch of off-season beach vacationers. That one bit of complacency 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—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. 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. He finished with a vicious slice into the blue meat of the man’s neck, unleashing a fountain of gore. 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 50 percent of the threat was neutralized.

  The guy who remained
outside to keep track of the other couple was slow to react. He seemed startled. But then he got his shit together and pushed his hostages aside. As the bad guy’s rifle swung up from low ready, Jonathan realized with more than a little irony that he had literally brought a knife to a gunfight.

  Jonathan charged forward, using the dead attacker as a human battering ram. Driving his limp body forward, across the patio and past the margin of the surrounding grass, he shoved him into his partner to knock him off balance. 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 not to be hit. 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.

  Jonathan’s heart hammered in his chest as he let the guy drop. He returned to his fighter’s stance, ready for the next threat. The young couple embraced each other, seemingly ready to die at Jonathan’s hand.

  “Edwards, right?” Jonathan asked. “Lori and Hunter.”

  They nodded in unison. Or maybe it was a shiver.

  “W-we met at the pool,” Hunter stammered.

  “Yeah,” Jonathan said. 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.

  He turned back toward the room, toward the shattered glass and the bedroom beyond. “Gail, are you all right?” She 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. Yes, 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 on 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. He wrapped his left fist around the reinforced tab, which existed on most tactical vests for the very purpose of dragging wounded comrades, and started pulling him back into the room.

  “Oh, my God, what are you doing?” This from Lori, who seemed to be rejoining the real world.

  “They’re sure to realize that they’re missing a couple of operators,” Jonathan said. “Makes no sense to leave them where people can trip over them.” He shot a look back toward the frightened couple. “You’re welcome to help.”

  The couple remained frozen in each other’s arms.

  As Jonathan 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 the other corpse, she tossed a glance back inside. She saw that Jonathan was depositing his guy at the base of the ornate claw-foot tub, probably with the intent of closing the door and turning on a light. That’s what she’d do.

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

  She found the tab between the dead guy’s 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.” She shot a look to Hunter. “No, really,” she said. “I’ve got this.” The irony missed him entirely.

  Several years ago, things had gone terribly wrong for Gail during an op, 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.

  “No,” 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.”

  “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 Jonathan’s expression that she’d never seen before. Fear.

  * * *

  “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, half the young men 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 khaki.

  He also noted that the chest rigs they wore were not plate carriers. They 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 earpiece into his own ear, but 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 sur
e 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.” 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, piece of paper, and bit of 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 and rifle sling. “I put socks and underwear for both of us into my carry-on backpack. Ditto toothpaste and toothbrushes, meds for me and toilet paper. Phones and laptops, 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. Then he slung the leftover M4.