John Gilstrap: Damage Control

Pacing her huge office high atop the Crystal Palace Cathedral in Scottsdale, Arizona, Reverend Jackie Mitchell checked her watch for the fifth time in half as many minutes. Three-oh-five. The unpleasantness was supposed to have ended an hour ago. Mr. Abrams had promised that she would know that her parishioners were safe within moments of the rescue’s final outcome.

As soon as we have anything to report. That’s how he’d put it. As soon as we have anything to report.

She tried not to worry-Abrams had assured her that everything would go well, that it had to go well-but given the stakes, it was hard not to harbor doubt.

Certainly, the children would be traumatized emotionally, and perhaps the adults as well, but that was to be expected under the circumstances. They’d been taken hostage. Of course there’d be trauma.

Jackie refused to dwell on the events that had brought her to this point. That was the past, and the end was finally in sight.

Abrams had sworn that this would be a seamless operation. Without that assurance, she’d never have gone along.

In the end, Jackie knew that the Lord would forgive her. The Crystal Palace was a testament to Him, after all. He had to understand. Why else would He have led her here? This… opportunity had come at too fortuitous a time for it to be anything but guidance by His hand. Abrams’s call had been a sign, a clear message that the Crystal Palace was destined to survive despite all the tests and the scandals. God knew Jackie’s heart.

We are all sinners. It’s God’s greatest desire to forgive us.

And forgive her He would.

When the phone rang, Jackie let out a yelp. She turned from the window and its panoramic view of Arizona’s rolling hills and walked across the plush baby-blue carpeting to her six-by-eight-foot glass-topped desk to lift the receiver from its cradle.

“God bless you,” she said. It was her standard greeting for any caller who got past her assistant.

“Would’ve been nice if he did,” Abrams said. With his thick New England accent, there was no need for him to introduce himself. “Unfortunately, it’s as bad as it can get.”

Jonathan Grave ignored the drop of sweat that tracked down his forehead and over the bridge of his nose. It made no sense to wipe it away when there’d just be another to follow. What was it about jungles, he wondered, that made them so attractive to bad guys? Perhaps it was a kind of insect-borne mass psychosis.

The same variety of sickness that kept bringing him back to the stifling heat time after time. He’d long ago stopped telling himself that he’d get used to it after a while. He concentrated instead on getting past it, and he did that by focusing on the misery of the people whose rescue was his responsibility.

The bud in Jonathan’s left ear popped to life. “Scorpion, Mother Hen,” said the voice that had guided him through way too many difficult moments. “The satellite picture just refreshed. You have what appears to be a squad of five soldiers approaching your location from the west. I’ve only got heat signatures because of the canopy.”

Jonathan pressed the transmit button in the center of his ballistic vest. “Range?”

“Close. Quit talking.”

They moved cautiously, but still made too much noise. His mind raced to make some sense out of it. They could not be reinforcements because no one outside his very small circle knew he was here. That made them bad guys until proven otherwise, and their presence made this operation vastly more complicated.

“I see movement but no faces.” Jonathan heard Boxers’ unmistakable growl through the same earpiece. Closer to seven feet tall than six, with a girth that made him look bulletproof, Boxers had been born as Brian Van de Meulebroeke, and had been Jonathan’s right-hand man from back in their days in the Unit when they’d toiled under the supervision of Uncle Sam and his surrogates. His position on the opposite hill gave him a good view of Jonathan’s location. “Looks like they might be here for the same reason we are. They’re taking positions next to you.”

Jonathan acknowledged by tapping his transmit button once to break squelch. They might be in the same place, Jonathan thought, but he doubted that they were here for the same reason. Jonathan’s plan was to let a group of kidnappers take a bag loaded with three million dollars in return for leaving behind their hostages. Now it seemed that there’d be competition for the money.

“One is very damn close to you, Boss,” Boxers went on. “I give it twenty feet of separation, and he’s settling in. There’s enough brush between the two of you that as long as you don’t sneeze, you’ll be invisible.” After about ten seconds, Boxers finished with, “I’ve got his range dialed in. If he makes an ugly face, I’ll take him out.”

In Boxers’ world, there were no problems so great that they couldn’t be solved with the appropriate application of firepower. In this case, the firepower in play would be Hechler and Koch’s HK417, a lightweight cannon chambered in 7.62 millimeter that could send ten rounds per second downrange with needle-threading accuracy. As far as Jonathan was concerned, it was the best marksman’s rifle since the M14, and he had every confidence that as long as Boxers was within a thousand yards (he was actually within a quarter of a thousand yards), his closest visitor posed no physical threat.

But why had he been joined by soldiers, and where had they come from?

His earbud popped again. “Look sharp, guys,” Mother Hen said. “I’ve got vehicles approaching from the south. Looks like a school bus followed by an SUV. School bus, maybe, but definitely not a late model. Estimate a half mile from the drop.”

Moving carefully, Jonathan flexed his shoulders and prepared himself. With his back braced against a leafy, foul-smelling tree and his elbows braced against his raised knees, he pressed his M27 carbine into his shoulder and scanned the area through his scope.

The backpack with the ransom remained at the base of the tree where he’d placed it twenty minutes ago, at the edge of the rutted path that looked more like a hiking trail than the road that it was supposed to be. The same canopy of leaves that trapped the humidity to the ground also filtered out much of the sunlight, casting this part of the world in a kind of perpetual twilight during the day. He’d done his best to make the backpack stand out in a shaft of light.

The instructions for this op were as simple as they were objectionable. Jonathan was to be a bagman. He and Boxers were to allow the bad guys to collect their millions and get away. In return, the bad guys would release their hostages, four adults and six children aged fifteen to seventeen. Jonathan knew little about their condition, but after a week in captivity, mobility was not going to be their long suit.

If Jonathan had been allowed to write the script, this drop-off would have been made in the wide-open desert regions of northern Mexico, where everything and everyone would be in the open, but the bad guys had insisted on a jungle transfer in the south. That was a mistake that played to Jonathan’s strengths. While the wide vistas of the north played to their paranoia of not being able to get away quickly, this kind of thick foliage screamed ambush opportunity.

Accordingly, he and Boxers had poised themselves for a classic ambush, to be sprung if the kidnappers decided to break the rules. As long as they drove into the clearing and off-loaded the hostages to be counted, they would be allowed to pick up their ransom and drive away in the follow car, leaving the bus behind. Just about any other scenario would result in a very, very bad day for the kidnappers.