Scorpion Strike. John Gilstrap

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