Hunt the Wolf (11 page)

“What?”

“He lives nearby, doesn’t he? So let’s go see him.”

“No!”

Yasir sneered, “Forget about Rafiq. He has nothing to do with this.”

“He’s the one who told me about the bike.”

He didn’t budge. “No. No, man. We’re going back to the club.” Then he walked away and pulled out his cell phone.

Crocker’s ploy hadn’t worked, so he pointed the bike west and cranked up the throttle. The exhilaration of the ride diminished as he tried to figure out what to do next. The person he wanted was Rafiq. These punks obviously knew who he was. Maybe if he could find a way to separate Yasir from the others and get him away from the club…

As he played out several scenarios in his head, the three bikes reentered Marseille and started winding up the hills past some old fortifications.

Crocker saw the light green Renault he and Akil had come in parked on the street before the alley—the same place they’d left it forty minutes earlier. But Akil wasn’t in the car or standing nearby. Nor was he among the dozen young men who stood in the alley outside the Club Rosa.

“Where’s my friend?” he asked the first kid he saw—a big guy with barbed wire tattooed across his biceps.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“A big Egyptian. Six feet two. Wearing a black T-shirt and chinos.”

“Haven’t seen him.”

Bullshit.

Crocker recognized the black kid with the shaved head from their first visit. “Where’s Akil?” he asked him.

“Who?”

“The guy I came with. My friend.”

“Don’t know.”

Then Yasir and his two buddies were in his face, demanding that he make good on the deal.

“Thirteen hundred euros. You show me the money first.”

“I’m not showing anybody anything until I find my friend.”

He sensed danger pressing in on all sides, then, glancing at his feet, saw a trail of blood on the pavement.

Akil!

A massive jolt of adrenaline slammed into his system. Pivoting on his right foot, he started to trace the blood out of the alley.

Two punks in black blocked his path, hatred in their eyes.

“Get out of my fucking way!”

He picked up one of them and was about to throw him against the wall when he felt the point of a knife against his back.

“Arrêtez!”
(Stop.)

He did.

“Where’s my friend? I wanna see him.”

Guys on each side grabbed his arms. “We’ll take you to him.”

He pushed them off roughly.

Yasir said, “There’s no reason to get excited.”

“I’m cool. I just want to see my friend.”

“Come with me. I’ll take you to him.”

People were craning their necks out of the apartment windows, watching what was going on below. Itching for a fight; more blood.

Crocker was trapped in the alley and on their turf. He tried to remain calm even though his blood was pounding.

“I want to see my friend first. Then I’ll pay you for the bike.”

Someone shoved him from behind. “Shut up, old man! Get in the car!”

He stumbled forward and somehow managed not to fall. More punks seemed to have appeared out of nowhere—like hyenas who smelled blood.

“Get in the car! Fucking liar!”

What car?

They pulled him roughly around the corner, where he saw a BMW with blacked-out windows parked on the side of an adjoining alley.

For a split second he considered running. But two big guys dressed in black emerged from the front seat. The punk on the driver’s side waved a silver automatic through the sulfuric light.

“Get in!”

The back door popped open.

With a mass of angry punks behind him and armed thugs in front, Crocker had no choice.

He was bending down to look inside the back of the car when someone pushed him so he fell forward and landed on the seat. The barrel of a Glock was literally two inches from his face.

Inside was another motherfucker armed with a handgun.

Before he could say anything, the door slammed and the car lurched forward, tires squealing. That’s when he saw eyes looking up at him from the floor near the third thug’s feet.

Akil.

T
he seconds
pounded in Crocker’s head as the coast road flew past, the sky thick, pitch black. Two guys with Soviet-made Makarov pistols laughed at some private joke up front. Another armed thug leered at him in back. Akil was on the floor to the man’s right with his mouth and hands taped.

Crocker’s own wrists were duct-taped together in his lap.

This sucks.

Crocker figured they were going to Rafiq’s place. There they would be interrogated and shot. Tortured, possibly.

He could almost smell the fear and desperation oozing from Akil. From Edyta’s death on K2 to this, in less than a week.

He felt bad. Responsible.

He’d met Akil’s parents and sisters. Knew the poor bastard’s life history.

Born outside Cairo. Moved to the States with his family at age six. Back in Egypt all of them had lived in two rooms. In suburban Virginia, Akil got his own room with his own bed. Remembered jumping up and down on it like it was a trampoline.

No one in school understood him, since his family spoke Arabic at home. Within a few months, he learned English. Adapted. Made friends.

When it came time to graduate from high school, his parents had plans for him to go to college and work for a cousin who ran a small trucking company near their home. Akil joined the navy instead, went through BUD/S, and became a proud member of SEAL Team Six. When he returned home after earning his trident, his father insisted his son wear his dress uniform and go with him to visit all their friends and family in the community. Akil had become the final validation of the family’s decision to immigrate to America.

Now this….

Crocker couldn’t let the dream end here. He focused intently.

The car was new. Maybe even brand-new, judging from the scent. Black leather seats, dark wood paneling on the doors.

The men were dressed in black. French-Arabic or Middle Eastern. All in their twenties. Slick operators. Far more sophisticated than the punks he’d tussled with in the alley. They carried themselves like they had money.

He searched for the slightest opportunity. A tiny bit of leverage. Anything to get them out of this before they arrived at Rafiq’s place, where more of them would be waiting and things could get ugly.

All he could think of was that maybe one of the doors was unlocked. But he wasn’t sure. And with the oily-haired fucker beside him sneering and pointing the Glock at his face—with his finger on the trigger—he wasn’t about to try.

They zipped by the turnoff to Cassis, the place where Crocker had pulled over on the Triumph Legend less than an hour earlier.

The moment was screaming at him.
Do something. Do something, goddammit!

But what?

“Who the fuck are you?” the driver asked.

“My name is Crocker. I’m a Canadian.”

“You work for your government?”

“No. I’m a climber.”

“What do you mean, a climber?”

“I climb mountains and train people who want to learn to climb.”

“Why do you want to see Rafiq?”

“I’m here as a tourist. I’m looking for a bike to tour through Europe. Figure I can really get to see the countries that way.”

“You’re a bad fucking liar.”

The driver nodded in the mirror to the man seated beside Crocker, who reached into the American’s pockets and located his wallet. Inside he found a thick wad of euros but no ID.

The two men spoke in Arabic, then the driver looked back at Crocker and said in English, “Now I know you’re a liar.”

Precious minutes passed. Above the smooth growl of the engine and the electronic dance music pumping over the stereo, Crocker heard a choking sound. Looking down and to his right, he saw two streams of yellowish puke shooting out of Akil’s nostrils, a pained exclamation in his eyes.

“You’d better do something. My friend’s going to choke!” he shouted in English.

The thug beside him smacked him with the back of his hand. “Shut up!”

Some of the vomit had splattered across the leg of the guy’s black jeans. He seemed more concerned about his pants than the fate of Akil.

“Cochon!”
Spitting at Crocker’s teammate. Like choking on his puke wasn’t bad enough.

Almost simultaneously the driver screamed in Arabic, “What’s that horrible smell?”

Then things happened fast. The thug in the backseat kicked Akil in the stomach with his boot. And the driver went apoplectic, shouting, “My car! Motherfucker! Get that nigger out of here. Throw him in the trunk!”

He steered the car abruptly right and stopped on the shoulder in a cloud of dust.

It took both men—the thug in the passenger seat and the dude in back—to pull Akil roughly out, the driver all the time screaming instructions in Arabic. “Watch the leather seats! Clean it. Make sure you clean it all up! Get rid of that fucking smell before I kick your asses!”

Crocker noticed that the driver wasn’t holding a weapon.

So he propelled himself over the seat, grabbed the Makarov pistol that was lying on the console with his hands still taped together at the wrists, and brought his arms up with all the violence he could muster into the driver’s jaw.

One, two, three times, quickly. He felt the driver’s head snap back and heard a groan.

Then turned immediately and fired two shots through the open front door into the back of the thug who had occupied the passenger seat.

The punk screamed something Crocker didn’t understand and fell to the ground.

Simultaneously the guy who’d been sitting in back directed a salvo of bullets that tore into the rear of the front seat. He was firing wildly through the open rear door of the car.

Crocker countered, slithering out the open passenger-side door onto the ground and shooting upward into the guy’s crotch. The thug squealed like a cat on fire, twisted and jumped, holding what was left of his balls, then crumpled along the rear wheel of the car, writhing in pain.

Rough justice.

High on adrenaline, Crocker pulled himself up into a crouch, then checked to see that the driver was still unconscious. The other two were dead.

He quickly crawled over to Akil, who lay on his side, and turned him over, pulling the tape from his mouth and feeling for a pulse along his neck. Using his teeth, Crocker ripped the tape from his own wrists, then quickly cleared Akil’s mouth and throat with a finger sweep, pulling out a glob of yellow bile and mucus. His colleague coughed up more, started breathing freely, and slowly came to.

Thank God.

Crocker found a bottle of Evian in a pocket on the passenger’s door and quickly washed Akil’s mouth and face. The smell was awful.

“What happened?” the Egyptian American asked, his right eye swollen nearly shut. “Where the fuck are we?”

“Heaven. How do you like it?”

“Looks like a fucking nightmare.”

“How do you feel?”

“My head is on fire. My face aches like shit.”

“You’re still complaining. That’s good.”

Akil looked around him, taking in the bullet holes in the car and the dead bodies on the ground, the groaning driver still in the car with blood dripping from his mouth. “You did all this yourself?”

“You pussied out on me, so I had no choice.”

Crocker was on his feet, quickly taking in the situation. So far no other vehicles had stopped. The BMW conveniently blocked the view of the dead bodies from anyone passing on the road. It was parked in a dirt turnaround. Ten feet farther the land dropped down into dark brush. There were no lights nearby, only a long deserted slope to the rocky shore.

It would be easy enough to hide the bodies. But he had to deal with the driver first.

He found the roll of duct tape on the floor of the backseat, covered the driver’s mouth, and taped together his ankles and hands. Then he slapped his face until he came to.

“Hey! Asshole! You remember me?”

Panic flashed in the man’s dark eyes.

Crocker pointed the Makarov at him and called Akil.

“Tell this piece of shit he’s going to take us to Rafiq. Tell him otherwise, I’ll shoot him in the stomach and let him bleed. Tell him it will be a slow and painful death.”

Akil did, dramatically, in Arabic.

The driver started nodding right away.

Meanwhile, Crocker dragged the bodies into the brush so they were out of sight. Then he circled around to the driver’s side, shoved the driver over so he was straddling the console, and slid behind the wheel. He made sure Akil, in the passenger seat, had a loaded pistol ready.

He stuck one of the other two he had recovered into the waistband of his pants, and stashed the third under the front seat.

“Pull the tape off this asshole’s mouth. Tell him if he screams or says one fucking word that doesn’t directly answer a question, you’ll shoot him in the balls.”

“Roger.”

Crocker hit the gas. Soon they were eating up the asphalt.

The driver started hyperventilating.

“Shoot the motherfucker!”

“Boss, not so fast. Give him a chance to talk.”

The driver pointed ahead and started speaking in Arabic.

“He says the house where Rafiq is staying is down a road before we reach Toulon.”

“Where?”

A few miles later, the driver directed them north onto a dirt road that wove around a grove of olive trees in a gully between some hills.

“He says the house is maybe two hundred yards ahead. He begs us not to kill him. He has a wife and baby son.”

“Tough shit.”

“He wants to cooperate.”

“Ask him how many men are with Rafiq.”

Akil did, and came back with the reply, “He doesn’t know.”

“Tell him to start praying.”

“Boss, he doesn’t know.”

“Bullshit.”

Crocker eased the car to a stop under some trees. “Tape his mouth shut again, then tape him securely to the passenger seat.”

“All right.”

Crocker ran ahead to recon the area, looked around the bend, and returned.

“It’s a one-story farmhouse with a barn-type structure in back. There’s a couple of lights on in the house. A jeep and a Nissan sedan parked out front.”

“Sounds like we’re outnumbered. What’s the plan?”

“Plan, my ass. Just go with the flow. We want Rafiq, alive if possible. And any intel we can find. Let’s go!”

Some would have called it a suicide mission, but Crocker didn’t care. He was amped up to the max. Though he was used to facing danger, most of the risks he took were calculated ones. When SEALs took on a mission, they usually planned thoroughly and rehearsed. It was rare that they would enter a potentially life-threatening situation on the fly, but it did happen.

Crocker couldn’t stop. All the anger and frustration that had built up during the last couple of weeks was about to burst out of him.

They moved quickly and quietly along the edge of the little dirt road. Owls hooted in the distance. Then a dog barked a warning.

Fuck.

As they drew within a hundred yards a second dog started up, barking deeper than the first. Sounded like a hound of some sort. The two dogs were near a porch by the side of the house.

He made out the sloping roof and the side of the structure through some thick bushes.

“You want me to silence them?” Akil whispered.

“Too fucking late for that.”

“What do we do now?”

It was the oldest trick in the books, one that Crocker had first seen as a kid watching a John Wayne western. When they got within twenty yards of the house, he picked up a big rock and threw it into the bushes on the right, near the dogs, which went ballistic, barking their heads off.

He threw another, and saw people moving in the house.

Crocker turned to Akil and whispered, “You hide behind those trees over there.” He pointed to the right. “When the bastards come out, start shooting. One shot at a time. Draw it out. Occupy them. Give me time to circle ’round the other side of the house. I’m going in.”

“Roger that.”

Akil took off one way, Crocker went the other.

Over the barking, he heard a door slamming and men’s angry voices shouting in Arabic and French. Then he heard the first shot from Akil’s nine-millimeter.

His adrenaline spiked further.

Entry was easy. An open window on the left side of the house (the opposite side from where the porch was located). All he had to do was punch in the screen, then yank it out.

In less than a minute he was standing in a bedroom, looking down at a king-sized mattress with rumpled sheets. Saw a stack of porn videos, a VCR, a TV, a soccer ball, an AK-47 propped in the corner.

No computers or other potential sources of intel, but the AK was his now. Loaded and ready, thank you very much.

The place was smaller than it appeared from outside. Two more little bedrooms off a hallway. One bathroom with a running toilet. All dark, unoccupied. Then another narrow hallway that led to a kitchen and a living room.

The living room lights blazed.

The racket from outside the front of the house was loud. Dogs barking furiously, men shouting, weapons discharging.

Pressed against the wall, he hoped Akil could hold them off long enough.

Crocker watched a little man in shorts run into the kitchen with an AK slung over his shoulder and quickly turn off something that was burning on the stove.

He stepped through the doorway and downed the man with two shots to the chest and one to the head.

Mozambique!
It was the name of the shooting drill he’d practiced thousands of times. Every time he used it on a human target, he was pleased at how quickly and effectively it worked.

He checked for doors that might lead to a basement or other rooms but found none.

Then he crossed to the stove, picked up the pan of liver, bacon, and whatever else had been frying in it and dumped everything on the living room carpet. He emptied the rest of the plastic liter jug of cooking oil over that and the wooden floor, and using a towel lit from the stove, set the whole mess on fire.