The Hunter (2 page)

He finally opened his eyes. It was pitch-black. He mentally checked his body—no pain anywhere, just a slight soreness around the right thigh. He remembered the kick. His heart wasn’t racing anymore. The drug must have been some kind of sleeping agent; he didn’t remember any hallucinatory dreams. There was a slight crick in his neck from lying on a hard surface, but other than that, he appeared to be fine.

So, where had his assailant taken him? It couldn’t be too far; Dragan Dilaver’s building was very heavily guarded. Recalling the attacker’s small build, Hawk doubted his ability to carry him out of a room, down several flights of stairs, through the huge foyer, and outside into the snowy open without a single soul seeing him. So that left only one simple conclusion—he was still in his own room, on the floor where he had been drugged.

Hawk lifted one hand and very slowly pulled at the material on him. He frowned, clutching the soft thickness several times. It felt like—his blanket. He drew his arm out from under it and encountered a lighter layer of cloth. This must be the one covering his face; the feathered blanket could have smothered him while he was out. What did you know, a thoughtful captor.

Part of him was pissed at the fact that he had been captured so easily. He couldn’t afford to let down his guard ever, and here he was, lying naked without any weapons, taken by surprise, and seemingly left—he cocked his head, listening—unguarded. Slowly, he inched the cloth down from his face.

Emerging from his warm cocoon, the air felt cold against his face. He
was
still in his room. His instincts told him that he was all alone, but caution told him to not move, just in case someone had a sick sense of humor and had wired a bomb nearby.

Hawk’s mind went over the events that he could remember. The attack had happened here, at the most open of the Dilaver holdings. Whoever his assailant was, he was cocky enough to do it, and was very sure of not being caught. And he was skilled in martial arts, so not just some dumb thief. He had deliberately attacked Hawk, so there was a message here somewhere. Conclusion: Explosives unlikely. Besides, why bother with the blankets if he had just wanted Hawk to die?

He was a SEAL. He sure wasn’t going to lie here and call for help so Dilaver’s men could come up to check around his naked body. Fuck that.

He rose up, letting the thick protective blanket fall away. It was still dark, so he couldn’t have been out more than an hour or two. The first thing to do was to turn on the light to see exactly what the dark stranger had left behind.

Turning on the bedside lamp, he squinted and adjusted to the sudden glare. Except for the blanket and spread on the floor, nothing appeared out of the ordinary. There was no sign of their fight at all. No hypodermic needle, nothing broken, not even a telltale shoe print. His attacker had been exceptionally careful not to leave any souvenirs for him to find.

Hawk started to head back to pick up the blanket. Something lightly scratched his thigh. He looked down. He softly cursed. Souvenir found.

Amber didn’t look up from her task when she heard Llallana coming into the kitchen. She arranged the freshly baked cookies in the jar, popping one into her mouth. There was always a lot to do for the café, and her customers, both Americans—mostly peacekeepers these days—and locals, seemed to love her cookies the best.

Llallana, as was her custom, poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down in her chair by the window. Her visits seemed to be less and less frequent these days, and Amber was beginning to worry about her friend. She knew how hard Llallana’s job was to one’s psyche, and wished she could offer more help, but in their business, each had to worry about her own assignment.

“You still won’t admit it,” Llallana finally began, voice filled with amusement.

“Nope,” Amber said, calmly closing the lid to the jar and reaching for another one. “No idea what you’re talking about.”

“You touched a man’s erection and won’t even tell your best friend.”

“I did not!” Amber munched on another cookie, not looking up but knowing her friend had an evil smile on her face that would make her break out laughing. “Besides, it wasn’t a full erection.”

“Aha. You at least admit to checking, then,” Llallana came back wryly.

Never mind checking, she had
felt
it in the most intimate way possible. She wondered how the poor man was going to react to her little present. “Can’t help it, he was naked,” she pointed out, finally looking up to meet her friend’s twinkling eyes. “At least I didn’t shine a flashlight on it and ooh and ahh over it like it’s the eighth wonder in the world.”

Llallana laughed. “Of course, blame it on me and my wicked ways.” She took a long sip of her coffee, then lazily settled back in her chair, cradling the cup in both hands. She watched Amber through half-closed eyes. “Unlike you, I’m not ashamed to admit to liking what I saw.”

Amber sighed. She reached for a cloth to wipe the flour from her hands. “Lily, darling, I think we both agree that shame isn’t in your genetic makeup. If we’re to work with this man, how could I look at him in the eye if I’d checked him out as thoroughly as you had?”

“Ahem…you’re the one working with him, not me, so I guess what I did was okay.” Llallana laughed again. “I think, either way, you’re going to be in trouble with the guy right now. He should have woken up by now and found your little present.”

Amber tried not to smile at the thought. “Maybe so. Maybe we shouldn’t have done what we did.”

Llallana arched her eyebrows. “Regrets? To hell with them if they can’t take it, and to hell with this new operative if he can’t take a little joke.”

“It isn’t a joke. It’s a test,” Amber corrected. She suppressed the thought of how
not
little he was.

“Oh yeah, tell his erection that.” Llallana took another sip of her coffee. “I’ve a feeling he’s going to be oh-so-mad with you.”

“You, too.”

“Ah, but he doesn’t know I was there, Amber. You’re all alone against his wrath.”

Amber crunched on her cookie. “
If
he can find me.”

Everything about their world was dreary and painfully serious. They had decided to seize every opportunity to have some laughter. So why not with the new operative in town? The CIA had sent him here to steal secrets. What a joke. Amber and Llallana had been working together for four years. Four freaking years watching the bloodbath around them. And now here comes some hotshot operative to take charge. Oh, really? Amber licked the crumbs from her fingers. In Macedonia, they had a saying: A foolish fox is caught by one leg, a wise one by all fours. Everything took time. And a lot of planning.

“What if he is better than the last one they sent?” Llallana interrupted her thoughts.

Amber rolled her eyes. “He has to be.”

“Okay, so the last one was a real bozo, but you said this time it involved a man named Jed McNeil. Is he showing up here, too, then?”

“No, Jed doesn’t just show up, Lily. He’s sort of like the cleanup guy in his outfit, so if we see him at all, it’s endgame time. But I did talk to him for a few short minutes.”

“What did he tell you, besides that it’s a CIA-sanctioned operation?”

“Jed never says anything, but the fact that he’s in on this thing makes it more interesting. And you know the CIA. Sanctioned? Pffft. We’re sanctioned, but that doesn’t stop them from betraying us if necessary. We’re still of use, that’s all.” Amber shrugged. “Back to this new guy—what’s our boy after that has Jed calling me up personally?”

“To warn you that he’s his boy?” As usual, Llallana chose not to address the subject of a CIA betrayal.

Amber nodded thoughtfully. “Lily, if he’s Jed’s boy, he’s not really CIA, you know that. There’s more going on than trying to find out coordinates.”

Llallana finished her coffee, placed the empty cup on the table, and stretched out her legs. “From what you told me about this Jed McNeil, he and his outfit are even grayer than our CIA, with lots of leeway. So what do you think is so damn important that everyone’s after? That Dilaver has?”

Amber had wondered herself. “Let’s find out,” she said. “If it’s that damn important, maybe we can get it for ourselves. Hell, possession is still nine-tenths of the law, even in these parts.”

Ubijati. To kill. Or not.

Hawk was a member of an elite black operations team, but this time he was handling an operation all by himself, with many different choices to make. No one to report to. No one to account for. Just his own life. No one would question his actions as long as he achieved the operation objective. No one to come in after him if things went to hell.

He didn’t move from his lazy lean against the door as he watched Dilaver smash up the furniture in the room, his tirade a mixture of Serbian and Croatian curses, with a healthy dose of Macedonian threats. No one else in the room made a move to stop their boss. Hell, they were probably happy Dilaver wasn’t in a truly mean mood. When that happened, furniture wasn’t the only thing that got broken.

Killing was a daily choice here. The careless disposal of life would be appalling to many, but not to this group of Macedonians. Velesta was an international crime center, and he was watching one of its most ruthless prime movers throw a tantrum.

Hawk understood most of the angry man’s diatribe, although sometimes the accent and the local dialect threw him off. Someone had done the impossible—challenged the most notorious crime lord in the most notorious crime city. His interest perked a little. Maybe this was an opening for him to get on track for his own mission. Right now he observed the men keeping out of their boss’s way. A good idea.
Ubijati
wasn’t the only thing fate could ask of one…sometimes it was
ubijen.
From killer to the one killed.

“Three trucks in a month! That’s thirty-six girls. Do you know how much our loss is, especially with the peacekeepers in town? Eight hundred Euro dollars per girl a night. That’s fucking thirty thousand dollars times thirty days. That’s practically nine hundred thousand missing dollars that I should have in my account. And you’re telling me you can’t catch the culprit?”

Dragan Dilaver was a large man. Like many in the region that was once Yugoslavia, he was a mixture of Macedonian and Asiatic genes. He was built like a boxer, with the same brutish strength and ability to withstand pain. Hawk had seen it himself. A few months earlier, in Asia, he had “helped” Dilaver flee from a firefight in which the drug kingpin had been intentionally “injured.” Many of Dilaver’s men had been killed or captured, allowing Hawk to move in to help him escape. All part of Plan A conducted in a joint mission by Hawk’s STAR SEAL team and GEM, a group of contract agents. They had, after all, been after the same man, and Hawk had been assigned to make sure of two things—that Dragan Dilaver stayed alive and to get the location of a certain cache of weapons dropped just before their joint operations.

If it were up to Hawk himself, he would have killed the man yesterday. He despised the son of a bitch. Not only was Dilaver an illegal arms dealer and a mercenary, he was also a sex-slave trafficker, especially of underage girls. As a seasoned operative, Hawk had taken the lives of others, but it had always been in the heat of battle. He had never had the chance to sit and plan the death of a human being the way he sometimes did whenever he watched Dilaver and his men during their rampages.

Violence was violence. He understood the context in which it was necessary. When one agreed to walk into a battlefield, one signed up for what violence stood for—war in all its horror and glory. He lived with the knowledge that he was, in spite of his love of all things civilized, a violent man, and sometimes, in the darkest of hours, he sat alone wondering what made him that different from a man like Dilaver.

But moments like those very quickly disappeared when he had a weapon in his hand and his life was in danger. Training took over, absolving him of the guilt of having to take lives. He was efficient at giving back to his opponents as good as they gave. He had always been focused like that. He had learned that a long time ago while watching a bird of prey while out hunting with his father and brothers. A hawk had sighted something he wanted in another bird’s beak and went after both bird and prey, shadowing the screeching bird in flight—dipping and soaring, swerving and gliding—until he had gotten what he was after. Hawk remembered thinking how beautiful and exciting the hunt was. And thus began his fascination for violence.

In a family of mostly men in Colorado, he had plenty of opportunity to be active in hunting and sports. His brothers and cousins were always around and, boys being boys, there were plenty of fights and competitiveness in everything. He had joined the Navy, following the footsteps of several members of his family, and learned there were different kinds of violence.

Hawk had never been part of this side of violence, where he had to take in instead of give out. He couldn’t compromise his job by walking away. And worse, he couldn’t do a thing about it. He had discovered something new lately—he was starting to take every violent crime Dilaver committed against young girls very, very personally. So much so, he wished that he had killed the crime lord instead of “saving” him. There was nothing, nothing that could have stopped him if he had known the things he was to see in Velesta.

That usual regret was replaying again in Hawk’s head as he stood there. He knew nothing in his stance or expression betrayed any of his violent thoughts. Besides, someone had done something pretty interesting—disrupted Dragan Dilaver’s business. Whoever it was had Hawk’s silent congratulations. Not many around here would dare lift a finger against the powerful man, let alone steal something from under his nose.

“You’re all fuckers—all of you! I can’t leave anything for you to take care of without some total fuckup. You think just because I’m walking around with a limp that I can’t kick all of your bloody asses from here to Skopje and back? I lose a fucking load of cargo in Asia and come home to find that you’ve been losing more of our cargo here, with all of you, supposedly my captains, in charge. Give me a good reason not to kill every one of you!”

Dilaver’s ranting grew more winded as he began to tire. He had been swinging his cane at every available piece of breakable furniture. Unable to kick because of his injury, he had resorted to tearing apart the room with his bare hands, scattering pieces of wood, china, cloth—anything that caught his line of fire.

Dilaver’s injury would have incapacitated a smaller man, but he had toughed it out like the mercenary he was. His guide gone, his cache of illegal weapons lost, he had to cut his losses and get the hell out of Dodge. He had finally worked out a deal with Hawk’s “boss,” Stefan, for Hawk’s services to guide Dilaver and his men out of Asia.

Hawk himself had sustained a slight “injury” to his arm, and although not as serious, it still needed time to heal. Dilaver had been impressed that the other man had saved him from being caught, despite having been shot himself, and sometimes introduced him as his “blood” brother. All part of the game, of course. Get close to Dilaver. Establish a bond. Find the locations.

And the past few months…life as Dragan Dilaver’s new best friend couldn’t have been more hellish.

“And what are you thinking of, my American friend, with that smirk on your face?”

Hawk unhooked his leg and kicked a nearby piece of broken china by his feet. “I’m glad there isn’t any food in here or you’d have made quite a mess by now.”

Dilaver stopped pacing and stared across the room. “Are you making fun of me?”

Hawk shrugged. “Would I dare?”

The big Slavic man dropped down on a battered chair, rattling his heavy cane against the side of the table. “Of course you would, you crazy son of a bitch. I’ve been observing you the last few months and have yet to see you back down from a fight when someone challenged you, and then you egg on the stupid bastard after he’s lost. With the same smirk that you have now.”

That was Dilaver’s version of friendship. Around here, one fought for fun. With real knives. Hawk had discovered that was a form of entertainment as well as a pressure release for some of these men. So far, he had handled the few who had wanted to try out the new American. Fights were nothing; Hawk fought with his brothers and cousins all the time at home.

He shrugged. “Sometimes they make it too easy.”

“Now you think my men are easy, huh? Where the hell are the drinks?” Dilaver snapped his fingers and everyone seemed to heave a quiet sigh of relief at the sight of their leader relaxing back in his chair. “You’re one man here under my protection, Hawk. Never forget that. We don’t like or trust Americans here.”

“You don’t like or trust Albanians, either, but you do business with them,” Hawk pointed out.

“Money talks. And it’s all business.”

“And I’m here to do business, that’s all. I have my own monetary concerns, Dragan. I got you home and as soon as I’m done, I’ll be out of your hair.”

“You know, that’s what I like about you—everything is all about you, your work and money. You haven’t relaxed once since you helped me get back here. No girls, no drugs, no partying. Don’t you want anything else besides finishing your job?”

Dilaver’s eyes were curious and challenging. Hawk knew that his refusal to be part of the other man’s carousing party had been the topic of discussion several times. Sorry, he didn’t like young girls. Reluctant young girls, at that.

“Yeah, I want something,” Hawk said softly.

“What, my friend? Anything I can get you?”

“I want to know where the best place is in Macedonia to get a real hamburger.”

Caught off guard by his answer, Dilaver stared at Hawk in astonishment. “A…what?” Then he laughed. He looked around at his men. “I lost a million dollars and all he thinks of is a hamburger!”

“Not just any hamburger,” Hawk replied. “I’m jonesing for the real American thing.”

“You’re insulting Macedonian food, too?” Dilaver accepted a bottle of beer from one of his men. “What’s with some mashed-up meat that looks like a pancake?”

“It’s a matter of taste, I guess,” Hawk said.

“Yes, like your…sexual preferences, I suppose.”

Hawk cocked a brow but didn’t say anything. He wasn’t going to start on
his
distaste of Dilaver’s toying with very young girls.

“Either you’re a homosexual, like some of my men have suggested, or maybe you just like something different. You’re a handsome devil, Hawk. Even some of the girls at the
kafenas
wouldn’t mind servicing you. You have even refused my offer of free females and it’s been a few months. It’s not as if you were shot near the vital parts like I was. A man has needs, you know…real men anyway.”

Hawk laughed. How ironic that his enemy was echoing his thoughts from the night before. And look what happened when he was busy thinking about his needs. Someone attacked him and…he was still pissed that someone got that close to his naked body. He pushed his anger away. He would deal with
that
soon enough.

“No, my
friend
.” Hawk emphasized the word so that everyone in the room could hear it. He deliberately added a touch of sarcasm in his voice. “I don’t need you to supply me with boys, either. But if any of your men want to try me out, I’d be happy to tear them a new asshole.”

Dilaver roared with laughter. For the time being, his rage at the loss of revenue had dissipated. “Must be a new American sport. You come up with the funniest lines.” He reverted into heavily accented English. “‘I am happy to tear them a new arsehole.’ I must remember this one. What was the other one? ‘He sucks’…what…?”

“He sucks canal water,” Hawk said obligingly.

Dilaver laughed again and repeated the phrase. His amusement and eagerness at collecting catchy clichés would have made him almost likable, if Hawk hadn’t known firsthand the ruthlessness behind the façade.

What would his team say if they knew that he spent his days teaching the enemy their favorite insults? He thought of Cucumber, the big SEAL who would have a few choice lines of his own about Dilaver and his kind. And Jazz, his best friend, who would have given Dilaver more than a limp, had he known, at the time Hawk ordered him to shoot, about the punch the bastard had landed on his girlfriend’s face. No, none of his SEAL brothers would understand this charade he was playing.

Life as a covert agent, Hawk was discovering, was too damn much skirting around the main issue. He had done some undercover work before. A seller looking for some quick cash. A businessman paying for an informant. Fast drug deals to pinpoint drug routes. Even a robbery in bright daylight once to prevent the sale of a bomb. But those were a cakewalk compared to what he was doing now.

His lips quirked at the term. Cakewalk. Another Americanism he could throw at Dilaver. He must buy a Macedonian book of aphorisms when he got a chance. Sometimes his American phrases didn’t translate very well. Not that any of the usual communication problems around here couldn’t be solved with a big weapon.

“Actually, there’s a good—how you say it—‘happening’ place right here in Velesta,” Dilaver said. “The peacekeepers love to go there, especially the American ones, and they say it’s the food. I say it’s the owner. She is”—he drew the hourglass outline in the air—“stacked. Just like the Americans like their women. In fact, she’s one.”

“An American running a restaurant in Velesta?” Hawk doubted that fact.

“Not just a restaurant, my friend. She pays for my protection, just like anybody else.”

“How?” Many business owners had to pay so their stores didn’t get bombed or robbed by the different gangs. It was all very old-fashioned. “Is she a friend of yours?”

Dilaver shook his head. “No, I think she dislikes me, but she is very polite about it.” His laugh wasn’t friendly. “But she’s very intelligent. She’s got my protection so her restaurant gets business, and she’s got the head of CIVPOL’s protection so I don’t get too close.”

“I didn’t know that you’re afraid of CIVPOL,” Hawk said casually. He had heard that the new man in charge of the drugs and sex-trafficking department of CIVPOL, the UN international police force, was looking for Dragan Dilaver. This woman’s friendship meant she had something over Dilaver that she was threatening to expose if he didn’t play nice. Interesting. He liked someone who could hold the Macedonian by his balls.