Hunter Killer

by Brad Taylor

  They paid for their tickets and dutifully followed the line down the worn dock to a large ferry, the captain’s berth on top, the bottom adorned with rows of plastic chairs bolted to the floor, the sides of the boat open to the air.

  Knuckles took a seat on a bench that ran the length of the side, leaning over to see the water. Wanting to break away from the weight of the earlier conversation, Brett said, “You can take the SEAL out of the water, but the water always calls him back, huh?”

  Knuckles smiled and said, “Same for you, Jarhead. Same for you.”

  In short order, the ferry was under way with only about half of the seats taken, the boat plowing out of the harbor toward Itaparica Island, the shore visible in the distance.

  The boat entered the strait between Salvador and the island, and Knuckles stretched out on the bench, closing his eyes and saying, “Supposed to take forty minutes.”

  Brett leaned back, then punched Knuckles in the thigh, saying, “Check out the guys that were in front of us.”

  Knuckles cracked his eyes and saw the four ragged locals all bent over, digging into their packs with a purpose. When they rose up, they were holding an assortment of weapons. One fired into the air and started screaming in Portuguese. Another began racing to the ladder leading to the captain’s deck. The others began herding the ferry passengers to the center of the boat, away from the sides.

  Knuckles said, “You have got to be shitting me.”

  The security man protecting the woman drew a pistol, fired once, and then was cut down in a hail of bullets. The woman fell on top of her child, covering the body. Two men ripped her off the child, throwing her into the center. The other man began rounding up the rest of the passengers. He reached Knuckles and Brett and began waving a weapon, screaming and pointing.

  Brett raised his hands over his head and said, “I fucking told you this was going to go bad.”

  Chapter 9

  I watched two more ex–frat boys enter the rooftop deck of the hotel—a couple of thirty-somethings dripping Rolexes and designer labels and looking for a new conquest. They did a double take when they saw Jennifer, then looked at me with what I took as amazement. It used to annoy me, but now it just made me secretly smug. I glared at them, because that’s what the alpha male does, and they moved on. Jennifer, of course, was completely oblivious.

  Honestly, we did look a little like beauty and the beast. She is blond and lithe, with a body like a surfer and a face from the same type of calendar. I’m not making anyone’s calendar, unless it was for pirates. With close-cropped brown hair and a scar tracking through the stubble on my cheek, I look a little craggy. But, hey, I have a great personality.

  She took a sip of her Coke and said, “How long do you want to pursue this?”

  “Until it’s done. We either confirm or deny these assholes. And so far, it’s falling in the confirmation column.”

  She toyed with the circle of water on the table from her soft drink, then said, “You don’t know that. All you know is what Nung told you last night. He might be wrong, and this whole thing could be a mistake.”

  I knew what she was afraid of. Me going into berserker mode in a misguided attempt at retribution for Kurt’s death. And she was right, up to a point. I would kill those fucks when I found them, but I would be positive of their culpability before I did. Something she wasn’t sure I was capable of. But I’d learned a thing or two since I’d known her, and I knew she had learned as well. We’d grown on each other, leaving my view of the world more aligned with hers, and hers more aligned with mine. Right now, she wasn’t sure what to think.

  She’d had a hard couple of days dealing with Kurt’s death, and it was showing. Her smile, once a brilliant thing that would light up a room all on its own, was broken, like a cracked mirror reflecting her soul. It was the same thing I’d seen when Decoy had been killed right next to her, the first combat trauma she’d experienced, and that had been hard. She didn’t want this to be the same. She wanted to believe that it was an accident, making the death just the fate of God instead of the work of men trying to kill her and me, but instead murdering her friend. It was something she couldn’t tolerate if it were true, and not the least for Kylie’s sake.

  Kylie had come to our house as our guest, as a favor to watch Amena, and now Kurt was dead. An uncle she cherished more than her own father. Jennifer didn’t want to be even tangentially responsible for that. The initial night had been a kaleidoscope of emotions—a blur in my memory—Jennifer and Kylie trying to absorb what had happened while I tried to find out why. Kylie had become distraught, and Jennifer had taken over, calling in Kylie’s boyfriend, Veep, to help out while I’d fled to plan my next moves. It made me a coldhearted bastard in Kylie’s mind, but there was a purpose behind it. Because I knew it wasn’t an accident, and no matter what Jennifer thought about my propensity for violence, one thing was true: it was coming.

  I said, “Hey, if these guys don’t pan out, I’m done. But you have to admit, it’s pretty strange they’re here on Saint Kitts passports. Just like the Russians Nung worked with. And he’s the one who said they were hunting us. That wasn’t my imagination.”

  The video I’d sent to Creed was paying huge dividends. In his effort to locate the cyclists, we’d learned that they had passports from the island of Saint Kitts, which would have been a strange thing in and of itself, but we’d also found out that Saint Kitts had what’s known as an “investment passport,” which basically meant if you dumped enough money into the country, you earned a passport. An American company called Monte Cristo Analytics had started a booming business of investment opportunities in Saint Kitts solely for the facilitation of passports, and now everyone from Iranian Quds Force members to drug cartels used it to circumvent immigration controls and sanctions around the world.

  She raised an eyebrow and said, “Yeah, well, Nung’s not the most trustworthy guy when it comes to this. Just because these guys have a passport doesn’t make them evil. His motto is just kill ’em all to be safe.”

  I smiled and said, “He’ll be up here in thirty minutes, and we’ll know. Don’t worry, I won’t kill anyone until then.”

  Nung had landed in Charleston late last night, and when I’d picked him up, he had a story to tell. He’d found evidence that a Russian private military company called Wagner was gunning for my company, and somehow they’d made the connection that we weren’t what we said we were. Just like them when they operated around the world.

  He’d said they’d recognized someone in Brazil from Grolier Recovery Services—which meant Knuckles and Brett—and that his boss had issued orders to kill me to defeat whatever we had planned. In effect, cut the head off the company to short-circuit our mission. I had no idea what that meant, how they’d recognized Knuckles and Brett, or why they cared. We weren’t even looking at Wagner or anything remotely Russian. We were targeting Hezbollah in the triple frontier of Brazil, and we had no indications of any Russian play, but it was enough to keep digging. And I had a handle that would allow just that.

  Creed had analyzed the video I’d sent him, and had given me a pretty good photo of one of the men, with the other still being a little sketchy. It was a physical identification I could use if I ever bumped into the man on the street, which wasn’t much of a help, but Creed had found something else: working through the video, he’d found that the two dumb-asses were riding bikes from a rental company called Holy Spokes.

  Dotting the entire peninsula, it was a version of Uber for bicycles. Tourists used an app to unlock a bike, then took one, pedaling around the Holy City. When they were done, they put them back into one of the racks pre-positioned around the peninsula. It was the perfect way to see our fair city if one didn’t care about being tracked, but it was abysmally stupid if one did, because every bike had a GPS tracker in it to prevent theft, and in order to rent it, one had to use a credit card.

  Creed had worked his magic and found the traces of every bike on the Charleston Peninsula. He
’d narrowed down the bikes that went by our house using time stamps, and then had located the credit card used from the app. From there he’d figured out where else the credit card had been swiped, and had found the Restoration Hotel on Wentworth Street, along with a complete profile of the men. And yes, they were from Russia, using a passport from Saint Kitts.

  A swank place with limited rooms, it had a rooftop bar that Jennifer and I were currently in. Ordinarily, going to the hotel of a target that could recognize us would be a nonstarter, but we knew that our targets were on a ferry headed out to Fort Sumter, a tour that took at least a couple of hours. They were actually enjoying their time in the Holy City after committing murder, which steamed me.

  I’d done a deep dive on the hotel itself, trying to figure out how to penetrate the target’s rooms for confirmation of my suspicions, and Creed had come up with another brilliant plan: Each room had an Amazon Alexa—a voice-activated device that would turn on the lights or the TV or tell you the weather. The Alexa was a pretty sweet little gadget, but had one flaw: It was always listening, waiting to wake up. Amazon would tell you that it would only turn on its microphones if it heard an initiation phrase, but Creed said we could turn it into a damn recording device if we could access the Wi-Fi it was on. The Wi-Fi in question being a hotel network, that was easy enough. I made Nung rent a room.

  He went in, and using Creed’s instructions, had modified the Alexa in his room. Because the device was designed to find all others on the same network for home use, linking them together for whatever advertising uses Amazon could find, it was an easy fix to locate the one in our target’s rooms. With a few hardwired soldering efforts from Creed and a small circuit card loaded with malware, Nung had our Alexa talking to the two target rooms, and we’d let it sit for a day, exporting everything it heard. Now we were waiting for the recordings—or more precisely, waiting on Nung to provide a translation of what he’d heard, because these guys spent all their time speaking Russian.

  At first, I had been exasperated at the wall placed in front of me, because there was no way I was going to get a Taskforce interpreter to translate anything they said. Then I was surprised, because it turned out Nung—of all people—spoke Russian.

  Chapter 10

  Jennifer toyed with her drink, not looking me in the eye. She said, “What if this is bad? What are you going to do?”

  I saw the angst on her face, put my hand on hers, and said, “I’m going to do what I do.”

  She pulled her hand away and said, “We don’t have a team. We don’t even have a mission. You can’t just kill someone here in Charleston.”

  I said, “They did.”

  “That’s not the same.”

  I let her words settle, saw her turn her eyes away, and said, “It isn’t?”

  She leaned back and said, “No, because we aren’t them. You don’t want to go back there.”

  That hurt. Back there was a cesspool I was living in when we first met.

  I said, “So just let this go? Let them get away with killing Kurt—when they are trying to kill us?”

  She reached across the table and took my hand again, saying, “No, that’s not what I mean. I . . . well . . .”

  No other words came out, and I said, “Look, if this is real . . . if they murdered Kurt . . . they pay the price.”

  “And what is that? Are you going to turn them over to the police? What is justice in your mind?”

  Now it was my turn to let go of her hand. I leaned back and said, “No. You know where this is going.”

  She said, “Pike, I’m not sure I can do that here. We live in America, not Russia. Just because—”

  I cut her off, saying, “Just because what? Just because it happened in our own hometown? Instead of Russia?”

  She snapped back at my comment and said, “No, because it’s wrong. And when I did it before, it almost destroyed the both of us.”

  I realized she was more concerned about what my actions would do to me than she was about the lives of the men. She was afraid of me crossing the line, because once upon a time, she’d crossed it, too.

  After Jennifer and I had collided, and I’d gotten her into the Taskforce, we’d conducted an operation in Dubai, and she’d been captured by the man who’d murdered my family. She’d barely managed to escape with her life, but in so doing, she’d found proof of his culpability in my family’s destruction. She hadn’t said a word about the assault, but had given me the proof of my family, and then had directed me at the man like a guided missile, seeking her own private vengeance. In an unspeakable rage, I’d targeted the wrong man and had come within a half pound on a trigger of killing him.

  The chase had torn us both apart, ripping at the very fabric of our beings, until each of us was almost destroyed. In the end, I’d killed the murderer of my family, and I don’t think she’d ever forgiven herself for that, even as she wanted him dead. She’d seen the beast in the mirror and hadn’t liked it.

  She was trying to protect me, and in so doing, protect herself. Something she felt she’d failed to do in Dubai.

  She took a breath, saying, “Okay. Okay. I get it. If this is real. But you really don’t want to go there. You need to back off and think. You need to be Pike. Not the man I met years ago.”

  I locked eyes with her and said, “This is going to get bloody. You need to trust me. I have never asked that of you before, but I’m doing it now.”

  She waffled, averting her eyes and seeking a way out of the path I was on. She said, “But we still have no team. Pike, we have nothing to execute anything even if we wanted to.”

  Not letting any emotions play across my face at her acquiescence, I said, “We have Brett and Knuckles in Brazil, and we have Nung here in Charleston. And we have a couple others who owe us a favor.”

  “Who?”

  Before I could answer, Nung walked onto the deck. A six-foot guy with a hint of Asian in him, he glided like a cat, and acted like one as well. He didn’t seem to give a damn about anything. Except family, and somehow, we’d earned that right.

  He sat down, handed me a sheaf of papers, and said, “I was right. They are bad. There are three of them, and they’re hunting your men in Brazil.”

  I took the stack and said, “Three? There are three targets? Not just the two we’ve identified?”

  “Yes. They have one man who never leaves the suite. Guarding it, as it were.”

  Which was something we did when we had classified or other secret stuff we didn’t want the maids to find by accident. The “Do Not Disturb” sign only worked so well.

  One more indicator.

  I focused on the readout—basically everything said in the room over the last twenty-four hours—and it was damning. Conversations between the targets, and one-way conversations on a cell phone to someone in Brazil, it detailed everything they had executed since they’d been here, including laughing about my death, not realizing they had missed.

  I felt the rage grow, begging for a release, and suppressed it. I passed the sheets to Jennifer and said, “It’s real.”

  She took it, read a few lines, then looked at me with trepidation. I said, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to run down there and kill them right now.”

  Nung said, “There is only one there. They won’t be back for a couple of hours.”

  I smiled and said, “So we have some time for planning. Before we go to Brazil.”

  Jennifer didn’t like the sound of that, but she said nothing. Nung said, “Pike, I can help here. I owe you that, but I cannot go to Brazil. You will be on your own there.”

  Jennifer leaned forward. “That’s what I was saying earlier. Let’s take this to the Taskforce instead of going off half-cocked without a team.”

  I pulled out my cell phone and dialed a number, saying “I’m not talking to the Taskforce. They don’t believe what’s happened, and they’re chickenshits even if they do.”

  She said, “Pike, come on. We aren’t the Russians. We can’t go on a tear
killing people for what they did.”

  I put the phone to my ear and said, “Yes, we can. It’s the one thing we can do. Kurt is dead because of these fucks, and for whatever reason they tried to kill me. It’s in Brazil. I’m going to stop it.”

  Exasperated, she said, “How? We have no support. No team.”

  I held up a finger, saying into the phone, “Hello, Pumpkin King. It’s Pike Logan. And it’s time to repay the favor you owe me.”

  Chapter 11

  Alek Sokolov watched the man behind the counter slice off the top of a coconut and put a straw into it. He passed it across, then tended to another patron as Alek stepped away from the bar, moving to a rickety table on the side of the thatched hut. He glanced around, seeing nothing but locals walking down to a small spit of beach, going toward a group of kids playing a game that looked like volleyball, but where they used their feet instead of hands. And they were surprisingly good at it.

  Alek broke away from the game, checking his watch, and saw he was within the window. He wasn’t late. Nikita was, but Alek sure wouldn’t make any waves about that. Not with the news he had to give, and knowing Nikita’s hair trigger to anger.

  Alek glanced back at the fort behind him, known as Forte de Monte Serrat, the last bastion of protection for the old Brazilian capital during the colonial days. It was an icon of Salvador but was now fading into disrepair. He watched groups of street urchins playing on the grounds, hanging on an anachronistic artillery piece from World War II, the area sprinkled with cups and other trash.

  He knew the urchins had more interest in fleecing him from his valuables than they did in the history. They had no sense of understanding of the land they were on, and it aggravated him. Something he intended to change. If they didn’t appreciate their history, they wouldn’t care about their future. And he was going to alter their future.