The Hunter

by Gennita Low

  Hawk reached for the peanut butter sandwich by the bed, carefully chewing it, since his gums seemed to have swollen. “So what are you saying?” he asked in between bites. “Sounds like you’re saying you might abandon Amber.”

  Lily’s smile widened. “I’m saying that everyone has priorities and they rewrite their rules around them. For example, Brad won’t arrest Dilaver. I’ll bet you, if Dilaver had Amber as a prisoner, he would break all sorts of laws to rescue her. Then there’s you. You’re on a special mission to retrieve something and won’t get rid of Dilaver because that isn’t part of your operation. But you’d help Amber by sneaking in the two reporters, which probably was what got you caught. And now you just want to go after Dilaver because he might have Amber, too. So the two of you rewrote your rules when it suited you. I, on the other hand, have very few rules and try never to break them.” She cocked an eyebrow. “Do you want to know why?”

  “Why?” Hawk finished the sandwich. He was still worried about Amber, but at least the conversation was making time go a little faster.

  “Because when you break a rule, there is no more order. The center doesn’t stand without order and the world around you collapses.”

  “You know, Lily, that’s too damn profound for a beat-up guy right now. I’ll tell you something, though. I don’t know what your rules are, but life isn’t order or chaos because of people who make or break them. And if you were in trouble with Dilaver, Brad would do the same thing for you. More, I suspect.” Hawk carefully sat up. His whole body was stiffening up from not moving about. “Are you going to shoot at me again if I take a piss?”

  “No. I just don’t want you to attempt rushing out of here like before. Looks like you’re in too much pain now, though. Are you still not going to take the painkillers?” Hawk shook his head. “Nope.”

  “Why? It’d make you feel better.”

  Hawk got off the bed. “One of my rules,” he said with a smile. “Never take medication when someone in the room is pointing a gun at you.”

  “That is, if you have a choice,” Lily pointed out.

  “That goes without saying,” he said.

  The door opened. Amber walked in, taking in Lily, the gun in her hand, and Hawk with a sweeping glance. She didn’t seem surprised at the weapon pointed at him, heading straight into his open arms, although she was very careful how she hugged him.

  “Tried to come after me, didn’t he?”

  Brad came in and he briefly exchanged glances with Lily.

  “He won’t be sedated. Then he got impatient and I had to get all philosophical with him,” Lily said, putting away her gun.

  “Oh no, she didn’t start one of her long tracts about choices and rules, did she, Hot Stuff?” Amber went over to the bed, her smile disappearing. “You look even worse in this light. What did Marisa say about your injuries?”

  Marisa was one of the housekeepers, who also appeared to be the nurse around here. “Nothing serious,” he answered, and looked over Amber at Lily. He nodded at Brad. Those two didn’t even address each other anymore. “So all that stuff about choices and rules was to distract me? Did you mean any of it?”

  “Absolutely,” Lily said, not indicating which question she was answering. “Marisa said he has bruised ribs, nothing broken. The pretty face is going to heal. But he really needs to go to a hospital just in case he’s hurt inside. There’s also a lump on his head, so probably a concussion.”

  “Shouldn’t you be in bed?” Amber tried to step out of his arms to get a better look, but Hawk wouldn’t let her. She frowned. “Hawk, I need you in bed. Oh, stop grinning like that. You don’t know how awfully swollen your lips are!”

  “Ah, in case you haven’t noticed, they are attached to me, so I do know they are swollen, thanks.” He just wanted to bury his nose in her hair, inhale her scent. It was good to have her in his arms again. “Did Dilaver give you any trouble?”

  “Yes and no. We’ll talk about this once I get you back in bed.”

  Hawk looked at the other two occupants in the room. “You’re going to embarrass Brad and Lily, sweetheart, the way you keep suggesting bed.”

  “I’d punch you if you weren’t hurt already,” Amber warned.

  Hawk sighed. He was going to have to show her how tough a SEAL was. “First Lily shot at me, now you’re going to punch me. I think I just escaped one torture chamber for another. I was heading for the restroom when you came in. I’ll get back into bed after taking care of business, if you don’t mind.”

  Lying down for so long had cramped up his sore muscles. Since he knew she was watching him, he tried not to hobble too much as he made his way to the john.

  “Look at him pretending to limp,” he heard Brad say as he closed the door.

  Hawk leaned heavily against the door, willing the burning in his ribs to go away. Bruised ribs were better than broken ones, he reasoned. It was going to hurt a lot while he hiked around in the country looking for weapons.

  He looked at his face in the mirror, turning slightly to the left to check out the cut that was courtesy of a bottle. The housekeeper had sewn up the wound. There was another cut above his eyebrow and he had a nice black eye.

  “Frankenstein,” he breathed out, baring his teeth to look at his gums. His swollen lips made the task more difficult than usual and even stretching his face that way hurt. He hoped the swelling would go down fast. It was easier to remember a battered face and it would make walking around incognito a bit tougher. He’d have to think of a good plan to protect both of them from Dilaver’s men.

  Amber tried not to look too worried. Hawk needed to be checked out by a doctor and there was no way she could get him to a hospital without Dilaver finding out. Maybe when they made it out of Macedonia…She frowned when she heard his breathing again. She wished she had been here when they had taken his shirt off. Those bruised ribs must make moving around very painful, yet he hadn’t taken any of the painkillers.

  They had to come up with a plan and she was glad Brad and Lily were here this time, and apparently holding a truce. After she had checked with the housekeepers and some of the girls, they pulled a table into Hawk’s room and gathered around it, with a map of the region spread out. She ordered Hawk to stay in bed, and placated him by sitting on it herself. He wanted her near him and the heated look in his eyes made her feel all warm and funny inside. She knew he was only obedient because he didn’t feel like arguing at the moment. She was beginning to understand how he was—always biding his time.

  “The most important thing is to get out of here,” she said. “Sooner or later, Dilaver will get wind that I’m still in town. Right now he thinks Brad is taking me on vacation, so we have to stick to that part of our original plan.”

  “I’m more interested in this Aunt Greta that suddenly appeared,” Hawk said. “You said she was at the apartment making a deal with you. I’m going to have to ask my contact about her. If only we had a last name….”

  “No reference to her last name in our conversation,” Amber said, frowning as she took a sip of her coffee. Hard to believe it was still barely noon. “She has no accent whatsoever, very chic, and knew a lot about information and how it works in the system.”

  “Maybe I can contact someone to check the airline logs, see whether any American woman around her age came into Macedonia recently,” Brad said.

  “Good, but according to her, something big happens soon. Why didn’t you tell me it was a bomb, Hawk?”

  “I was only told that the weapon was a trigger,” Hawk explained. “My contact told me he’d tell me what to do when I get to the right location.”

  Amber put down her cup and drew a circle on the map with her finger. “Jed probably didn’t want me to get the information. Anyway, from the coordinates, we’re going all the way to Serbia. Each weapons cache was dropped so Dilaver didn’t have to transport them to the different groups controlling the region. So why is Greta so adamant about getting her hands on a bomb? Anyone can make a bomb, right?”


  “The correct question is, what is the bomb for?” Hawk asked.

  “Well, you’re the one after it. Don’t you know?” Lily countered.

  Hawk shook his head. “I have only two tasks. Destroy the weapon caches at the different locations. But most important of all, retrieve this specific one. I can see now why I can’t just destroy it—it’s a bomb.” The first mission was for his SEAL commander, who brokered the deal to work with GEM and the COS commandos. Admiral Madison didn’t want any more weapons given or sold to anyone who might be shooting back at them in future covert ops. The second mission was to retrieve the secret weapon for GEM and the COS commandos, who weren’t exactly talkative types.

  “Don’t you know anything else?” Lily persisted.

  “Need-to-know basis,” Hawk said. “That’s the nature of the business, Lily. Thought you knew.”

  Lily shrugged. “Surely there’s a big picture. There’s always a big picture.”

  Amber caught Brad looking at Lily as if he were going to say something, then appeared to change his mind. He turned his attention to Amber instead. “So,” he said, “we’re going on this romantic vacation.”

  She smiled at him, knowing what it took for him to avoid starting an argument with Lily. “Yes, but we’ll have to detour because Dilaver will be keeping tabs on us to make sure we’re actually going somewhere.”

  “Where are we actually going?” Brad turned to Hawk. “We can’t stop at every place they dropped off shipments. It’d take more than a week.”

  Hawk nodded. “I’ll confirm this later, but the main plan is to get out of here without being spotted. Too bad you’re dark-haired, Lily, or we could use you as a decoy with Brad. Both of you can drive off in the opposite direction.”

  “There’s such a thing as a wig, you know.”

  “There’s that possibility,” Hawk said, looking at Brad, who kept silent. “Amber and I will head off to retrieve the bomb. We can keep in touch by cell.”

  Amber found it interesting to see how these two men were becoming sort of friends. They hadn’t talked that much with each other, but she could tell that they were backing each other up in a way only males did, by diverting attention.

  “What are you going to do with the bomb when you get it?” Lily asked.

  “I call my contact and wait for instructions.”

  “Then the mission is over? That’s it?” Lily hid a yawn behind a hand. “Where’s the glory? No payoff, nothing?”

  “We get to save the world, Lily, or some part of it,” Amber said, amused. “Guess that isn’t a big enough payoff?”

  “I’d much rather save a bunch of girls’ lives than some bomb that might be used somewhere. Who knows? It might explode in Dilaver’s face before he sells it, killing him and his buyers, and that’s a good thing.”

  “I think Dilaver and his aunt have very big plans for this particular bomb,” Hawk said. “First, they don’t even know what it looks like, which makes me think it’s a new weapon of some sort. Second, they have a deadline of a week, which points to the possibility of them using this bomb in a big way.”

  “That’s how it sounded when Greta talked to me. She offered me a big sum of money for you,” Amber said, smiling wryly at Hawk’s raised eyebrows. “I’m to call Dilaver if you contact me and to try to get you to tell me where you are. Huge sum of money.”

  “Glad to know my price tag is so high,” Hawk said.

  “I suspect they let me off so easy because they want to see what I’m going to do next. If I put the word out on the street looking for you, they will hear of it tomorrow. They also know that if they cut off your sources of help, they might get to you sooner. They didn’t mention to me how injured you are, by the way.”

  “Wouldn’t want you to feel sorry enough to help me, now, would they?”

  Amber reached over and lightly touched his bruised cheek. “He’s going to pay for this,” she said softly. “I’ll think of some ways to really hurt him back.”

  “This is tolerable. You came just at the right time, sweetheart,” Hawk said, covering her hand with his. “This boy would have been quite badly injured if Dilaver had started on me. Thanks to you, I only get to limp around like him for a while.”

  The knowledge of how close he had been to dying hit her like a bull’s-eye. She had avoided that very thought all morning. She had lived in Macedonia for four years. Lives were cheap here and many people she knew had either gotten hurt or had died. She had grown to accept that as part of her current job.

  Somehow Hawk had become important to her. She had fallen hard for him and had put his life before hers, running off to save him on her own. And what she was going to do now could also jeopardize her future here in Velesta. Lily was right. She couldn’t have it both ways—going off on a tracking mission and rescuing girls from Dilaver’s clutches. Dilaver’s suspicion could put the whole venture in danger. When this was over, she and Lily would have to talk things over. She had a feeling it was going to be a sobering conversation.

  “Hey, you okay?” Hawk nudged her with his leg.

  “Yes. Just thinking about everything.” When she caught Lily yawning again, she added, “I vote we take a break before we get our final plans together. We can get going easier in the dark, anyway. Hawk, you need to rest up or we can’t go anywhere.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I second the vote.”

  “I have a few of my most trusted men stationed outside,” Brad said. “I get the feeling that Dilaver will soon be on the way out of town, though.”

  “He didn’t seem too affected by the tear gas last night,” Amber observed.

  “CS gas isn’t long-lasting,” Hawk explained. “But he does have a lot of injured or dead men to take care of this morning, so that gives us a little time.”

  “Too bad neither of you killed him in there last night,” Lily quipped. “It’d save us all this trouble.”

  Amber sighed. “I didn’t get a long enough look to see where he was in that room.”

  “That’s because you were looking for Mr. McMillan here.” Lily stood up, stretched, and took her empty cup with her to the door. “Oh well, another wasted opportunity there, that’s all. Why can’t anyone see how easy it is? Kill this Greta bitch and Dilaver and we solve all these problems. But no, we’ll go off and find the bomb while they chase us everywhere. See you all later.”

  After she left, Hawk remarked, “Bloodthirsty woman, isn’t she?”

  “Lily and the army of one,” Brad said, looking at the closed door. “You take down Dilaver, there’ll be another in his place in a matter of days.”

  “And all the factions would start another civil war to grab land and power, and more UN and U.S. soldiers will be deployed,” Hawk said. “So we’re back to square one. Get the bomb before the KLA does. It’s got to be a different kind of bomb, Brad, or they would just rig up some ordinary plastic. I’m going to try to find out what it is when I call my contact.”

  Brad got up. “You do that. I have a few things to take care of before we leave, too. Call me.”

  Amber followed him out and then locked the door. She turned to Hawk.

  “And now, before we talk, I want to see every little bruise and cut,” she said. She had this need to touch him all over, feel his heat under her hands, make sure he was truly all right.

  “Come here,” Hawk said, patting his front. “I’ll let you be on top.”

  Smiling, Amber shook her head. If the man had a concussion, it hadn’t affected his libido.

  Lily slipped into her jacket, pulling the collar up. She pulled the gloves out of the pockets, turned, and bumped into Brad.

  “I thought you were tired.”

  She noticed that he always kept his distance when he stood by her, which should make her happy. So why did it irritate her? “I can’t. Need to walk off some of my energy.”

  “Be careful.”

  “I’m the only one no one’s looking for, remember?” she pointed out. “But I’ll be extra careful. You
aren’t going to sic your guys out there on me, are you?”

  “One might follow you, make sure you’re okay.”

  Lily rolled her eyes. “Oh, please, Brad, that’s so secret-agent. Haven’t I proven that I can take care of myself?”

  Brad moved a step closer, his eyes studying her closely. “I know you can. Why do you do that all the time?”

  Lily frowned. “What do you mean, why do I take care of myself all the time?”

  “Yes. You always act so independent, like you don’t need anyone. Is it to push people away or to keep yourself safe?”

  The hair on the back of her neck stood up. He was suddenly standing way too close. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “What’s Project Precious?”

  Lily blinked. “That’s none of your business,” she hissed sharply, then wished she had kept her cool. He was studying her reaction.

  “I just wanted you to know that I know,” Brad said quietly. “Lily, it doesn’t matter to me what that CIA file says. If nothing else, it makes me admire you even more.”

  A part of her wanted to kill him for knowing. Yet another part was relieved. Maybe he would understand her for what she was. But she couldn’t allow him to share the information. Not yet, anyway. “You don’t know anything. Those are just words written down by somebody. What I have is in here.” She tapped her forehead. “Don’t dig up information on me, Brad. I don’t need your or anyone’s pity. The last thing I want right now is to have Amber worried about me.”

  Brad searched her eyes and she stared back into his, willing herself not to show her fears. “I understand,” he finally said, “but I also want you to know that my feelings for you haven’t changed, Llallana. You’re special to me.”

  His smile was so tender, she wanted to walk up to him and lay her head against his chest, have him wrap his strong arms around her and take away the loneliness. But there was always reality. And it was buzzing for her in her coat pocket.

  “Thanks, Brad,” she said, smiling back. “I’ll think about that during my walk.”

  She could tell he was disappointed that she didn’t invite him along, but she needed to take this call. She was the only person left who could help the girls.