Hunter

by Chris Allen

  Having tagged the second bodyguard with a GPS tracking device - and pilfered a couple of items he thought might come in handy - Morgan exited the corridor through a smashed window and made his way toward the main villa via an alternate, less obvious, route. Approaching through the darkness to the side of the villa, he became aware of shouting, just audible above the blustery din of the wind. Male voices at first, aggressive and demanding. One voice was dominating the other when the exchange was joined by a woman's voice. She sounded young. Whatever was going on, whoever she was, she was desperate, shouting in terror and panic.

  Moving quickly, Morgan pushed through an assortment of wild herbs growing up against the house and the smells of rosemary, mint and garlic enveloped him. He found a discreet window nestled in a dark corner and peered inside. The small, ornate window gave him a clear, albeit angled, view of a long, luxuriously appointed room. From the artworks to the furniture, fittings and features, the interior of the villa was dripping with cash. The stench of far too much money and not enough taste permeated the scene, all paid for from the proceeds of a life of crime, violence and death.

  Jesus! Morgan thought with incredulity. I sure chose the wrong side of the trade.

  He edged closer and carefully pressed his face up against the glass. Yep, there they were. Target confirmed. Older and thinner and with much less hair, but definitely him. Morgan let out a tight hiss through clenched teeth. The man Morgan knew to be Serifovic was standing over a girl who looked like a tourist. Young, lithe and dressed to impress, she'd obviously been coaxed up into the mountains on the promise of a good time. The girl had no idea who she was dealing with. Flashing lots of cash and drugs, it wouldn't have been too hard for Serifovic to entice her enough to overlook the fact that he was in his sixties. But now the party was over. She was cowering helplessly on the floor and Serifovic was rough-handling her, slapping her and yelling at her to be quiet, while barking orders at the other man, the third bodyguard, to cover the door that led to the corridor. Morgan's blood boiled.

  They were expecting him from entirely the wrong direction. Good news for Morgan. Not so good for Serifovic.

  Urgently, Morgan surveyed the scene to ensure that he was absolutely clear on where each of them was positioned in relation to everything else in the room. He would not have time to become embroiled in another hand-to-hand confrontation with either Serifovic or his bodyguard - he would end up with a bullet in his back within seconds. Taking one last moment to scan the room, Morgan saw his opportunity. He knew what had to be done.

  Despite the modern restoration of the villa, local builders had made use of the original tiles. They were of the classic terracotta, convex design, loosely stacked in columns and regimented rows across the pitched roof. The strong winds of the looming storm were screaming through the huddle of buildings now and rustling the ancient tiles like canvas sails upon rough seas. The entire surface of the roof was an enormous, vociferous wind charm.

  Clambering across the roof of the villa, his movements covered by the volume of noise, Alex Morgan reached the spot he knew would provide the most direct access to his target inside. Extracting the still-bloodied SOG Force SE38 knife from his belt, he made quick work of a number of tiles, levering them off steadily before throwing them clear of the house. Then he took to the waterproof membrane and insulation beneath the tiles, making a hole just large enough to squeeze through.

  Inside the roof, with the aid of his SureFire tactical flashlight, Morgan made his way cautiously across the roof trusses, listening for voices and activity below him. He did not have far to go before he reached the service access panel in the plasterboard ceiling he'd noted from the window. The muffled voices from the living area below became clearer. He could hear heightened levels of uncertainty and anxiety in the voices of the men. The girl was relatively silent, only now and then offering a whimper or cry of fear. Poor thing. "I'll get you out of this mess shortly, darlin'," he whispered. "Sit tight."

  Steadying himself across the top of the access panel, Morgan bent his ear to the crack in the joinery and listened intently. His Serbian was scant, but he recognized enough to know they were perplexed and more than a little agitated. They'd expected him to come blundering in from the corridor minutes ago, but there'd been nothing and now, they had no idea.

  It's now or never, he thought.

  Just as Morgan prepared to assault, he shifted his weight across carefully to his left foot and the change in his balance caused a rippling creak along the latticework of trusses. The sound was a thunderclap in the confined space of the ceiling and the room below. It was too loud even for the wind to mask it.

  Pinpricks of light instantly appeared in radical patterns through the ceiling plaster as a barrage of 9mm rounds peppered every square inch around him, pelting the layer of insulation above his head with the force and frequency of heavy rain upon a tin roof. The narrow space was filled with the fine powder of shattered plaster, splintered wood and ricochets. Morgan had no time. He was seconds away from being riddled by bullets from the submachine guns and falling dead, or worse, fatally wounded to the floor.

  Alex Morgan jumped straight through the access panel, splintering the square of plaster while simultaneously hurling the M84 stun grenade he'd taken as a souvenir from the second guard. The flashbang landed perfectly in the center of the three of them. The shock of his appearance and the sight of the grenade at their feet stunned the two men and sent the girl into hysterics. Morgan dropped behind a natural barricade of lavish furniture - hands to ears, mouth open and eyes clamped shut - allowing the detonation to do its thing.

  The instantaneous combination of the one million candela flash and 170 decibel bang of the 84's eruption brought the room under Morgan's power. Without hesitation, he was in action, leaping across the furniture and heading first for the bodyguard.

  Once again, Morgan resorted to the baton. His targeted first strike of the telescopic high carbon steel blade at the side of the man's neck missed, but the baton still struck hard, crashing down upon the collar bone and shattering it. The guard screamed in agony. He teetered forward, grabbing for his shoulder, and Morgan followed through determinedly with a pulverizing knee strike to the face. The impact and pain of it all reduced the man to blithering semiconsciousness and Morgan immediately carried out the plasti-cuffs, duct tape and tracking device routine again.

  Three down.

  Morgan flashed across the room, responding to the sudden, but dazed, recovery of S erifovic. Beside him the girl lay silent - she'd fainted. For her it was a blessing; for Morgan it was one less thing to worry about. The Interpol liaison officer would ensure that she was identified and properly taken care of. Then Morgan saw clearly the bruising around her eyes and the splits and swelling of her lips, the results of being worked over by her host. The cold objectivity of his profession morphed into a primal revulsion of the coward - any coward - who would take to a woman with his fists.

  Morgan's anger turned upon Serifovic but he forced himself to refrain from beating the man senseless. The disturbing strength and menace captured by those grainy file images that had become so familiar to Morgan back in London had all but left the Serb. The file pictures, the only official record of his appearance, dated back to the early 1990s. Seventeen years later, all that remained was a gray, emaciated-looking wretch. The old man was finally beaten.

  Morgan kicked an MP5 far away from S Serifovic reach and hoisted him unceremoniously to his feet. He was groggy, a mix of the alcohol he'd consumed, the effects of the flashbang and shock, but he was coming around.

  "Who are you?" he asked in Greek, finally looking into Morgan's eyes.

  "Turn around," Morgan demanded in English, spinning the man on his axis.

  "Not Greek police then," Serifovic said. "Interpol? No, you are no policeman. I can see that in your eyes. You are a soldier - a mercenary after the bounty on my head?"

  "Consider me a facilitator. Nothing more," Morgan answered bluntly, as he pulled the man's arm
s behind his back and applied plasti-cuffs. "And you are to consider yourself officially under arrest. Move," he barked and frogmarched Serifovic hurriedly toward the door. S erifovic did not attempt to escape or resist but he was committed to making the task of removing him hard work, constantly tripping and stumbling as the Intrepid agent hurled him outside into the middle of the wind storm.

  "Where are you taking me?" he yelled. "You know, wherever it is, they will come and get me. My friends. They will come for me and when I am free again, they will come for you. And they will find you. You should think about that before—"

  Serifovic's taunts were abruptly ended by a punishing blow from Morgan, an expertly placed blunt trauma punch to the solar plexus. He crumpled to his knees, gasping horribly for air while his diaphragm went into spasm. Morgan stood over him, unemotionally, waiting for the man's breathing to recommence while he scanned their immediate surrounds. Even in the darkness he was vulnerable. Morgan was not about to assume he was home and clear. There could still be some other layer to SSerifovic's protection that intel had missed. That was why Morgan had decided upon a completely unexpected form of extraction.

  Finally, Serifovic regained his composure. He took in a series of long breaths, underscored by the smoker's phlegmy rattle, and then retched vilely before rolling onto his back. Morgan dropped to a knee beside his prisoner. In the darkness the man's features looked ghoulishly stricken. Calmly, authoritatively, the menace of his words chillingly discernible through the screaming winds, Morgan said, "Old man, if you think you're going to fuck with me all the way out of here, think again. You were right before - I'm not a cop. You should remember that. And where I'm taking you, no-one will ever find you."

  With that, Morgan heaved him to his feet and dragged him to the cliff's edge. Manhandling him and cutting him from the plasti-cuffs, it took only minutes to wrestle the utterly perplexed war criminal into the equipment Morgan had stashed earlier.

  "What the fuck is this?" S erifovic cried. "What are you doing? Is this a parachute? I'm just an old man, you can't do this to me! Who are you? I demand to know!"

  The fear and uncertainty spilling from him in every word and gesture found no solace in Morgan's stoic silence. Serifovic grabbed at the buckles and zips, trying desperately to work out what it was that Morgan had strapped him into and what was about to happen. The bravado and arrogance of the man who had eluded international authorities for a decade and a half, living a life of absolute luxury financed entirely by crime, had evaporated. Milivoj Serifovic, the former Serbian colonel of intelligence, was no more. All that remained was Serifovic, the 62 year-old man suffering the onset of lung cancer, who had been stripped of his money, his power, his privilege and influence and, above all, his protection in a few minutes. Now, he was just a frail and scared old man, as vulnerable as every one of the hundreds of poor souls over whose deaths he had presided in his glory days. Glory days. Christ! Morgan's loathing surged.

  In one swift, deftly executed maneuver, Morgan had Serifovic flat on his face on the ground. Placing a foot across the back of the man's neck, Morgan prepared himself for the extraction. In less than a minute he, too, was ready. Once again, he pulled the other man to his feet.

  "You are wearing a Freedivers Recovery Vest," Morgan snapped coldly. "Designed to inflate once you are in the water. Yours is already set."

  "Set? Water? What the hell do you mean? Are you crazy?" The whites of Serifovic's eyes showed clearly all the way around his irises. His breath was shallow and strained. Panic had consumed him, but he knew

  that there was no way out. Not with this man. "What am I to do? What if something goes wrong? Tell me! Tell me something! You can't just—"

  "OK, I'll tell you something." Morgan's hands suddenly locked on his prisoner: one onto the collar at the back of his neck and one onto the waistband of his trousers. "Mind the step."

  Alex Morgan hurled the man from the cliff and off into the darkness.

  Chapter 6

  LOCATION: UNDISCLOSED

  "Who the fuck decided to send those useless fucking assholes to do this?" The virulent, heavily accented Slavic voice crashed through the room. The three other men remained rigidly silent. "Who was it? I want a fucking answer!" A huge fist pounded emphatically upon the desk.

  "One of our American chapters, sefa," was the only reply - self-assured, cocky but respectful.

  "You did this?" The man's eyes blazed with betrayal. "No, tell me it was not you, my own son."

  "No, sefa. It was not me," the young man answered. The older man's attention turned to the other two, his dark brow heavy with anger.

  "I made inquiries, sefa," said one of the others nervously. "I was assured they could do it."

  "You made inquiries!" the voice boomed incredulously. "You did this and did not think to ask me! All you have done is scare that American bitch and the rest of those fucks into hiding."

  The man, the one they called sefa, or chief, was pacing the room. It was a big room, masculine, with no windows, luridly furnished with rich decor and dark, heavy furniture. There would normally be row upon row of ceiling-high books in this kind of room, but no such irrelevances existed here. Instead, a series of large television screens, half-a-dozen or more, were affixed to three walls at head height. Most of them were set to international news broadcasts. Where there were no screens there were oil paintings on large canvasses depicting female nudes in various displays of eroticism. Among them hung faultless reproductions of the Three Lovers by Theodore Géricault and Goya's famous La maja desnuda, alongside numerous darker, more explicit scenes.

  The chief paced back and forth behind a huge Alexander Roux desk, patinated by age and lavishly ornamented in ormolu. It was grand and completely over the top. Set high upon the wall behind the desk, glowering down upon the three obedient servants, was an enormous portrait of the chief as he once was, wearing the uniform of a brigadier general of the Army of Republika Srpska, more widely known as the Bosnian Serb Army. The portrait was an indulgence in the extreme. Commissioned by its subject, it was designed to awe and spoke volumes of the chief's conceit and sense of personal historical significance. The painting depicted the man in his mid-forties, powerfully built, square-jawed with prominent cheekbones, a long slender nose and cold eyes looking into the future with absolutely no humanity to be read in them. Thick graying hair showed around the temples beneath a cap that sat like a crown upon his large head. Golden badges and buttons and the vibrant colors of a general's embellishments and medal ribbons had all been presented against the olive drab dress uniform for prime intimidatory effect. This was a man of power, a decorated man of uncompromising motivation. A man apart from other men. One to be feared.

  Now, a decade and a half later, pacing beneath his portrait, General Dragoslav Obrenovic was an affectation of his former self. The cruel realities of decline and excess had begun to take their toll. The square jaw was now a jowl disguised by a dense steel-wool beard that jutted from his face like the prow of a Viking longship. The nose was fleshy and red and the hair, white and long, was gathered in a band behind his neck. Of course, the uniform was gone. No more gold braid or ribbon bars to draw attention away from the heavy weight at the waist, although he did have his clothes tailored to hide it as much as possible. But despite all the changes that so encumbered the man's journey into his later years, the cold, lifeless eyes remained. They were blocks of glacial ice, buried deep within the dark fissures of his face. They had seen too much to be even remotely altered or softened by age. The eyes told the story of the man's terrifying reputation. It was not one built on folklore: he'd earned it. And he was as brutal today as he had been twenty years ago. If that was possible.

  Dragoslav Obrenovic, or Drago as he was more commonly known, was a cold-blooded butcher; a murderer of such magnitude that the common laws of man could barely accommodate his depravity. In 1994, Radovan Karadzic personally promoted Drago to the rank of brigadier general. Fiercely loyal and answerable only to Karadzic, his sefa an
d mentor, Drago immediately assumed command of the largest body of ground troops committed to perpetrating the Siege of Sarajevo, a responsibility he retained until the very end of the Bosnian War. He willingly took responsibility for the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995, a genocide on a scale not seen since the Second World War; more than 8000 Bosniak men and boys were mercilessly exterminated and over 30 000 Bosniak women, children, elderly and infirm forcibly deported.

  With the arrest of Karadzic in 2008, Mladic and Hadzic in 2011 and their subsequent detention by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Drago then assumed absolute control of the forces remaining loyal to the old Serbian leadership. Now Drago was chief of the darkest arm of the Serbian mafia known only as Zmajevi, the Dragons; a name adopted in deference to the paramilitary force who, under Drago's personal direction, carried out some of the most heinous crimes of the war. As their commanding general, Drago was held in such high regard by the Zmajevi that he accepted the rare honor they bestowed upon him: to be tattooed with their unit crest, a blood-red dragon, on his left breast - above the heart. Now worn by all members of Drago's immediate circle, the mark of the Zmajevi was becoming a much-feared symbol within the European underworld.

  Drago's office, the heart of the Dragon empire, was located in the very center of his fortress-villa. It was his bunker, his war room. It was the platform from which he'd wielded his menace under the very noses of the international community and it was absolutely impenetrable. But somehow, in the bosom of all this protection, he felt exposed. Interpol had raised the reward for information leading to his arrest, while Karadzic, Hadzic, Mladic and his old comrade Serifovic were already rotting in the UN detention center in Scheveningen. Now his plan to devastate the ICTY was in jeopardy with this failed attempt against its presiding judge, the American bitch Madeline Clancy. Drago could feel the long arm of the law reaching for his collar. With the reward for his head now sitting at ten million euros, who could he trust?