by Joshua Hood
“Agreed,” Cabot said. “How soon can you begin?”
“Tomorrow afternoon.”
“Very well, but Vlad, this is your last chance. If you fail, I will kill everyone you have ever loved. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes,” the Russian said. “Crystal clear.”
“It seems our luck is beginning to change,” he said, hanging up the phone.
“So, Vlad has a plane,” Beck shrugged. “You still cannot fly.”
“No, but Zoe can,” Cabot said.
“Your daughter?”
“Go to the house, tell her to start packing.”
“And what about you?”
“I have some favors to call in,” Cabot said, turning to his desk.
8
CEUTA, SPAIN
Three hours later, the navigation computer alerted him that he was a mile from his destination. He killed the engines, dug the earplugs from his ears, and flipped the night-vision goggles up. After the continuous roar of the Mako’s engines, the silence was deafening.
Hayes was soaking wet, his face raw from the abrasive spray of the salt water, and his head ached from the night-vision goggles against his skull. But he’d been here before. Alone and beat to hell. His muscles aching, eyes burning from lack of sleep. Every fiber of his being begging him to stop before it was too late.
He thought back to the army, trying to remember the phrase they used to throw around when anyone got tired: You can rest when you’re dead.
What a bunch of bullshit, he thought, lowering his night vision and turning his attention to the tangle of marshland off the port bow.
From the cockpit, the cove appeared deserted, the only sign of life the tangle of reeds that choked the bank swaying in the wind. Even with the night vision, Hayes was unable to pierce the dense undergrowth or see anything past the dilapidated dock that bobbed near the beach.
He double-checked the coordinates.
This is the right place.
He dug the flashlight from his pocket and pointed it at the dock. He strobed the pressure pad—two long, one short, just as he’d been told—and waited.
The seconds ticked by, the thick marsh air weighing oppressively against his skin, the only sound the buzz of the mosquitoes around his ears.
Besides his ability to withstand pain and privation, Hayes’s time in Treadstone had given him a unique insight into the worlds that populated the gray zone—the shadowy world inhabited by the ghosts of cast-off countries.
Most of what he’d learned of Luca Harrak was rumor—hushed words traded over a round of drinks in one shithole bar or another.
The warnings came in whispered Russian, French, or Arabic—the language didn’t matter; the words were always the same—“a savage who’d sell his mother if the price was right.”
But Hayes had been in the game long enough to realize most of it was bullshit. Ghost stories told by rough men at the end of their serviceability. A way for them to remember the “bad old days” when they mattered.
The only thing he knew for certain was that to Luca punctuality mattered—not as a virtue but because the smuggler had learned that it was harder to hit a moving target. Hayes glanced at the Sangin Neptune strapped to his wrist. The Day-Glo hands told him that he was thirty minutes late.
Shit. Had they gone?
The answer came from the shadows, an armed man stepping out of the foliage that lined the bank, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He strolled leisurely to the edge of the dock, pausing to take a final drag of the smoke before flicking it into a barrel.
The contents ignited with a rush of flame that looked yellow through the night vision and Hayes watched the man wave him toward the shore.
He started the engine, the voice in his head screaming at him as he guided the boat toward the channel.
Are you crazy? Do not go in there.
But Hayes had come too far, gone through too much to turn back now.
By the time he made it to the back of the cove and nosed the boat to land, a second man stood on the dock, a coil of rope in his hand.
“You’re late,” he said, tossing the line.
“Traffic,” Hayes answered.
He tied off the boat, grabbed his bag, and stepped out—the stability of the dock beneath his feet unsettling after the pitch and roll of the open sea.
“This way,” the man said.
Hayes nodded and let his guide step off, but instead of following turned to the second man.
“After you,” he said, not liking the idea of an armed stranger on his backtrail.
But the man wasn’t having it.
“No,” the man said, shaking his head. “You go.”
When he still didn’t budge, the gunman unslung the AK-47 and leveled the muzzle at Hayes’s chest. He laid his thumb across the selector and flicked the catch from safe to fire.
The smuggler was less than a foot away, close enough for Hayes to smell the tobacco on his breath, watch his finger slip into the trigger guard when he said, “You go, now.”
Hayes was thinking about tearing the rifle from the man’s hands and beating him with it when the voice in his head chimed in.
No. You kill him, and all of this is for nothing. Just let it go.
But it was easier said than done. The altercation with Vlad had flipped a switch and now his mind was locked on destroy, and breaking free of the cycle was going to take a hell of a lot more than the calming exercises he’d learned from the shrink in Tacoma.
He ripped himself away, ignoring the smug smile that spread across the man’s face as Hayes turned and followed his guide.
The man led him down a scratch of a trail that cut through the underbrush, then took a hard left before ending at an ancient wood-planked footbridge.
You’ve got to be kidding me.
He stopped, desperate for another route across, but a quick glance showed nothing but marshland on all sides.
Sensing his hesitation, the guide flashed a toothy smile and stepped onto the first plank. Beneath his weight, the aged wood and the rusted chain screeched like a dying animal, but instead of being concerned, the man flashed a wide smile.
“It is perfectly safe,” the man said.
“For you, maybe,” Hayes said, staring at the rail-thin guide. “What do you weigh, sixty-five kilos?”
“Sixty,” the man grinned, “but it will hold.”
Sixty kilos, that’s, what, a hundred and thirty pounds? Shit, I weighed more than that in high school.
He scanned the bank, desperate for another way across, when the man at his back prodded him forward with an AK barrel to the kidney.
Hayes gritted his teeth, bit back on the anger, and glanced back at the man.
“You and I are going to have a serious problem if you do that shit again,” he said.
The man didn’t bother with a reply. Instead, he stepped forward, the rifle at the ready, leaving Hayes with two choices. He could make a play for the rifle, kill both men, and hope he could get back to the boat and the hell out of the area before more men showed up. Or he could stop being a little bitch and cross the bridge.
He turned and stepped onto the first plank and started across.
According to Vlad, the island was a major smuggling depot, a vital hub for Luca’s operation, but as he neared the end of the bridge, Hayes had yet to see any sign of life. In his mind there were two options: Either Vlad was telling the truth and the fabled smuggler hideout was so well camouflaged that it was invisible to even his well-trained eye, or . . . that sneaky Cossack had set him up. Paid the two assholes with the AKs to take him out in the woods and put a bullet in his skull so he could have the plane.
Either way, it was too late to turn back.
9
MOGADOR
He stepped off the bridge, walked over to where the guid
e stood beside a tree, a fresh cigarette clutched between his lips.
The man nodded down the hill, at the cluster of buildings in the low ground. “The boss is waiting in the bar,” he said, pointing to the building in the middle. “You knock first, yes?”
“Sure.”
It was hot at the top of the hill. The air was thick with moisture and mosquitoes that swarmed around his head and neck and Hayes was sweating. But halfway down the slope the temperature began to change. The oppressive heat and humidity were banished by a cool, salt-laden breeze that blew in from the east.
There was movement a hundred yards to his right, voices and the distant sound of machinery. What is that? A forklift?
He left the path, moved laterally along the slope through the trees until he had a clear view of a second harbor nestled in the dead space behind the building.
Yet another reason you don’t go off on half-cocked plans, the voice in his head chided.
“Yeah, thanks,” he said.
Hayes reached the flats, the dirt path giving way to gravel, the voices and laughter louder now as he approached the bar. He stopped at the door, the interior falling silent as a grave at the sound of his knock. There was a scratch of a chair across the floor followed by heavy footfalls walking in his direction.
Here we go.
Hayes looked down in an attempt to save his dilated pupils from the wash of light he knew would come when the door was pulled open from the inside. But it never came.
What the hell?
The reason was evident when he looked up, found a giant of a man—in a black tank top—his thick biceps and wide shoulders blocking out the light.
“What do you want?” the man demanded in French.
“I’m here for the gangbang,” Hayes answered, leaning past the man to get a look inside.
The bar was a small rectangle of a room with a bare floor, five scuffed wood tables, and a half moon of a bar on the far side. Hayes took in the men at the tables to his right and dismissed them but couldn’t see the rest of the room until the man took a step back and motioned him to enter.
He stepped inside and immediately shifted to the left, eyes darting to the back table where a man sat reading a copy of Le Monde and ignoring the three radios squawking on the table.
Hayes was on his way over when the man in the black tank top intercepted him with an open palm to the chest. “Hands on the wall,” the man ordered.
“Not happening,” he said.
The man’s lips curled into what he thought was a smile, displaying a mouthful of gold teeth. “What did you say, little man?”
“I said, fuck off before I knock those pretty teeth down your throat.”
The smile crumbled from the man’s face and he stepped forward, his hands curling into fists at his sides.
“Closest hospital is what, two hours away?” Hayes asked, without taking his eyes off the doorman before him.
Luca Harrak folded the newspaper in half and set it on the table, but instead of looking up, turned his attention to his fingernails. He studied his manicure for a few seconds and when he finally spoke, his voice was calm, seemingly indifferent to the impending violence before him.
“About that,” he said, looking up. “Why do you ask?”
“Because unless you have an orthopedic surgeon behind the bar, you might want to put your dog on a leash.”
“Emil, let him pass.”
The man grudgingly stepped aside, and Hayes made his way to the table, took a seat, and studied the man before him.
Luca Harrak was in his early forties and well dressed. The Saint Laurent suit, eggshell-white button-down, and slicked-back hair made him look more like an accountant than the head of the largest smuggling ring in the North Atlantic.
But Hayes wasn’t fooled.
“You are late,” Harrak said, his hand coming to rest on the black case sitting on the table.
“Yeah, but I’m here now.”
Luca popped the clasps that secured the Pelican case and opened the lid, revealing three stacks of white cartons with ERYTHROMYCIN 250MG written in black letters.
“May I?” he asked, waiting for Luca’s nod before grabbing two of the boxes from the case, opening them, and studying the pink pills inside the blister packs.
Hayes checked over the packaging, made sure the seals were intact while Luca spoke.
“In my line of work, I have been asked to acquire many things. Drugs, guns, even people,” he shrugged. “But never antibiotics. Turns out they are rather hard to find.”
Sucks for you.
He got to his feet, pulled a sodden envelope from his back pocket, and handed it to Luca.
“Yes, very hard to find,” the man said, opening the flap and thumbing the bills inside.
The menace in the man’s voice told Hayes it was time to go, and he hurriedly tossed the pills back into the case and shut the lid. He was reaching for the latches, ready to thumb them back into place and get the hell out, when Luca slammed his hand flat on the lid.
“Did you hear what I just said?” he demanded.
“Yeah, I heard ya,” Hayes answered. “But we had a deal—a deal that ended the second I handed you ten thousand euros.”
“That was the price an hour ago, but . . .”
“But what?” Hayes asked.
“But you were late.”
“You’re breaking my heart.”
“Be that as it may, if you want the merchandise, it will cost an additional five thousand euros.”
“You’re shitting me, right?”
Luca clicked his tongue behind his teeth, eyebrows and shoulders lifting into a prototypical Gallic shrug.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Hayes asked, aping the gesture.
The moment his hands were off the case, Luca tugged it back to his side of the table and lowered himself into his chair with an exaggerated sigh.
“Pay or leave,” he said, unbuttoning his jacket and leaning back in his chair. “The choice is yours, but either way, you are wasting my fucking time.”
In an instant, the atmosphere in the bar dropped from chilly to downright inhospitable and all talk ceased, the only sound the scrape of Emil’s chair against the floor as he got to his feet and walked to the table, coming to a halt behind his boss, fingers tapping the butt of the pistol at his waist.
The pistol was a Norinco NP-20, a Chinese knockoff of the Heckler & Koch P7. The pistol was a favorite in places like Morocco because they took a beating, and with a street value of fifty bucks cost a hell of a lot less than the German-made H&K.
While he generally believed in the old adage that you get what you pay for, he’d been around the block enough times to know that the 9-millimeter fired from the chamber of a fifty-dollar piece of shit would kill him just as fast as one from the custom STI on his hip.
“Well?” Luca asked.
Any other time Hayes would have paid the man, but after the boy in Ceuta, he was flat broke, and he’d come too far to leave empty-handed.
Which left only one option.
Hayes stepped away from the table, a shot of adrenaline rolling through his veins, widening his vision until he saw the entire room. His hand dropped to his side and he stood there, calm and relaxed, seeing everything but focusing on nothing.
“That’s not going to work for me,” he said, voice sharp as a straight razor.
The silence fell heavy over the bar. The blood hissing in his ears like static, Hayes took in the room. Aware of Emil’s hand cheating toward the pistol on his waist, the bartender reaching below the counter, and, finally, the bald smuggler near the door shifting so he could reach the pistol Hayes assumed was tucked into the small of his back.
Hayes worked the lethal calculus in his head. Big man first, then old Hooknose behind the bar, and then Baldy. Four seconds, five
max? Is it enough?
A gunfight was all about angles, space, and timing. Hayes had been in enough to realize that he was holding the short end of the stick. There was no doubt in his mind that he could dump one or two of the men before they got their pistols into action, but not all four.
He didn’t like the odds and would have bowed out if he could have, but the men in the bar were all gas and no brake, which didn’t leave Hayes many options.
“No one has to die,” Hayes said, “just give me what I came for and I’ll be out of your hair.”
“I’m afraid that is impossible,” Luca said.
“This isn’t going to go the way you think it is.”
“You Americans, so John Wayne, so Gunfight at the K.O. Corral.”
“That’s the O.K. Corral, and you’ve been watching too many Westerns.”
“Perhaps, but, since I am a sporting man, what do you say I count to three and yell draw like they do in the Westerns? Would that be fair, Emil?” he asked, looking up.
“Yes,” the man grinned.
“And you?” he asked, turning to Hayes.
“You can count to a thousand for all I care. But if I were you, I wouldn’t be sitting in that chair when the shooting starts.”
Luca’s face went white, the realization of his position in the line of fire sending a bead of sweat down his forehead. His hands snaked out for the arms of the chair and he cleared his throat, his voice weak when he spoke.
“If you gentlemen will allow me to get out of the way,” he began.
“Sure, take all the time you need,” Hayes said, already reaching for the STI.
The towering Frenchman saw the move and was reaching for his pistol when he realized that with his boss standing in front of him, there was no way he could draw and fire without hitting him.
He cursed and moved to shove his boss out of the way, but it was too late.