“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!”
