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 guide 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.”