Osvaldo Salazar was no coward. This was beyond all doubt.
He had demonstrated as much when, at the age of just twelve, in his native Cali, Colombia, he had joined the Norte del Valle Cartel and killed his first man. That rite of passage, which had turned him from just another street kid into a gunman, a full-fledged cartelsicario, had been the start of a brilliant career that had culminated in his current lofty position, to which he had ascended at the age of just forty. Tall and sinewy with crew-cut gray hair, he looked out at the world with ice-blue eyes that never failed to send shivers down the spines of his enemies.
At forty, the majority of people consider themselves to be just hitting middle age, but for a cartel member to survive that long was a major accomplishment. Violent deaths or long jail sentences had invariably claimed Osvaldo’s kind by then.
The fact that he had reached that milestone without serious injury or arrest said much about his skills, or his good luck. Along the way, his original cartel had ceased to exist, and he was now working for another organization, and divided his time between Mexico and Colombia. But it was all still part of the same game.
No, he could never be called a coward. But even he was struggling with the sheer terror of the stormy sea-crossing he was currentlycontending with. And there was no way he could let on about it with his men.
He hadn’t liked the assignment from the start. He had long since graduated from petty courier jobs, so being sent to Spain in search of a mislaid package had felt like an insult to his pride. But he hadn’t refused, not when the boss himself had selected him for the task. And when the details of the operation were explained, he saw why the boss had thought of him.
It turned out that a Spanish group operating in the Rías Baixas, the Ferreiros clan, owed his boss a considerable amount of money. Money that was supposed to have been left anchored at an agreed-upon pickup point but that, when their local contacts had arrived to get it, hadn’t been there. The Galicians swore blind they’d done as instructed.
Of course, the boss hadn’t believed a word of it. That wasn’t how things worked in his world.
And that was why Osvaldo was here.
He and his men had been in Spain a week. They had caught a scheduled flight to Madrid, and after a brief meeting with a fixer who’d provided them with the necessary equipment in exchange for a considerable sum of money, they had rented a car and made their way to Galicia.
The interview with the members of the Ferreiros clan, in an abandoned warehouse in an industrial park in Cambados, was brief, intense, and ultimately very satisfactory—at least for Osvaldo Salazar. The two men he’d tortured to death, who were now lying dead in a ditch, probably weren’t of the same mind.
He’d managed to establish that the Galicians weren’t lying. Storm Armand had been preceded by a less violent storm, and during that, the bundle must have slipped its moorings and since then had been drifting loose in the estuary.
If those men had bothered to undertake a proper search rather than making excuses about the storm and the difficulties of sailing in suchconditions, they’d still be alive. They’d overestimated the boss’s patience, but, worse than that, they’d been sloppy.
And if there was one thing Osvaldo could not stand, it was sloppiness.
However, he now knew where the bundle was.
It should have taken only a few hours to resolve the matter, but Storm Armand’s untimely arrival had complicated matters. He and his men had been forced to hole up in a hotel in Bueu for several days, waiting for the weather to settle.
Going out for air had been unthinkable, and not only because of the foul weather—four burly Colombians strolling along the quay would have been sure to attract unwanted attention in a tiny fishing port. And that was something that Osvaldo, in all his meticulousness, could not allow.
Finally, the conditions had started to improve. After several hours spent waiting in a bar in the port of Beluso, a short distance from Bueu, drinking cup after cup of the foul stuff the Spanish had the temerity to call coffee, Osvaldo and his men had been given the all clear to set sail.
All of which was why the four gunmen now found themselves being flung from side to side and up and down in a fiberglass speedboat, negotiating the most terrifying waves Osvaldo had ever seen, with four huge Yamaha engines booming out behind them.
No, he wasn’t a coward. But he was still looking forward to having dry land underfoot again, even if it was on the gloomy, forbidding island now coming into view up ahead through the freezing foam and spray.
The man at the helm was something of a character. His face was so weather-beaten that he could have been eighty years old rather than his true fifty. Short and squat, he had hardly a decent tooth left in his mouth, and the odd gold replacement glittering here and there gave his smile an ominous aspect. His name was Francisco “Chuco” Barreiros, and according to numerous sources among the local drug runners, he was one of the best speedboat skippers in the area. Half an hour into the crossing, Osvaldo could attest to that.
Chuco expertly steered a course between the waves, accelerating in bursts at just the right moment when he had to bring the vessel over the crest of one. They would reach the top and seem to hover momentarily, before hurtling down the other side. A deft flick of the rudder, and Chuco swerved around the next oncoming breaker.
His steering was a spectacle in itself, as was the sight of Osvaldo’s men, three of the toughest guys imaginable, leaning overboard to empty every last drop of their stomach contents.
“Nearly there!” Chuco bellowed.
“Can we dock in this?” Osvaldo held on tight as the speedboat bucked wildly.
“Dock?” Chuco laughed derisively. “If we go anywhere near the dock, we’ll be smashed to pieces!”
“So what are we going to do?”
Chuco Barreiros lifted one hand from the wheel to point to a whitish line that was rapidly growing closer. “Straight onto the fucking beach!”
“Sure that’ll work?”
“Death and taxes, man!” shouted Chuco, gunning the engines. “Those are the only things you can be sure of in this life!”
