“You can always say ‘bust a gut,’” Hawk said lazily. Dilaver laughed, shaking his head. He looked up to see the woman coming out of the kitchen, carrying some bowls. She avoided meeting the men’s eyes as she set them down.
“Hurry up, woman, we are all hungry. Do you want us to go in the kitchen to help you?” one of Dilaver’s men asked.
She couldn’t disguise her look of panic. “No…everything will be ready soon. Please, no need…. Make yourself comfortable.”
“Hey, you can have mine first if you’re that hungry,” Hawk said, trying to distract the young man who was watching the woman a bit too closely. “Come join us. Here, have a beer.”
The man caught the bottle Hawk lobbed at him and he twisted the cap. “Thank you. You’re probably not used to killing like we are,” he said as he walked over, “but there’s nothing like war to make a guy horny. Right now even that old bitch looks good to me.”
“I bet Hawk hasn’t seen a day of fighting like the kind we do,” another chimed in. Catching Hawk’s eyes, he added hastily, “I mean, you’re pretty good with that fucking knife, but something like today’s…You were hiding in the bushes, Hawk. I saw you.”
Hawk drank down his beer. War was his business. He had been trained for action in warfare on sea, land, and air. And he hadn’t been hiding in the bushes today. But he couldn’t say any of his thoughts out loud. “Yeah, well, it saved my life,” he said instead.
“Too bad about our guys with you. They were good fighters. I wish we caught that fucker who killed them.”
“There were quite a few of them, but I got them before they took off in the trucks,” Hawk said.
“I wish they hadn’t been killed that easily,” Dilaver said in between bites of food. “I wanted to question them about how they knew of my weapons being there.”
Hawk didn’t say that he had been busy making sure that no one who was going to be captured was left alive. It had to be done that way. The few he had set free, including Dija, the leader, understood this. Dija had nodded in the dark and had fiercely whispered, “I owe you. Come collect yourvezaif you need one,” before jumping into his truck with the few men left.
“Well, you know, you only gave me some grenades and an AK-47,” Hawk pointed out. “I didn’t know you wanted me to get up close and personal. I figure with so many trying to escape and two of the guys with me killed already, I had better do something.” Like taking them all down with the submachine gun before any of Dilaver’s men came for them. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save your friends.”
The young man shrugged and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Death is every day around here. I don’t care.”
Dilaver leaned over and smacked the side of the man’s face hard enough to catch the attention of the others in the room. Eyes wide with fright, the woman serving them stopped ladling out food from the big bowl.
“Those two who died were worth three of you, kid,” Dilaver said softly. “They’ve been with me a lot longer than you and have enough killings than the number of girls you’ve fucked in mykafenasthese last few years. They were great fighters, especially with knives, so whoever killed them must have given them quite a fight. Ask Hawk. He fought them before. They weren’t easy to take down, were they, Hawk?”
“They weren’t,” Hawk said quietly. “They were very good with their knives. I couldn’t make out how many men were fighting in the dark, but I know the battle was very fierce.”
He stretched out his legs under the table. The hilt of his hidden knife rubbed against the side of his leg. He wanted to be ready, in case he had to go into the kitchen to save the woman and whoever she was hiding in there. He might have to take down a few more of Dilaver’s men.
The gang war wasn’t the bloodiest battle he had been in, nor was it the toughest. Usually, he and his team would swoop in on a gang such as this one and do their business and leave. They didn’t take any prisoners unless they were ordered to do an extraction, and when they did, the prisoners were handed over to their higher-ups; they never did any interrogation of prisoners.
However, this group of men wasn’t his team. He was working with people he didn’t trust or want to work with. It didn’t bother him to take out the two who were with him earlier; he had seen them in action with prisoners, especially the female ones. In his opinion, they deserved a more painful death.
Sometimes he wondered at his cavalier attitude at taking lives. It seemed ridiculous to justify that it was easier when the men he had killed were called “hostiles” and “targets”; when he didn’t have to live among them and call them by names or listen to their jokes. Killing was killing. But he still wished he could just take them all out instead of living among them and watching them commit the kinds of things against which he was taught to fight.
Then there was the part of him that was horrified that he could just sit here with Dilaver and eat and drink with these men. He had just killed two of their friends. He was planning to get rid of all of them eventually. In his head, anyway. If he ever got out of this in one piece. He knew without a doubt that if Dilaver knew what happened tonight, he would be history.
It was a risk he had taken because of one woman’s request. In his job, many of the risks were calculated; this one wasn’t. He had done it because Amber Hutchens had asked him to. Even though she had given him an adequate reason, in most covert operations it was very rare to divert from the original plan. Short of a total disaster to the entire operation, as a team leader for his SEAL unit Hawk was a stickler for keeping to a plan once the mission was under way. To change direction suddenly could be dangerous to the team.
But this wasn’t a team operation. There was a team of commandos and operatives at different levels of this huge undertaking; he, Hawk McMillan, was a lone assignment here and he was responsible only for himself. As long as he got what GEM and COS Command Center wanted, he could use any means necessary.
Decisions like the one he had made didn’t come easily for Hawk. This was a calculated choice and he couldn’t help but wonder at why he felt he could trust Amber enough to do what he did. She could have easily turned around and betrayed him. After all, she sold “hot” information to the highest bidder. Yet, she was going out with the top lawman in the country. The woman was a contradiction.
Hawk watched one of Dilaver’s thugs whispering to another nearby, both eyeing the lone woman walking in and out of the kitchen with trays of beer and food. No time to reflect. When he saw Amber again, he would just have to get close enough to find out the real person inside. And he wasn’t interested in talking anymore. Macedonia wasn’t a place for long contemplation.
He got up after the woman made her last trip and stood in front of the kitchen doorway. “I don’t know about you, Dragan, but I don’t feel like watching a screaming woman being torn apart by the boys tonight. So, if you don’t mind, any one of your men thinking of going through here for their little fun will have to go through me.”
Dilaver bit into a piece of chicken, chewing with his mouth open as he looked from Hawk to his men, who had also stood up. He grinned and laughed. “Different entertainment.”
Hawk nodded. He could feel the woman behind him, listening in to the conversation. She was muttering prayers as she cowered near the door.
Lord protect us. Lord protect us.He hadn’t been wrong. There was someone else hiding in the kitchen. He casually finished his drink and passed the empty bottle back to the woman in the kitchen, his eyes on the watching men.
“What do you say? Drink or fight, guys?” he asked, giving them a toothy grin. He sincerely hoped they would choose the latter.
