The Hunter

by Gennita Low

  “Yes, she’s a pretty woman! Of course she has one. And a powerful man, too. That’s why you should get her between the sheets. It would please me no end to see that son of a bitch CIVPOL chief losing his girlfriend to one of my friends.” Dilaver laughed. “That would be funny. I’ll laugh my arse off. And don’t correct me about ‘ass’ and ‘arse.’ At least I’m not using the stupid phrase ‘you cracked me up.’”

  It still felt strange to know that the Macedonian and he spent time teaching each other idioms in their respective languages. But then, as Jed had warned Hawk before he had taken on the mission, everything was going to be upside down when he became “friends” with the enemy. To get close, he had to establish an easy camaraderie. He hated that piece of crap sitting across the table from him but had to hide it.

  “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 your veza if 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 my kafenas these 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, lis
tening 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.

  12

  Amber smacked the dough on the table with the palm of her hand, sending puffs of flour upward. Nothing from Hawk for two days. No phone signal. She had checked the instant messenger program. Even had it on at night, just in case. Nothing. She folded in the dough and started to knead it, pressing down with her thumbs. Where the hell was he?

  She made a face. He could have contacted her somehow. Even Dija, the mercenary he had helped, had gotten hold of Lily to report that he was safe. It was through Lily that she had an idea of what had happened during the firefight the other day.

  She had sat listening in on Lily’s speakerphone as Dija gave an account of how a man with dark hair and weird golden eyes had saved him from Dilaver’s men. It was full of macho talk. He and the stranger against a dozen, all wielding weapons. He and the stranger engaging in a tough knife battle that was fiercely fought in the dark. And how he and the same man had circled back and stalked the enemy, giving all of them what they deserved, and cutting off—

  It was at this point that Lily had leaned forward and cut off the communication. Obviously the man was full of it. Hawk would never have killed so many and risked Dilaver’s wrath. Dija was, Lily said with a dry smile, a very good embellisher of stories. He was lucky to be alive, and from the sound of it, Hawk was responsible for that fact.

  “I’ll get the real details when I see him on the way back with the girls,” Lily had added. “He was just drunk. They all get drunk after a battle.”

  Amber frowned, her hands automatically molding and kneading the dough. Hawk could have called her. Was he in another battle? Had Dilaver found out and…. After all, it was a risky thing she had asked him to do. Worry niggled at her, and she paused in the middle of her task to wonder at why she would feel that way about someone she barely knew.

  It was more than just a sense of responsibility in case he had been caught. She hadn’t been able to sleep well the past two nights, waking up several times just to go check a blank computer screen. That didn’t have to do with guilt or responsibility. It was worry, and now it worried her that she was doing it.

  As if she needed more on her mind. She had enough to contend with, what with the secret interview with the girls set up by Brad with some international reporter. The reporter wanted to bring two more people with him, a cameraman and a doctor, and Lily had insisted that the doctor be from out of town. Amber had agreed with her. Anyone local could betray locations as well as identities, and the owner of The Last Resort was well known.

  This interview was going to be a huge risk to her and Lily. The reporter had agreed that none of their identities would be revealed in any form of media, but one just never knew. Brad had given him fake identities just to be on the safe side, but how difficult was it to trace Brad, the head of CIVPOL, to her?

  And there was Lily and Brad. Amber shook her head as she rolled the dough into a long tube, then shook a couple handfuls of flour onto the table. She slowly glided the tube over it, lightly patting the flour onto the mixture. Those two were her friends, and something had happened between them during that dinner date. Now they were acting like two mountain cats with heartburn.

  Lily was probably nervous about the coming interview. Well, Amber was, too, but she didn’t go around trying to bite Brad’s head off whenever he asked her about the preparations. Brad, on the other hand, was mad about something else entirely. After one of their sharp exchanges, she would catch him standing back, hands in pockets, that brooding stare studying Lily’s every move as her friend pretended not to notice.

  Amber told herself it was none of her business. Usually she would play the peacekeeper, but this time there was a tension that wasn’t there before. She absentmindedly pinched the bridge of her nose. Brad would be here later. She was determined to pull Lily out of wherever she was hiding and get the three of them up in her dining room to talk without—

  The outside connecting door to the kitchen opened. Thinking it was Lily, Amber didn’t look up immediately.

  “I was just thinking about you,” she said, pinching off dollops of the dough.

  “Nice thoughts, I hope,” a male voice answered.

  Her gaze swung upward in startled surprise. Hawk stood at the doorway, his eyes that odd glittering color that reminded her of a wild animal. He looked like one, too, his clothes rumpled and stained, his handsome face dusty, covered by several days’ stubble. There was something dangerous about him. Amber straightened from the table. Why was her heart bursting into a smile at the sight of him?

  “Don’t you ever knock?” she asked. It wasn’t opening hours yet. Locks, it seemed, weren’t much of an obstacle for him.

  He sauntered in slowly, his gaze traveling from her face down to her floury fingers sticky with cookie dough. She was suddenly very aware of how civilized her surroundings were compared to what he must have been in the last few days.

  He stopped in front of her. “Ja sam gladna,” he said softly.

  “Want something to eat?” she asked, conscious of the way he was looking at her, as if he were hungry for something else.

  “Yes.”

  She indicated a nearby chair. He sat and watched as she put away the dough and cleared the table. “Are you all right? You’ve been away for a few days.” She patted the right side of her face, near the jawline. “There’s a cut there…I think. You’d better take care of that. It’s caked with dirt.”

  “Later.”

  She poured a cup of coffee from the carafe. “Cream and sugar?”

  “No.”

  “Anything particular for food?”

  His eyes gleamed and his teeth were very white against his tanned face. She wouldn’t quite classify that as a smile. He didn’t answer, either. The man was obviously not in the mood to talk right now. Another side of him. Where was all that sexy bantering?

  She went into the huge refrigerated pantry that kept all the restaurant food and took out anything that would heat up quickly. She glanced back at Hawk now and then and found him watching her with half-closed eyes. She was used to men looking at her—having grown up as the blond, blue-eyed missionary’s daughter, she had been in countries where her coloring attracted all kinds of attention. Her parents had taught her to treat it like background music, sometimes noticeable, sometimes slightly uncomfortable.

  The man sitting there with that intense look in his eyes couldn’t be ignored like background anything. He was too still. Too alive. Too damn sexy sitting there like a wild animal in her spic-and-span kitchen.

  And too dangerous to ignore.

  Hawk knew he shouldn’t be here. Not in his current mood. But he couldn’t help himself. He was drawn here as he was to his own sanctuary, his little private place on the island back home. And he wasn’t quite sure why.

  His island getaway off Florida was perfect when he felt like this—a little wild, a little melancholy, the need to connect to nature in its most natural setting, without battles and strategy planned ahead by humans. He could sit for hours playing with his fishing nets and going out to sea pretending to be Captain Ahab or the Old Man. Hours and hours of just sitting there enjoying the nothingness of contemplation, his mind at rest.

  But he had a fierce need tonight, after two days of going to battle for…nothing. He had never fought for a side he didn’t choose before, nor had he ever killed just for the sake of killing. It had left a hole inside him, one that seemed to be tearing wider. He wasn’t sure why, but the thought of Amber in her kitchen was on his mind.

  He didn’t want to talk to her on the phone or on the instant message pr
ogram; he wanted to see her. So he had asked Dilaver to drop him off here when they were heading back into town.

  “Doing your own celebration, Hawk, eh?” Dilaver had chuckled with a wink.

  Hawk didn’t feel the need to point out that there was nothing for him to celebrate. The only good thing he had done on this trip was to save that widow and her daughter, who had been hiding under the kitchen sink, from being used by the bastards. No one had dared pick up his challenge of a fight, not when they’d seen Dilaver warningly smack the young thug who had carelessly shrugged off the deaths of two of their gang. He had hoped for some outlet to the rage inside.

  Worse, after that night, they had gone off to raid a rival encampment in a small village town, one not endorsed by the KLA. Dilaver was, after all, one of the KLA’s own, and those illegal weapons Hawk had seen went right into their hands. That was what he was fighting for, Hawk told himself—to get hold of the one weapon that must not fall into enemy hands.

  The battle had been bloody. As he was with Dilaver most of the time, Hawk had to be part of the fighting in a real way. The other side was no better than this side, he had told himself. But he couldn’t help thinking what if it happened to be his SEAL brothers, and he was still undercover? What would he do then? Such thoughts were dangerous in the heat of battle, and he had cut them off almost as soon as they surfaced and had gone into combat mode.

  At the end of the day, Dilaver had captured his enemies and as a warning, chopped everyone’s middle finger off. And that was it. That was the fucking point of the battle—to chop off everyone’s middle finger.

  Driving back into town, with all the noisy aftermath of men high on adrenaline, all Hawk could think about was Amber and hamburgers. He wasn’t a man who questioned his own private needs. He knew where to find both, and he went for them.

  And she had been in the kitchen, looking so damn good, he had wanted to cross the room and take her on the kitchen table right then and there. There were smudges of flour on her nose and chin; her fingers looked sexily edible as he watched her knead and roll dough, a little frown on her forehead as if she were thinking unpleasant thoughts.