One Minute Out Read online

  There were one thousand places in sight for a man of great skill to hide himself in an overwatch position, and Verdoorn couldn’t help the prickly sensation that came with the worry that the Gray Man had eyes on him right now.

  He turned away from the view, facing the women and girls. In a calm voice, certainly calmer than he felt, he said, “We will all be leavin’ in fifteen minutes. You be good girls, and this will go smoothly.” His voice lowered, turning ominous. “But if you try anything . . . run, scream, fight, resist. If you try . . . anything . . . I’ll punish you myself, then I’ll feed you to the sharks.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Maja sat in the middle of the room, staring at the silhouette of the man who was obviously in charge here, and her heart pounded. Not because of the threat the South African had just made, not because of his dark tone, and not because of the gun he’d just revealed and then put away.

  These reasons were not why her lower back seized with terror, the hairs on her arms stood up, and she thought she might be sick.

  She felt the tremors of terror because, even though she could not see the man’s face, she knew exactly who he was.

  She recognized his voice, and suddenly things began to fall into place in her mind.

  But no comfort came with this newfound understanding. On the contrary, now she was even more certain she’d never, ever go home again.

  The girl the captors had been calling Maja since the day she was taken was actually named Roxana Vaduva. She was Romanian, twenty-three years old, and a university student in Bucharest, majoring in the performing arts.

  But none of that, not even her name, applied to her anymore, now that she’d heard the South African speak. She was certain she’d never be called Roxana again, she’d never go home to Romania again, she’d never live till her next birthday, and of course she would never go back to school.

  She knew what was happening now. It all made perfect sense.

  Roxana had recognized the big South African the instant she heard his voice in the dark, bomb-shattered warehouse in Dubrovnik, because she had first met him in a nightclub a few weeks earlier, when her sister, an investigator from Europol, sent her in to meet some rich bankers in order to help her with a case. The South African had been called John, had been at the American Tom’s side each of the four times she met with him during the week he was in Bucharest. John had never conversed with Roxana directly, but he sat close by, spoke often with Tom’s bodyguard, local mob guys, and the employees of the nightclub. Roxana had asked Tom what John’s role was, shouting the question into his ear during especially loud techno music, but Tom had simply explained that the man was a subordinate from South Africa, and they were on the business trip together. Roxana had wondered about the man after this.

  The bodyguard had been introduced as Sean; he was American, also. He seemed laid-back, especially compared to the bald South African. She’d even caught him drinking a couple of shots of vodka when his boss wasn’t looking.

  But Tom was the most charming of them all. The minute she’d approached his table, he asked her to sit next to him; he’d poured her Dom Perignon and regaled her with stories about his homes in exotic locations around the world.

  She’d been cool and standoffish with the American, despite his instant, obvious fascination with her; Roxana was both a talented actress as well as a confident flirt who knew how to attract men. She didn’t sleep around but wasn’t above getting a guy to buy her a drink in a bar by flashing a couple of glances his way. She knew how to play a role. She’d performed in theater in Bucharest and Timisoara since grade school, and had even done some commercial work for everything from bottled water to makeup to the Romanian car manufacturer Dacia.

  She knew how to sell herself, and she laid the push-pull on thick with Tom, because she saw this as an opportunity to gain the respect of her older, aloof, and dismissive sister.

  Then, on their fourth meeting together, Tom had tried to rape her. Roxana had run away, knowing she’d failed to gain anything useful for her sister, but glad the affair was behind her.

  Until the previous week, when she was drugged while out with friends and kidnapped by a cabdriver, then taken to a cellar somewhere in Bucharest.

  Since that evening she’d felt the panic and desperation, but only tonight did she know, without reservation, that she would not survive.

  She’d been cruel to Tom, he’d gotten angrier and angrier each night that she’d spurned his sexual advances, and then she’d fought with him when he tried to overpower her.

  Her sister had insisted he was just some kind of a banker, but if he was, in fact, involved in this human trafficking ring, she had no doubts that he could now easily get his revenge.

  These were incredibly powerful men in charge of this entire operation, and they could make a young Romanian college student disappear with no effort at all.

  Her mind weighed her options, and she considered killing herself. All she had to do was stand up and throw herself out of the huge paneless window ten meters to her left. Just leap over the little broken wall and fall to her death. Quick and easy.

  But she didn’t.

  She didn’t understand what was holding her back at this point. The desolation she felt knowing that the life she loved was over, to be replaced by a life in hell, was absolute.

  But the truth was that she did not want to die.

  Not until she took some of these bastards with her.

  Roxana Vaduva told herself in that moment that although she was going down, she wasn’t going down without a fight.

  * * *

  • • •

  Scanning with my binos, I eye the Dubrovnik President Hotel, which looks pretty swanky, but to the right of it I see a large patch of empty darkness by the water. As I do my best to adapt to the low light, forms in the dark begin to take shape.

  A concrete pad that looks like it could be used as a little dock juts a few meters out into the bay, and then the hill rising from the water is covered in tall grasses and brush. An unlit three-story building rests halfway up the hill to the road, and although it is standing and appears structurally sound, the window glass is gone and there are several gaping holes in the stone walls. Clearly the building was damaged in the war fought here nearly thirty years ago and has been left unattended since.

  It’s like this all over the Balkans. Chic tourist areas abut bleak, overgrown warscapes. I saw it in Mostar, and I see it here. The war kicked the shit out of these countries and, even though it ended in the 1990s, there is rubble all around still, evidence of the mayhem from long ago.

  I’m flat on my belly on the second floor of an apartment building that’s being built higher on the hill and next to a well-lit and new-looking complex of apartment buildings with views to the bay. Through my twelve-power binoculars I see several SUVs parked near one of the buildings, along with a telltale faint light in a doorway: a sentry checking his phone, perhaps.

  Scanning around for a minute more, I identify more men, all armed, kneeling in the brush or prone on the roof of the building. But it’s hard to see in the dark, even with the binos. If I had an infrared scanner, I imagine I would find a few more jokers down there in the sea grass.

  Checking the ones in view again, I recognize an intensity in their posture, an especially alert pace to their head swivels, a weight to their bearing that’s hard for sentries to maintain for long.

  These assholes are looking for something. Not something; me. The asshole who keeps screwing with their business.

  I breathe slowly, carefully, trying to minimize any movement at all. If any of these dudes have night vision gear I can only remain covert if I don’t move a muscle and keep my body from being exposed to their lenses.

  This is obviously the place where the Albanians were heading before I ended them, but I’m surprised by the number of personnel around. If the obj
ective had been to just grab the Europol lady and take her offshore to a waiting boat, as Talyssa suspected, then why are there so many people standing around here looking for trouble?

  I’m still pondering this minutes later when I see a brief flash of light out in the bay. A few seconds later it flashes again. The sliver of moon above is hidden by clouds at the moment, and I can’t make out anything, but then I see a third flash, and realize this one came not from the water, but from the concrete dock below the large building.

  I focus on the area and see a man standing there with a gun and a light. He flashes it again, signaling out to sea.

  I can’t hear the sound of a motor from here, but I feel certain some small craft is approaching.

  Wanting to take advantage of the temporary moonlight, I shift my focus back to the right towards the hillside, and I make out fresh movement in the dark. A cluster of figures moves away from me, down the hill and towards the water from the darkened building in the direction of the concrete dock.

  I widen my eyes and zoom in on the group.

  Instantly fresh adrenaline begins rushing through me. There are women in the cluster, seven or eight of them, and they are all bracketed by men carrying rifles. Someone in front of the pack is using a weak flashlight beam to help everyone navigate the way through the foliage on the hillside, and to safely get around the grown-over broken concrete strewn all around the hill, wreckage given off by the building when bombs were dropped on it during Croatia’s war with the Bosnian Muslims.

  The women and girls aren’t tied or being held at gunpoint, they’re just walking along. Around them armed men continue shepherding them towards the water.

  These have to be women from the farmhouse in Mostar. No . . . of course they don’t have to be, but I really want them to be. But why are there only eight women here, if I saw something like twenty-five in the cellar? I ask myself this question, but the answer comes quickly when I see a rigid-hull inflatable Zodiac boat motor up to the platform and a man on board throw a line to the individual with the flashlight.

  The Zodiac is larger than a dinghy, but only big enough for ten or so.

  I understand what is happening. The Albanians are bringing the women down to the shore in groups so that a tender can take them out to a mother ship before returning again to shore for the next batch.

  These are the kidnap victims from Mostar, I feel certain of it now. I’m happy I found the prisoners, happier still that they are alive, but I don’t really know what I can do for them right now.

  I count something like ten men in view dotted over the dark hillside and imagine there are more I can’t see.

  I, on the other hand? I’ve got a dirty pistol with a couple of magazines, a knife, a beaten-up and exhausted body, and a bad attitude.

  And that’s not going to be enough.

  No . . . I can’t save the women now, and in this low moment I wonder if I came all this way just to watch them sail off into oblivion.

  Shaking the thought from my head, I tell myself that my objective tonight is to find out what boat they board and which direction they sail. I’ll figure out the next stage of my operation after that.

  I scan back out to sea, look over every vessel I can find. A tanker is darkened a mile or so out; several fishing trawlers are closer to shore, moored or anchored in the bay here.

  There is a well-lit yacht just outside the mouth of the bay, partially hidden from my vantage point by a tiny island a couple hundred yards offshore. I can’t even tell how big the vessel is because it’s hard to judge distance and size over water, especially at night, but from here it looks massive.

  I’ve heard of human smuggling taking place in this part of the world, and the stories often include speedboats that race immigrants across the narrow Adriatic Sea to some town on the eastern coast of Italy, Bari or San Marino being the largest.

  But this big motor yacht hardly looks sufficiently inconspicuous to traffic sex slaves to the West.

  Scanning back around the overgrown property while the Zodiac loads up, I focus on the blown-out windows of the building in the center. There are multiple points of light on the top floor now. I take them for flashlights, as the intensity increases and decreases randomly, presumably as the devices are moved around.

  The remaining women could be held there, but it doesn’t really matter, because there’s not a damn thing I can do from up here.

  The first group is placed in the tender along with two of the armed men, and they begin motoring out into the bay. After just a couple of minutes the clouds cover the moon again, and the tender disappears from view, right before it rounds the little island.

  Much to my surprise, I’m pretty sure now it’s heading for the yacht.

  I back up on the floor of the new construction until I know I’m out of sight of anyone down the hill, and then I grab my gear, sling it all onto my back, and begin running for the staircase.

  I’ve got to get a better look at that yacht, and I can only do so by finding another position to the north of here.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Roxana Vaduva sat on the inflatable sidewall of the tender, feeling it bounce gently while it motored through the early-morning darkness. She peered ahead, looking for some sort of clue as to where she was being taken, but she couldn’t see any obvious destination.

  She’d been in the second of three groups of women taken down to the shore and placed on the inflatable boat. Her placement had not been arbitrary; on the third floor of the bombed-out warehouse, a man with what Roxana took to be a South African accent walked up to her, shined a light on her face, and told her she was to move with the second group.

  The other women and girls took her continued special treatment to mean she was the insider that one of the women claimed to have been warned about by the Serbian guard. Roxana wasn’t a plant, and of course she knew this. But she also realized tonight, for the first time in this ordeal, that she wasn’t just another one of the girls. She had a feeling she understood exactly why she was receiving special treatment.

  It was only when they rounded the little island and she looked out to the southwest, nearly a kilometer in the distance, that she saw the yacht, well lit and dead ahead. The island had shielded her view before, but now she found the vessel before her magnificent.

  As they approached the stern, she caught a glimpse of the name of the boat she was being delivered to. La Primarosa.

  The tender pulled up alongside the yacht and a ladder was lowered, a line was tossed up to a man on deck, and the women were offloaded. Roxana was still climbing onto the main deck behind the others as the little boat with the inflatable hull turned away and began heading back to shore.

  When the eight women in the group stood on the deck, they found themselves temporarily dazzled by the lights, and they squinted and held their hands to their eyes.

  Roxana fought through the glare and looked around. It was a stunning vessel, unlike anything she’d ever seen. A teak deck polished to a soft glow. Glistening wood and brass, high-end electronics in the main saloon, and eight or so smartly dressed deck crew and interior staff members standing shoulder to shoulder near the entrance to the saloon. Several more men, all young, bearded, and wearing black polos and gray trousers, stood along the deck railing facing the saloon. Most had rifles around their necks.

  These were the guards, Roxana knew, but to her this group looked different than the Albanians, and even more different than the South Africans she’d seen in the warehouse. They were all dark complected and tan, and her first impression was that they might be Greek.

  The men looked straight ahead, which surprised Roxana. All the men along this pipeline she had seen had looked the girls up and down as if they were property, but these guards didn’t leer at all. She recognized that this crew was more professional than the Romanians, Serbians, and Albanians she had encountered in the past week.

 
Through the window into the saloon, Roxana saw an attractive woman in her forties wearing a black pantsuit rising confidently out of the spiral staircase to the main deck. She then walked out of the saloon and over to the new arrivals. She spoke to the group in English with what Maja took for an American accent. “Ladies. Welcome. My name is Claudia. We understand the first part of your journey was arduous, but we hope to make your time on board with us unforgettable. Now, if you’ll follow me, I’ll show you to your quarters.”

  The stunned women followed Claudia back down the spiral staircase into the belly of the large vessel. In a corridor wide enough for two to move abreast, they passed another pair of suited men in their twenties with submachine guns on their chests.

  As they continued down the corridor, Claudia stopped at two open doors facing each other. To the right, Roxana looked in and saw the first group of eight already packed into a stateroom. They sat on the king-sized bed, in the two chairs in the little sitting area, or on the carpeted floor. In the second room, across from the first, she saw an identical stateroom, although this one was empty.

  “Ladies,” the American said. “These will be your quarters. Step in and make yourselves comfortable. Once we get everyone on board, food and drinks will be provided, and then everyone can get washed up.”

  The confused women and girls began filing into the room, but as Roxana passed Claudia in the hallway, the American put her hand on the twenty-three-year-old’s shoulder. “Not you, Maja. You will be staying somewhere else. Follow me.”