One Minute Out Read online

  I talk too much in times like this. I should’ve taken this guy out from a quarter mile away, forgotten about penetrating his compound, and there would have been no talking.

  But I am done talking now, so I put the knife against his bare stomach. Before I even draw blood, though, he says something that makes me hold again.

  “Girls! Girls here. You take. I give all to you. Perfect girls. The best in world.”

  At first I think he’s talking about the young woman who just ran out of the room, but he definitely said “girls,” so I next assume he means the three female cooks who I saw bringing the food out to the security guys. I’m not really looking to open a restaurant, so I don’t answer. I recover again, then ready the knife to drag it across Babic’s midsection.

  “Twenty-three. No! Twenty-five. Twenty-five beautiful ladies. High class. For you! Yes!”

  Wait. What? I ease up on the blade, but just a little.

  “Twenty-five ladies, here? You’re lying.”

  “I show you. You take. Make you happy.”

  Oh my God. Is this motherfucker a war criminal and a pimp?

  “You were already going to die poorly, Ratko. If you give me reason to form an even lower opinion of your character, this might get even nastier.”

  He doesn’t get what I’m saying. He responds, “Here. In cellar. Beautiful. All for you, friend.”

  I close my eyes. Shit. There’s always something. Some fucking fly in the ointment.

  The knife is poised; I am ready. I think about just killing him, ignoring the crazed rantings of a condemned man.

  But no.

  Because I am an expert in detecting deception, and I don’t think this asshole’s lying. There probably are some more women down here, and my educated guess is that they’d rather not be.

  And, much as I’d like to, I just can’t walk away from that. It’s my fatal flaw: time after time my conscience gets me deeper into the shit.

  “Show me.”

  “Yes, I show you.”

  I draw the Glock again, sheathe the knife, and push him back out into the hallway.

  We move quickly to the door at the end of the corridor where the music is coming from, the tip of my suppressor six inches from the back of his neck. I don’t know where the woman with the black eye has gone, but I assume she took the staircase up and is making a run for it.

  In seconds Ratko and I arrive at the door; he taps a code into a keypad and turns the latch. Quickly I shove him inside, rush in behind him, and pull the door shut, because in the hall I was exposed to anyone who came down the stairs at the opposite end.

  The room is so dark I reach for my NOD to pull it down over my eyes, but Ratko flips a light switch.

  A low-wattage red bulb hanging from a cord from the ceiling gives an eerie dim scarlet glow over the room.

  Before I can even focus on what’s before me, my earpiece comes alive.

  I don’t speak Serbian, but it’s clear: the security detail is performing a radio check.

  But it barely registers. I am too fixated on what I see.

  A room, about ten feet wide and twenty-five feet deep. Walls of bare earth and wooden beams. There are more dirty mattresses on the floor, more broken sofas around the perimeter. A row of three chemical toilets, essentially buckets with cracked plastic seats, sit exposed in the corner on my right.

  And two dozen or so women, some may be girls, sitting, squatting, lying flat. Pressed close together and forming a single life-form in the red dim. Someone turns off the music and I hear coughing, crying.

  I see chains, and realize they are all shackled by their ankles to eyebolts in the floor.

  I smell bad food, cigarette smoke, sweat, shit, piss, and, above it all, absolute and utter despair.

  No one speaks a word. They just stare at me with wide, fearful, imploring eyes.

  What . . . the . . . fuck?

  I’ve seen some things in my days. I’ve never seen this.

  “I tell you,” Ratko says while standing next to me. “Best in world for best in world. All for you, Gray Man.”

  I’m not the “best in world,” and though the ex-general keeps saying it, these people are probably not “best in world” at anything in this condition. But that isn’t for me to judge. They are all daughters or wives or sisters or mothers. And they are all human trafficking victims, it is plain to see.

  I have no idea what they’re doing here, why an old Bosnian general would have so many slaves with him on his farm, but whatever the reason, I know one thing for certain.

  All these women and girls, all of them are human beings, and right now they are circling the drain of a sick fucking world.

  I was mad before. Now I’m wild with rage.

  I raise my Glock at Ratko with my right hand while looking back to the ladies. “Those of you who speak English, close your eyes, and translate that to the others.”

  That gets Ratko agitated, but some of the ladies do as instructed. Others just keep looking on, knowing exactly what is about to happen, but unafraid.

  Babic speaks in a rush now. “There are more. Many more. In two weeks. You get them all. You come back. I give to you when they come.”

  I can’t listen to another fucking word out of this piece of shit’s mouth, my fury is so overpowering. My right hand clenches, not from the seething anger, but because I want to hear my gun go bang.

  My gun goes bang.

  I don’t even look at the general as the hollow-point round slams into his fat bare belly. The suppressor, plus the fact that we’re down in the basement, makes me feel confident I am still covert. He thumps to the floor, writhing and moaning. I glance his way briefly, and shoot him twice more.

  His body jolts with the impact of the rounds, then stills.

  The radio check continues in my ear. I hear the clipped cadence of different men as each calls in, with either a name or a location or something else in Serbo-Croatian that I can’t understand.

  I tune it out again and look up to the large mass of women in the tight space in front of me. “Who speaks English?”

  All eyes are open now, and one blonde stands up in the middle of the crowd.

  “I do.” Other women call out, as well.

  “Listen carefully. There’s an old bus behind the house. We’re going to get on it and get out of here, but we have to work fast, and we have to work together.”

  The standing woman—she sounds like she could be Ukrainian to me—simply says, “No, sir.”

  I’ve turned to check down the hall, but my head spins back towards her. “What?”

  “It is not possible. We stay. We must stay.”

  “Are you out of your mind? None of you look like you want to—”

  But I hold a hand up, telling the women to wait a moment, because the earpiece I stole from the security guard upstairs just came alive again.

  A man keeps repeating a word in a questioning tone. “Milanko? Milanko?”

  I guess I now know the name of the dude I dumped in the closet.

  The voice on the radio turns loud and authoritative, clearly telling someone, probably everyone, to get their asses to the farmhouse to see what happened to the guy at the top of the stairs.

  Back to the crowd I say, “We have to get the hell out of here right—”

  “Sir.” The standing woman speaks up again. I can tell even through the grime on her face and the bad light of the basement that she is young and pretty. “We have family. Ukraine. Romania. Moldova, Chechnya, Kosovo, Bulgaria. We leave . . . someone back home kill our family.” She shakes her head. “We no can leave.”

  For a moment I am frozen in place. I look at a busload of kidnapping victims who don’t want to leave their hellish prison; I know that something like a dozen men and a pair of attack dogs are about to rain down on my position, and I don’t have a
clue what the fuck I’m supposed to do now.

  FOUR

  Five men rushed into the house from various stations, all with guns drawn and held at the low ready because, for all they knew at this point, Milanko’s radio had failed or he’d dropped it in the toilet.

  But when Karlo got to the top of the stairs he thought to open the closet just behind Milanko’s chair, and when he did so, a very dead team leader flopped out onto the runner lining the floor.

  He called it in immediately, and within seconds the dogs were brought from the kennels and let loose in the farmhouse.

  * * *

  • • •

  I turn off the red light in this chamber of horrors, open the door to the cellar hallway, and notice that the Christmas lights running along the ceiling are plugged into an outlet within reach. I unplug them, casting the hallway into darkness, and I flip the NOD down over my eyes. Holstering the Glock, I heft my B&T MP9 machine pistol, extend the short stock, and bring the holographic sight up to eye level.

  I see nothing, but I hear the careful footfalls of a single person descending the circular staircase past the open doorway thirty feet up the hall.

  Then the footsteps stop.

  To the ladies behind me I ask, “Is there another way out of here?”

  One of them answers. “We no leave.”

  I’m over it by now, so I snap back at her. “I’m talking about me! You guys can do whatever the hell you want.”

  Can’t help the helpless, I tell myself, and then I consider their situation. If I had someone special back at home, I wouldn’t want them to pay a price for my noncompliance.

  But I don’t, so my ass is out of here.

  A lady says, “Only the stairs. There is no other way.”

  I turn back to them quickly. “They will move you after this.”

  The blonde who spoke before says, “They move us anyway. This is just a stop. We go to Europe, America. They use us for as long as they can, then . . . who knows?”

  Another woman says, “We are going to die.”

  She was immediately hushed by another English speaker.

  The blonde’s voice is grave. “They’ll punish us, now. Because of you coming here.”

  I’m certain she’s right. Anyone horrible enough to keep slaves for sex work is horrible enough to discipline the slaves for something that isn’t their fault.

  I find my feet rooted to the floor. I don’t want to leave these girls, but my tactical brain can’t find a solution to all this. “I’m sorry,” I say. It’s not enough. It’s nothing, in fact, but I’ve got nothing else.

  I don’t ponder my words long, because almost instantly I’m racing up the dark hallway towards the staircase, leaving two dozen desperate women and girls behind me.

  Nice work, Gentry.

  It seems my footfalls make noise in the hall because I see the dude in the stairwell lean out with his rifle. I have my B&T on full auto, and I fire a pair of three-round bursts at him while at a dead sprint. One or more of the rounds hits his hand or arm, because he drops the weapon and tumbles to the floor.

  I take the Swiss-made machine pistol in my left hand as I run, aim it high at the stairs, and as I leap over the wounded guard, I draw my Glock. I point it down between my legs and fire twice into the wounded sentry during my vault so he can’t draw a backup weapon and shoot me from behind.

  It’s dirty, but people who offer quarter in a gunfight typically don’t make good gunfighters.

  I holster the pistol but sense new movement on the staircase now, which is why I’ve kept my machine pistol aimed there. As soon as I see a rifle and a man holding it, I fire a long burst. The sentry falls forward and rolls down the stairs, and I leap over his sliding body to begin my ascent.

  Angling my B&T high and leaning out to cut the corners quicker than if I just kept running up the middle of the stairs, I catch the side of a descending man’s head in my sights before he sees me. I fire four rounds at him, and down he goes, ass over teakettle, his weapon clanking along with the thuds and slaps of his body as he tumbles down the stairs. I round the landing below the ground floor and vault this guy like I did the one below.

  Keep coming, assholes. I can do this all day.

  I hear a volley of impossibly loud gunfire above me, and the plaster on the wall inches to my right is chewed into dust by pistol rounds, and this tells me I probably can’t do this all day. I dive flat on the steps and return fire, almost blindly, nearly emptying my magazine, and then I roll tight against the wall, my head facing up as I reload.

  Two men look over the side one story up, whipping short-barreled rifles down at me as they do so.

  I slam the magazine in and rake them with outgoing fire, dumping two dozen rounds onto their position above. One man gets a single shot off before he flies back out of the view, and the second sentry spins away and falls onto the stairs above an instant later.

  I’m up and moving again, bursting through the door on the ground floor, where I catch one man kneeling down, getting into a fighting position. He obviously heard the battle in the stairwell and wanted to be prepared in case I made it out of there.

  I made it out of there, and he’s not prepared, so I fire the last six rounds from the B&T at him, killing him where he lies, and then I drop the empty gun on its sling and pull my Glock again.

  The house is dark, but I see a door open slowly on my right. I spin my weapon towards the movement, take up the give in the trigger safety on my weapon, then see the face of a middle-aged woman looking out at me. She isn’t holding a weapon, so I keep going, but as I near her position, I shout, “Close your door!”

  My ears are ringing from the gunfight in the stairwell, so if she says anything to me, I don’t hear it. But at least she shuts the door.

  I attempt a mental head count while I run. There were twelve security on the property when I came in; I knifed the dude upstairs, took down four in the stairwell, and another here.

  Six left. Shit.

  I open a door to find a bathroom with no window large enough to escape from. As I turn out of the space, I realize that I have not accounted for all the threats.

  It’s not just six sentries. It’s also the dogs. Can’t forget about the two—

  I face the room again and see a massive black form flying through the air in the darkness right at me. One of the Belgian Malinois slams my pistol against my chest as he knocks me against the wall. We both fall to the floor, and his crazed teeth snatch my right hand. The hand is wearing a Kevlar-lined glove with the trigger finger cut out, so he doesn’t rip it off immediately. Still, I know that with a simple shake or two he can snap my wrist.

  With my left hand I punch the dog hard in the snout, and he lets go and recoils an instant, but I’d broken this hand a couple months back, and the pain from the punch prevents me from driving it harder into the canine’s face.

  The dog recovers quickly, then charges at me again.

  He leaps, I duck, the eighty-pound animal flies into the bathroom, and I spin around and grab the door latch, yanking it closed in his snarling face.

  Hefting my pistol, I stagger a few feet; the damn dog knocked the wind out of me, but soon I’m heading off again.

  I don’t shoot dogs. Ever. Still, my Glock is up, and I’m muttering to myself as if I’m talking to the barking dog in the bathroom. “Where’s your buddy? Where’s your buddy?”

  I hear continuous voices in the earpiece, and I really wish I spoke Serbo-Croatian, because I could use some clarity on where the other halfdozen assholes are right now. I make my way into the kitchen, scanning for threats as I advance, then pass a stairway on my right. Looking up with my pistol trained, I see two men rush past up there, but neither looks down in my direction, probably because they don’t have night vision.

  I don’t fire; I continue through the kitchen towards a door, and then, through
my ringing ears, I hear a sound behind me in the large living area I’ve just passed.

  Paws beating on hardwood, getting louder and louder.

  The other dog is running me down from behind.

  “Shit!” Fresh panic wells in me, and I know I have to make it outside, because I don’t shoot dogs.

  I run as fast as I can, desperate to get out before the black monster rips me apart, but when I put my hand on the latch and pull, nothing happens.

  I see two deadbolt locks, and both are engaged.

  Behind me the beast keeps running; it snarls frantically as it races across the kitchen tile.

  I’m in trouble, serious trouble, but I don’t shoot dogs.

  I turn one of the locks, then begin to reach for the other, but I can tell I’m not going to get out in time. He’s only three huge bounds away from sinking his teeth into the back of my neck.

  Fuck it. I’m shooting this dog.

  Spinning around, I lift my pistol to line it up on the animal’s fat face; he’s ten feet away, just on the far side of the stairwell.

  The Malinois launches himself at me just as a man appears, leaping into view from the stairs, obviously responding to my shout or the sound of movement down here in the kitchen.

  He turns towards me, swinging his subgun, and the big canine slams into the man’s back, knocking him facedown and causing the dog to roll and slide on the tile, crashing through chairs and a small wooden table.

  I turn back to the door, open the second lock, and dive outside while pulling it shut behind me.

  I’m in the well-lit drive; there could be four or five guns lining up on me right now, but I don’t even scan for threats.

  I run. I just . . . fucking . . . run.

  * * *

  • • •

  Twenty-four-year-old Liliana Brinza raced through the woods down the hill, lost in the dark with no real concept of where she was or where she was going; all she knew for certain was that she had to get the hell away from the dungeon she’d been living in for the past week or so.

  She’d arrived at night, and since then she’d lived in the room with the red light, only to be dragged out, away from the other women, once or twice a day to be raped.