On his way over, the Avenue Juan de Borbón had been almost empty, the bars and nightclubs that lined it locked up tight. But with the sun on its way down that had changed. Now the street was alive, the neon signage from the bars bouncing off the stucco walls, illuminating the sea of flesh that writhed and danced in time with the music pouring from the clubs.
Well, shit.
Hayes stepped off the curb and turned to the side, trying to shoulder his way to the edge where the crowd thinned out, but it was no use. He was hemmed in, blinded by the flashing lights and thumping bass from the clubs and unable to break free of the sea of flesh carrying him down the street.
The panic attack started in the pit of his stomach, a cold twinge that raced up his spine and into his ears, where it hissed like static from a busted TV.
Not now, he begged, fighting the urge to lash out at the bodies pressing against him and the hands clawing at his skin.
He kept his head down and his hand clamped over his pistol, twisting and shouldering his way through the crowd, fighting his way to the edge.
Then he broke through and found himself standing alone, staring at the white halo of the stadium lights beating down on the marina a hundred yards ahead.
Almost there, the voice taunted.
“Fuck off,” Hayes said, wiping the sweat from his forehead.
Growing up in Tennessee, Hayes’s knowledge of boats was limited to fishing trips with his dad in Florida and the riverine training he’d received in Special Forces. But you didn’t need to be Magellan to figure out that if renting a twenty-foot Yamaha center console cost five hundred dollars a day, owning one of these yachts cost a hell of a lot more.
He guessed that there were at least a hundred million dollars’ worth of boats floating in the marina. Which is why he was surprised that the only people keeping him from walking down the pier and stealing whichever one he wanted were the doughy security guard sleeping in the air-conditioned shack and the single attendant fueling a Hacker Runabout from the gas pump on the edge of the pier.
But Hayes wasn’t buying it.
Mainly because he’d seen what lay beneath the town’s warm and sandy façade. Knew that the majority of the yachts bobbing in the marina didn’t belong to the rich tourists, but to the smugglers and drug runners who used Ceuta as a base of operations. People of means, guarded by serious men trained to shoot first and ask questions later. A fact that promised that somewhere down there, hiding in the shadows, were men with guns.
Only one way to find out.
Hayes skirted the marina, searching the slips until he located the black speedboat bobbing next to the Westport tri-deck he’d seen earlier. He was close enough now to read the name off the bow—The Mako—and recognize the model. It was an Outerlimits SV43—one of the fiberglass rocket ships drug runners used to outrun the Guardia Civil ships that patrolled the area.
It was the perfect boat for the job at hand, but first Hayes had to knock out the lights.
He found the junction box on the northwest side of the marina, a brushed metal square attached to a utility pole three feet from the guard shack. In a perfect world, one where Hayes had the time and resources to come up with a plan that didn’t involve him going to jail or getting shot, he would have requested a wiring diagram. Used it to find the upstream source of the thick black power cable that went into the side of the junction box. Once he located it, an explosive charge with a time delay would have allowed him to kill the power at his leisure.
But now all he had was a ticking clock and the gear in his pack.
He opened the front pocket and pulled out a magnesium road flare, a miniball fragmentation grenade, and a roll of duct tape.
Hayes stripped a length of tape from the roll, ripped it free, and stuck it to the front of his pants. He zipped the bag, stuffed the flare into his back pocket, and, holding the grenade, stepped out of the shadows.
Staying low, he eased onto the pier, footsteps silent as he slipped past the guard shack. At the junction box, he secured the grenade to the electrical cable with the strip of tape.
This is a terrible idea, the voice said.
As Hayes pulled the pin from the frag, he realized that, for once, he agreed with the voice.
Too late now.
He moved toward the Hacker Runabout, knowing he had about five seconds before the minifrag went off and all hell broke loose.
The attendant heard him coming and glanced up, a bored look on his face as he continued refueling the boat.
“There’s a fire,” Hayes said, tugging the road flare from his back pocket.
“What? Where?” the man asked.
“Right here,” he answered, scraping the nose of the flare across the abrasive striker.
The flare came to life in a sputtering rush of smoke and magnesium, the attendant’s features changing from boredom to alarm when Hayes dropped the flare atop the life jacket in the stern of the boat.
“If I were you, I’d get the hell out of here,” he said.
The man nodded, and leaving the nozzle in the Hacker ran toward the guard shack, screaming at the top of his lungs.
Hayes pushed himself into a jog and had just clattered aboard the Mako when the minifrag detonated and the marina went dark. He ducked behind the wheel, tore open his bag, and fumbled around inside until he found the crap pair of Russian night-vision goggles he’d borrowed from Vlad.
With a twist of the switch he activated the goggles and night-shifted to an emerald-green twilight. Compared to the PVS-23s or the GPNVG-18s the SEALs were using, the Russian-made night vision was junk, but he could see and that was all that mattered.
After casting off the lines, he ducked into the cockpit and was about to use the knife to snap the ignition lock when Hayes saw the key dangling from the dash.
It’s about time I caught a break.
He twisted the key to the on position and the gauges flickered to life, filling the cockpit with a pale yellow glow. Hayes was checking the fuel level when he heard the crackle of static from the Westport tri-deck, followed by an angry voice.
“Alexander, what the hell is going on out there?” the voice demanded in French.
Hayes followed the voice to the sundeck and found a man standing at the rail, the unmistakable outline of a submachine gun hanging from the sling around his neck.
Told you this was a bad idea, the voice said.
The man lifted the submachine gun to his shoulder, the bone-white glare of the LED weapon light mounted to the fore-end cutting through the darkness like a knife.
“Some kind of explosion, boss,” the man replied, “looks like a boat is on fire.”
“Get everyone on deck, now!” the voice screamed over the radio.
Hayes ducked beneath the dash, adjusted the brightness of the gauge lights, and then hit the power button on the Simrad HALO surface radar. During the day he wouldn’t need the GPS or the navigation computer to clear the marina, but at night it was a different story. And Hayes knew that even with the night vision, trying to get the Mako out to sea without the nav computer was a great way to end up as a grease stain on the rocks.