Savage Recruit (Ryan Savage Thriller Series Book 8)
hood was plucked from his head just before the door slammed shut and he was left alone.He blinked in the low light and took in his environment. The room was small, no larger than four square meters, made entirely of freshly poured concrete—the ceiling too. A small vent rattled above his head, and a naked bulb hung in the corner. A metal table sat before him, a chair on the other side. That was all. No window, no mirror, no cameras.
Between the dim light and the dark fear assaulting his mind, Bahar lost track of time. He waited, and then waited some more. His wrists ached behind his back, and his mouth was as dry as the inside of a flour jar.
Who had brought him here? And just where was here? What did they want with him?
Whatever the answers might be, he was sure that he would find out soon enough. And he was also certain of something else: he would never see his grandmother or his sister again. May God be merciful to them.
Bahar passed his time in the unnerving silence considering anything he may have done wrong. He had spoken nothing of his task, had been meticulous in the planning. His ability to network and plan while staying unnoticed was the very reason he had been selected. He may yet be a novice, but that did not mean he was incompetent.
Multiple possibilities ran through his mind, none of them good, none with outcomes that did not end with him in a dark prison for the remainder of his life. Or death.
Hours after he had arrived, after some of the initial adrenaline wore off and his head bobbed downward in a sleepy haze, the door scraped open behind him. Bahar jerked awake and sat upright, adrenaline flooding him all over again. The door slammed shut, and as he turned timidly in his seat, his most feared nightmare bloomed into reality.
He saw the laced boots first, then the cargo pants. As the man came around and stood on the other side of the table, Bahar recognized the distinct combat uniform of an American soldier. His icy blue eyes burned into Bahar’s. The young man looked away.
The soldier pulled out the chair across the table and sat. Placing a hand on the table, he slowly tapped his index finger in a slow cadence.
Bahar could feel the cold bore of his stare. He thought he might throw up. “What do you want with me?” he blurted in English. “What am I doing here?”
The officer gave him a hard, thin-lipped smile. “Bahar Shakor,” he said slowly. “I am Captain Savage. You and I—we need to have a little chat.”
Chapter One
Nice, France
Four Days Ago
The sun was warm on his face as his skis crested the speedboat’s wake and he cut away, returning to the flat surface of the dark blue water. His skis shimmered across it, the spray from the boat’s wake cascading by on his left. The burn in his legs continued to grow more intense, spreading past his knees and upward into his loins, the sensation of hot grease cascading through his veins. He had been holding the same rigid position on the water for nearly five minutes. He wasn’t a young man anymore. He wasn’t old either, but when you only go water skiing two or three days out of 365, it was hard for the body to keep up. Tomorrow and the following day, he would certainly be aching in places he forgot he had.
Florin Gronozav turned his attention to the boat and patted the top of his head. He was finished; thirty minutes in the skis was plenty. The pilot acknowledged him, slowed slightly, and carved a wide, foamy arc across the water as he made for a mooring field half a kilometer to the west.
The day was absolutely perfect: a cloudless sky and temperatures that had already peaked in the high seventies. In the distance, bikini-clad women lay sunbathing on the yachts, sailboats, and speedboats that peppered the enviable coast of the French Riviera.
Florin loved it here, so much so that he could not decide whether Nice or Lisbon clinched the top spot on his list of favorite summer destinations. His preferred winter destination was Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Germany. Nowhere came close to competing with it. Garmisch was home to the Zugspitze, the highest peak in the German Alps, and the town itself was rich in old-world Bavarian charm Florin loved so much. With each passing year, he saw his distaste for the urban accoutrements of the modern world growing stronger. He despised the thirty-story monoliths that made up every downtown, the concrete fields they stood in, and the light pollution that blurred out nearly every glowing speck in the starry heavens. And then there was the traffic, the noise, and the hurried bustle that made you think everyone was going to miss out on the creamy center of life if they didn’t get to their destinations in the next ten seconds. All that was for some people. But not for him. He preferred the slower pace of life and rich cultures of old-world towns scattered all over Europe. The quiet time he had spent on the Riviera these last few days had ticked away in a slow crawl. Just Florin’s pace. And it would have been the beginning of a perfect vacation if it wasn’t for that one nagging problem that was weighing him down like a pair of concrete boots. All the women and all the massages, all the sunbathing and water skiing, couldn’t shake the sensation of personal doom that had drifted over him like an ominous cloud.
As Florin skied into the mooring field and reached his destination, the muscles in his thighs burned at peak exertion. The pilot slowed and Florin bled off speed and sank back into the water. He slipped his feet from the bindings and gathered the skis to his chest. The pilot drew in the rope and then idled over.