Page 5 of Code Name: Harbor

I find the dock again. It’s a small private slip and I know the owners. I know every owner on this stretch of waterfront. Fishing family, two brothers, both retired. They head to Arizona every September and don’t come back until April. It should be empty but tonight there’s a forty-foot boat tied off with no running lights and three men standing on the dock. A panel van sits at the end.

My stomach knots as I watch a small line of figures being walked off the boat with hands behind their backs.

“Fuck,” I growl.

“What is it, boss?” Marcus asks, his tone laced with tightness.

“Voronin’s men.”

Marcus moves to my side, and I hand him the binoculars. He lifts them to his face and mutters the same curse before handing the optics back to me.

I look through the ocular lenses again. “I see Sokolov, but I don’t recognize the others.”

“Fucking leeches.”

Leeches is too kind a word for the assholes I’m watching, Mikhail Sokolov being the worst of the worst. As Voronin’s number one man, he handles all the runs. A fourth man has come down the bluff behind the dock, walking a woman in front of him at gunpoint. She’s not part of the women coming off the boat. She’s oddly dressed in tactical pants, a dark jacket and heavy boots. There’s an expensive camera with a long lens hanging from her neck.

Reporter?

“That’s interesting,” I murmur.

“What’s that?”

“They picked up a watcher.”

He swears under his breath, and I wait to see what happens. “We might have to ditch tonight.”

It’s too risky to unload our cargo so close to another trafficker.

“We could head down to Duwamish,” he suggests. “Connie could meet us.”

“Maybe.”

One of the men puts a gun to the woman’s lower back as the others seem to be discussing something. The sound doesn’t reach us, but I can imagine the conversation. The woman’s body language appears composed.

Too composed.

Undercover cop?

Mikhail gestures with his free hand toward the water.

“They’re going to kill her,” I say, the knots in my stomach tightening. I know what fate awaits those women being loaded into the van, but at least they’re likely to live.

This other woman though?

Not a chance.

“What do you want to do?” Marcus asks.

The instinct is to cut bait and run. Not only do I not want to be a witness to human trafficking going down, if that is a cop and there are others around, I don’t want to get caught with my own illegal cargo. I’m not going back to prison.

I calculate scenarios, weighing the risk of waiting. I consider intervening. I could fire a warning shot from the pistol strapped to my leg and perhaps it would be enough to make them scatter.

But that could have future deadly consequences if I’m seen. I’ve spent years cultivating a relationship with Voronin to share these waterways. It’s been a mutual agreement to leave each other alone, and if I were to interfere in his business, it would earn me a bullet to the head. Each of my crew would pay the price as well. Anatoli Voronin is the most ruthless person I’ve ever known.

“Need to make a decision,” Marcus urges.

My conscience is at war. “Just wait a minute.”