by Matt Rogers
Sure enough, trouble presented itself. King rounded a corner and found himself in a narrow street filled with rubbish and devoid of any significant lighting. Long shadows lay across the sidewalk, which was much less populated than other areas of Giza. This section of the city — at its outer limits — seemed darker. More decaying.
So did its inhabitants.
A pair of unruly young Middle-Eastern men laughed sharply as they tossed some kind of pocket knife back and forth, each catching it by the hilt in turn. King made to move past them, and they wheeled on the spot and stared at him for an uncomfortable length of time.
King knew that if he continued on — refusing confrontation — they would follow.
That was the last thing he wanted.
No matter his skill set, there was not much to counter-act a knife in the back. He opted to meet their gaze, grinding to a halt alongside them, challenging them to any kind of physical confrontation.
The youth in front was more than happy to oblige.
Surprisingly, he was almost as tall as King. Despite that, his frame couldn’t have been more gangly. King seemed to outweigh him by thirty or forty pounds. Nevertheless, he was hopped up on some kind of drugs, eyes dilated and unblinking, tongue flicking incessantly over dry lips. He twirled the pocket-knife — which had been sharpened beyond necessity — in his right hand.
He spat something in Arabic, flecks of saliva dotting King’s shirt. He sneered. The knife hand twitched in place, just waiting for the opportune time to strike.
Behind him, the second youth got ready for a fight. King guessed they despised foreigners. He saw the first guy’s wrist twitch again, and realised that he would have to do something. They had brought it on themselves by flashing a weapon which had very real and very dangerous consequences.
They had it coming.
He acted in the blink of an eye. Despite his injured state, enough of an experience gap separated them to end the altercation in a single strike. One moment he stood frozen to the spot, assessing the two twenty-somethings with a false expression of fear plastered across his face.
It caused them both to drop their guard. It made them think they had the upper hand.
So when his shin sunk into the side of the first guy’s knee hard enough to buckle the leg and tear the ligaments, the young man couldn’t help but let out a cry of surprise.
He went down on the injured leg like a deadweight. The knife clattered to the pavement as both his hands flew to the aggravated knee, clutching it in an attempt to deal with the world of hurt.
King simply turned and walked away. The other guy would be too shocked to act. He had seen it a million times before.
It seemed his entire life revolved around conflict and confrontation.
So be it, he thought.
He continued into the more desolate region of Giza, and before long any sign of civilian life vanished. The residential buildings became more and more interspersed, until finally they disappeared too, replaced by empty lots and flat stretches of sand. He followed a narrow path — overgrown and uneven — that curved around the far side of the Valley Temple of Khafre, an enormous labyrinth of archaeology at one end of the complex. He imagined it was not the most popular path into the Necropolis — home to the Great Sphinx and the multitude of pyramid complexes dotting around the land.
Beyond, the Sahara Desert.
King got his first proper look at the entire complex as he crested a rise, and let out a low whistle.
All in all, an unimaginable level of casualties could result from a few hundred pounds of Semtex over such an open area. There were numerous hotspots where he imagined tourists would conglomerate in order to find the best views of the pyramids. The structures themselves were mightily impressive. Despite the brevity of the situation, King couldn’t help but stop and admire the sight.
The full moon cast a pale glow over the massive temples of stone. They were striking when set against the backdrop of the Sahara Desert, like beacons amidst a wasteland. There were three main pyramid complexes, and the Great Sphinx rested a little further away, right near the Valley Temple.
He looked down on the massive site and pictured swathes of innocent men and women and children decked out in wide-brimmed hats and covered in sunscreen, snapping photos and staring in awe at the great archaeological builds. Then he pictured three hundred pounds of Semtex detonating all at once, violent and vicious in their shockwaves, sweeping across the currently-desolate precincts and blasting limbs from bodies, incinerating people at will.
He imagined the screams and the outcries of the wounded.
He felt a steely resolve and pressed forward toward the complex.
He came across the first obstacle on his path. This far off the beaten track, there were no live security guards present, but King spotted the ten-foot-tall chain link fence running around the perimeter of the site. Over the years it had been battered by the unforgiving desert heat and winds. He noticed great swathes of the fence had rusted, turning the metal from grey to a deep beige.
Those sections would be weaker…
On the flight to Cairo, he had read of the security measures the Egyptian government had put into place around the site. In 2008, they had installed the fence, along with close to two-hundred CCTV surveillance cameras and alarm sensors along the perimeter. During opening hours, all visitors were funnelled through a collection of security gates equipped with metal detectors and X-ray machines.
Despite this, Nasser and an army of hired help had managed to smuggle in such a devastating arsenal of explosives. King guessed it had happened piece by piece. They had either paid someone to utilise a back-door, or found a weakness in the procedures.
King didn’t care about drawing attention. If the motion sensors went off and the cameras filmed him breaking in, it would only bring extra security into the site. He saw no problem with that. The more trouble he stirred, the increased likelihood of the boy with the detonator getting spooked.
He relished any opportunity to terrify the kid out of acting.
He followed the fence along until he came across a particularly weak section of the chain. There were already several gashes and cuts in the metal, likely made by adventurous backpackers looking to weasel their way in for free. King grabbed two handfuls of the fence and tugged hard, drawing veins to the surface of his forearms like twin road maps. The metal groaned and sagged, and a section of the fence folded outward.
He shimmied through the newly-created gap and stepped through into the desert.
As his boots sunk into the sand — cool at this time of night — he drew the Glock-22 out of his waistband and checked the weapon was operating to its full capacity. His gut twisted into a knot as he did so. He had no idea how young the boy would be. Likely a teenager, given how confident Nasser had been in his assessment. The extremist had no doubts that his accomplice would see the mission completed.
King believed Nasser’s ability to prey on the weak.
He moved silently in the darkness, illuminated ever so slightly by the pale moonlight. The vast stretch of land was dead quiet, save for a howling wind that pierced intermittently between the pyramids and rolled over the plains of the Sahara.
A bead of sweat ran over his brow, dripping against his eyelid. He raised a hand and wiped it away, suddenly nervous. There was nothing he feared more than the quiet. It spelled danger around every corner.
He made it across the plains and onto a modern road that ran between the Pyramid of Khufu and the Pyramid of Khafre. Each footfall echoed off the gravel track, piercingly loud amongst the silence. King focused on quietening his strides and cast quick glances at the enormous pyramids on either side of him.
A distinct sense of inferiority washed over him. The gargantuan temples made him feel minuscule, unimportant. In the darkness, they appeared even more imposing. King took his eyes off the twin behemoths and focused on the path ahead. He assumed the boy would have hidden somewhere near the back of the complex, away from pry
ing eyes.
He headed for the western cemetery behind the Pyramid of Khufu.
When the pyramids fell away and were replaced by swathes of rubble and tombs, King dropped low and held his Glock at the ready. He sensed something, whatever that may be. The western cemetery lay ahead, sweeping across the Sahara. Beyond, the open desert and a smattering of buildings dotted across the dunes, likely the offices of all manner of official employees.
The entire site was deserted.
He ducked into the cemetery and the silence seemed to multiply tenfold. Amongst the ruins of a long-dead civilisation, he swept the barrel from left to right, covering all corners, searching all crevasses.
Then — just as he reached the very end of the site — a shockingly loud crack rang out across the cemetery.
Simultaneously, a bullet sliced past him.
CHAPTER 38
His heart leapt at the sound of the discharge, so loud and violent in the deserted cemetery that for a moment he thought the world was ending.
He saw a muzzle flare but couldn’t pinpoint its exact location. His eyes had grown accustomed to the darkness during the walk across the pyramid complex, and as a result he found himself blinded by the sudden flash, startlingly close.
He ducked more out of instinct than anything else. The bullet missed, for if the perpetrator had better aim his move would have proved useless. King would have been dead before his eyes registered the muzzle flash or his ears registered the sound of the discharge.
He slammed chest-first into the sand, sending grains flying in all directions. Another shot rang out, this one more panicked. The report tore through the cemetery. King scrambled behind a sizeable pile of rubble and pressed his back against the thick slabs of stone.
He kept his breathing controlled. He did not panic. He did not flee. He stayed exactly where he was and felt the forced calm of a dangerous situation. It was something he had learned to control ever since his first operations in Black Force. He would utilise it now, just as he always did.
Then he heard the breathing.
It wasn’t his own. It rose and fell in great gasps, sucking for air like a choking toddler. Ordinarily the sound would have been undetectable, but in the silent battle King heard every inhale and exhale in turn. He recognised the sound of youth in the boy’s terrified raspings.
A scared child.
That was who he had entered a gunfight with.
Despite every intuition in his mind screaming at him to be rational, King lowered the barrel of his Glock.
He had no intention of using it.
The boy — whoever he was — had clearly been brainwashed by Nasser. It was not his fault that he had ended up terrified for his life, laying low in the cemetery, waiting for the morning where he would carry out an unforgivable deed in the name of some higher power. That was the fault of circumstance. He had been weak, and Nasser had preyed on his weakness. Nasser and Walcott were the true monsters.
This boy didn’t deserve to die.
King scurried around the rubble and covered ground between them, still unaware of the kid’s exact location. He kept low, making sure there was cover between himself and the enemy weapon at all times. The last thing he wanted was to grow complacent and take a stray bullet to the skull as a consequence.
Just because he no longer felt the need to end the boy’s life, he had no intention of taking it easy on him. At the end of the day, the detonation had to be stopped. King kept his focus locked onto the task at hand as he ducked and weaved between tombs and rubble, wincing involuntarily at each report of the boy’s weapon.
When he finally covered the ground necessary to loop around to the other side of the kid’s location, he paused a beat to ensure he wouldn’t run straight into a barrel.
When the boy fired a panicked shot in the complete opposite direction, King charged.
He rounded the rubble at a full sprint and spotted the outline of the kid in between two of the tombs, crouched awkwardly on a flat stretch of sand. The kid’s back was to King. Due to his inexperience, he had completely lost King’s position, opting to face in the other direction instead. King put one foot in front of the other as fast as he possibly could and leapt the final few feet between them.
The boy wheeled around as he heard the commotion.
Too late.
King’s airborne mass slammed into him hard enough to break a limb. The two sprawled into the sand, King landing on top of the kid. He discarded the Glock-22 and dropped a scything elbow into the kid’s sternum, so hard that it had the potential to seriously injure him. King didn’t care. As long as the boy didn’t die, injuries could be recovered from.
The boy spluttered in shock as the blow connected.
Then, King did something beyond foolish.
He relaxed.
Thinking the tide had turned irreversibly in his favour, he took a little weight off the boy’s chest. It gave the kid just enough room to explode, one final burst of motion filled with life-or-death energy. He shot out from under King like a rabbit tearing away from a predator. King’s eyes widened and he snatched at the boy’s clothing. He got one hand on the flimsy material, and it tore.
The boy wrenched away from his grasp and took off in a mad dash for the road.
King swore viciously and scrambled to his feet, almost sliding off-balance on the sand. He stumbled once, then snatched up the Glock-22 and took off after the kid.
Silence and caution were thrown to the wind.
The two tore across the cemetery back the way King had come from, each equally determined to achieve their objectives. King was fast, but at over two-hundred pounds he had a distinct disadvantage to the kid’s lean frame.
They were almost the same height, and the boy used his long lanky limbs to his advantage. He reached the modern road that weaved between the two major pyramid complexes and skidded to a halt, sizing up his options as best he could.
King burst out onto the road behind him.
They faced each other off across the open land, dwarfed by the two gargantuan pyramids on either side.
King knew what he had to do. It hardened his face into stone and sent shivers of unease down his spine, but he couldn’t let this go on any longer.
He raised his gun.
As he did so, he locked eyes with the boy. The kid had black straggly hair hanging in strands over a creased forehead. His hollow cheeks and the heavy bags under his eyes signified that he had not lived an easy life. He met King’s gaze with a mixture of apprehension, confusion and disbelief. Possibly for the first time in his life, he was staring down the barrel of a gun — and it clearly terrified him.
King felt a wave of emotions roll over him, none of them pleasant. He hesitated on the trigger for a fraction of a second too long — which was just enough for the boy to act.
He dipped a hand into one of the baggy pockets on his cargo shorts and came out with a small black device the size of a smartphone. With shaking hands, he placed a finger firmly on a thin plastic switch on the side of the device and flicked off some kind of safety mechanism.
The device was live.
King froze in place, not daring to move a beat. If he fired now, the kid might instinctively clench his fists in death, which would spell disaster.
‘Don’t do it,’ he called across the hundred-foot gap between them. ‘Don’t.’
The boy just looked at him blankly.
‘Don’t,’ King mouthed.
But he knew nothing he could say would do anything to shift the emotions coursing through the boy across from him. He saw the shaking hands and the quivering lip and the blank eyes and the sheer terror plastered across his expression and knew that any chance of a rational response was gone. This kid had reached his limits. He had likely lived a cruel life which had only grown worse.
‘I can help you,’ King said.
But the boy didn’t speak English. He raised the detonator above his head, mouthed a silent prayer, and set off three hundred pounds of Semtex wi
th the flip of a switch.
CHAPTER 39
It took a moment to begin.
King saw the boy’s finger flip the switch, turning it from one side to the other. Every muscle in his body tensed up at once, and in that moment he had never felt truer fear. He clenched his jaw impossibly tight and waited for the end.
Now, his fate was in other hands.
For a single, horrifying beat, nothing happened.
Then the world went mad.
Indescribable noise — like a thousand nuclear bombs going off inside his head — roared around the complex. King knew that if the explosives had been concentrated anywhere nearby, he wouldn’t have been around to hear the destruction. But they were up the back of the site, past the three main pyramid complexes where visitors gathered. The Semtex had been clustered around the tourist precincts, intended to achieve the most collateral damage possible.
But three hundred pounds of explosives did not have to be anywhere nearby to have an effect.
King was taken off his feet by the eruption. He felt a massive invisible fist punch into him all at once, hitting him so hard that he felt as if each limb was being torn in an opposite direction. He squeezed his eyes shut and winced as an incredible amount of pressure punched straight through him.
In the back of his mind, he knew how easily it could kill him. The pressure from a blast’s shockwave — depending on a variety of factors such as distance and force — could cause irreversible damage or death to a subject. Lung damage and ruptured eardrums were the least of his worries. Three hundred pounds of Semtex could demolish his internal organs from a mile away.
He hit the ground so hard that — at first — he thought he may never get back up again. The shockwave spun him over like a rag doll, flinging him against the gravel. The coarse surface of the track sliced skin off his face and arms.
He clattered to a halt as the echoes of the detonation resonated throughout the Sahara Desert all around him. His eardrums screamed for mercy, his eyes throbbed in their sockets, and every square inch of his body hurt worse than anything he had experienced in years.
