by Matt Rogers
He made it back to the engine room in less than a minute. Veins still roaring, mind still tuned to what lay ahead, he kept low and darted around the corner, swinging the Beretta’s barrel left and right, clearing the area.
Randall Neak stood in the exact same position on the catwalk.
Identical Beretta M9 aimed right at Xu’s head.
Xu locked onto the man’s forehead at the exact millisecond he noticed Neak standing there. Both of them registered the stalemate at the same time, marbleising themselves in unison. Both were highly trained, highly proficient marksmen. Neither would miss at this range. Neither would falter.
A draw in every definition of the word.
‘What now?’ Randall roared above the mind-numbing drone of the engine below them.
‘I can wait like this for hours,’ Xu roared back. ‘Can you?’
‘Of course.’
Xu eyed the briefcase in his hand, and the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of information it contained on a hard drive.
You need better security measures, Lars.
Xu heard a footstep directly behind him, and his heart rate shot through the roof. But despite his panic, he couldn’t turn around. He couldn’t budge an inch. If the person behind him was hostile, he was dead, and there was nothing he could do about it. He stayed motionless, sweating freely, his Beretta trained on Neak. If he dropped his aim an inch, the man would shoot.
Nothing you can do.
Accept your fate.
But it wasn’t a hostile. Xu had killed all four of Neak’s JSOC buddies. This was a member of the crew — he could tell by the way the footsteps tiptoed tentatively out onto the catwalk.
‘What the fuck is going on, lads?!’ a voice roared over Xu’s shoulder. ‘What are you two doing? Who’s this dead guy?!’
It was one of the Geordies. Xu sensed the sheer panic in his voice, the shock at seeing a dead body with a gaping shotgun slug in its chest. Xu wanted to turn around and shoo the man away, but he couldn’t move. The second he did, he would die.
‘Fuck off,’ Randall Neak yelled. ‘Go back to your room.’
‘I knew what was going on, anyway. The rumours spread. Aren’t you two brothers?!’
Randall Neak froze. ‘What?’
Shit.
Xu had no other options. This was going to turn into blood-soaked mayhem, regardless. Randall would piece it together in seconds.
If this stranger was pretending to be Jimmy Neak, then where was his brother?
Xu pulled the trigger, and hoped Randall Neak wouldn’t shoot him between the eyes in his death spasm.
21
In that moment, Xu was convinced that he was going to die from a return volley.
But he didn’t.
Because his own weapon didn’t respond.
He pulled the Beretta’s trigger with the kind of finality that signalled he might soon be departing from the land of the living. There was no gunshot. No muzzle flare. No bullet tearing through Randall Neak’s flesh and bones. Just nothingness. The engine’s roaring didn’t cease — in fact, it seemed to amplify. Hammering home the knowledge that Xu had his hands on a defective weapon.
A freak coincidence, or…?
He saw Neak’s eyes widen — the man must have spotted the imperceptible movement as Xu’s finger depressed on the trigger. But then Neak grew curious, narrowing his gaze, honing in on the weapon, even taking a step forward to get a better look at what had happened. His own aim didn’t budge, and instantly Xu realised his life had become forfeit. Randall Neak could do what he wanted with the imposter, because the imposter had no functioning weapon in reach.
In a single one-inch movement of the finger, the situation had changed from a standoff to Xu being held at gunpoint.
Neak took another step forward, then another, as if coaxing himself to believe that the weapon truly had jammed. Then he made it to within a few feet of Xu, and pulled to a halt. He probably knew how dangerous it would be to close the gap. He’d seen what Xu had done to his friends. The barrel of his Beretta M9 hovered with menace, frozen in place, pointed squarely between Xu’s eyes.
Xu stayed completely still.
If he made the slightest movement, Neak would kill him. He was, or at least had been, U.S. Special Forces. That alone said everything that needed to be said.
I’m fucked.
Neak kept staring at the weapon. Then a wry smile crept across his features. He winced involuntarily at the deafening cacophony of engine parts moving around right beside them, then gestured with the barrel of the Beretta, keeping his movements rigid and firm. First he ordered Xu to lower the useless Beretta to the metal catwalk between his feet, which he did. Then he waved Xu away from the weapon. Xu stepped back. Neak strode forward, picked up the gun, and tucked it into the rear of his waistband. Finally he jerked the barrel toward the corridor they’d come from, ordering him out of the engine room.
Xu had no choice but to comply.
They passed the Geordie, who had both hands pointed skyward in a laughable display of surrender. Not that it would have mattered if he’d been armed. It seemed like he’d never seen a dead body, let alone used a gun, in his life. On the way out, Xu froze in place as he heard Randall close behind him.
Speaking to the Geordie.
‘Look,’ Randall said, his words loud enough to float over the roar of the engine. ‘I hate that it has to go like this. The plan was for guns to never come out. This was supposed to be peaceful. But … you know … shit happens. And now I can’t have the crew running their mouths on shore about what happened here. Because that’ll make things pretty obvious, don’t you think?’
‘I won’t say a word, mate.’
‘Somehow I doubt that. You’d have no reason not to.’
Xu took the risk of flashing a glance over his shoulder, just in time to see Randall Neak press the cold barrel of his own Beretta to the temple of the Geordie and pump the trigger twice.
Bang. Bang.
Done.
Neak caught the corpse as it collapsed, heaving it over the catwalk’s railing. The body disappeared from sight. He’d handled the near-two hundred pound deadweight as if it were a mannequin pumped up with air. The guy was strong. Xu had always assumed that — most of those who made it to JSOC had beefed their physiques up through a mixture of self-discipline and embracing the culture — but Neak had that kind of deceptive strength that one couldn’t ascertain from a single glance. Xu figured Neak could overpower him.
But could he beat him in a fight?
In the end, it didn’t matter. The entire ordeal — pressing the gun to the Geordie’s head, pulling the trigger, heaving the man over the railing — took a second and a half. Even if Xu had burst off the mark at exactly the right moment, he would have come up short before Randall wheeled his aim around and put a 9mm bullet in Xu’s head.
So he stayed put.
And waited for further instruction.
There was no practical reason to get emotional over the Geordie’s death. The guy hadn’t deserved it, but every shred of brainpower Xu wasted on unnecessary emotions would distract him from the real problem staring him right in the face. And if he wanted to make it off this freighter alive, it would all come down to what the next couple of minutes held.
He was still alive because Neak wanted to know what happened to his brother.
Xu had that up his sleeve.
He could coerce. Misdirect. Draw things out until he found an opportunity.
But the tightness in his gut told him he wouldn’t get the chance. Randall Neak was a consummate professional. He wouldn’t slip up.
Neak ordered Xu into the corridor, where the hum of the engine dissipated as soon as he swung the door shut behind him. They moved silently through the hallway, swaying and stumbling with every dramatic lurch of the ship, but Xu never had the opportunity to make a break for it. He sensed the gun aimed at the back of his neck at all times — even when Neak stumbled, he kept his aim fixed.
&nb
sp; ‘Shame that the gun jammed,’ the man said.
‘Sure is.’
‘It’s one of ours, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Xu said, and suddenly it all made sense.
‘You think we’re idiots?’ Neak said. ‘We’ve been embedded in Niger for over a year. You think we want some psycho native to sneak up on us and chop our heads off and then have free reign to use all our weapons?’
‘I guess not.’
‘Fingerprint scanner on the trigger,’ Neak said. ‘Not expensive. You can do anything in this day and age.’
‘But I just killed two of your friends with it. It seemed to work fine.’
Xu heard Neak audibly scowl. ‘Fucking piece of shit technology. Sometimes there’s a delay. The mechanism takes a few seconds to kick in after you take your finger off the trigger. And now it got my friends killed. Ah… goddamnit.’
‘You’re rambling. You going to put a bullet in me? I’m waiting.’
‘Not yet, dickhead. You’ve got some shit to answer for.’
‘Like where your brother is?’
‘Better choose your next words very carefully, because they’ll kill you if they piss me off.’
‘I have no idea where your brother is,’ Xu said, targeting the angle that would bring about maximum confusion. ‘He told me to take his place on this ship.’
‘What?’
Before Xu could take another step, a massive hand jerked him back by the collar and shoved him to his knees. He slammed down in the middle of the steel hallway, surrounded by flickering lights and eerie groans and spine-tingling cold and impenetrable darkness. A cold sliver of steel pressed hard into the back of his skull.
Is this it? he thought.
‘Tell me what really happened to my brother,’ Neak said. ‘I won’t ask you again.’
22
At a loss for words, Xu kept his mouth shut.
Bad idea.
Neak brought the Beretta’s stock down on the back of his head, eliciting a vicious crunch. Xu pitched forward, wobbled again, this time worse than the last. He put a hand down to break his fall, palm out, squashing it against the cold metal. Neak grabbed his head and spun Xu around to face him. He knelt down and placed the barrel against Xu’s jaw at an upward angle, so the bullet would blast through his mouth and into his brain, killing him instantly. Xu looked into the man’s eyes and saw rage and pain and guilt. Randall had been the one to put Jimmy on this ship, and now his little brother was almost certainly dead.
And it was his fault.
‘Where is my brother?’ Neak hissed.
‘With all the people you killed on your way here,’ Xu said. ‘I thought I’d let him join them.’
He figured there was no point drawing it out any longer. Neak was stronger, and he had a gun. Xu could probably beat him in a fair fight — he could trump almost anyone in unarmed combat, aside from maybe Gennady — but the blows he’d taken in the freighter and the empty stomach and the seasickness and the concussion had all combined to sap him of every last piece of strength. There was no need to rope Neak along through a web of lies, trying to buy himself one more second above ground.
He might as well come out with the truth.
Which he did.
And true rage flooded Randall Neak’s face.
But deep in Xu’s web of thoughts, he fixated on a particular name.
Gennady.
Where was…?
Footsteps. Booming footsteps, resonating down the hallway. A big man heading toward them. Xu couldn’t see, because Neak had spun him around so they were staring at each other face-to-face, but Randall Neak had an unobstructed view of whoever was charging down the corridor at them. A perplexed look spread across his face, and quiet confidence spread across Xu’s. There was only one man on board large enough to make that kind of sound in his strides. He pictured Gennady fishing through IDs minutes earlier, finding Jimmy Neak’s passport, staring at the photo, squinting and scrutinising it, putting two and two together, realising nothing on this ship was as it seemed, fetching a weapon, hearing gunshots, taking off in the direction of the carnage.
Because Gennady wouldn’t shy away from a war.
He was ex-KGB, after all.
Killing would be second nature to him.
And he’d had his practice with the pirates populating the Gulf of Guinea.
And then something else crossed Xu’s mind. Randall Neak looked eerily similar to him. They were both brown-skinned Asian men with wide shoulders and not a single piece of fat on their frames that didn’t need to be there. And the corridor was dark. And the ship was in motion, rocking up and down, obscuring the finer details. And Gennady’s blood would be boiling, anticipating an exchange of gunfire, his brain releasing a seductive cocktail into his body that made him trigger-happy, ready to shoot, ready to kill anyone that so much as…
Randall took his aim off Xu for a split second. He raised his Beretta a couple of inches to aim at the big Russian maniac charging directly toward them, probably armed too.
Xu made a wild snatch for the Beretta.
But the blow to the top of his head had thrown his senses off. It had shattered his proprioception, throwing off his vision and restricting his movements. He grabbed at the Beretta but he missed, snatching the air half a foot away from the gun, lurching forward on his knees.
Shit.
You’re dead.
That was your chance.
Neak sensed him lunging for the gun and brought his aim right back around to point the weapon between Xu’s eyes. He started to pull the trigger, then something seized his attention again over Xu’s shoulder.
This time, his eyes went ludicrously wide, almost boggling out of their sockets.
And a half-second later Randall Neak’s chest detonated in a spectacular shower of gore.
The noise of the shotgun blast hit Xu’s ears a half-second later.
23
The fact that they looked similar had signed Randall Neak’s death warrant.
The man’s broken body fell, his legs giving out and the life vanishing from his eyes, replaced by nothingness in an instant. Xu reached out and made a second grab for the Beretta M9 as it turned and fell from Neak’s dead palm. At the same time, he heard the shotgun report in his ears, a gigantic roaring sensation that echoed off all the metal surfaces at once.
This time, he caught the weapon.
Correcting the mistakes of the past, he snatched the gun out of thin air and wheeled on the spot, his vision reeling but his mind focused. Sure enough, he spotted Gennady in a kill-happy rampage, clasping a spare Remington shotgun between his meaty paws, his eyes transfixed on the man he’d just blasted to shreds with a close-range slug. He made eye contact with Xu, and a moment of confusion passed over his face.
Xu shot him twice.
No, you didn’t.
In his beat down, semi-conscious, altered reality, Xu couldn’t remember what he’d been told just seconds earlier. He’d forgotten all about the fingerprint sensors on the triggers of Randall Neak’s weapons, and when he pumped the trigger twice in consecutive fashion the gun simply sat in his palm, dormant, almost mocking him. This time, the fingerprint recognition technology had kicked in instantly. There’d been no lag time. Xu groaned and dropped it to the floor, abandoning all hope of using it to finish the job.
Gennady screeched to a halt in front of him, still confused as all hell.
‘What…?’ he started.
Didn’t I just kill you? he probably wanted to say.
The big Russian’s eyes wandered to the corpse of the man he’d thought was James Xu. It provided just enough of an opportunity for Xu to act.
But could he find the strength?
Yes.
He could.
He always did.
He got his feet underneath him and spear-tackled Gennady into the wall, taking them both to the floor and smashing all the breath out of the giant’s lungs in the process. On the way down he wrapped his hands around the Re
mington and heaved with all his might, trying to twist the barrel to face Gennady underneath him. Gennady sensed this halfway along its trajectory and panicked, jerking his finger out of the trigger guard to stop himself accidentally blowing his own brains out. Charged with fight-or-flight strength, the sudden jerking motion sent the Remington spinning away, ricocheting off the wall and tumbling down the corridor.
That suited Xu just fine.
He headbutted Gennady in the face, thinking, What’s one more knock to the head going to do?
He was already operating in a dream-like state, floating from one movement to the next. None of this felt real in the slightest. The ship crested another wave and the front dropped down, lurching the corridor sideways. Xu tumbled off Gennady, and the big man found space. Blood flowing from his nose, he rolled over and dropped a massive fist into Xu’s stomach.
Crunch.
Then it all felt too real.
Xu retched involuntarily, scrambling to his feet as the ship righted itself and he bounced off one of the walls, aggravating a pre-existing bruised shoulder. He let a right hook loose with all the energy he had, but Gennady brought both hands up in an effective boxing guard and the knuckles deflected off one of his giant forearms. Gennady retaliated with a vicious body shot, moving far faster than a man of his height and weight should be able to. Xu saw the blur of a fist, then his ribs exploded in pain, and he tumbled and fell and lurched down the corridor with sweat on his brow and the headache compounding in his skull. He staggered away from the Russian, figuring he couldn’t last another minute longer in combat. The seasickness and unstable ground underneath his feet had affected him in a way he hadn’t considered possible. They had sapped the life right out of him.
Then he put his foot down and it jolted against something.
An object.
He looked down.
The Remington lay there, still spinning in place, demanding Xu pick it up and utilise its massive slugs.
