by Matt Rogers
Worst case scenario — he would tail the moving behemoth to its final destination, whereupon he could inform Lars of its location and let the upper echelon of the Special Forces handle the rest.
As long as he kept track of Reed, he could manage.
Then the entire situation imploded in a single moment.
King noticed wraith-like shapes all around the cabin of his truck, ghosting along the sides of the trail, heading for the hole carved out of the complex’s front wall. Suddenly curious, he applied slight pressure to the brakes, allowing Reed a little extra ground he could make up later.
He wanted to work out what the hell was going on.
He recalled the blitz of gunfire as Reed had left the compound — the newly arrived party must have unloaded on him in the belief that he posed a threat. When Reed had rumbled straight past, unconcerned with them, they’d abandoned their efforts to stop him in his tracks. They must have assumed King belonged to the same convoy — no-one fired on him as he coasted to a crawl.
He stared in the side mirror and watched the shadowy forces slink into the artificial light of the compound.
They were dressed in cheap combat gear, sporting bulletproof vests and khaki pants. All of them were native Somali, wielding a wide range of assault rifles. They seemed high on stimulants, their movements jerky and charged with adrenalin. As King sat and observed, war broke out inside the compound.
Gunfire roared out through the gap in the perimeter, a fearsome staccato complete with accompanying muzzle flashes. King didn’t have enough details, but he assumed they were either al-Shabaab militants or a separate party of armed bandits. Out here, there was no telling who wanted your head on a stick. King realised that Reed had provided them with the initial distraction to stage a takeover-coup.
He had indirectly started an all-out war between an extra-legal smuggling ring and armed attackers.
In the chaos, no-one paid attention to King’s tractor unit. He wrestled with the idea of returning to the complex and attempting to instigate order, but quickly dismissed it as a fool’s errand. There was no controlling what had unfolded, and his main objective remained with Reed and the payload.
What that payload consisted of was anyone’s guess.
King tore his attention from the side mirror, leaving the warring factions to their own devices, and leant on the gas pedal again.
He made it a dozen feet before the three distinct gunshots rang through the space ahead.
He saw the trio of muzzle flares in the brush — they emanated from a shallow ditch in the land, off the beaten track from the main trail — just a few dozen feet from the nose of his semi-tractor. For a brief instant, the flashes lit up a strange scene — at least six or seven of the invading militants milling around in the darkness, surrounding a single spot. Three of them dropped, hit by the gunshots.
But that wasn’t what froze King in his tracks.
He recognised the weapon that had discharged.
It sounded an awful lot like an M45 pistol — standard issue for the Force Recon Marines.
A tight ball forming in the pit of his stomach, he snatched the Kalashnikov rifle off the passenger seat and flicked the safety off, temporarily abandoning all thoughts of pursuing Reed.
If he was correct in his assumption, then at this current moment Bryson Reed was the least of his problems.
He threw the door outward and leapt out into the dirt, landing hard on the side of the trail. He kept low, skirting down the terrain with silent, cautious steps, placing his boots on the flattest sections of ground. He worked with what little light he had available, some of the artificial glow from the complex dissipating into the surroundings.
Sure enough, he spotted a trio of Somali militants crouched low at the bottom of the shallow ditch, their attention fixed solely on their target.
In their midst, King saw an unkempt mop of blond hair.
He saw flaming, blistering red — and unleashed hell on the bandits who had dared to cross his path.
35
How, or when, or why — none of it mattered.
What mattered was Beth.
King surged into range and unloaded four rounds from the AK-47 into the chest of the bandit furthest away from her. He hadn’t been wearing a vest, and the bullets tore his vital organs to shreds. He fell forward, pitching face-first into the dirt.
The other two posed more of a threat. They were in the process of manhandling Beth around, snatching at her clothes in sadistic glee. King didn’t dare fire on them at risk of hitting her, so he dropped the weapon and launched himself at the pair with reckless abandon. He crash-tackled them into the mud, slamming an arm into each of their throats with enough force to send all three of them cascading to the floor of the ditch.
Wading in putrid muck, King reared his head out of the earth and smashed an uppercut into the exposed jaw of the closest bandit. Teeth shattered and blood sprayed — the guy let out a guttural moan and fell to the dirt. As the man collapsed, King spotted strands of Beth’s uniform fabric between his fingers. There wasn’t a shred of remorse in his body.
These men knew what they were doing — and they would face the consequences.
With two men out of the equation and three down behind them, it left the last bandit in a one-on-one confrontation with King. The guy — long and lanky but with similarly little muscle as the rest of the party — looked quickly in either directions, subliminally searching for an escape route. He had no weapons on his person — he must have felt he’d gained the upper hand after they wrestled Beth to the ground.
King didn’t hesitate. He sent the sole of his combat boot into the man’s chest, going through the motions of a vicious front kick. He guessed that the guy wouldn’t have the fast-twitch reflexes to dodge the blow, so he leant his whole weight into it, overcommitting in an attempt to floor the bandit with a single kick.
It worked swimmingly.
A distinct crack sounded in the gloom — King figured he’d broken the man’s sternum with the front kick. The guy wheezed and spluttered and went down on one knee, offering no resistance. He kept enough balance not to topple backward, but the horrified expression on his face as he sunk to the ground signalled that King had dealt out serious internal damage. The bandit wasn’t headed anywhere in a hurry.
With the two men nearest Beth temporarily incapacitated, King dropped to one knee and scooped up the AK-47 he’d abandoned in the close-quarters brawl. A rudimentary yet effective weapon, he had practiced with it mercilessly stateside, his superiors understanding that it was the most common rifle one could acquire on the third-world battlefield. The safety had been flicked off well before he’d come into possession of the firearm, so it all it took was a sweeping aim and two separate pumps of the trigger.
Just like that, a six-man party of savage Somali bandits were no more.
King didn’t pause — even as the sound of the unsuppressed gunshots pounded in his ears, he reached down and helped Beth out of the hot mud. She stumbled to her feet, taking a moment to find her balance. King’s stomach twisted as he searched for any sign of serious injury, but aside from a bloody lip she appeared unhurt.
Just shock, he thought.
If he hadn’t appeared to hurl the last three men off her, she would have succumbed to a fate neither of them wanted to consider.
‘You did good,’ he said, trying to take her mind off what might have occurred. ‘Those three dead guys back there — that was you?’
She nodded, white as a ghost. ‘I couldn’t do much against six of them.’
He nodded back. ‘Understandable. Anyone would be overwhelmed by six hostiles. Eventually.’
‘I can’t believe what just happened.’
King said nothing — he didn’t know how to respond.
‘Is it always that easy?’ she said, staring at the trio of dead men around her.
He shrugged. ‘Not usually. I outweighed them. I caught up to Reed back there and he beat the shit out of me. He’s damn
good.’
She visibly stiffened. ‘You found him?’
‘I’ve been trailing him this whole time.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Did you happen to see a building-on-wheels rumble past a few minutes ago?’
‘I was a little preoccupied.’
King nodded understandingly. ‘Look, we can’t hang around here for long. You okay?’
‘Yeah. I’ll live.’
‘You hit anywhere?’
‘No. You?’
‘Not hit. Might have a few broken bones, though.’
‘You’re inhuman.’
He shrugged. ‘Just adrenalin, mostly. I’ll come down soon. Let’s get out of here.’
‘Are we going after Reed?’
He paused. ‘I am. I always planned to. I don’t know what you’re doing here, but we’ll discuss it later. Now’s not the time.’
None of the colour had returned to Beth’s face, and King didn’t feel the urge to interrogate her about why she had come after him. He had a million questions — first and foremost, who the hell is protecting the peacekeepers if you’re here? — but he bit his tongue and helped her out of the ditch, aware that a close encounter with rape and murder left a permanent mark on the psyche. He had seen the effects of wartime trauma before and felt no need to add any kind of additional mental stress until she had time to process what had happened.
As they hurried back up the shallow hillside, Beth stared up at the semi-tractor King had parked in the middle of the road. The distant roar of all-out war drowned out all other sounds, floating over the top of the nearby compound’s perimeter walls.
‘Did you steal that?’ she said.
‘No, I ordered it online a few weeks ago. Planned with the dealership to pick it up in Afgooye.’
Despite everything, she smirked. He’d run the risk of falling horrifically flat with the attempt to distract her from the chaos of the last few moments, but he nodded quietly in satisfaction.
Then the smile vanished from her face as she turned toward the source of non-stop gunfire. ‘What the hell’s going on in there?’
‘World War Three, it sounds like.’
‘Because of you?’
King shrugged. ‘Somewhat. My trouble with Reed gave these men the opportunity to launch an attack. They must have been lying in wait for weeks, trying to find an opening.’
‘They’re al-Shabaab,’ Beth said. ‘At least, the men who attacked me were.’
‘Then the rest of them are too,’ King said, putting the pieces together. ‘The complex is a goldmine — that much is obvious. These militants must have been roaming around for weeks or months. They sensed profits, but it was heavily fortified until Reed ran an ultra-class haul truck through the front gate.’
‘A haul truck?’ Beth said. ‘Like in mines?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What’s he doing with one of those?’
‘It was the only reason he came here. I got the feeling they were about to hand it over to him before I crashed the party. He ended up having to take it by force — he killed a small army of hired guns trying to protect it. Six or seven men, minimum. He’d embedded himself into the trade route over time by killing off dock workers at the port. There was no-one along the chain to tell these people otherwise. They just assumed he was part of the process.’
‘What’s in the truck?’
‘We’ll find out when we catch up to him.’
King vaulted up onto the driver’s step and swung into the cabin, dropping into the indentation that the previous owner had battered into the seat through years of use. Beth skirted around the hood of the semi-tractor and climbed into the passenger seat. When they swung each of the cabin’s doors shut in turn, silence fell over them. They had the opportunity to breathe, to pause, to process.
King sat still for less than a minute before the pain from his accumulated injuries began to throb into existence.
He bowed his forehead to the top of the steering wheel for a single moment, composing himself. Then he sat up straight and wiped blood off his upper lip. ‘We need to keep moving. I’m going to crash if we stay still. I can’t think about this right now.’
‘What do you mean?’ Beth said, then her gaze wandered over to the extent of his wounds. She gasped, recoiling. ‘Oh, Jesus. You need a doctor.’
‘Not yet.’
‘King…’
‘I said not yet. I go to a doctor, Reed gets away.’
‘He already got away.’
‘He’s driving a truck the size of an office complex. He’s not going anywhere fast. We can catch him.’
‘You said that he planned to pick the truck up regardless?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So he’s obviously got a contingency plan in place to switch the payload over to a smaller vehicle. You don’t think he would have thought that through?’
‘He didn’t expect to be pursued.’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ Beth said, suddenly serious. ‘You think he would drive a truck that size all the way to the coast? He’d be setting himself up for a dozen separate ambushes.’
‘Why do you think he’s headed for the coast?’
Beth shrugged. ‘Intuition. Where else is he going to go? The airports are out of the question. Many of them are discreet but there’ll be a nation-wide search for this guy if he really did make off with an invaluable haul. That complex is at the heart of all this — they’d control the airports. He’ll leave on a ship.’
‘How’s he going to get a ship?’
‘Like I said, I feel like he’s already planned all of this. I feel like we’re clutching at straws.’
‘Well, then, if you’re so sure,’ King said, slotting the truck into gear. It lurched off the mark, rumbling away from the compound — which by this point had descended into total madness. ‘We’d better get a move on.’
‘We can stop him,’ Beth repeated. ‘If he needs to switch vehicles it’ll slow him down.’
‘Maybe,’ King said, sensing that her mind had wandered from the terrifying encounter in the ditch. ‘Now, in the meantime — what the hell are you doing here?’
36
‘Everything changed,’ she said, her voice low — King wondered if the shock was setting in. ‘As soon as you left, we got reinforcements. The timing was uncanny.’
‘What?’ King said, taken aback. ‘When?’
‘Thirty minutes after you drove off, a fresh group of Force Recon Marines rolled in. ’
‘The timeline doesn’t make any sense.’
She nodded. ‘It didn’t to me either. I asked them what the hell was going on. They told me they were in the middle of a “Deployment Phase” on a warship in the North Atlantic. Orders came down the pipeline and they were whisked straight here after one of our own requested immediate assistance.’
King paused. ‘Huh…?’
‘Johnson called them in. As soon as we heard you were on your way, he must have made the call. He didn’t trust you — and apparently, your division is fresh enough that there was a serious breakdown in communication. The Navy sent over a fresh batch on the next cargo plane. They weren’t happy about it, apparently. Our presence in-country is supposed to be low-profile. But Johnson wanted his own men — familiar faces — around him while trying to deal with Reed. Nothing about the situation made sense to him, so he was trying to handle things on his own.’
‘So they’ve got the place on lockdown?’
Beth nodded. ‘They’re handling the investigation. They grilled me on everything I knew, and then they left me alone. It gave me time to think, and I realised I was the only one who knew you were out here. It’s my responsibility to bring you back. So I told them I’d received direct orders to retrieve “critically important personnel” and set off. They must have thought I was talking about the peacekeepers. We were officially there in the first place as Personal Security Detail, after all. They must have thought I was just doing my job. And I don’t think they had the heart to
tell me to sit tight, after what had happened to the rest of my team. They let me go about my business.’
‘Did you tell them about me?’
She shook her head. ‘I still don’t know exactly who or what you are. I decided to leave it be — they didn’t have any knowledge of you when they arrived. Actually, they were flabbergasted that they were the first ones to be called in.’
‘For good reason,’ King said. ‘It would seem like there’s disarray in the upper echelon if they don’t know I exist. No-one had responded to an urgent situation except them.’
‘You came to recruit Reed, didn’t you?’ Beth said. ‘That’s why no-one knows.’
King paused. ‘There’s no point denying it.’
‘Did you expect this?’
‘Never.’
‘Which is why you’re so determined to stop him.’
‘I have to prove myself capable. And it’s slightly personal, too.’
‘It’s personal for me,’ she said. ‘You didn’t know Johnson or Victor. I did. And I hated the way you left — heading into the unknown with no plan. I hated what Reed did, and in the back of my mind I thought he might outsmart you.’
‘You thought about me an awful lot, then.’
‘I didn’t expect to walk into something like that. There were six militants around me before I could do anything. I tried to fend them off…’
‘You succeeded. You killed half of them. That’s nothing to scoff at.’
‘If you hadn’t shown up…’
‘Don’t think about that. Nothing happened — you’re fine. Now let’s go get Reed.’
They lapsed into silence, each drawing into their thoughts. King set a fierce pace with the semi-tractor, bouncing and jolting over the uneven terrain, and focused entirely on the road ahead.
