by Matt Rogers
Right then and there, King confirmed his initial theory.
Reed was simply using these men as a distraction.
King paused briefly to consider his options.
He conjured up the mental image of gunning down eight men in an unexpected bloodbath, and it set off a dark twinge in the pit of his gut. The idea didn’t entice him — he would do it if the situation demanded it, but nothing about it would carry pleasant feelings.
These men were born and raised Somalians — a tough life in itself. They were skinny and gaunt and hopped up on some cocktail of off-brand hard drugs. He could see it in the way their gazes jerked to the tractor unit, surrounding it, swarming it, their lips smacking at the thought of the dope they could buy with Reed’s generous payment.
King had the Kalashnikov AK-47 resting on a small, smooth rock in front of his pronated form.
He was ready.
But he needed the subconscious command.
Whether that came from youthful naivety or a strong moral compass, he needed the eight-man gang of barbarians to prove they deserved to die. It was something primal, something instinctive. He had been granted full discretion to act as he pleased on the battlefield, and he was determined not to lose his humanity on his second operation. It might have seemed ridiculous to a more hardened soldier, but King wouldn’t have made it this far if he’d simply tried to fit in with the rest of the pack.
It was part of the reason why he’d implemented Beth in his plan.
One of the thugs — clutching his own AK-47 at the ready — stepped up onto the driver’s step and hurled open the door of the truck. He aimed his barrel into the cabin and King’s heart leapt into his mouth — for a brief moment he thought the man might unload his weapon then and there, leaving no room for King to act. But the guy hesitated, his eyes widening, a sick grin spreading across his mouth, revealing a set of gums sporting a handful of rotting teeth.
He barked something to the men around the truck.
From inside the cabin King heard a soft whimper — Beth putting on her best performance. Before the convoy had arrived, King had smeared his blood across her chest, adding to the notion that she was injured.
Helpless.
Alone.
A tantalising prospect for a gang of degenerate scum.
They all lowered their weapons — nothing noticeable to the untrained eye, but King’s senses were thrumming with anticipation. He watched the tension diffuse in the air — they had been expecting violent confrontation and instead stumbled across something else entirely.
Something they hadn’t been expecting.
Something tempting.
Their shoulders slumped ever so slightly and they relaxed, moving forward in an eager cluster to get a glimpse at their prize. They lost their situational awareness, giving up on the task at hand.
They had their money. They had a woman.
A good day, all things considered.
King sensed the intention in their movements, and subconsciously he flipped the switch.
It was all too clear what they were about to do.
He saw red, and impulse took over.
The Somali thug on the driver’s step slapped against the side of the tractor unit’s exterior with a wet smack as he took a cluster of bullets to the temple. He simply crumpled, an ugly sight given his elevated position to the rest of the gang. His legs went limp and he simply folded into himself, leaving a thin trail of blood and brains down the exterior of the vehicle.
A horrifying sight from a distance.
King couldn’t imagine the reaction it would instil in those not used to death up close.
Out of the seven remaining hostiles, at least a handful were bound to be frozen in shock at the sudden shift in atmosphere.
He turned his attention instantly to the three thugs who reacted instantaneously. They jerked around, twisting on their heels, searching for the source of the gunfire. Before any of them had made it through a half-revolution, King worked the barrel from left to right, targeting the threats in clinical fashion. They dropped one by one, falling like dominoes amidst the procession.
Amongst the three of them lay the owner of the second AK-47 — now stone dead.
All rifles were eliminated from the equation.
King didn’t relent.
Four men ducked for cover, realising that their comrades were dropping all around them. King saw them cower, their morale withering in the chaos, but he heard nothing. The non-stop burst of unsuppressed rounds directly next to his ears had temporarily shut off his hearing. He sent a pair of rounds through the nearest man’s chest, tearing the machete from his grasp as his torso jerked from the kinetic force of the impacts. He came down on top of his friend, pinning one of the remaining trio to the dirt under the man’s dead weight.
Two left functioning.
By that point King had sunk deep into combat mode, all hints of morality and mercy thrown out the window. These men wouldn’t have hesitated to rape and murder Beth, before setting off to find more dirty work they could be paid handsomely for. He ignored the twisted expressions of fear on their faces — masks of sheer terror that somehow made them look ten years younger — and took the last pair out with a pair of successive headshots.
At such close range, with his senses wired and his vision focused, he had no chance of missing.
Seven men dead.
Blood spilt.
Bullets dispensed.
The lone survivor of the carnage — which had unfolded over the course of less than five seconds — whimpered from his back, staring up at the sky as the sun materialised on the horizon. With an orange glow swarming across the hillside, King got to his feet, hurling loose brambles off his back as he exposed himself again. He touched the tip of the AK-47 to the skinny guy’s bloody forehead and pulled the trigger, ejecting a single round into his skull.
A mercy kill. Had he left the man to stumble around the scene, drenched in the blood of his dead comrades, it would have spelled a grisly fate. Other parties of armed bandits would have sensed his weakness and either enslaved or murdered him. On the other hand, with his gang of thugs no more, the guy would have likely succumbed to insanity if left to fend for himself in this desolate wasteland.
King turned his eyes away from the bodies. He methodically ejected the AK-47’s near-empty magazine and chambered a fresh one home, snatching it off his combat belt. He dropped the used magazine to the trail floor and levered himself straight up into the tractor unit’s cabin.
He glanced at Beth — her face had paled and she’d ducked below the line of sight as the gunfire had begun to rage. Her M45 sidearm sat tight in her sweaty palm. She’d been ready to use it. He had no doubt she would have slaughtered anyone who dared step foot in the cabin after her acting job had been rendered suddenly useless.
‘They’re all dead?’ she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
‘They’re all dead. Let’s go get Reed.’
He swung the driver’s door closed, fired the truck to life, and navigated around the sea of dead bandits spread between their vehicles. He didn’t spend a second admiring his handiwork. There was nothing to admire.
They surged toward El Hur, and the sparkling ocean beyond.
42
‘You waited,’ Beth said, breaking the uncomfortable silence always present in the aftermath of violence.
The kind of violence King didn’t think he’d ever forget.
He nodded, quiet, eyes fixed on the trail ahead.
‘Why did you wait for them to open the door? You know how dangerous that was? That guy could have shot me and there was nothing I could have done about it. That wasn’t part of the plan.’
‘It was. I didn’t want to tell you. I’m sorry.’
‘You used me?’
‘You could call it that.’
‘Why?’
King paused, wondering how much he should tell her.
Fuck it, he thought. She could have died back there. She deserves t
o know.
‘I have a fairly unique position in the government,’ he said. ‘It allows me discretion. Way too much discretion. And I didn’t realise the kind of ramifications I was dealing with until I saw Reed fly off the rails.’
‘You took it for granted?’
He nodded. ‘Exactly. And it’s been chewing me up inside ever since I saw Victor and Johnson’s corpses. Can you imagine I liked what I saw yesterday, and I passed that information onto my handler, and my superiors made the decision to recruit Bryson Reed on the spot? Can you imagine the kind of things he could do if he had no-one to report to, and no rules to follow?’
‘Look what he did even when he had people to report to, and rules to follow,’ Beth said.
‘We were so goddamn close to fucking everything up. I realised the kind of things I’ve been allowed to do, and it’s made me think. What happens if I keep bending the rules over time, in slight increments? Just enough to not realise what I’m doing. How far could I stoop morally before I caught myself?’
‘You wanted to see their intentions,’ Beth realised. ‘To make sure they were cruel men before you killed them.’
‘If I need to kill, I want to be beyond sure from this point onward. I don’t want to be like Reed. And it’s a fine line in this business. One action leads to another. I can never allow myself to go down that path. There’s too much responsibility on my shoulders.’
He found himself gripping the wheel as tight as his massive hands would allow, attempting to transfer some of the tension in his body through to the tractor unit. Beth must have noticed his white knuckles. She reached across the centre console and touched a hand to his face. ‘You’ll never end up like Reed.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘I just know. You do too. Deep down.’
King didn’t respond. He pondered for a while, shaking his head in disbelief at how his life had unfolded before his eyes, moving so fast that he’d lost track of where he was. It was like he had suddenly, starkly realised his position all at once.
‘If a couple of those guys back there were innocent men,’ he said, ‘no-one would ever know. They could have been tagging along with their friends for the day. I’d never be held accountable for it. I’ve been turned loose, and I’m twenty-two years old. I want to be tested when I get back stateside. I want every psychological profile under the sun. I need it. I don’t know if Lars has realised the kind of burden he’s placed on me.’
‘Lars?’
He paused. ‘My handler. Probably wasn’t supposed to tell you his name.’
‘All this is affecting you, isn’t it?’
‘Somewhat. I’ll feel better when Reed’s dead.’
‘If he surrenders,’ Beth said, ‘you won’t take him in?’
‘That’s not how my job works. Not after what he did at the compound. And he won’t surrender. I might be young but I can tell you that much.’
‘It’s as simple as that? An eye for an eye?’
‘It’s never as simple as that. But it’s the way I do things, and I’ve accepted it. Wouldn’t have taken this job otherwise. They would have found someone else to do it.’
‘Would you have been okay with that?’
‘Not really. I wasn’t meshing well with my old unit.’
‘Want to talk about it?’
‘No.’
Beth nodded, staring out the grimy windshield. ‘We’re close.’
‘We certainly are…’
El Hur turned out to be nothing more than a ramshackle smattering of rundown houses strewn across a sandy dune, just a few hundred feet from the coastline. King sensed the desperation in the air as he guided their truck through the tiny village. He caught sight of men and women in his peripheral vision, but he didn’t dare look. Any further confrontation had to be avoided, and King figured the slightest hostility would be taken as a direct insult out here. The land he drove through had the aura of animalistic intensity — life in this frontier was tough and cruel. There was no doubt about it.
King headed straight through, instructing Beth to stay low in her seat and avoid the attention of the villagers. She complied, sensing the same atmosphere that King had. Mogadishu was hostile enough, but this was a whole different beast.
A new level of survival-of-the-fittest.
They left the village itself behind with much relief, trawling onto a narrow bumpy path barely wide enough to fit their truck. It led through undulating sand dunes to a coastline devoid of any man-made structures or signs of life. There was no port where Reed could load up his work boat under the veil of privacy. He would have to do it in the open, exposed to the world, frantically transferring mountains of cash from the back of a semi-trailer to an old transport boat.
With that thought in the back of his head, King screeched to a halt a few dozen feet from the gently lapping waves and almost gave himself whiplash craning his neck from side to side. He peered down the flat coastline for as far as the eye could see, squinting hard, searching for any kind of disturbance in the stark white plains.
‘There!’ Beth cried.
King followed her gaze and made out a distant, near-imperceptible object bobbing up and down in the shallow waters just off the shore. He estimated the distance at close to five hundred feet from their position. He let his vision focus and made out the distinct shape of a small boat’s hull.
He recognised the make. It was a rigid-hulled inflatable boat.
‘RHIB,’ he said. ‘That makes sense.’
Beth knew it too. ‘How’d he organise to have an RHIB meet him all the way out here?’
‘He didn’t. He brought it with him.’ King froze as he spotted a silhouette move from one end of the boat to the other. ‘Oh, shit. That’s him. He’s on board.’
There were no other watercraft in sight.
If Reed made it out of the shallows, they would lose him forever.
At the final hurdle.
On a deserted stretch of beach in a country as inhospitable as a post-apocalyptic wasteland, King twisted the big truck around in the sand and gave the protesting engine everything it had. For the first stretch it seemed like they were moving through mud — the wheels took a few painstaking seconds to find traction on the beach.
When they picked up enough momentum to make a break for it across the coast, King leant forward in the driver’s seat and hefted the AK-47 into his good hand.
The barrel aimed straight at the windshield — and past it, to the barely visible RHIB firing to life a few hundred feet away.
If they couldn’t make it to Reed’s position in time, he could do his best to throw every weapon in his arsenal in the man’s direction and pray for a direct hit. The RHIB’s inflatable collar would burst on impact if it took a round from the Kalashnikov rifle.
He narrowed his vision, tunnelling in on the boat, and fired.
43
The massive windshield blew out in a detonation of shards, compounding with the racket of the automatic gunfire reports. Glass sprinkled across the dashboard, making Beth recoil in her seat. King felt sharp nicks against his skin as slivers of the windshield drew across his forearms, but he ignored it and focused on holding his aim steady.
Tiny geysers of water kicked up around the RHIB’s hull, each of them missing by mere feet. King grunted out of frustration, took a moment to compose himself, and tried again.
All missed.
It was impossible. The truck he sat in bounced recklessly across the sandy beachhead — as if firing from a moving vehicle wasn’t challenging enough, the waves lapping at the shore threw the RHIB around in their churning swell. He had let fifteen rounds fly before Reed noticed the incoming gunfire and ducked below the line of sight, disappearing under the lip of the inflatable hull.
King grimaced and emptied the rest of the AK-47’s magazine at the watercraft, but the initial misses had rattled him. The sweat dripping off his forehead masked his vision and the pain of his broken hand had come roaring back to the surface all at once.
By the time he’d emptied every bullet in the magazine — with zero success — they were still three hundred feet from the RHIB’s location, and King could do nothing but watch as Reed fired the diesel engine to life.
The boat took off, screaming away from the Somali coastline, leaving nothing but churning water in its wake.
‘Shit,’ Beth cursed. ‘What do we do?’
‘I don’t know,’ King finally admitted.
He’d been pressing forward relentlessly for what felt like a month — even though he hadn’t even been in-country for twenty-four hours yet. Now, at the end of the road, he found himself lost on how to proceed. The endless stretch of beach was empty — he couldn’t spot a single craft in sight, save for the floating islands far out at sea which he recognised as dormant container ships.
He wondered how many of them were waiting for illegal payloads, their captains siphoning off cocktails of extra-legal funds in exchange for loitering in open waters as long as necessary.
That’s what Reed was doing.
He couldn’t imagine the bent Force Recon Marine was the first to devise such a scheme.
Two hundred feet up the beach — a destination they were rapidly approaching — King spotted the vehicle Reed had used to traverse the last stretch of the Somalian mainland. As he suspected, the man had used a semi-trailer to transport the cash. Its rear doors hung invitingly open, the vehicle abandoned a dozen feet from the lapping waves. Reed had backed it up to the ocean, where he had unloaded the inflatable boat — perhaps with the money already inside.
Beth spotted it simultaneously.
‘He’s going to get away with it,’ she said, stark realisation spreading across her face.
King nodded solemnly, slowing down as their truck pulled up to the abandoned scene. Much like the scene around the abandoned Liebherr haul truck, Reed had left a tiny portion of his haul behind in the bed of the semi-trailer. Hundred-dollar bills drifted out through the open doors, blown into oblivion by the seaside wind buffeting across the coastline.
