by Matt Rogers
The scale of the ship boggled his mind.
If Reed elected to hide onboard, squirrelling himself away, it might take weeks to find him.
But King imagined it wouldn’t come down to that.
It couldn’t have been more than five minutes since Reed had left shore, but he’d moved fast. King spotted a rusting access ladder attached to the side of the gargantuan ship, plunging into the churning waters all around the hull. As he narrowed his vision, he watched a rectangular object roughly the size of a grand dining room table disappear over the ladder’s lip, vanishing into the murky shadows on deck.
Reed’s RHIB.
It had been winched up by fat steel cables, a procedure no doubt planned out in painstaking detail. It confirmed what King had suspected all along — Reed was working with disciplined, well-trained co-conspirators. The winching system had been in place long before Reed arrived at the base of the massive container ship.
Somehow, King doubted those at the top of the ladder would offer the steel cables for a second payload.
He maintained the police boat’s pace, squinting as sea spray kicked off the hull and stung his eyes. Shadows materialised on the deck a few dozen feet above, occupying a dark space running underneath the piles of shipping containers. King caught sight of them and hunched low, anticipating gunfire from Reed’s friends onboard.
He reached back and threw Beth to the deck.
Thankfully, she’d also spotted the hostiles and was halfway to the floor when bullets cracked through the air above their heads.
King kept his head down, counting out the seconds as their boat entered the most vulnerable stretch of ocean. The closer they got to the side of the container ship, the more awkward of an angle it would take to score a direct hit. He flinched as the air displaced above his hunched back — a round had missed him by mere feet. It thudded into the wooden deck, sending splinters flying.
Another three-round burst dotted the floor around Beth’s head before the gunfire temporarily ceased — the enemy combatants would have to change position, aiming straight down the side of the giant ship. King took the opportunity to raise his head above the line of sight.
He tensed up.
‘Shit,’ he muttered.
He had almost covered the entire stretch of sea between their police boat and the looming container ship. Its pale blue hull towered over him, taking up his entire vision. Another couple of seconds following the same trajectory would send the front of the police boat smashing into the steel wall with enough force to break the craft in two.
It would sink, and they would either get swept into the path of the container ship and battered to a pulp by its giant propellers, or picked off by assault rifles from the deck, or simply be left to tread water miles off the coast until their energy depleted and they sunk to their watery graves.
None of the available options appealed to King.
He veered the boat sharply to the left, correcting into the same direction the container ship was moving. Now the two watercraft ran parallel, one outweighing the other by a few hundred thousand tons.
‘Are you sure we need to do this?!’ Beth roared above the chaos.
‘What?’ King shouted back.
‘It sounds like there’s a small army up there — and now we know what ship he’s on. We can just call it in. Live to see another day.’
King shook his head, still hunched low, minimising his target area. ‘Reed can bounce around from ship to ship on the open waters with barely any persuasion. We turn back and we lose them forever. He’ll be sucked into the maze.’
He turned to study her demeanour. All the blood had drained from her face, and she sported the expression of a deer in headlights. Beads of sweat had broken out across her forehead. She was clutching her M45 pistol with white knuckles. Despite that, resolve had set across her face, creasing her mouth into a hard line. She seemed determined. Scared, yet willing to press on.
King shared her sentiments, even though the symptoms of his terror weren’t so apparent. They presented themselves through a pounding pulse and an incessant tightness in his chest. He stuffed them down along with the mind-numbing agony of his broken wrist and turned back to the console to see them approaching the base of the access ladder at a blistering speed.
‘You can’t return fire when you’re climbing the ladder,’ Beth noted, motioning to his useless wrist.
He nodded. ‘I figured that out in advance.’
Another burst of gunfire sounded, directly above their heads. They both ducked for cover, and Beth lay down suppressing return fire with her M45, unloading seven consecutive rounds into the side of the container ship. The rounds ricocheted harmlessly off, but their combatants didn’t know that. King could sense them ducking for cover, protecting themselves from stray shots.
She fished a fresh magazine from her Combat Utility Uniform and chambered it home.
Now, a voice in King’s head demanded.
He swapped positions with Beth, allowing her to take over the reins and steer the boat roughly towards the access ladder. King made straight for the timid police officer they’d dragged aboard, who had opted to cower in an unresisting ball up the back of the police boat. The man was unarmed, and scared out of his mind.
A slight twinge in King’s gut made him pause halfway across the deck. He stared at the pitiful sight, his mind churning.
Do you really want to do this? he thought. After all that talk about morals earlier?
Then the officer decided for him. The man lifted his head off his chest and craned his neck, searching for any sign of life far above.
‘Reed!’ the man screamed, utilising his limited English skills. ‘Help!’
King hadn’t been sure that the trio of officers were directly assisting Bryson Reed, which was half the reason he’d beat them down instead of putting a bullet in each of their heads.
Now that he knew for sure, he compartmentalised his emotions and sunk into a rigid, unwavering state of mind.
He hauled the unarmed police officer to his feet — using his good hand — and hurried the man to the front of the deck, bundling them all to one side of the police boat in anticipation for what came next.
‘You piece of shit,’ King hissed in the man’s ear. ‘You have any idea what you’re doing? You just saw money and became a slave.’
He knew the guy couldn’t understand him, but his frustrations had reached boiling point and the need to unload some of his rage spurred him on. Everyone around him — besides Beth — had been swayed by the toxic lure of dollar signs. With his blood boiling, he shoved the officer to the lip of the boat as Beth steered it toward the access ladder.
King reached down, plucked the AK-47 off the deck, ejected the empty magazine, chambered a fresh thirty rounds home, and nodded once to Beth.
‘Now,’ he said.
She knew exactly what she had to do. There would only be an opening of a couple of seconds to mount the base of the access ladder. At the speed the container ship was travelling, fat clouds of sea spray washed over the police boat, making it appear insignificant in comparison to the behemoth alongside it. With no-one behind the controls, the entire craft would be hurled away by the churning waters before long.
Beth grimaced, braced for a messy departure, and steered the police boat straight into the gigantic metal hull.
Sparks flew and the deck underneath King’s feet lurched back and forth. He stumbled for balance, almost tipping head over heels into the tiny gap between the boat and the hull. He grabbed a handful of the police officer’s shirt to stabilise himself, letting the Kalashnikov rifle swing loose at his side.
‘Up,’ he commanded, shoving the man in the direction of the access ladder — now only a few feet of open space from their position. ‘Or I shoot you in the back of the head.’
King knew the man spoke minimal English, but there was no mistaking his tone. With the chaos of high-speed manoeuvres raging around them, he didn’t have to think twice about his next move
. Spurred on by the desperate lure of survival, the man leapt onto the access ladder. Briefly, he lurched sideways, and King paled as he realised the man might fall to his inevitable death.
Then the officer scrabbled for purchase — finding it all at once — and began racing up the metal contraption, moving as fast as his shaking limbs would allow.
King blocked all intrusive thoughts from his mind, letting it go blank.
‘After me,’ he said to Beth, his voice monotone.
She just nodded.
Operating with a single hand — allowing the broken wrist to dangle uselessly at his side — he launched off the side of the police boat, slamming home onto the metal rungs. He got both feet onto a single rung and wrapped his good arm around one at chest height, making sure he had successfully transferred between the watercraft before racing up after the police officer. Now that the guy had sensed a window of opportunity to get away, he had ignored the pain no doubt coursing through his mid-section and was scrambling toward the deck.
Toward allies.
Little did he know that King had expected him to do just that.
There was no time to check whether Beth had followed. King was disadvantaged in the race against time by an entire limb, and it would take serious safety risks to keep the officer’s pace. He checked that the AK-47 had remained on his person, and upon discovering it still swinging at his side he began to furiously ascend the access ladder.
The metal rungs cut deep, many of them rough and unfinished. He felt warm blood against his palm but ignored it, adding it to the list of injuries he’d sustained over the last twenty-four hours. If it didn’t debilitate him, it didn’t concern him.
Twenty seconds later, the police officer directly above him reached the lip of the ship’s sprawling deck.
King hovered only a couple of rungs behind the man, poised to capitalise on what he knew would come next.
The officer made it to the top of the ladder and began to haul himself onboard, onto flat ground.
A hail of gunfire tore his chest to shreds and sent him hurtling back in the other direction.
His lifeless form cascaded off the ladder, tumbling down, almost landing directly on top of King. The corpse grazed him as it flew past and he shouldered it aside, completely ignoring the brutal violence only a couple of feet above him.
There hadn’t been enough time for those on deck to assess the situation.
They’d expected King to appear first.
He hadn’t.
King recognised the single second of advantage he’d carved out of nothingness and elected to make full use of it.
He burst into full view of the deck directly after the police officer had, and swung the AK-47 round to unload on the unsuspecting hostiles.
46
He had never dealt with a greater list of unknowns.
As he reared into view, he had no idea how many combatants he’d be facing, what kind of skills they possessed, what kind of connection they had to Bryson Reed, or how close they had positioned themselves to the access ladder.
But he had been selected as Black Force’s inaugural recruit for a single predominant reason.
His reflexes in the field.
He laser-focused on a stationary target, identified that the target was a white man, recognised the man as a threat, noted his possession of a rifle, brought his AK-47 around in an instinctual, sweeping gesture and drilled three rounds straight through the guy’s centre mass, taking great care to aim for a portion of his body that carried the smallest potential to miss.
All in the space of a half-second.
Blood sprayed and the guy went down in a snarling heap, losing all function in his limbs at once. Out of the picture — no doubt about it.
Before the man had even started to topple, King’s attention tore across to another moving target, this man wielding a fearsome-looking assault rifle, only half of his body mass visible. Another white male. The guy had taken up position behind a giant steel column, used to prop up the football-field sized platform above their heads, piled high with shipping containers. He’d been the one to shoot the police officer dead, judging by the position of his rifle’s barrel. Recognition must have been flooding over him, pulsing hesitation into his trigger finger as he assessed whether the second man up the ladder was another friendly.
The shock of killing an ally by accident didn’t wear off quickly.
Nevertheless, these men were impressively trained, and King could sense he would take a bullet to the forehead if he hesitated for even a fraction of a second.
Luckily, he didn’t.
As the first guy collapsed, King sent a pair of rounds into the top half of the second guy’s skull, taking his head apart in grisly fashion. He didn’t stop to admire his handiwork, instead reeling to take aim on a third shape he’d sensed in his peripheral vision.
He’d been visible at the top of the access ladder for less than a second.
The third guy — another white male with a weapon — fired, reacting decisively to the carnage. But King had kept most of his body below deck, both heels firmly planted on the fourth rung from the top, which left a tiny sliver of available space for the third guy to nail a headshot. And the guy’s aim had been thrown off altogether as his subconscious dealt with the sight of his two friends blasted to shreds right before his eyes.
His first three shots missed, sailing over King’s head, rocketing out to sea.
That was all it took.
The third guy’s face exploded, caught by two consecutive rounds from the AK-47. He splayed back across a twisted mass of industrial machinery, slumping over pipes and dials and grates, bleeding all over them.
King froze in place, still as a statue, entirely motionless, his situational awareness honed into the space around him. He tuned his eyes and ears to the slightest disturbance in the dark industrial space, searching for a fourth hostile.
He found nothing.
Satisfied that he’d bought a minute to compose himself, he hurried up onto the deck, ushering Beth from her position directly beneath him. Only then did he stop to analyse the details of the gruesome scene.
And most of it surprised him.
In the heat of a live combat situation, he tuned out everything bar the necessary details. Now that he had a chance to soak in the sights, he paused to linger on the faded uniforms donning the trio of corpses.
They were MARPAT-style combat uniforms, sporting the familiar digital-patterned camouflage. King knew the Marine Corps held the patents on that design. And these weren’t cheap knock-offs. They were the real deal.
‘What’s the bet they’re ex-military?’ he said.
‘They have to be,’ Beth muttered. ‘I’ve never seen anyone move as fast as you do in the field, but that third guy got a few shots off.’
‘They almost had me,’ King said, nodding along. ‘Another half-second of hesitation and I’d have been dead. I could sense it. That’s some serious training.’
He kicked one of the rifles away, sending it to the lip of the deck, out from under the oppressive roof above their heads. The sunlight displayed its features in all their glory.
‘M4A1 carbines,’ King said. ‘You can’t get those easily.’
‘Unless you know people,’ Beth said. ‘Military contacts. People in the right places who can siphon a few rifles off an unchecked surplus.’
‘So he’s got old military buddies who want a piece of the pie. That’s what this is.’
‘There’s more to it than that,’ Beth said. ‘There’s gotta be. How were they going to avoid the authorities forever? If any of that cash shows up in banks, the government would have been all over them. They must have known that.’
Something clicked in King’s head, as if two pieces of an enormous puzzle slotted together instantly. ‘Unless they make it legit.’
‘What?’
‘I have an idea of what Reed’s trying to do. Now I want to hear it from the man himself.’
A soft noise fl
oated out of the darkness further inside the ship. King snapped his attention to the sound, perceptive to anything unusual in his surroundings.
He stared into the shadows. It looked as if a giant drawer had been pulled out of the side of the container ship — the body rested underneath them, and above lay the platform stretching from one end of the ship to the other, home to hundreds of shipping containers laid end to end. This portion of the ship was like a cavernous warehouse interior that stretched far into the distance, mostly bare but littered with the odd office or column.
‘Reed’s in there,’ King muttered. ‘Somewhere.’
He took a single step forward, dipping underneath the ceiling into the shadows. As he moved, he sensed another body — horrifyingly close.
He tensed up in anticipation as a man circled explosively around one of the nearest steel columns and swung a heavy wrench at his chest like a lethal baseball bat.
47
It wasn’t Reed, but that was all King had time to ascertain before he took the brunt of the impact to the sternum.
He’d sensed the presence of the man a moment before the guy made his move, which had provided him the opportunity to lean back away from the incoming blow. If he’d kept his forward momentum the wrench would have cracked his chest bone and likely killed him on the spot, if not dealing out horrendous internal damage.
Even as he rolled away from the strike, the fixed jaw at the head of the wrench landed against the centre of his chest with enough of an audible crack to send him straight to the metal floor. He landed hard on his back, two-hundred plus pounds crashing to the ground. He snatched for the AK-47 as he fell, but came up surprisingly short. His good hand brushed the weapon’s stock but it was already falling away from him, sent flying from the surprise attack.
As King missed the gun, he realised he might be far more hurt than he thought.
Before he even had a chance to skirt out of the way of another blow, his attacker had loaded up with another barbaric swing and dropped the fixed jaw of the wrench into King’s stomach. It struck a tender portion of his flesh, aggravating a pre-existing injury. Pain exploded across his abdomen and he spat blood across the metal beside his head. He crumpled involuntarily, helpless to resist his body shutting down on itself in an attempt to recuperate.
