by Matt Rogers
It was time.
Countless thoughts rolled through his head as he set off from the compound into the desolate plains of rural Congo. He wondered if smashing through a gang of South African mercenaries would prove anything, or if at the end of the day the ordeal would be entirely meaningless. He wondered if he could simply charge straight through Wyatt, or if the man had a past of discipline and focus which had honed him into an elite combatant.
What if he met his match?
King knew he had to believe that Brody’s training had warped him into something different, something … greater. He recalled every minute of training, every instance where he’d reached his physical limits and then pushed straight through them. With that affirmation in the back of his head, he calmed his nerves. He’d done everything possible to succeed. Now he just had to follow through with it.
Wyatt had been telling the truth about the trail connecting their complexes. King found the narrow opening after an uneasy half-hour of trawling the rural tracks, spotting a gravel trail that twisted through oppressive jungle, edging closer to the distant giant of Mount Nyiragongo.
A suitable backdrop, all things considered.
King had never seen scenery like this. It seemed as if he’d been dumped on a hostile planet and told to survive on his own, surrounded by jungles and volcanoes and endless fields and savagery at every turn.
It didn’t take long to meet his first roadblock.
The approaching set of headlights became visible almost a mile away, their surrounding glow filtering through the trees. King had his gaze honed on the road ahead, and as soon as he recognised the distant artificial light he stamped on the brakes and the Raptor ground to a halt on the trail, boxed in on all sides with barely enough room on either side of the truck for a man to squeeze past.
There was no way the approaching vehicle could get around.
Confrontation was inevitable.
King killed the engine with one smooth motion and the headlights disappeared, plunging the cabin into oppressive darkness. For a moment the tension and the humidity and the stifling atmosphere got to him, rubbing his stomach the wrong way and sending a pang of unease through his gut. He pushed it down and remained in absolute silence, waiting for the vehicle to reach him.
Had they seen him?
The answer came a few seconds later.
A faded old pick-up truck — some kind of Toyota — came screaming around a bend in the trail at a furious rate, kicking up mud and dirt off its massive wheels and spraying grit across the tree trunks on either side. The oncoming headlights nearly blinded King but he remained deathly still, clutching the SCAR-H to his chest and staring straight ahead, unblinking.
The pick-up, still travelling dangerously fast, noticed the giant Raptor hovering idly in the night at the last second.
There was going to be an impact.
There was no way around it.
The Toyota slammed on the brakes to prevent total destruction of both vehicles, but the impact jolted King in his seat all the same. His collarbone crushed against the seatbelt and for a horrifying moment he thought it might break, rendering one side of his upper body useless for the coming fight. But the Toyota proved much smaller than the Raptor, and it took the brunt of the trauma. King jerked back and forth in his seat as his vehicle scooted back through the mud, but when it came to a standstill he found himself relatively unscathed.
His eardrums throbbed from the horrendous sound, and his eyes felt like they’d been rattled in their sockets.
But otherwise, he felt brand new.
The Toyota fared worse. Its front bumper disintegrated as the smaller vehicle bore the most significant damage, grinding to a halt with most of its hood buried in the grille of the Raptor.
The standard wear-and-tear prevalent in older vehicles bode poorly for the occupants. King heard them staggering out of the cabin after a brief moment of absolute silence.
One vomited into the undergrowth.
Another let out a moan.
The two who seemed relatively healthy approached the dormant Raptor.
King remained where he was, adjusting his eyes to the darkness. All four headlights had been shattered in the head-on collision, plunging the trail into night. He kept the SCAR-H pressed tight to his chest in an underhanded grip, reluctant to use it to take the four men by surprise.
He wasn’t certain of their guilt.
And Somalia had taught him to be absolutely sure. With the amount of discretion he had, he couldn’t allow himself to take out his frustrations on anyone who inconvenienced him. For all he knew, these men were innocent of any wrongdoing.
Unlikely, but still…
Sounds of the night rolled in through the cabin and King realised the driver’s window had shattered in the collision. His lap was covered in fragments of glass that had spilled off the pane, putting him in earshot of the approaching two men.
They moved with caution.
They weren’t sure what they were walking into.
‘Fisher,’ one of them called, in heavily accented English. His accent was European. ‘You boys okay? We didn’t see you…’
King noted guilt and confusion in the man’s voice. They had been thrown off by the sudden crash and, more importantly, they knew the occupants of this vehicle. This must be one of the other mercenary parties manning the perimeter of Barnes & Cooper Resources. King wondered if they had been sent to check on their comrades after hours of radio silence.
In the darkness, he managed a wry smile.
Pressing himself into the seat, sinking lower against the leather, he silently unbuckled his seatbelt and tightened his grip on the SCAR-H. He could barely make out the outlines of the two men, approaching the driver’s side door from a dozen feet away.
But they were there.
And they were armed.
Moving with unbelievable care, he pried a half-full disposable plastic water bottle from the centre console and poured a steady stream of the warm fluid into his mouth. He sloshed it around once, spreading it between his cheeks, and then spat the drinking water all over the steering wheel with a pathetic gurgle.
‘Help,’ he croaked, with enough of a raspy voice to mask any identifiable accent.
One of the pair rushed forward and hurled the driver’s door open without a second thought.
Probably worried their friend was hurt.
King swung the SCAR-H like a baseball bat and bounced the stock off the guy’s jaw.
45
A battle rifle took considerable effort to wield due to its bulk, and packed a significant punch. With a noise like a gunshot the first guy reeled back, splaying into the undergrowth with his limbs flying in all directions, all the fight stripped from him as his jaw cracked. King burst out through the open doorway and closed the gap between the Raptor and the second mercenary in just over a second.
The second guy was darting his aim in all directions at once, clutching some kind of cheap Kalashnikov assault rifle, identical to the weapons seemingly everyone in the Congo carried around. He didn’t get a lock on his target before King surged in and doubled him over with a brutal swing of the SCAR-H, striking the guy in the liver and sending him stumbling a couple of steps forward across the uneven ground.
He lurched uncontrollably past King.
King reversed his grip on the SCAR-H and brought the rifle down across the back of the guy’s neck, pitching him face-first into the undergrowth without a shred of consciousness to clutch onto.
He turned to the other pair, eyes wide in the darkness, but they were no threat.
Both were in bad shape. One of the guys had been driving the Toyota and his forehead had bounced off the steering wheel, judging by the way he staggered like a drunk through the choking undergrowth along the side of the trail. As King noticed him, the guy tripped on a root and lay still, squirming and semiconscious but unable to offer the slightest resistance.
The other guy was busy vomiting. He might not have been wearing his s
eatbelt, and could have taken a headrest or some other kind of blunt object to the gut.
Noticing that everyone was preoccupied with their conditions, King glanced at the SCAR-H in his hands in contemplation.
But that would be a step too far.
The previous party of mercenaries had directly approached him, and had been milliseconds away from shooting him down in the dirt before he’d intervened. These men hadn’t mounted any offence. They’d run into him, and he’d launched the first attack.
Gunning them down on this trail didn’t seem … fair.
They were, in all likelihood, bad men. King had spent enough time in the Congo now to recognise that anyone involved in this world had blood on their hands. But he didn’t know for sure, and revelations from Somalia came roaring back to the forefront of his mind. He lowered the SCAR-H’s thirteen inch barrel from the throat of the nearest mercenary and crossed straight to their Toyota.
Moving.
Always moving.
The engine was still running. For a moment King considered all the ways the situation could go wrong — there could be a code of conduct regarding returning to the mining complex, and if he didn’t get into contact with the right parties his vehicle could be shot up on sight. He could run straight into an entire army of mercenaries if the executives at Barnes & Cooper Resources were prudent enough to oversupply their defence forces for this exact kind of situation.
Or none of that could happen.
He grimaced at the task ahead of him — turning the Toyota around on the narrow track with no working headlights. Then he forced all negative thoughts from his mind and slipped straight into the empty vehicle. He backed it up a few feet, complete with a horrific groan as the front end detached itself from the smoking Raptor’s grill. He completed what amounted to a twelve-point turn, inching around and bumping and jolting over potholes and roots and undergrowth surrounding the trail.
When he finally got the Toyota aimed in the right direction, he eased into a steady coast.
The Ford Raptor — along with the four mercenaries beaten into the dirt — faded from view, all their silhouettes dissipating in the rear view mirror. The old Toyota stank of cigarettes and alcohol and weed.
King imagined there was little to do this close to the Rwandan border apart from numb the senses with a cocktail of substances.
The general degradation of the interior turned his stomach, but it was smarter than continuing in the Raptor. The maroon monster of a vehicle had been gone too long, and too many suspicions would be roused if he returned to base in it hours later. He might not have even made it into the complex.
This truck, on the other hand, couldn’t have left the mine more than ten minutes ago.
Its front end was broken and twisted, but that served King’s favour. Darkness and confusion would reign supreme, something he thrived in. With no headlights, and such a hasty return, whoever now manned the gate would assume that the four mercenaries had run into a tree and turned back when they realised they couldn’t see the rest of their way.
Or, at least, he hoped that’s how things would unfold.
Now he snatched up the SCAR-H, ensuring it was ready to fire and resting the CQC barrel on the open windowsill of the Toyota’s driver’s seat. He had been merciful back there, in the middle of the trail, but that time had now passed. The milliseconds of debating were gone — that portion of his mind melted away, replaced by a cold and calculated decisiveness.
You didn’t operate a mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and peacefully co-exist with the locals.
He had learnt that, and he would not be merciful.
Not for a second.
He had an important meeting with a man named Wyatt, and no-one would get in his way.
They would be expecting him.
He didn’t care.
The patch of jungle fell away and the trail devolved into a series of interconnected gravel roads twisting and turning through the undulating fields. Dead ahead rested the mining complex, and only now could King recognise the sheer vastness of the place.
He crested a rise in the gravel trail and was offered a view of the entire complex. The perimeter fence stretched for a mile in each direction, forming an enormous rectangular space within which rested several different cordoned-off sections.
The closest stretch of land was home to a cluster of office buildings and living quarters, thrown across the earth randomly with no real attention to aesthetics. They were clinical and utilitarian, with white brick walls and zero distinguishable features. Dull and uncharismatic as they were, King imagined they served a purpose — handling the day to day operations of what rested beyond.
The open-pit mine covered a staggering portion of the earth, as if a mythical giant had bent down and gouged a multi-tiered scoop from the land itself. The halogen floodlights dotting the complex cast ominous shadows across most of the level ground, but none of the illumination stretched into the mine itself. As a result King had no idea where the bottom rested. For all he knew, the mine could be endlessly deep.
There was activity across the vast space, hundreds of workers and staff and executives flitting to and fro between different locations. Despite the scale of Barnes & Cooper Resources’ operation, it instilled a semblance of hope in King.
It would have been worse to approach a smaller outfit, where all eyes would be locked on the front gate with every member of security in the complex awaiting his arrival. Now he understood why Wyatt couldn’t co-ordinate anything with the other mercenaries spread across the mine. The operation was massive, consisting of hundreds of workers and untold schedules to maintain.
Certain people would be kept in the know, and certain people would be left out of the loop.
King sensed a narrow window opening up before him — nine of the perimeter guards that had been hired by Barnes & Cooper Resources lay behind him, more than half of them dead.
He gripped the SCAR-H a little tighter and gunned the mangled Toyota over the loose gravel.
‘I’m coming, Wyatt,’ he muttered under his breath.
He surged toward the complex.
Toward a force of men who were anticipating an intruder and would do anything to stop him.
Thankfully, he would do anything to get in.
46
King descended upon the closest perimeter fence of the mining complex expecting an all-out war, and instead he found a single man.
The sight threw him off guard immediately, so strange and cerebral in the lowlight that for a moment he thought he was hallucinating. He eased the Toyota to a steady crawl as he approached the chain-link fence, topped with barbed wire and crackling with static electricity. Beside the electronic front gate, suspended from one of the gutters overhanging the guard house, was a body.
It was one of Wyatt’s friends — King could tell from the faded khakis the man wore, silhouetting his physique as he twirled in the air, suspended from his neck by a frayed rope attached to the top of the guardhouse.
Resolutely dead.
It had to be Link. Apart from Wyatt, that man was the only one of his crew left.
There had been a fourth man, present during King’s initial confrontation with Wyatt and his buddies. He hadn’t seen that guy since — he imagined the guy was either let go from his position, or killed.
Knowing the Congo, he concluded it was the latter.
The third, Thorn, was tied up in the warehouse by Lake Kivu, at the mercy of a furious Brody Hartman. King guessed if Thorn wasn’t already dead, he soon would be.
That left Wyatt, and Link.
And this man was too small to be Wyatt.
King stopped the Toyota in the middle of the trail, at least a hundred feet from the complex’s perimeter. In the darkness he could only see the blackened silhouette of the dead man twirling on the rope, his boots identical to the ones King had seen back in Kisangani when Wyatt and his two friends had stormed into the locker room.
Why had Wyatt finished off his
team?
Cutting loose ends?
The man had already killed Rex Bernardi. Maybe he’d done it on a whim, and his superiors had revoked his privileges. Perhaps he’d rebelled against authority, lashing out at his closest friend on his descent into madness. Whatever the case, the sight set King on edge. He yanked the gearstick, putting the Toyota into park, and quietly got out of the car.
The night wrapped around him.
By this point he’d adjusted completely to the lack of light. As soon as the Toyota’s headlights had gone out ten minutes earlier in the head-on collision his eyes had set to work adjusting. A sudden rush of natural light would blind him, but the adjustments allowed him to ghost along the path without disturbing a soul. He kept the SCAR-H in front of him, both hands on the battle rifle, leaving the relative comfort of the vehicle behind.
The night was hot and the air was thick. Sweat poured off his frame as he stepped over roots and avoided dips in the road, where the loose gravel ran down shallow valleys and weeds grew out of everything. His heart hammered in his chest, riding out the sudden shock of seeing the man hanging.
He grew close enough to make out more detail, recognising the faded khakis and the way they hung off the man’s frame — it was definitely Link. King had only met the man once, and hadn’t spoken to him directly, but he couldn’t quite put it together.
Why had the man been left out here, in plain view of any passersby?
A symbol of punishment?
Had he deceived Wyatt in some way?
King took a step closer. The coast was clear — he’d spent the past couple of minutes scouting the surroundings relentlessly for any sign of life. He stepped up to the body and gently touched a hand to the man’s left arm, so the momentum spun him slowly around to face King.
The top half of his head was missing.
King realised it was Rex Bernardi — albeit dressed up in combat fatigues — at the same time as the dirt and grass and weeds a couple of feet to his left morphed into a mound, and then the mound got to its feet and jammed the cold barrel of an automatic pistol into the soft flesh of King’s ear. Despite his reflexes, he couldn’t have predicted the insane sequence of events, and the presence of Bernardi’s corpse had shocked him into the half-second of hesitation necessary for the enemy to take advantage.
