by Matt Rogers
This was a game of inches, and milliseconds, and instinctual reactions.
King had come up short in the crucial moment.
‘Drop the gun.’
He dropped the gun, recognising the voice from the small locker room the previous day. It had been laced with confidence and contempt then, and it was laced with confidence and contempt now.
Link.
The SCAR-H clattered to the dirt, making Link reflexively twitch — the gun barrel pressed a little tighter into King’s ear as the battle rifle rattled off the gravel. King noticed every tiny shred of the man’s imperceptible movements. They would be necessary for what happened next. Every last one of them.
Because Link hadn’t killed him yet, and that taught him everything he needed to know about the man he was dealing with.
‘What do you want?’ King said.
‘Didn’t think it would be that easy.’
‘I’m not dead yet.’
‘Wyatt wants to talk to you.’
‘About what?’
‘About why you feel the need to irritate him.’
‘Where’s your friends?’
‘Didn’t need them.’
‘You sent them after me.’
‘Those weren’t my friends.’
‘Then where are your friends?’ King repeated.
He inched one foot forward as slow as he could until he felt the familiar steel touch of the SCAR-H under the sole of his combat boot. As soon as he found it, he used the tiny platform to rotate his body ever so slightly to the left, facing diagonally towards Link instead of staring straight ahead. The amped-up mercenary registered the sound of the SCAR-H grating against the gravel, but there was a moment’s hesitation as he connected the sound to when the gun had clattered to the floor moments earlier.
So, for the briefest instant in time, he thought nothing of the noise, perhaps thinking the SCAR was tumbling down a ditch. But at the same time, that registration used up valuable milliseconds of computation deep in his brain.
Checking off a mental list of possibilities.
Is that a threat? No. Good. Wait — has he moved?
A game of inches.
And milliseconds.
And instinctual reactions.
So when King jerked his head off the centre line and thrust it in the general direction of Link’s torso, the man didn’t know what to do. Link couldn’t correct his aim because the ear he’d jammed the gun into was closer to his own chest than the barrel — the space had become impossibly tight, and King thrived in impossibly tight spaces.
He followed through with the headbutt, utilising his momentum to crack Link in the middle of his chest — nothing damaging, but forceful enough to throw his equilibrium off balance.
Then it was like clockwork.
As Link struggled to maintain his balance on the loose gravel King reached back and clamped both hands around the guy’s wrist. He shot one palm down the slim bones and ended up with his fingers jammed in between Link’s palm and the Colt M1911A1 pistol he wielded.
King smashed the gun into the undergrowth.
Then he considered the pain and suffering he would have experienced at the hands of Link and Wyatt and transferred that horrific knowledge into adrenalin, arcing back and smashing an elbow into the bridge of the man’s nose. Link went down without a sound as the pain drilled into his brain, but King didn’t stop there, thundering a combat boot into his groin and then following up with a one-two combination as the guy collapsed.
First punch to the same damaged nose.
Second to the chin.
He splayed into the tangled weeds, arms and legs falling everywhere at once, and King stomped down on his throat to make sure he didn’t move a muscle for the foreseeable future. Link spluttered, his teeth crimson from internal bleeding.
King sidestepped a couple of feet to the right and snatched the Colt out of the dirt. He bent down, touched the tip of the weapon to Link’s forehead, and pulled the trigger without a single uttered word.
No time for gloating.
Just time for dead enemies.
The gunshot resonated through the fields surrounding the open-pit mine, and King jolted as his ears rang.
He snatched up the SCAR-H and let the high-pitched whining in his ears fade, replaced slowly but surely by silence.
Nothing.
Not a peep.
No alarms.
No screaming and distress.
Then he remembered.
This was the Congo.
He advanced straight through the open perimeter gate into the mining complex, leaving Bernardi hanging from the gatehouse gutter and Link’s corpse sprawled across a nondescript field.
Business as usual.
47
King made it halfway across the open land between the fence and the nearest cluster of office buildings before he realised he was being overly paranoid, and that a unique situation had presented itself on the premises of Barnes & Cooper Resources.
There was no-one coming.
Barnes & Cooper Resources was a corporation, not a country. They were rich, but they weren’t prepared for a tactical invasion of this kind. They hired soldiers of fortune to deter corrupt militants and rebels and bandits and other undesirables. A surgical destruction of their forces — first at Brody’s compound, then the trail, then Link at the gate — had left them wide open.
It left King in a unique position.
Moving low across the open ground, enshrouded by the night, he realised there were no floodlights heading for his position. There was no-one watching. He would stalk through this complex until he came across Wyatt, even if it took until the early hours of the morning.
Everything had happened so fast that he hadn’t realised how effortlessly he had dispatched the hostiles in front of him.
His opponent in Kisangani.
Thorn in the crowd.
The five mercenaries at Brody’s compound.
The four on the trail.
Without a single significant injury to show for it.
He was improving. Reaching new heights. The only thing he’d come all the way to the Congo for.
But was it true evolution, or sheer dumb luck?
A giant office building towered in front of him, alone in the middle of the gravel lot. It stood eight storeys tall, dwarfing everything in sight, surrounded by simple temporary lodging erected in odd rows across the complex. It reminded King of a shipping port in Mogadishu, where buildings had been seemingly dumped at random.
Simple tools to conduct business in an undesirable location, and then pack up and get the hell out of there when the payload dried up.
Several windows of this enormous building glowed softly, lights seemingly left on at random. Certain levels seemed more populated than others. King kept still in the middle of the lot and listened intently for anything resembling a sign of life, but came up with nothing. He approached the entrance warily, recalling the wires criss-crossing the concrete floor of the room Bernardi had died in.
It had seemed to be some kind of server room.
Here was as best a place as any to start.
The reception area consisted of a large open space with no artwork or decorations in sight and a simple curving desk on the far wall. The lighting was low and moody, the type King had seen a thousand times before. It was the automatic lighting left on overnight to deter thieves, half-heartedly trying to convince anyone nearby that the building was still populated. He wondered if the lights upstairs were on for the same reason.
He kept a dozen feet away from the floor-to-ceiling glass walls at all times. He knew Wyatt could be anywhere, along with a small army of help.
He gripped the SCAR-H tighter and slunk a couple of steps closer to the building.
A shot rang out from within the lobby, arcing outwards, shattering one of the panes of glass. King registered the muzzle flare and dove for cover, flattening himself to the gravel with no regard for his comfort. He shredded the skin on hi
s palms as he wrenched himself a few feet across to the right. The gunshot had been unsuppressed, and even still no-one was panicking.
Then a voice floated out of the newly-formed gap in the lobby entrance.
A familiar voice.
Wyatt’s voice.
‘I evacuated this portion of the complex,’ he said, out of sight but within earshot. ‘So you don’t have to worry about collateral. It’s just us. Come in, King. Let’s talk.’
‘I’m not talking to you,’ King called out, and by the time he uttered the first syllable he was already on the move, crab-crawling fast to the left.
Sure enough, another couple of shots blasted in his general direction, passing well over his head.
‘You trying to hide?’ Wyatt said.
King didn’t respond.
As soon as he made it out of the line of sight of the floor-to-ceiling entrance windows, he got to his feet and bolted past the building, keeping as quiet as he could given the fact he was wielding a SCAR-H battle rifle and decked out in combat gear.
Wyatt could talk to himself for as long as he pleased.
King wouldn’t be there.
Because he’d recalled something else from Somalia, a behemoth of a vehicle sitting in a processing facility in the middle of a desert village.
An ultra-class haul truck.
Something told him there would be one here.
He would make sure to put it to good use.
48
The open-pit mine carried a certain sense of scale unparalleled in the ordinary civilian world. King started down the haul ramp only a couple of minutes after sprinting away from the office building, an enormous twisting path that descended in zigzagging fashion down one wall of the gargantuan pit. He felt entirely insignificant in the darkness, like nothing he was doing really mattered in the slightest.
It played tricks with his mind.
At the first bend in the haul ramp, King found a sign of life. He kept a steady pace for most of the descent, but froze when he noticed the tiny speck of orange light in the darkness.
The glowing embers of a cigarette.
As his eyes adjusted, he recognised the worker sitting on the edge of the massive dirt ramp, looking out over the chasm before them and studying the view in the lowlight. He must have just clocked off the job — either night security, or a late shift worker.
Regardless, King couldn’t take any chances.
The guy didn’t even hear him coming.
With one hand King snatched the guy by the back of the collar to make sure he didn’t pitch forward over the edge of the haul ramp, and with the other he curled his fingers into a fist and slammed his knuckles into the soft flesh above the guy’s ear, ruining his equilibrium and knocking him senseless with a single blow. The man fell onto his back across the haul ramp, a tiny speck amidst the open-pit mine, and lay still with his eyes rolled into the back of his head.
It looked gruesome, but he’d be awake in a few minutes with an awful headache, and potentially a mild concussion.
And no memory of what the hell had caused it.
King continued down a couple of levels, descending further into the earth. He passed a couple of hotspots where late-night staff were milling about, chatting underneath floodlights or directing heavy machinery around.
They wouldn’t interfere with what happened next.
Not if Wyatt had instructed them to stay out of the mercenary business.
King found a bank of ultra-class haul trucks on the fourth level down, tucked into a dirt parking lot the size of a football field. He selected the nearest beast — a Caterpillar truck with the distinct yellow hue and CAT logo emblazoned on the side — and ascended the scaffolding in the dark, surprised at the lack of security within the complex.
He guessed that was what the mercenaries were for.
To stop people getting in.
As he suspected, the controls were rudimentary enough. He worked the ignition and fired the enormous haul truck to life, which took an amalgamation of drawn-out beeps and hisses. Sure enough, it attracted the attention of every worker on the haul ramp, and King spotted a few workers hurrying into the lot’s entrance, waving their arms frantically in the air in an attempt to get King to shut down the truck.
Instead, he let the wheels — each the size of a house — roll forward.
Sure enough the workers bailed immediately, hurrying to either side of the haul truck as it rumbled out of the lot and onto the giant dirt ramp. From such a high vantage point in the driver’s cabin, King felt like he was moving at a snail’s pace, but he realised scale had to be taken into account.
He made it back to the surface within a couple of minutes, where pandemonium had struck.
Now alarms were sounding and lights were flaring and panicked shouts were resonating up into the open windows of the driver’s cabin. King ignored all of it, making a beeline across the complex, heading straight back to the office building.
The Caterpillar was daunting to handle, but he managed well enough. Thankfully the complex was spaced out over an enormous plot of land, so there were no tight turns to wriggle through. He simply set his course and gave the haul truck as much forward momentum as possible.
And then he didn’t stop.
The Caterpillar roared forward, large enough to impact the first three storeys of the office building. From this direction King would impact the other side of the building to where he’d confronted Wyatt, but that didn’t matter. It would run straight through the back of the lobby, an area he’d confirmed with his own eyes to be devoid of civilians.
And that was the most important thing.
A hundred feet from impact, he launched out of the driver’s cabin and hustled across the upper platform, making for the same access ladder attached to the front of the haul truck that he’d used to ascend moments previously. He found it and snatched frantically at the railings, put off by the momentum of the charging vehicle. A truck of such gargantuan size wouldn’t lose steam in a hurry.
A collision was inevitable.
Halfway down the ladder, he threw a glance over his shoulder and paled at how quickly the building was approaching. If he didn’t move faster, he’d be sandwiched between millions of pounds of steel and brick and glass. He took the last few rungs three at a time, almost stumbling at the final hurdle, keeping a tight grip on his SCAR-H in the process.
Sweating, shaking, seconds from getting crushed, he fell off the base of the ladder and hit the dirt hard enough to smash the breath from his lungs. He closed his eyes and burrowed his head into the mud, allowing the haul truck to pass over him. Only when he opened his eyes did he realise there was enough space to fully stand underneath the enormous vehicle.
Bang.
Impact.
Brick shattered and metal groaned and tyres squealed. King’s eardrums protested at the obscene noise but he ignored all of it, finding an opening in the side of the demolished building and ducking straight into the ruined lobby.
Supports be damned.
If the entire structure came down on top of him, then so be it.
He found Wyatt in the middle of the lobby, sprinting away from one of the haul truck’s massive tyres, heading for the glass doors King had almost strode through earlier.
Wyatt’s weapon had been abandoned in the carnage King had created.
Suddenly, King realised he might have taken things a little too far.
His surroundings rumbled — everything screamed. He grimaced, wondering if the building really would collapse. Then the haul truck finally screeched to a halt, having carved out an entire portion of the office complex, covered in broken plaster and crumbled brick.
King never stopped moving.
He caught up to Wyatt and crash-tackled the man through one of the floor-to-ceiling glass partitions, sending both of them tumbling out into the dirt, surrounded by razor sharp fragments.
King felt his palms sliced up as he slapped his hands to the ground to stabilise himself. As us
ual he prepared for a war — Wyatt was alongside him, in the process of scrambling to his feet just as King was.
But to no avail.
King kicked Wyatt’s leg out and the man grunted as his jaw smashed the ground. He tried again and King smashed an elbow into the meat of his side, following it up with a second, then a third. Wyatt crumpled, landing hard on the glass fragments. King wasted no opportunity, launching himself across the couple of feet of space and punching him square in the forehead — a jagged left hook that sent Wyatt’s head clattering back to the ground. When the big mercenary made a pathetic reach for the SCAR-H King had discarded beside him, King skirted to his feet and booted Wyatt in the forehead.
Finally he grabbed two handfuls of the man’s jacket and hauled him to his feet, head butting him in the nose and kneeing him once, twice, three times in the gut. The man spat blood and dropped, his legs giving out.
King reached down to haul him to his feet once more.
Wyatt threw a desperate final strike, whistling a right hook through the air towards King’s chin. A couple of months ago King might have taken the punch in stride, letting it ricochet off his head and cause a swollen lump in order to dish out more punishment.
But this time he let ice run through his veins as he jerked to the side, throwing his head off the centre line and letting the punch swing harmlessly by. Wyatt overextended with the strike, having put all his last drops of energy into the assault, and he found himself stumbling forward a step to correct himself.
King used the opportunity to deliver a fourth staggering knee into the man’s gut.
Wyatt simply crumpled, the fight sapped out of him.
King stared down at the pathetic shell, the space a tough-as-nails soldier of fortune had once occupied.
‘I think it’s time we had a talk,’ he said.
49
