by Matt Rogers
There was much to accomplish.
The situation had become clearer over time, and Graham had dropped his defensive posturing and begun to explain.
The four of them had been snatched from their shelter in one of the nearby villages by the Islamic group, the terrorists’ motivations unknown. Before she’d been restrained, Felicity had managed to send out an SOS signal on a concealed device provided to the journalists in case of emergency. Then the device had been destroyed, they’d been carted off to this compound, and they’d slowly started to accept their fate.
None of them had been traumatised. Scared, yes. Shocked, of course. But not permanently scarred. They’d already come to terms with the fact that they might die in their line of work, which brought about a mental toughness rarely found in common civilians. King found himself quietly impressed with their resolute stance on the issue.
‘Did anything … happen to the two of you?’ King asked the women as the five of them scurried to the perimeter fence, leaving the corpses to rot.
They both shook their heads.
‘That was the first time any of them tried anything,’ Alicia said. ‘That guy had been eyeing us for days. We knew something was coming. We were ready.’
‘Ready?’
She slid a tiny switchblade out of the cuff of her jacket. ‘They didn’t find it in the search.’
‘You didn’t use it on your restraints?’
‘They had automatic weapons. We’re not stupid. We could free ourselves, but there were eight of them, and they were fanatic. They ate and drank and pissed and shit and slept with their guns. And we couldn’t sneak away unnoticed, not the four of us. Not together.’
‘So you waited?’
‘I was about to cut off anything that guy wanted to put inside me.’
King glanced sideways at her. ‘In another life we should have been married.’
‘Uh … that’s a weird train of thought based on what I just said.’
‘I like strong women.’
‘Thank you.’
Graham sauntered up to them and said, ‘King, what are you going to do?’
The five of them pulled to a halt in front of an open-topped jeep with the network’s logo emblazoned on the side. It seemed the terrorists’ had seized their vehicle too. To King’s surprise, he stared at a sea of duffel bags and equipment containers sprawled across the rear tray.
‘They didn’t even take your stuff out of the car,’ King muttered.
‘Lazy, I guess,’ Graham said.
Lazy. Undisciplined. Unfocused.
Undeserving of a man of King’s calibre to venture halfway across the world to deal with them.
It only added to his unease.
‘What are you thinking?’ Graham said, sensing something was awry.
‘That emergency signal you sent out,’ King said. ‘Who did it go to?’
‘The network.’
‘And they alerted the authorities?’
‘I assume so. That’s protocol.’
‘They wouldn’t have gone to our government under any circumstances, would they?’
‘I can’t see why. There’d be no reason to. Unless you were already in-country. Sometimes we co-operate on things like that.’
‘I wasn’t. I was inserted. They went out of their way to put me here.’
‘Doesn’t add up to me,’ Graham said.
‘Me either.’ He paused, surveying the four journalists, sensing their confidence starting to return. ‘Now there’s the matter of dealing with you four.’
‘If we have any say in the matter, we’d like to request you leave us alone. Respectfully.’
Maybe they were expecting hostility, but to everyone’s surprise King simply said, ‘Fine.’
Ray, the meekest of the four, piped up for the first time. ‘Sorry?’
‘I said, fine.’
‘You just told us you were flown halfway across the world to set us free. And you’re really fine with letting us go? We’re stubborn bastards, us lot, and I’ll be the first to admit it.’
‘I don’t think you were my superiors’ main priority.’
‘What do you think was?’ Graham said.
‘I have an awful feeling they wanted me out of the country. They wanted me busy.’
‘For what?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll work it out, though.’
‘So you really don’t care if we keep doing our job?’
‘Like I said, I’m not here to babysit. You make your own choices. All four of you want to stay?’
Four nods.
‘Despite the risks?’
Four nods.
‘And you understand that if you get taken again, it’s on you? We can’t keep pulling you out of this mess.’
Four nods.
‘Then, quite frankly, I couldn’t care less what you do in your own time.’
‘Something tells me you know what it’s like to embrace a dangerous job,’ Graham said.
King nodded, managing a wry smile. ‘You’re perceptive.’
‘What will you do now?’
‘I wasn’t supposed to extract you guys for two days. My government wanted me to stake the compound out for no apparent reason. They were adamant about it.’
‘But you moved anyway?’
‘I did.’
‘You didn’t listen to your superiors.’
‘I generally do. This time I made a judgment call.’
‘If that knife plan didn’t work,’ Alicia said. ‘Then I would have been a wreck by the time you pulled us out of here.’
‘I know.’
‘So thank you.’
‘I don’t need thanking,’ King said.
‘Why not?’
‘Because if we knew you were British journalists, it would have been left to your own country’s covert ops. We’re stretched thin enough as it is. Just being honest.’
‘We appreciate honesty,’ Felicity said. ‘More than you can understand.’
‘You’re journalists,’ King said. ‘Investigative journalists in a place like this. Of course I can understand.’
‘It still doesn’t compute,’ Ray said. ‘Sorry to drag this out, mate — I don’t want you to change your mind — but you just risked your life for us. Now you’re letting us go?’
‘I’ve got more important things to worry about.’
‘Such as?’
Graham said, ‘Such as why his government doesn’t want him around.’
King nodded.
‘Have you told them you moved early?’
Wordlessly, King shook his head.
‘We can hold off on updating anyone on our condition for a few days.’
‘Graham,’ Felicity hissed.
‘No!’ Ray said, far too loud.
Graham wheeled on the spot and confronted both of them. ‘This man just killed eight people to get us out of that house. Who knows what might have happened if he’d listened to his government and waited. He’s got the mother of all opportunities right now to find out why he was lied to, and you’re saying you can’t tell your families you’re okay a couple of days later than necessary to let him go about his business without getting busted? We’re not babies. You said that yourselves.’
‘I agree,’ Alicia said.
‘Why can’t I tell my wife I’m safe?!’ Ray said. ‘She won’t tell anyone.’
‘Yes she fucking will,’ Graham said. ‘Your wife would ring the police if she saw someone jaywalking.’
King clamped a firm hand down on the shoulders of both men, freezing the conversation at its peak. ‘Okay. I’ve made up my mind. Ray, you’re going to listen to Graham, because I need these two days of freedom to do as I please. I’ve got a really bad feeling something’s going down back in the U.S., something they needed to keep me away from. So listen to your friend, and keep your mouth shut for a few days. Or I’ll personally come back here and hand you over to another terrorist cell myself.’
No-one said a word.
&
nbsp; King figured he’d got the point across.
He slapped each of them on the backs. ‘Now, off you go.’
Ray stared back over his shoulder. ‘Right now?’
‘There’s someone I need to have a private conversation with,’ King said.
10
Utterly alone in the compound, surrounded by nothing but death and devastation, Jason King sat down in the middle of the cluster of buildings and activated the device that had remained in his ear for the entire duration of the siege. He powered it up, tapped the surface of the earpiece once, and listened to a soft beeping that indicated the connection process had initiated.
It only took seconds for Lars Crawford to answer. ‘What’s the update?’
‘All quiet here. I want to speak about the two days I’m waiting.’
‘Those are your orders. Don’t you dare disobey them.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ King said, flashing a glance at the corpses of Islamic terrorists all around him.
‘Any movement?’
‘Oh, you know … this and that.’
‘King.’
‘What?’
‘You’re going to need to be more specific.’
‘Wish I could help. I can’t see much from the perimeter.’
‘You have enough supplies to last you a couple of days?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Okay, so—’
‘Last chance, Lars.’
‘What?’
‘Last fucking chance. Why do you want me to wait?’
‘That’s not something I’m willing to disclose with—’
‘Lars, what’s that?’
‘I said—’
‘Sorry, Lars, there seems to be trouble with the earpiece. I can’t hear you properly.’
‘King, I said—’
‘I can’t hear you. That’s a shame. Look, I’ll lay low for two days. If you don’t hear from—’
King cut himself off mid-sentence. He removed the earpiece with two fingers acting as pincers and crushed the device to pieces, destroying the GPS tracking electronics within the gadget. Then he tossed the broken remnants into the sand and got to his feet, dusting the shards of electronics off his fingers in the process.
He set off toward the outer perimeter fence, sneaking back through the same hole he’d entered through. He collected his hiking pack from underneath the dead bush, strapped it over both shoulders, and made for the fleet of ageing Toyota Land Cruisers the terrorists had been using to transport supplies back and forth from their compound.
As he walked, he recalled an operation years ago in Somalia.
Investigating a bent Force Recon Marine in Mogadishu, he’d discovered truths about the international shipping industry that he hadn’t considered possible. Billions of dollars in tax and tariff savings, thousands and thousands of undeclared shipping containers passing through ports each and every day all over the world. There simply wasn’t enough manpower on the planet to check all the cargo moving around the globe.
And as King had uncovered the revelations he’d realised it was the definition of a monumental cover-up, all of it swept under the rug so that most of the industry could profit illegally.
He couldn’t change it. Nothing he could do would even come close to altering the system. Much like how his very first operation in Tijuana had taught him truths about the nature of the cartels and how deeply embedded they were in society, his forage into international trade had left him more confused than when he’d been oblivious.
But he had the knowledge.
And now he could use it to his advantage.
He set to work preparing for the journey that would follow. There was no shortage of supplies or vehicles to plunder — the compound had to be self-sustaining, after all. Besides, he didn’t think he’d need to go far. The electronic tablet with satellite GPS at the bottom of his duffel bag would find the closest airfield. No matter how far Mali plunged into chaos, its infrastructure would keep churning over. Cargo planes would arrive, and then they would leave.
King figured it wouldn’t take much persuasion to get himself onboard.
Not based on what he knew about the industry.
‘Bet you’re not expecting this, Lars,’ he muttered as he dashed into the storage building and busied himself looting anything valuable in sight.
He’d need it.
There’s no such thing as a free ride.
11
The ramifications of what he was doing hit him as soon as he drove one of the battered old Toyota Land Cruisers out of the compound.
Leaving his objective behind.
For some reason, separating himself from the physical space made it all the more real.
Black Force tracked him through the earpiece, and its destruction assured he had a window of complete freedom. Lars would assume the electronics had been compromised and wait with bated breath for King to get in touch. But he wouldn’t take drastic action until the two-day window passed. King had disappeared off the map, but the last words he’d exchanged with his handler had confirmed his instructions were clear.
Lars obviously assumed King would follow orders.
Instead he barrelled away from the compound, leaving eight dead men in his wake, barely giving them a second thought. The fact that he’d rescued British journalists instead of American aid workers made no difference to the guilt of the regional group. They were still scum, and the guy with his pants around his ankles hadn’t given his hostages’ nationality a second thought.
So King allowed himself a moment of personal satisfaction.
He’d saved four lives.
It didn’t concern him if they decided to head straight back out into the madness and try to report on the coup tearing the country apart. He’d done his job well, and he could be proud of that.
Except he couldn’t focus on it for more than a couple of seconds.
Every time, his mind wandered back to Lars’ orders. Before he stewed over them, he made sure to locate the nearest private airfield by manually scouring the satellite feed on his tablet. He used his other hand to control the wheel, ignoring the vicious potholes on the desert road. It didn’t take long to find a barren runway only a couple of dozen miles away, past a cluster of tiny villages skewered into the undulating landscape.
He set the GPS to forge a path through the largely uncharted territory and it obliged, tapping into the arsenal of satellites the United States had trained on the region. He tossed the device aside and focused on the road ahead, relying on the spoken commands to direct him to his destination.
You need to focus on what to do when you get there.
International cargo transportation was a murky quagmire — King had spent five years embroiled in the darkness of black operations, most of which lay centred around the parts of the world people didn’t want to know existed. Operation after operation made him learn that those parts were a whole lot larger than most realised. But if you knew how the parts functioned, adding up to a cohesive whole, you could apply pressure at certain angles and get what you wanted every single time.
King knew that.
He just didn’t know how successful that theory would prove in a country that was literally falling apart around him.
But the fundamentals were the same. They had to be. Otherwise society would cease to function.
The golden rule: use intimidation whenever you can.
Above all else, he’d found that tactic the most effective. Especially when you took into account his enormous physique and the quiet, calm confidence of a man who had seen death so many times it had become commonplace. When someone like that asked for something, you usually allowed it.
So he kept that in his mind when, twenty-five minutes later, he twisted the Toyota onto a disused track bordered by twin ditches, each of which lay choked with weeds. He made sure to keep the truck on the right trajectory. Any kind of distraction that made him veer off the road would spell disaster out here. King possessed one of the mos
t useful skill sets for surviving in a war-torn wasteland on the planet, but he would die of thirst all the same if he found himself stranded dozens of miles from the nearest town without a functioning vehicle.
He spotted the cluster of buildings at the bottom of the shallow valley he was descending into, spread out at random in a giant semi-circle, two long runways running along either side. They were airplane hangars, enormous amalgamations of corrugated iron rusting in the Northern Mali desert. There was activity everywhere — trucks that looked like kids’ toys from this distance flitting between hangars, kicking up plumes of smoke on the desert floor, the whole airfield looking like a glowing spectre in the impenetrable night. Exterior lights on the sides of the hangars sent sweeping fields of dull yellow light across the valley floor, lighting up the edges of each runway in turn. Along each stretch of tarmac, harsh red lights blinked in a predetermined pattern.
A mini-civilisation, all the way out here, churning through its natural motions despite the chaos unfolding all around it.
Because the trade industry couldn’t afford to shut down for a coup.
People still needed to be fed, and clothed, and sleep under roofs.
Now that King had laid eyes on the airfield, he knew he would find his way out of the country.
Whatever it took.
He stilled a nervous tremor in his hands as he guided the Toyota down the gentle decline toward the northern perimeter of the airfield. It wasn’t brought about from the confrontation that would follow — instead, it was there because he wasn’t where his orders had told him to be.
King had killed hundreds of men.
He had come within a hair’s breadth of dying too many times to count.
But he had never disobeyed a direct order from Lars Crawford.
And that scared the shit out of him.
Sometimes, you need to trust your gut.
Wondering who he would run into first, he brought the Toyota down to a crawl as he approached a two-man guard booth slapped down in the middle of the wasteland, surrounded by fields of holes and weeds that vehicles weren’t able to traverse. The only way through to the airfield was directly past the guards, but the two men loitering in the shadowy doorway seemed like they didn’t have much of a job to do. They probably figured that anyone foolish enough to be out in this empty, violent land without business to attend to in the airfield were psychotic enough to be shooed away without confrontation.
