by Matt Rogers
‘That’s the way it’s structured,’ Velli said. ‘You win this and you’re in the semi-finals. Then you can sit back and watch the other contestants beat the shit out of each other for an hour. Now — Nguyen, Felix. You’re both up. Two minutes. Make it count. I won’t fucking say it again.’
But Xu understood, from the look on Velli’s face, that he had never intended anyone other than Felix to win the tournament. It was all an elaborate, pointless game — perhaps the distribution rights had already been sold to Felix’s organisation under the table, and the fights themselves were just a pleasant distraction from Velli’s hectic life. Because no-one in the room — and Xu spent a moment surveying all the other contestants — had a chance of overcoming a one-hundred pound weight disadvantage, himself included.
Weight classes existed in mixed martial arts for a reason.
On top of that, Xu had no idea as to the limits of the tournament. He’d pulled his punches short after beating Wilkinson into submission, but he’d seen nothing instructing him that he had to stop there. He couldn’t see a way through this giant brute of a man, and he wondered if Felix might beat him to death on the plastic sheeting.
His stomach tumbled end over end — something he’d become used to, considering the events of the last hour — and he became acutely aware of the Beretta M9A3 pressing into the small of his back. He could draw the weapon lightning fast, but as he eyed the line of Velli’s henchmen dotting the perimeter of the wide open-plan living area, he realised his efforts would be in vain.
He could hit Velli, and probably kill him, but then he would die — there was no doubt about it.
He was guaranteed death if he drew his weapon.
But, if he didn’t, he had a chance.
No matter how slim.
Gulping back apprehension, he shrugged and strode directly past Felix, ducking into the same room he’d dismantled Wilkinson in. The giant followed him in, having to stoop so he could fit through the doorway.
The door shut behind them, omitting a hollow thud, and James Xu tapped into every morsel of combat experience he’d accumulated over his life.
He would need it.
9
Felix didn’t waste any time. In such a confined space, it was impossible to keep any kind of tactical distance away from the giant. He thundered into range and simply crushed Xu against the far wall, bundling him into a claustrophobic corner of the room until he could barely move.
Xu’s first chance to cause a crippling injury presented itself.
He couldn’t throw a kick at this range, so he bounced off the plastic sheeting — taking the impact across his upper back — and used the quick change in momentum to fire off a series of lethal haymakers into Felix’s ribcage, which almost aligned perfectly with Xu’s shoulders given the man’s unbelievable height.
Bang-bang-bang-bang.
Left, right, left, right.
Each of the punches smacked off Felix’s torso, sounding like gunshots in much the same way his kick had debilitated Wilkinson.
But the giant was barely fazed.
Xu braced himself for what he knew was coming, and a moment later Felix dropped a scything elbow into the top of Xu’s head. He didn’t see the strike coming, which made it all the worse.
He hadn’t anticipated the giant moving so fast.
So he has combat experience, too.
Great.
The elbow crushed into Xu’s skull, carrying the same sensation as if a dump truck had been thrown off a skyscraper and come down directly on top of him. His legs buckled against his will, and he experienced the dizzy, woozy light-headedness that came from getting rocked. With his last moments of awareness he jerked out of range, slicing away from Felix as the giant stumbled off-balance from the amount of power he’d put into the elbow.
It opened up Xu’s second chance to strike the man down.
He had created a couple of feet of space between them, which was all he needed to launch the offensive barrage of his life. The fight was taking place in a matter of testosterone-fuelled seconds, which meant that Xu had a short portion of time where he could fire off strikes without realising the extent of how badly he was hurt. For all he knew, the elbow to his dome could have crippled him, but the adrenalin pulsing through his system would keep him going for vital seconds.
So he pictured Felix’s lead leg as a tree trunk and flashed back to his youth, where he’d hammered low kicks into the wood until the bamboo shredded and broke in half.
He aimed to achieve the same result here.
He smashed his shin into the side of Felix’s knee, omitting another crack of skin-on-skin contact. He pulled back and slammed a second kick home. Then a third.
Then he faked a fourth, which made Felix recoil slightly — the kicks were no doubt tearing his ligaments to pieces — but Xu planted that foot down and threw a low kick with his right leg this time, smashing his other shin against the inside of Felix’s leg.
Shredding ligaments and muscle on the other side of his knee.
That set Felix back a step — the destruction Xu had wreaked on the outside of his knee would have put him in a world of agony, and now he’d received another blast of pain on the inside of the limb. He buckled involuntarily, losing balance as the entire joint simply gave out.
Xu could kick with reckless abandon when he wanted to, and in this instance he’d been kicking for his life.
Literally.
Felix went down on one knee, probably losing all feeling in the lower half of his bad leg, and Xu moved in for the kill.
Big mistake.
Felix launched a big looping haymaker, which ended up crunching into Xu’s sternum as he surged into range. Even though the giant had taken a knee, the punch landed with such ferocity behind it that it simply took Xu off his feet, swatting him to the floor like he weighed nothing. He’d been entirely unprepared for the punch and found himself gasping for breath, lying on his back, staring up at the plastic-coated ceiling with the feeling that he’d taken a sledgehammer to the chest.
He rolled over to scramble out of range of Felix, but his limbs faltered. He could sense something seriously wrong with his insides, deep below the numbing haze of adrenalin. The punch had cracked something in his chest, and he spat blood across the plastic sheet underneath him as he tried desperately to launch to his feet.
Felix smashed another clubbing haymaker into the small of Xu’s back.
He was lucky it didn’t paralyse him.
He face-planted the floor, leaving a distinct imprint of blood on the sheeting, coughing and spluttering and hurting all over. He hadn’t been in this level of pain in quite some time, and even worse was the fact that it wouldn’t be ending anytime soon.
Somehow, Felix managed to lever himself upright again.
Xu got to his feet, bleeding out of both corners of his mouth, riding out muscle spasms that locked up the lower part of his back.
Felix kicked him in the stomach.
The giant used his bad leg, realising he would need the other to form a sturdy base. Even though there wasn’t full power behind the strike, the sole of his massive boot thundered into Xu’s gut all the same, slamming against his liver and sending searing bolts of rippling agony up through his torso.
He swayed on the spot, doubling over, dizzy and nauseous.
Felix threw an uppercut, but Xu darted his head out of range at the last moment, utilising every last ounce of energy in his system.
Hope surged through him, and he made to throw a devastating haymaker that would result in his knuckles crashing into the side of Felix’s jaw.
But the damage he’d accumulated was too much.
His body failed him, giving out at the last moment, crippling him with pain just as he threw the punch with all the effort he could muster. It sapped kinetic energy out of the shot, and the result left much to be desired.
Felix’s head rattled as he absorbed the blow, but his giant neck muscles kept him frozen in place. He raised an eyebr
ow in Xu’s direction, as if to say, Was that it?
Xu’s morale shattered.
His stomach and chest were on fire, burning with white hot pain. He couldn’t see straight, let alone even attempt to devise a strategy to take this man down. He’d effectively demolished the guy’s left knee, with no result.
He remembered the Beretta in his waistband. But then his memory turned to Velli standing just a few feet away on the other side of the wall, watching the proceedings. Any sign of a weapon would cause chaos to erupt, and Xu couldn’t see himself coming out of that situation alive. The house would become pandemonium, and more importantly any hope of finding out what Velli was up to would dissipate into thin air.
So he used all the restraint he could muster and ordered his hand not to reach back for the weapon. Intrusive thoughts flooded his system, screaming at him to take his one opportunity to avoid the beating of a lifetime.
But he couldn’t.
There was too much at stake.
He clenched his teeth and hoped Felix would restrain from beating him to death.
For the first time in his life, he prayed that getting beaten simply unconscious would be the best-case scenario.
10
He tried with noble effort to put up a fight, but it was hopeless.
The punch he’d thrown into Felix’s chin had been a last stand. He’d accepted the fact that if he didn’t separate the giant from consciousness with that haymaker, he would deplete his energy reserves.
And that was what happened.
He willed himself forward but it felt as if he were moving through quicksand, dragging his limbs across the plastic sheeting, closing in on Felix.
The man stumbled slightly, and Xu thought he might have managed a fluke and put the guy on wobbly legs. If so, another few punches should take him out. But then he realised it was simply Felix’s knee faltering, and resignation fell over him in a wave.
He smashed a kick into Felix’s gut, then threw another wild right hook, connecting on the same side of his jaw as the last haymaker. But there was nothing behind the strikes — his fast-twitch muscle fibres were spent, and against a man of Felix’s size they would have felt like nothing more than a fly swatter.
Felix grabbed Xu by the collar and threw him into the nearest wall.
Xu bounced off the plaster, sprawling into a heap on the floor. Felix stomped down on his back, then followed up with a diving punch to Xu’s prone form. Xu saw the giant clubbing fist soaring in his direction and only barely managed to wrench his head off the centre line at the last moment. Nevertheless the punch slammed down on the side of his face, and nerve endings screamed for relief.
He told himself to sit up, but nothing responded.
This was it.
The start of the beatdown.
He squeezed his eyes shut and braced himself for the next punch, which he knew would carry a similar sensation to getting hit in the face by a baseball bat.
But nothing came.
The slightest burst of motivation hit him and he scooted backward across the room, opening his eyes to try and get a sense of where Felix was. There was a strange disconnect between his brain and his senses — he could see, but he couldn’t register what lay in front of him. He recognised a giant hulking shape bearing down on him, open hands searching for his throat. He managed to scramble back into the far corner of the room, but then there was nowhere left to go. His head cleared for a brief moment, and he grimaced as he registered what was happening, just as two palms the size of dustbin lids closed around his neck.
Felix was going to choke him to death.
Xu sensed the massive power in the giant’s hands, compressing his windpipe, cutting off circulation. Panic set in, but there was nothing he could do. In a last, desperate act he shoved a hand behind the small of his back, searching desperately for the Beretta. If he was going to die, he might as well go out in a blaze of glory.
But he couldn’t find the weapon.
Resigned to his fate, he felt his face turning bright red. He gasped and choked and spluttered and snatched at the oxygen he so desperately needed. He had never experienced pain like this before. He knew he was going to die.
Then Felix bent down, his eyes wide and rabid, and muttered, ‘The fleece is mine, boy.’
Even in such a lucid state, only seconds away from falling into a permanent sleep, Xu’s brain connected the dots.
The call from Lars Crawford an hour earlier.
The Port of New York and New Jersey.
The strange impenetrable shipping container plucked out of a huge incoming delivery.
Suddenly, it all made sense.
And, without understanding anything regarding what the shipment contained, Xu knew the consequences of failure would be grave. The authorities were searching in the wrong place. They were concentrating on a decoy, letting the rest of the payload through so as not to offend the airtight schedule of the international shipping industry.
And Xu couldn’t let that happen.
So he forced all thought of the agony he was experiencing to the back of his mind, concentrated all his willpower on wrapping one hand around the handle of the Beretta M9A3 in his waistband, and tore it free.
He brought the gun up in one swift motion and squashed the end of the barrel into the soft skin above Felix’s eyebrows.
Before the giant even realised what was happening, Xu pumped the trigger three consecutive times.
11
He had to move fast.
He had to take all his physical senses and lock them in a cage for a couple of vital seconds, or he would die.
Xu understood this.
He had been through the ringer in the past.
So, despite the fact that one half of his face had already started to swell to twice its normal size, his ribcage burned, his guts seared, his chest felt like someone had struck it with a sledgehammer, and all his limbs were heavy from the lactic acid associated with throwing so many full-power strikes in such a short amount of time, he forced his way to his feet.
Felix’s corpse collapsed to the side, the top half of his head blown off by the gunshots. Each had sounded like a bomb going off in such a cramped space, and Xu had temporarily lost all his hearing. But he didn’t need to hear to go through the motions.
And he had to go through them at the speed of light.
Every CCTV system has a delay, no matter how slight. With the entire setup in such close proximity Xu couldn’t imagine Velli taking longer than a second to realise what was happening — to glimpse the gun on the surveillance feed, hear the shots, and piece everything together in an instant.
But, sometimes, that second was all it took.
Still moving, adrenalin screaming in his mind, he reached down and wrenched Felix’s body off the ground, heaving the man over one shoulder. It almost buckled his legs completely, considering the man weighed well over three hundred pounds, but the power of fight or flight was a strange and terrifying thing.
To Xu, Felix weighed nothing.
He tapped into years of strength training and set off in a wild charge across the room.
The door hadn’t been shut properly when they’d first entered the room, so it only took the weight of Xu and Felix combined to send it hurtling back in the other direction.
Xu burst out into the packed room, sensing the atmosphere was already in the process of shifting. He didn’t have time to see where Velli was, or how the men involved in the tournament would react, but he aimed in the general direction of Felix’s posse and hurled the body at them, using all the momentum he’d built up to force the giant corpse a couple of feet through the air. It took one guy off his feet, and Xu wasted no time, wheeling on the spot and bringing the Beretta up to aim down the sights.
He fired twice, each round punching across the room and drilling through both of Velli’s armed guards’ foreheads. Twin clouds of blood coated the wall behind the men, each a half-second apart. The blast of deafening gunshots ripped through the
space, shocking everyone into action.
As Xu had imagined, chaos erupted.
He ducked low and merged into the carnage as it unfolded.
Operating in these kinds of windows left zero room for error, but luckily Black Force recruited based on near-imperceptible reaction speeds. It was one of the main reasons Xu had been whisked into the program years earlier, after the success of the two founding operatives — Jason King and Will Slater. He had heard rumours about the pair of them, but never met either in the flesh.
He didn’t even know what they looked like.
But being accepted into such an elite group of solo operatives meant he could take advantage of situations where shit hit the fan, seeing that his mind processed information at a speed ordinarily unheard of.
So he focused all his attention on staying alive, and took in what was unfolding faster than anyone in the room.
Several things happened at once. Gunshots cracked in Xu’s left ear and he realised Velli had drawn a weapon and begun firing wildly at the space he’d been occupying a second earlier. By that point he’d hurled himself into the midst of the tournament’s participants, and blood sprayed against his cheek as he ducked between two of the men.
It wasn’t his.
Someone had been hit, and as he expected the complete shock of Felix’s death sent his posse into a frenzy — a couple of them withdrew concealed firearms and fired freely into the crowd.
That sparked madness.
Fifteen or twenty men in such a cramped section of a Brooklyn townhouse was enough of a recipe for a wild brawl following the outbreak of gunfire. But on top of that, every man around Xu had been preparing for a vicious, no-holds-barred fight in the room he’d burst from. Nervous energy had reached a fever pitch even before he’d come charging out of the room with Felix’s corpse in tow.
The room went wild.
Xu dodged a couple of full-power punches that swung in his direction, but even at the rate he could process information he couldn’t keep track of what was happening. Men were sprinting in all directions, crash-tackling armed hostiles into walls and pulling out weapons of their own. It seemed the Italian door guard had done an abysmal job of frisk-searching the procession.
