by Matt Rogers
Gennady seized him from behind, wrapping two burly arms around his waist, and simply hurled him backward across the corridor.
24
Xu almost landed on the back of his neck, which would have paralysed him considering the rate at which he fell. Instead he took the majority of the impact across his upper back muscles, bruising them and maybe tearing tissue but keeping him alert and conscious to feel the pain in all its glory. He winced and clenched his teeth together to ride out the agony and continued through with the motion, rolling to his feet despite every part of him telling him to rest.
To lie down.
To give up.
Gennady advanced, the Remington seemingly forgotten. Blood ran down the man’s face. Xu had landed a couple of good shots, and the big Russian was infuriated. His ego was on the line. He’d labelled himself ex-KGB, and that carried honour and duty along with it. He couldn’t cave into his natural instincts, blowing Xu to shreds with a Remington 870 when he might have been bested in combat. He had to find out for himself whether he could beat James Xu to death with his bare hands.
And he was over halfway there already.
Xu feigned serious injury, deliberately clouding his gaze and staring at a fixed point over Gennady’s shoulder, as if his senses had been scrambled by the wild tumble roll. Gennady sensed blood in the water and closed the gap, hurrying forward with his fists clenched and his fast-twitch muscle fibres ready to unleash hell.
Only he didn’t get the opportunity.
Xu kicked him in the head, taking advantage of a wide-open guard to slice his shin up through the air and bounce it off the side of Gennady’s skull. The hulking Russian was strong, and he was fast, and he was powerful, and he was smart, but none of that could defy the laws of physics.
And when Xu kicked people in the head, they went to sleep.
Sometimes forever.
A noise akin to a gunshot rippled through the corridor, the sharp crack bouncing and echoing off the walls as it ran all the way down to the engine room. It was the sound of Gennady’s brain rattling inside his skull, his eyes glazing over and his arms going limp and his legs caving in.
Xu didn’t often get the opportunity to kick someone in the head.
It felt as destructive and murderous as always. He ordinarily didn’t risk it in a standard brawl, unless he had no qualms with causing permanent damage to his adversary.
In this case, he couldn’t give a shit.
He moved past the unconscious Gennady to where the Remington 870 lay, picked it up, pumped the fore-end, crossed back to the big Russian, aimed the barrel at his head.
Pulled the trigger.
No final words.
No noble mercy.
Just reality.
He shielded his eyes from the result, not because of any kind of squeamishness but because he didn’t want to get blood in his eyes. He tossed the shotgun aside, sat down against the closest wall, felt the cool touch of the steel against the blood caked to the back of his head, and took a deep breath in.
The air tasted horrible.
Tasted like death.
Panicked footsteps sounded to his right, but these were lighter than Gennady’s fearsome strides. They came rapidly down the hallway — pitter-patter, pitter-patter, pitter-patter.
The cook appeared in the corridor, a dozen feet away. Horror spread across his features as he surveyed the dead. He met Xu’s gaze, sitting calmly amidst such a massacre.
‘If it makes you feel any better,’ Xu said, ‘I didn’t kill all of them.’
The cook said nothing. His face paled. Sweat broke out across his forehead and ran down into his eyes. His hands quivered.
‘Do you blame yourself?’ Xu said.
The guy shrugged.
‘Because you let me past without putting up a fight?’
Another shrug.
‘Don’t feel too bad. Everyone here deserved it. And the ones who didn’t… I had nothing to do with it.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Not a deckhand.’
‘I figured.’
‘Do you know who these guys were?’ Xu said, waving a hand around.
The man shook his head. ‘We just knew we were stowing them away.’
‘You didn’t think to ask why?’
‘Not my concern.’
‘I get it. See no evil, hear no evil.’
‘I guess that makes me weak.’
‘It makes you human. Don’t stress about that, either.’
‘How can you say this shit so casually? Look around you, man.’
Covered in blood, Xu got to his feet. He surveyed the scene. It wasn’t pretty. But he felt nothing.
‘I’m used to it,’ he said.
‘You do this a lot?’
‘In the right circumstances. Needs to be done.’
‘No, it doesn’t.’
‘Wait here.’
Xu powered back out onto the metal catwalk, ignoring the engine screaming alongside him, and snatched up the briefcase Neak had dropped on the metal landing for future collection. He made sure it was locked and retraced his steps back to the same point. The cook hadn’t budged an inch. Xu showed him the small black rectangle.
‘You know what this is?’
The man shook his head. ‘No.’
Xu waved an arm around. ‘It’s why all of this happened. You don’t want to know what it is. But if anyone asks you what happened here, what are you going to tell them?’
‘I just heard gunshots, man. I wasn’t anywhere near it.’
‘Who started it?’
‘Not a clue.’
‘That’s what I like to hear.’
‘I just… want to go home. I don’t want to be involved with any of this shit.’
‘You and the rest of the crew can figure out how to commandeer this thing?’
‘You mean the freighter?’
‘Yes.’
‘We can try. You killed the chief engineer.’
The cook stared at Gennady. Or, at least, what was left of Gennady.
Xu shrugged. ‘He wasn’t a great guy. Not the most pleasant history. You know what he used to do?’
‘I can guess.’
‘Ah. You’ve seen him kill pirates?’
‘Yeah. I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, though…’
‘You can tell me. Because I don’t exist.’
‘Got it.’
Silence unfolded. Xu surveyed the blood, the bodies, the devastation. He’d never known anything else.
‘What will you do now?’ the cook said. ‘Stay on board?’
Xu hadn’t thought that far ahead. But as the floor swayed underneath him and he shot out a hand to steady himself against the nearest wall and a sharp acrid clump of bile worked its way up his throat, he realised he’d reached his mental limit. He couldn’t spend another voluntary second aboard this piece-of-shit freighter, not unless he wanted to willingly drive himself into madness. Other options were few and far between, but at least he had one to work with.
Even if, at surface level, it seemed suicidal.
‘No,’ he told the chef. ‘I’m getting off this boat.’
‘And how are you going to do that?’
‘If I told you… you probably wouldn’t believe me.’
25
With the briefcase duct-taped to his chest to ensure its protection, Xu shimmied out of the shell door into the elements.
The full force of the storm battered him relentlessly. But the zipline held tight, its hook embedded in the wall a few feet inside the door. It wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry. The steel cable kept the fishing trawler forcibly tethered to the freighter, bobbing and weaving in the furious swell. Xu focused on putting one hand in front of the other, concentrating on nothing else. The wind whipped at his clothes, chilling him to the core. The rain lashed against his face, saturating him in seconds. In the growling sky above, lightning and thunder crackled. Underneath him, there were dozens of feet of empty space. If he slipped, the f
all would probably knock him unconscious, given his already compromised state. Then he would sink to the depths of the Gulf of Guinea, and no-one would even know he had existed.
The life of a black operations soldier.
But his grip held, even though his knuckles had long since turned white and his energy had long since drained from his body. He didn’t care that he was operating on an empty fuel tank. He drew from his reserves, urged himself forward — anything to get off that goddamn ship.
But it had to get worse before it got better.
Two minutes of pulse-pounding climbing later and he touched down on the soaking wet deck of the half-demolished fishing trawler. Most of its exterior features had been broken by the sheer intensity of the storm. If Xu thought the movement on the freighter was bad, he wasn’t prepared in the slightest for how the trawler treated him. Holding onto the railing for dear life, he worked the grappling hook launcher free from where Neak and his buddies had lodged it into the deck, and hurled the cable out into the ocean, untethering the trawler from the mammoth freighter overshadowing it.
The boat nearly capsized twice as he made his way to the cabin, and at one point he completely lost his footing and slid halfway along the deck, slamming into the railing — it stopped him short of tumbling off into the angry waves and disappearing forever.
He made it to the cabin, worked the controls, and got the broken trawler turned around in the swells. He stared out the salt-encrusted, half-shattered windscreen at a wave the size of a mountain, and surged toward it with what meagre horsepower the trawler’s engine had left. He left the freighter behind, dumping his memories along with it, compartmentalising that particular stretch of his life in favour of a hopeful future.
Even still, he wasn’t sure if he would make it through the upcoming voyage.
It would probably tear the boat apart.
He remembered the smoke he’d seen wafting from the cabin when Neak and his JSOC friends had boarded the freighter. Had the journey to the merchant vessel fried the electronics?
Xu would find out. The boat seemed to work fine, so he gave the engine a little more juice and tackled the wave in front of him with his knees shaking and his heart rate skyrocketing.
Heading back to the coast.
26
Somewhere in Ghana
Dawn broke across Africa, bringing with it a brilliant array of warm orange fingers spearing across the sky. Soft swells lapped gently at the shore, calm and serene in the aftermath of such a shocking storm. The giant waves of the previous night had faded into memory, and peace momentarily fell over this stretch of Ghana. There was conflict in the region, no doubt, but for the moment nothing stirred. All was quiet — a complete absence of civilisation aided that.
On a deserted stretch of beach, a fishing trawler in a pathetic state limped to shore. As its bow skewered into the wet sand, it let out a groan and came to rest with seawater pouring out of gaps in the hull. The cabin lay in ruins, its roof torn off by the wind and its walls sagging from relentless attacks from the foamy swells. Its sole occupant took three steps out of the cabin into the open air, tumbled over the railing, and hit the damp sand below with a resounding smack.
James Xu lay on his back, staring up at the cloudless sky, and smiled.
He didn’t want to consider the list of injuries he’d sustained. That would come later, when the best doctors the United States military had to offer got their hands on him and patched him up. Right now he simply focused on the ground underneath him, and savoured the fact that it didn’t sway, or pitch violently to one side or the other, or throw him stumbling across the cabin, or make him vomit his guts out over the side of the railing as he battled to control the tiny fishing trawler. He looked up at the boat, studied its condition, and found himself flabbergasted that he’d even survived the night.
Clutching a briefcase containing a laptop with information on it worth nine figures to the right bidder, James Xu lifted a soaking wet rectangular device out of his pocket. He shook water off the satellite phone, studied its broken screen, wiped glass fragments off the keypad, and thumbed a single button.
He prayed it still worked.
But these things were built to withstand hell.
Xu had certainly put it to the test.
It connected in a heartbeat — he hadn’t been expecting anything less. He imagined his handler hunched over the phone, sweating and shaking as intelligence officials hurried in and out of the room, informing him that they had no word of James Xu’s location or last known position.
‘Yes?’ the panicked voice on the other end of the line said.
‘Lars,’ Xu said. ‘In future, take better care of your secrets. And never put me on a fucking boat again.’
MORE BLACK FORCE SHORTS COMING VERY SOON…
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Books by Matt Rogers
THE JASON KING SERIES
Isolated (Book 1)
Imprisoned (Book 2)
Reloaded (Book 3)
Betrayed (Book 4)
Corrupted (Book 5)
Hunted (Book 6)
THE JASON KING FILES
Cartel (Book 1)
Warrior (Book 2)
Savages (Book 3)
THE WILL SLATER SERIES
Wolf (Book 1)
Lion (Book 2)
BLACK FORCE SHORTS
The Victor (Book 1)
The Chimera (Book 2)
The Tribe (Book 3)
The Hidden (Book 4)
The Coast (Book 5)
The Storm (Book 6)
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About the Author
Matt Rogers grew up in Melbourne, Australia as a voracious reader, relentlessly devouring thrillers and mysteries in his spare time. Now, he writes full-time. His novels are action-packed and fast-paced. Dive into the Jason King Series to get started with his collection.
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