by Matt Rogers
And now his path had led him here.
He tightened his finger around the trigger of the HK416, sensing its capacity, fundamentally understanding what he could do with it.
And, really, had he ever expected to do anything else?
Viola had been a complex web of a human being. Many things had led her to her death. Some were her own fault. Some weren’t.
What hadn’t been her fault, rested squarely on the shoulders of an elderly Asian kingpin recklessly fuelling a lavish retirement.
There’d be hell to pay for that.
Rollins set off up the driveway.
18
Stealth was not his highest priority.
In fact, his list of priorities was rather short. Most of his tactical awareness and ability to think three steps ahead had dissipated entirely, replaced by something he hadn’t experienced for a long time.
Pure rage.
He figured that was all he would need.
Besides, he couldn’t enter operational mode if he tried.
Something had happened. Deep inside him. Something he wasn’t sure would ever go away.
The knowledge that people died when he tried to ignore the fact that his life was suited for black operations.
It couldn’t have been chance that he’d stumbled across Viola. Of all the people for a kidnapping ring of crack addicts to potentially target, how had they ended up settling on him? He’d been trying his best to move on from this world, to employ blissful ignorance and focus on himself instead of throwing his life on the line for others.
Look where that got you.
It had been deliberate. He’d been sucked back into this madness to understand that people like Xiao would always exist, horrific unforgivable pieces of shit that had no consideration for the wellbeing of others and would do anything to further their own progress — whether that be through extortion, trafficking, terrorism, intimidation, torture, murder, rape…
Whatever it took.
And they would carry on existing — a tiny percentage of society — forever.
Some people were just born that way.
Rollins had the tools to stop it. Rollins had worked his whole life to reach peak performance, both physically and mentally. And a few weeks ago he’d thrown it all away in an attempt to focus on himself.
Look where that got you, he told himself again.
You have to go back.
The driveway curved up through the hills, enclosed on either side by natural swathes of forest. In any other setting Rollins would have found the view picturesque, the temperature balmy and the atmosphere pleasant.
Not now.
He hurried up the long and winding stretch of asphalt, eyes unblinking, gaze focused on the path ahead, searching for any sign of movement. Before long he spotted the first roadblock between himself and Xiao. It consisted of a pair of jumped-up thugs in cheap tactical gear. They were Xiao’s cronies — Gavin’s friends. They both sported identical buzzcuts, and were equally ugly as shit.
Both parties noticed each other at the same time.
There was all manner of ways the confrontation might have gone.
If they were in the movies, Rollins might have stopped in his tracks on the desolate stretch of driveway and vented his frustrations along the mountainside, exchanging ideals with the two guns-for-hire. They might have discussed the finer points of the moral codes that drove them. Then there might have been a Western-style showdown, with each of them raising their weapons to see who was the fastest to the draw. The winning side might have pumped themselves full of self-righteousness, convinced they had rightfully won, defending their viewpoint with honour. Either Rollins would have carried on with his rampage, culminating at Xiao’s villa, or the two mercenaries would have gunned down the intruder and protected their boss, which was all they were being paid to do.
But this wasn’t the movies.
Instead there was a beat of hesitation, considering Rollins looked awfully similar to Gavin. The blonde locks of long hair he’d previously sported had vanished weeks ago — he’d shaved his head as soon as he’d left Peru, trying to separate his new personality from government operative Sam Rollins.
That sure worked, he noted wryly.
But it paid off now, because the two men a couple of dozen feet in front of him took a second to realise that he wasn’t Gavin. Their weapons — similar Heckler & Koch assault rifles — remained pointed at the ground for the briefest of moments. They both narrowed their eyes and peered down the trail, discerning that, in fact, it wasn’t Gavin — instead, it was a man carrying Gavin’s gun.
They started to raise their own weapons.
Too late.
Game over.
Rollins used the vertical foregrip to steady his aim as he drilled a sharp burst of fully automatic rounds through the torso of the guy on the left. That man had been the fastest to react — the other guy hadn’t even started the upward trajectory with his rifle. Rollins could take a little more care in neutralising the second man — he’d had to target the centre mass for the first guy, but he nailed a headshot through his buddy’s forehead.
Both collapsed.
Blood, carried by the laws of gravity, began to stream in rivulets down the driveway.
Rollins advanced, barely giving a second thought to the men he’d gunned down. It was impossible that they knew nothing about their employer’s business, and even if they had decided to be wilfully ignorant and turn a blind eye to the suffering around them, that was their own damn fault.
They’d paid the price regardless.
It didn’t even cross Rollins’ mind to show mercy to the rest of the security detail.
They were all the same. It sounded like a generalisation, and he imagined many in today’s society would class it as such, but it was true. Men — and the occasional woman — who ended up using their combat skills to serve the highest bidder all had the same conscience.
That being, they had none.
Rollins imagined how effortlessly he could stoop to their lows. He had skills, both genetic and developed over time, that could serve almost anyone on the planet looking for a competitive edge in the global game of power. He could destabilise an entire nation if he wanted to. He had enough faith in his abilities to be confident of that talk.
But it had never even crossed his mind.
And it never would.
You need to go back.
The voice repeated itself as he strode around the twin puddles of blood and continued on his ascent to Xiao’s villa.
19
The villa was quintessentially Italian.
Rollins almost stopped to admire the details.
Almost.
The architecture of the Renaissance era was the last thing on his mind.
As he moved, he noticed the hipped roof and the pale orange hue of the stone and the balconies with iron railings along the second storey, but none of it meant anything to him. Maybe if he’d stumbled across this beautiful natural clearing facing the coastline the previous day, he might have appreciated how stunning the location was. Instead, he strode into the clearing with his ears ringing from the unsuppressed gunshots, and his mind fixated on one thing.
Kill everyone in that house.
He tried to tell himself that he should be scared. That’s what happened to normal people. Most early retirees who wound up in Vernazza would have been terrified by the concept of storming a villa packed with ex-SAS mercenaries protecting a sociopathic drug kingpin.
But you’re not an early retiree.
You’re an active operative who got confused.
You were born for this.
You were built for this.
He wished more than anything for the voices to shut up. Mostly because he knew they were telling the truth. He wasn’t psychotic — no part of him had spiralled into madness. The voices were simply his mind reinforcing what he’d known all along.
That once you step foot in Black Force, you don’t come out the ot
her side the same.
No matter how long you spend in its ranks.
Rollins had changed forever.
And the worst part was that he felt right at home.
He hustled across the carefully manicured lawn, passing a dormant ride-on mower that, judging by the freshly shredded grass, had been used only a couple of hours ago. As his customers inflicted torture and murder on innocent people to desperately fuel their addictions, Xiao sat listening to the peaceful sound of hired gardeners mowing his lawn.
No doubt he paid them in blood money, too.
Rollins darted between a gap in the ground floor balustrades and leapt onto the stone porch running around the perimeter of the building. He’d passed through no-man’s-land before any of the other mercenaries on the property had responded to the initial gunshots.
Rollins wanted to smirk, but he didn’t. It would take him back to the four months he’d spent as a black operative, to a time when everything had just seemed to click. He’d reached the pinnacle of secret operations, the peak of human achievement. Confrontation had begun to feel effortless. That was part of the reason he’d got out. Because there was nothing more intoxicating and alluring than the feeling of holding power over others.
Not that he had ever considered using his reaction speed and physical prowess for the wrong reasons.
But he knew it wouldn’t take much to get carried away. Many people had started an action with good intentions only for it to spiral into disaster.
Rollins had been trying to get out of the game to prevent that ever happening.
But this rampage, this charge through the Italian countryside to eliminate a drug lord…
…it showed him that this was what he was supposed to do with the rest of his life.
He sensed movement on the ground floor — a footstep against wooden floorboards, omitting just enough of a creak for Rollins’ heightened senses to pick it up on the edge of his hearing. He skirted along the porch, keeping low, ducking under the broad windows facing the front lawn. He eliminated any potential for the men inside the house to trap him, or to sneak up on him, or to take advantage of him in any way. It had already happened twice — on the trail to Monterosso, and on the road in front of Xiao’s villa.
Both scenarios had a red flag.
Viola.
She’d been the shred of humanity he’d been holding on to, even when he knew she was corrupt. Maybe he’d imperceptibly been holding back around her, trying to pretend he was an ordinary civilian.
You’re anything but that, he thought.
Now he understood.
He wouldn’t hold back again.
He reached a set of double doors, both glazed, preventing any curious trespassers from managing a peek inside the front hallway. Rollins paused in a low crouch in front of the doors for a split second, weighing his options.
In the end, he didn’t need to make a decision.
They made it for him.
The front doors burst open, hurled inward simultaneously, exposing Rollins to whoever had opened them. Fortunately for Rollins, it took two hands to open two doors, leaving a window of opportunity to retaliate. That, coupled with the fact that Rollins’ fast-twitch muscle fibres rested a cut above almost anyone on the planet, spelled bad news for the enemy.
The guy who’d flung the doors open had let his Heckler & Koch G3 rifle swing by his side on its shoulder strap for a half-second — he was a big man, probably close to six-foot-six with a wide bodybuilder’s frame and a giant physique to boot. He’d hurled the doors open with verve, putting unnecessary energy into the gesture. Maybe to intimidate. Maybe to release some adrenalin.
He wasn’t expecting Rollins to be waiting a foot from the entrance.
He hadn’t understood what a man could do with a simple half-second of opportunity.
And well over two hundred and fifty pounds of bodyweight did nothing to stop a bullet.
‘Sorry,’ Rollins muttered to himself as he fired, almost considering the situation unfair.
Deep down, he knew these guys didn’t stand a chance.
As the heavy mercenary crashed to the hallway’s marble floor, the doors shuddered as they flew along their hinges and bounced off each wall. Half the giant’s body came down on either side of the threshold, which made it fairly effortless for Rollins to leap over his corpse and sweep the HK416 from left to right in a tight arc, keeping his fingers wrapped tightly around the vertical foregrip to steady his aim.
Nothing.
No, not nothing.
Something — very close.
Shit.
The gunshot roared in Rollins’ ears, impossibly close, but the simple fact that he heard the report meant it hadn’t pulverised his brain. He ducked instinctively, unable to help himself. No amount of reflexes could prevent someone from jolting in surprise. He couldn’t quite believe that the unseen attacker — standing only a couple of feet to his left — hadn’t hit him.
Shouldn’t have flinched, he told himself.
That’ll cost you.
He was right. The attacker, seemingly frustrated at the fact that he’d missed a direct shot at such close range, released his pent-up energy by hurling himself into Rollins.
Both men crashed to the marble floor with enough of an impact to almost knock Rollins senseless for a third consecutive time.
20
He grimaced as he came down awkwardly on his side, hoping like hell that his head didn’t strike the marble hard enough.
He wouldn’t recover from a third concussion.
It would spell permanent brain damage, or death.
The two he’d already suffered hadn’t properly revealed their effects yet.
But he stayed alert. He successfully sheltered himself from any further blunt force trauma. A millisecond of relief washed over him. Then the cold reality sunk in, and he realised there was an unknown hostile bearing down on him with murderous intentions.
That never failed to wake you up.
Rollins was momentarily confused. He couldn’t for the life of him figure out why the thug hadn’t simply continued firing shots until he hit Rollins.
Then he worked out where he’d been standing in relation to the hostile, and it all made sense.
The guy was big and menacing and looked similar to the rest of the mercenaries protecting the villa, but he was human after all. Rollins had burst in through the double doors with enough speed to give him the fright of his life. The man had been standing in the left-hand doorway, provided a front-row view of his buddy getting shot squarely between the eyes. Then, without a moment to consider what he was looking at, Rollins had charged straight into the doorway. The guy had swung his rifle up to fire a wild shot, and it had missed by a mile.
Then it came down to momentum.
Rollins had been sprinting straight toward the guy, and his kneejerk reaction had probably sent his gun skyward in an upward path. There was no rapid way to correct that — it would have taken a vital second or two.
Which wouldn’t have been acceptable.
So he’d abandoned any hope of nailing Rollins with a bullet and had simply crash-tackled him into the floor, relying on sheer animalistic survival mode and the advantage of the element of surprise.
Let’s see who comes out on top, Rollins thought.
Despite his previous occupation, he hadn’t been in a vast number of life or death fistfights. He’d blindsided paramilitary thugs and mercenaries and terrorists with overwhelming offence, but that didn’t count as a truly even fight. Most confrontations were taken care of with automatic weapons.
Sometimes, though, situations like this unfolded.
Two men.
Both big and powerful and pumped full of testosterone.
No weapons in easy reach.
It all came down to technique, timing, reflexes, and an enormous dose of luck.
Rollins started the altercation on the bottom — a disadvantage.
He also started with two concussions festering in th
e recesses of his mind.
A huge disadvantage. His brain was compromised. One half-hearted hit could put him out for good.
But he ignored all of it.
His vision shrank to a tunnel, instinct took over, and he fought for his goddamn life.
He thrust an elbow into the guy’s face, hitting the skin below his nose but above his upper lip. A satisfying thwack sounded, and the guy’s head snapped back as if he’d been yanked from behind by a giant string, but he stayed conscious.
Not good.
As Rollins brought his elbow down to load up for another strike, the guy on top of him bunched up a fist full of giant, meaty fingers and dropped it like a club into Rollins’ stomach. There wasn’t an abundance of technique behind the shot, but the guy was heavy and his strikes were aided by the advantage of gravity. A hollow thud echoed through the entranceway as Rollins’ gut compressed, and an explosion of air burst out from between his lips.
Shit.
That hurt.
In fact, it proved worse than that. Rollins scythed another elbow across the man’s face, bloodying the guy’s lip, but superficial injuries meant nothing in a fight like this. Both of them were searching for the money shot, the blow that would render their opponent semi-conscious or unconscious, at which point the fight would be over. They would have all the time in the world to fetch a nearby weapon and finish the job.
He managed a third consecutive elbow in the space of a couple of seconds before he realised the punch to the stomach had done more damage than he’d thought. When he lined up a fourth elbow, his body didn’t respond properly. He froze in place — and not by his own accord.
