by Matt Rogers
Because what the hell else was there to do?
So he ran through the most dangerous stretch of open pavement — his vision blurring, the shapes around him threatening to materialise as armed men wanting to rip his head off.
But they didn’t.
The wild rollercoaster ride was over and he made it to the cover that the banked-up traffic provided. He ducked low, out of the line of sight, and a volley of shots cracked through the air above his head.
He dropped to his stomach, shocked by the proximity of the bullets, and crab crawled the last few yards to the dead mercenary. The guy was big and decked out in combat gear, and the rifle lay across his chest.
Slater scrutinised it.
And his heart skipped a beat.
It was a Heckler & Koch HK417 with a 20 inch barrel, a telescopic sight and a detachable bipod.
Identical in make, model, shape and size to the guns they’d taken out of the crates.
No time to think. No time to comprehend what was happening. No time to speculate on how it all connected. It was all connected — he knew that much — but anything past that emptied from his mind. It wasn’t necessary to the situation at hand, and he’d trained his body and mind to focus only on what was important.
So he snatched the HK417 off the body and worked at lowering his heart rate. If he was shaky and panicked and terrified — as anyone would be in the middle of a war zone — he wouldn’t be able to make use of the telescopic sight the way he knew he could.
He stayed low, and figured out his next move.
22
King spotted the armour-clad silhouettes sweeping across the rows of traffic, like a nightmarish vision come to life, then ducked behind the overturned town car.
He was still obscenely vulnerable, but Slater had already made his mad dash for cover, and King wasn’t about to follow suit. They’d have their guns trained on that path, anticipating their targets making a run for it.
But no-one did, and an uneasy silence played out.
Well, not a true silence, as the sounds of civilian panic were still resonating through the city streets, but King had long ago learned to tune that out. The screams and the horns and the general uproar were like an eerie choir floating up to the heavens, but he didn’t think about that. He thought about anything that could make a difference to his general wellbeing — like bullets.
But there were none, apart from the initial shot that Slater had fired at the start of the carnage.
And that proved their adversaries were efficient.
They were also brazen as hell, allowing this to unfold on the streets of New York. If it was anyone who had a stake in public wellbeing, they would have saved it for a more secluded location.
This was someone who didn’t give a shit.
Someone who needed Russell Williams dead yesterday.
King dropped into a crouch amidst shards of glass and peered inside the destroyed interior of the town car. He saw the driver slumped upside down in his seat, suspended by the belt. The man’s face was a bloody mask, and his skull looked dented.
Dead as nails.
He was beyond saving.
King turned his attention to the main compartment, and saw Williams lying there in a bloody heap.
He was semi-conscious.
Barely lucid.
But at least he was alive.
‘Williams,’ King barked. ‘Get out here, now.’
‘The glass…’ Williams moaned.
He was cut bad, bleeding from several deep gashes, pouring the stuff out. And, to make matters worse, he was surrounded by a sea of shattered glass fragments whichever way he turned. Getting out of the town car would be a painful and laborious process. But it needed to happen, and it needed to happen fast if he wanted a chance of making it out of this alive.
‘You’re going to get cut,’ King said. ‘That’s inevitable. Please get the fuck out of the car.’
Williams’ head lolled around on his shoulders like it weighed a hundred pounds. The man lifted his glassy eyes to meet King’s gaze and said, ‘It’s…’
‘What?’
‘It’s the Chinese.’
King stared at him.
Then a shower of bullets riddled the town car from the other side. Most ricocheted off the armoured chassis, sounding like deafening thwack-thwack-thwacks in King’s eardrums, but a couple made it through the window frames. One of them bounced harmlessly off the dented and twisted roof, but the other blew Russell Williams’ neck apart in a shower of gore and blood and bone. He managed a final, desperate moan as he looked down at his own anatomy.
Then he died.
King punched the side of the car.
Purely out of rage.
He might as well have shattered all five of his knuckles. He didn’t feel a thing. Not physically, at least. Mentally, he was overwhelmed with helplessness. The fact that Williams was dead highlighted his poor positioning, and his overall lack of strategy for what would come next, and…
And a million other things.
He was in serious, serious danger.
He adjusted his grip on the Glock and calmed his shaking wrists. Then he peeked over the top of the town car and saw the dark silhouettes fanning out tactically across the traffic, spreading out.
He had no idea what to do.
He ducked below the line of sight, and rode out a few bullets passing over his head.
He peeked again.
This time, one of the silhouettes turned and fired on his comrades.
King smirked.
He’d seen the same thing in Russia — a long, long time ago.
Will Slater, wearing a combat helmet to disguise his identity, unloading rounds into the other hostiles.
23
Slater wasn’t exactly comfortable.
There was blood all over the inside of his visor, having pooled out of the bullet wound in the head of the man he’d killed. But that was a small price to pay for the mass hysteria and confusion he created when he spun around and fired two shots into the nearest man, three into the second closest, and four into the third closest. A tiered firing system, constructed in his own head to make up for the increasing distance and therefore the increasing likelihood he’d miss with a couple of shots.
But he didn’t, so he killed three of the hostiles in a bloody fury, and the others ducked for cover as they realised how rapidly the tables had turned.
Slater had been crouching there amidst the traffic, and realised the solution was in front of him the whole time. He’d twisted and turned and pulled until the armoured helmet slid off the corpse, and shoved it on his own head. The dead man’s leather jacket had come next, covering his civilian attire. There was no time to unclip and steal the Kevlar vest the guy was wearing, but that didn’t matter. He looked like the rest of the hostiles at first glance, and that was all he needed.
He’d snuck down the line of cars and slipped between two pick-up trucks, heading behind enemy lines as they searched for him near the front of the queue. Then he’d sprung to his feet in an instant, well away from his last known location, and flashed a thumbs-up sign as if he’d been searching below the cars in his sector.
No-one had reacted.
No-one had shot him for his troubles.
Which was all that mattered.
Thirty seconds later, he killed three of them in a single flurry.
Now, King sprinted out from behind the wreckage of the town car and made a beeline for Slater’s position. Slater was surprised King had figured it out so quickly. Then he remembered a gold mine on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East, where he’d used the exact same tactic to slaughter a group of mercenaries holding King hostage.
And he smiled to himself.
They knew each other better than they knew themselves.
King leapfrogged the hood of a stationary car and slid to a halt alongside Slater. ‘How many more?’
‘Three, I think. Get down.’
They both ducked, and Sl
ater said, ‘Next aisle there’s a rifle. I killed a guy right nearby. You need it?’
King shook his head. ‘Three left, you said?’
‘I think.’
‘I’ll take one, you take two.’
‘Right.’
And that was that. They sprinted in different directions, now on the offensive, and there was a world of difference when Jason King and Will Slater stopped playing defence.
It was over in seconds.
Slater had the superior firepower, so he went straight for the two hostiles clustered close together a couple of rows away. He checked to make sure they were still taking cover, then leapt over the hood of a low sedan. Then he vaulted into the rear tray of an abandoned pick-up truck, fully exposing himself to the field of fire, and waited for the pair to take the bait.
They came up first, because they felt safer as a pair. The lone guy King had been tasked with taking care of stayed down, somewhere to the left. Slater kept his peripheral vision open, but he trusted his intuition. There was a certain flow to combat that only a veteran could get the hang of. When you spent enough time in situations that would kill almost anyone else, you got used to the chaos, and you learned to thrive in it.
When the two enemies materialised, one by one, Slater worked his aim left to right. He stayed tactical, and kept his shots measured. He hit the first guy in the throat with three rounds, and when he spiralled away Slater turned to his comrade and shot him through the crook of his elbow. The second guy had his chin tucked to his chest, so it was the last remaining option that was most likely to incapacitate.
It worked.
The bullet blew out the back of his elbow and his arm swung loosely away from the rifle. Not separated from his body, but close to it. There was no hope of the guy managing to hold the Heckler & Koch rifle in his other hand and squeeze off shots that were anywhere near accurate. So Slater paused to make sure his own aim was steady, and took his sweet time, which in his world was less than a second.
Then he finished it with a shot through the neck.
He looked instantly for the last man, and spotted him.
To his credit, the final enemy had heard his comrades under fire and decided to leap up and join the firefight. He came up with his HK417 raised, and Slater took a beat longer than usual to get his own aim focused. He felt a sharp pang of terror, and thought, Did I screw this up?
Then Jason King launched over the hood of the car right next to the guy and thundered a boot into his chest, smashing him into the vehicle behind, probably damaging internal organs, and when the guy went down in a crumpled heap King planted the Glock’s barrel against the back of his neck and pulled the trigger.
In the sudden quiet, King looked all around at the carnage they’d unleashed, then to Slater in the bed of the pick-up.
‘Run,’ he said.
24
They immediately split up.
Slater shed the leather jacket and leapt out of the tray, keenly aware of the possibility of long-distance shooters, and he tucked his collar up over his features, feeling intensely vulnerable.
Thankfully, when chaos erupts on civilian streets — particularly fully automatic gunfire — no-one looks for the source of the commotion. They cower away, they cover their eyes, they run in the opposite direction. So it’s awfully confusing when the gunfire dies down and the authorities ask what they saw. Because they didn’t see a thing. They weren’t looking. They were trying to survive.
Slater used that to his advantage, and in seconds he was enmeshed in the waves of civilians teeming away from the disaster zone. He hunched his shoulders and let fear spread across his face and tried to minimise his target area, and suddenly no-one knew the difference between a trained killer and a scared bystander. He ended up running alongside a thirty-something woman clutching a child, and they made brief eye contact.
The woman moaned, ‘What’s happening?’
‘It’s going to be okay,’ Slater said, but he made sure his voice wavered.
He didn’t want her remembering anything out of the ordinary afterward.
If he appeared too calm, it’d stand out. She’d remember later.
He peeled away and ran down a laneway between two buildings, passing a couple of hole-in-the-wall cafés closed for the evening. Then he came out on another street — less chaotic, but still sporting signs of stress from the nearby incident. The traffic hadn’t come to a standstill yet — it was too far from the initial contact point — but there were traumatised pedestrians everywhere, weaving between cars with no concern for their safety. In their minds, the moving traffic was the least of their concerns.
They’d seen a war break out in their city.
The world as they knew it was coming to an end.
Slater weaved this way and that, zigzagging left and right. He orientated himself, realised he was in Lower Manhattan, and charted a course for the Upper East Side.
He was sore, and he’d suffered an adrenaline dump, and fatigue was already setting in. The after-effects of the crash were beginning to present themselves. His left arm hurt like hell, and there was blood running down his chest, and he realised his neck was cut. There was blood on the top of his head, too, and the left side of his face was numb and puffy. All these symptoms rolled over him like a tidal wave, and he steadied himself against a parked car.
Then someone slammed into him from behind.
He skewered his legs into the ground and twisted on the spot, ready to break his own knuckles with a staggering punch to the face, but it wasn’t a hostile. It was a scared teenager, probably sixteen or seventeen, with no colour in his face and terror in his eyes. He mumbled an apology and tried to weave around, but Slater gripped him by the shoulders.
‘Kid,’ he said. ‘Danger’s over. Breathe. You’re going to live.’
The kid breathed.
Slater could see some semblance of colour return to his face. Right now he wasn’t playing the part of a civilian blending in, but he was worried the teenager might sprint into oncoming traffic in his panic.
‘Walk fast, but pay attention,’ Slater said. ‘Get yourself home, and stay there until you’re calmer. Then go to the authorities and tell them what happened. Got it?’
‘Yeah,’ the kid said, gulping back air. ‘Okay. Thanks.’
‘Go.’
They walked in opposite directions. The exchange meant nothing in the grand scheme of things, and Slater had technically compromised his position, but then again, it could mean everything.
That was the way the world worked.
He might have saved a life.
He crossed the street and went straight into another darkened laneway. No-one saw him. Everyone was focused on whatever the hell had happened a couple of streets over. Closing his mouth tight and holding his breath, Slater bent down and heaped dirty water off the alley floor into his palms. He splashed it over the top of his head, and scrubbed until the blood was gone. He still had a couple of scratches on his neck, and the knocks to the head had been severe enough to discombobulate him, and his muscles and bones hurt like hell, but outwardly he was presentable.
He stepped back out onto the street and walked hard.
It took him thirty minutes to stride back to his building on the Upper East Side. He kept his head down and his demeanour a little tighter, a little more aggravated. He didn’t want to be bothered — he needed to get home and regroup without interference. He passed a group of millennials hunched over their phones, whispering quiet concerns to each other. Immediately, Slater knew that rumours of an incident had already hit the news cycle.
Right now, the perimeter would be secured, and the bodies would be counted, and sweeps would be made. But there was no-one alive to interrogate, and he and King had disappeared from the scene in seconds. There would be mass hysteria and confusion, and for the next few weeks the incident would be played to death on national television. Speculation would be made, theories would be posited, and talking heads would bicker back and forth abou
t who had died, and why, and where the culprits had gone.
Like clockwork, everyone would move on.
Tragedy would strike, then be swept away as soon as it grew stale.
Slater powered into his lobby and nodded to Victor, one of the night staff.
‘Hey, Will,’ the guy said. ‘You okay?’
Slater paused. ‘Yeah. Why?’
‘There’s some weird stuff coming out on the news. Something happened in Lower Manhattan.’
Slater raised an eyebrow. ‘Something like…?’
‘Reports of shots fired. That’s about all I know.’
‘Goddamn. Crazy times we live in. I didn’t see anything. On that note — have you seen Jason?’
Victor shook his head. ‘I haven’t seen him yet. You expecting him?’
‘Thought he’d be here by now.’
‘I hope he’s safe.’
‘Me too, Victor,’ Slater said. ‘Me too.’
25
King stepped into the lobby, breathless, and took in the scene.
The sweeping reception was empty, save for a familiar face behind the main desk. Victor was tapping away at his computer, hunched over the keyboard, and there were beads of sweat on his forehead. The Hispanic man barely fit into his suit — he’d bought it a couple of years and a few dozen pounds ago and hadn’t made the effort to get a new once since. But they were all the regular sights, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary, aside from the strange amount of perspiration on the concierge’s brow.
Slater was nowhere to be found.
King approached the main desk and said, ‘Hey, Victor.’
Victor looked up. He was pale. He was doing his best to disguise it, but King could tell.
‘Oh, hi, Jason,’ he said. ‘How are you?’
‘Can’t complain.’
‘That’s good,’ Victor said. ‘Have a great night.’
King paused, and decided to loiter. Victor squirmed uncomfortably in place. They were incredibly subtle gestures, but King picked up on each and every one of them. He was still hyper-alert after the shootout, and although the cocktail of stress chemicals had faded away, he was still attuned to anything unusual.
