by Matt Rogers
‘I thought that was always the case. I won’t talk, don’t worry.’
‘You won’t get caught, I hope.’
‘Of course not.’
‘Then start—’
Something in the front pocket of Iosif’s uniform crackled to life. King jolted at the sudden noise and raised his Glock out of instinct. He had the sights trained on the man’s lifeless body in half a second.
But it wasn’t Iosif in his death throes.
It was some kind of radio in his breast pocket.
King walked over, his boots squelching under the soap and the blood, and lifted the device out of the man’s pocket. It was a standard-issue police radio, set to a certain frequency.
A deep voice blurted out a string of Russian, some kind of question judging by the inflection of his tone. The sharp and distorted vocals echoed off the walls.
King realised he still had his earpiece on.
‘Did you get that?’ he asked. ‘My Russian’s patchy.’
Isla hesitated. ‘He asked if the worker was dead yet, and if they needed assistance. What does that mean?’
‘I told them I was a health worker. They must have radioed their boss when I came in here…’
King froze as another few sentences were blurted out by the man on the other end. ‘And that?’
‘He says that if he doesn’t hear a response, they’ll come charging in. He said they’re only a couple of minutes away.’
‘Fuck,’ King said. ‘Gotta go, Isla.’
He dropped the radio, switched the earpiece off with the tap of a finger and gripped the Glock-22 tight. He listened intently for anything that resembled reinforcements. The only audible sounds were the wind buffering against the exterior of the town hall and the far-off rumblings of volcanoes and thunder.
Then a different kind of rumbling started to grow in volume.
He realised what it was almost instantly. It sounded exactly like the Otokar Cobra he had commandeered back in Venezuela — a behemoth of an armoured vehicle designed to resist bomb blasts and take part in urban warfare.
And it was headed straight for the town hall.
He turned on his heel and sprinted away from the entranceway, wondering just what the hell was about to unfold.
The answer came a second later.
With an ear-splitting shriek, some kind of gargantuan vehicle obliterated the front of the town hall and careered into the main room amidst a wave of demolished wood and plaster.
13
The first thing King noticed was the intense brightness. The massive truck’s twin headlights lit up the inside of the town hall, burning white light seeping into everything.
He made it to the other side of the room and dove into an adjacent doorway just as a hail of machine gun fire tore up the floor behind him.
Judging by the heavy reverberations King felt underneath his feet and the sheer noise of the gunfire, the weapon had to be an incredibly high caliber. A single wound from one of the rounds would likely take a limb off.
He crashed into a narrow hallway and sprinted further into the back of the hall, darting past a number of cramped offices — all unfurnished and abandoned.
He shouldered a flimsy door aside and ducked into the rearmost room of the entire building.
It was a bare rectangular space, just an empty area with flaking white walls and identical wooden flooring to the rest of the building. More importantly, two old-fashioned glass windows faced out over the rear of the property — a flat expanse of empty land covered in a thick layer of snow.
King destroyed the old pane of the left-hand window with an adrenalin-charged front kick. Wind howled into the room, loud enough to draw the attention of the yet-unidentified hostiles.
King stopped in his tracks.
He heard raucous commotion from the main room — boots slamming onto flat ground, magazines sliding into rifles, debris raining into the hall from the demolished front of the building.
There was a sizeable force coming for him.
It would do him good to eliminate a couple now.
He assumed at least one of them would have heard him shatter the window. He stayed frozen in place, waiting for someone to charge into the room in desperate pursuit.
The first man to enter was dressed differently to the policeman. He wore an outfit much similar to King’s — tactical all-weather gear and a thick woollen mask covering his features.
Standard attire for a mercenary.
The guy stormed into the room and made a beeline for the broken window, not bothering to look in either direction for potential hostiles.
King lined the Glock’s sight up with the back of his head in clinical fashion and pumped the trigger once.
With a .40 round embedded deep in the back of his skull, the guy slumped forward, carried by the momentum of his run. He toppled and his chin cracked against the bare windowsill, breaking his neck in grotesque fashion.
He wouldn’t have felt it.
King charged forward and leapfrogged the corpse, satisfied with picking off one of their group. He vaulted through the window frame and crashed into the ground outside, skidding uncontrollably on a hidden patch of ice.
He lost his footing and slammed into the snow.
Just in time.
Muzzle flashes roared from the room he had leapt out of and bullets passed through the air above his head. His heart rate skyrocketed as he experienced the closeness to death.
Nothing paralleled that feeling.
King scrambled like a madman along the side of the town hall, putting cover between himself and the gunmen. He was overwhelmingly underprepared. He didn’t know how many men had come with the armoured truck, or what level of firepower they possessed, or how talented they were.
He had a Glock-22 and his instincts.
And — if he could make it back to his duffel bag without dying — a carbine assault rifle.
That would certainly be useful.
The gunfire ceased as the men inside the town hall searched for a target. King pictured them sweeping their weapons over the land outside the window, hunting for his head. They wouldn’t find it. He pressed his back to the brick exterior and crept around to the front of the building, keeping low and clasping the Glock two-handed.
Ten feet away from the front lot, one of the gunmen rounded the corner and came face-to-face with King.
It came down to a matter of reflexes.
He heard the scuffing of the guy’s boots on the soft ground a moment before he came into view. Because of that, King had his sights trained on the dead space ahead a few milliseconds before he saw anything.
It saved his life and ended the gunman’s.
He fired three times, blisteringly loud in the relative silence that had settled over the town hall. It was too dark to make out exactly where the .40 rounds struck home, but amidst the trio of muzzle flashes he saw the man jerk unnaturally and twist on the spot.
His body thumped lifelessly to the snow.
King dove for the assault rifle that the guy dropped from dead fingers, scooping up the weapon before it hit the ground. He expected an AK-74 or some kind of Kalashnikov at least, given the region and the firearm’s popularity.
Glancing down at the rifle in his hands, he found himself pleasantly surprised.
These men were equipped with the very best.
It was an AK-15 with a digital-style snow camouflage wrap and attached suppressor. The AK-15 was one of the newest Kalashnikov’s available to the Russian Armed Forces and an incredibly versatile weapon, with a firing rate of five hundred rounds per minute. They carried 7.62mm rounds, which caused massive internal damage to anyone unlucky enough to be penetrated by the bullets.
King yanked the magazine free and confirmed that it was fully loaded. He glimpsed a full stack of thirty rounds before slamming it back home.
The man hadn’t had a chance to pull the trigger before he met his demise.
King discarded the Glock, its magazine almost empty
and its firepower minuscule in comparison to the AK-15. He inched around the corner, sweeping the thick barrel left and right.
Two hostiles. Straight ahead.
Neither were prepared.
Positioned side-by-side, the pair stepped out of the gaping hole in the front of the town hall, surrounded by splintered wood and crushed brick and piles of debris. Their attention had been drawn to the other side of the building.
The wrong side.
He moved to take advantage of their unpreparedness.
Before he fired, he scrutinised their appearances. They wore similar garb to the man he had shot down in the back room, dressed head-to-toe in expensive tactical attire.
These weren’t cops.
These were hired guns.
Soldiers of fortune.
King tasted something acrid and tangy in the back of his throat, a slight reflex that set him on edge. He hadn’t just stumbled across a small group of crooked policemen here…
This was something larger.
The two mercenaries carried themselves with the measured pace and sharp reflexes of trained professionals. Yet there were still serious flaws in their tactics, as evidenced by King gaining the upper hand so quickly.
He touched the AK-15’s stock to his shoulder, took careful aim, and squeezed off two separate bursts of fully-automatic 7.62mm rounds.
Three per man.
More than enough.
The pair were in the process of sweeping their gun barrels over King’s position when the bullets struck. They jerked like marionettes on strings in the low light, blood spurting out of freshly formed wounds.
King spent a patient few seconds staring at the aftermath of his shots, confirming the two men in front of him were well and truly dead.
Their guns clattered away and they lay still on the gravel.
He nodded — reassured — and pressed on.
His ears rang from the automatic gunfire, in such close proximity to his eardrums that he experienced some temporary hearing loss.
Then the mechanical roar of an engine sounded inside the town hall, shockingly loud even with his impaired hearing. He froze in his tracks, one finger delicately resting on the AK-15’s trigger. Normally he would employ trigger discipline when he wasn’t confronted with a visible enemy, but it was clear that everyone in the area wanted him dead.
He heard tyres screaming against the wooden flooring inside.
The armoured vehicle was reversing.
14
King turned and bolted for the corner he had rounded moments earlier. Realising he wouldn’t make it in time, he dove into the snow and spun like a scrambling lunatic, yanking the AK-15’s barrel to aim at the vast hole in the front of the building.
The massive truck came tearing out of the town hall a second later. He glimpsed the heavy machine gun mounted on a turret on the roof of the vehicle, the same machine gun that had almost torn him to shreds earlier.
It was his first proper look at the truck. He quickly identified it as an Otokar Kaya II. The tank-on-wheels was a full two feet taller than him, raised up on gargantuan bulletproof tyres and painted dark camouflage to blend in with the night.
Instantly, his attention snapped to the visible enemies. There was one man behind the turret, hastily searching for a target, swinging the thick barrel of the heavy machine gun in a wide arc.
There was no-one else visible.
King forced his mind to go entirely blank, zoning in on the man ahead. Most of the guy’s body mass was protected by an impenetrable metal shield fixed into the turret. He must have been tall, because the top of his head poked out above the barrier, barely visible in the darkness. The Kaya’s headlights flooded into the town hall, lighting it up in exquisite detail.
King had a half-second to act before the gunman found his target and opened fire. He lay out in the open, completely exposed, milliseconds away from being torn to shreds by rounds the length of his forearm.
He let his hands go still and his eyes laser in on the top of the man’s head. As soon as he pulled the trigger, they would see him…
He opened fire.
The first four or five bullets hit steel. King heard them ricochet off the shield, sending sparks flying. The noise of the magazine unloading from his prone position drowned out everything else. He clenched his teeth, watching the gunman recoil in shock and start to swing the giant barrel of the heavy machine gun around.
Come on…
He tightened his aim. For a split second, terror shot through his bones. The man finished correcting his aim and King stared down the barrel of the machine gun, waiting for the rounds to pulverise his exposed mass…
A vicious burst of crimson sprayed off the top of the gunman’s head, backlit by the glow emanating from the Kaya’s headlights. King saw the grisly cloud, and a moment later the guy disappeared from sight.
He let go of the trigger and tuned into the sudden silence.
Nothing. The Kaya froze in its tracks, motionless, surrounded by the dead. King imagined the dead gunman had slumped inside the vehicle, causing the driver to hesitate.
As the chaos settled, he quickly realised that the driver was the last man left alive.
One man in the back room. One on the side of the building. Two out the front. One manning the turret.
Five down.
One left.
King had decimated their forces without so much as a scratch to show for it.
In the heat of the moment, it never felt that way. He considered himself an inch from death at all times. It was only as the dust settled that he realised what he had done.
The odds he had overcome…
But it wasn’t over yet. King heard the engines roar once more. The Kaya screamed as it rotated ninety degrees, completing the wild manoeuvre by pointing its nose at King’s prone form.
Blinded by the headlights, he went pale and scrambled to his feet.
He knew exactly what the driver intended to do.
With a deafening growl, the armoured vehicle surged forward.
Thirty thousand pounds of steel, heading straight for King.
He kept the AK-15 clenched in one hand and sprinted away from the truck. The roaring of its engine grew louder. He felt the sheer weight bearing down on him.
At the last moment he threw himself to the side, taking a faceful of snow as he rolled away from the Kaya’s trajectory. His blood ran cold as he felt the ground reverberate all around him. Freezing air blasted his cheeks. He opened his eyes to see the enormous tyres pass him by, only half a foot from crushing him to death.
The Kaya slammed on the brakes and spun in a tight circle, readying itself for another charge. King got back to his feet, snow cascading off his cold-weather gear. He snatched up the AK-15 — aware that it would be useless unless he could somehow find his way inside the vehicle — and took off across the parking lot.
A particularly vicious blast of wind turned his exposed face to ice. He threw a glance over his shoulder and saw the Kaya shoot off the mark, powering toward him.
His stomach twisted into a knot.
He knew he couldn’t keep this deadly game up for much longer. Sooner or later his reflexes would fail him and the Kaya would crush him like a twig.
It had almost happened the first time.
Across the road, he spotted his duffel bag resting in the snow, propped up against the M4A1 carbine. Beyond that, the ground disappeared into shadow, plunged into darkness by the forest.
The trees.
He quickened his pace, pushing his limbs as fast as they would go. The roar of the engine filled his eardrums.
He powered across the road — almost slipping on a handful of icy patches spread across the dirt — and sprawled into the snowbank on the other side. He snatched up the duffel and his carbine, discarding the AK-15 onto the ground.
Then he sprinted full-pelt between two thick deciduous trees, passing between their trunks with inches to spare.
And milliseconds to spare.
<
br /> The Kaya didn’t slow down. Whoever sat behind the wheel possessed unimaginable determination, because the next thing King heard was the sound of steel crunching against wood. With so much weight behind the collision, the ground shook and his surroundings vibrated.
King threw his possessions away and dove with every ounce of effort in his body. He was so close to the impact behind him that for a moment he thought he had been struck.
Then he smashed into the hard ground and rolled to a halt ten feet from where he had first leapt.
He spun on his back to see both tree trunks tear from the ground in twin explosions of dirt and roots. They moaned as they fell, slamming into the ground where King had stood moments previously.
Something sliced across his face, hard enough to make him recoil. He tumbled backward, away from the pain. When he righted himself, he realised that a mass of branches had clattered to the ground all around him, knocked off one of the trees as it fell. He tasted warm blood and realised he had been cut.
What came next sent shivers down his spine.
The Kaya, disabled by the massive blunt force of the collision, rolled against one of the fallen trunks and lurched sideways. King realised the act had been a last-ditch effort. The driver had sacrificed the integrity of his vehicle to crush King under the fallen trees.
It toppled just far enough to get carried by its own momentum.
The Kaya smashed roof-first onto the hard forest floor, its steel frame bending under the weight bearing down on it. It skidded a few feet, then its front end crunched against another tree trunk hard enough to rattle the ground again.
It came to rest upside-down, enormous tyres still spinning in thin air.
King slumped against the ground and let out his nerves in a single, long exhale.
The Kaya’s crash had been so brutal that he knew the driver would at the very least have been knocked unconscious. Nevertheless, he wouldn’t feel safe until every last threat had been dealt with.
He clambered to his feet and tugged the M4A1 out of a mass of branches. He double-checked the weapon was still set to fully-automatic before hurrying over to the motionless vehicle.