by Matt Rogers
The place had been abandoned long ago. Water dripped from the ceiling. Crude graffiti covered all exposed surfaces, and the floor was littered with empty cans and dirty rags. King’s own panicked breathing was the only audible noise.
There was no sign of the two men. He stayed still for a moment as he took in every inch of his surroundings, making sure that they hadn’t made it to the ground floor before he’d entered the building. But the lower level was desolate. It felt like no-one had stepped foot in the complex for years.
He spotted a half-finished concrete stairwell in the corner, ascending into darkness. It seemed to be the only way to reach the higher levels. A dilapidated elevator shaft sat in a far wall, abandoned halfway through construction. It served no purpose.
The stairwell it is.
King powered across the room and took the stairs three at a time, keeping one finger slotted inside the trigger guard of his sub-machine gun. He knew the odds were in his favour. Not many people on the planet could react faster than he could — but it only took one bullet from behind to shut the lights out.
He cleared the second floor, keeping one eye on the stairwell at all times to make sure the two men didn’t pass him by. He could search the entire building this way. At some point, he had to run into the duo. It was paramount that he did. If either of them made it back into the shipyard, the Movers would be prepared for an attack.
He swore as the second floor turned out empty. Every second that ticked away created a higher likelihood that their cover had been blown. He darted back to the stairwell and made it to the third floor in seconds. He kept the MP7 raised, ready to react to the slightest unnatural movement. He looked past dusty columns and through the skeleton frames of half-erected plaster walls. Nothing. Completely empty.
Heart pounding in his chest, King took a deep breath and prepared for a trip to the fourth floor. Then he glanced at the elevator shaft and went pale.
A thick hessian rope had been fixed to the side of the shaft, dangling down to the lower floors. It swayed softly from side to side without any kind of draught. Which only meant one thing.
It had been used recently.
Very recently.
King swung the MP7’s leather strap over his shoulder and let go of the weapon as he ran back towards the stairwell. He knew he would not need it. It dangled by his side as he ran.
The two mercenaries would be long gone, high-tailing it back to the shipyard to inform their comrades of an approaching Otokar Cobra. He no longer had any advantages except for his experience in the heat of combat.
He doubted that would get them through the coming battle.
But every second that ticked away signalled another moment that Rico could spend getting ready for an attack.
So he tore down three flights of stairs. He burst back onto the ground floor and flew through the complex. His lungs pounded and the blood rushed to his head. He saw Raul peering out the windscreen of the Cobra. When the man saw King tearing towards the Cobra at breakneck speed his eyes widened and he opened the driver’s side door.
King dove in.
‘What’s going on?’ he demanded.
‘We’re compromised,’ King said, slamming the door shut behind him. ‘Two Movers saw us and got away. They’ve probably already raised the alarm.’
‘What?!’ Raul said with panicked urgency. King realised he should have just kept his mouth shut. The man was nervous enough.
‘We need to move,’ he said. ‘Right now.’
‘Fuck,’ Raul said, eyes widening. ‘I don’t know about this. Are you sure that—’
King leant over and gripped his shoulder tight, his own blood rushing. ‘Raul, I know instinct is telling you to back out. But we either go right now or we never go at all. There’s no other option. You can get out if you want to.’
With a determined nod of the head, Raul grit his teeth and nodded acceptance.
‘We’re going?’ King said.
‘We’re going.’
Adrenalin ran high as King seized the wheel and slammed the Cobra’s accelerator. It took off with surprising power given its extraordinary weight. The tyres spun on the gravel for a moment before finding purchase. The tank-on-wheels rocketed out onto the main road, coming into full view of the guards.
In King’s heightened state he noted each wave of reaction in the gangsters’ expressions.
First came shock. The sight of such an enormous vehicle made them hesitate. For a moment no-one moved. Their weapons hung at their sides as they stared at the scene with utter disbelief. King imagined they were fully unprepared for an actual attack. With absolute control over the city of Maiquetía and dominance over all competition, he didn’t imagine they faced threats very often. They were stationed at the gate for nothing more than deterrence. They looked imposing, even though Rico probably knew a full-scale invasion would never come.
But now it was happening — and they had been thrown into the midst of it — and they needed to react in the next few seconds or they would be rendered useless. It was too much for them to process. King grinned and ground his foot into the pedal, pushing the engine as hard as it could take. The guards stood frozen, locked in bouts of mental paralysis as their brains turned over at a million miles an hour.
The Cobra roared towards the gate, descending the slope at a lightning pace.
He didn’t even think about moving his foot over to the brakes. He and Raul had committed to the attack. By now there was no turning back.
The guards came to this realisation shortly after. Then came the next phase of reactions.
Sheer panic.
Mouths open, eyes boggling, they snatched for their guns with shaky hands. The four of them were unable to rip their gaze away from the battering ram headed their way. King knew they would get a few shots off before they reached the gate. That was inevitable.
Not that it mattered.
The Cobra went airborne as it crossed from the smooth asphalt to the dirty patch of land in front of the gate. Its massive wheels bounced once, then found purchase and surged forward. King felt the vibration deep in his core. The impact smashed him against his seat, jolting him hard. He kept his grip on the wheel.
A scattering of bullets chipped against the front windscreen. The first guard to gather his wits had unloaded his magazine at the vehicle. It had no effect whatsoever. The Cobra had been built specifically to withstand small-arms fire.
He turned out to be the only man that reacted fast enough to hit them.
The Cobra surged past the four of them — two on each side — and charged at the gate.
‘Brace!’ King roared.
Rico wrapped one hand around his door handle and covered his face with the other. King tightened his grip on the wheel and tensed every muscle in his body at once, ready for the impact.
They smashed into the steel mesh amidst the shriek of tearing metal.
CHAPTER 41
The gate was sturdier than King anticipated.
He’d expected to demolish it with barely any resistance, given the sheer weight and size of the Cobra. But the collision knocked the breath from his lungs and they slowed considerably. He slammed against his seatbelt, coughing as he did so. In the passenger’s seat, Raul jolted similarly against his own restraints. They both let out twin grunts of surprise.
The gate tore off its supports as it bore the full brunt of the Cobra’s momentum. Metal roared and steel bent and the structure collapsed. Despite the intensity of the crash, King kept his foot down. They stalled momentarily, then gained an extra burst of momentum and bounced over the destroyed frame.
‘Holy shit,’ Raul gasped, wheezing for breath.
The Cobra rattled to a halt inside the shipyard. They had entered the same stretch of bare ground that King had seen from the hotel window, running all the way from the entrance to the port. Carcasses of long-retired cargo ships had been cast across the space seemingly at random. They looked like enormous boulders amidst a concrete wasteland. The shi
pyard was deserted for as far as the eye could see. It seemed all the important activity took place in and around the cruise ship.
Raul had been right.
In one fluid movement King undid his belt and launched out of the driver’s seat.
‘Where the fuck are you going?!’ Raul yelled.
‘Gotta deter them from following.’
He snatched up a HK416 assault rifle from the steel floor and vaulted onto one of the seats, giving him enough room to stick his top half out the open hole in the roof. As he did so, he took a brief glance at the weapon in his hands.
No, not a HK416.
A HK417.
He hadn’t seen many of the variants in his time, which was why it had taken him a while to notice the slight differences. This version was a slightly larger version of the standard HK416, which made room for 7.62x51mm NATO rounds. He only remembered those facts because of intrigue at the time. In reality, they all killed just the same.
Except this model caused slightly more grievous wounds.
Perfect.
He brought the red dot sight to his eye and locked his aim onto the gaping hole in the shipyard’s perimeter. He knew how their minds worked. The four guards were stationed at the gate to prevent one thing — intruders. They had failed miserably, and now they would come storming through into the shipyard, recklessly exposing themselves, curious to catch a glimpse of what their shortcomings had resulted in.
One man came into view on each side of the gap. Both had their guns pointed at the ground, expecting King to have continued his rampage with the Cobra. They saw the huge vehicle stopped just inside the grounds of the shipyard.
Both froze in shock.
Too late.
King fired two clusters, separated by a second’s hesitation as he moved from one target to the next. He aimed for their torsos — the largest surface area and as such the easiest to hit. All six rounds thudded home. He didn’t see the impacts. The exchange happened too fast to fully take in the placement of each individual bullet.
He saw both men crumple like all the energy had been sucked out of them at once, and he knew his work was done. With the added size of the HK’s rounds, death would be inevitable. Vital organs had been destroyed.
The brutality of the violence would cause the other two men to pause. They would more than likely suffer shock from seeing their partners die so suddenly. King wasn’t interested in needlessly killing them too. If they decided to put up a fight when he returned, he would deal with them accordingly.
But for now, they would be preoccupied with aiding their dying comrades.
He ducked back inside. He dropped the rifle. He dove into the driver’s seat and squashed his boot into the footwell. The Cobra took off again, roaring away from the scene at the gate.
‘Are they following?’ Raul said.
‘Not anymore.’
The man inhaled, sucking air into his lungs. ‘I don’t know what to do…’
‘Stop overthinking things,’ King said as shipwrecks flashed past on either side. ‘Just follow me. I’ll get this done.’
‘You’re awfully confident.’
‘Have to be. I’d be shitting my pants otherwise.’
Up ahead, the ocean twinkled under the sun, which had just reached its apex in the sky. The edge of the shipyard came into view as they drew closer to the water. The Cobra flew past a final shipwreck obscuring the way and he finally saw the layout of Rico’s stronghold.
The cruise ship rested in an inlet just large enough to fit its gargantuan frame. It seemed to dwarf everything else in proximity. Previously white, most of the paint on its exterior had peeled off, revealing the dirty foundations underneath. In various places, the framework had collapsed, to the point where it looked like a giant beast had gouged chunks out of the ship.
King took in the sight of the behemoth, and then he noted the rest of the scene. His stomach fell into a deep pit.
He needn’t have bothered chasing the two Movers into the apartment complex. Because Rico had known an attack was imminent for some time.
And he’d prepared accordingly.
King stared out the windscreen at a barricade that had been erected in front of the cruise ship, made up of dozens of heavy-duty vehicles parked nose-to-end. Behind the trucks and sedans and pick-ups, more than thirty armed men stood in wait, barrels raised. They’d been simply waiting for the moment that King and Raul would come tearing around the corner.
Someone had tipped them off. Not the two scouts in the apartment complex. Sometime before that…
They unloaded their weapons simultaneously.
King slammed on the brakes, partially due to shock at the sudden turn of events, mostly due to the realisation that a head-on approach would accomplish nothing against such a well-prepared force. A hailstorm of bullets slammed against the front of the Cobra, hundreds and hundreds of rounds smashing into the steel and bulletproof glass at an overwhelming pace. The resulting cacophony of noise made King flinch. The din roared all around them.
‘What the hell!’ Raul screamed above the racket. ‘They knew we were coming!’
King grit his teeth. ‘Looks like your friend José might be Rico’s friend José.’
‘Then why would he give us all this shit? He would have just killed us at the warehouse.’
King paused. ‘Good question. What the fuck’s going on?’
Whatever the case, he knew one of the Movers would eventually get their hands on anti-tank weaponry if they stayed stationary in no man’s land. There was nothing they could do against Rico’s forces, especially when every man in the shipyard had been prepared for an assault.
King slammed the gearbox into reverse. He spun the wheel and punched the accelerator at the same time. In a scream of smoking rubber, the Cobra spun in a hundred-and-eighty-degree arc, bullets bouncing off its hull the entire time.
‘What are you doing?!’ Raul said.
‘Retreating.’
‘My family’s in that ship…’
‘We’ll be no use to them dead.’
‘Rico will kill them now that he knows we’re here.’
‘I know, Raul!’ King roared. ‘Give me a moment.’
But he didn’t have a moment, because just as he prepared to round the corner of the nearest shipwreck and take cover behind its massive frame, a frenetic explosion of movement broke out ahead. King jolted in shock. The sight took a second to process.
‘What the—’
A convoy of vehicles tore into sight, all beat-up and rusting but armoured with steel plates and other forms of amateur work. Several of them were pick-up trucks complete with pairs and trios of men perched in the rear trays, brandishing all kinds of shiny assault rifles. King spotted a couple of M32 grenade launchers identical to the haul littered across the Cobra’s floor.
Armed by José, without a doubt.
‘What have we stumbled into?’ King said, in awe at the sudden surge of armed forces.
‘Oh my God,’ Raul whispered. ‘That’s not good.’
King quickly realised that Rico’s forces hadn’t been preparing for him and Raul. They’d been bracing themselves for a skirmish with these new arrivals. It seemed that some kind of gang in competition with the Movers had chosen today to launch an assault on their compound.
The Otokar Cobra rested directly in the middle of an all-out war.
CHAPTER 42
The Cobra screeched to a halt once again as King hit the brakes. Chaos raged all around them as both sides exchanged bullets. He heard the familiar whump of a discharged M32 and clenched all his muscles simultaneously. If that grenade launcher had been aimed in their direction, it may be the last noise he ever heard.
The distant noise of an explosion ripped through the shipyard, overpowering the storm of gunfire. It came from behind them, somewhere in the midst of Rico’s ranks. King breathed a momentary sigh of relief and assessed the situation.
It didn’t look good. They were boxed in by shipwrecks, trapped in
the middle of the carnage. If they pressed onwards into the hostile forces, he didn’t doubt that a stray round from one of the M32s would find its way into their vehicle’s hull. Survival was highly questionable. He thought back to the brief glimpse he’d got of Rico’s forces, and couldn’t recall whether they had been armed with high explosives.
It was all he had to go off. A wild guess.
He could antagonise these new enemies, or charge headlong into Rico’s forces. Little good was likely to come from either option. But he had to make a decision, right now. Stalling in the dead space between the two forces would get them killed without question. So he spun the wheel again, aiming back in the same direction they’d just come from.
‘King?’ Raul said.
King pressed the Cobra forward with a surge of acceleration. It swung in a wide arc, its hull screaming under the impact of hundreds of stray rounds. The deafening rattle made his eardrums ring, but he grit his teeth and ignored it. Now was not the time to get cold feet.
‘King,’ Raul said, a little more urgently.
He completed the one-hundred-and-eighty degree turn. Rico’s forces remained behind the crude barricade, firing indiscriminately at both the Cobra and the approaching convoy. The side of the cruise ship loomed behind them, resting in the inlet, separated from the dock by a dozen feet of empty space. He assumed that a drawbridge usually connected the two sections together. Now it had been removed, to prevent enemy forces reaching the ship.
No matter.
Pick up enough speed and momentum would carry them across.
‘King!’ Raul roared.
‘We need to get inside the cruise ship,’ he said. ‘Once we’re in there, I can find Rico. I can kill him. I can find your family.’