by Matt Rogers
Then — just as suddenly as the chaos had started — it stopped.
King tumbled to a halt a safe distance away from the wreck. Before his vision even returned to him his brain frantically sent signals through his limbs, searching for any dire injuries.
No broken bones. Nothing impeding his movement. His tumble-roll had reduced the majority of the force behind the landing. Sure, he would be excruciatingly sore when the adrenalin wore off. Soft tissue damage was inevitable. Half his body would be bruised.
Right now, that was inconsequential.
There was still one hostile alive.
The corrugated iron wall had taken just as much damage as the 4WD. It was thick material, but the collision had demolished much of its form. The car itself was a battered mess, its bonnet smoking, glass strewn everywhere. Ten feet away, the driver lay on the concrete. Shell-shocked from the landing.
He’d hit the concrete violently, much harder than King had.
King would capitalise on his inability to act.
He sprung to his feet, ignoring the nerve endings across his body screaming for him to rest. Slowly, tentatively, the driver rose too.
In unison, they both saw it.
The Glock 19 had been flung from the wreck, thrown out of King’s hands as he dove to safety. It lay in the space between them. Still spinning slowly on its side.
The driver recognised the importance of the gun, and charged at it.
King was three steps ahead.
In one motion he reached down and scooped the weapon off the ground. His finger slid into the trigger guard. He took another bounding step toward the driver and levelled the gun.
Then the driver’s actions took him by surprise. Clearly a trained mercenary, the man reached out and wrapped his hands around the gun with surprising accuracy and power. King felt it slipping from his grip as he depressed the trigger. A single round spat from the barrel and hit the man squarely in the centre of the chest, accompanied by the vicious noise of steel sinking through bone.
The driver would succumb to his wounds, that was for sure.
But that meant nothing, for now he had control of the Glock.
‘Gun!’ a voice roared from behind them.
King spun to see Brad storming across the hangar floor. The SCAR assault rifle from the duffel bag sat on his shoulder. He peered down the sights, aim locked directly on the driver.
King stood in between them.
He flung himself out of the way, arcing sideways through the air. He hit the ground hard and came to a skidding halt. Just in time to see events unfold.
Brad fired a burst from the rifle. His aim rang true. Three rounds tore up the driver’s chest, tearing his jacket to shreds. One of them hit his vital organs. King saw his eyes glaze over.
Then the driver fell to his knees, raised the Glock and spat out a final, desperate shot. The reverberation echoed off the walls. Finally, there was silence.
King breathed a sigh of relief and turned to thank Brad on coming to his rescue.
Which he found would be impossible.
Brad sported a cylindrical bullet hole in his temple. An instantly fatal shot. The life in his eyes had already died out. King watched the limp body slump to the concrete. He took a moment to process the sight.
He was the last man alive in the warehouse.
He let his head fall back against the concrete, sucking in air, recovering from the brutal series of events. The only sound came from the wind slicing through the entrance and whistling around the empty hangar. He closed his eyes and let the calm of the aftermath wash over him.
‘This is fucked,’ he whispered, effectively summarising what had just occurred.
The operation had been torn apart before it was even supposed to begin.
CHAPTER 8
He heard Diego stumble into the hangar not long after. He kept his eyes closed, reeling from the close call.
‘Oh my god,’ the pilot exclaimed.
‘I’m alive, Diego,’ King shouted.
He opened his eyes to see Diego jolt, startled by the sound of a man he’d thought to be dead. He looked around. Brad and the driver lay opposite each other, face-down in pools of their own blood. The body of one of the passengers hung half out the window of the obliterated 4WD. Near the Cessna, Clint’s body slumped motionless.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Diego said. ‘What the — oh my god.’ He struggled to form a coherent sentence. The man was clearly in a considerable state of shock.
Understandably, King thought. With no prior combat experience, the scene he gazed upon would be far too bizarre to process. It was time to relay clear, concise instructions to Diego until they were out of this mess.
King rose off the floor and laid a hand on the man’s shoulder.
‘My name is Jason King,’ he said, slowly and calmly. ‘I didn’t get a chance to introduce myself earlier. I’m a soldier. A very good one. I’m going to get you to safety, okay?’
‘Okay.’ Diego remained unable to peel his eyes away from the bodies strewn across the hangar.
‘Look at me, Diego.’
The pilot glanced briefly in his general direction.
‘We need to go through with the plan,’ King said. ‘Do you hear me?’
‘Uh…’ he said, his gaze flittering from body to body. ‘I dunno, mister.’
‘Everyone who came for us is dead. The gang in the jungle will have no idea that we’re still on our way. All you need to do is follow exactly what I tell you. As soon as I’m out of your plane, you can fly back here, contact the authorities and forget this whole thing ever happened. Our command will take care of you. I promise.’
Diego’s lips remained firmly sealed. King didn’t know if he would get a response.
‘Did you hear me?’
Diego nodded.
‘Will you do what I say?’
Another nod.
‘Do you think you can still fly the Cessna?’
‘Yes,’ Diego said. ‘I fly plane for many years. Can do it with eyes shut.’
‘That’s good, Diego. The faster we do this, the faster you can get back home. Would you like that?’
Diego nodded again. ‘They all dead, King.’
‘I know.’
‘You kill them?’
‘I killed all the men in the truck. Clint and Brad didn’t make it.’
‘I see dead body before,’ Diego said. ‘But never this many. Never this much blood.’
‘Let’s get out of here. Nothing else to see.’
‘Are you okay?’
‘I’ll be fine. But there’s some people in the jungle who won’t be unless we go right now. It’s up to me to extract them. You got that?’
‘I got it. Let’s go.’
King led him to the small aircraft in the centre of the hangar and helped him into the pilot’s seat. As Diego preoccupied himself firing up the engine, he went back to Brad and plied the SCAR from his dead hands. He would no longer be needing it. King looked at the trestles tables. Sure enough, everything on their surface had been torn to shreds by gunfire. The satellite phones lay in pieces on the concrete floor. Completely ruined.
No backup.
His skin grew cold and he gulped, suddenly anxious, but it would do no good to let it show. Diego was dealing with enough already. He didn’t need to see a special forces soldier scared out of his mind.
Before King left, he stopped and glanced back at Brad. The man’s face sported the expression of steely determination, still frozen from his last moments. No surprise. No fear. He had never known his fate.
King knelt down and rested a hand on Brad’s vest, spending one final moment with the corpse. Then he jogged back to the tables, stuffed the SCAR into the duffel bag, zipped it up, threw it into the plane alongside the parachute container and clambered in through the open fuselage door.
‘Ready?’ he said to Diego.
‘Ready.’
The pilot thumbed a button and the single propellor at the front of the plane
whined into life, deafeningly loud. The drone of the engine drowned out all other sound. If King shouted, nothing would be heard.
He reached up and swung the door shut, sealing the interior in relative silence. Now there was nothing but a cluster of nervous energy inside the plane. A small, claustrophobic tin can, which he would soon be exiting at 14,000 feet. After all the death he had just witnessed, the jump seemed rather inconsequential.
‘How will I explain if police find this before I return?’ Diego said softly, his voice barely audible above the shuddering fuselage.
‘I know people so high up the ranks they could make this disappear in an instant,’ King said. ‘You’ll be safe. I swear.’
Silence.
‘Do you know where you’re going?’ King said.
Diego nodded. ‘Your friends give me co-ordinates.’
‘Just get me there. I’ll handle the rest.’
As he sat on the floor of the tiny plane and felt the vertigo in his stomach as it lifted off the runway, the gravity of the situation began to dawn on him. Brad and Clint were his only form of backup. He had no way out of the rainforest after he entered it, save for a hundred mile hike. No form of communications with his superiors in the government. The plan had been shoddy to begin with, even before the clusterfuck that had just unfolded.
His only hope at making it out alive was to steal communications equipment off one of the Phantoms. The men at the facility had to have some method of contacting their friends in Iquitos. King would find that method, no matter how many bodies he had to pile up to do so.
The three hostages needed him. He would do everything in his power to get them out.
He let his back rest against the wall behind him and felt the light aircraft shudder and shake in the wind. He was thirty minutes away from falling into the middle of the rainforest, with limited supplies, no backup, no real knowledge of what he would be facing, or where they were located.
But he was alone.
That was all that mattered. King could do things by himself that entire armies could not achieve. The circumstances did not matter. He was the only one responsible for his survival, and that was just the way he liked it.
CHAPTER 9
Back over the Amazon Rainforest…
As he stepped off the plane half an hour later, the fear instantly dissipated. It wasn’t the act itself that scared King. It was the build up. When he opened that door and dove out into thin air with the wind pummelling him from all sides, there was no time to think about anything other than action. The nerves remained. His pulse stayed high. But the sensory overload meant he felt none of those things.
Usually, skydiving was beautiful. King had only done it recreationally a handful of times. He spent the majority of the time in freefall racing toward hostile forces looking to violently murder him. It didn’t give him much time to focus on the pleasantries of the experience.
For a while it felt like he was floating. With nothing around him for 14,000 feet, there was nothing to compare his speed to. No way to gauge it. He fell at over one hundred and twenty miles an hour, but it was hard to tell that there was any movement at all.
The wind battered him relentlessly but that was the only noticeable factor. King held his stable position, arching his back and spreading his arms wide. It was a difficult position to control. The duffel bag around his mid-section plus his one-hundred kilogram frame combined to form a significant amount of weight under canopy. A heavy duty parachute had been required to handle his bulk.
It meant he fell like a bullet.
For a moment he admired the view. From this high up the jungle was a sight to behold. Endless plains of green, spanning as far as the eye could see. All lush and serene. He soaked it all in. He knew it wouldn’t last.
Sixty seconds from now, there would be nothing to admire.
Survival and completion of the mission would be the only things on his mind when he landed.
It didn’t take long for the ground to grow dangerously close. One second the rainforest was nothing but a tiny map far below. The next, it was right there. He began to make out individual trees.
He had to pull off an extremely low opening. Otherwise, his chances of detection would shoot through the roof.
He waited until just before his life fell into endangered territory, then reached back and yanked the ripcord from its position at the bottom of the container.
Nothing happened.
King didn’t panic. There was always a delay. A second of hesitation as the canopy billowed from the container. Most men would be certain of their impending death. The rainforest was less than a thousand feet below him. It felt like he would impact at any moment.
Calm, he told himself.
Then the chute caught the wind. A sudden jerk on his shoulder straps. The resounding whump of a fully opened canopy. He slowed in an instant.
Just in time.
The treetops were so near his feet he could almost kick them. It was the closest he had ever cut an opening. Another second’s hesitation and he would have been skewered on the branches. Preferably killed instantly. Worse case scenario: he would have bled out over the course of the day.
Now that he was alive, the hard part began.
King braced for impact.
He had a beat or two before he crashed into the trees at close to thirty miles an hour. He reached up and snatched the toggles on either side of his head. Usually they were used for steering.
There was no time to steer.
King yanked down hard on both toggles. Each side of the canopy bent toward him, effectively slowing him down. The move was known as ‘flaring’. It was used by all skydivers to reduce their speed before touching down. Most skydivers touched down on flat ground though.
‘Fuck,’ King muttered under his breath, preparing for what came next.
He slammed into a palm tree chest-first. Its large drooping fronds took away a little of the force behind the impact, but the hit still knocked the breath from his lungs. He spiralled away from the tree, now inside the rainforest. Branches tore at his khaki gear. He spun. Unsure which way was up, which way was down. Then a violent tug at his shoulders.
And he stopped.
He looked up. The canopy had caught on the branches and fronds above his head, severely entangled. There would be no salvaging the parachute. It was a miracle it hadn’t been torn to shreds already. King now dangled from the container’s straps, looping over his shoulders like a backpack. The weight of his gear threatened to cause significant problems. He heard the string lines of the parachute straining, threatening to give. They would snap if he didn’t act.
He took a second to get his bearings. The rainforest floor was as he expected. Dense and inhospitable. It would be difficult terrain to traverse. Foliage and overgrowth covered everything.
His current situation was far more precarious. A distance of at least twenty feet separated him from the ground. The vegetation was widespread, but it would not be enough to save him from broken limbs if he fell. Any serious injury in these parts would be a death sentence.
First he unclipped the duffel bag from his chest, letting it fall. There was significant weight in the bag and it made a hollow thud as it hit the ground below. King paused, slowly rotating in his harness.
Silence.
No sounds came from the jungle. Not even the chattering of wildlife. He assumed the parachute crash had caused enough commotion to scare off any animals in the vicinity. In the distance, he heard the exotic call of a native bird. But no signs of human activity. Nothing to signal he had been spotted.
Time to move.
He undid the strap around his waist. Then slowly and tentatively extracted one arm from the harness. The move swung him round. He shot his free arm around and snatched hold of the pack.
Now with both hands wrapped around the container’s straps, he hung suspended in the air, both feet dangling. There was nowhere to go but up. Breathing heavily with exertion he pulled himself up and snatched
hold of one of the string lines connecting the canopy to the container. With the extra weight of the duffel bag gone, the thin lines managed to support his weight.
Barely.
Although designed to hold a man in a harness, there were more than twenty of them. With two in each hand, the uneven distribution of the weight threatened to tear the canopy if he wasn’t careful. He began to slowly shimmy up the lines, attempting to spread his bulk out as evenly as possible.
‘This isn’t good,’ he whispered, staring up at the canopy.
It started to give. A tear in the fabric began to widen. It threatened to split the entire thing in half, sending him tumbling down to injury. He had to do something to avoid that situation before he wound up left for dead in the middle of the jungle.
A sturdy branch jutted out of a tree trunk a few feet above his head. He couldn’t reach it yet. But it was his best shot at survival.
He threw caution to the wind and lurched upward. Grabbing as many of the string lines as possible. Reaching as high as he could. As he hurried, the canopy tore, accompanied by the sound of ripping fabric. One final burst and he was within touching distance of the branch.
As he pulled on the string lines one last time they came down, sending a pang of shock through his chest. For a single terrifying moment he hung suspended in the air. Holding onto nothing. Milliseconds from falling.
Then he shot his hand out and wrapped three fingers around the branch.
CHAPTER 10
The canopy finished tearing in half. It cascaded to the forest floor below as King hung, breathless and shocked, still nowhere near safety. It would be a long trek down.
He began his journey, making slow deliberate movements. Any slip-up now would spell serious trouble. First he swung hand-over-hand along the branch. Not recklessly and spectacularly like Tarzan. But very carefully, and very hesitantly. Style points meant nothing out here.
He shimmied to where the branch met the trunk, and planned his next move. The tree was tall but its trunk was disproportionately thin. Still wider than a man, but small enough so he could wrap his arms around its girth and lock down a proper grip. He splayed his legs and arms out wide, feeling the rough bark against his fingertips. It would suffice.