by Matt Rogers
He fished a satellite phone out of his khaki pants and dialled one of the only numbers he’d bothered to save into the phone.
It was answered in seconds.
‘We just arrived,’ the bearded man said, not bothering to wait for a response. ‘Get moving. We’ve got twenty-four hours of loitering before locals will start to get suspicious. Get the payload to El Hur.’
‘On it,’ came the response. ‘Shouldn’t be a problem.’
Satisfied, the bearded man ended the call, tucked the phone back in his pocket, rested both hands on the rusting railing running the length of the walkway, and smiled.
Everything would work out.
He hadn’t slaved away on the battlefield all those years just to come up short after the transition to civilian life.
War had made him a hard man, and soon it would all pay off.
16
King ended up on Jaziira Road, a wide unkempt track that had received slightly more attention than the surrounding fields. His surroundings quickly shifted from rural to urban — sandy plains choked with dead trees and thick bushels gave way to rundown residential buildings and industrial complexes dotted intermittently across the terrain. He was heading straight for inner Mogadishu, straying away from the outskirts. He recognised the increasing likelihood of a confrontation with each step — his skin was naturally tanned, but he was still quite pale from spending time in Washington.
Noticeably foreign.
Something that the locals didn’t see much of, he assumed.
It wasn’t the locals he was worried about. Even as he strode purposefully through the sand, dodging twisted roots and deep potholes, he heard the distant staccato of gunfire resonating across the city. To his right, beyond the industrial congestion, the gentle noise of ocean waves lapping against the shore floated across, directly juxtaposed against the gunfire. King found the setting both serene and terrifying. He couldn’t deny that it felt off.
In truth, he didn’t know what the hell he was doing. What did he expect to find at the port? A collection of ragtag criminals, happy to explain that they were most definitely in the wrong and that Reed had been perfectly justified in shooting a few of them dead?
He knew full well he would find nothing of the sort.
But there was no harm in trying.
He told himself this was what Lars would want him to do.
Take matters into his own hands. Do what the Force Recon Marines were restricted from doing. After all, that was the entire reason he was here.
Screaming voices.
Nearby.
Trouble reared its head suddenly, in jarring fashion. King had been anticipating it, given the region he was travelling through, but the violent nature of the confrontation presented itself in such unbelievable haste that it startled him, making him hesitate. He heard the approaching drone of an engine and turned slightly to see a dusty sedan in his peripheral vision, boring down on him, headlights flaring.
For a fraction of a second, he ignored it. A handful of civilian vehicles had passed him by over the course of the trek, and none had felt the need to instigate trouble.
That moment of hesitation was all it took.
Four dark shapes piled out of the sedan, each of their frames nothing but skin and bone, all of them wielding assault rifles — King assumed Kalashnikovs, but couldn’t be certain in the darkness. Confusion reigned supreme. The pack descended on him in a cacophony of noise and steel. They were intending to overwhelm a straggler, robbing King of all his valuables, more than likely leaving him for dead. They were either off-duty militants, or national soldiers, or shadowy civilians looking for a quick dollar.
They weren’t intimidating King — that was for sure.
Their first mistake was the proximity. If King had been a hapless wanderer, devoid of weapons and easily terrified, he would have been shocked by how close the sedan had come to running him over. The vehicle had missed him by a foot, screeching to a halt close enough for the passenger to step straight out into him, aiming to knock him off-balance and throw him off with the first action.
King saw the entire ordeal coming with a second to spare, and prepared accordingly.
He had little experience dealing with ordinary civilian threats, but he imagined that the four rifles weren’t all trained on him. The four muggers didn’t know who or what he was, so they had evidently decided to swing the guns around like playthings, whooping and hollering in Arabic to intimidate him into submission.
As soon as the passenger hurled the door open and made it out of his seat, King raised his M45 sidearm and sent a round straight through the soft tissue of the man’s pronator teres muscle. The bullet sliced through the skin between his bicep and forearm, taking an enormous chunk of flesh out with it, rendering his good arm entirely useless.
It was one of the more painful gunshot wounds a man could experience.
The guy went down howling, dropping his weapon and clutching his arm at the elbow. The bloodcurdling screams froze up his friends, and King took the opportunity to turn to the man who had piled out of the rear seats on the same side as the passenger, and drill a round through each of the guy’s thighs.
Arterial blood sprayed, and the second guy collapsed in a state of shock.
Three unsuppressed gunshots, shockingly loud, one after the other.
Blinding muzzle flashes in the darkness.
By the time the pair of thugs on the other side of the vehicle had regained their senses and swung their weapons — which King recognised as Kalashnikovs now that he had more time to analyse the situation — he had hauled the now-crippled thug to his feet and wedged the M45’s barrel into the soft flesh above the man’s ear.
King also knew how to use intimidation to his advantage.
‘Put your weapons down!’ he roared at the top of his lungs, his voice booming down the trail. ‘Take your friends and fuck off!’
The two guys on the other side of the sedan had no idea what the hell had unfolded. They were shaking and sweating and their pupils had dilated drastically, a clear indication of mortal fear. They had expected a simple shakedown, and now one of their guys had his arm near-severed at the elbow and the other had a pair of rounds embedded deep in his thighs, already bleeding profusely.
‘English?!’ King barked, taking advantage of the shift in momentum.
One of the guys shook his head.
King took one hand off the human shield’s collar and pointed a sole finger back in the direction they had come from. He shot daggers over the roof of the sedan, his gaze burning into them. The pair nodded sheepishly and lowered their weapons.
That was all it took.
King didn’t feel like gunning down four civilians in cold blood, no matter how diabolical their actions. He let go of the human shield, and with no-one to support his weight the guy crumbled into a heap in the sand, both his legs useless for the near future.
The man with the bullet in his arm had his head bowed. King noticed his body jerking unnaturally up and down with each breath. The guy was crying, great sobs that wracked his whole body with motion.
How sad, King thought, his adrenalin still racing.
Keeping the barrel of the M45 trained on each of the four men to make sure they made no sudden movements, he let the unharmed pair help their injured friends back into the vehicle. Grunting and moaning, the two wounded men piled into the back seat, bleeding all over the upholstery.
The unharmed duo ducked into the front of the vehicle and screamed away from the scene, the tyres sending geysers of sand in every direction. King kept the M45 trained on the rear window, just in case any of them felt the need to squeeze off a potshot on their way back.
When the battered old sedan had faded into the darkness from whence it came, King fished a magazine out of the top of his duffel bag and reloaded the weapon, chambering a fresh seven rounds into the gun and discarding the old mag into the duffel to ensure he left no evidence of his presence behind. He breathed out sharply, sett
ling his heart rate, and continued.
‘I love Somalia,’ he muttered to himself.
17
An hour later, King sensed the Port of Mogadishu up ahead. Lars had made him skim a crystal-clear satellite map of the city before he’d landed, and it helped to register where certain landmarks were located. He spotted Aden Adde International Airport to his right, lying dormant and shadowy at this time of the evening.
He didn’t imagine it saw much civilian traffic during the daytime, in any case.
Mogadishu ranked low on the list of desirable tourist destinations.
A mile north of the airport’s perimeter, he slunk onto an industrial trail that weaved between darkened warehouses and scrap heaps. This portion of the town smelt awful — a sickening coagulation of rotting waste, abandoned infrastructure, and general disrepair. King kept the M45 at the ready, anticipating an ambush at any moment. He employed everything that had been taught to him in segments throughout his short but action-fuelled military career, taking tactics from the SEALs and the Delta Force in portions.
He kept low and quiet, darting efficiently from shadow to shadow, never loitering in the open. He moved with the practiced grace of a trained professional, something that had been drilled into him more times than he could fathom. He kept a pace neither slow nor fast, travelling at just the right speed to avoid drawing the eye.
For good reason, too.
When the scrap heaps and corrugated warehouses gave way to broad swathes of concrete and inspection sheds, King sensed he was passing into the port territory itself. He froze on the spot as a party of workers materialised ahead. It had to be almost midnight, which made him ponder why the hell these men were out here at such a late hour.
But, as they passed him by, he realised he had been foolish to judge so quickly.
The men were weather-beaten, their clothes filthy and bedraggled, but they posed no threat. They lit up cigarettes and talked animatedly amongst themselves, heading for the outskirts of the port where King imagined their rusting vehicles had been parked while they finished their shifts.
He let them go about their evening, not daring to interfere. His presence would be automatically assessed as hostile in intention if he appeared seemingly out of nowhere, stepping up to quiz them about an illegal pipeline that he suspected was running out of these docks.
Besides, he had no idea which of them were involved.
If any.
Drugs and guns.
That’s what Reed had said. The man had spotted an exchange between unknown parties, running a staggering quantity of weapons and narcotics off newly-arrived container ships and into trucks that funnelled them along a route that ran seemingly the entire width of the country.
King wondered if he would stumble upon it tonight.
He doubted it.
If Reed truly had taken three of the participants out of the equation, it would have sent the pipeline into disarray. King had learnt enough about the criminal industry during his brief stint in the Delta Force to understand how smuggling routes worked. When it came to the scale of business that Reed had stumbled across, any disruption to the routine would throw the entire flow of shipments off. There would be delays at the port, which would translate to delays further down the line.
Afgooye.
That’s what Reed had said. He’d made it to Afgooye before turning around.
King knew little about Somalia, but he imagined a town west of Mogadishu, further inland, where millions and millions of dollars in unregulated cash accumulated in offices you wouldn’t look twice at. He knew that the most inconspicuous-looking outfits often contained the darkest secrets.
That got him thinking…
He ghosted further into the docks, staying hidden in the lee of towering sheds and warehouses on the outskirts of the port. He didn’t know exactly what he was searching for, but he imagined security would be tight in the portion of the port reserved for the arching towers of shipping containers. He kept his eyes peeled for anything resembling a security office, a low building containing archives of footage that would make his job a hell of a lot easier. He spotted several of the white CCTV cameras on his journey through the docks, making sure he stayed well outside their field of view. If any of them had caught the incident Reed spoke of, he could return reassured that he had their man.
He realised Lars would be counting on a successful recruitment mission. King couldn’t see any other reason for his presence in Mogadishu. He didn’t have the experience to properly investigate, but he had the intuition to sense a man who would work better as a solo operative when he saw one.
Reed checked all the boxes.
So far.
His heart almost leapt out of his chest as a wire screen door flew open a dozen feet ahead, jerking around on its hinges so abruptly that for a moment he thought one of the security cameras had spotted him.
A man in a high visibility vest and tattered overalls stepped down off a small terrace and touched a faded lighter to the cigarette dangling from his lips. King crouched low and widened his eyes, scrutinising every minute detail of the man’s appearance, from the age of his clothes to the expression on his face. He seemed unperturbed, comforted by the smoke break, a welcome reprieve from the monotony of his job.
As King observed, the man stretched each limb in turn, bending down to lengthen his aching hamstrings and cracking the knuckles on each hand while the cigarette hung limp from his mouth.
The fact that he was still here at midnight, as well as the sedentary position he must have adopted over the last few hours, told King everything he needed to know.
He made up his mind and burst into action.
First, he switched the M45’s safety back on and tucked it into the rear of his waistband, ensuring he wouldn’t accidentally shoot himself in the leg. He had the moral integrity to remove firearms from this particular confrontation. He considered himself reckless, but not foolish enough to murder a port official in cold blood with no evidence that he was involved in any wrongdoing.
The terrace rested only a single step above the dusty ground, which left only a few feet of space between the dock worker and the open doorway he’d just stepped through. King darted smoothly into the space, now fully illuminated by the flickering lightbulb overhanging the terrace. If the man turned around he would see King standing there, and panic accordingly.
Even then, it would be too late.
At six-foot-three and over two hundred pounds, King figured he outweighed and outsized the dock worker by at least sixty pounds. The guy was frail and short, almost to the point where he appeared malnourished. His face was pockmarked by gruesome acne scars.
King looped both arms around the guy’s waist and activated all his fast-twitch muscle fibres at once, simply hurling the man back through the air. He launched himself off the ground at the same time, and the momentum carried them both through into the office the man had stepped out of seconds earlier.
They sprawled into the building in a tangle of limbs.
18
At close-quarters, King thrived.
Back in Tijuana he had subdued a pair of muscle-packed henchmen in a cramped apartment room, both of whom had outweighed him significantly. A scrawny, untrained dock worker caught off-guard shouldn’t have posed a problem.
He guessed correctly.
He came down on top of the man, both of them thudding into a bare stretch of cheap, stained carpet. King looped a foot back and planted it squarely on the edge of the half-closed door, slamming the wooden panel closed with a distinct click to isolate the fight from any prying eyes wandering past outside.
The next part was the easiest.
The dock worker had naturally fallen onto his stomach, shooting his hands out to protect himself from the impact. With his back facing King and his neck exposed, it took little effort to loop a brutish forearm around the guy’s throat and constrict the hold like a boa.
The guy wheezed and panted and tried to scream, but no sound esc
aped his lips. The pressure King applied cut off all noise, silencing him as effectively as if he had crammed a rag between the man’s lips.
It took eight seconds to put him to sleep.
King counted out each interval in his head, unrelenting with the pressure. The guy scrambled and bucked, squashing his face into the carpet out of sheer panic, but he wasn’t going anywhere. He slapped uselessly behind him, one of his sweaty palms pawing the side of King’s face.
King barely felt it.
His adrenalin had shot through the roof, lending him a surge of physical strength that only materialised in a no-holds-barred fight.
Then again, it hadn’t been much of a fight.
The carotid artery cut off the blood supply to the man’s brain and he slumped into temporary unconsciousness. King slid off the guy, springing to his feet inside the dimly lit room. He cast a glance at his prey and grimaced, recoiling at the expression on the dock worker’s face.
No-one ever passed out gracefully. He had spent enough time on the jiu-jitsu mats to grow accustomed to the strange, twisted expressions that replaced ordinary consciousness, appearing when anyone held a particular choke a second too long. It didn’t take much to summon unconsciousness, and King considered himself a master at it.
The guy had passed out with his eyes wide open — the literal act of “going to sleep” was a pipe dream reserved for Hollywood movies. He had begun to drool over the carpet, losing control of his bodily functions. King shrugged off the strange sight — any less experience and he might have taken the man’s behaviour as a sign that he was gravely crippled.
He knew for a fact that the dock worker would be awake in half a minute, drowsy and detached from reality but ultimately fine.
To ensure the guy didn’t cause any trouble, King manhandled him onto his side and stripped him of the high-visibility vest draped over his frame. He used the long stretch of material to fasten the man’s hands behind his back, applying enough pressure to ensure his wrists weren’t going anywhere but refusing to stoop so low as to cut off circulation.