by Matt Rogers
Before he could even turn around, a sharp steel blade hammered between his ribs, cutting him wide open with a sensation like nothing he’d ever felt before.
54
In the blink of an eye, King knew he was dying.
He had been stabbed without resistance, giving his attacker the opportunity to slide the entire length of a blade into his abdomen. It carried a squeamish sensation, the feeling laced with horror — King felt no immediate pain thanks to shock, but the knowledge descended over him that the stab wound was fatal.
At the same time, some kind of primal instinct took hold.
He lunged into action with both hands spread wide, searching for the one manoeuvre that would keep him alive for a few seconds longer.
That was all that mattered.
Prolonging his life by seconds.
He would go down fighting. He was only twenty-two years old, but the only thing he knew he could rely on was sheer, unadulterated willpower.
So he clamped both his hands down on the knife, keeping it buried to the hilt in his flesh, using every shred of power in his massive forearms to lock the blade in place. Subconsciously, he knew that if the attacker wrenched it free, he would undoubtedly go into shock from massive blood loss. He would be dead within a minute.
And despite his rational self screaming at him to remove the foreign object from his body, he kept it pinned inside him with a vice-like grip, sweating and shaking and paling as he rode out the abhorrent waves of agony. He looked up into the eyes of his attacker — just another bearded white man with hard lines creased into his features from years of exposure to the sun.
Probably the desert.
Ex-Marines, just like the lot of them.
In the grand scheme of things he meant nothing — just one of dozens of men that had tried to take King’s life in the past.
This one, however, was about to succeed.
King realised how pathetic his efforts were. He wavered in and out of reality as he fought to keep the knife embedded in his side, just as the bearded man battled to wrench it free. Muscles strained and veins pulsed with exertion, both men locked in a struggle that could only end one way.
King felt the lactic acid burning in his arms, and his grip began to falter. It would have been simple enough for the bearded man to release his grip on the knife and beat King into oblivion with his bare hands — such was the nature of King’s injuries. But the man elected to continue trying to pull the knife free, maybe sensing a personal challenge to out-wrestle a dying man.
King knew he didn’t stand a chance. Even if he managed to keep the knife in place, he couldn’t move. His body was shutting down on itself — he was acutely aware of the sensation. With cold sweat dripping off his brow he began to lose traction on the handle.
Any second, it would tear free.
Slipping…
Slipping…
The top of the bearded man’s head exploded, showering King with gore. A fraction of a second later he heard the gunshot, deafeningly loud in the otherwise-silent vehicle bay. The guy pitched forward, missing a significant portion of his skull, and slumped across the cash next to King and Reed, his legs kicking unconsciously in his death throes.
The gunshot — coming seemingly out of nowhere — spurred Reed into action. He began to buck violently underneath King, sensing a fleeting opportunity.
King understood. He couldn’t move a muscle.
Reed’s wild thrashing began to topple him over onto his side, both hands still feebly clutching the knife in his side.
King pitched, then fell.
He hit the ground with a certain finality, aware that he wouldn’t be getting up again. He’d taken full advantage of his second wind but now it had dissipated entirely, and he was left clawing for consciousness in a body that had given up on itself. He was dying, and he recognised that.
Reed began to scramble upright, breaking free from the full mount he’d been trapped under.
Then a second bullet caught him full in the face, yielding similarly graphic results to the last gunshot. Through half-closed eyes King watched the man twist unnaturally off his feet, more blood added to the crimson mask covering his features. The man collapsed into one side of the mountain of hundred-dollar bills, bleeding all over the paper.
A round sat firmly embedded in his forehead.
King glimpsed the result and let out a sigh that had been building in his chest ever since he’d discovered Bryson Reed’s deception. Justice, natural law, had been exacted. It took the stress away, and his mind settled into a trance.
He fell into a welcome unconsciousness, not really caring if he would wake up from it or not.
He doubted he would.
His last vision before he blacked out was of Beth standing underneath the open roller door, her hands on her knees, vomiting seawater onto the metal floor. Her left arm was twisted at a horrific angle, clearly broken. Her face was a swollen, bruised mess. The bullet wound in her shoulder was pouring blood down her side. Her skin was pale and her eyes were wide. In her right hand, she clutched her M45 MEUSOC pistol, but as she realised the threat had dissipated she let it fall from her grasp, clattering to the ground between her feet.
King chalked the sight up to a hallucination and slipped into nothingness.
55
He came to slowly, darkness giving way to a soft white glow, which then gave way to a blinding explosion of harsh white light. He opened his eyes, peeling his eyelids apart one after the other, taking a moment to soak in his surroundings and make sure he was back in reality.
‘I’m not dead,’ he muttered, his voice croaky.
He’d uttered the words more to hear the sound of his own voice and confirm he wasn’t imagining things, and he hadn’t anticipated a response.
‘No, you’re not,’ someone said from beside him. ‘Can’t really believe it myself, to be honest.’
Features of the room became apparent, from the hospital bed to the white blanket draped over his legs and mid-section to the small flat-screen television hanging from the ceiling on the other side of the room. He rolled his head slowly to the left and spotted the familiar unimpressive oak bedside table topped with a tiny vase of flowers. Past that, he saw a cheap wooden waiting chair that someone had dragged around to face the bed.
Lars sat in the chair, his eyes wide and an expression of disbelief plastered across his face.
‘Is this a civilian hospital?’ King muttered, rolling his gaze around the room.
‘Sure is. We were sending you express to a military hospital but this place had a private room available and some of the best emergency doctors in the country on-staff. All very convenient.’
‘Where?’
‘Virginia Beach. We came straight down as soon as we hit the east coast. You were barely clutching onto your life.’
King paused, dealing with the befuddled mental state that came with losing a significant chunk of time. ‘Did you treat me on the container ship?’
Lars nodded. ‘That Force Recon Marine I warned you about — Bethany Morris. She made a series of calls and managed to get through to the very top. They put her in touch with the appropriate parties. We had a chopper on deck within a couple of hours.’
‘A couple of hours…’ King said. ‘How’d I survive?’
‘She stabilised you as best she could. She was in pretty horrendous shape herself. You’ve both been dragged through the ringer.’
‘You flew me straight stateside?’
Lars shook his head. ‘We had a small army of medics operate on you both on one of our warships in the area. We kept you there twenty-four hours, but we wanted you back here for most of your recovery.’
‘Wait … how long have I been out?’
‘They deliberately induced a coma so they had time to deal with each of your injuries. You’re only just coming out of it now. It’s been four days since we found you on the container ship.’
‘Jesus.’
‘You can imagine I’ve got
about seventeen thousand questions,’ Lars said.
‘I thought you might. Can it wait?’
The man nodded. ‘Of course. You shouldn’t be talking to me, actually. Doctor’s orders. But I know what a tough son of a bitch you are. You wouldn’t let something like that stop you, hey?’
‘Did you check the bodies I left on the ship?’ King said, keen for at least a handful of answers before he slipped back into a much-needed slumber. ‘They were ex-Marines. Ran their own security firm in New York. Apparently.’
Lars nodded. ‘As you can imagine we’ll be dissecting what happened for months. But that checks out. It didn’t take much digging to bring up a laundry list of dirt on the bastards. It’s not pretty. They did their best to hide their pasts. Most of them were dishonourably discharged, and the rest were implicated in shady dealings during their time in service. Seems the scum of the earth banded together when they all got out. The one thing they all shared in common was that they’d avoided military prison by the skin of their teeth. Not enough evidence to put them away, so they were let loose into civilian society to do as they pleased. We should have got them sooner. You can be damn sure we’ll be changing our transition programmes.’
‘They almost had all the money Reed stole at their disposal. That would have been grim. That kind of cash could have bought them influence anywhere in the world.’
Lars nodded. ‘We counted everything we could find in the vehicle bay. Nine hundred and fifty six million dollars, give or take. Not a bad haul, all things considered.’
King made to respond, but a sharp bout of phantom pain in his side creased him over. He scrunched up his face and rode out the agony — it managed to seep through despite the cocktail of drugs racing through his system, injected through the intravenous drip in the crook of his elbow.
Lars noted the bout. ‘Let’s not talk for too long. We have all the time in the world for that later. Just know you did damn good. Reed would have got away if you didn’t persevere.’
‘Is Beth here?’ King said. ‘At this hospital?’
Lars nodded. ‘She sure is. Anything else I can get for you before I leave? I’ve still got this whole mess to sort out.’
‘You can get her a goddamn medal. And you can get us both some time off after we finish recovering. In the same place, preferably.’
Lars smirked. ‘What did I tell you about not getting distracted?’
‘I’ve earned a fucking distraction. With respect.’
‘That you have. Job well done, my friend. Talk soon.’
And with that he disappeared into the sterile hallway, melting into the doctors and nursing staff flowing past King’s room. For a moment King wondered whether security measures had been put into place given the fact that he lay in a civilian hospital.
But then he remembered that he didn’t officially work for the United States government, and in turn didn’t officially exist.
He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and sunk back into slumber.
He deserved it.
56
Miami
Florida
Five weeks later…
After a recovery process that had taken longer than expected, given the mess King’s insides had been left in, he woke up one hot August morning realising he felt as close to a hundred percent as he had for quite some time.
The penthouse suite of the Titanium Seaside Resort on Miami Beach had been booked for two weeks, courtesy of a gift from the United States government based on exceptional service to one’s country. Of course, nothing about the transaction was on the record — King hadn’t bothered to involve himself with the finer details, but he imagined it had involved certain back-channels that the general public had no knowledge of.
Looking out at the turquoise ocean through the floor-to-ceiling windows stretching across one side of the towering complex, King realised he didn’t care about the specifics.
He was just here to enjoy the view, and unwind.
Last month, he never would have considered himself capable of a retreat like this. But, then again, last month he had never known true pain. The injuries he’d sustained in Mexico had been significant, but they’d paled in comparison to what had happened to him in Somalia. The full diagnosis had come back a few days after his first meeting with Lars.
A torn oblique. Three broken ribs. A fractured nose. Two broken bones in his wrist. The horrific stab wound in his side, which had entered between his fourth and fifth ribs on the left side of his sternum and barely missed both ventricles. If the blade had nicked either of them, it would have been game over. He’d scraped through by the skin of his teeth, apparently stunning every civilian doctor that had dealt with him throughout his recovery process.
He’d found out Beth had dealt with similarly graphic injuries. She had plunged fifty feet off the top railing and hit the ocean surface hard enough to tear several muscles across her body. When he’d first seen her after the ordeal, seventy-five percent of her skin had been a mottled shade of black and blue, the bruising like nothing he’d ever seen before. She’d broken her arm snatching at the base of the access ladder as it passed by, almost wrenching her shoulder from her socket at the same time. No-one had expected her to survive, which had allowed her to ascend the ladder for a second time — albeit a little slower — and track the commotion into the bowels of the container ship where she’d stumbled across the vehicle bay, barely conscious in her own right.
Now, her naked frame lay unblemished. She stirred in unison with King, opening her sleepy eyes one by one and glancing momentarily at the view, following the direction of his gaze. Then she turned her attention back to him and slid on top of him underneath the thin sheet.
‘You know,’ she breathed as he pressed his lips to the soft skin at the base of her neck, ‘I was hoping we could have done this kind of thing in Mogadishu. Would have added the thrill of getting caught to it.’
‘I’m not thrilling enough?’ he muttered, kissing her long and hard.
She smiled. ‘You’re more than enough — don’t worry about that. We were busy in Somalia, anyway.’
‘Let’s not talk about that place.’
‘I agree.’
What felt like hours later they rolled off each other, panting with exertion. The pair had worked up a sweat throughout their activities, losing themselves in the heat of the moment. King touched a hand to her supple hip and planted a passionate kiss on her lips. ‘As much as I want to just do this forever, we both know it can’t last, right?’
She nodded solemnly. ‘How much downtime did they give you?’
‘Lars told me he booked this place for two weeks. But I have the feeling I’ll be recalled sooner than that. I’d rather return on my own accord. Don’t know why. Something psychological, maybe. Like I’m choosing to go back rather than get dragged there unwillingly.’
‘Do you want to go back?’
He paused, weighing up her words. He knew if he answered out of impulse, it would be a resounding no. The picturesque setting and the beautiful girl by his side and the unsettling memories of his near-death experience would have bubbled together into a stern unwillingness to return to the fray.
But then he used logic to discern that none of the material things would last, and he would be left broken and alone with the voice in the back of his head telling him he could have done great things. He could have saved lives. He could have been remembered.
And the chaos in Somalia had taught him a great deal about himself.
Namely, his ability to withstand near-unbelievable amounts of pain.
He knew the benefits of possessing a skill as valuable of that.
He thought of his youthfulness, and his abilities, and his sheer potential.
It lit a fire under him to test the true capacity of his mind and body. He wanted nothing more in that moment than to return immediately, to get straight back to work, offering his services wherever they were needed. The thought of the pain and suffering the ex-military thugs cou
ld have dealt out with close to a billion dollars in capital eliminated all trace of regret for stepping foot in Somalia.
He would have done it all again, even if he knew the kind of trauma that would be enacted on his body.
So instead of a resounding no, he instead said, ‘Wouldn’t pass it up for anything.’
Beth nodded, as if it was what she’d been expecting. ‘I can’t say I share the same sentiment.’
‘You thinking about retiring?’
She nodded. ‘At least from active service. I don’t know — besides the fact I met you, I hated everything about Somalia. When that gang jumped me…’
‘Of course. That’s completely understandable. You’ll get an honourable discharge. Do what’s best for yourself.’
She smiled. ‘This has been fun. I needed it.’
‘So did I.’
‘Some part of me wishes it was permanent.’
‘If I wanted to settle down, it would be with someone exactly like you. Don’t think I’m not interested because I’m going back into the field. It’s just … I was supposed to do this. You understand, right?’
She nodded. ‘Not completely. But enough of it has rubbed off onto me over the last few days. You’re a different breed, that’s for sure.’
‘It’s just not the right time in my life,’ he said. ‘I’m young. Hungry.’
She touched her lips to his. ‘I’ve been made fully aware of that.’
He smirked. ‘I don’t know if I’ve said this yet — but thank you. If you hadn’t fought to get back aboard, even with all your injuries, I’d be a dead man. You know that. But I need to tell you it. Over and over again, if I have to. You saved my life.’
‘Would have done it for anyone,’ she said.
‘You’re the toughest goddamn woman on the planet, Bethany Cooper,’ he said. ‘The Force Recon Marines would be losing one of their best if you retired.’