Bear

by Matt Rogers

  ‘You don’t think I’ve got it in me to be a martyr?’

  Slater didn’t respond.

  Magomed looked into his eyes and said, ‘Fuck this world. Fuck everything about it.’

  Then he jerked forward.

  Slater flinched. Through the distorted goggles of his concussion he bit at everything.

  He recognised it was a fake, but he recognised too late.

  Magomed lunged off the mark, taking a violent step forward, and Slater pumped the trigger once. The bullet spat out of the barrel like an angry bull and smashed through the old man’s delicate forehead. It came out the back of his head a few milliseconds later, creating a gaping exit wound, spraying blood across the far wall. The old man’s legs gave out and he slumped to his knees, a perfectly cylindrical hole resting an inch above his eyebrows.

  His body, already lifeless, hovered there for a single moment.

  Kneeling on the spot.

  Back straight.

  Hands by his side.

  A sick smile plastered across his dead face.

  He’d died happy.

  Fulfilled.

  And that was the worst part.

  Because it hadn’t been Slater’s choice. Magomed had made that decision himself. He’d never intended any harm by the lunge. It was a simple fake designed to elicit an overreaction. And it achieved what it set out to do. Maybe in a more composed state Slater would have recognised what Magomed was trying to do instantaneously. Maybe he would have held back. Refused to let the old man achieve his voluntary suicide.

  The system had broken him. The exact details of what had happened to Magomed in office, and during his subsequent short-lived retirement, had died with the man. But they’d made him vengeful, bitter, wallowing in a pit of his own misery. He’d set to work forging this grand scheme, connecting a myriad of moving parts to align the largest icebreaker in the world with a convoy of U.S. Navy warships, for no ulterior reason whatsoever. He just wanted to spread anarchy. Tear the men from power that had cast him out of the system he’d devoted his life to climbing.

  Shit, Slater thought.

  Because there was nothing more uncontrollable than someone who didn’t give a shit what happened to them. There were no sensitive details to handle. There was no money or power to collect at the end of the rainbow. There was just a blissful death, knowing he’d left the world in as much chaos as he could feasibly manage from a man in his position.

  Slater stared down at the corpse in a trance, realising Magomed had accomplished everything he’d set out to accomplish.

  It hasn’t happened yet.

  Those four words pierced through the fog around his brain, and he nodded to himself. He stepped forward. Reached down and scooped up the satellite phone. The call had disconnected. He redialed the last number Magomed had called, figuring the only attempt he had left was to impersonate the old man as best he could.

  It dialled.

  And rang.

  And rang.

  And rang.

  And then it cut out.

  No answer.

  The contingency plan. When orders were given, communications ceased. That way there was no room for unnecessary repetition. And it also eliminated the chance of anyone compromising the schedule. Like Slater was trying to do right now.

  He gripped the satellite phone in white knuckles, and the reality of the situation sunk in. He stared down at the grimy digital screen, only the size of a thumbprint, displaying a multitude of menu options in Russian. He gulped back apprehension. He couldn’t speak the language. Fingers shaking, he tried to navigate through the phone. It proved disastrous. He bogged himself deeper in menus and sub-menus, getting nowhere close to anything productive. The icebreaker shook underneath him, and he gripped the table with a clammy hand.

  Standing over Magomed’s corpse, he started to realise than any hope of salvaging the situation had died with the old man.

  Is this it? he thought.

  Is this where it starts?

  A third world war. He’d used the buzzwords a couple of times, in conversation with King and others, but it hadn’t quite sunk in back then. The sheer scale of what was about to happen. The unimaginable suffering.

  He bowed his head, let it drop to the cold surface of the metal table, and fought down the anxiety racing its way up his throat, clogging his airways.

  Partly due to the concussion.

  Mostly due to the knowledge that he’d failed.

  He hoped like hell for a miracle.

  61

  King stormed onto an exterior walkway, exposing himself to the elements. Wind howled off the surface of the ocean and battered his frame, rattling the metal railing alongside him. He stared down at the weather deck, anticipating rusting machinery and ancient mechanisms but finding everything pristine instead.

  Of course.

  The icebreaker was brand new.

  He squinted against the barrage of Mother Nature and made out the faint outlines of the three U.S. Navy warships in the distance. They floated in the Sea of Japan in a line, end to end, spaced far enough apart to remove any threat of collision. He imagined the plan had been for the trio of ships to fall in line behind the Mochnost icebreaker. He thought he could make out a couple of helicopters far in the distance, circling the meeting point like vultures.

  Cameras aimed at the fleet, no doubt.

  The reality of the situation sunk in.

  For the first time.

  In all its terrifying glory.

  Possessed by an animalistic motivation, King broke into a flat out sprint along the walkway, giving no regard to his personal safety. The wind picked up and threw him against the railing. For a moment, he almost pitched over the side. It would have killed him, either breaking an assortment of bones as he plummeted to the weather deck or tossing him into the ocean itself, to be overwhelmed by fatigue and sink to its murky depths at an undetermined future time.

  Instead he snatched at the railing with white knuckles, steadied himself back on course, and tried to fight the urge to stop and vomit.

  Partly because of the seasickness.

  Mostly because of the consequences of failure.

  He kept moving, surging toward the icebreaker’s bow, heading for the wheelhouse. He didn’t know what to do when he got there.

  Halfway along the walkway a door burst open in his face, almost knocking him out cold. A bit more force and the metal door would have caught him clean on the bridge of his nose, probably punching the entire appendage inside his skull. It might even have killed him, if the angle was just right.

  Four men spilled out onto the walkway, moving rapidly through the motions, throwing caution to the wind. There was nervous anticipation in their wide eyes. Their skin was all pale and clammy. They also recognised the consequences of failure. This was manic competition. Something primal, reduced to its very essence.

  Tactics and carefulness had been hurled out the window.

  This was the end game.

  King raised the HK433, jabbed the barrel into the stomach of the guy who’d almost bowled him over, and pulled the trigger before any of the four could understand what was happening. A hail of bullets tore through the man’s gut, and a handful of them sliced up the two men standing directly behind King’s first target.

  Three men buckled at the knees and went down in a tangle of limbs, either dead or mortally wounded, the weapons in their hands forgotten.

  King tried to aim at the fourth guy, but the angles were all wrong.

  The walkway was over capacity, and there’d been five people in a restricted space moving like their life depended on it. Two of the three bodies fell into each other, so there was a delay before they hit the metal floor of the walkway. It restricted King’s aim to the fourth guy, and this was a world where a half-second of restriction spelled the difference between life and death.

  So King activated Plan B without even consciously registering it.

  He didn’t think.

  He didn’t p
lan.

  He just moved like an NFL defensive end.

  He shouldered the two bodies that had caught on each other into the railing, hurling them aside as if they weighed nothing, and swept the fourth man off his feet with two beefy arms wrapped around the guy’s mid-section. A standard double leg takedown, common on the wrestling mats in colleges and gyms across the globe.

  But King simply didn’t know whether it would work.

  Because the guy had a fearsome looking sidearm in his right hand, and he tilted it downward and jerked the trigger a couple of times as King took him off his feet. One bullet missed, and the other cut a thin line vertically down King’s back, slicing straight through his combat gear and tearing flesh away. He sensed the hot fury of pain and understood he’d been hit, but the consequences wouldn’t present themselves for another second or two.

  So he dropped the mercenary against the railing on the small of his back, probably paralysing him, given the rage behind King’s movements. He hit the guy full in the face with an impossibly quick elbow, probably knocking every tooth out of his gums. Then, for good measure, he bent back and hurled a final elbow, connecting so hard he almost took the man’s head clean off his shoulders. With a broken skull and a rearranged complexion, the mercenary toppled over the railing and spiralled lifelessly to the weather deck far below.

  King straightened up, panting, breathing hard.

  He could be a real monster when he needed to be.

  The wound was superficial. It hit him with overwhelming relief, because if the bullet had touched his spine he wouldn’t have been feeling anything at all. In fact, that would have been his own private version of hell, because it probably wouldn’t have killed him instantly. Piece by piece, the feeling would have sapped out of his limbs, rendering him a quadriplegic on the freezing walkway, and he would have been made to watch helplessly as the icebreaker plunged into the warship and destroyed what little goodwill still existed between the U.S. and Russia.

  But none of that happened, so he forced it from his mind.

  Warm blood ran down his back, but his movement remained uninhibited.

  He tested the weight of the rifle in his hand, spotted the wheelhouse directly ahead, and charged straight into the thick of the action without a moment’s hesitation.

  Because the towering bulk of the warships in the distance grew rapidly closer.

  The icebreaker ploughed through the swells.

  Full speed ahead.

  He had a couple of minutes.

  Maybe less.

  Heart pounding in his chest, he threw himself into the line of fire.

  62

  Through the haze, Slater pieced it together.

  The phone.

  It got through.

  Magomed had his own personal device, independent of the signal jammer he’d brought aboard. The satellite phone in his hand was his one hope of contact with the outside world. He wasn’t sure what he’d be able to prevent, given the fact that a collision was moments away, but he had to do anything he could to try. He had to exhaust every possible option. Because every second he wasted standing around in agony, wading through a maze of concussion symptoms, was another moment of potential disappearing.

  And it would all add up to unimaginable, soul-crushing guilt if he lived to see the world tear itself apart.

  Or nothing could happen.

  Maybe his concussion was complicating things. Heightened emotions. Panicked reactions. Maybe the world was more civilised than he expected.

  No.

  He’d seen the look on King’s face. And King wasn’t concussed.

  King figured the ramifications would be like nothing the modern world had ever seen before.

  Slater knew human nature better than almost anyone else on the planet. He’d spent a lifetime surrounded by the worst of the worst, the lowest form of human life, and he’d also seen innocent people do horrific things instinctually. When they felt threatened. When they thought there was no other option than all out violence.

  He’d seen the bottom of the cesspool.

  So he knew how quickly things could escalate if the icebreaker struck the warship.

  A rather simple action, all things considered.

  Maybe a few hundred deaths aboard the warship. Sailors plummeting to the bottom of the Sea of Japan.

  On a planet of seven billion people, nothing too drastic.

  But it was what it symbolised. It was the cameras in the helicopters circling above, capturing the incident in all its shocking brutality. It was the transformation of a peaceful meeting into a devastating massacre. And it was the information buried somewhere on board that Magomed had planted, the details that would turn up in a subsequent investigation into exactly what had happened.

  Magomed was brilliant. Slater had to concede that point. Most of his adversaries were, or they never would have made it to the level where Black Force had to intervene. So Slater could imagine how intricate the web was that Magomed had crafted. He didn’t figure the word of two excommunicated government operatives would change a thing. In fact, he and King would probably be carted off to prison for their acts of vigilante justice, given what the world was about to descend into.

  So he wiped sweat off his brow as he continued thumbing through menus on the satellite phone. But he couldn’t help the tension twisting his gut tighter, or making him sweat harder, or making the breath catch in his throat. He wished he was outside, so he was able to see the approaching impact before it shattered the rhythmic swaying of the icebreaker and plunged the world into anarchy.

  He had no hope of navigating to the weather deck. He couldn’t even walk down a corridor without stumbling into walls. He needed rest. Lots of it. But there was no time for rest.

  He swore.

  Out loud.

  His words rang off the walls.

  He couldn’t figure the phone out. How demoralising that at the most important moment of his life, the language barrier removed any chance of succeeding. In any case, he didn’t know what he’d do if he got the phone working.

  Who would he call?

  How could he stop it this late?

  ‘Hey!’ a voice screamed.

  Right behind him.

  And the barrel of an automatic weapon pressed to the side of his sweaty temple.

  He hadn’t even heard the hostile approaching. In his peripheral vision he spotted a hulking figure — another faceless mercenary, taking up most of the doorway, both hands outstretched to make room for the giant assault rifle in his hands.

  Slater lowered his own Makarov — there was nothing he could do to fight against that kind of firepower at that kind of proximity.

  He slumped his shoulders, dejected.

  The mercenary reached out, snatched the satellite phone out of Slater’s hands, and tossed it away.

  Then he snatched Slater’s Makarov and hurled it aside.

  Then he said, ‘Get on your knees. You will beg like a dog before you die.’

  Slater had no fight left in him.

  He got on his knees.

  63

  King shouldered the door aside, moving like a man possessed, operating at an incomprehensibly fast pace. His vision narrowed to a tunnel. He tuned out all his surroundings except what lay directly ahead. And he whipped the HK433’s barrel onto anything that moved, assessing threats faster than his brain could comprehend.

  At this level of the game he ceased to make decisions, instead giving himself over to the unconscious force that carried him through every instinctual reaction beaten into him over a lifetime of training.

  He moved fast.

  But not fast enough.

  By the time he lined the assault rifle up with the only threat in the wheelhouse, the man fired his final bullet. The gunshot was deafening in the confined space, but King didn’t retaliate, because the man wasn’t firing at him.

  With a jolting motion, the last member of the Mochnost’s crew took a round to the forehead and slumped across the controls, b
leeding profusely, already deceased.

  King stared at the bodies.

  Eight men in official uniform.

  All sprawled across the floor.

  All dead.

  His stomach sunk into his feet.

  The last remaining man smiled. He was tall and carried himself with impeccable posture, not chunky like a bodybuilder, more lithe like a long distance athlete. His long black hair was swept back off his forehead and held in place with some kind of pomade, revealing his unblemished skin. He was remarkably photogenic for someone involved in life or death combat, surrounded by devastation and blood and suffering. There wasn’t a speck of crimson on his combat gear. His jawbone was defined, and his eyes were dark and brooding. He wasn’t sweating. He seemed right at home amidst the madness, in direct contrast to the sweat pouring out of King’s pores, to the blood drenched across his own gear.

  But appearances didn’t matter.

  Because King had the bead on him.

  And the guy seemed to know that. As soon as he executed the last remaining crew member he dropped his weapon, letting the pistol clatter to the floor between his feet. He clasped his hands behind his back, almost standing at attention, and smiled grotesquely at King.

  ‘Seems like you’re too late.’

  ‘Seems like it.’

  King glanced out the windshield and saw the warship only a mile or so from the icebreaker. He sighed, keeping the HK433 pointed exactly where he needed it.

  ‘I take it you can’t control this thing,’ he said, gesturing with the gun barrel to the amalgamation of switchboards in front of them.

  The man calmly shook his head. ‘Afraid not. Even if I could, I wouldn’t.’

  ‘If you’re holding anything back…’

  The man raised an eyebrow in mock enquiry. ‘You’ll do what?’

  ‘You ready to die here?’

  ‘Would I have dropped my gun if I wasn’t?’

  ‘Maybe you thought I’d be merciful.’

  ‘I’m not stupid.’

  ‘Why’d you do it?’ King said. ‘You know what’s about to happen.’

  Because if King couldn’t prevent the chaos, he could at least try to understand the reasons behind it.