by Matt Rogers
‘Same as Magomed,’ the man said, adding a shrug as if that explained everything.
‘I don’t know his motivations.’
‘Well … there’s not much to say.’
‘Try your best.’
‘I’d rather you just kill me.’
‘I want to know.’
‘Don’t want to live anymore,’ the guy said. ‘Sick of what I do.’
‘What do you do?’
‘Anything that paid money.’
‘Did you work on the Kamchatka Peninsula before this stint in Vladivostok?’
A pause. A sly look. ‘I did. How did you know that?’
‘Lucky guess. I just don’t understand. You’re put together well. You’re in shape. You seem eloquent. So you have good habits in that regard. You could have put yourself on the right path. At any time. All this potential and … for fuck’s sakes … I just…’
He knew he was ranting, but the inevitability of the warship rapidly swelling in size through the windshield sent dread through him. He was in the process of metaphorically ramming his head against a brick wall, trying to understand exactly why this was happening, and he found nothing comprehensible.
He forced himself to accept that humans were wired very differently. Motivations varied in scope, and he would never understand the intricacies of a mind like what lay in front of him.
And now wasn’t the time.
So he said, ‘One more thing.’
And the man said, ‘Yes?’
And King shot him in the face, wiping the inquisitive expression off his features with a single cluster of lead. The guy went down vertically, hitting the floor of the wheelhouse in an ungainly heap, and King found a tiny morsel of satisfaction in the way he’d died. The man hadn’t been expecting it.
And right now, King had to take any victory he could.
In the empty wheelhouse, he strode to the bank of digital controls and gave a blank stare.
Nothing he could figure out.
Maybe if he had hours to test the workings of the icebreaker through trial and error.
But he had a couple of minutes.
Maybe less.
He stood at the helm of a thirty thousand tonne behemoth and waited for the impact. It stayed on course, barreling through the seas toward the warship in the centre of the trio. The three Navy ships hovered in place, blissfully unaware of what was about to happen. Above, in the grimy grey sky, the helicopters idled.
King gripped the edges of the control panel.
And bowed his head in abject failure.
64
Slater would never be able to explain what happened.
Maybe in future he would liken it to the sheer power of momentum. He would think about the way a million small unnoticeable actions could add up to a massive payoff at the end. Much like the way he’d approached life. He’d honed himself into a human weapon over years of monotonous daily routines, so in the end it was only a condensed version of that concept.
Because everything just fell into place with obscene ease.
First he got angry. Because the sharp edge of the gun barrel against his sweat soaked temple drew blood, and that slight irritation somehow managed to pierce through the fog of the concussion. And that led to a sudden surge in motivation, which made him decide that in truth he really didn’t want to give up and die in this cramped, sterile office space in the bowels of an icebreaker.
So as the mercenary leered over him he reached up and plucked the gun right out of the air, moving as if he wasn’t inhibited in the slightest.
That sent confidence rippling through him. He got the slightest taste of his old reflexes, the uncanny reaction speed that had seen him defy death for years on end, charging from one objective to the next with little time to stop and consider what an anomaly he truly was.
And somewhere in the recesses of his mind, he told himself he could still find that version of Will Slater.
So he found it.
And the seizure of the gun led to a wrenching motion with all the strength in his system, and he broke the mercenary’s finger as he tore the weapon out of the man’s grasp. With the fog receding he recognised the gun as an FN FNP-45 semiautomatic pistol with a fourteen round capacity. He made a mental note of his prior history with that particular weapon and corrected his movements in real time, bringing it up to aim at the underside of the mercenary’s chin. The guy seemed horrified by how quickly the tables had turned, but Slater didn’t give him any time to consider that.
He pumped the trigger twice and the thug tumbled back through the doorway, spilling out into the passageway beyond.
Slater leapt over the corpse and retrieved the phone. His actions were starting to compound. The small things were adding up, and the receding fog made the screen a little clearer, the buttons a little sharper in clarity. He started to recall past menus he’d navigated through and deemed useless. Hunched over the device, he moved faster and faster.
He found some kind of call log.
The first number was useless. Maybe that guy was already dead. King would have ensured that.
Operating on blind instinct, Slater thumbed down to the second last call Magomed had made and dialled.
Hoping for the best.
‘Hello?’ a voice said, almost instantaneously.
American.
Slightly concerned.
‘Are we still on track?’ the voice said. ‘You’re coming in awfully fast. Are you sure—’
Slater digested the words, and they made sense. He couldn’t believe it. He didn’t need to spend unnecessary time grappling with the implications, connecting the dots as best he could.
He just understood.
There was no time to ascertain which of the three warships the voice at the other end of the line belonged to. There was no time for any real conversation. Not if they were as close to impact as he thought. That was the most nauseating aspect of the whole thing. The absolute unknown. There were no windows, no portholes, no connection to the outside world. Slater was trapped inside a behemoth of steel and machinery.
So he said, ‘Listen! We no longer have control of the icebreaker. There’s been some huge internal errors. Get your ships out of the way right now.’
‘I’m sorry, who are—?’
‘Get out of the way!’ Slater roared.
‘Sir…’
‘We do not have control.’
‘I—’
‘We do not have control.’
‘Okay. Wait … oh, Jesus. You’re too close!’
‘We do not have control.’
‘Okay, okay.’
The call ended. From the other end.
Slater seized the table, sweating bullets, and battled down a vicious panic attack.
His throat tightened, closing, painful and searing and…
Is this it?
Is this the end?
65
King figured if he was about to have a front row seat to the incident that would plunge the world into irreparable conflict, he might as well experience it up close. As the icebreaker barrelled incessantly toward the middle warship, he blinked irritation out of his eyes and stared in disbelief through the windshield.
The sea seemed to swell. The waves increased in both height and weight, rising out of the ocean like angry pulses, but they did nothing to deter the icebreaker. Thirty thousand tonnes of steel plunged forward, making a beeline for the side of the warship. Now King could make out the control tower, the aircraft perched aboard the ship. But not much more than that.
He lined up the trajectories. He glanced helplessly at the controls. There was nothing resembling a wheel. This was a modern beast, all electronic, all automated. All locked, set in its ways. There was nothing he could do. He’d never felt more helpless.
The three ships remained in place, perched there. Vessels of this size required dozens of crew members to control, and nothing happened in a hurry. There were no violent changes in direction or anything of the sort.
If a behemoth of a ship was floating in place, it couldn’t get out of the way fast.
The icebreaker reached the point where an impact was inevitable, and then it kept barreling in a straight line.
Now King could see how it would unfold. The bow would hit the mass of the warship at full speed, demolishing it where it rested. The icebreaker was three times the size of the warship and reinforced with all the modern marvels of engineering. The warship they were heading toward was a relic of a bygone era, probably outdated in comparison to the technological wonderland underneath King’s feet.
He swallowed raw fear.
By now the sailors aboard the warship would understand what was happening. Attention would be drawn to the approaching vessel. Maybe an alarm would sound. It would all prove futile.
Unless…
Heart hammering in his throat, King’s eyes widened as he spotted the slightest sliver of movement. It might have been his imagination. He couldn’t be sure. There was no way to be certain, considering the surroundings. The icebreaker swayed underneath his feet, and the sea spray pouring off the ocean obscured any hope of a clear view, battering the bow and blasting up onto the weather deck. The storm clouds thickened above the three warships, compounding the dread, adding to the general atmosphere of fear draped over everything. The helicopters continued to circle obliviously, the men and women behind the cameras excited to record a historical unification of the U.S. and Russia in such a turbulent time.
But his eyes weren’t deceiving him.
The icebreaker barged forward, and the middle warship started to trundle out of the way.
Too late.
No.
Not too late.
Or maybe it was…
King didn’t know. He’d never been so uncertain. The fact that he couldn’t control the outcome set him on edge, making the symptoms of stress amplify with each passing second. He fixated on the warship, now scrutinising its every detail, confirming that it was moving, slowly but surely. Too slow. It crept through the sea, fighting the waves.
None of this made sense. By the time the sailors aboard the Navy vessel determined the icebreaker was closing the gap with hostile intentions, it would have been too late to manoeuvre out of the way. The distances and speed were too close. There was no room for error. It would have taken a prescient admiral with total unobstructed command of the ship to recognise the intent of the icebreaker and kick the crew into high gear.
And that would have all had to happen well before the Mochnost surged into range, well before anyone understood what was truly happening.
Unless Slater had rolled off the bed.
Unless he’d found a way to bypass the signal jammer. Unless he’d somehow navigated the stifling bureaucracy of the American government and managed to get in direct contact with the warship.
All unlikely.
But not impossible.
The bow powered onward.
Two hundred feet.
One hundred feet.
Fifty feet.
The warship inched away from the point of contact. Now the icebreaker would strike the stern, not the centre mass. It would still cause untold destruction. It would probably sink the ship. It would still kill dozens, if not hundreds. Sailors would die.
Not much better.
Then the warship picked up an iota of momentum. It slid through the dark grey waters a little faster. Its stern started to inch out of sight. Moving to the right.
Still, the icebreaker charged.
Then the gargantuan bow of the Mochnost swallowed the sight of the warship whole, towering over it, obscuring King’s view. He swore. And yelled. Letting out all the adrenalin in his system. He waited with bated breath for the shattering impact, the moment when all his worst fears would be confirmed. The single event that would instigate a political reaction like nothing the world had ever seen before.
It didn’t come.
Exploding with nervous energy, he leapt onto the console, perching precariously atop the digital panels. By a stroke of bad luck he twisted his knee unnaturally to the left, too caught up in the terror to focus on planting his feet correctly. Something in the outside of his knee tweaked. A ligament snapping, maybe. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. He’d put his body through the ringer over the course of his time aboard the icebreaker. It was all catching up to him. His limbs felt dead, his muscles heavy, his mind exerted from reacting left and right to combat situations where a moment’s hesitation spelled the difference between life and death.
There were physical limits, after all.
He went down on one knee, frustrated by the horrendous timing. He craned his neck as he felt his left leg give out, searching for any sign of the warship on the starboard side of the icebreaker.
He found it.
The warship’s bow crept into view, then the bulk of the ship including the control tower, followed swiftly by the stern.
Unblemished.
The icebreaker rolled steadily past.
It had been close.
Horrifically close.
So close that King knew he might pass out from sheer stress if he stopped to think about what might have been. But the sight of the untouched warship rumbling away from the impact zone sent a kind of relief flooding through him that he hadn’t known was humanly possible.
He collapsed off the control panel, slumping mercifully to the floor of the wheelhouse. He breathed in a deep lungful of air, his shoulders shaking, his palms sweaty. The compartmentalisation of his emotions dissipated, replaced by the raw reality of how close he’d come to failure.
It must have been Slater.
There was no other explanation.
King gave silent thanks to his brother in arms. In all his time in the field, he’d never seen someone fight through concussion symptoms like Slater had. Anyone with normal human tendencies wouldn’t have stepped foot out of that bunker earlier that morning. But Slater hadn’t even thought twice about it.
King remembered the conversation.
He’d said, ‘I can’t go up against them myself.’
Slater had said, ‘You think I can help? In this state?’
‘Maybe you can’t fight. But they know about you. You show your face and that’s all they’ll focus on. They won’t be paying attention to anything else.’
‘When?
‘In the morning. Rest now.’
‘Where do you need me?’
‘Wherever you’re comfortable going.’
‘None of this is comfortable.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘You mean the most amount of risk I’m willing to take?’
‘Basically.’
‘I stopped caring about that a long time ago. I’ll go where you need me.’
‘It’ll be dangerous. I can’t guarantee anything.’
Slater had laughed.
66
Slater waited for the world to end.
Moment by moment, the momentum he’d built up started to descend from its peak. First he sensed the fog clouding in again, muddying his thoughts, making him confused and scared and unclear all at once. He stumbled over to the nearest wall and slid down the cool surface, letting his back drag against the metal, dealing with the return of a mammoth headache. It seemed far too familiar. It was almost a return to normalcy. Feeling fine hadn’t seemed natural. Ever since Ruslan Mikhailov had stomped down on his head, he’d started acclimatising to his compromised state. Now back in the thick of it, he felt right at home.
He winced, bowed his head, squeezed the satellite phone with all the nervous energy at the forefront of his mind, and waited for the earth-shattering impact.
The giant crruuunnchhhhhh as the icebreaker struck the warship, obliterating its hull, slaughtering most of the men aboard and drowning the rest as the Navy ship sunk to a watery grave.
And he kept waiting.
And moment by moment he sensed the danger passing. He started breathing deeper. Less constr
icted.
With caution, he started getting optimistic.
Something happened. A shuddering groan. The distant muffled sound of a giant object rumbling past in the ocean, perilously close. Fear blasted through Slater’s consciousness, and his eyes went wide. He flinched, curled up in a ball, and squeezed his eyes shut.
Here we go.
But the impact didn’t follow. The creaking and groaning subsided, replaced by a dark silence. He kept his eyes closed, convinced he was getting hopeful for no reason. His worst nightmare was to open them, reassured that the danger had passed, and then feel the resounding impact that would lead to the deaths of hundreds of sailors and compromise the peace of the free world.
But nothing happened.
Then, after what felt like an eternity, he heard footsteps. He sighed. There was no way King had mown through the entire mercenary army. Even if he’d killed dozens, which Slater seriously doubted, that wouldn’t be enough. There were nearly fifty aboard, spread across the floating island. Tucked into the crevasses. Slinking through the shadows. They couldn’t hope to come out on top. Not against all of them. If the enemy force was highly motivated, they could flush them out with relatively simple tactics. King had succeeded in the beginning because of his innate ability to take advantage of chaos and confusion, but now that had dissipated.
So Slater opened his eyes and raised the FN pistol, pointing it at the doorway, his hand shaking.
He saw three doorways.
You don’t stand a chance, a voice told him.
And he believed it.
Jason King stepped into the doorway. He was armed, the fearsome Heckler & Koch HK433 sweeping the room, but it was only a precaution. He meant no threat. He surveyed the scene, concluding Slater was alone. Then he lowered the rifle and stepped into the room. Blood covered the front of his combat gear, staining his compression shirt. He was pale. His eyes were wide. There were dark bags underneath both lids. It had been a chaotic whirlwind of forward movement ever since he’d left Koh Tao. He’d barely had time to get an hour’s sleep.