The King: A Black Force Thriller (Black Force Shorts Book 8)

by Matt Rogers

  King took a deep breath, opened the door, and hurled himself out of the vehicle.

  He bounced once, twice, then flailed wildly to his feet. The gravel shredded the skin on his forearms to pieces, but King had learned of his innate ability to temporarily withstand pain years ago. So, despite the fact that he might have broken a rib or two in the process, he largely ignored how violently he’d impacted the ground and watched the driverless Hyundai brutalise a pair of windows on the ground floor.

  The empty husk of a vehicle shot straight through into the large space within.

  King followed it.

  The sounds of abject destruction echoed out of the newly-created hole in the wall.

  The Hyundai screeched to a halt, utterly broken, deep inside the house.

  King charged into the mansion with momentum and a death wish.

  23

  He stepped into an enormous space, half of it eviscerated by the car-sized bullet King had sent through the entranceway. He cast his eyes over lavish leather couches, a couple of hundred-inch flat screen televisions, and enough mood lighting to turn the entire mansion into a dimly lit tavern. The space was empty, but there was no denying the governor, Stanley Fischer, lived well.

  No wonder he refused to take a salary, King thought. He’s got enough money to last ten lifetimes.

  Which explained the circumstances. It seemed brash to win an election using fear-mongering in the form of mass murder, but a man like Fischer used to getting his own way would go to any lengths to achieve his goals. He’d seen it countless times before. People who mastered the code to wealth often deemed themselves superior to their fellow man. After all, if it was this simple, why couldn’t anyone do it? So maybe a few innocents deserved to die to further Fischer’s ambition.

  There was a fine line between ruthless businessman and complete sociopath.

  King had yet to determine exactly where that line lay.

  He didn’t bother moving tentatively. He’d just caused enough chaos to resemble a bomb going off downstairs. No-one had materialised, but King doubted a man of Stanley Fischer’s standing would keep just one guard in a booth on the perimeter of the property. The inept senator had recruited more security, for God’s sake.

  Suddenly, an ominous chill settled over the base of King’s spine.

  He didn’t like this one bit. Acting on intuition, he dropped to the cold stone floor and crab-crawled to the nearest couch, an enormous leather contraption tall enough to disguise his bulk. He took a knee, keeping his Glock at the ready, and allowed silence to settle back over the mansion. His ears rang from the assault on his senses, but his gut continued to twist tighter and tighter. He’d been relying on an instinctive reaction from Fischer’s security, but if no-one had appeared in plain sight yet, even though it must have sounded like the world was ending around them, then King was surrounded by invisible professionals.

  And that perturbed him more than he cared to admit.

  Suddenly he heard footsteps. Dozens of them. At least six men, maybe more.

  Shit.

  A voice rang through the house, echoing off the exposed concrete walls. ‘Where are you, Jason King? I know you’re back from Africa. I was keeping track of you over there. Couldn’t let you rain on my parade. You think I’m stupid enough to leave this place unarmed? I know everything.’

  But do you know about me? King thought. Do you know why Black Force was formed?

  Do you know what I am?

  Evidently, Fischer didn’t.

  And in that moment, King felt no fear.

  Because whatever came next wasn’t affected by whether he lived or died. He would take at least a handful of them with him.

  But he doubted it would come to that.

  Because he was Jason fucking King.

  So he stood up like a cannonball fired out of a turret, so unbelievably focused on the room around him that not even trained professionals stood a hope in hell. His back up against the wall, he tapped into something he didn’t use often, the sheer destructive operational mode he needed to call upon when he found himself in a situation otherwise unsurvivable.

  Six men.

  And Fischer, somewhere up the back of the room, unarmed.

  Filed. Compartmentalised.

  Milliseconds later, he located the closest threats. Two men with high-powered carbine rifles. He didn’t make out any of their features. There was no time.

  Before they’d even registered his appearance he blasted both their heads open with two pinpoint accurate shots from the Glock 17. As blood and gore sprayed everywhere he wheeled his aim to another grouping, another pair up the back of the room, and punched a round through each of their throats, his shots coming half a second apart despite the time he needed to aim.

  In that moment his humanity shrank away, replaced by a machine, a terminator that locked onto each shot with uncanny precision.

  He watched four men drop out of the corner of his eye, and he wheeled to the fifth and put three rounds in his forehead, then he pivoted another half-rotation and emptied half the remainder of the clip into the face, throat and chest of the final man.

  Three seconds.

  Six men.

  Do you know what I am, Fischer? he thought.

  The sheer overwhelming amount of death in the room put Stanley Fischer in a state of paralysis. Eyes widening, pupils dilating, he flapped his lips like a dying fish as he searched feebly for some kind of weapon nearby. That had been the last thing on his mind. Sure, one or two of his men might die, but they were necessary sacrifices. The other four would overwhelm King before anything drastic happened.

  Instead, he watched all six of his comrades crumple, splaying across furniture, bleeding over upholstery, their exit wounds pouring blood, their mouths agape in their death throes.

  From across the room, King said, ‘You were saying?’

  24

  There was no time to waste.

  Fischer proved easy to handle. He stood frozen on the spot, his motor functions refusing to respond, locked in a perpetual state of terror.

  The confidence of power, King thought.

  Now he was the one in danger.

  And he couldn’t quite comprehend how truly fucked he was.

  King walked straight up to him and threw a Muay Thai teep kick, stabbing forward with the sole of his boot, like jabbing a pole into Fischer’s mid-section. He hit the liver with perfect accuracy, and Fischer entered his own personal world of absolute agony. The mid-forties governor with the charismatic smile and the perfect haircut went down in a snivelling heap, crying out from the pain as he experienced the sensation of his body completely shutting down.

  ‘No-one can hear you, pal,’ King said.

  He dragged Fischer to his feet, hurled the thin man over to the couch, and threw him down on the expensive leather. Fischer made a half-hearted attempt to make a break for it, turning his body toward the hole in the wall and trying to put his feet underneath him on the cool stone, but he barely made it a step before his body gave up and he doubled over again.

  For good measure, King grabbed the back of his neck in a Muay Thai clinch and drilled a knee into the man’s face, snapping the bones in his nose with an audible crack. Blood pouring, Fischer howled and collapsed onto the couch, entirely unprepared for the onslaught King could deliver.

  King sat down calmly on the couch next to him. ‘You know there’s no-one around. I killed all your men.’

  ‘Help!’ Fischer screamed at the top of his lungs, his pathetic voice wavering, his cry for assistance falling on deaf ears.

  King slapped him in the face, jolting the shattered bones in his nose. He moaned, fell back into the leather, and curled up into a ball, his liver still giving him hell.

  ‘We’re going to have a chat,’ King said.

  ‘Help!’ Fischer screamed again. ‘I’m being attacked! Help!’

  King slapped him in the right cheek once, twice, three times. Then he snatched hold of Fischer’s index finger, wrestli
ng it out from where he had both hands tucked into his stomach, and broke the bone clean in two with a single downward wrenching motion.

  Fischer didn’t have the energy to scream anymore. He went pale and slumped back on the couch in a near-catatonic state.

  ‘We both know how much there is at stake,’ King said. ‘So I won’t mess around. Close your eyes and pay attention to all that pain you’re feeling. It’s unbearable, isn’t it? You just want it to end?’

  Despite himself, Fischer nodded, his eyes streaming tears.

  ‘Well, that’s about one percent of what I’m going to do to you if you don’t call off the attack that’s happening this afternoon.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Fischer whispered, now drooling from the corners of his lips.

  King broke the man’s thumb with the same motion — like snapping pork crackling.

  Fischer howled, on the brink of going insane from the agony, and held up his good hand in protest. ‘No! No! Jason! Listen to me. Listen. Please. Please don’t hurt me anymore. Please. I physically can’t. You have to believe me. You have to.’

  ‘I’m just about sick of believing people.’

  ‘You have to believe me.’

  ‘You going to try and tell me there’s no attack?’

  ‘There’s an attack,’ Fischer said, his face a pale sheet, his eyes dejected. He knew he was about to ruin everything he’d worked toward. ‘But I’ve signed my own death sentence. I put safeguards in place so it couldn’t be aborted. I can’t contact my men. We cut off all communications a few hours ago. I knew you were in-country. I didn’t want to take any chances.’

  ‘So you can’t tell them to stand down?’

  ‘Not a chance. And I don’t think they’d listen. They’re … highly motivated.’

  ‘Extremists?’

  ‘Not quite.’

  ‘I’m not sure if you’re telling the truth about not being able to reach them,’ King said, more to himself than anyone else.

  Fischer winced, cradled his mangled hand, and sucked in a deep breath. ‘I swear. They destroyed all their burner phones. Everything was in place. It was my idea.’

  ‘You know where they are, though.’

  ‘I…’

  Hesitation. If King gave Fischer any room to breathe, he could start to make sense of the pain and unease and turbulence and sift through a web of lies to drape over their conversation. He was already trying — King could see it in his face. His features were grotesquely twisted, a man trying to grapple with agony he’d never felt before, at the same time trying to maintain some semblance of control over circumstances he’d spent months putting into place.

  So before the governor could fully take a breath, King reached out and snatched hold of his middle finger.

  ‘Euuughhhh…’ Fischer moaned, a primal sound.

  He was genuinely terrified.

  He couldn’t take much more pain without passing out.

  ‘You know where they are,’ King repeated.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know everything about the plan.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re going to tell me everything.’

  ‘Okay,’ Fischer mumbled. ‘Okay…’

  ‘There’s eight fingers left.’

  ‘Jesus … okay. I’ll give you all of it.’

  ‘How do I know you won’t lie?’

  But King already knew Stanley Fischer wouldn’t dare. He stared into the eyes of a broken man. A ruthless man, an ambitious man, but broken all the same. He’d experienced adversity in the realm of business, but he didn’t even have Arnold Allen’s eight years of service in the Armed Forces. He had no experience to draw on, to brace himself for the withering assault of pain someone like Jason King could dish out. He had nothing to resist it.

  His willpower had shattered along with the bones in his fingers.

  ‘I just want this to all be over,’ Fischer said, appearing far younger and more immature than his age and profession dictated.

  ‘You don’t know pain yet,’ King said. ‘I haven’t even started. Don’t lie to me.’

  ‘I’ll tell you all of it. Then you can stop the attack. Then you can stop hurting me.’

  ‘Start talking,’ King said.

  Surrounded by six of his dead bodyguards, bleeding all over a couch that must have cost nearly fifty thousand dollars, bathing in the sunlight filtering in through the hole King had gouged out of the mansion’s side, shivering in the cold morning air, Stanley Fischer told him everything.

  25

  Behind the wheel of Stanley Fischer’s Lamborghini Huracan, King thrashed the ten cylinders to the brink as he ate up the asphalt underneath. The sheer power of acceleration slammed him back in his seat, and he left the governor’s mansion in the rear view mirror, already shrinking to nothingness.

  His business lay in Columbus.

  Fischer himself was now inconsequential.

  Genuine tension running through him, King used Fischer’s own smartphone to dial the number ingrained in his head, and Lars Crawford answered in seconds.

  ‘You got it?’ his handler said.

  ‘I’ve got it. I’m the only one who can stop it.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Columbus. Easton Town Centre. The mall.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Midday. Today.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s paying a gang of rural psychos to dress up as Islamic extremists and hit the mall. Fischer’s always been firm on his anti-immigrant policies. His election opponent is the opposite. He thinks such a huge death toll will make it impossible for him not to win the election.’

  ‘What an absolute piece of shit.’

  ‘That’s what I told him.’

  ‘What’d you do with him?’

  ‘That depends. Who are you going to tell?’

  ‘Not a soul.’

  ‘Then I’ll give you the truth. I left him tied up in his mansion. All his security are dead. I told him if I’m able to stop this in time, I’d come back and shoot him in the head. If I’m not, I’ll come back and make it painful. Felt like that’s the least he deserved.’

  ‘You going to do it?’

  ‘You going to stop me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You won’t get the cops to secure the governor’s place?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Then that answers that.’

  ‘How far are you from Easton?’

  ‘They’re not at Easton yet. They’re gearing up in an industrial warehouse Fischer rents under a false name on the outskirts of Columbus. I wormed all the details out of Fischer. Every last one. I think I can handle this, but they’ll all be on high alert, and jumpy as hell. There’s eight of them. Most of them white supremacists. Joyful bunch.’

  ‘You sure you got every detail?’

  ‘Broke seven of his fingers, but I got there.’

  ‘Was he co-operative?’

  ‘He was in the end.’

  ‘I can get the mall evacuated in minutes. I can get all of Ohio P.D. descending on that location before these guys can try anything.’

  ‘No,’ King hissed. ‘You can’t. Trust me.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘That won’t achieve anything. They’ll just shoot up something else. There’ll be catastrophic loss of life no matter what.’

  ‘But why?’ Lars said. ‘They can put turbans on and kill as many people as they want, but the truth is out there. We know they’re white supremacists. Doesn’t that negate anything they’re trying to accomplish? Anything they do will be shown as the madness that it is.’

  ‘Fischer planned for this. He knew I was in-country. He was keeping tabs on me in Mali.’

  ‘How the hell did he do that?’

  ‘I don’t know, but he knew. It wasn’t an important detail. What’s important is he was expecting something, so he cut himself off from the men he’s paying to carry this out. He couldn’t contact them even if he tried. And, trust me, I made him try.’

&nb
sp; ‘You sure?’

  ‘You should see the state of him.’

  ‘Okay, I believe you. You don’t need to elaborate. Where are you now?’

  ‘In Fischer’s Lambo. Heading for Columbus. At this pace I’ll be there in twenty minutes.’

  There was a pause as Lars checked his watch. ‘Christ, that’s eleven. What if they move early?’

  ‘Then there’s nothing I can do.’

  ‘You sure you don’t want me to shut the mall down?’

  ‘You shut the mall down, it makes it easier for them. Whole crowd of people milling around the exits, thinking it’s an ordinary fire alarm. They can unload automatic weapons into them, or just go somewhere else. No, I need to pull the root out.’

  ‘Kill them?’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘You said you know where they are. Give me the location.’

  ‘There’s eight of them,’ King repeated. ‘And they all have automatic weapons — M4 carbines, to be precise — and they’re probably hopped up on a bucketload of stimulants to psyche themselves up for what they’re about to do. And Fischer screened them first. They all have professional training. Most of them ex-military. You send the cops to hold them up and there’ll be a bloodbath.’

  Lars didn’t respond for a few seconds, composing his thoughts, and King took the time to overtake a long string of cars travelling the speed limit. Pushing a hundred miles an hour, he sensed the raw power in the wheel and urged the supercar faster.

  Faster, and faster, and faster.

  All he knew.

  ‘Okay,’ Lars said. ‘I won’t make the call. I trust you.’

  ‘I was hoping we’d have built that up by now.’

  ‘You haven’t let me down so far. But the second you do…’

  ‘When have I failed?’

  ‘There’s a first time for everything.’

  ‘Not this time.’

  ‘I’m tracking your phone,’ Lars said. ‘Whose is it?’

  ‘Fischer’s.’

  ‘Right. Our program says you’re twelve minutes out from the mall if you maintain your current pace.’