by Matt Rogers
They couldn’t stay here.
Under a heavy barrage of gunfire he grabbed Kitchener and Kate from their crouched positions and hurried them toward the door on the other side of the room. The pair had instinctively covered their ears and ducked their heads, hoping to avoid getting struck by a bullet. Often King felt the same urge, but he knew their best shot at survival was getting as far away as possible, even if it meant risking a bullet in the spine. They passed harnesses and unpacked parachutes and a rack of different-sized jumpsuits and then smashed open the double doors that led somewhere outside.
He found himself in a narrow gravel alleyway between the hangar and the clubhouse. The trail arced down past the two buildings, opening out onto a cluster of caravans that normally housed fun jumpers and solo course students. He gripped the two women by the shoulders, getting their attention, and pointed down the path.
‘Take cover down there,’ he said. ‘Shoot anyone who comes near you.’
‘What about you?’ Kate said.
King looked at the clubhouse and said, ‘I’m going in there.’
Kitchener said, ‘You’ll be trapped.’
‘I know. But there’s nowhere else to go. And I’ve made it out of worse situations before.’
‘I don’t doubt that, but that doesn’t mean you’ll make it through this.’
From within the hangar came the sound of a door crashing open. The mercenaries were through to the gear room.
King gave Kate a quick hug. They made brief eye contact, and he could see the fear in her eyes. Not so much for her own life, but for the fact that she might see King die in front of her. He nodded reassuringly, smiling, as if to show that everything would be okay. She nodded back, unsure. Then Kitchener dragged her away. The pair took off running down the road.
King spun, raised the M4’s sights to his eye and fired a volley into the double doors. It would make the remaining mercenaries hesitate. They would take a moment to regroup, form a strategy, so that they didn’t come running out to their own deaths. Which gave Kate and Kitchener precious time to find cover amongst the caravans.
King looked up at the clubhouse. Perhaps he would do better to make a break for it. If he ran for his life there was a chance he would live. But then what? He would be without a vehicle, without a proper arsenal, ten miles from where he needed to be as Lars loaded a plane full of weaponised anthrax spores. Then the six men left here would tear the property apart searching for Kate and Kitchener. He needed to kill these men, or he would never make it to the other runway in time.
And he worked best in close quarters. Messy fighting, just how he liked it.
He vaulted onto the clubhouse’s porch and aimed the barrel of his M4 skyward. He fired a few shots into the air, drawing attention to his location. He stepped through one of the open doors, heading inside.
CHAPTER 37
The rounds of unsuppressed rifle fire had temporarily stunned his hearing, meaning the inside of the clubhouse felt like a mausoleum. He looked over the familiar sights. The main area branched off in two separate directions, the left-hand side leading to a set of offices where clerical work occurred, and the other leading to a communal kitchen. At one end of the kitchen, a narrow tiled hallway led to a shared bathroom. King took all this in, knowing it would be valuable information in the event that all hell broke loose.
He jogged to the centre of the room and ducked behind one of the couches. It was a disadvantageous position to wait for combat. The clubhouse sported a few large windows, some floor-to-ceiling, all positioned at random intervals around its perimeter. Plenty of vantage points if they decided to surround the building.
Which they did.
King saw movement on the far side. Nothing prominent, just a flash of limbs and the glint of a weapon. He skirted around, positioning himself between two couches. M4 up, searching for targets.
They were taking their time. Which meant they had their forces under control. They weren’t bull-rushing in, like King had expected them to. With a sinking gut, he realised he had put himself in serious danger.
One of the windows shattered. Somewhere behind him, out of his line of sight. He spun, weapon raised. No sign of an enemy, nothing to shoot at. He searched for the source of the breakage, and found nothing. Then a second later he saw the small black cylinder skid to a halt on the linoleum, not far in front of him.
A flashbang.
He had no time to shield himself. The grenade went off just as he noticed its presence, an all-encompassing explosion of bright light, accompanied by an ear-splitting din. The combination ravaged his senses simultaneously, blinding him, deafening him. He knew he was ducking for cover but he couldn’t see or hear anything. He loosened his grip on the rifle in his hands and it scattered away to parts unknown. He knew he wouldn’t find it again.
He moved instinctively, crab-crawling across the floor, navigating by touch alone. His head spun. He felt the scratchy surface of a countertop. Somehow he’d made it to the kitchen. The bathroom should be somewhere behind him. He would be trapped, but he needed cover. Even if that meant cornering himself. Losing all senses was a terrifying sensation, especially in the heat of combat.
He felt shards of something brush across his skin. Fragments of plaster or ceramic. They were tearing the place apart. He couldn’t see or hear the bullets flying all around him, but he knew they were there.
The bathroom was his only available option.
He crawled and scratched his way down the hallway, at the same time shaking his head vigorously side to side, desperate to regain some kind of sight. Even a blurry haze would do. Anything was better than total darkness, coupled with a pounding headache and ruined eardrums. He felt weak like this. Vulnerable. Exposed. Slowly his hearing began to return, and he heard the muffled thumping of automatic rounds ripping the walls of the clubhouse to shreds.
Movement, close by. He felt the displacement of air and a distant, tinny sound at the edge of his hearing. Like grunting. Someone had come charging into the bathroom. A large shape, directly in front of him. He shot forward, wrapping an arm around the man’s midsection, still blind, acting merely on touch alone. He used his momentum to throw the guy off-balance and they both crashed to the floor amidst a tangle of limbs. He heard metal against linoleum, off to the side. A weapon hitting the floor. King’s crash-tackle had sent the rifle spinning away.
It seemed they would have to brawl.
He swung wildly, scrambling on top of the guy. His vision was nothing but a pulsating, blurry mess. He landed a couple of shots, then the guy bucked him off and slammed a fist into his throat. He fell back against the bathroom wall. Disorientation and dizziness and a shortage of breath all combined together. Panic rose in his chest. He could see colours now, but his surroundings remained muddled. He saw the mercenary in front of him, scrambling to his feet.
He began to rise. His knee brushed against something long and metal.
He bent down and scooped up the dropped weapon, relying on reflexes alone. The man across from him was too close to get off a shot in time but he brought the butt of the rifle around in a scything arc. It cracked the guy’s jaw, audible even with King’s impaired hearing, sending him crashing to the bathroom floor in a heap, clutching his face.
King began to make out more features. He saw tiled walls, painted stark blue. There was a row of toilet cubicles on the other side of the room, and a row of showers on this side. The guy on the floor was white, middle-aged, fit. He kept his hair short. He was dressed in military-style khakis, but some kind of cheap knock-off, not the real thing. King’s senses would not return to one hundred percent for hours, but this rudimentary form would do for now.
He reversed his grip on the weapon — which he noted was a Ceska Scorpion sub-machine gun with detachable stock — and put a few bullets into the dazed mercenary’s skull. Blood arced from the man’s temple. He was dead.
Five left.
King knew that he could not slow down. If he paused even to breathe,
the remaining forces would come charging in through the hallway and outnumber him effortlessly. He would die in a blaze of gunfire. So he reached down and gripped the corpse underneath him one-handed. Using previously untapped primal strength, he heaved the dead man out into the hallway.
Bullets dotted the walls and the floor as the remaining mercenaries reacted to the sudden movement. They’d been ready to fire on King the second he left the bathroom. Distracted by their dead friend, they would now be caught off-guard. Just for a split second. The time it took them to shake off the sight of a deceased comrade and return to laser-focus.
But King thrived off capitalising on confusion.
He peeked down the hallway at the same moment as the gunfire ceased. Two mercenaries outside had been stupid enough to break their cover in an attempt to unload everything they had at the moving target. King raised the Ceska to his shoulder and picked them off effortlessly, drawing on the thousands of hours he’d spent on target practice over his life.
Two bullets each, a double-tap straight to the head.
Pop-pop. Pop-pop.
They jerked back like marionettes, dead on impact, blood fountaining from the wounds in their foreheads. Both of them collapsed out of sight.
Three left.
King decided it was time to wait. Three-on-one had a much different feel to it than ten-on-one. Especially when the one had taken out seven. The last mercenaries would prove much more cautious than their dead friends. He was sure of it. Reality would sink in. They would grow nervous. Their hands would shake. So he stayed poised in the bathroom. He shrank away from the corridor and ducked into one of the toilet cubicles.
The after-effects of the flashbang began to take hold. Between his ears his temple throbbed like crazy. His ears rang with the high-pitched whining of temporary hearing loss. His mouth was dry. His nose ran with blood. But he wasn’t dead. And that was all that mattered.
He let the chaos settle, until a minute had passed without a gunshot. Directly following the previous barrage, it made for an uncomfortable silence. Not for him. He relished these moments. The times when the enemy was unsure of themselves. Combat tended to follow a predictable pattern. Countless hours of waiting, watching, preparing. Then an all-out blitzkrieg of action and adrenaline and pent-up energy that didn’t cease until a single individual remained.
Not this time.
He heard shuffling in the clubhouse. Panicked whispering. Had they hit him? Was he dead? He knew their veins were pumping. They were desperate to finish the job.
It took them two full minutes to come storming in. Two minutes in which King had ample time to plan a course of action, to calm himself, to let the stoic focus return.
He got into position. He waited.
The hallway was barely wide enough to fit two men, so when they bull-rushed into the bathroom with their guns blazing it was in a clumsy, predictable manner. The racket was deafening but King barely heard it. His hearing had taken enough damage to muffle all sounds. The trio must have unloaded fifty bullets between them as they stormed into the cramped space. Tiles all over the walls shattered, fragments cascading to the floor.
But King remained unhurt.
He sat perched on top of one of the cubicle stalls, wedged into the short space. His back against the ceiling. It would not protect him from gunfire. In fact, he was completely exposed. But it meant that he stayed out of the typical level of engagement that most men decided to fire at when running into a room blind. For the single second in which they had the advantage they moved their aim in a horizontal arc, panning the room from left to right, brutalising their surroundings.
But they didn’t think to aim up.
No-one thinks to aim up.
King waited until all three were inside the bathroom before he emptied what was left in the Ceska’s magazine. It turned out to be sparse. No more than ten bullets. Enough to get the job done though. He lit up the chests of the two men in front, dotting them with rounds. Before he could bring his aim over to the third, the guy fell back into the hallway, reacting impressively fast. King’s gun clicked empty, a bad sign.
He dropped down from the cubicle and snatched up one of the rifles discarded from the two men he’d just killed. Before he had a chance to ascertain the make of the weapon, he saw the last mercenary fleeing down the hallway, heading for the other end of the clubhouse.
Attempting to escape.
King couldn’t let that happen.
It would only take one phone call and Lars would leave the Australian countryside behind, flying on to who knows where. Perhaps that had already happened. Perhaps all of King’s efforts were futile.
But in the time he had left, he had to try.
He broke into a sprint, chasing the man through the destroyed clubhouse.
CHAPTER 38
He followed the last mercenary through the main room, passing the shredded couches and the bar covered in alcohol and shattered glass. Out the same door he’d come in, legs pumping, trying to gain ground. From the back, he noticed the man was roughly the same size as him. Muscular, too. If he had any kind of fighting talent he might be able to gain the upper hand on King, who was reeling from numerous injuries and beatdowns. He didn’t know what his reaction speed would be like. It would almost certainly be impaired. If that affected him enough to struggle against a man his size, he would soon find out.
They crossed the same gravel path. The mercenary headed into the hangar, slamming the doors apart, running fast. Seeing his co-workers decimated by a single man must have shattered his morale. King had seen it on the faces of many of his past enemies. The sheer incomprehension. How could one man cause so much chaos and destruction?
The double doors leading to the gear room swung closed just before King burst into them, knocking them back apart. It disorientated him for a split second, as the doors were solid. They obscured his view into the next room.
Enough for the mercenary to capitalise.
King ran straight into a fist, cracking him low and hard across the face. He recoiled and involuntarily let go of the rifle in his hands. His boots skidded on the concrete floor. Pain flared up inside his head, just before his neck whiplashed against the ground. The gun clattered away, useless.
He spun and righted himself, knowing that one wrong move would lead to unconsciousness, followed quickly by death. The man in front of him moved with desperation. His actions were fuelled with a rabid intensity that only came in a life-or-death situation.
At least King felt the same animalistic sensation.
He studied the guy. He looked to be roughly the same age as King, with the hardened expression of a man experienced in combat. An ex-soldier also.
‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ King said, facing off with him across the gear room. He spat blood in the space between them.
‘Making a living,’ the guy said.
‘You’d kill hundreds of thousands of people for money?’
‘That’s not up to me. I’m getting paid enough to live well for the rest of my life. Just to protect the boss.’
‘So you don’t care?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Well,’ King said, ‘at least I’ll feel better about this.’
He charged in, knowing a punch or two would land, bracing for them. A right hook glanced off the side of his head as he closed the distance but he rolled with it. Let his head move with the blow, knocking much of the power away. That way he wasn’t disoriented for the next step. He wrapped an arm around the mercenary’s neck, looping it over his shoulder, getting a tight grip, powering through his guard. He dropped his hips low and threw the guy head-first over his body. The guy landed with all King’s weight on top of him. A pathetic wheeze escaped his lips.
He was winded.
King slammed an elbow into his head, feeling his skull bounce off the concrete floor. He dropped another one, then a third. Then he paused. Not many people could take three direct blows from him. At least, not that he had experienced.
The mercenary used the hesitation to buck violently, throwing King’s weight off his chest, escaping out from underneath. He clambered to his feet and staggered across the room, toward the hangar.
King felt a pang of shock.
The four dead mercenaries at the hangar entrance would be surrounded by their weapons, all fully loaded. If this man got his hands on one of them, he would be as good as dead.
He scrambled off the ground, stumbling slightly. Disorientation almost swept his feet out from underneath. He gulped and tried to ignore the ramifications of so much physical violence in such a short space of time. He would address the consequences later.
The clock was ticking.
A loud thump echoed through the gear room as the door to the hangar slammed shut behind the mercenary. He disappeared from sight. The glass window revealed a small patch of the hangar within. It showed nothing. King would be running in with no spatial awareness, no knowledge of where the man was.
But the longer he left it, the higher the chance he would be facing an automatic weapon on the other side.
So he sucked up his courage and threw caution to the wind and wrenched the door open and ran through into the hangar, flicking his gaze side to side as rapidly as possible, searching for any sign of the man.
He looked right. Nothing.
He looked left, and caught the sight of a wrench swinging at his face in his peripheral vision.
Instinct.
He spun away, feeling the end of the heavy tool brush past his nose, indescribably close. It sent a shiver of fear down his spine. The guy had put everything into the swing and as a result he overcompensated. His arm carried through, causing him to stumble. He stepped out of position.
King needed no other opportunity. He lunged in with a powerful stride, placing his body in just the right position so that a punch would create a perfect symmetrical diagram, transferring power from the balls of his feet, up through his legs, through his glutes, up his back muscles, through the shoulder, down the elbow, released through his knuckles. He threw all his bodyweight into the blow. Aware that if he missed the attempt would throw him wildly off-balance, leaving him exposed and vulnerable to another swing of the wrench. One connection from the heavy tool and he would go down. There was little left in his gas tank. He was already fighting on wobbly legs.