The Victor: A Black Force Thriller (Black Force Shorts Book 1)
Page 7
Xu let the silence drag out, mulling over the words. ‘You done?’
‘Yeah. Now let me die in peace. And good luck to you.’
‘Just so you know, I’m a man of my word. I’ll do this myself.’
‘Good.’
‘And I don’t give scum like you the courtesy of dying in peace.’
With one hand he reached across and yanked the passenger door handle toward himself, unlatching the mechanism that kept the door fixed in place. Then — taking his other hand off the wheel for a single moment — he shoved Velli’s weakened body out of the car.
Still travelling at eighty miles an hour along the expressway, Xu audibly heard the thwack of Velli’s body bouncing off the asphalt.
The man had been on death’s door already.
Xu had simply finished the job.
Now he let the door slam closed on its own, aided by the wind battering the SUV’s hull, and wrapped both hands back around the wheel. The vehicle crested a rise on the expressway and Xu noticed that the rain had vanished, leaving behind a thick coating of water across everything. Over the East River, Manhattan hovered in all its glory, a sea of lights spreading out as far as the eye could see as the sky darkened. Dusk was falling, and the city that never slept was coming alive.
Two minutes.
Xu spotted Brooklyn Bridge soaring over the East River — if he stayed on the expressway, he would loop onto the bridge in just a couple of short miles. Across the river, FDR Drive ran perpendicular to the Brooklyn Bridge, dipping underneath the towering structure while running along the bank of the river. At this time of night the road was alive with a steady stream of traffic, so far away that Xu could barely make it out.
Two fucking minutes.
He couldn’t have shut FDR Drive down in time even if he wanted to. By the time he made the call and the authorities scrambled to co-ordinate, the convoy would be long gone. He didn’t doubt Velli’s excruciating attention to detail. The window was narrow, which was why he had even bothered to share it.
Deep down, he had known that Xu wouldn’t make it.
He had probably wanted to provide as much false hope as he could.
But Velli didn’t know James Xu’s track record.
Xu smashed the SUV’s accelerator to the floor, powering the modified truck as fast as it could go, and veered around civilian traffic with enough recklessness to spell his death if he made the tiniest error.
He probably wouldn’t make it.
But he would sure as hell try.
17
Adrenalin flooded his brain like a ferocious shot to the senses.
He was pushing a hundred miles an hour in the SUV, diving into gaps in traffic with zero room for mishaps. Ahead, a truck slammed on the brakes to merge into another lane and Xu’s heart rate skyrocketed. He touched his own brakes and fish-tailed wildly through a narrow gap between two cars to his right. He clipped the rear bumper of the car in front and its back end simply disintegrated — the modified ram bumper on Velli’s truck took care of that.
A chill ran up the back of Xu’s spine as he recognised how close he’d come to simply demolishing the entire vehicle. It would have resulted in the deaths of every civilian inside the car, and that would have haunted him for the rest of his life. He slowed a fraction, recognising the kind of power he had in his hands — this truck was goddamn unstoppable.
That gave him an idea.
It would be suicide. Utter madness to any sane person. But a sane person never would have made it into the ranks of Black Force, and Xu hadn’t worked his way up to the position he held by acting reasonably. It would probably kill him, but that carried over to most of the events of his career.
And he’d made it this far.
Because — as he took the exit off Interstate 278 and began to loop around onto the Brooklyn Bridge, he spotted a convoy of trucks across the East River. There was no way to tell whether they held Velli’s cargo in their shipping containers or not, but there were five of them, and Xu couldn’t spot another truck of that size in sight. They were stuck in traffic, crawling along FDR Drive, probably set to pass underneath the Brooklyn Bridge itself in just over a minute, given their current speed.
Then the convoy disappeared from sight as Xu entered the line of traffic merging slowly onto the bridge.
He sensed the opportunity of a lifetime, and once again crushed the accelerator to the floor.
He spotted a Ford Raptor to his left and took it out, recognising that the driver would survive if he was enclosed in such a large vehicle. The front ram bumper of his SUV crushed the rear tray of the Raptor, swatting the big pick-up truck to the side like it weighed nothing. That allowed Xu to force his way into the gap created and surge forward, speeding into a free lane and beginning the trek across the three lanes that crossed over the bridge to Manhattan. He veered wildly in and out of traffic, taking every available gap he could spot, creating a cacophony of horns as his erratic behaviour infuriated half the motorists on the bridge.
The brown metal supports began to flash past overhead as Xu approached the first of the bridge’s two enormous sets of towers. He gazed up at the limestone for a beat, but couldn’t pause to soak in the sights. He was not a tourist. He lived in this city.
And the gap he’d beat in Velli’s airtight system of transportation was rapidly closing.
He had no idea where the convoy was. Thankfully, he knew Manhattan well, and had made the drive across Brooklyn Bridge many times before. If it passed over FDR Drive at a point where the traffic was surrounded by these metal supports, Xu would have no hope of attempting the impossible.
But, sure enough, after a minute of screaming dangerously around passing traffic, Xu noticed the metal cage-like structure shrink away, replaced by open sky and a low concrete barrier separating the right lane from a colossal drop to the river below.
Then the water turned to concrete, and Xu realised he was directly over the top of FDR Drive.
It had seemed like a feasible idea minutes earlier, but now in the heat of the moment he realised what a fool he had been. As his pulse pounded and sweat ran down his forehead and he swallowed raw fear, he realised what came next might be the death of him.
If his timing was off, or if his grasp of physics wasn’t quite as accurate as he imagined, he would die.
But he was sitting in a tank on wheels. It would hopefully have some kind of roll cage built into its chassis.
Everything revolved around that.
And, to spur him into action, he glanced down at FDR Drive dozens of feet below to see the first of the line of container trucks soar past underneath, barreling out into the open as the traffic picked up speed. The drivers were determined to get to their destination.
Xu stared down at the roof of the first shipping container on the first truck. It had passed into the open, which meant the second container would follow a second later. Xu himself had a half-second to act — he was still flooring the SUV at close to eighty miles an hour, and he couldn’t slow down. He needed the momentum to help with what came next.
‘Fuck!’ he screamed, effectively summarising all the emotions racing through his head.
He had to do it.
If he didn’t, these containers would be gone forever.
He couldn’t imagine what an arsenal of state-of-the-art weaponry in the hands of New York City’s most vicious drug gangs would achieve. That wasn’t taking into account the drugs, which — if Velli had been telling the truth — would be some of the cleanest product Manhattan had ever seen. The overdoses, the gang wars. He understood why Velli had done it.
The openings it would create.
The potential to sweep in and takeover amidst the carnage.
Xu couldn’t let it happen.
So, entirely convinced he was going to die in the next few seconds, he swerved the giant SUV into the low concrete barricade at top speed.
18
He certainly had an inaccurate grasp on the laws of physics.
Instead, the ram bumper on the reinforced truck broke through the concrete barrier with the same sensation as taking a freight train to the chest. Xu whiplashed against his seatbelt, almost knocked completely unconscious by the force of the impact, and was nearly oblivious to the SUV pitching forward and dropping nose-first toward FDR Drive.
He’d miscalculated the length of the drop, too.
It was unimaginably long.
Actually, it couldn’t have been more than a couple of seconds of freefall, but to Xu that was an eternity. The giant bunker of a vehicle picked up so much speed in the anarchic drop that when it slammed home on the roof of the shipping container, Xu blacked out.
He came to a half-second later, battered back into consciousness by the SUV twisting end over end, rolling out of the dent it had gouged in the roof of the container and spilling over the side of the giant container truck. He braced for impact and a barrage of noise assaulted him as all the windows shattered at once. Bulletproof or not, the SUV coming down on its roof on the asphalt of FDR Drive was too much for the structure to handle. The body armour twisted and groaned and Xu felt the car sliding across the road, its body warping all around him.
He had never taken damage quite like it.
It seemed like every bone in his body had been broken simultaneously. Any other vehicle — at least, any car not reinforced into a tank — would have simply disintegrated upon hitting the roof of the shipping container, bursting into pieces and shredding its occupants to a fine paste. But Velli’s modifications had absorbed the majority of the blunt force. That hadn’t stopped Xu getting battered to near-death by each of the gruelling impacts, one after the other.
Now, the tank on wheels was sliding on its roof across FDR Drive’s right-hand lane, skirting dangerously close to the East River.
Too close.
Xu, groggy and delirious and hurting in ways he hadn’t thought imaginable, hung suspended upside-down by his seatbelt. He caught a flashing glimpse of a dark body of water and some kind of survival instinct kicked in.
You haven’t made it this far to wind up drowning at the bottom of the fucking East River.
He ignored everything his brain was telling him and clawed like a rabid dog for survival. With blood pouring out of several cuts across his face that glass fragments had shredded, he reached up and stabbed with one finger at the seatbelt latch.
He found it.
The seatbelt came loose from around his frame and he dropped to the roof of the out-of-control SUV. His world had gone frighteningly mad. All his senses reeled, and he could do nothing but fight for an extra second of life. He spotted the contorted opening in the driver’s door where the window pane had used to rest, now barely wide enough to fit through. Nevertheless he dove for it, his position awkward but his willpower still strong.
He passed through, rolling along a shower of glass shards in the process.
Then he was somehow out of the vehicle, tumbling in a mad barrel roll across the asphalt of FDR Drive itself, breathing fresh air even though he couldn’t see or hear or think. His consciousness had become an unrelenting stream of pain and momentum, and when he finally tumbled to a halt on the very edge of the far lane, he barely got a second of respite before a horrendous crash and groan rocked his senses.
He sat up, even though everything hurt at once — it sounded like the world was ending. He twisted his vision left and right until he realised the SUV had skidded into the thin barricade on the side of FDR Drive and demolished it. He watched, flabbergasted, as the vehicle plunged a dozen feet to the surface of the East River and impacted on its roof with an enormous splash. Geysers of water speared in every direction, and the SUV sank like a rock.
Xu found himself alone in the right-hand lane of the parkway.
He’d avoided sinking to a watery grave by mere seconds. Upside down and disoriented, there would have been no way to get out of the sinking SUV in time if it had plunged into the water. Besides, another impact like that would have all but guaranteed unconsciousness.
He wasn’t quite sure how he was awake right now. His surroundings seemed dream-like, floating and shimmering before his eyes. There were bright headlights everywhere, but traffic had come to a standstill. It took him a moment to process the madness — the entire convoy of trucks had screeched to a halt as the SUV had dropped onto the first vehicle. Two of the trucks had collided, sending one of them thumping onto its side with enough force to rattle the ground underneath Xu.
Thankfully, the traffic behind the convoy had reacted in time, and the closest cars were in the process of backing up to create a perimeter around the carnage.
Xu didn’t know where to start.
Where did he go from here? He could hardly think straight. He was bleeding from seemingly everywhere at once, his head had started thrumming incessantly with a migraine-level headache, one of his wrists had been badly mangled in one of the impacts, and the beating he’d taken back at the townhouse was starting to show its symptoms.
But he couldn’t stop now.
The cabin doors of the first truck — the one closest to Xu, now sporting a giant dent in its rearmost container — lurched open. Xu spotted the driver and passenger clambering down onto the asphalt. It was hard to see — both due to his impaired mental state and the blinding glare of the truck’s headlights — but he recalled what Velli had told him earlier.
I know these boys. They’re professionals.
Which meant they weren’t ordinary truck drivers.
Somehow, Xu was on the move. His limbs had taken on a life of their own, snatching onto the concept of survival and running with it, just as he had in the townhouse. He surged forward, hurrying across the middle lane to intercept the passenger. The Beretta had been lost in the crash — he’d tried to secure it as best he could, but nothing could have prepared him for what had just happened.
The passenger — a burly dark-haired man dressed in overalls and carrying some kind of automatic weapon — was slow to respond. Xu couldn’t discern the make of the weapon in the low light. Despite the sheer ferocity of the impact against the roof of the shipping container, Xu had been prepared for anything. It seemed these men, as professional and prepared as they were, hadn’t been anticipating any kind of attack to come from above, especially not in the form of a reinforced SUV plunging in a nose dive into the first vehicle in their fleet.
The passenger was still gathering his wits and getting his bearings on the assault rifle in his hands when Xu thundered into range and tackled him into the side of the truck’s cabin. Both men bounced off the hull, but the passenger took the brunt of the impact. Xu slammed the heel of his boot into the guy’s gut, doubling him over. Then it was simply a matter of wrenching the weapon — a Kalashnikov AK-15 — out of the guy’s hands.
These men might have training with automatic weapons, but that didn’t make them professionals.
Xu was a professional.
He moved out of instinct and adopted a firing stance with the AK-74, his eyes darting to each component of the weapon in a pre-determined pattern. Realising it was ready to fire, he wheeled on the spot and aimed past the enormous hood of the truck, anticipating the driver to come hurrying into sight at any moment.
Sure enough, the man charged around the hood a moment later, wielding a handgun that Xu recognised as a Makarov. He’d been ready to drill a round through the man’s leg, just as he had done to Velli, but when he saw the barrel of the Makarov coming up to aim at his unprotected face he changed his gameplan and shot the driver three times in the face.
Each of the shots seemed to add another level of damage to the guy’s facial features. The first round had killed him — the other two were for good measure. The Makarov flew out of his grasp as he collapsed mid-s
tride, and the gun skittered toward the now-prone passenger who Xu had disarmed. The guy made a lunge for the weapon but Xu put that to rest with a single unsuppressed shot through the back of his skull.
Relentless shouting drifted across FDR Drive, coming from the far end of the enormous container truck. Xu grimaced — he could hear engines being killed, and troops being rallied. The first truck in the convoy had come to rest awkwardly, diagonally skewed across the three lanes. Xu could see the dent in the top of the second shipping container. There was enough room underneath the giant pair of containers for a man to easily pass through.
If there were two men to a truck, that left him with another eight hostiles to deal with.
Nothing he hadn’t handled before.
He ejected the AK-74’s magazine and checked the number of rounds left in the clip — he’d fired four, which gave him twenty-six left. The standard thirty round detachable box magazine would come in handy in the following skirmish. At the very edge of his senses he could hear civilians screaming and fleeing for their lives, but he tuned most of it out. It was background noise. He zoned in on the hostile voices, employing tunnel vision.
He ducked low and passed underneath the second shipping container, slamming the magazine back into place and making the AK-74 live, safety still set in the middle position, ready for fully automatic gunfire.
19
Instantly he realised the situation was more complicated than he’d envisioned.