The Victor: A Black Force Thriller (Black Force Shorts Book 1)

by Matt Rogers

  Time after time he hoped for the best in urban warfare, but it never seemed to unfold that way. He preferred fighting in the most isolated corners of the globe, in third world war zones and inhospitable jungles and empty deserts. Not in cities like New York, where the population pushed over eight million, leaving chasm-sized openings in the battle to take hostages and generally make things a mess for those parties not keen on taking civilian lives.

  It seemed that in this skirmish, Xu was the only man focused on minimising collateral damage.

  Men from the trucks — all of them big and bulky and mixed between Americans and Europeans — were hauling civilians out of their trapped cars and pressing all manner of automatic firearms to their heads. A couple of them already had human shields in place, and were in the process of rotating on the spot, searching for any sign of Xu. They must have heard the conflict happening around the first truck and began preparing for a skirmish.

  But they didn’t realise Xu was just one man.

  They were spread out, and seemed to lack any kind of plan of attack. They simply sprinted toward the nearest cars — which had stamped on their brakes as the convoy screamed to a halt — and set about wrenching unsuspecting drivers and passengers from their seats.

  Xu took a quick head count, and sure enough there were eight of them. More importantly, though, they hadn’t seen him.

  He set to work, analysing the entire situation in an instant and concluding that the longer he hesitated, the more opportunities one of the drivers would have to locate Xu and make it very clear that he would execute a hostage if Xu didn’t put his weapon down.

  So Xu set his targets, his heartbeat hammering in his ears as he realised the ramifications of missing a target by mere inches. He isolated two of the closest men, both of whom had managed to pull hostages out of their vehicles without realising that men and women being abducted by truck drivers with guns would not go quietly.

  They had their guns aimed in the general direction of the hostages, but Xu determined that even if the weapons went off as they died the civilians would live if he timed it accurately.

  The man on the left had a screaming thirty-something blond woman in his grip — she was clutching a bundle of blankets to her chest that Xu only just now recognised as a baby. She must have been in the process of pulling her child free from the car seat in the back when the man had snatched her.

  An icy chill settled over Xu and he decided to deal with that issue first.

  The man was rabid — at least thirty pounds heavier than the woman and six inches taller — and he was yanking her about in a display of dominance whilst lurching a Kalashnikov rifle around with the other hand.

  At one point the gun barrel drifted to point across the East River, as the man was preoccupied with hauling the woman into place between him and where he imagined the enemy would come from.

  He still hadn’t seen Xu.

  Xu focused on that one moment in time and pulled his own trigger, blowing the top half of the guy’s head off with a single round from the AK-74. Blood sprayed and the woman screamed in a fit of terror, but she stayed alive.

  The man’s Kalashnikov didn’t even go off.

  He buckled at the knees, letting go of the woman’s wrist as he died, and she fled behind one of the idle civilian vehicles.

  Xu had already stopped paying attention to that particular situation. For now, the woman and her child were safe. He barely hesitated before squeezing off a pair of shots in the direction of the other guy, who had almost managed to pull a young Asian guy in front of him as a human shield. The bullets passed straight over the shoulder of the hostage and embedded themselves in the throat of the truck driver.

  It wasn’t pretty.

  Arterial blood arced, and the Asian guy turned pale with fear. He ducked away from the truck driver — who was collapsing at a similar rate to his friend across the parkway — and mimicked the actions of the woman hostage by scurrying for cover.

  Xu silently applauded both of their responses. Many people seized up in fright, sitting ducks for any other hostiles in the area.

  But the three rounds he’d dispensed from his shadowy position underneath the shipping container had attracted the attention of every last hostile in the area. If Xu’s preliminary assessment had been right, there were still six of them.

  He couldn’t put up a fight against that many men.

  Especially with no cover.

  He searched for a window of opportunity to take out another one of the hostiles but — before he could even locate anyone to hit — a crippling wave of pain seared through his insides. He cursed his own weakness and involuntarily buckled, having to use all his conscious effort just to keep the AK-74 in his hands.

  Adrenalin could only keep him going for so long. Taking the SUV off the Brooklyn Bridge had dealt untold damage to his central nervous system. The entire sequence still felt like a dream, incomprehensible in his memory. He knew what had happened, but it was difficult to understand the beating he had taken and managed to stay conscious and alert. The Brooklyn Bridge hovered far above his head, almost unbelievably high.

  He had plunged off it just a minute earlier…

  Perhaps he wouldn’t be conscious for much longer.

  As he grappled with the debilitating agony, one of the truck drivers or passengers must have drawn a beat on him. Next thing he knew warm liquid sprayed out of his face, accompanied by a bolt of molten hot pain as his nerve endings fried. He recoiled back, tumbling across the asphalt for cover, wondering what the hell had happened.

  It took him a moment to realise a bullet had grazed some of the skin off his left cheek.

  The rifle’s report followed a second later, cracking across FDR Drive.

  Xu fought to suppress the urge to collapse and black out, and took off running for the other side of the container truck.

  20

  The diagonal container truck certainly served as a barricade, but not one that could prove effective for long.

  Xu didn’t need long.

  In fact, he posited that he had minutes before his body simply shut down on itself. His injuries, although numerous and brutal in nature, hadn’t been enough to kill him, or hinder him in any significant way. That didn’t stop the pain, which was pushing the upper limit of what Xu had ever experienced. He’d been beaten and battered and bruised and cut in every way imaginable, and adrenalin could no longer keep those sensations at bay. In a world of hurt, he hobbled around to the front cabin of the container truck.

  It was the only part of the vehicle that could protect him from having his legs shot to pieces. There was too much space underneath the shipping containers to fire off a series of rounds, most of which would shred Xu to pieces. He stayed low for a moment, assessing the likelihood of which direction the small party of Velli’s thugs would approach from. He wondered if they were smart enough to corner him from a number of different directions, which would no doubt result in his death.

  But, deep down in the palpable raw essence of the confrontation, Xu knew these men were not trained in urban warfare.

  Their numbers were overwhelming, but if they had any semblance of true tactical training they should have dealt with him far earlier. He was one man. They probably didn’t even know how many people they were fighting. So they wouldn’t want to split up. They would move in a tight unit if they wanted to pursue Xu, buying into the old adage that there was safety in numbers.

  And they wouldn’t follow him underneath the shipping container. That would also make them vulnerable. And it was the obvious choice.

  They would circle…

  They would bullrush...

  As soon as Xu pieced their likely next step together he reached the left-hand corner of the truck’s front cabin, and he twisted the AK-74 in his grip and swung it as hard as he could like a baseball bat at the open space in front of him. If he’d miscalculated, he’d run the risk of looking like an idiot, but thankfully one of Velli’s thugs chose that moment to come
sprinting around the hood of the truck. His jaw met the stock of Xu’s Kalashnikov and he went down with a noise similar to a porcelain cup shattering against the floor. Xu had broken all manner of bones in the guy’s face, and he wouldn’t be getting up anytime soon.

  As soon as the guy crumpled, Xu recognised that he had a second to act whilst the men behind the first guy hesitated. They would have heard the sickening crunch of breaking bones, dealt out by an unseen enemy, and they would pause for just enough time…

  …so Xu spun the AK-74 back into the firing position, ducking low and leaning out into open sight for a beat, spotting a pair of bulky thugs in overalls with cheap assault rifles at the ready.

  But he had the jump on them.

  He fired a three-round burst two consecutive times, jerking the barrel from left to right, dotting each man’s torso with three punching parcels of lead. They went down without any resistance, their weapons cascading away. Xu noted the blood spraying and confirmed they were dead, or so close to it that they had ceased to become a factor in the skirmish.

  He started to gain a fleeting burst of confidence as he soaked in the sight of the three men he’d incapacitated. Wondering, just maybe, if he might make it out of this alive after all…

  Then something clattered off the back of his head with enough force to put him down on his stomach, the AK-74 falling away without resistance, and he realised that even though he was still somewhat alert his body had shut down completely. He tried to put his hands out to break his fall but his limbs wouldn’t respond. He splayed across the asphalt, all the resistance gone from his body, and he realised he’d been struck from behind by a blunt object with enough force to rattle his brain inside his skull.

  Of course.

  There were three men left.

  They wouldn’t have been stupid enough to travel in one pack.

  What were you thinking?

  Then a second dose of blunt force trauma hit him in the back of his head and he lost all ability to think.

  21

  When he came to, he took a moment to gather his bearings.

  It all seemed so inherently familiar. He was on a busy three-lane parkway bordering a river. It was dark. Traffic had screeched to a standstill and he could see civilians fleeing down the narrow lanes between cars, hurtling away from the scene that had broken out in the middle of the road. There were giant container trucks all around him, like monoliths blocking the way, parked and stalled at awkward angles across the asphalt. On one side of the parkway the river lay dark and foreboding, and on the other the bright lights of Manhattan sprawled out in the form of towering skyscrapers and beautiful residential complexes, all bordered by parks and gardens and well-trimmed trees.

  Quite a beautiful part of town, if not for the fact that he was being dragged by the collar by a grim-faced truck driver, bloodied and bruised and barely able to think straight.

  What? he thought.

  What the hell is all this?

  Fleeting memories came back, and that was all he needed to snatch onto. He remembered a terrifying drop off a bridge, and stared up at where the sky should be to see the underside of the very same bridge. From there instinct kicked in. He could barely function, barely string a sentence together or latch onto memories of the past thirty minutes, but years of training had drilled such an impulsive urge to act in the heat of combat that he didn’t even need to understand what he was doing to go through with it.

  In that sense, he was a human weapon.

  Subliminally he understood that even though he didn’t quite know what was happening, he had been unconscious for a brief period of time. Unconsciousness only lasted seconds, usually. It was nothing like the movies. One good punch could shut someone’s lights out but they usually came to not long after, stunned and disoriented but awake and moving. That was Xu’s current state, so he knew that only half a minute at best had elapsed since he’d been pummelled into the ground.

  Everything hurt, and beyond that he sensed serious damage to his internal organs — something was broken.

  No, multiple things were broken…

  But he didn’t need to run a marathon. He needed a single controlled burst of action, and he could pull that off.

  At least, he thought he could.

  Groggily, he stared up at the truck driver heaving him across the asphalt, shredding the back of his clothing to tatters in the process.

  The man hadn’t killed him.

  What an idiot.

  Xu couldn’t form a sentence, but he noticed the truck driver staring down at him with unbridled rage in his eyes.

  ‘Dunno who the fuck you are, buddy,’ the guy spat in a thick Brooklyn accent, ‘but you just had to crash our party, didn’t you? We’re fucked now. Every cop in the city is gonna be here in a minute. Gotta leave the payload here. How you gonna explain that to Velli?’

  Xu said nothing, trying to compute the information.

  Velli?

  He was dead…

  More memories were returning.

  Oh, he realised. These guys don’t know that, do they?

  The truck driver seemed to take Xu’s silence for fear. Still dragging him along the ground, clearly mistaking him for closer to death’s door than he actually was, the man bent down with a thin sneer on his face.

  ’You ain’t got a clue who Velli is,’ he snarled. ‘You in some trouble now, boy. You ain’t know who you’re dealing with. He’ll kill you slowly for what you did to my men. Those were my friends, boy. You lost us a lotta money. But you’re gonna bleed. You’re gonna—’

  Whilst the driver had been deep in his mad tirade, Xu had set to work figuring out the distances between the driver and the two other thugs he was being dragged toward. The three of them had hijacked one of the empty civilian vehicles left running as its occupants had fled. The back doors hung open, and Xu imagined the driver was looking to cram him into the back seat and get the hell off FDR Drive before the authorities descended on it like a plague. A war had broken out on an ordinary civilian parkway, and Xu imagined it would be the talk of the country for months to come.

  Then Xu’s attention turned to the driver’s other hand, the one not being used to drag him by the collar. This hand clutched one of the more futuristic looking pieces of weaponry he had ever seen. For a moment he imagined he was hallucinating, his brain conjuring up images of a dystopian future, but then he studied the shape of the rifle and realised he recognised it. He’d seen it once before.

  And he realised where the man had got it.

  It was a MAUL shotgun, developed by an Australian firm called Metal Storm. It must have been a prototype because the weapons hadn’t entered the production stage yet. In fact, Xu remembered a snippet of information about Metal Storm now being defunct…

  How Velli had managed to get his hands on a prototype was anyone’s guess, but these were clearly the kind of fearsome weapons that would have been distributed into the hands of New York’s gangs. He’d underestimated Velli’s ability to acquire the most cutting-edge technology — the man really had been looking to incite a city-wide meltdown.

  In a sick and twisted way, Xu admired the man’s tenacity.

  But that didn’t change the fact that this truck driver — despite having the common sense to duck into one of the containers and snatch up a fearsome-looking rifle — didn’t possess the common sense to finish Xu off. The guy was in such a hurry to get away from the scene and present his boss with some kind of evidence to explain the failure that he hadn’t anticipated a fight.

  ‘Velli’s dead,’ Xu said, interrupting the driver’s spiel. ‘And this isn’t a movie, brother. You should have just killed me.’

  He simply got his feet underneath him and sprung up, ignoring his body’s screams of protest. It took the driver — who had imagined Xu was on the verge of death — by such surprise that Xu simply had to lunge across and wrench the MAUL shotgun out of his frozen hand.

  Then it was a slaughter.

  Long ago, Xu had skim
med the bullet points of the way Metal Storm weapons worked to understand the science behind the superposed load firing system. The shotgun rounds — five total, he thought he remembered — were loaded in the barrel nose to tail and implemented an electronic firing system to send off rounds at an unbelievable rate. He couldn’t remember the finer details, but he knew he had five shotgun rounds in the munition tube without any need to eject spent shells or pause in any capacity.

  So he sent a slug through the truck driver’s chest, drilling a literal hole through his torso, then pivoted and blasted the guy on the left hand side of the car away a half-second later. The man spiralled into the side of the waiting car in a cloud of blood, and before he’d even hit the ground Xu fired a third shot — everything had happened in the space of a second and a half. The third slug tore the last guy’s stomach to shreds, and he blacked out as he dropped to the ground. He would be dead from massive blood loss within a minute.

  And then it was done.

  Xu froze in the middle of the parkway, surrounded by devastation on all sides, unable to comprehend the fact that he had made it through the carnage. He’d lost count of the number of people he’d killed. In the back of his mind, a faint voice told him that he should take the opportunity to flee and avoid a world of trouble as law enforcement scrambled to realise who he was.

  In fact, they would never find out.

  They would simply receive a direct order from the President of the United States to release the man they had in custody, with no further questions.

  But he preferred to avoid that window of time in which he would be treated as an enemy of the state by officers who thought he had incited a massacre, so he turned on his heel and made to hurry down a connecting stairwell and into the streets of Manhattan below.

  But on the first step his body realised that the threat had dissipated and every last sensation he’d been suppressing for the duration of the conflict caught up with him. It hit him like a dose of lightning, overwhelming him and sending him down on one knee, then crumpling onto his back, and finally he collapsed in a sweaty heap on the asphalt, staring up at the bridge he’d plunged off not long before.