by Matt Rogers
The game had changed.
He was no longer Jimmy Neak the deckhand — that cover had shattered as soon as he’d armed himself with a weapon in plain view of anyone walking the corridors. He didn’t care if Gennady discovered who he really was anymore. The ex-KGB brute might have all the physical training in the world, but he wouldn’t survive a shotgun slug to the chest.
Xu recalled exactly where the shell door had been positioned, and leapt straight into the stairwell without hesitation. He raced down three decks, making an endless series of left turns with the giant weapon clasped in his sweaty palms. The ship lurched, and he fell. His heels slid out on the slick metal and he landed on his rear, almost cracking the back of his skull against one of the higher steps. It would have burst his head open and sent most of his brains pooling over the stairwell.
He picked himself up with his gut twisted into a knot, and carried on.
Sooner or later, he knew he would run into someone.
And the truth would come out.
The first obstacle proved the easiest to handle — the unsuspecting chef. Xu burst out onto one of the lower levels and ran straight into the Filipino man, carrying a giant plastic bucket full of raw chicken. He must have fetched it from the freezer, and been in the process of carting it back to the kitchen when the madness broke out.
Madness.
An apt description.
‘Get out of the way,’ Xu said.
He shouldered the man aside, paying him no attention, because the cacophony of voices floating down from the other end of the corridor were far more important. Amidst the foreign shouting of the crew were new voices — American accents.
Hello, brother Neak, Xu thought.
He slowed to a fast stride, sucking freezing air in giant lungfuls, and raised the barrel of the Remington, all senses fixated on the path ahead. The white metal corridor twisted to the left, plunging out of sight, and the voices he heard had a notable echo in their inflection.
He would be entering a large space, it seemed.
Once again, he cursed the unknown — he hadn’t a clue as to the layout of the freighter, and didn’t know what he’d be walking into. But there was no better time to strike than right now, before the thin cover he’d established fell apart, before the five men had time to compose themselves after such a harrowing and traumatic journey through one of the more devastating storms Xu had experienced.
Yes, right now.
Go.
It clashed with the laws of human nature — Xu certainly didn’t want to take action. Common sense screamed at him, trying to convince him that it would be prudent to retreat, to formulate a plan and take out the members of the unit one by one as they settled into their living quarters to rest after a long journey.
But they wouldn’t rest.
They were U.S. Special Forces.
They would stay up for days on end if they needed to flush out an imposter — and Xu’s cover wouldn’t hold up for a moment longer.
It had to be now.
So, ignoring common sense with the kind of tenacity he’d become accustomed to, he darted around the corner, spotted a dark-eyed American man with a strong jawline and pale, clammy skin dressed in dirty, faded military fatigues, standing soaking wet in the middle of the corridor…
…and he lined up the Remington 870 and blasted the guy’s chest to pulp with a single pull of the trigger.
18
Blood and gore sprayed. The pale skin turned paler still. The guy went down in a heap, all the fight sapped out of him by the fatal gunshot — at this range, it had never been survivable. His fate had been sealed the moment he made the decision to go along with his comrade’s wild plan.
Xu leapfrogged the man’s corpse, hurried out onto a metal catwalk spanning the width of a broad space, and spotted Randall Neak and his other three friends immediately.
It wasn’t hard. The catwalk enclosed a giant contraption in the centre of the floor below. The enormous device omitted a deafening roar, to the extent that Xu had barely heard his shotgun discharge — the mechanical barrage of sound had already impaired his hearing. He realised he was staring at the ship’s main engine, at least six or seven hundred horsepower, screaming and whining as it battled to power the freighter through the storm. The shell door that Neak and his friends had entered through must have led here.
Randall Neak himself looked like absolute shit.
As did his three JSOC buddies.
Xu had guessed correctly — the storm had taken it out of them. They’d spent hours, if not days, battling the waves, unsure if they would survive the next moment, clawing for survival. Now, cold and pale and exhausted, they stood clustered in a tight pack on the catwalk only a few feet from Xu. He’d killed their friend who had ventured out into the hallway, and they’d heard the shotgun blast, even above the monotonous roar of the engines.
Hands reached for weapons.
Bedlam erupted.
They were unusually slow to react given their conditions, which saved Xu’s life. He pumped the fore-end of the Remington and levelled the barrel at the closest man’s face, pulling the trigger as soon as he locked his aim on. Given his reaction speed, it must have seemed like a sentient robot with uncanny accuracy had burst out onto the catwalk and turned one of their heads to pulp in a half-second.
The decapitated corpse slumped to the catwalk floor, but Xu was already in motion.
Two down.
Three to go.
He pumped the fore-end again and aimed directly past the two unknown Special Forces guys, zeroing in on the perplexed expression of Randall Neak. The man was a dead ringer for his brother, only built like a tank.
Got you.
Xu pulled the trigger.
Nothing.
In the blur of adrenalin, he hadn’t realised the fore-end had jammed. The Remington locked up, completely useless, an ancient weapon running into the inevitable problems that came with that kind of shelf life. Xu was still charging full-pelt at the three men, who had formed a triangle with the two nameless men protecting their de facto leader.
And they almost had their weapons out.
Xu’s advantage of surprise was rapidly diminishing.
He simply leapt on the pair, tossing the Remington aside to free up his hands. They hadn’t been anticipating that, and the resulting mess of three broad-shouldered, well-built men slamming into each other ruined any attempt to wriggle weapons free from their holsters. Xu found it odd that they hadn’t managed to draw their guns yet, but then he caught a fleeting glimpse of one of the holsters and realised the JSOC guys had secured their weapons tight before making the treacherous trip across the zipline. If they dropped their weapons into the ocean, they would be helpless to defend themselves.
That proved disastrous now.
Xu looped an arm around each of their faces as he jumped into the two men, squashing their delicate noses against his skin and squeezing as hard as he could, making life hell for the half-second of opportunity he had. His feet swung off the ground, all the momentum of his charge transferring over to the two men. They both panicked simultaneously, and jerked themselves around violently in an attempt to throw Xu off them.
As a result the trio tumbled off-balance, careening wildly into a nearby doorway in a tangle of limbs. Xu fell backward and rolled with it, sprawling across the corridor they’d fallen into. He got his feet underneath him and kicked out, catching the steel with the sole of his shoe and slamming the door shut behind them.
Just in time.
Randall Neak had successfully wrenched his Beretta M9 service pistol from its holster and had the barrel aimed squarely at Xu’s head when the steel door thundered closed between them. A gunshot sounded on the other side of the door, its intensity muffled but its sound unmistakeable.
Xu couldn’t even stop to consider how close he’d come to death.
He twisted at the waist, still stumbling off-balance — the ridiculousness of the situation was not lost on him. Already o
ut of control, neither of the trio could get their feet underneath them as the ship rolled and dipped and rose in the storm outside. Xu thundered into the nearest wall, bouncing off a metal column, and used the momentum to launch himself into the nearest man.
The first guy was six foot even, built powerfully with long wet brown hair pulled back in a greasy ponytail. Probably Delta, considering he was sporting the opposite of a standard military buzzcut. Xu grabbed him around the back of his neck and smashed a knee into his nose, breaking it, then hurled him back into the far wall. At the same time the freighter’s momentum shifted, and Xu lost his footing and fell straight into the guy, crunching him against the wall, aided by the ship pitching violently.
The second guy pulled his gun.
Xu spotted it out of the corner of his eye and threw a Hail Mary of a twisting side kick, sending the toe of his foot lashing to the side like a dagger darting through the air toward its unsuspecting victim. In the movies, the hero could knock a weapon seamlessly out of an enemy’s hands without so much as a second glance, but Xu had to deal with reality. So he targeted the wrist, and he succeeded. He kicked the guy in the lower arm with enough force to break bones, probably snapping the forearm and crushing a couple of fingers in the process, sandwiching them between the steel of the pistol and the hard toe of Xu’s combat boot.
The gun didn’t fly out of the man’s hand, but his hand disintegrated under the force of the kick.
The guy didn’t scream. He didn’t even open his mouth.
But all the blood drained from his face and he involuntarily doubled over at the waist. The pain would be horrendous.
Xu turned his attention back to the first man.
The guy with the ponytail.
Blood flowing from his shattered nose, the guy smashed a fist into Xu’s jaw.
Crack.
Oh, shit.
Lights out.
19
But only temporarily.
A flash knockout.
Thank fuck, Xu thought.
He’d been on the receiving end of such an injury a couple of times before. He didn’t even know what had happened. There was no reference point, no way to tell where he was or what was happening. He saw nothing but a tunnel. One second he spotted the fist darting in his direction, and then he teleported to a different section of the corridor, like an omnipresent force had snapped its fingers and dumped him in a disorientated state a few feet away from his original position.
‘What the…’ he mumbled, and then he realised.
Flash knockout.
Survive.
His legs had turned to jelly, and he stumbled all over the hallway like a newborn giraffe learning to walk. The storm certainly didn’t help. Just as he thought he was regaining his balance, the entire corridor tilted and he smashed into one of the walls, losing his footing and ricocheting off, sprawling across the hallway floor.
Thankfully, the tilt took out the other two guys as well.
All three of them slid out across the metal floor, giving Xu valuable time to recover. He forgot where he was, what he was doing, who he was fighting.
What the fuck is going on? he thought.
Randall Neak. Black Force. The laptop. It all came back to him.
You’re a government operative.
There we go.
Get it together.
Eyes wide and manic, he sprang to his feet. The punch to the jaw had been expertly placed, and a couple more ounces of force behind it might have knocked him unconscious entirely, putting him down for the count, allowing either of the pair to put a bullet in his brain. But it hadn’t, so there was no point considering it. He’d lost consciousness for a single moment, staggering across the corridor like a drunk, but an overwhelming jolt of adrenalin had kicked in as soon as he realised he wasn’t dead.
Fight.
Survive.
He wondered why the hell Randall Neak hadn’t followed them into the corridor. Then he threw a glance over the shoulder of the man with the ponytail and spotted the latch that had fallen into place over the steel door, sealing them into the hallway.
You lucky bastard, he told himself.
Surging with invigoration, glad he wasn’t dead, he sprinted at the nearest man as soon as the ship righted itself. The second guy hadn’t quite recovered yet — he was pale as a ghost, clutching his useless right hand, the pistol long gone. Xu spotted it skittering away on the floor, spinning end over end as the mad tilting of the ship carried it off down the hallway, giving it a life of its own. He disregarded it. The man tried to straighten up to offer some kind of resistance but Xu smashed a left hook into the side of his head, putting him down with such ferocity that a bystander would have thought Xu weighed three hundred pounds.
Truth was, there was an almighty difference between a tough guy with good aim and an elite martial artist who had spent years forging their body into a collection of fast-twitch muscle fibres. Gennady was a martial artist. The KGB had trained him well. These two men in front of Xu were all show muscles and puffy chests. The fist to the skull of the second guy knocked him into a semi-conscious haze, crumpling him against the cold steel behind him.
Xu grabbed him by the collar on the way down and rammed his head into the wall for good measure, making sure he stayed out. He didn’t want anyone sneaking up behind him.
The first guy with the broken nose made a noble attempt to save himself. He wrestled with his firearm, finally managing to wrench the Beretta free from its leather holster. By that point Xu had closed the gap. He seized the man by the wrist, his blood boiling now that there was a live weapon in the mix. He used primal strength to squeeze the guy’s forearm as hard as possible, constricting the bones, cutting off the blood supply, crushing muscle tissue. Then he kicked the guy in the gut — once, twice, three times. Each impact doubled him over a little bit more, so Xu kneed him in the forehead as soon as his face pointed toward the floor.
That jerked him upright, and knocked a few teeth loose at the same time.
An unrelenting barrage of pain and shock.
It loosened his grip on the Beretta.
Now.
Xu timed it perfectly. At the man’s weakest, he wrenched the gun from his grip. He spun it in his palm and worked a finger inside the trigger guard. He pressed the barrel to the guy’s temple and pulled the trigger, blowing his brains over the far wall. Then he turned and fired two shots into the upper back of the unconscious second man, making sure the guy stayed down forever.
One left.
With Randall Neak alone in the bowels of the freighter, Xu turned and slunk off down the hallway. He knew Neak was standing there on the other side of the door, ready for someone to come through, gun probably trained on the steel.
I won’t allow you the courtesy, Xu thought.
He disappeared into the darkness of the freighter.
A ghost, retreating to the shadows.
Leaving four dead men in its wake.
20
He tucked the magazine he’d ejected from the second Beretta into his back pocket and made sure the original M9 was ready to fire. The weapon was reliable, and that was all he needed. He’d lost count of the thousands of hours he’d put in at shooting ranges across the world — a requirement for the line of work he operated in. It meant that the Beretta M9 was almost a part of Xu, like an extension of his own arm. He would have no qualms with drilling a single round through Randall Neak’s forehead and continuing on his way, getting the hell off this goddamn freighter as fast as he could.
He hated everything about the ocean.
His veins still pulsating with stress chemicals, he paused to dry heave in a darkened stretch of the corridor. The space below deck was effectively deserted, so it didn’t bother him to turn his back on the path ahead and let out the churning empty mess sifting around his guts. The motion of the ship drilled into his brain, fine needles pushing through his skull, beyond frustrating to grapple with. He’d never wanted to step foot on dry land more than
this. He still wasn’t accustomed to the sensation — even though they’d been deep in the storm for hours, every time the massive vessel crested a wave and plunged toward the ocean below, he thought they were about to capsize.
One man left.
He couldn’t stay put for too long. Then his brain would tell his body he was done, and the adrenalin would start to ebb out of his system. The crash would seize him, draining all his muscles of energy, weighing him down, like heavy chains around his ankles.
Not yet.
There was little left to do. He made his way back around to the engine room in a giant arc, estimating his way through the bowels of the ship, growing acutely aware of all the bumps and knocks he’d taken since he stepped foot on the ship. They were beginning to accumulate, and he knew if he stayed inactive for much longer they would start to cripple him. He’d lost count of the times he’d just collapsed, completing an operation and then succumbing to the agony of his wounds. But until then he would surge forward with a clear head and a ticking clock in the back of his head telling him his time was limited.
If he wanted to fend off the pain, he had to keep moving.
It didn’t take much mental effort to circle back. He simply followed the incessant drone of the engine, filtering through the empty hallways with a sinister echo, ricocheting off the walls. A headache sprang to life behind his eyeballs, but by now he’d become so used to the sensation that he passed it off as nothing. Any kind of blunt force trauma caused a migraine to sprout to life, and Xu had been forced to grapple with it time and time again. Now he could operate at full capacity even with an icy hot needle drilling into his brain.
Just Randall Neak.
One left.
That was all the motivation he needed to carry himself forward. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he’d glimpsed a dark blue briefcase in Neak’s hand as he’d been dealing with the other four thugs. That was the only thing that mattered.