by Matt Rogers
He grimaced and switched into desperation-mode.
Over the din of the carnage unfolding all around him, he heard someone running down the corridor ahead. He flashed a glance sideways and spotted a dark alcove wedged into the nearest wall, between a pair of locked doors. He pressed the Vikhr rifle to his chest and slotted neatly into the shadowy space.
The approaching man came flying past several heartbeats later.
Sergei dashed out of the space and locked a sinewy arm around the guy’s throat — just like he had done to Ramsay. He timed it perfectly, and the man was taken off his feet by the sudden change in momentum. Sergei slammed him back-first into the floor, keeping the pressure around his throat immense.
It was another Navy soldier.
This man looked a similar age to the pair he had gunned down upon entering the ship. Young and vulnerable — likely inexperienced in life-or-death situations.
Perfect, Sergei thought.
‘The American prisoner,’ he snarled in the guy’s ear, as the man’s face began to turn a horrific shade of red. ‘Have you heard of him?’
The man wasn’t listening — his brain had embraced survival-mode in desperate fashion. He clawed at Sergei’s forearm in an attempt to loosen the hold. Sergei shook him like a crocodile wrestling with its prey, wrenching him left and right by the neck to shock him into hesitation.
It worked.
The guy stopped struggling.
‘Did you hear me?’ he said.
‘Yes, yes…’ the man choked. ‘That area’s off limits to grunts like me.’
‘But you know where it is?’
‘Rumours spread.’
‘And these rumours are…?’
‘Down this hallway, make two lefts in a row — there’s a section of corridors with white walls instead of grey. I’ve been told that he’s in the brig there.’
‘Thank you,’ Sergei said, and fired a suppressed round through the top of the man’s exposed skull.
He darted away from the body and hustled further inside the warship. He had faith that the man had been telling the truth — panicked youths were seldom aware of the intricacies of providing false information. They talked effortlessly. Sergei checked the ammunition left in his magazine.
Over twenty rounds left.
More than enough.
He found the white walls within seconds, and the knot in his gut loosened slightly. Perhaps this would all work out. He snatched at a handhold in the wall nearby as another crippling blast rocked the carrier, then took off at a sprint through the hallways.
The corridor opened out into a row of cells — most of them empty — packed in tight to compensate for the limited amount of space. Sergei moved like a ghost down the hallway, sweeping the suppressor through the bars of each cell in rapid succession.
Empty.
Empty.
Empty.
Empty.
He paused by the final cell and couldn’t resist a smirk of satisfaction.
The American rested on a steel bed frame, alone in the makeshift cell block. He was sitting nervously on the edge of the frame, gripping the steel with white knuckles to ride out the tremors and vibrations rocking the ground on which they stood. The jumpsuit draped over his muscular frame was filthy.
Sergei met his gaze for a split second…
…then raised the Vikhr and emptied its contents through the bars.
Twenty rounds left no room for interpretation. They shredded the man’s chest to pieces, sending geysers of blood across the polished metal floor. A few rounds punched through his throat, and he slumped off the edge of the bed, landing in a pool of his own blood.
He twitched twice, writhing on his stomach. Then he rolled over, gave one final wheeze, and died.
Sergei heard the rifle click dry in his hands.
He exhaled — letting out the tension racking his body — and peered down at the dead American. An enormous weight lifted off his shoulders. His final mission — and his most difficult to co-ordinate — had succeeded. As long as he could make it back to the Mi-28, he would live out the rest of his days as a wealthy man.
A successful and eventful career had ended with the American’s life.
He lowered the empty Vikhr.
Then, as his gaze lingered on the dead man, he began to notice the discrepancies.
This man’s hair was a very light shade of brown, almost caramel in colour — not dark brown like in the surveillance photo. His features were slightly off. His jawline wasn’t as pronounced. He wasn’t quite as tall — probably closer to six-foot-one than six-foot-three.
He appeared smaller.
Sergei’s stomach dropped.
It wasn’t him.
All of a sudden, he heard thunderous footsteps tearing toward his location. Still shocked by the deception, he was a little slow to react. His mental state had slackened as he’d gunned down what he assumed to be his target.
Now he would pay the price.
He turned his head and saw an enormous man sprinting at him, dangerously close.
It was the guy from the photo.
The man he had come here to kill.
He instinctively began to raise the barrel of his weapon, but a quiet voice reminded him that he had wasted all his ammunition on the dead man in the cell. He quickly realised the gravity of his mistake.
The sudden understanding that all of his meticulous planning had been demolished in an instant hit him like a ton of bricks.
Next, he watched the American launch himself into the air and a moment later two heavy boots slammed into his chest hard enough to shatter his sternum.
12
Jason King tore around a sharp corner as he heard a barrage of silenced gunfire close by.
A pair of Navy technicians had let him out of his cell after several moments of intense persuasion. It hadn’t made him feel any better, because the only reason they had done so was because they believed the supercarrier would sink if it took any more damage. They felt it was their responsibility to free the prisoners that were rumoured to be onboard, regardless of the consequences.
They had attempted to stick with him — due to some sense of responsibility to control the prisoners they found — but he’d lost them by heading deeper into the ship when their only focus had been on escape.
He wanted to find Slater and Isla.
As he rounded the corner, he spotted a masked figure firing into another row of identical holding cells. The man’s gaze was transfixed inside the cell, barely paying any attention to his surroundings.
King waited for the man’s weapon to click dry, then took off at a sprint. The guy saw him coming, but he only had a second to react. The man was dressed in paramilitary gear. He was short and squat, but from this distance he seemed powerful enough.
King wondered if he had martial arts training, then shrugged it off.
The size difference would be too great at close-quarters.
He launched a reckless dropkick from three feet away, using the momentum he’d built up to throw caution to the wind. He planted both feet square in the centre of the guy’s chest and transferred all the kinetic energy into his stationary form.
The guy was hurled off his feet by the force of the kick.
They both crashed to the floor, scrambling for purchase. King shot to his feet and caught a glance of a dead man inside the nearby cell. A ridiculous amount of blood had already pooled around his corpse. He felt hot anger in his chest as he charged at the mercenary.
The guy had been seriously injured by the kick to the chest — maybe even permanently so — but his mind would still be churning at a million miles an hour. Still on the ground, the man lunged for one of King’s ankles, barely functioning but still in the right state of mind to attempt to tie his enemy up.
King was impressed. The guy had hordes of experience in combat. Most shrivelled up at the first sign of adversity.
King threw a knee at the speed of light, targeting the man’s exposed chin. He
missed by inches as the guy got hold of his other leg and ripped it off the floor. For such a short man, his strength was deceiving.
King spilled to the ground in a tangle of limbs.
The guy moved at incredible speed, transitioning to side control on top of King’s struggling form. King bucked hard, throwing the man off for a second. He thrust his hips off the cold floor and scrambled away from the man.
His breath caught in his throat.
Another second of hesitation and the guy would have taken his back and choked him unconscious. His jiu-jitsu was some of the best King had seen.
As soon as he was out of range, he launched to both feet and threw a twisting side kick. He assumed that ordinarily the man would have been able to dodge the blow, but he was slow to move. Perhaps the kick to his chest had done serious internal damage.
The point of King’s boot met the side of the man’s head, omitting a sharp noise that could only signify horrendous internal damage. The guy keeled forward, dazed and disoriented by the power of the kick. King had spent years upon years drilling the same move into full-length Muay Thai bags, to the point where his kicks could kill or cripple weaker men.
As the man toppled over, King spotted a Glock sidearm tucked into a holster at the rear of his waistband. The man hadn’t had a chance to reach for it yet.
King darted to it and wrenched it free. He flicked the safety off in one practiced motion and forced the man’s head into the floor by shoving the barrel against the back of his skull.
No hesitation.
He fired once.
That was all it took.
At such close range, the result was inevitable. Brain matter discharged from the exit wound in grisly fashion, and King turned away from the body. He rose tentatively to his feet and assessed the damage he’d received.
Zero.
A rare feat.
In the whirlwind of life-or-death fighting, it was often hard to ascertain how injured one was in the heat of the moment. King had made sure to involve his hands as little as possible, and his still-broken wrist thanked him for it. Now out of the sling, his swollen hand ached horribly — likely from using it to push off the ground — but other than that he was unhurt.
With the ground trembling under his heels, he got a proper look inside the cell that the dead mercenary had been so intent on targeting.
He froze.
The corpse looked oddly similar to himself — roughly the same frame, hair cut short, a vague resemblance in the features. The differences were noticeable, but in the midst of an operation one could have easily mistaken the prisoner for King.
He ran his gaze down the length of the second brig and realised that the man had been isolated in this hallway, alone.
His blood boiled as he realised what Ramsay had done.
The man was a decoy, a plant whose location had been spread around the warship’s personnel to test whether any of the soldiers with connections to King felt the need to attempt to break him out. He imagined the area had been under constant surveillance, for Ramsay to keep an eye on the loyalty of the ship’s crew. If one of the Navy soldiers who knew King from his time in the SEALs had learned of his location, it might not have taken much persuasion to help set him free.
King kept staring at the corpse. He would never truly know who the dead man was — maybe an actual prisoner, maybe one of the crew tasked to help their superiors with an odd but necessary task.
But by planting him in this cell, Ramsay had led him to his death.
‘Piece of shit,’ King muttered under his breath.
He stood in silence for a moment, wondering where Slater and Isla were, wondering if all this chaos had been just to kill him and how many innocent lives would be taken when the battle had faded to a close.
He should never have surrendered himself over to the U.S. Navy.
He made a decision, right then and there. He wouldn’t willingly return to his cell — not if it put anyone else in the United States military at risk of being attacked by private paramilitary forces.
He would exile himself, from the special forces and from the rest of civilisation.
Until this had been brought to a close.
With the notion of escape seeping into his mind, he turned to run.
A shocking groan rumbled the entire carrier around him. He froze — then a wave of heat struck him and the walls at the back of each cell twisted and deformed.
A blast had ravaged the exterior of the warship, incredibly close to his location.
All hell broke loose.
His surroundings screamed and groaned in inhuman fashion. The floor tilted underneath him. A massive wave of vertigo threw his stomach into a tight knot. He snatched at a handhold on the nearest wall and paled as his feet left the ground for a moment.
The supercarrier had taken serious damage. Either the sub-levels were collapsing, or the entire behemoth of a warship was sinking.
Without a true sense of spatial awareness, he couldn’t tell down here.
With exposed pipes bursting and the walls warping before his eyes, he dashed for the top deck as fast as his limbs could allow.
His life depended on it.
13
Slater rounded the corner without a sound, sweeping Derek’s M4 across the space ahead.
Clear.
Isla trailed close behind, covering his six and scouting the doorways they passed for any sign of life. Ahead, Slater spotted a stairwell trailing up to the top deck. Gunfire and frantic shouting echoed down from above. Rainwater sloshed along the floor at the end of the hallway, spilling down from the stairwell’s exit.
‘That way,’ Slater said.
‘What do you propose we do after that?’
‘I did two years in the Air Force,’ Slater said quietly. ‘I say we steal a jet.’
‘Will, no…’
‘You got another idea?’
Isla paused. ‘Not right now.’
‘Then it’s my way or the highway. Unless you want to go back to your cell.’
‘Fuck that place. And fuck Ramsay.’
‘That’s what I like to hear.’
‘Speak of the devil,’ Isla muttered.
Slater wheeled on the spot as he heard someone staggering into the corridor behind them. He trained his M4 on the figure for a split second, before he realised the man was unarmed.
He was in bad shape. Slater had only seen him once, and in that time he had oozed superiority and control. Now his hair stuck out at crazy angles, smeared with blood. His eyes were bloodshot and his face was a deep shade of red. Slater spotted purple bruising around his throat, and realised he had come close to being choked to death.
By who? he thought.
It didn’t matter.
Slater was more than happy to finish the job.
He thought of the state that he’d found Isla in and saw the same surge of flaming red descend over his vision. Before anyone could stop him, he smashed a boot into Ramsay’s chest, sending the man to the ground in a spluttering heap. Slater stood over him, his finger twitching on the M4’s trigger.
‘Will, no!’ Isla screamed, piercingly loud.
Slater hesitated.
‘If you kill him,’ she said, ‘there’ll be no going back.’
‘I’m not going back regardless.’
‘It doesn’t matter. You don’t want the burden of having murdered a U.S. official.’
‘He’s not an official. He’s scum.’
‘Do it for me, at least.’
He sighed and lowered the weapon. Then he stamped down on Ramsay’s stomach, making the man splutter a second time. Ramsay winced, his usually-fierce eyes bunched up in pain.
‘I’m not helping him out of here,’ Slater said.
‘I’m not asking you to,’ Isla said. ‘But don’t you dare kill him.’
Slater nodded, seeing the sense in her line of reasoning. He stepped over the man and left him on the ground.
‘Get back … in your cells,’ Ramsay
whispered, only just audible above the din of war.
‘This ship’s going down, you idiot,’ Slater said. ‘We’re getting off it.’
‘You’re … too dangerous … to be on the run. We won’t allow it. I’ll hunt you down.’
‘Best of luck,’ Slater said.
He led Isla away from Ramsay, toward the stairwell. He watched her take a final glance at the man who had caused her so much distress and pain over the last week. Then she turned away and he hurried her up the stairs and into the storm.
They arrived in the open air in the shadow of the flaming control tower. Slater cast his gaze up at the enormous structure and winced. He looked out across the supercarrier, and it dawned on him just how massive the warship was.
The flat expanse of tarmac was the size of two football fields laid end to end. The carrier appeared as a floating island. Slater glanced off the edges of the ship and saw the swirling ocean lashing at the sides, stretching as far as the eye could see. It was almost fully dark now. Vast storm clouds covered the sky above, sending down torrential rain to wash across the warship’s deck.
He spotted three enemy helicopters circling the supercarrier, all Mil Mi-28 “Night Hunters”. Missiles streaked from the racks under their wings, detonating against the sides of the warship and slamming home on the top deck. Many of the aircraft sitting atop the tarmac were aflame, some of them utterly destroyed by the bombardment.
Across the runway, U.S. Navy soldiers and faceless mercenaries fired on each other. The sharp crack of automatic weapons blasted Slater’s ears like a deafening symphony. He sprinted to an empty Humvee and crouched beside it, shielding himself from any stray bullets tearing across the open ground.
Despite everything, the wind and rain blasting his face felt surprisingly pleasant. He had been locked up in a windowless cell for the last seven days, and the freedom struck a satisfying nerve.
‘If we’re really stealing a jet,’ Isla yelled above the relentless noise. ‘We need to wait for King. He can’t fly a plane.’