by Rogers, Matt
Rollins rotated a half-revolution in the centre of the clearing and fled down the trail, with a ticking time bomb on the passenger seat and a spear lodged through the headrest next to him.
All in a day’s work, he thought, as the furious outcries of the tribe echoed through the rainforest.
22
When he’d put a hundred feet of distance between himself and the clearing that had wreaked such havoc on his physical and mental state, Rollins could take the time to assess his condition.
He was in bad shape. He didn’t need a doctor to understand that. He’d taken numerous knocks to the head over the last twenty-four hours, and they’d accumulated into a strange brain fog that hung heavy over him. It took immense effort just to twist the jeep’s steering wheel from left to right. The jungle terrain didn’t help one bit — every pothole and dip in the dirt trail sent a jolt of nausea through him. He knew he needed rest, but there was no time for rest.
He still had a long way to go.
His bearings were shaky, no thanks to the beating the tribe had dished out on him the night before, but he figured he could plant the accelerator to the floor and race through the jungle until he came across ordinary civilisation. From there it would be a straightforward process of contacting the relevant authorities and extracting himself from Peru as fast as humanly possible.
Coated in sweat and blood and shaking with feverish chills, Rollins figured he needed at least a month of rest. He’d received the necessary immunisation shots, but something told him sustaining injuries of this nature in the Peruvian rainforest could spell disaster all the same. Reality was detached, like a filter had been placed over his vision that delayed everything by a half-second. He was slow to react, which meant…
The bomb.
He hadn’t even looked at it. All his concentration had been focused on escaping the clearing, and the fact that three spears had been hurled in his direction — each coming within a foot of taking his head clean off — had ruined his ability to form cohesive thoughts. He couldn’t focus on anything except how close he’d come to death.
So when he took one hand off the wheel and rotated the bomblet across the passenger seat to reveal the crude digital display, his brain didn’t process what his eyes were seeing right away.
4:36.
4:35.
4:34.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Rollins said, losing what little colour had returned to his face over the last couple of minutes.
He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what to think.
Four minutes.
How powerful is this thing?
He calmed himself as best he could, recognising that the uninhabited swathes of Peruvian rainforest stretching out all around him would be the best place for the device to go off. He just needed to gather his thoughts, clear his headspace, and search for somewhere to deposit the…
Bang.
His mental state was certainly compromised, because he hadn’t seen the vehicle approaching from the side until it was far too late. A jeep of identical size and shape roared into his peripheral vision and smashed into the rear door on Rollins’ side of the vehicle. He sensed the hood of the enemy vehicle crumple the metal framework mere inches behind his seat. He ducked involuntarily and held on for dear life as his own jeep entered a violent tailspin, kicking up mud and churning the undergrowth along the side of the trail.
‘Where the hell did that come from?’ he muttered to himself through clenched teeth.
G-forces yanked him this way and that, threatening to strip him of consciousness. He twisted the wheel left and right but nothing seemed to work. Something thudded into his lap hard enough to send a bolt of agony shooting up through his core, and he looked down to see the bomblet rolling across his thighs. The shift in momentum had displaced the capsule, sending it careening across the centre console into Rollins’ lap.
He couldn’t move the bomblet without taking his hands off the wheel, which was out of the question at this point.
So he ignored the explosive sphere resting in his lap and battled for control of the jeep. Half the chassis had been caved in by the impact with the new vehicle, and Rollins realised the rear tyre had been misaligned, jolted off-centre. He corrected course and barely managed to avoid ploughing straight into an enormous tree positioned just off the side of the trail.
He regained control of the jeep, and searched desperately for the new arrival.
Sure enough, his initial glimpse had proved accurate. It was an identical jeep, packed with three hulking combatants of similar ethnicity to the men Rollins had gunned down in the village. More of Frisson’s thugs, evidently chasing up the disappearance of their employer.
Rollins shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He wondered how many more mercenaries were headed this way…
Where did they even come from?
Then he saw another trail running perpendicular to his own, forming an X in the dirt. The enemy jeep had come screaming in from the right and T-boned him at exactly the right moment. His own jeep’s engine coughed and spluttered as it battled to stay alive. Sweating freely, Rollins brought the Heckler & Koch USP up to aim and let off a series of four consecutive shots, expertly placed. He was in the midst of a chaotic war zone, but all his training had taught him to calm down in the heat of the moment and deal with the issue at hand.
Namely, the enemy vehicle.
Two of his shots caught the driver in the face, destroying the windshield and sending blood spraying around the enemy jeep, which had come to a standstill a few dozen feet away. The third glanced across the passenger’s shoulder, and the fourth missed.
That was enough.
They weren’t going anywhere in a hurry.
Rollins dropped the gun and stamped the accelerator again, barely able to comprehend what was happening.
He fishtailed the rear of his jeep wildly across the trail and powered back in the same direction he’d been heading in the first place…
…and behind him, an approaching cavalcade of engine roars rose through the jungle.
More.
23
It came down to momentum.
Rollins spent vital seconds crushing his foot against the pedal, willing the jeep to find traction on the slippery, uneven surface and pick up speed. In that time a pair of newly arriving jeeps came roaring around the bend, mounting Rollins’ trail and surging toward him in pursuit. They passed the driverless jeep, leaving it behind. This was a cold, ruthless world. One of their own was dead, and the passenger of the first jeep was potentially fatally wounded, but avenging the death of their employer was paramount.
And, in all likelihood, retrieving the bomb they’d worked so hard to construct was important too.
The bomb.
Rollins grimaced, wiped sweat and dirt and blood off his forehead, and checked the timer again.
3:16.
3:15.
3:14.
He let out an animalistic grunt, unable to find words to express the gravity of the situation. Before, he’d figured the worst case scenario would be throwing the bomblet out of the moving vehicle and letting it explode by the side of the trail, but even that option had been exhausted. There were two enemy jeeps only a hundred feet behind him, and closing the distance fast. If he took his hands off the wheel to heave the bomblet off his lap, the jeep would careen off the trail and hit a tree, killing Rollins where he sat. If he kept his hands on the wheel in order to use all his available energy to evade his pursuers, then the bomb would go off in his lap.
Goddamnit.
It didn’t help that he’d taken the beating of a lifetime.
He hadn’t realised at the time, but the jarring impact with the enemy jeep had done more damage than he’d originally anticipated. A horrendous ache had sprouted to life in his neck — he’d suffered whiplash. He rolled his head from side to side, but that only made things worse.
Pull yourself together.
Three minutes, then you can rest.
Until then…
Fat insects rushed in through the open windshield frame, a couple of them splattering off Rollins’ face. He ignored them completely, even though the horrid humidity and overall stink of the uninhabited jungle proved uncomfortable as all hell. Right now it was the least of his concerns.
Sparks flew directly in front of his eyes, and then a searing pain exploded in his leg. He gasped in shock and looked down, trying to work out what the hell had happened.
He was pouring blood out of his upper thigh — not the kind of unbelievable outpour that indicated a severed artery, but serious damage all the same. His brain tried to process what his eyes were feeding it.
He’d been shot.
How?
The sparks. A bullet fired from one of the pursuing jeeps had ricocheted off the top of the windshield frame and speared down into Rollins’ leg. He cursed the open-topped frame of his jeep and spurred the vehicle faster, desperate to put distance between himself and the pursuing convoy.
He couldn’t feel the pain yet. The dull throbbing was there, pounding in his ears and drowning out all the other sounds, but the searing agony of a gunshot wound hadn’t yet materialised. He knew adrenalin was keeping it at bay, and that his mind could only control the sensation for a few minutes before he caved in.
But that didn’t matter, because he only had a few minutes anyway…
He surged down the trail, taking each bend as fast as he dared without overturning the jeep itself. He hit a particularly deep pothole and the entire chassis shuddered and groaned, threatening to tear apart at any moment. At the same time the bomblet weighed heavy on his legs, now coated in blood from his gunshot wound.
And the roaring of the approaching vehicles gained steadily closer.
Rollins glanced down.
2:10.
2:09.
2:08.
He crushed the pedal underfoot, but it was no use. He’d maxed out the jeep’s capabilities — it was an efficient, reliable vehicle, but it hadn’t been tuned for speed. It had its limits, and Rollins had met them. He could do nothing but mentally will the truck faster, which did nothing to help.
Slowly, he began to come to terms with the fact that he might die out here.
His escape had been near inconceivable — he hadn’t even expected to make it out of the hut without catching a spear to the throat. But he’d killed Bradley Frisson, and escaped the tribe, and now on the final stretch of the madness he was going to fail. He had two minutes to dispose of the bomblet and rid himself of the two pursuing vehicles, both packed with European mercenaries in perfect health. Trained men, hellbent on stopping him in his tracks.
And he was running on fumes.
He took a deep breath and steeled himself for the inevitable. It was a difficult concept to grapple with — the understanding that no matter what you did, nothing would get you out of this situation alive.
Then the pain set in.
As soon as he latched onto a moment of weakness, it opened the floodgates.
Rollins winced and doubled over in his seat, grappling with a wave of agony that passed through him, shaking him to his core, debilitating him where he sat. He hunched over the bomblet. Sweat dripped off his brow, splashing against the steel. It was a strange enough sight to bring him hurtling back to reality, and he straightened back up as he caught a second wind.
Too late.
After drifting a few dozen feet in the wrong direction, one of the front wheels caught in a pothole and twisted wildly off-centre. A horrendous wrenching, earth-shattering groan resonated up through the chassis, and the next moment Rollins jerked viciously against his seatbelt as the entire jeep rolled up on its side and flipped on the trail.
24
Rollins’ world disintegrated.
The build up of the accumulated injuries — coupled with the jarring impact of the barrel roll and the blurred rush of near hallucinogenic images as his vision twisted and turned in all directions at once — spelled disaster. There was a single vicious impact, then another, then a third, softer hit, and then everything was still. Rollins came to rest upside down in the driver’s seat, blood dripping off his scalp, his head pounding and chills running down his spine.
He slipped in and out of consciousness.
The jeep had come to rest upside-down, sprawled wildly across the ground, its chassis all but destroyed. The open top frame had protected Rollins from getting pulverised, but the impacts had stripped him of any ability to move, let alone defend himself.
When he looked around and saw surroundings entirely unfamiliar to the path he’d been travelling along seconds earlier, he couldn’t quite put it together.
Then it clicked.
He wasn’t on the trail anymore.
The jeep had ended its brutal roll in a shallow ditch in the rainforest floor, coming to rest surrounded by lush ferns and thick swathes of undergrowth. Rollins couldn’t see more than a few feet in any direction, but he could certainly hear the drone of the two pursuing jeeps. They were closing in fast. They would be on him in moments.
He didn’t have time to think.
He just had to move, to scrape out survival one step at a time.
And that began with a simple click.
He reached up and unbuckled his seatbelt, depressing the latch. He fell in ungracious fashion out of the seat, landing on the small of his back on the undergrowth below the jeep’s open roof. He spent a few seconds there, panting hard, frozen in time.
Feeling awfully sorry for himself.
Then he sucked it up and searched in a panic for the glint of the steel bomblet.
It was there, only a couple of feet from his face. The bomb sat unceremoniously atop a pile of ferns, weighing them down, innocuous as anything. It was hard to discern that it was dangerous at all. But as Rollins laboured to roll onto his stomach and rotate the capsule toward his face, he wiped blood out of his eyes for the millionth time and scrutinised the digital display.
1:08.
1:07.
1:06.
‘Move,’ he whispered through crimson-stained teeth, willing himself forward, trying anything to encourage his body to get the hell up and get out from under the jeep.
So he moved.
He searched deep within himself and found some untapped level to his psyche, a storage container of energy reserves buried deep within for times when superhuman effort was required. Rollins had been through unbelievable hardship over the course of his life, but nothing like this.
Nothing where the essence of his being would soon cease to exist unless he moved.
So he rose. He shifted to a crawl and heaved the bomblet out from underneath the overturned jeep, letting it bounce and thump across the undergrowth. He shut out the sounds of screaming European mercenaries descending the slope toward his vehicle. The Heckler & Koch semi-automatic was nowhere to be found — not that he would have been able to do anything with it anyway. He could barely see a foot in front of his own face.
He shimmied out from underneath the jeep, unable to believe he was moving. He stamped one boot into the earth and skewered it in place, testing it for support before he put weight on it.
Then he put the other foot down.
He stood up.
Every action took an obscene amount of effort. He bent down and clasped both hands around either side of the bomblet, and he wrenched the steel capsule off the ground with all his might. If it had seemed heavy before, that was nothing in comparison to what followed. It drew similarities to a six-hundred pound deadlift — in Rollins’ diminished state, even moving the bomblet off the ground made him squeeze and strain with what pathetic energy he had left in his system.
He took a step forward.
The world spun.
He took another step forward.
His vision lurched.
He stepped again.
Nausea overwhelmed him. He’d only made it a few feet away from the jeep. He threw a single glance over his shoulder and saw murky silhouettes gh
osting down the hillside, some of them shouting inarticulate commands.
The mercenaries…
Coming for him…
He found a sudden burst of momentum and managed a rapid burst of steps, each of them drilling a bolt of agony through his torso. He didn’t imagine making it much further. Ahead, the jungle sprawled out in a wide arc, thick with vegetation and towering tree trunks. A thin veil of light filtered through the canopy of leaves overhead, creating a cathedral effect in the gloom.
It was oddly beautiful.
Rollins checked the bomb.
0:48.
0:47.
0:46.
He nodded, trying to reassure himself that he had ample time left. Three quarters of a minute was a world of time. He would keep moving. Never stop moving…
Why was he even carrying the bomblet?
The thought speared through him and sapped him of all motivation. Paling, he realised he’d been operating on autopilot. He should have thought the situation through. He had no reason to be dragging the capsule. He should have left the bomblet underneath the jeep and ran for his life.
He collapsed, sapped of all his strength.
He went down on his rear, slumping into the undergrowth and twisting simultaneously, so he landed in a seated position facing the mercenaries. He wanted to look death in the eye. He wondered who would kill him first — the approaching enemies, or the bomb.
It didn’t matter either way.
They swarmed toward him, five or six of them, gleeful smiles spread across their faces. They were built like tanks, all muscles and tattoos and tactical gear. Rollins had seen their type a hundred times before. Men with combat experience that favoured turning a profit over serving one’s country. They would continue to plague the seedy stretches of the earth for as long as it existed.
Rollins wondered why he’d even bothered trying to become a Black Force agent.
The bomb would go off, and he would die.
But at least he stopped Bradley Frisson.
Then one of the mercenaries went down in a bloody heap, and the situation changed once more.