by Matt Rogers
He moaned, and wondered if he’d even manage to stay conscious.
And then the anger built.
It rose like a storm, brewing in intensity despite his best efforts to control it. If one more punch—
—bang.
It hit him in the forehead, and he lost his composure entirely.
He shot to his feet, dodging a couple of half-hearted looping haymakers from the secret policemen, and darted between the ranks of the trio that were beating him.
They did nothing to resist — they could do nothing at all. They were in shock.
They thought they’d been beating him senseless, but now they were beginning to realise he’d just been biding his time.
He shoved them all aside and punched the first armed policeman so hard in the nose that his nostrils exploded in unison, like twin faucets turned on. Slater used the same arm to bend into a vicious elbow, going into killer mode as he cracked the second armed policeman’s jaw with the same sweeping motion.
Two men permanently injured, maybe even crippled, in a single strike.
All his anger and fury unleashed.
Two loaded assault rifles spilled to the ground.
Slater turned his attention to the three men who’d been raining down blows on him, and got ready to fuck them up.
And then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw one of the men on the other side of the jeep put a pistol to Mehmut’s head and pull the trigger.
17
Time slowed down.
Slater heard the weapon discharge, and saw the translator’s head snap back on his shoulders, and instantly knew the man was dead.
There was blood and gore and brain matter in the mix, but he ignored the sight.
He simply acknowledged Mehmut’s death, and kept moving.
Not a single millisecond was worth wasting right now.
He compartmentalised. The first port of call was arming himself. Moving fast, he bent down and picked up one of the assault rifles that had been dropped at his feet. It was a QBZ-97A 5.56 mm — a variant of the Type 95 Automatic Rifle used at large by Chinese law enforcement. This particular model had been set to fire three-round bursts, and Slater absorbed all this information in a heartbeat.
He shot the guy with the pistol in the head, firing across the top of the open-topped jeep. That guy took all three consecutive rounds to his delicate facial features and spiralled out of sight, losing his footing as he died.
There was one other guy armed on that side of the vehicle, so Slater shot him too — this time targeting the chest.
He’d risked the headshot to ensure a quick death, but centre mass was always more desirable.
That man crumpled, bending at the waist like a collapsible table and disappearing in turn.
Then there were four left — three right near Slater, one standing across from him over Mehmut’s corpse.
And none of them were armed.
Slater had them all at gunpoint, and the rapidity with which he’d decimated their entire party left them frozen in a collective state of shock. The two guys previously holding Type 95 rifles — one now sporting a broken nose, the other a broken jaw — stirred from semi-consciousness, and sat up in unison.
They studied their surroundings through hazy eyes.
Slater kicked them in the head, one by one, and sent them straight back down again.
The four secret policemen left standing watched in awe.
And Slater stewed with indecision.
Deep in the throes of a moral crisis.
He didn’t let it plague him for long. He had a decision to make.
Leave these men alive and he was giving them the chance to regroup and come after him — which they no doubt would do. They weren’t noble in any sense of the word. Sure, they were up here intercepting ETIM soldiers, perhaps even planning an assault on the encampment in these mountains.
But when they weren’t doing that, they were running secret torturous re-education camps and slaughtering the ethnic natives of the region.
Slater knew exactly what was required to operate as a secret policeman in a region like this. It took a ruthless level of sociopathic behaviour. It took lies, espionage, rape and murder. It took locking up hundreds of thousands of people under the guise of “vocational training” and then pretending the camps didn’t exist.
He stared at them, and they looked back at him with hard, cruel eyes.
They would kill him without a moment’s hesitation, just like they’d slaughtered Mehmut.
Slater had no allegiance to the translator, but he could use it as a reference point for what they’d do to him.
He imagined if he hadn’t fought back. They would have kept beating him, then carted him off to a labour camp, allowing him to suffer miserably until he either starved to death or was worked to death.
And Black Force would have never heard from him again.
Slater decided.
One by one, he shot them all in the head.
And he considered it a mercy.
18
He didn’t say a word.
There was no-one to speak to.
Alone again, he left all the corpses where they were, and got behind the wheel.
He didn’t bother collecting their weapons. What was the point? He had an M4A1 carbine with every attachment he could think to use, and enough ammunition to last for weeks at the bottom of his pack. The carbine was in the passenger footwell, so he propped it up on the centre console, and he shifted the pack from the rear seats to the passenger seat.
That was all he needed.
Stoic and calm, he accelerated away from the bodies of Mehmut and eight secret policemen.
His heart rate had barely increased throughout the ordeal. In fact he now felt nothing at all, and that simple fact perturbed him. He’d just taken part in something that might scar a civilian permanently. Anyone witnessing such graphic violence — let alone doing most of the killing themselves — might ruin their brain for life. Trauma was real, and incredibly serious, and yet Slater had never had to grapple with the murder he dished out.
He always considered it justified.
What he’d seen, on the other hand…
The worst part was always what he was unable to prevent. It was the depressing reality of the job — he couldn’t save everyone. Mehmut, despite his flaws, truly did have a family. They’d be waiting for him to come home, and provide for them. In other parts of the world, equality between the sexes was making rapid progress, but the same could not be said for rural China. It would be awfully difficult for Mehmut’s wife to find work. She would struggle, maybe for the rest of her life, to feed her children.
But Slater cut himself short right then and there, because if he went down that avenue he’d spend all his life in China helping the oppressed.
Prioritise.
You know what you’re here to do.
So do it.
There were hardly any turn-offs this deep in the mountain range, and Slater gave silent thanks that Mehmut had got him this far. There was just a single mountainous trail passing through treacherous gorges and valleys, zigzagging its way through the landscape. He figured he’d stay on the trail for as long as he dared, and if he didn’t run into the encampment he’d track down a lone party of ETIM soldiers and force the information out of them. He was a man of improvisation above all else — it had been drilled into him since he’d first signed the contract to join a black operations wing of the U.S. government.
There were never any concrete plans in place for his assignments.
He just put boots on the ground, and then figured it out as he went along.
With one hand firmly attached to the wheel, he fished a couple of MREs out of his pack and wolfed them down. He realised he hadn’t eaten since leaping out of the plane the night before, and the intense physical exertion made him famished like nothing else. He gave it ten minutes, and then extracted a third ration pack. He ate that too.
Satiated, he worked on ke
eping the tendrils of fatigue at bay. They were there in the corners of his vision, enticing him with whispered promises of rest.
You need to sleep.
You’re not on your A-game.
Pull over.
Have a nap.
Insidious, and ever-present.
He reached a crest in the trail and slowed to a crawl before it fell into a steady decline for much of the next few miles. He didn’t want to roar over the rise and find ten gun barrels pointed right at him.
Lucky he slowed down.
As soon as he made it over the lip of the incline, he saw a vast valley sweeping out before him. There were mountains dusted with snow all around the valley, like something straight off a postcard. But at the bottom of the decline rested a cluster of human activity — Slater saw log buildings and open-topped jeeps identical to his own, and tiny silhouettes darting to and fro between the huts in the mountainous chill, and a larger main warehouse for storing God-knows-what.
ETIM.
The camp.
Slater weighed up his next move. He considered what they knew. They were anticipating the arrival of the jeep, driven by Mehmut, and they expected the other four men to be there, too. They expected to see Slater bound and gagged in the rear seats, or stuffed in the trunk.
There was no possibility in which he could disguise himself as an ETIM soldier. He was simply too big, and too dark-skinned, and even if he was wearing Mehmut’s clothes, they would realise he wasn’t one of them in seconds.
He studied the slope of the land. It wasn’t overwhelmingly steep. It ran at perhaps a twenty degree angle all the way down to the base of the trail, and the encampment rested maybe five hundred feet off the main trail, in the small bowl at the bottom of the valley. The hills surrounding it were steep and riddled with overgrown shrubbery. Impossible to traverse on foot, or by vehicle.
And that was the beauty of the camp.
There was one way to get down there, and they’d know you were coming from a mile away.
The only possibility for a siege would be to take the high ground, right here, and potshot the ETIM soldiers with a sniper rifle.
But Slater knew he could only get one shot off before the rest of the terrorists scattered, and with hostages in the mix it was nigh-on impossible to protect them.
And he didn’t have a sniper rifle.
With no intel on the camp, or how many hostiles he’d be facing, he removed the possibility of a reckless forward charge.
He’d done it before, but the landscape — coupled with the realm of the unknown — made it a bad move in every sense.
So he kept his foot on the brake. He threw the jeep into reverse and edged away from the crest of the trail, ducking the hood back out of sight in case one of the terrorists looked up and saw the vehicle hovering there, just a tiny speck amidst the sweeping mountains.
Then he turned it around and set off back the way he had come.
19
Ethan Turner had little hope for the future.
He was in a log hut, bound at the ankles and wrists, with a dirty rag between his teeth that had been tied tight behind his skull. The rag tasted horrid, like it hadn’t been washed in years, and the real terror came when he’d dry-heaved earlier that morning. He’d quickly figured out that if he vomited, the puke would go straight back down his throat, and he’d probably choke to death on it.
So he’d spent much of the last day fighting the irresistible urge to bring up the contents of his stomach. He knew they were insidious thoughts, but part of him wanted to just do it.
If he made himself throw up, at least he’d be dead in a couple of minutes.
It wouldn’t be a particularly pleasant way to go, but he figured whatever his captors had in store for him was bound to be a whole lot worse.
Ultimately, he decided not to.
He didn’t have much willpower, but there was a fraction of resistance locked away inside him. He let it out, and turned as stoic as it was possible for a twenty-two year old slacker to be.
He couldn’t see much — there was no light in here, and he relied on slivers of natural light from outside the hut to creep in through the gaps between logs.
It was cold, and there was a sickly smell in the air.
Ethan had precious little experience in these parts of the world, and as he lay there he figured out he’d never experienced real adversity in his life, but he thought he could identify the smell all the same.
It was fear.
And it came from the walls, from the floor, from the air.
People had died in this hut. He was sure of it. He could taste their terror, smell their sweat. Maybe it was dried blood he could smell. He didn’t know, but it was awful, and he’d now spent five days in this godforsaken place.
At least Samantha was here with him.
At least he had someone he knew in proximity, even if the rags in their mouths prevented them from speaking to each other.
The only times the dark-skinned Asian men running the camp took their gags off was to feed them, give them water, and let them empty their bladders and bowels outside. Every time they stepped outside, Ethan lost a little more hope. He looked all around at the mountains spearing into the sky, creating an arena-like effect at the base of the valley the camp sat in, and he figured no-one would ever come to help them.
He was in rural China, for God’s sakes.
Why did he ever anticipate a rescue if they were taken?
No, they had made the choice to come out here, and it had backfired spectacularly.
Well, Noah Powell had made the choice. And they’d only seen brief glimpses of him over the last five days.
For reasons unbeknownst to either of them, they’d been keeping Noah in a separate hut. In fact, Ethan figured he hadn’t seen Noah in two whole days. For all he knew, the guy was dead.
And the last time he’d seen Noah—
Don’t think about that.
Samantha stirred beside him — she was pinned to the wall in a seated position, with her hands bound to cable ties looped around the logs and her ankles locked to the floor by iron manacles. She wasn’t going anywhere. Their eyes met, and the desperation flowed between them.
That was all they could do.
Look at each other.
And hope for a way out of this mess before things got really bad.
Because they both silently knew how much worse it could get. Samantha hadn’t been raped yet. They’d both been beaten at the start — Ethan had been punched and kicked to the point where Samantha had failed to recognise him when they’d first been locked up in the hut, but over the preceding days the swelling had gone down and his skin had gone from purple to brown, and finally back to pink. Then the terrorists hadn’t hit either of them since.
Ethan got the sense they were preserving them both for something.
The desperate look went on a little longer.
And then Samantha jerked her right wrist and it came free.
They both sat there, stunned, not knowing what to do. Ethan instinctively threw a glance at the door. It remained closed. No-one had heard the sound of the cable tie dislodging from the wall. Samantha was equally shocked. She looked down at her raw wrist, then back up at Ethan, then at the old piece-of-shit cable tie that had snapped in half the moment she’d applied force to it.
Ethan remembered the old tale of baby elephants kept in place by a rope, so that by the time they became fully grown they were so accustomed to captivity they did nothing to resist — even if the rope around their neck wasn’t attached to anything at all.
Samantha hadn’t even tried to break her restraints for nearly five days.
She could have had a hand free the whole time.
She nearly sobbed at the revelation.
Then she pulled herself together, reached up, and pulled the rag out of her mouth. She slid it out from between her teeth, and it fell loose around her neck.
Then she stretched out her hand and managed to touch the very e
dge of Ethan’s gag.
He looked at her with pleading eyes.
She fell back, then tried again, and finally got her fingers hooked in the foul-smelling material.
Ethan pulled his head away, and she pulled in the opposite direction with her fingers.
The rag came loose.
He made to take a giant gasp of air, but cut himself off at the last second. He breathed low and shallow and quiet instead. There were footsteps all around them — movement in the camp.
Ethan savoured each breath, and before he spoke, he took a moment to compose himself.
He whispered across the hut, ‘You okay?’
She looked at him, and nodded.
Her face was pale.
She said, ‘Where’s Noah?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ethan whispered.
Then he looked down at the rag resting on top of the manacles around his ankles and said, ‘How am I going to get that gag back around my mouth?’
They both went quiet.
They could almost hear each other’s hearts thrumming in the silence.
20
Finally, Samantha said under her breath, ‘We’ll figure something out.’
‘We’d better,’ Ethan said, and he sensed the beginnings of a panic attack rising. ‘Because they’re not going to be happy if they come in and we’re speaking to each other.’
He slowed down his breathing, and focused on lowering his heart rate.
It didn’t help that he’d been affected by an almost permanent anxiety since the acid had worn off five days earlier. It had been, single-handedly, the worst experience of his life, and he figured it was close to the worst experience it was possible to have. He’d wondered if he would ever recover from the trauma. With his brain firing on all cylinders from the LSD, creating fragmented spirals of thought and wonder, it hadn’t taken long to spiral into utter disaster as soon as they’d been kidnapped. It had taken him hours to figure out whether the terrorists were part of the acid trip or not.