Warrior_A Jason King Thriller Read online

King sat motionless behind the wheel of the truck, watching the bills dissipate into thin air.

  Just as Reed had.

  Then he noticed churning water out the driver’s window, significant enough to seize his attention away from the wind howling through the open windshield frame. He looked out to sea and spotted a craft hurtling toward the shore, moving fast, approaching hard.

  He instinctively reached for the HK416, ready to fetch another magazine from the duffel bag and prepare for an all-out war.

  ‘He can’t have more reinforcements,’ King muttered under his breath. ‘How the fuck…?’

  Beth turned to him inquisitively, then she looked past him to stare at the approaching craft in unison. He noticed her paling out of the corner of his eye.

  ‘Extra forces from the container ship?’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t think he’d bring an army with him. He must have planned this out in detail.’

  He began to reach into the passenger footwell for a fresh magazine, but something stopped him. He squinted, analysing the approaching boat.

  ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that…?’

  All of a sudden, he recognised the insignia on the hull. It was the same emblem emblazoned on the convoy of vehicles that had stopped him on the way to Afgooye. He squinted hard and made out a trio of shadowy figures milling around onboard the boat’s upper deck. It was hard to discern, but he thought he spotted uniforms.

  ‘Somali Police Force,’ he said. ‘Thank God.’

  Beth nodded. ‘Makes sense. They deal with maritime law enforcement. I haven’t been here long, but they must do an awfully poor job of it if these kind of payloads are getting through to container ships.’

  ‘I can only imagine,’ King said, remembering the glint in the officers’ eyes as he’d handed over a hefty bribe to ensure safe passage. ‘Do you have your military credentials on you?’

  She nodded again. ‘I look like hell though. Still covered in your blood.’

  ‘Sorry about that,’ King said. ‘Needed something to shock the bandits into hesitating.’

  ‘It worked,’ she said. ‘That’s all that matters.’

  ‘You think you can persuade these guys to take us out to sea?’

  ‘I’m sure I can.’

  ‘Then let’s go.’

  He reached down and snatched the entire duffel bag out of the footwell, slinging it over one shoulder. He and Beth stepped down out of the tractor unit, plunging into the white sand. It stretched for miles in either direction, shrinking to a pinpoint whichever way King looked. To their rear, the rising sand dunes masked the view of El Hur itself.

  The Somali Police Force boat pulled into shore in a blaze of momentum and the three officers leapt out into the shallow waters. Here, the swells had diluted, allowing the boat to hover in place without the need for one of the men to drop an anchor over the side. The ocean soaked through their pants, sloshing around their knees as they waded up to Beth and King.

  There were 9mm semi-automatic pistols in leather holsters at their waist, but it seemed they had no intention of drawing them.

  They didn’t consider King a threat, obviously.

  King followed suit, dropping the duffel bag into the sand and letting the empty AK-47 fall on top of the canvas material.

  As soon as he let them out of his hands, and gestured for Beth to follow suit, the tension seemed to dissipate from the approaching officers. Their gazes wandered, when previously they’d been locked onto the pair.

  The officers had certainly stumbled onto a strange scene.

  They sauntered onto the beachhead and came to a halt directly opposite King and Beth, forming a single line. It was obvious they were hesitant on how to proceed. They were maritime law enforcement officers, but King doubted that usually involved confronting a pair of Americans this far off the beaten track.

  King knew none of them would speak English — the SPF translator he’d met on the way to Afgooye had been a mild fluke, only present upon Reed’s request.

  These men hadn’t been instructed to meet them anywhere.

  A chance encounter.

  So, immediately, he started a series of gestures, ushering the trio’s attention to the RHIB speeding away from shore. The craft was already a dot on the horizon, heading straight for one of the container ships floating a mile or so out at sea.

  The three men turned in unison to follow King’s gaze.

  They noted the fleeing craft, and turned to study the empty semi-trailer littered with cash, right next to the dormant tractor unit.

  An odd sight, to be sure.

  One of the men stepped forward, his eyes still fixed on the semi-trailer. King took the movement as simple curiosity, unable to help himself as he closed in on the sight of hundred-dollar bills drifting in the breeze.

  ‘Not mine,’ King muttered.

  Then, in one fluid motion, the officer who had waltzed into range snapped his attention straight to King, producing a set of steel handcuffs from his belt with a practiced flick of the wrist. They made eye contact, and the man gave King a look as if to say, What were you expecting?

  King understood, all at once.

  The party of police officers on the road to Afgooye weren’t isolated from the rest of the force. They were a single entity, led to servitude by whoever paid the most. Obviously King’s ruse to pass himself off as Reed’s brother had only worked for a short period of time. It would have taken one phone call on Reed’s part during the drive to El Hur, and from that point onward the entire Somali Police Force would have been instructed to keep an eye out for King, and stop him at any cost.

  Money talked, after all.

  It meant everything out here.

  A billion dollars could buy a whole lot of help.

  But — in the half-second it had taken King to realise the trio’s intentions — none of them had bothered to reach for their firearms. Perhaps they weren’t accustomed to violent combat, used to compliance from their foes. Perhaps they had taken King dropping his rifle as an act of surrender, even before the confrontation had taken place.

  In the end, King had no qualms with the trio’s decision to attempt to apprehend him without expecting him to resist arrest.

  Because that meant the following seconds would hand themselves over to fists and feet.

  King bristled with anticipation as the officer closest to him reached half-heartedly for his wrists, searching with the open handcuffs, sizing up the stretch of skin to clamp the steel across.

  He waited until the officer touched him — some kind of effort to flick an internal switch, just as he had done with the armed bandits.

  When a single sweaty palm clamped down on his forearm, he exploded off the mark.

  44

  It came down to physics.

  The guy across from King had sinewy muscle, but it rested on a skinny, athletic frame. He was built like a marathon runner — obviously he kept himself in good shape, without an ounce of fat on him, but it was a world away from the brutish powerlifter’s frame King sported. With five inches of height over the man and enough explosive power in his strikes to put anyone down for the count with a single direct impact, the guy never stood a chance.

  King knew exactly where he and Beth would end up if they allowed themselves to be arrested, and nothing about the grim situation enticed him. He let the ramifications fuel him as he swung a pointed elbow like a steel baseball bat, hitting the guy in the lowest point of his jaw with enough kinetic force to shatter bones and send teeth flying loose.

  King had overcompensated with the first strike, because he needed to take advantage of the time it would take the other pair to react. Their eyes widened as their comrade crumpled before them, but by that point King had leapfrogged over the first officer’s unconscious form and surged into range within the space of a single second in time.

  He focused entirely on intimidation.

  The two remaining officers were reaching for their weapons — one a little faster than the other. The
guy on the right looked youthful and inexperienced, his eyes widening as the situation backfired. King imagined he hadn’t spent much time in live combat situations. The murky world of bribes and extortion paled in comparison to an adrenalin-charged fistfight. Now he was panicking. King had seized his attention, and he hadn’t even thought to reach for his sidearm.

  The other guy was a little older, a little wiser. He’d experienced the trials and tribulations of Somalia for long enough to be ready in a heartbeat. So as the man reached down instinctively and wrapped a hand around his firearm, King slipped straight into a Muay Thai stance and fired off a blistering volley of side kicks with the same leg, one after the other in rapid succession.

  Bang-bang-bang-bang.

  Leg down, leg up. Repeat.

  Four total, in the space of a couple of seconds.

  Thousands of hours of relentless practice on heavy bags and coaches’ pads paid off — the first kick crushed the officer’s forearm into his side, the second slammed with a hollow thud into the guy’s exposed abdomen, the third pummelled the exact same area with an equal amount of explosive force, and the fourth landed a little higher, smashing across his sternum.

  The guy went down in a crumpling heap, stunned into submission by the onslaught, not going anywhere. Bones had been broken and shock had set in. All thoughts of reaching for a weapon had been hastily abandoned.

  With each consecutive kick, King had shifted a little closer to the last officer, skirting a few inches across the sand with his grounded foot. By the time he completed the barrage he had manoeuvred himself into range.

  By that point it had been four seconds since King had thrown his first strike — and, finally, the third officer realised he would achieve nothing by gawking and reached for his gun.

  Perhaps it might have surprised King years earlier, but he’d seen it many times before — those unaccustomed to sudden and explosive violence often found themselves slow to react, even if all their training had taught them to respond fast to an instant threat.

  The last officer clamped a hand around his weapon, but it took him a half-second to wriggle the gun free from its holster, and by that point King had closed the foot of space between them and bundled the man by the collar. He wrapped his unbroken hand around the young guy’s shirt and transferred all his energy into a single mighty heave.

  He hurled the kid — literally — through the air, yanking him off the ground with enough of a change in momentum to make him drop the pistol.

  As soon as King saw the weapon fly free of the guy’s sweaty palm, he reversed the officer’s momentum in the air and dumped him on his head in the sand. The somewhat-soft terrain ensured the kid wouldn’t be paralysed for life, but the dull impact had enough force behind it to knock him senseless for the foreseeable future.

  He stepped away from the third and final body, barely out of breath. From there it was a methodical process of levering the sidearms out of the officers’ holsters and tossing them far out to sea. He briefly considered adding them to his arsenal, but any extra firepower would just prove cumbersome. He had the AK-47 and the M45 pistol in his duffel bag, which would prove more than enough for whatever lay ahead. He only had one functional hand, after all.

  Beth didn’t move.

  ‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘We’re in deep shit.’

  King said, ‘I’m not. I’m allowed to do this. And if we make it through this, I’ll make sure you’re cleared of all wrongdoing.’

  ‘You can do that?’

  ‘No, but my handler can.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Not really. But I’m hoping he has the influence. Now let’s go. Clock’s ticking.’

  The sun had finished its ascent, casting warm daylight over the coastline. In any other circumstance, King might have stopped to admire the view in either direction down the coastline — if he could forget he was standing on the edge of a war-torn wasteland, it might have even seemed like a desirable setting.

  But the distant patch of sea spray representing Reed careening toward one of the offshore container ships shattered all chances of getting distracted.

  King stared at the now-empty police motorboat — roughly the size of a small car with a windshield covered in grime and scratches — and made up his mind on the spot. He fetched his duffel bag and the loaded Heckler & Koch assault rifle from the sand a few feet away and made straight for the boat.

  When he noticed that he’d plunged into the shallow waters alone, he turned back to see Beth standing awkwardly on the spot, shifting from foot to foot.

  ‘I’m not used to this,’ she said.

  ‘Used to what?’

  ‘All this forward momentum. I got accustomed to staying in one place, and protecting it. I’ve never been further from my comfort zone in my life, to be perfectly honest.’

  ‘Stay here,’ King said. ‘I don’t want you doing anything you’re not okay with.’

  She shook her head. ‘Can’t do that either. I would have just stayed at the compound in Mogadishu if I didn’t want to see this through. I’d had enough of Personal Security Detail, thank you very much.’

  ‘Is it personal? Did you like Victor and Johnson?’

  ‘I hate Bryson Reed,’ she said, which provided all the answers King needed.

  ‘Then get in the boat. You didn’t come this far to stall here.’

  It gave her the kick in the stomach she needed to lurch forward after King. He didn’t give her time to reconsider, turning away and heaving himself over the lip of the motorboat’s hull. He landed on his rear in the middle of the deck, taking caution to cradle his badly broken wrist. Despite his best efforts to ignore the injury, treating it as another scratch in the overall accumulation of trauma, the next level of pain was presenting itself.

  Throbbing agony ebbed and flowed up his arm, making his vision waver. He grimaced, stuffed the sensation down into a tiny compartment within himself, and focused on helping Beth into the boat.

  He reached for the controls, ready to turn the craft one-hundred-and-eighty degrees and send them hurtling after Reed in a blaze of horsepower, but something made him hesitate. He checked the three police officers on the beach, each of them in varying states of agony, and thought long and hard about their potential usefulness.

  ‘Reed has help,’ he said finally. ‘On the container ship. He must. There’s no way he could have co-ordinated an exact meeting point with an international shipping company in the time he had to infiltrate the trade route.’

  ‘He might have,’ Beth said. ‘He managed everything else.’

  King shook his head. ‘No. We’re missing something. There’s someone else involved here. How’s Reed going to put a billion dollars in cash to any use without help? I think he’s meeting people onboard the ship. People who planned to be there. I think I might need a distraction.’

  With that, he hopped straight back into the knee-deep water and trudged to shore. The second officer in the three-man chain — the guy who’d taken four consecutive kicks to the arms and mid-section — seemed to be in the worst shape. King had dealt out some serious internal damage.

  Regardless, he felt inclined to use the man. The guy had almost managed to draw his gun and cut King’s life brutally short.

  He didn’t care what happened to him.

  With his good hand, King heaved the officer to his feet and hurried him back into the water, heading straight for the boat. The man wilted under King’s pressure, and willingly stumbled through the lapping swell. King thrust him up to the lip of the hull and Beth snatched two handfuls of his shirt, hauling him onboard. As soon as she put her hands on him, he burst into a half-hearted panic, writhing to try and escape.

  Perhaps he thought he’d have a better chance at breaking free of a woman’s grip.

  Female or not, Beth was a Force Recon Marine, which came with all manner of physical training. She thundered a straight punch into the guy’s stomach, adding an explosion of pain to an area already tender from King’s blows. The m
an crumpled and she finished dragging him to the floor of the motorboat.

  King smiled wryly and levered himself up. He found the corrupt officer cradled in the foetal position on the deck, head bowed and eyes squinted shut. He turned to Beth.

  ‘That looked like it hurt.’

  ‘Because it did. You think I’ll get in trouble for it if he talks to the right people?’

  ‘If he’s still alive in thirty minutes, then we won’t be. And there won’t be much to worry about if we’re dead.’

  She paled. ‘What are you planning on using him for?’

  ‘A precautionary measure.’

  He revved the outboard engine to life and sent the craft rocketing away from Somalia.

  Good riddance, he thought.

  He’d only spent a day straight on the mainland, and the country certainly hadn’t been kind to him.

  Cradling his broken wrist, he turned all his attention to the ocean in front of them — and, far in the distance, a looming container ship beckoning them ominously forward.

  45

  The police vessel had been designed to allow high-speed pursuits, tailored to the requirements of the Somali Police Force.

  It allowed King the capacity to reach an unbelievable speed, giving the motor all it had. Horsepower chewed through the ocean, sending them hurtling toward the container ship at a rate he didn’t think possible. Briefly he turned and soaked in the rapidly subsiding coastline, the sight of the two abandoned trucks becoming increasingly blurry as the seconds flew by.

  He turned back to the path ahead, hunched low behind the console, realising the speed would play right to their advantage.

  There was no way to do this other than all-out assault.

  The nearest container ship dawned on them like a floating city, hundreds of feet long and stacked with an unfathomable quantity of supplies. King stared at the steel containers towering high above the ship’s deck, and he mentally connected them to the size of the containers he’d glimpsed up close at the Port of Mogadishu.

  The scale of the ship boggled his mind.