Hunted: A Jason King Thriller (Jason King Series Book 6) Read online

  Vehicular warfare took an unimaginable toll on the brain.

  And he had started the journey in a volatile state to begin with.

  Dripping blood out of both corners of his mouth, he threw the Humvee’s door open and collapsed out of the cabin.

  Unarmed.

  Barely conscious.

  Ahead, he watched Ramsay drag a bloodied and beaten Isla out of the cargo truck’s horizontal cabin.

  There was a semi-automatic pistol pressed to the side of her head.

  47

  King staggered across the lawn towards them.

  ‘No,’ he moaned, a whisper away from blacking out. ‘No.’

  Ramsay looked manic.

  The man’s hair — usually slicked back and well-maintained — stuck out at wild angles. Blood was smeared across his face. King figured he must have smashed his head against the inside of the cabin when the massive truck had overturned.

  Isla looked similarly hurt. She had been punched in the face at least twice — likely Ramsay taking out his rage after having to chase them all the way across the globe. A nasty hematoma had developed underneath one of her eyes, swollen and purple.

  The weapon was a Beretta M9, standard issue for the U.S. military. Its barrel had been shoved against the side of Isla’s sweaty temple. Ramsay’s finger hovered less than an inch over the trigger.

  The man stared across the stark green lawn at King with an unhinged expression warping his features.

  ‘You just couldn’t accept your fate, could you?’ he snarled. ‘This is what it has to come to. This is what you want.’

  King made it three more steps before he dropped to his knees.

  His body had stopped listening to his mind. He urged himself forward with everything he had left inside, but it was futile. His limbs wouldn’t function.

  He felt the darkness closing in.

  ‘Ramsay,’ he muttered, struggling to voice what he wanted to say. His mouth moved, but it responded slowly as his brain clung to consciousness by a hair’s breadth.

  ‘What?’ Ramsay said. ‘What on earth do you think you can say? Sorry? Get the fuck out of here. You should have died on that aircraft carrier, and then this would have been the end.’

  ‘Not her,’ King spat. ‘Not Isla. She was … just trying to save her sister.’

  ‘That’s nowhere close to a valid excuse.’

  ‘Take me,’ King said. ‘Do whatever you want … with me. Leave her. Leave Slater. I’m … I’m the cause of this.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Ramsay hissed. ‘Lie on your stomach and put your hands over your head. If you move, she dies.’

  ‘Ramsay…’ King mumbled. ‘Please, just take me away. Lock me up in a black jail. Take out your anger … on me. Not Isla.’

  ‘Lie down!’

  ‘Not Isla!’

  It was the only thing he could muster the energy to say. He conveyed his point over and over again in two distinct syllables, urging Ramsay to change his mind. He wouldn’t be able to live with himself if she was harmed. He wanted her to have a full life.

  A happy life.

  The life she hadn’t got the chance to experience yet.

  Ramsay seemed to freeze. He let go of Isla, and she dropped to the grass, spitting blood into the unblemished lawn. Then he made his way slowly over to King, reaching back and sliding a set of steel handcuffs out of the back of his combat belt.

  He bent down and cupped a hand underneath King’s chin, lifting his head up.

  King could barely make out the man’s face.

  Ramsay sneered down at him, and locked the handcuffs over his wrists.

  King let out a bone-chilling yell, riding through the agony of the steel grinding against the broken bones above his left hand. By now, the pain had all moulded together. His state of consciousness was an unfathomable wave of fire, needling into his brain.

  ‘Good,’ he whispered, pleading for unconsciousness. ‘Good.’

  Ramsay knelt down by King’s sorry form, until his face was only inches away.

  ‘You want to know something, Jason King?’ he snarled, seething with anger.

  ’S-sure,’ King croaked.

  He blinked hard, fighting back tears. His body couldn’t handle much more. He longed for unconsciousness. As long as they took him away, he could handle it. Slater, Isla, Klara. They would all be free to live their lives.

  Unburdened by him.

  Ramsay seized King by the throat, so he had a direct line of sight into the man’s eyes. They were crazed, bloodshot, emotional as all hell.

  King realised quickly that something was drastically different in the man’s demeanour.

  He seemed psychopathic.

  ‘You want to know what your little escapade to save your girlfriend caused?’ he said through bared teeth. ‘You beat down my men. Men I had spent years working with. The elite of the elite…’

  King swallowed fear.

  ‘One of them passed away from his injuries a few hours ago,’ Ramsay spat. ‘One of my men. One of my goddamn fucking friends — dead. He was thirty. You hit him so hard that he suffered internal bleeding. He went into a coma and died just before I landed here. You fucking killed one of your own, Jason. You’re the scum of the earth.’

  King winced, riding out both physical and emotional pain. ‘You … you were going to hurt Klara. I did … what I had to do.’

  ‘Oh, no doubt I would have hurt your squeeze,’ Ramsay said. ‘I would have tortured her to get to you, because I take my job seriously. Unlike you — you seem to change allegiances like the fucking wind. I don’t take no for an answer. I don’t let enemies of the state escape.’

  King drooped his head. He had never been more conflicted in his life. He didn’t know what to think. He fought desperately through a swirling haze of agony, clawing at reality, trying to stay in the land of the living.

  ‘You want to know what else I believe in?’

  Silence.

  ‘An eye for an eye,’ Ramsay whispered.

  In a startling flash of movement, he lifted the Beretta M9 and fired a single round.

  48

  King watched everything unfold through a mask of blood.

  He hoped more than anything that it was all a hallucination.

  But he knew it wasn’t.

  The Parabellum bullet spat out of the Beretta’s barrel — unsuppressed, deafeningly loud — and sliced through Isla’s forehead just above her eyebrows. It was a perfect shot, leaving no room for doubt.

  The life disappeared from her eyes within milliseconds of the bullet entering her brain.

  Her head snapped back, grotesque in its movement, and her body splayed across the grass amidst a puff of crimson mist.

  The reverberation of the report echoed across the land between the towers.

  A silence like nothing King had ever experienced before settled over his surroundings.

  His brain switched gears.

  Something took over — something past primal rage, something even darker. A black, hellish sensation overcame him. It blasted through him like an out-of-body experience, controlling his motor functions without a second thought.

  He knew what it was.

  Pure, unbridled fury.

  The kind of fury that swamped people when they watched someone close to them die. There was no room for speculation — Isla was dead. The single round had stripped her of all the untapped potential that lay in front of her.

  The life she wanted to live. The happiness she had been searching for.

  King had promised her that she would find it.

  She had found nothing but pain and death.

  It was like all his injuries fell away. He barely acknowledged his shattered wrist or the mountain of gruesome wounds that had piled up over the course of his journey.

  He burst up like a bat out of hell and wrenched his arms over Ramsay’s throat, slicing into the already-weakened skin with the steel chain connecting his cuffs together.

  King locked his bulky thighs a
round Ramsay’s mid-section, slamming the man into place like a boa constrictor dominating its prey. Ramsay fumbled desperately with the Beretta in his hand, but the threat barely even crossed King’s mind.

  Before Ramsay could reach back with the barrel of the pistol, King caved his throat in with the steel chain, tearing through soft tissue and meaty flesh until the man’s neck broke and blood poured from his open mouth.

  Then he kept squeezing.

  Ramsay remained alive for a few precarious seconds, consumed by a world of raw, visceral torment as his oesophagus and trachea were demolished.

  Before unconsciousness could strip the man of the sensation, King continued destroying his throat, hearing bones pop and muscles tear.

  The man’s bloodshot eyes bulged in their sockets, threatening to burst out of his head.

  He died in the most horrific way possible, crushed to death by the personification of King’s deepest, darkest rage.

  When the man gave a final, horrified wheeze, releasing the trauma he had suffered through — his head almost removed from his body — King released his grip and rolled off his corpse.

  He sprawled onto his back, staring up at the cloudless sky. The sun beat down on him, heating his skin. He couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t breathe.

  He burst into tears.

  Seeing the life sap from her eyes right in front of him struck his emotions harder than he ever thought possible. He hadn’t even known Isla that long — but persevering through the odds together had created a bond tighter than the best of friends.

  Through a haze of wretched anguish, he slid the grey military satellite phone out of Ramsay’s back pocket and flicked through the list of contacts. Finding nothing, he switched across to the previous call list and dialled the last-contacted number.

  He hoped it was Abdullah’s phone.

  Slater answered. ‘Whoever this is, your man is dead.’

  ‘It’s me,’ King muttered.

  Slater exhaled. ‘You’re alive? I was scared shitless.’

  ‘Barely.’

  ‘It’s done,’ Slater said, his tone filled with finality. ‘I did what I thought was necessary.’

  ‘Abdullah? The oligarchs?’

  ‘All dead. I made it quick.’

  King nodded. At least some semblance of vengeance had been carried out. ‘Isla didn’t make it.’

  He heard the hollow thud of a plaster wall caving in from the other end of the line — Slater must have taken out his rage on the nearest breakable surface.

  ‘Was it Ramsay?’ the man hissed, barely controlling himself.

  ‘Yeah,’ King said. ‘I made him pay.’

  ‘That piece of shit.’

  ‘I … I can’t believe it.’

  His eyes wandered over to Isla’s motionless body, lying face-up on the grass, and he quickly tore his gaze away to suppress a wave of emotions.

  ‘She went through so much to help us,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ Slater muttered. ‘Fuck, man…’

  ‘Look,’ King said, forcing himself to think logically, stifling everything that he wanted to feel in order to preserve the health of his remaining loved ones. ‘We have a unique opportunity here. To disappear forever. Ramsay was foolish by accepting the invitation of a psychotic tycoon. Everything about the op would have been kept under wraps. The aftermath will be a muddled mess. Dead titans from Russia. A dead businessman from Dubai. A dead army of hired guns. Dead operators from one of the government’s most secretive divisions. On top of the attack on the supercarrier, I think finding us will take a backseat to riding out this chaos. Our government has a world of trouble to worry about before they bother focusing their attention on us.’

  ‘So let’s move,’ Slater said, keeping his tone level to try and mask the obvious misery he was experiencing.

  ‘Klara’s in the residential sector. You’ll find her as you turn into the first road. She should be standing guard over one of Ramsay’s men. I’m at the base of the Emirates Towers. Come get me after you’ve picked her up.’

  ‘On it.’

  The need for the clinical delivery of the necessary lines ended as Slater hung up the call.

  King took the phone away from his ear and let his anger out, seething silently at the world around him. He stumbled slowly past Ramsay’s corpse and crossed to where Isla lay.

  He dropped to his knees and touched a hand to her shoulder. It felt overwhelmingly final — this would be his last memory of her. He had to move if he didn’t want to get apprehended red-handed, thrown into a corrupt Dubai prison for the rest of his days. He would have to leave her here — all her memories and experiences, gone.

  He remembered the pain in her eyes when she’d sent him into Russia after her sister. The one link she had to a normal life. He’d done everything he could to help her, to get her blood-relation back from the captors.

  He’d failed.

  In more ways than one.

  Stomaching a wave of sadness, he climbed to his feet and focused on putting one foot in front of the other, staggering across the vast space between the Emirates Towers. The violent crash and subsequent gunshots had cleared the area of civilians. He found himself walking through a ghost town, not really sure where he was headed, or why.

  He felt broken.

  The shadow of the taller tower enveloped him, hiding his blood-stained features from the sun.

  He tucked himself into an alcove of bushes and clutched the satellite phone in his hands with tight knuckles, waiting to hear from Slater. A drop of crimson blood splashed across the phone’s screen, dripping off the bridge of his nose.

  He closed his eyes and wished for relief.

  The darkness accepted him with open arms.

  49

  The cool touch of a sterilised wipe against his hot skin brought him back to the land of the living.

  He opened his eyes and stared up at Klara, who was in the process of wiping some of his blood away. The thin metal panel underneath him rattled and shook, aggravating his injuries. The space was dark. He looked from left to right — his vision wrapped in a murky haze — until his situation became clearer.

  He was in the rear compartment of a panel van.

  The side of Slater’s head was visible in the driver’s seat. The man was focused on the road ahead. There was no artificial light in the dark space, just the Dubai sunlight filtering through the windshield up front.

  Klara noticed him surface from unconsciousness and pressed a hand to his forehead, keeping his head in place.

  ‘Don’t move,’ she said. ‘You’re hurt.’

  ‘I figured,’ he muttered.

  His body hurt in so many places that he didn’t know where to focus on first. Instead, he opted to let the agony wash over him in great, sweeping waves. He acknowledged the fact that it would be like this for some time. His wounds would not heal quickly. The damage accumulated over the last few weeks might take months to return to normalcy.

  In his delirium, he continued scanning the interior of the vehicle, searching for the other member of their…

  Oh.

  He remembered.

  He looked up and saw that Klara’s eyes were red and puffy, aggravated from crying. Now, he realised why. It all came rolling back in nightmarish flashes of memory. Ramsay’s arm jerking out, straightening, aiming, squeezing the trigger.

  Isla crumpling.

  He winced — either from physical or emotional trauma — and tried his best not to move.

  ‘Where are we?’ he muttered, his voice wafting into the front cabin.

  ‘Headed south-east,’ Slater said. ‘En route to Oman. I want to put as much distance between us and that goddamn city as possible.’

  ‘Was that your first time in Dubai?’ King whispered, his voice hoarse.

  ‘Yeah. You?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘First impression wasn’t great.’

  King rolled onto his side and coughed a mouthful of blood onto the metal floor near his he
ad. Klara cupped his cheek in her hands and winced, outwardly worried about him.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he muttered.

  ‘No you’re not.’

  She had him there. No amount of persuasion would convince her otherwise. He couldn’t even convince himself. Something was horrifically wrong internally. He needed a doctor, and a truckload of medicine.

  ‘Two and a half hours to Sohar,’ Slater said, as if reading his thoughts. ‘It’s a port city — the capital of Oman. There’ll be a horde of merchants there willing to do anything for the right price. Like smuggle us out of the Middle-East.’

  ‘Can you get there in two?’

  ‘I’ll certainly try my best.’

  The journey passed in sporadic bursts of consciousness — King spent the time fading in and out of lucidity. He was delirious, barely able to comprehend what was happening. One second Klara was wiping the blood off him, doing her best to patch him up as best she could. Next, she was halfway across the rear compartment, head in her hands, sobbing.

  King kept forgetting why.

  The memory of Isla’s death came back to him at least three times over the next few hours. He recalled it in vivid detail, replaying it over and over again in his mind. He swallowed sadness, then faded out of reality and came back forgetting just why he felt so dejectedly heavy and morose.

  At one point, he lost himself to darkness and then resurfaced surrounded by harsh, artificial white light.

  For a moment, he thought he had died.

  He was in a hospital — albeit a shoddy one. The walls had paint flaking off them and there was a peripheral venous drip taped to his arm. He was alone in the room. He glanced at the bag connected to the catheter and saw a clear fluid draining through the tube, circulating through his system.

  No wonder he felt a sudden relief from the worst of the pain.

  He also felt intensely groggy.

  The door to his room opened and three people stepped through. A dark-skinned, well-built man with pearly white teeth. A blonde European woman with startling blue eyes and a gash across her right cheek. And a short Middle-Eastern man in a white robe, clutching a faded wooden clipboard between his bony fingers.