There was a line from an American film—Speed—which summed up her feelings perfectly. The villain of the movie, a former bomb disposal officer who had himself become a bomb wielding terrorist, told the hero: ‘A bomb is made to explode. That’s its meaning. Its purpose. Your life is empty because you spend it trying to stop the bomb from becoming.’
That line had stuck in her memory. The tactical nuclear device would one day fulfill its purpose, and she would be the one to make it happen. That was her purpose. The bomb was the instrument — the paintbrush — with which she would create her masterpiece, but like any artist, she needed to find the right inspiration.
She caressed the trigger and thought about the American. There was something about him, something that made her believe he might be a very formidable enemy, the very challenge she so craved.
If her men returned and reported that they had carried out her orders, then she would know that she had read the man wrong, that he was not the man she believed him to be.
But a gut feeling told her that her men would not be coming back with such a report. They might not ever return, in fact, and the idea brought the smile back to her face.
20
King did not share Favreau’s rosy optimism with respect to the matter of his own survival, but he was by no means resigned to his fate. As soon as the makeshift cell was unlocked, and he and Asya were escorted out by the steroid twins and a platoon of Congolese soldiers, he began looking for any opportunity to turn the tables on their captors.
“Be ready,” he told Asya, as the soldiers entered the cell, brandishing carbines. Two of their number came in to bind the prisoner’s hands with zip ties.
There was no time to say more, and really nothing more to be said. King didn’t know when their chance would come. If they were lucky, the soldiers would do something very stupid — that wasn’t completely beyond the realm of possibility — but it was much more likely that they would have to make their own luck. Unfortunately, without the glasses, there was no way to coordinate with Asya. She would just have to follow his lead.
Nothing that seemed like a good opportunity presented itself as they were hastened to a side exit and into the back of a waiting heavy transport truck, where Favreau’s mercenaries were joined by several Congolese army troops. He and Asya were forced to sit on the floor of the truck’s cargo bed, in between two rows of soldiers assembled on the inward facing troop seats.
The canvas canopy had been rolled back, exposing the occupants of the truck to the elements, but King’s view of the roadside was mostly obscured by the wall of bodies. At first, he caught glimpses of tall buildings, but as the journey progressed, they were replaced by the tops of trees. There were other changes, too. The sudden stops, accompanied by squealing and hissing air brakes, and followed by lurching starts, became less frequent, replaced instead by the back and forth sway of the truck swerving through turns or jouncing over potholes. It was a punishing ride, and King knew from experience that the wooden benches where their captors sat were only marginally more comfortable.
Something wet struck his cheek. At first, he thought one of the soldiers had spit on him, and he studied their blank faces to identify the culprit, but then another gob of moisture hit him, and he realized that it was rain.
In the space of just a few seconds, the afternoon sky darkened and the scattering of droplets became a torrent. Water filled the bed of the truck faster than it could drain out through the gaps in the tailgate. The soldiers did their best to lift their boots up out the flood, but King and Asya were obligated to simply slosh about in the deepening puddle.
A blinding flash seared across the sky and King’s retinas, followed about two seconds later by a peal of thunder that reverberated through the truck bed.
Damn, that’s close.
The basic rule for estimating the distance of a lightning strike was to count the number of seconds between the flash and the thunderclap — five seconds meant the lightning was a mile away. Two seconds meant only about seven hundred yards.
There was another flare — not a quick flash, but a prolonged burst of light that seemed to come from all around, shifting through degrees of intensity. The thunder boom arrived even before the electrical discharge finished.
They were driving right into the heart of the storm.
The African soldiers took the weather in stride, but King noticed the steroid-twins looking around nervously. Lightning was unpredictable, and while the all-steel frame and roll-over cage construction of the truck could afford some protection against electrocution — acting as a sort of impromptu Faraday Cage — the open bed offered no shelter whatsoever from a direct strike.
King realized this was the moment for which he’d been waiting. He doubted there was a psychic bond between siblings, but tried to project his intention into his sister’s brain. He closed his eyes, squeezing them shut tight so that the next flash wouldn’t blind him. When it came just a few seconds later, it wasn’t lightning that struck the back of the truck.
“Now!”
Even as he shouted it, he was moving, twisting around and aiming a kick up at the nearest of the steroid twins. His boot heel caught the unsuspecting man under the chin, snapping his head back with a crunch of vertebrae that King felt but could not hear over the thunderclap that followed.
Still flash-blind from the lightning, the soldiers were slow to react, giving King time to roll over into a kneeling position. The remaining mercenary’s eyes widened in alarm, but before he could even twitch a muscle, King threw himself forward, smashing his forehead into the bridge of the man’s nose. The injury had the desired effect of stunning the mercenary, but King’s primary goal had been to get closer to the man’s weapons, and he accomplished that task by spinning around and throwing himself bodily onto the man’s lap. As his fingers knotted around the nylon sling of the man’s MP5, King saw the soldiers on the opposite side start to raise their carbines.
There were shouts, but the men couldn’t shoot King without hitting their fellow soldiers. The men on the bench to either side of King realized this, too, and almost in unison, they threw themselves flat onto the bed, leaving only the stunned mercenaries and King in the line of fire.
Several carbines fired all at once, but none found a target. In the instant before a single trigger was pulled, Asya, who had scrambled to the front of the bed to avoid the tangle of bodies seeking cover, lashed out with a double-footed kick to the line of soldiers on the bench. The shove not only threw off their aim, but sent two of them spilling over the tailgate.
“Jump!” King shouted.
Asya didn’t hesitate. She got her feet under her, scrambled onto the bench and leaped over the side.
Before he could follow, King felt the truck braking. The sudden deceleration threw him forward, but he kept his grip on the sling of the machine pistol. The mercenary, who was just starting to recover from King’s initial attack, was pulled off the bench, and fell atop King in the midst of the tangled bodies.