With his hands still bound, King had to wriggle like a snake to get free of the squirming mass, but unlike the other men jumbled together, he knew exactly what he was trying to accomplish. He rolled out from under the mercenary, and without releasing his hold on the nylon sling, got to his feet and heaved himself over the side of the truck.
The sling pulled taut against his grip and for a moment, he feared it might rip right through the flesh of his fingers. His arms were suddenly yanked up painfully, and for a moment, he hung from the side of the truck, a few feet above the glistening mud that covered the road. The still rolling dual wheels were close enough to kiss.
Then, as abruptly as his fall had been arrested, it resumed, and he slammed onto the ground. The dazed mercenary slammed down atop him a moment later, driving the wind from his lungs.
King fought to suppress the pain and rising panic of breathlessness. Everything that had occurred had been a result of action he had taken, and that gave him the edge, no matter what happened. He heard the truck’s brakes squealing as it slid to a stop perhaps fifty yards away, and he knew he had to keep moving, had to keep acting instead of reacting, if he was going to survive the next few seconds.
Bending his body like a contortionist, King slipped his bound hands down past his hips and then threaded one leg at a time through the hoop formed by his arms. It took only about three seconds, but that was time enough for the soldiers to start piling out of the truck.
He dropped to his knees beside the mercenary, delivering a double-fisted hammer blow that rendered the man unconscious, and then he brought the machine pistol up. He flicked a thumb across the fire selector, and then swept the muzzle toward the line of soldiers as he squeezed the trigger.
The MP5 bucked in his hands and a long yellow tongue of flame erupted from the muzzle, along with a report to rival the thunder. King had fired thousands of rounds from MP5s, but never in all that time had he ever experienced so much recoil. The pistol bucked in his hands like one of Rook’s Desert Eagles. Yet that was nothing compared to the effect of the shots.
Two of the soldiers simply burst, like enormous water balloons filled with blood. A third was only grazed. The bullet took his arm completely off below the shoulder in an eruption of gore.
King let go of the trigger and stared, dumbstruck, at the weapon in his hands. Some part of him understood what had just happened, at least in respect to the matter of physics. The MP5 was loaded with some kind of special overpressure ammunition — probably hollow rounds filled with a dense heavy metal like tungsten or depleted uranium. They would be fired by a larger than normal gunpowder charge or even some new experimental powder that yielded more explosive energy. That was the how and what, but it didn’t begin to explain the why.
The surviving soldiers bolted for cover, but they didn’t flee. Instead, they brought their weapons around and took aim at him. He fired again, just a single shot this time, and at the noise of the bullet punching through the metal bed of the truck, he spun on his heel and ran.
Another flash of lightning revealed Asya, a short distance away, crouching down near the edge of the road and attempting to wriggle her hands around to the front as he had done.
The lightning also illuminated the surrounding environment: undulating hills covered with lush green fields and trees, pools of brown water in the hollows, fed by raging torrents of rainwater runoff, and in the distance, the blocky shapes of tall buildings. A line of headlights was visible on the glistening ribbon that was the graded gravel road leading back to the city.
“Get off the road!”
Asya looked up just as King reached her. She doubled her efforts and slipped her bound wrists over her left foot, freeing her legs for the much more urgent task of running for her life. He grabbed her arm and hoisted her to her feet. He steered her toward the marshy ground to their right, as the tumult of lightning and gunfire filled the air. Mixed in with the bullwhip like crack of the Kalashnikov carbines, King heard the deeper, rhythmic report of a heavy machine gun. The sound echoed weirdly off the hills, but from the corner of his eye, he glimpsed muzzle flashes right above the headlights of the approaching vehicles.
A three foot wide stream of water flowed between the road bed and the field beyond. A drainage ditch, King surmised. It was filled to capacity by the tropical downpour and on the verge of overflowing. He leaped across and saw Asya do the same, but when his feet touched down, the ground tried to swallow him whole. He pitched forward and felt vegetation and gritty mud close in around him.
For a moment, the threat of death at the hands of the soldiers was diminished by the much more immediate danger of drowning. He tried to push himself up, but his hands found nothing solid to grasp. Fighting back a primal instinct, he stopped struggling and instead rolled over, curling his body to get his head out of the mud. His lower extremities sank deeper, the earth sucking him down, but he also felt a cascade of rain on his face, and as it sluiced the mud away from his mouth and nose, he risked a shallow breath and felt the damp air enter his lungs.
It was the briefest of reprieves. Silhouetted on the road, less than twenty yards away, King saw three large vehicles that looked like oversized SUVs. The trucks weren’t moving, but while their headlights shone straight ahead, swiveling searchlights were probing the field where he and Asya now hid.
Asya!
Frantic, he looked to where he had last seen her. The grass had closed over the spot, but something was moving beneath the green shroud. He thrust his bound hands into the tangle and felt something solid.
Asya thrashed violently, her desperation accomplishing nothing more than digging her grave deeper. King tried to pull her up but the soft earth beneath him confounded his efforts, and instead of freeing her, he found the mud once more closing over his head.
Recalling his earlier success, he tried rolling again, first pulling away from Asya’s struggling form, and then rolling toward her. He felt the earth’s grip loosen, and then, like Jonah vomited from the belly of the whale, they were both disgorged out of the soft mud bank and into the rushing water in the drainage ditch.
The current wasn’t quite strong enough to sweep them away, but every time King tried to plant his feet against the solid ground below, he was promptly bowled over and returned to the water’s embrace. He felt Asya’s arm slip away, and when he reached out to her, he found only handfuls of water.
As exhaustion closed over him, he felt a strong arm close around him, drawing him out of the flood. He knew that it wasn’t Asya. He intuitively recognized that it could only be one of the soldiers, saving him from drowning to carry out Favreau’s death sentence later, but there was no fight left in him.
He let himself be dragged up onto the road, where he was surrounded by a knot of men in camouflage fatigues. Another man pulled Asya, coughing and gasping for air, from the ditch and laid her beside him.
A knife flashed, and before King could take any kind of defensive action, the blade moved close and sliced through the zip-tie that bound his wrists together. Surprised, he looked up into the smiling face of General Mabuki.
“I am sorry I wasn’t able to stop them from taking you,” the general said. He turned to Asya and cut her bonds as well. “We must go. Things are happening very quickly. There isn’t much time.”
21
Rook checked the rearview mirror again as they turned onto the M20 motorway and headed toward London. There had been no sign of pursuit since they’d lost sight of the truck, and while he wasn’t about to relax his guard, he reckoned they were safe for the moment.