Besides, he’d come to learn that almost everyone broke the rules in one way or another. The open ocean was effectively lawless, and certain advantages were taken.
The bearded man excused himself from the bridge and hurried along an open-air walkway, seeking privacy. He turned his face to the open skies and stark moonlight and soaked in the sights — much of the last week had been spent indoors, crammed into a claustrophobic box, riding out the storms.
He fished a satellite phone out of his khaki pants and dialled one of the only numbers he’d bothered to save into the phone.
It was answered in seconds.
‘We just arrived,’ the bearded man said, not bothering to wait for a response. ‘Get moving. We’ve got twenty-four hours of loitering before locals will start to get suspicious. Get the payload to El Hur.’
‘On it,’ came the response. ‘Shouldn’t be a problem.’
Satisfied, the bearded man ended the call, tucked the phone back in his pocket, rested both hands on the rusting railing running the length of the walkway, and smiled.
Everything would work out.
He hadn’t slaved away on the battlefield all those years just to come up short after the transition to civilian life.
War had made him a hard man, and soon it would all pay off.
16
King ended up on Jaziira Road, a wide unkempt track that had received slightly more attention than the surrounding fields. His surroundings quickly shifted from rural to urban — sandy plains choked with dead trees and thick bushels gave way to rundown residential buildings and industrial complexes dotted intermittently across the terrain. He was heading straight for inner Mogadishu, straying away from the outskirts. He recognised the increasing likelihood of a confrontation with each step — his skin was naturally tanned, but he was still quite pale from spending time in Washington.
Noticeably foreign.
Something that the locals didn’t see much of, he assumed.
It wasn’t the locals he was worried about. Even as he strode purposefully through the sand, dodging twisted roots and deep potholes, he heard the distant staccato of gunfire resonating across the city. To his right, beyond the industrial congestion, the gentle noise of ocean waves lapping against the shore floated across, directly juxtaposed against the gunfire. King found the setting both serene and terrifying. He couldn’t deny that it felt off.
In truth, he didn’t know what the hell he was doing. What did he expect to find at the port? A collection of ragtag criminals, happy to explain that they were most definitely in the wrong and that Reed had been perfectly justified in shooting a few of them dead?
He knew full well he would find nothing of the sort.
But there was no harm in trying.
He told himself this was what Lars would want him to do.
Take matters into his own hands. Do what the Force Recon Marines were restricted from doing. After all, that was the entire reason he was here.
Screaming voices.
Nearby.
Trouble reared its head suddenly, in jarring fashion. King had been anticipating it, given the region he was travelling through, but the violent nature of the confrontation presented itself in such unbelievable haste that it startled him, making him hesitate. He heard the approaching drone of an engine and turned slightly to see a dusty sedan in his peripheral vision, boring down on him, headlights flaring.
For a fraction of a second, he ignored it. A handful of civilian vehicles had passed him by over the course of the trek, and none had felt the need to instigate trouble.
That moment of hesitation was all it took.
Four dark shapes piled out of the sedan, each of their frames nothing but skin and bone, all of them wielding assault rifles — King assumed Kalashnikovs, but couldn’t be certain in the darkness. Confusion reigned supreme. The pack descended on him in a cacophony of noise and steel. They were intending to overwhelm a straggler, robbing King of all his valuables, more than likely leaving him for dead. They were either off-duty militants, or national soldiers, or shadowy civilians looking for a quick dollar.
They weren’t intimidating King — that was for sure.
Their first mistake was the proximity. If King had been a hapless wanderer, devoid of weapons and easily terrified, he would have been shocked by how close the sedan had come to running him over. The vehicle had missed him by a foot, screeching to a halt close enough for the passenger to step straight out into him, aiming to knock him off-balance and throw him off with the first action.
King saw the entire ordeal coming with a second to spare, and prepared accordingly.
He had little experience dealing with ordinary civilian threats, but he imagined that the four rifles weren’t all trained on him. The four muggers didn’t know who or what he was, so they had evidently decided to swing the guns around like playthings, whooping and hollering in Arabic to intimidate him into submission.
As soon as the passenger hurled the door open and made it out of his seat, King raised his M45 sidearm and sent a round straight through the soft tissue of the man’s pronator teres muscle. The bullet sliced through the skin between his bicep and forearm, taking an enormous chunk of flesh out with it, rendering his good arm entirely useless.
It was one of the more painful gunshot wounds a man could experience.
The guy went down howling, dropping his weapon and clutching his arm at the elbow. The bloodcurdling screams froze up his friends, and King took the opportunity to turn to the man who had piled out of the rear seats on the same side as the passenger, and drill a round through each of the guy’s thighs.
Arterial blood sprayed, and the second guy collapsed in a state of shock.
Three unsuppressed gunshots, shockingly loud, one after the other.
Blinding muzzle flashes in the darkness.
By the time the pair of thugs on the other side of the vehicle had regained their senses and swung their weapons — which King recognised as Kalashnikovs now that he had more time to analyse the situation — he had hauled the now-crippled thug to his feet and wedged the M45’s barrel into the soft flesh above the man’s ear.
King also knew how to use intimidation to his advantage.
‘Put your weapons down!’ he roared at the top of his lungs, his voice booming down the trail. ‘Take your friends and fuck off!’
The two guys on the other side of the sedan had no idea what the hell had unfolded. They were shaking and sweating and their pupils had dilated drastically, a clear indication of mortal fear. They had expected a simple shakedown, and now one of their guys had his arm near-severed at the elbow and the other had a pair of rounds embedded deep in his thighs, already bleeding profusely.
‘English?!’ King barked, taking advantage of the shift in momentum.
One of the guys shook his head.
King took one hand off the human shield’s collar and pointed a sole finger back in the direction they had come from. He shot daggers over the roof of the sedan, his gaze burning into them. The pair nodded sheepishly and lowered their weapons.
That was all it took.
King didn’t feel like gunning down four civilians in cold blood, no matter how diabolical their actions. He let go of the human shield, and with no-one to support his weight the guy crumbled into a heap in the sand, both his legs useless for the near future.