King looped both arms around the guy’s waist and activated all his fast-twitch muscle fibres at once, simply hurling the man back through the air. He launched himself off the ground at the same time, and the momentum carried them both through into the office the man had stepped out of seconds earlier.
They sprawled into the building in a tangle of limbs.
18
At close-quarters, King thrived.
Back in Tijuana he had subdued a pair of muscle-packed henchmen in a cramped apartment room, both of whom had outweighed him significantly. A scrawny, untrained dock worker caught off-guard shouldn’t have posed a problem.
He guessed correctly.
He came down on top of the man, both of them thudding into a bare stretch of cheap, stained carpet. King looped a foot back and planted it squarely on the edge of the half-closed door, slamming the wooden panel closed with a distinct click to isolate the fight from any prying eyes wandering past outside.
The next part was the easiest.
The dock worker had naturally fallen onto his stomach, shooting his hands out to protect himself from the impact. With his back facing King and his neck exposed, it took little effort to loop a brutish forearm around the guy’s throat and constrict the hold like a boa.
The guy wheezed and panted and tried to scream, but no sound escaped his lips. The pressure King applied cut off all noise, silencing him as effectively as if he had crammed a rag between the man’s lips.
It took eight seconds to put him to sleep.
King counted out each interval in his head, unrelenting with the pressure. The guy scrambled and bucked, squashing his face into the carpet out of sheer panic, but he wasn’t going anywhere. He slapped uselessly behind him, one of his sweaty palms pawing the side of King’s face.
King barely felt it.
His adrenalin had shot through the roof, lending him a surge of physical strength that only materialised in a no-holds-barred fight.
Then again, it hadn’t been much of a fight.
The carotid artery cut off the blood supply to the man’s brain and he slumped into temporary unconsciousness. King slid off the guy, springing to his feet inside the dimly lit room. He cast a glance at his prey and grimaced, recoiling at the expression on the dock worker’s face.
No-one ever passed out gracefully. He had spent enough time on the jiu-jitsu mats to grow accustomed to the strange, twisted expressions that replaced ordinary consciousness, appearing when anyone held a particular choke a second too long. It didn’t take much to summon unconsciousness, and King considered himself a master at it.
The guy had passed out with his eyes wide open — the literal act of “going to sleep” was a pipe dream reserved for Hollywood movies. He had begun to drool over the carpet, losing control of his bodily functions. King shrugged off the strange sight — any less experience and he might have taken the man’s behaviour as a sign that he was gravely crippled.
He knew for a fact that the dock worker would be awake in half a minute, drowsy and detached from reality but ultimately fine.
To ensure the guy didn’t cause any trouble, King manhandled him onto his side and stripped him of the high-visibility vest draped over his frame. He used the long stretch of material to fasten the man’s hands behind his back, applying enough pressure to ensure his wrists weren’t going anywhere but refusing to stoop so low as to cut off circulation.
He propped the dock worker — already semi-conscious — up against the far wall, and turned his attention to the room itself.
As he’d suspected, it was a security office — hopefully everything King needed rested on the computers scattered across the trestle tables in front of him. He cast his gaze over automatic screen-savers and active screens displaying grainy live CCTV footage of the entire port. Most of the port lay dormant, shrouded in shadow and uninhabited at this time of the night. King imagined the office was occupied twenty-four-seven, a security measure implemented to ensure no-one snuck in unannounced.
Effective system, he thought when he considered how easily he had penetrated the port.
King recalled what Reed had told him hours earlier.
It happened two nights ago. The hired guns came for me the next afternoon.
He yanked the office chair out from underneath the desk and pulled up a seat in front of the only active monitor displaying current CCTV footage. He had little experience with computers, but the port’s security system seemed archaic, a program that a toddler could navigate if they simply applied critical thinking.
He navigated to a menu, and raised an eyebrow in surprise when he noticed the tabs were labelled in English.
He glanced back at the immobilised dock worker in the corner of the room and pondered whether the man spoke the language. He hadn’t considered such a notion, but it opened up a wide range of possibilities — interrogation presenting itself as the most effective option. He wondered just why the hell the man had bothered to learn English — then again, if he was head of security and actively communicating with the dozens of behemoth container ships that trawled into port each day, it made sense that he would need to be able to converse in the most popular language on the planet.
King shrugged it off and turned back to the monitors. A development he hadn’t been anticipating, but would almost certainly make the process smoother.
It didn’t take much effort to pull up the archives. He clicked and scrolled through a dozen separate directories, each labelled meticulously to allow ease of navigation. Briefly, his hands grew cold at the notion that the office was a decoy — everything seemed far too easy.
Then he shrugged it off.
The port had terrible security measures because the workers’ ordinary opposition consisted of junkies and thugs, more than likely. Fools who would slip up when trying to infiltrate the port.
Besides, King imagined the majority of focus rested on the towering skyscrapers of shipping containers piled high along the front of the docks. Those contained the priceless valuables, or — if Reed’s story had any accuracy — the guns and drugs.
He found the archives of all the CCTV footage from two nights previously. A warning as he opened each file informed him that the footage would be overwritten after fourteen days of inactivity, a measure that ensured the archives didn’t pile up terabytes worth of storage with each passing month. It kept the need for storage space at a minimum. Most security systems employed something similar.
King juggled between eight total feeds, covering most of the hotspots within the port, scanning through each grainy archive of footage at a rapid pace. He didn’t need to pay attention to the finer details. If Reed’s shootout with the smuggling ring had indeed taken place, it would flash by on one of the feeds like a detonating bomb, complete with a storm of muzzle flares materialising in the darkness.
It took him four minutes to scan through the entirety of the first feed.
Grimacing at the task that lay before him, fully aware that each passing second risked another chance of getting caught, he twisted in his seat as the dock worker let out a low moan across the room. The man had surfaced from unconsciousness, darting his eyes around the room, groggy and delirious.
King imagined the man didn’t deal with the sudden, violent loss of consciousness very often.
The entire ordeal would seem like a lucid dream, and it would take some time for the guy’s brain to grapple with a return to reality and start firing neurons predictably. King wrenched the M45 pistol out of his waistband and aimed the barrel square between the man’s eyes. With his free hand, he lifted a finger to his lips and stared piercingly across the room, demanding silence.