‘How can you be sure?’
‘I just know. You do too. Deep down.’
King didn’t respond. He pondered for a while, shaking his head in disbelief at how his life had unfolded before his eyes, moving so fast that he’d lost track of where he was. It was like he had suddenly, starkly realised his position all at once.
‘If a couple of those guys back there were innocent men,’ he said, ‘no-one would ever know. They could have been tagging along with their friends for the day. I’d never be held accountable for it. I’ve been turned loose, and I’m twenty-two years old. I want to be tested when I get back stateside. I want every psychological profile under the sun. I need it. I don’t know if Lars has realised the kind of burden he’s placed on me.’
‘Lars?’
He paused. ‘My handler. Probably wasn’t supposed to tell you his name.’
‘All this is affecting you, isn’t it?’
‘Somewhat. I’ll feel better when Reed’s dead.’
‘If he surrenders,’ Beth said, ‘you won’t take him in?’
‘That’s not how my job works. Not after what he did at the compound. And he won’t surrender. I might be young but I can tell you that much.’
‘It’s as simple as that? An eye for an eye?’
‘It’s never as simple as that. But it’s the way I do things, and I’ve accepted it. Wouldn’t have taken this job otherwise. They would have found someone else to do it.’
‘Would you have been okay with that?’
‘Not really. I wasn’t meshing well with my old unit.’
‘Want to talk about it?’
‘No.’
Beth nodded, staring out the grimy windshield. ‘We’re close.’
‘We certainly are…’
El Hur turned out to be nothing more than a ramshackle smattering of rundown houses strewn across a sandy dune, just a few hundred feet from the coastline. King sensed the desperation in the air as he guided their truck through the tiny village. He caught sight of men and women in his peripheral vision, but he didn’t dare look. Any further confrontation had to be avoided, and King figured the slightest hostility would be taken as a direct insult out here. The land he drove through had the aura of animalistic intensity — life in this frontier was tough and cruel. There was no doubt about it.
King headed straight through, instructing Beth to stay low in her seat and avoid the attention of the villagers. She complied, sensing the same atmosphere that King had. Mogadishu was hostile enough, but this was a whole different beast.
A new level of survival-of-the-fittest.
They left the village itself behind with much relief, trawling onto a narrow bumpy path barely wide enough to fit their truck. It led through undulating sand dunes to a coastline devoid of any man-made structures or signs of life. There was no port where Reed could load up his work boat under the veil of privacy. He would have to do it in the open, exposed to the world, frantically transferring mountains of cash from the back of a semi-trailer to an old transport boat.
With that thought in the back of his head, King screeched to a halt a few dozen feet from the gently lapping waves and almost gave himself whiplash craning his neck from side to side. He peered down the flat coastline for as far as the eye could see, squinting hard, searching for any kind of disturbance in the stark white plains.
‘There!’ Beth cried.
King followed her gaze and made out a distant, near-imperceptible object bobbing up and down in the shallow waters just off the shore. He estimated the distance at close to five hundred feet from their position. He let his vision focus and made out the distinct shape of a small boat’s hull.
He recognised the make. It was a rigid-hulled inflatable boat.
‘RHIB,’ he said. ‘That makes sense.’
Beth knew it too. ‘How’d he organise to have an RHIB meet him all the way out here?’
‘He didn’t. He brought it with him.’ King froze as he spotted a silhouette move from one end of the boat to the other. ‘Oh, shit. That’s him. He’s on board.’
There were no other watercraft in sight.
If Reed made it out of the shallows, they would lose him forever.
At the final hurdle.
On a deserted stretch of beach in a country as inhospitable as a post-apocalyptic wasteland, King twisted the big truck around in the sand and gave the protesting engine everything it had. For the first stretch it seemed like they were moving through mud — the wheels took a few painstaking seconds to find traction on the beach.
When they picked up enough momentum to make a break for it across the coast, King leant forward in the driver’s seat and hefted the AK-47 into his good hand.
The barrel aimed straight at the windshield — and past it, to the barely visible RHIB firing to life a few hundred feet away.
If they couldn’t make it to Reed’s position in time, he could do his best to throw every weapon in his arsenal in the man’s direction and pray for a direct hit. The RHIB’s inflatable collar would burst on impact if it took a round from the Kalashnikov rifle.
He narrowed his vision, tunnelling in on the boat, and fired.
43
The massive windshield blew out in a detonation of shards, compounding with the racket of the automatic gunfire reports. Glass sprinkled across the dashboard, making Beth recoil in her seat. King felt sharp nicks against his skin as slivers of the windshield drew across his forearms, but he ignored it and focused on holding his aim steady.
Tiny geysers of water kicked up around the RHIB’s hull, each of them missing by mere feet. King grunted out of frustration, took a moment to compose himself, and tried again.
All missed.
It was impossible. The truck he sat in bounced recklessly across the sandy beachhead — as if firing from a moving vehicle wasn’t challenging enough, the waves lapping at the shore threw the RHIB around in their churning swell. He had let fifteen rounds fly before Reed noticed the incoming gunfire and ducked below the line of sight, disappearing under the lip of the inflatable hull.
King grimaced and emptied the rest of the AK-47’s magazine at the watercraft, but the initial misses had rattled him. The sweat dripping off his forehead masked his vision and the pain of his broken hand had come roaring back to the surface all at once.
By the time he’d emptied every bullet in the magazine — with zero success — they were still three hundred feet from the RHIB’s location, and King could do nothing but watch as Reed fired the diesel engine to life.
The boat took off, screaming away from the Somali coastline, leaving nothing but churning water in its wake.
‘Shit,’ Beth cursed. ‘What do we do?’
‘I don’t know,’ King finally admitted.
He’d been pressing forward relentlessly for what felt like a month — even though he hadn’t even been in-country for twenty-four hours yet. Now, at the end of the road, he found himself lost on how to proceed. The endless stretch of beach was empty — he couldn’t spot a single craft in sight, save for the floating islands far out at sea which he recognised as dormant container ships.
He wondered how many of them were waiting for illegal payloads, their captains siphoning off cocktails of extra-legal funds in exchange for loitering in open waters as long as necessary.
That’s what Reed was doing.
He couldn’t imagine the bent Force Recon Marine was the first to devise such a scheme.
Two hundred feet up the beach — a destination they were rapidly approaching — King spotted the vehicle Reed had used to traverse the last stretch of the Somalian mainland. As he suspected, the man had used a semi-trailer to transport the cash. Its rear doors hung invitingly open, the vehicle abandoned a dozen feet from the lapping waves. Reed had backed it up to the ocean, where he had unloaded the inflatable boat — perhaps with the money already inside.