King knew exactly where he and Beth would end up if they allowed themselves to be arrested, and nothing about the grim situation enticed him. He let the ramifications fuel him as he swung a pointed elbow like a steel baseball bat, hitting the guy in the lowest point of his jaw with enough kinetic force to shatter bones and send teeth flying loose.
King had overcompensated with the first strike, because he needed to take advantage of the time it would take the other pair to react. Their eyes widened as their comrade crumpled before them, but by that point King had leapfrogged over the first officer’s unconscious form and surged into range within the space of a single second in time.
He focused entirely on intimidation.
The two remaining officers were reaching for their weapons — one a little faster than the other. The guy on the right looked youthful and inexperienced, his eyes widening as the situation backfired. King imagined he hadn’t spent much time in live combat situations. The murky world of bribes and extortion paled in comparison to an adrenalin-charged fistfight. Now he was panicking. King had seized his attention, and he hadn’t even thought to reach for his sidearm.
The other guy was a little older, a little wiser. He’d experienced the trials and tribulations of Somalia for long enough to be ready in a heartbeat. So as the man reached down instinctively and wrapped a hand around his firearm, King slipped straight into a Muay Thai stance and fired off a blistering volley of side kicks with the same leg, one after the other in rapid succession.
Bang-bang-bang-bang.
Leg down, leg up. Repeat.
Four total, in the space of a couple of seconds.
Thousands of hours of relentless practice on heavy bags and coaches’ pads paid off — the first kick crushed the officer’s forearm into his side, the second slammed with a hollow thud into the guy’s exposed abdomen, the third pummelled the exact same area with an equal amount of explosive force, and the fourth landed a little higher, smashing across his sternum.
The guy went down in a crumpling heap, stunned into submission by the onslaught, not going anywhere. Bones had been broken and shock had set in. All thoughts of reaching for a weapon had been hastily abandoned.
With each consecutive kick, King had shifted a little closer to the last officer, skirting a few inches across the sand with his grounded foot. By the time he completed the barrage he had manoeuvred himself into range.
By that point it had been four seconds since King had thrown his first strike — and, finally, the third officer realised he would achieve nothing by gawking and reached for his gun.
Perhaps it might have surprised King years earlier, but he’d seen it many times before — those unaccustomed to sudden and explosive violence often found themselves slow to react, even if all their training had taught them to respond fast to an instant threat.
The last officer clamped a hand around his weapon, but it took him a half-second to wriggle the gun free from its holster, and by that point King had closed the foot of space between them and bundled the man by the collar. He wrapped his unbroken hand around the young guy’s shirt and transferred all his energy into a single mighty heave.
He hurled the kid — literally — through the air, yanking him off the ground with enough of a change in momentum to make him drop the pistol.
As soon as King saw the weapon fly free of the guy’s sweaty palm, he reversed the officer’s momentum in the air and dumped him on his head in the sand. The somewhat-soft terrain ensured the kid wouldn’t be paralysed for life, but the dull impact had enough force behind it to knock him senseless for the foreseeable future.
He stepped away from the third and final body, barely out of breath. From there it was a methodical process of levering the sidearms out of the officers’ holsters and tossing them far out to sea. He briefly considered adding them to his arsenal, but any extra firepower would just prove cumbersome. He had the AK-47 and the M45 pistol in his duffel bag, which would prove more than enough for whatever lay ahead. He only had one functional hand, after all.
Beth didn’t move.
‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘We’re in deep shit.’
King said, ‘I’m not. I’m allowed to do this. And if we make it through this, I’ll make sure you’re cleared of all wrongdoing.’
‘You can do that?’
‘No, but my handler can.’
‘You sure?’
‘Not really. But I’m hoping he has the influence. Now let’s go. Clock’s ticking.’
The sun had finished its ascent, casting warm daylight over the coastline. In any other circumstance, King might have stopped to admire the view in either direction down the coastline — if he could forget he was standing on the edge of a war-torn wasteland, it might have even seemed like a desirable setting.
But the distant patch of sea spray representing Reed careening toward one of the offshore container ships shattered all chances of getting distracted.
King stared at the now-empty police motorboat — roughly the size of a small car with a windshield covered in grime and scratches — and made up his mind on the spot. He fetched his duffel bag and the loaded Heckler & Koch assault rifle from the sand a few feet away and made straight for the boat.
When he noticed that he’d plunged into the shallow waters alone, he turned back to see Beth standing awkwardly on the spot, shifting from foot to foot.
‘I’m not used to this,’ she said.
‘Used to what?’
‘All this forward momentum. I got accustomed to staying in one place, and protecting it. I’ve never been further from my comfort zone in my life, to be perfectly honest.’
‘Stay here,’ King said. ‘I don’t want you doing anything you’re not okay with.’
She shook her head. ‘Can’t do that either. I would have just stayed at the compound in Mogadishu if I didn’t want to see this through. I’d had enough of Personal Security Detail, thank you very much.’
‘Is it personal? Did you like Victor and Johnson?’
‘I hate Bryson Reed,’ she said, which provided all the answers King needed.
‘Then get in the boat. You didn’t come this far to stall here.’
It gave her the kick in the stomach she needed to lurch forward after King. He didn’t give her time to reconsider, turning away and heaving himself over the lip of the motorboat’s hull. He landed on his rear in the middle of the deck, taking caution to cradle his badly broken wrist. Despite his best efforts to ignore the injury, treating it as another scratch in the overall accumulation of trauma, the next level of pain was presenting itself.
Throbbing agony ebbed and flowed up his arm, making his vision waver. He grimaced, stuffed the sensation down into a tiny compartment within himself, and focused on helping Beth into the boat.
He reached for the controls, ready to turn the craft one-hundred-and-eighty degrees and send them hurtling after Reed in a blaze of horsepower, but something made him hesitate. He checked the three police officers on the beach, each of them in varying states of agony, and thought long and hard about their potential usefulness.
‘Reed has help,’ he said finally. ‘On the container ship. He must. There’s no way he could have co-ordinated an exact meeting point with an international shipping company in the time he had to infiltrate the trade route.’
‘He might have,’ Beth said. ‘He managed everything else.’
King shook his head. ‘No. We’re missing something. There’s someone else involved here. How’s Reed going to put a billion dollars in cash to any use without help? I think he’s meeting people onboard the ship. People who planned to be there. I think I might need a distraction.’
With that, he hopped straight back into the knee-deep water and trudged to shore. The second officer in the three-man chain — the guy who’d taken four consecutive kicks to the arms and mid-section — seemed to be in the worst shape. King had dealt out some serious internal damage.