Regardless, he felt inclined to use the man. The guy had almost managed to draw his gun and cut King’s life brutally short.
He didn’t care what happened to him.
With his good hand, King heaved the officer to his feet and hurried him back into the water, heading straight for the boat. The man wilted under King’s pressure, and willingly stumbled through the lapping swell. King thrust him up to the lip of the hull and Beth snatched two handfuls of his shirt, hauling him onboard. As soon as she put her hands on him, he burst into a half-hearted panic, writhing to try and escape.
Perhaps he thought he’d have a better chance at breaking free of a woman’s grip.
Female or not, Beth was a Force Recon Marine, which came with all manner of physical training. She thundered a straight punch into the guy’s stomach, adding an explosion of pain to an area already tender from King’s blows. The man crumpled and she finished dragging him to the floor of the motorboat.
King smiled wryly and levered himself up. He found the corrupt officer cradled in the foetal position on the deck, head bowed and eyes squinted shut. He turned to Beth.
‘That looked like it hurt.’
‘Because it did. You think I’ll get in trouble for it if he talks to the right people?’
‘If he’s still alive in thirty minutes, then we won’t be. And there won’t be much to worry about if we’re dead.’
She paled. ‘What are you planning on using him for?’
‘A precautionary measure.’
He revved the outboard engine to life and sent the craft rocketing away from Somalia.
Good riddance, he thought.
He’d only spent a day straight on the mainland, and the country certainly hadn’t been kind to him.
Cradling his broken wrist, he turned all his attention to the ocean in front of them — and, far in the distance, a looming container ship beckoning them ominously forward.
45
The police vessel had been designed to allow high-speed pursuits, tailored to the requirements of the Somali Police Force.
It allowed King the capacity to reach an unbelievable speed, giving the motor all it had. Horsepower chewed through the ocean, sending them hurtling toward the container ship at a rate he didn’t think possible. Briefly he turned and soaked in the rapidly subsiding coastline, the sight of the two abandoned trucks becoming increasingly blurry as the seconds flew by.
He turned back to the path ahead, hunched low behind the console, realising the speed would play right to their advantage.
There was no way to do this other than all-out assault.
The nearest container ship dawned on them like a floating city, hundreds of feet long and stacked with an unfathomable quantity of supplies. King stared at the steel containers towering high above the ship’s deck, and he mentally connected them to the size of the containers he’d glimpsed up close at the Port of Mogadishu.
The scale of the ship boggled his mind.
If Reed elected to hide onboard, squirrelling himself away, it might take weeks to find him.
But King imagined it wouldn’t come down to that.
It couldn’t have been more than five minutes since Reed had left shore, but he’d moved fast. King spotted a rusting access ladder attached to the side of the gargantuan ship, plunging into the churning waters all around the hull. As he narrowed his vision, he watched a rectangular object roughly the size of a grand dining room table disappear over the ladder’s lip, vanishing into the murky shadows on deck.
Reed’s RHIB.
It had been winched up by fat steel cables, a procedure no doubt planned out in painstaking detail. It confirmed what King had suspected all along — Reed was working with disciplined, well-trained co-conspirators. The winching system had been in place long before Reed arrived at the base of the massive container ship.
Somehow, King doubted those at the top of the ladder would offer the steel cables for a second payload.
He maintained the police boat’s pace, squinting as sea spray kicked off the hull and stung his eyes. Shadows materialised on the deck a few dozen feet above, occupying a dark space running underneath the piles of shipping containers. King caught sight of them and hunched low, anticipating gunfire from Reed’s friends onboard.
He reached back and threw Beth to the deck.
Thankfully, she’d also spotted the hostiles and was halfway to the floor when bullets cracked through the air above their heads.
King kept his head down, counting out the seconds as their boat entered the most vulnerable stretch of ocean. The closer they got to the side of the container ship, the more awkward of an angle it would take to score a direct hit. He flinched as the air displaced above his hunched back — a round had missed him by mere feet. It thudded into the wooden deck, sending splinters flying.
Another three-round burst dotted the floor around Beth’s head before the gunfire temporarily ceased — the enemy combatants would have to change position, aiming straight down the side of the giant ship. King took the opportunity to raise his head above the line of sight.
He tensed up.
‘Shit,’ he muttered.
He had almost covered the entire stretch of sea between their police boat and the looming container ship. Its pale blue hull towered over him, taking up his entire vision. Another couple of seconds following the same trajectory would send the front of the police boat smashing into the steel wall with enough force to break the craft in two.
It would sink, and they would either get swept into the path of the container ship and battered to a pulp by its giant propellers, or picked off by assault rifles from the deck, or simply be left to tread water miles off the coast until their energy depleted and they sunk to their watery graves.
None of the available options appealed to King.
He veered the boat sharply to the left, correcting into the same direction the container ship was moving. Now the two watercraft ran parallel, one outweighing the other by a few hundred thousand tons.
‘Are you sure we need to do this?!’ Beth roared above the chaos.
‘What?’ King shouted back.
‘It sounds like there’s a small army up there — and now we know what ship he’s on. We can just call it in. Live to see another day.’
King shook his head, still hunched low, minimising his target area. ‘Reed can bounce around from ship to ship on the open waters with barely any persuasion. We turn back and we lose them forever. He’ll be sucked into the maze.’
He turned to study her demeanour. All the blood had drained from her face, and she sported the expression of a deer in headlights. Beads of sweat had broken out across her forehead. She was clutching her M45 pistol with white knuckles. Despite that, resolve had set across her face, creasing her mouth into a hard line. She seemed determined. Scared, yet willing to press on.
King shared her sentiments, even though the symptoms of his terror weren’t so apparent. They presented themselves through a pounding pulse and an incessant tightness in his chest. He stuffed them down along with the mind-numbing agony of his broken wrist and turned back to the console to see them approaching the base of the access ladder at a blistering speed.
‘You can’t return fire when you’re climbing the ladder,’ Beth noted, motioning to his useless wrist.
He nodded. ‘I figured that out in advance.’
Another burst of gunfire sounded, directly above their heads. They both ducked for cover, and Beth lay down suppressing return fire with her M45, unloading seven consecutive rounds into the side of the container ship. The rounds ricocheted harmlessly off, but their combatants didn’t know that. King could sense them ducking for cover, protecting themselves from stray shots.