She fished a fresh magazine from her Combat Utility Uniform and chambered it home.
Now, a voice in King’s head demanded.
He swapped positions with Beth, allowing her to take over the reins and steer the boat roughly towards the access ladder. King made straight for the timid police officer they’d dragged aboard, who had opted to cower in an unresisting ball up the back of the police boat. The man was unarmed, and scared out of his mind.
A slight twinge in King’s gut made him pause halfway across the deck. He stared at the pitiful sight, his mind churning.
Do you really want to do this? he thought. After all that talk about morals earlier?
Then the officer decided for him. The man lifted his head off his chest and craned his neck, searching for any sign of life far above.
‘Reed!’ the man screamed, utilising his limited English skills. ‘Help!’
King hadn’t been sure that the trio of officers were directly assisting Bryson Reed, which was half the reason he’d beat them down instead of putting a bullet in each of their heads.
Now that he knew for sure, he compartmentalised his emotions and sunk into a rigid, unwavering state of mind.
He hauled the unarmed police officer to his feet — using his good hand — and hurried the man to the front of the deck, bundling them all to one side of the police boat in anticipation for what came next.
‘You piece of shit,’ King hissed in the man’s ear. ‘You have any idea what you’re doing? You just saw money and became a slave.’
He knew the guy couldn’t understand him, but his frustrations had reached boiling point and the need to unload some of his rage spurred him on. Everyone around him — besides Beth — had been swayed by the toxic lure of dollar signs. With his blood boiling, he shoved the officer to the lip of the boat as Beth steered it toward the access ladder.
King reached down, plucked the AK-47 off the deck, ejected the empty magazine, chambered a fresh thirty rounds home, and nodded once to Beth.
‘Now,’ he said.
She knew exactly what she had to do. There would only be an opening of a couple of seconds to mount the base of the access ladder. At the speed the container ship was travelling, fat clouds of sea spray washed over the police boat, making it appear insignificant in comparison to the behemoth alongside it. With no-one behind the controls, the entire craft would be hurled away by the churning waters before long.
Beth grimaced, braced for a messy departure, and steered the police boat straight into the gigantic metal hull.
Sparks flew and the deck underneath King’s feet lurched back and forth. He stumbled for balance, almost tipping head over heels into the tiny gap between the boat and the hull. He grabbed a handful of the police officer’s shirt to stabilise himself, letting the Kalashnikov rifle swing loose at his side.
‘Up,’ he commanded, shoving the man in the direction of the access ladder — now only a few feet of open space from their position. ‘Or I shoot you in the back of the head.’
King knew the man spoke minimal English, but there was no mistaking his tone. With the chaos of high-speed manoeuvres raging around them, he didn’t have to think twice about his next move. Spurred on by the desperate lure of survival, the man leapt onto the access ladder. Briefly, he lurched sideways, and King paled as he realised the man might fall to his inevitable death.
Then the officer scrabbled for purchase — finding it all at once — and began racing up the metal contraption, moving as fast as his shaking limbs would allow.
King blocked all intrusive thoughts from his mind, letting it go blank.
‘After me,’ he said to Beth, his voice monotone.
She just nodded.
Operating with a single hand — allowing the broken wrist to dangle uselessly at his side — he launched off the side of the police boat, slamming home onto the metal rungs. He got both feet onto a single rung and wrapped his good arm around one at chest height, making sure he had successfully transferred between the watercraft before racing up after the police officer. Now that the guy had sensed a window of opportunity to get away, he had ignored the pain no doubt coursing through his mid-section and was scrambling toward the deck.
Toward allies.
Little did he know that King had expected him to do just that.
There was no time to check whether Beth had followed. King was disadvantaged in the race against time by an entire limb, and it would take serious safety risks to keep the officer’s pace. He checked that the AK-47 had remained on his person, and upon discovering it still swinging at his side he began to furiously ascend the access ladder.
The metal rungs cut deep, many of them rough and unfinished. He felt warm blood against his palm but ignored it, adding it to the list of injuries he’d sustained over the last twenty-four hours. If it didn’t debilitate him, it didn’t concern him.
Twenty seconds later, the police officer directly above him reached the lip of the ship’s sprawling deck.
King hovered only a couple of rungs behind the man, poised to capitalise on what he knew would come next.
The officer made it to the top of the ladder and began to haul himself onboard, onto flat ground.
A hail of gunfire tore his chest to shreds and sent him hurtling back in the other direction.
His lifeless form cascaded off the ladder, tumbling down, almost landing directly on top of King. The corpse grazed him as it flew past and he shouldered it aside, completely ignoring the brutal violence only a couple of feet above him.
There hadn’t been enough time for those on deck to assess the situation.
They’d expected King to appear first.
He hadn’t.
King recognised the single second of advantage he’d carved out of nothingness and elected to make full use of it.
He burst into full view of the deck directly after the police officer had, and swung the AK-47 round to unload on the unsuspecting hostiles.
46
He had never dealt with a greater list of unknowns.
As he reared into view, he had no idea how many combatants he’d be facing, what kind of skills they possessed, what kind of connection they had to Bryson Reed, or how close they had positioned themselves to the access ladder.
But he had been selected as Black Force’s inaugural recruit for a single predominant reason.
His reflexes in the field.
He laser-focused on a stationary target, identified that the target was a white man, recognised the man as a threat, noted his possession of a rifle, brought his AK-47 around in an instinctual, sweeping gesture and drilled three rounds straight through the guy’s centre mass, taking great care to aim for a portion of his body that carried the smallest potential to miss.
All in the space of a half-second.
Blood sprayed and the guy went down in a snarling heap, losing all function in his limbs at once. Out of the picture — no doubt about it.
Before the man had even started to topple, King’s attention tore across to another moving target, this man wielding a fearsome-looking assault rifle, only half of his body mass visible. Another white male. The guy had taken up position behind a giant steel column, used to prop up the football-field sized platform above their heads, piled high with shipping containers. He’d been the one to shoot the police officer dead, judging by the position of his rifle’s barrel. Recognition must have been flooding over him, pulsing hesitation into his trigger finger as he assessed whether the second man up the ladder was another friendly.