The shock of killing an ally by accident didn’t wear off quickly.
Nevertheless, these men were impressively trained, and King could sense he would take a bullet to the forehead if he hesitated for even a fraction of a second.
Luckily, he didn’t.
As the first guy collapsed, King sent a pair of rounds into the top half of the second guy’s skull, taking his head apart in grisly fashion. He didn’t stop to admire his handiwork, instead reeling to take aim on a third shape he’d sensed in his peripheral vision.
He’d been visible at the top of the access ladder for less than a second.
The third guy — another white male with a weapon — fired, reacting decisively to the carnage. But King had kept most of his body below deck, both heels firmly planted on the fourth rung from the top, which left a tiny sliver of available space for the third guy to nail a headshot. And the guy’s aim had been thrown off altogether as his subconscious dealt with the sight of his two friends blasted to shreds right before his eyes.
His first three shots missed, sailing over King’s head, rocketing out to sea.
That was all it took.
The third guy’s face exploded, caught by two consecutive rounds from the AK-47. He splayed back across a twisted mass of industrial machinery, slumping over pipes and dials and grates, bleeding all over them.
King froze in place, still as a statue, entirely motionless, his situational awareness honed into the space around him. He tuned his eyes and ears to the slightest disturbance in the dark industrial space, searching for a fourth hostile.
He found nothing.
Satisfied that he’d bought a minute to compose himself, he hurried up onto the deck, ushering Beth from her position directly beneath him. Only then did he stop to analyse the details of the gruesome scene.
And most of it surprised him.
In the heat of a live combat situation, he tuned out everything bar the necessary details. Now that he had a chance to soak in the sights, he paused to linger on the faded uniforms donning the trio of corpses.
They were MARPAT-style combat uniforms, sporting the familiar digital-patterned camouflage. King knew the Marine Corps held the patents on that design. And these weren’t cheap knock-offs. They were the real deal.
‘What’s the bet they’re ex-military?’ he said.
‘They have to be,’ Beth muttered. ‘I’ve never seen anyone move as fast as you do in the field, but that third guy got a few shots off.’
‘They almost had me,’ King said, nodding along. ‘Another half-second of hesitation and I’d have been dead. I could sense it. That’s some serious training.’
He kicked one of the rifles away, sending it to the lip of the deck, out from under the oppressive roof above their heads. The sunlight displayed its features in all their glory.
‘M4A1 carbines,’ King said. ‘You can’t get those easily.’
‘Unless you know people,’ Beth said. ‘Military contacts. People in the right places who can siphon a few rifles off an unchecked surplus.’
‘So he’s got old military buddies who want a piece of the pie. That’s what this is.’
‘There’s more to it than that,’ Beth said. ‘There’s gotta be. How were they going to avoid the authorities forever? If any of that cash shows up in banks, the government would have been all over them. They must have known that.’
Something clicked in King’s head, as if two pieces of an enormous puzzle slotted together instantly. ‘Unless they make it legit.’
‘What?’
‘I have an idea of what Reed’s trying to do. Now I want to hear it from the man himself.’
A soft noise floated out of the darkness further inside the ship. King snapped his attention to the sound, perceptive to anything unusual in his surroundings.
He stared into the shadows. It looked as if a giant drawer had been pulled out of the side of the container ship — the body rested underneath them, and above lay the platform stretching from one end of the ship to the other, home to hundreds of shipping containers laid end to end. This portion of the ship was like a cavernous warehouse interior that stretched far into the distance, mostly bare but littered with the odd office or column.
‘Reed’s in there,’ King muttered. ‘Somewhere.’
He took a single step forward, dipping underneath the ceiling into the shadows. As he moved, he sensed another body — horrifyingly close.
He tensed up in anticipation as a man circled explosively around one of the nearest steel columns and swung a heavy wrench at his chest like a lethal baseball bat.
47
It wasn’t Reed, but that was all King had time to ascertain before he took the brunt of the impact to the sternum.
He’d sensed the presence of the man a moment before the guy made his move, which had provided him the opportunity to lean back away from the incoming blow. If he’d kept his forward momentum the wrench would have cracked his chest bone and likely killed him on the spot, if not dealing out horrendous internal damage.
Even as he rolled away from the strike, the fixed jaw at the head of the wrench landed against the centre of his chest with enough of an audible crack to send him straight to the metal floor. He landed hard on his back, two-hundred plus pounds crashing to the ground. He snatched for the AK-47 as he fell, but came up surprisingly short. His good hand brushed the weapon’s stock but it was already falling away from him, sent flying from the surprise attack.
As King missed the gun, he realised he might be far more hurt than he thought.
Before he even had a chance to skirt out of the way of another blow, his attacker had loaded up with another barbaric swing and dropped the fixed jaw of the wrench into King’s stomach. It struck a tender portion of his flesh, aggravating a pre-existing injury. Pain exploded across his abdomen and he spat blood across the metal beside his head. He crumpled involuntarily, helpless to resist his body shutting down on itself in an attempt to recuperate.
Through blurred vision, he watched the ghost-like apparition of his attacker float over him. The guy lost concentration on King, focusing instead on the other significant threat — Beth, standing a few feet back with the M45 pistol in her hand. Something deep inside King’s head had plunged him into semi-consciousness, so he couldn’t turn his head in time to watch the commotion unfold.
There were two gunshots — each from a different weapon.
They sent twin bolts of fear through his chest.
Like a nightmarish dream where all his limbs were weighed down, he found himself slow to react. Like moving through quicksand. He laboriously rolled his head around to soak in the sights behind him, terrified of what he might see.
His heart dropped as he made out what had happened.
Beth had been hit.
The attacker hadn’t.
Now that King had time to get a better look at the man, he noticed certain features. The heavy physique. The full beard. The hard, narrow eyes. Definitely ex-military. A man who had learnt when to compartmentalise all emotions for the sake of the task at hand.
King realised the guy was about to make use of that talent.
He willed himself forward with every ounce of conscious energy he had, but it was no use. He had only made it to his knees by the time the man strode across the deck to Beth, where she stood rigid, motionless, completely pale. She’d been struck in the shoulder — King had no clue as to the extent of the injury.
It was significant enough to send blood pouring down her uniform, and the M45 sidearm clattering to the deck. Whether he’d intended it or not, the bearded man’s bullet had rendered her right arm useless, the arm she used to fire a weapon.
She was helpless to resist as the man closed the space between them and thundered an elbow into the side of her head.