He continued onward.
A figure in military uniform came sprinting out from behind one of the nearest columns, nothing but a silhouette in the dim lighting. King raised the Browning and fired once, deafeningly loud in the empty space, the muzzle flare blinding to anyone in the vicinity.
The shot passed straight through the figure.
In the light of the flashing barrel he saw the uniform-clad apparition in full detail. It was Beth. Half the skin on her face was missing, chewed away by fish. She stopped directly in front of him and stared, her single functioning eye boring into him.
You could have done something, her face said.
Then she vanished.
King stayed motionless for a beat, his breath sinking into rattling gasps, his heart pounding hard. He’d never experienced anything like that.
You’re losing your mind.
You don’t have much time.
Spurred on by the grievous nature of his wounds, he hurried toward a pinprick of light far in the distance. At this point he couldn’t ascertain if the faint orange glow was also a hallucination. He didn’t care either way. Some part of him had detached back near the railing, allowing him the energy to avenge Beth but leaving a hollow broken shell in its place.
He’d sacrificed his sanity to stay alive for another moment longer.
He found himself empty of thoughts entirely.
The tiny singularity of light was the only thing that mattered. Something told him it would lead to the end of the road. He hurried forward, as fast as his broken body would allow.
As he reached the outer limits of the glowing aura, he realised that it wasn’t an apparition, or a hallucination, or a vision of any importance whatsoever.
It was the reversing lights of a giant forklift heading straight into a vehicle bay. The structure had been erected somewhere deep within the ship’s bowels, a hangar-sized room inside a vast disused stretch of deck. Everything about the warehouse-like structure and its surroundings reeked of abandonment, as if no-one had visited this section of the ship in years. King imagined the container ship was understaffed.
Budget cuts, perhaps.
A strange thought to have in the middle of a confrontation.
As he watched, the forklift reversed straight underneath an open roller door, dipping into the vehicle bay. Soft LED lights dotted the ceiling within — that was the faint blue glow King was picking up on the edge of his vision. He turned his attention to the massive object resting on the two steel forks, propped up in the air to make it easier to transport.
The RHIB.
King squinted in the gloom and spotted the sides of the craft literally overflowing with cash. The money trickled down across the floor like a waterfall — whoever sat in the forklift’s cabin had become increasingly careless with the payload, hurrying to hide it as best as they could.
King knew exactly who it was.
He kept low, praying he still had the element of surprise on his side. It hadn’t worked at the compound in Afgooye, but Reed would be panicking here, struggling to shield the RHIB and its massive fortune from sight while his ex-military buddies dealt with the threat at hand.
King paused. Maybe the Browning round he’d fired earlier had added to the effect. Perhaps it had convinced Reed that the conflict was still raging.
He wondered if a resolution was still possible…
He’d abandoned all hope of making it off the container ship alive, considering a stalemate with Reed the best-case scenario. Now he willed himself forward, trying to bring old combat tactics to the forefront of his mind but failing spectacularly. He couldn’t focus on anything — a blistering headache had sprouted to life deep behind his eyeballs.
The forklift’s hydraulic lift cylinder whined as Reed lowered the RHIB to the floor. King slunk into the shadows of the vehicle bay’s entrance, watching the proceedings with blurry vision. The boat slumped against the metal and pitched over, emptying its contents across the bay floor.
King’s eyes boggled.
He’d been right.
Hundreds of millions of dollars — no, billions. The money poured in avalanches out of the RHIB, more cash than King could possibly fathom. The kind of money that could start a country. The kind of money that could support an entire town for generations.
The kind of money that bought unparalleled power.
There was something toxic about the scale of it. This entire time King had been pondering just what kind of motivation someone needed to murder their brothers-in-arms and take off in search of dirty profits. Now, in his suggestible state, with the power leeching from the mountains of cash washing over him, he could see how a sick mind might be lured by the prospect.
Reed stepped down out of the forklift’s cabin and slammed to the floor, landing with both boots simultaneously. Just from the noise of the impact King ascertained that the man outweighed him. Maybe two hundred and ten pounds. Maybe more.
In the end, it didn’t matter.
Reed’s attention had been seized whole-heartedly by the piles of U.S. dollars. He crossed to the mountains and stood before them, enraptured, pausing in the heat of a war zone to admire his haul.
King took the opportunity to raise the Browning level with the back of the man’s skull and pump the trigger once, with finality.
50
Nothing.
The gun lay dormant in his hand. He had instinctively leant forward with the expectation of firing a shot, hoping to blast Reed’s head to pulp in a spray of gore. Instead he scuffed the sole of his boot along the bay’s floor, barely audible but noticeable enough to seize the attention of Bryson Reed.
The man wheeled on the spot, reaching automatically for his waist.
Reed found nothing there to comfort him.
He paused, sizing up the situation, staring across the vehicle bay at the weapon in King’s palm. It posed an odd sight — King glanced briefly past Reed to the backdrop of a billion dollars cash. It lent an eerie aura to the setting.
‘Well,’ Reed said, his voice hollow. ‘Seems like I lost my gun in all this confusion. I was in a bit of a rush to get the haul out of sight. Impressive, isn’t it?’
He motioned over his shoulder, imploring King to gaze at the mounds of hundred dollar bills.
‘It’s yours if you want it,’ Reed said. ‘As much of it as you can bother to take.’
‘No thanks.’
‘Suit yourself.’
Despite the cloud of confusion descending over King’s senses, he kept his mind racing, assessing possibilities. What if Reed didn’t know the gun was empty? Had it made a sound? Had it jammed — a freak accident at the worst possible time — or was there something else at play?
Reed answered all those questions a second later.
He motioned to the Browning. ‘That’s ours, isn’t it?’
King said, ‘Might be.’
‘No, it definitely is. Because you tried to shoot me before. I heard it. We fit all our firearms with a secondary safety, just beside the trigger guard. You don’t thumb it down before firing and the slide locks up. Complicated work, but it pays off. Saved my life just then, didn’t it?’
King imperceptibly shifted one of his fingers, searching for the additional safety catch in as subtle a fashion as possible.
Reed noticed immediately.
‘Don’t bother,’ he said with a smirk. ‘Miss it once and the gun’s fucked. You’ll need to disassemble it and put it back together to get it working again. Little trick-of-the-trade my friends taught me to stop hostiles making use of the weapons they take off their dead bodies. Like you just tried to do.’