It seemed they would have to brawl.
He swung wildly, scrambling on top of the guy. His vision was nothing but a pulsating, blurry mess. He landed a couple of shots, then the guy bucked him off and slammed a fist into his throat. He fell back against the bathroom wall. Disorientation and dizziness and a shortage of breath all combined together. Panic rose in his chest. He could see colours now, but his surroundings remained muddled. He saw the mercenary in front of him, scrambling to his feet.
He began to rise. His knee brushed against something long and metal.
He bent down and scooped up the dropped weapon, relying on reflexes alone. The man across from him was too close to get off a shot in time but he brought the butt of the rifle around in a scything arc. It cracked the guy’s jaw, audible even with King’s impaired hearing, sending him crashing to the bathroom floor in a heap, clutching his face.
King began to make out more features. He saw tiled walls, painted stark blue. There was a row of toilet cubicles on the other side of the room, and a row of showers on this side. The guy on the floor was white, middle-aged, fit. He kept his hair short. He was dressed in military-style khakis, but some kind of cheap knock-off, not the real thing. King’s senses would not return to one hundred percent for hours, but this rudimentary form would do for now.
He reversed his grip on the weapon — which he noted was a Ceska Scorpion sub-machine gun with detachable stock — and put a few bullets into the dazed mercenary’s skull. Blood arced from the man’s temple. He was dead.
Five left.
King knew that he could not slow down. If he paused even to breathe, the remaining forces would come charging in through the hallway and outnumber him effortlessly. He would die in a blaze of gunfire. So he reached down and gripped the corpse underneath him one-handed. Using previously untapped primal strength, he heaved the dead man out into the hallway.
Bullets dotted the walls and the floor as the remaining mercenaries reacted to the sudden movement. They’d been ready to fire on King the second he left the bathroom. Distracted by their dead friend, they would now be caught off-guard. Just for a split second. The time it took them to shake off the sight of a deceased comrade and return to laser-focus.
But King thrived off capitalising on confusion.
He peeked down the hallway at the same moment as the gunfire ceased. Two mercenaries outside had been stupid enough to break their cover in an attempt to unload everything they had at the moving target. King raised the Ceska to his shoulder and picked them off effortlessly, drawing on the thousands of hours he’d spent on target practice over his life.
Two bullets each, a double-tap straight to the head.
Pop-pop. Pop-pop.
They jerked back like marionettes, dead on impact, blood fountaining from the wounds in their foreheads. Both of them collapsed out of sight.
Three left.
King decided it was time to wait. Three-on-one had a much different feel to it than ten-on-one. Especially when the one had taken out seven. The last mercenaries would prove much more cautious than their dead friends. He was sure of it. Reality would sink in. They would grow nervous. Their hands would shake. So he stayed poised in the bathroom. He shrank away from the corridor and ducked into one of the toilet cubicles.
The after-effects of the flashbang began to take hold. Between his ears his temple throbbed like crazy. His ears rang with the high-pitched whining of temporary hearing loss. His mouth was dry. His nose ran with blood. But he wasn’t dead. And that was all that mattered.
He let the chaos settle, until a minute had passed without a gunshot. Directly following the previous barrage, it made for an uncomfortable silence. Not for him. He relished these moments. The times when the enemy was unsure of themselves. Combat tended to follow a predictable pattern. Countless hours of waiting, watching, preparing. Then an all-out blitzkrieg of action and adrenaline and pent-up energy that didn’t cease until the last man stood standing.
Not this time.
He heard shuffling in the clubhouse. Panicked whispering. Had they hit him? Was he dead? He knew their veins were pumping. They were desperate to finish the job.
It took them two full minutes to come storming in. Two minutes in which King had ample time to plan a course of action, to calm himself, to let the stoic focus return.
He got into position. He waited.
The hallway was barely wide enough to fit two men, so when they bull-rushed into the bathroom with their guns blazing it was in a clumsy, predictable manner. The racket was deafening but King barely heard it. His hearing had taken enough damage to muffle all sounds. The trio must have unloaded fifty bullets between them as they stormed into the cramped space. Tiles all over the walls shattered, fragments cascading to the floor.
But King remained unhurt.
He sat perched on top of one of the cubicle stalls, wedged into the short space. His back against the ceiling. It would not protect him from gunfire. In fact, he was completely exposed. But it meant that he stayed out of the typical level of engagement that most men decided to fire at when running into a room blind. For the single second in which they had the advantage they moved their aim in a horizontal arc, panning the room from left to right, brutalising their surroundings.
But they didn’t think to aim up.
No-one thinks to aim up.
King waited until all three were inside the bathroom before he emptied what was left in the Ceska’s magazine. It turned out to be sparse. No more than ten bullets. Enough to get the job done though. He lit up the chests of the two men in front, dotting them with rounds. Before he could bring his aim over to the third, the guy fell back into the hallway, reacting impressively fast. King’s gun clicked empty, a bad sign.
He dropped down from the cubicle and snatched up one of the rifles discarded from the two men he’d just killed. Before he had a chance to ascertain the make of the weapon, he saw the last mercenary fleeing down the hallway, heading for the other end of the clubhouse.
Attempting to escape.
King couldn’t let that happen.
It would only take one phone call and Lars would leave the Australian countryside behind, flying on to who knows where. Perhaps that had already happened. Perhaps all of King’s efforts were futile.
But in the time he had left, he had to try.
He broke into a sprint, chasing the man through the destroyed clubhouse.
CHAPTER 38
He followed the last mercenary through the main room, passing the shredded couches and the bar covered in alcohol and shattered glass. Out the same door he’d come in, legs pumping, trying to gain ground. From the back, he noticed the man was roughly the same size as him. Muscular, too. If he had any kind of fighting talent he might be able to gain the upper hand on King, who was reeling from numerous injuries and beatdowns. He didn’t know what his reaction speed would be like. It would almost certainly be impaired. If that affected him enough to struggle against a man his size, he would soon find out.
They crossed the same gravel path. The mercenary headed into the hangar, slamming the doors apart, running fast. Seeing his co-workers decimated by a single man must have shattered his morale. King had seen it on the faces of many of his past enemies. The sheer incomprehension. How could one man cause so much chaos and destruction?
The double doors leading to the gear room swung closed just before King burst into them, knocking them back apart. It disorientated him for a split second, as the doors were solid. They obscured his view into the next room.