Enough for the mercenary to capitalise.
King ran straight into a fist, cracking him low and hard across the face. He recoiled and involuntarily let go of the rifle in his hands. His boots skidded on the concrete floor. Pain flared up inside his head, just before his neck whiplashed against the ground. The gun clattered away, useless.
He spun and righted himself, knowing that one wrong move would lead to unconsciousness, followed quickly by death. The man in front of him moved with desperation. His actions were fuelled with a rabid intensity that only came in a life-or-death situation.
At least King felt the same animalistic sensation.
He studied the guy. He looked to be roughly the same age as King, with the hardened expression of a man experienced in combat. An ex-soldier also.
‘Do you know what you’re doing?’ King said, facing off with him across the gear room. He spat blood in the space between them.
‘Making a living,’ the guy said.
‘You’d kill hundreds of thousands of people for money?’
‘That’s not up to me. I’m getting paid enough to live well for the rest of my life. Just to protect the boss.’
‘So you don’t care?’
‘Not at all.’
‘Well,’ King said, ‘at least I’ll feel better about this.’
He charged in, knowing a punch or two would land, bracing for them. A right hook glanced off the side of his head as he closed the distance but he rolled with it. Let his head move with the blow, knocking much of the power away. That way he wasn’t disoriented for the next step. He wrapped an arm around the mercenary’s neck, looping it over his shoulder, getting a tight grip, powering through his guard. He dropped his hips low and threw the guy head-first over his body. The guy landed with all King’s weight on top of him. A pathetic wheeze escaped his lips.
He was winded.
King slammed an elbow into his head, feeling his skull bounce off the concrete floor. He dropped another one, then a third. Then he paused. Not many people could take three direct blows from him. At least, not that he had experienced.
Obviously this guy was different.
The mercenary used the hesitation to buck violently, throwing King’s weight off his chest, escaping out from underneath. He clambered to his feet and staggered across the room, toward the hangar.
King felt a pang of shock.
The four dead mercenaries at the hangar entrance would be surrounded by their weapons, all fully loaded. Discarded after King had shot them. If this man got his hands on one of them, he would be as good as dead.
He scrambled off the ground, stumbling slightly. Disorientation almost swept his feet out from underneath. He gulped and tried to ignore the ramifications of so much physical violence in such a short space of time. He would address the consequences later.
The clock was ticking.
A loud thump echoed through the gear room as the door to the hangar slammed shut behind the mercenary. He disappeared from sight. The glass window revealed a small patch of the hangar within. It showed nothing. King would be running in with no spatial awareness, no knowledge of where the man was.
But the longer he left it, the higher the chance he would be facing an automatic weapon on the other side.
So he sucked up his courage and threw caution to the wind and wrenched the door open and ran through into the hangar, flicking his gaze side to side as rapidly as possible, searching for any sign of the man.
He looked right. Nothing.
He looked left, and caught the sight of a wrench swinging at his face in his peripheral vision.
Instinct.
He spun away, feeling the end of the heavy tool brush past his nose, indescribably close. It sent a shiver of fear down his spine. The guy had put everything into the swing and as a result he overcompensated. His arm carried through, causing him to stumble. He stepped out of position.
King needed no other opportunity. He lunged in with a powerful stride, placing his body in just the right position so that a punch would create a perfect symmetrical diagram, transferring power from the balls of his feet, up through his legs, through his glutes, up his back muscles, through the shoulder, down the elbow, released through his knuckles. He threw all his bodyweight into the blow. Aware that if he missed the attempt would throw him wildly off-balance, leaving him exposed and vulnerable to another swing of the wrench. One connection from the heavy tool and he would go down. There was little left in his gas tank. He was already fighting on wobbly legs.
But the blow landed.
It crashed off the mercenary’s chin in just the right spot, breaking bone. The guy sprawled to the ground. At the same time he released the wrench. It skittered away, out of reach. His legs had given out under the impact of the punch. King felt pain shoot up his wrist, and he knew damage had been done. Yet it didn’t matter. The mercenary’s head would be a lot worse off than his hand.
Just like that the fight was over. No prolonged battle or heroic comeback from the brink of defeat. In a fight between two men of their size, it only took one shot with just the right timing and placement to send the other to a dark place.
A place where quick recovery was impossible.
King knew a devastating concussion when he saw one. For a moment he considered mercy. He questioned the potential ramifications of leaving the man to recover from the beatdown. But it would do no good to spare his life. He would wind up killing someone else, that much was certain.
Men who were swayed so easily by dollar signs had no clear path to moral redemption.
So after assessing the state of the guy and deducing that he would not be getting up anytime soon, King crossed to the other side of the hangar and fished a bloodied assault rifle out of the cluster of dead mercenaries. Another M4 carbine. Safety off. Whoever supplied them must have delivered a bulk discount.
He turned back to the dazed mercenary.
His face fell.
The man had produced a small satellite radio from somewhere, probably one of the pockets in his khakis. Before King could react, he thumbed a button on the side and spoke two sentences into the device. They were disjointed, and he stumbled over his words, but the message was clear enough.
‘They’re coming. Take off now.’
He tossed the radio away and stared at King. Smiling. The expression was full of contempt and jest and sick satisfaction.
Now Lars knew he had to hurry.
He would be gone by the time they got there.
The anthrax spores would leave Jameson, and King would spend countless days eating himself alive with worry, wondering when he would switch on the news to see the effects of the most devastating terrorist attack in history.
He shot four times, wiping the smile off the man’s face, but what had been done would not be so easily repairable.
Silence descended over the dropzone, and with it came a tension so thick and overbearing that King felt the sudden urge to vomit.
He had failed.
CHAPTER 39
‘Kate! Kitchener!’ King roared at the top of his lungs. ‘All clear!’
It echoed out of the hangar and through the empty cluster of buildings, which were now populated by a wave of dead men. He strode into the sunshine, passing the bullet-ridden corpses of the first four mercenaries he’d killed. The runway stretched off in either direction, showing no sign of life. Adjacent to the hangar, the pair of Hawkeis now lay empty, engines still running.
He jogged to the nearest one, tossed the M4 carbine in the back and leapt into the driver’s seat.