No Contest
For the Glorious House of Sinanju
With special thanks and acknowledgement to Tim Somheil for his contribution to this work.
Copyright
First published in the United States in 2005 by Worldwide
First published in Great Britain in ebook by Sphere in 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7515-6087-9
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2005 Warren Murphy
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
Sphere
Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DZ
Contents
Dedication
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Epilogue
About the Authors
Chapter 1
Dee Ligit didn’t care anymore about being a champion. All he cared about was staying alive.
Two competitors were dead already, and the evidence was right there in front of him. Blood-black smears stained the plywood catch basin that was jokingly called “the Moat.”
Getting hurt was one thing—in the sport of rail surfing you broke bones all the time. But these guys were dead. And not just any two rail surfers. They had been two of the greats.
Antonio the Terrible was a legend. Around from the beginning, when kids first started standing atop trains as a sport, these days he was to rail surfing what Michael Jordan was to basketball. He’d been on a hundred magazine covers in his native Brazil. He had his own line of helmets and knee pads. And now he was dead.
Francis the Fran Man had been around almost as long. He was old, like, in his thirties, and he’d been a star of the sport since he was twelve. It was the Fran Man, the grandfather of American rail surfers, who inspired Dee Ligit to stand on top of a speeding train for the first time. And now the Fran Man was dead, too.
“The show will go on,” declared the vice president of programming for the Extreme Sports Network, sponsor of the first North American extreme rail surfing competition-called Pro Train Surf I. “It would be an insult to these brave athletes to stop it now.”
The network gave the media prerecorded videotapes of Antonio the Terrible and the Fran Man. “We all face death every time we strap a locomotive to our sneakers,” Antonio said in his heavily accented English. “I don’t want the sport to stop if something happens to me. Carry on—let the world see the bravery of all professional rail surfers.”
The Fran Man’s video said pretty much the same thing. In fact, Dee Ligit had made a tape just like it, which was a requirement of the games. You couldn’t compete in Pro Train Surf I until you’d made a tape like that and handed it over to ESN.
Dee said pretty much the same words on his tape and he felt oh so sincere at the time. Now he was miserable and afraid. Sure, he was a professional rail surfer, but he wasn’t one of the superstars of the sport. Tony and the Fran Man—they were in a league of their own, right. If they couldn’t surf this course, how could he?
But he had no choice. If he backed out now, his career was over. He’d lose all credibility. He’d never get another promotional fee. Landing his own branded line of surf shoes would be out of the question—who’d want surf shoes from a guy who was afraid to surf? And for sure he’d lose the fifty-thousand-dollar check from the cereal company that was sponsoring him. He really needed that money.
Dee had to surf the course, but that didn’t mean he had to kill himself in the process. He’d take it easy, go casual. As he stood out on the launch platform, he examined the track and tried not to see the plywood gutters.
When he was a kid, he rail surfed for fun. He didn’t let high school or his parents interfere with his passion. He was expelled from school three months before graduation and kicked out of the house the same day, but it was right about that time he won his first big rail surf competition. He couldn’t even count how many contests he had won since then.
Back then the competitions were strictly underground and illegal. A few hundred devotees would meet in the middle of the night to watch the launch. The launch pad was a truck, a parked boxcar or anything else that was close enough to make a jump possible. The surf train would roll alongside, and the surfers would leap aboard. They were always passenger trains, which traveled regular schedules and offered curved, challenging roofs.
After the surfers leaped aboard, the crowds would drive to the finish line. The best contests involved high-speed trains traveling track with a lot of twists and turns.
Sure, it was hard to stay on. Especially on a sharp curve with a speeding engineer. Dee took his share of tumbles and broke his arms and legs, but he had natural talent, and his cut of the wagering pots was more than he’d make at any job he could think of.
A few months ago he had his biggest win. It was in South Dakota, or maybe the other Dakota. The contest started out as nothing special until Dee heard that the sponsors, a bunch of small-time hoods from Fargo, had invited friends from Las Vegas. The friends from Vegas had never seen train surfing before, but they had cash to wager. The stakes grew to astronomical levels.
The train came and the players leaped onto it. One first-timer misjudged his leap and tumbled right off. Dee chuckled when he witnessed the snap of bones as the kid landed. He heard the kid was a Texan. Hell, they surfed on boxcars down there. His grandmother could surf a boxcar!
When the rain started Dee thought he was a goner, but at least he knew how to take a fall. And yet, as the surface of the passenger car grew slick and the other contestants flew off one after another, Dee managed to stay on.
A rain out became official if all the contestants slid off before the halfway point. Everybody assumed this early downpour would be a rain out for sure—and yet the train came into the finish line with Dee Ligit still surfing the top.
Dee was already well known on the underground train-surfing circuit, and that win made him famous. He got his first cover on LocoSurfer magazine. Then he heard plans for the first legitimate, legal rail-surfing event in the U.S.