Hawk, p.18
Hawk, page 18
part #6 of Will Slater Series
But King was fighting against that, because it left them open to the vehicle alongside them. If they got rammed again, they’d be going straight into the ditch.
King was threading the needle.
Slater felt his brain going into overdrive. They were doing nearly ninety miles an hour, the ground all around them flashing by at impossible speed. One slight overcorrection to either side could send them spinning end over end into the ditch. Without seatbelts on, they’d be smashed and crushed and squashed to a pulp.
Slater said, ‘Ram them.’
‘What?!’
‘Ram them. Fuck it. Just do it. I can get to them. We don’t have any other options.’
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘King,’ Slater yelled. ‘Just do it.’
King clenched the wheel and swore under his breath.
Then he did it.
He jerked the wheel to the right and the Brabus went back in the direction of the enemy vehicle, and the driver of that vehicle seemed to sense the opportunity to capitalise, and Slater could almost see him snarling with glee.
The driver of the other Brabus came back at them with reckless abandon, so they’d collide at diagonal angles, side to side, and one of them would be sent spinning off toward destruction, given the velocity they were both travelling at.
And King knew he’d lose.
He wasn’t experienced enough with lining up the trajectory. The other driver came in at a better angle, and he would crunch into King’s hood and send the Brabus plummeting off the road.
But Slater, crouched in the back, was the wild card.
King came in reckless too, and Slater sized up the gap and the primal part of his brain made the calculation and said, Yes.
So he went, without even thinking of the risk.
He dashed forward a moment before impact and threw the rear driver’s door open and hurled himself out onto the step running along the exterior of the Brabus.
The wind lashed him hard, turning his hands and face numb, and the mountains in the background loomed into the heavens.
Through the open passenger’s window of the other truck — still stained with blood from the headshot Slater had landed — he saw the driver go wide-eyed.
The driver realised what he was about to do.
And the man had to keep both hands on his own wheel, because he was in the process of ramming King.
The two hoods collided, and King’s Brabus bounced away from the impact zone like it had been slapped by a giant. It zigzagged across the highway, sliding out with its massive bull bar hanging in a state of disrepair. It plummeted over the embankment and turned end over end before crumpling into a twisted mass of metal, resting on its roof with its fat tyres spinning, clogged with mud.
But Slater wasn’t there.
He’d leapt across the narrow gap, threading a needle of his own, and piled in through the open passenger window. There were two men in the rear seats of the enemy vehicle — and the driver, of course — but neither of them could reach over and wind up the window pane in time. Slater went in head-first, tantalisingly aware of the ground speeding past him underneath. If he missed and tumbled out, he’d skin himself alive on the asphalt.
But he didn’t.
He landed on his neck on the soft leather, and it broke his fall. It still hurt like hell, but adrenaline quashed the pain, and with no serious nerve damage he was free to control himself as his legs followed suit, toppling in over his neck and lashing the driver in the face.
The guy swerved, irritated yet unhurt, but it didn’t matter.
Slater was inside.
41
He lurched around, shoving his feet into the passenger footwell so he could lever himself upright.
The driver swung a closed fist sideways, taking one hand off the wheel to try to smash the side of his hand into Slater’s unprotected face.
Slater jerked backwards, and it hit him in the chest. It cracked against his sternum and he wheezed for breath.
Holy shit, he thought.
The guy had fists like bricks.
The driver pulled back and tried another sideways hammer fist, but this time Slater was ready for it. He jerked away from the seat, bouncing off the dashboard, hoping he didn’t set the airbag off.
The driver stamped on the brakes, suddenly aware that he had his precious cargo in the vehicle and there was no need to speed.
At the same time, one of the guys in the rear seats made a lunge for Slater in the cramped interior, trying to dive over the centre console and tie him up.
Unfortunate timing, Slater thought as the guy sailed head-first into the dashboard, encouraged by the momentum of the Brabus decelerating hard.
Slater helped him along with a vicious close-range elbow to his temple, and the unconscious body collapsed across the centre console. It restricted the driver from throwing another fist, and Slater lunged across and head butted the guy in the side of the skull.
The driver recoiled against his own door, rattled by the impact, close to unconsciousness.
Slater helped him along, too.
He threw a fist with maximum intensity, literally leading with it across the cabin. If he missed, he’d break all his fingers on the door behind the driver.
But he didn’t miss.
He struck the guy in the side of the head, right where his own forehead had slammed home.
The man collapsed against the driver’s door, and Slater reached over and tugged the handle, and the guy spilled out onto the road at sixty miles an hour.
Slater didn’t want to see the grisly aftermath.
He grabbed the unconscious guy who’d lunged from the rear seats and threw him out of the car after his comrade.
Then, in one fluid sequence of movements, he leapt up onto the centre console with one leg in a crouch and jackknifed the other close to his body, then he aimed into the back seats and let loose with a stabbing front kick, and he hit the last guy square in the jaw with the sole of his boot. The guy was slack-jawed as it was, frozen in place as he tried to comprehend the rapidly unfolding crisis, and the kick broke his jaw and sent him crumpling into the footwell in a literal world of pain.
Slater slotted into the empty driver’s seat, slammed the door closed and grabbed the wheel.
Just in time.
The Brabus was heading fast for the opposite side of the highway, veering into the oncoming lane. Thankfully there was no civilian traffic this far south of Christchurch, so he hadn’t pulverised any vehicles coming the other way.
He swerved back into his own lane, and pushed the accelerator all the way down, and when the guy in the back with the broken jaw sat up with his hands against his face, Slater whipped around and elbowed him hard in the nose, breaking that bone too in quick succession.
The guy collapsed against the seats, overwhelmed by the pain and receding into unconsciousness.
Slater glanced to his left, searching for King’s vehicle alongside him.
It wasn’t there.
His stomach fell.
He gripped the wheel and scanned the side and rear mirrors, and he saw the bulky shape of a black vehicle nearly half a mile back, resting on its roof in the shallow roadside ditch.
He swore.
He slowed down.
He wasn’t leaving without King.
No matter what.
The brakes kicked in and the Brabus began to slow, and the asphalt flashing past underneath lost its motion blur as Slater receded to a more traditional speed. He could survey the landscape now, but nothing had changed. They were still deep in the endless plains of farmland, and an approaching road sign told him he was bearing down on the town of Orari. Soon the state highway would branch to the left and sweep along the coastline, no doubt paving the way for more stunning views. To the right, he spotted the same sinister mountain range — capped with snow, draped in cloud, faded by the mist in the air.
It was a cold, wet, miserable day on the South Island, and Slater’s sinking stomach reflected the weather.
When the Brabus reached an appropriate speed, Slater turned around in the driver’s seat.
‘You’re probably in too much pain to comprehend this, but if you want to live you need to get out of the car right now. I won’t tell you again.’
Sporting a broken jaw and a broken nose, the crippled mercenary nodded once.
Without considering the consequences for a moment, he opened the rear door and tumbled out of the cabin. Slater was still travelling at thirty miles an hour, and the guy didn’t land correctly. Slater saw him tumble head over heels in the side mirror. But clearly the terror he held toward Will Slater overpowered any of his natural survival instincts, and he’d willingly leapt free at the first command.
Slater reached back and tugged the door closed, then sat in the empty Brabus and sighed.
There was another M4 carbine in the passenger footwell, loaded and ready for use. When Slater had shot the passenger the man had tumbled out of the open window clutching his own rifle, but this was clearly a spare.
He reached over, picked it up, and held it in one hand.
He checked his rear view mirror.
Four of the massive vehicles approached him. Two had peeled off to subdue King, and they were out of sight.
Actually, Slater thought he could make out their faint outlines, but it was pointless. He had four armoured wagons bearing down on his position, and if he took off now they would probably double back and make sure King was dealt with.
Even though King was likely already dead.
When King’s Brabus had veered off the road, it hadn’t looked survivable.
But without him, Slater was here pointlessly.
Alone on a misty island, with no friends or family left in the world.
And that wasn’t somewhere he wanted to exist.
He had to give King some sort of chance if he was alive, and that involved doubling back. At least he could separate the two groups long enough for King to have hope.
What hope?
He just flipped his truck, and he hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt.
It was futile, but Slater had nothing without King.
So he twisted the wheel and turned around on the highway, facing the oncoming fleet.
He readied the carbine in his right hand, and gripped the wheel with his left.
He took a deep breath.
The mountains and the mist and the chill bore down on him — crushing, oppressive, sapping the hope out of the air.
He had nothing.
Which meant he had nothing to lose.
He stamped on the accelerator.
42
King’s eyes came open.
He was bleeding. From the forehead, from the shoulder, and from a deep cut along the top of his right wrist. Any deeper and it might have nicked an artery.
And he was upside down.
Suspended from a seatbelt he’d thrust into place at the last second.
He’d spotted the embankment coming up to greet him and wrenched it across his body and felt the click just as the front end of the Brabus rocketed off into nothingness, and then pitched and groaned and fell and smashed into the earth and spun the car over vertically, where it came crashing down in the ditch in an explosion of mud. Metal had screamed and he’d squeezed his eyes shut and the force of the seatbelt wrenching against his collar bone had sapped all his energy.
An obscene impact.
He thought he’d snapped his collarbone clean in two.
And that would be that, because even if he managed to peel himself out of the wreck, he’d have no ability to use his right arm, and he couldn’t survive surrounded by trained militants armed with automatic weapons without the use of his good hand.
But when his eyes came open and he got past the sight of all the blood and tested his limbs, he found himself almost entirely unhurt.
And he didn’t chalk it up to chance.
He’d put his body through the ringer on Koh Tao. Retirement hadn’t lasted long, but that hadn’t meant he’d become civilised. He relished the animalistic part of his brain, and he’d vowed to never let it go. He’d taken all the energy he normally channelled into life-or-death black operations and put all of it into the gym. Into training and pushing himself with weights and obscene cardio workouts, and sparring in the Muay Thai gym every day, and generally hardening and callousing his mind and body until it ran like it was made of pliable steel.
Which allowed him to take a bump that might have shattered bones in a soft-bodied civilian.
The same way Muay Thai practitioners kicked trees over and over and over again until their shins hardened and became near indestructible.
He wasn’t superhuman, but he was as close as you could get to a perfect physical specimen.
He didn’t dwell on this — he just gave thanks for it. He reached up and unbuckled his seatbelt and dropped into a small pool of his own blood. He landed on shattered glass fragments and grimaced as he squirmed and writhed and worked his way out of the truck.
And then he pulled the M4 carbine out after him.
He stood up in a half-crouch, his ears ringing and his head pounding, but already the presence of all the blood had disappeared from his mind. It didn’t matter. You could lose three or four pints before things got disastrous. Instead his senses were wired, having descended totally and completely into operational mode. Clutching the carbine in front of him, he vowed to make it through this coming fight by whatever means necessary. He’d been beaten and cut and bruised, but none of that mattered. None of the men chasing him had caused a significant injury.
The first Brabus appeared at the top of the embankment, but it didn’t pause there. It seemed its occupants had been taught a valuable lesson by their late predecessors. They’d driven past the corpses of those who had hesitated at the side of the highway before King ambushed them.
Now this vehicle dipped onto the muddy embankment, its fat tyres chewing up the earth, and it made a beeline for the bottom of the ditch where King’s vehicle lay on its roof.
King squatted down behind the crumpled Brabus.
He tensed up.
He breathed.
Calm.
Focus.
Reaction speed.
You know what you can do.
So do it.
On the other side of the wreck, the enemy vehicle pulled to a halt.
The engine growled throatily as the enemy Brabus idled.
Doors opened.
Now.
King came up into view and trained the carbine on the first man to get out of the car and shot him through the head. He put two bullets into the guy to make sure he was dead, and the blood and brain matter spraying across the door confirmed it. That man had come from the passenger seat, so when the driver materialised a half-second later he quickly realised his error and tried to duck back behind the safety of the bulletproof windows.
King shot him in the face before he could react.
The third guy tumbled out of the back in a desperate attempt to close the gap, probably figuring he had a better chance of succeeding if he bull rushed King’s position rather than cowering and exchanging gunfire in a tactical shootout.
But that was the worst strategy imaginable against someone with King’s reaction speed.
He zeroed in on his target and put a three-round burst into the guy’s chest before the man made it three steps away from the car.
The enemy Brabus sat there, its engine still rumbling, its occupants slaughtered.
King breathed out, settled his racing heart rate, and watched for the other vehicle. He’d seen four of the trucks blazing down the highway after Slater when he’d climbed out of the cabin, so there could only be one left on his tail.
You can do this.
A soft breeze blew against his back. He threw a glance over his shoulder — both to assess the new landscape and search for potential ambushes — but he saw nothing except a grid of manicured fields, separated by thin wire fences, some packed with cattle and horses. And further beyond that, he saw the mouth of a forest — enormous coniferous trees standing at least a hundred feet high, visible from a mile away. The woods had been chopped back to make space for additional farmland.
King filed the terrain away for future use.
Then he turned back to scrutinise the top of the embankment, and he saw it.
Not a truck.
Five men, walking shoulder to shoulder. Four of them armed with carbines. One clutching some sort of electronic device. Slightly larger than a phone. A customised device. Purpose unknown.
King ducked below the line of sight as a hail of withering gunfire assaulted the overturned Brabus in front of him.
43
Slater quickly realised his options were scarce.
The terrain was too flat. It was the same problem he and King had faced when they decided to run, but now the hopelessness had amplified without King’s presence. He was alone, facing twenty times the level of firepower he possessed on his own — and ordinarily he would have overcome the odds, but this time he had nothing to work with. He was surrounded by fields, and he thrived in claustrophobic conditions. He relished tight corners and dark spaces and shadows — it enhanced the need to react faster than the opposition, something he excelled mightily at.
There was no chance of that on the open highway, with farmland the only terrain in sight.
Actually…
He saw the faint outline of a forest far in the distance, back the way he’d come from, but he had no chance of reaching it. He’d have to find a way through the rapidly approaching blockade of vehicles. King stood a better chance of making it there, but Slater doubted King was still alive.
Then what the hell are you doing?
He quickened his pace, speeding toward the line of armoured trucks, wracked with doubt and guilt.
Why are you fighting for a man you know is dead?
Because it was Jason King, and if there was anyone who could find a way to survive the impossible, it was him…
