Hawk, page 14
part #6 of Will Slater Series
‘It just reads, “Go ahead.”’
King swore, and Slater scrunched up his features. ‘Got a location?’
‘Yes, actually,’ she said. ‘It was sent from a set of coordinates that seem to lead to farmland near Tapanui.’
‘Tapanui?’
‘It’s a small town on the South Island of New Zealand. Middle of nowhere.’
Slater sighed.
King didn’t say a word.
He stared across the room vacantly, looking into space, his gaze focused on nothing.
He said, ‘I don’t like this at all.’
Slater said, ‘Guess we’re flying halfway across the world.’
‘Could be a ruse. Just to get us out of the picture for … something.’
The woman shook her head vehemently. ‘No.’
Slater raised an eyebrow.
She said, ‘It’s genuine. I’d bet my life savings on it. They tried so hard to mask all the sensitive data. It’s a miracle we got text logs out of the phone. They definitely didn’t want anyone seeing this. It was a nightmare to crack. Even when we got into the phone itself, the location the texts were sent from was scrambled. We had to decrypt that, too.’
‘How’d you do it?’
‘You got all day?’ she said.
‘What else is on it?’ he said, moving on.
‘Almost nothing,’ she said. ‘That’s the truth. It was a burner phone, in case you didn’t put it together. Supposed to be untraceable. Supposed to mask everything. I’m telling you — no-one other than the three of us together could have got through that encryption. Whoever’s doing it is damn good.’
Slater said, ‘Then they won’t expect us to show up on their doorstep.’
The woman said, ‘Who are they?’
‘We don’t know.’
‘What did they do?’
Slater glanced imperceptibly at King, who shivered as something cold ran down his spine.
Slater knew what it was.
Dark, black rage.
Unfortunately, the pair of warehouse workers deemed it a suitable time to mount a resistance.
They leapt to their feet in unison and charged at King, thinking they were taking advantage of some kind of lapse in attention.
Slater winced.
They fell on him, and one of the office workers decided he was lucid enough to pile on too, but what they hadn’t predicted was something out of their worst nightmares rising up to retaliate.
Jason King lurched around to face them with pure anger in his eyes.
31
Bad timing, was all Slater could think.
Don’t attack the man when he’s mourning the loss of his life partner, you fools.
The warehouse workers were strong and short and built like tanks, almost wider than they were tall. Their forearms rippled with muscle, resting over thick calloused fingers, their physiques hardened by manual labour. In a civilian confrontation, they might have intimidated the competition nine times out of ten. But this was a world away from the civilian sphere, and King whipped around with lightning speed to meet their oncoming bullrush.
He raised the .44 over his head and pistol-whipped the first worker, somehow slashing his way between the guy’s outstretched hands, splitting the guard and sending him careening off-balance in response to his broken nose.
King didn’t stop there.
He was angry as hell, furious at the turn his life had taken, and Slater could see it in the man’s eyes. He could almost see the gears turning in King’s head.
These guys have been supplying the country with crack for years.
Imagine the untold devastation they’ve caused.
The addicts’ families won’t mind if I take out my rage on them.
King lashed out with a vicious leg kick, tearing cartilage in the first guy’s knee, sending him half-falling, half-bowing toward the carpeted floor. King encouraged him down by grabbing the back of his neck and wrenching downward, helping him along his journey. He slammed the guy face-first into the carpet and then sprung upward, leaving the broken man in a pool of his own blood. The second guy hesitated, shocked by the sudden violence, but he’d already shown his hand and King wasn’t about to deliver any mercy.
He kneed the guy in the mid-section as soon as he realised his adversary had left his stomach exposed.
Bone crunched against muscle, and bone won.
Slater heard the impact of the knee and visualised the worker’s insides seizing up, cramping and screaming for relief. The guy bent over with all the breath smashed out of him and King followed up with the same knee directly to the unprotected face. The worker shot back, and King thundered a kick into his chest, bouncing him off the wall like he weighed ten pounds.
The office worker piled in, seemingly unfazed by his two colleagues’ demise.
Slater figured he was either dumb or brave.
Probably both.
King clenched his teeth and threw another looping overhand haymaker of a punch, this time out of sheer irritation instead of desperation. He wanted to throw something with mean intentions, and he wanted it to hurt.
It hurt, alright.
Four knuckles landed against a jaw and broke the bone.
The office worker moaned and collapsed.
King shook his hand and winced, testing to see whether he’d broken any of his fingers, but he seemingly came away without significant injury.
He straightened himself up and flashed a glance at the tech workers, surrounded by three men all seriously injured, and a fourth so intimidated he might have wet his pants.
‘Sorry,’ King said. ‘This isn’t a great time in my life.’
‘We can tell,’ the woman said.
Suddenly eager to get the hell out of here before King made things worse, Slater slid his own phone out of his pocket and said, ‘Those coordinates, please.’
The woman read them off the screen.
To make sure she wasn’t bluffing, Slater leant in and cross-checked them with his own notes, but it all added up. She had a maps application open in the desktop background, and he could see the same latitude and longitude entered in. As she’d told him, it narrowed in on a tract of land a few miles east of the tiny New Zealand town of Tapanui. The map feed was from a satellite, and Slater could see staggering peaks of mountains dotted with snow all around the bright green fields.
He glanced from the monitor to King. ‘Ever been to New Zealand?’
‘No,’ King said. ‘But there’s a first time for everything.’
Slater put his own phone back in his pocket and straightened up. He surveyed the damage. There were three men lying flat on the carpet in the corner of the office, bleeding everywhere and moaning to themselves. The fourth was sitting in the same position, with his knees tucked up to his chest and his gaze fixed on the ground, as if he could wish his way out of his predicament. The tech workers seemed slightly more subdued, resigned to whatever fate Slater and King had in store.
Slater turned to them and, wishing he could rewind the last minute of their lives so they weren’t intimidated by King’s ferocity, said, ‘Here’s the deal.’
They listened in.
Slater said, ‘You’ve got no reason to trust us, but you nailed it the first time. We have nothing to do with this airfield, or this operation. It’s too big for us to take care of, and quite frankly it’s none of our concern. You three can carry on doing what you’re doing and keep your same jobs, and we couldn’t care less. We needed information on that phone, and we needed it fast. This was the only way. If you hold that against us, then that’s alright. But we’d prefer if you were as vague as possible about what happened here for as long as possible. We need a head start and it sounds like whoever runs this operation has connections everywhere. We’d prefer not to get shut out of the airports before we can get out of the country, because we need to get to New Zealand. So ask yourselves if it’ll affect you in any way if you’re sparse on the details for twenty-four hours. Once we’re gone, call this in, but you don’t know what happened to these guys. You only saw a glimpse of us. We never spoke to you. None of this will ever come back to haunt you.’
They shrugged and nodded in turn, but there wasn’t the slightest guarantee they’d stick to their word.
He’d used all the persuasion he could manage.
Now he bored his gaze into them.
Deep into their souls.
He tried to show them, with just a look — I’m not a bad guy.
One by one, they seemed to genuinely believe him.
He nodded silently to each of them.
He mouthed, ‘I’m sorry.’
Then he pointed King toward the door and gestured that it was time to leave.
They stepped outside simultaneously, and Slater gently shut the door behind him. Before he pulled it closed in its entirety, he gave the tech team one final, pleading look.
He wasn’t going to kill them to protect himself.
He had to hope like hell they would follow his advice.
They stared back at him, but there was very little fear in their expressions.
He shut the door, and followed King out of the module. They crossed silently to the perimeter door and re-entered the same code Lukas and Benicio had provided them with, this time from the other side. The green light buzzed and they slipped out of the airfield.
On the other side, King let out a hearty sigh.
Slater did the same.
It felt like they’d beat down half the damn complex.
Slater’s bones were weary. He had the beginnings of a throbbing headache. But he tuned all of it out, because there was work to do. He had to admit he’d expected a hell of a lot more information off that phone.
They had almost nothing to work with.
But they had a location.
New Zealand, he thought. Never been there.
And he was due for a vacation.
32
As they clambered up the incline and made for the small rural lot nearly two miles north, they both let the silence drag out. It was something subtle between them. They didn’t need to pour out their conflicting emotions about what they’d found. They just dealt with it on their own, going deep into their own heads.
Processing the recent developments the only way a couple of solo black-ops killers knew how.
King said, ‘A goddamn burner phone.’
‘We’ve got a location.’
‘Yeah, but it’s not enough.’
‘It’s more than enough. Look what we had to work with today. If we stayed on this path, we could have shut down an operation that would have made international news.’
King hesitated at that, mulling over it. ‘Maybe we should have…’
Slater said, ‘I wish I could hold a mirror up to your face right now.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re a mess, King. Your head’s not right. You almost killed those three guys back there—’
‘They deserved it.’
‘I could see you running that through your head. Weighing up whether you could live with yourself if you beat them all to death. But that’s not what we came here to do. We’re not sociopathic. We needed information, and we got it, and you might have crippled all those guys you beat down. If they pulled a gun on you, then fair game. But you only did it because you were angry.’
Alone on the deserted trail, King turned to look at Slater as the country wind lashed their faces. ‘Do you understand what I’m going through right now?’
‘Yes,’ Slater said. ‘I haven’t told you much about what I’ve been through recently, but I’ve experienced something similar. I had someone I considered a daughter. I had to give her away because of my own lifestyle. Because of the way I’m wired. Because of what I do day to day. And that made me angrier than I ever thought it could. So I went to Zimbabwe to try and get away from it all, to grapple with the fact that I’ll never have anything resembling a family because I can’t go two days without getting into some kind of chaos. And I was slowly coming to terms with it, and then everything went to hell in Zimbabwe, too. Because that’s my life. And it’s yours, too. You tried to avoid it for so long, but the bottom line is that neither of us are going to be able to avoid it in future.’
King said, ‘Then what’s the point?’
‘You know what the point is. You know what we can do. You know what we’re capable of. It’s what I was trying to accept this whole time, when you were on a tropical island trying to live a peaceful existence. It was never going to work, King. But at least you got the chance to give it a shot.’
‘Don’t act like you’re superior.’
‘I’m smart enough to know where my lane is, and to stay in it.’
The fist came at his face so fast that for a moment he thought he was hallucinating. He’d never dealt with a combatant like Jason King in his life, and the blinding speed nearly deceived him. If he’d hesitated a half-second longer, it would have crashed against his jaw and knocked him unconscious.
But, under the surface, it seemed King had been holding something back. It was imperceptible, barely noticeable, but Slater sure picked up on it.
His own speed rivalled King’s, and he knew the man had second-guessed himself as soon as he’d thrown the punch. He’d thrown it with anger and animosity and frustration, all rising up like an unstoppable ball in his chest, and as soon as Slater had insinuated it was King’s fault, he had unleashed it with all his rage.
But Slater was fast as hell, and he knew King hadn’t dealt with anything like that in a long time either.
He recalled an encounter at an airport in Corsica a couple of years ago. Back when they’d first met.
He’d beat King then, and he’d do it again now.
Because he was quick, and relentless, and he considered himself a little more unhinged than his counterpart. King had morals and a rigorous code. Slater was a cooped-up bull, and it didn’t take much to set him off.
A fist flying at his face from someone he thought he trusted was enough to do it.
He flipped a switch and jerked out of the way, and the fist missed him by inches. King had overcompensated with it, throwing caution to the wind as he channelled all his anger, and Slater took advantage of the speed difference. He was behind King in a half-second, and wrapped around his back like a boa constrictor in another half-second.
He bucked with his hips and wrenched downward and used every morsel of his jiu-jitsu ability to lever all his weight across King’s upper back. King weighed more, so he kept his feet under him, but Slater reached down and seized hold of King’s left wrist and jerked it down, sending him stumbling to the left wearing a two hundred pound backpack, and that was enough to tip the equilibrium and seize control.
To a bystander, it would have seemed incomprehensible. Two of the fastest, most dangerous men on the planet locked in a vicious battle of leverage, both aware that with a third-degree black belt in both their possessions, it would be a matter of who got to the ground in an advantageous position to tip the scales in their favour.
King went down into an awkward half-squat, fighting with all his might to stay on his feet, but it was a test of technique, and Slater had come in with bulletproof composure. King was getting his awareness back, but he’d been furious at the start, and as that flowed out it translated into a loss of momentum.
As soon as he was down in the half-squat, Slater sunk the hooks in, wrapping both his legs around King’s mid-section, securing the metaphorical backpack. King’s hands flew to his face, knowing full well that a choke attempt was coming, but Slater knew he’d do that. So he jerked again at the hips, jolting King in place, and he lost his balance and fell forwards without the use of his arms to stabilise his stance.
He ploughed into the dust, and on the empty gravel trail they fought and squirmed and battled for every inch of control.
But the fight was done.
Slater had every advantage.
And there was an unspoken agreement in the air not to resort to blows. Jiu-jitsu was just enough of a test of competition as a straight-up fight, without the accompanying brain damage that came from men of their calibre smashing fists against skulls.
Because they both knew they could kill each other in a heartbeat.
Slater flattened King out on his stomach, his legs still looped around the man’s abdomen. He tried to squeeze with his legs and crush the breath out of his opponent, but King had abdominals that felt like steel. Slater ignored it, concentrating on what he could control. He forced King’s face into the dirt by pressing down on the back of his skull with a calloused palm, and used the momentary discomfort to loop his other hand around King’s throat.
But he was slightly out of position.
He crushed the head down harder, and King fought against it with animalistic strength.
Slater adjusted his hips, sliding a few inches down to get better leverage.
King bucked hard, threatening to throw him off.
Slater held tight, and nearly broke a nail off on the ground as he clenched his teeth and forced his arm through the gap.
Nearly there…
Just a few…
More…
Inches…
There.
He felt the crook of his elbow touch the soft flesh of King’s throat, despite the man’s efforts to crush his chin into his chest and prevent any attempt at a rear naked choke.
And then he knew he had it, so he stopped forcing King’s head down and used his other hand to wrench the choke in tight, the muscles in his arms screaming and straining and crushing tight against King’s windpipe, and as he held it he channelled his own anger at what his life had become over the last few years, feeding off the chaos and uncertainty, wondering if he would ever live a stable, comfortable life, and then he realised that wasn’t what he wanted and instead he would be happy to do this forever, fighting and struggling for every inch of space and finding out what he could truly become when he wasn’t tethered down by personal and emotional burdens.
All that played out in the space of a couple of seconds, and King rolled him over so now Slater’s back was on the ground, but the choke sunk in tighter and tighter, and King’s face turned red as Slater cut off the carotid artery and any moment he would pass out…
