Hawk, page 26
part #6 of Will Slater Series
One.
Two.
Three.
He steeled himself against the seatbelt.
Nothing.
Half a second passed, and he figured, Fuck. I’ve overshot it.
He started to raise his head up, to make sure he didn’t plummet off the road.
Then he T-boned the enemy vehicle.
He hit it in the rear door, and it seemed his aim held up. He heard the sound of twisting metal, followed by a terrible, guttural scream. It was barely audible above the rest of the racket, and the shock of the impact ruined his perception right afterward.
But he heard it all the same, as imperceptible as it was.
It was the rear gunner, crushed either to death or paralysis as the hood of King’s sedan smashed into the rear door.
King then heard screeching tyres, and a laboured shout of panic as the brutality of the car crash faded away.
He lifted his head back up, and took in his surroundings.
The enemy vehicle screeched and twisted and flew off the road a moment later.
It fell a couple of feet to a gravel ditch, but that was enough to disrupt the balance. Its right-hand wheels lifted up, and momentum did the rest. It tumbled end over end and crashed down on its roof. King thought he saw the driver and passenger spill out the shattered windshield, their bodies and faces bloodied, but he might have imagined it. He was past the crash site in another half-second, and that was when he felt the surge.
The surge?
He’d never put a label on it, but he knew what it was.
It was the first victory notched on his belt. In the heat of a war zone, surrounded by enough chaos to make any lesser warrior wilt, he was wired. Primed. Ready for anything. It didn’t matter that he was still in maximum danger, surrounded by vehicular carnage as the ambush party swerved and skidded in the darkness, aiming to cut him off, aiming to riddle him with bullets, aiming to tear him limb from limb. Aiming to shred him to a pulp.
None of that mattered.
What mattered was the first victory, and he took it in stride as he saw the first enemy vehicle incapacitated alongside him.
1-0, he thought.
How’s the rest of this going to go?
It was a ludicrous thought to have. Especially considering there were four vehicles left, all containing armed killers, all with the tactical advantage over him. They knew the terrain. They had faster cars. They could box him in, entrap him, remove any chance of escape. They could aim assault rifles at him from four separate directions.
Who cares? he thought.
And he gritted his teeth as manic focus descended over him.
He twisted the wheel, ripped the handbrake, fishtailed wildly across the two-lane road, and aimed for the nearest car.
They expect me to run.
No-one would ever know, but in that moment a small smile crept across King’s face, and he figured if he’d gone insane it was best to come out a psychotic winner than a psychotic loser.
He thought he saw a horrified face through the windshield of the oncoming car, but he might have been imagining that too.
He hit it head-on, slamming against his seatbelt, stopping both cars in their tracks.
Then, before the aftershock of the collision had even worn off, he leapt out of the groaning vehicle and sprinted the few feet toward the enemy.
The rear gunner of this car was reeling — perhaps a couple of ribs were broken. He’d been hanging out the open rear window with a carbine rifle in his hand when the impact occurred. The sudden deceleration had thrust his mid-section into the window frame at an incredible speed.
He was half in and half out of the car, barely hanging onto his weapon.
King was on him in a heartbeat, and he wrenched the M4 carbine out of his hands.
A brand new rifle.
It shone in the moonlight.
Hawk spared no expense.
King used the carbine to kill three of Hawk’s thugs in the idle sedan — two in the front and the incapacitated guy in the back.
Three quick headshots.
Then he turned to the other three cars making sharp turns on the desolate mountain road and said under his breath, ‘Let’s go.’
61
Somehow, Slater slept.
Except it wasn’t really sleep, because he couldn’t quite comprehend where reality started and the dreams ended. He dreamt of automatons and faceless robots. He dreamt of a changing world. A dark world. A world where the limits of what was possible turned fuzzy. And then he woke up, and realised he was in the same world. He tossed and turned and the bloodstained metal of the handcuffs bit into his raw wrists. He sucked up the pain, and fought down the panic, and sat still.
His hip flexors ached from being locked in position overnight.
A pounding started behind his temples, perhaps from the accumulation of stress.
He closed his eyes and breathed, and figured that was all he could do until they came for him.
It happened in the early hours of the morning.
Renae stepped back into the room either minutes or hours or days later. Slater had no way of knowing. There was no natural light down here, and there were no clocks on the walls. He couldn’t keep track of his own wakefulness, so he figured it was best to ask.
But from her puffy face and slightly damp hair and relaxed demeanour, he figured she’d managed a good night’s sleep before she came for him — so it was probably morning.
He hadn’t had a good night’s sleep by any stretch of the imagination.
She had a plate in her hand, and a fork in the other. Slater spotted the same food groups he’d seen Ali Hawk gorging on in the Brabus the previous afternoon. Smoked salmon. Avocado. Goat’s cheese. Braised beef. And a heaped pile of spinach, freshly sautéed.
‘You got a chef here?’ Slater said.
Renae said, ‘Of course. Hawk has everything here.’
‘Is that for you or for me?’
‘For you.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘You haven’t eaten since yesterday afternoon,’ Renae said. ‘You’re definitely hungry.’
‘Then consider this a hunger strike.’
‘You’re going to eat this,’ she said. ‘Whether you want to or not.’
‘How do I know it won’t kill me?’
She narrowed her eyes, as if wondering whether he was truly that stupid.
She put the fork down and picked up a Glock pistol from one of the free-standing metal trays.
She pointed it at his head.
‘This will kill you,’ she said.
‘But you won’t. I’m the man of the hour this morning. I’m the human guinea pig. You wouldn’t dare kill me before the big moment. I take it I’m not going under for at least six or seven hours if you’re trying to feed me. Otherwise I’d be fasting.’
She said, ‘Surgery is at midday.’
‘And the time now is…?’
‘Four in the morning.’
‘So eight hours until I become an automaton.’
‘Unless I kill you first.’
‘You won’t. Why are we even entertaining the possibility?’
‘Hawk and I have a … special kind of working relationship. I’m sure he’d understand almost anything I do.’
‘So you’re sleeping with him. Good for you. He’s an attractive fellow. Doesn’t change the fact that you’re not going to touch me without his permission.’
She set the plate down on the tray, freeing up her other hand, and walked all the way up to the foot of the bed. She stood there, cold and silent, watching Slater. Daring him to speak.
He did.
He said, ‘Are you going to stand there all day?’
‘No,’ she said, and shot him through the top of his foot.
At first he didn’t understand what had happened. There was a delay as his brain saw the blood erupt from his sock, and then the limb went numb.
He thought, Am I dreaming?
He wasn’t.
The pain quickly followed.
Out of some sadistic competitive instinct, he refused to react. Inside his head, his brain was a cesspool of white hot fire. His nerve endings screamed for mercy and his leg twitched uncontrollably against its shackle, but some deep primal stoicism kept his gaze unflinching.
He stared Renae right in the eyes, and he said, ‘Is that all you’ve got?’
And he broke her.
Not on the surface.
In real time, she simply put the gun down, furrowed her brow, and left the room.
But Slater had been analysing micro-expressions for over a decade, and he saw everything. He saw the twitch in her eyes as she paired what she was seeing with the rumours that had probably been spread about Slater and King throughout Hawk’s private army.
He could almost see her thinking, Is this fucking guy human?
Is he really the Terminator like they say he is?
And then the twitch in her eyelids gave way to very real, very perceptible anxiety. He could feel her heart rate increasing and her chest tightening and her throat constricting as she wondered if she was the one dreaming. She’d just blasted a 9mm round through the delicate bones in his foot and he’d stared at her with a bored expression on his face.
And then she realised that if she stayed there, those anxiety symptoms would compound and come out to bear, no matter how hard she tried to stifle them. She needed to be alone, right now, to calm down. Which was a foolish position to put herself in in the first place, which only made it worse in her own head.
That was why she turned around and left the room.
Slater’s foot poured blood onto the cold metal.
When she disappeared from sight, his face contorted into a mask of pain.
He closed his eyes and crushed both rows of teeth together and flared his nostrils and took long, ragged, deep breaths.
Because he was human.
Very human.
But what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.
He sat there, eyes closed, bleeding all over himself, for what seemed an eternity. Then he heard commotion all around him, and the next thing he knew there was pressure on his foot. He opened his eyes and winced at the same time, and saw a man and a woman resembling nurses cleaning up his foot, ripping his sock off, assessing the wound, stopping the bleeding.
Renae, or Hawk, had sent them in.
Because what Slater said was accurate.
He was the man of the hour.
And the hour was quickly approaching.
They needed him alive for the procedure, whether Renae wanted to admit it or not.
Hurting all over, Slater imagined Jason King barrelling toward Tapanui and whispered under his breath, ‘Please hurry up.’
He didn’t know how much more of this nightmare he could take.
62
King almost immediately realised his temporary bravado wouldn’t win him the rest of the fight.
The three cars skidding in semi-circles and recalibrating their aim were loaded with hostiles. The two sedans he’d already removed from the equation had three occupants apiece, but the three vehicles still alive and kicking were bigger.
Two of them were SUVs, and one was a long Mercedes sedan. The SUVs were Toyota Klugers, but the bodies had been jacked up on modified suspension, and the tyres were fat and built for off-road use.
King figured the windows were armour-plated. They had the same tint as the Brabus’ from the previous day.
So King made up his mind in a heartbeat.
He hauled the dead driver out of the second sedan and dove in himself.
The three enemy vehicles completed their turns and roared towards him.
King slammed the door shut and cut off the mountain wind lashing his frame. The engine seemed to still work, so he reversed away from the crash site as fast as he dared. The hood removed itself from the empty police car opposite, and both cars shrieked in protest. When King was free, he navigated around the police sedan with one hand on the wheel. He used the other to drop the carbine across the lap of the dead passenger.
The skirmish was unfolding at lightning speed.
He completed his short detour around the wreckage and weighed his options. Ahead he saw the state highway stretching past Fox Glacier — Slater lay somewhere ahead, almost beckoning him into the darkness.
But the road was long and flat and there was no cover in sight.
Then King glanced at the entrance to Cook Flat Road.
It spiralled into the mountains, heading in the general direction of Fox Glacier.
There were no streetlights that way. King stared into the gloom and winced. Neither option appealed to him, and the fleet lying in wait to ambush him had come from Cook Flat Road.
It was familiar territory to them.
But nevertheless, it would provide a hell of a lot more cover than the open highway.
King cursed his luck and slammed a palm against the wheel.
Then he twisted it to the left.
He rocketed up the dark rural trail, flashing past a pair of broad log buildings. Then civilisation fell away as the town receded into the emptiness behind him. He quickened his pace, feeling the suspension rattle and shake as the sedan fought to handle the uneven terrain.
And suddenly there was nothing to his right.
He glanced out the driver’s window — more to get his bearings than anything else — and his heart thudded a hefty boom against his chest wall when he saw a darker black than the rest of his surroundings.
There was a precipitous drop right there, but his headlights did nothing to illuminate the gorge. He figured it was a valley of some kind, perhaps not as vicious of a fall as he first thought, but in these conditions it would be fatal all the same.
He reached across and tugged his seatbelt across his chest, and that was when the first hostile vehicle caught up to him.
It was one of the Toyota Klugers — big and blocky and built to handle the potholed road. King’s sedan struggled and coughed and wheezed in comparison. As soon as clicked the seatbelt into its buckle, a bull bar came out of the night behind him.
It hit the back of his sedan, tearing metal and destroying the trunk beyond repair.
King fought with the wheel as all four tyres lost traction on the loose trail.
The sedan skidded diagonally to the left.
King had no time to react.
The first hit from an enemy truck, and he was going over.
He fished for the buckle, undid his seatbelt, threw the door open, and leapt out of the car.
Time stopped.
Only for a moment.
He savoured the silence. It wasn’t true silence, but in comparison to vehicular warfare it was bliss. He fell and heard icy wind howling all around him and the distant grumble of tyres on gravel and the distant screech of metal on metal, but it was all so far away. He couldn’t see a thing. It was pitch black out here, and the endless stars overhead did nothing to illuminate the rural road.
Then the ground rushed up to meet him.
He heard and felt it before he saw it. There was an ominous woosh as he dipped closer to the gravel, and in that moment he figured he’d only been airborne for less than a second, but the brain goes haywire in the heat of battle. Time becomes inconceivable, and the fall dragged out another few moments in his mind — when in reality no time at all had passed — and then the ground was right there and he hit it.
He’d been trained to absorb an impact.
He’d spent his whole life doing it successfully.
This time, despite the circumstances, was no different.
As soon as he felt the horrid slap of the soles of his feet against the ground he buckled at the knees and bent at the waist, preventing any joints from contorting the wrong way. Then he threw himself forward and tumbled headfirst, twisting a full revolution in the air. He came down across his upper back and went head over heels again, then again.
He rolled a grand total of three times, absorbing a litany of superficial injuries.
Bruises and cuts and bumps and scrapes all over.
But no broken bones. No shattered limbs.
The vital components of his physique remained intact.
He came to rest in a seated position only a few feet from the lip of the drop, and a moment later a wave of air washed over him. It took him a second to realise it was his own car barrelling past, followed swiftly by the enemy Kluger. They’d come within inches of smashing him to a pulp, almost ruining his mad leap.
But he didn’t tumble to his death in an enclosed metal box.
The next moment his empty sedan plummeted over the edge.
King realised the gradient was shallow enough for him to come to a halt even if he’d gone headfirst off the side of the road — it was actually a giant hillside sloping down to a shallow valley.
But a full-sized vehicle wasn’t so lucky.
The sedan went over, and pitched and groaned and spiralled down to a broken grave.
And the Kluger followed.
To his credit, the driver tried in vain to correct his fishtail. But ramming King’s sedan with the bull bar had thrown him harder off-course than he ever could have anticipated, and by the time he realised he was going over it was too late. The passengers also tried desperately to escape the moving vehicle.
King saw the rear door facing him fly open.
He jolted in shock, and waited for an armed hostile to spill out of the car before it went over. Then they would be alone atop the hillside. The pair of them sitting there in shock. One armed, one not. The mercenary would line up his aim, and then…
Bang-bang-bang.
Triple shot to the chest.
Jason King, slaughtered in the lee of a glacier, late at night on the South Island of New Zealand.
But none of that happened, because none of the men in the rear seats made it out of the Kluger before its front tyres went off the trail and the rest of the chassis followed.
The guy closest to the open door tried his best to escape the death trap.
He got one leg out of the car.
Then the doorway tilted up toward the sky, and he toppled back into the vehicle.
It disappeared from sight, replaced by the cacophony of a large SUV tearing itself apart as it tumbled down a hillside.
Two.
Three.
He steeled himself against the seatbelt.
Nothing.
Half a second passed, and he figured, Fuck. I’ve overshot it.
He started to raise his head up, to make sure he didn’t plummet off the road.
Then he T-boned the enemy vehicle.
He hit it in the rear door, and it seemed his aim held up. He heard the sound of twisting metal, followed by a terrible, guttural scream. It was barely audible above the rest of the racket, and the shock of the impact ruined his perception right afterward.
But he heard it all the same, as imperceptible as it was.
It was the rear gunner, crushed either to death or paralysis as the hood of King’s sedan smashed into the rear door.
King then heard screeching tyres, and a laboured shout of panic as the brutality of the car crash faded away.
He lifted his head back up, and took in his surroundings.
The enemy vehicle screeched and twisted and flew off the road a moment later.
It fell a couple of feet to a gravel ditch, but that was enough to disrupt the balance. Its right-hand wheels lifted up, and momentum did the rest. It tumbled end over end and crashed down on its roof. King thought he saw the driver and passenger spill out the shattered windshield, their bodies and faces bloodied, but he might have imagined it. He was past the crash site in another half-second, and that was when he felt the surge.
The surge?
He’d never put a label on it, but he knew what it was.
It was the first victory notched on his belt. In the heat of a war zone, surrounded by enough chaos to make any lesser warrior wilt, he was wired. Primed. Ready for anything. It didn’t matter that he was still in maximum danger, surrounded by vehicular carnage as the ambush party swerved and skidded in the darkness, aiming to cut him off, aiming to riddle him with bullets, aiming to tear him limb from limb. Aiming to shred him to a pulp.
None of that mattered.
What mattered was the first victory, and he took it in stride as he saw the first enemy vehicle incapacitated alongside him.
1-0, he thought.
How’s the rest of this going to go?
It was a ludicrous thought to have. Especially considering there were four vehicles left, all containing armed killers, all with the tactical advantage over him. They knew the terrain. They had faster cars. They could box him in, entrap him, remove any chance of escape. They could aim assault rifles at him from four separate directions.
Who cares? he thought.
And he gritted his teeth as manic focus descended over him.
He twisted the wheel, ripped the handbrake, fishtailed wildly across the two-lane road, and aimed for the nearest car.
They expect me to run.
No-one would ever know, but in that moment a small smile crept across King’s face, and he figured if he’d gone insane it was best to come out a psychotic winner than a psychotic loser.
He thought he saw a horrified face through the windshield of the oncoming car, but he might have been imagining that too.
He hit it head-on, slamming against his seatbelt, stopping both cars in their tracks.
Then, before the aftershock of the collision had even worn off, he leapt out of the groaning vehicle and sprinted the few feet toward the enemy.
The rear gunner of this car was reeling — perhaps a couple of ribs were broken. He’d been hanging out the open rear window with a carbine rifle in his hand when the impact occurred. The sudden deceleration had thrust his mid-section into the window frame at an incredible speed.
He was half in and half out of the car, barely hanging onto his weapon.
King was on him in a heartbeat, and he wrenched the M4 carbine out of his hands.
A brand new rifle.
It shone in the moonlight.
Hawk spared no expense.
King used the carbine to kill three of Hawk’s thugs in the idle sedan — two in the front and the incapacitated guy in the back.
Three quick headshots.
Then he turned to the other three cars making sharp turns on the desolate mountain road and said under his breath, ‘Let’s go.’
61
Somehow, Slater slept.
Except it wasn’t really sleep, because he couldn’t quite comprehend where reality started and the dreams ended. He dreamt of automatons and faceless robots. He dreamt of a changing world. A dark world. A world where the limits of what was possible turned fuzzy. And then he woke up, and realised he was in the same world. He tossed and turned and the bloodstained metal of the handcuffs bit into his raw wrists. He sucked up the pain, and fought down the panic, and sat still.
His hip flexors ached from being locked in position overnight.
A pounding started behind his temples, perhaps from the accumulation of stress.
He closed his eyes and breathed, and figured that was all he could do until they came for him.
It happened in the early hours of the morning.
Renae stepped back into the room either minutes or hours or days later. Slater had no way of knowing. There was no natural light down here, and there were no clocks on the walls. He couldn’t keep track of his own wakefulness, so he figured it was best to ask.
But from her puffy face and slightly damp hair and relaxed demeanour, he figured she’d managed a good night’s sleep before she came for him — so it was probably morning.
He hadn’t had a good night’s sleep by any stretch of the imagination.
She had a plate in her hand, and a fork in the other. Slater spotted the same food groups he’d seen Ali Hawk gorging on in the Brabus the previous afternoon. Smoked salmon. Avocado. Goat’s cheese. Braised beef. And a heaped pile of spinach, freshly sautéed.
‘You got a chef here?’ Slater said.
Renae said, ‘Of course. Hawk has everything here.’
‘Is that for you or for me?’
‘For you.’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘You haven’t eaten since yesterday afternoon,’ Renae said. ‘You’re definitely hungry.’
‘Then consider this a hunger strike.’
‘You’re going to eat this,’ she said. ‘Whether you want to or not.’
‘How do I know it won’t kill me?’
She narrowed her eyes, as if wondering whether he was truly that stupid.
She put the fork down and picked up a Glock pistol from one of the free-standing metal trays.
She pointed it at his head.
‘This will kill you,’ she said.
‘But you won’t. I’m the man of the hour this morning. I’m the human guinea pig. You wouldn’t dare kill me before the big moment. I take it I’m not going under for at least six or seven hours if you’re trying to feed me. Otherwise I’d be fasting.’
She said, ‘Surgery is at midday.’
‘And the time now is…?’
‘Four in the morning.’
‘So eight hours until I become an automaton.’
‘Unless I kill you first.’
‘You won’t. Why are we even entertaining the possibility?’
‘Hawk and I have a … special kind of working relationship. I’m sure he’d understand almost anything I do.’
‘So you’re sleeping with him. Good for you. He’s an attractive fellow. Doesn’t change the fact that you’re not going to touch me without his permission.’
She set the plate down on the tray, freeing up her other hand, and walked all the way up to the foot of the bed. She stood there, cold and silent, watching Slater. Daring him to speak.
He did.
He said, ‘Are you going to stand there all day?’
‘No,’ she said, and shot him through the top of his foot.
At first he didn’t understand what had happened. There was a delay as his brain saw the blood erupt from his sock, and then the limb went numb.
He thought, Am I dreaming?
He wasn’t.
The pain quickly followed.
Out of some sadistic competitive instinct, he refused to react. Inside his head, his brain was a cesspool of white hot fire. His nerve endings screamed for mercy and his leg twitched uncontrollably against its shackle, but some deep primal stoicism kept his gaze unflinching.
He stared Renae right in the eyes, and he said, ‘Is that all you’ve got?’
And he broke her.
Not on the surface.
In real time, she simply put the gun down, furrowed her brow, and left the room.
But Slater had been analysing micro-expressions for over a decade, and he saw everything. He saw the twitch in her eyes as she paired what she was seeing with the rumours that had probably been spread about Slater and King throughout Hawk’s private army.
He could almost see her thinking, Is this fucking guy human?
Is he really the Terminator like they say he is?
And then the twitch in her eyelids gave way to very real, very perceptible anxiety. He could feel her heart rate increasing and her chest tightening and her throat constricting as she wondered if she was the one dreaming. She’d just blasted a 9mm round through the delicate bones in his foot and he’d stared at her with a bored expression on his face.
And then she realised that if she stayed there, those anxiety symptoms would compound and come out to bear, no matter how hard she tried to stifle them. She needed to be alone, right now, to calm down. Which was a foolish position to put herself in in the first place, which only made it worse in her own head.
That was why she turned around and left the room.
Slater’s foot poured blood onto the cold metal.
When she disappeared from sight, his face contorted into a mask of pain.
He closed his eyes and crushed both rows of teeth together and flared his nostrils and took long, ragged, deep breaths.
Because he was human.
Very human.
But what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.
He sat there, eyes closed, bleeding all over himself, for what seemed an eternity. Then he heard commotion all around him, and the next thing he knew there was pressure on his foot. He opened his eyes and winced at the same time, and saw a man and a woman resembling nurses cleaning up his foot, ripping his sock off, assessing the wound, stopping the bleeding.
Renae, or Hawk, had sent them in.
Because what Slater said was accurate.
He was the man of the hour.
And the hour was quickly approaching.
They needed him alive for the procedure, whether Renae wanted to admit it or not.
Hurting all over, Slater imagined Jason King barrelling toward Tapanui and whispered under his breath, ‘Please hurry up.’
He didn’t know how much more of this nightmare he could take.
62
King almost immediately realised his temporary bravado wouldn’t win him the rest of the fight.
The three cars skidding in semi-circles and recalibrating their aim were loaded with hostiles. The two sedans he’d already removed from the equation had three occupants apiece, but the three vehicles still alive and kicking were bigger.
Two of them were SUVs, and one was a long Mercedes sedan. The SUVs were Toyota Klugers, but the bodies had been jacked up on modified suspension, and the tyres were fat and built for off-road use.
King figured the windows were armour-plated. They had the same tint as the Brabus’ from the previous day.
So King made up his mind in a heartbeat.
He hauled the dead driver out of the second sedan and dove in himself.
The three enemy vehicles completed their turns and roared towards him.
King slammed the door shut and cut off the mountain wind lashing his frame. The engine seemed to still work, so he reversed away from the crash site as fast as he dared. The hood removed itself from the empty police car opposite, and both cars shrieked in protest. When King was free, he navigated around the police sedan with one hand on the wheel. He used the other to drop the carbine across the lap of the dead passenger.
The skirmish was unfolding at lightning speed.
He completed his short detour around the wreckage and weighed his options. Ahead he saw the state highway stretching past Fox Glacier — Slater lay somewhere ahead, almost beckoning him into the darkness.
But the road was long and flat and there was no cover in sight.
Then King glanced at the entrance to Cook Flat Road.
It spiralled into the mountains, heading in the general direction of Fox Glacier.
There were no streetlights that way. King stared into the gloom and winced. Neither option appealed to him, and the fleet lying in wait to ambush him had come from Cook Flat Road.
It was familiar territory to them.
But nevertheless, it would provide a hell of a lot more cover than the open highway.
King cursed his luck and slammed a palm against the wheel.
Then he twisted it to the left.
He rocketed up the dark rural trail, flashing past a pair of broad log buildings. Then civilisation fell away as the town receded into the emptiness behind him. He quickened his pace, feeling the suspension rattle and shake as the sedan fought to handle the uneven terrain.
And suddenly there was nothing to his right.
He glanced out the driver’s window — more to get his bearings than anything else — and his heart thudded a hefty boom against his chest wall when he saw a darker black than the rest of his surroundings.
There was a precipitous drop right there, but his headlights did nothing to illuminate the gorge. He figured it was a valley of some kind, perhaps not as vicious of a fall as he first thought, but in these conditions it would be fatal all the same.
He reached across and tugged his seatbelt across his chest, and that was when the first hostile vehicle caught up to him.
It was one of the Toyota Klugers — big and blocky and built to handle the potholed road. King’s sedan struggled and coughed and wheezed in comparison. As soon as clicked the seatbelt into its buckle, a bull bar came out of the night behind him.
It hit the back of his sedan, tearing metal and destroying the trunk beyond repair.
King fought with the wheel as all four tyres lost traction on the loose trail.
The sedan skidded diagonally to the left.
King had no time to react.
The first hit from an enemy truck, and he was going over.
He fished for the buckle, undid his seatbelt, threw the door open, and leapt out of the car.
Time stopped.
Only for a moment.
He savoured the silence. It wasn’t true silence, but in comparison to vehicular warfare it was bliss. He fell and heard icy wind howling all around him and the distant grumble of tyres on gravel and the distant screech of metal on metal, but it was all so far away. He couldn’t see a thing. It was pitch black out here, and the endless stars overhead did nothing to illuminate the rural road.
Then the ground rushed up to meet him.
He heard and felt it before he saw it. There was an ominous woosh as he dipped closer to the gravel, and in that moment he figured he’d only been airborne for less than a second, but the brain goes haywire in the heat of battle. Time becomes inconceivable, and the fall dragged out another few moments in his mind — when in reality no time at all had passed — and then the ground was right there and he hit it.
He’d been trained to absorb an impact.
He’d spent his whole life doing it successfully.
This time, despite the circumstances, was no different.
As soon as he felt the horrid slap of the soles of his feet against the ground he buckled at the knees and bent at the waist, preventing any joints from contorting the wrong way. Then he threw himself forward and tumbled headfirst, twisting a full revolution in the air. He came down across his upper back and went head over heels again, then again.
He rolled a grand total of three times, absorbing a litany of superficial injuries.
Bruises and cuts and bumps and scrapes all over.
But no broken bones. No shattered limbs.
The vital components of his physique remained intact.
He came to rest in a seated position only a few feet from the lip of the drop, and a moment later a wave of air washed over him. It took him a second to realise it was his own car barrelling past, followed swiftly by the enemy Kluger. They’d come within inches of smashing him to a pulp, almost ruining his mad leap.
But he didn’t tumble to his death in an enclosed metal box.
The next moment his empty sedan plummeted over the edge.
King realised the gradient was shallow enough for him to come to a halt even if he’d gone headfirst off the side of the road — it was actually a giant hillside sloping down to a shallow valley.
But a full-sized vehicle wasn’t so lucky.
The sedan went over, and pitched and groaned and spiralled down to a broken grave.
And the Kluger followed.
To his credit, the driver tried in vain to correct his fishtail. But ramming King’s sedan with the bull bar had thrown him harder off-course than he ever could have anticipated, and by the time he realised he was going over it was too late. The passengers also tried desperately to escape the moving vehicle.
King saw the rear door facing him fly open.
He jolted in shock, and waited for an armed hostile to spill out of the car before it went over. Then they would be alone atop the hillside. The pair of them sitting there in shock. One armed, one not. The mercenary would line up his aim, and then…
Bang-bang-bang.
Triple shot to the chest.
Jason King, slaughtered in the lee of a glacier, late at night on the South Island of New Zealand.
But none of that happened, because none of the men in the rear seats made it out of the Kluger before its front tyres went off the trail and the rest of the chassis followed.
The guy closest to the open door tried his best to escape the death trap.
He got one leg out of the car.
Then the doorway tilted up toward the sky, and he toppled back into the vehicle.
It disappeared from sight, replaced by the cacophony of a large SUV tearing itself apart as it tumbled down a hillside.
