Hawk, p.10
Hawk, page 10
part #6 of Will Slater Series
So Slater had stripped them all defenceless. Knocked them over like dominoes.
He lined them all up in the opulent hallway, and kicked the door shut behind him.
20
The problem with attacking Jason King with blunt instruments is the simple fact that it takes five or six well-placed blows to kill someone with a baseball bat or a two-by-four.
If you want to make sure you put Jason King down, you need to shoot him with a rifle from across the street.
Because anything close-range, anything in a claustrophobic space…
…that comes down to reaction speed.
And that was a specific skill that King had in spades.
No matter how long he’d been out of the game.
It was simply genetic, and it was why he’d pioneered a whole new division in the covert world of U.S. black operations.
A couple of street dealers was no problem at all.
The first guy came in from the left, and swung a steel bat at his head. King sidestepped it, but he didn’t overreact. He could have thrown himself wildly off-balance — most people would. You see a steel object coming at your face, and you panic and hurtle out of the way, and stumble or even fall down, and leave yourself open for further attacks.
But King shot sideways, figured out exactly where he was out of range, and then stayed right there.
The bat whistled past, missing him by inches.
He kicked the guy wielding it square between the legs with enough force to rupture a testicle. He didn’t know if it actually happened, but the man sure went down like it did, complete with the primal groan that came with taking a blow to the most sensitive region imaginable.
King pivoted and struck with the same leg, this time twisting sideways and opening his hips in a traditional close-range Muay Thai stance. He didn’t know where the second hostile was exactly, but he had a general idea.
They’d taken up position on either side of the doorway.
King had disrupted the natural rhythm of things — obviously, the first guy swinging the bat was meant to connect. And he hadn’t, so therefore there was a strange half-second of delay from the second attacker, because he had another bat in his hand but he’d deemed it useless to swing at the exact same time as his friend.
So King managed to connect with the kick before he had to deal with a second bat.
The second guy had his bat cocked back, ready to go, but he didn’t follow through in time, and when King’s shin bone caught him in the ribcage he flew off his feet like something out of a movie. But, really, it was grounded in reality, and it made sense given the circumstances.
King hit like a Mack truck, and the guy was lean and wiry, and he hadn’t been bracing himself for an impact like that. He’d been focusing all his mental acuity on figuring out when to swing the bat, and he’d failed spectacularly at that anyway.
So he wasn’t focused on keeping his balance.
He bounced off the wall and tumbled down to the cheap rug on the floor, clutching his stomach and retching violently.
King turned around and kicked the first guy in the chest, and he yelped.
Then he turned back and lined up another kick square to the chest of the second man, but he pulled back at the last second.
There was no point prolonging the suffering.
They were both down, and out for the count.
King crouched next to both of them, making sure he remained in the doorway, keeping the guy in the hallway in his peripheral vision.
He took a deep breath, and sent oxygen to his burning muscles.
It had been some time since he’d thrown full capacity strikes like that. He hadn’t thrown anything with murderous intentions since he’d found Klara’s body in Koh Tao.
He kept breathing, and the three thugs kept wincing and gasping for air and rolling around in horror on the floor. Their entire world had just been turned on its head. They were at the mercy of a vicious intruder.
There were few things on earth more horrifying than that.
King said, ‘All three of you get up, real slow, and go sit on the sofa. I need information and I’m not leaving without it.’
They picked themselves up, still wincing, still traumatised, and stumbled over to a tattered old couch in the corner of the room. It had been wedged into place underneath a wide window with a tacky white sill and a plain glass frame. They dumped themselves down on it, and King held the .44 at the ready. For the first time, he could get a better sense of where he was, rather than only absorbing the necessary details as he fought for survival.
The living area was just big enough for three residents, with most of the floorspace occupied by a giant table positioned in the centre of the room. The surface was coarse wood, and it was packed with packaged bricks of hard yellow rocks. There were beakers and burners and jugs of water and bicarbonate soda strewn everywhere. And there were sachets of white powder all over the place, ready to be mixed and burned and left to set.
Cocaine to crack cocaine.
An age-old process.
King gave the contents a dark look, and then turned his attention to the three dealers.
‘You three haven’t been behaving very well,’ he said.
He raised the .44 and pointed it at the head of the guy in the middle.
Six in the cylinders.
The guy squealed.
King said, ‘I need to know where you pick up the drugs.’
The guy on the left sat up a little straighter. He squared his shoulders, and gave a slight smirk, which he quickly wiped away.
But King saw it.
King said, ‘Did I say something funny?’
‘There’s no way we’re giving you that information,’ the man said, and he didn’t have a trace of a European accent. He was a native English speaker. Australian, maybe. ‘I thought you wanted something reasonable, like drugs or cash or guns.’
‘I’m just climbing up the food chain,’ King said. ‘That’s all. Where do you pick the crack up from?’
A pause, and then the man said, ‘Another apartment.’
‘Where?’
‘In another district.’
‘Give me the address right now or I’ll blow your brains out.’
King held the .44 at the ready, and he put an expression on his face like he was going to use it at the slightest provocation. He added a certain derangement to his stare.
They seemed to believe him.
The guy in the middle softly elbowed the guy on the left in the ribcage. All their eyes were wide and unblinking. As if silently saying, He’s going to do it, man. Just tell him. I don’t want to die here.
The guy on the left sighed and bowed his head, suddenly realising he couldn’t come up with anything believable on the spot, especially not with a gun aimed at his head, and finally he said, ‘Okay, it’s not an apartment. It’s an airfield.’
‘Where?’
‘South. In the countryside. Middle of nowhere. Near Sárbogárd.’
‘You got an exact location?’
The guy on the left raised his head with a quizzical look on his face and said, ‘What do you think you’re going to do?’
‘Pay the airfield a visit.’
‘And what to do you propose to do from there? You realise what this is, right? This is a production line. We’re nobodies, man. We drive up to a gate that’s fortified to the eyeballs, and a bunch of armed guards dump coke in the back of our truck, and then we drive off. We’re not allowed into the airfield. That’s where the drugs arrive, but we don’t know how to get in. We’re just grunts. There’s nothing you can get from us.’
‘Except the location.’
‘It won’t help you. It’ll be like trying to storm a castle. I’m not kidding when I tell you it’s fortified. How are you planning to get around that? You can’t just drive a truck through the wall. It doesn’t work like that.’
King said, ‘Don’t worry about that. All I need is the location. I’ve got a friend working on the rest.’
21
Slater told them to stand shoulder to shoulder with their arms down and their palms facing forward. He told them if they made any sudden movements, he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot them dead. There was no proof linking him to the townhouse. He could massacre them all, wipe the secret CCTV feeds, and then disappear into the wind like the ghost that he was.
They believed him.
They stood there in a row like toy soldiers, the colour drained from their faces. Even Lukas and Benicio had reached their wits’ end. This mystery man was terrorising them, but it seems he didn’t want to kill them. Did he just want to prolong their suffering?
Slater lined up the three men in tracksuits on the left, and in the silence of the empty townhouse he stepped up to the first in line.
He said, ‘Please stay perfectly still.’
The guy complied.
Slater jerked forward and hit him with a trademark horizontal elbow, slashing it like a whip into the guy’s forehead. The man’s brain rattled, his legs gave out, and he collapsed. Slater had seen it a hundred times before.
He stepped up to the second guy.
He said, ‘Please stay perfectly still.’
But he knew the man wouldn’t.
He feigned an elbow, and the guy flinched hard.
Slater stared at him.
The silence dragged out.
Slater said, ‘Either I give you a concussion, or I give you a bullet.’
The guy nodded, and sighed, and straightened up, and closed his eyes so he wouldn’t see it coming.
Slater elbowed him, and it sounded like a starting gun going off at the races.
He repeated the process with the third man.
Lukas and Benicio stood there, mouths agape, staring at their only remaining guards wallowing in semi-consciousness on the floor of the entranceway.
Benicio shifted restlessly, as he was next in line.
Slater smiled and shook his head. ‘Don’t worry. That was just for them.’
‘What the hell do you want?’ Benicio said.
‘One thing at a time,’ Slater said. ‘I can’t keep tabs on all five of you at once, so I had to do that. Now the three of us are going to get something to tie them up. You got duct tape?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where?’
‘Kitchen drawer.’
‘Let’s go.’
Slater followed Lukas and Benicio into the kitchen, keeping the Heckler & Koch aimed squarely at their backs, alternating between both of them every couple of seconds to make sure he didn’t get complacent. Benicio strolled straight over to a drawer, and reached for the handle, but Slater stopped him with a sharp verbal command.
Benicio froze in place.
Slater crossed the kitchen and placed the barrel right in the small of Benicio’s back. ‘Now open it.’
Benicio gulped.
Slater said, ‘If there’s a gun in there that you were about to go for, I’m going to kill you right here. No second chances. You want to tell me in advance?’
‘It’s just duct tape,’ the man hissed. ‘That’s it. I wouldn’t risk it with someone like you.’
Slater nodded. They were getting the sense of what he could do. ‘Good.’
Then Lukas lunged at him.
And it almost worked.
Lukas came at him at an angle, diagonally from behind, figuring he was just out of sight to try some final desperate dive for the gun. Slater had him right outside the edge of his peripheral vision, but it meant that when he twisted his head imperceptibly to the right he was able to see where Lukas should have been. And he wasn’t there, so what followed was a violent pivot to the right, and at the same time he wrenched the gun inwards, bringing it closer to his body, putting some kind of awkward obstacle between Lukas and the gun.
Which was exactly the right decision to make, because Lukas slammed into him with enough force to send him skidding a few inches across the kitchen tiles. The man had his hands outstretched, his fingers splayed, searching for the Holy Grail — a grip on Slater’s wrist. Then he’d be able to use all his strength to control the trajectory of any gunshot, which would leave Benicio free to punch Slater endlessly in the face until he dropped in a dazed and bloody heap to the kitchen floor.
But the lunge didn’t work.
Slater composed himself and picked his next move wisely, getting a better sense of where Lukas had ended up after the desperate charge. He was flustered, unsure what to do next, contemplating whether to keep charging — and risk Slater shooting him dead — or surrender right there. It was only a half-second of hesitation, but Slater used it to make sure Benicio hadn’t moved.
Benicio was effectively a prisoner by this point.
The man was standing by the kitchen drawers, his eyes wide.
Unmoving.
So Slater jerked forward and headbutted Lukas in the chin with his own forehead. He made sure to line up the strike so it had no chance of missing, and when it came down on the perfect target area there was a crunch and Lukas fell to the floor with a guttural moan.
His jaw might be broken.
Slater found it hard to care.
He came away unscathed, apart from a slight rattle to the head. But he’d taken a thousand of those over the course of his life, and here he was.
A forehead was considerably thicker and stronger than a jaw.
Slater levelled the VP9SK at Lukas’ head and said, ‘I should kill you right here. I don’t need you.’
Everyone was a tough guy until the concept of instant death reared its head. Lukas went pale and started shaking, and Slater spotted beads of sweat forming on the man’s brow. He imagined the guy’s internal situation was no better — a pounding heart, a churning stomach, lightheadedness, deep thrumming anxiety.
Slater said, ‘You going to do anything remotely like that again?’
Lukas said, ‘No.’
But it didn’t come out right. It come out weak and stilted and his voice quivered. It had only been a single syllable, but he still hadn’t pronounced it correctly.
Definitely some sort of serious injury to his jaw.
Again, Slater found it hard to feel a shred of empathy.
He turned back to Benicio and said, ‘Get the duct tape.’
22
Jason King sat at the wheel of a beat-up old Peugeot and floored it through the Hungarian countryside.
As he drove, he ruminated on how fast circumstances could change in the space of sixteen hours. The night before, he’d sat in the ruin bar in relative misery, figuring that Will Slater would want no part in whatever barebones plan he’d concocted. It had all been a pipe dream — he had a phone seemingly no-one could crack, and a lingering sorrow over how quickly his life had been torn apart, and a surprisingly resolute dead end, despite his past ability to overcome almost any situation he found himself in.
But he’d been out of the game for a couple of years, and sometimes that was all it took.
The world was changing, and his kind were slowly being phased out. All the reaction speed in the world ceased to matter when you couldn’t even find the hostiles you were looking for. They buried themselves in a digital maze, under a labyrinth of encryption, and the opportunity for a covert solo operative to storm into a compound and run amok was increasingly becoming rarer and rarer as time went on. Everything was done by tech prodigies paid handsomely by the government to sit behind their desks and burrow their way into the most tightly secured virtual locations.
You didn’t need to actually pick up a gun if you could drain a terrorist’s bank account, completely eliminate their funds and prospects, and then send a drone missile through their window for good measure.
But now there was hope.
Slater had encouraged a very hands-on approach to the problem at hand, and it had all gone swimmingly so far.
The three crack dealers were tied up in their apartment under enough duct tape to prevent them doing anything at all for the foreseeable future. King had taken their keys, gone down to the parking garage below the building, and commandeered the small Peugeot the three of them shared between them. He’d left the pieces of tape loose on their mouths, so eventually they could work their lips around and shift it free and scream for help, but by then he planned to be a ghost in the wind.
The timelines were aligning in all the right ways. Earlier that morning neither of them had expected this would work, but now it was, and it was all unfolding awfully quickly.
King accelerated faster, heading for a set of coordinates a couple of miles north of the town of Sárbogárd in Hungary’s countryside. The journey would culminate at a very private, very secluded airstrip that for all intents and purposes did not exist. It was paid for by a shell corporation, and its tracks were covered up with the help of three or four prominent politicians who had enough influence and deep enough pockets to take a meaty bribe when required.
Therefore it wasn’t actually an airfield receiving valuable cargo — instead it was an empty tract of public land resting between two giant privately-owned corn farms.
The three crack dealers had been incredibly hesitant to pass on that information.
King had persuaded them.
Somehow…
Half an hour on Route 63 and he was there, trundling down narrow roads, surrounded by endless undulating fields, tasting crisp countryside air through the open window. He rested a giant forearm on the sill and made sure to savour the present. For all he knew, he wouldn’t get another moment like it…
He pulled up two miles from the airfield’s supposed location in an empty overgrown lot, got out, and walked along the deserted gravel trail.
He knew the dealers hadn’t been lying.
