Callsign: King - Blackout

18

As King’s feet hit the hard fiberglass deck, the boat lurched forward, the thrust of the outboard’s screws finally overcoming the craft’s inertia. King pitched backward, stumbling over a low aluminum bench seat, and crashed into the man seated at stern. Their combined weight and the sudden forward thrust nearly sent both men into the river, but the commando managed to wrap his arms around the engine cowling to arrest his fall, and King knotted his fingers in the man’s dark combat uniform to prevent his own.

That was all the help he got from the commando. The man freed one of his arms and immediately started pummeling King with his fist. The strikes were awkward, seemingly desperate, but the rapid impacts sent bursts of pain through King’s skull, further disorienting him and for a moment, all he could think about was holding on tighter. The assault abruptly relented and King felt the man shift in his grasp, trying for a better angle of attack. The next wave of blows would, he knew, be far more decisive.

Setting his jaw in anticipation of the pain he knew was coming, King pulled the man in close and thrust his torso up, ramming his forehead into the commando’s chin. Light exploded across his vision as he made contact, but even over the roar of the outboard, the satisfying crunch of the commando’s jaw breaking was audible. The Russian slumped in King’s grasp, his hold on the engine cowling slipping away, and he teetered back over the gunwale. King released his grip and pushed the man away, hastening the latter’s plunge into the Seine.

There was no time to savor the victory. King twisted around to find the second commando looming above him. Clad in black from head to toe, the man was almost invisible against the backdrop of night, but King had no difficulty making out the glinting steel of the knife in the man’s right hand as it slashed down toward him. He shrank away, pressing himself into the bilge space, but there was nowhere to go.

The knife slashed again but even as he felt its tip snag the fabric of his dinner jacket, King brought his own right arm up and caught the man’s forearm in the crook of his elbow. The commando reflexively tried to pull away, but King trapped his foe’s forearm with the heel of his left hand and then with a savage scissor-action, broke the man’s wrist. The commando howled in pain; the knife fell from his fingers and clattered into the bilge space. King, still on his back, did not release his hold on the injured limb, but drew his knees up, planted his feet squarely in his opponent’s chest, and used his legs to launch the man out into the river.

In the moment that followed, King wanted nothing more than to simply lay still and savor a few seconds where no one wanted to kill him, but he knew that, despite this initial victory, his real objective was slipping further away with every tick of the clock.

He rolled over and struggled to get to his hands and knees. The cramped bilge space at the rear of the boat conspired with the undulations of the craft as if bumped across wakes and ripples in the river’s surface to make it a ridiculously complicated task. He finally managed to grasp the control lever on the outboard and hauled himself into a sitting position.

The inflatable boat was moving at an almost perpendicular angle away from the floating casino. He could make out the city skyline in every direction, but everything in the foreground was shrouded in darkness. As his eyes adjusted to the low light, he could make out the ripples left by the wake of another craft. It was moving away in the same general direction he was now traveling, and he followed the ripples to their source: two more Zodiacs, barely more than shadows, a few hundred yards away, just passing under one of the many bridges that spanned the river and connected the city proper with Ile Saint-Louis. He adjusted the tiller to bring his boat into line behind them and opened the throttle wide. The bow of the craft came up as the burst of speed sent it rocketing forward, almost skimming across the surface of the Seine.

He could tell he was closing the gap on the retreating boats. If their operators were the professionals he guessed them to be, they would sacrifice speed for stealth. Unfortunately, that meant they would notice his approach, and if they didn’t already know that he had commandeered one of their boats and reduced their fighting force by two, they would at the very least be alerted to the fact that something was wrong.

He took stock of his tactical situation. The Glock he had taken from Brown was gone. There was no sign of the pistol in the bilge space, and he could only assume that it had gone into the river during the struggle with the commandos. His foes had likewise taken their guns with them into the Seine. The only weapon available to him was the knife that the second man had dropped. King retrieved the blade and gave it a cursory examination.

In the darkness, it was difficult to distinguish any manufacturing marks, but his fingertips probed the knurled metal of the cylindrical hilt-heavier than expected, making for a poorly balanced weapon-and the odd shape of the finger guard, which sported a metallic stud that reminded King of a gun’s magazine release button. It was, he realized, a ballistic knife. Depressing the stud would trigger a blast of pressurized gas inside the hilt and simultaneously release a mechanism holding the blade in place, subsequently launching the blade like a crossbow bolt.

When he recognized the weapon, any remaining doubts about the identity of the commando team were swept away. The ballistic knife was the signature weapon of the voyska spetsialnogo naznacheniya, the elite special forces of Russia’s military intelligence directorate, the Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye.

If there was a Russian equivalent of Chess Team, it was the GRU Spetsnaz.

King knew the outcome of his first battle with the Russian commandos had been more a matter of luck than anything else, and as Brown had pointed out, luck was fickle.

He backed off the throttle a little, somewhat reducing the noise and fury of his progress across the watercourse. The longer he succeeded in not attracting the attention of the occupants of the other boats, the better his chances of surviving the next encounter. For that reason, he also pulled the lapels of his dinner jacket together, covering up the white shirt beneath, and sank down low, trying to hide as much of his face from view as he could.

He risked a quick glance over the bow. The nearest Zodiac was now only about a hundred yards away, the other at least fifty yards beyond that. If they were operating as he expected, Brown would be in the closer boat, with the lead craft acting as a vanguard to make sure that the landing zone was secure. That would work to his advantage; he would only need to subdue Brown’s immediate captors, and with a little luck, the men in the front boat would never even know that their comrades were in trouble.

There was that word again. Luck.