Springboard

42

As part of his colonel’s uniform, Locke had a pistol. This was a QSZ-92, a no-nonsense black metal and plastic handgun made in a People’s Liberation Army arms factory outside Beijing, and chambered for the proprietary 5.8mm Chinese round, with the bottlenecked and pointed bullets. The gun held fifteen cartridges in the magazine, plus one in the chamber, and there was a spare magazine on his belt, so he had thirty-one shots. It was a semiautomatic double-action weapon, and all you needed to do was disengage the safety, aim, and pull the trigger each time you wanted it to go bang! A well-made military pistol, and if not the best in the world, certainly not the worst. Sufficient for his needs here, this gun.

Locke drew the side arm from its holster and clicked the safety off. He took a deep breath.

In front of him, Khasar, who was every centimeter Wu’s man, was not yet ready to begin his assigned task. The would-be assassin was halfway down the ramp from the freighter to Locke’s powerboat, with the last bags of cash in hand.

Wu would have told Khasar to hold off, to wait until they got the diverted money onto the getaway boat, to be sure of what Locke planned. To be certain the wily criminal did not have something nasty rigged to cover his escape. For Wu knew that Locke would try to sneak off, and well that he should — Locke had left plenty of clues lying around to make sure the general figured it out.

Locke shook his head. Did Wu really think he was that stupid? With Locke knowing that Wu would kill his own troops, that Locke would never think that he might be a target? Did Wu expect him to believe in honor among thieves?

Wu had his own kind of honor, but his goals did not include letting Locke — or anybody else — remain alive to be a potential problem. Wu was a burn-the-fields, salt-the-earth kind of general. If there was nobody left behind, there would be nobody to sneak up on you someday when you might not be expecting it.

Not that Locke himself had a problem with that. He just wasn’t about to be a victim of it.

Locke waited until Khasar had stepped onto the boat. It was twelve or fifteen meters from the deck of the freighter, at a steep downward angle, but an easy shot.

Locke lined up the sights square between the man’s shoulder blades and fired twice.

Khasar the Mongol fell, no doubt surprised, and the last bags of cash thumped down onto the power boat’s deck. Neat.

But the Mongol was a big and strong man, and the bullets were small. Locke took careful aim at Khasar as he came unsteadily to his feet, and squeezed off one more round — into the man’s head.

It didn’t matter how strong he was, Khasar wasn’t going to shake that one off.

The Mongol fell again, going boneless in that way only the dead can achieve.

Locke lowered the pistol. He would descend the ramp now, shove the body into the bay, and be gone. Ten minutes away, his helicopter awaited, and once he got there, he would be essentially home free.

“Don’t turn around, Colonel,” came an unfamiliar man’s voice from behind him.

Locke froze. The speaker spoke badly intoned Chinese, and Locke guessed that whoever it was was probably British or American.

Another small boat churned into view then, and upon the craft, five men, dressed as tourists! — but armed with pistols and submachine guns — approached Locke’s getaway craft.

Locke’s heart fell.

Nobody down there but a dead man to stop them.

Who were they? They weren’t Chinese, he could see that.

And he had just murdered a man in plain view of whoever was behind him. This was bad.

He’d never be able to get down the ramp and outshoot those men below, who, even as he thought it, reached Locke’s boat and pulled alongside to board it.

Locke sighed.

It wasn’t the money so much. It stung, of course, knowing he’d had it in his grasp and now would not be able to collect on it, but then he hadn’t joined Wu for the money. Locke had enough — more than enough — for his own needs.

No, he had joined Wu for the challenge, for the thrill, for the knowledge that he had been able to stand up to the United States and to CyberNation, and to win.

But to do that he had to get off this boat alive.

This all ran through his mind very fast. He had to leave.

But first he had to deal with the problem behind him.

“Down put the gun,” came the voice, again in fractured Chinese.

“You’re CIA?” he asked, in English.

“Close enough,” the voice said in that same language. “Put your gun down, please. Slowly and carefully.”

An American. They weren’t ruthless, the Americans, they believed in fair play. The man wouldn’t shoot him in the back.

He had a chance.

Locke began to lower the pistol, slowly, as instructed. He marked the voice, guessed the speaker was no more than five or six meters directly behind him. The man would be aiming his weapon at Locke’s back. If he dropped and spun fast enough, it would take the American a second to adjust his aim. Locke knew how to shoot. He hadn’t done much of it in a long time, but it was like riding a bicycle, you never forgot how. Especially when your life depended on it.

“Take it easy,” Locke said. “Don’t shoot, I give up—”

With that, he dropped and turned at the same time, ending up in a tripod on the deck, on his knees, stretched out and supported on his left hand. He brought his right hand up and around fast, thrust the pistol out and fired — one-two—!

But even as he fired, he knew it was wrong — the man behind him wasn’t standing — he was prone!

Locke’s shots missed by a meter, too high, too high—!

The American was on his belly, his own handgun extended in front of him. Locke had time to see that the man was also dressed like a tourist — a bright orange and yellow shirt, shorts — and that he was old and gray-haired.

He tried to adjust his aim downward—

An icy hammer smashed into his chest, just below his neck. The shock was so unexpected that Locke’s supporting arm collapsed and he fell on his face. He had to let go of his pistol to push himself up, but halfway there, his strength failed, and he sprawled again.

The wooden grate over the metal deck felt very cold against his face.

This couldn’t be happening. Everything had been going so well!

He saw the man’s feet — he wore sandals, no socks — as he approached. Saw the shooter kick the fallen handgun away, then squat down.

Locke’s vision went gray, then faded. And it was suddenly so very, very cold… “All… wrong…” he managed.

“Colonel Abraham Kent of Net Force and the United States Marines,” he heard the man say.

And that was the last thing Jack Locke heard as the spirit fled his body.