Sean Ellis - Callsign - King

“Did you hear it? An explosion?”

“I heard nothing,” said Abdullah, looking perplexed.

Suddenly, the quiet environment of the hospital ward was shattered by a wailing fire alarm siren.

Fulbright drew a compact semi-automatic pistol from a holster concealed beneath his shirt. “We need to get out of here,” he declared. “It’s an attack.”

Even though she knew better, her first impulse was incredulity. Denial. It’s just a coincidence… He’s being paranoid… Everything is going to be okay…

But the appearance of two men at the end of the hall, dressed head-to-toe in black combat gear and brandishing guns, swept away all trace of doubt.

The taxi rolled three times.

King was sure of that. His perceptions were heightened by the rush of adrenaline through his bloodstream, and everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. Even curled as he was in a protective ball, he watched as the interior of the cab rotated around him, batting him around like a wet sock in a tumble dryer. Each impact was like getting hit by a linebacker in a football game.

But then, after an eternity of spinning and slamming into nearly every surface in the taxi’s interior, the cacophony of the Corolla’s destruction ceased, and King found himself jammed against the passenger side door, with something heavy pressing down on him.

He lay there for a moment, surprised to still be conscious, grateful to be alive, and vaguely certain that there was something important he should be doing.

Get moving…

Even though the motion had ceased, he felt like his brain was still spinning, flinging his thoughts away before he could string them together in a coherent fashion.

I’m in a taxi, he thought. There was a rollover accident… What’s this holding me down?

It was a body; a dead man.

Get moving…

A dead man that got shot by…who again?

It doesn’t matter. Someone killed him and they’re coming from you. Get moving!

“Get moving, soldier.” He said it aloud, like a boot camp drill sergeant, and something inside him clicked. Reaching down past the pain and disorientation, he willed himself to action. He squirmed out from under the weight of the dead driver and took a quick look around.

The taxi had come to rest on its right side. The broken windshield was completely gone, and beyond it he saw the Dodge pick-up that had caused the wreck. It had also rolled, and had come to rest upside-down, only a few feet away. The reinforced roll-cage had prevented anything more serious than cosmetic damage to the vehicle, but the men inside did not appear to have faired as well. King could see the driver through the open window and resting on the inverted headliner. He assumed it was the driver because the man was entangled with the steering column, which had sheared away during the wreck.

King stared at the man, as if in the twisted limbs and blood, he might find some hint of what to do next, and then he remembered; there was a second truck.

The realization galvanized him. He squirmed through the windshield and, propelling himself on elbows and knees, crawled into the overturned Dodge. He scraped past the unmoving-dead?-driver and got a look at the passenger, likewise motionless in a heap on the truck’s ceiling. The man still clutched the weapon he had used to strafe the taxi and kill its driver, a Heckler amp; Koch MP5, fitted with a noise suppressor.

When King tried to wrestle the machine pistol free, the man’s eyes fluttered open and he instinctively tried to jerk the gun away. Without a moment’s hesitation, King punched the man in the Adam’s apple, crushing his trachea. The gun fell from the man’s grasp, forgotten, as he commenced clawing at his throat, an activity which occupied him for the last few seconds of his life.

With the MP5 in hand, King wormed through the window opening on the passenger side and onto the hot pavement. He quickly got his feet under him, but stayed low in a crouch, as he peered around the back of the truck’s cab. Beyond the wreckage of the taxi, he saw the second truck, parked with both doors open. A man wearing the same digital-camouflage pattern fatigues and tactical gear as the occupants of the crashed truck-and sporting an identical HK MP5-was peering into the smashed taxi.

These guys work in pairs, King thought. He drew back, pivoting on one foot just as the second man rounded the front end of the truck. The gunmen started to bring his weapon up, but King was faster.

The MP5 hardly made any noise at all. The suppressor muffled the report so effectively that King heard only the clicking of the pistol’s bolt sliding back and forth, not much louder than a toy gun. Nevertheless, a three-round burst stitched the man’s face with blotches of red and he pitched backward.

King was moving before the body hit the ground. He turned again, dropping onto his belly, and low-crawled under the bed of the truck. A cautious peek revealed the remaining gunman crouching at the front of the taxi. The man edged forward and King dropped him with well-aimed burst from the MP5.

King wasted no time. He crawled out from under the pick-up and crossed the short distance to where the gunman lay. The fallen man wore a tactical chest rig, similar to the kind Chess Team utilized on mission, with numerous pockets and pouches containing spare magazines, grenades, and other equipment, but there nothing to indicate who he worked for or why he and his comrades had made the assassination attempt. King gathered four magazines for the MP5, then skirted around the front end of the taxi, his weapon at the ready in case he had misjudged the size of the assault force.

He had not. The second truck sat idle, with the front doors open and no one else inside.

Nevertheless, it was too soon to count this as a victory. He had no idea why the men had ambushed him, but it almost certainly had something to do with Sara’s assignment, and that meant she was in imminent danger.

Traffic on Ring Road had ground to a halt behind the scene of the accident and curious motorists were disembarking their vehicles to get a better look. Somewhere in the distance, the sound of sirens was audible, and King knew he had to keep moving. He crawled back inside the taxi just long enough to grab his duffel bag then headed for the abandoned pick-up.

The truck was outfitted with a dash-mounted GPS device, and unlike the app for King’s phone, this unit communicated directly with the orbiting satellites. He quickly tapped in the coordinates for the hospital, and as the route flashed on the map, he started the engine and sped away from the scene of the ambush.

As he climbed out of the pick-up, King glanced at his watch. Although it felt like hours had passed since he’d left the ambush, according to his Timex, it had been more like ten minutes.

The drive had seemed interminably long. The unfamiliar environment was a flood of new sensory information that had to be interpreted and categorized. At the same time, he wrestled with the mystery of the attack.

His mind was like a computer, sorting what he knew and what he suspected, running through all the possible explanations to see which made the most sense, and like a computer running a complex program, the activity slowed down his processing speed.

He was certain that the four shooters were private contractors, and knew that, once he could establish contact with Deep Blue he’d be able to pin down exactly who they were. The trucks and other equipment would have left a money trail. But because the attackers were in all likelihood hired guns, there was no guarantee that the trail would lead back to the person or organization that had ordered the attack. A connection to Sara’s mission in Africa was by no means explicit, but none of the alternative explanations made any sense.