Badge of the Death Game

Chapter 011

The first order of business was ammunition.

Soren went through the pockets of the man whose AK rifle he'd taken, found a full magazine, and swapped it in. The other bodies yielded two more magazines, a folded wad of local currency, and a set of identity documents he couldn't read but pocketed anyway. Then he grabbed the nearest pair of ankles and started dragging.

Evan watched him for a moment, then grabbed the other ankle without being asked. They worked without talking, pulling the bodies one by one into the banana grove on the right side of the road, pushing them far enough into the broad-leafed shadow that a passing vehicle wouldn't catch them in a casual glance. The blood on the asphalt was a different problem. There was too much of it and too little time, and Soren made the call quickly: leave it. Anyone who stopped to investigate a bloodstained stretch of highway in the Frontier Republic was already the kind of person who wouldn't be deterred by a clean road.

"We need to change," he said, and stripped the jacket off the nearest of the escort guards without ceremony.

The fabric was dark, which helped. The stains that had soaked into it from the previous owner's final minutes were visible up close but wouldn't read as blood at a distance. He pulled it on, checked the fit, and moved to the next problem.

Evan had already found a shirt that more or less fit him and was pulling it over his head with the grimacing focus of a man trying not to think too hard about where it had come from. "Are we driving the truck into the city?"

"We need to get to Port Morrow," Soren said. "Your cousin, the contacts, the way out. We go now, while we have a vehicle and nobody knows what happened here yet."

He hadn't expected the ambush. That was the honest accounting of it. The plan had been the Delta Team Support Card, a controlled interception somewhere on the open road, clean and manageable. Instead, a group of opportunists with AK rifles had solved the immediate problem for him in a way that left him with a truck, weapons, cash, and a timeline measured in minutes before someone came looking.

He'd take it.

"Go get the man from the cargo bed," he said to Evan. "The one who speaks the language. We need him up front."

Evan jogged back to the truck. While he was gone, the other occupants of the cargo bed had begun climbing out on their own, moving with the tentative, disbelieving slowness of people who had been in a confined space for a long time and weren't yet certain the outside was real. They stood at the roadside in the early morning light and looked at the bodies in the ditch and the blood on the road and the two men moving through it all with purposeful efficiency, and none of them said anything.

Evan came back with the translator, who had the look of a man who had decided somewhere in the last ten minutes that he was going to hold himself together through sheer force of professional habit.

"This is Soren," Evan said. "He's the one keeping us alive."

"Howard," the man said. "Howard Anson. I'm from Dongshan."

He was at least fifteen years older than Soren, which made the slight formality in his manner feel appropriate rather than awkward. Soren nodded.

"Evan told you what we need?"

"To play the driver. Get us through any checkpoints." Howard straightened slightly. "I'm not an actor, but I can manage a conversation. I know the language well enough."

"You won't need to perform. If we hit a checkpoint, you talk, we stay quiet. We're not trying to impersonate the Blake family indefinitely. Once we're in the city, we ditch the truck and walk."

"Understood." Howard nodded, and the relief in his face was the relief of a man being given a task he could actually complete.

Soren turned to Evan. "Tell the others to get back in the cargo bed. We need the truck to look normal from the outside."

Evan hesitated. "We're bringing them with us?"

"We need the cargo. If we pass anyone who knows this route, an empty truck raises questions that a full one doesn't." He kept his voice neutral. "Once we're in the city and clear of the vehicle, they're on their own. We'll leave them near the police station. After that it's their problem."

Evan's expression moved through several things in quick succession, then settled. "Some of them want the consulate, not the police. They don't trust the local force."

"The consulate isn't in Morrow Province. We can't take them there, and I'm not staying in this country a minute longer than I have to." Soren looked at him steadily. "Tell them we'll do what we can to contact the consulate on their behalf once they're at the station. That's the best offer available."

It wasn't a comfortable answer. Evan knew it and Soren knew it, and neither of them said so out loud. Evan went to relay it, and the group accepted with the quiet, exhausted pragmatism of people who had learned not to hold out for better options.

They loaded up and moved.

Howard took the driver's seat with the careful composure of a man sitting down to a job interview he hadn't prepared for. Soren took the passenger side, the AK rifle laid flat across his knees beneath the window line. Evan settled into the rear cab space and said nothing.

The road to Port Morrow ran straight through low, flat country, the landscape on either side a mix of agricultural land and scrub, the occasional cluster of buildings marking villages that looked as though they'd been there since before anyone thought to name them. The morning light was clean and direct, the kind that made everything look more exposed than it actually was.

No checkpoints appeared. No vehicles flagged them down. The truck moved through the outskirts of Port Morrow and into the city proper without incident, and Soren let himself acknowledge that quietly, without making too much of it.

________________________________________

Behind them on the highway, the bodies in the banana grove had already been found.

Several vehicles were parked at the roadside, and armed men in matching fatigues were working the scene with the methodical attention of people who took this kind of thing personally. The three men stripped of their clothing had been identified quickly. The Blake family affiliation was obvious to anyone who knew what to look for.

"Someone pulled the clothes off three of them," one of the men said. "That wasn't the Blake family doing cleanup. That was someone taking cover."

The man he was reporting to stood at the edge of the road and looked at the highway marker indicating the distance to Port Morrow. Victor Shaw was lean and unhurried in the way that people who had been dangerous for a long time tended to be, the urgency in him running below the surface rather than showing on his face.

"A third party," he said.

"Local farmers heard gunfire about an hour ago. One of them saw a grey cargo truck leaving the scene at speed. The seedling logo on the panel matches the Blake family's transport contracts."

Victor looked at the road for another moment, then turned back toward the vehicles. "Find them," he said. "Whoever they are, find them and put them down."

________________________________________

"We're in," Evan said from the back seat, his voice carrying the particular relief of someone who had been holding their breath for an hour and had finally remembered how to exhale.

Port Morrow was not what the word "capital" typically implied. The streets were wide enough but unhurried, the buildings along them mostly two or three stories, the traffic a mix of aging sedans and motorbikes moving at the pace of a city that had never been in a particular hurry. A group of young monks in saffron robes crossed an intersection ahead of them, and Evan pulled out a battered flip phone he'd taken from one of the bodies, snapped a photo through the window, and looked pleased with himself.

"I pulled the SIM already," he said, catching Soren's look. "No signal, no tracking. I'll get a new card when we stop."

Soren was in the rear seat with a Beretta 92F resting in his lap. He'd found it in the cab's door pocket, the previous driver's personal weapon, with one magazine already seated and two spares in the glove compartment. Forty-five rounds total. He'd checked the slide tension, inspected the chamber, and confirmed the recoil spring was clean. The g*n had been well maintained, which said something about its former owner that was no longer relevant.

The AK rifle was staying in the truck. A long weapon in a city environment was a liability, not an asset, and he had no way to carry it without announcing himself to everyone within a hundred yards. The Beretta fit inside the jacket he'd taken from the road, and that was sufficient.

"Where are we stopping?" Howard asked from the driver's seat, his eyes moving steadily between the road and the mirrors.

"Somewhere quiet," Soren said. "Away from foot traffic. We get out, you drive the truck two blocks toward the nearest police station and leave it running. Don't wait to see what happens."

Howard nodded without looking back.

"After that," Evan said, "I find a phone card and call my cousin. He'll know where we can go." He paused. "What's the plan once we're off the street?"

Soren looked out the window at the city moving past, at the ordinary texture of a place that had no idea what was behind them on the highway or who was already looking for a grey cargo truck with a seedling logo on the side.

"One step at a time," he said.