No Contest

No Contest

For the Glorious House of Sinanju

DestroyerBooks.com

With special thanks and acknowledgement to Tim Somheil for his contribution to this work.

Copyright

First published in the United States in 2005 by Worldwide

First published in Great Britain in ebook by Sphere in 2016

ISBN: 978-0-7515-6087-9

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2005 Warren Murphy

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Sphere

Little, Brown Book Group

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London, EC4Y 0DZ

www.littlebrown.co.uk

www.hachette.co.uk

Contents

Dedication

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Epilogue

About the Authors

Chapter 1

Dee Ligit didn’t care anymore about being a champion. All he cared about was staying alive.

Two competitors were dead already, and the evidence was right there in front of him. Blood-black smears stained the plywood catch basin that was jokingly called “the Moat.”

Getting hurt was one thing—in the sport of rail surfing you broke bones all the time. But these guys were dead. And not just any two rail surfers. They had been two of the greats.

Antonio the Terrible was a legend. Around from the beginning, when kids first started standing atop trains as a sport, these days he was to rail surfing what Michael Jordan was to basketball. He’d been on a hundred magazine covers in his native Brazil. He had his own line of helmets and knee pads. And now he was dead.

Francis the Fran Man had been around almost as long. He was old, like, in his thirties, and he’d been a star of the sport since he was twelve. It was the Fran Man, the grandfather of American rail surfers, who inspired Dee Ligit to stand on top of a speeding train for the first time. And now the Fran Man was dead, too.

“The show will go on,” declared the vice president of programming for the Extreme Sports Network, sponsor of the first North American extreme rail surfing competition-called Pro Train Surf I. “It would be an insult to these brave athletes to stop it now.”

The network gave the media prerecorded videotapes of Antonio the Terrible and the Fran Man. “We all face death every time we strap a locomotive to our sneakers,” Antonio said in his heavily accented English. “I don’t want the sport to stop if something happens to me. Carry on—let the world see the bravery of all professional rail surfers.”

The Fran Man’s video said pretty much the same thing. In fact, Dee Ligit had made a tape just like it, which was a requirement of the games. You couldn’t compete in Pro Train Surf I until you’d made a tape like that and handed it over to ESN.

Dee said pretty much the same words on his tape and he felt oh so sincere at the time. Now he was miserable and afraid. Sure, he was a professional rail surfer, but he wasn’t one of the superstars of the sport. Tony and the Fran Man—they were in a league of their own, right. If they couldn’t surf this course, how could he?

But he had no choice. If he backed out now, his career was over. He’d lose all credibility. He’d never get another promotional fee. Landing his own branded line of surf shoes would be out of the question—who’d want surf shoes from a guy who was afraid to surf? And for sure he’d lose the fifty-thousand-dollar check from the cereal company that was sponsoring him. He really needed that money.

Dee had to surf the course, but that didn’t mean he had to kill himself in the process. He’d take it easy, go casual. As he stood out on the launch platform, he examined the track and tried not to see the plywood gutters.

When he was a kid, he rail surfed for fun. He didn’t let high school or his parents interfere with his passion. He was expelled from school three months before graduation and kicked out of the house the same day, but it was right about that time he won his first big rail surf competition. He couldn’t even count how many contests he had won since then.