by Rob Jones
He spun it around in his hand and held it at arm’s reach. “Take this gun, Dirk and kill Joe Hawke. If he’s alive by the time we reach Miami Beach, I will personally execute you and throw you to the sharks – understand?”
Kruger extended a shaking hand and took the pistol. “He’s a dead man, sir. I swear it.”
*
Hawke stamped on the throttle pedal so hard he thought he might just push it right through the bottom of the boat. They raced forward sending giant arcs of seawater into the air either side of them, all the time inching closer to the Anshar.
“It’s gaining altitude!” Ryan yelled.
Devlin stared up into the sky. “We have to make a move now or it’s too late, Hawke!”
He was right. “Take over the controls, Ryan! We’re going up there.”
The young man stood fast. “No way!”
Hawke knew this was coming. He opened his equipment bag and rummaged around, pushing aside his Kukri knife and a butcher’s steel until he found what he was looking for – a compact rocket-propelled grappling hook. “We can’t mess about, Ryan. We don’t have time for an argument – I have to get the grappler prepared.”
Devlin stepped up. “I’ll take the controls while you two ladies decide what’s going on!”
“Kruger’s up there, Joe! This could be my last chance!”
Hawke made a split-second decision. His old friend was right about Kruger and the last chance, but did he have it in him to fight Kruger to the death? He recalled Ryan’s failure to kill the South African when he had the chance back in Rio de Janeiro after the Lost City of the Incas mission.
Was this a chance to redeem himself, or was he risking the mission by replacing a seasoned soldier like Devlin with a dope-smoking hacker with a chequered background? When he looked into Ryan’s eyes he knew what he had to do. “Fine, you go up after me and do as I say.”
“Thanks Joe.”
“Get us closer, Danny!” Hawke said, pulling the compressed air launcher from his bag. He turned to the young Londoner. How he had changed. The meek computer nerd was no more than a pale rasher of wind when he’d met him. He could have knocked him over with a feather, but he’d worked hard to prove himself. Tattoos on his toned arms, hair shaved down and a week’s stubble on his jaw. He felt a bit like a father watching his son leave home. “Don’t make me regret this, Ryan.”
“I won’t.”
Hawke hoped so from the bottom of his heart as he prepared the grappling hook and aimed it at the bottom of the airship’s gondola. Firing on a moving target was never easy, especially one that was not only moving to the side but also gaining elevation at the same time.
The range of the launcher was rapidly running out, but he stayed calm and aimed as Devlin kept the airboat smooth and steady. Taking the thing out of the sky would have been a simple matter of firing on the airship with their guns and blowing a few holes in the elevators and aft ballonet, but Lea was on board.
If an airship of that size crashed into water from this altitude she might survive, but she might not and that wasn’t something any of the ECHO team, least of all him, wanted to live with. The only solution was to fire the grappling hook onto one of the struts holding the engine motors to the gondola and then climb up the hard way and do the job by hand.
He fired the hook and they watched it spiral through the humid Floridian twilight until it collided with the airship. For a second, he thought he’d missed, but then he saw its metal claws wrap around one of the support struts. Instantly, the massive coil of rope attached to it started to unravel on the airboat’s tiny foredeck.
“It’s now or never, Ryan!” Hawke said, grabbing the end of the rope. “Which is it?”
CHAPTER FORTY
Cougar had been tracking them since Pavlopetri, sitting up on a cliff with her binoculars watching them in a savage fight with some men on a yacht. Garcetti was vague about who the men in black suits were, but whoever they were, they sure could fight.
She had followed them back to the airport without a hitch and tracing their outbound flight to Florida hadn’t exactly been tough with Garcetti’s contacts. She was there at Miami airport’s car hire before their plane’s wheels hit the asphalt. Watched them pile into the SUV and then pulled out after them.
When the chopper nearly got blown out of the sky over Copperhead Key she thought her mission was over, but when she heard the gunfire on the island she knew they’d survived. Waiting for them to make their next move was easy.
Easy as cherry pie.
Now, sitting in the front of her truck, she looked at the picture of Matty that she kept on her dashboard. There he was, a rare smile on his young face. A moment without pain snapped by a forgiving iPhone camera.
Her phone rang.
“I miss you, Mom.”
“I know. I’ll be home soon. You go back to bed, you hear me?”
“I hear you, mom.”
“I mean it, Matty. I don’t want you getting tired. Did you find the soup I left in the refrigerator?”
“Already ate it.”
She imagined him all alone in the apartment warming the chicken soup on the stove. Sitting at the kitchen table as he ate it by the spoonful. It broke her heart, but there was no other way. When you’re going through hell, keep on going. She forgot who said that now, but it stiffened her resolve to get the job done.
“Listen, you make sure the place is locked up before you go to bed.”
“I will.”
“And if there’s any problem you can speak with Mrs Kowalczyk across the hall, you got it?”
“I got it.”
She hoped he did and she blew a kiss down the phone to him when she said goodbye. It was a tough conversation to have, but soon all this hell would be over. Justin had called earlier to tell her things were coming together south of the border. There was a neat little place just outside of Los Cabos he had his eye on for the three of them. All they were waiting for was this one last job and then they could be together forever.
And Matty could have his operation.
She opened the box of high velocity rounds and carefully selected exactly one bullet. She never needed more than one. More than one was useless. If the target survived the first round then he knew he was under sniper fire and took evasive action. The job always got done with the first round.
And this one had something etched into the side of it.
A name.
A marked round. Her specialty. The bullet with your name on it. It was why her name struck fear into the hearts of men and women all around the world.
Cougar.
Just one shot and it was over.
She glanced down inside the box at all the other rounds. Chunky, lethal .408 bottlenecked cartridges and each one carrying the name of the intended victim.
Taylor.
Camacho.
Devlin.
Reno.
Zhang.
Bale.
Each one of them a perfect killing tool. Solid bullets, not lead-core. Every one of the copper nickel alloy rounds delivering a violent and bloody end from over two kilometers away.
Lund.
Eden.
Sloane.
Each one of them nothing but death on speeding wings of lead.
Donovan.
Hawke.
She selected one of the named rounds and slid it inside the CheyTac M200 Intervention. The most lethal sniper rifle in the world, it could effortlessly power a .408 bottlenecked cartridge at over three thousand feet per second.
She set the weapon down in the footwell and leaned back in her seat with the monocular at her eye. It was dark now, but it was a high-quality night vision model and she was able to track the movements of the ECHO unit easily.
After a short time on Copperhead Key in what looked like some kind of firefight with a bunch of men dressed in black suits, Hawke, Devlin and Bale had climbed into an airboat and were in pursuit of an airship. Crossing back to the island, she saw the rest of the tea
m fighting with more men in black. Looked like they were from that movie she liked when she was younger.
The Matrix, she guessed.
Crossing back to the airboat, they were still in pursuit of an airship which had risen from the center of the island and was now gaining altitude and heading out toward Biscayne Bay. She knew all of this must have something central to do with the kill order, but it wasn’t her place to ask questions or second-guess. Her superiors didn’t like that. They told her what to do and she did it. That was just about how it had always worked.
Government assassin, they called her. A ghost, others said. She didn’t care what words they used, all she knew was, this was her last job. The dark reality of what she did for a living was no longer something she could live with. They got her when she was young, but now she knew better. She closed her eyes and thought about Matty and Justin. She thought about Los Cabos and the villa. She thought about going fishing in the Gulf of California. Watching her boy laugh and play in the bright turquoise water far away from the streets of LA. No more pain, no more suffering.
A life worth living and it was all hers for the taking.
All she had to do was execute Operation Crossbow and she was home free.
She opened her eyes and started to track the ECHO team once again through the monocular.
*
Ryan yelled back, “It’s now, Joe!”
The rope was rapidly running out. Hawke threaded it forward until he was holding a section three or four meters from the end, giving Ryan the final section of the line to hang onto. “Keep us directly underneath, Danny!”
“No problem,” the Irishman yelled back over the noise of the propeller.
“They’re still ascending,” Hawke cried out. “When the rope goes taught we’re leaving this boat in a hurry, so hang on!”
Ryan nodded but said nothing. He swallowed hard and tried to look unfazed. Checked his gun was in his belt and gripped the rope with both hands. Now or never.
Now.
The rope tugged tight as the airship lurched upwards. Hawke was first off the deck and Ryan a second later. Their ascent was rapid and soon the Englishman was suspended in mid-air, fifty feet above the shark-infested water of Biscayne Bay. He looked down to check Ryan was all right and found him clinging to the rope for his life. His grip was good and he knew what to do, but getting up there was one thing – then they had to fight their way through an airship full of Athanatoi.
Craning his head up he saw the base of the gondola. He had around one hundred feet of rope to climb until he reached the engine’s support strut. He prayed he could get that far without someone shooting at him and started to heave himself up the rope.
He’d spent half his life climbing up and down ropes, but he quickly found he was developing blisters on both hands. Maybe ECHO needed a long, hard training course to toughen themselves up for the hard stuff like this? Ten feet to go now and the portside door of the gondola swung open to reveal a man dressed in black.
Athanatoi.
He was holding a compact machine pistol he didn’t recognize and now fired on him with a merciless fusillade of automatic rounds. Just as the airship had not been easy to hit with the grappling hook, neither were he and Ryan. The rope was swinging wildly in the wind as the giant craft continued to gain elevation and the bullets went all over the place.
Hawke looked down and saw Devlin had used his common sense and was steering the airboat out of the gunman’s line of fire. He coiled his left hand around the rope and moved his right hand across to his shoulder holster, ducking as another wave of bullets traced through the air inches from his head.
He pulled the pistol from the holster and aimed it at the young cultist. Immortality was no match for the lethal aim and shot of the former SBS sergeant and his first shot struck the man in the dead center of his forehead.
He tumbled out of the gondola and whistled past him and Ryan before crashing through the surface of the bay in a twisted, broken heap. Progress, Hawke considered, but these guys were like ants. Another would be along any second now.
A few feet from the strut, another Athanatoi appeared. This time Hawke was ready with his gun in his hand and his aim worked out in advance. When the face appeared in the door, Hawke fired and killed him instantly, this time blasting him back inside the gondola and hopefully causing an obstruction to stop others from leaning out of the door.
He dragged himself up over the support strut and made himself secure against the side of the gondola, firing inside intermittently to provide cover fire for Ryan as he climbed up behind him. When his friend was almost at the top, Hawke blasted his way inside the gondola and took out two more Athanatoi. The captain was standing at the bridge with his hands in the air. Beside him was a nervous-looking Blankov, but there was no sign of the Oracle, Kruger or, more worryingly, Lea.
“Where are they?”
“You can’t stop this now, Hawke.”
“Stop what?”
Blankov and the captain exchanged a nervous glance.
Hawke aimed his MP5 at Blankov’s face. “Stop what?”
“The tsunami.”
He and Ryan stared at each other for a moment. “A tsunami?”
“Yes, or a tsunami bomb to be more accurate. It’s buried off the coast of Miami Beach. The Oracle is going to detonate it with a remote when we’re in the right position to watch it flood the city.”
“My God, you people really are insane. You’ll kill thousands of innocent people!”
“We see the grand plan you are unable to see.”
Blankov reached for a gun on the consul and Hawke released a burst of rounds from his MP5, mowing him down and killing him on the spot.
“You didn’t see that part of the plan though, did you mate?”
Behind the terrified captain through the front window of the airship, Hawke saw a long golden line of sand and glittering tower blocks shining in the sunset. They were already approaching Miami Beach but taking care to avoid the no-fly zone. All the Oracle had to do was hit the remote and detonate the tsunami bomb and hundreds of thousands of innocent people would die, not to mention the Five Eyes officials, including President Brooke.
Hawke pulled back the hammer on his pistol. “I said, where are they?”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
With Ryan holding the captain at gunpoint, Hawke made his way through the door and started to walk down the length of the gondola. Around fifty feet long, a central corridor gave way to doors on either side and at the end of it at the stern was a large viewing deck. On the table was Kruger’s backpack, complete with the codex and what looked like the base of one of the idols.
He had struck gold.
Now he saw the Oracle and a huddle of Athanatoi, then Kruger dragged Lea into view. There was a struggle and then the arms dealer slapped her hard across the face.
“Let her go, dickhead!”
Lea sighed with relief when she saw the Englishman.
Kruger shook his head. “Fuck me dead, Hawke. Can’t you take a hint?”
The Oracle swivelled around, a bomb remote in his hand. “I told you to kill him! Kill him now and throw his dead body out of my airship!”
“Who do you think you are?” Hawke said. “Max Bloody Zorin?”
They fired on him with a vengeance, spraying the rear section of the deck with bullets and instantly blowing out the large observation window. Glass spewed out into the air and vanished in the twilight and a loud, howling noise filled the inside of the cabin.
Hawke dived to the floor and rolled behind the long wooden bar as Kruger dragged Lea across the viewing deck and toward some steps. He was trying to take her up into the space between the rigid structure of the airship and its helium bags.
Hawke raised his head above the edge of the bar as bullets drilled into it and forced tiny clouds of splintered wood and shattered glass into the air. He ducked back down just in time to avoid being shot in the face, slamming into the floor and cutting his hands on the shards o
f broken glass.
He cursed and looked down at the wounds but they were superficial. He’d just have to suck it up for now, he thought with a grim smile. An Athanatoi acolyte rounded the edge of the bar in pursuit of him. Finding him crouched in the detritus, he grinned and raised his gun.
Hawke grabbed the neck of a broken bottle of vodka and threw it at the cultist with all his might. It spun through the air like a dart and the jagged end buried itself into the middle of his face like a set of jaws.
He screamed in agony and dropped the gun as he reached up to pull the broken glass fragments from his bleeding face.
Hawke seized the moment and grabbed the dropped weapon. Still lying on his stomach, he held the gun with both hands and fired on the man, planting three rounds in his chest. With the glass fragments still wedged in his face, he stumbled back a few paces and then his legs collided with an upturned chair in front of the shattered observation window. Losing his balance, he tipped backwards and gave a heart-stopping scream as he fell out of the window and spun down toward the ocean hundreds of feet below.
“A new high-dive record, I think,” Hawke said, peering outside the window. “Two tucks and a pike.”
Someone else fired on him. The bullet slammed into the wall beside his head and he crashed down to the floor behind a long leather sofa. He cursed but at least he still had the gun. He checked the magazine and saw ten rounds remaining.
The man who had fired on him was reloading and Hawke used the moment to return fire under the sofa. The rounds strafed across the carpet, kicking up little puffs of rubber and polyester before tearing through the man’s boots and burying themselves in his feet and ankles.
The cultist wailed and collapsed to the floor, howling in pain and desperately trying to drag himself into the cover of the central corridor.
Hawke fired on him and took him out before he’d made a yard.