by Rob Jones
“Just whose bloody idea was this again?” said Lea. “I could be watching a romance film with a box of flaming chocolates on my lap and instead I’m risking getting impaled on a sodding Punjabi stick.”
Hawke rolled his eyes. “Punji stick, not Punjabi stick.”
“Whatever.”
“But you’re not far off,” Hawke said. “The name derives from the north of Burma when the British Army first discovered them in conflict with the Kachins.”
“Thanks, Joe,” Lea said. “At least I’ll have that to think about when I’m slowly dying down in that pit with a six foot splinter up my ar...”
“What was that?” Lexi asked.
“What?” Lea said, her last sentence already forgotten.
“I heard something up ahead.”
“Me too,” Reaper said. “Maybe one of the tests has slowed Sheng down?”
Hawke hushed everyone and listened hard but there was no sound other than the wind howling through the chamber complex. “Maybe just the wind, or a falling rock,” he said.
“Yes, a magic rock that just decided to fall over all by itself,” Lea said. “Or maybe a little magic pebble that decided it was time to go on an adventure to the surface after two thousand years down in this shit hole?”
“Your concern is noted,” Hawke said.
“It’s not concern, Joe! How can a bloody rock just fall over – we’re obviously closing in on Sheng!”
“Then we had better shut up and get on with it or he’ll get away again, yeah?”
“If only Ryan were here,” Lea said.
Hawke looked at her. “Eh?”
“We could send him across first.”
Hawke smiled. “I’d be up for that. He could bore the trial to death.”
Slowly, Hawke led the way across, and carefully worked out where to tread and where to avoid. After the final soldier had crossed the canyon, they made their way through the next tunnel, closing in on Sheng. After a few slow minutes moving through the long, twisting tunnel, Hawke and the others emerged into the next chamber.
They were staring at a broad expanse of what looked like a sandy-clay, submerged beneath a few inches of icy water. Around the outside of the chamber stood a dozen more terracotta soldiers like the ones from the public tomb above. Each one stared at them with dead, silent eyes, somehow beckoning them deeper into the tomb.
Han nodded and smiled. “This confirms the trials are in the order of mutual overcoming – the next will be water, with no doubt, and this is trial by earth.”
“But it’s underwater!” Lexi said.
“Wrong,” said Han flatly. “It’s the Trial by Earth.”
“Otherwise known as quicksand,” Hawke said, pushing the steel toecap of his heavy boot gently down into the water until it hit the squashy surface of the sand beneath. He frowned as he studied the wide expanse of sand. He knew from his SBS training the dangers of quicksand – a loose sand that has turned into liquefied soil due to the water being unable to escape from it.
“I read quicksand is not that dangerous, actually,” Lea said. “It’s just some crap they put in the movies to get rid of unwanted characters during the final act.”
“True enough, if the sand is on a dry surface,” Han said. “But underwater like this, it is utterly lethal. Trust me. The Emperor was not concerned with crap they put in the movies when he devised this defense, and that is why he put the sand beneath the water. That is what makes it dangerous. Now the earth beneath the water will test us as we must walk across this pool to reach the other side. There is no other way.”
Hawke went first, bravely pushing out into the water and feeling tentatively with his boots as he went. There was an art to walking across quicksand. There was an art to getting yourself out of it as well, but he didn’t even want to consider that at the moment.
Other than the quicksand, the path ahead of them was clear enough – the far bank was a shallow, smooth rock leading up to a door-sized hole hewn from the rock thousands of years ago by Qin’s men. The very same men whom the Emperor had sealed up inside after the tomb was completed, Hawke thought with a shudder. Perhaps one of the many skeletons they had seen at the entrance once belonged to the man who had carved that hole, or created this fiendish quicksand trial.
As he moved slowly forward, the water slopped and splashed around his ankles, and behind him the others followed in his footsteps, taking care not to deviate from the path he was finding through the lakebed. He looked up to study the surface of the lakebed a little further ahead and caught another glimpse of one of the stone soldiers. It stared back at him in the silence – cold, dead, inanimate terracotta.
For a second he thought he saw it move ever so slightly – just a quick flick of its eyelid – but rebuked himself for being so stupid. Flights of fancy like that got you killed fast on SBS missions, and if anything this was the most important mission he had ever been on.
Over the years he had fought more foreign soldiers and terrorists than he could remember and each time the security of the nation was at stake, or even the safety of the people. His superiors, including Hart, had told him whatever they’d had to in order to make him do the things he had to do for Queen and Country, but this was different. He closed his eyes for half a second… Hart – Sheng would pay for that.
Never before had he faced the prospect of a man as powerful as Sheng getting so close as this to something as powerful as the Map of Immortality. It made even Zaugg look like small fry. As for the lives of every man, woman and child in Tokyo now being in the hands of Cairo Sloane and the others, the weight of the responsibility he was holding felt heavier than ever.
“How’s it going?” It was Reaper, calling from the back – his thick French accent boomed in the cavernous chamber.
“Not too bad,” Hawke called back. “But it’s almost impossible to tell where...”
A second later he felt himself tumbling over to the right. His right boot was rapidly disappearing beneath the sucking surface of the quicksand under the water. Lexi screamed but immediately reached out and grabbed Hawke’s belt, almost toppling herself over in the process.
Hawke stayed calm. He knew a few old tricks to extricate himself from quicksand and panicking was the worst thing he could do. The extra agitation only served to force you deeper into the trap. He quickly prodded the sand with the butt of the rifle until he found a solid area and leaned into it as he pulled his boot out of the quicksand.
“Yeah...’ he said calmly. “Best not stand on that bit.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
A few minutes later and Hawke was leading the other members of the team away from the trial by earth and into the third chamber. Han had described how according to ancient Chinese philosophy this would be the trial by water, and being a former SBS man he liked his chances, even in this madhouse, but that didn’t stop him worrying about the others.
The reason he had been so sympathetic when Lea told him about her mistake in Syria was because of his own officer past. There was nothing he liked to talk about down that particular memory lane, but right now it rose to the forefront of his mind – now he was leading his team into danger. As a former Major in the SBS he knew what it meant to be in command of others and the grave responsibility that came with it. When they had busted him down to NCO it had come almost as a relief.
But his confidence was whittled away when he turned a bend in the tunnel and saw the size of the third chamber.
It was barely bigger than an elevator in terms of floor space, but the floor was nothing but black water.
“I have a really bad feeling about this,” Lexi said.
“Woah!” said Lea. “Flashbacks of our little holiday in Greece, or what!”
Hawke nodded grimly. When he first saw it, he had also thought of the cave system on Kefalonia where they almost drowned thanks to Zaugg and Baumann exploding a hole in the bottom of the bay, but this was different – this was altogether more claustrophobic.
“We have to be
careful here,” Han said.
“This from the man who should be in hospital,” Lea said, shaking her head.
“The wound was cauterized,” Han said without emotion.
“You don’t need to remind me,” Lea said, shuddering. “I was there and I saw it...”
“Then let's get on,” Han said. “There are some people inside the cave system with whom I wish to have a short conversation.”
“Everyone stay here,” Hawke said. “I need to check this out.”
He jumped in the water. It was freezing cold and with no light there was zero visibility. He had trained in these exact conditions more times than he could remember, and not only that he had swum in them for real on a top secret mission along the Russian coast, although he was a much younger man back then.
But today there was more at stake than simply fixing a seabed listening device so the Royal Navy could track Russian submarines going in and out of Northern Fleet headquarters in Kola Bay. Today he was trying to stop an insane human-trafficking megalomaniac from getting his hands on what he was reliably informed would be the greatest power ever wielded by man. There’s your incentive, Joe, he thought.
Inside the submerged tunnel, memories of Kefalonia came flooding back to him again, almost literally. As he felt his way along the tunnel, pushing deeper into the filthy, near-freezing water, all he could think about was how close he had come to getting all those people killed back in Greece, and now the same had happened to Olivia Hart. For that, someone would pay a heavy price, but he realized the number of people lining up to get their revenge on Sheng was getting longer by the second.
After a while, he saw a grubby, orange light slowly begin to emerge ahead of him. He was nearly out of breath, and he knew he could hold his breath for a full five minutes. Back in the height of his SBS days he could do nearly ten, but that took a hell of a lot of training. How the others were going to hold theirs for so long he had no idea.
Now, he followed the light and swam smoothly upwards until his knees were banging against something – steps. He climbed up them and a moment later his head emerged into a dank little chamber lit orange by the fading, flickering light of one of Sheng’s glow-sticks.
So that was the trial by water – he made it look easy, but he knew ninety-nine percent of people would be dead if they didn’t have the sense to turn around before they got halfway, and he hadn’t even known how long it was when he started out. Normally he would never consider such a suicidal thing to do, but desperate times called for desperate measures, as his Dad used to say.
He took a second to get his breathing back under control and then went back into the water to tell the others the good news. He knew what he had to do, but whether or not he could do it was another thing altogether.
*
The chopper circled the Tokyo Bay Aqua Line main service area as they scouted for the enemy, and then began to descend. Scarlet and the others jumped out into the Tokyo drizzle, rifles slung over shoulders and pistols in their hands. Some members of the public looked startled but were moved quickly away by uniformed police officers. As they marched to the entrance they noticed another chopper with a rope ladder hovering a few hundred yards away.
“The gyrodyne!” Ryan said.
Scarlet nodded. “Ready to kick some arse?”
“Always,” Bradley Karlsson said, a wide grin on his face. “It’s what I live for.”
“Me too, so let’s go,” Sophie said, pausing for a second to make sure Ryan was ready. “Are you okay?”
“Of course he’s okay,” Scarlet boomed. “We need you more than ever now, Ryan, remember that. When we’ve blasted these tossbags into the next life it’s going to be down to you to disable that Tesla thing.”
Ryan swallowed hard but tried to look cool.
“No problemo,” he said, and rubbed a trembling hand over his face.
*
“You’re not breathing air into my lungs,” Reaper said. “I’d rather die.”
Hawke had expected that reaction from the former French Foreign Legion man, now unreformed Merc and all-round nutcase.
“You’d rather die?”
“Of course! I’m a Frenchman. It’s not necessary. I doubt it even works.”
“Of course it works,” Hawke said. “Regular inhaled air is around twenty-one percent oxygen, but exhaled air is seventeen percent oxygen. It works, believe me. I’ve been there before, and on both ends of it.”
Reaper was horrified. “You let another man kiss you?”
“It’s not a kiss, Vincent, it’s passing oxygen from one person to another.”
“You tell yourself that... and don’t call me Vincent. The answer is still no. Maybe if you were a beautiful woman like Lea here, but otherwise, no.”
“In that case I hope you can hold your breath for a full five minutes or you’re going to be dead.”
“Of course I can,” he boomed. “I think.”
Lea blushed slightly. “You think I’m beautiful, Reap?”
“Of course he thinks you’re beautiful,” Hawke said, annoyed. “He’s French. He’d hump a bicycle if you put a skirt on it.”
Lea was offended. “Well, thanks a lot!”
Hawke ignored her. “What about you, Han? How long can you hold your breath for?”
“Perhaps five minutes during meditation, but swimming under water... I don’t know, Joe.”
“Lea?”
“I have no problem at all with it, Joe,” she said, and winked at him. “In fact I might just pass out on purpose so you can rescue me all over again.”
“So now you want me to rescue you? I thought your ego couldn’t handle that?”
She shrugged and kissed him on the cheek. “What can I say? I blow hot and cold.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Hawke took Han through first, and had to resupply him with oxygen from his lungs only once. Five minutes doesn’t sound like a long time until you’re underwater, as his old CO used to say, and Han found that out three-quarters of the way through the pitch-black tunnel.
Next was Lea, who needed two top-ups and seemed to enjoy them rather more than the Shaolin monk had. Finally it was Reaper’s turn, and to his eternal disgust he was forced to give Hawke the pre-arranged signal for more air with the end of the tunnel only a few dozen feet away.
“I nearly made it without any help,” he said, breathing hard as he clambered up into the tiny chamber. “I can’t believe it... I could even see the light!”
“Sounds to me like you wanted a little kiss from Hawke, Reap.”
Reaper glared at her, still breathing hard. “I did not.”
“Are you sure about that, boyo? You sound pretty excited by it all, what with that heavy breathing and all...” She looked up at Hawke and winked. “And what’s this I hear about you being so close to the end and seeing the light and still asking for some air. I know if I saw the light I’d probably be able to make it on my own.”
“Leave it,” Reaper said.
“You love Hawke!”
“Then you better watch out, yeah?” he said, and clambered to his feet. He turned to Hawke. “Seriously though, thank you my friend. You saved my life. One day, perhaps, in the far distant future...”
“You’ll repay the favor?” Hawke asked.
“I was going to say maybe I will let you call me Vincent.”
Hawke laughed as they moved on deeper into the cave system.
The next bend in the tunnel revealed an enormous cavernous space bigger than any of the previous ones with a single footbridge carved out of the cave’s stone stretching across to the other side. Hawke flicked a small stone over the ledge and counted as it fell into the darkness. At least two or three hundred feet, he thought.
Lea joined him and held his arm as she peered over the edge. “How long till you’d hit the bottom, do you reckon?”
Hawke shrugged. “If Ryan were here I’m sure he’d tell us.”
“If Ryan were here,” she said, “we’d be getting a f
ull-on lecture about the terminal velocity of a human being.”
Han leaned over and peered into the darkness. “The question is,” he said, “if you fell over that ledge would your fall be too short or too long?”
Reaper coughed and spat over the ledge. “If I fell over there, I would shoot myself before I hit the bottom, no?”
Hawke nodded in agreement. “So let’s make sure no one is stupid enough to fall over then. I don’t want any of my guys turning themselves into pancakes on my watch.”
“Oh, it wouldn’t be like pancakes,” Reaper said. “I saw a man leap from the top of the Eiffel Tower once.”
“Yes, thanks, Vincent,” Hawke said,
“It looked like someone had dropped a bag of oatmeal and strawberry jam over the side.”
“But wait a minute,” Lea said, turning to Han, “and by the way thanks very much for that little image, Reaps... I thought you said this was the trial by fire?”
Han nodded grimly as his eyes crawled over the cavern. A cold, damp wind blew up from behind them on its way deeper into the cave system.
“Exactly what I was thinking,” Hawke said.
Han looked concerned.
They made their way across the footbridge and reached the other side without any problems.
“I don't like it,” Hawke said. “That was too easy.”
“And where was the fire?” said Lea as they pushed on.
Then everything changed.
They turned the final bend in the tunnel and saw Sheng and his men standing and facing them, all armed with submachine guns.
“How fortuitous that you should stumble upon us here, Mr Hawke,” Sheng said coldly. “And how polite of you to volunteer to put yourself first for the next trial.”
“Always a pleasure to help the criminally insane, Sheng,” Hawke said.