by Rob Jones
“I think that ship sailed a few years ago,” replied Hawke.
“You can't catch him now. He had a secret escape route built into the wall here. It takes him to a cable car which goes straight down into the town. He’s heading for the airport – I heard him ordering the pilots to ready his private plane for a long-haul flight.”
“You’ve been very helpful,” Hawke said, and knocked Grobel unconscious. He disappeared into the secret passageway and took the elevator up to the platform where he too was met by a blast of icy, snowy wind.
He turned and saw the cable car, and watched in horror as Zaugg dragged Lea roughly into the gondola.
Zaugg raised his gun to Lea’s temple.
“So we meet again, Mr Hawke,” Zaugg stroked his goatee beard and examined Hawke as if he was an insect. “Under any other circumstances perhaps I would describe it as a pleasure to make the acquaintance of someone like you, but as it is I’m sure you will forgive me if I tell you I am quite sick of the sight of you and wish you dead. As it happens, I always get my wish.”
Hawke took a step forward.
“Get back! I will shoot her, I swear it! Lower your gun.”
Hawke stopped and did as he was told.
“Admit it!” screamed Zaugg. “You lost! Like so many before you, you tried to beat me, but once again I have won! Ich habe gewonnen!”
*
Lea felt Zaugg’s slate-gray eyes burning into her as the cable car began to descend out of the compound’s housing and into the howling snowstorm outside.
Now safely away from the imminent explosion of the compound, Zaugg stood motionless and stared at her. She saw him up-close for the first time. He was skeletal-thin, with a few days’ stubble covering his horribly sunken cheeks like thin gray moss.
Horror crossed Lea’s face as she watched him pull a radio control device from his pocket and slide out an aerial on the top of it.
“Please don’t do this!” she shouted.
“Silence! The last thing I will do before we take to the air is push this button. That will explode a series of charges carefully located in the compound and along the snowline of these mountains. The entire valley will be crushed and the compound annihilated. I will survive, however, and so will this.”
Zaugg caressed the golden trident resting in his arms as the cable-car jolted downwards towards the valley, buffeted by the growing power of the snowstorm.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Hawke watched the cable-car descend into the snowy night and knew he had only one play left. He raced back to the Ark’s warehouse and grabbed a pair of skis and ski poles. A quick search in the weapons section revealed a sniper’s rifle which he loaded in double-quick time before making his way back to the slopes outside.
There was only one way he could beat Zaugg to the valley below.
*
“You can’t get away, Zaugg, you freaking maniac!” Lea said.
“Why ever not? I have my own plane, and no one knows I’m responsible for any of this. I will simply fly away into the night and bide my time. And you’re coming with me. Pushing you out the back of my jet at ten thousand feet will bring an indescribable satisfaction to me. I may even film it and keep it for posterity.”
Zaugg pulled a cell phone from his pocket and tapped a number.
“Is the plane ready? Good.”
He slammed the phone shut and weighed the Luger in his hands. “Or then again, perhaps I should just shoot you now? I know what my father would do... I know what he would tell me to do, if he were here...”
He closed one eye slightly and raised the gun at her in a mock execution.
“Bang!” he shouted, and laughed violently.
Lea screamed and scrambled back on the floor, fear in her eyes.
“You really are insane!” she shouted, her voice hoarse with terror.
“No. I am a realist and will live forever!”
“You will die a failure just like your father!” Lea screamed, trying to make him lose his composure. It was her only chance.
“No! Silence!” Zaugg was spitting with rage now, barely able to control himself.
“The only immortal thing about you will be your reputation as a genocidal maniac!”
“You will die for this, and I will be your executioner.”
Zaugg raised the gun a second time, with murder in his eye, but a strong gust of wind rocked the gondola and knocked him off his feet.
Lea snatched her chance, and pulled herself up through the maintenance hatch in the top of the gondola as fast as she could. But before she was safely through she felt Zaugg’s hands swiping at her ankles.
He grabbed one and tried to pull her back inside the gondola, but she lashed out with her foot and kicked him hard in the face, sending him flying back inside the car.
She was breathing hard, adrenalin coursing through her system. She thought fast and slammed the hatch down, but now she was out of ideas. She was standing on the roof of a cable car five thousand feet above a rocky valley, swaying wildly in the freezing wind, blackness all around her.
The hatch slammed open.
Zaugg began to crawl out of the hole in the roof. He reminded her of a kind of black insect, crawling out of a hole on its way to a kill.
She had nowhere to run, but instinct made her look around for an escape route all the same. Nothing but mountain ridges thousands of feet away, their distant peaks dimly lit by a fleeting flash of moonlight through a thin break in the snowclouds. The grim howling of the snowy wind highlighted her terrible isolation in the middle of nowhere.
Zaugg was now on the roof of the gondola, grinning insanely. He wiped the blood from his face on his sleeve and spat a tooth over the side of the car.
It fell into the oblivion. “I told you not to defy me, Donovan.”
Again from instinct, Lea stepped back away from the horror of Zaugg, each step taking her closer to the smooth, cambered edge of the gondola. She felt herself begin to fall backwards, and wildly flailed her arms to grab anything to stop her slipping over the edge.
Her fingers made contact with a support beam holding the car to the steel cable and she grabbed hold of it with a second to spare before her legs slipped over the back of the gondola.
She screamed in terror, her legs kicking out in an attempt to clamber back on to the roof. One of her shoes fell off and tumbled out of sight into the swirling void below her.
Zaugg laughed and closed in on her like a cougar ready to pounce on a wounded deer.
Lea knew it was fight or die, and there was no Joe Hawke to save her now. She was as alone as she could be, and facing a cold-blooded killer with nothing to lose.
Zaugg was upon her, and reached out with his hands to grab her jacket. For a second she thought he was trying to save her, but then she realized he merely wanted to prolong her suffering. He took hold of her and roughly spun her around and flung her down hard on the gondola roof.
She hit the aluminum alloy roof with a metallic crunch and cried out in pain as her head struck the hatch handle. She rolled over onto her stomach and reached out to open the hatch in a desperate bid to get back inside and lock Zaugg out. It was her only chance now. She gripped the metal handle and tried to heave it up.
Zaugg padded over to her and stamped on her hand. The movement of the cable car as it trundled slowly down to the gound station and the wind cutting across from the west almost knocked him off his balance once again, but the look of determination on his face told Lea that this time he wasn't go to stop until she was dead.
He stamped on her hand a second time.
She screamed again – it felt like he’d broken her fingers.
She flipped herself back over onto her back and scrambled away from him like a crab.
He followed her to the other end of the gondola roof, his eyes narrowing now. He held his hands out, rigid like claws, and leaned forward to grab her throat. He was going to strangle her.
*
Hawke sprayed a great arc of sno
w into the air as he skidded to a halt. Without waisting a second, the sniper rifle was off his back. He kicked off the skis and ran over to a low rock which he used to steady the weapon.
He looked through the sights to see the tiny cable car suspended in the darkness, lit only by the greenish striplight inside the gondola.
“Oh my God!” he said. Zaugg and Lea were fighting on top of the cable car. For a while it looked like she was going to get the better of him, but after a few seconds the tables definitely turned, and Zaugg was on top.
He watched Zaugg pointing at her, and ranting. From this distance he could see everything but hear nothing – but what did it matter? He knew what the deal was up there.
He remembered his training, now nearly twenty years’ old, and slowed his breathing. He aimed the weapon. Zaugg’s head was in the center of his sights. Hawke knew there was a precision formula used by professional snipers, but it required time and a better knowledge of the distance. He had neither of those things, and could only make a rough correction based on a simple and quick guess of the wind speed, which he judged by watching how Lea’s hair was blowing around.
This was his moment to right the balance. This was his only chance to save her life. This is what he failed to do back in Hanoi all those years ago. This was as close to redemption as Joe Hawke was ever going to get.
He slowed his breathing again.
Then he squeezed the trigger so gently he barely touched it.
It took the 50 cal just over one and half seconds to cross the one thousand yards between the muzzle of the rifle and Hugo Zaugg, hitting him in the throat, which blew out in a spray of red mist.
Hawke watched the reaction through the sights.
Zaugg flailed around like a marionette with its strings cut, grabbing at his throat and staggering backwards at the same time. Incredibly, he made one final lunge at Lea with blood pouring from his throat. Hawke wondered how long before he passed out from the inevitable drop in blood pressure, but didn’t want to wait to find out.
He readied a second shot and fired again, this time hitting his target in the chest, causing another burst of red to spray out into the snowy air, and blasting Zaugg off the roof of the gondola into oblivion.
He spiralled down to the rocks, screaming for every single one of the seventeen seconds it took before his body smashed into the frozen granite with a distant thud. Hawke considered if he should have made it a head shot, giving him the mercy of being unconscious as he fell, but shrugged his shoulders and put the rifle back in the sling on his back.
Without sparing another thought for Hugo Zaugg, Hawke fitted his skis back on and started to ski down the mountain to be at the cable car when it arrived at the ground station.
*
“Joe!” Lea said, and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Thank God. I thought he was going to kill me.”
Hawke held her. “No bloody chance. I’d never let a tosser like that get the better of...”
Before he could finish his sentence, Lea stood on tiptoes, held his face in both hands and kissed him hard on the mouth. It seemed to last forever.
“Wow!” Hawke said. “That was longer than Zaugg’s death spiral.”
Lea sighed. “You are just so damned romantic, Joe.”
“Hey, did you notice that?”
“No, what?”
“You called me Joe, and not Joe Hawke.”
“”That’s because Joseph is such a good Irish name.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but my name’s not Joseph.”
“It’s not Joseph? So what’s it short for?”
“You have more chance of being reincarnated as Amphitrite than ever finding that out.”
Lea sighed again. “It just goes to show no one’s perfect, Joe Hawke.”
She kissed him again.
“But my kissing is perfect, right?” Hawke shot a quick glance at Lea to see that she was smiling at him. He brushed her cheek with his hand.
“You are so arrogant!” she said.
“I’m far too amazing to be arrogant.”
“If this is your idea of a date, Joe Hawke,” Lea said, “I think maybe you could be looking at second base after all.”
“Are you warming to me, Lea Donovan?”
They walked to the tourist viewing platform to see a team of search and rescue police already making their way to Zaugg’s corpse.
“Can’t say the Swiss aren’t efficient,” Lea said.
“True, but it’s sad really.” Hawke looked at Zaugg’s broken body on the rocks below, the snow around him red with blood. “In the end, it looks like he really fell for you.”
Lea ignored him. She was starting to fall in love with Joe Hawke.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
After the battle was over, they secured the trident from the gondola and flew back up to the compound where they began to disassemble the charges that were supposed to cause Zaugg’s mega-avalanche. Grobel had decided stealing the gold was more important than setting them off, and when Hawke knocked him out cold back in Zaugg’s office that permanently ended the threat.
Now, it was dawn, and the sky filled with more helicopters. The first to arrive was a white Sikorsky S-76C, a powerful twin-engined chopper which swooped over the compound a couple of times before touching down on Zaugg’s tennis courts. Moments later James Matheson, the British Foreign Secretary appeared. He was met by Sir Richard Eden who shook his hand and began the debrief immediately.
A second wave of choppers came in behind that, led by a black Sikorsky Sea King. They landed on the lawns behind the tennis courts and as the rotor blades slowed the doors swung open to reveal the American Secretary of Defense George Chambers, flanked by his Secret Service detail and followed by a familar face which Hawke took less than ten seconds to identify: Eddie Kosinski, the CIA officer from New York.
Kosinski recognized Hawke at the same time, and gave him a sarcastic salute as he walked past, flanked with men in military fatigues.
“What’s going on, Richard?” Lea asked.
Sir Richard Eden began to speak when James Matheson interrupted him.
“Seems like our American friends here caught on that something was up and joined the chase. They’re rather keen to get their hands on the contents of the tomb, I'm afraid.”
“But we found it!” Hawke protested. “The gold, the jewels, the trident... the whole bloody lot is ours!”
“But not the map,” Scarlet said, smirking.
James Matheson and Richard Eden shared a glance.
“You found a map?” Matheson said bluntly.
Hawke shook his head. “Nope. Poor old matey-lad Zaugg was under the impression that there was a map in the tomb somewhere, but he couldn’t find one. He was most upset about it.”
“Did he search the sarcophagus itself?” Matheson said.
“Yup – nada.”
“Could mean anything,” the Foreign Secretary said.
Hawke looked at Eden and Matheson. “Listen gents. I’ve been shot at on the streets of London, New York and Geneva, nearly drowned in a speedboat chase on the Thames and in a Greek cave, and almost crushed to death in an avalanche.”
“And your point is what?” Eden said, the thin trace of a smile appearing on his lips.
“My point is, I think I’ve earned the right for someone to tell me just what the fuck is going on.”
Matheson’s eyes narrowed, but Eden laughed.
Eden spoke first: “All I can say is that it looks like Zaugg may have been working on the orders from an unknown agency, and we’re already looking in to who it could be, but we can’t rule out an inside man.”
“But what is this damned map about?”
“The map is reputed to lead the bearer of it to the source of eternal life,” Matheson said flatly. “It’s probably nothing more than a legend. The real treasure is the trident – archaeological treasure, I mean, naturally.”
“And that’s going back to the States,” a loud voice said. Hawke turned to
see Chambers and Kosinski approach Matheson and shake his hand. “Along with everything else here. Your government was most obliging when we reminded you about who controls the nuclear codes.”
“Quite,” Matheson said bitterly.
Hawke watched in disbelief as the Americans walked all over the top of Matheson and Eden, removing the trident and everything else they had ultimately rescued from Zaugg.
Hawke and Lea left Hart with the dignitaries and walked over to the others who were now sitting on a low wall beside the tennis courts. A light snow began to fall and the high mountain air was crisp and cool. They watched the teams of American soldiers dragging the final contents of Poseidon’s tomb from Zaugg’s compound into the back of a US Army Chinook, blades whirring above the hurried activity of the military personnel.
“So that’s the last evidence on earth of Poseidon,” said Lea.
Hawke sighed. “I still can’t believe that Poseidon was real.”
As he spoke these words, they watched the Americans leading a bruised Dietmar Grobel out of the compound and throw him in the back of a Huey.
“This one’s an extraordinary rendition,” Kosinski shouted to Eden.
Over on the tennis courts, Sophie asked: “But what about the source of his ultimate power – it was the trident, no?”
“No I don't think so,” Hawke said. “I’m more convined than ever that’s a reference to his immortality, and that Zaugg knew that too, which is why he wasn't bothered about the gold and gems – or even the trident – and just searched for this mysterious map.”
“Which could just be a legend,” Lea said, shrugging her shoulders.
“The whole thing is probably just a legend,” Scarlet said. “Tombs full of bones and gold is one thing, but the idea of immortality is quite another. Oh, look! They’re off.” She gestured casually at the Chinook as its rotors sped up and the giant helicopter slowly lifted off the tennis courts and powered up into the air. It flew up and away from the compound and dipped below the horizon as it descended into the valley below, taking the contents of the vault of Poseidon with it.