by Rob Jones
Whoever the biker was, he had a long way to go. Covent Garden Station was one of only a handful of stations on the London Underground which had no escalators. Travellers could only reach the platforms by elevator or stairs, and there were nearly two hundred steps if you chose the hard way.
“Couldn’t you have chased him into another frigging station?” Lea said, breathing hard as they sprinted down the stairs. Below them the rasping sound of the Vespa reverberated loudly and echoed off the tiles in the enclosed stairwell. “I’m knackered.”
“I’d order one of those pink Humvee limos to take you the rest of the way but I’m not sure it would fit down here.”
“Always with the funny, aren’t you?”
“Thanks.”
“It wasn’t a compliment, ya fool…”
“Less whining, more running!” Maria said.
Round and round they went, gradually growing dizzier as the endless circular stairwell started to mesmerize them.
“Did you know that running down these steps is the equivalent of running down a fifteen storey building?” Lea said. “And I wasn’t whining!”
Hawke listened to the Vespa’s engine and tried to work out how far below them it was. Its exhaust fumes hung heavily in the air. “Ryan told you that, didn’t he?”
“Of course.”
“Thought so. Smart arse.”
“Me or him?”
“Him!”
“Thanks, Joe,” Ryan said from the back.
“At least he’d be smart enough to run into the bloody lifts instead of these sodding stairs.”
“Thanks, Lea!” Ryan said.
Hawke sighed. “Oh yeah… real smart – trapping yourself inside a lift with an insane gunman in the vicinity.”
They finally reached the bottom and saw the biker racing toward the platforms but he was bang out of luck. The Tube authorities had already informed the train drivers of the shooting and ordered them not to stop at the station.
The Biker skidded onto the platform and watched helplessly as a train zoomed south on the Piccadilly line on its way to Leicester Square.
“Well, he’s not getting away on an arsing train, that’s for sure,” Lea said.
“Quite,” Hawke said, thinking fast. Ahead of them they heard the sound of the Vespa as the masked man drove it to the other end of the platform and skidded out of sight into the exit at the far end.
“What now?”
“He’s on the other platform,” Hawke said. “He’s going to try and come around behind us but he’s trapped and panicking. We have to take him out before he tries to escape into the tunnels.”
“Now you’re talking!”
Hawke scanned the platform for a weapon but there was almost nothing to use. Then his eyes settled on a fire extinguisher in a locked red container at the end of the platform. He ran to it and booted the lock’s cylinder housing until he kicked it clean off the mounting plate and the door swung open to reveal a carbon dioxide fire extinguisher.
“That’ll do it,” he said as he took hold of the handle and wrenched it free from its support brackets. They heard the bike getting louder as it raced along the opposite platform on its way back to them, and then a gunshot as the rider fired the shotgun at an armed policeman who had just stepped out of the elevator.
“He’s almost here, Joe!” Lea shouted from the center of the platform.
“No problem. He’s about to have his spark put out.”
He turned to the Irishwoman and looked at her for a second as he decided the best play. “Okay – you stand there and when you see him start to run away down to the end of the platform.”
“Sure, no prob… hang on! You’re not using me as bait again, are you?”
“Well…” he looked at her sheepishly and shrugged his shoulders. “Theoretically, yes, but…”
“And they say romance is dead,” Maria said.
Lea rolled her eyes and waited for the masked rider as Hawke stood up against the wall beside the entrance to the platform.
“Here’s the little pox right now!”
After letting the rider see her, Lea turned on her heel and started to run to the end of the platform.
Hawke released the safety clip on the extinguisher and holding the discharge tube in his hand he waited until the last possible second before smacking the plunger and spinning around into the entrance.
Slowing to take the bend in pursuit of Lea, the rider was startled when he saw Hawke appear out of nowhere, but before he had a chance to think the Englishman sprayed the CO2 in his face at close range.
The white fog covered the rider’s helmet and blinded him. He skidded all over the platform as he tried desperately to stop himself from going over the edge onto the rails, but Hawke gave him a helping hand by smacking the base of the heavy cylinder into the back of the man’s helmet.
The bike flew off the platform and crashed on the rails in a shower of sparks and smoke, but the rider just managed to save himself. He staggered to his feet and flicked up his visor to get his visibility back again. Hawke read his eyes – a little older, maybe late twenties.
He came at Hawke like the first guy, but without the knife. Hawke sidestepped to the right, trying to keep the biker between him and the tracks at all times. The man’s eyes were wide-open, almost deranged. Hawke guessed it was the adrenaline, but couldn’t rule out drugs – coke maybe.
He lunged at Hawke again. The former Special Forces man dodged calmly to the left but was too slow, and a second later he felt the man’s gloved fist pile into his chest. It knocked him back a couple of steps but his heavier weight limited the damage of what might otherwise have been a very dangerous punch.
Hawke took a deep breath and moved back into the fight. For a few long minutes the underground station platform became a makeshift boxing ring as the two men danced around and took pot-shots at each other.
The biker learned quicker than the Bastard and cottoned on to the fact that his helmet was slowing him down. He reached up and tore it off, and then swung it at Hawke as hard as he could.
Hawke tipped his head back and dodged to the left, feeling the air whistle past him as the helmet came less than an inch from smashing his nose all over his face. He knew his reply had to be fast.
Before the biker could bring the helmet back around and regain his center of gravity, Hawke brought his left fist around in a massive haymaker and drove it into the man’s exposed face, striking his right temple as hard as anything he’d ever hit before. He heard a cracking sound as either the temporal or sphenoid bone gave way under the force and the man’s eyes rolled up to heaven.
Hawke pulled back his right arm for a follow-up roundhouse but it was unnecessary. The biker staggered backwards and tipped over the edge of the platform, falling on the conductor rail running outside the main running rails. Hawke watched without emotion as over six hundred volts coursed through the man’s body and killed him over several agonizing seconds.
As his body jerked and smoked like a barbecued sausage, Lea strolled over to Hawke and peered casually over the platform. “I guess no one ever told him to mind the gap, right?” she said and linked her arm through Hawke’s.
“I guess not,” Hawke said, grimacing at the sight.
“What now?” Ryan asked.
“Obviously Barton was telling the truth or they wouldn’t have killed him,” Hawke said firmly. “So we can presume the museum raid he told us about is real.”
“But there are literally hundreds of museums in London, Joe,” Lea said. “And thanks to you cooking this guy we can’t grill him for information.”
“No, it’s obviously the British Museum,” Ryan said. “They have an exhibition on right now all about the Aztecs.”
“Only you would know that,” Lea said.
“Just as well,” he replied, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Or no doubt you’d be leading us to the London Sewing Machine Museum in Wimbledon.”
Lea smirked. “Wait just a minute. H
ow do you know there’s a sewing machine museum in Wimbledon?”
“Yes, well,” Ryan said quietly. “Never mind about that – we have work to do.”
“So let’s get on it,” Hawke said.
*
US Secretary of Defense Jack Brooke ran a hand over his eyes and squeezed his temples while a junior staffer was hunting down some Tylenol in the bottom of her bag. He was in the back seat of his official car on his way to Washington Dulles Airport, but even in here there was no respite from the crushing pressures of his job.
Things had started badly when he’d had to provide testimony to the House Armed Services Committee on defense acquisitions for that fiscal year. From there he’d had to attend in the Marine Corps Commandant Passage of Command ceremony at the Marine Barracks on 8th and I, the “oldest post of the corp” as they liked to put it.
It was after lunch when the headache started. He was hosting an honor cordon to welcome Poland’s Minister of National Defense to the Pentagon for a series of meetings on the Ballistic Missile Defense System. Putin was pushing his luck in the Ukraine and the Baltics were starting to get nervous. The new European Inteceptor Site was planned for construction in Poland in 2018 and the Poles wanted to chew the fat about it in DC.
Now, he was being handed two cell phones at once. Waiting for the left hand was Davis Faulkner, the Director of the CIA. On the other hand was an in-coming call from Alex Reeve, his daughter.
“Alex – hi, it’s Dad,” he said, warm but weary. Before she could reply he spoke up again. “Darling, could you please give me a second?”
He hated pushing her along, but she knew the deal.
“Davis, what gives?”
“It’s about Wade, Jack.”
Brooke sighed. Morton Wade. The tech guru who had gone AWOL after the Great Recession. Rumor had it he’d hooked up with a crazy bunch of former cartel members and was up to no good south of the border. “What about him?”
“We picked up his trail south of the Rio Grande.”
“Mexico, huh?”
“Sure. Apparently, he has some business interests down there.”
“He sure doesn’t have any up here,” Brooke said.
Davis ignored the quip. Brooke knew he would. “Jack, we have very little on this, but one of our guys in Lahore… a little naked asset we keep in the shadows – he says someone’s on the market for a WMD of some description.”
“Of some description,” Brooke shook his head. “That’s real helpful, Davis. You got anything more exciting for me?”
“Sure,” he said flatly. “Whatever it is, it’s got a price tag of fifty million dollars.”
Brooke didn’t like the sound of where this was going. “Fifty million US?”
He heard the sound of Faulkner exhaling his famous cigar smoke. “Uh-huh.”
“We know where Wade is in Mexico?”
The gaps in between the two men’s sentences were starting to get longer and tenser.
“Not exactly. Spends half his time in the jungle. Some say his base is a coffee plantation but we’re not even sure if it exists. The Beltway scuttlebutt has it that he’s trying to get hold of something pretty nasty, Jack, and we don’t know anything – not even what it is or where it’s headed.”
Brooke was unruffled. “Who else knows?”
“President Grant. Me. You. Maybe some others.”
“We need a team down there, Davis.”
“Mexicans won’t like it.” More smoke. Faulkner was a Robusto man and Brooke could almost smell the Cohiba smoke drifting through the tiny speaker.
“Too bad. I’m sending Kim Taylor and Doyle. I’ve seen them under pressure and they’re good.”
“Send Camacho as well. They could use him.”
“Jack Camacho?”
“Sure.”
“Thought he was teaching down at Camp Swampy?”
“Best agent I ever knew. Bomb disposal skills too.”
“Joint BDS-CIA, huh? Okay, fine. Leave it to me – and say goodbye to that cigar for me.”
Brooke cut the call and switched hands.
“Alex – sorry, darling.”
“Sure.”
“Everything okay?”
“I need your help, Dad.”
Brooke straightened up in his seat. This was unexpected. Alex had never forgiven him for leaving her mother, and they had rarely spoken in the intervening years. She was fiercely independent and had been a quality CIA agent before the attack in Colombia. He knew how hard it would be to ask him for help. And yet now she was doing just that.
“Anything… you know that.”
“We’ve been keeping surveillance on Morton Wade.”
This held no surprise for Brooke. Any intel group worth its salt in the region would be all over Wade like honey on a hot biscuit, and he knew ECHO had a habit of punching above their weight. “You and me both, darling. What’s the problem?”
“He killed some of our people, Dad.”
Brooke’s face soured. “He what?”
“It was some kind of execution in the jungle. We got a live video feed until he cut it. Dad?”
“That son of a bitch! What the hell is he thinking?”
“It gets worse… before our assets were murdered they sent back some information.”
“What sort of information?”
As he spoke, the motorcade pulled up to the airport.
“Missing people.”
“And you need some more muscle?”
“Yes.”
“Just so happens I’m onto Wade myself and I’m sending a team down.”
Brooke ended his call as airport security was rushing his party through the departure lounge and across the air-bridge to his waiting plane. Thank God his daughter was on the island with Eden. The old English politician might be a cranky, mysterious old bastard, but he was a respected former Army officer and a good man, and while the CIA sure knew where Elysium was, it was a secret to pretty much the rest of the world. That was a calming thought in a shit-storm of a day that was just getting worse and worse with every hour.
Now, as the aircraft was taxiing to the runway, he opened his cell phone and made the hundredth call of the day to one of his two special assistants, working late as usual back at the Pentagon. He spoke into the phone for a few moments: “I’m sending you the details of some agents. We’re putting together a mission for them and they need to be on a plane an hour ago… Thanks, Jena.”
He cut the call and turned to the staffer.
She looked at him and offered a tired smile.
He tried to return the smile. “You find those Tylenol?”
She held out her hand to reveal the two tiny tablets. In her other hand she held a bottle of mineral water, but before he could take them another staffer approached with his hand cupped over yet another cell phone.
“The Mexican Secretary of National Defense, Mr Secretary. Says it’s urgent.”
Brooke nodded unhappily and took the phone.
Yeah. A shit-storm of a day that was just getting worse and worse with every hour.
CHAPTER SIX
Viktor Sobotka stepped out of Santa Fe airport and wiped the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief. He stuffed it haphazardly back into his pocket and cursed this place. So early in the morning, and already it was as hot as hell in New Mexico today and he was having trouble handling it. His Czech homeland had some fierce summers, but nothing like when the south-easterly blew the hot air up over the Chihuahua Desert.
He checked his trusty weather app on the iPhone and sighed when he saw they had revised the night-time low to thirty-two degrees Celsius. Another night soaked in sweat, he thought with dismay, but then he remembered the day he had ahead of him and a smile spread across his face. He’d just flown back into the state after a conference in New York, but now he was going home. Today was his wife’s birthday and he had a party to attend.
After an arduous trek across the car park, he climbed into his Nissan and switched on the engine
. A few moments later he sighed in relief as he redirected the dashboard vents and felt the conditioned air blowing on his face. He felt the cool current ruffling his hair as he cranked it onto full and pulled out of the car park the same way he had done for countless times after academic conferences and business trips all over the world.
Except this time was different.
This time they were waiting for him, and they got him at the second bend in the road as it snaked away from the airport. One woman and a man, both armed, standing in front of a GMC Vandura, guns pointed at him. He knew it was a carjacking. They were a serious problem in many parts of Mexico, but not up here in America.
He tried not to panic and slammed the car into reverse. The smoke billowed from the spinning tires and the bitter stench of burned rubber came in through the dash vents.
He swung around to check the rear was clear and that was when he saw the third man, standing in the center of the road. He was tooled up with a Mossberg 590A1 pump-action shotgun and the sun flashed off his sunglasses as he took aim at the Nissan.
Then the rear window shattered into a million pieces as a devastating hail of tungsten buckshot drilled into the rear of the Japanese sedan. A hot air chaser rushed into the car on the tail of the flying shot and Viktor felt his panic rise. Heart rate up, sweating and vaguely dizzy now.
He skidded to a halt, not knowing what to do. They had blocked both ways out, but he had no time to think. Several more blasts followed and he felt the car listing over to one side as the air rushed from his tires. He was going nowhere.
Then they approached his car and opened the door like they owned it. He guessed they did.
Pointing the barrel of a shotgun in his face, the woman spoke.
“Get out.”
Viktor shifted out of the car and stared at her. “What do you want?”
“I am Aurora Soto,” she said. “I want everything.”
For a few seconds, Viktor Sobotka forgot to breathe. He watched the woman glance at his trembling hands. She grinned at him.
“What do you want?” Viktor blurted again. He glanced at his wrist and then snapped open the stainless steel band of his Omega. “You want this? It’s not even worth a thousand dollars.”