by Rob Jones
“Wait a minute,” Lea said. “They took Ryan and Maria?”
The pilot nodded as Kim helped him drink some water. “They sure did, and they wrecked the choppers too. We’re stranded here.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
In the chopper behind Wade’s, Miguel Garza stared down at Ryan and Maria. He nodded slowly as a greasy shit-eating grin spread on his face at the sight of the two helpless prisoners. There they were, on the floor of the helicopter, bound and gagged. Sure they looked pretty angry, but there was nothing they could do about it. Garza studied Maria one more time. This was even better than Alena Sobotka, he thought.
He manhandled his assault rifle until the barrel was pointing down at the two ECHO members and then traced the muzzle of the weapon up Maria’s leg. She tried to kick back but her restraints held her in place. “You like it, no?” he grinned down at her. “I don’t want you to think I don’t care, blondey.”
Ryan squirmed on the floor with his hands bound. He tried to yell something but the gag muffled it to pathetic nonsense and Garza roared with laughter.
Garza put his boot on Ryan’s face and pushed down hard. “You be quiet, Iron Man or we’ll see if you can fly like in the movies.” He swung open the chopper’s side door and the steamy jungle air rushed into the cabin. Then he moved the muzzle over to Maria for a second time but a heavy hand wrapped around the barrel and forced it away. He looked up to see Delgado staring hard at him.
“They’re for the Boss, you asshole. Leave them alone or I’ll throw you out into the jungle and we’ll see how well you can fly.”
Garza stared into the other man’s eyes with nothing but pure hatred, but turned away when Delgado didn’t blink. Garza knew his place in the pecking order, and the truth was he was more comfortable when it came to bullying and intimidating women than facing up to other men, especially men like Delgado. But then what the others didn’t know about…
When Delgado lit a cigarette and returned to his conversation with one of the Jaguar Knights, Garza cautiously returned his gaze to Maria. Keeping one eye on the other men, he smirked at the Russian spy and mouthed the words: You’re mine.
*
After an hour of frustration, two Mexican Air Force Pumas thundered over the canopy to the west of the coffee plantation and swooped down on the lawn. Hawke, Lea, Reaper and Lexi climbed into the first one, and watched as Scarlet, Alex, Kim and Jack Camacho climbed into the second.
Hawke was furious about the delay, but there was no point in dwelling on it. Their plan now was clear enough – he would lead an assault team on the temple to rescue Ryan and Maria and put an end to Wade and his cult once and for all. Meanwhile, Scarlet and the Americans would lead the assault on Alcatraz and deactivate the cobalt bomb before it took out Jack Brooke, the Californian Primary, the City of San Francisco and eight million people across the Bay Area. Alex had unsettled everyone even more by mentioning the risk of the bomb triggering the San Andreas Fault and sending northern California into the Pacific, so there was no time to waste.
The former SBS man looked around the helicopter’s cabin as it raced deeper into the jungle. The Puma was a heavy utility chopper with a capacity of up to sixteen passengers, and thanks to the connivance of Richard Eden, Jack Brooke and their Mexican counterpart Enrique Valles they were now joined by a dozen members of the Cuerpo de Fuerzas Especiales, or the Special Forces Corps of the Mexican Army. They were led by a Sergeant Gonzalez who had been selected because of his knowledge of Aztec culture.
They flew for hours, crossing the Oaxaca Mountains and heading into wild jungles untouched by man for millennia. A sense of deep helplessness washed over him as he thought about Wade’s crazy underlings getting their hands on Ryan and Maria.
He clenched his jaw when he thought about what the Texan was planning to do to his friends – and probably just to get to him and punish him for pursuing the Order of the Sixth Sun. His mind raced with thoughts about the torture his friends would undergo if he didn’t get to them fast, but he quickly snapped back into the moment and started to organize weapons and tactics for the team along with Sergeant Gonzales, a man of considerable experience in both military insertions and the Lacandon Jungle.
As they went deeper into the jungle, the chopper climbed higher into the sky to avoid the undulating contours of the Mexican ranges. Below them now acres of jungle slipped past in a blur. Vincent turned around to face Hawke and gave him a knowing nod of the head. Words were not necessary… both men knew what was coming, and after what seemed an eternity, the pilot called over the comms that the temple was in sight. Hawke’s memory of the map was good, and they had found Wade.
The twin Turbomeca turboshafts rumbled as the pilot reduced speed and flared the nose ready for the landing. Hawke looked through the open door across the canopy of the jungle and saw in the distance a strange stone structure protruding slightly from the top of the canopy. Unless you knew where to look, you would never be able to find it, he thought. The thick tropical rainforest obscured it almost totally from sight and the section he could see was only visible because Wade had cleared the jungle away. Broken roads connected plazas to crumbling pyramids in an enormous complex centred on the first structure he had seen – the massive central pyramid complete with two sacrificial temples on its upper plaza.
And somewhere in all that were two of his closest friends.
The chopper approached the clearing and the pilot slowed to a hover fifty feet above the jungle canopy. After what had happened to the two choppers back at the plantation the Government weren’t taking any chances and seconds later Hawke rappelled down from the Puma into the jungle below. The others followed behind him.
When they were on the ground, Gonzalez gave a signal and the Puma rose into the air, beating the canopy and anyone still underneath it with the chunky downdraft of the four powerful composite rotor blades.
With the sketchy information they had about the complex layout, the ECHO team and the Mexican Special Forces had planned their assault as best as they could, and now Hawke led the first wave against the complex’s western perimeter.
He stepped over the crumbling ruins of the outer wall and drew his gun, ready for the battle ahead and was suddenly aware how different this had now become to a regular ECHO mission. This time both the Mexican and US Governments were actively involved in the pursuit of Wade, and he felt the heavy eye of international scrutiny weighing on his shoulders as he led the soldiers forward into the complex. He knew Eden preferred to keep things under the radar, and even to this day Hawke still didn’t know exactly how much the British Government knew about Elysium, but this mission had changed when Jack Brooke got involved. Now a mistake could mean international disaster.
Moving across what had been a wide courtyard at the front of the main temple, they emerged from the jungle into the area Wade had ordered his men to clear and Hawke almost took a step back when he saw the temple up close for the first time. Its sheer size staggered him, and he was amazed to think such a structure could hide in the jungle, evading the eyes of the world for so long.
Jungle vines and plants clasped at the base of the monument and wound up its stone steps on their way to reach more light. Hawke crunched on them as he began to climb the steps on his way to the top, joined at his side by his friends and the Mexican soldiers.
“That’s what used to be the sacred precinct,” Gonzalez said. “You can tell because the outer wall is decorated with serpent heads. Those steps leading up the side of the main pyramid lead to the Great Plaza. At the top will be the shrines to the House of the Jaguar and the House of the Eagle.”
“Where they sacrificed people?” Hawke asked.
Gonzalez’s brief nod was the only reply.
Climbing the steps, he was able to see that the actual Temple of Huitzilopochtli was situated at the very top behind an expansive flat square. This is where Ryan had told him people would gather to watch the sacrifices.
Hawke glanced at his flanks to ensure all the
forces were in position and then ordered the assault to move forward. At first, their passage across a second, smaller courtyard was uninterrupted, with Hawke leading the way closer to the ancient temple. He smiled inwardly as he pulled the slider on the Sig and moved closer to danger, but then he saw the piles of bones littered at the bottom of the pyramid.
“What the hell?”
“There must be dozens of skeletons here,” Reaper said, staring in disbelief at the sun-bleached bones, picked clean by the incessant teeming of tropical insects.
“Oh my God…” Lea said sadly. “The missing people…”
Lexi covered her mouth in horror. “All dead.”
“Wade’s sacrifices,” Hawke said. “He must have killed them up there and kicked their corpses down the steps like the Aztecs used to do. Let’s get this bastard.”
Less than halfway up the structure Delgado and Garza appeared at the top of the steps with the Jaguar Knights. It looked like they had replaced their blow pipes with carbines and wasted no time in opening fire on them.
Hawke and Lea dived for the cover of a stone ledge which ran around the sides and rear of the temple, while Reaper, Lexi and the Mexicans followed suit but on the other side of the steps.
Delgado, Garza and their men took advantage of the situation and the superiority offered to them by their elevated position and fanned out before advancing slowly toward them. They kept up their barrage of fire, blasting stone chunks out of the masonry all around the ECHO team’s defensive position.
“This ain’t gonna be easy, Joe,” Lea screamed as she dodged a bullet.
Hawke had a feeling she was on the money.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The jets of the Citation were still whirring when Alex Reeve and Scarlet Sloane landed at San Francisco International Airport. They crossed the apron to climb into the Eurocopter Lakota that was awaiting them. Following up the rear were Kim Taylor and Jack Camacho.
Now, Alex was running the tactical side of the operation through her mind for the tenth time as the chopper rose up over South San Francisco and speeded toward the Financial District. Alex knew the area well – after her father had walked out on her mother the two of them had relocated to the city. She had spent part of her childhood here. She clenched her jaw at the thought of all it being turned to a radioactive wasteland of broken buildings and melted glass.
Down there in those busy streets, eating at the cafés and walking in the parks were her friends and her family – all unsuspecting of the terrible danger hanging over their heads. Her father was down there too, preparing to give the biggest speech of his life. All of this would be gone when Wade’s ‘new sun’ exploded in the city, and now she was the one charged with bringing this madness to an end. She kept calm… she had a lot of experience, and it meant she could do it.
Thanks to her father she’d spent half her life around generals and soldiers. She’d learned how to keep her nerve, and the CIA had trained her well. Now it was time to put all of that to the test because if she failed – if her team failed – San Francisco would be reduced to burning ash and Wade would have won.
She cleared all that from her mind – she knew the way to win the war was to focus on each separate battle, one at a time… just as her father had taught her. It was time to put that into practice.
“Is it true they can’t deploy the army?” Scarlet asked.
Alex turned to the Englishwoman. “You mean the Posse Comitatus Act?”
Scarlet raised an eyebrow. “The what?”
“It means the power of the country, and to answer your question – yes and no. The Posse Comitatus Act signed by President Hayes in 1878 limits the deployment of federal forces in a law enforcement capacity by Washington, but the states can still use troops to enforce the law within their own jurisdictions. Just look at Kent State when the Ohio National Guard were ordered to control protests against the Cambodian Campaign and ended up killing four students.”
“Do you have any idea, Alex,” Scarlet said deadpan, “just how boring the boy would have made that reply?”
“Hey, we’re almost there,” Camacho said through the headsets, interrupting the banter.
Alex looked down and saw the busy city streets rushing up to meet them as the chopper made its way down to land. She prayed they would get there on time. The sun was low on the horizon. It wouldn’t be long now until Aurora Soto, Jorge Mendoza and the other members of the Sixth Sun on Alcatraz activated the bomb.
And that meant millions of lives were hanging on a thread.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Bullets and grenades rained from the sky like never before as the unholy alliance of Mexican cartel men and Sixth Sun cultists unleashed their own brand of hell on the ECHO team and their allies. Hawke’s mind was suddenly filled with a flashback of war. Memories of the joint SBS-CIA search and destroy mission he had done in Afghanistan’s Nakar Valley now flew through his mind like hot lead.
There, they had risked their lives to track down top-level Al-Qaeda operatives, but even they weren’t as crazy as Wade. He was desperate and insane, a dangerous combination. With the combined forces of the US, Mexico and ECHO closing in on him, there was no telling what he would do, and Hawke suspected the fight to the dark heart of Mictlan would be hard and bloody.
Fine with him. He’d smash them just like he smashed Matheson and he didn’t care how he did it either: By Strength and Guile.
Another wave of bullets zipped through the muggy air and drilled into the gravel and ancient stone at their feet. Clouds of dust burst up into the air as the rounds pelted down like hail. After taking a few more yards toward the rim, the serpientes fought back hard, and forced the allies to take more cover. Hawke and Lea crashed down behind the relative safety of a snake statue beside the steps.
Before the cult could reload, the allies returned an equally devastating volley of gunfire at them, but they were restricted by a ludicrous order not to damage the archaeological ruins. Then two of the Mexican Special Forces took savage wounds in their throats and heads and fell back into the lower square, dead. Their helmets cracked hard on the paving.
On the upper ridge at the top of the temple, Hawke saw a group of cult members setting up what looked from a distance like a Soltam K6, an Israeli mortar that fired sixteen 120 mil rounds per minute – in the right hands. Luckily, Wade’s goons were the wrong hands, and as they fumbled around with the weapon, the Englishman was able to loose a rapid fire volley from the Sig as he advanced on them like a one-man army.
As the cartridges flew out of the ejector, so did the cultists trying to operate the mortar, falling dead as the bullets tore mercilessly into them. Two of them went down like tin soldiers, but the third only got winged, and spun around in a blood-spray arc before flailing wildly and falling over the western edge of the temple. Hawke watched as the dying man rolled down the mighty central stairway, smashing his bones as he went and finally collapsing in a cloud of dust in the lower square.
The advance continued with Hawke powering his way forward. Never flinching as the fire rained down over him, he realized he was back in the mental zone he’d developed in the SBS, and it almost unnerved him how little he felt for the enemy. He felt the dark part of his soul rise within him now as he smacked another magazine into the grip and pounded forward up the steps: draw the weapon, into the aim, target evaluation… it all flooded back every time he was drawn into battle.
Almost at the top, he was dimly aware of the Americans and Mexicans progressing up the other side of the steps, and from somewhere behind he heard Lexi Zhang as she unloaded a magazine of nine mils into the enemy, her familiar war-cry echoing in the smoky air of battle. He was glad she was at his side.
A cultist leaped from the cover of the temple at the top of the complex. Hawke raised the Sig and instantly judged he was fifty meters away to the south. It made a difference and all Special Forces operatives knew why. The closer the target, the harder the impact. This was because the bullet had more kinetic ener
gy when it left the muzzle of your weapon. As the projectile traced through the air, it lost its kinetic energy and dropped from its original firing line. If the target was close, you fired lower, but the further away the target, the higher you aimed. He also knew the target was to his south and the prevailing wind was blowing from the monsoon to the west. This calculation made in a heartbeat, Hawke fired high and to the right.
The cultist dropped like a sprayed fly, the entry wound in between his eyes gaping for his compatriots to see: smack-bang in the T-box. Now the allies were making progress and some of the cartel dropped their weapons and fled in all directions. Some got away down the steps into the jungle while others were cut down by the lethal accuracy of the Mexican Special Forces to the west.
At the top of the complex was a scene of unbridled pandemonium… the smell of gunpowder, the acrid stench of smoke, flames rising from the mortared jungle, the chank chank chank of an M2 in a machine gun nest at the mouth of one of the sacrificial temples… all of it would have made most people’s heads swim with terror and confusion, but Hawke was trained to filter it all out. To him, the situation was as clear as day and he stormed forward, twisting his upper body to the left and right, picking off Sixth Sun members as he went.
Lea took out the machine gun nest, and when the last of the Sixth Sun men were dead, or had fled into the jungle, Hawke knew what he had to do.
“Into the temple!” he yelled, heaving his gun hand up into the air and waving the surviving members of their forces forward for the final assault. It looked like the way was clear but as they crossed the upper plaza he saw Delgado and Garza set up another M2 in the mouth of the second temple. Seconds later it was spitting fire all over them.
*