The Aztec Prophecy

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Alex Reeve held onto the safety handle as Camacho swung open the door and the warm Californian air blasted into the chopper whipping her hair around and pushing her back inside. As she watched Potrero Hill slip beneath them, she knew time was running out. Just a couple of miles north was the Embarcadero Center where her father was about to give his speech.

The Eurocopter touched down minutes later on the Helipad of the new San Francisco Police Headquarters in Mission Bay. Alex and the others climbed out and ran out of the chopper’s powerful rotorwash toward a utility door leading inside the enormous complex. It was a vast monolithic structure of concrete and glass that housed the city’s 911 Emergency Communications Center and the regional Homeland Security.

They were met by a nervous police chief and after some hurried handshakes introduced to the SWAT Incident Commander, a man named Jackson. Thanks to a briefing from her father’s office, they knew that news of the bomb hadn’t reached the media and the city’s population was blissfully unaware of the terrible threat facing them. There was little point, the city’s authorities had argued forcefully — there was no way they could safely evacuate millions of people from the peninsula. In other words, it was all on Alex and the others to save Everybody’s Favorite City.

Jackson was on the ball, as Alex had expected. Moments after landing, his SWAT team was assembled and ready to go. They were armed with an eye-watering array of weapons including Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns, AR-15 assault rifles and Beretta and Sig-Sauer side-arms. Other weapons in their arsenal included impact munitions and flash-bang diversions. There was even a sniper with a Remington 700LTR.

“Impressive little army you have here, Sergeant Jackson,” Scarlet said.

“The SFPD SWAT team is a highly-respected elite force, ma’am. If some crazy cult bastards want to take over our city then they’re shit out of luck with us around.”

It took a few short minutes for the team to strap on the body armor jackets and tool up with submachine guns and back-up side-arms and then they were walking back to the choppers, rotors already whirring and powering up ready for the short flight to Alcatraz.

As she walked through the warm San Francisco evening on her way to the helicopter, Alex reflected on how peaceful it could be even in the heart of a massive, sprawling city like this. All round her millions of people were living their lives — driving cars, pushing prams, walking dogs, sitting in bars enjoying a drink… children playing. She knew the cobalt bomb would sweep all of this away in a fraction of a second. It would be gone forever, and millions of lives all over the Bay Area extinguished because of one man’s insane obsession with revenge and resurrecting an ancient cult.

And Alcatraz was the perfect place to keep the bomb. Before her parents had split, they had made a visit to the island one hot afternoon in June. It was one of her favorite childhood memories — the last summer before her father left home, and their last family vacation together. If she closed her eyes she could almost walk back into that day, and hear the laughter as her father made jokes all the way around the tourist trail. Now her father was a mile to the south in the Embarcadero preparing to fight his way to the White House and there was an old Soviet cobalt bomb about to annihilate everything, and it was guarded by an insane death-worshipping suicide cult.

…Another day in ECHO, she thought as she climbed inside the chopper with her friends. But would it be her last day?