The Curse of Medusa

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Hawke and Scarlet used the cover of night and the shadows caused by the beams supporting the radar arch above the helipad to move unnoticed toward Jakob. He was fitting the canister to a manned helicopter drone, and the Englishman moved silently forward and raised his silenced weapon, ready to shoot him.

Then a car backfired on the West Side Highway. Hawke cursed — another curfew breaker, or looters maybe.

Jakob spun around instinctively and saw Hawke and Scarlet in the shadows just a few yards from him. In a second the German bodybuilder leaped into the helicopter and raised the collective, slowly lifting it into the air.

Hawke and Scarlet fired at the chopper drone but realized with horror that there was a chain gun fitted to the front of it. They dived for cover behind a lifeboat when Jakob opened fire on them, holding the manned drone in a steady hover about fifty feet above the yacht. The downdraft from the blades lifted water from the pool and sprayed it all over them as the heavy duty rounds from the chain gun drilled into the deck, tearing up the polished teak and shredding the fiber-glass sides of the pool.

Inside the drone, Jakob was laughing hysterically.

“We have to stop him!” Hawke yelled. “The canister is attached to the bottom of the chopper. They’re obviously planning on flying through Manhattan and releasing it into the atmosphere there.”

“What do you propose?” Scarlet shouted over the sound of the rotors and chain gun. “Using your martial arts skills to karate chop the bullets away?”

“No… Actually I want to use you as bait…”

“You’re so romantic, Joe — I almost wish I never had to set eyes on you again.”

“But I know you’d miss me,” he said.

“Only if I sneezed when I pull the trigger.”

Hawke gave her a look, and then without another word, Scarlet leaped up from their cover behind the lifeboat and sprinted toward the front of the yacht. Jakob immediately turned to fire on her, giving Hawke the chance he was looking for. He ran forward and gripped the starboard skid of the drone with both hands, as if he were about to do a chin-up exercise, and then pulled himself up until his body was hanging over it.

Scarlet disappeared inside the yacht, and Jakob gave up the chase. He turned the drone toward the Manhattan skyline and began to gain altitude rapidly. Hawke clung on for his life. He knew he had seconds to make the decision of whether or not to let go — either he let go now while he was still low enough to survive the fall or he would be forced to hold on for the whole ride — whatever that meant.

In his mind there was no decision — if he let go now Jakob would be on his way over Manhattan in seconds and Kiefel would have won. Wherever this thing was going, Hawke knew he was going along for the ride, and his eyes desperately stared with more than a small degree of terror at the canister he had seen Jakob fitting to the base. If that thing opened its deadly cargo while he was hanging onto the drone, there was going to be a perfect life-size statue of Joe Hawke on the bottom of the Hudson River.

It was then he noticed that it was on a timer — counting down from five minutes. That didn’t give him a lot of time to get things sorted out as far as he was concerned, but it was all he had to work with. Unfortunately, the canister was fitted to a specially constructed bracket and bolted into place. It was impossible to get it loose without shooting at it and that went against his long-standing policy of not shooting at any aircraft that he was hanging off the bottom of — so he had to think again.

It was time to persuade Jakob Müller to turn the helicopter around.

Scarlet felt a maternal awww moment when she watched Agent Doyle taking cover behind Kiefel’s upper deck bar. She peered around the door of the room and saw the German laughing deeply as he took casual pot-shots at the American, one hand on his hip in a display of nonchalant mockery.

“Would you like a vodka, my friend?” Kiefel asked. He shot the vodka bottle and sprayed the drink all over Doyle’s head. “Or perhaps a bourbon is more your thing?” Another shot blasted through a bottle of Jim Beam and the spirit showered down over him mixing with the vodka.

“Mock this, you bastard,” she said, and spun around the door frame with her Heckler & Koch submachine gun.

Kiefel turned in horror as the Englishwoman gripped the powerful weapon and unleashed a merciless volley of automatic fire at him. He dived for cover amidst the deathly dunk dunk dunk sound as the bullets exploded from the gun’s muzzle and traced all around him.

Doyle looked up and nodded. “Am I glad to see you! Ran out of bullets about two minutes ago…”

“Here, take this,” she said. Without so much as glancing at Doyle, she pulled the SIG from her belt and tossed it at him. She also tossed him a gas mask from her pack. “Wear it, now.”

Kiefel fled the room, and Doyle took the weapon, checked it was loaded and moved forward in pursuit of the German. Scarlet paused to toss her lighter into the pool of spirits behind the bar, igniting them in a rush of flames which started to burn their way up the sides of Kiefel’s luxury bar. “One good turn deserves another.”

Outside, she saw Doyle chasing Kiefel down to the front deck. She watched in horror as the German dragged a man out of a chair and held a gun to his head. It was President Grant. Kiefel fumbled with the camera, desperate now, but determined to get his revenge.

“Get back or I kill him! It’s all being broadcast live on the internet!”

Doyle froze where he was, but Scarlet saw her chance.

She made her way down the side steps, out of sight.

“Where are you, English lady?” Kiefel called out. “Come out or I kill Mr Grant. I count to ten.”

“Ten…” Scarlet thought. “That should just about give me enough time.”

Hawke clambered over the skid and wrenched open the door on the passenger’s side of the drone. Hundreds of feet above the ground, the night air whistled around him and the downdraft buffeted him as he tried to climb inside.

Jakob saw him immediately and turned in the pilot’s seat, lashing out with his left leg and smashing his boot into Hawke’s chest. The SBS man flew back out the open door and fell backwards toward the ground, his arms flailing out in front of him helplessly. In a heartbeat he wrapped his legs around the skid and clung on for his life as the German began to violently swerve the chopper from side to side to shake him off.

Now hanging upside down, Hawke heaved himself up in the airborne sit-up from hell until he could grasp hold of the metal skid with his hands again. Jakob leaned over to see what was happening and pulled a gun from his pocket. At the same time, he leaned forward on the cyclic and plunged the drone down into a shallow nosedive. Hawke slid forward on the skid until he was now hanging off the front.

Jakob then levelled the drone and aimed it north along Fifth Avenue before activating the Drone Automatic Flight Control System and shifting over to the passenger’s seat.

He casually aimed the gun at Hawke and took a pot shot. It missed, ricocheting off the skid with a metallic ping. Hawke flinched, unable to protect himself while both hands were gripping the skid.

“You really are very irritating!” Jakob shouted. His voice was barely audible over the sound of the helicopter’s massive turbine engine.

With all his might, Hawke leaped to the other skid and clambered up inside the drone from the other side. It took Jakob half a second to move across again and try the same trick with his boot, but this time Hawke grabbed his ankle twisted it around hard.

Jakob screamed and fired his pistol wildly at Hawke, missing each time because of his rage. Hawke twisted it again the other way until he heard something pretty chunky crack and give way inside the ankle, and now Jakob was howling in agony.

Hawke took advantage of his pain to get inside the drone and push the German out the other side. Jakob tumbled out but hooked his good ankle inside Hawke’s jacket on the way, pulling him forward with the same momentum. Jakob fell backwards, grabbing the skids and Hawke fell past him, now suspended five hundred feet above Manhattan and held in place by Jakob’s boot inside his jacket.

Jakob looked down at him and despite the pain in his ankle, grinned. “Now we must say auf wiedersehen, Englishman!”

He started to twist his boot out of the jacket, and for a second Hawke thought it was over, but then he looped his legs around the drone’s skids and gave Jakob’s good ankle a hard twist and pulled down at the same time.

The German screamed in agony and leaned forward instinctively to grab his ankle, allowing Hawke to grasp his belt and yank him down over his head.

Jakob tumbled forward now, helpless to fight against the momentum produced by his full bodyweight as it fell forward out of the drone. His face filled with fear as he realized what had happened, and he reached out pathetically for help as he went, but Hawke declined the invitation, pausing only to snatch the German’s parachute as he fell forward and rip it from his back.

Jakob Müller tumbled away from the drone, screaming as he dropped down through the air like a rock. Hawke watched without emotion as the German fell toward the top of the Chrysler Building. “Surely not…” he said to himself, but he was wrong.

A second later Jakob smashed into the vertex on top of the deco skyscraper — the 186 foot-long spike on its roof, and was instantly impaled. His body, now skewered like a kebab, ground to a halt as the friction of the gleaming vertex against the insides of his broken body slowly increased until the German came to a terrible, horrendous stop.

Vincent and Kim clambered over Alan Pauling’s corpse and continued their pursuit of Angelika Schwartz. The German chemist hadn’t hesitated to shoot Pauling through the middle of his forehead simply to use his body to block the door, which told the former French Foreign Legion man more about his quarry than endless interrogations ever would. She was as cold as steel and twice as hard.

Kim now looked at Pauling with disgust as she reloaded her gun. “Where did she go?”

Vincent squinted into the darkness as he scanned the horizon. “There! She’s running south along the beach toward the pier.”

They wasted no time in sprinting after the German woman. Vincent knew Kim was now motivated not only by the hideous murder of her colleague Dirk Partridge, back in the New Orleans processing plant, but also by the slaughter of all her men in the siege of Kiefel’s beachfront estate.

As for him, he still needed nothing else to drive his pursuit and neutralization of Schwartz other than the thought of his children being exposed to the bacteria. He knew he had only one duty to them, and that was to kill her and secure the canister. He speeded up as fast as he could, pounding along the sand of Santa Monica State Beach toward the pier.

Angelika vaulted over the car park fence and sprinted to the pier, slipping under the pedestrian walkway. Vincent aimed and took a shot, but missed and smashed a chunk of concrete from one of the walkway’s support beams. He cursed and powered forward, once again straining in the dark to see where she had gone.

“I can’t see her!” Kim screamed. “The bitch has got away… Damn it all!”

Then the German woman gave her position away by shooting at them and striking Kim in the shoulder. Vincent spun around just in time to see his partner fly backwards with the force of the round and collapse in a heap against one of the car park’s toll booths.

“Go on without me!” she screamed.

The Frenchman had no time to think and instantly dived for cover in the shadows beneath the pier to escape the same fate as Agent Taylor. At least in wounding Kim, Angelika had given her position up, he thought grimly, and climbed up the steps to the boardwalk.

Now, silence fell as he moved forward along the pier. The only sound was the gentle hum of occasional curfew-breaking traffic on Ocean Avenue somewhere behind him. He felt the eerie atmosphere of the pier — bustling with laughter and joy in the day, but now deserted by everyone and everything except a psychopath and a night wind. And somewhere close-by that psychopath was hiding in the shadows.

He moved cautiously forward, gun-raised and ready to fire in a heartbeat. He weaved his way forward to the end of the pier — he knew she was here somewhere. As he went, he checked the stalls and restaurants — now locked up and empty — for any signs of break-ins, but there was no sign of her.

He checked behind a Coke vending machine as he made his way forward but it was clear just like everywhere else. He peered inside the Ice Cream and Treats bar, but still nothing. Angelika Schwartz would be getting a treat very soon, he thought.

Then he saw her at the base of the Ferris wheel. She was moving slowly in the shadows, trying to get around behind him so she could escape back to the beach. He fired a shot and it struck her in the shoulder. She spun around one-eighty and he thought he’d done the job, but then she scampered to her feet and disappeared once again into the night.

He vaulted over the fence where people queued for tickets and saw her at once — she was trying to climb over the rail at the end of the pier. As she clambered over the rail she dropped the canister. Pausing for half a second to retrieve it, Vincent saw his chance and seized it.

He fired and the bullet hit her in the center of her head, just as she had done to Pauling. She dropped like a bag of concrete over the end of the pier landing with a splash in the Pacific below. Vincent ran forward as the canister rolled slowly to the edge and snatched it up in his hands.

He sighed with relief. His boys, wherever they were sleeping, were safe.