The Curse of Medusa

CHAPTER FIVE

In the Idaho Mountains, Hawke, Alex and the Pentagon Chief dropped to all fours and crawled through the cabin on their way to the garage. Bullets flew all around them, busting the wooden panels into splinters and covering the rug in thousands of shards of glass from the exploded windows. When Alex began to slow down, Hawke pulled her along at his side. Ahead of them, Jack Brooke smashed open the internal door to the garage and tumbled down the steps.

Hawke got to his feet and helped Alex into the garage where her father was already rummaging around.

“Joe — buy me a couple of minutes.”

Hawke took cover behind a workbench and fired defensive shots from the Beretta when anyone tried to enter the garage. “They’re running around to the front, Jack!”

Behind him, Brooke snatched up a couple of empty bottles of Coors and some old rag which he tore into strips. Then he flicked open the cap of a small portable gas can and inserted some clear plastic tubing. “Bastards won’t be expecting this,” he mumbled. He sucked on the tube and drew the gas through into the bottles.

He hurled the hastily constructed Molotov cocktail into the cabin and seconds later the door was ablaze and impassable. “Now we focus on getting out of here.”

Brooke hit the electronic door mechanism and the roller doors began to wind open. Instantly they were met with more gun fire, many of the bullets blowing neat circular holes through the aluminum door while others were lower and ricocheted off the smooth concrete floor of the garage.

They dived for cover behind the workbench while Hawke scanned the area outside the garage to see where the enemy was. He located three men with machine pistols who were using Brooke’s old Winnebago across the yard for cover.

Hawke immediately opened fire with the M9 and hit one of the men in the chest, killing him instantly. The other two retreated further back in the shadow of the RV to a low wall running along the edge of the main driveway.

“Looks like the coast is clear,” Brooke said. “But for how long, I don’t know…”

“Get over to the outbuilding,” Hawke said. “I’ll slow the bastards down here as much as I can.”

Before she could object, Brooke took his daughter’s arm and pulled her away toward the line of spruce trees across the yard which divided the main property from the outbuilding where he stored his cars.

Hawke covered them as they ran, pinning down the gunmen behind the wall. Then he made a break for it, firing as he went. Two simple parkour rolls later he was sprinting through the row of spruces and heading for the outbuilding.

He heard a burst of machine pistol fire from behind him and turned to see the men closing in on him. One of the men — one with heavily gelled-hair combed back in a slick — was laughing as he fired.

“We have to get out of here, Jack!” the Englishman yelled.

“So move your ass!” Alex screamed back.

The men fired at Hawke and puffs of gravel dust flew up all around his feet. He was only just out-running the lethal rounds.

“The thought had crossed my mind, Nightingale…”

Angelika Schwartz watched with her usual carefully measured excitement as the battered, shot-up Cadillac DTS containing the world’s most powerful man reversed out the back of the Pepsi truck. When it hit the ground, she smiled as it crawled like a wounded bear across the loading bay of their temporary home — an abandoned paint factory in New Orleans’s Bywater district.

She was chewing gum and wore torn denim jeans and a leather jacket. Shifting her weight from one foot to the other she now stood with a Mossberg 500 pump-action shotgun casually resting on her shoulder. She ran a hand through her spikey pink hair and glanced at the platinum Rolex on her wrist, smiling — bang on time. The Boss would be impressed.

She waited with growing impatience while somewhere across town the rude Australian techie used the tiny night vision camera in the car’s front fender to control the vehicle. He brought Cadillac One to a gentle remote-controlled stop less than three yards from her biker riding boots. The engine shut down, and a dozen men armed with submachine guns encircled the presidential limo.

She walked forward and pulled the shotgun from her shoulder. Smiling, she tapped the muzzle of the gun gently on the reinforced glass of the Caddy’s rear window.

Inside, the President was in animated dialogue with his Secret Service agent.

Angelika frowned. “Out you come, Mr President. Now.” Her German accent was thick, but understandable.

The politician inside looked through the bullet-proof window at her and hesitated, thinking through his options one last time. He looked nervous, but she could see a glimmer of hope in his eyes. That would be gone soon enough.

“Three seconds or we do it the hard way.”

She raised her fingers to her mouth and wolf-whistled. A second later a man in black overalls stepped out of the shadows. He was holding a bundle of Composition C-4 blocks in his hands, better known to the world simply as C-4, a type of malleable plastic explosive. He began to mold the explosive in specific locations around the driver’s door of the limo and then inserted several blasting caps into it before turning and giving Angelika an emotionless nod. He stepped far away from the vehicle.

Angelika pulled a detonator from her jacket and waved it at the President. “Vielen dank, Jakob… Now I will count to ten, and on ten I hit the detonator. There will be consequences for making me get you out the hard way. One…”

Inside, more heated debate, and then finally, President Grant’s shoulders visibly slumped as he turned and opened the rear door. He stepped cautiously out into the warehouse.

“You did the right thing, Mr Grant.”

“You can’t possibly hope to get away with this,” Grant said. “My people will be all over this place in minutes.”

He’d barely finished speaking when Angelika smacked him across his face with the back of her gloved hand. “Silence!”

Partridge leaped forward but his attempt to defend the President was met by a savage blow in the center of his back with the butt of one of the men’s guns. He fell forwards and hit the hard concrete floor, crying out in pain.

“No more silliness, Mr President, please,” Angelika said coolly. “Besides, if you’re referring to the tracking devices in your limousine, they are are currently residing in the chassis of the identical limo you saw in the underpass a few moments ago. That should keep your people busy for a while.”

President Grant looked crestfallen for a few seconds, and rubbed the blood from the corner of his cut, bleeding lip. Then he raised his chin and straightened his shirt before replying. “Then I wouldn’t want to be in the shoes of the man driving that limo.”

The woman from Berlin smirked. “Sadly, once again you have misplaced your hope. Like your own vehicle, the decoy car is remote-controlled by a man in the center of New Orleans. He has orders to drive it as far from the underpass as he can until the Secret Service or police catch it or until it runs out of fuel, whichever comes first… by which time, you shall be tucked away somewhere nice and safe.”

Angelika barked some orders at Jakob who padded over to the President and grabbed him roughly by his collar.

“Best not resist, Mr Grant. Jakob Müller here was a former rhönradprofi — a wheel gymnast and a serious bodybuilder. He’s a good East German. He tells me he has the strength of five men, and few here have dared him to prove it.”

On Angelika’s orders, Jakob dragged Grant away from the relative safety of the limo and shoved him into the side of an old GMC van idling just inside the entrance to the factory. A moment later, Partridge was hauled off the floor and thrown in the back beside him.

Now, President Grant sat in the back of the windowless van in silence. Either side of him was an armed man, and opposite was the German woman and the man she had called Jakob.

After half an hour of driving mostly on the straight he felt the van lurch to the right and descend what could only be an off-ramp. Judging by the turns at the start of the journey he guessed he was somewhere to the north of New Orleans, but couldn’t be sure. Instead of speculating, he focussed on what would be by now the largest manhunt in history as his team scrambled to rescue him.

A couple more turns and the van came to a juddering stop. A few seconds later Jakob grinned at him and the side door swung open. “Get out.”

Grant climbed out of the van and blinked in the sunlight. He was standing in the middle of a vast industrial landscape, littered with countless buildings and chimneys all covered in pipes and air-conditioning ducts. It looked like they were in some kind of processing plant, but by the looks of things it was clearly abandoned. Grant began to grow pessimistic.

Just beyond the parking area where they had pulled up in the GMC was a cleared area with a sparkling white Sikorsky S-76. Grant knew the model because he recognized it as the same as the one Donald Trump owned — and he’d had a flight around Manhattan in that one a few weeks ago so he would know better than most. If it weren’t obvious enough already, these people were well-funded.

Jakob stepped from the van and stood beside him. “Over there.” He nodded at what had clearly been the main entrance to the complex, but was now partly overgrown with weeds.

Grant bristled, unaccustomed to being talked to like this, but kept silent. It wasn’t every day the President of the United States got kidnapped — in fact this was the first time in history — so whoever was behind it was playing the highest stakes of all. It wouldn’t be wise to anger them before finding out what they wanted, and he knew from his many Secret Service briefings that he had to play for time.

Jakob shoved him hard between the shoulder blades and with his hands tied behind his back he struggled to stay on his feet, but just managed it. He gave the man a snarl of contempt and moved slowly toward the enormous factory complex.