The King's Tomb

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The large-calibre rounds tore holes in the bottom of the mezzanine’s stainless-steel deck as if it were made of aluminum foil. A speechless Camacho and Kim watched the holes rapidly approaching where they were taking cover. “We’re outta here!”

They leaped to their feet and sprinted away from the carnage created by the Vektor, taking pot shots at the gunner behind the GPMG as they went. “Keep going!” Camacho yelled and leaned over the top of the wall to get a better shot at the gunner. He fired and hit him, ripping part of his skull away and spraying brain matter and blood all over the man feeding the ammo belt into the gun.

“Get on that weapon, man!” Venter yelled.

The man now covered in blood slipped behind the Vektor and immediately pulled the muzzle around until it was pointing directly at Jack Camacho. With a fury the American had rarely seen before, he started firing the powerful GPMG at him.

The bullets traced and whistled all around him as he and Kim sprinted for cover like the devil was on their tails. One of the rounds blew through the wooden handrail and blasted a cloud of splinters into his path. He felt several embed themselves in his face as he threw himself into a dive and rolled down into the other corner dropping down beside his old friend.

Kim looked at his face. “Cut yourself shaving?”

“Funny.”

“Seriously, you okay?”

He nodded. “Just a graze, but it was close.”

Peering through the gap between the wall and the handrail, they saw another man feeding a fresh ammo belt into the Vektor and the blood-soaked goon operating it looked angrier than ever. Another volley of automatic fire came from the far end of the deck. “Looks like they’re trying a pincer movement,” Kim said.

Camacho felt his jaw tighten with rage and fear. He’d been in a few scrapes in his time, both in the CIA and with ECHO, but things around here were hotting up much more than usual. They’d been fighting for nearly ten minutes now and they’d only advanced the length of the mezzanine. He had no idea if Lea and Ryan were still alive and no way of contacting them to find out. Venter was fighting as brutally as he had ever seen anyone fight before. He guessed that was what twenty years in the 4 Special Forces Regiment did to a man.

“Down the stairs!” he yelled. “I see Lea and Ryan!”

They sprinted down the spiral staircase and met up with their friends in the lobby. “Way too hot back there,” Kim said. “What about you guys?”

“See for yourself,” Lea said.

Tucked down behind the wall at the base of the artificial waterfall, Ryan grinned and opened his bag.

“Holy shit!” Kim said. “The Sword of Fire!”

Lea smiled. “We found it in Kruger’s study after a ten minute fire fight. We got the translation too.”

“Guess they’re not too happy about us having it, right?” Camacho said.

“See for yourself,” Lea said.

Men carrying MP5s and Milkor BXPs burst into the giant lobby and immediately took up position behind the rocks at the base of the waterfall. Lea and Ryan moved toward them while Camacho and Kim provided cover. Lea ran toward their position and fired on them with her weapon.

The closest of them turned and aimed his gun, a look of terror on his young face. He moved to fire but Lea struck first, landing two in his chest and one in his forehead. “Maybe you can hunt defenseless animals, laddo, but I’m a different story.”

“Woah.” Ryan slammed down beside her. “You get out the wrong side of bed this morning or something?”

“Yes.”

Camacho fired on a man at the top of the waterfall, striking him in the head. He tumbled down over the edge of the falls and crashed down into the lake at the base, disappearing in the swirling foam. Ryan was closest and ran over to the dead man, snatching a belt of grenades from him.

The four of them ran from the lobby, pausing only for Ryan to hurl one of the grenades into the base of the waterfall. The explosion filled the space with smoke and flames and blew out the containing wall around the raised lake at the base of the waterfall. Thousands of gallons of water burst out through the broken brick and started to flood the lobby.

“That way!” Lea said.

A fire door behind the reception desk led to a service corridor, at the end of which was a staff elevator. Kim opened the doors and they bundled inside with the sound of Kruger’s men screaming and shouting back in the lobby. One of them reached the other end of the service corridor and lifted an automatic rifle into the aim.

“Doors!” Camacho shouted.

Kim hit the button while Ryan and Lea opened fire on the man through the ever-narrowing gap. He returned fire, his bullets pinging off the elevator’s stainless-steel doors and some entering inside and raking up the inside wall.

When the doors slammed shut, Kim blew out a deep breath. “That was too close.”

The doors opened at the subterranean level where the facility’s vehicles were parked. Lea turned and fired on the control panel, disabling the elevator, then turned and saw a sprawling parking lot. Due to the park’s extremely remote location, most of the staff and guests flew in and out but there was still a good handful of vehicles to choose from, mostly used for moving around the enormous compound or even the main park itself.

Camacho’s eyes soon alighted on a white Mercedes AMG G63 with black stripes designed to resemble a zebra’s markings. The luxury super-SUV would normally be filled with rich men in big hats being chauffeured out to hunt big game, but today the former CIA man had another use for it.

They ran closer. Printed on the side in a red rectangle were the words KRUGER WILDLIFE & GAME RESERVE. Camacho ran to the driver’s door and punched the air when he saw the keys in the ignition.

“This is our baby.”

“Everyone in!” Lea yelled. Her ploy to disable the elevator had worked, but Kruger’s men had simply diverted to the service stairs beside the elevator shaft. They poured out of the double doors with guns blazing, shooting up anything that moved in the parking lot.

“John McClane wouldn’t take any of this shit in Die Hard,” Camacho said with a sigh.

“I love his Homefries,” Ryan said.

Kim was confused. “What the fuck are you two talking about?”

Ryan said nothing, but blew out the rear window of the Merc SUV with his handgun before picking off two of Kruger’s men. He saw Venter now, reaching the bottom of the concrete steps and emerging into the parking level’s yellow strip lights.

Lea climbed into the back and slammed down into the seat beside Ryan. The luxury interior of the G63 included a chunky console between the two rear seats and she was able to raise one knee onto it to get a better view out of the shattered back window.

“Venter!” she said.

Ryan was aiming at him. “The one and only and he’s mine.”

She watched him gently squeeze the trigger but the bullet went high as they tumbled forward. Camacho had stamped on the accelerator and flung him off his balance. The Merc lurched forward in a cloud of burnt rubber smoke and spinning wheels that filled the entire garage with an ear-piercing squealing noise.

“Dammit, Jack!” Lea said. “Ry nearly had Venter.”

“Company employees are welcome to use the suggestion box,” he shouted from the front, ducking quickly to the right as a bullet punctured his window and traced past his head. It blew another perfect hole in the opposite window beside Kim Taylor who screamed loudly before spinning around and scanning for the gunman.

“They’re everywhere!”

Ryan flicked a panicked glance over his shoulder. “And they’re never going to stop until they have the sword back!”

Camacho reversed at high-speed in the underground car park, smoke spewing from the wheel arches as the rubber tires spun on the polished concrete. Spinning the steering wheel hard to the right, he flung the vehicle around in a tight arc, changed into drive and stamped on the gas.

The underground parking lot filled with the sound of tires squealing as Camacho weaved the SUV in between the support pillars and hit the exit ramp. Bullets chased them all the way outside and when they emerged from the subterranean parking area it was into a soft African twilight. The intense heat and glare of earlier in the day had dissipated now and night was rapidly approaching.

Camacho pushed the Merc as hard as it would go as he steered it around to the left and followed the signs for the helipad, praying there was a chopper there. They got there seconds later and found their prayers had been answered. A nice, new helicopter was sitting beside Blankov’s private jet. The jet offered a much faster way out of the nightmare but none of them knew how to fly it.

The former CIA man skidded the SUV to a halt a few meters from the chopper. “We’ll have to destroy the jet when we’re airborne. Everyone out!”

With the sword in the bag under Ryan’s arm, they clambered out of the SUV and jumped into the chopper. Camacho made some instant pre-flight checks and then fired up the engine. As the rotors started to whir, a team of Athanatoi and some of Kruger’s commandos appeared at the top of the car park ramp and opened fire on them.

Camacho lifted the chopper into the Transvaal dusk and rotated it to the side to allow Ryan and Kim to return fire on the enemy. They took cover behind a low concrete wall which marked the perimeter between the complex and the car park, giving Lea time to fire on the jet with the MP5.

With the chopper’s rotors noisily whirring overhead, she leaned out into the downdraft and swept the powerful machine pistol up and down the wings, puncturing the aluminum as if it were foil. The jet fuel sparked and ignited and blew the private plane into a terrifying ball of fire.

“Get us outta here, Jack!”

Camacho spun the chopper and increased speed, swooping low over the complex as he steered around to the south. “Goodbye, assholes.”

Lea twisted in her seat to see Blankov running out of the complex and staring at his aircraft, now no more than a black burning skeleton. The cloud of thick, choking smoke was the thickest she had ever seen. She high-fived Kim and Camacho set a course for home.

With the day long-gone, the exhausted four-strong team sat on the veranda running around the front of a large villa north of Pretoria. Set in the middle of a wildlife sanctuary owned by old friends of Danny Devlin from his South Africa days, they all agreed it was the safest place any of them could be right now.

The brother and sister owners of the property, Isaac and Lily Elsey, were away in France on business, but they had answered Danny’s call for help in a heartbeat and now the place was theirs for as long as they wanted it.

But that wouldn’t be long. Now, they cracked some beers, dressed their wounds and breathed a collective sigh of relief. Lea rubbed her temples and tried to force the stress away, but it wasn’t going anywhere.

In the notes containing Julius’s translation they had found references to an ancient shield that was made to match the sword. The Athanatoi scholar’s deciphering of the symbols on the sword described the shield in intimate detail and both Julius and Ryan had instantly recognized the item in question as being the Shield of Pridwen.

It was a relic from Camelot, much like they believed the Sword of Fire to be and both men knew where it was last seen: in the National Museum of Archaeology in Athens. Ryan was especially pleased.

He’d had time with the sword before when they found it in Wales, but not enough time to make a proper study of the symbols etched into it. This plus Julius’s hard work had yielded a fantastic result and they all felt like they were making real progress. It was a relief to all that the shield was in a museum and not at the end of a week-long treasure hunt.

But not all was great. They might have the information they needed about Athens, but so did Dirk Kruger and his psycho boss Ivan Blankov. It was true they had a good head-start on them, but there was still no sign of their puppet master, the Oracle. Lea felt the ominous signs of a migraine headache creeping around the sides of her skull.

Kim cut the call she was making and slipped her phone in her pocket. “I got some great news, guys — they got Lexi back!”

The relief was massive and they all shared a whoop of joy and a few high-fives on the veranda in the twilight. Lexi Zhang was not the closest member of the team, always keeping her emotional distance, but she was fiercely loyal and had risked her life many times to save them. The thought of her being tortured by the Zodiac assassins had given everyone a few sleepless nights and now it was over.

“Thank God,” Lea said.

Kim frowned.

“What is it?”

“But Alex just told me she was pretty badly messed up.”

“What do you mean?” Ryan asked.

“She didn’t say, but I got the impression they screwed her up pretty bad before Joe and the others got to her.”

Camacho punched the side of the wall. “Sons of bitches!”

“What about the Zodiacs?” Ryan asked.

“They got Rat in custody and Pig and Zhou died in a helicopter crash.”

“Tiger and Monkey?” Lea asked.

“She said Lexi took Monkey out, but Tiger got away.”

“So four down, one to go, in other words,” Camacho said.

“Right,” said Kim. “Tiger is still out there.”

“And how do you go about catching a man like that?”

Camacho mulled it over. “You catch more flies with molasses than you do with vinegar, right?”

Ryan sank a beer and watched a crane heave itself up into the air over the dust-dry landscape. “You tell him about the Shield of Pridwen and Athens?”

She nodded. “They’re flying there right away.”

“Great,” Ryan said. “We’re closer than we’ve ever been guys.”

They toasted their success in retrieving the sword, but in her heart, Lea knew the fight hadn’t even started yet.