The King's Tomb

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Kruger ordered Venter and his men to step forward. Without a further command they slid the bolts on their weapons and aimed them at the ECHO team. If they fired in here it would be a bloodbath beyond description and no one would ever find their bodies.

Kruger took one last look around the mausoleum and that was the only chance Hawke needed. Grabbing one of the bronze discuses, he threw it at full speed like a Frisbee. It raced across the tomb and struck Kruger in the center of his face. He cursed and kicked and swore and when he looked back up his nose looked badly broken by the force of the discus smashing into it.

Hawke knew what came next, so before the arms dealer gave the execution order, he threw another of the Frisbees at Venter, causing him to duck to avoid the same fate. The discus smashed into the carved wall behind him and the ECHO team needed no order from Hawke to tell them what to do.

They charged Venter and the other men in the gloomy light of the mausoleum, piling into them and forcing their guns up to the ceiling. A few of the weapons fired off, blasting holes in the night-sky mural, but now they had a chance.

Reaper’s opponent went down first. The Frenchman easily disarmed him and kicked his gun away. He punched him in the face but the man drew a combat knife from his belt. The former Legionnaire fought like a bull, strong and agile and cunning. Twisting the knife out of his hand, he drove the serrated blade up into the soft flesh beneath the man’s ribcage and silenced his screams with his hand until he was dead. The man’s corpse slipped to the floor of the cave and Reaper turned to help Ryan who was fighting with Kruger.

Hawke and another soldier were rolling in the dust over by the sarcophagus. The South African mercenary knew some moves but he was no match for the former commando. Hawke got the better of him and was soon pinning him down and pounding him in the face.

Camacho and Venter were taking swipes at one another nearer the door and Lea, Scarlet and Lexi were deconstructing a merc’s ego on the other side of the sarcophagus, taking it in turns to hit him and then push him over to the next in the group for a go.

“That’s enough!”

A gun went off in the semi-darkness and everyone froze where they were.

Hawke twisted around and saw Kruger with a gun at Ryan’s head. The South African had captured him and was holding him hostage. “I said that is enough! Release my men!”

“Men? I thought I was fighting fairies,” Scarlet said.

“Shut up, bitch!” He cursed. “Get me the sword Venter.”

Venter picked up the Sword of Fire and walked it back over to Kruger.

Hawke climbed off the badly beaten soldier who joined Venter and the others with Kruger at the entrance to the tomb. “Just when I was having fun, too.”

Kruger grinned. “Is it fun you want, boy?”

Hawke bristled at the insult, but kept his emotions under tight control. “Nothing could be more fun that watching you die, Dirk. How are you going to beat that?”

“You’ll find out. Venter! Get your men out of here and use up the rest of our C4 on the entrance tunnel.” He turned to Hawke. “That sound like fun to you — trapped in here under a hundred tons of granite?”

“You bastard, Kruger,” Lea said.

“Not even the mighty Joe Hawke can dig his way through a fucking mountain, I’ll bet. I bid you farewell, my friends and I thank God we’ll never meet again.”

Kruger pushed Ryan away and stepped back into the tunnel, the shadows of the tomb slowly obscuring his grinning face and then he was gone.

Seconds later they heard a tremendous explosion that made the entire mountain shake under their feet. Pieces of the carved walls fell to the floor and one of the bags of gold coins tipped over and spilled its precious cargo all over the dust of the mausoleum’s floor.

“That’s torn it,” Lea said.

“I don’t think so,” said Ryan. “Start searching for the other entrance.”

“What other entrance, mate?” Hawke said.

“The sarcophagus is marble, right?”

Hawke looked at him, unable to resist grinning at how his friend’s mind worked. “If you say so, then yes.”

“Well, it is. Does it look like this mountain is made of marble?”

“To be honest,” Scarlet said. “I wouldn’t know.”

“Let me help then,” Ryan said. “It isn’t. As our good friend Dirk Kruger just said, it’s made mostly of granite. That’s because this part of Greece is in the Attico-Cycladic Massive region, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Lea said with a smile and a shake of her head.

“Still not getting why this means we’re not suffocating to death tonight,” Lexi said.

Ryan huffed and pointed at the sarcophagus. “How big is that thing, Lex?”

“Huh?”

“I’ll give you a clue, the side panels alone are wider than the tunnel we walked through to get down here.”

“Ah…”

“I get it, Ry,’ Lea said. “The sarcophagus is too big to have been brought down the entrance tunnel and it wasn’t carved down here because it’s made from the wrong stone.”

“Give that girl a cigar,” Ryan said, resuming the search. “And there’s another thing, too — where’s the antechamber? A tomb for a man like Alexander the Great would have had an antechamber. In other words, we came in through the back door.”

Hawke felt a wave of relief. “The lad’s a genius.”

“And that is so, so annoying,” said Scarlet.

“C’est ici, je pense,” Reaper said, heaving a small, square block of chiselled granite out of the wall. “On the north wall.”

Kim crawled down and looked through the gap. “There’s a tunnel.”

“That’ll be the connecting corridor to the antechamber,” Ryan said. “Built after the sarcophagus was placed in here.”

They crawled through the corridor until they were in the antechamber and found themselves staring at a much wider entrance on the far wall. Ryan pointed at it. “And that is where the sodding sarcophagus was brought in.”

Hawke turned to Ryan and gave him a heavy slap on the back. “You saved our arses again, mate.”

“I believe in the modern vernacular, that’s because I’m a boss, is that right?”

Scarlet rolled her eyes. “Don’t push it, neckbeard.”

“Hey!”

“All right, let’s move out.” Hawke led the way into the tunnel.

They followed it up an incline but then it turned sharply back down again and they felt like they were walking to the center of the planet. Intrigued as to where it was going to break the surface, they soon found out when they heard running water.

Turning a corner in the wide tunnel they found a pool.

“My bet is we swim our way out through there,” Kim said.

Scarlet looked at Ryan with a look of smug satisfaction on her face. “And how did they get the bloody sarcophagus through that pool, Poindexter?”

“My best guess is that when we come to the surface we’ll find we’re in a river and that they diverted the river to fill this pool after they delivered the sarcophagus.” He returned the smug look with a raised middle finger. “How d’ya like them apples, Cairo?”

She twisted her lips. “I’ll let you off, boy, but only if when we get to the other side we find ourselves in a fast-moving river!”

“Wanna bet on it?”

“I’m not afraid of wager.”

“A hundred quid.”

Camacho was impressed. “That’s a hundred and fifty bucks — he must be pretty damned sure.”

Scarlet thrust out her hand. “Done. Let’s get on with it.”

“No one’s going anywhere until I’ve checked it out for safety,” Hawke said.

Specially trained for deep dives and long periods underwater by his SBS years, the Englishman slipped down into the water.

They waited in the silence of the cavern for a few moments and then the Londoner broke the surface of the pool with a grin on his face. “Hope you’ve got some cash on you, Cairo. You own Ryan here one hundred smackers.”