The King's Tomb

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Danny Devlin had enjoyed better days. Chained to a wall in the dungeon of a freak like the Oracle while a meat mountain with medieval weaponry padded over to him was not his idea of the perfect evening.

Boboc grunted and swung the mace.

Devlin ducked and the spiky iron ball smashed into the wall behind his head and blasted a chunk of stone into the room.

“Are you not going to whisper sweet nothings into my year first?”

Another swing of the mace, closer this time. He actually felt the chain connecting the ball to the handle swipe past his face.

“OK,” Devlin said. “So now I know how you really feel about me…”

He stepped fast to his right and flicked up the manacle on his right wrist, sending the chain whipping up like a skipping rope. It sailed through the air just as he thought it would and when it came back down he pulled it around Boboc’s head and snapped it tight as hard as he could.

The chain-links cut into the flesh on the giant’s neck and Devlin whipped it around a second time creating a kind of metal noose which he pulled on with all his strength. The man grunted in response and dropped the mace, bringing his fat hands up to try and prise the chain away from this throat.

Devlin sighed with disappointment. “So you can dish it out but you can’t take it.”

Boboc’s mouth worked silently as he gasped for air. The powerful man spun around and threw Devlin back against the wall.

He started unravelling the chain from his neck, so the Irish Ranger knew he had to act fast. Reaching down he grabbed the mace and swung it hard at his enemy, catching him square between his shoulder blades with the heavy spiked ball. The bones in the man’s back splintered like old pottery and he opened his mouth wide to scream hard and loud.

Devlin wrenched the mace ball from Boboc’s back in a jet of blood and bone fragments and swung it again. It was a heavy, tough weapon to manipulate but Devlin was no slouch. He twisted his upper body to increase momentum and brought the spiked ball smashing into the back of the choking man’s skull.

Boboc fell forward like a freshly-cut tree falling over, smashing his face into the stone floor with a toe-curling crunch as his nose and cheek bones shattered.

Devlin took the mace and then reached into the man’s pocket and found the keys. Freeing himself he leaned forward and checked Boboc’s breathing, but there was nothing. “Just staying on the safe side, you big ape.”

Then he walked across the dungeon and slipped through the door, locking it behind him as he checked the corridor for any sign of the guards who might have overheard the festivities back in the cell. Nothing. “Good,” he said. “Hold on, Lea. I’m on my way!”

Hawke waited until the men were almost at touching distance from the chopper and then fired at the pool of jet fuel at its base. The men saw the trap a millisecond before the fuel ignited. They turned to run but the explosion swallowed them whole and burned their fleeing bodies to a crisp before they could take two steps.

With fire consuming the chopper’s twisted, gnarled wreckage in a fierce blaze, the other men backed up on their quads and turned away from the carnage. Spotting Hawke in the tree line, one of them alerted the rest of his team to his location and immediately headed for him.

Hawke darted back into the shadows of the jungle, allowing the men a long enough view of him to draw them in. As they approached, Lexi and Reaper opened fire on them and took another two of them out blasting them clean off their quads. The riderless machines spun out of control, one of them piling into the burning wreckage and the other smashing head-on into a tree trunk and spinning over on its side.

“There’s another one!” Ryan yelled.

One of the quads turned sharply to the right and sprayed an arc of dirt and leaves into their faces. The man riding it lifted an MP5 and fired a long burst of rounds at them. The bullets slammed into the earth and ripped chunks off nearby trunks filling the air with splinters and misty clouds of palm sap.

“Take cover!” Hawke yelled.

He leaped into a trench and slid to a stop in a pile of rotten coconuts. Scrambling to the top of the trench, he returned fire, aiming squarely at the quad’s fuel tank. He squeezed the trigger and emptied the magazine all over the man who had just tried to kill them.

The rounds snaked up the path behind the quad, blew out the two rear tires and then hit the target. The tank exploded in a ferocious storm of ignited gasoline and black smoke, blasting the quad into the air like a toy and propelling the rider into a palm trunk. He struck it with his back and slid down dead onto the jungle floor.

With the last of the men dead, they climbed on the quads ready to take off toward the villa in the center of the island when Scarlet’s phone buzzed. She took the call and they all watched as her face dropped.

“That was Rich.” She put her phone in her pocket. “He says the Five Eyes are meeting in a hotel in Miami Beach.”

“Mon Dieu!” Reaper said. “Now there’s a target worth hitting.”

“What’s Five Eyes?” Ryan asked.

Hawke fired up his quad and raised his voice. “It’s an alliance of the intelligence agencies of the main English-speaking countries — America, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. It started after World War II when they created the ECHELON surveillance network.”

“Right.”

“They hold covert meetings every now and again to discuss stuff they don’t want hacked or compromised. These meetings are so classified that only the very top tier of the governments know about it — presidents, VPs, prime ministers, you name it.”

“Woah.”

“Exactly,” Scarlet said. “Usually it’s just intel agency officials but this time the heads of state are involved.”

“And the Oracle just happens to be in the vicinity!” Kim said.

Camacho swore loudly. “This is the mother of all assassinations!”

“Has Rich warned them?” Hawke asked.

“He’s contacted a friend in MI5 who has briefed the British contingency, but they’re not seeing it as a credible threat. They’ve swept the hotel and blocked all local airspace.”

“So how can Wolff touch them?”

“That’s what we have to find out and fast. They’re not going to cancel a meeting of this level and importance and airlift everyone out until we can give them evidence of a solid terror attack.”

“You told them there’s an airship in the middle of this island, right?” Hawke said.

Scarlet nodded. “His MI5 contact has said that the Americans are very clear about defending the meeting. The second that airship crosses into prohibited airspace they’ll blow it out of the sky. Their view is the president is safe and so are the other leaders and officials.”

“I can see their point,” Camacho said. “They get threats all the time and if they canned everything they were doing every time they got one they’d never get anything done. They’ve looked into it, done their checks and they’re satisfied the president’s not at risk. If all Wolff’s got is an airship, I don’t rate his chances up against a couple of F-16s.”

“But this is Wolff we’re talking about,” Scarlet said. “He doesn’t make mistakes like that. He’s up to something and if they’re not going to cancel the meeting and airlift the president to safety then it’s up to us to stop it!”

“Plus the bastard’s got our friends,” Reaper said. “This cannot go unpunished.”

“No,” Hawke said coldly. “It’s not going to. Everyone, with me.”

Devlin stalked through the complex in search of Lea. He was sure the Oracle would be keeping her close to him, so he headed for what he guessed was the center of operations — the main villa in the center of the island.

He heard voices up ahead in an office and thought he recognized the sound of Wolff arguing with Kruger. Creeping along a corridor with the mace in his hand, he was approaching the door to the office when the game changed.

The serrated blade of a combat knife pushed into the soft flesh of his throat.

He stopped dead in his tracks. Could he swing the mace around and hit this guy before he drew the blade across his throat? No chance. “All right, you got me.”

“You shouldn’t give in so easily, Danny.”

He breathed a sigh of relief.

Lexi’s voice.

“What the hell, Lex?”

Scarlet stepped out of the shadows too. “You need to take five to change your pants, Danny?”

“Fuck off, Sloane.”

Hawke said, “Good to see you, Danny — but where the hell’s Lea?”

“You Know Who’s got her. We were both in some kind of torture cell when he and his South African lapdog showed up and took her. They said they were going for a little flight, so I guess they’ve gone to the airfield. I haven’t seen Blankov since we arrived.”

A terrific explosion ripped through the pool house just outside the window, blasting the roof off and blowing out the windows. The shockwave expelled smoke and glass splinters away from the window at high-speed as a massive fireball bloomed up above the complex.

Then another explosion, and a third.

“What the hell’s going on?” Camacho said.

Hawke punched the wall. “Scorched earth policy,” he said. “He’s pulling out and making damn sure he leaves nothing behind. I’d say every building on this island is rigged to blow, so we need to get the hell out of here!”

They sprinted from the office suite just as the room exploded. The power of the detonation lifted them from their feet and flung them into the swimming pool. They crashed through the burning wood and plastic from the pool house that was bobbing about in the surface of the water and sank to the bottom.

Hawke twisted around in the water and looked up to the surface. He saw black smoke, fire and pieces of roofing timber slowly falling back to earth. They splattered all over the surface of the water while pieces of metal shredded past them to the pool floor.

When the worst of the fallout was over he swam to the surface. The others followed his lead and they assembled on the surface of the pool, swimming to the edge through the wreckage.

Ryan saw it first and pointed it out to everyone else. “Up there! The airship!”

Hawke glanced and saw it. Smooth and silver and with the word Anshar painted on the side.

“Babylonian creator deity,” Ryan said.

“Fuck it, he got away,” Scarlet said.

Devlin cursed. “And he still has Lea!”

Hawke pulled himself out of the pool. “I don’t bloody think so.”