The King's Tomb

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

With Ryan holding the captain at gunpoint, Hawke made his way through the door and started to walk down the length of the gondola. Around fifty feet long, a central corridor gave way to doors on either side and at the end of it at the stern was a large viewing deck. On the table was Kruger’s backpack, complete with the codex and what looked like the base of one of the idols.

He had struck gold.

Now he saw the Oracle and a huddle of Athanatoi, then Kruger dragged Lea into view. There was a struggle and then the arms dealer slapped her hard across the face.

“Let her go, dickhead!”

Lea sighed with relief when she saw the Englishman.

Kruger shook his head. “Fuck me dead, Hawke. Can’t you take a hint?”

The Oracle swivelled around, a bomb remote in his hand. “I told you to kill him! Kill him now and throw his dead body out of my airship!”

“Who do you think you are?” Hawke said. “Max Bloody Zorin?”

They fired on him with a vengeance, spraying the rear section of the deck with bullets and instantly blowing out the large observation window. Glass spewed out into the air and vanished in the twilight and a loud, howling noise filled the inside of the cabin.

Hawke dived to the floor and rolled behind the long wooden bar as Kruger dragged Lea across the viewing deck and toward some steps. He was trying to take her up into the space between the rigid structure of the airship and its helium bags.

Hawke raised his head above the edge of the bar as bullets drilled into it and forced tiny clouds of splintered wood and shattered glass into the air. He ducked back down just in time to avoid being shot in the face, slamming into the floor and cutting his hands on the shards of broken glass.

He cursed and looked down at the wounds but they were superficial. He’d just have to suck it up for now, he thought with a grim smile. An Athanatoi acolyte rounded the edge of the bar in pursuit of him. Finding him crouched in the detritus, he grinned and raised his gun.

Hawke grabbed the neck of a broken bottle of vodka and threw it at the cultist with all his might. It spun through the air like a dart and the jagged end buried itself into the middle of his face like a set of jaws.

He screamed in agony and dropped the gun as he reached up to pull the broken glass fragments from his bleeding face.

Hawke seized the moment and grabbed the dropped weapon. Still lying on his stomach, he held the gun with both hands and fired on the man, planting three rounds in his chest. With the glass fragments still wedged in his face, he stumbled back a few paces and then his legs collided with an upturned chair in front of the shattered observation window. Losing his balance, he tipped backwards and gave a heart-stopping scream as he fell out of the window and spun down toward the ocean hundreds of feet below.

“A new high-dive record, I think,” Hawke said, peering outside the window. “Two tucks and a pike.”

Someone else fired on him. The bullet slammed into the wall beside his head and he crashed down to the floor behind a long leather sofa. He cursed but at least he still had the gun. He checked the magazine and saw ten rounds remaining.

The man who had fired on him was reloading and Hawke used the moment to return fire under the sofa. The rounds strafed across the carpet, kicking up little puffs of rubber and polyester before tearing through the man’s boots and burying themselves in his feet and ankles.

The cultist wailed and collapsed to the floor, howling in pain and desperately trying to drag himself into the cover of the central corridor.

Hawke fired on him and took him out before he’d made a yard.

Then he heard Lea screaming.

Scanning the room through the smoke he saw she was nowhere in sight. Kruger must have taken her into the top of the airship — but where the hell was the Oracle? He stuffed the gun into his belt and darted across the observation deck toward the steel staircase.

Taking a rail in each hand, he leaped up the steps two at a time until he found himself inside the space between the rigid structure and the helium balloons. It was cramped and smelled of oil but he had no time to assess the situation further. A gun fired in the darkness and he heard a bullet trace past his face and slam into one of the rigid structure support beams.

He dropped to his knees and pulled the gun from his belt. Looking ahead, he saw Kruger but still no sign of Lea. “Give up and I’ll let you live, Kruger!”

“Get real, Englishman.” Kruger fired again and Hawke buried his head in his crossed arms as the bullet blew past him and ricocheted off another of the steel girders. “We both know this is a fight to the death… Yours!” He fired on him again and the bullet struck a support strut and ricocheted down into Hawke’s shoulder.

It felt like flesh wound, so Hawke fired back, but Kruger dropped away into the thin air like a phantom, leaving nothing behind but gun smoke.

“What the hell?”

Hawke ran to where Kruger had been standing and saw a maintenance hatch leading down to the bridge. There, on the floor, Kruger was fighting Ryan. He went to jump down when he heard Lea screaming. She was back with the Oracle and she needed his help.

Lea or Ryan?

Hawke knew Ryan needed to exorcise his demons when it came to Kruger, so he threw him his gun, turned on his heel and sprinted back down the inside of the structure.

Ryan saw the hatch burst open but had no time to respond. The man crashed through the hole and landed right on top of him, pushing him to the floor in the middle of the bridge with heavy work boots that almost knocked him out. When he staggered up to his knees and saw who had attacked him, he thought his heart had stopped.

Dirk Kruger.

“Fuck me,” Kruger crowed. “I didn’t know we had the Girl Guides on here.”

Ryan saw the gun in the arms dealer’s hand. His own had been knocked across the floor when Kruger crashed into him, but Hawke had thrown him another. It was out of reach. He started to panic, but knew he had to play for time. The captain took a few cautious steps back and steadied the airship’s controls.

Then Kruger rushed him.

Ryan felt a surge of rage he had never known before. Before ECHO his life had been spent as a man on the run. When it came to fight or flight, he could write a PhD on running away. Mr Line-of-Least-Resistance, he always backed down, said sorry, walked away.

ECHO had changed all that. Hawke had changed it. Lea and the others had led him out of the darkness of timidity and into the light of courage and he needed to draw on that now, or he would die. He needed to use the intense, animal anger that Dirk Kruger was inducing in him if he was to survive.

The arms dealer’s sweaty face was right over the top of him now, looking down with a grin as he tightened his fingers around his throat. Visions of Maria Kurikova flew through his mind like starlings. What heaven was she in now, he wondered… and would he soon be joining her?

The fingers squeezed tighter. He felt Kruger’s fingernails burying themselves into the soft flesh of his neck, the fingertips pushing into his veins and blocking the circulation of blood, choking the windpipe. Maybe, he thought, it would be easier just to let go. I’d be back with her then. We’d be together in a better place and all this suffering would be over forever.

“You’re fucking weak, Bale!”

Ryan strained for air.

“I should have killed you when I had the chance. This time I’m putting you down like a rabid dog.”

The periphery of his vision started to fade out and he saw stars forming wherever he turned his bulging eyes.

“Men like me will always beat pathetic, weak bastards like you. As long as you’re in this world you’re just wasting my oxygen. Your Russian girlfriend must have been fucking insane to go with you, boy. Too bad she’s dead, eh?”

Motivated by a depth of burning anger he’d never known before and never wanted to know again, Ryan heaved Dirk Kruger away from him and leaped to his feet. The South African did the same and reached for a knife on his belt.

Ryan lunged at him, snatching up the gun Hawke had thrown down and stuffed it into his stomach.

“You won’t do it!” Kruger said. “You’re a girl.”

Ryan felt a kind of sick pleasure rush through him as he buried the muzzle of the Glock in Kruger’s belly. It felt good. If only he had the strength to ram the barrel right through this bastard’s stomach wall and out of the other side. As it was, he’d have to settle for using it the way God intended.

He fired point blank. The flesh of Kruger’s stomach acted a little like a muffler and reduced the ferocious sound of the weapon. The man’s eyes opened wide as the rest of his face froze. He knew what had happened. He was a dead man walking.

Ryan wondered what it felt like to have a nine-mil slug fired through your stomach at point blank range and then fired another one to see if it made things better. And a third and a fourth.

The captain rushed Ryan, but he spun and fired, hitting him in the head and killing him on the spot, then he emptied the rest of the mag into Kruger’s stomach and pushed the dying man away. “You’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, Dirk, but in your case, I’ll make an exception.”

Kruger tried to talk but bubbles of blood formed in his mouth, popping like bubblegum as he took his last breaths. Behind him, air rushed in through the open gondola door and rippled through his hair. He reached out a trembling hand, a look of terror on his face. It was the face of a voiceless man begging for help, but he wasn’t going to get, Not today. Not from this man.

Ryan hurled the empty gun to the floor and walked over to the kneeling Kruger. Raising his leg, he planted the sole of his boot squarely on the South African’s chest and without saying a single word, he pushed his defeated enemy out of the gondola. There were no screams as he tumbled down to the tropical waters of Biscayne Bay.

An ugly splash formed in the water below. It wasn’t the sort of splash you survived, but Kruger was one lucky bastard, after all. Ryan blew out a breath and for a moment he thought he saw the familiar outline of a great white shark swimming toward the splash. He looked closer and saw he was right.

Maybe Dirk Kruger’s luck had run out after all.