The King's Tomb

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Hawke reached the observation deck and saw Lea struggling with the Oracle. He was forcing her toward the shattered window at the rear of the cabin and the tsunami bomb remote was lying in the splintered glass on the carpet beside an upturned barstool. The bag with the seven idols was on the floor and the codex was upside down on the carpet beside it.

Hawke leaped from the top of the steps and crashed down into Wolff’s back, piling him face-first into the broken glass. The Athanatoi chief cried out as the glass splinters embedded in his face and he fought like a madman to get the Englishman off his back.

“How long can an immortal spend in jail?” Hawke pulled his arm in a half-nelson and made him squeal like a pig.

“You’re dead a lot longer,” he snarled and whipped a knife out with his other hand.

Hawke saw it coming. He’d been reaching for the very same arm to pin them both behind his back and tie them together, but his right hand was weakened by the bullet wound Kruger had planted in his shoulder.

The Oracle struck out wildly with the knife, but surprised Hawke by not attacking him. Instead, he threw the knife at Lea and it sliced through her thigh.

She screamed and kicked the knife away, but she had lost her balance and started to tumble back to the open window. She started to grow faint and her eyes rolled up into her head.

“Lea!” Hawke released the Oracle and sprinted to her, pulling her roughly back from the gaping void and resting her down on the sofa.

He turned. “You fucking bastard, Wolff.”

The airship pitched forward and knocked them all off their feet. The idols rolled down to Hawke and Lea but the codex stayed up at the other end with the Oracle.

Hawke watched his eyes crawl over the idols. “If you want them, come and get them.”

The old man’s eyes leaped from the idols to the codex. Time was running out.

Lea came to and looked at the Oracle with disgust. “God, I wish you were dead!”

“Let me give you a goodbye kiss, instead.” The Oracle reached into his pocket with a withered, bony hand and pulled out a grenade. Snatching up the codex, he put on a backpack and climbed over to the open window. He pulled the pin and tossed the grenade at them. Then he jumped into the void and fell away from the bottom of the gondola.

“The grenade!” Hawke yelled, rugby tackling Lea to the floor. “Get down!”

The grenade detonated and blasted the back of the observation cabin clear off the gondola and sent debris ripping across the fins and elevators. Fire wrapped up around the roof and snaked back down the walls toward where they were taking cover. When the smoke cleared, the Oracle had escaped and the airship was a dead bird, pitching down and speeding toward Miami Beach.

USAF F-16 fighter jets closed in on them as they approached the no-fly zone.

Lea watched with disbelieving eyes as a parachute canopy popped open from the backpack and unfurled in the gathering night.

The Oracle twisted down for around a hundred feet and then dropped down onto the deck of a submarine. He slammed the hatch down behind him and seconds later the enormous boat was under the waves.

“I don’t believe it, Joe.” She fought the tears back. “He’s done it to us again!”

Hawke could offer no more than a heavy sigh and wrapped his arm around her shoulders. “It’s not over. We have the idols now, remember. If he wants them, he has to come and get them and then we’ll kill him.”

“But he has the codex.”

“And we have Alexander’s ring.”

Lea wiped a tear from her eye. “Am I imagining it or are we plummeting to the ground?”

“Eh?”

“Look… outside.”

Hawke didn’t have to look outside. As she spoke, the airship pitched down even more, sending all the broken furniture and glass sliding along the floor to the front of the cabin.

“This isn’t good.”

“It feels like we’re on the sodding Titanic!” Lea said.

“Except we get to crash into the sea before we sink in it,” Hawke said. “Brilliant.”

They ran down the central corridor where Ryan was desperately fiddling with the controls at the front of the bridge.

“Er. We’ve got some major problems guys!”

“What’s up?” Hawke asked.

“The Oracle’s goodbye kiss wrecked everything. The primary control surfaces are out, including the elevators and rudder.”

Hawke frowned. “Not what I wanted to hear, mate.”

“I don’t know what to do!”

“Let me have a look.” Hawke walked over and fiddled with the dials and levers on the consul, checking the response each time he operated one of the control surfaces.

“Well?”

“It’s going to be rough, but we’ve got enough elevator control to bring the pitch up and make a shallower descent. You get on the radio and tell those F-16s we’re friendly!”

He wrestled with the controls as the stricken airship plummeted to the beach. Buffeted by the wind which howled in through the smashed bridge window, Hawke fought hard to bring the nose up just as the bottom of the gondola smashed into the sea a little way off shore.

Lea screamed and Ryan swore loudly, neither able to look as the impact blasted tons of water up over the sides of the gondola. Hawke cursed as he pulled the controls back to keep the nose up. The last thing he wanted was for the force of the impact to plow the gondola under the surface of the sea and drown them all.

Successfully pitching the airship’s nose up again, the gondola skidded across the surface of the ocean for a few hundred meters before plowing up into the sand and screeching toward the large collection of emergency vehicles that had assembled on the beach as first responders.

“You two OK?” he yelled.

Two scared nods.

“In that case, please wait until the aircraft comes to a full and complete stop before unbuckling your seatbelts.”

Slowly, the friction of the sand against the gondola’s glass-fiber hull brought the wrecked airship to a stop less than ten meters from one of the fire trucks.

He saw the rest of the team he had left back on the island and now Camacho and Scarlet sprinted over from the fire trucks as Lea draped her arms over his shoulders and kissed him on the back of the neck.

It was over.

Almost.

It was full night when they crawled from the crumpled gondola. The lights of Miami Beach glittered all around them and the sounds of the city were playful and innocent. Music boomed from a Porsche convertible cruising along Miami Beach Boardwalk and laughter echoed from a nightclub’s rooftop terrace.

Hawke was exhausted. He cricked his neck and strolled over to the rest of his team with his hands in his pockets. He wanted nothing more than a good night’s sleep and then another good night’s sleep straight after. When he glanced at his leg, he thought that maybe a trip to a local hospital might also be in order.

The entire team was together now except Devlin. He was piloting the airboat in from Biscayne Bay.

“There he is!” Kim said, pointing out into the darkness.

Devlin waved back as he navigated the airboat toward the beach.

“Why the long faces?” Hawke said. “And no horse jokes.”

“He got away, Joe.” Lea kicked he sand with her boot. “The bastard got away.”

“But this was a successful mission!”

“Not if he got away it wasn’t.”

“What are you talking about? We now have all eight of the idols and that weird little ring… and we killed Kruger!”

Ryan coughed. “Who killed Kruger?”

Hawke patted him on the back. “We all know what you did, mate. Well done. That settles an account, right?”

Ryan reddened a little. “I guess so.”

Reaper lit up a cigarette and blew the smoke into the night air. “That day you fired on him in Rio, do you remember?”

“I’ll never forget it,” Ryan said. “I let everyone down that day.”

“That day was the day you started on your journey to becoming a real man, Ryan. Today you finished the journey and I am proud of you.”

Lea started to well up.

Scarlet rolled her eyes. “Is there a fucking bar around here? I mean, it’s Miami, right?”

Hawke huffed out a tired laugh. “When Danny gets here, I promise we’ll find a bar. Somewhere nice and seedy where we can drink this nightmare away.”

“Debriefing first,” Lea said, pointing to a group of men in suits at the top of the beach. “The Five Eyes survived a serious terror attack tonight and those dudes are going to want every inch of it on paper.”

“Dotted Is and Crossed Ts,” Camacho said. “Gotta love the CIA.”

Lea looked at Hawke’s leg and shoulders. “And then hospital for you, mister.”

As the others walked over to the authorities for a debriefing, Lea kept watching her old friend and lover as he drove the airboat to the beach. When she saw the tiny red dot on the surface of the water she knew at once what it meant. She felt her skin crawl as it slipped effortlessly onto the airboat’s curved hull and then up over Devlin. It danced over his shirt and then settled on his left temple.

She cried out, “Danny!”

He couldn’t hear her and then it was over. A high-velocity round drilled into Danny Devlin’s head and blasted him off the airboat. He crashed down into the dark water and the airboat spun out of control, tipping up and cartwheeling over and over until it broke up and smashed into a hundred pieces.

No one in the team moved or spoke.