The Tomb of Eternity

CHAPTER TEN

Hawke popped the trunk and climbed out of the Q7. It was freezing cold and snow blasted into their faces as they armed themselves from Brooke’s mini-arsenal in the back. They selected from a range of weapons including assault rifles, automatic pistols and finally Hawke pulled out a Remington 870 Magnum shotgun for the internal doors, weighing it appreciatively in his gloved hands.

They put the final touches on their assault tactics as they marched through the snowstorm toward the dacha. Latest intel from Washington told them no one had left the complex and that Alex was still inside, but beyond that neither Jack Brooke nor anyone else knew what sort of danger she was in. They knew time was of the essence.

Now, Hawke moved forward through the snow and led the others closer to the enormous dacha complex, partially obscured by black Siberian pines and the swirling blizzard. They used the harsh conditions to their advantage and moved through the trees in the heavy snow to keep themselves out of sight.

Somewhere ahead of him was Agent Nightingale — the woman whose name he now knew was Alex Reeve, and she needed his help. Beyond that, he thought he might finally be nearing the truth that had evaded him since all this started — the truth about Scarlet Sloane never having been in MI5 — the truth about what Eden and Lea had kept from him.

He stared at the outline of the building in the snowy distance and was amazed by its size. He hadn’t expected anything quite like this. “When they said ‘holiday home’, I wasn’t exactly expecting all this — it’s like a sodding castle.”

“And who says crime doesn’t pay?” Lea said.

Phillips opened the fence up with a pair of collapsible bolt cutters and a moment later the six of them were inside the grounds of the dacha. In front of them was a narrow stream, which ran freely in the summer but was now frozen solid. They stepped on the ice and climbed up the far bank to find a small clearing. They were now no more than fifty yards from the west wing of the dacha.

“Look over there!” Lea said, pointing to their right. “Looks like they’re preparing to clear out.”

Hawke looked to where she was pointing and saw several men in thick black coats and ushanka hats readying a sleek silver helicopter for flight. It was parked on a landing pad beside a hangar a hundred yards or so from the main house, and a second chopper was parked behind it.

Hawke sighed. “Not the best news I’ve had today…”

“Maybe they got what they wanted from Nightingale,” Ryan said with a shudder. Ice was forming in his eyebrows.

“Let’s hope not,” Hawke said. “If they don’t need her any more there’s nothing to stop them killing her.”

Zimmerman raised his rifle and squinted through the sights.

“No!” Hawke said, pushing the barrel away and down toward the snow. “Are you crazy?”

“I could take them all out right now!” he replied.

“No, Zimmerman! He’s right,” Dempsey said. “You could take those guys out, sure, but then our cover’s blown and the Secretary’s daughter is dead. You want to be responsible for that?”

Zimmerman lowered the rifle but said nothing. Hawke knew the tension was running higher than usual on this mission. The failure to rescue hostages always made the news, and a bungled attempt to save the life of the American Defense Secretary’s daughter would make headline news on every network for weeks. It wasn’t the sort of publicity any of these Special Forces operatives would ever desire.

For Hawke, nothing mattered except saving Alex’s life. He couldn’t give a damn either way what the press said, but the thought of failing Alex at her moment of need — when she had saved his life back in that Balkans hellhole — just wasn’t worth contemplating.

They drew closer to the hangar and Hawke stood on a disused engine block to look through one of the windows. He pulled himself back to avoid being seen by an aviation mechanic who was whistling to himself and working casually inside the small building. Luckily, he hadn’t seen him, and Hawke took a second look. The interior of the hangar was brightly lit by strip-lights and mostly empty now that the helicopters had obviously been rolled out ready for Vetrov.

“We need to get to the house, fast,” Hawke said.

They moved toward the house and in line with their plan, they used grappling hooks to ascend to the roof where they moved low and cautiously until they found the atrium.

Hawke cleared some of the snow away and peered down through the thick glass.

“What the hell is this place?” he said, confused. “Looks like some kind of swimming pool.”

“I don’t think so,” Ryan said.

“What do you mean?”

“I might be mistaken, Joe, but I think that’s pretty much the last place you want to go swimming — look carefully over there by the artificial island.”

Hawke followed where Ryan was indicating with his gloved hand and saw to his horror what had to be at least a twenty-five foot-long crocodile submerged a few inches below the surface of the brown water.

“Bloody hell! It’s some kind of enclosure.”

Ryan nodded. “Unbelievable. Who the hell has a crocodile enclosure in their house?”

“I’m learning more about Maxim Vetrov with each passing minute,” Lea said. “And I don’t like it…and just what the hell is that?”

Hawke looked closer and saw a woman suspended over the enclosure.

“Could that be Nightingale?” Ryan said, squinting through the snow.

“Holy crap, that’s the asset,” Dempsey said, and began radioing information into a concealed headset.

Hawke gave him a look. “It’s not an asset, Dempsey, it’s a person, and she happens to be an old friend of mine.”

“Sorry…”

“Forget it,” Hawke said flatly. “Listen up, here’s the plan.”

Alex Reeve had spent an agonizing length of time being slowly winched down toward the crocodiles. As each link in the chain had clunked in the housing, inching her ever closer, she had felt sick as her death drew ever nearer. In that time, Vetrov had been busy preparing to move out — mocking her as he gave his men orders and loaded his gear into the helicopters. Now he was ready for the short chopper flight to Moscow where his private jet was fuelled and ready to go.

She watched Vetrov and Kosma move to the door for the final time as the chain hoist lowered her slowly toward the snapping crocodiles, but then she heard the sound of smashing glass and glanced up to see something fall from the atrium roof into the water. A second later there was an enormous underwater explosion which sent a colossal wave of spray into the air, followed by flying bloody chunks of what she could only presume were crocodile, blown apart by the force of the grenade.

Vetrov staggered backwards and stared upwards at the roof in horror, the smile officially wiped from his face. Another grenade came down into the water and a second explosion made an even more lethal impact inside the enclosure.

The Russian called out with his arms wide open in shock. “Anubis! Osiris! My darlings!”

The calm, controlled madness of the enclosure room had now turned to chaos as Vetrov began to scream orders at his men, starting with Kosma, who snatched up a closed-bolt Uzi pistol and began spraying nine mil parabellum bullets in a lethal arc across the glass-roofed atrium.

The other men followed suit and discharged their weapons in the direction of the atrium, spraying the glass with lead and shattering it into thousands of pieces. It fell through the air like crystal, followed by tons of the snow which had been accumulating on it since the start of the blizzard. The snow blew into the expansive room and added a further degree of confusion to the chaos.

“Kill them all!” Vetrov screamed hoarsely as his enraged eyes searched the destroyed enclosure for any signs of life.

Then the main doors blew off their hinges in a cloud of dust and splinters and a second later a man in a black Special Forces mask rushed into the room. He slung a shotgun over one shoulder and pulled a submachine gun off the other, firing in controlled, short bursts at the men in the room. His aim was lethally accurate, and he took out three of them with only six bullets in less than ten seconds.

He hit the reverse gear on the rigging and Alex began to rise back toward the shattered atrium as the fighting intensified. He directed the chain hoist to bring her back down outside the enclosure and she landed with a thud on the paving.

As the bullets flew over their heads, the masked man wordlessly ripped off her duct tape and freed her, but was then gone into the fray, stopping only to fire two rounds into a man running toward them. His bullets struck the man in the skull and sprayed high-velocity spatter all over wall behind him.

Alex took advantage of her new freedom and dragged herself away from the water with her arms in an attempt to hide behind Vetrov’s depraved viewing platform, but at that moment she watched with stomach-turning terror as the head of a crocodile emerged from the depths and headed in her direction, crawling through a hole in the enclosure fence made by one of the grenades.

Vetrov saw what was happening and smiled with a mixture of relief and amusement. “Sekhmet, my darling… kill her!”

She jumped with fear as the bullets traced over her head, the terror of her vulnerability coursing through her veins like never before. Back in the CIA, when she had been on active operations all over the world, she had known the feeling of adrenalin rushing through her system, and she had known gun fights where her own survival was at stake, but she had never seen anything like this. This was total war — an all-out, open fire-fight with dozens of machine guns and hand grenades. It was total chaos, far-removed from the world of covert intelligence and computer surveillance she had trained for. And now a crocodile was hunting her.

Other masked men stormed the room, rappelling down through the atrium and pushing deeper into the fight. They took out two more of Vetrov’s goons as the lead man drew closer to the panicking Russian. Alex was now beginning to wonder just who the hell this guy was, but her thoughts were disrupted by the sight of Darling Sekhmet crawling out of the water and moving slowly toward her.

She raised her weight up on the strength of her arms and started to pull herself back, dragging her powerless legs as fast as she could, cursing them for failing her as the crocodile’s jaws began to open and revealed dozens of hideous yellow teeth, much larger in reality than they had ever looked in the pictures she had seen.

Slowly it gained on her until it was a matter of inches from her legs. It stopped for a second and she looked deep into its reptilian eyes. It was looking back at her, studying her weaknesses, and then it lunged forward, its jaws opening faster than anything she had ever seen in her life. She screamed and instinctively shut her eyes tight as she prepared for the attack.

Then she heard three sharp cracks from her left, close by and deafening. She opened her eyes and saw the masked man had returned and fired three shotgun rounds into the crocodile’s head and exploded half its skull into oblivion. It now lay motionless and dead less than an inch from her legs. Slowly its jaws closed in response to the lethal attack.

The man wasted no time with pleasantries and shouldered the shotgun before snatching her up in a fireman’s lift and hurling her over his shoulder. With his arm wrapped tightly around her legs, he ran from the room. Her head hung down behind his back, and the last thing she saw from her new upside-down perspective was Maxim Vetrov ordering Kosma and the surviving men to retreat as another man in a black mask rappelled through the atrium room and descended into the chaos of the enclosure.

The masked man carried her along the same corridor Kosma has used to take her to the enclosure, only now she was being rescued instead of taken to her execution. Behind her, she heard the screams of dying men as the battle raged on. They turned a corner and went into what looked like a library, inside which were two people — an attractive woman with her hair tied back and a slightly younger man with messy hair and a Superman t-shirt.

“Take care of her,” screamed the man, and then he placed her down gently. “I’m going back to find Dempsey.”

The man slipped through the door and disappeared into the smoke.

“Hi,” the woman said. “I’m Lea, and this is Ryan.”

Ryan gave her the slightest nod and an awkward wave, but no smile.

“You must be Nightingale?” As she spoke, she and Ryan moved her to a soft chair and tried to make her comfortable.

“Er… sure, but you can call me Alex, I guess.”

“Sure thing, Alex. Good to meet you at last. Joe’s told me a lot about you.”

“Joe Hawke?”

Lea nodded. “Holds you in the highest of regards, he does.”

Alex’s head was still spinning from the action of five minutes ago. “That’s good to know. Is he here? When can I meet him?”

Ryan smiled and pushed some hair away from his face. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you just did.” He nodded at the door where Hawke had brought her into the room.

Alex watched their faces, and then glanced back over her shoulder at the door she had just come through. “Oh… got it.”

“You’ll get used to it,” Ryan said.

Lea raised an eyebrow. “Or not.”

“I’m sure I will, but I have to tell you something. It’s really important.”

Ryan sighed. “Most things seem to be these days.”

“Vetrov kidnapped me to get information — he wanted the name of someone I’ve been working with on the map — Dario Mazzarro. The thing is…” she looked down, ashamed. “I gave it to him. I was scared, I thought he was going to kill me. We have to get to Venice to warn Mazzarro before Vetrov gets to him.”

“We can do that,” Lea said.

“Hell yeah,” Ryan said. “I’ve always wanted to go to Venice.”

“There’s more than that, Vetrov also mentioned something about how he couldn’t fail like all the others because he knew the darkest truth of all.”

“Standard evil genius waffle,” Lea said. “Heard it all before.”

“No, he said he knew about the existence of a group called the athanatoi. I don’t know what that means but I have a feeling they’re behind all of this hell.”

Ryan jerked his head up and stared at Alex. “Say that again.”

“About the darkest truth?”

“No, the last thing you said — the people Vetrov said he knew existed.”

“The athanatoi.”

Ryan frowned.

“What’s the matter, Ry?” Lea was unsettled by the look of concern now crossing Ryan’s face like a shadow. “What does it mean?”

“It’s Greek — it means The Immortals.”

Scarlet, Karlsson and Lexi fired a ferocious volley of return fire at Kodiak, and forced the Russian to retreat behind a parked Nissan, but now the beating of the chopper’s rotor blades was louder than ever. A moment later it drifted into view above the towering Europa-Center building complex on the Breitscheidplatz just off Budapester Strasse where they were currently taking cover behind the thrashed BMW.

“That doesn’t look good,” Lexi said.

“Seconded,” Karlsson said.

“Thirded,” added Scarlet, craning her neck to look for an egress point. “Over there!”

She pointed to a large gatehouse complex on the other side of the street. It looked Chinese in its construction, and two large stone elephants stood silent guard either side of the gates. A large sign said Zoologischer Garten Berlin.

“You want to take us to the zoo?” Lexi said.

“Hey, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,” Karlsson said, smiling. “Can I have an ice cream when we get in there?”

The chopper came down into the center of Budapester Strasse and Kodiak clambered inside. As it rose up into the air, Scarlet saw at least three police cars racing up the street behind it in their direction, and then the chopper moved closer and made a ninety-degree turn so its side door was facing them.

“Incoming!” Karlsson shouted, and the three of them raced away from the BMW as an RPG tore through the air from the hovering Bell and hit their car, sending a gargantuan explosion of metal, glass shards and burning petrol into the air.

The police cars skidded all over the road, the confusion of their drivers obvious as they slammed on reverse and moved away from the carnage unfolding in the center of their capital city.

In the chaos, Scarlet Sloane and her sub-unit slipped away with the map into the Berlin Zoological Gardens, but behind them, the newly airborne Kodiak gave chase.