The Tomb of Eternity

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

With the chopper still blasting huge chunks of limestone out of the Khufu Pyramid, Hawke knew he had to switch his mind to battle mode and do something fast. In a surprise attack situation it was never a good idea to focus on strategy. The smart thing to do was work out what to do about it — think tactically. Revenge came later.

“Give me your weapon!”

“What?” Snowcat looked at him like he was insane.

“Your gun — hand it to me — now!”

“Russian agents do not give their guns to British soldiers.”

“Former soldier — now I’m just a loveable rogue. Now hand it over.” He put his hand out for the weapon and waggled his fingers.

“This is most unorthodox…”

“It’s now or never, Snowcat!”

She handed him the compact Makarov and he checked it was loaded and ready to fire. Two rounds.

“What are you going to do?”

Hawke jabbed the gun in the direction of the Apache. “I’m going to shoot that bloody thing down.”

“You can’t bring down a helicopter with a handgun, Hawke — especially an Apache!”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

She sighed. “And just how the hell are you going to do it?”

“We’re going to split up. You’re going to sprint over there toward that pyramid…”

“The Pyramid of Khafre?”

“If you say so, love.”

She looked at him with horror on her face. “You want me to be bait for an Apache helicopter’s chain gun?”

Hawke shrugged his shoulders. “Unless you think you stand a better chance of shooting it down?”

Snowcat looked at him and nodded in reluctant agreement. “All right, I’ll do it. I am not afraid of anything.”

“Good job — you go toward the Pyramid of Coffee or whatever you said it was called, and the bastard will turn to fire at you. When he turns I’ll get a clear shot at his rear rotor and bring him down.”

“This will work?”

“The slightest obstruction in those rotor blades at the back and that thing’s uncontrollable,” he said coolly.

“And if you miss?”

“If I miss you get shot with the chain gun and then they’ll turn around and put a hundred holes in me as well.”

She smiled awkwardly. “In that case, I’d prefer it, Englishman, if you did not miss.”

“Trust me, I won’t.”

Hawke watched Snowcat sprint from the entrance of the Pyramid of Khufu past the ancient boat pits and over the road. Just as he thought it would, the Apache responded in an instant, turning to port and moving forward slightly to close in on its new target. The sound of the engine was overwhelming from so close, and its downwash was kicking up a storm of sand and grit.

As Snowcat approached the Pyramid of Khafre, the Apache opened fire. Hawke watched in horror as a trail of bullets flicked up in the sand behind her with the terrible chak chak chak sound of the chain gun as it unloaded its lethal thirty mil rounds all over the young Russian woman.

Hawke slowed his breathing and remained calm. The image of Hugo Zaugg trying to kill Lea on the cable car entered his mind. For a second he was standing in the snow of the Alps and taking aim through the sniper’s rifle, but then the cold of the snow was washed away with the heat of the Egyptian desert — now it was another woman’s life in his hands.

He raised the pistol and cradled it with both hands. He squinted as he took aim, and prepared to take the shot. He knew bringing down a chopper with a single shot from a handgun was going to be hard work — almost impossible, some would say, but he also knew it had been done before.

In terms of its capacity to remain airborne, any chopper, Apaches included, was a very delicate piece of machinery. As a helicopter pilot himself, Hawke knew the function of the tail rotor was to stop the rest the machine spinning around under the force of the main rotors. It applied a counter torque to the force created by the main engine, and kept the whole thing airborne and stable.

Firing at the main rotor blades would achieve nothing. It was common knowledge among those who’d been there that Huey pilots back in the Vietnam War would use their main rotor blades to clear landing areas by pruning tree branches.

He’d done something similar on a mission in the Sierra Leone jungle, hovering his way down into a hole in the trees and having to slice his way back out of it because the downwash had sucked the canopies back over the top of the chopper. It was messy, and noisy, and wrecked the blades, but it was easier to replace a blade than a Special Forces operative so the Top Brass turned a blind eye. The tail rotor, on the other hand, was nowhere near as robust, and yet crucial to the stability of the aircraft.

“Fire!” Snowcat screamed. “They’re getting too close to me!”

“No, we have to wait until they slow down or their speed will stabilize the chopper after I hit the rotor.”

Having reached their target, the Apache slowed to a hover and turned gently in the hot air to fire the chain gun at the Russian agent for the second time.

“Hawke, this is getting a little too real right now!”

“Another second…”

A slow breath, a gentle squeeze of the trigger.

He fired the penultimate bullet in the Makarov’s magazine and hoped for the best.

He wasn’t disappointed.

The bullet struck one of the tail rotors and because of the chopper’s reduced hovering speed there was no longer enough lift on the vertical surfaces of the machine to help stabilize it.

Hawke watched as the pilot reacted to the loss of the tail rotor, altering the pitch of the main rotors and adjusting his speed, but it wasn’t enough. Finally he tried to cut the engine to allow autorotation — the force of the air rushing up as they descended — to force the rotors around, but they didn’t have the height.

They had been too greedy in their pursuit of Snowcat and a controlled descent was impossible. It plummeted toward the ground and just before it hit, Hawke directed his final shot into the fuel tank and the crippled helicopter went up in an enormous explosion, leaving nothing but a burned out shell amidst a hot fireball that fell through the sky and crashed into the sand at the southern edge of the Great Pyramid.

As the explosion dissipated and the smoke and dust began to clear, he saw Agent Snowcat was lying in the hot sand, motionless. He ran to her, and checked her vital signs. She was still alive, but her breathing was shallow and she had a flesh would on the side of her head. It looked like she had been knocked unconscious in the shockwave of the chopper when it exploded.

Hawke pulled her over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift and pocketed the Makarov before making a call to Eden. Both men of few words, it took just seconds to establish that Ryan had nailed down the Karnak Temple as the location of the other half of the map, and that Eden would send a chopper to pick them up and take them to the airport.

One step backwards, and two steps forwards, Hawke thought. That’s how you get where you want.