The Vault of Poseidon

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The silhouette of the Thalassa appeared on the horizon, and Hawke and the others prepared to go to war. He’d done enough fast rope drills in his time to know what was coming, and for that reason Yannis Demetriou would be staying on board the chopper with the crew until the yacht was secured.

Hart’s V Squadron men readied the abseiling equipment at the doors while Pavlopoulos and his men were calmly talking in Greek and pointing out the window at the water below. Scarlet checked her weapons and tied her hair back.

Hawke watched her and smiled.

“I want to look my best for when I kill Zaugg,” she said.

Then the chopper veered heavily to the right, causing everyone to hold on to the grab handles and steady themselves. “They know we’re here!” shouted the pilot. “We’re coming under heavy fire.”

The pilot took more evasive action before swinging around to a parallel position along the portside. Chief swung open the door and unleashed a terrific burst of fire from the M60 clamped inside the chopper. It spat fire all over the boat, splitting the wooden deck and taking out two rows of cabin windows on the superyacht’s upper deck.

“Damn that’s fun!” he shouted, spinning the gun around to take out an offensive position on the rear deck. Down on the boat, the surviving men scattered to take cover.

“We can’t get near the rear deck and the helipad,” the pilot told them over the radio. “Too heavily defended. We’ll go to the front as per Plan B and you fight your way back.”

The pilot brought the chopper down to a hovering position over the broader front deck and Hawke led the way down the ropes while Chief provided cover with the M60. Then with Chief on the deck, the chopper banked hard to the right and flew to safety.

It was time to fight.

As soon as they were on the deck, they fanned out in a standard position and began their assault. Hawke staked out his territory by firing into the bridge and taking out two men in a hail of hot lead and smashed glass. Maybe he would get back in the saddle faster than he thought.

He approached the lower deck, submachine gun raised, butt in his shoulder and eye firmly down the sights. A man appeared at the top of a flight of metal steps on the starboard side of the yacht. He was holding a pistol, but a cool double-tap from Hawke and he was over the side of the boat, gun and all.

Between Hawke, Scarlet, Pavlopoulos and one of his men, they made the classic four-man SAS patrol, with Sparky set up behind them on the bow with the M60, pinning down Zaugg’s men inside the boat. On the other side of the boat Hart led Chief and the other two Greek men.

Hawke’s unit arrived at a door on the starboard side which he smashed open with a solid kick from his boot. Behind them they heard more blood-curdling screams as Sparky took out another man on the bridge.

Hawke was beginning to wonder if their small military unit was more than a match for Zaugg’s crew of sloppy part-timers and unpredictable mercs. But now, as they moved closer to the heart of the yacht, the fighting got more intense. Zaugg’s men fought hard to protect not only their boss’s life but their own.

Hawke charged the next door and burst inside, his bullets taking two men with Uzis totally out of the game and redecorating Zaugg’s plush interior with unsettling amounts of their blood. Nothing he hadn’t seen before, he thought, but this time he questioned the morality of the thing. Was he losing it? He shook the thought from his mind and stormed forwards.

“We have to find Lea and the others!” he shouted, ducking behind a well-stocked bar. As he spoke, a volley of submachine gun fire from two directions raced over his head and slammed into the wall behind him, splintering the oak veneer and sending shards of smashed vodka bottles into the air like chiselled ice.

This was going to get nasty.

He made a swift double-roll across the glass-encrusted carpet and slid into the main corridor on the starboard side of the yacht. Somewhere to his left he heard Hart’s team hard at work fighting what sounded like a heavy general purpose machine gun. Zaugg had this place armed like his own private military base, he thought.

The others joined him, with Pavlopoulos at the rear covering them with his M4 carbine and making a serious mess of the yacht as he did so. He looked like he was enjoying himself.

Hawke saw a staircase ahead, and knew it must lead to the rear deck and the helipad. He had noticed that they were now meeting less resistance. Either Hart and her team had too many of them tied down on the port side or Zaugg was planning a retreat to somewhere he could gather more forces for his main attack on Poseidon’s final resting place.

Then, he heard a familar voice. “Joe!” It was Ryan and Sophie.

“Bloody hell!” he said, relieved to have secured two of the hostages. “You’re alive, Rupert.”

This time, Ryan was too relieved to comment. “We’re alive, but only just.”

“All good?” Hawke asked.

“They keelhauled someone, Joe!” Sophie said. “A man named Matteo Grasso — a worker here on the boat. He was under the water for several minutes and when they dragged him back on the deck he was cut to ribbons.”

“She’s telling the truth,” Ryan said. “These guys are total maniacs.”

“Where’s Lea?” Hawke asked.

“We disabled the engine and she went to sabotage the helicopter.”

Hawke smiled. “Smart girl. Let’s get to the helipad. That’s Zaugg’s only way out now.”

They ascended the carpeted stairs, and Scarlet went into the lead. She turned the corner at the top of the steps and was out of sight for a few seconds.

“If this is as good as it gets, I’m disappointed,” Pavlopoulos said, smiling. He had a flesh wound on his left temple. He wiped the sweat from his eyes and reloaded the M4. Somewhere on the deck was another burst of machine gun fire followed by hoarse screams. “Hopefully not one of ours,” he added, breathing hard.

“Nope,” Scarlet said, returning with a smoking gun. “Turns out he wasn't my type.”

They hit the landing and went through a door leading to the rear deck. Pavlopoulos’s man took the lead. He moved too fast, and then Hawke saw it but it was too late.

“No!” he shouted, but the soldier had already tripped the wire, and was blown to pieces by a booby-trapped grenade.

Pavlopoulos could do nothing to save him, and watched with uncontained horror as the smoke cleared and the devastation appeared before him. He gritted his teeth. “For this, they will pay a thousand times over.”

Before Hawke could stop him Pavlopoulos sprinted onto the deck with his carbine spitting fire.

Hawke and Scarlet followed him out, taking secure positions and covering him, but he was like a man possessed, wiping out three more of Zaugg’s men without fear of being struck. He had clearly been away from combat situations for too long and was making a serious misjudgment.

His bravado was misplaced, and seconds later he was peppered through from the rear by a man hiding behind a circular staircase winding up to the helipad. Blood exploded through his chest like an over-the-top Hollywood special effect. His eyes widened in terror before he slammed face down into the deck with a sickening crunch as his face hit the hard teak.

Now, renewed chaos reigned. Hawke and Scarlet had no time to grieve for Pavlopoulos, He had reacted unprofessionally to the loss of his man, possibly haunted by memories of his grandfather, and his wreckless act had cost him his life. Hawke wouldn’t make the same mistake.

On the deck they met up with Olivia Hart and Chief. The other soldiers Pavlopoulos had given them were also dead, a stunning testament to the abilities of ordinary soldiers in a Special Forces environment, Hawke thought.

Now all of the Greeks were dead and they were down to a handful of specialists at the stern of the boat, Sparky at the front with the GPMG and Ryan and Sophie. He had to find Lea.

More machine gun fire was pouring down on them from somewhere up on the top deck where the helipad was situated. They returned fire, and a man fell over the rail and sailed past them on his way into the drink. He landed with a tremendous splash and disappeared beneath the waves.

Hawke sprinted up the circular staircase leading to the helipad, followed closely by Scarlet and the commodore. All three of them firing in formation to keep the last of Zaugg’s men pinned down.

A tall man with a flesh wound on his head fired a submachine gun at them but scrambled for cover when Hawke returned fire. His shots tore a line of holes in the mesh support struts of the helipad. Hawke rolled across an exposed section of the deck and rose up to fire on the men guarding the chopper.

“We need to take that chopper out of the equation,” he shouted. “Without that they’re not going anywhere.”

But then Zaugg appeared from the top of the other staircase, with Lea in his arms and a silver pearl-handled revolver at her head, flashing in the bright Mediterranean sun.

“Mr Hawke, I presume,” he shouted across the windy deck. “We meet at last, but sadly, I am sure, only for the briefest of moments.”

“Let her go, Zaugg!” Hawke shouted back.

“Drop your weapons, or I will put a bullet in her head.” Zaugg was no longer grinning, but instead looked mildly rattled. He slowly paced backwards, nearing the helicopter, and shouted some orders at Baumann who then climbed into the Bell.

“Do as he says!” Hawke told the others. He lowered the submachine gun to the deck, never once taking his eyes off Lea’s terrified face.

Everyone put down their weapons and then Zaugg relaxed. “You come at a very opportune moment, Mr Hawke,” Zaugg said. “For just a few seconds ago we were preparing to keelhaul Miss Donovan here.”

Lea struggled in Zaugg’s icy grip.

“You bastard, Zaugg!” Hawke shouted.

“Ah! The English gentleman… You need have no fear. Miss Donovan is saved, because you are the one I want to see keelhauled.”

Before Hawke could react, Zaugg barked some orders in German and some men grabbed him and dragged him across the helipad.

“I do prefer to perform this operation at the bow of the Thalassa so I can enjoy it over my breakfast, but as it is, we shall be forced to do it here, because I have much business to attend to and so little time.”

The men began to bind the ropes tightly around Hawke, pinning his arms at his sides and permanently ending any chance he had of either escaping or being able to swim. Lea and the others held their breath in horror.

“It will bring me great pleasure to watch this,” Zaugg said, and clicked his fingers. Upon that command the men raised Hawke up over the side of the yacht and dropped him into the water below.

He smashed into the waves feet first, which was a small mercy in the circumstances. Training for the Special Boat Service is among the hardest and most gruelling in the world, being largely SAS training and then on top of that additional specialist underwater training.

Hawke had completed his commando training with ease and was soon a respected NCO in the Royal Marines, easily catching the attention of SBS recruiters. He had sailed through the endurance training, including the notorious ‘long drag’, a forty kilometer trek with a crushingly heavy bergen on his back, to be completed in less than twenty hours.

He had skipped easily over the special weapons training, the anti-terror training and the covert demolition courses. Combat survival techniques, jungle training, white noise torture training, food and water deprivation, piloting a boat from the ocean at full speed into the back of a hovering Chinook, interrogation resistance training that would break the hardest of men — all passed with flying colors.

But the worst was what made the men of the SBS so formidable: the underwater training. Being dropped from a helicopter into the sea in the middle of the night and having to make his own way on board a ship posing as an enemy vessel was as tough as it got, but proved to be useful because he’d had to do it for real since then on numerous occasions.

But as hard as SBS training was, no one ever tied him in ten meters of yacht rope and keelhauled him underneath a superyacht.

He knew what he was going to find down there — he had dived down beneath keels to fix mines on them enough times — and he wasn't disappointed. Despite the yacht’s pristine appearance from the surface, the bottom of the hull was peppered in razor-sharp barnacles, each one a savagely sharp blade. The lacerated body of Matteo Grasso that Sophie and Ryan told him about would have been an illustrated testament to their lethality.

Under the water the temperature dropped fast, and the light faded as he went deeper. He felt the tugs on the rope as Zaugg’s men dragged him deeper beneath the keel. Luckily, Ryan and Sophie had sabotaged the engine and this meant the ship was stationary in the water.

Thanks to that, his weight would ensure he would likely miss most of the devastating barnacle plates, and all he had to do was avoid drowning. His SBS training had taught him to hold his lungs for longer than Grasso had presumably been left underwater, and he clung to that hope as the ropes tugged him roughly under the yacht.