Valhalla Gold

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Her mind was now focussed on nothing but the fateful mission ahead of her.

Lexi Zhang slid her hand along the pipe guard railing as she skipped down the steps and made her way to the wheelhouse. From the crow’s nest of the modest trawler, she had studied the silhouette of the small island known to a tiny elite as Elysium, but now they were closing in and it was time to shut down the engines.

Federico had been fishing these waters for most of his life and had nodded casually when she showed him the coordinates. “Isla privada…” he had said with a nonchalant shrug of the shoulders.

“Si,” she had said. “Don’t worry about.” She checked the fisherman’s tired eyes to see if he had understood her broken Castilian. It was all she had, and no matter how many subjunctives she mangled it was better than poor Federico’s English. After deciding his Mandarin was probably even worse, she made another sentence in her Spanish.

“Veinte minutos,” he said in reply with an apologetic smile.

He lit up an ancient-looking pipe and leaned against the rickety navigation panel as he blew the cloud of sweet-smelling tobacco into the hot air. He resumed the story about how he had inherited his father’s gambling debts and not for the first time Lexi wondered if she shouldn’t just shoot him and give him to the sharks, but that wouldn’t be fair she thought. Not on the sharks, at any rate.

She decided to get some fresh air and stepped out onto the deck. Slowly the old boat creaked forward in the water and drew her ever closer to her mission. She wondered if she should check the weapons again, but she’d already done it more times than she could remember. This wasn’t like her, but then this wasn’t like a regular mission.

Now, Lexi swayed softly with the gentle rocking of the boat as it drifted a mile off-shore in the darkness of night. There was a calm stillness to the ocean she had loved since she was a small child and this was about as smooth as things got. Here in what sailors called the intertropical convergence zone the trades could drop away and leave a sailing boat lost at sea for what might be as good as eternity.

She looked up into the sky and noted the full moon. A mistake on her part, but not one that would stop her doing her business tonight. A little way to the moon’s left, Jupiter hung silently in the sky. She stared at the tiny cream disc until the motion of the boat began to make her feel uneasy. It was time to go.

As the engines puttered to silence, Lexi paid Federico the second half of his fee. He took hold of the heavy brown envelope with a sweaty hand and peered inside. Smirking and nodding with satisfaction, he unfastened a small rowing boat at the rear of the trawler and pushed it into the water.

He held its mooring rope tightly in his hands. “This is where we part company,” he said in Spanish.

Lexi understood and climbed into the small boat with her tool bag over her shoulder. A few seconds later she was rowing gently to the high cliffs on the west coast of the island, and Federico started up his engines and steered the boat back to port. Now she was on her own.

The island rose up before her, its craggy tropical cliffs looming higher than she’d expected — but this was the last place anyone would attempt an insertion on Elysium and so that was the plan.

When she was fifty feet from the shore she used one of the oars to test the depth of the water and it was just as she expected — knee high and an inviting twenty degrees. She retracted the oars and secured them in the rowlocks before pulling her bag of tricks from beneath the sternsheets and shouldering it. Then, she stepped into the ocean and walked silently to the shore in the moonlight, dragging the boat behind her with the mooring rope.

After securing the boat to a lonely coconut palm in the breaker zone, she took a deep breath and tilted her head back to survey the cliffs towering above her. Then she pulled on a pair of crag gloves and began to ascend the sharp, vertical rocks. Also as she had expected, this was the sort of classic volcanic cliff that was so common to this part of the world, and especially on a former volcanic island such as Elysium.

She struggled onwards and upwards, the heavy weight of the weapons in her bag pulling on her back all the way. She used a heel hook to get some pressure on a hold, and then a few yards from the top she gripped what she thought was a secure arête, but then it broke loose and she swung wildly to her left. She hung on for her life with one hand as the treacherous piece of cliff tumbled the few hundred feet to the beach below and smashed into the moonlit surf.

Lexi strained to keep her grip as she swung her right hand up and grabbed hold of another small ridge. She balanced her bodyweight and used a move known to climbers as a gaston where she pushed her thumb down into a crag and forced her elbow out in order to push herself upwards just enough to reach a more secure hold. She sighed with relief. She was too high to bail out now, she thought, and kept on going.

Finally she crawled onto the top of the cliff and took a second to get her breath back. Looking behind her, she was able to make out the faint silhouette of Federico’s boat as he steamed toward the horizon. Ahead of her Elysium stretched out, majestic and tranquil. From one of the highest points on the island she was able to survey everything. She put a night-vision monocular to her eye and began to study the facts.

Directly below her, on the eastern slopes of her conquered mountain, she saw what looked like the western perimeter of the ECHO complex. Standard fare, she thought without emotion — it looked like a razorwire fence, clearly electrified by the solar-powered chargers and insulators she could see — and by the looks of the photodetectors and mirrors she thought she could spy a laser tripwire alarm just inside the perimeter fence as well. She expected nothing less.

I wonder, she contemplated with interest, exactly what Richard Eden keeps hidden away in this place?

She made her way down the slope, weaving in and out of the tropical undergrowth. In places it was so thick she was forced to hack her way clear with a machete. At times like this, she thought, was it all worth it? What was it that drove her onward through the night like this, so far from her family and the comfort of home? Ah yes, she thought… I remember now.

But she wasn’t here to reminisce. She brought her attention back to the mission. This was about settling old scores and righting old wrongs. Ever since Joe Hawke had run into her life again back in Hong Kong she knew this day was inevitable. It was just the way things were with her and sometimes she felt like she couldn’t stop herself even if she wanted to.

At the bottom of the mountain she stopped again and refocussed. Her mind was buzzing with a mix of adrenalin and dopamine as she went through her mission plan once again — it was always like this… When the hunt was getting hot and the victims’ end drawing closer, only this time there were so many differences. This time there could be no going back, and she knew it. For a second, she felt her heart waver — was she really going to go through with this?

Yes, she said, newly determined and pushing all doubt from her mind. She was a highly trained assassin and this mission was a cakewalk, not to mention the new life she would have after it. Her mission objective was sitting down there somewhere in a secret, luxury compound in this paradise, and it was time to reintroduce them all to the Dragonfly.