by Rob Jones
Neverov’s face hardened. “This is no problem. I am able to fly it. It is a Ukrainian plane flown by many Russian companies and military units. I have flown one before.”
“What you’re talking about is insane! It’s suicide!”
“It is my choice, Special Agent Fox!”
Amy lowered her voice. She knew there was no changing his mind. “This is crazy.”
“I will get inside the first Antonov, kill the crew and seize the aircraft. Then I will fly in a circuit and return to the complex. You will seize the one behind it and stop the others from taking off. When I bring the plane about, do not be within a kilometer of this place.”
Amy looked at Hunter for support, but the Englishman was already reloading the Uzi he had snatched from one of the dead men. “We’re really going to let him do this?” she asked.
Hunter said nothing.
“It’s his choice,” Blanco said. “And he’s right. There’s no other way to destroy this Aimatos creation of his.”
“Good… we are agreed. Now get out of here!” Neverov said. “Get as far away as you can!”
As the older Russian man handed her his dog tags, Amy couldn’t hide her shock. “Why would you do this for us?”
“I am not a genocidal tyrant. The Wolf Pack were not psychopaths. We were trained Russian soldiers here to do a job. That job was to retrieve the Aimatos microorganism and return it to private labs in Moscow for analysis and then hide it from the world. We were just trying to do for our country what you were trying to do for yours, but I failed.”
“You mean, my enemy’s enemy is my friend?” Hunter said.
Neverov managed a sour smile. “Something like that, Major Hunter. You were worthy adversaries. Now, take my dog tags and get away before it’s too late. I will fly this Antonov into the airfield and make sure this nightmare ends here and now. This my only chance of redemption and I must seize it while I still can.”
“I still don’t know about this,” Amy said. “We’d have to place a lot of trust in you to do that.”
“We can trust him.” Hunter said, turning to Neverov. “I know you’re a man of your word.”
A sad nod. “And now it’s time to go! Run!”
Hunter wasted no time in implementing the Russian’s plan. As Neverov ran ahead of them toward the first Antonov, the Englishman led the rest of the HARPA team out onto the airfield and up the back of the rear cargo door of the second Antonov. Resistance was as fierce as he’d expected. Firing on the men in the back of the giant aircraft, they worked hard to get up inside and make their way along to the cockpit.
Hunter ripped a grenade from his belt and threw it inside. “Down!”
His team pulled back and took cover.
The cockpit exploded in a blinding burst of white light and electric sparks. The force of the detonation blasted the Perspex windows out into the night air, leaving only their bent and burned frames sticking out like charred ribs.
Flames covered every surface of the flight deck and thick black clouds of smoke spewed from the polyurethane foam chairs and billowed up onto the ceiling. It rolled out of the cockpit and into the main cabin and created a noxious black fog. Seconds later, the sound of gunfire echoed from somewhere back down in the Antonov’s cavernous cargo hold.
Hunter sprinted away from the burning cockpit and took the narrow metal stairs leading down from the upper deck three at a time. Leaping the bottom six steps, he landed with a crash on the lower deck and was heading straight for the first exit when he heard an Uzi firing. He turned and saw one of the Brothers shooting at Jodie.
She dived to the riveted plate floor, rolling away from the rounds as they chewed into the metal all around her. She reached out for the gun and grabbed it, swinging it around at arms’ length and firing on her opponent. Exposed and with nowhere to run, his arrogant confidence in his own ability to hunt her down was the end of him. Jodie fired into the big man’s chest and blasted rounds into him.
After the first three had found their mark, she closed her eyes, finger still squeezing on the trigger. Empty cases flew from the ejector port and the smell of gunfire exploded in the air but she didn’t stop until the whole mag was clear. Then she heard the sound of dry clicks as the hammer struck empty space. She opened her eyes in time to see the man’s shredded body crash down onto the floor and sprawl out in a dead heap beside a pallet of Aimatos canisters.
Aware that the aircraft was turning to the right, Hunter called out to his friends. “We need to get out of here right now! Neverov won’t waste time!”
They sprinted out of the rear cargo door and into the night. The chaos had grown. The long line of Antonovs were trapped behind the one they had just disabled, but the explosion in the cockpit had caused the aircraft to turn to the right. An impact with the third Antonov was inevitable and now Hunter watched as it ploughed into it and exploded.
A fireball blasted out into the night, lighting everything as bright as day for a few seconds and then fading back to black. The rest of the crew were abandoning the third Antonov now, streaming out of any exit they could find and making a break from the burning aircraft. With well over seventy thousand gallons of highly flammable kerosene in the wings rapidly approaching its flashpoint, Hunter couldn’t disagree with their strategy. Then, he saw the first Antonov roaring along the runway, its six monstrous turbofans growling as they lifted the one and half million pound aircraft up off the airfield and into the night.
“There goes Neverov. We need to be far away from here, guys!”
Through the carnage, they saw an airplane pushback tractor rumbling through the smoke toward them. Standing on top of it, Belisarius was holding an Uzi in each hand and cursing in his ancient language. With the tractor still driving along the runway beside one of the Antonov’s, he was aiming both guns at Hunter and Amy and the rest of the team as he cried out in rage and fired.
But the tractor got too close to the Antonov’s number six engine which was still at full throttle and making the plane spin around. With the turbofan’s blades spinning at nearly twenty thousand revolutions per minute, Hunter knew what came next. He grabbed Amy and turned her away from the scene a second before Belisarius got sucked through the rapidly spinning blades and blasted into the axial flow compressor into a thousand pieces.
As his body parts were sprayed out the back of the jet in a bloody mist, Quinn doubled over and vomited but time had run out. Blanco was pointing into the sky at the ominous sight of Neverov’s Antonov as it wheeled in the night and aimed directly for where they were standing.
The team went quiet for a split second.
“Go, go go!” Hunter yelled. “Now!”
They sprinted off the apron, running through the burning oil smoke, away into the scrub surrounding the complex. They made it to Neverov’s kilometer just in time to see Kandarian stumble out of the back of the last Antonov and register with terrified horror what was about to happen to him. Then Neverov was true to his word, and ploughed the giant strategic airlift cargo plane into the apron, directly striking the head of the line and exploding everything in the most ferocious fireball any of them had ever seen.
The momentum of the speeding Antonov caused a domino effect, smashing each aircraft into the next and triggering fireball after fireball after fireball. A wild conflagration exploded and lit the night for miles, spraying burning jet fuel and twisted metal debris across the airfield. The heat scorched their faces as they watched, and in the middle of it all, Alexios Kandarian had been incinerated along with his Aimatos nightmare. Turning from the carnage, the team made their way back along the goat track until they reached the Otokar Cobra. On the short walk, none of them spoke a word.
Then Blanco swung open the Cobra’s driver door. “C’mon. Let’s get the hell out of this place.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Back at the airport a few miles to the north, dawn rose over the Turkish horizon. Hunter walked across the warm asphalt apron and wearily climbed up inside the HARPA j
et. He was grateful it was here; James Gates had ordered the pilots to fly out to Iğdir as soon as Amy had told him where they were going and they had taken off from Athens immediately.
The first flight of the day, the Russian Ilyushin that had delivered them to this place, roared off the runway and gradually disappeared into the southern sky as it flew back to its base in Syria. Hunter paused on the Gulfstream’s top step and took one last look at the airport before stepping inside the private plane.
“Any sign of the Brotherhood out there, Hunter?” Jodie asked.
He shook his head and crashed down into one of the leather seats. “Not that I could see – and when are you going to start calling me Max instead of Hunter?”
“When I know you better,” she said.
“You mean like when we’ve been through something serious and life-changing together?”
“Sure.”
He shook his head but said nothing. They were all too shaken up by what they had seen back in the mountains. Neverov’s resurrection, the truth about what the Revelation relic really was, Kandarian’s insane weaponization of it into Aimatos and then the sight of twelve Antonov An-225s exploding in the night in the heart of the Armenian Highlands. It was a week none of them would ever forget.
Stretching out in his seat, Hunter breathed a long sigh of relief. Beside him, Amy was pulling a blanket from a bag. She looked exhausted.
“Getting ready for a good day’s sleep?” he said.
“And then some.”
Jodie laughed. “Me too.”
“Looks like we’re not alone,” said Amy.
Hunter glanced down the aisle, and sure enough she was right. Lewis and Blanco were settling down at the back, each too tired to talk. Quinn was already asleep. Then, the pilot spoke to them over the cabin speaker. Hunter presumed it was a message to prepare them for take-off, but he was wrong.
“This is a message for Special Agent Fox,” he said. “We have an incoming communication from Director Gates. It’s on the plasma screen.”
The announcement woke Quinn, who grumbled and begrudgingly opened her eyes. Amy was already staring wide-eyed at the screen up on the cabin wall when Jim Gates’s familiar face appeared. It was odd seeing the rain of Washington DC on the window behind him. It all looked so normal and safe compared with what they had just been through.
“I hear congratulations are in order,” Gates said.
Amy huffed out what might have been a very cynical laugh. “I’m not seeing it quite that way, but thanks all the same.”
“You had a mission and you succeeded. Good work.”
“Thanks,” Hunter said. “It was a piece of cake.”
The sound of Blanco chuckling from the back made Gates frown. “Some sort of in-joke?”
“You could say that,” Hunter said.
“It’s good you’re settling in, Dr Hunter. Amy, you look like you could use a shower and a few days off.”
Amy managed a weary laugh. “Try a month off.”
“That’s too bad,” Gates said. “All I can offer you is twenty-four hours.”
The team members turned and stared at each other. Blanco said, “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
“Yeah, you do,” Jodie said.
“If this call is about the mission debriefing, Jim,” Amy said. “It’s going to have to wait.”
“It’s not, but the mission debriefing is going to have to wait, all the same.”
Amy’s tired eyes narrowed. “Why?” she asked cautiously.
“We have a problem. A big problem.”
“Another one?” Quinn said.
“Yes,” Gates said. “And this one might just make your last few days seem like a Sunday school picnic.”
“That I find hard to believe,” Lewis said.
Amy sighed. “What’s it about this time, Jim?”
Gates stared into the camera, as usual his face giving away nothing. “Tell me, Team HARPA, what do you guys know about the Titanic?”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
With this story at an end, it only remains to say that book three of the Hunter Files is already underway and I’ll update with more news as soon as I have it. The third novel is called The Titanic Mystery and promises to be a very different kind of adventure for the HARPA team.
Long-time readers of my Joe Hawke series will no doubt see many similarities in the style and subject matter between those books and this new series. For readers new to these escapist blockbuster-style stories, the first novel in my Joe Hawke series is called The Vault of Poseidon and is also available for Amazon Kindle.
Please consider leaving a review if you enjoyed this novel.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rob Jones has published twenty-three international Kindle bestsellers, including the Joe Hawke series, the Avalon Adventures, the Cairo Sloane series, the Raiders series and the Harry Bane Thriller series. He has also recently published Angel of Death, the sequel to The Fifth Grave, a romantic suspense thriller starring DCI Tom Jacob, set in England’s beautiful Wiltshire Downs. The Revelation Relic is the second novel in The Hunter Files, a brand-new series of fast-paced archaeological adventure thrillers. Part three, The Titanic Mystery is slated for release in 2020.
If you would like to stay up to date with new releases and other information from Rob Jones, simply click on the following link to his website and join his newsletter.
Max Hunter and Amy Fox return in THE TITANIC MYSTERY
Other Books by Rob Jones:
The Hunter Files
The Atlantis Covenant (The Hunter Files #1)
The Revelation Relic (The Hunter Files #2)
The Titanic Mystery (The Hunter Files #3) – Coming Soon
The Joe Hawke Series
The Vault of Poseidon (Joe Hawke #1)
Thunder God (Joe Hawke #2)
The Tomb of Eternity (Joe Hawke #3)
The Curse of Medusa (Joe Hawke #4)
Valhalla Gold (Joe Hawke #5)
The Aztec Prophecy (Joe Hawke #6)
The Secret of Atlantis (Joe Hawke #7)
The Lost City (Joe Hawke #8)
The Sword of Fire (Joe Hawke #9)
The King’s Tomb (Joe Hawke #10)
Land of the Gods (Joe Hawke #11)
The Orpheus Legacy (Joe Hawke #12)
Hell’s Inferno (Joe Hawke #13)
Day of the Dead (Joe Hawke #14)
Shadow of the Apocalypse (Joe Hawke #15) – Coming Soon
The Cairo Sloane Series
Plagues of the Seven Angels (Cairo Sloane #1)
The Avalon Adventures
The Hunt for Shambhala (An Avalon Adventure #1)
Treasure of Babylon (An Avalon Adventure #2)
The Doomsday Cipher (Avalon Adventure #3) – Coming Soon
The Raiders Series
The Raiders (The Raiders #1)
The Harry Bane Thriller Series
The Armageddon Protocol (A Harry Bane Thriller #1)
The DCI Jacob Mystery Series
The Fifth Grave (A DCI Jacob Mystery)
Angel of Death (A DCI Jacob Mystery)
Visit Rob on the links below for all the latest news and information:
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @AuthorRobJones
Facebook: www.facebook.com/RobJonesNovels
Website: www.robjonesnovels.com
Copyright © 2020 by Rob Jones
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THE REVELATION RELIC is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places and occurrences are entirely fictional products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to perso
ns living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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