by Rob Jones
“Only victims,” the young man said, but in his heart he felt nothing but admiration for her as she unloaded a magazine of nine mil bullets. She had been the one cradling his head when he nearly died in Valhalla, after all.
Now Reaper made the same turn that had nearly sent the Hilux to the scrap-yard, but the FAP had a higher center of gravity than the pick-up. It made the turn with considerably less grace, and for a second before he straightened the wheel he thought they were going over.
The Hilux went in a different direction from the Escalade and Wrangler and soon they were zooming into a large town somewhere south of Belgrade. Seconds later they were all aware of a screaming siren behind them. Reaper flicked his eyes to the rear view and saw the blue and white stripes of the Serbian Police BMW F10 as it gave pursuit. “Shit!”
“What is it?” Lea said, turning in the back seat to look out the window. She saw the Beamer and sighed. “Shit!”
For Lea Donovan, she knew the hunt had started once again, and things were getting up-close and in her face. As Camacho hammered the FAP around another corner they saw he was making progress closing the gap between them and the Hilux, but now the Serb thugs were speeding along the A1, a straight highway south of the Belgrade suburb of Kumodrž. As they powered the FAP along the motorway the goons on the back took advantage of the long, straight road to open up the M240 on the flatbed and seconds later carnage exploded on the highway.
Innocent commuters and other travellers skidded left, right and center to avoid the lethal barrage of ammunition as the rounds ricocheted off the tarmac and punctured the steel panels of their cars.
On the back of the Hilux, one of the goons was still firing the GPMG as another fed more and more bullets into its firing chamber via the one hundred-round bandoleer in his hands. The metallic split-link ammo belt was designed to disintegrate as the machine gun swallowed the rounds and spat them at the enemy, but it still took the second member of the crew to feed more bandoleers into its hungry jaws.
Camacho reacted the same as the regular punters, skidding hard to the left and right in a bid to make it harder for the gun crew to hit the FAP, but this wasn’t impressing Scarlet who was still hanging out the window and trying to cause some havoc with her handgun. As they swerved hard to the right the GPMG chewed up the police car and sent it flying off into a ditch.
“For fuck’s sake, Camo!” she yelled, and banged on the roof. “Can’t you keep this thing on the straight and narrow for five seconds?”
“Keeping you on the straight and narrow is hard, but this is impossible!”
She rolled her eyes and sighed as she raised her Glock into the aim and put the crosshairs over the top of Mr Bandoleer. It was a two man crew and the first target was the guy behind the gun but he was obscured so she settled for second best. She squinted her eye and gently squeezed the trigger, but just before she fired the FAP swerved without warning to the right and her shot went high and wide.
“Are you doing this on purpose?” she screamed.
“For fuck’s sake, Cairo!” Lea shouted. “He’s making sure we don’t get…”
Before she finished her sentence the M240 successfully ploughed dozens of rounds into the front of the FAP and punctured the grille, giving Camacho half a second to get out of the way before a line of bullets smashed into the windscreen and tore through them in the front seat. “Holy Bloody Mary – that nearly hit me!” Lea screamed.
Up top, Scarlet rolled her eyes again and shook her head. “It’s always about Lea Donovan isn’t it?”
“Eh?”
“I’m the one on the outside of the sodding truck!” And with that she took a second aim and fired. This time Mr Bandoleer got it right between the eyes, with a couple more in the chest as a goodwill gesture. Scarlet nodded with pride at a good job done as he tumbled over and fell over the Hilux’s tailgate, smashing face-first into the asphalt.
The final bandoleer he had fed into the GPMG was now gone, and the gunner had smacked it out of frustration before pulling a handgun out of his jacket and using that instead.
“At least now you’re even!” Ryan shouted.
“Even?” Scarlet shouted. “Don’t be silly, boy! He’s a man. We’re nowhere near even. Have to feel sorry for him, really.”
She punctuated her comment with a series of rapidly-fired bullets, striking the gunner in the throat and smashing the rear window of the Hilux’s double cab behind him. The pickup swerved wildly to the left and right and then skidded toward the crash barrier in the center of the highway.
It smashed straight through it and crossed the path of a DAF truck hauling timber. The DAF hit the air brakes and the massive vehicle violently juddered and jackknifed. The weight of the timber on the semi-trailer spun the truck around as the driver fought to maintain control, but the DAF’s cab just clipped the rear of the fleeing Hilux and sent it smashing over onto its side.
The surviving Serbian mercs struggled to release themselves from their belts as the timber-laden truck ploughed into them and crushed their Toyota to no more than a metre wide. The carnage was total, and soon the traffic was backed up in both directions as drivers rubbernecked to see what had happened. Somewhere in the distance they heard the sound of sirens as the emergency services raced to the scene of the accident, but the ECHO team were still staring in disbelief at how much the timber had compacted the Hilux down to almost nothing.
As she surveyed the damage, Scarlet winced. “That’s not nice at all.”
“Neither were they,” Camacho said.
“Seconded,” Maria said.
“Thirded,” said Lexi.
“Can you say fourthed?” asked Lea.
Ryan cleared his throat, unable to look at the terrible mess captivating the others. “Guys… I think we need to get out of here unless we want to spend the next ten years in a Serbian prison.”
“The boy’s got a point,” Scarlet said.
They climbed back into the battered FAP and slowly dissolving into the gridlock, they pointed the car in the direction of Belgrade.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Hawke checked the hotel car park one last time before strolling across the room and perusing the takeout boxes. They were stacked in a messy jumble on the telephone table at the foot of the bed beside some beer cans. Wherever Kruger and Korać were, it wasn’t here. His first guess was they were already gathering their forces together and preparing to leave the country. His next guess was that Luk and Kamchatka were busy briefing their new friends on all they knew about him and the rest of the ECHO team.
He was sharing the Chinese food with his ECHO compatriots and Vincent Reno, but Vincent had looked at the food with disgust and chosen instead to make a cup of coffee from the complimentary jar beside the small kettle. He took a tentative sip, nodded his head with meaning, and then poured the contents of the cup into the pot of a plastic bonsai tree on the windowsill.
No one was saying much and the atmosphere in the room was tense at best. It was true they had gained valuable information from their infiltration of Korać’s compound, but things had gone badly wrong when Luk and Kamchatka had walked back into the picture, and the ensuing chaos had resulted in the compound being torched and some of the enemy taken out, but the main players had escaped.
Mendoza and Soto were out of the game, but Luk and Kamchatka were back in it, and not only that but the Mexicans had managed to pass the idol to Dirk Kruger, the only man who Eden considered worthy of the word nemesis. Kruger always meant business, but this time was more serious than ever because he had forgone home-grown amateur muscle for the much tougher brand available for hire in the Balkans and hitched the notorious war criminal Dragan Korać to his looting wagon.
His phone rang. He looked at the screen and saw it was Alex.
“What gives?” she said.
“We cocked up and lost them and the idol. You?”
“They lost Kruger?” Eden’s voice, in the background.
“Let’s just say he’s expanded hi
s fighting force,” Lea said.
Hawke sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Bastard surprised us with a shitload of hoodlums.”
“Hoodla,” Ryan called out from the bathroom.
Lea sighed. “Oh, fuck off, Ry. You know what he means.”
“Seriously,” Alex said. “Korać had that many men?”
“Uh-huh,” Camacho said flicking through the TV channels.
Hawke shovelled some cold noodles into his mouth. “Including our old friends Luk and Kamchatka.”
“You get anything from them?” said Alex.
“Yes, we think they’re heading to a town called Kalaat Mgoun in the Atlas Mountains. Kruger was more than certain. A place in Morocco called the Valley of the Roses.”
Ryan emerged from the bathroom. “Which means I was probably right about my Atlantis theory. No one go in there for at least half an hour by the way.”
A look of disgust crossed Lea’s face as she slammed the bathroom door behind her ex-husband. “What were you doing in there, opening a drain?”
“All right,” Hawke said, opening the window and giving Ryan a suspicious glance. “We need to focus.”
Lea sighed. “We don’t know about Atlantis, but we do know that what we have is basically dozens of mercenaries belonging to Korać’s insane private army, now hired by a South African tomb raider and gold lover…”
“You mean a chrysophilist…”
“Fuck off again, Ry. You know what I mean.”
“He’s a diamond lover actually, not bloody Goldfinger,” Hawke said.
Scarlet got up from the bed. “Everyone who wants to flush Ryan’s head down the toilet he just defiled, raise your hand!”
Everyone’s hands went up except Maria’s, who shook her head and mumbled something about behaving like stupid children.
“This is an abuse of democracy!” Ryan said.
Lea looked at him. “I once read that the definition of democracy was two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner.”
“Or Scarlet, Lexi and Ryan voting on who gets the coffee,” Camacho said with a smirk.
Hawke stepped in, setting the phone on speaker so everyone in both locations could hear the conversation. “All right – recap. What we have here is simple. A Mexican drug cartel boss found an ancient idol and was way over his head. He spoke to an antiquarian specialist in the field and before he murdered him he found out that Dirk Kruger was the only man who could help him. Kruger in turn spoke to Korać because he knows he’s going to need a lot of aggressive manpower for the mission.”
“So right up our street,” said Scarlet.
“Maybe, but this is getting darker now,” Hawke said. “We’ve never faced anyone with their own army for one thing – especially an army of hired mercs with a lot of experience.”
Reaper stubbed out a roll-up and sighed, breathing the smoke from the cigarette through his nostrils. “And Korać can call on people all over the world. He knows mercs in many, many countries.”
Hawke nodded. “Plus we now know Luk and Kamchatka are back on the scene, and they both have a major score to settle with us so it’s personal.”
“In other words,” Scarlet said, “we have enemies coming out of our ars…”
“Yes, thanks, Cairo – we get the picture,” Hawke said. “And while we certainly do have enemies coming out of our arses, I want everyone to understand Kruger is our main target now. He’s payrolling everything.”
“How come you get to say arses and I don’t?” Scarlet said.
Hawke looked at her and shrugged. “Just the way it is.”
“So what’s next?” Lea said.
“Easy,” said Hawke. “We have to get our backsides to Morocco as fast as possible because Kruger has a major head start on us. We need the time to organize a proper strategy against these guys or we could easily lose this one.”
“Agreed,” Lea said.
“All right, so we know where in Morocco thanks to Joe and Vincent – The Valley of Roses in the Dadès Gorge,” Camacho said. “But what’s bothering me is what Kruger thinks he’s going to find there. No one can seriously believe Atlantis is in the middle of the Moroccan desert.”
“That’s why we’re chasing him, Jack,” Lea said.
“So we’re just winging it?” the American asked.
The ECHO team looked at each and replied together: “Yeah!”
“Because we’re that hard,” Scarlet said, and cracked the lid off a bottle of chilled Niška.
*
Moments after their jet tore off the Belgrade asphalt, Scarlet was still in close dialogue with the rest of the beers she’d stolen from the minibar back at the hotel and her mood was starting to show it. She yawned and stretched her arms. “I’m getting too old for this.”
“What is it now?” Ryan asked. “Forty-five?”
“I’m not a day over thirty-something,” she said, her hands cradling a chilled beer.
Ryan looked at her over the top of his glasses. “You’re having a laugh!”
“Look at my face Ryan. Does it look like I’m having a laugh?”
“In all fairness, it actually does not look like you’re having a laugh, but you might want to pitch your fake age within more realistic parameters next time.”
“Look, it works like this.” Scarlet said, taking a pen off the small table. “You will shut up or I will sign my autograph up your arse.”
“You know what, Cairo?” Ryan said, fronting up to her. “Why don’t you take those stupid mirrored sunglasses off so we can see the real you, or are you too hungover?”
“Bugger off.”
“And what is it with those things anyway?” he said. “A tad eighties, don’t you think?”
Scarlet sighed. “Coming from a fully-grown man in a Green Lantern t-shirt I hardly think you’re in a position to make comments about fashion.”
“They’re back in fashion, anyway,” Lea said matter-of-factly from across the cabin.
“What?” Camacho said, “Green Lantern t-shirts?”
“No, mirrored shades.”
“Well, they look ridiculous,” Ryan said.
“Settle down, everyone,” Hawke said. “We’ve got enough shit to deal with without turning on each other.”
Hawke grabbed a coffee from the galley and went back to his seat. He checked his watch and cursed Kruger’s head start. Eden had been right when he talked about the South African’s luck. He sipped the coffee and hoped that his luck was about to run out, but he knew that in this world a man’s luck never ran out. It had to be taken from him.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“They just left Serbia, sir,”
The Oracle heard the words as if they had travelled miles to his ears. As was often the case, his eyes were closed and his mind was in another time and place. Now, he was thinking about the day he had discovered what had been concealed from them for so long… the day his long life had changed forever.
He hadn’t even been looking for it, but instead searching for other records in the Athanatoi vaults deep beneath Rome. It wasn’t even as if it had been his first time in the vaults, either, and yet there he had found it – the ancient text, the oldest records, a damning truth that had shocked him to his core. It had set his old life on an entirely different path the way two comets might collide out in the furthest reaches of space.
When he’d found those ancient documents his heart had almost stopped. For so long the secret society of which he was a member had spoken in hushed tones of all this but there was never any proof – just rumor, and then just like that the mythological vapor had condensed into reality for the first time, and he knew it was true.
The witless ramblings of the old priests had been real after all, and there was a higher source, and ancient power. It was if someone had handed the Pope undeniable proof of the existence of Adam and Eve themselves. The whole thing had been a terrible shock.
That was where conceit got you, he’d thought.
The conceit that h
e, as the Oracle, had known everything there was to know about the world, but he should have known better.
Much better.
The world was far too great for a single man ever to know, even a man with his reach and power, and that day taught him more than he had simply been ignorant of the true depth of it all. It also taught him humility. And it gave him an insatiable urge to rip his way though the layers of deceit the way a hungry lion’s lethal jaws tear through the flesh of a trapped gazelle.
Yes, the whole thing had come as a shock, but then the possibilities began to present themselves and his mood began to change very much for the better.
Somewhere in front of him the man was speaking again. He was saying something about the ECHO team leaving Serbia, but his words were hard to hear over the sound of the Mozart which was playing so loudly in his study. Rosina Almaviva was singing about her grave and now the whole thing was being ruined by Joe Hawke.
“Sir?”
“What?” the Oracle snapped viciously.
“They just left Serbia, sir.”
Serbia. He had the vaguest recollection of when Serbia won autonomy from the Ottomans, and a fine piece of diplomacy it was, too. But now the ECHO team was there sniffing about like truffle hogs in the dirt and fungus of antiquity in their pathetic search for a truth they would never be able to accept.
“What should we do, sir?”
The Oracle raised a withered finger to indicate that silence was required, at least from the man, if not the singing Countess, and turned his thoughts inward once again. Their journey to Serbia was a confusing one but he would follow their quest until the very end. Were they working for someone else besides Eden? So many wanted the idol.
“Nothing, just monitor. And get out.”
The old man watched his underling leave the room and then he pulled a cell phone from his pocket. A few seconds of static and someone picked up the call. “Hello?”
The Oracle sighed. “Davis, we have trouble.”
Davis Faulkner, the head of the CIA, took several seconds to think before replying but when he did, it was as cool as usual. “Go on.”
