by Rob Jones
Then he heard Lea screaming.
Scanning the room through the smoke he saw she was nowhere in sight. Kruger must have taken her into the top of the airship – but where the hell was the Oracle? He stuffed the gun into his belt and darted across the observation deck toward the steel staircase.
Taking a rail in each hand, he leaped up the steps two at a time until he found himself inside the space between the rigid structure and the helium balloons. It was cramped and smelled of oil but he had no time to assess the situation further. A gun fired in the darkness and he heard a bullet trace past his face and slam into one of the rigid structure support beams.
He dropped to his knees and pulled the gun from his belt. Looking ahead, he saw Kruger but still no sign of Lea. “Give up and I’ll let you live, Kruger!”
“Get real, Englishman.” Kruger fired again and Hawke buried his head in his crossed arms as the bullet blew past him and ricocheted off another of the steel girders. “We both know this is a fight to the death… Yours!” He fired on him again and the bullet struck a support strut and ricocheted down into Hawke’s shoulder.
It felt like flesh wound, so Hawke fired back, but Kruger dropped away into the thin air like a phantom, leaving nothing behind but gun smoke.
“What the hell?”
Hawke ran to where Kruger had been standing and saw a maintenance hatch leading down to the bridge. There, on the floor, Kruger was fighting Ryan. He went to jump down when he heard Lea screaming. She was back with the Oracle and she needed his help.
Lea or Ryan?
Hawke knew Ryan needed to exorcise his demons when it came to Kruger, so he threw him his gun, turned on his heel and sprinted back down the inside of the structure.
*
Ryan saw the hatch burst open but had no time to respond. The man crashed through the hole and landed right on top of him, pushing him to the floor in the middle of the bridge with heavy work boots that almost knocked him out. When he staggered up to his knees and saw who had attacked him, he thought his heart had stopped.
Dirk Kruger.
“Fuck me,” Kruger crowed. “I didn’t know we had the Girl Guides on here.”
Ryan saw the gun in the arms dealer’s hand. His own had been knocked across the floor when Kruger crashed into him, but Hawke had thrown him another. It was out of reach. He started to panic, but knew he had to play for time. The captain took a few cautious steps back and steadied the airship’s controls.
Then Kruger rushed him.
Ryan felt a surge of rage he had never known before. Before ECHO his life had been spent as a man on the run. When it came to fight or flight, he could write a PhD on running away. Mr Line-of-Least-Resistance, he always backed down, said sorry, walked away.
ECHO had changed all that. Hawke had changed it. Lea and the others had led him out of the darkness of timidity and into the light of courage and he needed to draw on that now, or he would die. He needed to use the intense, animal anger that Dirk Kruger was inducing in him if he was to survive.
The arms dealer’s sweaty face was right over the top of him now, looking down with a grin as he tightened his fingers around his throat. Visions of Maria Kurikova flew through his mind like starlings. What heaven was she in now, he wondered… and would he soon be joining her?
The fingers squeezed tighter. He felt Kruger’s fingernails burying themselves into the soft flesh of his neck, the fingertips pushing into his veins and blocking the circulation of blood, choking the windpipe. Maybe, he thought, it would be easier just to let go. I’d be back with her then. We’d be together in a better place and all this suffering would be over forever.
“You’re fucking weak, Bale!”
Ryan strained for air.
“I should have killed you when I had the chance. This time I’m putting you down like a rabid dog.”
The periphery of his vision started to fade out and he saw stars forming wherever he turned his bulging eyes.
“Men like me will always beat pathetic, weak bastards like you. As long as you’re in this world you’re just wasting my oxygen. Your Russian girlfriend must have been fucking insane to go with you, boy. Too bad she’s dead, eh?”
Motivated by a depth of burning anger he’d never known before and never wanted to know again, Ryan heaved Dirk Kruger away from him and leaped to his feet. The South African did the same and reached for a knife on his belt.
Ryan lunged at him, snatching up the gun Hawke had thrown down and stuffed it into his stomach.
“You won’t do it!” Kruger said. “You’re a girl.”
Ryan felt a kind of sick pleasure rush through him as he buried the muzzle of the Glock in Kruger’s belly. It felt good. If only he had the strength to ram the barrel right through this bastard’s stomach wall and out of the other side. As it was, he’d have to settle for using it the way God intended.
He fired point blank. The flesh of Kruger’s stomach acted a little like a muffler and reduced the ferocious sound of the weapon. The man’s eyes opened wide as the rest of his face froze. He knew what had happened. He was a dead man walking.
Ryan wondered what it felt like to have a nine-mil slug fired through your stomach at point blank range and then fired another one to see if it made things better. And a third and a fourth.
The captain rushed Ryan, but he spun and fired, hitting him in the head and killing him on the spot, then he emptied the rest of the mag into Kruger’s stomach and pushed the dying man away. “You’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, Dirk, but in your case, I’ll make an exception.”
Kruger tried to talk but bubbles of blood formed in his mouth, popping like bubblegum as he took his last breaths. Behind him, air rushed in through the open gondola door and rippled through his hair. He reached out a trembling hand, a look of terror on his face. It was the face of a voiceless man begging for help, but he wasn’t going to get, Not today. Not from this man.
Ryan hurled the empty gun to the floor and walked over to the kneeling Kruger. Raising his leg, he planted the sole of his boot squarely on the South African’s chest and without saying a single word, he pushed his defeated enemy out of the gondola. There were no screams as he tumbled down to the tropical waters of Biscayne Bay.
An ugly splash formed in the water below. It wasn’t the sort of splash you survived, but Kruger was one lucky bastard, after all. Ryan blew out a breath and for a moment he thought he saw the familiar outline of a great white shark swimming toward the splash. He looked closer and saw he was right.
Maybe Dirk Kruger’s luck had run out after all.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Hawke reached the observation deck and saw Lea struggling with the Oracle. He was forcing her toward the shattered window at the rear of the cabin and the tsunami bomb remote was lying in the splintered glass on the carpet beside an upturned barstool. The bag with the seven idols was on the floor and the codex was upside down on the carpet beside it.
Hawke leaped from the top of the steps and crashed down into Wolff’s back, piling him face-first into the broken glass. The Athanatoi chief cried out as the glass splinters embedded in his face and he fought like a madman to get the Englishman off his back.
“How long can an immortal spend in jail?” Hawke pulled his arm in a half-nelson and made him squeal like a pig.
“You’re dead a lot longer,” he snarled and whipped a knife out with his other hand.
Hawke saw it coming. He’d been reaching for the very same arm to pin them both behind his back and tie them together, but his right hand was weakened by the bullet wound Kruger had planted in his shoulder.
The Oracle struck out wildly with the knife, but surprised Hawke by not attacking him. Instead, he threw the knife at Lea and it sliced through her thigh.
She screamed and kicked the knife away, but she had lost her balance and started to tumble back to the open window. She started to grow faint and her eyes rolled up into her head.
“Lea!” Hawke released the Oracle and sprinted to her, pulling her rou
ghly back from the gaping void and resting her down on the sofa.
He turned. “You fucking bastard, Wolff.”
The airship pitched forward and knocked them all off their feet. The idols rolled down to Hawke and Lea but the codex stayed up at the other end with the Oracle.
Hawke watched his eyes crawl over the idols. “If you want them, come and get them.”
The old man’s eyes leaped from the idols to the codex. Time was running out.
Lea came to and looked at the Oracle with disgust. “God, I wish you were dead!”
“Let me give you a goodbye kiss, instead.” The Oracle reached into his pocket with a withered, bony hand and pulled out a grenade. Snatching up the codex, he put on a backpack and climbed over to the open window. He pulled the pin and tossed the grenade at them. Then he jumped into the void and fell away from the bottom of the gondola.
“The grenade!” Hawke yelled, rugby tackling Lea to the floor. “Get down!”
The grenade detonated and blasted the back of the observation cabin clear off the gondola and sent debris ripping across the fins and elevators. Fire wrapped up around the roof and snaked back down the walls toward where they were taking cover. When the smoke cleared, the Oracle had escaped and the airship was a dead bird, pitching down and speeding toward Miami Beach.
USAF F-16 fighter jets closed in on them as they approached the no-fly zone.
Lea watched with disbelieving eyes as a parachute canopy popped open from the backpack and unfurled in the gathering night.
The Oracle twisted down for around a hundred feet and then dropped down onto the deck of a submarine. He slammed the hatch down behind him and seconds later the enormous boat was under the waves.
“I don’t believe it, Joe.” She fought the tears back. “He’s done it to us again!”
Hawke could offer no more than a heavy sigh and wrapped his arm around her shoulders. “It’s not over. We have the idols now, remember. If he wants them, he has to come and get them and then we’ll kill him.”
“But he has the codex.”
“And we have Alexander’s ring.”
Lea wiped a tear from her eye. “Am I imagining it or are we plummeting to the ground?”
“Eh?”
“Look… outside.”
Hawke didn’t have to look outside. As she spoke, the airship pitched down even more, sending all the broken furniture and glass sliding along the floor to the front of the cabin.
“This isn’t good.”
“It feels like we’re on the sodding Titanic!” Lea said.
“Except we get to crash into the sea before we sink in it,” Hawke said. “Brilliant.”
They ran down the central corridor where Ryan was desperately fiddling with the controls at the front of the bridge.
“Er. We’ve got some major problems guys!”
“What’s up?” Hawke asked.
“The Oracle’s goodbye kiss wrecked everything. The primary control surfaces are out, including the elevators and rudder.”
Hawke frowned. “Not what I wanted to hear, mate.”
“I don’t know what to do!”
“Let me have a look.” Hawke walked over and fiddled with the dials and levers on the consul, checking the response each time he operated one of the control surfaces.
“Well?”
“It’s going to be rough, but we’ve got enough elevator control to bring the pitch up and make a shallower descent. You get on the radio and tell those F-16s we’re friendly!”
He wrestled with the controls as the stricken airship plummeted to the beach. Buffeted by the wind which howled in through the smashed bridge window, Hawke fought hard to bring the nose up just as the bottom of the gondola smashed into the sea a little way off shore.
Lea screamed and Ryan swore loudly, neither able to look as the impact blasted tons of water up over the sides of the gondola. Hawke cursed as he pulled the controls back to keep the nose up. The last thing he wanted was for the force of the impact to plow the gondola under the surface of the sea and drown them all.
Successfully pitching the airship’s nose up again, the gondola skidded across the surface of the ocean for a few hundred meters before plowing up into the sand and screeching toward the large collection of emergency vehicles that had assembled on the beach as first responders.
“You two OK?” he yelled.
Two scared nods.
“In that case, please wait until the aircraft comes to a full and complete stop before unbuckling your seatbelts.”
Slowly, the friction of the sand against the gondola’s glass-fiber hull brought the wrecked airship to a stop less than ten meters from one of the fire trucks.
He saw the rest of the team he had left back on the island and now Camacho and Scarlet sprinted over from the fire trucks as Lea draped her arms over his shoulders and kissed him on the back of the neck.
It was over.
Almost.
*
It was full night when they crawled from the crumpled gondola. The lights of Miami Beach glittered all around them and the sounds of the city were playful and innocent. Music boomed from a Porsche convertible cruising along Miami Beach Boardwalk and laughter echoed from a nightclub’s rooftop terrace.
Hawke was exhausted. He cricked his neck and strolled over to the rest of his team with his hands in his pockets. He wanted nothing more than a good night’s sleep and then another good night’s sleep straight after. When he glanced at his leg, he thought that maybe a trip to a local hospital might also be in order.
The entire team was together now except Devlin. He was piloting the airboat in from Biscayne Bay.
“There he is!” Kim said, pointing out into the darkness.
Devlin waved back as he navigated the airboat toward the beach.
“Why the long faces?” Hawke said. “And no horse jokes.”
“He got away, Joe.” Lea kicked he sand with her boot. “The bastard got away.”
“But this was a successful mission!”
“Not if he got away it wasn’t.”
“What are you talking about? We now have all eight of the idols and that weird little ring… and we killed Kruger!”
Ryan coughed. “Who killed Kruger?”
Hawke patted him on the back. “We all know what you did, mate. Well done. That settles an account, right?”
Ryan reddened a little. “I guess so.”
Reaper lit up a cigarette and blew the smoke into the night air. “That day you fired on him in Rio, do you remember?”
“I’ll never forget it,” Ryan said. “I let everyone down that day.”
“That day was the day you started on your journey to becoming a real man, Ryan. Today you finished the journey and I am proud of you.”
Lea started to well up.
Scarlet rolled her eyes. “Is there a fucking bar around here? I mean, it’s Miami, right?”
Hawke huffed out a tired laugh. “When Danny gets here, I promise we’ll find a bar. Somewhere nice and seedy where we can drink this nightmare away.”
“Debriefing first,” Lea said, pointing to a group of men in suits at the top of the beach. “The Five Eyes survived a serious terror attack tonight and those dudes are going to want every inch of it on paper.”
“Dotted Is and Crossed Ts,” Camacho said. “Gotta love the CIA.”
Lea looked at Hawke’s leg and shoulders. “And then hospital for you, mister.”
As the others walked over to the authorities for a debriefing, Lea kept watching her old friend and lover as he drove the airboat to the beach. When she saw the tiny red dot on the surface of the water she knew at once what it meant. She felt her skin crawl as it slipped effortlessly onto the airboat’s curved hull and then up over Devlin. It danced over his shirt and then settled on his left temple.
She cried out, “Danny!”
He couldn’t hear her and then it was over. A high-velocity round drilled into Danny Devlin’s head and blasted him off the airboat. He crashed
down into the dark water and the airboat spun out of control, tipping up and cartwheeling over and over until it broke up and smashed into a hundred pieces.
No one in the team moved or spoke.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Hawke leaned on the edge of the wall and looked out across Galway Bay. The sunset was lighting the sky in pinks and ambers and a new hush was descending over the world. A swallow dipped and dived and twisted in the twilight. It landed on a telephone wire above his head and chirped in the dying light.
He considered Danny Devlin and how he had died fighting alongside him for the good of the team. He wasn’t quite sure what to feel when he thought about what had happened. He’d barely known Devlin but in the short time they had worked together he’d seen how brave he was and he felt a wave of guilt when he realized how badly he had misjudged the man when he’d hugged Lea in London.
Everyone in the ECHO team except Sir Richard Eden had attended the funeral in Dublin. Over a hundred friends and family had been there, including former colleagues from his army days and relatives from South Africa. No one could believe the great Danny Devlin was dead, but they raised many good glasses at the wake in his memory before the day was done.
That was a week ago and the rawness was starting to fade now. Scarlet and Camacho had travelled to visit her brother Spencer at Rytchley Manor in England and Ryan had returned to London to spend some time with a few friends from his hacking days.
Reaper had taken Lexi back to Provence where they planned to go to his summer home with his wife and twin boys. Her time at the hands of the Zodiacs had left her drained and she needed time to recover. Reaper’s wife knew a good plastic surgeon who had promised to help mend her tortured hand.
As for Kim, she had returned to Washington DC and her job with the President. Hawke knew in his heart that was where she really longed to be and he guessed she wouldn’t be coming on many more ECHO missions.
And there was Lea. After the funeral, when everyone had flown away and it was just the two of them, they had walked on the cliffs around Galway Bay and visited places she knew as a child. He’d watched her come back to life as she spoke in Irish to the older people in her family and realized just how damaging the lives they led really were.
