Joe Hawke Series Boxsets 4

by Rob Jones

  “If only it was a boat,” she said. “There’s even a queue for the toilet. This is intolerable.”

  Ryan craned his head over the seat behind. “This is your idea of hell, isn’t it, Cairo?”

  “It is since your face appeared.” She lifted her arm, grabbed his face and pushed him back into his own seat. “Boy.”

  Zeke was easier to please and hadn’t complained once since climbing on board back in Athens. “I think it’s just great. Shoulda seen the time me and my buddies travelled around Mexico. Hell, some of those planes were like crates with wings. Once I shared my ride with some cages of Plymouth Rocks… oh lord, thank God my window was broken.”

  Scarlet stared at him, open-mouthed and unsure what to say. “What the hell…”

  The Texan turned to her with a bright, toothy grin. “Chickens, sweetheart.”

  “It’s like you read my mind!” she said sarcastically.

  “Hey.” Zeke was unfazed. “Nothing wrong with some good ole fashioned bantam banter.”

  She rolled her eyes, but Lexi laughed. “The great Cairo Sloane outclassed at last.”

  “Hardly, darling. Just ask Jackie here.”

  But Camacho wasn’t listening. Like Kamala Banks one row ahead of him, he had found Kim Taylor’s murder back in Washington DC hard to handle. He had known her a long time and watching her death at the hands of the sniper had hit him harder than he’d expected.

  “Jack?”

  He turned and saw Scarlet was waiting for an answer. “Sorry, what?”

  “Never mind, darling.”

  Lea checked her watch. “We’re almost in Sofia, so this is it guys. We need the cash so we can’t screw up. The mission is simple. We have to find this Dimitrov guy and get the lyre back for Francken, and we have to do it without that son of a bitch sniper taking another one of us out.”

  A grim silence followed her words. It sounded simple enough, and the retrieval of the lyre was something they should be able to execute without too much pain, but the sniper was starting to get to them more than any of them cared to admit out loud. With three of their team murdered by him and with no way to tell when the next strike would come or who could be the next victim, they all felt much more on edge than usual.

  Worse, their impressive network of contacts stretching from Eden and MI5 in Europe and Alex and her father and the CIA in the US was now gone – ripped away from them when they needed it most. This meant their chances of tracking down the killer were almost zero until he struck again and even then they were painfully dependent on him screwing up and leaving some kind of clue to his identity behind him.

  Right now, that was the only way they could get on his trail and track him down, but that would mean another of them losing their life which was just too high a price.

  “As the great man said, we just have to keep on buggering on,” Hawke said.

  Ryan feigned confusion. “I never said that.”

  “Tosser.” Lea hid her smile and turned to Hawke. Lowering her voice, she said, “Tell me about Matt Jagger.”

  “Captain Matt Jagger,” Hawke said quietly. “Former Grenadier Guards officer and the man behind Redarrow International.”

  Kamala fiddled with her gold necklace. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a private military company based just outside of London. They are – or were – in the business of providing top-notch military training to anyone with a big enough wallet, and that’s not all they do. They’re also heavily involved with weapons procurement and they have an extensive network of intel gathering specialists, too.”

  “They sound dangerous.”

  “They are,” he said flatly. “If there’s an armed conflict in this world, Jagger had a dog in the fight. His mercs have been everywhere – Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea, Papua New Guinea, Yemen, Syria – you name it.”

  “And yet in less than ten minutes, he and his men were wiped out by King Kashala’s team,” Scarlet said grimly.

  Hawke read the look on her face and felt the same way. “Matt was a very experienced man with many years of solid professional soldiering behind him. In the British Army he served in Northern Ireland, Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq and then he went even further afield as the head of Redarrow. Not many could have bettered him the way this team of mercs did on the Electra.”

  “Seems to me,” Kamala said, “that if we screw with this Kashala guy, we’re playing with fire.”

  As the landing gear extended beneath the aircraft and they banked to line up with the runway at Sofia Airport, Hawke checked his watch. “I have to disagree.”

  “How so?” she asked.

  “The second Guy Francken hired ECHO to get the lyre back, it was Dimitrov and Kashala who were playing with fire. Buckle up everyone, it’s going to be a hell of a ride.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Tartarus

  Alex Reeve’s head pounded like a carnival drum. When she opened her eyes, the pain of the light hitting them was so harsh she had to fight back the basic instinct to scream. She blinked several times and brought her hand up to her eyes to shield them. At least, she thought a few seconds later, the hood was no longer on her head and her hands were no longer tied.

  Her eyesight gradually returned to her. Unfocussed and blurry at first but slowly coming back and building a picture of her world. She knew she had been drugged more than once and she no longer had any idea of what time it was or how long ago she had been arrested by Faulkner’s men.

  She looked around. She was in what was clearly a prison cell and she was on her own. The room was small and sparse. Plain cinder block walls on all four sides, painted a dull olive green color that she recognized immediately. It was the one used by the US Marine Corp from basic equipment all the way up to the president’s personal helicopter, Marine One.

  She looked down and saw she was on a metal wall-mounted bunk covered in rough blankets. Beside it was a stainless steel wall-mounted toilet.

  Without a seat, she noticed with dismay.

  The only source of light was a narrow window at the top of the cell, too high for her to see through. Then she looked behind her and saw her wheelchair at the head of her bed, but even if she climbed into it and pushed herself across the cell there would be no way for her to haul herself up and get a look out of the window.

  So this was Tartarus.

  Once again considering how alone she was, she felt her heart quicken in her chest. She was alive, but that didn’t mean to say her father or Brandon had made it. She guessed Faulkner had some kind of insane show trial planned for her father, but that still didn’t guarantee he was alive. What if a fight had broken out and things had gotten ugly?

  Easy, Alex.

  You have to stay calm – there ain’t no getting out of here by having a panic attack and passing out on the floor. You have to hold it together and think rationally.

  She pushed herself up into a sitting position and then pulled the chair around to the side of the bed. With a great deal more effort than most realized, she heaved herself over into the chair, pulling her heavy legs into place when she was comfortably sitting down.

  She blew out a breath and took a second before releasing the brakes and wheeling over to the door on the far wall. In its center was a letterbox which she presumed was for posting meals into the cell. When she raised her hand to touch it, she saw it was bolted shut from the other side.

  Of course it was.

  She pressed her right ear up against the cold, bare metal of the door and strained to hear anything that might give her a clue to any sign of life, but she heard nothing. From the far side of the cell and with her eyes properly adjusted to the light now, she was able to get a slightly better angle of the window but all she saw was a perfect rectangle of pure blue sky. It told her nothing. She could be anywhere on earth.

  She felt like crying and for a moment wondered if she might lose control and all the horror of the last few days would come flooding out. But she surprised herself by holding it back and k
eeping a level head on her shoulders. She closed her eyes and heard her father’s voice in her head.

  Don’t let the bastards get to you, kiddo.

  “I won’t Dad,” she whispered in the unforgiving silence of her new home. “I promise.”

  *

  When Jack Brooke woke up, he found himself slumped face-down on the floor of a grimy prison cell. He had a split lip and a black eye, but only the vaguest memory of how they got there. He knew he had been drugged. How hard had they beaten him while he was under their influence? Had he said anything? Checking his arms, he saw several puncture marks and started to get an idea of just how much they had drugged him.

  He rubbed the back of his head and cursed under his breath. Struggled to his feet and took a seat on the side of his wall-mounted bed. Blowing out a long, anxious sigh he stared around the small room and tried to take stock of his situation. As a man with many years military experience under his belt, he knew where he was straight away. He was sitting on military-issue sheets and this was a military prison.

  Tartarus, just as Faulkner had threatened.

  The only problem was up until right now he had no idea such a place even existed and certainly not the first clue as to where its location might be. Was it on an island in the middle of an ocean, or was it a compound somewhere hidden in a jungle or a desert? Some said it was on an artificial island, but that could be disinformation.

  Judging from the bright light streaming in through the cell window high above his head, he knew one thing – it wasn’t an underground facility. That was something, at least, but he had so many other concerns he didn’t even know where to start.

  Except he did.

  Alex. She wasn’t in here with him, so they must have put her in another cell. He got up from the bed and paced the room, counting the steps and taking measurements. Assessing the height and tapping the walls to see what materials had been used to construct his prison. He tried to check the light bulb for any information that might give him a clue – a date, a name – but it was screwed in behind a chunky panel of safety Perspex.

  He walked over to the window and leaped up until his hands grabbed the slim concrete sill. Heaving with all his might, he pulled himself up until he could just peer out of the window, but when he saw the view outside he almost wished he hadn’t bothered. All he could see was another plain cinder block wall stretching out of his line of sight in both directions.

  “Great,” he muttered, and lowered himself back down to the floor.

  He checked the door but it was locked, just as he had fully expected it to be. A man like Faulkner didn’t take over the United States in a coup d’état and then forget to lock a door on the cell of the man he’d just ousted.

  Stepping back over to the bed he stretched himself out flat and crossed his arms behind his head. He’d been in worse scrapes in his life. Seen more shit than a monkey can fling, he thought. All that was really bothering him at this exact second was the wellbeing of his daughter and the Secret Service Agent who had loyally defended her right up to the last moment.

  He sighed. The reinforced concrete ceiling offered the blandest view on earth so he closed his eyes and let his mind wander. None of this left him with much hope. Faulkner seizing power and then arresting him and his daughter. Flying them out to this Tartarus location that he had never heard of in all his time in the top echelons of the US Government.

  If he knew one thing, it was that things were going to get a hell of a lot worse before they got any better. With that thought, he started to drift back to sleep.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Bulgaria

  High in the Vitosha Mountains and in the darkness of night, Hawke skilfully slipped his trusty monocular from his pocket and raised it to his eye. Lit in the eerie phosphor-green of the night-vision technology, the rugged slopes of the nation’s biggest park stretched away into the night in an endless vista of pine forests, canyons, caves and waterfalls.

  In a smooth sweeping motion he followed the line of a ridge in the middle distance until he found what he was looking for – the private castle of Sergei Dimitrov. It was nestling deep in a narrow valley of myrtle and heath and much larger than he had expected.

  Built inside the grounds to the west of the castle, he counted three smaller villas dotted about here and there, all connected by wooden footbridges and floating staircases. Besides the castle itself, the center attraction was an enormous sparkling swimming pool the shape of an electric guitar.

  “So where’s the lyre?” Camacho asked. “In the villas or in Castle Grayskull?”

  Hawke felt the cool night air on his cheek. “My money is on the castle.”

  “Mine too,” Lea said. “But we should split up.”

  “Bagsy the villas,” Ryan said. “That castle looks like the kind of place you don’t come out of. There’s probably vampires in there.”

  Lea rolled her eyes. “This is Bulgaria, Ry, not Romania.”

  “Vampires don’t respect borders, Lea.”

  “For fuck’s sake stop being such a fool.”

  “Just making conversation.” He smacked a mag into his gun and stuffed it in his belt, silently giving thanks to Orlando Sooke. Their new friend had been as good as his word. When they told him where Dimitrov was located, he quickly arranged for an SUV loaded with weapons to be delivered to a parking lot in Sofia. When they arrived a man who introduced himself only as Krasimir gave them the keys and wandered off to the nearest Metro station.

  A low growling noise emanated from somewhere in the darkness and Kamala spun around to scan the trees. “What the hell was that?”

  “Maybe a bear,” Camacho said. “I read they have them in Bulgaria.”

  Her eyes widened like saucers. “No shit?”

  The former CIA man swept his flashlight across the tree trunks. “Not that long ago they still used to go to dancing bear shows here. People would transport the bears from town to town across the country on chains. I guess when they cracked down on that shit they just let ’em go.”

  “But not here,” Nikolai said. “There are no bears in these ranges as far as I know. Too many tourists. But they can be found wild further south in the Rila ranges, or maybe in the Pirin Mountains.”

  “Must have been Vincent’s stomach then,” Kamala said with a nervous smile.

  “Maybe,” the Frenchman said. “And it’s…”

  Before he could finish his sentence, the rest of the team answered simultaneously: “It’s Reaper, I’m on a mission.”

  The former Legionnaire gave a disarming shrug. “Mais, c’est vrai.”

  Checking his watch, Hawke said, “Listen up everyone, as we all know there’s a lot riding on this one. If we’re going to have even half a chance of saving Alex and her father then we’re going to need some real money and the only way we get hold of that sort of cash is by getting this job done for Francken. We go in, get the business done and get out. We deliver the goods, get paid and then we start looking for our friends.”

  “So let’s get on with it,” Lea said.

  They adjusted their backpacks, picked up their weapons and followed Hawke as he walked into the trees. A few short moments later they were walking along a narrow, winding forest path, lit from above by a half-moon and a blanket of stars. Hawke and Scarlet took the lead and as the low murmur of their friends’ chatter died away, they stopped at a break in the trees and stared out across a wide, moonlit valley.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked with a sideways glance. “That big tum-tum got you out of breath?” To add insult to injury, she now leaned across and patted his stomach like a dog.

  Hawke said nothing. Maybe his stomach could be a tad tighter, not that he would admit such a thing to Scarlet Sloane. They continued along the track until reaching a ridge. Here, he told the rest of the team to hold back while he and Scarlet took up a covert surveillance position down in some undergrowth and began to monitor the castle’s inner courtyard.

  “That’s Kashala there,” Hawk
e said.

  Cairo zoomed in on the group of men. “The one that looks like a 1983 Action Man doll?”

  “Yes, and they were figures, not dolls.”

  “You’re too easy, Joe. Way, way too easy.”

  “If you say so.” He tracked Kashala on the monocular as he approached the other men. As usual, Scarlet’s cutting description of the former Congolese Army general had been very close to the mark; Joseph Kashala really did remind him of an Action Man. The beret was original, he could tell that just from looking at it, but the rest of the kit had been purchased online, including the olive green Chatham roll neck and the DPM combat trousers.

  “Looks like he’s taking his new career as CEO of Mercs R Us very seriously indeed.”

  Cairo pulled the monocular away and rubbed her eye before replacing it. “Action Man had a scar though, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s one thing Kashala is lacking.”

  “For now.”

  “Who’s that coming out into the yard?”

  Hawke tracked across to the east and saw a walking man-mountain emerging into the cool twilight from one of the castle’s exterior doors. “Must be Mukendi, his 2iC.”

  “Looks like trouble.”

  “If what Ryan said is anything to go by, then he’s trouble with a capital T. Around five years in the Congolese Army until found guilty of stabbing another soldier to death. Court martial, demoted to private, kicked out of the army and after a spell in the Ndolo Military Prison he was transferred to a civilian prison for a twenty year sentence. Gets out and hooks up with Kashala to be a full-time merc.”

  “The great thing about my job is how I get to meet the crème de la crème of society.”

  Hawke gave her a quick glance. “I’m sure you’ll get along just fine with him. Here comes another one – Crombez by the looks of it.”

  Scarlet lowered her voice to a confidential tone. “And what about that?”

  He looked at her again. “What about what?”