by Rob Jones
Hawke watched the destruction and death unfurl with no sense of pleasure or relief. These men might be their enemy, but they were paid mercs working for cash. Maybe if he hadn’t met Lea, he’d be doing something similar right now. He just didn’t know. Now, a substantial section of the cavern’s roof split away and fell to the ground, squashing two of Dimitrov’s mafia goons flat. Hawke looked away and reloaded his gun.
“Mon Dieu!” Reaper gasped. “I’ve never seen such destruction.”
“Remind me again,” Kamala said. “This is what you do for a living, right?”
“Don’t worry,” Ryan reassured her. “We make it look harder than it is.”
Kamala fired two short bursts from the pistol Hawke had given her, but the mercs had regrouped after the mortar attack. “They’re heading over here again and they look pissed!”
Mercs streamed over the rocks and boulders they were using for cover. One of the new additions to the Blood Crew lunged at Reaper, but the Frenchman never flinched. He ran into the man with the full force of his substantial weight, twisting his body down and to the left at the last minute and shoulder-barging him off his feet and into the dark cave behind him.
On the ground now, the merc brought up his fist and pounded the Frenchman in the side of his head with all the energy he could muster. It was hard and heavy, but Reaper took the blow, absorbing some of the force by rolling his head to the side.
Now he was angry, but a savage headbutt down in the center of the merc’s face seemed to redress the balance. With the man’s nose smashed into a jelly pulp, he gave a shrill gasp of pain and reached his hands up to his face to feel the damage.
“Non, non, non.” Reaper recoiled his fist and aimed into the man’s face. For a moment both men felt time almost stop as the fist hovered in the air, awaiting its next command. Gnarled, bruised knuckles, on a filthy, dirt-covered hand, smeared in the blood of countless mercenaries recoiled like a spring-loaded weapon.
Then he unleashed it into the man’s face and knocked him clean out. Turning to check his friends, he saw Hawke fighting another merc. “You need some help?”
“Do I fuck,” Hawke said, wrenching his combat knife from his belt and slashing it through the air. It struck the merc’s knife and the two steel blades clashed in a small shower of sparks. Bringing his other hand up, he smashed an uppercut on the man’s jaw and sent him flying back into the rocky wall. When the merc struck his head on the granite, he was knocked out instantly and crashed to the floor in a heap in front of Hawke.
Behind him, Nikolai drew on his vast martial arts knowledge to dismantle two of the Mafia henchmen. It was an eye-watering display of controlled violence, ending in the stomach-turning sound of breaking bones and men howling in pain. The former Athanatoi monk showed no mercy. He brought up his leg and spun around on the spot, sweeping his heavy boot into the faces of both the kneeling men.
Across the chamber, Lexi was moving like a CGI demon, hop-skip-jumping from one merc to the next in a blur of one-eighty degree twists and turns and savage scissor kicks as she tore through them. A Belgian at the end dropped his knife and sprinted into the darkness of one of the tunnels, but Lexi was too fast.
She ran to him, launching herself into the air and running up his back as he fled. Using the fleeing man like a springboard, she leaped into the air above him and delivered a hefty kick with her left leg, knocking him out cold. He fell to the floor and she landed beside him in the gloomy, dusty cave.
“Too easy,” she said.
The bedlam worsened. Across the chamber, Kashala’s men had secured the entrance to the sanctuary and Dimitrov and Zhivkov were heading back inside under armed guard.
Heavily engaged in her own fight with a Belgian merc, Lea cried out in the searing heat and chaos. “They’re going inside!”
“We’re going nowhere until we’ve taken these guys out!” Lexi said.
Another jumped down from the rock and landed on the Chinese assassin, knocking her to the ground. She rushed to her feet, saving her life from a brutal knife attack. Then she pulled her knife and lunged at the man. He dodged the strike with a neat sidestep and brought his own knife hand up into the fight. Turning on her heel, she brought her other leg up into his face and knocked him off his balance. Arms flailing in the air, she took full advantage and mercilessly knocked the knife from his hand with a wrist strike.
Snatching up the weapon, she slashed it across his chest and gouged a deep cut in him. He howled in pain but was still tumbling backwards toward a ledge. Lexi flipped the knife in the air, caught it by the blade and then she threw it at him as hard as she could. The switch-blade’s heavy ivory handle struck the man in the forehead and knocked him out.
Lexi watched him tumble into the darkness behind the ledge and dusted off her hands. “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
Closer to the lava flow, Ryan was scrambling through the dirt and dust in search of his gun. He was fighting the female merc they had seen earlier with Kashala and she had kicked it from his hand and was closing in for the kill. He saw it now, glinting dully in the ambient light of the glow sticks, but just as reached out for it, the merc got to it first and kicked it away from him once again. Then she spun around and kicked him hard in the face, forcing his head back and nearly knocking him out.
Ryan saw stars. They spun around his head and flashed like aluminum countermeasure chaff in a bright sunny sky. Through the dazed confusion of his mind, he looked up and saw the unsmiling face of the female Congolese mercenary looking back down at him.
“You are a very naughty boy,” she said quietly. “You don’t know how to treat a lady, so let me teach you how.”
She reached down, clamping his head in her two hands and lifted him up until they were face to face, his legs dangling down in the air. He lashed out with fists squeezed tight, but she took the blows with barely a flinch. Craning her neck, she brought her face closer to his ear. Whispering, she said, “You fool with Nzuji and you pay with your life!”
Ryan fought back but she was too strong, and when she dropped him to the ground and pulled a hunting knife from her belt, he thought it was all over. She lunged at him, slashing the blade at his throat, but he rolled away and threw a handful of sand and dirt into her face.
As she cried out, he had time to snatch up the gun and crawled backwards as he raised the muzzle and aimed it at her face.
“Now, you pay with your life!”
He moved to squeeze the trigger, then everything changed.
“Everyone lay down your arms or the old man dies!”
Ryan looked through Nzuji’s long legs and saw Mukendi marching into the cave. He had the presbyter in his grip and a gun at his head.
“I’m sorry,” the old man said. “This man caught me on the road leaving the monastery and he put this gun to my head. He said he will kill me if you don’t lay down your guns.”
Hawke recognized the terror in the elderly churchman’s voice; he’d heard it many times before in his travels with ECHO and he knew it was authentic.
“Take your gun away from his head!” he shouted.
Kashala and his men laughed. “I think you’re the ones lowering their weapons.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Lea looked at Hawke with desperate eyes, and then back at the old presbyter. “You son of a bitch, Mukendi!”
“Tut tut, woman,” he purred. “Don’t make me laugh or I might pull this trigger and blow his head clean off his shoulders.”
Hawke knew he had only one play, and that was to obey Mukendi’s demand to lower his gun. As he released the weapon and let it clatter to the cave floor, he closed his eyes and tried to think of a way out of the situation.
Across the chamber, Nzuji sneered as she snatched the gun from Ryan’s hand and walked back over to the Blood Crew, and further back, a dazed Crombez staggered to his feet, rubbing his head where Reaper had hit him.
“Now,” Kashala said smugly. “You will hand over the mobile field generator cannist
er before His Holiness is executed by my men.”
With one look at the presbyter, Hawke didn’t hesitate. Pulling the cannister from his canvas bag, he walked it across to Kashala. The African general snatched it from him and delivered a hefty smack across Hawke’s face.
The Englishman kept his balance and stayed on his feet, but Reaper had already leaped forward in his defense. In response, Crombez raised his assault rifle and aimed it at the Frenchman. “Back, now! Or you all die.”
Reaper reluctantly obeyed, raising his hands in the air in a show of surrender, but giving Crombez a devilish wink. “You and I have some unsettled business, n’est-ce pas?”
“Tell me, Vincent – how are Monique and the kids?”
Reaper bristled at the question. “You stay away from my family, Olivier!”
Crombez laughed. “On verra.”
“I mean it.” Reaper lowered his voice. “Once, we were friends, but if you go near my family, I will kill you. All of you!”
Now Mukendi chuckled and sucked his teeth. “No more threats, Legionnaire, or I will skin you alive and feed you to the general’s crocodiles.”
Kashala’s face grew more serious. “It’s true. I’ve seen him do it. He likes the sound of their squeals as they thrash about in the water. Zhivkov, get over here.”
The professor moved over to the general and took the cannister. “You want me to start work?”
Kashala gave a curt nod. “Yes, and fast. Transfer the particles from the main field generator to the cannister. We don’t have much time.”
Boris Zhivkov shuffled over to his metal briefcase, scrolled through the combination lock and lifted the lid. Licking his lips with concentration, he gently placed the cannister out of sight behind the lid and started to work.
“Professor Zhivkov is very fast,” Kashala said. “Soon, I will have what I need and you will all be dead.”
Tense minutes passed with the Blood Crew and what was left of Dimitrov’s mafia heavies training their weapons on the subdued ECHO team and the elderly presbyter. When Zhivkov finally turned from the main generator beside the hole in the wall, he was smiling and holding the cannister in his hands.
Handing it to Demotte, the merc passed it to his boss, King Kashala. The Congolese warlord weighed it in his hands and held it up to the light of a nearby glow stick. “Very interesting… very interesting indeed. I can feel the power in my grasp.”
“And what now?” Lea said.
Dimitrov gave her a patronizing smirk. “With this antimatter, I will be able to extort anything I wish from any government. Up until now, even CERN physicists have only been able to produce a few nanograms of this per year, but now I have over a gram, enough to totally annihilate any city on earth in a fraction of a second. Now, General Kashala, hand it over.”
Kashala stood there, his hand gripped around the antimatter cannister, but he said nothing.
“I said, bring me the cannister, Kashala!”
The Congolese merc leader was still holding his Kalashnikov. Awkwardly now, he raised it and gently buried the stock into his hip as he aimed the weapon at Dimitrov.
The Bulgarian took a step back. “What are you doing, General?”
“I am executing my plan, Mr Dimitrov,” Kashala said in the quiet, tense cave. “And that means first executing you.”
“No!”
Dimitrov’s screams were cut short by the wild, metallic sound of the assault rifle’s magazine emptying in the dark cavern. When the Mafia chief finally collapsed face-first into the gravel, his body had taken the better part of the weapon’s forty-round box magazine. What was left, Kashala used to fire on the remaining mafia goons, ruthlessly cutting them to ribbons where they stood.
As smoke curled from the exit holes in the Bulgarian mafia boss’s back, Kashala turned to face Hawke and the rest of the ECHO team. “His plan wasn’t spicy enough for me. He wanted to use the weapon only to blackmail various governments for money. This has its merits, but I think it would be much better if they had an idea of how powerful it is first. Much more impact that way, no?”
Hawke’s eyes crawled up from Dimitrov’s cooling corpse to the Congolese general standing a few yards away from him. The smoking Kalashnikov was still in his right hand, and the antimatter cannister still firmly gripped in the other.
“You’re a psychopath, Kashala.”
“And you are out of cards to play, Hawke.”
“You think, eh?”
“In a few moments, my men will seal you in this cave with a grenade and then test the antimatter’s power by detonating Zhivkov’s cannister. He tells me that we can turn an entire city to ash with an amount of antimatter fifty times smaller than a sugar cube. It will scar the world forever, and in the meantime, knowing you and the rest of your friends have been crushed by millions of tons of granite will further enhance my pleasure.”
Boris Zhivkov stepped cautiously forward and took the cannister from Kashala. Sweat beaded on his forehead as he walked it over to his briefcase and started to transfer some of the particles into the test device. His hands were steady enough, but Hawke noticed his breathing was hurried and inconsistent. Clearly, he didn’t have the same confidence in his work that General Kashala seemed to have.
“We are ready,” he said at last. Behind him, Crombez walked back over to the mercs. As he passed Reaper, he made a gun with his hands and pointed his finger at him. “Tu es un homme mort, mon ami… un homme mort, et votre famille, aussi.”
Reaper said nothing but stood his ground and met the other man’s gaze, his face square and solid.
Kashala gave a curt nod and ordered the professor and the rest of the Blood Crew to withdraw. “And now we must bid you farewell, Mr Hawke. Me and my men are setting sail for foreign climes, but you and your friends will die here in this filthy hole, surrounded by lava. Au revoir.”
Before he left, he turned his gun on the presbyter and fired three shots into his stomach.
“No!” Lea screamed.
Kamala was closest, and now she rushed to him and lifted his head from the ground. “You’re going to be okay.”
“You bastard, Kashala!” Hawke yelled.
As the old man collapsed into the dirt, Hawke watched the general’s sweaty face as he tossed a grenade at his boots beneath the archway and then disappeared in the darkness of the entrance. The explosion buckled the portico pillars and brought them crashing down to the ground with hundreds of tons of mountain on top of them.
“Anyone got a spade?” Ryan asked.
“Funny,” Scarlet said. “Except no, we don’t have a fucking spade and now we’re trapped down in hell with only the lava for company.”
“And it gets worse,” Camacho said. “The grenade explosion took out part of the rockface containing the lava flow and now it’s pouring down the side into this cavern. I’d say were going to have some pretty hot feet in a few hours.”
“That’s not good,” Lea said.
The dying presbyter groaned in pain and tried to get her attention. His head was still cradled in Kamala’s arms when he mumbled some Greek words.
“Ryan!” Lea said. “Get over here right now!”
“What is it?”
Kamala turned desperate eyes to the London hacker. “He said something, but I don’t know what.”
“Can you say it again, sir?” Lea asked.
He spoke in Greek again.
“He says we’re not trapped,” Ryan said.
Lea’s eyes filled with hope. “Did you get that right, Ry?”
“I think so.”
Ryan spoke in slow, gently Greek to the man, who replied in hushed, dry tones.
“He says he always knew about this tunnel complex, but pretended not to earlier in case we were like Dimitrov and Kashala. He says there are other ways out of here, through the archways on the far side of the cavern.”
“Where do they lead?” Hawke asked.
“One to the monastery, one to Ancient Thera and one to the coast.”
> “What’s Ancient Thera?” Zeke asked.
“It’s an ancient city high on Mesa Vouno Mountain.”
Lexi furrowed her brow. “Mesa Vouno Mountain?”
“The millions of tons of rock over our heads,” Ryan said.
“Ah.”
“But we want the coast,” Hawke insisted. “Kashala said he and his men were sailing away.”
“That could be any coast,” Scarlet said. “We’re on an island.”
“Hey, what do you want from me?” Hawke said. “A printed itinerary of his journey on an embossed card? We take what we can get, Cairo, you know that.”
“Point accepted, grudgingly.”
He gave her a look, then returned to Ryan.
“So which archway?”
“He’s dead,” Kamala said.
Lea looked at the old man. “Dead?”
Ryan nodded. “The good news is that before he died, he told me we needed the one on the right.”
“We have to go, and in a hurry!” Hawke said. “We need to get that cannister back.”
Kamala gently laid the presbyter’s head down and got to her feet while the others grabbed whatever kit they could get their hands on. “It doesn’t feel right leaving him here.”
Lea watched the lava slowly crawl over the top of Dimitrov’s corpse and instantly incinerate it. The presbyter awaited the same fate, and in no more than a few minutes, judging by the progress the lava was making inside the cavern. “No, but we have no choice.”
“Lea’s right,” Hawke said. “This whole place is going to be filled with lava in a few hours and Kashala and the Blood Crew are getting further away every second.” Hefting one of the mercs’ semi-automatic pistols from the ground, he checked the mag and turned to face his team. “We move out, and we move out now.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
They reached the end of the long, twisting tunnel the presbyter had pointed them to and found a large rockpool surrounded by stalagmites. “Another dead end,” Kamala said. “There’s no way we can catch up with Kashala now.”
