The Tomb of Eternity (Joe Hawke Book 3)

by Rob Jones

  THE TOMB OF ETERNITY

  (Joe Hawke #3)

  Rob Jones

  Copyright © 2016 by Rob Jones

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used, reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author or publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  THE TOMB OF ETERNITY 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 persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This ebook is for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you would like to share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, please go to an ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Other Books by Rob Jones

  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)

  This novel is an action-adventure thriller and includes archaeological, military and mystery themes. I welcome constructive comments and I’m always happy to get your feedback.

  Website: www.robjonesnovels.com

  Facebook: http://bit.ly/RobJonesNovels

  Email: robjonesnovels@gmail.com

  Blog: http://robjonesbooks.blogspot.com

  Twitter: @AuthorRobJones

  DEDICATION

  For T

  CONTENTS

  DEDICATION

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  CHAPTER ONE

  New York

  The view of Manhattan was obscured by heavy cloud as the Boeing banked to starboard and began its final descent into the city. An exhausted Joe Hawke snatched a glimpse of the Chrysler Building before it was blocked by more of the same cloud. Next to him, Lea Donovan, the Irishwoman he trusted more than anyone else in the world slept fitfully, and across the aisle Ryan Bale stared into nothing without blinking or moving.

  Hawke looked away and closed his eyes. It was less than a day since Nightingale had sent him the text saying she was being kidnapped. He had stared at those words dozens of times during the flight, each time hoping he had made some kind of a mistake, that maybe it was a joke after all.

  As for the picture of the man she had sent before he snatched her – the hideous, blurred image of her tormentor looming over her with what looked like a kitchen knife in his hand – he felt an uncontrollable rage rise in him every time he looked at it.

  Lea had done as promised and taken the situation straight to Sir Richard Eden, but as he was listening patiently to her words, Hawke was already booking the flight to New York. He appreciated the open offer of help, but he was reluctant to take it.

  The last time he had led a crew of people into a mission, two of them hadn’t come back, and he wouldn’t forget how Olivia Hart and Sophie Durand had died – on his watch, under his command. He saw Sophie’s death in Ryan’s face every time he looked at him. He clenched his jaw and looked down to see he’d squeezed all the blood from his knuckles. This time he wanted to face the enemy alone and be responsible for only himself, but Lea would have none of it.

  “Where you go, I go, Joe Hawke,” she had said.

  Ryan agreed with a non-committal shrug of his shoulders.

  So now the three of them flew into New York.

  He looked ahead with hatred in his heart, and knew there was a lot of hard, dangerous work to do if he was going to rescue Nightingale. The big question on his mind was why had she been taken? Was it simply to strike at him somehow – some kind of personal vendetta – or did it have something to do with the cursed Map of Immortality?

  He didn’t know for sure, but he had a bad feeling the damned map was behind everything, and if all of this weren’t bad enough, his mind was also being tortured by the thought of Dragonfly’s treachery, a woman he now cursed himself for trusting with such an important mission. It was another terrible lapse of judgement that made him question all over again his ability to be leading people into such danger.

  When they boarded the aircraft in Hong Kong, Eden had contacted Lea and told her he was already on Dragonfly’s trail. He had sent Scarlet Sloane and Bradley Karlsson to Germany to start the hunt for the Chinese assassin and the map which she had taken from the burning tomb back in Xian. Hawke knew he had to save his old CIA friend first, but the thought of hunting down Lexi Zhang and settling his account with her was almost enough to quell the rage rising in his heart.

  At least, he considered bitterly, all of this had pushed thoughts of his wife, Liz, to the back of his mind. Even now after he’d had time to think about what Hart had told him on their way to Xian, he could hardly bring himself to believe a word of it, and yet… He knew in his heart what she had told him was true. His wife had not been who he thought she was. He had to accept the terrible truth that throughout their relationship she had been someone else – someone with a secret past, who had lied to him every day they had been together. That tore him up almost as much as the savage murder which he had witnessed on their honeymoon.

  The aircraft turned once again and lined up for its final approach. Lea stirred from her sleep and stretched her arms. She looked tired, Hawke thought. He watched her buckle her seatbelt and prepare for the landing, but then he saw Ryan and his mind drifted to the terrible loss the young lad had sustained when the Lotus’s underlings had murdered his girlfriend while she was trying to save his life. He knew what he was going through, but it was pointless to say it. Absent-mindedly he buckled up as Lea checked her phone.

  “Anything?” he asked.

  She nodded and swept her hair up behind her ears. “A message from Richard – just reiterating that we should focus on finding Nightingale because he’s going to put Scarlet on the search for Lexi. As for Nightingale, I asked him to run some traces on her calls to try and get an address.”

  Hawke considered the plan for a moment a
nd decided that if anyone could track Lexi Zhang down then that person was Cairo Sloane. “Let’s hope she can find her then,” he said, thinking once again about her betrayal of him and his friends back in Xian.

  “What’s the matter?” Lea asked.

  “Nothing…it’s just that I was the one who dragged Lexi into all of this – it’s my fault that we got shafted over the map. I knew I couldn’t trust her… I just can’t believe I introduced her to everyone and seriously put your lives into her hands.”

  Lea sighed. “Don’t be so bloody melodramatic, Joe Hawke!”

  “Eh?”

  “You heard me well enough.”

  “Well, sure, but…”

  “But you were expecting some sympathy? Well forget it, boyo. We’re all big grown-ups around here you know, with the exception of Ryan, at least.”

  “I heard that,” Ryan mumbled with his eyes closed.

  “The point is that we made our own judgement about Lexi Zhang and whether or not to trust her. It’s not all down to you, so pull your head out of your arse and focus on finding Nightingale, got it?”

  Hawke smiled. “Got it.”

  “That’s what I like to hear. Now, is it too late to order some beer and peanuts?” As she spoke she craned her neck above the headrest of the chair in front and tried to find a flight assistant. Hawke shook his head and turned to the window.

  Below them now he saw the squat buildings of an industrial zone adjacent to the airport, and thousands of cars snaking their way in and out of the sprawling city. The flaps were now fully deployed and the odd silence of final approach filled the cabin. He hadn’t been to America since Eddie Kosinski had released him from CIA custody, and as the plane touched down on US soil and the cascade reversers were deployed, he half wondered if they would let him back in again.

  “I’ll find out soon enough,” he said to himself.

  They taxied slowly to the gate and a gentle drizzle began to fall.

  *

  A short car ride through the city brought them to their destination – what looked from the outside like a pretty expensive condo building in the Tribeca district. Yellow cabs honked horns and fought for supremacy somewhere in the distance, and a few dozen people hurried along the sidewalks wrapped in scarves and gloves. The cold sky promised snow, but for now it was still just drizzle. In the distance a giant billboard flashed an image of the latest iPhone, but everyone was too cold to notice.

  “Joe?”

  It was Lea. Her voice was quiet, and she gently brushed his arm when she spoke.

  “Yeah?”

  “We’re here, babe.”

  He looked at her distractedly, not even seeing her, and then stared up at the building while a solemn Ryan Bale paid the cab driver.

  “This is it?” he said.

  Lea shrugged. “Sure. This is the location Richard traced her last call to.”

  Thank God for Richard, was all Hawke could think. He had never met anyone with more influence and reach than Sir Richard Eden, and, he suspected, more money. Right now, Hawke was so angry he just wanted to punch his way through the problem, but having Eden use his MI5 contacts to trace Nightingale’s call was a stroke of genius from Lea. He knew it almost certainly meant the difference between life and death for his old CIA friend, wherever the hell she was right now.

  “Let’s start this, then,” he said, steeling himself for another fight. He turned to Lea, lowered his voice and quietly gestured to Ryan over at the cab. “You really think he’s up to it?”

  She nodded. “I think so. I think he got a lot of it out of his heart last night – I’ve never seen Ryan drink an entire bottle of Scotch like that before. I know he must be totally crushed inside, but he seems to be projecting his anger outwards.”

  “Is that a good thing?”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Sounds unpredictable to me, but…”

  “But we both know we’re going to need him.”

  Hawke nodded. “Exactly.”

  “And…”

  Hawke flicked his eyes to Lea. “What?”

  “He says he won’t stop until he’s killed everyone in Sheng’s team.”

  “They’re already all dead – apart from Luk, of course, and a few lackeys.”

  Lea shuddered when Hawke mentioned Luk. The last time she had seen him he was fleeing for his worthless life from the burning tomb of the Emperor Qin, and the time before that she was chained down to a boatshed bench while Luk sharpened a cut-throat razor. Now, he was out there somewhere, anywhere. She couldn’t bear to think about it.

  “Don’t remind me about that weirdo, please. I’m just saying I think he’s alright but we can’t rule out him doing something crazy – dropping off the grid and going it alone, or something like that. He wouldn’t last five minutes, Joe.”

  “We’re not going to let that happen, all right? But now we have to focus.”

  Hawke pulled up his collar and walked toward the apartment building. It was time to stop asking questions and start finding answers.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Berlin

  Dragonfly lit the cigarette and held the smoke deep down inside. She sighed, and with the gentle exhalation the hot smoke flowed smoothly out of her body and into the cold Berlin sky. All was fair in love and war, or so they said, and yet… She shook the thought from her mind and watched the traffic below her hotel room.

  Yes, she had betrayed Joe Hawke. She knew that. It was part of the game. She had taken the map from Sheng Fang, prising it from his dead hands – but she had no choice. Sorokin had contacted her just hours before. He had sent her a simple message explaining that he knew her darkest secret, and would reveal it to Hawke and everyone else she knew if she didn’t comply. The information was safe, he had said. He’d been very reassuring. Kill me and it will be released to the world. Get me the map or they find out, he had told her. One false move and they find out, he had said. It didn’t look like he was kidding around.

  She knew she would get her revenge on Sorokin – no one threatened her and got away with it, but she also knew she had to play along – play for time – do as the Russian told her until the moment for revenge presented itself. As it turned out that happened sooner than she thought when an unknown hit-man took Sorokin out of the game on the taxi rank outside the airport in Berlin. As far as the old Chinese proverb went, the hen had flown, but the egg was not necessarily broken.

  But it would be if Joe Hawke ever got his hands on that information about her.

  As for who else knew what Sorokin had discovered about her past, she could never know. That was the life she led, but at least it was one less fire to put out. She knew she would have to find out if Sorokin was telling the truth about the information being hidden away somewhere, but there was no time for that now.

  She also knew there was much more damage to undo – Hawke and the others would take some persuading that she had not deliberately betrayed them, especially considering that she could never tell them the truth about why she had done so – she would have to get creative on that score and cook something up for them. More lies… and then there was this damned map… She had to do something with it before Sorokin’s killers came calling a second time.

  She gazed down into the city. An absent-minded flick of the cigarette knocked a cloud of ash over the balcony. She watched it drift through the air, its aimless trajectory reminding her sadly of her own bitter past. Even here, so far away from her life in China, that dark, repressed history had a way of rising up and almost choking her. If only she could go back in time, she thought…

  Now, just because she didn’t want them to, her mind filled with memories of the past. The day she left home to join the Ministry, her training, how the State took her under its wing and showed her everything. Her first kill – it was a shooting in Pyongyang and she still had nightmares about it… The first time she met Joe Hawke in Zambia – she was there to investigate corruption. Someone was diverting Chinese state development funds into a
private account in the Caribbean when he should have been increasing productivity in the Chambishi copper mine. She had persuaded him to return the money before placing him on early retirement. Or that’s what the government told his family, anyway. The reality was somewhat different.

  Hawke was there as part of a joint SBS-SAS team protecting a British trade envoy and his team in the country who were there to talk about investment opportunities. There had been a terror threat made against the envoy and Hawke and his squadron travelled alongside the officials in civvies, posing as administrators.

  They had met in a restaurant in Lusaka, each pretending to be someone they were not, but each had the skills and experience to know the other was lying. It wasn’t long before they had each other’s true story and a few bottles of Mosi lager on the side. They had spent three nights with each other, totally against the rules, but neither seemed to care. The mission had ended badly for the British, but a success for the Chinese, and she was given a special commendation when she got home.

  Now, if Hawke refused to believe her she would have to add yet another betrayal to the ash-heap of her memories. But maybe she could fix it. Just maybe.

  She stood motionless and considered her position. She was alone in a German hotel room with the Map of Immortality – the object of the most insane desire in history. Sorokin had taken them there to meet with a man who promised to translate the map. Probably just a charlatan, she thought, and rolled it out on the bed. She took a long look at the thing that had caused so much trouble and death. She felt like using it as an ashtray.

  It was, sadly, unintelligible. She was angry with herself for being so naïve – she had pretty much expected it to be a map of some kind of territory with something approximating a big red cross on it to show where the hidden treasure was. Instead she was confronted with an illegible, messy scrawl – some kind of code – that reminded her of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Whatever it was, it meant nothing to her, and it wasn’t the sort of thing you could Google, either. She had no chance of finding the elixir without the others’ help, and she knew it.