The Tomb of Eternity (Joe Hawke Book 3)

by Rob Jones

  “But no one even knows I’m here in Cairo…”

  “No one?”

  “Well, only Sir Richard Eden, Scarlet, Lexi Zhang, Ryan and Alex.”

  Snowcat’s words went round in his head – your enemies are closer than you think – what could it mean? Between the accents he’d heard and the sound of the Rolls-Royce engine in the chopper now hovering outside the pyramid, it was obvious that it was the British who were trying to kill him, but the only people who knew he was in Cairo were his friends – or those he presumed were his friends. Had one of them sold him out for some reason? Maybe someone had decided he was getting too close to the truth about his wife – the initial assault on them had happened in the Sheraton before the Russian agent had a chance even to talk to him, after all.

  He shook the thought from his mind. He’d known for some time that there was more to Sir Richard Eden than met the eye – but a traitor who would order his assassination in the heart of Cairo? Hawke couldn’t imagine the old man making such an order against him, and as for the culprit being Scarlet Sloane or Ryan – or Alex… it was impossible to accept.

  That left Lexi Zhang, and he didn’t have such a hard time believing that – but she could have killed him at any time – the thought of her somehow engaging Apache attack helicopters to kill him was ridiculous, not to mention the fact she was Chinese and those currently hunting him were all British.

  His mind spun with questions but there wasn’t an answer in sight. Clearly Agent Snowcat knew more than she was letting on, but as she said, now was not the time to be pursuing the matter.

  Because now they were trapped inside the Khufu Pyramid by an Apache chopper which had started to unload its chain gun on them once again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  With the chopper still blasting huge chunks of limestone out of the Khufu Pyramid, Hawke knew he had to switch his mind to battle mode and do something fast. In a surprise attack situation it was never a good idea to focus on strategy. The smart thing to do was work out what to do about it – think tactically. Revenge came later.

  “Give me your weapon!”

  “What?” Snowcat looked at him like he was insane.

  “Your gun – hand it to me – now!”

  “Russian agents do not give their guns to British soldiers.”

  “Former soldier – now I’m just a loveable rogue. Now hand it over.” He put his hand out for the weapon and waggled his fingers.

  “This is most unorthodox…”

  “It’s now or never, Snowcat!”

  She handed him the compact Makarov and he checked it was loaded and ready to fire. Two rounds.

  “What are you going to do?”

  Hawke jabbed the gun in the direction of the Apache. “I’m going to shoot that bloody thing down.”

  “You can’t bring down a helicopter with a handgun, Hawke – especially an Apache!”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  She sighed. “And just how the hell are you going to do it?”

  “We’re going to split up. You’re going to sprint over there toward that pyramid…”

  “The Pyramid of Khafre?”

  “If you say so, love.”

  She looked at him with horror on her face. “You want me to be bait for an Apache helicopter’s chain gun?”

  Hawke shrugged his shoulders. “Unless you think you stand a better chance of shooting it down?”

  Snowcat looked at him and nodded in reluctant agreement. “All right, I’ll do it. I am not afraid of anything.”

  “Good job – you go toward the Pyramid of Coffee or whatever you said it was called, and the bastard will turn to fire at you. When he turns I’ll get a clear shot at his rear rotor and bring him down.”

  “This will work?”

  “The slightest obstruction in those rotor blades at the back and that thing’s uncontrollable,” he said coolly.

  “And if you miss?”

  “If I miss you get shot with the chain gun and then they’ll turn around and put a hundred holes in me as well.”

  She smiled awkwardly. “In that case, I’d prefer it, Englishman, if you did not miss.”

  “Trust me, I won’t.”

  Hawke watched Snowcat sprint from the entrance of the Pyramid of Khufu past the ancient boat pits and over the road. Just as he thought it would, the Apache responded in an instant, turning to port and moving forward slightly to close in on its new target. The sound of the engine was overwhelming from so close, and its downwash was kicking up a storm of sand and grit.

  As Snowcat approached the Pyramid of Khafre, the Apache opened fire. Hawke watched in horror as a trail of bullets flicked up in the sand behind her with the terrible chak chak chak sound of the chain gun as it unloaded its lethal thirty mil rounds all over the young Russian woman.

  Hawke slowed his breathing and remained calm. The image of Hugo Zaugg trying to kill Lea on the cable car entered his mind. For a second he was standing in the snow of the Alps and taking aim through the sniper’s rifle, but then the cold of the snow was washed away with the heat of the Egyptian desert – now it was another woman’s life in his hands.

  He raised the pistol and cradled it with both hands. He squinted as he took aim, and prepared to take the shot. He knew bringing down a chopper with a single shot from a handgun was going to be hard work – almost impossible, some would say, but he also knew it had been done before.

  In terms of its capacity to remain airborne, any chopper, Apaches included, was a very delicate piece of machinery. As a helicopter pilot himself, Hawke knew the function of the tail rotor was to stop the rest the machine spinning around under the force of the main rotors. It applied a counter torque to the force created by the main engine, and kept the whole thing airborne and stable.

  Firing at the main rotor blades would achieve nothing. It was common knowledge among those who’d been there that Huey pilots back in the Vietnam War would use their main rotor blades to clear landing areas by pruning tree branches.

  He’d done something similar on a mission in the Sierra Leone jungle, hovering his way down into a hole in the trees and having to slice his way back out of it because the downwash had sucked the canopies back over the top of the chopper. It was messy, and noisy, and wrecked the blades, but it was easier to replace a blade than a Special Forces operative so the Top Brass turned a blind eye. The tail rotor, on the other hand, was nowhere near as robust, and yet crucial to the stability of the aircraft.

  “Fire!” Snowcat screamed. “They’re getting too close to me!”

  “No, we have to wait until they slow down or their speed will stabilize the chopper after I hit the rotor.”

  Having reached their target, the Apache slowed to a hover and turned gently in the hot air to fire the chain gun at the Russian agent for the second time.

  “Hawke, this is getting a little too real right now!”

  “Another second…”

  A slow breath, a gentle squeeze of the trigger.

  He fired the penultimate bullet in the Makarov’s magazine and hoped for the best.

  He wasn’t disappointed.

  The bullet struck one of the tail rotors and because of the chopper’s reduced hovering speed there was no longer enough lift on the vertical surfaces of the machine to help stabilize it.

  Hawke watched as the pilot reacted to the loss of the tail rotor, altering the pitch of the main rotors and adjusting his speed, but it wasn’t enough. Finally he tried to cut the engine to allow autorotation – the force of the air rushing up as they descended – to force the rotors around, but they didn’t have the height.

  They had been too greedy in their pursuit of Snowcat and a controlled descent was impossible. It plummeted toward the ground and just before it hit, Hawke directed his final shot into the fuel tank and the crippled helicopter went up in an enormous explosion, leaving nothing but a burned out shell amidst a hot fireball that fell through the sky and crashed into the sand at the southern edge of the Great P
yramid.

  As the explosion dissipated and the smoke and dust began to clear, he saw Agent Snowcat was lying in the hot sand, motionless. He ran to her, and checked her vital signs. She was still alive, but her breathing was shallow and she had a flesh would on the side of her head. It looked like she had been knocked unconscious in the shockwave of the chopper when it exploded.

  Hawke pulled her over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift and pocketed the Makarov before making a call to Eden. Both men of few words, it took just seconds to establish that Ryan had nailed down the Karnak Temple as the location of the other half of the map, and that Eden would send a chopper to pick them up and take them to the airport.

  One step backwards, and two steps forwards, Hawke thought. That’s how you get where you want.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Joe Hawke watched the runway turn into a blur and then drop away beneath them as the small jet raced up into the Egyptian sky. Far to the west, he saw the massive city of Cairo sprawling either side of the Nile, and rising up behind Giza were the famous pyramids, lit bright yellow in the hot sun. He could still see the columns of smoke from the carnage he had left behind in the shape of a burning Apache, and he guessed by now it would be surrounded by emergency crews, army and police.

  As they briefed him on what they had discovered about Osiris, he sensed more tension than was normal among his friends. Ryan was even quieter than usual and seated at the desk on the starboard side of the Gulfstream, buried in a laptop, and Alex was opposite him leafing through Mazzarro’s notebooks.

  As for him, he watched Snowcat gently breathing on the couch, still unconscious from the shockwave of the explosion back at Giza. Lexi had tended and dressed the wounds on her arm and head and said they weren’t serious.

  Hawke heard the Russian’s words again – what she had said about how his enemies were closer then he thought – and glanced at the faces of his friends for a few seconds. Could it be true that one of these people had ordered the hit on him in Cairo? Now, in their company, it seemed an even more unlikely possibility than it had done in the heat of the fire-fight down in the pyramids.

  He watched Scarlet rise from her seat. She wasted no time in hitting the mini-bar, and cracked open a vodka miniature, downing it in one. “Better,” was all she said as she pulled a second one from the fridge.

  She turned to Hawke. “Tough day at the office, darling?”

  “You could say that,” he said. “We spent half the morning on a guided tour of Cairo courtesy of some kind of renegade British Special Forces. They even laid on a helicopter.”

  “A helicopter?” Eden said, eyes narrowing.

  “Apache,” Hawke replied. “Big black thing with more arms than an octopus. British, as well.”

  Eden frowned. “I was afraid of this.”

  “Afraid of what?” Hawke asked.

  “I’ll explain later – our Russian friend is waking up.”

  Hawke watched as Snowcat slowly came back to life after the shockwave, and he offered her some water as she sat up and rubbed her head. She mumbled some words in Russian and blinked a few times to regain her focus.

  “How long was I out for?” she asked, looking down at her wristwatch.

  “Less than half an hour,” Hawke said quietly. “We’re on a plane going to Luxor.”

  “Woah – things move fast around you, Mr Hawke.”

  “They seem to, yes,” he said, smiling.

  He gave her more water and some time to regain her composure, but his compulsion to know the truth moved him to speak with her about his wife. He had waited long enough.

  As he spoke, she unbuckled her seat belt and pulled a hair tie loose, shaking her long, blonde hair free.

  “So you want to know what I have to say?”

  He nodded. “First, I want your real name. I’m not calling you Snowcat for the rest of the mission.”

  She smiled and dipped her head in agreement. “My name is Maria Kurikova.”

  “Thanks, and pleased to meet you, Maria. I’m Joe, so you can leave the ‘Mr Hawke’ stuff at the door, all right?”

  She smiled and nodded her head.

  “So why are we going to Luxor?” she asked.

  Hawke explained. “Apparently Ryan and Alex worked out that a French Egyptologist called… what was his name again?”

  “Champollion,” Ryan called over.

  “That guy, anyway,” Hawke continued, “he discovered a tablet in the desert with similar glyphs to those on our map, and tried to decode it but made very little progress before he died. Decades later some other guy…”

  “Pernier.”

  “Thanks, mate… well, that guy discovered something called the Phaistos Disc, an ancient Greek artefact…”

  “Minoan,” Ryan said. “Do you want me to tell this story?”

  “Thanks, but no thanks, mate. Anyway Pernier and Mazzarro used the information on the disc along with Champollion’s earlier work and began to create a sort of decoder…”

  “A deciphering matrix.”

  Hawke gave the younger man a look and Ryan shrugged his shoulders and walked off down the aisle to get a drink.

  “Anyway, thanks to the deciphering matrix, Ryan and Alex here were able to make sense of the map.”

  “But we only had half the map, remember,” Alex said. “Hi, I’m Alex Reeve, by the way.”

  “Hello. Maria Kurikova.”

  They shook hands.

  “Like I say, we only had the Poseidon half. We knew from Mazzarro Senior’s work on the Phaistos Disc that there had been some kind of ancient war when Poseidon and Osiris fought over possession of the map, and that’s why it was torn in half.”

  “And that’s when we realized the other half must be the Tomb of Osiris,” Ryan said, returning with a large neat whisky. He took a gulp. “The only problem was where exactly.”

  “Abydos, surely,” Maria said. “The Great Osiris Temple is in Abydos.”

  “The Great Temple is, sure,” Ryan said. “And there’s another smaller temple dedicated to him at Karnak, but we were looking for a tomb, don’t forget. His temple is well-known, and he has a temple because he was a god. But just like with Poseidon, now we know Osiris was really here on earth, we know he must have a tomb, and that’s different from a temple.”

  “I understand…”

  “Luckily for us, it looks like Poseidon’s trust for Osiris didn’t run very far, and he had the location of his rival’s tomb written on his half of the map, so now we know where the tomb of Osiris is.”

  “And it’s in Karnak,” Alex said. “Just like the smaller temple dedicated to him.”

  “But not in the same place. The tomb is deep underground, beneath the Temple of Amun, so that’s why we’re flying to Luxor.”

  Scarlet got up from her chair and yawned. “Get all that?”

  Maria laughed. “I think so…”

  “All that matters,” Hawke said with quiet determination, “is that we get there before Maxim Vetrov, stop him getting into the tomb and acquiring the other half of the map, and rescue Lea and Brad.”

  “Damn right,” Scarlet said.

  “Then we can translate Osiris’s half and finally discover the location of the Tomb of Eternity,” Ryan said, finishing his whisky.

  Hawke eyed the empty glass with concern, but said nothing. He’d been there.

  “Because in that tomb,” Eden said quietly, “there exists knowledge that has been hidden from mankind for thousands, or perhaps millions of years…”

  “And hopefully gold,” Scarlet said, causing a subdued ripple of laughter in the cabin.

  Hawke waited until the others had returned to their seats and then he lowered his voice. “Now no one’s trying to kill us any more, and we’ve got the Indiana Jones stuff out the way, I have some questions for you.”

  Maria smiled. “I thought you might, Joe.”

  “Why were British agents trying to kill us back there?” He glanced at the display on the bulkhead wall to read the fl
ight information. “I can see why they might want to take you out, but not me. At this speed we’ll be in Luxor in less than an hour, so you don’t have much time to tell me.”

  Maria inhaled deeply and took her dusty, torn suit jacket off. She draped it over the seat beside her and fixed her eyes on Hawke.

  “Joe…those men were ordered to kill us in order to silence me and to stop you.”

  “Stop me?” he asked, incredulous. “Stop me from doing what? And what does this have to do with my wife?”

  “They don’t want me to tell you what I am about to tell you, Joe.”

  Hawke clenched his jaw and rubbed a hand over his tired face. “I’ve had just about enough of secrets. Tell me what you know, and tell me now.”

  Without a pause, Maria started to speak, calm and quiet. “Elizabeth Compton was a Russian agent, Joe.”

  Hawke narrowed his eyes in shock and disbelief. “What are you talking about? Liz worked for the Ministry of Defence as a translator. She was fluent in German and Spanish.”

  “And Russian.”

  “No! She didn’t speak a word of Russian.”

  Maria offered a sympathetic smile. “I’m sorry, but she did speak Russian. I spoke with her myself in the language.”

  Hawke was shell-shocked at the revelation and could barely control the thoughts of incredulity and despair that raced into his mind so fast he couldn’t begin to process them all. “You knew my wife?”

  The Russian woman nodded respectfully. “Agent Swallowtail and I spoke on several occasions.”

  “Agent Swallowtail?”

  She nodded and Hawke recoiled in horror. Before she had died, Olivia Hart had used that word to describe the operation to murder Liz, and now the Russian agent was telling him it was his wife’s codename. He felt like the plane was falling apart all around him and he was tumbling to earth without a parachute.

  “Your wife was half-Russian, Joe. I know she kept that secret from the Ministry in London, but she never told you either?”