by Rob Jones
THUNDER GOD
(Joe Hawke #2)
Rob Jones
Copyright © 2015 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.
THUNDER GOD 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.
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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: [email protected]
Blog: http://robjonesbooks.blogspot.com
Twitter: @AuthorRobJones
DEDICATION
For Snow-White, Again
CONTENTS
DEDICATION
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
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
AUTHOR’S NOTE
CHAPTER ONE
London
Joe Hawke woke with a start. In the darkness of his London flat the telephone was ringing, and he scrambled to pick up the call before it rang off.
“Hawke,” was all he said. He squinted at the small clock beside his bed: 01:17.
“This is Eden.” His voice was level and inscrutable.
Hawke felt a surge of uncertainty course through his veins. He had no idea why Sir Richard Eden would be calling him in the middle of the night, but he knew he wasn’t inviting him to a birthday party.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s Lea,” Eden said firmly. “She’s gone missing.”
Hawke paused a beat to let the words sink in. He was still half asleep, and part of him wondered if all this was nothing more than a terrible dream. Eden was talking about Lea Donovan, his personal security chief, and the woman Hawke had started to fall in love with. He swung his legs out of the bed and switched on the light. The past few weeks had changed his life completely – he’d hunted down a Swiss megalomaniac, ending his insane dreams of world domination, and met Lea, the first woman he’d felt strongly about since the cold-blooded murder of his wife. Now, Eden was telling him she was gone.
“What does missing mean, Richard?”
“We don’t know. She was on assignment for me in the Far East and she’s dropped off the grid. A few days ago I sent her to Hong Kong to look into something that could be a potential problem for me – for us all. She always sticks to protocol, which is to make contact with me every six hours, but contact was broken around ten hours ago.”
“I’m listening.”
Eden continued, calm and measured, but clearly concerned and trying to hide the fact from the former SBS man. “I have a feeling something pretty big is about to kick off, Hawke, and I’m trusting you to sort it for me. I know there are some things you don’t trust about me, and I know you’re aware that I’m not telling you everything, but I’m asking for your help, and in return you’ll get the knowledge you’ve been searching for.”
Hawke listened carefully to what Eden was saying. Since the very beginning he’d known something big was being kept from him, and that Sir Richard Eden was where the mystery began and ended. He also knew the deceit had something to do with not only Scarlet Sloane and Sophie Durand but also Lea Donovan herself – the woman who had broken contact with her boss and was now missing in Hong Kong.
Now Eden was confirming that his intuition had been right all along and that there was more to all of this than he knew. The old English politician was also telling him that he was closer than ever to finding out the truth about it all, but Hawke didn’t need any of that as an incentive – the fact that Lea was missing while on assignment was enough to motivate him.
“Can I take your plane?” Hawke asked.
“No. I sent the plane to Dubai to pick up Scarlet Sloane. I know how well you worked together and I asked her to help you. You’ll have to fly on a commercial airline, and that means waiting until the morning.”
“I’m on it.”
A second after Eden had hung up, Hawke was on his feet.
He got up and paced into the bathroom where he picked up his pre-packed kit bag and brushed his teeth. Light off and back in the bedroom, he tossed the bag on the bed and pulled some clothes off the back of an old chair at the side of his bed.
The agony he’d felt after Liz’s murder had ruined him for years, and left him a broken man. He’d long ago lost count of how many booze-soaked nights it had taken to get over Liz – nights full of tears and insomnia so carefully hidden from the rest of the world, and yet he knew you never really got over something like that, not completely.
Worst of all was the knowledge that her killer was now dead himself, taken out by a Special Forces raid in Thailand. Instead of celebrating his death, Hawke found it had robbed him of the most primal of desires – revenge, and that meant a never-ending cycle of hatred and regret without any closure.
All this had left him scarred and with a greater fear of losing those he loved than he had ever had before Hanoi. Now, faced with the thought of something similar happening to Lea, his fists tightened and he clenched his jaw, totally rejecting even the thought of such a terrible nightmare.
Whatever he felt about Eden and his game of secrets, he knew he w
as an extremely professional man with serious contacts in the intelligence communities, as well as a highly respected archaeologist and discoverer of ancient treasures. None of this made him inclined to take his word with anything but the gravest seriousness.
Whatever had happened to Lea, he would undo it.
Whoever was responsible, he would punish.
He slammed his door on his way to the cab and told the driver to get to London Heathrow Airport as fast as possible.
It was all kicking off again.
CHAPTER TWO
Paris
Art historian Felix Hoffmann sprinted through the foot tunnel of the Kléber Metro station. The cold air burned the back of his throat as he desperately searched for a way to escape his pursuer. He had known they would come for him one day, but not like this. Not with such ferocity. Not in the middle of the night.
A moment ago he was enjoying a simple apéritif with friends in the Club Kléber, but then his world had changed forever when the stranger whispered in his ear: the God of Thunder has returned. He knew what that meant. He knew what they wanted.
Now, he stumbled down the tiled steps and ran deeper into the deserted station, straining every fiber of strength he could find in his desperate bid to outpace the much younger and stronger assailant chasing him through the Paris night.
Below in the darkness, he heard the sound of a train on the line. For the briefest of moments he thought he was going to live, to see his family again. But when he reached the platform he saw it was not an arrival, but an outbound train leaving the station.
Desperate and scared, he looked up and down the platform for someone to help him, but there was no one there – just the roving eye of a security camera fixed to the wall, cold, remote and powerless to stop his terrible fate from unfolding. Behind him he heard the footsteps again, the breathing. The assailant was getting closer.
There was only one course of action now, and he took it.
He climbed down into the tunnel and moved through the darkness. He was fearful now not only of the lethal threat behind him, but of the potentially fatal consequences of touching the third rail. He weaved as fast as he could along the guiding rails of the tracks, his feet occasionally brushing against the rubber-tired lines.
Hoffmann was a specialist in Chinese art in everything ranging from Shang Dynasty bronze work to Zhou Dynasty artwork and he was proud of his ignorance of the technical world. But he had read the signs all over the Paris Métro warning against urinating on the third rail often enough, and he needed no further explanation as to why doing such a thing would be a bad idea.
But now he was actually down on the tracks, running for his life and breathless with panic at the thought of what would happen to him if he was caught. Maybe even electrocution in this dark, cold tunnel would be preferable to that.
Now, he heard the familiar rumble of an approaching train. He strained his eyes in the low-light of the tunnel and saw something that filled him with dread. Ahead of him, one side of the tunnel was being illuminated by the ghostly yellow light of an approaching Métro train. His only chance of escaping being crushed to death by it was to turn and run back into the arms of his pursuer. As he thought about options, he watched the rats scatter in fear of the imminent danger.
Then he heard the voice. “You can’t escape, Felix!” It was cold, and emotionless, and bounced icily from the tiled walls of the grimy tunnel.
“Why can’t you people leave me alone?” he screamed, his voice hoarse with the effort of sprinting and the sheer terror he now felt coursing through his veins. “Haven’t you taken enough from me?”
“You have given us very much, yes,” said the voice. “But it is what you are keeping from us that we are more interested in. Where are the papers?”
Hoffmann’s mind raced with indecision. In one direction was certain death, brought by the crushingly heavy twin steel bogies of the Métro train now rumbling toward him with terrifying speed. In the other direction was also certain death, brought by the people he feared more than anything.
The train driver sounded the horn. It was shrill and deafening in the enclosed tunnel.
“Give us this one last thing, Felix,” the voice said, calm even in the face of the on-coming train. “Join us!”
“Never! I will never involve myself with such sacrilege!”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Felix. This is what you’ve always wanted. Now is your chance! Help us, and you will taste eternal life.”
Hoffmann stared at his pursuer’s silhouette. He looked at the train – thousands of tons of metal racing towards him. He knew what acquiescing to them would mean. It exhilarated him, but it terrified him more.
“Last chance, Felix! Give us what we need and join us. Join the Gods!”
One more look at the train and Felix Hoffmann obeyed his deepest instinct and ran away from it, sprinting closer to his pursuer with every step. He might stand a chance on the platform, but if he stayed here on the tracks his life was certain to end in seconds.
“You made the right decision, Felix.”
“Somehow I doubt that...” he said. He would live today, he thought, so he could run tomorrow.
But he didn’t have long to think about tomorrow, because then his future took a drastic change for the worse.
As he crawled up on to the edge of the platform to get out of the tunnel, he felt his assailant move quickly behind him, and then suddenly it happened.
The cord flicked around his neck and tightened, cutting an agonizing groove into the soft flesh of his throat and cutting off his air supply. In vain, he tugged at the cord, but it was too tight around his neck for him even to get his fingertips beneath it.
Behind him, the train raced past in a howling gust of grit and grime.
“Where are the Reichardt Papers, Felix?” the voice said. Cool, authoritative. In complete control.
“Please!” he croaked hoarsely.
“Where are they?”
Hoffmann flailed about in a vain attempt to free himself, but he grew weaker with every missed breath. His eyes were bulging so much he thought they might burst from his head, but he somehow managed to get the words out. “You said I could join you...”
“I lied. Give me their location or your family will die just like this.”
“They’re... they’re... here! I have them on me now. Please don’t harm my family!”
As Hoffmann felt his pursuer reach into his jacket and pull the papers from his pocket, he knew he had betrayed not only himself but the entire world. “I’ve told you now, please... please just let me breathe and let my family live!”
But the assailant didn’t let him breathe. Hoffmann struggled but there was no escape. The last thing he saw was the glowing strip lights of the Métro station through his painful, bulging eyes, and then he felt himself slip away. They had won at last, and the world would pay a terrible price for his failure.
CHAPTER THREE
Hong Kong
Hawke knew when he was being followed, and now was one of those times. He and Scarlet Sloane had been in Hong Kong less than one hour and already there was someone tailing them. For all he knew, they could have been watching him on the plane from London – the first flight to leave London for Hong Kong after Sir Richard Eden had woken him to tell him about Lea’s disappearance.
They cut through an alley and entered the Temple Street Night Market in a bid to lose their pursuer. Years ago, Hawke was stationed in the city as a commando in the British Forces Overseas Hong Kong. The Royal Marines had been stationed in the city since the very first days of British colonization, and it was a great posting loved by most of the military who went there.
But as Hawke looked for a way to lose the tail, he saw things had changed. For one thing, the night market was different. Once it offered excellent food, a great atmosphere, singers on the sidewalks – but now not so much. It looked tacky and tired, the singers had disappeared into the cool, subtropical night and the food was c
heap and salty.
And the man was still behind them.
The tourists in the market grew in number as the night grew older and the familiar smell of fried meat and plum sauce filled the air. All around them people laughed and took selfies of their night in the exotic city.
They passed some prostitutes outside a noodle bar and moved deeper into the crowd to consider their situation. Only one person knew they were in Hong Kong – Sir Richard Eden. Hawke knew he would never betray him.
They crossed Saigon Street. Red bunting flapped in the wind and a man was arguing with a fortune teller, raising his voice to be heard over the noise of a nearby karaoke bar.
News of Hugo Zaugg’s death less than two weeks ago had been presented to the world as a tragic suicide, but how many knew the truth outside of Eden’s official circle and certain elements of the American Government was unknown.
When he’d landed in Hong Kong things had gotten even worse. Eden had contacted him to brief him about another murder. A private researcher in Paris who was somehow linked to Lea’s disappearance was killed shortly after Eden’s first phone call to Hawke, and of grave concern to Eden was the simple fact that Lea had been tasked with putting this particular man under surveillance while he was recently in Hong Kong.
Hawke wondered if the death of Felix Hoffmann and now his new friend a few hundred yards behind him were connected to the Zaugg affair, but instantly put it out of his mind. He was in Hong Kong to find Lea and now work out the Hoffmann connection, and he knew where he had to start.
“Check out the guy in the black shirt.” Hawke jabbed his thumb over his shoulder.
“We’re being tailed?”
“Pretty sure we are, yeah. He’s been keeping around a hundred yards behind us since we turned into the market.”
