Valhalla Gold (Joe Hawke Book 5)

by Rob Jones

  “I’m so sorry…” she said quietly.

  “Forget it,” Hawke said. “People like this don’t play fair.”

  Smets grinned, but there was nothing in the eyes except hate. “Now we go, and you stay here like good little puppies or the Irish woman gets her throat slit.”

  They moved Lea away into the kitchen and silence fell in the room as the ECHO team looked at each other, stunned.

  Hawke knew there was no time to waste, so he grabbed his gun and ran to the kitchen. He went through the narrow door and turned the corner with the weapon raised but found an empty room. The flyscreen door was closing slowly behind them. They had gone, and he had to act fast if he was going to rescue Lea. Why they had gone to all this trouble to take her was a question he could answer later, but how had they known they were in Florida?

  He smashed his way through the wedged-shut outside door and scanned the back yard for Lea and her kidnappers. He felt the adrenalin pounding through his body as his mind raced with visions of her being subjected to another kidnapping, and maybe worse. He wasn’t going to let that happen again.

  “I see them!” he shouted to the others. “The bastards are dragging her toward the boat!”

  The yacht he had seen going south was slowly moving further along the coast from Victoria’s beach hut to where it was covered by the curve of a tree-lined beach. The Englishman now saw it was a Maritimo M58, a luxurious sixty-foot motor yacht with several opulently appointed decks not to mention some pretty chunky hardware under the hood. Whoever was behind this operation had funds.

  “We can’t let them get away!” Ryan shouted, pulling out his phone.

  “Thanks for that contribution, Captain Obvious,” Scarlet said as she smoothly reloaded her SIG. “And now is hardly the time to play Final Fantasy, is it dear?”

  “I’m not playing Final Bloody Fantasy,” he replied. “I’m taking their picture. If they’re Foreign Legion our friend from Marseille might be able to help identify them.” He zoomed in on them and started snapping pictures.

  “Ah, yes,” Scarlet said. “I was waiting to see how long it would be till you thought of that.”

  Hawke ignored the comments as he tracked the attackers’ progress through the resort. They were keeping off the central path and using the gardens of the beach huts for added cover as they made their way to the boat.

  “The yacht has to come into the coast to pick them up.” Scarlet said.

  From their position in the garden they were able to look down the side of the property at the coast and watch as the luxury boat sailed calmly away from them.

  “They’re going to rendezvous further down the coast behind those palms!” Hawke said.

  “There’s a short-cut through here!” Victoria said. “It’s a narrow track which is used by the garbage trucks once a week. If they’re trying to get back to the coast then this is the fastest way to try and catch them.”

  “Right,” Hawke said firmly. “Scarlet, you stay here with Vikki and Ryan – I’m going after Lea.”

  Scarlet rolled her eyes. “Babysitting again?”

  “We’re not sure if they’re planning on attacking again or if they have other men here we don’t know about. The last thing we want is for us both to go after Lea and get back to find Vikki and Ryan with their heads blown off.”

  “Er yeah…” Ryan said with a look of horror on his face. “That’s definitely the last thing we want.”

  “Heads blown off?” Victoria said, going white. “You don’t mean that literally, do you, Mr Hawke?”

  Scarlet sighed. “I will do literally anything if you let me go for Lea while you stay here with these two.”

  “Sorry, Scarlet, but not this time.”

  “Bastard, but go… just go!”

  Hawke didn’t reply, but just started running.

  He sprinted down the track Victoria had suggested and kept his eye on the progress of the yacht. His boots crunched on the gravel and he made his way along the backs of the luxury huts at speed, calling out an apology as he ran through the middle of someone’s garden picnic and getting snagged in their birthday bunting.

  He saw the yacht was slowly drawing away from him, and the humidity of the Florida day was dragging on him like a weight as he sprinted. He leaped over a low wooden fence and sent a shower of startled Bahama mockingbirds flying from an orange tree up into the air. It was then he realized he was starting to lose the race.

  He increased speed, but they were still too far away. He vaulted over another low fence and made his way toward the shore, noticing an Innespace Seabreacher X moored to a pier. It must have been the one Lea had seen earlier.

  Now Smets was dragging Lea along the jetty and waving his gun in the air as he screamed at his underlings. He turned, saw Hawke and fired a series of casual shots in his vague direction to keep the Englishman from getting any closer, but Hawke slipped into parkour mode to dodge the bullets and executed a couple of high-speed shoulder rolls as he drew closer.

  Now he felt like his lungs were about to burst as he finally got to the beach, only to see Smets hauling Lea roughly into the back of the large boat and shouting commands at the man in the wheelhouse.

  Without thinking of his own safety, Hawke took a deep breath and started to sprint to the jetty. He’d let Lea slip through his fingers before and he was damned sure he wasn’t going to let a man like Smets get his hands on her.

  But even running as fast as he could, he knew he wasn't going to get there in time, and as he hit the foreshore and vaulted up onto the jetty he watched in agony as the Maritimo’s powerful engines roared loudly and pushed the boat out into the ocean.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Maritimo raced away from the shore, its twin Volvo engines powering the sixty-foot motoryacht toward the eastern horizon with an impressive roar. Hawke raised his gun and shot one of the men at the rear of the boat. He tumbled toward the bright blue water clutching at his neck before hitting the surface with a loud splash and disappearing into the white foam in the boat’s wake.

  Leon Smets was still holding a gun to Lea’s throat. A faint smirk was visible on his face as the boat moved further out to sea. As they accelerated away, he turned and dragged her below decks. The woman with the shaved head stopped to flip the bird at Hawke and then followed Smets and Lea into the cabin.

  Hawke knew he had seconds to give chase, and scanned the area for a solution. He saw plenty of boats bobbing up and down in the marina, but that was a five minute sprint and by the time he got there a boat as powerful as the Maritimo would have built up too much of a lead.

  Then he remembered the Innespace Seabreacher X he had seen earlier – the one Lea had told him about back at the beach house. That was less than half the distance and those things were fast enough to eat up any lead generated by the motoryacht.

  He sprinted to the private jetty and climbed aboard the Seabreacher. It was a semi-submersible watercraft painted to look like a shark, and as watercraft went it was in a different league to just about anything else on the water. Thanks to the TV show he’d watched with Lea he knew they worked on a three dimensional axis with pitch, roll and yaw, the way aircraft moved. He also knew it had a top speed of almost fifty knots, which was nearly twice as fast as the Maritimo could manage.

  He wasted no time in dexterously unscrewing the ignition and hotwiring the boat, and seconds later he felt the revs of the lightweight supercharged Rotax engine all around him. This was the fighter jet of the ocean.

  Behind him he heard the sound of a man shouting and screaming. He turned in the seat and saw a man with a white hat running toward him. “Get out of my boat you god-damned thief!”

  Time to go, he thought.

  He closed the cockpit hatch and secured it before strapping himself in and squeezing on the joystick. Instantly he increased in speed and shot away from the jetty, leaving nothing behind him but a lengthy wake and a massive spray of seawater.

  Looking ahead he saw the Maritimo, and squeezed do
wn on the trigger once again to increase his speed. As the rapid acceleration pushed him back into his seat he felt like he was riding a bullet, but now he was getting close enough to the motoryacht to start making the gunmen suspicious. They assembled on deck with their weapons and watched with interest as he piloted the Seabreacher closer and closer to their boat.

  After much pointing and arguing they decided he was a threat and started firing on him. Hawke reacted in a heartbeat, steering into the yacht’s wake and pushing down on the joystick. The Seabreacher pushed through the wake and descended beneath the waves for a few seconds – just long enough for Hawke to steer the high-velocity watercraft away from its original vector and bring himself across to the yacht’s portside.

  He pulled back on the stick and the Seabreacher broke the sea’s surface at high speed, shooting up into the air like a dolphin racing alongside the prow of a cruise liner. Now he was on the portside of the Maritimo and the men raced from the rear of the yacht, lined up along the left side of the boat and began to pour fire on the compact watercraft with their submachine guns.

  Hawke heard the familiar metallic pings as their bullets sprayed up the side of the Seabreacher’s reinforced glass-fibre hull. He cursed and steered sharply to the left and then pushed down on the stick sending the craft under the waves once more. Correcting his course to the right, he crossed in front of the Maritimo just as he emerged from the surface again and shot into the air barely avoiding a collision with the bow of the yacht. The Rotax engine revved wildly as he shot into the air and landed with a smack at ninety degrees to the boat.

  Now on its starboard side, he decided playtime was over and hit the hatch release. The glass dome slid back like the cockpit on a fighter jet and allowed him to return fire. He slowed the craft until the boat pulled parallel with him and smiled warmly at the men who had now reassembled on the starboard side, giving them a cheery wave.

  For a second his disarming smile seemed to confuse them, but then he raised his gun in his left hand and fired a series of shots at them while still controlling the boat with his right hand. The Seabreacher slipped around on the surface back and forth and the salty water sprayed up into the now open cockpit as Hawke struggled to control the craft while simultaneously aiming at the gunmen.

  It paid off as he successfully picked off another of the men and sent him flying off the back of the yacht, but the men returned fire and this time they had more success. The Seabreacher’s incredible speed and versatility in the water was dependent on its amazing design, part of which was the inclusion of shark-like fins. The men’s second volley of fire had blasted one of these fins to pieces and raked a series of holes in the hull and now Hawke felt the craft slipping out of his control.

  With the Seabreacher now veering all over the place, he knew there was only one move left to play, and that was the move he was here to make anyway, so he did his best to navigate the craft over to the yacht and then pulled back on the stick. The speeding watercraft launched into the air and flew towards the yacht’s rear deck.

  The men scrambled for fear of getting hit by its lethal whirring propellers, but it flew past them just as Hawke had planned. On its way past the yacht he leaped from the small cockpit and grabbed hold of the yacht’s rear deck. Somewhere behind him the Seabreacher spun upside down and hit the water at full speed, sending a massive explosion of fire and sea-spray into the hot afternoon.

  Half immersed in the water as the yacht raced forward, Hawke scrambled up onto the stern and clambered over the railing to the relative safety of the rear deck.

  But it was only a relative safety, because a second later a man emerged from the yacht’s galley and fired an uncompromising quantity of hot lead at him from the flashing muzzle of a Heckler & Koch MP5. Hawke ducked behind the lazarette, the small storage area at the rear of the yacht. Ryan had once told him this was named after Lazarus, because he was placed on board an old sailing ship in such a place after his death. Thanks for that, Rupert, he thought as he reloaded his gun and prepared to fight back.

  Hawke’s death nearly ensued seconds later when the man returned fire and his bullets punctured their way through the lazarette and drilled into the teak deck, splintering all around him. He waited until the assault was over and the man tried to reload before he spun around and fired at him, but the man had wedged himself behind the cockpit’s folding doors for cover. Hawke’s bullet smashed the panel of strengthened glass but it did no more damage than cause a spider web fracture and further obscure the man from view.

  He ducked again as the man returned fire, but then the gun jammed, and Hawke took advantage of the situation by firing two more bullets at him, planting them in his chest and neck. He collapsed like a sack of potatoes and Hawke leaped to his feet and crossed the small deck to the cabin.

  As he went, he saw Leon Smets and the woman with the crew cut zooming away from the Maritimo in a Nautilus 12 DLX – a luxury console tender attached to the larger yacht. They were moving away at some speed from the Maritimo, the Suzuki outboard roaring away as the vessel cut through the surface of the water. He cursed himself for letting them get away, but it was then he heard Lea screaming from somewhere below decks.

  He had only seconds to make the call and went with his heart – save Lea. He knew that the Maritimo was faster than the Nautilus, so maybe Smets had made a mistake and would pay for it later. With the decision made he moved toward the cabin. It was empty, but he knew there was another man somewhere on the top deck – someone was controlling the boat after all – and this was confirmed a few seconds later when a man began firing at him from above. He dodged the burst of bullets from the goon and turned to go in the main cabin for cover.

  He was now in a sumptuous open-plan room surrounded by a horse-shoe shaped white leather couch and a sparkling glass coffee table. He ran right over the top of the table, booting the centerpiece out the way as he went, and headed for the lower decks. Somewhere down there was Lea Donovan, and he prayed she was unharmed.

  He kicked open a polished wooden door, gun raised, but saw nothing except a gleaming galley replete with bowls of fresh fruit and orchids. It reminded him of the catamaran Reaper had acquired back in the Ionian Sea, but if anything it was even more stunning.

  He heard a noise above him and looked to his left to see a man trying to make his way down a series of steps leading to the galley from the upper portside deck. It was the goon from the wheelhouse who had been piloting the yacht. By Hawke’s reckoning this man must be the last remaining man on board, but it only took one to knock you out of the game.

  Hawke fired a shot at his legs and hit the man’s knee. He screamed in agony and tumbled down the steps until landing with a smack on the hard teak decking. Hawke smiled at him before piling a fist into his face and knocking him out. “Nighty night.”

  He then helped himself to the man’s machine pistol and moved through the saloon and into the lower corridor. With no one at the controls the yacht turned sharply to starboard and everything tipped to the left. Hawke had to grab a handrail to stop himself from being thrown into one of the guest cabins.

  “Fuck it!” he screamed.

  “Joe?”

  It was Lea’s voice coming from behind a heavy wooden door opposite the guest cabin.

  “Sorry about the language.”

  “Is that you, Joe?”

  “No, it’s King Edward the First… who do you think it is?”

  “Just get on with it Your Majesty!”

  He blasted the lock before moving inside and was faced with a large double bed in what was obviously the VIP suite, but there was no sign of Lea.

  “Where the hell are you?” he asked.

  “In the toilet.”

  “If it’s at sea it’s called the head,” he said.

  “Oh sorry – is that like if you’re at sea you’re called a dickhead?”

  Hawke rolled his eyes and aimed the machine pistol at the door, setting it on single shot. “Stand away from the door – I wouldn’t
want to accidentally hit you and deprive the world of your cutting wit.”

  “Sorry,” Lea replied, her voice muffled by the heavy door. “Did you say you were a cunning shit?”

  Hawke ignored the comment. “Stand back, Lea!”

  He fired and blasted the lock off the door. The force of the explosion smashed the door back against the compact shower cubicle and revealed a smiling Lea Donovan. She winked at Hawke and kissed him on the cheek. “My hero!”

  “All right, that’s enough of that,” Hawke said, handing her his pistol. “Here, take this.”

  “Why do you get the MP5? I want the MP5!”

  Hawke sighed and switched guns. “Fine, you have the MP5 if it means that much. At least with a rapid fire weapon you stand a chance of actually hitting your target.”

  “Seriously now, Josiah – why did you give up your comedy career?”

  Hawke held her shoulders and looked her in the eye. “You said these were the same men who attacked you in Ireland… the same men behind your father’s death. I’ll only ask you once, Lea – why did they take you?”

  He watched as she agonized over her answer. “I’m sorry, I should have told you all earlier… especially you.”

  “Told me what?”

  “We’ve no time now, Joe – but when I went to Ireland I found something, a file containing research about the Norse legends. It was written by my Dad… I put the information on a flash-drive and…”

  “And these goons just took it?”

  She nodded glumly. “I think the plan was to torture it out of me or something, but when they found the flash-drive they thought all their birthdays had come at once. Please tell me you took them all down on the deck?”

  “Sorry, but no… I think I know where your flash-drive is though.”

  “Where?”

  “Follow me!”

  They ran up to the deck and Hawke cursed when he saw the Nautilus was nowhere in sight. “Damn it – they’ve gone!”