The Vault of Poseidon (Joe Hawke Book 1)
Page 19
“I think Ryan might be over you, Lea.”
“Eh?”
“Have you not seen the way he and Sophie are looking at each other?”
“Oh... no. Good for him.”
“So you’re not going to thank me for rescuing you?” Hawke said.
“You didn’t rescue me!”
“Of course I did!”
“Hardly. You landed on a yacht, got captured, keelhauled and then Ryan saved you. How is that you rescuing me?”
“Well...”
“And who the hell gets keelhauled in this day and age?”
“Keelhauled in the act of rescuing you, yes. You could be a bit more grateful if you ask me.”
“But I didn't ask you,” she said, smiling gently in the warm sun.
“You’re welcome, all the same...”
Lea pursed her lips. “You’ve got a real nerve, Joe Hawke, did you know that?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact I did know, and why do you always call me by both my names? It sounds weird.”
“I didn’t know I did.”
“Well, you do.”
“And so what if I do?”
“Just saying it’s weird, that’s all.”
But there was no reply. Lea had fallen asleep, her head rolling down onto Hawke’s shoulder.
Hawke stayed awake, and began to plan the assault on Zaugg at Kefalonia.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Kefalonia
Thirty miles west of the Greek mainland, Kefalonia is the largest of all the islands in the Ionian Sea. Its coastline is punctuated with a blend of rugged cliffs, pebble-covered coves and golden beaches glistening in the Mediterranean sun. Tourists amble along the waterfront and the tavernas, oblivious to what is buried deep beneath their feet.
Now, the island’s mountainous east coast slipped beneath the helicopter as it swung around into the bay and began to descend to the peninsula to the east of Sami.
Hawke and the others weren’t taking in the view. Their minds were too focussed on the dangers that lay ahead in whatever subterranean hell Zaugg and his men were opening up on the island below them in their insane quest to become immortal.
Hawke was uneasy. He was finding the whole idea of living gods and armageddon weapons hard to handle, and as for the concept of immortality actually being real – that really blew his mind.
On top of that were the usual fears when going into a combat situation, only this time he wasn't backed by one of the best Special Forces units in the world – the SBS, but a loose collection of misfits, most of whom he’d only just met.
He knew from experience that Lea, Cairo and Olivia could look after themselves, and he was pretty sure that Sophie knew how to handle things as well. The less said about Reaper the better, he thought, but when he looked at Ryan Bale and Professor Demetriou he knew they were at great risk entering into a situation like this.
Now, as he looked at their apprehensive faces, he wished he’d asked Hart for some back-up instead of telling her to focus on Zaugg’s headquarters.
She’d made a joke about how if anyone could save the world single-handedly then it was him, but now he was getting closer to the action it really did feel like he was going into war again. And yet... it wasn’t Zaugg and his thugs that made him uneasy, but whatever the hell was lurking in that vault.
The Vault of Poseidon. Lost to mankind for thousands of years, and holding the greatest and most terrifying secrets in history. Now it was within Zaugg’s grasp, and only Hawke could stop him from seizing its guarded treasures.
The pilot decreased the power and lowered the collective. As they approached the ground, the trail of Zaugg’s destruction was clearer to see. A column of black smoke twisted into the bright blue Greek sky, emanating from half a dozen police cars, now burning wrecks at the side of the road which lead up from Sami to the acropolis.
“Looks like they were hit with a rocket launcher,” said Scarlet as she loaded her MP5.
Hawke nodded gravely. He wondered what other nasty surprises Zaugg had in store for them.
“That’s probably all the local law enforcement taken care of.” As he spoke, the chopper made its final descent and touched down just below the acropolis, as near as the pilot could get without putting the helicopter at risk.
They jumped from the helicopter and ran out from under the whirring blades.
“We don’t have much time!” he shouted at the others. “Let’s get on with it!”
He saw Ryan and Sophie exchange a warm glance as they left the chopper, and their hands brushed together for just a moment. Great, he thought. Now he finds love.
They hiked the half mile to the acropolis, where they were saved the effort of finding the entrance to Hades’s underworld courtesy of Hugo Zaugg who had beaten them to it. A great slab of stone that once formed the floor of the acropolis had been hauled away from the ruins, presumably by the Bell which was now long gone.
The sun beat down, hot for winter even this far south. Hawke squinted in the sunlight as he peered down into the hole. He saw a pile of rubble created by Zaugg’s descent maybe fifty feet beneath the surface. A warm breeze blew the scent of sea-salt across them as they stood on the cliff top. To his right, a single olive tree bent gently in the wind.
“So this is it.” Hart and Hawke set up the abseil line while the others kept a lookout for any approaching dangers.
Hawke scrambled onto his stomach and craned his head down into the hole, lighting his way with the flashlight.
“This is it, all right,” he said, his voice echoing strangely in the cavity below. “I hope none of you is afraid of small spaces.”
He crawled out again and sat up to look at the others.
“How small is small?” Ryan asked.
“It’s a good job none of you is a serious beer drinker, let’s put it that way.”
Lea smiled. “One thing I love about you is your honesty, Joe Hawke.”
“Then you’ll love it when I tell you Zaugg has a real head-start on us because all his glow-sticks are burned out.”
Hawke held the flashlight in his mouth and rappelled down into the void. It widened slightly as it got deeper, and the walls were roughly hewn out of the bedrock. It must have taken months of hard labor, he thought.
At around fifty feet down, he reached the floor – mostly sand with a few small rocks strewn about the place, untouched since the time of the ancient gods. He called up to the others and told them to come down, and moments later they were all standing in the small dugout at the base of the tunnel.
Ahead of them was another tunnel. Hawke led the way, shining his flashlight into the darkness ahead. The bright yellow light dissipated in the black distance of the tunnel, so he kept its beam fixed to the floor as they walked.
“It’s cold.” Lea shivered.
“As cold as a tomb,” Ryan added.
“There’s a turn-off here,” Hawke said. He swung the flashlight into another tunnel on their right.
“And one up there on the left as well,” said Sophie. Their voices echoed strangely in the tunnels.
Hawke moved the flashlight back around to the tunnel Sophie had found. There were steps in this one, and it descended even deeper into the earth.
“I don’t like the look of that,” Ryan said.
“Where’s your spirit of adventure?” joked Hawke.
“We’re not actually going in there, are we?”
“What do you think?”
They moved through the darkness for several more minutes before they reached what looked like a small room, carved painstakingly out of the bedrock. Hawke was finally beginning to enjoy himself.
Back in the SBS he had done all the usual Special Forces training – parachuting techniques, desert warfare, but after that they sent him down to Poole, in Dorset, where they gave him the specialist training in diving and just about anything else to do with maritime warfare.
He had also trained in pot-holing and caving, and had been part of the SBS comman
do team engaged in the fierce firefights in the Tora Bora cave complex where Osama Bin Laden was hiding. Not that he had ever told anyone that – no one except Liz.
Caves for him meant fun.
“It looks like an antechamber of some kind,” Lea ran her hands over the walls, amazed by their smoothness. “This place is the find of the century.”
Hawke looked concerned. “No, I think Poseidon’s tomb is the find of the century. This is just one more step on the way there.”
In the dust at their feet they noticed another burned-out glow-stick.
Hawke stared at it. “Zaugg again.”
They turned a corner and saw one of Zaugg’s men pinned to the cave wall with a spear through his heart.
“What the hell?” Ryan said.
“Did Zaugg do this?” Sophie asked.
“No,” replied Hawke, studying the path of the spear. “This looks like some kind of ancient booby-trap – look there on the wall and you can see where the spear came from, and if you look on the floor you can see where he stepped on a pressure pad of some kind built into the path.”
“Zaugg’s obviously the kind of guy to lead from behind,” Hart said.
Demetriou suddenly looked very nervous as they silently moved past the dead man and left him in his final resting place, where his bones would hang for the rest of eternity.
“Everyone be very careful where you step,” Hawke shouted. “This place is rigged!”
They kept going deeper into the complex and a few paces later they emerged into an enormous cavern.
“A place this size must have been an aquifer once,” said Lea. “No one could have carved something like this.”
“Unless they were a god,” Ryan said.
Moments later they found another hole in the ground.
Hawke began to lower himself down, negotiating the rough, crumbling edges of the ancient tunnel with care as he went. He reached the bottom and shone the flashlight around to find a tunnel stretching into darkness on the western edge.
Lea was next, then Ryan who was followed closely by Sophie and then Demetriou and Reaper. Hart lowered herself down last.
They pushed into the tunnel, Hawke staring up at the tiny aperture fifty feet above them and wondering if they would ever see daylight again.
They walked for several minutes, holding their silence and proceeding with a kind of anxious diligence, guns and glow-sticks raised and eyes adjusting to an even greater darkness.
“What are these marks in the ground?” Lea asked.
Hawke shone his flashlight to reveal gouge marks in the dirt. “Looks like Zaugg’s dragging a lot of gear down here. He obviously doesn’t want to leave empty-handed. And he’s taken a lot of care to take his abseil lines with him as well. Obviously doesn’t want anyone following him.”
Then Hart spoke, her authoritative voice shattering the silence. “Watch out, everyone! There’s another hole here – it looks like we’re going further down.”
They dropped a glow-stick down to reveal another descent of around fifty feet. Hart set up another abseil line, and a few moments later they were all together again on the lower level where a second tunnel now stretched further away to the west.
“Sooner or later we’re going to end up under the bloody bay!” Hawke said.
With the thought of going under the sea in their minds, they pushed on into the tunnel, taking care not to stumble and injure themselves. This was not the time or place to get a broken ankle.
Then, without any warning, one side of the tunnel was gone – receding away into the darkness. “What the hell?” Hawke shone the flashlight at the wall and saw the tunnel had now turned into a ledge. To their right the safety of the carved tunnel wall had given way to a drop hundreds of feet down.
“Everyone get back!” he shouted. “We’re on a ledge!”
Ryan peered down over the edge where a ravine formed and rows of razor-sharp stalagmites twisted up like needles. “I’m surprised this isn’t on the tourist trail – and look!” He shone his flashlight at the far wall and illuminated a series of giant carvings of figures in the rock.
“And who might they be?” Scarlet said. She almost sounded impressed.
“Those are Hades and Zeus, and that must be Poseidon himself,” Ryan said. “I’m not sure about that fella there though.” His flashlight settled on the ghostly stone lines of the biggest face of all.
“He looks pretty angry, whoever he is,” Sophie said.
“That is Kronos, the father of all time,” Demetriou whispered in awe. His eyes were glazing over as he stared at the ancient god’s face. “It can mean only one thing – we really are in the right place and must be getting closer to the tomb.”
They moved on, and after a short walk they emerged at the top of more steps which led into yet another tunnel.
Lea looked up. “This place is like a labyrinth.”
“It actually is a labyrinth,” said Ryan.
Ahead, they saw Zaugg’s team. They had caught them up. From their position further back they watched Zaugg and his men working their way forward deeper into the complex.
“He’s been a busy boy,” Scarlet said, frowning. “Where the hell did he get all those men from?”
Hawke looked at her. “A man like Zaugg is very resourceful, and very rich. Put those two qualities together and you get what you want, when you want it.”
“Either way,” Lea said, “we’ve got our work cut out for us now, Joe.”
Hawke agreed, and nodded in appreciation of the fact.
“So what do we do?” Sophie asked.
Then Ryan sneezed.
Lea tutted. “Good work, genius.”
Zaugg’s men turned and opened fire with a ferocity Hawke had rarely seen outside of full military combat. The bullets traced over their heads and peppered the cavern wall behind them, blasting chunks of the ancient walls into smithereens and forcing them to take cover behind a handful of inadequate boulders at the mouth of the tunnel.
“Return fire!” Hawke screamed.
But it was too late. Already Zaugg’s men were upon them, and he saw they were massively outnumbered. Seconds later it was close quarter combat as Zaugg’s men were ordered forward to capture them.
Hawke met them head-on, punching one in the face and knocking him out, and then spinning around and grabbing another by the back of his head. He slammed him face-first into the rock wall and he fell into the dirt.
Another man fronted up to him. Hawke had been in more fights than he could remember, and knew how to assess his opponent quickly. This one looked like he was up for it. Hawke saw the tension in his fists and shoulders, and the hateful gleam in his eye.
The man pulled a knife from his belt and lunged toward Hawke. It was some kind of hunting knife in a black-matte finish with a very nasty serrated blade.
Hawke stepped aside and avoided the blade. As it sailed past him he spun around and leaned into the man, holding his knife-wielding hand at arm’s length while he brought his hand down hard on the man’s wrist and knocked the knife from his hand. It fell with a thud into the sand.
The man struggled to free himself but Hawke brought his right elbow up into his face and broke his nose, turning on his heel to land a solid inside power punch on the man’s jaw and send him flying out of consciousness into the dirt.
Hawke turned to take stock of the situation.
Demetriou and Ryan were at the back, out of sight, and ahead of them was Scarlet Sloane, teaching some of the Swiss mercs about the pleasure of underestimating a woman with an intimate knowledge of Krav Maga. Hawke thought he could have been watching a Bruce Lee movie as she used Zaugg’s men for her daily workout.
Lea and Reaper were fighting together, back to back, but slowly they were overwhelmed by the sheer force of numbers as a mix of Zaugg’s Swiss mercs and local hired thugs piled forward into them.
Ahead, Zaugg, Grobel, Baumann and a dozen men moved forwards toward the tomb, their precious goal almost in sight.
“What’s the plan now?” Lea screamed.
“You and Hart lead the others towards Zaugg while we finish up here, then Cairo and I’ll bring up the rear.”
“You were always good at that,” Scarlet muttered.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Lea rolled her eyes. “Don’t you ever give it a rest?”
“Take it easy, darling,” Scarlet said coolly. “You’ll not impress Joe here with foul language.”
“Why, I ought to smack you in…”
“Not now chaps,” Hart said. “We have arses to kick.”
Slowly they turned the tables on them, and after taking out the last of the enemy, they moved forwards to attack Zaugg.
They gradually made their way deeper into the underground complex, closing in on the Swiss team, who were now in what looked like a dead end.
Zaugg screamed a string of curses in German and kicked the cave wall. The others moved forward to see what had enraged him so much. Hawke watched as he and Grobel discussed something at the end of the tunnel. There was nothing down there except a simple rock pool.
“He’s saying that Grobel has led him the wrong way,” Ryan said. “He’s not very happy.”
“I think that’s obvious in any language.” Hawke watched Zaugg smack Grobel over the back of the head with his gloved hand and knock him to the ground.
Grobel tumbled forward and fell into the pool, and to the great surprise of everyone watching, completely disappeared.
“What the hell?” Ryan said.
Hawke sighed. “It’s another buggering tunnel, only this time it’s filled with water.”
“The seventh tunnel in between us and the tomb, Ryan said. “Just like you wrote about professor.”
“I always believed there would be seven levels,” Demetriou said.
“If I were going to hide something like the tomb of a god,” Lea said, “then I reckon at the end of an underwater tunnel might be a good place to start.”