The windshield was instantly streaked with oil and fire. Smoke poured in and the helicopter shook like a speeding car that had lost a couple of wheels.
Ivan tried to control it, but the rotors were damaged. “Hang on!” he shouted.
Shuddering wildly, the helicopter lurched to the side, spinning and dropping from the air.
Aboard his personal Skycrane, Kang saw the Russian craft go down. His men had done well. “Turn us around,” he ordered.
“To the men?”
“No, up on the ridge.”
He could see a figure near the far side of the mesa, sprinting across it.
“That’s the one,” he said. “Run him down.”
The pilot turned the helicopter toward the target and accelerated. “We have no weapons,” he warned.
Kang shouted above the noise. “Just get me close. I’ll kill him myself.”
In the darkness of Yucca Mountain, Byron Stecker watched Arnold Moore step out of the trailer carrying his suit jacket awkwardly over his shoulder. His gait was slow, as a beaten man’s should be.
“What’s the word?” Stecker asked, keenly aware that there were less than five minutes to go before the zero state.
“You win,” Moore said. He nodded toward the rocket sled. “Might want to get that thing ready.”
Moore shuffled away, moving toward the big wrecker tow truck that had been used to drag the trailer in.
Stecker grinned and took a moment to soak up the glory of victory. He turned to his staffer. “We have four minutes. Get the sled primed. We’ll need to do this quick.”
He stepped inside the trailer.
The screen inside was still glowing with the president’s image. “About damn time, Stecker.”
“Moore just informed me,” he said. “We’ll destroy the stone immediately.”
“Good. Contact me when it’s done.”
The president cut the line and Stecker switched the screen off. He walked to the lab section and opened the door. The room was dark except for the glow of computer screens.
He stepped toward the viewing platform and nearly slipped.
“What the hell?”
Looking down, he saw a puddle of grape soda. Nathanial Ahiga lay sprawled on the floor, semiconscious, with a large welt across his forehead.
“What the hell happened?” Stecker asked.
Moaning, Ahiga opened his eyes, but before he could even say a word Stecker realized the truth. He rushed to the observation stand and looked into the vault. The stone was gone.
Without stopping to help Ahiga, he ran out of the lab and burst through the trailer door, into the tunnel.
The box truck was rumbling away with Moore inside it.
“Stop the truck!” he shouted. “Moore has the stone!”
CHAPTER 66
Whatever madness was going on behind him, Hawker could only guess at, but as he reached the edge of the cenote, he saw a different problem. The opening was a huge depression, a circular well carved from the granite, two hundred feet across and a hundred feet deep. From the precipice it looked like an open-pit mine flooded with unmoving water.
“What am I, a cliff diver?” he said aloud.
At the center he saw the tiny island that Father Domingo had told him about. It looked like the top of a spire, a pillar of stone twenty feet in diameter, with its foundation disappearing into the water, like a bridge stanchion. A set of stairs, carved into the side of the pillar, descended into the water, but no bridge or cable ran to it.
Apparently it would be a swim and then a climb.
He noticed a narrow pathway that wound down and around, but he didn’t have time for such a long route. He dropped in over the side, skidding down the slope until he reached a narrow ledge. As he stopped, a sound like thunder roared in above him.
Looking up, he saw Kang’s Skycrane fan out in a braking action. He expected a sniper to be targeting him from the open door, but instead he saw a man in body armor.
To his absolute astonishment, the man leaped from thirty feet above, falling toward Hawker and clotheslining him across the chest. The impact sent both of them tumbling down the slope.
Despite Ivan’s efforts, the Russian Hind-D was finished. It crashed and skidded forward on the mesa, sliding to a stop.
The impact threw Danielle about, but her seat belt held and she was uninjured. She pulled out of her harness, helped Ivan to extricate himself from the wreckage, and then dragged him away as the helicopter began to burn.
“Are you okay?” she asked
Ivan shook his head. “My feet,” he said. A quick look told her that both of his ankles were broken. She glanced toward the valley, where Kang’s men had been.
“Give me your gun!” she demanded.
Ivan held out the Makarov.
She grabbed it and crawled toward the edge of the ridge. The last of Kang’s men were headed the other way. Done with the battle. Thank God for that.
Now to find Hawker.
She made her way back to Ivan. “You should be safe here,” she said. “Which direction was the line?”
“West.”
She looked that way. A thousand yards off, the last of the three Skycranes hung in the air, circling something at a snail’s pace. She saw no sign of Hawker. And yet halfway between her and the hovering copter, she saw something else: a small figure, no more than three feet tall, running across the top of the mesa.
It was Yuri.
Hawker’s bruising ride stopped on a midlevel outcropping, fifty feet above the water.
He sprang to his feet and threw a punch toward his attacker’s head, but the man blocked it with his armored wrist and fired a punch into Hawker’s chest that knocked the wind out of him and sent him tumbling backward.
Landing hard, Hawker coughed uncontrollably and tried to shake off the blow. He’d been in plenty of fights in his life, a lot of them losing ones, but short of being hit with a two-by-four, he’d never felt a shot like that.
Still hacking, he tried to scramble away, but a hand grabbed the back of his shirt and yanked him up. Before he could react, he took a blow to the side of the head and went spiraling down again.
Hawker looked up at his opponent. The man himself was average and frail looking, but built up around him were hydraulic actuators, padding, and armor that made him into a hulking brute.
“You are inferior,” the man said.
The statement rang out like a discovered truth. Not a boast or a threat, but a simple statement of the facts. Hawker couldn’t argue it.
“You should give me what I want,” the machine-assisted man told him. “I will make your death easier.”
Breathing hard, Hawker answered. “Why is it … you guys always think … that’s such a good deal?”
Kang stepped toward him and Hawker spun to one side, delivering a solid kick to the man’s knee. It should have shattered the joint, should have bent the knee sideways, tearing the ligaments to shreds, but the armor and the bracing prevented it from doing any damage at all.
In response, Kang thrust a knee into Hawker’s ribs. He went flying backward, slid off the ridge, and tumbled down to the lowest of the ledges.
Kang slid down after him, planting his feet firmly and standing ominously over Hawker.
Groggy from the last blow and tenuously holding on to consciousness, Hawker crawled a few feet, grabbing a rock from the rubble of the slope.
Kang reached for him. The hand was like a vise crushing his arm. It yanked him upward. And even as Hawker swung the rock, Kang’s other arm slammed down on his shoulder.
Hawker fell to his knees.