Lea rolled her eyes and smirked. Men. “Then get your arse back up here and help me, would ya? If we want to ask Ryan anything we have to save him first — and Maria!”
“All right,” Hawke said, taking out the last man and leaving the way clear. “Looks like we just progressed to the next level.”
At the other end of the underground complex, Lexi Zhang hunted Garza along another winding tunnel. The contempt she felt for men like him was indescribable. He was lower than a worm. He was poison, and she was the cure. To her right was the enormous Frenchman, Vincent Reno.
Despite his advancing age he was still as strong as an ox and barely breaking a sweat as he pounded along the tunnel beside her. She surprised herself when she realized that she was glad he was with her tonight as she tried to navigate her way through this madness. Spies were one thing but death-worshipping cults were quite another. Not even the Ministry had trained her for this demented lunacy.
“There he goes,” Reaper said, pointing ahead. “I see the green glow. He tries to fly away like the little moustique…mosquito, n’est-ce pas?”
Lexi narrowed her eyes as she focussed on the fleeing Mexican. “Dragonflies eat mosquitoes.”
“I like that,” Reaper said matter-of-factly. “C’est très drole, mon amie.”
She couldn’t speak French, but she knew what mon amie meant, and she liked to hear it. It meant they were accepting her and that made her feel good. What made her feel bad, however, was Zambia. Was there a path that could lead Hawke to what she had done in Zambia? She thought maybe so, and that meant it was time to cover up that particular trail, however…
A gunshot.
They dived for cover behind a bend in the tunnel and returned fire. Garza was well concealed and after a short fire-fight things went quiet. “Bastard’s out of ammo,” Reaper said. “Me too, so just as well…”
“And me,” Lexi said, tossing her gun to the ground. “But I don’t need lead to do my fighting for me.”
They heard Garza’s footsteps shuffling away and gave chase once again, but moments later they turned a corner and saw their quarry in a dead end. He looked scared.
“You just ran out of luck, Garza,” Reaper said.
Garza pulled out a flick-knife and extended the blade. It flashed in the eerie light of the glow stick. “You come near me and I cut your throats.”
“Trapped like a mosquito with broken wings,” the Chinese woman said, advancing on the cornered gangster.
They leaped into action, starting with Lexi’s ruthless delivery of a high-velocity and unexpected slap kick to the Mexican’s lower left jaw. He staggered back, his eyes rolling up as he almost passed out with the trauma of the blow, but then an adrenalin burst must have snapped him back into the moment because he moved forward and slashed the blade at Lexi.
She dodged the strike and returned fire with a savage spear hand strike at his neck which knocked him staggering back to Reaper, gasping for breath. Except for a few taekwondo moves, the former legionnaire was untrained in the finer martial arts, so he leaned his weight into Garza and made do with a no-nonsense shovel hook thrown hard into his jaw.
Lexi heard Garza’s teeth shattering as Reaper’s broad fist smashed his lower jaw up into his top teeth. The Mexican screamed in agony as he fell down on his backside.
“Get up,” Lexi said. “I haven’t finished playing with you yet.”
She struck a savage salvo of blows against Garza in an unrelenting attack, pounding him all over as her head filled with the thought of all the women he had attacked over the years.
She struck him in the throat and then a double axe-kick as fast as two lightning bolts smashed his balls and he fell forward howling like a baby. Still she fought on, and Reaper began to see another side to her. A darkness she rarely let escape from her gravity. She kicked his shins and then planted a heavy boot in his stomach, striking his diaphragm and blasting the air out of his lungs.
He gasped, but she was merciless. She stood over him and slammed her hand down on his head in a savage palm strike which knocked his head back on the rocks and killed him.
“You think I went too far?” she said.
Reaper gave a Gallic shrug. “Pas du tout. C’était dingue…”
“Let’s get back to Hawke.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Terror consumed Kim Taylor as she stared at the monstrous cobalt bomb before her, almost humming with power. It felt like it was alive, breathing almost — a hideous lead-gray beast intent on the annihilation of everything she had ever loved or known. This wasn’t something Wade was using to destroy San Francisco. This inhuman, obscene creation had used Wade to get what it wanted, and it terrified her. She hadn’t exactly led a sheltered life since becoming a field agent, but this was something else. Just looking at its sleek, lead-colored casing made her feel sick and that was before she even contemplated the extermination it was capable of delivering.
“Holy shit,” was all she could say, but everyone agreed with her.
After Camacho lowered Alex to the bunk, they all moved in closer and beheld Wade’s monstrous Hummingbird. When Scarlet saw the whirring numbers on Sobotka’s digital timer she shook her head in horror. “Less than nine minutes now…”
Kim glanced at the pale, sweat-soaked faces of her friends and swallowed hard. These people had fought with her across Mexico and California to stop the Order of the Sixth Sun and their insane suicide cult, but they could still lose everything if they failed to deactivate the weapon. The weight of eight million lives was on her shoulders and she felt every ounce of it.
8:37 to detonation…
Kim tried to focus. Back when the island was used as a prison, the inmates could hear the sounds of San Francisco blowing on the wind across the bay, but now all she could hear was the sound of SWAT teams as they cleared up the last stragglers of the Sixth Sun who were trying to flee on their boats.
8:31
Jack Camacho moved forward to do his thing. He was fully trained in explosive ordinance disposal techniques as part of the years he spent with the CIA’s bomb squad, not to mention the time in Afghanistan and Iraq in the US Army he spent diffusing IEDs. He knew the buck stopped with him. He’d stopped many threats over the years, but nothing like this had ever crossed his path.
8:11
He lifted the housing from around Sobotka’s jerry-rigged timer. It was good work, especially considering that he’d done it while Wade and Mendoza were pointing a gun in his face, but it was done fast and might give him options. Like all bomb disposal professionals, Camacho knew the preferable option was a controlled explosion, but that method was kind of unavailable when dealing with a nuclear device of this magnitude.
Instead, he knew he had only one option left to him — neutralizing the device right here on the island — and it was time to get to work.
Time.
He looked at the timer.
7:24
Time to move faster… But this was no ordinary bomb with a blast cap, batteries, duct tape and sticks of explosive… this was a Soviet-era cobalt bomb which like everyone else he had thought a mere myth until today.
Camacho knew the bomb was useless if the trigger failed to fire enough uranium along the cylinder into the main store of uranium in the heart of the bomb. This was how critical mass would be achieved and what would cause the nuclear reaction — but it was all dependent on the trigger, and that was linked to Sobotka’s timer.