Venter picked up the Sword of Fire and walked it back over to Kruger.
Hawke climbed off the badly beaten soldier who joined Venter and the others with Kruger at the entrance to the tomb. “Just when I was having fun, too.”
Kruger grinned. “Is it fun you want, boy?”
Hawke bristled at the insult, but kept his emotions under tight control. “Nothing could be more fun that watching you die, Dirk. How are you going to beat that?”
“You’ll find out. Venter! Get your men out of here and use up the rest of our C4 on the entrance tunnel.” He turned to Hawke. “That sound like fun to you — trapped in here under a hundred tons of granite?”
“You bastard, Kruger,” Lea said.
“Not even the mighty Joe Hawke can dig his way through a fucking mountain, I’ll bet. I bid you farewell, my friends and I thank God we’ll never meet again.”
Kruger pushed Ryan away and stepped back into the tunnel, the shadows of the tomb slowly obscuring his grinning face and then he was gone.
Seconds later they heard a tremendous explosion that made the entire mountain shake under their feet. Pieces of the carved walls fell to the floor and one of the bags of gold coins tipped over and spilled its precious cargo all over the dust of the mausoleum’s floor.
“That’s torn it,” Lea said.
“I don’t think so,” said Ryan. “Start searching for the other entrance.”
“What other entrance, mate?” Hawke said.
“The sarcophagus is marble, right?”
Hawke looked at him, unable to resist grinning at how his friend’s mind worked. “If you say so, then yes.”
“Well, it is. Does it look like this mountain is made of marble?”
“To be honest,” Scarlet said. “I wouldn’t know.”
“Let me help then,” Ryan said. “It isn’t. As our good friend Dirk Kruger just said, it’s made mostly of granite. That’s because this part of Greece is in the Attico-Cycladic Massive region, obviously.”
“Obviously,” Lea said with a smile and a shake of her head.
“Still not getting why this means we’re not suffocating to death tonight,” Lexi said.
Ryan huffed and pointed at the sarcophagus. “How big is that thing, Lex?”
“Huh?”
“I’ll give you a clue, the side panels alone are wider than the tunnel we walked through to get down here.”
“Ah…”
“I get it, Ry,’ Lea said. “The sarcophagus is too big to have been brought down the entrance tunnel and it wasn’t carved down here because it’s made from the wrong stone.”
“Give that girl a cigar,” Ryan said, resuming the search. “And there’s another thing, too — where’s the antechamber? A tomb for a man like Alexander the Great would have had an antechamber. In other words, we came in through the back door.”
Hawke felt a wave of relief. “The lad’s a genius.”
“And that is so, so annoying,” said Scarlet.
“C’est ici, je pense,” Reaper said, heaving a small, square block of chiselled granite out of the wall. “On the north wall.”
Kim crawled down and looked through the gap. “There’s a tunnel.”
“That’ll be the connecting corridor to the antechamber,” Ryan said. “Built after the sarcophagus was placed in here.”
They crawled through the corridor until they were in the antechamber and found themselves staring at a much wider entrance on the far wall. Ryan pointed at it. “And that is where the sodding sarcophagus was brought in.”
Hawke turned to Ryan and gave him a heavy slap on the back. “You saved our arses again, mate.”
“I believe in the modern vernacular, that’s because I’m a boss, is that right?”
Scarlet rolled her eyes. “Don’t push it, neckbeard.”
“Hey!”
“All right, let’s move out.” Hawke led the way into the tunnel.
They followed it up an incline but then it turned sharply back down again and they felt like they were walking to the center of the planet. Intrigued as to where it was going to break the surface, they soon found out when they heard running water.
Turning a corner in the wide tunnel they found a pool.
“My bet is we swim our way out through there,” Kim said.
Scarlet looked at Ryan with a look of smug satisfaction on her face. “And how did they get the bloody sarcophagus through that pool, Poindexter?”
“My best guess is that when we come to the surface we’ll find we’re in a river and that they diverted the river to fill this pool after they delivered the sarcophagus.” He returned the smug look with a raised middle finger. “How d’ya like them apples, Cairo?”
She twisted her lips. “I’ll let you off, boy, but only if when we get to the other side we find ourselves in a fast-moving river!”
“Wanna bet on it?”
“I’m not afraid of wager.”
“A hundred quid.”
Camacho was impressed. “That’s a hundred and fifty bucks — he must be pretty damned sure.”
Scarlet thrust out her hand. “Done. Let’s get on with it.”
“No one’s going anywhere until I’ve checked it out for safety,” Hawke said.
Specially trained for deep dives and long periods underwater by his SBS years, the Englishman slipped down into the water.
They waited in the silence of the cavern for a few moments and then the Londoner broke the surface of the pool with a grin on his face. “Hope you’ve got some cash on you, Cairo. You own Ryan here one hundred smackers.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The ancient city of Pavlopetri is one of the world’s oldest submerged cities and a popular site for divers to hunt for ancient treasures and relics. Laying off the golden shores of the Laconian coast of southern Greece, its name means Paul’s Stone, a reference to the Christian saint. The settlement contains archaeological evidence dating back to Minoan culture, almost five thousand years old and today is a UNESCO site under the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage.
As their boat speeded away from the coast, Hawke looked out across the sparkling turquoise water with a strange mix of excitement and anxiety. Frozen in time, the streets below the water were just as they were all those thousands of years ago when the ocean swallowed the city.
For a team like ECHO the opportunity to visit such a site and explore for relics and treasure was a once in a lifetime event, but they all knew Kruger must already be here, at least an hour ahead of them. Ryan was certain a close reading of the codex would have revealed Pavlopetri to the South African, but at least they knew the exact location was theirs alone.
He turned and looked at his team as they prepared for the battle ahead. They were tired. Bags under their eyes and sluggish movements. Adrenaline would get them over that, but he wondered for how much longer he could push these people. Now, sailing over the Mediterranean Sea, Hawke sensed for the first time that he might be nearing the end of this mission. Staring out over the vast expanse of water, he wondered what turmoil would be lurking beneath its calm surface.
Beside him, Camacho and Scarlet were sharing a kiss. Devlin rolled his eyes and took the moment to check his equipment. Reaper and Kim were talking quietly at the end of the cabin. Lea was sitting separately from the rest, eyes closed but still awake and for some reason Lexi was tweaking Ryan’s ear and forcing him to apologize for something he had said. In other words, the team was acting as normal and all looked totally unfazed about the battle to come. That, at least, was something.
But his mind was far from satisfied. When Eden had called about hiring the boat, he’d had nothing new to report on the location of Otmar Wolff. Hawke had hoped the team might have found him down with Kruger in Pretoria, but it was a hope too far. The immortal monster known as the Oracle had been evading them for so long now it felt like they were never going to hunt him down.